As we look back over the travelled road of our attempt to
articulate the ultimate secret, there arises one last stupendous
question, not to meet which would be to shirk the heaviest weight
of the problem. We have reached the conclusion that the secret of
Nature is to be found in personality. We have reached the further
conclusion that personality demands, for the integrity of its inmost
self, an actual "soul-monad." We are faced with a "universe," then,
made up entirely of living souls, manifested in so-called animate,
or so-called inanimate bodies. Everything that our individual mind
apprehends is therefore the body of a soul, or a portion of the body
of a soul, or the presence of a soul that needs no incarnation. The
soul itself is composed of a mysterious substance wherein what we
call mind and what we call matter are fused and merged. What I
have named throughout this book by the name of the _objective
mystery_ is therefore, when we come to realize the uttermost
implications of our method, nothing more than the appearance of
all the bodies of all the souls in the world _before_ the creative act
of our own particular soul has visualized such a spectacle. We can
never see the objective mystery as _it is_, because directly we
have seen it, that is to say, the appearance of all the adjacent
bodies of all the souls within our reach, it ceases to be the
objective mystery and becomes the universe we know.
The objective mystery is therefore no real thing at all, but only the
potentiality of all real things, before the "real thing" which is our
individual soul comes upon the scene to create the universe. It is
only the potentiality of the "universe" which we have thus named,
only the idea of the general spectacle of such an universe,
_before_ any universe has actually appeared.
And since the final conclusion of our attempt at articulation should
rigorously eliminate from our picture everything that is relatively
unreal, in favour of what is relatively real, it becomes necessary,
now at the end, to eliminate from our vision of reality any
substantial basis for this, "potentiality of all universes," and to
see how our actual universe appears when this thing has been
withdrawn as nothing but an unreal thing. The substantial basis for
what we actually see becomes therefore no mere potential
universe, or objective mystery, but something much more definite
than either of these. The spectacle of Nature, as we behold it,
becomes nothing else than the spectacle of all the living bodies
that compose the universe, each one of them with its corresponding
invisible soul-monad.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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