The permanent "surface," or identical susceptibility, of this ebbing
and flowing stream of emotion is memory; but the emotion itself,
divided into the positive and negative "pole," as we say of love and
malice, is an actual projection upon the objective universe of the
intrinsic "stuff" or psycho-material "substance" of which the
substratum of the soul is actually composed. The other aspects of
the soul are, so to speak, the various "tongues" of diversely coloured
flame with which the soul pierces the "objective mystery"; but the
substance of all these flames is one and the same. It is the soul
itself, projected upon the plane of material impression; and thus
projected, becoming the conflicting duality to which I give the name of
"emotion."
The attribute of "will," also, differs radically from the rest; in the
sense that "will" is the power which the soul possesses of
encouraging or suppressing, re-vivifying or letting fade, all the other
attributes of the soul, including that attribute which is the substance
and synthesis of them all and which I name "emotion."
In regard to "emotion" the will can do three separate things. It can
encourage the emotion of love and suppress that of malice. It can
encourage the emotion of malice and suppress that of love. And
finally it can use its energy in the effort, an effort which can never
be totally successful, to suppress all emotion, of any kind at all.
Man's complex vision then consists, in simple terms, of
self-consciousness, reason, taste, imagination, conscience, instinct,
sensation, intuition, will, memory, and emotion. These various
activities, differentiated clearly enough in their separate energizing,
must never be regarded as absolutely separate "faculties," but rather
as relatively separated "aspects." Behind all of them and under all of
them is the complex vision itself, felt by all of us in rare moments in
its creative totality, but constantly being distorted and obscured as
one or other of its primal energies invades the appropriate territory
of some other.
The complex vision must not be regarded as the mere sum or
accumulated agglomeration of all these. It is much more than this. It
is more than a mere formal focussing of its own attributes. It is more
than a mere logical unity suspended in a vacuum.
The complex vision is the vision of a living self, of an organic
personality, of an actual soul-monad. It may be the vision of a man.
It may be the vision of a plant or a planet or a god. It may be the
vision of entities undreamed of and of existences inconceivable. It
may be the vision, for example, of some strange "soul of space" or
"soul of the ether" whose consciousness is extended throughout the
visible universe and even throughout the "etherial medium" which
binds all souls together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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