And the eternal vision, thus momentarily attained, and hereafter
gathered together from the deep cisterns of memory, liberates us,
when we are under its influence, from that contemplative or creative
tension whereby we reached it. It is then that the stoical pride of the
soul, in the strength of which it has endured so much, undergoes the
process of an immense relaxation and relief. An indescribable
humility floods our being; and the mood with which we contemplate
the spectacle of life and death ceases to be an individual mood and
becomes an universal mood. The isolation, which was a necessary
element in our advance to this point, melts away when we have
reached it. It is not that we lose our personality, it is that we merge
ourselves by the outflowing of love, in all the personalities to which
the procession of time gives birth.
And the way we arrive at this identification of ourselves with all
souls, living or dead or unborn, is by our love for that ideal
symbolized in the figure of Christ in whom this identification has
already been achieved. This, and nothing less than this, is the eternal
vision. For the only "god" among all the arbiters of our destiny, with
whom we are concerned, is Christ. To enter into his secret is to enter
into their secret. To be aware of him is to be aware of everything in
the world, mortality and immortality, the transitory and the eternal.
Life then, as I have struggled to interpret it in this book, seems to
present itself as an unfathomable universe entirely made up of
personalities. What we call inanimate substances are all of them the
bodies, or portions of the bodies, of living personalities. The
immense gulf, popularly made between the animate and the
inanimate, thus turns out to be an unfounded illusion; and the whole
universe reveals itself as an unfathomable series, or congeries, of
living personalities, united by the presence of the omnipresent ether
which fills universal space.
It is of little moment, the particular steps or stages of thought, by
which one mind, among so many, arrives at this final conclusion.
Other minds, following other tracks across the desert, might easily
reach it. The important thing to note is that, once reached, such a
conclusion seems to demand from us a very definite attitude toward
life. For if life, if the universe, is entirely made up of personality,
then our instinctive or acquired attitude toward personality becomes
the path by which we approach truth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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