Claude Fayette Bragdon

“ THE PHENOMENON OF PAUSE Let us conceive of sleep less narrowly than we are accustomed to: think of it only as one phase of the phenomenon of pause, of arrested physical activity, universal throughout nature. The cell itself experiences fatigue and goes to sleep—"perchance to dream," Modern experimental science in the domain of physiology and psychology proves that we see and do not see, hear and do not hear, feel and do not feel, in successive instants. We are asleep, in other words, not merely hour by hour, but moment by moment—and perhaps age by age as well. ”

“ The Beyond-man discovers beauty in the abyss, and ugliness in mere worldly rectitude. Leonardo painted the Medusa head, with its charnel pallor and its crown of writhing snakes, no less lovingly than the sweet-tender face of the Christ of the Cenacolo, and the beauty is not less, though of an opposite sort. Shakespeare's most profound sayings and most magical poetry are as often as not put in the mouths of his villains and his clowns. To genius, pain is purgation; ugliness, beauty in disturbance. It injects the acid of irony into success, and distils the attar of felicity from failure. ”

“ Though genius rebels at our moralities, it always submits itself to beauty. Emerson says, "Goethe and Carlyle, and perhaps Novalis, have an undisguised dislike or contempt for common virtue standing on common principles. Meantime they are dear lovers, steadfast maintainers of the pure, ideal morality. But they worship it as the highest beauty, their love is artistic." And so it is throughout the whole hierarchy of men of genius. "Beauty is Truth: Truth, Beauty," is the motto which guides their far-faring feet, as they lead us wheresoever they will. ”

“ The play of reason upon phenomena dissects life, and translates it in terms of inertia. The pure logic of mathematics ignores life and disdains its limitations, leading away into cold, free regions of its own. Now our desire for freedom is not to vibrate in a vacuum, but to live more abundantly. Intuition deals with life directly, and introduces us into life's own domain: it is related to reason as flame is related to heat. All of the great discoveries in science, all of the great solutions in mathematics, have been the result of a flash of intuition, after long brooding in the mind. ”

“ One by one the sky has yielded its amazing secrets, till the mind roams free among the stars. The reason why there are to-day so many men braving death in the air is because the conquest of the third dimension is the task to which the Zeit-Geist has for the moment addressed itself, and these intrepid aviators are its chosen instruments—sacrificial pawns in the dimension-gaining game.
All these things are only the outward and visible signs of the angel, incarnate in a world of three dimensions, striving to realize higher spatial, or heavenly, conditions. ”

“ Character is destiny, and character is self-created. "All that we are is the result of what we have thought." But in the vast complexity and volume of human life there is a constant production of forms, with all the varieties of characteristics and capacities requisite to meet the needs of every soul, thirsty for the destiny that awaits it; and here heredity plays its part. Beyond the individual soul is the world-soul, which periodically incarnates in the humanity of a planet, and beyond the worlds of a single system, suns and congeries of suns. ”

“ This "eternal return," so far from being a new idea, is so old that it has been forgotten. Its reappearance in novel guise, along with so many other recrudescences, itself beautifully illustrates time curvature in consciousness. Yugas, time cycles, are an integral and inexpugnable part of Oriental metaphysics. "Since the soul perpetually runs," says Zoroaster, "in a certain space of time it passes through all things, which circulation being accomplished, it is compelled to run back again through all things, and unfold the same web of generation in the world." ”

“ Eastern wisdom casts such a light upon the problems of subjectivity that it should not be lightly dismissed. For uncounted centuries Hindu-Aryan spiritual science has recognized, not one plane or condition of consciousness, but three; waking, dreaming, and deep sleep—the gross, the subtle and the pure. In the waking state—that is, with the vehicle attuned to vibrate to materiality—the individual self is as a captive in a citadel of flesh, aware of only so much of the universal life as chances to enact itself before the windows of his prison. ”

“ We are wont to think of feeling, the form in which Being manifests to consciousness, as an effect instead of as a cause. When Sweet Sixteen becomes suddenly and mysteriously interesting to the growing boy, it is not because sex has awakened in his body, but because the dread time has come for him to contemplate the Idea of Woman in his soul. If you are sleepy, it is not because the blood has begun to flow away from your brain, but because your body has begun to bore you. Night has brought back the Idea of Freedom, and consciousness chloroforms the thing that clutches it. ”

“ By this disastrous sentence direct vision is denied to us; we can see only by the aid of the outer light; these are but windows that we possess—not eyes. Nor will our pain be less when we hear in the fraternal breathing of the winds with which no longer can we mingle our own, since ours will have for its dwelling, instead of the sublime and open world, the narrow prison of the breast! ”

“ Evolution is to be conceived of as a continuous pushing back of the boundary between representation and reality, or as a conquest of space. We may conceive of space as of an infinite number of dimensions, and of consciousness as a moving—or rather as an expanding—point, embracing this infinity, involving worlds, powers, knowledges, felicities, within itself in everlasting progression. ”

“ It is only when these recurrences do not submit themselves to our puny powers of analysis and measurement that we are incredulous of a larger aspect of the law of time-return. Sleep for example, is not less mysterious than death which, too, may be but "a sleep and a forgetting." The reason that sleep fails to terrify us as death does is because experience has taught that memory leafs the chasm. Why should death bedreaded any more than bedtime? Because we fear that we shall forget. ”

“ All that occupies his attention is the kind of movement that his ship makes. The operations by which that movement is produced have sunk below the threshold of his consciousness; his own actions, by which he pushes the buttons, gives the orders, are so familiar as to be automatic; his mind is on the motion of the ship as a whole. In such a case we can imagine that he identifies himself with the ship; all that enters his conscious thought is the direction of its movement over the plane surface of the ocean. ”

“ Of all the writers on the subject of genius, Schopenhauer is the most illuminating, perhaps because he suffered from it so. According to him, the essence of genius lies in the perfection and energy of its perceptions. Schopenhauer says, "He who is endowed with talent thinks more quickly and more correctly than others; but the genius beholds another world from them all, although only because he has a more profound perception of the world which lies before them also, in that it presents itself in his mind more objectively, and consequently in greater purity and distinctness." ”

“ Looking now in thought not at the body of man, but within it, we apprehend an ordered universe immensely vast in proportion to that physical ultimate we name the electron, as is the firmament immensely vast in proportion to a single star. ”

“ If you are ill, you grow cold or your temperature rises: it is the signal by which you know that your consciousness is turning toward the Idea of Pain.
Just as a savage looks for a man behind a mirror, we foolishly seek in materiality for that which is not there. The soul determines circumstance: the soul contains the event which shall befall. The organic and environic rearrangements incident to obscure rotations in higher space are like the changes a mirror-image undergoes as an object draws near and then recedes from its plane. ”

“ With Balzac and Tolstoy we gaze unrevolted upon the nethermost depths of human depravity, discerning moral beauty even there; while with Virgil, Dante and Milton, we walk unscathed in Hell itself. The terribilita of Michaelangelo, the chaos and anarchy of Shakespeare at his greatest, as in Lear—these find expression in perfect rhythms, so potent that we recognize them as proceeding from a supernal beauty, the beauty of that soul "from which also cometh the life of man and of beast, and of the birds of the air and of the fishes of the sea." ”

“ Our sense of space is the consciousness that we abide in Him; our sense of time is the consciousness that He abides in us. Both are modes of apprehension of divinity—growing, expanding modes. In conceiving of a space of more than three dimensions we prove that our relation to God is not static, but dynamic. Christ said to the man who was sick of the palsy, "Rise, take up thy bed and walk." The narrow concept of three-dimensional space is a bed in which the human mind has lain so long as to become at last inanimate. The divine voice calls to us again to demonstrate that we are alive. ”

“ No writer was more of his period than Shakespeare, yet how contemporary he seems to each succeeding generation. Leonardo, in a perfect portrait, showed forth the face of a subtle, sensuous, and mocking spirit, against a background of wild rocks. It represents not alone the soul-phase of the later Renaissance, but of every individual and of every civilization which on life's dangerous and orgiastic substratum has reared a mere garden of delight. ”

“ This struggle for space, by means of which the birth and growth of organisms is achieved, is the very texture of life, the plot of every drama. Cells subdivide; micro-organisms war on one another; plants contend for soil, light, moisture; flowers cunningly suborn the bee to bring about their nuptials; animals wage deadly warfare in their rivalry to bring more hungry animals into a space-hungry world. Man is not exempt from this law of the jungle. ”

“ Just as a moving picture shows us the round and living bodies of men and women as flat images on a plane, enacting there some mimic drama, so on the three-dimensional screen of the world men and women engaged in unfolding the drama of personal life may be but the images of souls enacting, on higher planes of being, the drama of their own salvation. The reluctance of the American aborigine to be photographed is said to have been due to his belief that something of his personality, his human potency, went into the image, leaving him by so much the poorer from that time forth. ”

“ If we assume that clairvoyance in space is the perception of the things of our world from the region of the fourth dimension, the phenomena exactly conform to the demands of our analogy. It is no more difficult for a four-dimensional intelligence to understand the appearance or disappearance of a body in a completely closed room, or the withdrawal of an orange from its skin, without cutting or breaking that skin, than it is for us to see the possibility of taking up a pencil point from the center of a circle and putting it down outside. ”

“ TIMELESSNESS The inspirations of genius come from a failure of attention to life, which, all paradoxically, brings vision—the power to see life clearly and "see it whole." Consciousness, unconditioned by time, "in a beautiful strong dream," awakens to the perception of a world that is timeless. ”

“ Death also is a failure of attention to life, the greatest that we know, and poorest therefore in plunder from supernatural realms. Nevertheless reports of persons who have narrowly escaped death give evidence at least that to those emancipated by death, life, viewed from some higher region of space, is perceived as a unity. When a man is brought face to face with death, the events of life pass before the mind's eye in an instant, and he comes from such an experience not only with deeper insight into himself, but into the meaning and purpose of life also. ”

“ If we conceive of each individual as a "slice" or cross-section of a higher being, each fragment isolated by an inhibition of consciousness which it is moment by moment engaged in transcending, the sacrifice of the Logos takes on a new meaning. This disseverance into millions of human beings is that each may realize God in himself. Conceiving of humanity as God's broken body, we are driven to make peace among its members, and by realization we become the Children of God. ”

“ The Yogi, as the word implies—it means literally union—seeks to unite himself with his own higher self, the eternal and immortal part of his own nature, and the achievement of this brings with it the freedom of the three worlds at all times, and in full consciousness. As this involves an inward turning of the mind and will, and the withdrawal from the ordinary active life of average humanity, he alone is witness of his own success. ”

“ If thou could'st discern, my beloved, how distinctly and ordinately these forms are arranged and connected with each other, from the mere aspect and infinity of so many wonderful things connected with each other, from the mere aspect and infinity of so many wonderful things conspiring into one, thou would'st fall down, from an inmost impulse, with sacred astonishment, and at the same time pious joy, to perform an act of worship and of love before such an architect. ”

“ They found that in a great number of cases these cross-sections, when thus isolated, revealed little of the symmetry and beauty of their higher-dimensional archetypes. It is clear that a beautiful form of our world, traversing a plane, would show nothing of its beauty to the planeman, who lacked the power of perceiving it entire; for the sense of beauty is largely a matter of co-ordination. We give the names of evil, chance, fate, ugliness, to those aspects of life and of the world that we fail to perceive in their true relations, in regard to which our power of correlation breaks down. ”

“ THE IMMANENT DIVINE In the fact of the limited nature of our space perceptions is found a connecting link between materialism and idealism. For, passing deeper and deeper in our observation of the material world, that which we at first felt as real passes away to become but the outward sign of a reality infinitely greater, of which our realities are appearances only, and we become convinced of the existence of an immanent divine. "In Him we live and move and have our being." Our space is but a limitation of infinite "room to move about": "In my Father's house are many mansions." ”

“ Our planet appears as a moving point, tracing out a line—a one-space—its path around the sun. Now let us remove ourselves in imagination only far enough from the earth for human beings thereon to appear as minute moving things, in the semblance, let us say, of insects infesting an apple. It is clear that from this point of view these beings have a freedom of movement in their "space" (the surface of the earth) , of which the larger unit is not possessed; for while the earth itself can follow only a line, its inhabitants are free to move in the two dimensions of the surface of the earth. ”

“ Genius but utters experiences common to us all, records perceptions of a world-order which we too have glimpsed. Love, hope, pain, sorrow, disappointment, often effect that momentary purgation which enables consciousness to function independently of the tyrant will. These hours have for us a noetic value—"some veil did fall"—revealing visions remembered even unto the hour of death.
"DEATH" That "failure of attention to life" which begets inspiration in the man of genius comes, indeed, daily to every one, but without his being able to profit by it. ”

“ THE ORBITAL MOVEMENT OF TIME Now if our space is curved in higher space, since such curvature is at present undetectable by us, we must assume, as Hinton chose to assume, that it curves in the minute, or, as some astronomers assume, that its curve is vast. These assumptions are not mutually exclusive: they are quite in analogy with the general curvature of the earth's surface which is in no wise interfered with by the lesser curvatures represented by mountains and valleys. It is easiest to think of our space as completely curved in higher space in analogy with the surface of a sphere. ”