Sun of Reality

“ Here, then, is another view of the universe—not an unchanging, relationless, eternal reality, but varying degrees of reality manifested in that complex process which we call sometimes the world and sometimes 'experience,' But the two views are connected. For it is assumed that the Absolute Reality is harmonious and all-comprehensive ”

“ That we are now living personalities, possessed of soul and body, and surrounded by an unfathomable universe, is a revelation about which all ages and all generations agree, whenever the complex vision is allowed its orchestral harmony. The primeval savage looking up at the sky above him might regard the sun and moon as living gods exercising their influence upon a fixed unmoving earth. ”

“ I know not by what name to call it, except that to me it is a reality transcending any merely sensible experience one ever enjoys upon this earth. It is the kingdom of the Unseen; but only the unseen things are real and eternal, for they are the hidden springs of existence and life. Can one resist the melancholy, the sense of tears in things when we reflect that, like our own bodily frame, the whole visible world is hastening to dissolution? ”

“ We see, as knowledge dawns upon it, truth and error strangely commingled; here, a bright spot illuminated by truth-and there, one darkened and distorted by error; and the state of such a soul may be compared to a landscape at early dawn, where the sun is seen superbly gilding some objects, and causing others to send forth their lengthened, distorted, and sometimes hideous shadows. ”

“ I am surrounded by images, [Pg 96] my present state of being is a shadow, but I crave reality. The symbol is fair, but Truth is fairer. To that verity all types must yield, how beautiful soever they be, or meet to express their burden. ”

“ No such inspired creation is at unity with itself, any more than the clouds of heaven when the sun pierces through them. Every shade of light and dark, of truth, and of fiction which is the veil of truth, is allowable in a work of philosophical imagination. ”

“ We are invited to one gradual undivided process of sublimation, penetrating ever more deeply into the reality of the Universe, to find at last “that One who is present everywhere and absent only from those who do not perceive Him.” What we behold, that we are: citizens, according to our own will and desire, of the surface world of the senses, the deeper world of life, or the ultimate world of Spiritual reality. ”

“ These hidden listeners, these tacit arbiters, these assumed and implied witnesses of our life, give value to every attempt we make at arriving at some unity amid our differences; and their vision seems, as the eternal duality presses upon us, to be at once the thing from which we start and the thing towards which, moulding the future as we go, we find ourselves moving. In the unfathomable depths of the past we are aware of a form, a shape, a principle, a premonition; and into the unfathomable depths of the future we project the fulfilled reality of this. ”

“ All the unfathomable souls of the world, and all souls are unfathomable whether they are the souls of plants or animals or planets or gods or men, are found, the closer they approach one another, to be in possession of the same vision. For this immortal vision, in which what we name beauty, and what we name "reality," finds its synthesis, is found to be nothing less than the secret love. ”

“ The rays of the truth, like the rays of the sun, which universally seems to have been man's first adoration, have two properties equally inherent in their essence, warmth and light. And as for the life of all things on this globe both attributes of sunshine are necessary, so to the development of that something which constitutes the ego both qualities of the truth are vital. ”

“ We are but the visionaries of the fleeting phenomena, we perceive only the shadows. But, by Thy grace and mercy, as the eyes are closed, the heart is opened; as the senses are sealed up, the spirit within is unveiled; and we behold Thee behind the phenomena, beyond the shadows, as the One Eternal Reality; and we rejoice that thus we are led even by Thee into the Holy of Holies. There, in the immost shrine of Thine eternal presence, what are we, where are we, except as mere glimpses and as surface-expressions of Thy profound reality? ”

“ Why may not the advancing front of experience, carrying its immanent satisfactions and dissatisfactions, cut against the black inane as the luminous orb of the moon cuts the caerulean abyss? Why should anywhere the world be absolutely fixed and finished? And if reality genuinely grows, why may it not grow in these very determinations which here and now are made? ”

“ Had he possessed any powers of definition at that age, probably he would have described our accepted beliefs as shadows of the Truth, distorted and fantastically shaped, like those thrown by changeful, ragged clouds behind which the eternal sun is shining, shadows that vary in length and character according to the hour and weather of the mortal day. ”

“ But beyond the heat and light, I felt the presence of the sun as I felt it in the solitary valley, the presence of the resistless forces of the universe; the sun burned in the sky as I stood and pondered. Is there any theory, philosophy, or creed, is there any system or culture, any formulated method able to meet and satisfy each separate item of this agitated pool of human life? ”

“ The craving for truth, the unquenchable desire to escape from reality, leads them into realms of mystery and dream, where simple peasants and labourers, religious men and agnostics, philosophers and mystics, all meet together. ”

“ With the death of the Physical, the rending of the Veil, as we have seen in View Two, all Shadows and Reflections disappear, and, in place of "seeing as through a glass darkly," the Soul has its true birth, and at last enters upon its heritage in the Divine Life, face to face with the Reality, the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. ”

“ Though men hail it as reality, and band thoughts of its many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in truth the very opposite. That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality. ”

“ When the reason, for instance, usurps the whole field and acts in isolation from the imagination and the intuition, it tends to persuade us to deny the very existence of that deepest and most vivid reality of all, the handle of our spear-head, the base of our pyramid, the mysterious entity within us, which we have come, following the traditions of the centuries, to name the "soul." ”

“ In the midst of a civilization that was content to feed on shams and lies and to stop its ears to the voice of reality they follow the forgotten feet of truth—the truth that is mighty and must prevail at last—probing the secrets of the infinite universe, exploring the infinite labyrinths of the human mind and revealing the God within it. ”

“ There is in our hearts an inward, spiritual world, that breaks like a sun upon the clouds of the outward world. I mean that inward universe of goodness, beauty, and truth,—three worlds that are neither part, nor shoot, nor copy of the outward. ”

“ You talk of reality as fact. Well,” insists the mystic, “here shall be your fact, your datum, an absolutely pure datum. As pure it will fulfil the purpose of thinking, which always desires its own Other, or in other words always really desires just the cessation of all its strife in peace. Only in the immediate that has no beyond, is such peace. Now that is the Reality, that is the Soul. ”

“ But now he saw them crouching under the sky, with still the dark, mysterious world of reality inside, but as a world within a world, a sort of side show, whereas before they had been as a world to him within a chaos: a reality, an order, an absolute, within a meaningless confusion. ”

“ This, that, and the other, of things unnumbered, material and immaterial, wise and otherwise, make up the marvelous microcosm we call Self—the world where, like the sun of the planetary system, shines the intellect with perfect splendor. But, as the spectrum has dissected the solar ray, so has the understanding, by a process of self-inflicted vivisection that seems scarcely less than divine in its insight, pierced and resolved the mysteries of its own composition. ”

“ It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do Overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to be the fair accidents and effects which change and pass. ”

“ To try to answer these questions by searching for their reasons in the historical circumstances of the time, life, and character and special qualities of those men who first accepted and expressed this conception of life, is as though one were to try to prove why the rising sun first casts his rays on certain objects. The sun of truth, rising higher and higher upon the world, enlightens it ever further, and is reflected by those forms on which first fall the illumination of its rays, and which are most capable of reflecting them. ”

“ It needs no initiation before we can understand its mysteries, excepting that of the pure heart and the awakened mind. It represents nature, but in representing, it interprets her. It shows us nothing but reality, but in the real, it mirrors the invisible ideal. ”

“ Every great truth has at first been no more than a dream,—that is to say, a thought, or an instinctive perception of the Soul reaching after its own immortal heritage. And what the Soul demands it receives. ”

“ If however you ask me what amount of truth or reality there has been in these dreams and visions, I should reply, as about poetry and prophecy, that some of these imaginations have represented realities, some unrealities; but that the total result to which they have led men, the belief in the immortality of the soul, is a reality. ”

“ But when by the use of the term objective mystery I have indicated that general and universal something, not itself, by which the soul is confronted, that something which, like a white screen, or a thick mass of darkness, waits the moving lamp of the soul to give it light and colour, it becomes clear that the name itself does not cover any actual reality other than the actual reality of all the bodies in the world joined together by the universal ether. ”

“ When the sun shines the eye sees, and in the intellectual world where truth is, there is sight and light. Now that which is the sun of intelligent natures, is the idea of good, the cause of knowledge and truth, yet other and fairer than they are, and standing in the same relation to them in which the sun stands to light. O inconceivable height of beauty, which is above knowledge and above truth! (‘You cannot surely mean pleasure,’ he said. Peace, I replied.) ”

“ The force of association makes out of this unreal world a reality; and the longer the company, the more real seems the shadow. But the day comes when the unreal goes to the unreal, and, ah, how sad to bear.
Yet that which is real, the Soul, is ever with us, omnipresent. Blessed is the person who has seen the real in this world of vanishing shadows. ”

“ Never can reality and the mere semblance of reality be one, and wide is the difference between fancy and fact, between truth and the phantom thereof.
Know thou that the Kingdom is the real world, and this nether place is only its shadow stretching out. A shadow hath no life of its own; its existence is only a fantasy, and nothing more ”

“ Since what we call beauty is the evocation of these two confronted existences, the existing thing which we call the soul and the existing thing which we call the objective mystery, it follows that there resides, as a potentiality, in the nature of the objective mystery, the capacity for being converted into Beauty at the touch of the soul. There is thus a three-fold complication of reality in this thing we call the beauty of the universe. ”

“ He that eats of the fruit of the tree of life shares the vision of the gods. He gazes upon the naked face of truth. I don't pretend that the face of truth is beautiful. It is hideous beyond imagination. ”

“ Thus the fact that all these three aspects of objective reality are under the domination of the same time and space is a further confirmation of the truth which we have already assumed by an act of faith, namely that all the various "universes," half-discovered and half-created by all the souls in the world, are in reality "one universe." ”

“ There is left us, I reply, just this world of our daily experience, with precisely its stars and milky ways, with its human life and its linkages — this world, only given already a deeper meaning by this very study. For now we already begin to see, as from afar, the realm of truth that is not independent of, but the very heart and life of this fragmentary finite experience of ours. ”

“ When we have basked in the beauty of a summer sunset, was there nothing in the sky that spoke to the soul of Truth and Goodness? And when the opening intellect first received the truth of the great law of gravitation, or felt itself mounting through the profound of space, to travel with the planets in their unerring rounds, did never then the kindred Ideas of Goodness and Beauty chime in, as it were, with the fabled music,--not fabled to the soul,--which led you on like one entranced? ”

“ This doctrine has undergone extreme modification in the course of culture. It has outlived the almost total loss of one great argument attached to it,—the objective reality of apparitional souls or ghosts seen in dreams and visions. The soul has given up its ethereal substance, and become an immaterial entity, ‘the shadow of a shade.’ Its theory is becoming separated from the investigations of biology and mental science, which now discuss the phenomena of life and thought, the senses and the intellect, the emotions and the will, on a ground-work of pure experience. ”