Fathom

“ She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep. ”

“ IMITATION A dark unfathom’d tide Of interminable pride— A mystery, and a dream, Should my early life seem; I say that dream was fraught With a wild, and waking thought Of beings that have been, Which my spirit hath not seen, Had I let them pass me by, With a dreaming eye! Let none of earth inherit That vision on my spirit; Those thoughts I would control As a spell upon his soul: For that bright hope at last And that light time have past, And my worldly rest hath gone With a sigh as it pass’d on I care not tho’ it perish With a thought I then did cherish. ”

“ But what after all is the character of these pleasures upon which there is such a high estimate placed? They are all vain and empty as a bubble on the wave. They are like a dream which assumes all the appearance of reality, till we awake from our slumber and discover the deception. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I do not believe that either to myself or my friend were such words spoken, but the whole being is lifted up in vision and overmastered, and the words that came flying upward in consciousness perhaps represent our sudden harmony with a life which is beyond ourselves, we in our words interpreting the life of the spirit. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If, indeed, the realities not reflected became unrealities, were annihilated, then there would be some sense in veiling those portions of the mirror in front of which certain features of our life are exposed. ”

“ This was the experience, then, of ‘distinct pre-eminence’ in whose recollection his mind was ‘nourished and invisibly repaired.’ It is in such a moment that the soul’s strength is shown; when common objects evoke what he calls the imagination, the reality, of which they are a suggestion. ”

“ In these pantheistic sympathies I dimly recall that another sect finds three great mysteries in its esoteric view of the world. The wind whistling through the trees, the river breaking over its rocks, the movements of man and his voice,—or, indeed, his silence,—are the expression of the great mysteries of body, of word, and of thought. ”

“ The Anæsthetic Revelation is the Initiation of Man into the Immemorial Mystery of the Open Secret of Being, revealed as the Inevitable Vortex of Continuity. Inevitable is the word. Its motive is inherent—it is what has to be. It is not for any love or hate, nor for joy nor sorrow, nor good nor ill. ”

“ I can confirm you in this remark, as for many years I have made dreams the subject of a special study and observation. When the soul, freed from the attentions, the preoccupations, the encumbrance of the body, has a vision of the object which charms it, and towards which it is irresistibly drawn, all disappear except the object. That alone remains, and becomes the centre of a world of creations ”

“ Like the ethereal waves, whose inconceivable rapidity and number are said to impart the sensation of vision, the undulations of opinion are speeding on to produce the perception of truth. They are the infinitely complex and delicate movements of that universal Human Mind, whose quiescence is darkness,—whose agitation, light. ”

“ As to me, this world of phenomena—if it have all its truth in these phenomena, and no more profound significance, if it have nothing beyond itself to reveal to me—becomes a repulsive phantom, in whose presence I curse the consciousness which has called it into existence, and I invoke against it annihilation as a deity. ”

“ On the one hand, there are those that seem to spring from dimly lit or dark feeling, to arise,—as it were, hydra-like, to sting and madden, or mist-like, to benumb all life, and turn it into mere drift and dreaming,—from out of the obscure, undrained, swampy places of human ignorance and passion. ”

“ But should aught of ethereal spirit be perceptible, yet scarcely so, glimmering along the dull train of words,—should a faint perfume breathe from the mass of clay,—then, gentle reader, thank the ghost, who thus embodies himself for your sake! Will you believe me, if I say that all true and noble thoughts, and elevated imaginations, are but partly the offspring of the intellect which seems to produce them? ”

“ I can imagine the spirit struggling outwards making of element, colour, form or sound a mirror, on which, outside itself, it would find symbols of all that was pent within itself, and so gradually becoming self-conscious in the material nature in which it was embodied, but which was still effigy or shadow of a divine original. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He thought he could detect in nature—both animate and inanimate, with soul or without soul—something which manifests itself only in contradictions, and which, therefore, could not be comprehended under any idea, still less under one word. ”

“ The power of the spirit, vui, belonging to the stone or the spring could lay hold on the man by his shadow and reflection, as the power of a ghost could get a hold on a man by a fragment of his food, the shadow being in a way another person of the man. But that the shadow was the soul was never thought. ”

“ Belief in the unreality of the world of sense arises with irresistible force in certain moods—moods which, I imagine, have some simple physiological basis, but are none the less powerfully persuasive. The conviction born of these moods is the source of most mysticism and of most metaphysics. ”

“ Not a storm, then, but an instant change from something to nothing, with consciousness preserved; complete, far-reaching consciousness, that was more perfect than sight, yet was not sight, but a being everywhere at once, a universal understanding, a part of something all pervading, a unification with all things past, present, and to come, with no desire for them, nor vision of them, but perfect knowledge of them all. ”

“ Fate slaps your face midway in a pretty romance. All right. But when I make a record of the matter I pick, choose, sort, re-assort my box of words, and when things are going too rapidly I wink at Fate with my tongue in my cheek and round up everybody so amiably that nobody knows exactly what did happen—and nobody even stops to think because everybody has already finished the matter in their own minds to their own satisfaction. ”

“ He reasoned as the shadows reason in dreamland, the boundaries of common probability receded to an immeasurable distance, and he almost ceased to know where reality ended and where imagination took up the sequence of events. ”

“ Many things then become visible as by a lightning flash in the darkness, and are apprehended by the vigorous grasp of pure intuition. But more generally the imagination throws itself on these intuitions, and presents them to the lower soul under the semblance of forms and sounds the angelic beauty which the seer beholds, and the harmonious speech which a heavenly voice seems to utter in his ear. ”

“ If, for example, we should think that something we see is an unreal phantom, or a ghost, or some kind of hallucination, and on going up to it find that it does actually occupy space, we correct our opinion and say the thing is real. ”

“ That which sense deemed shadow will be found substance, and what it called substance will become nothingness, as the dream vanishes and the reality appears. The parent of all discord was not a man, but a dream that man is material and mortal, that he originated in dust, started materially instead of spiritually. ”

“ Perhaps I may point out that this Transcendental Feeling—the ultimate material alike of prayer and of poetry—has, like the mystic consciousness, a dual perception of Reality: static being and dynamic life. ”

“ The crude creations of mortal thought must finally give place to the glorious forms that we sometimes behold in the camera of Mind, where the mental picture is more real.
The fading forms of matter are the fleeting thoughts of mortal mind, that have their day before the permanent perfection of Spirit shall appear. ”

“ In those I remember one view would begin like a faint ghost, and grow and oust another. In just that way it seemed to me that a ghostly set of new sensations was struggling with those of my ordinary self. ”

“ And this intimate relation between the scientific and the philosophic consideration of illusion is abundantly illustrated in the history of philosophy. The errors of sense, appearing in a region which to the vulgar seems so indubitable, have again and again set men thinking on the question, "What is the whole range of illusion? Is perception, as popularly understood, after all, a big hallucination? Is our life a dream?" ”

“ Thus they explain the origin of matter by reference to an occult, immense, and immensely mysterious phantasm without body, parts or passions, who sees though not to be seen, hears though not to be heard, feels though not to be felt, moves though not to be moved, knows though not to be known, and in short, does everything, though not to be done by anything. ”

“ Let him who reads forgive the intrusion of a dream into a history of fact. But it came so home to me—I saw it all so clear in a moment, as it were; and, besides, who shall say what proportion of fact, past, present, or to come, may lie in the imagination? What is imagination? Perhaps it is the shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is the soul’s thought. ”

“ But, Sir, does your old philosophy never suggest to you the idea that these new discoveries and emotions, with their consequent anticipations, may be referable to the mysterious action of a disturbed imagination, rather than the direct action of a supernatural power—what scepticism designates the flights of fancy? ”

“ It may be urged by those who still cling to the old-fashioned fetish of a distinction between Spirit and Matter, that this explanation of predictions, oracles, and insight, is simply materialistic and utterly destructive of all the poetry, grandeur, and beauty which is associated with mysterious divination. ”

“ The mystic insight begins with the sense of a mystery unveiled, of a hidden wisdom now suddenly become certain beyond the possibility of a doubt. The sense of certainty and revelation comes earlier than any definite belief. The definite beliefs at which mystics arrive are the result of reflection upon the inarticulate experience gained in the moment of insight. ”

“ Using then, as our instrument of research, that totality of attributes by which the soul in its rare moments of rhythmic consummation visualizes the world, the question arises—what, in plain untechnical terms, is the revelation made to us by this complex medium? Here, as before, I am anxious, before I venture upon such a hazardous undertaking as an answer to this question, to indicate clearly that what I am attempting to state is a revelation which is common to the experience of all souls, wherever such a thing as the soul exists. ”

“ Hermitages, recluses, silences and funereal glooms, and the entire family of grotesque thoughts and things, are not merely wrought into the writer’s canvas, but are his very staple, the warp and woof composing it. It is an across-the-seas collection of conceits, skilfully strung on one glittering thread by a matured thinker. The attempt is made to carve out the mystery of things from the heart of the outward existence. ”

“ The confusion in the barbaric mind between the objective and the subjective, and between the name [Pg 169] and the person or thing, which has been illustrated in the foregoing pages, will enable us to see more clearly how the like confusion must enter into the interpretation of such occult and compound phenomena as dreams, and all their kind.
They supply the conditions for exciting and sustaining that feeling of mystery which attends man’s endeavour to get at the meaning of his surroundings. ”

“ Our carnal hearts have so feeble and so faint a feeling of them, and our dull worldly wits are so little able to conceive so much as a shadow of the right imagination! A shadow, I say, for, as for the thing as it is, not only can no fleshly carnal fancy conceive that, but beside that no spiritual person peradventure neither, so long as he is still living here in this world. ”

“ Their gross unconsciousness survive Thy godlike energy of thought? In thoughts which answer to my own, In words which reach my inward ear, Like whispers from the void Unknown, I feel thy living presence here. ”

“ But where miracles happen, all definite forms melt in the golden haze of imagination and feeling; there the world, reality, is no truth; there the miracle-working, emotional, i.e., subjective being, is held to be alone the objective, real being. ”

“ But solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotional attributes, admit of various shades; and, do what we will with our defining, the truth must at last be confronted that we are dealing with a field of experience where there is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn. ”

“ To explain more fully what has given rise to those phantoms, the apparition of which has been published in all ages, without availing myself of the ridiculous opinion of the skeptics, who doubt of everything, and assert that our senses, however sound they may be, can only imagine everything falsely, I shall remark that the wisest amongst the philosophers maintain that deep melancholy, anger, frenzy, fever, depraved or debilitated senses, whether naturally, or by accident, can make us see and hear many things which have no foundation. ”