Mysticism
THE HOUR OF TWILIGHT
For the future we intend that at this hour the Mystic shall be at
home, less metaphysical and scientific than is his wont, but more
really himself. It is customary at this hour, before the lamps are
brought in, to give way a little and dream, letting all the tender
fancies day suppresses rise up in our minds. Wherever it is spent,
whether in the dusky room or walking home through the blue evening,
all things grow strangely softened and united; the magic of the old
world reappears. The commonplace streets take on something of the
grandeur and solemnity of starlit avenues of Egyptian temples; the
public squares in the mingled glow and gloom grow beautiful as the
Indian grove where Sakuntala wandered with her maidens; the children
chase each other through the dusky shrubberies; as they flee past
they look at us with long remembered glances: lulled by the silence,
we forget a little while the hard edges of the material and remember
that we are spirits.
Now is the hour for memory, the time to call in and make more
securely our own all stray and beautiful ideas that visited us during
the day, and which might otherwise be forgotten. We should draw them
in from the region of things felt to the region of things understood;
in a focus burning with beauty and pure with truth we should bind
them, for from the thoughts thus gathered in something accrues to the
consciousness; on the morrow a change impalpable but real has taken
place in our being, we see beauty and truth through everything.
It is in like manner in Devachan, between the darkness of earth
and the light of spiritual self-consciousness, that the Master in each
of us draws in and absorbs the rarest and best of experiences, love,
self-forgetfulness, aspiration, and out of these distils the subtle
essence of wisdom, so that he who struggles in pain for his fellows,
when he wakens again on earth is endowed with the tradition of that
which we call self sacrifice, but which is in reality the
proclamation of our own universal nature. There are yet vaster
correspondences, for so also we are told, when the seven worlds are
withdrawn, the great calm Shepherd of the Ages draws his misty hordes
together in the glimmering twilights of eternity and as they are
penned within the awful Fold, the rays long separate are bound into
one, and life, and joy, and beauty disappear, to emerge again after
rest unspeakable on the morning of a New Day.
Now if the aim of the mystic be to fuse into one all moods made
separate by time, would not the daily harvesting of wisdom render
unnecessary the long Devachanic years? No second harvest could be
reaped from fields where the sheaves are already garnered. Thus
disregarding the fruits of action, we could work like those who have
made the Great Sacrifice, for whom even Nirvana is no resting place.
Worlds may awaken in nebulous glory, pass through their phases of
self-conscious existence and sink again to sleep, but these tireless
workers continue their age-long task of help. Their motive we do not
know, but in some secret depth of our being we feel that there could
be nothing nobler, and thinking this we have devoted the twilight
hour to the understanding of their nature.
GEORGE WILLIAM RUSSELL
THE MYSTIC
Angels have talked with him, and showed him thrones:
Ye knew him not; he was not one of ye,
Ye scorned him with an undiscerning scorn:
Ye could not read the marvel in his eye,
The still serene abstraction: he hath felt
The vanities of after and before;
Albeit, his spirit and his secret heart
The stern experiences of converse lives,
The linked woes of many a fiery change
Had purified, and chastened, and made free. . . .
For him the silent congregated hours,
Daughters of time, divinely tall, beneath
Severe and youthful brows, with shining eyes
Smiling a godlike smile (the innocent light
Of earliest youth pierced through and through with all
Keen knowledges of low-embowèd eld)
Upheld, and ever hold aloft the cloud
Which droops low-hung on either gate of life,
Both birth and death: he in the centre fixt,
Saw far on each side through the grated gates
Most pale and clear and lovely distances.
He often lying broad awake, and yet
Remaining from the body, and apart
In intellect and power and will, hath heard
Time flowing in the middle of the night,
And all things creeping to a day of doom.
How could ye know him? Ye were yet within
The narrower circle: he had wellnigh reached
The last, which with a region of white flame,
Pure without heat, into a larger air
Upburning, and an ether of black blue,
Investeth and ingirds all other lives.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
