(Huge thanks to Keith Armstrong of the Findhorn Archive for preparing this transcript of one of Sir George’s lectures).
Sir George Trevelyan:
“Our theme is ‘the Poetry of the Living Earth’, which appropriately follows that perfectly beautiful audio visual of the seasons. The poets have always known it. It’s axiomatic. Listen to Wordsworth (On the Power of Sound):
By one pervading spirit
Of tones and numbers all things are controlled
As sages taught, where faith was found to merit
Initiation in that mystery old
The heavens, whose aspect makes our minds as still
As they themselves appear to be,
Innumerable voices fill
With everlasting harmony
and Dryden [A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687 JOHN DRYDEN]
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.
And of course the passage in the merchant of Venice, Lorenzo speaking in Belmont.
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
To the poetical consciousness this is open. Listen to a few of these lines from Anna Kingsford
The poet hath no self apart from his larger self…
his personality is divine, and being divine has no limits,
he is supreme and ubiquitous in consciousness
his heart beats with every element
the pulses of the infinite deep of heaven vibrate in his own
and responding to their strength
and their plenitude he feels more intensely than other men.
Not merely does he see and examine these rocks, these trees,
these variable waters and these glittering peaks;
not merely does he hear this plaintive wind,
and these rolling peels, but he is all these.
And when he sings it is not he, the man, whose voice is heard,
it is the voice of manifold nature itself.
The great continual cadence of universal life moves,
and becomes articulate in human language.
And let me give you a poem by our modern poet, who has been here in Findhorn, Kathleen Raine. This to me, expresses what we are talking about. Its all included here and I may say this poem will be used tonight in the Eurhythmy performance, and I’ve asked the permission of those performers whether I may use it now in my talk. She is dealing now with this sense of the world of the Living Archetypes, realise this basic truth which is coming to us all now, which is nothing other than saying ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word is with God, and the Word was God and by Him were all things made.’
First the Divine Mind pours out the Ocean of Thought, the Ocean of Creative, Living Archetypal Ideas.
And out of these ideas then, is crystallised the world of physical, material form.
It is back to this thought that we are now coming.
That there exists this great realm, this Ocean of Living Being which is Living Idea,
and behind every Form is Living Idea, including our own Body and Soul.
Pure was I before the world began
I was the violence of wind and wave
I was the bird, before the bird ever sang,
I was never still. I turned upon the axis of my Joy.
I was the lonely dancer on the hill
The rain upon the Mountainside
The rising mist. I was the seas unrest
I wove the web of colour before the rainbow
the intricacy of the flower before the leaf grew
I was the buried ore
and the fossil forest
I knew the roots of things
before death’s kingdom
I passed through the grave,
Times out of mind my journeys circles the Universe
and I remain before the First Day.
The whole mystery is contained in that. But, how easy it is to say ‘Earth Sings’. How easy it is to grasp the concept of the vast Oneness. As Frances Thompson puts it.
When with the new eyes of Thee
All things by immortal power, near and far,
Hiddenly to each other linked are,
that thou canst not stir a flower
without troubling of a star.
Then seek no more,
Pass the gates of Lutinay
Tread the region Elinore.
It is easy to say that. Once you get to the stage that you canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star. I can’t contend that were I to pick one of those flowers here I would make much difference, to disturb a star very much. The danger, of course, is a bit of masquerading of the Spirit, by using poetry and quoting like that, but it does indicate the poetical consciousness that we’re striving for, is the clue to our making the breakthrough and the break back to the Universal Consciousness which is so much lost. I found a passage from D.H. Lawrence, which I must give you. You see the point is that for so many the Universe is a mass of separate things. You cannot honestly contend that that oak tree over there, that you are that oak tree, or that you are that waterfall, or that flower, or that other person. Palpably you are not. There’s the oak tree, there’s the flower, there’s the star and here’s me. We have lost that Oneness.
The Universe is dead for us, and how is it to come alive again?
Knowledge has killed the Sun making it a ball of gas, with spots.
Knowledge has killed the Moon. It is a dead little Earth, fretted with extinct volcanoes, as with small pox.
The machine has killed the Earth for us, making it a surface, more or less bumpy, that you travel over.
How, out of all this, are we to get back to the grand orbs of the Soul’s Heaven that fill us with unspeakable joy?
How are we to get back to Apollo and Atis, Demeter and Persephone and the halls of Dis?
How even see the star Hesperus or Betelgeuse? We’ve got to get them back.
They are the world our Soul, our Greater Consciousness, lives in. The world of Reason and Science.
The Moon a dead lump of earth, the Sun, so much gas with spots.
This, the dry sterile little world the abstracted mind inhabits.
The world of our little consciousness which we know in our pettifogging apartness.
In the mean separateness of everything.
When we know the world in togetherness with ourselves, we know the world Hyacinthine, and Plutonic.
We know that the Moon gives us our body, as delight upon us, or steals it away.
We know the purring of the Great Gold Lion of the Sun, who licks us like a Lioness her cubs, making us bold. |
Or else like a Red Angry Lion dashes at us with open claws.
There are many ways of knowing. There are many sorts of Knowledge.
But the two ways of knowing for Man, are Knowing in terms of Apartness, which is mental, rational, scientific.
Or Knowing in terms of Togetherness which is religious and poetic. [D.H.Lawrence, A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover]
Now that, written in the 1930s, the point is that we are realising that there is a third way of knowledge, which is the uniting of the two. And discovering how our scientific intellect can take a step in Consciousness, so that we can, by intensifying, enhancing our thinking and our imaginative vision, open ourselves to the world of Living Idea and Being within the separate form. The point is now that the most advanced Science is arriving at the same understanding of the Oneness.
I quote one sentence from a great American scientist, Professor Dart from the University of California, in our own Wrekin Trust Conference this year, which we’ve done each year, on Mystics and Scientists, which he says: ‘There is no conflict between Science and Religion. The conflict is between dogmatic people, between second-rate scientists and second-rate mystics. There is only conflict between arrogance and humility, between closed-mindedness and open-mindedness.’
Now, I get called on by Hopkins, Manley Hopkins. He wants to contribute something. I have the strangest sensation as I go into these lectures constantly that the poet comes over my shoulder and nudges me, says ‘Look old man, come on’. So I do honour to Manley Hopkins. A wonderful sonnet called Hurrahing in Harvest.
SUMMER ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
[Sir George misquotes this poem, but I leave it as Hopkins wrote it. The sense remains the same.]
Hopkins was acutely conscious of the Living Christ present in the Whole of Nature, and most of his poems are giving us that cue. Note again:
Summer ends now, now barbarous in beauty the stooks arise around,
Up above, what Wind-walks; what lovely behaviour of silk-sack cloud
has wilder, wilful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour.
Hurrahing in Harvest is the poem.
Glean Christ out of your looking at the Glory of the sky, of the cloud
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder, Majestic
Christ’s
as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!
And now the moral of it
These things, these things were here and but the beholder wanting
which two when they once meet
The thing and the beholder –
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
Now the problem is how we make that bridge. He sees the wonder of this, the etheric wonder, the wonder of the Life, of the Oneness Life of God, within all form is there, and we are that part of Nature, where Nature has become Self-Conscious. We have gone through the experience of separation. Inevitable that we should learn Self-Consciousness, and ultimately become a co-creator with God. Going through that inevitable sacrifice which was necessary for the development of our acute intellectual Self-Consciousness, the sacrifice of the intuitive organs of the right hemisphere of the brain which could apprehend the Living Oneness.
Therefore we go through this narrow and difficult time, of aloneness and separation from God, and are now at the threshold as we reach, we approach the Aquarian Age, when human Consciousness is able to lift and take the step and see beyond the outer form and know that within itself it is one with the Living Whole. The Great Poetic Expression knows that, and here, perhaps a most remarkable illustration, comes from our metaphysical poet, Thomas Traherne, who possessed the faculty of remembering into the womb and beyond. Traherne’s poems, written 1650, were lost and not recovered until they were found in a barn, in an attic, round about 1900. How fittingly Destiny works. For until that time, nobody would have known what they were about. Now we begin to see. He experiences himself as One with the Whole Universe, before he was born. Pre-existence he actively experienced, and knows his Consciousness to be One with the Entire Whole.
Listen to this.
My essence was capacity,
That felt all things;
This made me present evermore
With whatsoe’er I saw.
An object, if it were before
My eye, was by Dame Nature’s law,
Within my soul.
…
O Joy! O wonder and delight!
O sacred mystery!
My Soul, a Spirit infinite!
An image of the Deity!
A pure substantial light!
…
A strange mysterious sphere!
A deep abyss,
That sees and is
The only proper place of Heavenly Bliss.
…
A strange extended orb of Joy,
Proceeding from within,
Which did on every side, convey
Itself, and being nigh of kin
To God did every way
Dilate itself even in an instant, and
Like an indivisible centre stand,
At once surrounding all eternity.
He is now talking about the inner centre which we enter in meditation. Here is this pearl of great price, this treasure, this secret chamber of the Soul which by rightful entering in, we discover a radiant centre of Light, which is one with Eternity. Note this:
A strange extended orb of Joy
Proceeding from within
which did on every side convey itself
And being nigh akin to God
Did every way dilate itself
Even in an instant.
And like an indivisible centre stand
At once surrounding all Eternity.
This is a tremendous message. Realise this, that we are now, we here, are concerned with the polar counterpart of Space exploration. The shooting of our physical rockets through Space is a wonder and an amazing achievement, but everything works in polarity. And the polarity with our physical rockets is the inner space exploration, moving into what we must now call Ethereal Space. The moving inwards, and over the ether frontiers, to expand into the etheric world, up and up and up, as Dante did, discovering that within us is an organ of sense and Consciousness, which can instantly be anywhere in this vast Space. It moves faster than Light because it is the speed of thought which is instantaneous.
We are, where we project our Consciousness, and therefore if you explore into the Eternity, into Ethereal Space, you can become an Indivisible Centre, but of course, right out to the far periphery, and so stand at once as surrounding all Eternity. This is the exploration with which we are concerned. And he goes on. This is yourself and mine, your inner sanctum of the Soul, in its potentiality. But the poet, the great poet, is actively experiencing it:
O wondrous Self! O sphere of light,
O sphere of joy most fair
O act, O power infinite;
O subtile and unbounded air!
O living orb of sight!
Living Orb of Sight, that is what the sanctum, of the Soul is
Thou which within me art, yet me!
Thou eye, And temple of His whole infinity!
O what a world art Thou! A world within!
All things appear,
All objects are Alive in Thee! Supersubstantial, rare,
Above themselves, and nigh of kin
To those pure things we find
In His great mind
Who made the world! Tho’ now eclipsed by sin
There they are useful and divine,
Exalted there they ought to shine.
Now he actively experiences that all things appear, all objects are alive in Thee. The objects, the tree, the flower, the rock, the waterfall, whatever, is super-substantial. In other words he is experiencing within the Soul, the being within the tree or the flower and That is one with Him. Super-substantial. Above solid matter. Rarified. Rare. Above themselves. Not the physical Oak Tree, but the Being of the Oak Tree, the Idea of the Oak Tree. And nigh of kin to those pure things we find in His great mind that made the world.
These are the Ideas, the Archetypal Ideas, which are the Thought of God and are present in every Form, and this is a question of achieving a form of Consciousness in which we can unite with the Being within the flower, or the tree. And when we touch it, that is alive in our own soul. Or, our own soul, extending everywhere, unites with the Idea within plant, tree, crystal or whatever. And in that sense you can truly say with the Orient,’That Art Thou’. For our ordinary Western Consciousness it is nonsense to say ‘I am that oak tree’. But if I can extend consciousness and grasp the plant or the oak tree and its being can play back into my … into this inner ethereal Space, then we are all one, for the Divinity in the Tree is the same as the Divinity in me, and the Divinity in me is the same as the Divinity in you. So Love floods between us all.
Now the clue to this, which I think we must bring in here, comes best in Goethe’s concept of Metamorphosis. Let me say a word about metamorphosis. See the point clearly is this, that we have developed our acute and scientific intellect, which was part of the Destiny of Western man. It was not wrong. It was what we in the West had to do, and we have mastered matter and we have realised that the whole thing is energy. And Alive. But in Nature is this instrument of the Intellect, of the human intellect. Separated off. But that instrument of the brain bound intellect was itself made by Spirit. And the brain truly is the instrument for perceiving Ideas, and Ideas are alive. Ideas are Beings waiting to be incarnated into human thought.
So our task is so to intensify our looking, towards imaginative and intuitive vision, that we may with a scientific clarity of thought, find a way of seeing the life that is working within the changing form, which we saw so beautifully in those photographs earlier this morning. Goethe’s realisation of the metamorphosis of the plant is the most valuable thing for us to start, and I must be brief, it’s a huge subject, but let me just touch upon it.
Your clue is to look into the plant, even to take its leaves to bits, and look at the series of the leaves. Let us take the idea of one, we’ll probably find a plant in which the, the first leaves are fairly simple form, and if you go a little higher you will find that that form is getting indented, and you reach a stage when you realise the most beautiful form achieved by the leaf. Your own artistic consciousness will see that in a mysterious way that is what the Idea of the plant is trying to achieve. And then, likely enough, you’ll find, after that point, it gets slightly tired. It gets more ethereal, and you see just a reflection of the glory of that leaf there, up here, up there, and it finally fades into the stamens. You sense a sort of spiral running round here through shape, from a simple shape, elaborating and fading, and fading, and fading, and brrr… Spinning round like that. And at that point the miracle happens and this green chlorophyl substance, metamorphoses into the glory of petal, coloured petal.
Now until you’ve got the idea you say now that’s the leaf and that’s the petal. The idea that your mind has got to be plastic enough to take is that the plant is all leaf. Is one organ and that there is something within the plant which is capable of taking organ leaf and metamorphosing it in infinite variety of forms. And once you get the idea and look at the plant, you see what is happening. And erm, this contention that that coloured petal is the leaf, may at first sight seem like nonsense. But look at, for instance, a tulip.
Now what nonsense to say that is the same as that. But, constantly what happens with the Tulip, is that about half an inch down a sport, an accident happens, and a petal comes off there. But that petal is half green leaf and half red petal. To the artistic eye of Vision you can see that this, has lifted itself right up into a world of colour. Has touched into a world of living colour and that at that point, it’s there, so to speak, where the new world of flowing colour is, living red. And here it is both the heavy substance of chlorophyll of the green leaf, and the red. So that an example like that will convince you that in all the plants this is happening, and leaf is metamorphosing. That first the plant spreads into the glory of leaf, many different ways, contracts, and moves into ethereal and scented, refined… more refined matter.
But it doesn’t end there. If you look into the Rose, you will find that constantly the outer petal, has just a sort of crinkle, in the top of it. And that a little further in, for clearly the inner petals are later. That’s clear enough isn’t it? The outer petal comes first and then.. and that a little later hardens up, turns into … and then at a certain stage you find a tiny spot of pollen, of yellow pollen, in that cyst there, and you find that the heart of the petal hardens up and a little further in, you find petals in which the hardened rib, perhaps only has petal on one side of it, and is really showing pollen in the top. And a later stage, that disappears altogether and you get nothing but the pollen organ. And you get quite clear demonstration that the pollen organ is metamorphosis of the leaf, the leaf is metam… of the petal, petal is metamorphosis of the leaf, and, as we shall see at Randolph’s Leap tomorrow, certainly the roots are also metamorphosis downwards of the leaf.
And then the plant dies, dies, so-called, its petals fall to the ground, rot down and become compost and the plant swells itself into fruit. I know a tulip doesn’t quite do this but good enough. It swells again into fruit and within the fruit is the ultimate contraction, of the seed. And that seed is a magical organ. The seed is an organ of chaos. Chaoticized matter. Matter returned to formlessness. This is an immensely important thing to get. It would be a materialistic mind that would think that you saw the whole tulip or the whole oak tree within the seed. You don’t. You see matter returned to absolute formlessness and therefore it is the point into which the ethereal Idea can pour in order to make the start again.
So we come to the glorious idea that … Earth creates no Form. The world of Gravity creates no Form. The Forms pour in from the world of Creative Idea, the ethereal world, into the Forms in Earth and are broken down by Dissolution. The glorious process of washing down to make the matrix for all, more life to come.
Take this thought now. I’m going to touch on a few ideas here. I’ve spoken of polarities. It’s one of the great Hermetic doctrines, following on the concept that All is Mind and that the whole of the Mind works by correspondences, Microcosm-Macrocosm, As Above – So Below, and that all works on Polarities.
We have forgotten the absolutely basic polarity. In the last three centuries, since Newton, we have forgotten that the world is made up of Gravity and its counterpart of, what you must call, Levity. We’ve worked… we’ve analysed our Universe on the basis of the pull towards the centre of the solid body, which Newton proved. But we have forgotten that there is an exact polar opposite, which is the pull towards the Ethereal Space, the furthest perimeter.
I just take this idea, as I say Time is against me but I want to get this thought in, to lead over to what I really want to say. Our minds must begin once more to entertain the concept of Levity. The concept of a pull which lifts towards the polar opposite to Gravity, the realm of Light. The Realm in which the upper elements of Fire and Air operate, centrifugally, while Water and Earth operate inwards, and downwards. And Man, and the Tree, and the Plant, are perfect examples of organs which are in exact balance of Levity and Gravity. And the Life pole Levity, is Primary to the Death pole of the Grave, of Gravity. But they work together in this wonderful way.
I must say, attempt a brief word, about a wonderful cue that comes from, out of, what is called Projective Geometry. I am only interested in one point here, but the realisation in this very living form of Geometry. That there is a polar opposite of Point and plane, and the Plane illustrates our Ethereal Space, and we have concentrated always on the point, which is the Gravity centre, and explained everything from the Centre Point. One lovely and simple illustration is that you can conceive a point, Gravity, radiating out like this, you can make the point. Whereas you get a line is, on this theory, this Euclidean Theory, consists merely of infinite points. You can also, and you can therefore create a circle, by simply taking a number of points, all the way round like this, and so you achieve a circle. But you can also take an infinite number of planes, like this, and you thereby create a circle.
Feel the artistic difference of the two.
Now in your imagination, reduce these, bring these planes inwards, go on doing that. These planes from infinity. Bring them in until we reach .. that. You have created a point with is qualitatively totally different from that one. You’ve created an empty centre of Light, ‘at once surrounding all eternity.’ There is your ‘sphere of Joy most rare’. This ‘infinite centre of light’ that Traherne spoke about. Conceive your own inner centre as such a tiny point in which the Infinite Divine Periphery, has concentrated down and that holds all infinity within it. Not Gravity, but total Levity. And then let it extend. Let it widen. And you realise the nearer you get to the centre, in a Gravity bound body, the stronger the pull. The more you are held down to the centre, and we have built our entire philosophy and our civilisation on Gravity alone, wholly ignoring Levity.
The converse holds. That in this field, the Levity field, the nearer you get to the Periphery, the stronger is the pull. You are perfectly capable in Consciousness of taking that Point, which is your own inner thing, which is a tiny space, and allowing it to expand. Let it fall outward. And the further you go the more you will be drawn to the Great Vast Periphery. And you are actually experiencing the polarity, the Gravity pole and the Levity plane which, when it gets to Infinity, is just like a flat plane that really does run the whole way round.
Now I can do no more than just give you this illustration. To get our thinking on to it, because where is this going to take us? This leads through to a point, basic in the whole Romantic Movement, of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the rest. Wordsworth and Coleridge were both very much disturbed as to why they were losing the vision of the Light within things. As Wordsworth says:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream…
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
The whole problem was – How can we recover? Wordsworth and Coleridge, both of them were experiencing the evolution of modern Consciousness. This is what really matters. They were going through the experience of having seen the glory and the dream, the Light within things, of losing it again, and not knowing where it had gone to, and the possibility of recovering, as Wordsworth then says in the great Ode, that:
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
That glory that is brought down at birth by the child, out of Pre-Existence, narrowed down into this point at Infinity inside the Soul, loses the Vision Splendid. And it is so often implied in that poem that ‘Ach- when we’ve grown up we now see clearly, and we know it was just the idealism of childhood.’ But no. Our task now is simply the recovery of the Vision Splendid. We, as we age, or as we mature whatever our age, are called on to see once more, so to extend Consciousness in Ethereal Space, that we can once more become one with Tree and Cloud, and Bird and the lot. That is the adventure of modern Consciousness, and the Romantics, the Romantic Movement, knew this fundamental point, that not only is Man integrally part of Nature, but Nature is not fulfilled, until Man takes the step in Consciousness to unite within the Ethereal in Nature. As Shakespeare puts it:
‘Nature was made better by no mean, but Nature makes that mean.’
We are part of Nature, integrally part of it, not an accident in a Nature indifferent to us. And we therefore, Human Consciousness, is called on to take a step which brings us into relation to the Idea within the Form, that by doing so it fulfills the Form. Nature is not fulfilled until Man takes this step. That’s why this planet is so infinitely important to the universe. And the Experiment of Man is being watched now, as to whether we can, having gone through the age of separation and materialism, we can take the step which re-unites us with the Ethereal Whole. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge talking set down to explain the phenomenon, and Wordsworth produced the great Ode on ‘Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood’, and Coleridge produced the so-called ‘Dejection Ode’ in which this paragraph comes:
we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
(the cold inanimate world)
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the Soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth—
And from the Soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
We have got to do this business, of sending, in Creative Imagination, this luminous cloud around to envelope the whole Earth. Allow this to happen, out of this centre which contains the lot, as Traherne knew, we’ve got to make that Consciousness Good, and then the active deed:
‘and from the soul there must be sent
a sweet and potent voice of its own birth
of all sweet sounds the life and element.’
That is our task. And the last thing I want to say which will draw me to an end. An extraordinary little poem by Walt Whitman, which he calls Whispers of Heavenly Death. Whispers of Heavenly Death, and we know that all death is the passage through to renewal. The resurrection to awakening. There can be no renewal without a dying process. So Heavenly Death is the opening into Ethereal Space. And he talks, the Self talks to the Soul.
DAREST thou now O soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?
No map there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.
I know it not O soul,
Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us,
All waits undream’d of in that region, that inaccessible land.
Till when the ties loosen,
All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.
Then we burst forth, we float,
In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,
Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O soul.
Get this thought. It is terrific, and very concentrated as a poetical thought is. ‘Darest thou now O Soul come out with me, into this unknown land, when the ties loosen, except the Eternal ties, nor darkness, gravitation, sense, or any bounds bounding us’. If in the soul expansion we can free ourselves from the bond of sense and gravity, then we burst forth, you expand in every direction, at once surrounding all Eternity, in Traherne’s words.
Then we burst forth, we float, in Time and Space,
prepared for them, equal,
equal in time and Space,
equipped at last them to fulfil O soul.
Time and Space itself is not fulfilled, till human Consciousness expands itself into it. We are God-begotten, God-companioned, forever Godward striving. We are the potential Co-Creator with God. We are, the Human Archetype is First in Creation, and we’re working up towards that Archetype. This is not making an extravagant claim for the importance of Man, but it is recognising that the Divine Idea, which has been developed upon Planet Earth, is of Supreme importance, and importance to the Whole of the Universe. For in this real sense Nature and Time and Space are not fulfilled until we take this step in Consciousness. Into the poetical vision which marries Science and Mysticism.
And that step it is that will really bring us over the frontier into the Aquarian Age… and we are called upon to take it“.
