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object:1.01 - Introduction
class:The Wherefore of the Worlds
author class:Paul Richard
magazine class:Arya
class:chapter

Introduction
1914 Sat 15 August

Night, there is none, no night except the veil which we create for ourselves, no other obscurity than the darkness in which our eyes indulge.

The mind that looks deeply into existence, finds there no shadow but that of appearances, and the most obscure and infinitesimal of these can uncover to its search sovereign realities, once it has accustomed its gaze to the light of the mystery which every appearance conceals. Where the indifferent sees only a valueless object or a fortuitous and unimportant detail, the thinker whom no coverings can deceive, is able to detect one of the signs by which eternal laws yield up their secret. A stone that falls, a ripe fruit that opens, become to his vision initiating symbols, keys to a supreme knowledge. By relativities that all disdain, the Absolute delivers up to him the secrets reserved for the sages.

For him the very darkness becomes light, because all is light. But what light can be sufficient for eyes that keep themselves closed, for the mind which remains sealed?

How often have the predestined messengers of knowledge, the circumstances privileged to bring to us supreme teachings, passed before our eyes, teaching us nothing? The very abyss has opened without revealing to us the secret of its depths. We weep before a tomb. The sensations of our egoistic nature compel us to suffer where we might have thought and our affliction remains to us a barren experience. It has torn from us what we loved, but what it brought to us, we did not know how to receive. The tumult of the heart prevents the mind from learning these eternal verities, "There is no death; there is no night."

All is light, a lustre which blinds instead of enlightening us because it is too puissant for our gaze; for all the veils in which our vision is enveloped, are only veils of dazzlement. There are for our eyes excessive splendours as well as insufficient gleams. The measure of every obscurity is the imperfection of our vision and the night is the symbol of our ignorance.

But nothing is really hidden; for where shall anything whatsoever dissimulate its presence or its truth in the all that is universally self-evident? The things that are visible to us are those which are in correspondence with the measure of clarity already acquired by our consciousness and our mind.

The progressive illumination of our faculties prepares them for the perception of things more luminous, because more real and permanent than those that are visible.

For that which is visible, since it is adapted to our special sense-faculties and itself dependent on the transitoriness of our being, is necessarily ephemeral. So also may be much that is invisible to us; but things eternal are by their very essence alien to our perceptions and they escape in the proportion in which their modes of being differ from ours.

And even that which is visible may dwell beyond the range of our perceptions if it exceeds our proportions. The vaster it is in its totality, the less ephemeral in its duration, the less is it perceptible to us. Thus the earth which we inhabit is visible to our eyes solely in its details and we can compass the knowledge of it in its totality only by a method of abstraction and by an appeal to means that belong to the order of mathematical or geometrical perceptions and are borrowed, therefore, from faculties of consciousness which are supersensuous. The same law holds good with greater reason for that which we call, without knowing where it commences or ends, the universe.

And towards what does our Science tend, if not towards the indirect discovery, surpassing the means of observation with which our senses provide us, of realities more and more essential and permanent, less and less incidental and, because incidental, therefore visible?

From this point of view it would be true to say that things visible are transitory and things eternal invisible,-invisible at least for those of our senses that are constructed according to the laws of our ephemeral being, but not for that vision of the profundities of existence, present in us already in its rudiments, which we awaken to the perception of its proper world when we take cognizance within ourselves of that which is eternal.
***

How has that sense-vision been formed of which our eye, gathering into a focus the rays of Light, is at once the symbol and the organ?

To produce our conscious perceptions it was necessary that all the diffused clarities which the intelligence and the sense-faculty in our rudimentary being could assemble or could produce, should converge towards certain points in the vastness of infinity destined to form the field of our experiences and of our progress, and each of our possible conquests in that field, always obtained by a greater concentration of light, has circumscribed around us, by the very act of giving it precision, the province of the visible.

In the beginning there was the immense penumbra of the uniform Inconscient and when the Spirit said, "Let there be light," the lightning broke forth from it and the Night settled with a greater weight of darkness over all that the flashes did not illumine. Thus the day was born out of the shadows and night had the day for its cause.

But now the day which the luminous point of the conscious ego has created in us, can extend itself beyond our limits over the whole universe. For that extension it is enough that we should learn to enter once more into communion with all that we have rendered alien to us.

There is not in the whole of infinity a single reality, be it object or being, on which our internal gaze, once clarified, cannot shed its pure illumination.

But how do these realities, when we so regard them, differ from their appearances! Truly has it been said, "Things are not what they seem."
***

What we see is not the universe. What we see is our personal universe, the world which we fashion for the use of our needs, in the measure of our means, by the play of our faculties, a symbolic, schematic universe which our sense-perceptions cut out upon the infinite, profound, moving and living reality.

That which we call phenomenon is only the relation between the veritable reality and our modes of subjective perception.

It is the manner-such as our senses understand it-in which a totality of particular activities reacts in relation to the all, that is manifest to our eyes in each element of the reality, whether that element be an object or a being. So too it is the relation between their modes of action and ours that permits us to differentiate ourselves from all that is other than ourselves and determines for us the character, the forms, the values, the accidents of all that environs us.

The attempt to explain the world by the things that we see, is therefore vain; it is these, on the contrary, that find their explanation in those that we do not see. To find the causes of thing we must turn our regard not on the visible, but on the invisible.

This world of phenomena which we call the universe, is only the apparent figure, the image in us of the real world; it is the myth which covers a truth too profound for us. All philosophy consists in the discovery of its hidden sense, and it is the more and more veridical interpretation of it that we call knowledge. May its illumination render the human mind master of the shadow and the mystery and open to us the paths of the unknown!

But how shall we discover the paths that lead to an unknown? And how shall we discover that unknown itself if we do not first know the paths? Therefore these two, the way and its goal, must manifest themselves together and each must reveal the other.

On the knowledge that we attain of the supreme realities, depend all the steps that we shall take towards them, and on our courageous self-orientation towards the highest point of truth of which we have caught a glimpse, whatever it may cost to our thought, depends our progressive conquest of the Light.

It is the most disinterested effort that will bring us to the most considerable result; it is the steepest way that will permit us to ascend to the highest summit.

And again, is it not by directing our march towards supreme goals, towards those that seem inaccessible to us, that we shall be able step by step to trace out the straightest roads?

Now, among all the inquiries possible to the human spirit, those which are concerned with the very origin of being and of the universe are surely the most disinterested. What profit comparable to the results of our utilitarian Sciences can we reap from the discovery, even if that discovery be possible, of the first reasons of things? Among all the questions that the mind can present to itself, this is, in appearance, the least useful; for that very reason it is in reality the most fertile. It is the most transcendent, the most daring of all, and for that reason we choose it in preference to all others.

For the boldest, the highest Wisdom! For the pioneers of action and thought, the heroic march through the paths of the unknown!
***



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