Fire, we say, is combustion. It is marvelous how science proceeds like witchcraft and alchemy, by means of an abracadabra which has no earthly sense. Pray, what is combustion? You can try and answer scientifically, till you are black in the face. All you can say is that it is _that which happens_ when matter is raised to a certain temperature--and so forth and so forth. You might as well say, a word is that which happens when I open my mouth and squeeze my larynx and make various tricks with my throat muscles. All these explanations are so senseless. They describe the apparatus, and think they have described the event.
Fire may be accompanied by combustion, but combustion is not necessarily accompanied by fire. All A is B, but all B is not A. And therefore fire, no matter how you jiggle, is not identical with combustion. Fire. FIRE. I insist on the absolute word. You may say that fire is a sum of various phenomena. I say it isn"t. You might as well tell me a fly is a sum of wings and six legs and two bulging eyes. It is the fly which has the wings and legs, and not the legs and wings which somehow nab the fly into the middle of themselves. A fly is not a sum of various things. A fly is a fly, and the items of the sum are still fly.
So with fire. Fire is an absolute unity in itself. It is a dynamic polar principle. Establish a certain polarity between the moon-principle and the sun-principle, between the positive and negative, or sympathetic and volitional dynamism in any piece of matter, and you have fire, you have the sun-phenomenon. It is the sudden flare into the one mode, the sun mode, the material sympathetic mode. Correspondingly, establish an opposite polarity between the sun-principle and the water-principle, and you have decomposition into water, or towards watery dissolution.
There are two sheer dynamic principles in our universe, the sun-principle and the moon-principle. And these principles are known to us in immediate contact as fire and water. The sun is not fire. But the principle of fire is the sun-principle. That is, fire is the sudden swoop towards the sun, of matter which is suddenly sun-polarized. Fire is the sudden sun-a.s.sertion, the release towards the one pole only. It is the sudden revelation of the cosmic One Polarity, One Ident.i.ty.
But there is another pole. There is the moon. And there is another absolute and visible principle, the principle of water. The moon is not water. But it is the soul of water, the invisible clue to all the waters.
So that we begin to realize our visible universe as a vast dual polarity between sun and moon. Two vast poles in s.p.a.ce, invisible in themselves, but visible owing to the circuit which swoops between them, round them, the circuit of the universe, established at the cosmic poles of the sun and moon. This then is the infinite, the positive infinite of the positive pole, the sun-pole, negative infinite of the negative pole, the moon-pole. And between the two infinites all existence takes place.
But wait. Existence is truly a matter of propagation between the two infinites. But it needs a third presence. Sun-principle and moon-principle, embracing through the aeons, could never by themselves propagate one molecule of matter. The hailstone needs a grain of dust for its core. So does the universe. Midway between the two cosmic infinites lies the third, which is more than infinite. This is the Holy Ghost Life, individual life.
It is so easy to imagine that between them, the two infinites of the cosmos propagated life. But one single moment of pause and silence, one single moment of gathering the whole soul into knowledge, will tell us that it is a falsity. It was the living individual soul which, dying, flung into s.p.a.ce the two wings of the infinite, the two poles of the sun and the moon. The sun and the moon are the two eternal death-results of the death of individuals. Matter, all matter, is the Life-born. And what we know as inert matter, this is only the result of death in individuals, it is the dead bodies of individuals decomposed and resmelted between the hammer and anvil, fire and sand of the sun and the moon. When time began, the first individual died, the poles of the sun and moon were flung into s.p.a.ce, and between the two, in a strange chaos and battle, the dead body was torn and melted and smelted, and rolled beneath the feet of the living. So the world was formed, always under the feet of the living.
And so we have a clue to gravitation. We, mankind, are all one family.
In our individual bodies burns the positive quick of all things. But beneath our feet, in our own earth, lies the intense center of our human, individual death, our grave. The earth has one center, to which we are all polarized. The circuit of our life is balanced on the living soul within us, as the positive center, and on the earth"s dark center, the center of our abiding and eternal and substantial death, our great negative center, away below. This is the circuit of our immediate individual existence. We stand upon our own grave, with our death fire, the sun, on our right hand, and our death-damp, the moon, on our left.
The earth"s center is no accident. It is the great individual pole of us who die. It is the center of the first dead body. It is the first germ-cell of death, which germ-cell threw out the great nuclei of the sun and the moon. To this center of our earth we, as humans, are eternally polarized, as are our trees. Inevitably, we fall to earth.
And the clue of us sinks to the earth"s center, the clue of our death, of our _weight_. And the earth flings us out as wings to the sun and moon: or as the death-germ dividing into two nuclei. So from the earth our radiance is flung to the sun, our marsh-fire to the moon, when we die.
We fall into the earth. But our rising was not from the earth. We rose from the earthless quick, the unfading life. And earth, sun, and moon are born only of our death. But it is only their polarized dynamic connection with us who live which sustains them all in their place and maintains them all in their own activities. The inanimate universe rests absolutely on the life-circuit of living creatures, is built upon the arch which spans the duality of living beings.
CHAPTER XIV
SLEEP AND DREAMS
This is going rather far, for a book--nay, a booklet--on the child consciousness. But it can"t be helped. Child-consciousness it is. And we have to roll away the stone of a scientific cosmos from the tomb-mouth of that imprisoned consciousness.
Now, dear reader, let us see where we are. First of all, we are ourselves--which is the refrain of all my chants. We are ourselves. We are living individuals. And as living individuals we are the one, pure clue to our own cosmos. To which cosmos living individuals _have always_ been the clue, since time began, and _will always_ be the clue, while time lasts.
I know it is not so fireworky as the sudden evolving of life, somewhere, somewhen and somehow, out of force and matter with a pop.
But that pop never popped, dear reader. The boot was on the other leg.
And I wish I could mix a few more metaphors, like pops and legs and boots, just to annoy you.
Life never evolved, or evoluted, out of force and matter, dear reader.
There is no such thing as evolution, anyhow. There is only development. Man was man in the very first plasm-speck which was his own individual origin, and is still his own individual origin. As for the origin, I don"t know much about it. I only know there is but one origin, and that is the individual soul. The individual soul originated everything, and has itself no origin. So that time is a matter of living experience, nothing else, and eternity is just a mental trick. Of course every living speck, amoeba or newt, has its own individual soul.
And we sit on our own globe, dear reader, here individually located.
Our own individual being is our own single reality. But the single reality of the individual being is dynamically and directly polarized to the earth"s center, which is the aggregate negative center of all terrestrial existence. In short, the center which in life we thrust away from, and towards which we fall, in death. For, our individual existence being positive, we must have a negative pole to thrust away from. And when our positive individual existence breaks, and we fall into death, our wonderful individual gravitation-center succ.u.mbs to the earth"s gravitation-center.
So there we are, individuals, single, life-born, life-living, yet all the while poised and polarized to the aggregate center of our substantial death, our earth"s quick, powerful center-clue.
There may be other individuals, alive, and having other worlds under their feet, polarized to their own globe"s center. But the very sacredness of my own individuality prevents my p.r.o.nouncing about them, lest I, in attributing qualities to them, transgress against the pure individuality which is theirs, beyond me.
If, however, there be truly other people, with their own world under their feet, then I think it is fair to say that we all have our infinite ident.i.ty in the sun. That in the rush and swirl of death we pa.s.s through fiery ways to the same sun. And from the sun, can the spores of souls pa.s.s to the various worlds? And to the worlds of the cosmos seed across s.p.a.ce, through the wild beams of the sun? Is there seed of Mars in my veins? And is astrology not altogether nonsense?
But if the sun is the center of our infinite oneing in death with all the other after-death souls of the cosmos: and in that great central station of travel, the sun, we meet and mingle and change trains for the stars: then ought we to a.s.sume that the moon is likewise a meeting-place of dead souls? The moon surely is a meeting-place of cold, dead, angry souls. But from our own globe only.
The moon is the center of our terrestrial individuality in the cosmos.
She is the declaration of our existence in separateness. Save for the intense white recoil of the moon, the earth would stagger towards the sun. The moon holds us to our own cosmic individuality, as a world individual in s.p.a.ce. She is the fierce center of retraction, of frictional withdrawal into separateness. She it is who sullenly stands with her back to us, and refuses to meet and mingle. She it is who burns white with the intense friction of her withdrawal into separation, that cold, proud white fire of furious, almost malignant apartness, the struggle into fierce, frictional separation. Her white fire is the frictional fire of the last strange, intense watery matter, as this matter fights its way out of combination and out of combustion with the sun-stuff. To the pure polarity of the moon fly the essential waters of our universe. Which essential waters, at the moon"s clue, are only an intense invisible energy, a polarity of the moon.
There are only three great energies in the universal life, which is always individual and which yet sways all the physical forces as well as the vital energy; and then the two great dynamisms of the sun and the moon. To the dynamism of the sun belong heat, expansion-force, and all that range. To the dynamism of the moon the _essential_ watery forces: not just gravitation, but electricity, magnetism, radium-energy, and so on.
The moon likewise is the pole of our night activities, as the sun is the pole of our day activities. Remember that the sun and moon are but great self-abandons which individual life has thrown out, to the right hand and to the left. When individual life dies, it flings itself on the right hand to the sun, on the left hand to the moon, in the dual polarity, and sinks to earth. When any man dies, his soul divides in death; as in life, in the first germ, it was united from two germs. It divides into two dark germs, flung asunder: the sun-germ and the moon-germ. Then the material body sinks to earth. And so we have the cosmic universe such as we know it.
What is the exact relationship between us and the death-realm of the afterwards we shall never know. But this relation is none the less active every moment of our lives. There is a pure polarity between life and death, between the living and the dead, between each living individual and the outer cosmos. Between each living individual and the earth"s center pa.s.ses a never-ceasing circuit of magnetism. It is a circuit which in man travels up the right side, and down the left side of the body, to the earth"s center. It never ceases. But while we are awake it is entirely under the control and spell of the total consciousness, the individual consciousness, the soul, or self. When we sleep, however, then this individual consciousness of the soul is suspended for the time, and we lie completely within the circuit of the earth"s magnetism, or gravitation, or both: the circuit of the earth"s centrality. It is this circuit which is busy in all our tissue removing or arranging the dead body of our past day. For each time we lie down to sleep we have within us a body of death which dies with the day that is spent. And this body of death is removed or laid in line by the activities of the earth-circuit, the great active death-circuit, while we sleep.
As we sleep the current sweeps its own way through us, as the streets of a city are swept and flushed at night. It sweeps through our nerves and our blood, sweeping away the ash of our day"s spent consciousness towards one form or other of excretion. This earth-current actively sweeping through us is really the death-activity busy in the service of life. It behooves us to know nothing of it. And as it sweeps it stimulates in the primary centers of consciousness vibrations which flash images upon the mind. Usually, in deep sleep, these images pa.s.s unrecorded; but as we pa.s.s towards the twilight of dawn and wakefulness, we begin to retain some impression, some record of the dream-images. Usually also the images that are accidentally swept into the mind in sleep are as disconnected and as unmeaning as the pieces of paper which the street cleaners sweep into a bin from the city gutters at night. We should not think of taking all these papers, piecing them together, and making a marvelous book of them, prophetic of the future and pregnant with the past. We should not do so, although every rag of printed paper swept from the gutter would have some connection with the past day"s event. But its significance, the significance of the words printed upon it is so small, that we relegate it into the limbo of the accidental and meaningless. There is no vital connection between the many torn bits of paper--only an accidental connection. Each bit of paper has reference to some actual event: a bus-ticket, an envelope, a tract, a pastry-shop bag, a newspaper, a hand-bill. But take them all together, bus-ticket, torn envelope, tract, paper-bag, piece of newspaper and hand-bill, and they have no individual sequence, they belong more to the mechanical arrangements than to the vital consequence of our existence. And the same with most dreams. They are the heterogeneous odds and ends of images swept together accidentally by the besom of the night-current, and it is beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them.
It is always beneath our dignity to go degrading the integrity of the individual soul by cringing and sc.r.a.ping among the rag-tag of accident and of the inferior, mechanic coincidence and automatic event. Only those events are significant which derive from or apply to the soul in its full integrity. To go kow-towing before the facts of change, as gamblers and fortune-readers and fatalists do, is merely a perverting of the soul"s proud integral priority, a rearing up of idiotic idols and fetishes.
Most dreams are purely insignificant, and it is the sign of a weak and paltry nature to pay any attention to them whatever. Only occasionally they matter. And this is only when something _threatens_ us from the outer mechanical, or accidental _death_-world. When anything threatens us from the world of death, then a dream may become so vivid that it arouses the actual soul. And when a dream is so intense that it arouses the soul--then we must attend to it.
But we may have the most appalling nightmare because we eat pancakes for supper. Here again, we are threatened with an arrest of the mechanical flow of the system. This arrest becomes so serious that it affects the great organs of the heart and lungs, and these organs affect the primary conscious-centers.
Now we shall see that this is the direct reverse of real living consciousness. In living consciousness the primary affective centers control the great organs. But when sleep is on us, the reverse takes place.
The great organs, being obstructed in their spontaneous-automatism, at last with violence arouse the active conscious-centers. And these flash images to the brain.
These nightmare images are very frequently purely mechanical: as of falling terribly downwards, or being enclosed in vaults. And such images are pure physical transcripts. The image of falling, of flying, of trying to run and not being able to lift the feet, of having to creep through terribly small pa.s.sages, these are direct transcripts from the physical phenomena of circulation and digestion. It is the directly transcribed image of the heart which, impeded in its action by the gases of indigestion, is switched out of its established circuit of earth-polarity, and is as if suspended over a void, or plunging into a void: step by step, falling downstairs, maybe, according to the strangulation of the heart beats. The same paralytic inability to lift the feet when one needs to run, in a dream, comes directly from the same impeded action of the heart, which is thrown off its balance by some material obstruction. Now the heart swings left and right in the pure circuit of the earth"s polarity. Hinder this swing, force the heart over to the left, by inflation of gas from the stomach or by dead pressure upon the blood and nerves from any obstruction, and you get the sensation of being unable to lift the feet from earth: a gasping sensation. Or force the heart to over-balance towards the right, and you get the sensation of flying or of falling. The heart telegraphs its distress to the mind, and wakes us. The wakeful soul at once begins to deal with the obstruction, which was too much for the mechanical night-circuits. The same holds good of dreams of imprisonment, or of creeping through narrow pa.s.sages. They are direct transfers from the squeezing of the blood through constricted arteries or heart chambers.
Most dreams are stimulated from the blood into the nerves and the nerve-centers. And the heart is the transmission station. For the blood has a unity and a consciousness of its own. It has a deeper, elemental consciousness of the mechanical or material world. In the blood we have the body of our most elemental consciousness, our almost material consciousness. And during sleep this material consciousness transfers itself into the nerves and to the brain. The transfer in wakefulness results in a feeling of pain or discomfort--as when we have indigestion, which is pure blood-discomfort. But in sleep the transfer is made through the dream-images which are mechanical phenomena like mirages.
Nightmares which have purely mechanical images may terrify us, give us a great shock, but the shock does not enter our souls. We are surprised, in the morning, to find that the bristling horror of the night seems now just nothing--dwindled to nothing. And this is because what was a purely material obstruction in the physical flow, temporary only, is indeed a nothingness to the living, integral soul. We are subject to such accidents--if we will eat pancakes for supper. And that is the end of it.
But there are other dreams which linger and haunt the soul. These are true soul-dreams. As we know, life consists of reactions and interrelations from the great centers of primary consciousness. I may start a chain of connection from one center, which inevitably stimulates into activity the corresponding center. For example, I may develop a profound and pa.s.sional love for my mother, in my days of adolescence. This starts, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, the whole activity of adult love at the lower centers. But admission is made only of the upper, spiritual love, the love dynamically polarized at the upper centers.
Nevertheless, whether the admission is made or not, once establish the circuit in the upper or spiritual centers of adult love, and you will get a corresponding activity in the lower, pa.s.sional centers of adult love.
The activity at the lower center, however, is denied in the daytime.
There is a repression. Then the friction of the night-flow liberates the repressed psychic activity explosively. And then the image of the mother figures in pa.s.sionate, disturbing, soul-rending dreams.
The Freudians point to this as evidence of a repressed incest desire.
The Freudians are too simple. It is _always_ wrong to accept a dream-meaning at its face value. Sleep is the time when we are given over to the automatic processes of the inanimate universe. Let us not forget this. Dreams are automatic in their nature. The psyche possesses remarkably few dynamic images. In the case of the boy who dreams of his mother, we have the aroused but unattached s.e.x plunging in sleep, causing a sort of obstruction. We have the image of the mother, the dynamic emotional image. And the automatism of the dream-process immediately unites the s.e.x-sensation to the great stock image, and produces an incest dream. But does this prove a repressed incest desire? On the contrary.
The truth is, every man has, the moment he awakes, a hatred of his dream, and a great desire to be free of the dream, free of the persistent mother-image or sister-image of the dream. It is a ghoul, it haunts his dreams, this image, with its hateful conclusions. And yet he cannot get free. As long as a man lives he may, in his dreams of pa.s.sion or conflict, be haunted by the mother-image or sister-image, even when he knows that the cause of the disturbing dream is the wife. But even though the actual subject of the dream is the wife, still, over and over again, for years, the dream-process will persist in subst.i.tuting the mother-image. It haunts and terrifies a man.
Why does the dream-process act so? For two reasons. First, the reason of simple automatic continuance. The mother-image was the first great emotional image to be introduced in the psyche. The dream-process mechanically reproduces its stock image the moment the intense sympathy-emotion is aroused. Again, the mother-image refers only to the upper plane. But the dream-process is mechanical in its logic.
Because the mother-image refers to the great dynamic stress of the upper plane, therefore it refers to the great dynamic stress of the lower. This is a piece of sheer automatic logic. The living soul is _not_ automatic, and automatic logic does not apply to it.
But for our second reason for the image. In becoming the object of great emotional stress for her son, the mother also becomes an object of poignancy, of anguish, of arrest, to her son. She arrests him from finding his proper fulfillment on the sensual plane. Now it is almost always the object of arrest which becomes impressed, as it were, upon the psyche. A man very rarely has an image of a person with whom he is livingly, vitally connected. He only has dream-images of the persons who, in some way, _oppose_ his life-flow and his soul"s freedom, and so become impressed upon his plasm as objects of resistance. Once a man is dynamically caught on the upper plane by mother or sister, then the dream-image of mother or sister will persist until the dynamic _rapport_ between himself and his mother or sister is finally broken.
And the dream-image from the upper plane will be automatically applied to the disturbance of the lower plane.
Because--and this is very important--the dream-process _loves_ its own automatism. It would force everything to an automatic-logical conclusion in the psyche. But the living, wakeful psyche is so flexible and sensitive, it has a horror of automatism. While the soul really lives, its deepest dread is perhaps the dread of automatism.
For automatism in life is a forestalling of the death process.