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CHAPTER
V
The Cosmic Illusion;
Mind, Dream and Hallucination
Thou who hast come to this transient and unhappy
world, turn
to Me.
Gita.1
This Self is a self of Knowledge, an inner light in the heart; he is
the conscious being common to all the states of being
and moves
in both worlds. He becomes a dream-self and passes beyond this
world and its forms of death.... There are
two planes of this con-
scious being, this and the other worlds; a third state is their place
of joining, the state of dream,
and when he stands in this place of
their joining, he sees both planes of his existence, this world and
the other world.
When he sleeps, he takes the substance of this
world in which all is and himself undoes and himself builds by his
own
illumination, his own light; when this conscious being sleeps,
he becomes luminous with his self-light.... There are no
roads nor
chariots, nor joys nor pleasures, nor tanks nor ponds nor rivers,
but he creates them by his own light, for he is
the maker. By sleep
he casts off his body and unsleeping sees those that sleep; he
preserves by his life-breath this
lower nest and goes forth, im-
mortal, from his nest; immortal, he goes where he wills, the golden
Purusha, the solitary
Swan. They say, “the country of waking only
is his, for the things which he sees when awake, these only he sees
when
asleep”; but there he is his own self-light.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.2
What is seen and what is not seen, what is experienced and what
is not experienced, what is and what is not,—all it
sees, it is all
and sees.
Prasna Upanishad.3
ALL human thought, all mental man's experience moves between a constant affirmation and negation; there is for his mind no
truth of idea, no result of experience that cannot be affirmed, none that cannot be negated. It has negated the existence of
the individual being, negated the existence of the cosmos, negated the existence of any immanent or underlying Reality,
negated any Reality beyond the individual and the cosmos; but it is also constantly affirming these things, — sometimes one
of
1 IX. 33
2 IV. 3. 7, 9-12,14.
3 IV. 5.
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them solely or any two or all of them together. It has to do so because our thinking mind is in its very nature an ignorant
dealer in possibilities, not possessing the truth behind any of them, but sounding and testing each in turn or many together if
so perchance it may get at some settled belief or knowledge about them, some certitude; yet, living in a world of relativities
and possibilities, it can arrive at no final certainty, no absolute and abiding conviction. Even the actual, the realised can
present itself to our mentality as a “may be or may not be”, syad va na syad va,
or as an “is” under the shadow of the
“might not have been” and wearing the aspect of that which will not be
hereafter. Our life-being is also afflicted by the
same incertitude; it can rest in no aim of living from which it can
derive a sure or final satisfaction or to which it can assign
an enduring value. Our nature starts from facts and actualities which
it takes for real; it is pushed beyond them into a pursuit
of uncertain possibilities and led eventually to question all that it
took as real. For it proceeds from a fundamental ignorance
and has no hold on assured truth; all the truths on which it relies for
a time are found to be partial, incomplete and
questionable.
At the outset man lives in his physical mind which perceives the
actual, the physical, the objective and accepts it as fact
and this fact as self-evident truth beyond question; whatever is not
actual, not physical, not objective it regards as unreal or unrealised,
only to be accepted as entirely real when it has succeeded in becoming
actual, becoming a physical fact,
becoming objective: its own being too it regards as an objective fact,
warranted to be real by its existence in a visible and
sensible body; all other subjective beings and things it accepts on the
same evidence in so far as they can become objects of
our external consciousness or acceptable to that part of the reason
which builds upon the data supplied by that
consciousness and relies upon them as the one solid basis of knowledge.
Physical Science is a vast extension of this
mentality: it corrects the errors of the sense and pushes beyond the
first limitations of the sense-mind by discovering means
of bringing facts and objects not seizable by our corporeal organs into
the field of objectivity; but it has the same standard of
reality, the objective, the physical actuality; its test
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of the real is possibility of verification by positive reason and objective evidence.
But man also has a life-mind, a vital mentality which is an instrument
of desire: this is not satisfied with the actual, it is a
dealer in possibilities; it has the passion for novelty and is seeking
always to extend the limits of experience for the
satisfaction of desire, for enjoyment, for an enlarged self-affirmation
and aggrandisement of its terrain of power and profit.
It desires, enjoys, possesses actualities, but it hunts also after
unrealised possibilities, is ardent to materialise them, to possess
and enjoy them also. It is not satisfied with the physical and
objective only, but seeks too a subjective, an imaginative, a
purely emotive satisfaction and pleasure. If there were not this
factor, the physical mind of man left to itself would live like
the animal, accepting his first actual physical life and its limits as
his whole possibility, moving in material Nature's
established order and asking for nothing beyond it. But this vital
mind, this unquiet life-will comes in with its demands and
disturbs this inert or routine satisfaction which lives penned within
the bounds of actuality; it enlarges always desire and
craving, creates a dissatisfaction, an unrest, a seeking for something
more than what life seems able to give it: it brings about
a vast enlargement of the field of physical actuality by the
actualisation of our unrealised possibilities, but also a constant
demand for more and always more, a quest for new worlds to conquer, an
incessant drive towards an exceeding of the
bounds of circumstance and a self-exceeding. To add to this cause of
unrest and incertitude there comes in a thinking mind
that inquires into everything, questions everything, builds up
affirmations and unbuilds them, erects systems of certitude but
finally accepts none of them as certain, affirms and questions the
evidence of the senses, follows out the conclusions of the
reason but undoes them again to arrive at different or quite opposite
conclusions, and continues indefinitely if not ad
infinitum this process. This is the history of human thought and human endeavour, a constant breaking of bounds only to
move always in the same spirals enlarged perhaps but following the same or constantly similar curves of direction. The mind
of humanity, ever seeking, ever active, never arrives
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at a firmly settled reality of life's aims and
objects or at a settled reality of its own certitudes and convictions,
an established
foundation or firm formation of its idea of existence.
At a certain point of this constant unrest and travail even the
physical mind loses its conviction of objective certitude
and enters into an agnosticism which questions all its own standards of
life and knowledge, doubts whether all this is real or
else whether all, even if real, is not futile; the vital mind, baffled
by life and frustrated or else dissatisfied with all its
satisfactions, overtaken by a deep disgust and disappointment, finds
that all is vanity and vexation of spirit and is ready to
reject life and existence as an unreality, all that it hunted after as
an illusion, Maya; the thinking mind, unbuilding all its
affirmations, discovers that all are mere mental constructions and
there is no reality in them or else that the only reality is
something beyond this existence, something that has not been made or
constructed, something Absolute and Eternal, — all
that is relative, all that is of time is a dream, a hallucination of
the mind or a vast delirium, an immense cosmic Illusion, a
delusive figure of apparent existence. The principle of negation
prevails over the principle of affirmation and becomes
universal and absolute. Thence arise the great world-negating religions
and philosophies; thence too a recoil of the
life-motive from itself and a seeking after a life elsewhere flawless
and eternal or a will to annul life itself in an immobile
Reality or an original Non-Existence. In India the philosophy of
world-negation has been given formulations of supreme
power and value by two of the greatest of her thinkers, Buddha and
Shankara. There have been, intermediate or later in
time, other philosophies of considerable importance, some of them
widely accepted, formulated with much acumen of
thought by men of genius and spiritual insight, which disputed with
more or less force and success the conclusions of these
two great metaphysical systems, but none has been put forward with an
equal force of presentation or drive of personality
or had a similar massive effect. The spirit of these two remarkable
spiritual philosophies, — for Shankara in the historical
process of India's philosophical mind takes up, completes and replaces
Buddha, — has weighed with a tremendous power on
her thought, religion
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and general mentality: everywhere broods its mighty shadow, everywhere is the impress of the three great formulas, the
chain of Karma, escape from the wheel of rebirth, Maya. It is necessary therefore to look afresh at the Idea or Truth
behind the negation of cosmic existence and to consider, however briefly, what is the value of its main formulations or
suggestions, on what reality they stand, how far they are imperative to the reason or to experience. For the present it will be
enough to throw a regard on the principal ideas which are grouped around the conception of the great cosmic Illusion, Maya,
and to set against them those that are proper to our own line of thought and vision; for both proceed from the conception of
the One Reality, but one line leads to a universal Illusionism, the other to a universal Realism, — an unreal or real-unreal
universe reposing on a transcendent Reality or a real universe reposing on a Reality at once universal and transcendent or
absolute.
In itself and by itself the vital being's aversion, the life-mind's
recoil from life cannot be taken as valid or conclusive. Its
strongest motive is a sense of disappointment and an acceptance of
frustration which has no greater claim to conclusiveness
than the idealist's opposite motive of invariable hope and his faith
and will to realise. Nevertheless there is a certain validity
in the mental support of this sense of frustration, in the perception
at which the thinking mind arrives that there is an illusion
behind all human effort and terrestrial endeavour, the illusion of his
political and social gospels, the illusion of his ethical
efforts at perfection, the illusion of philanthropy and service, the
illusion of works, the illusion of fame, power, success, the
illusion of all achievement. Human, social and political endeavour
turns always in a circle and leads nowhere; man's life and
nature remain always the same, always imperfect, and neither laws nor
institutions nor education nor philosophy nor morality
nor religious teachings have succeeded in producing the perfect man,
still less a perfect humanity, — straighten the tail of the
dog as you will, it has been said, it always resumes its natural curve
of crookedness. Altruism, philanthropy and service,
Christian love or Buddhist compassion have not made the world a whit
happier, they only
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give infinitesimal bits of momentary relief here and
there, throw drops on the fire of the world's suffering. All aims are
in the
end transitory and futile, all achievements unsatisfying or evanescent;
all works are so much labour of effort and success
and failure which consummate nothing definitive: whatever changes are
made in human life are of the form only and these
forms pursue each other in a futile circle; for the essence of life,
its general character remains the same for ever. This view
of things may be exaggerated, but it has an undeniable force; it is
supported by the experience of man's centuries and it
carries in itself a significance which at one time or another comes
upon the mind with an overwhelming air of self-evidence.
Not only so, but if it is true that the fundamental laws and values of
terrestrial existence are fixed or that it must always turn
in repeated cycles, — and this has been for long a very prevalent
notion, — then this view of things in the end is hardly
escapable. For imperfection, ignorance, frustration and suffering are a
dominant factor of the existing world-order, the
elements contrary to them, knowledge, happiness, success, perfection
are constantly found to be deceptive or inconclusive:
the two opposites are so inextricably mixed that, if this state of
things is not a motion towards a greater fulfilment, if this is
the permanent character of the world-order, then it is hard to avoid
the conclusion that all here is either the creation of an
inconscient Energy, which would account for the incapacity of an
apparent consciousness to arrive at anything, or
intentionally a world of ordeal and failure, the issue being not here
but elsewhere, or even a vast and aimless cosmic Illusion.
Among these alternative conclusions the second, as it is usually put
before us, offers no ground for the philosophic
reason, since we have no satisfying indication of the connection
between the here and the elsewhere which are posited
against each other but not explained in the inevitability of their
relations, and there is no light cast on the necessity or
fundamental significance of the ordeal and failure. It could only be
intelligible,—except as the mysterious will of an arbitrary
Creator,—if there was a choice by immortal spirits to try the adventure
of the Ignorance and a necessity for them to learn
the nature
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of a world of Ignorance in order that they might reject it. But such a creative motive, necessarily incidental and quite
temporary in its incidence, with the earth as its casual field of experience, could hardly by itself account for the immense
and enduring phenomenon of this complex universe. It can become an operative part of a satisfactory explanation if this
world is the field for the working out of a greater creative motive, if it is a manifestation of a divine Truth or a divine
Possibility in which under certain conditions an initiating Ignorance must intervene as a necessary factor, and if the
arrangement of this universe contains in it a compulsion of the Ignorance to move towards Knowledge, of the imperfect
manifestation to grow into perfection, of the frustration to serve as steps towards a final victory, of the suffering to prepare
an emergence of the divine Delight of Being. In that case the sense of disappointment, frustration, illusion and the vanity of
all things would not be valid; for the aspects that seem to justify it would be only the natural circumstances of a difficult
evolution: all the stress of struggle and effort, success and failure, joy and suffering, the mixture of ignorance and knowledge
would be the experience needed for the soul, mind, life and physical part to grow into the full light of a spiritual perfected
being. It would reveal itself as the process of an evolutionary manifestation; there would be no need to bring in the fiat of an
arbitrary Omnipotence or a cosmic Illusion, a phantasy of meaningless Maya.
But there is too a higher mental and spiritual basis for the philosophy
of world-negation and here we are on more solid
ground: for it can be contended that the world is in its very nature an
illusion and no reasoning from the features and
circumstances of an Illusion could justify it or raise it into a
Reality, — there is only one Reality, the transcendent, the
supracosmic: no divine fulfilment, even if our life were to grow into
the life of gods, could nullify or cancel the original
unreality which is its fundamental character; for that fulfilment would
be only the bright side of an Illusion. Or even if not
absolutely an illusion, it would be a reality of an inferior order and
must come to an end by the soul's recognition that the
Brahman alone is true, that there is nothing but the transcendent
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and immutable Absolute. If this is the one Truth, then all ground is cut away from under our feet; the divine Manifestation,
the victory of the soul in Matter, its mastery over existence, the divine life in Nature would itself be a falsehood or at least
something not altogether real imposed for a time on the sole true Reality. But here all turns on the mind's conception or the
mental being's experience of Reality and how far that conception is valid or how far that experience is imperative, — even if
it is a spiritual experience, how far it is absolutely conclusive, solely imperative.
The cosmic Illusion is sometimes envisaged, — though that is not the
accepted position, — as something that has the
character of an unreal subjective experience; it is then, — or may be,
— a figure of forms and movements that arises in some
eternal sleep of things or in a dream-consciousness and is temporarily
imposed on a pure and featureless self-aware
Existence; it is a dream that takes place in the Infinite. In the
philosophies of the Mayavadins,—for there are several
systems alike in their basis but not altogether and at every point
coincident with each other,—the analogy of dream is given,
but as an analogy only, not as the intrinsic character of the
world-illusion. It is difficult for the positive physical mind to admit
the idea that ourselves, the world and life, the sole thing to which
our consciousness bears positive witness, are inexistent, a
cheat imposed on us by that consciousness: certain analogies are
brought forward, the analogies especially of dream and
hallucination, in order to show that it is possible for the experiences
of the consciousness to seem to it real and yet prove to
be without any basis or without a sufficient basis in reality; as a
dream is real to the dreamer so long as he sleeps but
waking shows it to be unreal, so our experience of world seems to us
positive and real but, when we stand back from the
illusion, we shall find that it had no reality. But it may be as well
to give the dream-analogy its full value and see whether our
sense of world-experience has in any way a similar basis. For the idea
of the world as a dream, whether it be a dream of
the subjective mind or a dream of the soul or a dream in the Eternal,
is often entertained and it powerfully enforces the
illusionist tendency
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in human feeling and thinking. If it has no
validity, we must definitely see that and the reasons of its
inapplicability and set it
aside well out of the way; if it has some validity, we must see what it
is and how far it goes. If the world is an illusion, but
not a dream-illusion, that distinction too must be put on a secure
basis.
Dream is felt to be unreal, first, because it ceases and has no farther
validity when we pass from one status of
consciousness to another which is our normal status. But this is not by
itself a sufficient reason: for it may well be that there
are different states of consciousness each with its own realities; if
the consciousness of one state of things fades back and
its contents are lost or, even when caught in memory, seem to be
illusory as soon as we pass into another state, that would
be perfectly normal, but it would not prove the reality of the state in
which we now are and the unreality of the other which
we have left behind us. If earth circumstances begin to seem unreal to
a soul passing into a different world or another plane
of consciousness, that would not prove their unreality; similarly, the
fact that world-existence seems unreal to us when we
pass into the spiritual silence or into some Nirvana, does not of
itself prove that the cosmos was all the time an illusion. The
world is real to the consciousness dwelling in it, an unconditioned
existence is real to the consciousness absorbed in Nirvana;
that is all that is established. But the second reason for refusing
credit to our sleep experience is that a dream is something
evanescent without antecedents and without a sequel; ordinarily, too,
it is without any sufficient coherence or any
significance intelligible to our waking being. If our dreams wore like
our waking life an aspect of coherence, each night
taking up and carrying farther a past continuous and connected
sleep-experience as each day takes up again our waking
world-experience, then dreams would assume to our mind quite another
character. There is therefore no analogy between a
dream and waking life; these are experiences quite different in their
character, validity, order. Our life is accused of
evanescence and often it is accused too, as a whole, of a lack of inner
coherence and significance; but its lack of complete
significance may be due
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to our lack or limitation of understanding:
actually, when we go within and begin to see it from within, it assumes
a complete
connected significance; at the same time whatever lack of inner
coherence was felt before disappears and we see that it
was due to the incoherence of our own inner seeing and knowledge and
was not at all a character of life. There is no
surface incoherence in life, it rather appears to our minds as a chain
of firm sequences, and, if that is a mental delusion, as is
sometimes alleged, if the sequence is created by our minds and does not
actually exist in life, that does not remove the
difference of the two states of consciousness. For in dream the
coherence given by an observing inner consciousness is
absent, and whatever sense of sequence there is seems to be due to a
vague and false imitation of the connections of
waking life, a subconscious mimesis, but this imitative sequence is
shadowy and imperfect, fails and breaks always and is
often wholly absent. We see too that the dream-consciousness seems to
be wholly devoid of that control which the waking
consciousness exercises to a certain extent over life-circumstances; it
has the Nature-automatism of a subconscient
construction and nothing of the conscious will and organising force of
the evolved mind of the human being. Again the
evanescence of a dream is radical and one dream has no connection with
another; but the evanescence of the waking life is
of details,—there is no evidence of evanescence in the connected
totality of world-experience. Our bodies perish but souls
proceed from birth to birth through the ages: stars and planets may
disappear after a lapse of aeons or of many light-cycles,
but universe, cosmic existence may well be a permanent as it is
certainly a continuous activity; there is nothing to prove that
the Infinite Energy which creates it has an end or a beginning either
of itself or of its action. So far there is too great a
disparateness between dream-life and waking life to make the analogy
applicable.
But it may be questioned whether our dreams are indeed totally unreal
and without significance, whether they are not a
figure, an image-record or a symbolic transcript or representation of
things that are real. For that we have to examine,
however summarily, the nature of sleep and of dream-phenomena,
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their process of origination and their provenance.
What happens in sleep is that our consciousness withdraws from the
field
of its waking experiences; it is supposed to be resting, suspended or
in abeyance, but that is a superficial view of the matter.
What is in abeyance is the waking activities, what is at rest is the
surface mind and the normal conscious action of the bodily
part of us; but the inner consciousness is not suspended, it enters
into new inner activities, only a part of which, a part
happening or recorded in something of us that is near to the surface,
we remember. There is maintained in sleep, thus near
the surface, an obscure subconscious element which is a receptacle or
passage for our dream experiences and itself also a
dream-builder; but behind it is the depth and mass of the subliminal,
the totality of our concealed inner being and
consciousness which is of quite another order. Normally it is a
subconscient part in us, intermediate between consciousness
and pure inconscience, that sends up through this surface layer its
formations in the shape of dreams, constructions marked
by an apparent inconsequence and incoherence. Many of these are
fugitive structures built upon circumstances of our
present life selected apparently at random and surrounded with a
phantasy of variation; others call back the past, or rather
selected circumstances and persons of the past, as a starting-point for
similar fleeting edifices. There are other dreams of
the subconscious which seem to be pure phantasy without any such
initiation or basis; but the new method of
psycho-analysis, trying to look for the first time into our dreams with
some kind of scientific understanding, has established in
them a system of meanings, a key to things in us which need to be known
and handled by the waking consciousness; this of
itself changes the whole character and value of our dream-experience.
It begins to look as if there were something real
behind it and as if too that something were an element of no mean
practical importance.
But the subconscious is not our sole dream-builder. The subconscious in
us is the extreme border of our secret inner
existence where it meets the Inconscient, it is a degree of our being
in which the Inconscient struggles into a half
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consciousness; the surface physical consciousness also, when it sinks back from the waking level and retrogresses towards
the Inconscient, retires into this intermediate subconscience. Or, from another viewpoint, this nether part of us may be
described as the antechamber of the Inconscient through which its formations rise into our waking or our subliminal being.
When we sleep and the surface physical part of us, which is in its first origin here an output from the Inconscient, relapses
towards the originating inconscience, it enters into this subconscious element, antechamber or substratum, and there it finds
the impressions of its past or persistent habits of mind and experiences, — for all have left their mark on our subconscious
part and have there a power of recurrence. In its effect on our waking self this recurrence often takes the form of a
reassertion of old habits, impulses dormant or suppressed, rejected elements of the nature, or it comes up as some other not
so easily recognisable, some peculiar disguised or subtle result of these suppressed or rejected but not erased impulses or
elements. In the dream-consciousness the phenomenon is an apparently fanciful construction, a composite of figures and
movements built upon or around the buried impressions with a sense in them that escapes the waking intelligence because it
has no clue to the subconscient's system of significances. After a time this subconscious activity appears to sink back into
complete inconscience and we speak of this state as deep dreamless sleep; thence we emerge again into the
dream-shallows or return to the waking surface.
But, in fact, in what we call dreamless sleep, we have gone into a
profounder and denser layer of the subconscient, a
state too involved, too immersed or too obscure, dull and heavy to
bring to the surface its structures, and we are dreaming
there but unable to grasp or retain in the recording layer of
subconscience these more obscure dream-figures. Or else, it
may be, the part of our mind which still remains active in the sleep of
the body has entered into the inner domains of our
being, the subliminal mental, the subliminal vital, the
subtle-physical, and is there lost to all active connection with the
surface
parts of us. If we are still in the nearer depths of these regions, the
surface subconscient which is our sleep-wakefulness
records something of what we
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experience in these depths; but it records it in its
own transcription, often marred by characteristic incoherences and
always,
even when most coherent, deformed or cast into figures drawn from the
world of waking experience. But if we have gone
deeper inward, the record fails or cannot be recovered and we have the
illusion of dreamlessness; but the activity of the
inner dream consciousness continues behind the veil of the now mute and
inactive subconscient surface. This continued
dream activity is revealed to us when we become more inwardly
conscious, for then we get into connection with the heavier
and deeper subconscient stratum and can be aware, — at the time or by a
retracing or recovering through memory, — of what
happened when we sank into these torpid depths. It is possible too to
become conscious deeper within our subliminal selves
and we are then aware of experiences on other planes of our being or
even in supraphysical worlds to which sleep gives us
a right of secret entry. A transcript of such experiences reaches us;
but the transcriber here is not the subconscious, it is the
subliminal, a greater dream-builder.
If the subliminal thus comes to the front in our dream-consciousness,
there is sometimes an activity of our subliminal
intelligence, — dream becomes a series of thoughts, often strangely or
vividly figured, problems are solved which our waking
consciousness could not solve, warnings, premonitions, indications of
the future, veridical dreams replace the normal
subconscious incoherence. There can come also a structure of
symbol-images, some of a mental character, some of a vital
nature: the former are precise in their figures, clear in their
significance; the latter are often complex and baffling to our
waking consciousness, but, if we can seize the clue, they reveal their
own sense and peculiar system of coherence. Finally,
there can come to us the records of happenings seen or experienced by
us on other planes of our own being or of universal
being into which we enter: these have sometimes, like the symbolic
dreams, a strong bearing on our own inner and outer life
or the life of others, reveal elements of our or their mental being and
life-being or disclose influences on them of which our
waking self is totally ignorant; but sometimes they have no such
bearing and are purely
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records of other organised systems of consciousness independent of our physical existence. The subconscious dreams
constitute the bulk of our most ordinary sleep-experience and they are those which we usually remember; but sometimes the
subliminal builder is able to impress our sleep consciousness sufficiently to stamp his activities on our waking memory. If we
develop our inner being, live more inwardly than most men do, then the balance is changed and a larger
dream-consciousness opens before us; our dreams can take on a subliminal and no longer a subconscious character and can
assume a reality and significance.
It is even possible to become wholly conscious in sleep and follow
throughout from beginning to end or over large
stretches the stages of our dream-experience; it is found that then we
are aware of ourselves passing from state after state
of consciousness to a brief period of luminous and peaceful dreamless
rest, which is the true restorer of the energies of the
waking nature, and then returning by the same way to the waking
consciousness. It is normal, as we thus pass from state to
state, to let the previous experiences slip away from us; in the return
only the more vivid or those nearest to the waking
surface are remembered: but this can be remedied, — a greater retention
is possible or the power can be developed of going
back in memory from dream to dream, from state to state, till the whole
is once more before us. A coherent knowledge of
sleep-life, though difficult to achieve or to keep established, is
possible.
Our subliminal self is not, like our surface physical being, an
outcome of the energy of the Inconscient; it is a
meeting-place of the consciousness that emerges from below by evolution
and the consciousness that has descended from
above for involution. There is in it an inner mind, an inner vital
being of ourselves, an inner or subtle-physical being larger
than our outer being and nature. This inner existence is the concealed
origin of almost all in our surface self that is not a
construction of the first inconscient World-Energy or a natural
developed functioning of our surface consciousness or a
reaction of it to impacts from the outside universal Nature, — and even
in this construction, these functionings, these
reactions the subliminal takes part and exercises on them a
considerable influence. There is here a
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consciousness which has a power of direct contact with the universal unlike the mostly indirect contacts which our surface
being maintains with the universe through the sense-mind and the senses. There are here inner senses, a subliminal sight,
touch, hearing; but these subtle senses are rather channels of the inner being's direct consciousness of things than its
informants: the subliminal is not dependent on its senses for its knowledge, they only give a form to its direct experience of
objects; they do not, so much as in waking mind, convey forms of objects for the mind's documentation or as the
starting-point or basis for an indirect constructive experience. The subliminal has the right of entry into the mental and vital
and subtle-physical planes of the universal consciousness, it is not confined to the material plane and the physical world; it
possesses means of communication with the worlds of being which the descent towards involution created in its passage
and with all corresponding planes or worlds that may have arisen or been constructed to serve the purpose of the re-ascent
from Inconscience to Superconscience. It is into this large realm of interior existence that our mind and vital being retire
when they withdraw from the surface activities whether by sleep or inward-drawn concentration or by the inner plunge of
trance.
Our waking state is unaware of its connection with the subliminal
being, although it receives from it, — but without any
knowledge of the place of origin, — the inspirations, intuitions,
ideas, will-suggestions, sense-suggestions, urges to action that
rise from below or from behind our limited surface existence. Sleep
like trance opens the gate of the subliminal to us; for in
sleep, as in trance, we retire behind the veil of the limited waking
personality and it is behind this veil that the subliminal has
its existence. But we receive the records of our sleep experience
through dream and in dream figures and not in that
condition which might be called an inner waking and which is the most
accessible form of the trance state, nor through the
supernormal clarities of vision and other more luminous and concrete
ways of communication developed by the inner
subliminal cognition when it gets into habitual or occasional conscious
connection with our waking self. The subliminal, with
the subconscious as
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an annexe of itself, — for the subconscious is also
part of the behind-the-veil entity, — is the seer of inner things and
of supraphysical experiences; the surface subconscious is only a
transcriber. It is for this reason that the Upanishad describes
the subliminal being as the Dream Self because it is normally in
dreams, visions, absorbed states of inner experience that we
enter into and are part of its experiences, — just as it describes the
superconscient as the Sleep Self because normally all
mental or sensory experiences cease when we enter this superconscience.
For in the deeper trance into which the touch of
the superconscient plunges our mentality, no record from it or
transcript of its contents can normally reach us; it is only by
an especial or an unusual development, in a supernormal condition or
through a break or rift in our confined normality, that
we can be on the surface conscious of the contacts or messages of the
Superconscience. But, in spite of these figurative
names of dream-state and sleep-state, the field of both these states of
consciousness was clearly regarded as a field of
reality no less than that of the waking state in which our movements of
perceptive consciousness are a record or transcript
of physical things and of our contacts with the physical universe. No
doubt, all the three states can be classed as parts of an
illusion, our experiences of them can be ranked together as
constructions of an illusory consciousness, our waking state no
less illusory than our dream state or sleep-state, since the only true
truth or real reality is the incommunicable Self or
One-Existence (Atman, Adwaita) which is the fourth state of the Self
described by the Vedanta. But it is equally possible to
regard and rank them together as three different orders of one Reality
or as three states of consciousness in which is
embodied our contact with three different grades of self-experience and
world-experience.
If this is a true account of dream-experience, dreams can no longer be
classed as a mere unreal figure of unreal things
temporarily imposed upon our half-unconsciousness as a reality; the
analogy therefore fails even as an illustrative support
for the theory of the cosmic Illusion. It may be said, however, that
our dreams are not themselves realities but only a
transcript of reality, a system of symbol-images, and our waking
experience of the
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universe is similarly not a reality but only a
transcript of reality, a series of collection of symbol-images. It is
quite true that
primarily we see the physical universe only through a system of images
impressed or imposed on our senses and so far the
contention is justified; it may also be admitted that in a certain
sense and from one viewpoint our experiences and activities
can be considered as symbols of a truth which our lives are trying to
express but at present only with a partial success and
an imperfect coherence. If that were all, life might be described as a
dream-experience of self and things in the
consciousness of the Infinite. But although our primary evidence of the
objects of the universe consists of a structure of
sense-images, these are completed, validated, set in order by an
automatic intuition in the consciousness which immediately
relates the image with the thing imaged and gets the tangible
experience of the object, so that we are not merely regarding
or reading a translation or sense-transcript of the reality but looking
through the sense-image to the reality. This adequacy is
amplified too by the action of a reason which fathoms and understands
the law of things sensed and can observe
scrupulously the sense-transcript and correct its errors. Therefore we
may conclude that we experience a real universe
through our imaged sense-transcript by the aid of the intuition and the
reason, — an intuition which gives us the touch of
things and a reason which investigates their truth by its conceptive
knowledge. But we must note also that even if our image
view of the universe, our sense-transcript, is a system of
symbol-images and not an exact reproduction or transcription, a
literal translation, still a symbol is a notation of something that is,
a transcript of realities. Even if our images are incorrect,
what they endeavour to image are realities, not illusions; when we see
a tree or a stone or an animal, it is not a non-existent
figure, a hallucination that we are seeing; we may not be sure that the
image is exact, we may concede that other-sense
might very well see it otherwise, but still there is something there
that justifies the image, something with which it has more
or less correspondence. But in the theory of Illusion the only reality
is an indeterminable featureless pure Existence,
Brahman, and there is no possibility of its being translated or
mistranslated
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into a system of symbol-figures, for that could only
be if this Existence had some determinate contents or some unmanifested
truths of its being which could be transcribed into the forms or names
given to them by our consciousness: a
pure Indeterminable cannot be rendered by a transcript, a multitude of
representative differentiae, a crowd of symbols or
images; for there is in it only a pure Identity, there is nothing to
transcribe, nothing to symbolise, nothing to image. Therefore
the dream-analogy fails us altogether and is better put out of the way;
it can always be used as a vivid metaphor of a certain
attitude our mind can take towards its experiences, but it has no value
for a metaphysical inquiry into the reality and
fundamental significances or the origin of existence.
If we take up the analogy of hallucination, we find it hardly more
helpful for a true understanding of the theory of
cosmic Illusion than the dream-analogy. Hallucinations are of two
kinds, mental or ideative and visual or in some way
sensory. When we see an image of things where those things are not, it
is an erroneous construction of the senses, a visual
hallucination; when we take for an objective fact a thing which is a
subjective structure of the mind, a constructive mental
error or an objectivised imagination or a misplaced mental image, it is
a mental hallucination. An example of the first is the
mirage, an example of the second is the classic instance of a rope
taken for a snake. In passing we may note that there are
many things called hallucinations which are not really that but
symbol-images sent up from the subliminal or experiences in
which the subliminal consciousness or sense comes to the surface and
puts us into contact with supraphysical realities; thus
the cosmic consciousness which is our entry by a breaking down of our
mental limitations into the sense of a vast reality,
has been classed, even in admitting it, as a hallucination. But, taking
only the common hallucination, mental or visual, we
observe that it seems to be at first sight a true example of what is
called imposition in the philosophic theory; it is the
placement of an unreal figure of things on a reality, of a mirage upon
the bare desert air, of the figure of a non-present
snake on the present and real rope. The world, we may contend, is such
a hallucination, an imposition of a
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non-existent unreal figure of things on the bare ever-present sole reality of the Brahman. But then we note that in each case
the hallucination, the false image is not of something quite non-existent; it is an image of something existent and real but not
present in the place on which it has been imposed by the mind's error or by a sense-error. A mirage is the image of a city,
an oasis, running water or of other absent things, and if these things did not exist, the false image of them, whether raised up
by the mind or reflected in the desert air, would not be there to delude the mind with a false sense of reality. A snake exists
and its existence and form are known to the victim of the momentary hallucination: if it had not been so, the delusion would
not have been created; for it is a form-resemblance of the seen reality to another reality previously known elsewhere that is
the origin of the error. The analogy therefore is unhelpful; it would be valid only if our image of the universe were a falsity
reflecting a true universe which is not here but elsewhere or else if it were a false imaged manifestation of the Reality
replacing in the mind or covering with its distorted resemblance a true manifestation. But here the world is a non-existent
form of things, an illusory construction imposed on the bare Reality, on the sole Existent which is for ever empty of things
and formless: there would be a true analogy only if our vision constructed in the void air of the desert a figure of things that
exist nowhere, or else if it imposed on a bare ground both rope and snake and other figures that equally existed nowhere.
It is clear that in this analogy two quite different kinds of illusion
not illustrative of each other are mistakenly put
together as if they were identical in nature. All mental or
sense-hallucinations are really misrepresentations or
misplacements or impossible combinations or false developments of
things that are in themselves existent or possible or in
some way within or allied to the province of the real. All mental
errors and illusions are the result of an ignorance which miscombines
its data or proceeds falsely upon a previous or present or possible
content of knowledge. But the cosmic
Illusion has no basis of actuality, it is an original and
all-originating illusion; it imposes names, figures, happenings that
are
pure inventions on a Reality in which there
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never were and never will be any happenings, names
or figures. The analogy of mental hallucination would only be
applicable if we admit a Brahman without names, forms or relations and
a world of names, forms and relations as equal
realities imposed one upon the other, the rope in the place of the
snake, or the snake in the place of the rope, — an attribution,
it might be, of the activities of the Saguna to the quiescence of the
Nirguna. But if both are real, both must be either
separate aspects of the Reality or co-ordinate aspects, positive and
negative poles of the one Existence. Any error or
confusion of Mind between them would not be a creative cosmic Illusion,
but only a wrong perception of realities, a wrong
relation created by the Ignorance.
If we scrutinise other illustrations or analogies that are offered to
us for a better understanding of the operation of
Maya, we detect in all of them an inapplicability that deprives them of
their force and value. The familiar instance of
mother-of-pearl and silver turns also, like the rope and snake analogy,
upon an error due to a resemblance between a
present real and another and absent real; it can have no application to
the imposition of a multiple and mutable unreality upon
a sole and unique immutable Real. In the example of an optical illusion
duplicating or multiplying a single object, as when we
see two moons instead of one, there are two or more identical forms of
the one object, one real, one — or the rest — an
illusion: this does not illustrate the juxtaposition of world and
Brahman; for in the operation of Maya there is a much more
complex phenomenon, — there is indeed an illusory multiplication of the
Identical imposed upon its one and ever-unalterable
Identity, the One appearing as many, but upon that is imposed an
immense organised diversity in nature, a diversity of forms
and movements which have nothing to do with the original Real. Dreams,
visions, the imagination of the artist or poet can
present such an organised diversity which is not real; but it is an
imitation, a mimesis of a real and already existent organised
diversity, or it starts from such a mimesis and even in the richest
variation or wildest invention some mimetic element is
observable. There is here no such thing as the operation attributed to
Maya in which there is no mimesis but a pure and
radically original creation of unreal forms and movements
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that are non-existent anywhere and neither imitate
nor reflect nor alter and develop anything discoverable in the Reality.
There is nothing in the operations of Mind-illusion that throws light
upon this mystery; it is, as a stupendous cosmic Illusion of
this kind must be, sui generis, without parallel. What we see in the
universe is that a diversity of the identical is everywhere
the fundamental operation of cosmic Nature; but here it presents
itself, not as an illusion, but as a various real formation out
of a one original substance. A Reality of Oneness manifesting itself in
a reality of numberless forms and powers of its being
is what we confront everywhere. There is no doubt in its process a
mystery, even a magic, but there is nothing to show that
it is a magic of the unreal and not a working of a Consciousness and
Force of being of the omnipotent Real, a self-creation
operated by an eternal self-knowledge.
This at once raises the question of the nature of Mind, the parent of
these illusions, and its relation to the original
Existence. Is mind the child and instrument of an original Illusion, or
is it itself a primal miscreating Force or Consciousness?
or is the mental ignorance a misprision of the truths of Existence, a
deviation from an original Truth-Consciousness which is
the real world-builder? Our own mind, at any rate, is not an original
and primary creative power of Consciousness; it is, and
all mind of the same character must be, derivative, an instrumental
demiurge, an intermediary creator. It is likely then that
analogies from the errors of mind, which are the outcome of an
intermediate Ignorance, may not truly illustrate the nature or
action of an original creative Illusion, an all-inventing and
all-constructing Maya. Our mind stands between a
superconscience and an inconscience and receives from both these
opposite powers: it stands between an occult subliminal
existence and an outward cosmic phenomenon; it receives inspirations,
intuitions, imaginations, impulsions to knowledge and
action, figures of subjective realities or possibilities from the
unknown inner source; it receives the figures of realised
actualities and their suggestions of further possibility from the
observed cosmic phenomenon. What it receives are truths
essential, possible or actual; it starts from the realised actualities
of the physical universe and it brings out
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from them in its subjective action the unrealised possibilities which they contain or suggest or to which it can arrive by
proceeding from them as a starting-point: it selects some out of these possibilities for a subjective action and plays with
imagined or inwardly constructed forms of them; it chooses others for objectivisation and attempts to realise them. But it
receives inspirations also from above and within, from invisible sources and not only from the impacts of the visible cosmic
phenomenon; it sees truths other than those suggested by the actual physicality around it, and here too it plays subjectively
with transmitted or constructed forms of these truths or it selects for objectivisation, attempts to realise.
Our mind is an observer and user of actualities, a diviner or recipient
of truths not yet known or actualised, a dealer in
possibilities that mediate between the truth and actuality. But it has
not the omniscience of an infinite Consciousness; it is
limited in knowledge and has to supplement its restricted knowledge by
imagination and discovery. It does not, like the
infinite Consciousness, manifest the known, it has to discover the
unknown; it seizes the possibilities of the Infinite, not as
results or variations of forms of a latent Truth, but as constructions
or creations, figments of its own boundless imagination.
It has not the omnipotence of an infinite conscious Energy; it can only
realise or actualise what the cosmic Energy will
accept from it or what it has the strength to impose or introduce into
the sum of things because the secret Divinity,
superconscient or subliminal, which uses it intends that that should be
expressed in Nature. Its limitation of Knowledge
constitutes by incompleteness, but also by openness to error, an
Ignorance. In dealing with actualities it may misobserve,
misuse, miscreate; in dealing with possibilities it may miscompose,
miscombine, misapply, misplace; in its dealings with truths
revealed to it it may deform, misrepresent, disharmonise. It may also
make constructions of its own which have no
correspondence with the things of actual existence, no potentiality of
realisation, no support from the truth behind them; but
still these constructions start from an illegitimate extension of
actualities, catch at unpermitted possibilities, or turn truths to
an application which is not applicable. Mind creates,
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but it is not an original creator, not omniscient or omnipotent, not even an always efficient demiurge. Maya, the Illusive
Power, on the contrary, must be an original creator, for it creates all things out of nothing unless we suppose that it creates
out of the substance of the Reality, but then the things it creates must be in some way real; it has a perfect knowledge of
what it wishes to create, a perfect power to create whatever it chooses, omniscient and omnipotent though only over its own
illusions, harmonising them and linking them together with a magical sureness and sovereign energy, absolutely effective in
imposing its own formations or figments passed off as truths, possibilities, actualities on the creature intelligence.
Our mind works best and with a firm confidence when it is given a
substance to work on or at least to use as a basis
for its operations, or when it can handle a cosmic force of which it
has acquired the knowledge, — it is sure of its steps when
it has to deal with actualities; this rule of dealing with objectivised
or discovered actualities and proceeding from them for
creation is the reason of the enormous success of physical Science. But
here there is evidently no creation of illusions, no
creation of non-existence in vacuo and turning them into apparent
actualities such as is attributed to the cosmic Illusion. For
Mind can only create out of substance what is possible to the
substance, it can only do with the force of Nature what is in
accordance with her realisable energies; it can only invent or discover
what is already contained in the truth and potentiality
of Nature. On the other side, it receives inspirations for creation
from within itself or from above: but these can only take
form if they are truths or potentials, not by the mind's own right of
invention; for if the mind erects what is neither true nor
potential, that cannot be created, cannot become actual in Nature.
Maya, on the contrary, if it creates on the basis of the
Reality, yet erects a superstructure which has nothing to do with the
Reality, is not true or potential in it; if it creates out of
the substance of the Reality, it makes out of it things that are not
possible to it or in accordance with it, — for it creates forms
and the Reality is supposed to be a Formless incapable of form, it
creates determinations and the Reality is supposed to be
absolutely indeterminable.
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But our
mind has the faculty of imagination; it can create and take as true and
real its own mental structures: here, it
might be thought, is something analogous to the action of Maya. Our
mental imagination is an instrument of Ignorance; it is
the resort or device or refuge of a limited capacity of knowledge, a
limited capacity of effective action. Mind supplements
these deficiencies by its power of imagination: it uses it to extract
from things obvious and visible the things that are not
obvious and visible; it undertakes to create its own figures of the
possible and the impossible; it erects illusory actuals or
draws figures of a conjectured or constructed truth of things that are
not true to outer experience. That is at least the
appearance of its operation; but, in reality, it is the mind's way or
one of its ways of summoning out of Being its infinite
possibilities, even of discovering or capturing the unknown
possibilities of the Infinite. But, because it cannot do this with
knowledge, it makes experimental constructions of truth and possibility
and a yet unrealised actuality: as its power of
receiving inspirations of Truth is limited, it imagines, hypothetises,
questions whether this or that may not be truths; as its
force to summon real potentials is narrow and restricted, it erects
possibilities which it hopes to actualise or wishes it could
actualise; as its power to actualise is cramped and confined by the
material world's oppositions, it figures subjective
actualisations to satisfy its will of creation and delight of
self-presentation. But it is to be noted that through the imagination
it
does receive a figure of truth, does summon possibilities which are
afterwards realised, does often by its imagination
exercise an effective pressure on the world's actualities. Imaginations
that persist in the human mind, like the idea of travel
in the air, end often by self-fulfilment; individual thought-formations
can actualise themselves if there is sufficient strength in
the formation or in the mind that forms it. Imaginations can create
their own potentiality, especially if they are supported in
the collective mind, and may in the long run draw on themselves the
sanction of the cosmic Will. In fact all imaginations
represent possibilities: some are able one day to actualise in some
form, perhaps a very different form of actuality; more are
condemned to sterility because they do not enter into the
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figure or scheme of the present creation, do not come within the permitted potentiality of the individual or do not accord with
the collective or the generic principle or are alien to the nature or destiny of the containing world-existence.
Thus the mind's imaginations are not purely and radically illusory:
they proceed on the basis of its experience of
actualities or at least set out from that, are variations upon
actuality, or they figure the “may-be”s or “might-be”s of the
Infinite, what could be if other truths had manifested, if existing
potentials had been otherwise arranged or other possibilities
than those already admitted became potential. Moreover, through this
faculty forms and powers of other domains than that
of the physical actuality communicate with our mental being. Even when
the imaginations are extravagant or take the form
of hallucinations or illusions, they proceed with actuals or possibles
for their basis. The mind creates the figure of a mermaid,
but the phantasy is composed of two actualities put together in a way
that is outside the earth's normal potentiality; angels,
griffins, chimeras are constructed on the same principle: sometimes the
imagination is a memory of former actualities as in
the mythical figure of the dragon, sometimes it is a figure or a
happening that is real or could be real on other planes or in
other conditions of existence. Even the illusions of the maniac are
founded on an extravagant misfitting of actuals, as when
the lunatic combines himself, kingship and England and sits in
imagination on the throne of the Plantagenets and Tudors.
Again, when we look into the origin of mental error, we find normally
that it is a miscombination, misplacement, misuse,
misunderstanding or misapplication of elements of experience and
knowledge. Imagination itself is in its nature a substitute
for a truer consciousness's faculty of intuition of possibility: as the
mind ascends towards the Truth-Consciousness, this
mental power becomes a truth-imagination which brings the colour and
light of the higher truth into the limited adequacy or
inadequacy of the knowledge already achieved and formulated and,
finally, in the transforming light above it gives place
wholly to higher truth-powers or itself turns into intuition and
inspiration; the Mind in that uplifting ceases to be a creator of
delusions and an architect of error. Mind then
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is not a sovereign creator of things non-existent or
erected in a void: it is an ignorance trying to know; its very
illusions start
from a basis of some kind and are the results of a limited knowledge or
a half-ignorance. Mind is an instrument of the
cosmic Ignorance, but it does not seem to be or does not act like a
power or an instrument of a cosmic Illusion. It is a
seeker and discoverer or a creator or would-be creator of truths,
possibilities and actualities, and it would be rational to
suppose that the original Consciousness and Power, from which mind must
be a derivation, is also a creator of truths,
possibilities and actualities, not limited like mind but cosmic in its
scope, not open to error, because free from all ignorance, a
sovereign instrument or a self-power of a supreme Omniscience and
Omnipotence, an eternal Wisdom and Knowledge.
This then is the dual possibility that arises before us. There is, we
may suppose, an original consciousness and power
creative of illusions and unrealities with mind as its instrument or
medium in the human and animal consciousness, so that the
differentiated universe we see is unreal, a fiction of Maya, and only
some indeterminable and undifferentiated Absolute is
real. Or there is, we may equally suppose, an original, a supreme or
cosmic Truth-Consciousness creative of a true universe,
but with mind acting in that universe as an imperfect consciousness,
ignorant, partly knowing, partly not knowing, — a
consciousness which is by its ignorance or limitation of knowledge
capable of error, mispresentation, mistaken or
misdirected development from the known, of uncertain gropings towards
the unknown, of partial creations and buildings, a constant
half-position between truth and error, knowledge and nescience. But
this ignorance in fact proceeds, however stumblingly, upon knowledge
and towards knowledge; it is inherently capable of shedding the
limitation, the mixture, and can turn by that liberation into the
Truth-Consciousness, into a power of the original Knowledge. Our
inquiry has so far led rather in the second direction; it points
towards the conclusion that the nature of our consciousness is not of a
character that would justify the hypothesis of a Cosmic Illusion as the
solution of its problem. A problem exists, but it consists in the
mixture of Knowledge with Ignorance
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in our cognition of self and things, and it is the origin of this imperfection that we have to discover. There is no need of
bringing in an original power of Illusion always mysteriously existent in the eternal Reality or else intervening and imposing a
world of non-existent forms on a Consciousness or Superconscience that is for ever pure, eternal and absolute.
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