The Complex Vision | Page 4

finds itself surrounded, both in regard to the matter of its own body and
in regard to the still more alien matter of which all other bodies are
composed.
But when by the use of the term objective mystery I have indicated that
general and universal something, not itself, by which the soul is
confronted, that something which, like a white screen, or a thick mass
of darkness, waits the moving lamp of the soul to give it light and
colour, it becomes clear that the name itself does not cover any actual
reality other than the actual reality of all the bodies in the world joined
together by the universal ether.
Is the term "objective mystery," therefore, no more than the name given
to that first solid mass of external impression which the insight of the
soul subsequently reduces to the shapes, colours, scents, sounds, and all
the more subtle intimations springing from the innumerable bodies and
souls which fill universal space? No. It is not quite this. It is a little
deeper than this. It is, in fact, the mind's recognition that behind this
first solid mass of external impression which the soul's own creative

activity creates into its "universe" there must exist "something," some
real substance, or matter, or world-stuff, in contact with which the soul
half-creates and half-discovers the universe which it makes its own.
When, however, the soul has arrived at the knowledge that its own
physical body is the outward expression of its inner self, and when by
an act of faith or imagination it has extended this knowledge to every
other bodily form in its universe, it ceases to be necessary to use the
term "objective mystery"; since that something which the soul felt
conscious of as existing behind the original solid mass of impressions
is now known by the soul to be nothing else than an incredible number
of living personalities, each with its own body.
And just as I make use in this book of the term "objective mystery,"
and then discard it in my final conclusion, so I make an emphatic and
elaborate use of the term "creative" and then discard it, or considerably
modify it, in my final conclusion.
My sequence of thought, in this matter of the soul's "creative" power,
may thus be indicated. In the process of preparing the ground for those
rare moments of illumination wherein we attain the eternal vision the
soul is occupied, and the person attempting to think is occupied, with
what I call "the difficult work of art" of concentrating its various
energies and fusing them into one balanced point of rhythmic harmony.
This effort of contemplative tension is a "creative effort" similar to that
which all artists are compelled to make. In addition to this aspect of
what I call "creation," there also remains the fact that the individual
soul modifies and changes that first half-real something which I name
the objective mystery, until it becomes all the colours, shapes, sounds
and so forth, produced by the impression upon the soul of all the other
personalities brought into contract with it by the omnipresent
personality of the universal ether.
The words "creation" and "creative" axe thus made descriptive in this
book of the simple and undeniable fact that everything which the mind
touches is modified and changed by the mind; and that ultimately the
universe which any mind beholds is an universe half-created by the
mood of the mind which beholds it. And since the mood of any mind

which contemplates the universe is dependent upon the relative
"overcoming" in that particular soul of the emotion of malice by love,
or of the emotion of love by malice, it becomes true to say that any
universe which comes into existence is necessarily "created" by the
original struggle, in the depths of some soul or other, of the conflicting
emotions of love and malice.
And since the ideal of the emotion of love is life, and the ideal of the
emotion of hate is death, it becomes true to say that the emotion of love
is identical with the creative energy in all souls, while the emotion of
malice is identical with the force which resists creation in all souls.
Why then do I drop completely, or at least considerably modify, this
stress upon the soul's "creative" power in my final chapter? I am led to
do so by the fact that such creative power in the soul is, after all, only a
preparation for the eternal vision. Creative energy implies effort,
tension, revolution, agitation, and the pain of birth. All these things
have to do with preparing the ground for the eternal vision, and with
the final gesture of the soul, by which it enters into that ultimate rhythm.
But once having entered