The Complex Vision | Page 5

into that vision-- and in these things time is
nothing--the rhythm which results is a rhythm upon which the soul
rests, even as music rests upon music, or life rests upon life.
And the eternal vision, thus momentarily attained, and hereafter
gathered together from the deep cisterns of memory, liberates us, when
we are under its influence, from that contemplative or creative tension
whereby we reached it. It is then that the stoical pride of the soul, in the
strength of which it has endured so much, undergoes the process of an
immense relaxation and relief. An indescribable humility floods our
being; and the mood with which we contemplate the spectacle of life
and death ceases to be an individual mood and becomes an universal
mood. The isolation, which was a necessary element in our advance to
this point, melts away when we have reached it. It is not that we lose
our personality, it is that we merge ourselves by the outflowing of love,
in all the personalities to which the procession of time gives birth.
And the way we arrive at this identification of ourselves with all souls,
living or dead or unborn, is by our love for that ideal symbolized in the

figure of Christ in whom this identification has already been achieved.
This, and nothing less than this, is the eternal vision. For the only "god"
among all the arbiters of our destiny, with whom we are concerned, is
Christ. To enter into his secret is to enter into their secret. To be aware
of him is to be aware of everything in the world, mortality and
immortality, the transitory and the eternal.
Life then, as I have struggled to interpret it in this book, seems to
present itself as an unfathomable universe entirely made up of
personalities. What we call inanimate substances are all of them the
bodies, or portions of the bodies, of living personalities. The immense
gulf, popularly made between the animate and the inanimate, thus turns
out to be an unfounded illusion; and the whole universe reveals itself as
an unfathomable series, or congeries, of living personalities, united by
the presence of the omnipresent ether which fills universal space.
It is of little moment, the particular steps or stages of thought, by which
one mind, among so many, arrives at this final conclusion. Other minds,
following other tracks across the desert, might easily reach it. The
important thing to note is that, once reached, such a conclusion seems
to demand from us a very definite attitude toward life. For if life, if the
universe, is entirely made up of personality, then our instinctive or
acquired attitude toward personality becomes the path by which we
approach truth.
To persons who have not been plunged, luckily or unluckily, in the
troublesome sea of metaphysical phrases, the portions of this book
which will be most tiresome are the portions which deal with those
"half-realities" or logical abstractions of the human reason, when such
reason "works" in isolation from the other attributes of the soul. Such
reason, working in isolation, inevitably produces certain views of life;
and these views of life, although unreal when compared with the reality
produced by the full play of all our energies, cannot be completely
disregarded if our research is to cover the whole field of humanity's
reactions. Since there is always an irresistible return to these
metaphysical views of life directly the soul loses the rhythm of its total
being, it seems as if it were unwise to advance upon our road until we

have discounted such views and placed them in their true perspective,
as unreal but inevitable abstractions.
The particular views of life which this recurrent movement of the
logical reason results in, are, first, the reduction of everything to an
infinite stream of pure thought, outside both time and space,
unconscious of itself as in any way personal; and, in the second place,
the reduction of everything to one universal self-conscious spirit, in
whose absolute and infinite being independent of space and time all
separate existences lose themselves and are found to be illusions.
What I try to make clear in the metaphysical portion of this book is that
these two views of life, while always liable to return upon us with
every renewed movement of the isolated reason, are in truth unreal
projections of man's imperious mind. When we subject them to an
analysis based upon our complete organ of research they show
themselves to be nothing but tyrannous phantoms, abstracted from the
genuine reality of the soul as it exists within space and time.
What I seek to show throughout this book is that the world resolves
itself into an immeasurable number of personalities held together by the
personality of the universal ether and by the unity