Can it ever be known? Is the Universe knowable at all: the real scheme corresponding to the sham scheme in which the symbols figure?
If the world were knowable it would not be itself; if it were knowable for ourselves we should not be ourselves. Acatalepsy makes equation with agnosticism, the object’s incapability of being known with the subject’s incapability of knowing. At most, our knowledge is of structure not contents; of dream-shape not dream-substance; of how imaginary things seem to fit together, not what real things are. The Universe-in-itself, being unlike anything we can think, may be the opposite: Antichthon, Counter-Earth, with matter spirit, and the past the future. We may be the wine, and the world the bottle; knowable to the Universe, though not it to us. Life may be emergent in matter, a waste product, of matter, a last phase of dying matter, or matter may be the dead deposit of life; matter may be a configuration of our brains or our brains a configuration of matter; reality may be what we call matter plus what we call soul; or it may be matter without soul, or soul without matter, or neither, or some other mixture of both, or a symbiosis of one with some other thing than the other. … Back in the prison-house! Round in the trap! What are “matter,” “life,” “soul”? What are “we”?
How can we know? No juggling with the counters can help us to know.
Can any other method of approach? Can religion? When not a bare system of life or government, a mere ethical programme or aesthetic cult, but when reigning in her home province as sovereign remedy for and minister to the metaphysical ills and needs of man, she utters the magical name of God. Who avails us little. For He is not God. He is our own invention, a man-made figure of God, an idol made with minds; a token, a terrible toy, a word of thunder deafening us to the emptiness within, a prisoner with us in the circle our senses go round in. Unless the Circle Itself.
Mysticism? Whether luminous under the banner of one religion or another, or of none, she takes the soul nearest to understanding, or the illusion of understanding; to high telepathy with the Unknown God. Conducting her favourites—her victims?—beyond the borderland of sensuous experience, she leaves them an instant there, translated, in nameless ecstasy or nameless terror, for an instant there to know the unknowable; without the circle of themselves, within His arms. They come back, and tell little. Only that the beauty, or the horror, was absolute; only that the experience was authentic, noëtic, as no other experience ever was or could be; only adjectives decking the soon-faded memory of their glimpse beyond. What they saw, they cannot tell. Did they see anything? Anything beyond shadows of the Shadow?
Strange ways are theirs of squaring the Circle: contemplation of His Person or Passion; eating His hidden manna; drinking His precious blood; kissing His cross, bearing it; dervish devices—repetition of the same word or same whirl; mad child’s devices—stare into the mirror, kiss your own lips there, think “Jesus” forever. Thus too the wild expectation arises, and nearer, nearer—almost, all but—the mystery is uncovered. It is illusion; and perfect is the illusion that it is not illusion.
Mysticism like mechanism, religion like reason, all are prisoners. What the Universe is can never be known. We are in it, we are of it, we are it; but what it is we do not know, world without beginning, world without end. The reality is unseizable, unapproachable, indefinable, in the most ultimate sense ineffable. The mystery, the misery, is forever.
Is the Universe real?
For the solipsist nothing exists apart from himself, and he is the only reality; he imagines the world, he himself makes it. When he dies the world dies; his brain projected it. No hope in spiritualist hopes of the soul’s survival: survival after this life, even to a thousand lifetimes, holds no promise of life eternal. With the death of the last disembodied spirit—instead of the last man alive—the world, as projection of his spirit, then would die.
Should however the solipsist be wrong, and the world exist on its own, then are there two things uncomprehended instead of one, and duality of ignorance. Or should the world be multiple, a manyness not unity, a complex of numberless planes or levels compresent at the same time though unperceived each by the other, then an eternity of things uncomprehended, and cosmic infinity of mutual ignorance. Sometimes the different planes seem to guess or grope at each other’s existence, as when, at this present moment, mind is wedded to matter and together they constitute life; as when, in the love moment, two together become one; as when, in nirvana, we taste and see the Lord; as when, in pari-nirvana, God tastes and sees Himself. Mostly the levels stay alone, unknowing and unknown of the others—like those electric currents that, though they have power to flame cities, pass through our bodies unobserved; like that magnet which could lift a steel mightiness but not my little finger; like the spirits around us whom so few perceive; like the finite, unperceived by the infinite—straight parallel lines through the magic.
Ghost lines, not real ones.
Is the Universe rational?
Evidence of some plan or
