25.

I have tried to tell in a small way with as little
detail as possible, how Lo-fu looked at that branch. He
really did look at it. He really did see it. Then he
went inside and in his little cool room, out of the sun
he closed his eyes. He saw that branch but more clearly,
more vividly than ever. That branch was his mistress now,
his love. As he saw it in the orchard, that mistress was,
as it were, observed in a crowd, from a distance. He could
not touch her, his mistress with all the world about. Here,
in his little room, the world had ceased to exist. It was
shut off, shut out, forgotten. His love, his apple branch,
his beautiful subtle mistress, was his. And having possessed
her with his great and famished soul, she was his forever.

She was his, and though he knew she was only one, one
of a thousand women, one of a thousand, thousand beautiful
women, she was his, his own. And he was never jealous,
though her beauty was so obvious, for no one else could
possess her. Yet unlike another lover, he longed that his
friend should love her too, or should make another branch
his own, for the orchard was full and beyond the orchard
the mountain and pine forests were a thousand intimate
friendly herbs and grasses.

Lo-fu was a poet. To him that apple branch, outside in
the orchard, existed as an approach to something else. As
the body of a man's mistress might be said to exist as the
means of approach to something else, that is as a means or
instrument of feeling or happiness, so the branch in the
orchard existed to Lo-fu as the means of attaining happiness,
as a means of completing himself, as a means of approach to
ecstasy.

26.

I have been talking with a young man, a scholar and
philosopher. He says my term over-mind is not good,
because in his case at least the mental state I describe,
lies below the sub-conscious mind. That is, I visualise
my three states of consciousness in a row,

1. Over-conscious mind.

2. Conscious mind.

3. Sub-conscious mind.

He visualises his three states,

1. Conscious mind.

2. Sub-conscious mind.

3. Universal mind.

He means by universal mind exactly what I mean by over-mind but certainly my term over-mind is not adequate, if this over-mind state is approached by others through the sub-conscious.

But we both visualise these states in a row though
I suppose the universal symbol is the triangle, or taken
a step further, the circle, as the three seem to run into
one another, though neither he nor I visualise them that
way.

27.

The body of a man is a means of approach, or can be
used as a means of approach to ecstasy. Man's body can
be used for that. The best Greek sculpture used the
bodies of young athletes as Lo-fu used the branch of the
fruit tree. The lines of the human body may be used as
an approach to the over-mind or universal mind.

The lines of the human body and the lines of the
fruit tree are like the body of the Delphic charioteer
that I spoke of some time ago. The fruit tree and the
human body are both receiving stations, capable of
storing up energy, over-world energy. That energy is
always there but can be transmitted only to another body
or another mind that is in sympathy with it, or keyed to
the same pitch.

The body of the Greek boy, Polycleitus used for
his Diuademenos, was as impersonal a thing as a tree.
He used the body instead of a tree. That boy's body
was, of course, capable of human passions but Polycleitus'
approach to that body was not through the human passions.

But of course he was in love with it just as Lo-fu
was in love with apple branch and Leonardo with the boy's
face or the Gallilean with the field lilies.

28.

But the body, I suppose, like a lump of coal, fulfils
its highest function when it is being consumed.

When coal burns it gives off heat.

The body consumed with love gives off heat.

But taken a step further, coal may be used to make
gas, an essence, a concentrated, etherial form of coal.

So with the body. It may burn out simply as heat
or physical love. That may be good. But it is also
interesting to understand the process whereby the heat of
the physical body is transmuted to this other, this different
form, concentrated, etherial, which we refer to in common
speech as spirit.

It is all spirit but spirit in different forms.

We cannot have the heat without the lump of coal.

Perhaps so we cannot have spirit without body, the
body of nature, or the body of individual men and women.

29.

I spoke to a scientist, a psychologist, about my divisions of mind and over-mind. He said that over-mind was not exactly the right term, that sub-conscious mind was the phrase I was groping for.

I have thought for a long time about the comparative value of these terms, and I see at last my fault and his.

We were both wrong. I was about to cover too much of the field of abnormal consciousness by the term over-mind. He, on the other hand, would have called it all sub-conscious mind.

But the sub-conscious and the over-conscious are entirely different states, entirely different worlds.

The sub-conscious world is the world of sleeping dreams and the world great lovers enter, physical lovers, but very great ones.

The over-conscious world is the world of waking dreams and the world great lovers enter, spiritual lovers, but only the greatest.

A sub-conscious dream may become an over-conscious dream at the moment of waking.

The intellect, the brain, the conscious mind is the bridge across, the link between the sub-conscious and the over-conscious.

I think at last, I have my terms clear.

There are three states of manifestations - sub-conscious mind, conscious mind, over-conscious mind.

Where does the body come in?

What is the body?

30.

I imagine it has often been said that the body is like an oyster and the soul or spirit, a pearl. But to-day I saw for myself that the jelly-fish over my head had become concentrated. I saw that the state of mind I had before symbolized as a jelly-fish was just as well symbolized differently. That is, all the spiritual energy seemed concentrated in the middle of my forehead, inside my skull, and it was small and giving out a very soft light, but not scattered light, light concentrated in itself as the light of a pearl would be. So I understood exactly what the Gallilean meant by the kingdom of heaven, being a pearl of great price.

Then in the same relation, the body was not a very rare or lovely thing. The body seemed an elementary, unbeautifal and transitory form of life. Yet here again, I saw that the body had its use. The oyster makes the pearl in fact. So the body, with all its emotions and fears and pain in time casts off the spirit, a concentrated essence, not itself, but made, in a sense, created by itself.

I know that this has been said before but I speak for myself, from my personal experience.

These jelly-fish, I think, are the "seeds cast into the ground". But as it takes a man and woman to create another life, so it takes these two forms of seed, one in the head and one in the body to make a new spiritual birth. I think that is why I saw them as jelly-fish. They are really two flecks of protoplasm and when we are "born again", we begin not as a child but as the very first germs that grow into a child.

Probably we pass through all forms of life and that is very interesting. But so far I have passed through these two, I am in my spiritual body a jelly-fish and a pearl.

We can probably use this pearl, as a crystal ball is used, for concentrating and directing pictures from the world of vision.

31.

It is necessary to work, to strive toward the under-
standing of the over-mind. But once a man becomes con-
scious of this jelly-fish above his head, this pearl
within his skull, this seed cast into the ground, his chief
concern automatically becomes his body.

Once we become concretely aware of this pearl, this
seed, our centre of consciousness shifts. Our concern
is with the body.

Because the spirit, we realise is a seed. No man
by thought can add an inch to his stature, no initiate
by the strength and power of his intellect can force his
spirit to grow.

He cannot force his spirit to grow, but he can retard
its growth. At least so it seems to me.

He can retard its growth by neglect of his body
because the body of man as the body of nature is the
ground into which the seed or spirit is cast.

This is the mystery of Demeter, the Earth Mother.
The body of the Elusinian initiate had become one with
the earth, as his soul had become one with the seeds
enclosed in the earth.

No man by thought can make the grain sprout or the
acorn break its shell. No man by intellectual striving
can make his spirit expand.

But every man can till the field, can clear weeds
from about the stems of flowers.

Every man can water his own little plot, can strive
to quiet down the overwrought tension of his body.

32.

Christ and his father, or as the Elusinian mystic
would have said, his mother, were one.

Christ was the grapes that hung against the sun-lit
walls of that mountain garden, Nazareth. He was the white
hyacinth of Sparta and the narcissus of the islands. He
was the conch shell and the purple-fish left by the lake
tides. He was the body of nature, the vihe, the Dionysus,
as he was the soul of nature.

He was the gulls screaming at low tide and tearing
the small crabs from among the knotted weeds.