NOTES ON THOUGHT AND VISION.

Three states or manifestations of life: body, mind, over-mind.

Aim of men and women of highest development is
equilibrium, balance, growth of the three at once;
brain without physical strength is a manifestation of
weakness, a disease comparable to cancerous growth or
tumor; body without reasonable amount of intellect is
an empty fibrous bundle of glands as ugly and little
to be desired as body of a victim of some form of
elephantiasis or fatty-degeneracy; over-mind without
the balance of the other two is madness and a person
so developed should have as much respect as a reasonable
maniac and no more.

2.

All reasoning, normal, sane and balanced men and women need and seek at certain times of their lives, certain definite physical relationships. Men and women of temperament, musicians, scientists, artists especially, need these relationships to develop and draw forth their talents. Not to desire and make every effort to develope along these natural physical lines, cripples and dwarfs the being. To shun, deny and be-little such experiences is to bury one's talent carefully in a napkin.

When a creative scientist, artist or philosopher has been for some hours or days intent on his work, his mind often takes on an almost physical character. That is his mind becomes his real body. His over-mind becomes his brain.

When Leonardo da Vinci worked, his brain was Leonardo, the personality, Leonardo da Vinci. He saw the faces of many of his youths and babies and young women definitely with his over-mind. The Madonna of the Rocks is not a picture. It is a window. We look through a window into the world of pure over-mind.

3.

If I could visualise or describe that over-mind in
my own case, I should say this: it seems to me that
a cap is over my head, a cap of consciousness over my
head, my forehead, affecting a little my eyes. Sometimes
when I am in that state of consciousness, things about
me appear slightly blurred as if seen under water.

Ordinary things never become quite unreal nor dis-
proportionate. It is only an effort to readjust, to focus,
seemingly a slight physical effort.

That over-mind seems a cap, like water, transparent,
fluid yet with definite body, contained in a definite space.
It is like a closed sea-plant, jelly-fish or anemone.

Into that over-mind, thoughts pass and are visible
like fish swimming under clear water.

The swing from normal consciousness to abnormal
consciousness is accompanied by grinding discomfort of
mental agony.

4.

I should say - to continue this jelly-fish metaphor - that long feelers reached down and through the body, that these stood in the same relation to the nervous system as the over-mind to the brain or intellect.

There is, then, a set of super-feelings. These feelings extend out and about us, as the long, floating tentacles of the jelly-fish reach out and about him. They are not of different material, extraneous, as the physical arms and legs are extraneous to the gray matter of the directing brain. The super-feelers are part of the super-mind, as the jelly-fish feelers are the jelly-fish itself, elongated in fine threads.

I first realised this state of consciousness in my head. I visualise it just as well, now, centered in the love-region of the body or placed like a foetus in the body.

The centre of consciousness is either the brain or the love-region of the body.

Is it easier for a woman to attain this state of consciousness than for a man?

For me, it was before the birth of my child that the jelly-fish consciousness seemed to come definitely into the field of realm of the intellect or brain.

Are these jelly-fish states of consciousness interchangable? Should we be able to think with the womb and feel with the brain?

May this consciousness be centred entirely in the brain or entirely in the womb or corresponding love-region of a man's body?

6.

Socrates' whole doctrine of vision was a doctrine of love.

We must be "in love" before we can understand the mysteries of vision.

A lover must choose one of the same type of mind as himself, a musician, a musician, a scientist, a scientist, a general, a young man also interested in the theory and practice of arms and armies.

We begin with sympathy of thought.

The minds of the two lovers merge, interact in sympathy of thought.

The brain, inflamed and excited by this interchange of idea, takes on its character of over-mind, becomes (as I have visualised in my own case) a jelly-fish, placed over and about the brain.

The love-region is excited by the appearance or beauty of the loved one, its energy not dissipated in physical relation, takes on its character of mind, becomes this womb-brain or love-brain that I have visualised as a jelly-fish in the body.

The love-brain and over-brain are both capable of thought. This thought is vision.

7.

All men have possibilities of developing this
vision.

The over-mind is like a lense of an opera-glass.
When we are able to use this over-mind lense, the
whole world of vision is open to us.

I have said that the over-mind is a lense. I
should say more exactly that the love-mind and the
over-mind are two lenses. When these lenses are
properly adjusted, focussed, they bring the world of
vision into consciousness. The two work separately,
perceive separately, yet make one picture.

The mystic, the philosopher is content to
contemplate, to examine these pictures. The Attic
dramatist reproduced them for men of lesser or other
gifts. He realised, the whole time, that they were not
his ideas. They were eternal, changeless ideas that
he had grown aware of, dramas already conceived that he
had watched; memory is the mother, begettor of all
drama, idea, music, science or song.

We may enter the world of over-mind consciousness
directly, through the use of our over-mind brain. We
may enter it indirectly, in various ways. Every person
must work out his own way.

Certain words and lines of Attic choruses, any
scrap of da Vinci's drawings, the Delphic charibteer
have a definite, hypnotic effect on me. They are
straight, clear entrances, to me, to over-world con-
sciousness. But my line of approach, my sign-posts
are not your sign-posts.

8.

My sign-posts are not yours, but if I blaze my
own trail, it may help to give you confidence and
urge you to get out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-
times explored old world, the dead world of overworked
emotions and thoughts.

But the world of the great creative artists is never
dead. The new schools of destructive art theorists are
on the wrong track. Because Leonardo and his kind are
never old, never dead. Their world is never explored,
hardly even entered. Because it needs an over-mind or a
slight glimmering of over-mind intelligence to understand
over-mind intelligence.

The Delphic charioteer has, I have said, an almost
hypnotic effect on me: the bend of his arm, the knife-
cut of his chin, his feet, rather flat, slightly separated,
a firm pedestal for himself, the fall of his drapery, in
geometrical precision, and the angles of the ingatherings
of the drapery at the waist.

All this was no "inspiration", it was sheer, hard brain
work.

This figure has been created by a formula arrived
at consciously or unconsciously.

If we had the right sort of brains, we would receive
a definite message from that figure, like dots and lines
ticked off by one receiving station, received and trans-
lated into definite thought by another telegraphic centre.

There is no trouble about art. There is already
enough beauty in the world of art, enough in the fragments
and the almost perfectly preserved charioteer at Delphi
alone to remake the world.

There is no trouble about the art, it is the appreci-
ators we want. We want young men and women to communicate
with the charioteer and his like.

We want receiving centres for dots and dashes.

9.

It is said that da Vinci went mad if he saw a boy's face in Florence or a caged bird or a child with yellow hair that fell or stood up in tight whorls like the goldsmith work he had learned with Verrochio. Da Vinci went mad because those lines of the bird's back or the boy's shoulder or the child's hair acted on him directly, as the lines of a statue, worked out like the charioteer, would act on us if we had the right sort of receiving brain.

Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead, murky thought.

Two or three people gathered together in the name of truth, beauty, over-mind consciousness could bring the whole force of this power back into the world.

It is true that, in the year A.D.361, the Gallilean conquered at Delphi. That was because the Hellenic mind had entirely lost the secret of dots and dashes. The electric force of the lines and angles of the priest-like body of the charioteer still gave out their message but there was no one to receive this message.

The Gallilean conquered because he was a great artist, like da Vinci.

A fish-basket, upturned on the sand, or a candle in a candle-stick or a Roman coin with its not unbeautfully wrought head of a king, could excite him and give him ideas, as the bird or boy's face or child's yellow hair gave da Vinci ideas.

10.

The Gallilean fell in love with things as well as people. He would fall in love with a sea-gull or some lake-heron that would dart up from the coarse lake grass, when Peter leapt out to drag his great boat on shore, or the plain little speckled-backed birds bought in the market by the poor Jews. Then, he would look at Peter with his great archaic head and the young Jude with his intense eyes, and he would exclaim suddenly: "ah but your faces, your faces are more beautiful, more charged with ideas, with lines that suggest and bring me into touch with the world of over-mind thought, than many, many sparrows."

He looked at the blue grass-lily and the red-brown sand-lily that grew under the sheltered hot sand-banks in the southern winter, for hours and hours. If he closed his eyes, he saw every vein and fleck of blue or vermillion. He would breathe in the fragrance with the wind and the salt. He would rest for days along the shores of the sea-lakes.

Then, in the town, there would be some tragedy and he would send the friends and wailing relatives out of the way. He would be angry, as he looked at the little girl's face, that she was surrounded by such ugliness. He would look at her for a long time because of the beauty of the little, straight nose and the eyelids, the hair clinging like sea weed to the fine little skull, the very white hands. He would like to have stayed looking at her for hours, like the blue grass-lily. But he was afraid they would break in, suddenly again, with their heavy, black clothes, and ugly voices. So he said, "daughter, I say unto you, arise."

11.

The first step in the Elusinian mysteries had to with sex. There were images set up in a great room, coloured marbles and brown pottery, painted with red and vermillion and coloured earthern work or clay images. The candidates for admission to the mysteries, would be shown through the room by a priest or would walk through at random, as the crowd walks through the pornographic chamber at the museum at Naples.

It would be easy enough to judge them by their attitude, whether it was one of crude animal enjoyment or hypocritical aloofness.

The crowd that got through to the second room would be different, more sensitive, more fastidious. They would correspond to certain of our intellectual types of to-day. They would be interested because it was the thing to be interested - also to show their superiority.

Any one who got safely through the mere animal stage and the intellectual stage would be left in a small room by himself to make his constation.

Anyone who wants, can get through these stages to-day, just as easily as the Elusinian candidates outside Athens in the fifth century B.C.

There is plenty of pornographic literature that is interesting and amusing.

If you cannot be entertained and instructed by Boccacio, Rabelais, Montaigne, Sterne, Middleton, de Gourment and de Regnier there is something wrong with you physically.

If you cannot read these people and enjoy them you are not ready for the first stage of initiation.