Chapter 10: Let Your Tones Be Very Gentle

1Let your tones be very gentle … 2O Supreme Guide of all the worlds, accept this soul who seeks to be sanctified to You. 3Assist him in acquiring all that will contribute to his wisdom and his enhanced worth. 4And unite him with the Divine whence he was born.

5Still and peaceful night, ground in him your deep serenity. 6Vivid moon, permeate his spirit. 7And from the treasure trove of the sky may he draw health and life and sweetness ... 8So that his existence will be a delight and his love a benediction.

N.B. 9,10Mastery of the life-forces is an aptitude not within the grasp of all souls.

ECHOES AND NOTES

10.1: Let your tones be very gentle …

God is here. Everything is sacred.

10.2: O Supreme Guide of all the worlds, accept this soul who seeks to be sanctified to You.

The Self-begotten Hidden One pre-exists, because he is an origin of the Self-begotten One, a god and a forefather, a cause of the First-Appearing One, a father of his parts, a father-God, a foreknowledge. Yet he is unknown, for he is a power and a father from himself. Therefore, he is fatherless. The Invisible Triple Powerful, the first Thought of all these is the Invisible Spirit and Essence and Existence. The In-visible Spirit is a psychic and intellectual power, a knowledgeable one and a foreknower. (Zostrianos [c200 A.D.] in NHLiE [1977] 1990: 409-29)

In this whole vast universe, there is nothing higher than I. All the worlds have their rest in me, as many pearls upon a string. I am the taste of living waters and the light of the sun and the moon. I am ÔM, the sacred word of the Vedas, sound in silence, heroism in men. I am the pure fragrance that comes from the earth and the brightness of life. I am. I am the life of all living beings, and the austere life of those who train their souls. And I am from everlasting the seed of eternal life. I am the intelligence of the intelligent. I am the beauty of the beautiful. I am the power of those who are strong, when this power is free from passions and selfish desires. (Bhagavad-Gītā 7.7-11)

10.3: Assist him in acquiring all that will contribute to his wisdom and his enhanced worth.

Who worships wisdom as Spirit, attains all knowledge and experience; moves within the limits of its subject, as it may please him, provided he worships wisdom as nothing but Spirit. (Chandogya Upanishad 7.7 in The Ten Principal Upanishads [c800-c600 B.C.] 1937: 100)

10.4: And unite him with the Divine whence he was born.

Knowledge of ourselves teaches us whence we come, where we are, and whither we are going. We come from God, and we are in exile; and it is because our potency of affection tends towards God that we are aware of this state of exile. (Ruysbroeck [1293-1381] in Huxley 1946: 187)

10.5: Still and peaceful night, ground in him your deep serenity.

Even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. (Ps. 139:12)

10.6: Vivid moon, permeate his spirit.

The symbolism of the moon … reveals a connatural solidarity between the lunar rhythms, temporal becoming, water, the growth of plants, the female principle, death and resurrection, human destiny, weaving, and so forth. In the final analysis, the symbolism of the moon reveals a correspondence of mystical order between the various levels of cosmic reality and certain modalities of human existence. Let us note that this correspondence becomes evident neither spontaneously in immediate experience nor through critical resolution. It is the result of a certain mode of ‘being present’ in the world. Even admitting that certain functions of the moon have been discovered through attentive observation of the lunar phases (for example, the relationship with rain and menstruation), it is hard to conceive that lunar symbolism in its totality has been constituted by a rational process. It is quite another order of knowledge that discloses, for example, the ‘lunar destiny’ of human experience, the fact than man is ‘measured’ by the temporal rhythms illustrated by the phases of the moon, that he is fated to die but, quite like the moon which reappears after three days of darkness, man too can begin his existence anew, that in any case he nourishes the hope in a life after death, assured or ameliorated through an initiation ritual. (Eliade [1959] 1973: 99)

When the spiritual monad, or Individuality, quits the lower nature, it passes into the energised higher mental vehicle, or causal-body, and from thence unites with the Higher Self. Fortified by this union, it passes upward through the Buddhic plane (moon) and becomes merged with Love eternal on the plane of Ātma. (Gaskell [1923] 1981: 510)

10.7: And from the treasure trove of the sky may he draw health and life and sweetness,

Thoughts of joy, love and health stimulate the revitalizing elements, a force conducive to activating the building of new nervous tissue and new blood. All this implies the working of an unshakeable will, a functioning to which everything in nature responds.

10.8: So that his existence will be a delight and his love a benediction.

In the end we will find, I believe, the inherent joy in existence itself, a joy that stems from the great perfection of this and every moment, a wondrous whole in itself, a part of the whole of the next, a sliding series of wholes and parts that cascade to infinity and back, never lacking and never wanting because always fulfilled in the brilliance that is now. The integral vision, having served its purpose, is finally outshined by the radiance of a Spirit that is much too obvious to see and much too close to reach, and the integral search finally succeeds by letting go of the search itself, there to dissolve in a radical Freedom and consummate Fullness that was always already the case, so that one abandons a theory of everything in order simply to be Everything, one with the All in this endless awareness that holds the Kosmos kindly in its hand. And then the true Mystery yields itself, the face of Spirit secretly smiles, the Sun rises in your very own heart and the earth becomes your very own body, galaxies rush through your veins while the stars light up the neurons of your night, and never again will you search for a mere theory of that which is actually your own Original Face. (Wilber 2004: 184)

10.9,10: Mastery of the life-forces is an aptitude not within the grasp of all souls.

If we fail to safeguard our lives against the disintegrative elements and misperception, lack of compassion and sorrow set in.

Every human soul by its very nature has beheld true being—otherwise it would not have entered into the creature we call man—but it is not every soul that finds it easy to use its present experience as a means of recollecting the world of reality. (Plato, Phaedrus 250a [370 B.C./ 1975] 1981: 56)