17. But what can it be which is loftier than that existence – a life compact of wisdom, untouched by struggle and error, or than this Intellect which holds the Universe with all there is of life and intellect?
If we answer “The Making Principle,” there comes the question, “making by what virtue?” and unless we can indicate something higher there than in the made, our reasoning has made no advance: we rest where we were.
We must go higher – if it were only for the reason that the maker of all must have a self-sufficing existence outside of all things – since all the rest is patently indigent – and that everything has participated in The One and, as drawing on unity, is itself not unity.
What then is this in which each particular entity participates, the author of being to the universe and to each item of the total?
Since it is the author of all that exists, and since the multiplicity in each thing is converted into a self-sufficing existence by this presence of The One, so that even the particular itself becomes self-sufficing, then clearly this principle, author at once of Being and of self-sufficingness, is not itself a Being but is above Being and above even self-sufficing.
May we stop, content, with that? No: the Soul is yet, and even more, in pain. Is she ripe, perhaps, to bring forth, now that in her pangs she has come so close to what she seeks? No: we must call upon yet another spell if anywhere the assuagement is to be found. Perhaps in what has already been uttered, there lies the charm if only we tell it over often? No: we need a new, a further, incantation. All our effort may well skim over every truth and through all the verities in which we have part, and yet the reality escape us when we hope to affirm, to understand: for the understanding, in order to its affirmation must possess itself of item after item; only so does it traverse all the field: but how can there be any such peregrination of that in which there is no variety?
All the need is met by a contact purely intellective. At the moment of touch there is no power whatever to make any affirmation; there is no leisure; reasoning upon the vision is for afterwards. We may know we have had the vision when the Soul has suddenly taken light. This light is from the Supreme and is the Supreme; we may believe in the Presence when, like that other God on the call of a certain man, He comes bringing light: the light is the proof of the advent. Thus, the Soul unlit remains without that vision; lit, it possesses what it sought. And this is the true end set before the Soul, to take that light, to see the Supreme by the Supreme and not by the light of any other principle – to see the Supreme which is also the means to the vision; for that which illumines the Soul is that which it is to see just as it is by the sun’s own light that we see the sun.
But how is this to be accomplished?
Cut away everything.