Mina Loy - Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

Above all in illumination the mystic abstractly perceived our impossible to blossom forth as the POSSIBLE.

CONTEMPLATION drew him far beyond his ego-electric exercises. In ECSTASY he at last tuned in on

THE CREATIONAL OVERTURE —

– — on beauty before its semblance descends

– — on music before it in utterance descends

– — on the source of presensate ecstasy whereof, to earth life, Eros alone brings some intimation.

However evasive of description their illumined experience, it imposed upon all illuminati an obligation: to impart to others the formula for its inducement.

An impartation involving the esoteric import of the CIRCLE.

Deific electricity coursing through a circle of mentalities, all concentrated on a like aspiration, increased the spiritual power. 5

THE ELEVATIONAL MAGNET

Illumination effected our elevation of the spirit to that other magnet opposite to the Earth’s attraction: a gravitation upward — — a sublime buoyancy.

The eastern attitude of prayer, the joined palms, the soles of the feet pressed flatly together, precluding the ego-electricity from running off into the ground as in our bi-ped activity, constrained it, through circling and recircling, to vivifying accumulation sufficient for cooperating with the electric inspiration of Deity. The fingers tapered to point upward serving as antennae.

Study of the esoteric is not needful to prove the effectiveness of this gravity upward . Haphazardly we connect with it, when, for no apparent cause, at certain times we find ourselves suddenly light as air skimming the pavement, where oppositely at some recent hour, our leaden legs seemingly bored into the earth a tonnage of onerous animation, under a like leaden lunge of the brain to the tug of the terrestrial center.

To the mystic our human world of phenomena as we experience it at present compares to a sculpture-picture, a radio-television broadcast in three dimensions, issuant from the Deific designer; while to the non-mystic this projected image of the actor assumes his entire identity, dynamism, origin and permanence whereas

MAN IS A COVERED-ENTRANCE TO INFINITY

Contemporary man presumes his life to begin, come to an end, with his body. His intelligence to be manufactured by the brain; he being unaware of the currents in cosmic power conveying to man his apparent esse ; unaware of the brain being merely an instrument of reception and transmission.

Seemingly this psychic system of scientific investigation, tending toward total depreciation of the tangible universe, being too acutely specialised for working out the dual abstract-concrete imperative of our intended evolution, 6short-circuited — –

A strange inertia settled upon the Orient. Exercisers of Spirit sat, incessantly asleep, in public places, their finger-nails growing through the palms of their hands.

To the earliest disciples, the mystic system proved often communicable. But all systems of spiritual exercise come to a crisis incurring decrease of comprehension. The snap-back of human consciousness from the take-off of inspiration: the stretch of consciousness into the imperceptible universe still depending, to some degree, on the contemporary stage of evolution in the concrete world .

Later students misinterpreted the scientific-mystic teaching as an exhortation to make the mind a blank; to immobilise the flesh.

Books of mystic instruction, written in code, conveyed nothing of their real significance to the uninitiated. Held by the purist to be supremely authentic, one, apparently an account of many battles, precisely and reiteratively enumerating the hordes of warriors engaged, had the trick of turning into a mathematical treatise on the control and alternation of rates of vibration involved in various psychic operations. At which point in perusal the student’s cranium seemed to open up, very like a certain Picasso cubist head, for abstract instruction to pour into it. Not oral. Communicated thought. Not the student’s thought.

The thought of DIRECTIVE INTELLIGENCE Religion’s VOICE OF GOD.

While modern science successfully harnesses intangible phenomena inducted from the invisible Universe, the layman unquestioningly accepts the astounding results. Presented with any claim of mystic science his faith immediately reverses. He behaves as if he had never even heard of anything but solids.

His “keep-off-the-grass-of-the-infinite” is self-protective — — the brain is cautious.

The mystic, in contemplation received lightning impressions of the inconceivable — — as of the universe timeless, dimensionless, “turning inside out” in process of creative revelation — — passing during the eternal moment through itself — — identifying the microcosmic with the macrocosmic in the energy of the atom,

The absolute momentum causative pulse of Life, of Breath, of procreation — — construed for him by conscious magnitudes, living equations.

The Brain is cautious — –

The characteristic result of encroachment on the frontier dividing the abstract from the concrete being explosion. Even as the modern scientific extraction of force from Power produces explosion, cerebral encroachment may cause explosion in the mind. Inasmuch as the mind is not kept tensile. Restricting speculation as to the larger resources of existence with the irreflective assumption that the evolution of man is completed; whereas he should measure his mental capacity in conformation to his travel of transition since, sequent to chaos, a miniscule incipience of life first quivered in an ocean. He does not keep in balance with time through realization that his destiny is to fare onward, at least as far as he has come, which realization would preserve his equilibrium, even on impact with the “unknown.”

EROS

Human emotion is become excessively confused owing to the scission of sex from religion.

Sex presented to the purity of youth as at once beatitude and secret filth

Religion , as sole security and total prohibition

Sex! This word, at last, so overflows with misassociations. To clarify its future significance, sex must be renamed. Meanwhile, for “sex” let us substitute Eros . Somehow the sound of the Greek cupid survives unsullied; unlike longer words derived from it.

Eros became identified with “Sin” when the uninitiated misconstrued the asceticism of ancient Asia’s students of psychic science; mistook an automatic transmutation of virility for drastic mortification of the flesh, thus dragging a metaphysical dis-“connection” into the domain of physical interchange — — repression.

The oriental quarrel with “Desire” coincides with the incipience of Exoteric Religion.

Exoteric religion originated in a fusion of ancient seers’ determination to mystify such as might degrade the psychic technique to destructive demonstrations — origin of Black magic, and the “outsider’s” own misinterpretation of religion’s dicta.

Any disciple, by nature unadaptable to transformation of his auto-electric potency, could, as anyone to-day, simply not imagine what that would be like.

In trying to make it out, he substituted the mutilation of impulse for the transformation of impulse. Incapable of purely mental relaxation he strained against a biologic process. How could he understand “having no desire” to mean “desire vanished of itself”?