If we assume that all life is conscious life, as much aware of its
environment as the freedom of movement of its life vehicle in that
environment permits, a corpuscle vibrating in a solid would have a
certain sense of space and of movement in space gained from its own
experience. Now imagine the solid, which is its world, to be
subjected to the influence of heat. When the temperature reached a
certain point the solid would transform itself into a liquid. To the
corpuscle all the old barriers would seem to be broken down; space
would be different, time would be different, and its world a
different place. Again, at another increase of temperature, when the
liquid became a gas, the corpuscle would experience a further
emancipation: it would possess a further freedom, with all the facts
of its universe to learn anew.
Each of these successive crises would constitute for it an initiation,
and since the heat has acted upon it from within, causing an
expansion of its life vehicle, it would seem to itself to have
attained to these new freedoms through self-development.
The parallel is now plain to the reader: the corpuscle is the Yogi,
bent on liberation: the heat which warms him is the Divine Love,
centered in his heart, his initiations are the successive
emancipations into higher and higher spaces, till he attains
Nirvana--inherits the kingdom prepared for him from the foundation
of the world. As latent heat resides in the corpuscle, so is _Release_
hidden in the heart--release from time and space. The perception of
this prompted the exultant apostrophe of Buddha, "Looking for the
maker of this tabernacle, I have run through a course of many births,
not finding him; and painful is birth again and again. But now,
maker of the tabernacle, thou hast been seen; thou shalt not make up
this tabernacle again. All thy rafters are broken, thy ridge-pole is
sundered; the mind, approaching the Eternal, has attained the
extinction of all desires."
Upon the mystery of Nirvana the Higher Space Hypothesis casts not a
little light. To "approach the Eternal" can only be to approach a
condition where time is not. Because there is an escape from time in
proportion as space dimensions are added to, and assimilated by,
consciousness, any development involving this element of space
conquest (and evolution is itself such a development) involves time
annihilation also. To be in a state of desire is to be conditioned
by a limitation, because one can desire only that which one has not
or is not. The extinction of a desire is only another name for the
transcending of a limitation--of all desires, of all limitations. If
these limitations are of space they are of time also; therefore is
the "approach to the Eternal" through the "extinction of all desire."
Christ said, "Him that overcometh will I make a pillar of the temple
of my God, and he shall go no more out"--go out, that is, into
incarnation--into "time, besprent with seven-hued circumstance."
Such are the testimonies of the world-saviors regarding the means
and end of liberation. Below them on the evolutionary ladder stand
the mystics, earth-bound, but soul-free; below them, in turn, yet
far above common humanity, stand the men of genius, caught still in
the net of passion, but able, in their work, to reflect something of
the glory of the supernal world. Let us consider, in the next two
chapters, each of these in turn.