THE SILENCE.... And now thy SELF is lost in SELF, THYSELF
unto THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which thou first didst radiate..
. . Behold! thou hast become the Light, thou hast become the Sound,
thou art thy Master and thy God. Thou art THYSELF the object of thy
search: the VOICE unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities,
exempt from change, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE
OF THE SILENCE. Om tat Sat."[277]

[277] H. P. Blavatsky: The voice of the Silence.

These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them,
probably stir chords within you which music and language touch in
common. Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical
criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our
foolishness in minding them. There is a verge of the mind which these
things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our
understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their
waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.

"Here begins the sea that ends not till the world's end. Where
we stand,
Could we know the next high sea-mark set beyond these waves
that gleam,
We should know what never man hath known, nor eye of man
hath scanned....
Ah, but here man's heart leaps, yearning towards the gloom
with venturous glee,
From the shore that hath no shore beyond it, set in all the
sea."[278]

[278] Swinburne: On the Verge, in "A Midsummer vacation."

That doctrine, for example, that eternity is timeless, that our
"immortality," if we live in the eternal, is not so much future as
already now and here, which we find so often expressed to-day in
certain philosophic circles, finds its support in a "hear, hear!" or an
"amen," which floats up from that mysteriously deeper level.[279] We
recognize the passwords to the mystical region as we hear them, but we
cannot use them ourselves; it alone has the keeping of "the password
primeval."[280]

[279] Compare the extracts from Dr. Bucke, quoted on pp. 398, 399.

[280] As serious an attempt as I know to mediate between the mystical
region and the discursive life is contained in an article on
Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, by F. C. S. Schiller, in Mind, vol. ix.,
1900.

I have now sketched with extreme brevity and insufficiency, but as
fairly as I am able in the time allowed, the general traits of the
mystic range of consciousness. It is on th