Page:Episodes-before-thirty.djvu/42

Rh expression. In that silent bedroom, dawn not far away, I can hear myself saying aloud: "But I've known all this before--only I've forgotten it." Even the Sanskrit words, given phonetically in brackets, had a familiar look.

Shutter after shutter rose, "lifting a veil and a darkness," letting in glimpses of a radiant and exciting light. Though the mind was too untaught to grasp the full significance of these electric flashes, too unformed to be even intelligently articulate about them, there certainly rushed over my being a singular conviction of the unity of life everywhere and in everything--of its one-ness. That objects, the shifting appearance of phenomena, were but a veil concealing some intensely beautiful reality--the beauty shining and divine, the reality bitingly, terrifically actual--this poured over me with a sense of being not so much dis-covered as re-covered. Ignorant as I was, without facts or arguments or reason to support me, this I knew.

It is possible the awakening consciousness fringed some state of ecstasy during that long communing with ancient things.... The house, at any rate, was still dark, but sunrise not long to come, when at length I stole down into the deserted hall and replaced the little book upon the table.

Those Yoga aphorisms of a long-dead Hindu sage, set between a golden September evening and a guttering candle, marked probably the opening of my mind.... The entire paraphernalia of my evangelical teaching thenceforth began to withdraw. Though my father's beliefs had cut deep enough to influence me for many years to come, their dread, with the terror of a personal Satan and an actual Hell, grew less from that moment. The reality of the dogmas was impaired. Here was another outlook upon life, another explanation of the world; caprice was eliminated and justice entered; the present was the result of the past, the future determined by the present; I must reap what I had sown, but, also, I could sow what I wished to reap. Hope was born. Apart from Rh