Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/354

332 fashioned the forms. Among this stately people there is less activity of mind needing constantly to be curbed, It shows itself before long-continued habit can have set its seal upon the man himself. He inherits it with the rest of his constitution. In Japan the very babies are unconscionably good.

X.

We now come to a consideration of the trance. To this sleep and dreams may make a fitting word of introduction. For the phenomenon of sleep and dreams are kin enough to those of the trance state to entitle this night side of our nature to be called the normal trance.

There is a curious rhythm in our conscious life of which both the occasion and the cause is cosmic. Our spiritual life, in contradistinction to our bodily existence, is made up of disconnected bits, whose conditioning is emphatically of the earth, earthy. It is indeed worth noting, that our minds should thus in a sense be more mortal than our bodies. For once during every rotation of the earth consciousness is snuffed out like the candle we extinguish to help us to the