From the Editor’s Desk

I came upon the true ease of myself, as if another man appeared out of the depths of my being, and I stood outside myself, beyond becoming and perishing. A something wholly other.

Roethke

Roethke, like all seekers of the Self, always felt the urge to find in himself something that was wholly other than himself as he knew himself to be. And in his searchings, he thought deeper and deeper within to find his double in the depths of his being, a duplicate. the ever active and Everlasting Principle that worked and manipulated his physical being.

He tells us what he had to do to achieve his purpose in his own words:

It lies upon us to undo the lie of living merely in the realm of time.

This is the crux of the problem: how to get out of time so as to get into the Timeless. One is to break through the self-involvement in time and space, in which one is caught. Again the realm of time and space extends immeasurably beyond the human ken and to get out of it is not an easy task. The journey from mindfulness to mindlessness is long and tortuous. From events and effects on the surface one has to make his way to the underlying causes working beneath the visible sea of life. That which persists and survives the changing panorama of life is the immaterial Self within the material self – body. It is the Self that causes that self to work and act in so many diverse ways.

To know and understand the imperishable quiet at the heart of form there is no other way but to make a journey into the interior. Are we prepared to make this journey inward and to solve the riddle of life? Have we ever given any thought to it? And if so, what preparation have we made to chart out the uncharted sea of life that lies in and around us. The shadows of life fly past us with the rapidity of a whirl-wind and we are ever after them unmindful of Reality behind the shadows.

We have to come to and not come upon or stumble at by mere chance ‘the true ease’ as poets do and then to retain it at will for any length of time as we may desire. The poets in the flight of their imagination do get a dip now and then and get an instinctive glimpse of the double in them. In most cases it is just a mind-out-of-body experience. as they momentarily outleap the world. These intuitive flashes bring home to them the fact:

The flesh can make the spirit visible.

But soon and very soon to their dismay they lose the way and beyond expressing these experiences in words they cannot command the experiences at will. On the other hand, the Masters of the science of soul have from time immemorial known the way, traversed it at Their will and pleasure and can even impart a practical experience, direct and immediate to seekers after Truth by leading them out of the dark world into the self-radiant sun of the soul that never sets and casts no shadow. The world is not without really awakened Souls, though They are rare and he who sincerely seeks can find the Way, however narrow and sharp it may be. In the present scientific age it is presented scientifically so as to appeal the scientific mind which wants a practical demonstration before one is prepared to accept it. A Perfect Master never asks for blind faith. All that is required is just an experimental faith.