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It fails to let us understand how that relation arises, how the sensible is generated, or how it enters into our consciousness. We have the theory that the essential forms of Reality are to be found in the Object and are thence supplied to the Understanding, which plays the part merely of a receptive surface or tabula rasa.
Sri Yukteswar taught me how to summon the blessed experience at will, and also how to transmit it to others if their intuitive channels were developed. For months I entered the ecstatic union, comprehending why the UPANISHADS say God is RASA, "the most relishable." One day, however, I took a problem to Master. "I want to know, sir-when shall I find God?" "You have found Him."
Such is the pretension and the boast of this new Peter the Hermit, who would get rid of all we have done in the way of improvement on a state of barbarous ignorance, or still more barbarous prejudice, in order to begin again on a tabula rasa of Calvinism, and have a world of his own making.
Even in the most common of our sensations there are enigmas never to be solved by those holding the absurd doctrine that all feeling and cognition belong to individual experience, and that the mind of the child newly-born is a tabula rasa.
But thus far he has laid only the foundation, has acquired only rudiments and generalities, has only served his apprenticeship to letters. God gave mind and nature, but art has furnished him a new capacity and a new world, the capacity to read, and the world of books. He has simply acquired a new nature, a psychological texture of letters, but the artificial tabula rasa has yet to be filled.
And we have thus shown that it has two functions. One is to endow sublunar nature with the intelligence and purpose visible in its processes and evolutions; the other is to enable the rational power in man to rise from a tabula rasa to an actual intellect with a content. From both these activities it is evident that the Active Intellect has a knowledge of sublunar creation as a systematic unity.
How pleasant it is to have money. Clough. Tabula Rasa Nature has given us a virgin continent, a clean slate upon which to write what we will. And what are we writing? What is our intellectual life? I came to the far West, which I had been taught by novelists and poets to think of as a place of freedom. I came, because I like freedom; I am staying because I like the climate.
By such simple exercises the mind learns how to rest and refresh itself. Its quickness of apprehension and its retentive power are considerably increased, for words and facts imprinted on it when by the suppression of its ordinary activities it has thus been made a tabula rasa remain fixed and clear.
It serves merely as a tabula rasa, as a potential background, as an empty receptacle, as a reflecting mirror for form to be written, filled out, impressed or reflected therein or upon. Hence we may view God as the spectator, universal matter as the mirror, and universal form as the reflection of the spectator in the glass.
It is the same with those who reflect upon their actions: it appears to them at first that all we do is only impulsion from others, and that all we apprehend comes from without through the senses, and is traced upon the void of our mind tanquam in tabula rasa. Yet M. Bayle cites poets who pretend to exonerate men by laying the blame upon the gods.