Early Lights, pp. 240-241

Opening Remarks
The little mind is the realm of early light. It is from its low slopes that our being begins to search for meaning and purpose, to understand, seek and know, to reflect and discover oneself. The vital worlds seek for and are satisfied with power and joy. It is the mind that seeks for knowledge.

Half risen sun
At the glow-worm top of these pale glimmer-realms
Where dawn-sheen gambolled with the native dusk
And helped the Day to grow and Night to fail,
Escaping over a wide and shimmering bridge,
He came into a realm of early Light
And the regency of a half-risen sun.

In this realm light begins to dawn upon the consciousness and we begin to seek and know. Though the darkness is still there yet this realm helps the dawn to emerge out of the pregnant night. The sheen can be felt rather than seen. This realm awaits the rising of the sun which comes only as we step beyond its boundaries.

Mind’s full orb
Out of its rays our mind’s full orb was born.

It is the supramental Sun, the Source of all Knowledge and Light that this mind is born. Though it does not behold its own Source yet it searches for it.

The mediating stair
Appointed by the Spirit of the Worlds
To mediate with the unknowing depths,
A prototypal deft Intelligence
Half-poised on equal wings of thought and doubt
Toiled ceaselessly twixt being’s hidden ends.

This realm of early light is a mediating link between the half conscious beast driven largely by subconscious urges to a fully conscious divine humanity of the future. Its light moves within limits between the Superconscient Glories that it cannot behold and the Inconscient mystery that is concealed to its vision. Yet it is the beginning of a prototypal Intelligence full of craft and cunning moving towards knowledge poised on wings of thought and doubt. It must find and doubt again what it has found. Thus it advances towards discovering itself and the universe.

Mind’s tent
A Secrecy breathed in life’s moving act;
A covert nurse of Nature’s miracles,
It shaped life’s wonders out of Matter’s mud:
It cut the pattern of the shapes of things,
It pitched mind’s tent in the vague ignorant Vast.

This early mind shapes the patterns of life and its delicate intricate machinery that works with a clock-work precision in a miraculous way. It is the formative intelligence that whose action cuts shapes in matter out of an undetermined chaos of energies flowing through endless Space. .

Master Magician of measure and device
A master Magician of measure and device
Has made an eternity from recurring forms
And to the wandering spectator thought
Assigned a seat on the inconscient stage.

The action of this Mind puts these energies into a certain grove of habitual motion. It is that gives the sense of fixity to form. Its perfect measure and genius of device is seen throughout the forms and workings of nature. It is this mind that becomes the seat of thought for its further climb.

Arch-Intelligence
On earth by the will of this Arch-Intelligence
A bodiless energy put on Matter’s robe;
Proton and photon served the imager Eye
To change things subtle into a physical world
And the invisible appeared as shape
And the impalpable was felt as mass:
Magic of percept joined with concept’s art
And lent to each object an interpreting name:
Idea was disguised in a body’s artistry,
And by a strange atomic law’s mystique
A frame was made in which the sense could put
Its symbol picture of the universe.

It is this Intelligence that limits the Infinite into finite forms and phenomenon and corresponding names. It classifies and divides and arranges things by assigning to each element a mass and shape and function in the universe. It also builds instruments to perceive its workings thereby joining percept and concept through which we try to comprehend the incomprehensible universe. The senses themselves are designed by this mind to build a frame around a bodiless energy to create the image of a palpable and sensible universe.

Closing Remarks
A profound and subtle truth is being revealed to us about how the universe of forms and phenomenon is built. It is by the action of a cosmic mind that directs the flow of energy into fixed patterns that move at regular recurrent intervals. It is this fixity of movement that builds patterns and also gives to us the sense of solidity even though everything is in a constant flux. Our senses themselves a product of this mind cannot detect this perpetual change below a certain threshold . Much like a cinematic film that is discontinuous yet gives the sense of continuity so also our senses are tricked into the mesh of phenomenon and are unable to behold what lies behind.