Echoes occupies in its entirety the second side of Meddle (1971). What is there deposed is a succession of states, and it is of the succession that one must treat, since of single images the poetries of every latitude are full, whereas the order in which the images dispose themselves is not matter of fantasy but of occurrence. And it is of the event that a reading is given, which reading, being discourse, that is, not being the events of which it discourses, is nothing other than a succession of words that each understands in a different manner according as he have or have not experience of the event of which one speaks, as it is said, he who has ears understands, he who has not does not. It is not after all so rare that the event occur, and yet it happens for the most part that he who lives it remain upon the threshold, and that rather than being able to cross it he believe he must and can explain it with his own ordinary mind, reducing to the I a dimension that is on this side of the I; and thus the Christian mystics see God, others speak of entities or of quantum theory, all of them undergoing that which would instead liberate them; not only in the East but in the West as well the Adepts have mastery of the philosophia naturalis, and for this reason they indicate the way.
The piece opens upon a bird suspended on high, motionless in the air, and descends immediately thereafter beneath the water, into labyrinths of caves of coral. The two terms are a single term. The motionlessness on high is the seeing from above, which the Tantra number among the canonical aptitudes of the consciousness unbound by means of that mental organ which is called Sūrya or Ājñā-cakra; and the seeing from above of the unbound consciousness is alien to the abstracting of oneself from things in order to look upon them with detachment, this latter being a point of view, barely less crude than the ordinary ones, whereas the unbinding of oneself from the ordinary mind is the finding oneself in the suspension of the point of view as such: it is then a matter of undergoing it or of realising it in the viewing. What signifies in Echoes the suspension of the point of view is the motionlessness of the wings, since that which hangs suspended without beating them does not come from a place and does not go toward a place. The cave beneath the water is the same state reported from the side of matter: it is the interior space in which the light is seen, and it is the black mountain in whose heart the Rigvedic seers pray that Agni may cause them to find the go, the cows-of-light; for the secret doctrines the cave is anything but a metaphor, and the philologists who take it for such have made an ornament of that which nature precludes them from knowing. That everything there should be green and submerged, and that no one should have called to the dry land, reports the state anterior to the emerging, that is, on this side of the installing of the I, where there is not yet anyone who might be called nor land to which to call him.
Overhead the albatross
Hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves
In labyrinths of coral caves
An echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine
And no one called us to the land
The verse that follows deposes that no one knows the where nor the why, and deposes with this the lapsing of the causal nexus, which is created by the ordinary mind itself: that phenomena should appear in some manner concatenated is certain, but the ordinary mind knows only that which it is able to know, and its own logically self-referential concatenation it takes for the structure of the real. The where and the why are the two questions that presuppose the place and the cause; they lapse together, and what remains after their lapsing is the base of the mind.
Upon that base, and only upon it, something stirs and something tries, and begins to climb toward the light. The impersonal is here obligatory, since the I cannot will to exit from itself, being an entity, and the attempt of an entity to negate itself is an affirmation of itself; that which stirs at the bottom is therefore other than the I and is not commanded by it. The absence of the I only he who knows nothing but the I can believe to be a nothing; only he who believes he knows that the person coincides with the I must conjecture that, the I removed, there remain the nothing: I, being, God, nothing, vain words of one who names colours while groping in the darkness. The ātman returns toward the light and not from the light, which is the direction proper to the ascent; that which ascends, in the Indian texts, sleeps coiled at the base, and what its ascent produces upon arrival is the light interior to the mind, that which Kuṇḍalī in Ājñā-cakra makes explode like millions of milky suns, and which Alchemy calls the work at the white. The fragments of the event are said in many manners, none less correct than another, some undergoing them and speaking of them while losing them, some to whom it is given (Es gibt) that the occurring occur; it depends upon the adhikāra, upon the ātman before it be ātman. That the verb should be tries belongs to the same exactness: the ascent is attempted and interrupted, Kuṇḍalī yawns and turns over, and one must be fortunate enough to notice it and then steadfast in raising its hints to their height.
And no one knows the where’s or why’s
Something stirs and something tries
Starts to climb toward the light
After the ascent come the two glances. Two strangers pass one another in the street, by chance two separate glances meet, and the verse deposes that I am you and that what I see is I. The first proposition is Tat Tvam Asi, "thou art That", which Uddālaka repeats nine times to Śvetaketu in the sixth chapter of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, and which is the enunciation of Tantric reality on this side of representation, and not a pathetic moral exhortation to brotherhood as the academics who are not That declare it to be. The second proposition touches the very structure of the seeing: that what one sees should be he who sees signifies that there is no object to be known nor subject that knows, that the seer and the seen do not stand at the two ends of a relation, and that vision is not an act performed by an I upon a thing. It is the question of Yājñavalkya to Maitreyī in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, vijñātāram are kena vijānīyāt, the knower, by what would one know him: the knower cannot fall to the position of the known without ceasing to be the knower, and the knowledge of which it is a matter is vidyā, knowability in itself without there being an I that sees and things to be seen, which is to say that the ātman is the Brahman. The encounter takes place between strangers, by chance, in the street: the yogīn say that they see the ātman, and not the thoughts that deform them, and he who apprehends in such a manner has no need to be introduced.
Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
The verses immediately subsequent, in which the two take one another by the hand and one asks to be helped to understand, are the residue of the I, and they stand in their proper place, since for as long as the yogī is still in the body he has still, at least at the intermediate level of Tantra, something analogous to the point of view, and this is permeated by the viewings of the ātman.
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand
The best I can
Of that which is here deposed there exists a Western formulation in a single line, read for twenty centuries as a consolation for a funeral: videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem; nunc cognosco ex parte, tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum (Saint Paul, First Letter to the Corinthians). Every term in it is technical. The speculum is the pane that separates the mind from reality, and this pane is the I, that is, representation, so that one sees the substitution of the thing in place of the thing, which is then what the neurosciences say of themselves without drawing the consequence. The aenigma is the mode proper to a knowledge that gives itself by images and tolerates no definition, and it is for this that the Renaissance alchemists offer figures in place of arguments. The nunc and the tunc are taken for two dates, whereas the operative esotericism of the two hemispheres consists in the affirmation that the tunc may occur while one is in the body, which is jīvanmukti, liberation in life. The last proposition carries the weight: cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum, I shall know in the very manner in which I am known, that is, from the side of the knower and not from the side of the known, which is to say that the distinction between the two sides will not obtain, and it is the same abolition that the Bṛhadāraṇyaka performs in Sanskrit.
The last movement of the piece inverts the direction. Until then everything had risen from the bottom; now through a window in the wall the light enters from without, and is called a million bright ambassadors of morning. The window in the wall is the doctrine of the aperture, and the ambassadors are envoys, that is, the light in its function of announcing that which it does not itself bring. The inversion is the second half of the Tantric account, since the ascent is attempted whereas the descent occurs: grace, when it occurs, occurs unexpected and starts from before, and is called in the texts a descent of power.
And no one called us to the land
And no one crosses there alive
No one speaks and no one tries
No one flies around the sun
Almost everyday you fall
Upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me
To rise
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning
The final verses invert a second time and close the piece in emission rather than in reception: the windows are thrown wide and a voice calls across the sky. He who has arrived has the obligation to set out how he arrived, so as to indicate a way that others may follow, and this is the language of which Kuṇḍalī is the goddess, which is the mind in the ātman unfolded in its creative power.
And no one sings me lullabys
And no one makes me close my eyesSo I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky
Let There Be More Light, of three years earlier, reports the event that opens the succession, and the title says it entire, being a comparative. The fiat lux is creation, and creation from nothing is performed by none of the gods of the sacred texts; the comparative presupposes instead that which it augments, and asks that a light already present be increased. The expansion of a light interior to the mind is the crucial moment of Tantra, of the Kabbalah, of Alchemy and of every effective esoteric doctrine: the work at the white is an expansion and not an ignition.
The song stages the descent as a landing. A ship descends upon a point of flame and makes contact at Mildenhall. The flame is punctiform as is punctiform that Single Point of which some Tantra speak, the point at which representation ceases to be the framework of individual being, and the fire that descends and receives is Agni, into whom the yajña casts the entire I. Mildenhall is a military aerodrome in Suffolk, and the choice of a place possessed of a postal code in place of Benares corresponds to what is said by the adepts concerning grace, which occurs where the person happens to find himself, without forewarning and without regard for the dignity of the setting.
Far, far, far, far away, -way
People heard him say, say
"I will find a way, way
There will come a day, day
Something will be done"
Then at last the mighty ship
Descending on a point of flame
Made contact with the human race at Mildenhall
There follows an injunction composed of three words placed in the only order in which they can stand, now, be, be aware. The now is not the present of the three times, which of the three is the most fragile and the one the ordinary mind believes it inhabits, but is the nunc that Paul opposes to the tunc, the instant in which the thing occurs or does not occur; what is there required is to be, and immediately thereafter to be aware, which is the whole difference between a state and the recognition of a state, and upon that difference everything turns, since each carries grace within himself and is already Buddha, and the question lies in being capable of recognising it.
Now, now, now is the time, time
Time to be, be
Be aware
Immediately after, a road is revealed to a man, and what is revealed along it is the living soul of Hereward the Wake. Wake is the vigilant, the awake, he who does not sleep, and buddha signifies the awakened; all human beings are the ātman, that is, they are buddha, but they sleep blissfully upon the nature of mind. Of that soul it is said moreover that it is living, in a song that reports a descent of light.
There come then the eye and the sky, something in the eye and something in the sky that waits there. The two are not two: chidākāśa is the space of consciousness, and the dhāraṇā that bears its name consists in the interior wall of the forehead becoming a window through which one sees an I of one's own act, directed according to the inscrutable ways of the ātman; the space is within and is nonetheless a sky.
Then the outer lock rolls slowly back and what is within reveals itself in glowing robes. The lifting of the veil is rendered as a piece of airlock machinery, and the rendering restores to it the character that the centuries had taken from it: the veil of Isis at Saïs, beneath which no mortal has yet looked, is a mechanism, and it opens slowly.
The outer lock rolled slowly back
The servicemen were heard to sigh
For there, revealed in glowing robes, was Lucy in the sky
The last figure reports the ascent. Powers are summoned, the glow begins at the toes, the emanations flow. The glow begins at the extremity of the body furthest from thought, that is, at the base, and it rises, which is the direction already deposed in Echoes; and the adverb with which it is reported, slightly, belongs to the manner in which those to whom it has occurred describe it, since the Cakra are plexuses of nervous energies whose activation brings about an emergence of physical interior light, and it is a fact of the body and not a vision of the mind.
Summoning his cosmic powers
And glowing slightly from his toes
His psychic emanations flowed
It is not in question whether these men were Adepts, yogīn, alchemists or Kabbalists; the answer would be negative. In question is the succession: the suspension of the point of view, the descent into the antrum, the lapsing of the where and the why, the stirring at the base, the ascent toward the light, the abolition of the difference between seer and seen, the aperture in the wall, the entry of the light from without and the call sent back through it. It is deposed entire and in order, and it is the succession that the revealed texts report.
Śrī Aurobindo said of Nietzsche that he was an apostle who never entirely understood his own message; in like manner, in these texts of Pink Floyd the images were let be and were deposed in the order in which they came, which is the order in which the thing occurs. The language of which Kuṇḍalī is the goddess does not require, in order to be spoken, that he who speaks it know its grammar.