Part Three:
The Creative Release of Spirit - 2

The first requirement which is to be met by a person reaching toward a condition of Spirit-conditioned activity is that he should consciously and understandingly include and accept all the manifestations of the Day-force and the Night-force, of the individual and the collective polarities of life. As he does so consistently, a time necessarily comes when the two forces, periodically waxing and waning, reach a point of balance within his cycle of being. At that moment, the person who, until then, had been polarized at any time by the force then dominant, finds himself equally swayed by the two forces. Their pulls neutralize each other. The man, as a whole, becomes still. In that incredibly brief moment of stillness and "silence," the whole can express its wholeness without being controlled by the nature of one of the forces playing through it. In that moment, the wholeness of all that occurs during the entire cycle is revealed in a synthesis of being which transcends the qualities produced by the ever-changing and ever-challenged preponderance of either the Day or Night forces. Nature is transcended; Spirit is revealed.
      Spirit is wholeness of cyclic activity; and that wholeness is dispassionate and even in its quality of being, because it includes the complementary energies in a balanced state. Such a "balanced state" occurs in the yearly cycle of the Day-force and the Night-force at the equinoxes. Thus these two points in the yearly cycle are the archetypal symbols of those moments in any life-cycle at which Spirit can be revealed.
      In any life-cycle, however small or however vast, these two equinoctial points are the "gates of Initiation" which mark the entrance into the realm of Spirit-conditioned being. That realm can be entered from the side of the particularizing Day-force or from that of the universalizing Night-force. But at the Spring-equinox the experience of Spirit cannot be normally held in consciousness, because the personality-structure which alone could hold it is not yet formed. At the Fall equinox it is the individual personality which takes the initiatory step, in conscious self-surrender to the Night-force; and in compensation for that surrender it can retain a structural memory of the event. It can gain personal immortality in Spirit, and henceforth operate as a Spirit-conditioned being.
      The first condition necessary to become prepared for such an equinoctial confrontation is an understanding of the cyclic nature of all experience. No experience can have spiritual meaning unless it is referred to the wholeness of the cycle in which it occurs. The "reference" may be instinctive or intuitional, below or above the level of the normal consciousness; but because all experience begins in the realm of change and thus of time, the spiritualization of experience implies that the entire cycle to which the experience naturally belongs has to be seen and felt in that particular experience. The wholeness of the cycle must be realized by the experiencer within the "equinoctial" experience which can be made into a focal point for the expression of the wholeness of the entire cycle.
      Because at the "equinoctial" points of any cycle the two forces, the interplay of which is the substance of the cycle, are balanced and neutralized, in that equinoctial moment the wholeness of the whole cycle can become active. This activity is essentially different from the activity which is conditioned by a preponderance of either the Day-force or the Night-force, of individual or collective. It is Spirit-conditioned activity: creative activity. The creative power of Spirit potentially radiates from the core of the equilibratedness of the two forces. It is a power which makes all things new. It is sheer originality. It is the incalculable element which upsets predictions based on sequences of cause and effect. It produces an activity which is not conditioned by causation or by time- relationship — even though it is released at a certain moment of the cycle. It is activity which creates time and starts a new causal sequence, It is activity which is free.