Fetching
One moment.
1external world, first sensed by the sense organs and then perceived by my brain, reach my I or consciousness in the form of mental images, and it is upon these mental images or, better said, availing itself of them, that my I creates concepts and ideas.
2This is the work of thought, its specific activity, which gives origin to its products: ideas.
3But those ideas are not my I — first, because they are the product of my faculty of thinking, and then because I can refrain from producing them or, once produced, reject them from my consciousness.
4Thought has, moreover, another object: unlimited space.
5Space does not usually depend on the activity of the five senses, but is known immediately by “pure thought” when the activity of the senses is temporarily suspended.
6Space is, in reality, the immediate object of thought and, when we begin to think, space presents itself immediately to us.
7As soon as thought is set in motion by an activity of the senses, we necessarily perceive space as well.
8We cannot know any object that falls under the action of the senses without knowing at the same time the space within which that object is found [Editorial gloss: the Spanish prints a duplicated phrase, “los sentidos sin conocer al mismo tiempo”, transmitted as a compositor’s doubling].
9Inversely, we can know space alone (without other objects) when we suspend the activity of the five senses and concentrate thought solely upon that space.
10We have, then, the perception of unlimited space, and we can even separate space from our thought and, in spite of that, continue thinking.
11But to accomplish this prodigy we must completely suspend the activity of the senses and concentrate thought exclusively upon this idea: “Nothing now exists for me”.
12Space itself can then be eliminated from consciousness, only the thought subsisting: “Nothing more exists”.
13And not only is it possible to eliminate space from consciousness, but we can further recognise directly and in a perfect manner that space has, objectively, nothing in common with my I.
14To give an example, let us imagine an impossibility: all the space outside my body is annihilated.
15This fact would not affect me at all.
16Now it remains for us to know whether the space occupied by my body is essential to me.
17Let us imagine that this body, always keeping its vitality, shrinks until it reaches the dimensions of an insect.
18And shall “I myself” not be diminished by this reduction of my body, a reduction that has as its consequence the diminution of the space occupied by it?
19I should still recognise myself as “I myself” (identically like the one I have always been) despite my more reduced body and the likewise more reduced space occupied by it.
20Thus, with this example it is demonstrated that space has nothing in common with my I.
21Space is simply a condition of the existence of my body.
22This further clarification made, we can establish another point of study with the following definition: THE BODY IS NOT MY I Within what relation do I stand with my body?
23The body is a physical organism consisting entirely of materials of exterior nature, taken and assimilated in
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
Nº 49 is a devotional issue: Jehel's essay on Prayer opens it, the Suddha Dharma pages call the whole community to pray for a pilgrim in India, and the literary section closes with an elegy for a dead child. The doctrinal serials — Guénon's Demiurge (concluded) and the chromotherapy course — run between.
Masthead unchanged from Nº 47: the collective collaborators formula, the exchange-control notice, the 1.80-dollar overseas price.
The SUMARIO shows two of the masthead's fraternal orders now writing under their own banners — Suddha Dharma Mandalam and Maha Boddhi Sangha each head their own section — the review functioning as the shared organ of Montevideo's several Eastern-rite groups.
Jehel's 'La Oración' proceeds by numbered conclusions from a single epigraph by 'Sevananda' — prayer as the murmur of Divine Love in the heart. The essay's method — seven deductions, then a litany — is scholastic in form and devotional in content, the director's characteristic register.
The 'final key' is given by Zanoni's words to his wife — 'There are beings whose thoughts and feelings are constant prayers' — from Bulwer-Lytton's initiatic novel, which the circle knew intimately: Sevaka's own 'El Hijo de Zanoni' (a sequel) heads the Kier list on this issue's back cover.
→ thread:zanoni_bulwer_lytton
The closing rollcall — 'Masters like Papus, Philippe (AMO), Ramakrishna' — names Maître Philippe of Lyon (Nizier Anthelme Philippe, 1849–1905), Papus's own spiritual master, under the initials AMO by which the Martinist tradition and this review's earlier lineage diagrams designate him. The three names bind the essay's doctrine of prayer to the run's twin lineages, French and Hindu.
The astrology course pivots from houses to signs: having finished the planets-in-houses cycle (Saturn through Neptune, Nºs 42–48), Surya begins the planets-in-signs cycle again with Saturn, 'the planet of sorrow'. The delineations remain in the Alan Leo textbook mould.
'Situated at the 29 degrees of this sign, the seat of its exaltation' — Saturn's exaltation degree in Libra (the classical 21st degree is often given as 29 in Spanish-language manuals of the period); the course keeps the traditional dignities alongside its modern psychological vocabulary.
'The Pilgrim of the Full Moon' interrupts the Gita commentary by editorial decision — Jehel's footnote says so — to relay news from 'The Suddha Dharma' (Madras, last quarter of 1945): Sri Vasudeva Row, President of the Suddha Dharma Mandalam, was renouncing his office to walk into the interior of India seeking the order's hidden Elders.
The response in Montevideo: collective petitions and meditations in the 'little Temple' of the Guru Subrahmanyananda Ashrama — the Suddha community in Montevideo and Buenos Aires organised as an ashrama under the deceased founder's continuing patronage, with reported manifestations of his presence and a message from Vasudeva Row himself. The page is primary evidence of the group's devotional practice, not just its reading.
The appointed night is 'the Full Moon of May' — Wesak, the Buddha's festival, which the theosophical world held to be the annual convergence of the Masters. Jehel dates the piece 14-4-46, one lunar month ahead: the review is coordinating a hemisphere-distant act of collective prayer to a precise astronomical hour, the same time-discipline its planetary-hours praxis teaches.
Upasika's 'The Way of the Buddha' brings her G∴E∴I∴D∴E∴ course ('The doctrine of the Buddha', on the back-cover roster since Nº 45) into print under the Maha Boddhi Sangha banner, signed 'Bikku'. The opening moves — Buddhism as philosophy not religion, Buddhagama, Vibhajja 'those who analyse' — frame the Dhamma in the review's analytic idiom.
The space-meditation — suspend the senses, hold 'Nothing now exists for me', then eliminate space itself — walks the reader through the formless-jhana sequence (infinite space, then nothingness) as a reasoned psychological experiment rather than a scriptural citation: the course's signature translation of contemplative technique into introspective argument.
'I am not an organism; I possess an organism' — the anatta analysis lands on the vocabulary of the review's Western courses (the I as owner of its instrument), and the section closes with the Pali homage formula transliterated as the compositor could manage it: Namo Tassa Bhagavato...
The Demiurge reaches its fourth and final section. Guénon draws the moral consequence — morality is real within the Demiurge's domain and meaningless beyond it — and reaches for the Taoist wu wei: the Sage's non-action that is the plenitude of activity. In La Gnose this essay ended Guénon's debut sequence; the review has now serialised it entire, across four numbers.
'Nirvana, very far from being annihilation… is the plenitude of Being' — the conclusion the review's Buddhist course (three pages earlier in this same issue) will need: the two serials, gnostic and Buddhist, converge on the same doctrine of the formless, and the issue's architecture lets the reader watch them agree.
The chromotherapy course turns clinical: diagnosis before treatment, with the aura as the ideal instrument and — for those without astral vision — face, nails, sclerotic, urine and faeces as colour-indicators. The Mars-red / opposite-blue example applies the planetary correspondences the course laid down in earlier instalments.
The physical methods catalogue is the practical heart of the series: painted rooms, coloured dress, window glass, mineral-salt crystals, colour-corresponding foods, and solarised water — bottles exposed 4 hours minimum, dosed 30 grammes each half hour — the Babbitt/Phasad Jha technique of Nº 48 now given posology.
Astral and mental chromotherapy — projecting visualised colour or dynamised thought into the patient's aura — are underwritten by Calligaris again: his 'Telepatía e radio-onde cerebrali' is cited with page numbers for the plaque that transmits red from 1 metre to 10 kilometres. The course wants its subtle-plane therapeutics to stand on laboratory paper.
The colour-blocking experiments yield an affect-lexicon — violet for pain, blue for pleasure, dark red spotted for excitation, grey for calm — which the course reads as proof that feeling, thought and colour are one vibratory fact: the theoretical bridge to the ten conclusions that follow.
'Pasan los Ángeles' is by Hérib Campos Cervera (1905–1953), the great Paraguayan poet of the Generación del 40, writing from Asunción with an epigraph from Pablo Neruda; the dedication — 'for Lydia and Augusto, in the hour of the passing of their Son' — makes it a consolation elegy. That the review could print a new poem by the leading Paraguayan modernist, dated two months before publication, shows its literary reach across the Río de la Plata.
'The Angels are ours; they are our broken wings' — the poem's angels are the dead and the unlived selves at once, sailing 'the nocturnal channels of the blood'. Its placement after the chromotherapy course's aura-doctrine is an editorial rhyme: the issue ends where clinical vibration turns into elegy.
Signed at Asunción, 15 March 1946 — six weeks before this May number; the review's literary section is running on a fast exchange with the Paraguayan capital.
The G∴E∴I∴D∴E∴ plate unchanged; Upasika's course, whose print debut fills this issue's Buddhist pages, still stands on the roster.
Back cover unchanged: the Ateneo Martinist list and the Kier Rose Cross list — the latter's 'El Hijo de Zanoni' by Sevaka closing the loop with the Zanoni quotation in this issue's opening essay.