[Extract from Chapter VIII: Everything depends on the Mind]
‘In Resolution and Independence we find the solitary line
By our own spirits are we deified,
and we think immediately of the monk who wished to be free, and the counter-question by the master, Sekito,
“Who puts you under restraint?”
The answer is given by Blake in the last line of the second verse of London.
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
There is the same thought in The Sisters, where Tennyson says,
My God, I would not live,
Save that I think this gross, hard-seeming world
Is our misshaping vision of the Powers
Behind the world, that makes our griefs our gains.
This self-betrayal, self-imprisonment of the mind, caused by its misshaping vision, is expressed in some famous lines from the 3rd Act of The Borderers:
Action is transitory - a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle - this way or that-
’Tis done, and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed,
Wordsworth states the problem, but his wording of it shows that he does not understand it properly. A better word than transitory would be instantaneous; there is no gap between the mind and the action. But afterwards when there is a separation between the mind and the Mind, there is a sense of separation, of betrayal, - not only in the after-vacancy but in the pre-vacancy also. This is what Ummon means when he says to his monks,
If you walk, just walk. If you sit, just sit, but don’t wobble whatever you do.’