Phase Fifteen

Yeats’s description of the phase from A Vision

Body of Fate and Mask are now identical; and Will and Creative Mind identical; or rather the Creative Mind is dissolved in the Will and the Body of Fate in the Mask. Thought and will are indistinguishable, effort and attainment are indistinguishable; and this is the consummation of a slow process; nothing is apparent but dreaming Will and the Image that it dreams. Since Phase 12 all images, and cadences of the mind, have been satisfying to that mind just in so far as they have expressed this converging of will and thought, effort and attainment. The words 'musical', 'sensuous', are but descriptions of that converging process. Thought has been pursued, not as a means but as an end – the poem, the painting, the reverie has been sufficient of itself. It is not possible, however, to separate in the understanding this running into one of Will and Creative Mind from the running into one of Mask and Body of Fate. Without Mask and Body of Fate the Will would have nothing to desire, the Creative Mind has been so interfused by the antithetical tincture that it has more and more confined its contemplation of actual things to those that resemble images of the mind desired by the Will. The being has selected, moulded and remoulded, narrowed its circle of living, been more and more the artist, grown more and more 'distinguished' in all preference. Now contemplation and desire, united into one, inhabit a world where every beloved image has bodily form, and every bodily form is loved. This love knows nothing of desire, for desire implies effort, and though there is still separation from the loved object, love accepts the separation as necessary to its own existence. Fate is known for the boundary that gives our Destiny its form, and—as we can desire nothing outside that form—as an expression of our freedom. Chance and Choice have become interchangeable without losing their identity. As all effort has ceased, all thought has become image, because no thought could exist if it were not carried towards its own extinction, amid fear or in contemplation; and every image is separate from every other, for if image were linked to image, the soul would awake from its immovable trance. All that the being has experienced as thought is visible to its eyes as a whole, and in this way it perceives, not as they are to others, but according to its own perception, all orders of existence. Its own body possesses the greatest possible beauty, being indeed that body which the soul will permanently inhabit, when all its phases have been repeated according to the number allotted: that which we call the clarified or Celestial Body. Where the being has lived out of phase, seeking to live through antithetical phases as though they had been primary, there is now terror of solitude, its forced, painful and slow acceptance, and a life haunted by terrible dreams. Even for the most perfect, there is a time of pain, a passage through a vision, where evil reveals itself in its final meaning. In this passage Christ, it is said, mourned over the length of time and the unworthiness of man's lot to man, whereas his forerunner mourned and his successor will mourn over the shortness of time and the unworthiness of man to his lot; but this cannot yet be understood.

(AV B 135-37)