The New Mythology of John Cowper Powys

with the Third Revelation, that is with the indefinitely large number of points between the circumference and the centre, all of them being on some radius and each being the potential centre of another circle. Thus the starting point of the Third Revelation, as it is also for Powys, is with the individual human being alone. “We have decided,’ he says, ‘to have absolute faith in nothing save in the “self” or consciousness of self within us.’

And so in the Glastonbury Romance he denied the existence of an Ultimate Mystery as some final absolute unchanging principle in the universe. “The mystery of mysteries,’ he affirms, ‘is Personality, a living Person, and there is that in Personality which is indetermined, unaccountable, changing at every second... Apart from Personality, apart from Personal Will, there is no such “ultimate” as Matter, there is no such Ultimate as Spirit. Beyond Life and beyond Death there is Personality.’

Powys is not speaking of personality in the abstract. He is referring neither to some hidden essence within ourselves, nor to the outer mask which we present to other people, but to our own inner selves as we experience ourselves. This self Powys does not take as something given, something which is there apart from any effort we may make. He is not saying that we have an immortal soul which is an objective fact as some would like to regard it. On the contrary he says we must continuously face the probability of a total annihilation of ‘the self we have hitherto known as ourself’ and ‘learnt to think of as I’.12 He has no sentimentality and no illusion about this self, to which he constantly refers as the Iam I’ within us. This phrase is significant because he is not calling it the ‘ego’ or the ‘self’ as if it were a ‘thing’. The reality of the self is in our awareness of it. There is no ‘T apart from the affirmation ‘Tam.

Thus we have to take part in creating ourselves and he believes that this creation of an original and unique self is the true art of life which can be practised by anyone, however simple. But it does not happen by accident. It must be persevered with. “Thought,’ he says, ‘creates a thought-body of its own... . which although it is linked in space and time with the material body feels itself to be different, feels itself to be inviolate. What we steadily, consciously, habitually think we are, that we tend to become.’

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