May the Solar Ray Within Illumine Our Mind

William Quan Judge · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 4 pages

Four pages giving Judge's commentary on the Gāyatrī, first published in The Path in January 1893 and republished in Echoes of the Orient. The verse itself is printed first in the translation he adopts.

The prayer asks the giver of sustenance to the universe, from whom all proceed and to whom all return, to unveil the face of the true Sun now hidden by a vase of golden light, so that the seeker may see the truth and do his whole duty on his journey. Judge takes it apart word by word. He identifies it as the sacred verse of the Hindus, beginning with Om — which he reads as containing the three periods of a manvantara and the three powers of the one Being, the beginning, middle and end, and creation, preservation and destruction — while the first three words designate the three worlds. He declines to give the further instruction every Brahman receives at initiation, on the ground that he cannot give it in a way in which he did not receive it. Most of the commentary is on the first word. Unveil is called the cry of a man determined to know the truth who perceives that something hides it from him; and what hides it is his own karmic effects, which have placed him where brain and desire are too strong for the higher self to pierce through while he remains careless. The cry is expressly not made to a man-made god with parts and passions, but to the Self within, likened to the bird sitting in the tree and watching. The later pages carry the teaching that the disciple of Yoga was shown that sun, moon and stars are in himself, supported by two old demonstrations — the interpenetration of one world by another, with other beings living among us and finding their own plane objective, and a set of experiments resembling modern hypnotism in which a subject could be made not to see a wooden barrier he knew perfectly well was there, and yet perceive everything behind it.

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