BUFFALO

The buffaloes indicate rash and obscure vital forces. A buffalo conveys the idea often of an obscure violence in the nature.

When you see a buffalo rushing upon you and missing and feel you have escaped a great danger, that is a transcription. Something actually happened of which the buffalo's ineffectual rush your mind's transcription -- the rush of some hostile force represented by the buffalo.

About the contact with the world and the hostile forces, that is of course always one of the sadhak's chief difficulties, but to transform the world and the hostile forces is too big a task and the personal transformation cannot wait for it. What has to be done is to come to live in the Power that these things, these disturbing elements cannot penetrate, or, if they penetrate, cannot disturb, and to be so purified and strengthened by it that there is in oneself no response to anything hostile. If there is a protecting envelopment, an inner purifying descent and, as a result, a settling of the higher consciousness in the inner being and finally, its substitution even in the most external outwardly active parts in place of the old ignorant consciousness, then the world and the hostile forces will no longer matter -- for one's own soul at least; but there is a larger work not personal in which of course they will have to be dealt with; but that need not be a main preoccupation at the present stage.

A violent, fierce and formidable world,
An ancient womb of huge calamitous dreams,
Coiled like larva in the obscurity
That keeps it from the spear points of Heaven's stars.
It was the gate of a false Infinite,
An eternity of disastrous absolutes,
An immense negation of spiritual things.