make-belief and mummery, their processions and religious festivals are
profoundly impressive, solemn, and rapt.

It is a race that moves on the poles of mystic sensual delight. Every
gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression is a symbolic
utterance.

For learning there is sensuous experience, for thought there is myth and
drama and dancing and singing. Everything is of the blood, of the
senses. There is no mind. The mind is a suffusion of physical heat, it
is not separated, it is kept submerged.

At the same time, always, overhead, there is the eternal, negative
radiance of the snows. Beneath is life, the hot jet of the blood playing
elaborately. But above is the radiance of changeless not-being. And life
passes away into this changeless radiance. Summer and the prolific
blue-and-white flowering of the earth goes by, with the labour and the
ecstasy of man, disappears, and is gone into brilliance that hovers
overhead, the radiant cold which waits to receive back again all that
which has passed for the moment into being.

The issue is too much revealed. It leaves the peasant no choice. The
fate gleams transcendent above him, the brightness of eternal,
unthinkable not-being. And this our life, this admixture of labour and
of warm experience in the flesh, all the time it is steaming up to the
changeless brilliance above, the light of the everlasting snows. This is
the eternal issue.

Whether it is singing or dancing or play-acting or physical transport of
love, or vengeance or cruelty, or whether it is work or sorrow or