puts her face quite near, and laughs and coos,
then the baby trembles with an ecstasy of love. The glamour, the
wonder, the treasure beyond. The great uplift of rapture. All this
surges from that first center of the breast, the sun of the breast,
the cardiac plexus.

And from the same center acts the great function of the heart and
breath. Ah, the aspiration, the aspiration, like a hope, like a
yearning constant and unfailing with which we take in breath. When we
breathe, when we take in breath, it is not as when we take in food.
When we breathe in we aspire, we yearn towards the heaven of air and
light. And when the heart dilates to draw in the stream of dark blood,
it opens its arms as to a beloved. It dilates with reverent joy, as a
host opening his doors to an honored guest, whom he delights to serve:
opening his doors to the wonder which comes to him from beyond, and
without which he were nothing.

So it is that our heart dilates, our lungs expand. They are bidden by
that great and mysterious impulse from the cardiac plexus, which bids
them seek the mystery and the fulfillment of the beyond. They seek the
beyond, the air of the sky, the hot blood from the dark under-world.
And so we live.

And then, they relax, they contract. They are driven by the opposite
motion from the powerful voluntary center of the thoracic ganglion..
That which was drawn in, was invited, is now relinquished, allowed to
go forth, negatively. Not positively dismissed, but relinquished.

There is a wonderful complementary duality between the voluntary and
the sympathetic activity on the same plane. But between the two
planes, upper and lower, there is a further dualism, still more
startling, perhaps. Between the dark, glowing first term of knowledge
at the solar plexus: _I am I, all is one in me_; and the first term of
volitional knowledge: _I am myself, and these others are not as I
am_;--there is a world of difference. But when the world changes
again, and on the upper plane we realize the wonder of other things,
the difference is almost shattering. The thoracic ganglion is a
ganglion of power. When the child in its delicate bliss seeks the
mother and finds her and is added on to her, then it fulfills itself
in the great upper sympathetic mode. But then it relinquishes her. It
ceases to be aware of her. And if she tries to force its love to play
upon her again, like light revealing her to herself, then the child
turns away. Or it will