If spirit is the storehouse of possibilities, possibilities in their moving dynamism, and matter is all locked in its modes of expression, it admitting no change, then this situation will imply a fundamental incompatibility between the two, incompatibility even to the extent of them becoming antagonistic to each other. One is freedom and the other fixity, freedom for growth, expansion, and fixity to give stability to what is, support that things do not collapse, disappear in the void. The Cartesian dichotomy thus gets badly hardened in our mental formulations. Even as form had to endure itself against the great onslaught of the all-swallowing emptiness from which it came, this mind of matter had to see that it is not destroyed by the invading powers of the spirit. Even as the spirit found it more and more difficult to enter into the forms of matter, it started disclaiming it as incapable of holding what it was bringing. The opposition between the two is not just in the mind, at the mental level, of an abstract kind, it is not just a cerebral-conceptual formulation; the battle is in the deep occult. Thus when Life entered into Matter, Prāņa in Anna, she was stunned by Death and decay-disintegration-death became her law of existence. Such helplessness happens at every stage, whenever the higher tries to enter into the lower.

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