The title of The Mummery Book shows us the error of our perception: the subtitle goes beyond it, to provide the paradoxical truth.
A Parable Of The Divine True Love, Told By Means Of A Self-Illuminated Illustration Of The Totality Of Mind
If what is illuminated is the totality of mind, from what standpoint is that illumination made? Does that not imply a greater totality than mind? Does it not imply that there must be a reality which is not mummery, and about which something can be said or intimated, and by which mummery can be understood and transcended?
In the title and subtitle, Adi Da Samraj provides an answer in literary and experiential terms, asserting that if one can set limits to a thing or domain, the setting of such limits takes place from a position transcending them.
In one sense such a "transcendence" of limits is constantly performed by the mind: the so-called "expansion of consciousness," in which one can traverse an endless number of ever-widening rooms, thinking that one has reached an absolute view — which turns into only another limited version of reality, albeit a wider one.
The optimistic but in the end hopeless (and often merely theoretical) version of the holistic claim of "expansion" is to assert that at any moment we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories, our expectations, our past experiences, our language.
But then, as Karl Popper puts it, "We are prisoners in a Pickwickian sense: if we try, we can break out of our framework at any time. Admittedly, we shall find ourselves again in a framework, but it will be a better and a roomier one; and we can at any moment break out of it again."
But The Mummery Book brings an end to this seemingly never-ending spread of self-enclosure, which is just another round of mummery already encountered, a pattern of "Always repetitions — and, yet, never the same."
It shows us the futility inherent in better and roomier "mental facilities," as if Raymond could console himself with a more comfortable asylum. True liberation is the liberation from the torment of all confinement.
Only a different perspective can do that, a radical perspective, where Raymond and Quandra are one, where there is no other, no pattern by which enclosure can be defined.
The "Self" in the subtitle points this out. "Self" indicates an ultimate "view": a view that can illustrate any of the particulars of mind, but which also transcends mind; a view that is not separate from anything because there is no opposite to be separate from.
The Mummery Book is a "book" that both contains and steps outside of the "world." From this perspective, Raymond is both the pilgrim and the object of pilgrimage, both a searcher after the lost Quandra and the one who has already found her — all presented in a kind of simultaneity of being that the text renders parabolically, like a spectrograph which includes itself in the perspective that it displays.
Raymond Is the True Heart, Itself — the Only Subject, the Very Self, or Consciousness, Itself. Presuming Itself to be separate from Quandra — the Loved-One, the Only Object, the Light, Itself, Which Is Love-Bliss-Happiness, Itself.
Because of this mysterious interpenetration, The Mummery Book presents us with a true vision of the mummery, like that of an anaphoric image portrayed in language which, when viewed from a "normal" standpoint depicts at first what appears to be an or confusing object, but when viewed rightly exhibits itself in the true totality of its context.
As the Epilogue states:
This Tragic Story Of Raymond's Love Is Perfect, True, and Truth. It Happened. And It did not Happen. And It will, Forever, Happen, Thus, In your own feeling-heart, Again.
This perfect story — perfect in its happening and not happening, in its cutting through all possibilities of time and non-time — ultimately occurs in a place beyond language, and validates its truth at the level of feeling and intuition.
This "Tragic Story" is not tragic in the conventional sense, if we remember that Aristotle’s earliest definition of tragedy is not a story that requires an unhappy ending but merely "an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with every kind of artistic ornamentation," and for the purpose of purifying the emotions by bringing the audience to experience what it normally wants to avoid: the feeling heart.
In that sense, a tragedy is like Adi Da Samraj’s definition of a parable:
A Parable Is Made— to Purify and (soon) Illuminate the mortal, human heart.
And the human heart, thus purified, can be defined as that impulse at the core of one's being, motivated by an unknown intuition, that rejects every framework, every dark and partial room, as a form of limitation and therefore of unhappiness.
It cannot be truly satisfied until it is absolutely free, until it is in Raymond's House, in which there is:
