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The Great and the Little Man
The treatise begins with a deep meditation. By opening himself, the disciple reaches the consummation of his efforts, and receives initiation from the Master of the masters, who is to confer upon him authority to teach, that is, to be a master or like Hermes. That this Grand Master of the Inner Mysteries was both Man and Shepherd of men, the true Self of men, has been amply shown in the Prolegomena to the Corpus Hermeticum , but the striking parallelism with the very wording of our text, the Great Man, the "Being more than vast", who tells the little man, that though for the first time he now knows his Greater Self, that Self has always been "everywhere with you." This idea is best shown by the beautiful logos from the Gos pel of Eve (presumably an early Egyptian gospel):
"I stood on a lofty mountain and saw a gigantic Man and another, a dwarf; and I heard, as it were, a voice of thunder, and drew nigh for to hear; and He spake unto me and said: I am thou, and thou art I; and wheresoever thou mayest be, I am there. In all am I scattered, and whencesoever thou willest, thou gatherest Me; and gathering Me, thou gatherest Thyself."
The Presence
The conditions of seeing the Holy Sight have been fulfilled by the disciple; he has weaned himself from all lower desires. No longer, like the theurgist in the Hermes-invocations of the popular cult, does he pray for wealth and fame and cheerful countenance, and the rest. His one desire, his only will, is now to "learn the things that are, and comprehend their nature and know God." He craves for Gnosis -- Gnosis of the Cosmos and its mysteries, Gnosis of Nature or the Great Mother, and, finally, Gnosis of God, the Father of the worlds. This is the one question he "holds in his mind." His whole being is concentrated into this question, this one point of interrogation.
It is to be noticed that we are not told, as in the Gospel of Eve, that the seer stood, as it were, apart from himself, and saw his little self and greater Self simultaneously. He is conscious of a Presence, of a persona in the highest theological meaning of the word, who is not seen so much as felt. He speaks to this Presence mind to Mind; he hears this Presence rather than sees it.
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