And although all these moral qualities have their bearing upon sexual morality, they do not establish a uniform ideal of sexual morality. Honesty is honesty whether in Paris, London, Calcutta, or Pekin, but as has been previously observed, sexual morality is determined by local conditions.
Can there, then, be established a universal standard of sexual morality? There can, but its universal acceptance is a remote probability, albeit it will arrive some day.
First of all, the sex relation must be absolutely free from sale; coercion; or barter; whether within the respectable "sale" of matrimony or of recognized prostitution. It must be free from any erroneous idea of marital duty; it must be exalted, reverenced, deified, in all its aspects, from the impregnation of a plant, to the sexual embrace of human lovers.
An Utopian dream it appears, if we note but one side of the picture. If we consider the lightness with which so many men look upon the physical form of women; and if we realize the attitude of so many women toward men, in their conflict with life, using the age-old dowry from mother Eve, of sex, as a weapon of defense and of offense; if we listen to the ribald songs that offend our ears and nauseate our souls, not only in music-halls and on the streets, but in supposedly cultured homes; and above all if we contemplate the uncleanness of mind displayed by those who are really in earnest in their endeavor to uplift the moral tone of the world.
These latter are, by far, the worst enemies to the Regeneration of Sex. A wise man once said, "Save me from my friends; I can protect myself against my enemies"—and so it is in this instance.
Most "Civic-Leaguers" and members of "Vice-Commissions" (why that name, anyway?) are infectedwith the bacteria of sex-degradation. They really require a lengthy process of mental disinfection, before attempting to handle so delicate a problem as this one of sexual uplift.
A woman member of a Young People's Civic League of the second largest city in the United States recently declared in public print, of the beautiful and chaste painting "September Morn," that it was "lewd, filthy, and suggestive of unclean things." This type of woman is intrusted with the task of teaching youthful minds; polluting them with the blasphemous affirmation that the Creation of the Father-Mother God of the universe is "lewd and filthy!"
Let us get this truth implanted in our mentality, as it is inrooted in our souls, namely:
Sex is always the purest, the holiest, and the most sacred thing in the universe—because God is Him-Her-Self, bi-sexual. The righteousness of it cannot be determined by so fickle a thing as man's customs; cannot be dependent upon mortal laws. This statement, indisputable as it is, will nevertheless start a chain of thought which may lead to confusion; and it is because of this tendency to confusion that the real issue is so frequently avoided. But let us see if we may not dispel the confusion by a system of logical deduction.
One thing is certain. The present condition of the Sex-problem is sadly chaotic. If we cannot hope to clarify it to the comprehension of the average, we may at least do so for some.
One of the first objections to the acceptance of the statement that the sex relation is, per se, always right, will be found in the conclusion to which the average mind immediately jumps: "Ah, then it is right for men and women who are depraved and licentious to live as they do; it is right for husbands and wives to deceive each other, and while pretending to be faithful to their marriage vows, to secretly carry on flirtations and intrigues with other men and other women!"
Ask one hundred men or one hundred women this question: "Is the sex-relation right or wrong?"
The men will declare that it is "right sometimes and wrong sometimes." The women, almost as a unit, will do the same. Occasionally a woman will be found sufficiently illumined to give a sane answer.
Following up the thoughtless answer with the request to illustrate, and the reply will be something like this: "Well, if people are married it is right, but if they are not married it is wrong;" and even as this silly answer is given, the person answering knows that it is puerile; but since the Public Mind prefers hypocrisy to Truth, few have the temerity, and fewer yet have the capability, to utter Truth.
It would be as sensible to say that it is right for the sun to shine sometimes and wrong for it to shine some other times. It is right for the sun to shine. This is all the answer that there is, and all that is needed.
Whether the sunshine bestows life and health, or decay and death, is entirely "up to us." The sun does its part. It is fulfilling the inexorable law of Nature, and is therefore right.
But of even greater importance in the universe is this law of sex. The law is forever and always right. Our concept of it may be right or it may be diseased. As a matter of fact it is, in all too many cases, diseased. If it were not, there would be no disease in the world.
How is it possible to have a perfect flower—a healthy, normal and wholesome sprout from a diseased root?
The root of all life is sex. We have thought disease into it, and the only remedy is to change our thought toward the function. This may be done by realizing that the sex-relation is always pure, holy, sacred—the bi-une God of the universe. This statement is quite different from saying that people are always right or sacred in their sex-relations.
To say that the sex-relation is always right under the institution of marriage and always wrong outside of it, is a lie. A lie cannot bring back health to either a person or a principle. Truth is the only thing that can make us whole—and the first office of Truth, as everyone knows, is to make us free. We cannot be whole until we are free, and the essential thought to be free from, is an attempt to keep alive the lie that the righteousness of Sex, per se, depends upon marriage.
Does the libertine believe in the sacrednessof sex? Never. Does the prostitute claim for herself spotless purity? If she did, she would not sell herself for money.
Do men and women who are living in secret unfaithfulness hold exalted ideals of sex?
If they did, they would not maintain a life of deceit.
These people live as they do, because they have divorced sex from love. They agree absolutely with the blind "moralists" who regard Sex as a human plaything—something which may be called bad one day and good the next, according to whether it is viewed from afar or near.
Does anyone imagine that when Society shall have established the "one standard of morality" replacing the double standard which now persecutes the woman only, for infringement upon Society's one demand, that of concealment, that the answer to sex-degradation will have been found?
A single standard is an improvement upon the old habit of stoning the woman only and letting the man go free. But why stone anybody?
History fails to record a single instance where Society has succeeded in improving either itself or its victims by the procedure. The best that can be said of the stoning habit is that it distracts attention from ourselves.
Persons who hold exalted ideas of the function of sex, realizing that a force so eternal and universal must be disassociated from man-made regulations, are not in danger.
Such as these will not foster deceit nor profligacy, any more than they will cringe and crawl under the lash of Society's disapproval, should they encounter it. They know that if they would find the highest good, they must serve Truth first of all, no matter how high the price of such devotion.
Love is the Great Reality.
Everything else in this world of Experience is either tributary to love or it is an unsatisfying substitute for love; or a counterfeit of love. Love is the one cohesive, unifying, constructive force, and it is at the same time the only liberating force.
Hatred, as exemplified in warfare, may sometimes appear to free a people from the rule of a tyrant, but unless love be at the root of the "casus belli," other and more direful disasters will follow in the wake of seeming victory.
There is an erroneous idea, quite general among Christian people, that Death frees the spirit from the bonds that hold it to the mortal and the incomplete. Death only drops off the garment of the flesh; there are innumeral sheathings yet to be shed, before the soul grows the wings with which to soar to the celestial realms, where Love reigns supreme.
Love is the only power on earth or in the spheres, that can liberate us either from our own prejudices and hatreds and fears; or from the limitations and attractions of the animal-man.
Love is, indeed, the Alpha and Omega of Life."There is no other God but Thee," has been the cry of every race on this globe, apostrophizing the unrecognized little baby-God, personified and presented to the race-mind as Horus; or as Krishna, or as Christ; but always it is Love, the Invisible, the Beautiful One, who is adored.
Ingersoll with his wonderful gift of word-painting, and inspired by that great love of humanity which characterized him, has said:
"Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud. It is the morning and evening star. It shines on the babe and sheds its radiance on the tomb. It is the mother of art; inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart; builder of every home; kindler of every fire on the hearth; it was the first dress of immortality. It fills the world with melody, for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter that changes worthless things to joy and makes right royal queens and kings of common clay. It is the perfume of that wonderful flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion that divine swoon, we are less than beasts, but with it—earth is Heaven and we are gods."
It would be superfluous to state here, that Love has ever been recognized as the supreme prize, lacking which all other gifts of life are worthless.
It is admitted that Love is almost the only thing in this age of commercial supremacy which can not be bought. Though it may be bartered for.
Although it be unreservedly admitted that Love is the all-powerful and magic solvent which transmutesall baser emotions into the higher, the general inference will be drawn that this type of love is not sexual. It will be termed parental; humanitarian, self-sacrificing, or altruistic love, and the point may be taken that if humanity had developed nothing higher than the love which is manifested in the sex instinct, the world would be a sorry one indeed, since sexual love, as we have witnessed its ascent from protoplasm to man, has been, in most instances, a blind urge toward personal gratification, not more lofty than the need of supplying the craving for food. This is quite true of animals, and of the lower types of animal-man; not necessarily the earliest types of men, but the lowest types, which we still have with us but happily in decreasing numbers.
But even among animals we find evidences of something vague, indefinite, but insistent which leads the animal to exhibit what we term a tendency towardselection; and in the animal also, through the exigencies of sexual love, we find parental love, and here again we note a peculiarity which ascends also into the family life of humans, namely, that in some instances what we have called the maternal love, the gentle, care-taking, guarding and protecting love, is demonstrated by the male. This is less common with the animals than with Man, but it is sometimes found and proves the existence of the evolutionary trend toward balance in the individual, as well as in the family.
If maternal love were confined strictly to thefemale parent, and the procreative instinct were the legitimate inheritance of the male only, we could never hope for a perfect sexual union, for the very cogent reason that the love of the male would never equal that of the female, since our capacity grows by becoming diffused.
As the world stands today, parental love takes a higher place in the life of the family, and of the nation and of the race (the family on a larger scale), than does love of husband or wife; and over and above even parental love we have been accustomed to place the love of God.
Now we know that there are many who claim that their love of this abstract God supercedes that of love for their family, but we may tacitly agree to take this statement as either an admission of fear of the Unknown or the realization that there are heights and depths of the love-principle which they have not yet penetrated, something to which the spirit soars. They intuitively recognize that there is some perfected state to which we aspire, else human love would never flower into its full possibilities.
And so when we declare that we love God above all other loves; more than wife or husband; children or parents; we are but admitting that we realize in our interior nature that we have not yet loved anyhuman beingwith as great a love as we are capable of.
If any one holds the mistaken idea—and it is one that is very generally held—that the perfect sex union can be attained by no finer phase ofemotion than that expressed in procreation; and that in order to develop the highest quality of sex-love, he must eschew all other phases of manifestation, and concentrate the forces of his being in the direction of sexual expression, he will meet with dire defeat. The laws of the cosmos cannot be broken. We are constantly confronted with the admonition, the child of Fear, to "be careful not to break the laws of God." We need not worry at all about the laws of God, whether we call these Cosmic Law, or Nature, or Divine Providence or something else. Our concern is with ourselves. Neither need we worry whether our neighbor obeys the moral code as we see it. So long as he does not refuse to us our right to follow our own ideals, we may permit him the same liberty.
God, as manifested in the cosmic law of transmutation, will take care of Him-Her-Self. Morality can not be extinguished. Love cannot be killed by men. We can only hurt ourselves in trying.
Love is neither fickle, capricious nor sly, notwithstanding tomes of seeming evidence to the contrary. Love is the most perfect mathematician in the universe. With whatsoever measure a man or a woman metes out love, with that same measure it is returned. Neither is Love blind. Love is depicted thus, because he is not concerned with appearances, but with realities. He is not gazing without, but within. He is doing his best, the poor little neglected Love-god, with the material at hand since he must fulfill the law of his being. He seeks to unite lovers in their interior nature, butas each of the would-be happy pair is bent on gazing without, instead of within, he is handicapped. And when unhappiness follows, they blame the blindness of Love, instead of realizing that He is depicted with a bandage over His eyes, to indicate that Love is an interior quality. So too, the Egyptian God Horus, the God of Love, was depicted with his finger on his lips, to typify the truth that true love is not noisy, blustering, jealous, burning, ranting, protesting. He is silent; soft; melting; blissful;magnetic;uniting.
Our noisy civilization, seeking happiness in Things, mistakes protestations and appearances for realities, and so modern marriages are consummated on this basis, and the caricaturists have depicted Cupid as having exchanged his love-darts for dollars, but this is a slander on the little god who wouldn't know a dollar if he could see one. "It is not true that one knows what one sees; one sees what one knows," declared a clever Frenchman, and as the average modern bride and bridegroom are forced, or think they are, by modern standards of living, to know dollars better than they know Love, their perverted vision sees Cupid's arrows tipped with the dollar mark. But even the dollar mark spells US, united, and if they are indeed truly united in love, wealth untold is theirs, and if they are not thus united then indeed are they poor in happiness, which is the only real poverty.
But even in the very failure to attain happiness in things, married couples have learned or they arelearning, that there is an interior nature which must be considered if marital happiness is expected.
In all too many instances it may take many experiences and the road to the heights may for a time be lost but let us remember that "Love never faileth."
It has been said that "love makes gods of men," and we have taken this phrase as a charming bit of hyperbole, whereas it is a literal truth, because when two individual souls have rounded and balanced their natures by means of love, they come together in an eternal union, and are immortal; "in their flesh they have seen God," and the pilgrimage is ended.
There is a phrase current at the present day, belonging to slang, that universal language of the masses, "the Volapuk of the melting-pot." It comes to us simultaneously with the affinity-wave and the soul-mate quest; and it is both pertinent and timely, although by no means always wisely applied. It is the expression "I have found my seek-no-farther; he (or she) is the Real Thing."
Life is a succession of experiences in the quest of immortality. Immortality would be a curse instead of a blessing if attained alone.
Even the attainment of so unworthy an ambition as riches is a mockery if unshared by others. Fame is like a ruined and deserted castle to the one who has achieved it, unless there be the one other to share it. Even the philosopher, the philanthropist, the humanitarian, he whose love natureis supposed to find satisfaction in making others happy—can not realize the completeness and fullness of joy, unless there is the one mate with whom he may share his altruistic work; or lacking this, he looks to the Life Beyond for the completeness which he does not find here.
Renan says: "One reason why religion remains on such a material plane for many is because they have never known a great and vitalizing love; a love where intellect, spirit and sex finds its perfect mate."
Verily, love is the only vitalizing power in the universe; and when denied the interior union which should exist between a conjoining pair, Love does the best He can, and infuses into the relationship as much of the divine nectar as they will accept.
There is no impure love.I repeat: There is no impure love. The impurity is in the mortal mind of man, obstructing his vision until he fails to see the purity of that which fain would lift him from the Slough of Despond to the Heights of Bliss.
If love be always pure, if it be always the uplifting, unifying, constructive power of the universe, what becomes of the apparent fact that men have sinned for love of woman; that for love of man, women have lost their self-respect, their hope of Heaven; and have sunk to depths below that of the brute creation?
What becomes of the all too many instances where human nature appears to love vice; to be under the spell, as it were of a passionate love forall that is ignoble and defiling? How, then, can we say that love is always pure when it leads to such disaster?
Love never leads to disaster, though love may follow wheresoever the erring mind of man leads, and thus Love is all too frequently dragged from his true place of exaltation, and brought into the arena of human conflict. Love is no fighter; He never opposes; He only concurs; He unites if there is anything with which he can establish an affinity of union.
Egoism is the arch-enemy of love, selfishness is the manifestation of egoism. Selfishness seeks to possess; it is selfishness that causes a man to commit crime, in order that he may bedeck the woman he loves with jewels and fine raiment. He is buying her bodily presence with the baubles which he vainly believes will bind her to him; and he must be taught the lesson of the Yoga sutras "not this way; not this way;" and the more worthy he is of redemption, the more certainly will he be caught in the trap of his own making, lest he really perish; whereas by seeming defeat, outward defeat, he may learn the true path of inwardness. Certainly Love is the only guide to whom he may safely trust his redemption.
If a woman really sinks into the depths of degradation through what appears to be love, it is because selfishness and vanity have temporarily supplanted Love. But there is another side to the question. Society has very erroneous ideas of success and failure; and in looking at theseopposite ends of the same pole, Society may be standing on it's head.
A story illustrative of this inverted view of success is worth repeating.
A young Englishman of aristocratic family, tired of the inanities of social life, and denied the privilege of entering the commercial world, emigrated to the South Seas. It was reported at home that he had married a native Samoan woman and was living the simple life of the Islanders. English society, when his name was mentioned at all, spoke of him with hushed voices and with a "what a pity y' know" manner as of one who had sunk below the depths of ordinary failure. Subsequently a friend visited Samoa and found the young man enjoying life and evidently supremely content. In the course of conversation the visitor chanced to speak of a mutual friend who had been rather wild in the days when they both knew him, and thinking to impart agreeable news to the exile, the visitor eagerly assured him that "Sir Arthur is respectably married and settled down now" whereupon the self-constituted exile commiseratingly responded with: "what a pity; and he was such a decent sort, too." So we may see that there is much in the point of view.
Happiness is the final test of success or failure; and we may trust this test, because no one can be happy in any other than the progressive, upward-trending life. Dissipation has never been a satisfactory substitute for happiness. Wealth is valueless to the possessor if it shuts out love; and iflove be present, wealth holds but an inconsequential place.
However it be, the pathway of Love is long; and between the force of attraction which unites two atoms in chemical affinity, and the union of two perfected human beings, in whom Love and Wisdom are balanced, there are many degrees of the manifestation of Love, and the question inevitably arises "what shall we do with those marriages that are not yet perfect?"
If, as here premised, there is in the entire universe but one mate for each man and each woman; and if the union of perfect mates is the only truly spiritual union; if this union precludes the possibility of "temptation" in any other direction, what is to be done with all the marriages which we know to be imperfect; wherein it is evident that soul-union is not present? Are they immoral, and are they to be abandoned? And is marital infidelity in such instances immoral?
It is. Infidelity is always immoral, because all deceit and deception and dishonesty are immoral.
Let us see what constitutes infidelity, irrespective of marriage. Infidelity is to be unfaithful to a trust imposed; to betray a confidence; to break a promise. This is the abstract definition and it is the only definition that will withstand analysis, whether applied to the marriage vows or to other promises and pledges.
Obviously the answer to this question, then, is to either not impose upon oneself or upon another "vows"; or, if we do so impose, not tobreak them; but if vows are not to be broken, they may, thank Heaven, be dissolved.
And surely the marriage ceremony of the future will not impose vows or promises, because intelligent men and women must rise superior to the necessity for bonds and promises. A marriage ceremony is, even at its very highest, when the contracting persons are spiritually mated, nothing more than announcement to the society of which they are members, of the fact of their mutual agreement to live outwardly, as well as inwardly, in sexual union.
We make too much of the marriage ceremony and too little of the fitness for marriage. The business of the clergyman is altogether too much confined to seeing whether a couple is "respectably" bonded, and altogether too little as to whether they are spiritually united.
Possession! that is the word that spells unhappiness, in married life; each wants to possess the other; neither one tries for the spirit of union. Possession cannot be divorced from deceit.
Vows and promises challenge us to keep them, and because our pathway leads upward to freedom, we constantly find these vows and promises staring us in the face and daring us to advance. We must substitute mutual confidence for vows. Vows are childish and puerile. If we cannot keep faith without vows then are we sadly lacking in faith and should cultivate it by offering to others the freedom of action we would have ourselves. When the time comes, as it will, that a husbandand wife can "talk it over" in a friendly, mutually helpful frame of mind, when either one is attracted by another, there will be no further opportunity for infidelity; and the sooner we rid the world of a belief in sin and immorality, the sooner will Love reign.
It is said of the sages of India that they can live in the jungles and the ferocious tigers will not harm them; how do they accomplish this?
They have disassociated themselves from ferocity. They do not desire to crush or kill the tiger. Their minds are so filled with love and compassion that there is no point of connection between them and the destructive instinct in the beast.
When we get away from the fear of "impure" love; when we get away from the tremendous load of belief in evil which keeps the back bent and the eyes lowered to the dust, we will be ready to meet the pure and perfect love when it comes; and when we are fit for it we will meet it and when we have found this pearl of great price, all doubt and fear, all jealousy; all dissatisfaction will vanish. There will be no fear of "losing" each other. The union is an interior one, and even though "seas divide and mountains vast, rear their proud crests 'tween thee and me," the call of soul to soul will be felt and answered. Byron says:
"There are two souls of equal flow,Whose gentle streams so calmly run,That when they part—they part? Oh no,They cannot part, those souls are one."
"There are two souls of equal flow,
Whose gentle streams so calmly run,
That when they part—they part? Oh no,
They cannot part, those souls are one."
With a sentiment such as this between two beings, what need for vows and promises, and bonds?
It is customary for writers on the sex question to emphatically, even feverishly, emphasize the fact that they have no intention of implying that they would do away with the bonds of matrimony; and although this conclusion is inevitable where one's intellect is active and the faculty of deduction brought into play, yet the false modesty that prevails and the prejudices that blind the eyes of the multitude, and above all, the tendency of the undeveloped race-mind to impute personal motives to such as would, if permitted, lead them to a freer, and consequently a purer life, impel the writer to deny that which is, finally, the very point at issue.
In the interest of Truth, we are compelled to state that we would do away with "bonds." We would substitute therefor mutual agreements, subject to renewal or repudiation within certain defined and mutually helpful conditions. Vows and bonds and oaths are the crutches of the crippled human race. We need not always walk lame.
It may be argued that man is still largely animal; yes, but the surest way to keep him so is to treat him like an animal. If we remind him that he is also a man and that he may be a god; and if we point out to him the way in which he may accomplish this transmutation, no man has so little intelligence that he will not attempt to follow, when assured that God-hood means a blissso great that he can hardly imagine it; that it means cessation of the "endless round of births and deaths" from which Gautama, the Buddha, sought to free himself. Mankind has always been promised immortality through spiritual union—with what? An abstract principle called God, or Aum or any other impersonal formless all-inclusive Being?
No, but with his mate.
On this point we trust that there will not remain any obscurity. There is no higher God than Love. There is no higher love than sexual-love in its highest manifestation. The more we truly love, the more love flows into and through our consciousness, until from a tiny little pearly drop of the "wine of life" we ascend to the Olympian Heights and imbibe floods of the "nectar of the Gods."
Even the libertine, that pauper in the realm of Love, wants the perfect life. His soul is forever hungry for that which he gropingly tries to catch and chain and possess; and which by virtue of these same desires will evade him until he ceases thus to seek, and instead of demanding possession of the object of his desires, he asks for union. Union is interior; possession is always and ever limited to exterior contact. They who would enter the sanctuary and defile the "Holy of Holies" are saved from such a load of self-inflicted sin; they cannot if they would. There is but one key which will open the golden gate to heaven. The way chosen by the libertine is in exactly the opposite direction.
Are all marriages that are not soul-mate unions immoral? Most certainly not. Are all unions that are not married immoral. Most certainly not.
We have made an attempt to define sexual immorality and we have concluded that as yet there is no absolute standard in civilized or uncivilized ethics, since, as Letourneau points out, what is immoral in Pekin or Calcutta may be moral in Paris or London. Truth is adherence to facts in whatever section of the world. Tolerance; sympathy; charity; may be clearly defined wherever we roam. Sexual immorality has no stable standards. We here suggest one and submit that it is the only one possible of universal concurrence. It is based upon personal freedom. Wherever the sexual relation is made a convenience; or where either one marries in the face of his or her own realization that there is no love bestowed, that relationship is immoral. Thus, it will be seen that sexual immorality is independent of marriage, and cannot be estimated by law. Marriage for money; for position; for convenience; for anything other than a desire for mutual helpfulness, is immoral. Indulgence in the sexual act for selfish gratification without regard to the welfare of each other; for money; or pastime; or for any motive other than a reverential expression of an unselfish love, is immoral and is a prostitution of the divine office of sex.
But, though not all sex relationships can be perfect and eternal, yet all may, if we desire, bemoral. And all moral and sexual relationships must, and will, lead to perfect sex-union, whenever the time comes that either one is ready for the completement. This truth need not, and will not, disrupt any happy marriages.
If the Church had not made the mistake of teaching the fallacy that sex-love is a strictly earthly or mortal function, divorcing Sex from pure love; and if the Theology had not tried to substitute the love of, and union with, an abstract Creator for love of mates in soul-union, perhaps there would be exhibited less impatience of the restraints of marriage.
But with a cat-and-dog married life on the one hand and the prospect of an inane, blank, and sexless union with an abstract God-idea on the other, it is small wonder that mortal consciousness has rebelled, and has decided to take its chances with Hell, rather than to forego the happiness which is intuitively sensed as being the direct prerogative of perfect mating.
If this God-idea had not been presented as an eternal, unescapable finality, there might have been hope; but to fly about a throne endlessly, night and day, singing, "I want to be nothing; nothing; only to lie at His feet"—the prospect appalls!
Small wonder that the conclusion has been deduced that "life is too short" for anything like domestic misery, when domestic happiness is the only happiness we know, and that is to cease at death!
But, if we take the truthful view of marriage and of heaven; if we realize that mortal life is Experience; that as we learn by experience, we acquire knowledge; as we accumulate knowledge, we begin to glimpse wisdom; and that when we have sufficient Wisdom and sufficient Love, we graduate into the classification of God-hood, immortality; and that immortality means union with our mate; sex-union, in all that constitutes its highest and most satisfying aspect as we know it, with infinitely more of beauty and love and bliss, there is an incentive to aspire.
Love is the only way that immortality can be attained. It cannot be "taken," like degrees of secret societies. It cannot be purloined, or feigned. Fear has never made people good. The doctrine of punishment has never deterred the sinner. Even in his apparent acceptance of the doctrine of sin and of consequent punishment, the poor sinner has known better. Humanity has progressed in spite of the fear that has dwarfed our stature.
In the new day, with hope ahead and fear transmuted into a wise patience, this earth may yet be a "fit dwelling-place for the gods."
Leigh Hunt says: "Love is a personal proof that something good and earnest and eternal is meant us; such a bribe and foretaste of bliss being given us to keep us in the lists of time and progression; and when the world has realized what love urges it to obtain, perhaps death will cease and all the souls which love has created crowdback at its summons to inhabit their perfected world."
We are prone to consider such statements as only so many beautiful words—elusive, ethereal, and descriptive of something that is always in the future; but if it be always in the future it will never be ours; we cannot catch up with it; and thus it becomes a mockery. These prophetic utterances are literal truths.
Let us confide to you a little secret: We are as much spirit now as we will be when death has unloosed the bindings of our disguise—the body. The real of each of us is what we are now, in our interior nature.
While we are building the business which sustains our physical body; while we are studying law or medicine or philosophy or religion or whatsoever, we are at the same time developing the interior nature which we are now, and which we will be when the life of the body ceases. Not all business men are alike, and yet, if business were their only reality, they must needs be all the same for employing the same methods. Not all doctors are alike although they graduate from the same school of medicine. The inner entity that we are, stands or falls in the final test, by the motives; the desires; the sentiments; the sympathies; the generosities; the forgiveness; the kind impulses; the pities; the charities; the tolerances; we feel while we are apparently engrossed in the outer life. Together, these little impulses, perhaps forgotten in the rush of the day's seeminglyimportant business affairs, come finally to be the ladder by which we climb to the spiritual heights where the bliss of true and perfect, melting, merging, liquid-love, of the one and only mate awaits us.
One thing more. This also is a secret. Perhaps you will not even believe it, but it is true: Poets are the practical members of our crazy civilization. Business men are practical only when they are also, and above all, idealists.
External life is a succession of picture blocks with which we have builded our thoughts into shapes and forms manifest to the mortal senses. But back of every act there is the invisible ideal which prompted it, so that to the one who has the interior vision; one who looks at life from the citadel of his own interior nature instead of merely sensing it by external contact, every material thing tells its interior story; everything has an esoteric or occult meaning. It is said that mystic truths have been veiled in symbolical language; but to those who know the language of symbolism, there is no veil; what seems so is due to the refractory character of the mind which is limited to sense consciousness.
There are two words much used in this day of the Dawn which give the key to the trend of the cosmic cycle upon which the earth has entered. The word "union," or its equivalent, enters into almost every phase of our busy life as well as into ethical and philosophical thought. This word, with much that it stands for, has superseded the word "agreement," or "combination" or "partnership," formerly used. Union means somethingmore interior, than do these other words, even when applied to commercial issues.
The business man says to his partners "let us unite on this question." They are already partners, but unless there is a unity of thought and ideals, their partnership is an unsatisfactory and unfruitful one. We have labor unions which are intended to suggest a solidarity of effort; a merging of interests; a welding together into one thought-force, of those who enter the organization. The fullness of meaning of this word "union" is not adequately expressed in the words lodge, or club, or any of the terms used to designate an organization of men in social or commercial combination.
In union there is strength; but in partnership, or in clubs, there may be no quality of union, although there is the outward bond of fellowship. "I shall look into this" we say when we want to know more of a subject than appears on the surface. We want to know the within. We want to fathom the interior meaning; to get below the surface, or the appearance of it. This is the other word of vital import—the wordwithin. We see it everywhere like a signpost directing our footsteps toward home.
The Master Jesus said that the immortal kingdom was within, but the Christian world evidently has not believed Him. He also told those who would listen to Him, that there was but one commandment that was truly spiritual, but as he did not come to destroy anything that existed, butonly to transmute it, He paid no attention to the commandments already in vogue, but contented Himself with a repetition of the one and only commandment of the Father-Mother God Principle which begat him: "That ye love one another."
Now we are being told from the housetops and from the streets and through all the channels of the physical senses to look within. That which you are—not what you appear to be to the eyes of the sense-conscious—but that which you are in your interior nature, is what counts to you. The writer who writes because he is paid to write salable stuff, harps upon the necessity for "efficiency" in the commercial game; but when the word is impartially considered efficiency consists in the long run in reliability, and reliability is measured by one's honesty; integrity; square-dealing; wise judgment—interior qualities all. It matters not whether the skin be white or black or brown or yellow or green; whether you are of imposing stature or but four feet tall; it is what you are within that constitutes true efficiency.
So the kingdom whatever it may be whether of heaven or hell; of love; or of power; or of ambition; the kingdom is within. The source of your power is in the interior of your nature.
If we go to slang, which offers the line of least resistance to the Cosmic Law, we find that the cue has been given over and over again to those who are interiorly awake to receive it. "You are not in on this," has been said to one who was leftout of some supposedly desirable thing; or "you are notinit," meaning that you are not up to the required standard. Even as the walls of a building only imperfectly indicate the nature of that which is within, that which the building stands for; that which it symbolizes, so physical appearances are symbolical hieroglyphs of the inner nature.
"Learn to look into the hearts of men" admonishes the spiritual teacher. "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." The character of the heart is the test, and though a man's lips utter words that are at variance with his inner nature, yet if we have learned to look within, we are not deceived. This then is the key to the kingdom—interior vision.
Words are like buildings; like personalities; they have their exterior and their interior message. Knowledge may be accumulated; piled up like a mountain of possessions. But knowledge may not bestow one grain of true wisdom. It is only as we extract the interior message from knowledge that we attain wisdom. We possess knowledge and wefindwisdom, when we have transmuted that knowledge into its interior meaning.
The fundamental difference between mysticism and theology is a difference founded upon this axiom. The true mystic penetrates to the interior nature of manifestation and gets the message of Experience. Mysticism excludes nothing. It includes the manifest with the interior; it penetratesthe outer and seeks the interior; but never does the true mystic confound the spirit with the letter; never does he mistake the external for the Reality; the symbol for the message.
Suppose that what is generally called the practical side of life were the only reality. What would be the inevitable conclusion of the thinker if he were to consider only the outer, the manifest, the visible results of a given achievement? He would conclude that civilization is insane.
If we did not know with an intuitional grasp of truth that all this which we call "marvels of achievement" is symbolical of what Man is in his interior nature, it would be the veriest folly. What, for example, is there in a modern sky-scraper indicative of man's advanced civilization?
With millions of acres of unused land, it would be inconceivable folly to project into the inoffensive atmosphere twenty-eight stories of wood and iron merely to buy and sell the products of man's brain and hands. But while our Twentieth Century feverish activities are ostensibly engaged in the external world, they are symbolizing, embodying, teaching if we will but learn, the fact of the evolution of man's interior nature. Sky-scrapers are indicative of the heights to which we are aspiring; to which we are climbing; air-ships only tell us that man in his interior nature—in his reality—is not a creeping, crawling Thing, chained to the earth. He may, if he will, soar into ethereal realms. He has wings, and if he so desires, he may use them.
Wireless telegraphy would be a much less consequential discovery, did it not foreshadow the coming time when mind will speak to mind regardless of desert wastes and imponderable mountains that seemingly intervene. Wireless messages are the result of vibrations set in motion by means of a dynamo and received by an instrument attuned to a corresponding rate of motion. But no dynamo ever invented has the power that is centered in the dynamic will of a human being. Brute strength is paralyzed into inactivity by the comparatively puny strength of a man. The fierceness of the lion, the tremendous force of the elephant, give way before the potent power of Man's desire—an interior quality.
Do skyscrapers, or air ships, or wireless telegraph systems make us happier? If they do, is it not because of their ethical rather than their so-called practical value? Is it not because they prove to man his power to use the plastic material of the planet and control it to do his bidding? Rapid transit adds to convenience; but above and beyond all the so-called practical valuation which can be put upon modern inventions and accomplishment is the message which these mechanical marvels present to the mind. The message that man is not a machine; that he is not a creature but a creator; that he is not a miserable worm of the dust, but a winged god.
Greater than all the other benefits bestowed by modern mechanical marvels is the knowledge of each other which has resulted from intercommunicationbetween nation and nation. The great breeder of discord and the waste of hatred is the idea of segregation. The man of the cave and the club feared his next door neighbor, because he did not know him, and the animal-man fears that which he does not know; his imagination pictures the unknown one as something monstrous and dangerous. Intimacy will teach us that people of a distant country are like ourselves, even though they may dress differently; even though they may wear their hair an inch longer or shorter; may eat a diet of nuts instead of meat; may pray standing up rather than kneeling down. Upon such trifling and absurd differences as these are based our ideas of "alien" races and "foreign" nations.
Annihilation of space and time accomplished by modern mechanical inventions has made us familiar with the interior life of other human beings and has compelled us to the knowledge that they have feelings, emotions, desires, hopes, aspirations, and faults, exactly like our own, and thus will be established a bond of unity, which will reach the heart of our neighbor. If this bond of unity has not as yet been established, it is because the majority of Mankind are still only sense-conscious. They have not yet assimilated the knowledge which the past few years has precipitated in such an avalanche that the slow-moving mind cannot keep pace with it. But out of all this knowledge must come in due time the quality of wisdom. Wisdom seeks love as the only eternal reality. Not because God has commanded that we shall do so;not because of a sentimental ideal, but because any other course is futile, foolish, silly and does not "get us anywhere" as the slangologists rightly express it.
Thus everything in the busy commercial world, seemingly bent upon perpetuating external forms and systems, is in reality a symbolic language of which "unity" and "within" are the pivotal centers. These two words are really complementary, because it is only with the interior nature that unity can be established.
We may conjoin; combine; contact; cohere. We may form partnerships, corporations, combinations from the outside. These are external expressions of the interior desire for unity, but union is of the interior nature only.
With the more intimate knowledge of each other which intercommunication between nations makes general, each little segregated mass of human beings must sooner or later arrive at the conclusion that we are very much alike and that to "get together" on any proposition involving the welfare of all humanity is a much less costly and a far more satisfactory way of settling matters than by going to war over it. Not that this idea is yet fixed in the brains of the majority, but there is creeping into man's cranium a faint thought that perhaps the survival of the fittest will be best maintained by peaceful methods; an idea that honor can neither be maintained nor appeased by shedding blood. This knowledge will bring us to the wise observation that fundamentally, cosmicallythere is no place for enmity between nations and races and classes and the sexes; that the whole conglomerated mass of hatreds and inherited enmities and segregated interests; the absurd idea that one part of the world can permanently prosper by the enslavement of any part; the undeveloped and savage ideas that underlie our civilization; all these thought-concepts have no more reality in the cosmic scheme of things, than have the picture-blocks of the child in the adult life.
The world has been living through a nightmare. The warfare which belongs to the animal plane of Man's evolving consciousness has been carried into the mental world as well. Not only do men fight like tigers in the jungles, but they fight with tongue and pen as well, using food products, textile fabrics, inventions, mechanical devices and the creations of brains of men, for their weapons. But this type of warfare will not much longer survive. Mankind must choose between transmutation or annihilation. Hatred is self-destructive. Blind indeed must be those who can expect to escape this law. "They who use the sword shall perish by the sword." How else can it be? There is but one force. If we use it to construct, we are constructed. If we use it to destroy we are destroyed, since it is by the very nature of law that we become involved in that which we employ. It is a simple sum in arithmetic. We may either add or subtract. If we add, there is no limit. If we subtract we ultimately wipe off the slate.
The fact is dawning upon an increasing numberof thinkers, that even as brain is superseding brawn in the marts of the world, so there is still a finer and higher and better force, so potential in its power that nothing can withstand its melting, merging, unifying motive. That power is love, without which though we have all else we are but as "sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal."
Even as the ferocious man-eating animals have disappeared from the earth; even as the giant gladiators, the mailed knights, the erotic pomp and regalia of Imperialism, with their captives chained to their chariot-wheels; the cruel despots, the tyrannical masters and scourged slaves; the bloody sacrifices, the horrible games of the amphitheatres, even as these one-time evidences of alleged "civilization" have passed away, so too will time see the dissolution of our own "false gods." Transmuted into pure and perfect love and peace and equality, the power now misapplied in the work of hate and destruction, will increase a thousand fold and be directed toward the maintenance of a balanced world—a world in which Love and Wisdom are united.
We are always fearful of changes. The bat-like eyes of the multitude are blinded by the light of the sun. Why cannot we trust the Cosmic Law which has always given us a better ideal in the place of the decadent one? If we prefer to use the word God, then let us say why cannot we trust God?
In the external world, then, the idea that a partof this sphere is inherently antagonistic to another; that men are born enemies; that the female and the male must forever struggle for supremacy—all these ideas are disappearing. "Unity" is the password to the coming civilization. If then we will accept this conclusion and apply it to our individual selves, we will conclude that no function of the human organism should merit disapproval; or be regarded as an enemy. Before we can arrive at a balanced and sane world without, we must come to a balanced and sane state within our own organism.
We must know that the sex function, the most vital of all the various expressions of life in the individual body as well as in the social body and the racial body, is not an enemy with whom we must maintain unceasing warfare, but a wise and trustworthy friend with whom we may safely co-operate, neither repressing this vital force until we have conquered it and dragged it like a bleeding captive behind our chariot-wheels, nor should we like the drug-slave become lost in the clutches of an abnormal appetite.
Indeed, as the forces of life become transmuted from the physical appetites to the finer, and interior desires of the soul, abnormalities and perversions of sex-force will be impossible.
Sex-force is, at the Center of Being, unpolluted. It is pure, perfect and harmonious. It is divine. Why? Because it is bi-une; it is balanced.
In our present-day lopsided civilization, we find that nearly every one is lop-sided, and unbalanced.Alienists declare that almost every man and woman has some hobby or mania. Doubtless this is true. An age of specialization would incline the race toward "lopsidedness." But the source of Life is balanced; if we come to the place where we consciously unite with that interior source we will no longer be unbalanced, because the central source of life is Sex, and Sex is, at the center of the radius, bi-une, which is to say balanced. There is no chance for sex supremacy, for domination, or dispute, or jealousy. There is equilibrium.
It is probable that to those who cannot compass the consciousness that equality does not mean identicalness this sort of balanced life will appear tame and tasteless. Few women perhaps and certainly fewer men can imagine a sex-union in which love is so great, so over-powering and at the same time so perfect, that there is no room for jealousy. The average person believes that jealousy is inseparable from sex-love. But even as our antediluvian ancestors could not imagine the mechanical miracles of the telephone and the telegraph, so we fail to comprehend the infinite depth and intensity of our interior being until we come to the place where we awake from the sleep of the mortal and glimpse the heights of the immortal life.
No one can give to another this interior wisdom—this philosopher's stone, by means of which all baser instincts are transmuted into the pure golden-tinted light of illumination. He can but point the way and promise that the results aremathematically proportionate to effort, and effort will be backed by individual desire.
We do not hold, as do many writers dealing with the physiological side of the subject of Sex, that the sex function is primarily designed for purposes of procreation and that any other expression of sex is contrary to nature. The essential function of sex is to vitalize. Procreation is one of the uses of sex-love, but it is not its primary function.
Until men and women have absolute control over their sex impulses they are still on the plane of sense-consciousness; and as long as they remain only sense-conscious they miss the very thing that they seek. All that is pleasureable in sex-contact that reaches any man or woman who is only sense-conscious is no more than a faint echo of the ecstacy of divine and perfect love which is known to the spiritual alchemist, who has discovered the art of transmutation and thus found the key to the gate of eternal life.
As long as we remain limited to the plane of sense-consciousness, old age is a blessing. It compels transmutation of the love-nature into interior channels. By the failure of the physical organism to express the sex-desires, this force is given an opportunity to become transmuted into higher, finer and more intense and beautiful thoughts. It takes on whatever quality of soul we have acquired and it fosters that quality—be it much or little—so that we may not go into the interior realms a spiritual pauper.
Even as our physical childhood is a prelude to mental adultship, so old age, our "second childhood," is a prelude to our soul adultship, and the character of our old age period is prophetic of our state in the soul life.
There are some extremely aged persons whom we cannot, if we have any degree of interior vision, classify as old; the youth and beauty and love-radiance of their interior nature is so potent that it shines through the worn and wrinkled garment that covers it; and we know that when that garment shall have been removed by the hands of Death, that the soul will be clothed in radiant youth and beauty, and light.
This is indeed the esoteric cause of the widespread repudiation of a mental recognition of age.
"I am seventy years young" says the man who hopes for eternal youth and life; and if he says it from the standpoint of wisdom—the wisdom that knows himself an immortal soul fired by pure and holy spiritual love, then indeed his words are truly symbolical.
But if he utters them merely in desperate defiance of organic decay, they are empty and he will enter the after-life, even as he leaves this one, without having attained that which he craves.
This truth is an integral part of the cosmos, from which there is no appeal; no reprieve; no immunity, no "respecter of persons." The law is absolute and it is also just. Pure and perfect love is the price of immortal life. There is no other "coin of the realm."
"But," questions the initiate, "why cannot those who know, if there be such in the world today, give us this mystical formula? Why do they not tell us how we may reach this desirable state of spiritual sex-love, which affords such divine happiness to those who find it?" The query is pertinent and the desire is natural; the doubt of its reality is consistent, yet we are constrained to say that in the very nature of such inquiry the disciple of the Hidden Wisdom voices his unreadiness forIllumination. The desire for self-gratification, though right and natural to the sense-conscious plane, is yet inimical to attainment of spiritual consciousness.
There is a spiritual message in the persistently inculcated doctrine of sacrifice. It is not that a Supreme Being desires sacrifice, or gifts, or adulation, or homage, or worship, or that any power glories in our unhappiness. It is not that we may purchase any spiritual thing by giving up something which we prize, but it is because our spirit becomes attuned to the central source of Life by means of our willingness to perform what to the sense-conscious plane of existence seems a sacrifice.
"He sought for others the good he desired for himself; let him pass on" is the Egyptian phrasing of the Golden Rule, and this states it as clearly as it can be stated.
Yet should any one take this truism as an unfailing formula and expect to enter the golden gate of eternal life because of obedience to theletter of the pass-word, he would fail. Altruismis; it is not mere recognition of a word.
We may presuppose another natural andinstinctivequery: "If then only by union with one's true mate one can enter the bliss of eternal life and love, should not we drop every other responsibility, sever all ties of relationship, give up wife or husband or family or work, and search for the one perfect complementary, finding which, is found the answer to all life's problems?"
Again we can only say that the seeker would be disappointed. We should remember the story of Sir Launfall. Returning from the unfruitful quest of long years for the Holy Grail (the golden chalice), he learned the lesson of Truth from the beggar at his own door to whom he gave the cup of cold waterwithout any consciousness of doing a good deed; without hope of thereby finding the grail.
He who seeks with the selfish thought of securing for self any good will not find it though he should give away every farthing to the poor; though he should never permit one unkind word to pass his lips; though he should fast and scourge and deny the flesh; kneel all day and all night in prayer. As long as he holds to the thought of self and ofobtainingsomething so long will he miss theattainment.
Spiritual insight establishes two facts beyond cavil or dispute or reversion. One is that God's laws cannot be broken. We are not trying to say that they should not be broken; or that they cannotbe broken with impunity; or that if broken we shall be punished. They simply cannot be broken—they are unbreakable.
We cannot buy or sell or beg or steal or borrow or take as a gift, or in any wise acquire immortal godhood, except by attaining it any more than we can come to physical manhood or womanhood except by growing to it; and by the same law no one can keep it from us; neither priest nor scribe; neither prophet nor inventor. We are a law unto ourselves. No one can break the law of your being any more than you can break that of another. No power on earth or in the celestial spheres or in the intervening spaces can keep that which is our own from us. Wherefore then, should we tear ourselves and each other with strife and jealousy and wounded honor and outraged marriage vows, when either partner to a marriage contract sees fit to sever that relationship?
If you lose out in what you believed to be love, be sure that the object of your desires was not yours to lose; in all the spheres there is only one who is yours by divine right and no one can by any possibility usurp your place in the final issue; and that place once found no one can oust you from it. But remember what we have said in previous chapters of the word "found;" it is from within.
How vain and how foolish it is to think that a power so stupendous, so magnificent and so beneficent as to project this immense panorama of life; to establish such marvelous diversity within suchsimple unity; to bestow the bliss of love, could make a mistake. How puerile has been the teaching that we can sin against the Eternal God. We need not worry about the Supreme and Eternal Power. "The dice of God are loaded." Our concern is with ourselves, lest we imagine that we may cheat in the game of life.
We are self-centered, free-willed; immune from any possibility of offending the universe. The whole problem of life and death, in so far as it relates to our individual selves, is "up to us." We can delay arrival at the goal of our desires; we can dally by the wayside if we will. Only our own loss, our own suffering, our own unsatisfied longing shall punish us. But who is so stupid that he would remain wandering in the bleak and barren desert, when he might by a turn of his hand enter fields Elysian and merge his soul into the boundless areas of infinite bliss and wisdom?
We should not imagine that death will do this for us. Death is nothing morephenomenalthan withdrawing from one room to another. The soul may strive on for ages through many incarnations. Only one thing can free it; and that is love; love for others than the personal self. The broader and deeper the love nature, the wider it reaches out to enfold in its tender protection all living things, the more nearly divine we become, and the sooner will we touch the area of the spiritual and attract our own.
It is evident that self-seeking even for so worthy a possession as one's own counterpart defeatsthe very effort. We are not to seek; we are only to prepare ourselves to be ready and worthy; when we shall have done this, nothing can withhold our own from us; not though the two halves of the One Being are separated by all the barriers which the sense-conscious race of men have erected between themselves and the bliss of Heaven. Says Emerson: "What is thine, will gravitate to thee." We need not therefore go about apprehensively fearful lest we lose that which belongs to us; in so doing we are apt to keep our eyes glued to the earth, thus forgetting that it is from the higher realms of vibration "whence cometh our light."
Says Emerson: "O, believe as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world which thou oughtest to hear will vibrate on thine ear. Every proverb, every book, every by-word that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will, but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this because the great and tender heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly, an endless circulation through all men as the water of the globe is all one sea, and truly seen its tide is one."
Here then are specific and trustworthy statements for the further enlightenment of the student of the problems of Sex. Like algebraicalpropositions they prove themselves when correctly solved. Immortal godhood is attained by counterpartal union, because the Central Source of Life is bi-une. Immortality is our spiritual birthright, but we must claim it if we would consciously realize this truth.
God is the bi-une creative principle, and we are literally and in truth the "image and likeness" of this bi-une Being. Not one hermaphroditic personality but a pair. A pair is one whole, even though each of the pair is distinct in form and diverse in temperament and qualities. We are especially emphatic upon this point because there has been so much vague and speculative theorizing upon this definition of a bi-une Being. Your perfect mate is distinctively masculine or distinctively feminine in sex as the case may be; and he or she is your mate because of this perfection of distinctiveness.
Our former ideas of femininity and of masculinity were faulty. Woman is not less but much more womanly, if she has exchanged fear for courage; deceit for truthfulness; ill-health for vitality; helplessness for helpfulness. Even as a man is more manly when he spares the nesting birds where formerly he ruthlessly destroyed; when he unites protection with bravery; when he knows sympathy from weakness; when he combines sentiment with principle; and gentleness with vigor.
No mortal can by any possibility break the laws of God. Therefore you are not to try to enforceyour ideas of morality upon others. Who has constituted you book-keeper for the universe? You are to concern yourself with establishing happiness upon this earth.
You are to see to it that your love is big and broad enough; all-inclusive enough to wish to see every one happy from your immediate family to your far-off neighbor in Central Africa. You need not worry about whether they break the moral code as you see it. You are to render love and service to this world with all your heart and all your power; if you do this, you will reach the goal of your desires.
No mortal can by any other method than love and the service that is rendered through love seek and find the "Holy Grail," which is to say the bliss of spiritual union with his Beloved. Therefore to fly from the responsibilities and the environment in which you are, without regard to the welfare of others, is to defeat your own quest; neither do we claim that you should under all circumstances remain chained to a post like an unwilling captive, poisoning your mind with resentment and hatred.
There is no one formula which fits all cases—other than that given in love and service. The Golden Rule which tells us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, has another side to its shield, and it may read "Do not permit others to do unto you what you would not do to them." If you seek freedom from a specific environment from no other motive than personal selfishness,you may be doing yourself an injury; but if you are also doing an injury to others by remaining, then you are doubly mistaken in your course.
The way of attainment is not easy, although the formula is simple; it may be briefly but concisely summed up in the vital and important word "unselfishness." "Not mine but thine also," is the watchword of the wise in love. Not possession of the Beloved One, but union with him or her. There is just one big world of difference between these two points of view. More than that, there is the difference of Heaven and Hell.