18SHUK
SHUK
I was talking to a group of young artists in Chicago. There was a boy there who seemed disturbed because the others dared to be natural in my presence, and talk about themselves. I was quite at ease, enjoying myself, and getting altogether as much respect as I deserved.... This lad walked with me to the train. I wanted to take him home. I liked his voice and his hand and his mind. I thought at first that he could not mean all he said, but I was wrong about that. Reverence is sometimes very hard to take, but the one who brings it has the pure surface of receptivity. The boy said, as my train pulled out:
"No, I can't come now. There's a month to be spent at home in Michigan, and a season's playing with an orchestra up in the lake resorts, but after that—say October, I'll come to Stonestudy."
That was exactly what he did. He had itall planned months ahead. It's Shuk's[18]way—a mathematical mind, a crystal mind. The theosophists would say that he belonged to the intellectual ray.... We are always better with Shuk in the room. He comes half way to meet our process of lighting up, which is the devotional process; in fact, Shuk incorporated himself in our ideals in exchange for a year or two of living the life at Stonestudy.... These things never die.
A raincoat, a black bag—these are Shuk's possessions, all weight and measure minimised, even to the kind of white paper which wears best and packs best. Shuk means order. A page of his "copy" is a rest to the eye. There is a finished quality to his sentences. My tendency is to rush into a mental clean-up when he enters the room. I'm not impressing these details as his virtues. Shuk's virtues are cosmic. He will presently be telling the big tales, and telling them fast.
As a group, we are learning to come and go from each other. We have learned well not to lean—rather to anticipate the Law and leave the beloved when the tendency to cling becomes too keen.... There is a time to come and a time to go. I always think of the Master Jesus, leaving His disciples—saying that they would not find the Comforter within, if He remained with them always.
Shuk had much to do in bringing home to usthis valuable concept. We had a way of thinking the world would come to us on the Lake Erie bluff. It would. It did. But we were getting fat and baronial; a bit fat of brain, perhaps.... Better than that, the gaunt, lean face forever at the window-panes of civilisation.... Comrades are always together. Big meetings, easy partings. One does not know how close he is to another, until their thoughts spark warm over a lot of mileage—the immortality of it all stealing in through the soft airs of night, perhaps.
I teach the young ones to stand alone at every chance. The idea is to make them penetrate for themselves, as swiftly as possible, the main tricks and illusions of matter; to make them see past any doubt that to be worldly-minded is to be inferior. Still they must see this for themselves. I formally renounced parentage in the case of the Little Girl. I take all my authority from the younger boys at frequent intervals—especially when they have been real mates:
"Don't advise with me," I tell them. "Show what you know about living.... Do it your way. If you begin to botch it, I'll come in and be a regular parent again, but the idea is to set you loose."
These matters come out naturally in relation to Shuk. He'll be surprised to read this. None of the young ones ever adequately credit the fact that I do a lot of sitting at their feet.... Wecould see the world as one piece better with Shuk in the room. His intense listening pulled my eyes constantly. He wanted to know about stories—about writing stories. His presence made us all better workmen because he was so zealous to become one. I had long been absorbed in the romantic side of world-politics, but Shuk decorated the subject with a new romance.... The farther away a country is, the more we know about it from a fiction standpoint. His mental forms are very strong. Shuk and I have practically covered the same run of thoughts in a morning's work—our machines a mile apart—no prearrangement. But this has worked out so often as to cease to be a novelty. The Little Girl's letters have often crossed with mine, carrying the same spiritual unfoldment—a four days' journey distant....
Another realisation related with Shuk's coming, is that I do not belong as the master of a school in the economic sense. There was much detail at Stonestudy, much householder's management required. I wouldn't have given it up, if I had been unable to do that part, but it was a waste of force—wretched economy for me to take charge of such affairs. We plan to support ourselves, but I cannot run a school, apportion tasks, or puzzle devotedly among the meshes of finance. This part of the work in California will doubtless be taken care of by those who do it well and profitably. There have been moments when I wanted to go among all the schools—happen in, stay an hour or a week—until the children and teachers forgot me, so I could find my own among the many.... But again it occurs to me that wiser plans than mine are behind it all. Those who are ready, come; numbers will take care of themselves; all we need to do is to make the most of the nearest, and keep up our song in such accord as we can in the midst of the world's sacrificial madness—many girls' voices now, for the war has plucked the boys....
Some of the things of Shuk's which I chose for this book were about the big war and are not profitable discussions now, but with his paper included in an earlier chapter, and one or two small things here, his quality can be seen. This is a letter to the Old Man:
... I haven't ceased to follow the Wars. Big one inside. Tremendous flights, dizzy careenings, impossible falls. Am tramping noisily through the forbidden garden of Books. Am becoming more and more vividly aware of Life, above actuality, beyond sorrow, interior to joy. Vital and thrilling peace to all your endeavours.... Enclosed a paragraph or two on tallying off the world-war within, with the world-war without:Evil is stupid mixing of good things into in-harmony. Evil is simply ignorance. Ignorance does not fade away, but must be worked out, worndown. War is evil in this process. Man's higher nature is naturally at war with ignorance, manifesting in his lower nature. If man had always kept at this war against the domination of the lower self, he would never have needed another war to jar and jog him along. But man decided, in ignorance, that he had no cause for war with the lower self. This was his first illusion. The next mistake was natural. Man thought he would get rid of evil by killing off the lower selves of other men. All due to his first error in looking outside instead of in.It's all wrong to think we must leave our own houses in order to fight the greatest battles conceivable. If we do not accept the fight within ourselves, we shall certainly have the same fight, once or twice removed, forced upon us....
... I haven't ceased to follow the Wars. Big one inside. Tremendous flights, dizzy careenings, impossible falls. Am tramping noisily through the forbidden garden of Books. Am becoming more and more vividly aware of Life, above actuality, beyond sorrow, interior to joy. Vital and thrilling peace to all your endeavours.... Enclosed a paragraph or two on tallying off the world-war within, with the world-war without:
Evil is stupid mixing of good things into in-harmony. Evil is simply ignorance. Ignorance does not fade away, but must be worked out, worndown. War is evil in this process. Man's higher nature is naturally at war with ignorance, manifesting in his lower nature. If man had always kept at this war against the domination of the lower self, he would never have needed another war to jar and jog him along. But man decided, in ignorance, that he had no cause for war with the lower self. This was his first illusion. The next mistake was natural. Man thought he would get rid of evil by killing off the lower selves of other men. All due to his first error in looking outside instead of in.
It's all wrong to think we must leave our own houses in order to fight the greatest battles conceivable. If we do not accept the fight within ourselves, we shall certainly have the same fight, once or twice removed, forced upon us....
Whatever portion of humankind is chastened and quickened by this big field-war and sea-war, is the first fruits of a nobler race. Man has had countless and continuous opportunities of doing this purifying process to himself in privacy and peace; instead, he has consistently, with rarest exceptions, used his will to serve the lesser self, or deal with the lesser selves of other men. Now, in these years, every man who failed, will learn the lesson, because it will be forced upon him. If our wisdom is not so great and old as we hope, if we have in the long past thrown away our chances, then we shall surely go out and fare as the others fare now—in exactly the right proportion.
Killing another doesn't work as a means of self-correction. Hereafter, I'm interested in correcting myself. There is very little outside work left to do. This is a commonplace, of course, yet it reminds me that the highest wisdom is something grandly simple and easy. Murder is an aggravated waste of both time and opportunity.
Yet I am at peace with nobody, not even myself. Peace ought to be more intense than war, and until it is, we shall have to go through many wars to arrive at any kind of peace. Many slaveries is the price of freedom.
One who fears will be brought up facing monster fears, until he learns next time that his personal fears were too petty to mention. One who has greed and envy will surely be made a pawn in a game of greed so colossal that perhaps, in a future time, he will have no interest in neighbourhood greeds, but will have learned to see and to desire the whole world. His greed has been stretched into a passion for dominion; and the most fascinating field for empire he will discover within himself.
So wherever we stand, we can't lose out. We can choose to do good, better, best—but without choosing, nothing less than all right can happen.
The brighter facts are that all these warring energies, whether of men or ordnance, are the force of one God, energies working out of the muddles men made. Man has disturbed the balance. Man now makes a sacrifice in order to restore equilibrium, to release the powers he misused.
The greatest conceivable struggle must sooner or later come between the higher and lower nature of every living thing. Man is now preparing himself, collectively and individually, for this final conquest. His prime illusion seized him when he turned away from his own faults, to correct the faults of his brother. The secondary illusion is that the brother will not be able to care for his own faults. The third is that we must help our brother correct himself. The fourth is that if he won't do it himself, in the way we say, we will do it for him.
The world (and this means me) is just learning the rudiments of war, just finding out how much vitality man has, how much courage, the stupidity of all fear, the size of the globe, the depth and possibilities of the elements, including the human soul; is perceiving more of life and accepting intenser vibrations than ever before on this terra. All this knowledge will go into the True Peace some day. But in these nearby years, men are prayerfully eager to get back "home," where all these godly lessons may be forgotten.
Real War will positively show man that he must remember what he is taught. When he comes "home," he will enlist immediately in the interior struggle with his lower self. His war with other men will train him to fight with the greatest enemy on earth, his own ignorance.
I have already enlisted in this big war. My first victory was in seizing the fact that the world is me and I am the world and nothing to the contrary. The universe rises and falls with me, subjectively. The goal is to make it—objectively.
I am locked with impatience these days.
After that, comes fear.
I may go to the red fields to learn the nonsense about fear. Of course I can theorise it now perfectly, and practise it at periods. But I want it steadily, the non-wobbling wisdom. Already I have conquered some fatuousness in myself. Out of my jubilation I write to you.... Of course, the Many is not a model to follow. The "Many" is a picture in every man's mind, composed of the inferior things that all other men do.... Inclusion—intensity—love—creativeness—these Stonestudy precepts contain all the story. They are certainly the way out and up and over into Life.
Shuk has done a little sketch or two on the big Romance of the new social order:
Humour, universality, the highest good will, he writes, are the symbols that flame from the temple of the New Race.... Everywhere appear children of the renovating, re-vitalising, more cosmic tribe. They are easily recognised. The hope of a full and decent future is with them.They will do little according to their immediate predecessors, and much by an inner light of their own. Being wise and simple and not destructive, they will gratefully accept all that has proven true for earlier peoples. But they will instinctively have nothing at all to do with the traditions based on three-score-and-ten, or any other of the unfortunately solid viewpoints that frost the world to-day.They love the world, have come to claim it whole, to reclaim it from deluded ancestors who were solemnly, from birth, bent upon deeding and selling and stealing and fencing in bits of the planet's surface. Forerunners of this happier race have shown themselves to be masters of materials, true workmen in the solid stuffs; but by their sense of humour they are saved from any impulse to seize and sit upon fragments of earth.These new ones are born with an urge towards unity. Their task, to set the world in order. Their means, not so much a rearrangement of objects as a very intense activity along the roads of Beauty and Truth, in a co-operation unstudied and normal with the rest of mankind and with the Igniting Principle.It may be observed that Beauty and Truth are too vague to produce effective action in a solid world. This is invariably a saying of the material-minded, however virtuous they may be. It is they who loudly demand a dull utility over and above Beauty, and apart from it. It is they who have agglomerated the chaos that is in this hour threshing about in dust and blood. Their sober iniquities are the fertiliser to force the seed of the New Race.It is not a cosmic blunder that the great minds of the world are found in art, including the supreme art of mystic religion—and seldom in the arena of statecraft. The world was never managed from a senate chamber; the cosmos is not guided by a king. When rulers of the past have become great figures, that greatness usually rested upon their gift of poetry, their love of art or wisdom, or some religious quality.Poems of twenty words have outlived the might of forty wars. A great book is a higher achievement than a sweeping political move. The dullest changeling with an obsession may set his seal upon a war to the death of ten million men, but in the few lines of a true poem are stored the honey of millenniums of human life. A genuine work of art is more potent and practical than any blood-bought wall of tribal separation, more vital and immediate than the doings of armies. To judge of this properly, one need only know both kings and poets.Of the early kings of Rome, it is Numa who is remembered—and he was in harmony with Celestial Order. Of countless other Roman figures, the average mind turns first to Cæsar, who was a literary man, and whose passion to write outlasted every march of his legions. Greece had kings and statesmen and great generals, yet it is her wise men who stand foremost. The conquering Alexander is famed chiefly because he was the unwitting distributor of Grecian beauty. In fact, Greek history began with Homer, the poet, and American history with Columbus, the dreamer who is still our creditor. The mystics of oldChina reached for the Torch of Light, and they might have attained a true dominion over the planet, had not their fear-inspired kings built a Wall and gelded the Empire once for all. Gautama Buddha gave up kingcraft in order to gain a higher mastery. Mohammed lived on the Road. Jesus the Christ set free an energy in the world that is only gaining its real momentum after two thousand years—and he firmly refused a material crown.
Humour, universality, the highest good will, he writes, are the symbols that flame from the temple of the New Race.... Everywhere appear children of the renovating, re-vitalising, more cosmic tribe. They are easily recognised. The hope of a full and decent future is with them.
They will do little according to their immediate predecessors, and much by an inner light of their own. Being wise and simple and not destructive, they will gratefully accept all that has proven true for earlier peoples. But they will instinctively have nothing at all to do with the traditions based on three-score-and-ten, or any other of the unfortunately solid viewpoints that frost the world to-day.
They love the world, have come to claim it whole, to reclaim it from deluded ancestors who were solemnly, from birth, bent upon deeding and selling and stealing and fencing in bits of the planet's surface. Forerunners of this happier race have shown themselves to be masters of materials, true workmen in the solid stuffs; but by their sense of humour they are saved from any impulse to seize and sit upon fragments of earth.
These new ones are born with an urge towards unity. Their task, to set the world in order. Their means, not so much a rearrangement of objects as a very intense activity along the roads of Beauty and Truth, in a co-operation unstudied and normal with the rest of mankind and with the Igniting Principle.
It may be observed that Beauty and Truth are too vague to produce effective action in a solid world. This is invariably a saying of the material-minded, however virtuous they may be. It is they who loudly demand a dull utility over and above Beauty, and apart from it. It is they who have agglomerated the chaos that is in this hour threshing about in dust and blood. Their sober iniquities are the fertiliser to force the seed of the New Race.
It is not a cosmic blunder that the great minds of the world are found in art, including the supreme art of mystic religion—and seldom in the arena of statecraft. The world was never managed from a senate chamber; the cosmos is not guided by a king. When rulers of the past have become great figures, that greatness usually rested upon their gift of poetry, their love of art or wisdom, or some religious quality.
Poems of twenty words have outlived the might of forty wars. A great book is a higher achievement than a sweeping political move. The dullest changeling with an obsession may set his seal upon a war to the death of ten million men, but in the few lines of a true poem are stored the honey of millenniums of human life. A genuine work of art is more potent and practical than any blood-bought wall of tribal separation, more vital and immediate than the doings of armies. To judge of this properly, one need only know both kings and poets.
Of the early kings of Rome, it is Numa who is remembered—and he was in harmony with Celestial Order. Of countless other Roman figures, the average mind turns first to Cæsar, who was a literary man, and whose passion to write outlasted every march of his legions. Greece had kings and statesmen and great generals, yet it is her wise men who stand foremost. The conquering Alexander is famed chiefly because he was the unwitting distributor of Grecian beauty. In fact, Greek history began with Homer, the poet, and American history with Columbus, the dreamer who is still our creditor. The mystics of oldChina reached for the Torch of Light, and they might have attained a true dominion over the planet, had not their fear-inspired kings built a Wall and gelded the Empire once for all. Gautama Buddha gave up kingcraft in order to gain a higher mastery. Mohammed lived on the Road. Jesus the Christ set free an energy in the world that is only gaining its real momentum after two thousand years—and he firmly refused a material crown.
... A hopeful dream, the poem of an autumn afternoon, the building of a sphinx or a pyramid—these are not subject to time or conditions. They remain.
So the Children who are the hope of the world are not dismayed at the medley of illusions emanating from the so-called ruling class. Emperors and premiers do not get very much done either way; they themselves abandon their own works over night. They are deserving of profound sympathy. They only spread out more manful chaos to be set straight by the master craftsmen—the artists, humorists, vitalists, mystics.... Beauty is the sun-bright flash of the Infinite.
With duty raised to a joy, and pain forgot, the Singers come, the Builders, the Quickeners of man. The Unforgettables of the so-called past were of this stock. Their leisure is deep—of a sort that sustains the finitudes.
All the good goals of yesterday are to be counted as mile-posts. Direction is more important than any imaginable goal; unvarying tendency is more direct and splendid than any creed; the white path of the quester is more precious than a stationary heaven.
The modern children cannot stop on this side of the horizon because they are creators. Life is their religion. Their rites are broad and deep as man, as ancient and reverent as time, as new as dawn.
They do not reject the Vedas. They re-fashion the Upanishads in their own hearts. They study the travels and hopes of Jesus, listen for the divine songs of Orpheus, penetrate the glitter of numbers with Pythagoras, find satisfaction in the Mohammedan thinkers who connected Aristotle with Moses. These names do not belong to the past. The many Buddhas are perpetually modern. Kabir lives to-day in Tagore. Heracleitus and Plato are still living springs.
In just the same sense, the children of the New Race are old as the Pelasgian Zeus, though in point of time they are here for work and play in 1920. But their vitality, reality, beauty, power and achievement—these are affairs of all time.
19IMAGINATION
IMAGINATION
Many mystics have lost touch entirely with the deep sunken abutments of the spiritual edifice—the footings in matter. They are deeply wise in the mysteries and unfoldments of contemplation, but lose their way like mindless lambs in the world. We idealise a practical mysticism which dares to walk the earth in the heat of the day, dares to contemplate the stars as outposts of the heavenly kingdom, launching the vision at last, not only to the Holy City, but to the Throne of Itself....
Talks with Shuk at Stonestudy had a tendency to make us see the big Unseen politics and diplomacies and rulerships of the planet. Here are a few paragraphs from one of his letters which show the quality:
... Kings and presidents are the most hampered of men. Great generals are silly without their armies. To remove externals from us, torid our minds of the illusive and the inessential, is simply to clear us for action. Even a gunner, in taking aim, regards the object or enemy as an abstraction, and focuses his whole attention upon his own instrument, his sights. If he actually looks at the enemy, he will not hit him. The billiardist first glances over the entire table, then, to make a true shot, concentrates his full attention upon the tip of his own cue. Perhaps the great leader of armies does not regard individuals or see them as men, but as extensions of his own body, and in time of stress, he has forgotten them completely save as abstract power for his use, and that use he determines interiorly. Even the most material-minded of men, in the crux of worldly and four-square events, sinks into deep and effective cerebration. Can we, who realise this as a conscious and direct principle, do any less?I think the Guardians are sitting together a little way off, watching with grand interest, to see just how much of a mess mankind can make. Man is always given lavish supplies with which to create works of art that may prove equal in beauty and wonder to the universe itself. Man does not yet see art in these materials.He must open his eyes before the Powers are able to help him. The Guardians cannot operate against man's will, because their will and his will, including yours and mine right now, are of one piece. The will of the Guardians is better trained and cleaner, because more experienced.... When men cease to shout for different thingsfrom the same Father, they stand a chance of getting the Father's attention.
... Kings and presidents are the most hampered of men. Great generals are silly without their armies. To remove externals from us, torid our minds of the illusive and the inessential, is simply to clear us for action. Even a gunner, in taking aim, regards the object or enemy as an abstraction, and focuses his whole attention upon his own instrument, his sights. If he actually looks at the enemy, he will not hit him. The billiardist first glances over the entire table, then, to make a true shot, concentrates his full attention upon the tip of his own cue. Perhaps the great leader of armies does not regard individuals or see them as men, but as extensions of his own body, and in time of stress, he has forgotten them completely save as abstract power for his use, and that use he determines interiorly. Even the most material-minded of men, in the crux of worldly and four-square events, sinks into deep and effective cerebration. Can we, who realise this as a conscious and direct principle, do any less?
I think the Guardians are sitting together a little way off, watching with grand interest, to see just how much of a mess mankind can make. Man is always given lavish supplies with which to create works of art that may prove equal in beauty and wonder to the universe itself. Man does not yet see art in these materials.
He must open his eyes before the Powers are able to help him. The Guardians cannot operate against man's will, because their will and his will, including yours and mine right now, are of one piece. The will of the Guardians is better trained and cleaner, because more experienced.... When men cease to shout for different thingsfrom the same Father, they stand a chance of getting the Father's attention.
We have had many astonishing hours in Chapel talking about these "Guardians," the arrangements above, as below, one Plan governing all. We do not care to bandy about the name of God a great deal, for we realise that He is most unseen when embodied in matter; that He is apt to be far from the mind that makes familiar with Him in words. Yet all stands for Him, all reveals Him. The farther we can see beyond mere eyesight, the more we realise that He isnotstanding exactly in person, just outside of the boundaries of matter.
There are hierarchies, so to speak. There are messengers and couriers and charioteers, saints, pilgrims, angels, courtiers, priests and politicians, grades and authorities represented there, such as we find in Matter and Romance here.... Shuk and Steve and I used to hypothecate the existence of a White Council back of all the religious movements of the world. By humour and analogy and romantic speculation, we arrived at the point of view that the world religions are one at the top, and that initiates, illuminati, masters are stationed at intervals to help humanity up the slopes. We conceived the White Council as a centre of wisdom love and power, holding up the cup continually for revelation, guiding and guarding humanity's soul. We glimpsed the fact that the leaders of theWhite Council might be beyond embodiment—at least in avoirdupois—the holy of all holy men. Only a most pure and potent messenger, we thought, would be permitted to reach this Inner Temple, this Shamballah, compared to which the Vatican is a salon open to the public and the monasteries of Thibet a concourse for pilgrims.
After religion, we realised that there must be an upper centre for all that is represented here below so diversely in politics and nationalism. It couldn't be God Himself back of the dumas and senates, reichstags, diets and parliaments. One does not pass from elevator-boy to editor in chief in a great commercial office. If there were a White Council back of all the religious movements of the world, there must be a Big Mill back of all world-politics—a gathering of directors, venturing to judge the problems of men because they had risen above them.... These men could want nothing material. We perceived them behind armies and thrones, manipulating kings and diplomats and secret centres, in ways that even the closest agents did not understand.
We concluded there must be another centre made up of the master-artists, bringing through into matter (as the world can stand it and as the little human instruments reach up for them), the great delivering beauties of song and story, paint and verse and tale. And this we called the Shop Itself. Sometimes we fancied that it wasall too much, even to dream of going there sometime to see the forms, the marbles, the canvases, the manuscripts—the Artists themselves.... And then we realised that, just as all the arts and all the religions and all the political movements were one at the top, that Politics and Art and Religion were one at the next eminence; that the Inner Council and the Big Mill and the Shop Itself were one at the top, just as Wisdom, Love and Power are; as Goodness, Beauty and Truth are; as Father, Son and Holy Spirit are—three in one at the Top, and that was Himself....
And then we would rise from Chapel and go out and look at the lake—Steve and Shuk and I.
Finally one day we were told that we had done some right good dreaming—that it was all true. We were advised that it was no affair of ours if other people didn't get it right away; that they would get it.... So we began to put these things in stories. They mean Romance to us. Queerly enough the stories are coming through—one long one especially, calledArcher, that shows the downhere activities of the Big Mill and the White Council and the Shop Itself.
I have said it often in this book—that our culture consists of the quantity of properties that we have tallied off—the within with the without. The Kingdom is within, also the King; the Sky and the Nest are one; one are the heavensand the homing heart that finds its peace in the deep vales where the adorable humanities come to be. The inmost and the uppermost are one.
We are where the torch of consciousness is.
We are in the body, or in the mind, or in the soul; we are in time or eternity, or we pass back and forth.... First we tally off the far outposts of the kingdoms without and within; first we are mere sentries learning to become clear-eyed and brave to stand alone—almost outsiders, having scarcely heard of the Kingdom, dimly conscious, but learning to become steady-eyed. Then we are called in a little—called in to become couriers on foot, running to and from among the outer provinces of the kingdom; then messengers to the Middle Countries; then Charioteers to the gates of the City; then ministers to the court of the King....
The day comes at last when we have audience with Him—when we rule with Him, when we become united with Him. From the throne Itself, then we perceive the outsiders, the sentries, the couriers, messengers, charioteers, the winged riders and the deep-down men of the dungeons.... With the fine tranquillity of power, we measure forth to all, reverence, justice and grace.
20BOYS AND DOGS
BOYS AND DOGS
Children of the new social order love strange creatures; they are passionate about the care and protection of animals, but until they are made to suffer, they are apt to be sceptical about the infallibility of their elders. They are usually forced into silence early. I have noted that their ideas are intrinsically at variance with parental ideas—about purity, sunlight, dancing, foods, religion, odours.... It takes a good man to break a horse or a dog. In a sensebreakis the word, although I would accomplish it with enchantment rather than a gad.... This is invariable: "When the pupil is ready—the Master appears——" an old occult saying, and another: "The first thing the Master does, is to break the back of his disciple——"
Stiffness of opinion, rigidity of holding to that which one has, preconception, deep-rutted habits of mind—all these are fatal to that swift andsplendid growth of the disciple when he first finds his teacher. For days the child is in a bewildering series of changes—made over new each fortnight—reviewing lives of experience—razing the old structures to the very footings for new temples of mind and soul. The child must be ready to give himself—must give himself utterly. The essential reverence is first required; the self is broken for all births; one gives one's self to gain all. I would not try to quicken a child who doubted what I was saying; and yet I have never sought to make myself unerring or infallible. I like to have the young ones make humour of my frailties, and at the same time believe there is something priceless in our better moments together. There is no possibility of front or acting.
I seek to make them practise the presence of the Divine in themselves. I tell them never to do anything alone that they would not do before me. I take away all sense of sin from them. I sometimes congratulate them on being especially close to us, because of mistakes. I seek to set them free in all their ways, stripping the last attraction from evil, jockeying them higher from a humorous and artistic point of view. I show them the banality of many popular and obvious evils, the dulness of paying the price for somethingoffform and of questionable taste.
There is a lot of humour and nobility about agood dog and a good boy together. John has been sleeping for a few nights in a bit of a cabin with an open door. He picked up a friend down on the beach somewhere, the same that he described as "World Man Dog" in one of his letters. I liked the tone of his voice as he talked with this old loafer named Seaweed.... One evening I was sitting on the hill above the cabin, so still that even a bird would have mistaken me for a part of the landscape.
World Man Dog came up the cabin grade. His head was down—thinking. His tail was straight out behind him, as a dog's tail is when very much engaged with his own thoughts. You could see that he was going to keep an appointment; it was evident that he was afraid he might be late. He did not see me, so completely was he engrossed in his own affairs. He went right on up to John's door, entered, gave a look round the shack, first eagerly, then to make sure. His face fell, his body sagged—down he slumped in the middle of the floor—utterly dejected. As plain as day:
"Hell,—he ain't here!"
A real dog trainer is a wise man. I used to raise collies and was around the benches some—watching the champions come and go. One old trainer talked to me:
"Styles change in dogs," he said, "but a good dog doesn't change. He goes on and on. Youdon't get the good collies here on the benches any more. This year they want the collie so fine that we have to pinch the brain out of his head and break his lung-room in two. Last year we bred for hair, not for body and brain. Look at that one——"
He pointed to an old sire that had three seasons of the bench and blue, a sweeper of prizes. I remember the time when such a head would have started a stealer anywhere. The old collie had not lost form, but styles had changed. A most stupid dog with a straight, narrow head had won—not the shepherd type at all, but the head of a Russian wolf-hound—a bit of the monster left in it, a drugged look in the small black eyes; hysteria there, and not fealty—madness and not soul.
"We breed them for the cities now—for porches and parlours," the trainer added. "Yes, those great collie strains that we have been nurturing for centuries to all that is brave and hard and useful—we are putting the hair of the lap-dog on them now—long silky stuff, not for snow and sleet. The collie walks by himself these days. No, we won't altogether ruin the strain. Many individuals are spoiled, but the race had come too far and too long to be broken down by a few years of fancyfying."
Of course, I was thinking of the children atevery stage of the talk—of city people and children. As a race, the city-bred have become too fine. Life has worn them thin—given them the drugged look about the eyes. The race will never get far in the art of living until it comes home to the land and the restful distances and free flowing airs. This is so true that it seems to risk wearing the eye and the mind—to say it again....
It's good to see them—a boy and a dog together in the hills or down by the edges of the land. There was a piece of decent collie in a dog named Jack back on the lake shore. He was long in strength and courage, but a bit shy in obedience. As a work-dog, he was ruined by a man who knew less than he did, frequently the case in bringing up dogs and men—whipped at the wrong time, every forming endeavour in the pup-brain broken by that. He is seven or eight years old now ... a clean dog, a very wise and kind dog, with a sly and quiet humour that seldom is cruel and never falls into horse play—a lover of many children and confident of an open door in many homes.
I remember the dignity and beauty of his first appearance over the bank from the shore, almost timed to our arrival. We were tender to the collie in general, having passed years with them. Jack moved from one to another accepting embraces with a kindliness that mellowed that cloudy day. There was joy about it all. I stood back waitingmy turn with much self-control. He submitted to the welcome—to the last detail, and a little later refused refreshments with perfect courtesy.
When we came back the second summer, we found that a bullet had broken Jack's right front leg. He had wintered out at times, had known much pain. It was not that he did not have good friends who would have taken him in, but I think Jack lost faith a bit in the pain and stress. There was grey about his muzzle. One day he sat in the centre of the little Chapel class.
"I'd like to be as good a man as Jack is a dog," one of the boys said.
"You'd be one more man," said another.
The fact is Jack has filled his circle rather well. This thought came to me presently with fuller meaning. I regarded him with knowledge of three seasons. A clean dog, a gentleman, a master of himself, very courageous and slow to anger, impossible for small children to anger—a dog among dogs, but more than dog among men.
"Hehasfilled his circle," I said aloud. "What makes a man look less in these very virtues that Jack has mastered, is that a man's circle is larger, and he has not reached the time of fulfilment as Jack has. If the dog's accomplishments were suddenly lifted from his circle and placed in a larger one, we would not be conscious of the fine integration of virtues that keep us interested now."
Men, lost in the complications of cities, yearn for the simplicity of their early days on the farms; and yet they could not go back. The simplicity they yearn for is ahead. That of the old country days is but a symbol of the cosmic simplicity in store for us. Tolstoi turned back to the peasants, yet the simplicity he craved was not there.
The peasants are merely potential of what the New Race will be; the peasants themselves must suffer the transition—must have their circle widened and feel their little laws and their little sense of order suddenly diffused over broad, strange surfaces. Their cosmic simplicity will appear when the larger dimension is put in order. That which is lovely in any plane of being, is that which is in flower—when it has about filled its present circle. We are not less, intrinsically, because our values are placed in a larger vessel, though we have a renovating sense of our own insignificance. There is an order of small men, so obviously a part of their very narrowness, that it becomes instantly repulsive to larger souls. Many of the latter have flashed off to the end of their tether for the time, preferring chaos, to the two by two neatness of small-templed men.
A secret of growth lies in these observations. We fill a certain circle, restoring a kind of order in the chaos; and then the circle is suddenly widened and that which was our order and mastery is loose and diffused within the larger orbit. Herein are the pangs of transition. We lose our way for the time in the vaster area, like a man who is unfamiliar with an estate just purchased. There is but one thing to do—to begin to work upon the new dimension. As we work, courage and patience steal in. Presently comes the vision of the completed circle. When this comes, our labour is pinned to a fresh ideal, and we are safe.
In a hundred ways I have found it true that the vision comes in the labouring hours. One may move for weeks about his new estate (or manuscript), planning this and that, but the glimpse of the cohering whole is denied him, until he has actually begun upon the nearest or most pressing task. This is the miraculous benefit of action again. In giving ourselves forth in action, the replenishment comes. The sense of self ceases to clutter the faculties as we bend and toil.
The days that are added to our experience each bring this story in a different way: that the sense of self impedes reality on every hand; that the loss of the sense of self in labour and service renders us instantly quick to the animations of the spirit, without which at least from time to time, a man belongs to the herd, and is lost, like all gregarious creatures, in the will of his superiors.
21THE MAN WHO FOUND PEACE
THE MAN WHO FOUND PEACE
There is a man here who has found peace. I made a pilgrimage to his house. A boy from the village went with me part of the way up the mountain. The Pacific was presently visible upon the right hand, and a spacious verdant valley on the left. I lingered a moment on the trail, rejoicing in the quiet splendour, and then noticed a vine-clad hut still farther up the slope.
"That's Mr. Dreve's cabin," the boy said.
I learned from him that this man Dreve was well-loved in the village and in the big city beyond; that he was a very different man now from the one who had come here a few years ago; that he was torn and maddened then, cursing God, but too stubborn to kill himself.
"What helped him?" said I, because the boy had paused.
"Well, it wasn't the climate," he answered.
I saw he was wondering if I were worth risking the truth upon.
"Did he fight it out with himself?" I asked carelessly.
"Yes," said the boy, and I now met a fine straight pair of eyes....
There was an old sharp wedge to the story. Dreve's sweetheart had died—the loss twisting him to the point almost of insanity. He had climbed this mountain, it was said, and remained for three days, until the town began to search. The marshal had found him sitting up there, where the shack is now. Dreve was quiet and normal, but confessed himself hungry. He had returned to the mountain soon afterward, and built his cabin. In six months, Dreve was all changed over. He seemed to have a new body and new mind.
"You said he's here four days a week," I suggested.
"Yes, he goes to the city. He has a good business, but has mastered it to the point that several younger men can run it. Dreve only gives two or three days a week to business affairs, though he has been a great worker——"
"He's up there now?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Does he mind strangers?"
"Not your kind."
I thanked him, and added, "Tell me—he means a lot to you, doesn't he?"
"All a man could," said the boy. "I'm going back now."
Dreve was middle-aged, clean-shaven, deep-eyed. Time had been driven to truce in his case. His face showed many battles, but when he spoke, a kind of new day dawned and you looked into the face of a boy. I remained with him three days. We talked of the new magic in the training of children. We talked of the New Age and the great song of joy and peace that would break across the world when troops turned home.
Dreve hadsomething. He seemed to breathe something out of the air that other men's lungs aren't trained for. He seemed to havewithineverything necessary for a human being, including vision and humour and a firm grasp of the world. He was at peace about God and the world; at peace also about death. Slowly it dawned upon me that this man had walked arm in arm with life to the last abyss, and that life had been forced to confess that she had nothing worse to offer, whereupon the two had become fast friends.
When a man can sit tight and lose everything he formerly wanted in the sense of world possessions; when he has winnowed the last shams outof the things calledfameandconventionandsociety; when he has lost the woman who means all the world to him, and still loves her memory and her soul better than the living presence of any other woman; when he has come to realise that death contains everything he wants, yet is content to wait for it—the idea of hell becomes a boyish thing to be put away, and Lucifer returns to his old place as a Son of the Morning.
We stood together in the noon sun. Dreve did not even wear a hat.
"I came here in great shadow and could not bear the light," he said. "But one day I found my heart lifting a little as the sun came out. Then I found that it was really true—that sunlight helped me. The more I thought about it, the more I needed it; the more I loved it, the more its particular excellence for me unfolded. Take anything to the light, and it ceases to be formidable. Sickness is a confession. The time is at hand when schools will teach that. Sickness is a confession of ignorance which is a lack of light. If one is weak he cannot stand the light. Transplanted things must be protected from the light. St. Paul on the road to Damascus did not have enough inner light to endure the great flash from without. Light works upon evil like quicklime—that's why sunlight hurts the sick ones. It is also hostile to the utterly stupid idea of what clothing is for—clothing that thwarts and strangles every circulatory process of the flesh. There's nothing the matter with sunlight——"
The sun had not only redeemed the physical shadows of Dreve's life, but symbolised the spiritual light which had come to him with the calm and power of the greater noon-day. He did not speak in exact statements of the one who was gone, but that romance, too, was like light about his head. I thought of the wonderful thing that Beatrice said which helped to heal the forlorn heart of her great lover:
"I will make you forever, with me, a citizen of that Rome whereof Christ is a Roman——"
And I thought of the Blessed Damosel leaning over the barrier of heaven with sweet and immortal messages for him who waited below in the very core of earth's agony. In passing, the great lovewomen bridge the Unseen for their lovers, who in their turn give to the world the mighty documents of the human heart. In passing, this woman had become everything to Dreve, so that I, a stranger, felt that he was not alone but twice-powered. All his life was a prayer to her. He brought to her spirit now the greatest gift that man can bring to his mate—the love of the world through her heart.
We had walked down to the ocean. Many young people were bathing in the surf or playing on the strand. It was the presence of Dreve perhaps, but I confess that human beings never before looked so wonderful to me—a fearlessness and candour and beauty about the moving groups that was like a vision of the future. All smallness of self was smoothed away in the grand harmony of sun and sand and sea.
"It's a kind of challenge to a war-stricken world, isn't it?" he asked quietly. "Aren't they splendid together—the big boys and girls of California?... Don't misunderstand me. I know the world. I'm not lost in dreams. I know well the darkness of the world. But there are great ones among the boys and girls playing together here. All are on the road, but the great ones of the Reconstruction are already here in the world—playing.
"Great ones play," he repeated. "First we are labourers, then artisans, then artists, then workers—at last we learn to play. That means that we dare to be ourselves, wherein lies our real value to others—when we dare to become as little children.... Hear them laugh.... You wouldn't think this was the saddest little planet in the universe.... Look at that tall young pair of sunburnt giants! She's a Diana, conquesting again. Look at the wonder in his eyes! Perhaps it is just dawning upon him that the man who walks with this girl must walk to God.
"... Oh, yes, I know," he added laughingly, "there is flippancy and a touch of the uncouth here and there—but we have all played clumsily at first."
I continually marvelled at Dreve's remarkable health. His stride up the mountain-side was actually buoyant.
"Did you ever feel that you could live as long as you pleased?" he asked.
"No."
"I think one does not learn this until after one has wanted to die. One must live above the body and not in it—in order to make it serve indefinitely—quite the same as you would climb above a street to watch a parade go by."
I put that thought away for contemplation, knowing that it belonged to a certain mystery of Dreve's regeneration.
"You know," he added, "one has to get very tired to want to die. Those young people down on the shore—they want to live. They are not tired. They want to cross all the rivers. They mean to miss nothing down here. They can't see through it all. It challenges them. But the time comes when everything on earth seems to betray. Then you have to turn to the Unseen for the big gamble. The world is learning it rapidly to-day. Look——"
We had reached his hill-cabin.
He turned from the sea to the valley. Night was falling. There was a big moss-rose plant that smelled like a harvest apple, and filled all the slope with sweet dry fragrance. There wasa constancy about it, and the great sun-shot hill was blessed with the light and creativeness of the long day. It was like the song of finished labour from a peasant's heart.... One forgot the world, the war, forgot that the holy heart of humanity was in intolerable travail.... The valley that Dreve now pointed to was like an English pastorale. It had the look of age and long sweet establishment in the dusk. My friend was quick to catch the thought in my mind.
"... It is like England," he said. "There was a development of detail in English country-life as nowhere else. I think of cherries and cattle, of strawberries with clotted cream, of sheep-dogs and sheep-tended downs and lawns, of authoritative cookery, natural service and Elizabethan inns.... Everything was regular and comfortable. One forgot to-morrow and yesterday in England before the war. I heard a dog-trainer, speaking of a pup, say, 'He's a fine indiwidual, but his breeding isn't exactly reglar.' ... With a rush it came to me that nothing in the world is regular now. England isn't a soothing pastorale any more—everything changed, demoralised—but only for the present."
The dusk was stealing down from the far ridges. Our eyes were lost in the California valley which seemed to be growing deeper in the thickness of night. Almost as Dreve spoke, I expected tohear vesper bells from some Kentish village. His low voice finished the picture:
"Country roads and sheep upon the lawns, vine-finished stone-work, doves in the towers and under the eaves, evening bells and honest goods.... I think of the ships going forth from England, boys from the inland countries answering the call of the sea and finding their fore-and-afters and men-of-war in Plymouth or Bristol.... You know it is the things that make the romance of a country that endure? All these will come again. All the good and perfect things of the spirit of old England will come again.... Our hearts burn within to think of the yearning in the world for a peaceful valley like this.... Think, if I could take your hand now and watch the sun go down upon a peaceful world ... hear the cattle coming home and sheep in the perfumed mist of evening ... doves under the eaves and the sleepy voices of children.... I think Europe would fall to screaming and tears, and then lose its madness for strife—if the big picture of our valley at evening were placed before the battle-lines as we see it now."
Dreve stared a moment longer. I fancied I saw a bone-white line under the tan, running from chin to jaw.
"A woman was leaving her lover," he added. "It had to be so. Each knew that. Just as she was going, the woman said, 'I forget—I forgetwhy I have to go away.' ... It would be that way with the soldiers, if they could look down upon their own valleys and farms. They would forget war and hurry down, saying, 'I'm coming!'"
I wanted to get closer to Dreve's secret of peace and power. I wanted to tell it. Apparently Dreve wanted me to. Now, there's a price to pay for these big things, but many are willing to pay the price if the way is clear. Dreve had suffered all he could; then something had turned within him, and he found himself in Day again instead of Death.
"It must be told differently," he began. "For instance, if I should tell you that the way is to love your neighbour as yourself, you wouldn't have anything. Whitman said, 'Happiness is the efflux of soul,' which is exactly true, but it didn't help me until I had experience. Happiness is the loss of the sense of self. You can see that clearly. All pleasure-seeking is to forget self. We loosen something inside that sets us free for a moment, and we say we've had a good time.
"There are great powers within. The greater the man, the more he uses this fact. We thought of steam as a finished power until the big straight-line force of electricity was released. We can't explain it, but we have touched certain of the laws which it obeys. The materialist is inclined, asever, to say that electricity is the last force to be uncorked on the planet, just as he said that the kerosene lamp was the last word in illumination. The occultist declares that there are still higher and hotter forces, touching Light itself, and indulging in the laughter of curves and decoration where the cold monster electricity moves only in straight lines.
"Men have died to tell the story that happiness is radiation, not reflection—that we have it all inside, if we could only turn it loose—that all pain and fear and anger and self-illusion disappear the instant we enter the larger dimension of life, exactly as the moon goes out of sight in the presence of the incandescent sun.
"I was emptied of all that life meant in the world—but something new flooded in. I saw that all was not lost, but that all was greater than I could dream; that all was waiting for fuller and finer expression. I saw that what I could do for you, or for any man or woman or child, brought me a living force of the love I was dying for. It became clear that I needed only to clear away the choking evil of self, in order to feel that I was a part of the tender and mighty Plan,—to touch the rhythm of the Source, from which all songs and heroisms and martyrdoms come.
"It has all been said again and again. There comes a moment usually after much pain when the human mind realises that it is invincible whenworking with the Plan; that it may even merge with a kind of Divine Potency yet retain itself; that it can actually perform its actions with the help of that mighty fluid energy in which the stars are swung and the avatars are born.
"A cold monster indeed is this electricity compared to the odic force, the dynamo of which is the human will. But the magic of it all lies in the reverse of the whole system of use. This force destroys when used for self, but constructs when it is turned outward. Here we touch the law again that happiness is in radiation—in the loss of the sense of self—in incandescence—"
Dreve smiled at me with sudden revealing charm. "I would say that it was all in loving one's neighbour," he added, "except that it has been said so much.... It is true. You seemed to know it to-day on the shore. You seemed to see the great ones passing there. If the world could only know the joy of seeing the sons of God in the eyes of passing men!"
Night had come. We sat at the doorway of his cabin, a waver of firelight within, stars clearing above the misty sea.
"It's all play when one gets into the Plan—all pain while one resists the Plan," Dreve added slowly. "I used to think that I had a strong will; that I had good will-force, as men go. It was the will of an invalid child. If men could onlyknow the force that is theirs to use when they enter the Stream! One is asked to give up old habits and ways and propensities—but only because they are harmful and impeding. All which really belongs is merely obscured for the time. It returns to you with fresh loveliness and power. One does not give up three-space to understand four-space. The truth is he must rise above the former to see it all.
"It isn't you and I who matter," he said abruptly, after a pause. "These things are for all. I know what comes afterward—to a man or to a nation—when driven to the last ditch of pain. A new dimension of power comes. That's what happens. That's what the New Age is all about. That's what the war means. We shall learn our new chastity. We shall emerge as a race into a more serene and splendid consciousness.... The price—the dead.... I could tell you something about that. One must have prayed for death to know about that. Don't think of that now—only take it from me, or from your own soul, that the big Plan is all right—thatTheyhaven't made any mistakes yet—that the loved one is only away for a time—busy—quite right—about the Father's business. Another time for that.
"I can't forget them down on the Shore," Dreve finished. "That was play. It was all a laugh down there. The big forces and the big peopleare always a part of laughter. The laugh will take you to the throne. The Gods laugh.... There's a laugh that ends pain. There's a laugh that challenges power. There is the laugh of the aroused lover in the world. We shall hear the laugh of the world itself, when the big revelation breaks upon us all that the Plan is good—that the Plan is for joy."