and developed, would lift one to higher planes and induce in him such an
accession of activities and energies as to fairly transform his entire
being and achievement. This would be effected, too, on an absolutely
normal plane. The development of the spiritual faculties is just as
normal as is that of the intellectual. And it is to this development
that we must look for the true communion with those who have passed into
the Unseen. The objective life must be spiritualized. The soul can come
into a deeper realization of its own dignity and the worth of its higher
nature; can discern the spiritual efficiency, the energy commensurate to
every draft upon it.
All, however, that is done by the highest phase of hypnotism, as exerted
by Doctor Quackenbos, can be done by auto-suggestion. The soul has only
to call upon its own higher forces. It has only to act from love and
compassion,--from sympathy and generous aims, and all the infinite power
of the Divine world is at its service.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Service of the Gods.]
"We had letters to send; couriers could not go fast enough, not far
enough; broke their wagons, foundered their horses; bad roads in spring,
snowdrifts in winter, heats in summer; could not get the horses out of a
walk.
"But we found out that the air and earth were full of Electricity, and
always going our way--just the way we wanted to send. _Would he take a
message?_ Just as lief as not; had nothing else to do; would carry it in
no time. Only one doubt occurred one staggering objection--he had no
carpet bag, no visible pockets, no hands, not so much as a mouth, to
carry a letter. But, after much thought and many experiments, we managed
to meet the conditions, and to fold up the letter in such invisible,
compact form as he could carry in those invisible pockets of his, never
wrought by needle and thread--and it went like a charm.
"Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor,
to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chores done by the gods
themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might
of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light,
magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day, and cost us nothing."
With his wonderful insight into conditions, Emerson thus expresses a
provision of conditions that are now being realized to an even greater
degree than he consciously knew, although he unconsciously foretold
them. Now it is wireless telegraphy that is the ultimate fulfilment of
what he saw,--the method that will reduce to practical realization his
counsel to hitch one's wagon to a star, and "see his chores done by the
gods themselves."
It is not only humanity--civilization--the onward sweep and march by the
progress of the world, but the individual life also that can take
advantage of "the might of the elements." The one irresistible element
is the power of will, the power that results from the perfect uniting of
the human will with the divine will. People talk of fate, and
conditions, and burdens, and limitations. They are all merely negative,
and are easily and instantly subject to the infinite and irresistible
potency of the will brought to bear upon them.
On the threshold of any endeavor when one takes account of his
possessions and conditions,--material and immaterial; when he again,
from a new vantage ground, surveys his future, it is his salvation and
success to realize the depth and height of his own personal power over
his own life.
"There are points from which we may command our life,
When the soul sweeps the future like a glass,
And coming things, full freighted with our fate,
Jut out on the dark offing of the mind."
But when these points appear they must be taken advantage of at the
moment. They are the result of an occultation of events that may never
occur again within the limits of a lifetime. The swift intuition that
leaps over all conceivable processes is the heaven-appointed monitor. It
is the divine voice speaking. It is the word which must be obeyed. When
one
"... by the Vision splendid
Is on his way attended,"
he must give heed to the vision or it vanishes and returns no more.
We need a new, a deeper, a far more practical realization that the
ideals and visions which flash before us are the real mechanism of life;
that they are the working model by which one is to pattern his
experience, in outward selection and in grouping by means of his own
force of will. Somewhere has Emerson said,--
"All is waste and worthless till
Arrives the wise selecting will,"
which is, to the potential circumstances, like a magnet introduced among
filings that suddenly attracts to itself and draws all into related and
orderly groups. Circumstances are thus amenable to the power of will
brought to bear that selects, arranges, combines, after the pattern of
the revealed ideal held in view.
Each individual life may "borrow the might of the elements." Man is
created, not only in the image of God, but with God-like faculties and
potency, which, if he but truly relate them to the divine potency, if he
unite his will with God's will, there is then no limit, no bound to that
which he may achieve.
In one of the most wonderful creations of Vedder, the artist shows us
the figure of a woman whose eyes are closed, and whose hands, lying in
her lap, are inextricably entangled amid crewels and threads that bind
and hold them. But one sees, also, that she has but to open her eyes,
and lift her hands, and all the entanglement would fall off of itself.
The picture offers the most typical lesson of life. All imprisonment of
conditions is dissolved into thin air the instant one impresses his own
will-power on the affairs and circumstances of his life. He _can_ do
that which he _desires_ to do. The desire has only to be intensified
into conscious, intelligent choice, into absolute will,--and all the
minor barriers melt away and are no more. Every life may hitch its wagon
to a star. It may borrow the might of the elements. It has but to
resolve to hold its ideal firmly and clearly in mind, and it will then
be realized as the sculptor's dream in clay is realized in the marble.
"All things are yours," said Saint Paul. One has but to take his own; to
wisely and clearly select the elements and combine them by that
irresistible potency of mental magnetism and energy.
THE POWER OF THE EXALTED MOMENT.
"The salvation of Christ is the complete occupation of the human
life by the divine life."
_It is in our best moments, not in our worst moments, that we are
most truly ourselves. Oh believe in your noblest impulses, in your
purest instincts, in your most unworldly and spiritual thoughts!
You see man most truly when he seems to you to be made for the best
things. You see your true self when you believe that the best and
purest and devoutest moment which ever came to you is only the
suggestion of what you were meant to be and might be all the time.
Believe that, O children of God! This is the way in which a soul
lives forever in the light which first began to burn around it when
it was with Jesus in the Holy Mount._--PHILLIPS BROOKS.
The power of the exalted moment is the very motor of human life. The
exalted moment is the dynamo that generates the working energy. The
moment itself fades; it passes into the region of memory where its true
service is to shine, with the unfailing continuance of radium, as a
perpetual illumination of life. It is the greatest, the saddest, the
most hopelessly fatal error that can be made,--to cast away from one the
exalted moment because it has not fulfilled itself in outer condition
and circumstance. Vision and prophecy are given by God for a working
model, which the long patient days--days of monotony, of trial, of
commonplace work under commonplace conditions, amid commonplace people
and events--are yet to fashion and fulfil. These are the material,--the
ordinary events, the commonplace daily duty. The perplexity of problems
rather than the clear grasping of their significance; the
misunderstanding and the misconstruction of motive that make the tragedy
of life; the interpretation of evil where one only meant all that was
true, and sympathetic, and appreciative, and holy; the torture and
trial, where should be only sweetness of spirit and true
recognition,--of all these are the days made; all these are a part of
"the flowing conditions of life," which it is the business, the
responsibility, the personal duty, to transmute into noble living, into
poetry and ecstasy and exaltation, and into that perfect faith in God
that can truly say, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Though
He slay all that made life seem worth the living; the enchantment, the
response of sympathy; recognition rather than misconstruction,--though
all these be obscured in what may seem a total eclipse,--still let one
not forget "The Gleam;" still let one keep faith with the power of the
exalted moment. It came from God and held its deep significance. It laid
upon its beholder consecration of divinest aspiration and unfaltering
effort. "If I could uncover the hearts of you who are listening to me
this morning," said Phillips Brooks, in a memorable sermon, "I should
find in almost all--perhaps in all--of them a sacred chamber where burns
the bright memory of some loftiest moment, some supreme experience,
which is your transfiguration time. Once on a certain morning you felt
the glory of living, and the misery of life has never since that been
able quite to take possession of your soul. Once for a few days you knew
the delight of a perfect friendship. Once you saw for an inspired
instant the idea of your profession blaze out of the midst of its dull
drudgery. Once, just for a glorious moment, you saw the very truth, and
believed it, without the shadow of a cloud. And so the question
comes,--What do they mean? What value shall I give to those
transformation experiences?"
On the personal answer to that question depends all the success or the
failure; all the nobleness or the unworthiness of the individual life.
No one can estimate too ardently, or too earnestly, the spiritual
salvation of keeping faith with the exalted moment,--
"Delayed, it may be, for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse--not a few,
With much to learn and much to forget"--
ere the golden hour of fulfilment shall come; but faith in the exalted
moment is but another name for faith in God.
The great truth of life--that which we may well hold as its central and
controlling and dominating truth--is that "our best moments are not
departures from ourselves, but are really the only moments in which we
have truly been ourselves." These moments flash upon the horizon of the
soul and vanish; they image themselves before us as in vision, and fade;
but the fact of their appearance is its own proof of their deep reality.
They are the substance compared with which all the lower and lesser
experiences are mere phantasmagoria.
And this fulfilment is not found, but made. It is a spiritual
achievement. So let one not reject, or ignore, or be despairing before
undreamed-of, unexplained, and incomprehensible forms of trial, but know
that it is trial that worketh patience; know that "no chastening for the
present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous; nevertheless, afterward it
yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness unto them which are
exercised thereby."
"It was given unto me," wrote Dante in the _Vita Nuova_, "to behold a
very wonderful vision; wherein I saw things that determined me."
It may be given to any one at any time to behold the vision.
Circumstances are fluidic and impressionable, and take on any form that
the mental power has achieved sufficient strength to stamp, and because
of this--which is the explanation of the outward phenomena whose
significance, on the spiritual side, is all condensed in prayer--one
need never despond or despair. At any instant he can so unite his own
will with the divine will that new combinations of event and
circumstance will appear in his life. A writer on this line of thought
has recently said:--
"There is an elemental essence--a strange living essence--which
surrounds us on every side, and which is singularly susceptible to
the influence of human thought.
"This essence responds with the most wonderful delicacy to the
faintest action of our minds or desires, and this being so, it is
interesting to note how it is affected when the human mind
formulates a definite, purposeful thought or wish."
There is a phase of occult thought represented at its best by Mr. C. W.
Leadbeater of London, and at its worst by a host of miscellaneous
writers, whose speculations are more or less grotesque and devoid of
every claim to attention, who materialize thought and purpose, and
invest it with an organism which they name "an elemental," and one finds
Mr. Leadbeater saying things like this, of the results of an intensely
held thought:--
"The effect produced is of the most striking nature. The thought
seizes upon the plastic essence, and moulds it instantly into a
living being of appropriate form,--a being which when once thus
created is in no way under the control of its creator, but lives
out a life of its own, the length of which is proportionate to the
intensity of the thought or wish which called it into existence. It
lasts, in fact, just as long as the thought force holds it
together."
Mr. Leadbeater continues:--
"Still more pregnant of results for good or evil are a man's
thought about other people, for in that case they hover not about
the thinker, but about the object of the thought. A kindly thought
about any person or any earnest wish for his good will form and
project toward him a friendly artificial elemental; if the wish be
a definite one, as, for example, that he may recover from some
sickness, then the elemental will be a force ever hovering over him
to promote his recovery, or to ward off any influence that might
tend to hinder it, and in doing this it will display what appears
like a very considerable amount of intelligence and adaptability,
though really it is simply a force acting along the line of the
least resistance--pressing steadily in one direction all the time,
and taking advantage of any channel that it can find, just as the
water in a cistern would in a moment find the one open pipe among a
dozen closed ones, and proceed to empty itself through that."
This train of speculation, which if one is to reject he must first
confront, is demoralizing. It leads nowhere save into mental quagmires
and quicksands. It leads into materiality and not into spirituality. Of
course with all this the one question is as to whether such conceptions
are true; but judged by intuition, which is the Roentgen ray of
spirit--judged by the data reached by scholars and thinkers, by
psychologists and scientists--it has no claim to recognition. That
thought is the most intense form of energy, its potency far exceeding
that of even electricity, is certainly true, and that one can think
himself--or another person--into new and different outward phases and
circumstances is most true.
Tesla, in a paper discussing the problem of how to increase the sum of
human energy, considers the possibility of the existence of organized
beings under conditions impossible for us. "We cannot even positively
assert that some are not present in this, our world, in the very midst
of us," he says, "for their constitution and life manifestation may be
such that we are unable to perceive them."
This speculative possibility opens the gate to the scientific
recognition of the truth that "all the company of heaven" may companion
us, here and now, in the terrestrial life, invisible, intangible,
inaudible to the perceptions of sense. It may largely be through their
ministry and mediation that the unforeseen and unexpected opportunities,
privileges, gifts fall upon man,--gifts that the gods provide.
Dreams, visions, and ideals are given that they may be realized. The
vision is projected from the higher spiritual realm as the working
model, the pattern of the life here. A dream is something to be carried
out; not put aside and neglected and lost in over-lying and
ever-accumulating stratas of experience. The dream, once clearly
recognized, becomes a personal responsibility. It has been revealed for
a purpose. It is the Divine revelation to the individual life, and these
visions are given to the individual as well as to humanity, and they are
the most significant occurrences in the entire experience of life. To
once clearly recognize this divine ideal, this glorious vision of
possibilities that shines once and for all upon the individual, and then
to turn away from it and leave it unrealized in the outward life: to put
it by, because the effort to transform the vision into external and
visible conditions is surrounded with difficulties and invested with
perplexities, is to wander into the maze of confusion. Difficulties are
merely incidental. They are neither here nor there. If God give the
dream He will lead the way. If He gives it, He means something by it,
and its significance should be appreciated and taken into life as a
working energy. It is the will of the Lord, and to pray sincerely that
the Divine will be done, is also to accept the obligation of entering
into the doing of it. Indeed, difficulties and perplexities in the way
do not count and should not. Briars and brambles there will always be,
but one's path lies onward all the same. Who would relinquish a right
purpose because its achievement were hard? All the more should he press
on and gain the strength of the obstacles that he overcomes.
Doctor William T. Harris says, "Realize your ideals quickly." That is,
an ideal is a responsibility; it is the working model that God has set
before the individual; the pattern after which and by which he shall
shape his life. If he accept and follow it with fidelity and energy;
with that energy born of absolute faith in the Divine leading,--he will
find himself miraculously led; he will find that the obstacle which
appears so insurmountable in perspective vanishes as he comes near; that
a way is made, a path appears.
It chanced to the writer of these papers to take a long day's stage
drive one summer through the Colorado mountain region. For a distance of
forty-five miles the solitary road wound on and on, ever ascending
through the dreamy, purple mountains. The entire route was a series of
vistas that apparently came to an abrupt end at the base of an
insurmountable height. The mountain wall seemed to utterly arrest
progress, as it rose across the ascending valley through which the
driver urged his "four-in-hand," and no way to pass beyond the next
mountain ahead could possibly be discerned. But as the stage drew near,
a way, unseen before, revealed itself, and the winding road found its
outlet and onward course in another valley opening by a natural pass
between the hills, and one that apparently in its turn was as inevitably
blocked at its end by another mountain range. It was a constant interest
to watch the changing landscape and discover the new ways that
constantly came in sight as fast as the need for them came. That day
amid the dreamy purple of the Colorado mountains was one to translate
itself into renewed trust in the Divine guidance on the journey of life.
Some wonderful words of Phillips Brooks seemed to write themselves on
the air:--
"Look up, poor soul, out of the valley and know that on the top of
yonder shining mountain lies folded safe the secret of your life,
the oracle which would, if you could read it, solve all your
mysteries and tell you just exactly how you ought to live. Look up
out of the valley and know that it is there; and then turn back
again into the valley, for in the valley is the home where you must
live, and you can never read the oracle which you know is there
upon the mountain top."
That day, alone with the mountains and with God, was one to leave its
impress forever upon life. It was a day of solutions as well as of
impressions--of solutions of the problem of living. One has but to
follow the path that God has revealed to him, and however insurmountable
the difficulties that seem to hedge him in and to limit his progress,
they vanish as they are drawn near, and a way is revealed.
[Sidenote: Obey the Vision.]
To forsake a dream as being impracticable and impossible of realization
is to take the wrong turning in life, like one who leaves the mountain
road,--which winds in and out of the passes, on and on, and leads to a
definite place at last,--and, because he sees an apparently impassable
mountain wall across the path, forsakes this and wanders off into some
other valley and defile that looks more open, but in whose mazes he
loses himself and makes no progress toward his true destination.
No,--when the vision shines suddenly upon one's life, it is God's call
to him to realize in it outward expression. The difficulties that hedge
it round about will vanish as he approaches them. A dream is given to be
realized. It is the working model that God sends into one's life for
that full expression which alone is at once his best service and truest
success. It is the common daily work of fulfilling duties add meeting
claims. "Not by the exceptional," says Maeterlinck, "shall the last word
ever be spoken; and, indeed, what we call the sublime should be only a
clearer, profounder insight into all that is perfectly normal." It is of
service, often, to watch those on the peaks who do battle; but it is
well, too, not to forget those in the valley below who fight not at all.
As we see all that happens to these whose life knows no struggle; as we
realize how much must be conquered in us before we can rightly
distinguish their narrower joys from the joy known to them who are
striving on high, then, perhaps does the struggle itself appear to
become less important; but, for all that, we love it the more. This
normal fulfilment of the due claims of ordinary life leads to that order
of success which is a beautiful and desirable one, and which is almost a
universal aim and purpose. Aspirations and energy are its factors, and
these are of all various and varying degrees of excellence according to
the specific aim in view. Success itself, therefore, is merely a
representative term, and may be used regarding almost every variety of
achievement, from the triumphant winning of a game of football, the
making of a great fortune, the attainment of professional or political
rank, the production of great art, the acquirement of world-wide fame,
or the achievement of character that is potent for fine and ennobling
influence. All these are typical of myriad forms of the thing the world
calls success, and while it involves a vast amount of competition, of
selfishness, of greed, of injustice, it is yet a matter of the progress
of humanity that each individual should strive after the highest form
of attainment that he is capable of conceiving. In the long run, and as
a general principle, this is advantageous and desirable. It involves and
indeed develops many of the lower and baser qualities; but these are the
tares among the wheat, and the wheat is essential. The great enterprise
that builds a railway across the continent, tunneling under mountains,
or climbing the precipitous inclines; that inaugurates a new steamer
line, or that exerts itself for the founding of institutions for culture
or technical instruction; that concerns itself with municipal reforms
and improvements,--all these expressions of energy are manifestations of
successful effort, and are necessary to the onward march of
civilization. Yet the visible achievement is not, after all, the
realization of the highest ideal of success.