I remember when a boy lying on my back in the grass, gazing into the
summer blue above me, and wishing that I could melt into it,--become
a part of it. For these fancies I believe that a religious tutor was
innocently responsible: he had tried to explain to me, because of
certain dreamy questions, what he termed “the folly and the wickedness
of pantheism,”--with the result that I immediately became a pantheist,
at the tender age of fifteen. And my imaginings presently led me not
only to want the sky for a playground, but also to become the sky!
Now I think that in those days I was really close to a great
truth,--touching it, in fact, without the faintest suspicion of its
existence. I mean the truth that the wish _to become_ is reasonable in
direct ratio to its largeness,--or, in other words, that the more you
wish to be, the wiser you are; while the wish _to have_ is apt to be
foolish in proportion to its largeness. Cosmic law permits us very few
of the countless things that we wish to have, but will help us to become
all that we can possibly wish to be. Finite, and in so much feeble,
is the wish to have: but infinite in puissance is the wish to become;
and every mortal wish to become must eventually find satisfaction. By
wanting to be, the monad makes itself the elephant, the eagle, or the
man. By wanting to be, the man should become a god. Perhaps on this
tiny globe, lighted only by a tenth-rate yellow sun, he will not have
time to become a god; but who dare assert that his wish cannot project
itself to mightier systems illuminated by vaster suns, and there reshape
and invest him with the forms and powers of divinity? Who dare even say
that his wish may not expand him beyond the Limits of Form, and make him
one with Omnipotence? And Omnipotence, without asking, can have much
brighter and bigger play-things than the Moon.
Probably everything is a mere question of wishing,--providing that we
wish, not to have, but to be. Most of the sorrow of life certainly
exists because of the wrong kind of wishing and because of the
contemptible pettiness of the wishes. Even to wish for the absolute
lordship and possession of the entire earth were a pitifully small
and vulgar wish. We must learn to nourish very much bigger wishes than
that! My faith is that we must wish to become the total universe with
its thousands of millions of worlds,--and more than the universe, or a
myriad universes,--and more even than Space and Time.