MY EDUCATION
THE strain on my attention had been extreme as I tried to follow his
explanations. It was not merely the words that were unfamiliar, but the
very manner of the thoughts. I had not felt how exhausted my tissues
were growing, or how soothing was the influence of the perfumes and
soft music. I had been deeply moved by the joy of my acceptance by this
strange community and by the profound truths woven into the fabric of
its civilisation. Imperceptibly the mist of dreams stole over me. I was
not even conscious of the gesture of his hand. I thought that I had
fallen back again into the darkness of Western civilisation, and yet
that my Limanoran guardian was silently hovering round me, protecting
me amid the horrors of the reality. I seemed to be present at a court
scene, where the monarch and his ablest statesmen and soldiers were
welcoming a hero back from a victorious campaign that had added a great
province to the kingdom. There were shoutings and huzzas without,
whilst within strains of triumphant music alternated with bowings and
ceremonies from the gorgeously robed officials. In some strange way
I thought that it was I who was being lauded. Conscious of the tens
of thousands left dead upon my battle-fields, I loathed it all; for
by some soul-magic, perchance my Limanoran influence, the hearts of
eulogists and courtiers were laid bare before my eyes, all (there was
not an exception) black with envy and designings; the king himself
was sick of me and my honours, even as he showered them on me. I knew
the pitfalls and intrigues prepared for me; I saw the whole mass of
humanity, both lacquered and tattered, that was now cheering, hiss and
groan at me as I fell; and I turned away from the applauding crowd and
looked into the homes of my dead soldiers, and I heard the weeping and
despair of the widow with her orphans and the mother bereft of her
children in their prime. Here the depths of sorrow were its surface
too. What was there to my credit in the book of time?
Then with sudden transformation I saw the crowd swaying like billows
before the wind; every inch of space on the floor of the vast cathedral
was filled with an adoring multitude, tears falling from the eyes of
every up-turned face. What could not be done with a mass of humanity so
filled with passion for the highest! None too large were the vaulted
aisles and nave for the tremulous thunder of the anthem. It seemed as
if the dome of the sanctuary would open and the Deity would reveal
Himself to His rapt suppliants. Then the music died away and silence
magnetised the people and drew down the influence of heaven upon them.
And it was I that was in the pulpit, seeming a feeble and sinful thing
beside this divinely inspired multitude. Could I do aught but still
their quivering hearts?
With sudden impulse my voice rang out in the cadences of the great
organ as I raised their thoughts to the cross over the altar where hung
the One who was rejected and despised of men. I painted the poverty
and neglect and scorn of the life of the Man of Sorrows. They wept
as I bent their thoughts to the weary mission of this lofty spirit
amongst men, and His despair as He saw them turn in contempt from Him.
The death of torture that marked the close of His sojourn here was as
nothing to the crucifixion of the spirit that He bore each day from the
cold neglect or the supercilious sneer with which His message was met.
None but lowly fishermen would accept His divine teachings. And never
a murmur issued from His lips. Heart-broken and martyred in soul, the
crown of thorns was a fit close to His career. I seemed to hold the
great assemblage in the hollow of my hand. The sound of weeping rose,
while with love and adoration they gazed on the crowned agony as it
hung on the cross.
Then I blessed the people and left the pulpit, my heart hard and dry
within me, when an alien sound broke upon my ear from the farther end
of the great aisle. A commotion arose, and before many minutes the
whole mass of worshippers had joined in the passionate discord. There
was a conflict about some centre that was moving upwards from the door.
Before I could regain the pulpit, a bruised and bleeding body had been
raised above the sea of heads upon a cross against one of the huge
pillars. A cry of execration rose from the whole church. It was useless
to attempt interference, for my voice could not be heard in the tumult.
In a few minutes the insults and buffetings had accomplished their
work; the wounded, bleeding head sank upon the breast of the figure
on the cross; his spirit had fled. It was a preaching reformer of the
town, who was accounted a madman for his enthusiasm. He had fallen into
some controversy and had shown his opponents the gross and material
nature of their worship, insulting to a Deity who was pure spirit;
he had prophesied the downfall of all their gorgeous churches and
ceremonials, and the substitution of silent reverence within the temple
of the heart. They had taken his prophesy as an insult to the Christ
and His church. Fleeing to the sanctuary to be safe from the furious
attack of the crowd, they had followed him and with a few hurried words
had enlisted the worshippers within against the blasphemer. And this
had been the result.
As I looked at the blood-stained features, there seemed to gather round
the head a halo of light as of a crown of thorns. I was struck with a
strange resemblance and glancing back at the altar, saw the faces were
the same. This passionate devotion to a dead Christ had found Him in
living form and had crucified Him again.
I was appalled at the thought of all the centuries having passed for
naught. Not one step upward had been made. No nearer were the multitude
to recognising their Saviour when He came in the form of living man.
There seemed to be nothing to live for, if this were the end of the
agonising toil of the ages.
How sweet it was when I awoke to find it was but a dream, and that I
was not in Christendom but in Limanora! I was alone, but there was
the sense of comradeship around me. I found afterwards that the wise
men of the medical caste had been electrising portions of my brain as
I lay asleep. It was the beginning of my education, which was to go
on even in sleep, moulding dreams that should modify my whole nature.
Perhaps the most important part of the growth of the spirit is during
the hours of rest, when the past or future may enter the vacant mind.
My imagination had been sent out on its travels into my past and had
found its way into the heart of Western ambitions and hypocrisies. Thus
the wise men had perceived by their electric sense the dreams that had
oppressed me, and they drew from them the master-sorrows of my past.
Half of the success of education depends upon the most intimate
knowledge of the history of the soul to be educated, a knowledge more
intimate than the soul itself can have; else the educator will be
alarmed and defeated by the surprises of survivals or resurrections.
It is not the history of the mere incidents of life, of even spiritual
life, from birth that is needed, but the unrecorded history of the
mental and emotional tissues of a countless ancestry. And no annals
could reveal this so well as the dream-flashes of the night. They are
brief as the tremors of lightning, but they illuminate a midnight
world, a glimpse of which is as great as an inspiration. “Night is
the confessional of the unknown”; “Sleep unburies the dead”; “Dreams
kaleidoscope the vanished past.” These are three of their world-old
sayings, which were striking at first, but after I knew their exact
science of somnology, became as commonplace to me as they were to the
Limanorans.
This science, like all their sciences, was practical and but the
other side of an art; it was one of the most helpful auxiliaries of
education. It had classified all types of dreams, and found the inner
test of truth in them. Though seemingly capricious, to these medical
wise men not a dream occurred but had its significance in the life of
the individual. They could touch any section of the brain tissue into
dream-activity during sleep by means of their magnetic and electric
probes and stimulators; they could feel by their own electric sense
all that was flashing through the corridors of sleep; and, with their
electrographs could take an exact image of every portion of the dream.
Dreams, they held, made men children again, with their souls upon
their skins, so absolutely transparent did they render the nature, so
free from convention and the mask of policy. And what was best of all,
the shadows of the past, at times of the primeval past, answered to
their call and played upon the mind during sleep. “We are such stuff
as dreams are made of” was a saying of our own far-seeing dramatist’s
which often came into my mind as I looked into their somnology. Into
the making of our bodies and our brain-tissues go elements from all
the ages of our human and animal past, ages buried beyond the reach
of history or speculation. They enter subtly into the tissue of our
life, though we are all unconscious of the process. And these elements
are the stuff that goes to the making of dreams as well. But in the
dream-world there is no central personality, no will to control or
transform, no mask to wear, no power to conceal. We are ofttimes
ashamed of our dreams because they are so unconsciously naked in their
savagery or even animality.
Nor is it an uncommon or unnatural thing that dreams foreshadow
incidents in the after-life of the individual; for they bring into play
elements in his nature that he has never been conscious of and whose
existence he would stoutly deny. Then, when the favouring circumstance
or set of conditions brings these elements into action, he is startled
to remember how close the long-forgotten dream had come to the
unimagined reality. If only he had known how much it had meant, as it
entered on the theatre of sleep and then vanished, he might have been
forewarned and have avoided the opportunity for its reappearance on the
stage of life.
And the Limanoran medical sages had taken advantage of this prophetic
provision of nature. They systematically tested every fibre and cell
of the brain of each individual they had to educate and develop, and
without hesitation or error found out every possibility of his nature.
They tested and tabulated the results of every electric stimulus and
every dream that followed it, and by this means had a complete natural
history of all his ancestral past. No revolution could happen in the
state of any Limanoran, nothing of what we mean by conversion. It has
sometimes been said in the science of the West that there are two
brains or physical organs of soul in every man, and this explains the
strange actions and reactions, conversions and recoils that so often
occur in life. But it is far truer that there are a hundred brains
in every man, and that his brain is composed of elements out of all
his ancestry, even his far-back animal ancestry; and it all depends
on the stimulus which of those brains or ancestral brain-elements
will come uppermost. The Limanorans had millions of sun pictures
of their own exiles and of the various peoples of the rest of the
world in innumerable attitudes and situations, and with expressions
on their faces unconsciously worn; and they could point out in each
the predominating animal. In going over the memories of the men and
women I had known I could recall times when the look of some animal
had come out strongly on their faces. I had had, to my misfortune,
much acquaintance with the serpent nature, the most predominant in an
unwisely progressive civilisation like that of Western Europe where
convention and custom and law become the opportunity and the mask of
characters fallen far into the rear of progress. When laggard natures
are not monasticised and prevented from breeding, a progressive people
get overrun with hypocrisy; under convention and custom and law they
take shelter and there is no power that can drive them out; the finer
phases of civilisation, industry, art, learning, speculation, morality,
religion, become their nesting-ground. At last the serpent nature is
accepted as the type, provided there is not too fatal a sting in it.
The religious legends mirror this serpent-like development. The serpent
is the spirit of evil which caused their degeneration from the godlike.
The serpent they see everywhere, even when it has disappeared from
their own land. Their greatest successes in any sphere are by means of
serpent-like subtlety, whilst they still profess to worship the ideal
of truth and candour abandoned by them in the far past. In practice it
is the qualities of the serpent they embody and develop; in theory they
worship its foe and conqueror.
The Limanoran sages explain this reappearance of animal natures in
human civilisations and individuals by showing how the elements of all
exist in infinitesimal germ in the most primitive form of animal life;
as this crept up the scale, certain elements grew stronger and led
to new species still retaining the others in subordination; at each
higher and higher division of the vital way the elements became more
vigorous and more distinct in their characteristics; it is therefore
traces of the higher animals that are most apt to appear in man. And
the only means of ridding these of their retrogressive influence is to
make the newer and higher spiritual qualities more dominant. The first
rule of a civilisation that means to advance in reality and not in mere
appearance is to monasticise all atavistic natures and prevent them
from handing on their retrogression to a posterity; the second is to
encourage only the higher and more spiritual features of those that
remain.
It took many months to examine and catalogue my powers and tendencies.
I often awoke unconscious or with a confused recollection of the dreams
they had stimulated and recorded. The first few were most distinct,
and seemed to follow me when I waked with the reality and perspective
of life. But I could not interpret them; they seemed fanciful and
capricious, and when I puzzled over them, yielded nothing. And yet,
when I saw my dream-confession and autobiography, I was startled with
the truth of its great features; thoughts that I had never uttered to
mortal ear were there; words that had been spoken in the secrecy of
confidence far off in my village home were recorded; actions light and
insignificant had their due place, and seemed to have new and infinite
meaning in their new setting. So circumstantial were the details of
much of my past life and character that I could not but accept the rest
as absolute truth. And what a strange array of facts it was! Parts of
my immediate ancestral history I knew, more I had conjectured, some I
could never have guessed at; but here it was spread out as on a map,
with every new advance or retrogression any progenitor had accomplished
or suffered. I seemed to see my inner nature photographed and by the
light of a magic-lantern.
At first, when I saw it stand out detail after detail in lifelike
truthfulness, I felt in the presence of some supernatural power. But
when I came to know the methods they had employed, it seemed as simple
as a child’s puzzle. Every conclusion had been reached in the most
scientific way. All the minutiæ of every dream had been faithfully
recorded and microscopically examined. Then they were tabulated and
compared with the most untiring industry. And out of the shapeless
mass had come by the aid of their logical methods or dream-tests the
clear, unquestionable truth. Their brilliant, but by no means reckless,
imaginations did the rest, evolving order and lifelikeness out of
seemingly barren and confused facts. It is true, they did not make
any attempt at the chronology of the past; they had been able only
to group the facts in great spaces of time, and in a certain order
of development. Their minute knowledge of the evolution of life, and
especially of human life, gave them the framework for this grouping. I
was astonished at the quickness of their work, when I considered the
fulness of the natural history of my mind and character; it seemed as
if they should have taken years and not months to investigate with such
care every atom and cell of the tissue of my brain.