John then fell into a psychological tangle which we found little
profit in following. By the "Mother" he referred to Nature.... The
verse period has passed for the time. Around the age of seven, boys
change. Often, as in this case, they are not so interesting for a while
afterward. John is coming nine now and is writing "action" stories with
all the worn and regulation props and settings. The early tendency will
return with a dimension added. All transitions are times of disorder,
but they are followed by larger areas and truer fulfilments of order. A
cloud falls upon the sanctuary, but when it is dispelled, one perceives
a lifted dome, bright with its new cloth of gold.
I am struck every day in dealing with young boys how wisdom and beauty
and truth can be inculcated in their lives, without pain and strain to
them, and with great profit to the teacher. The young mind is quick to
change. It has not grown its pharisaical ivory....
The sanction of a boy must be won on a physical basis. A man must know
what the boy knows and go him one better. The man must understand boy
points of view, but never expect the boy to be puerile. Parents of the
past generations have had the steady effrontery to expect very little
from children. "Why, they are only children!" has done more to make
for vacuousness and drivel than any other visionless point of view,
none of which has been missed. There is a difference in ages, to be
sure. The child's mind has not massed for use the external impacts
of twenty or thirty years of life in the world, but there is also an
Immortal within--a singer, hero, builder, or a teacher possibly, eager
to manifest through the child's fresh mind, fervid to bring the mind of
the child to its subjection, for the expression of its own revelations.
Indeed, the parents themselves are enjoined to become as little
children. In arriving at this wisdom and humility, they may suddenly
find masters in their own children.
There is also a lad here of seven named Tom. Yesterday I found him
beside me on the sand, down by the water's edge. I began to tell him
about the Inner Light that we all carry. You can talk over a child's
head, if your words are choked with mental complications (which is apt
to be second-rate talk, anyway), but you seldom are out of reach of a
fine child's grasp when you speak of spiritual things. He was sitting
cross-legged, folded hands between his knees--a little six pointed
star--head and shoulders the three upper points, knees with folded
hands between, the three lower. He was bare from the waist up and
thighs down, and brown as the honey of buckwheat.... I told him that
the seventh and perfect point of his star was within; that if he shut
his eyes and kept very still, putting away for the present all his
thoughts about himself, his feelings, his wants and his rights--looking
into himself as one would look ahead for a lamp in the night, listening
deep within, as one would listen for the voice of a loved friend,--I
promised that at last he would see what the three wise men saw--the
Star in the East. He need only follow that Star and be true to its
guidance to come at last to the Cave and the Solar Babe.... After that
I hinted that I would come to _his_ feet and listen.
Tom felt that it was worth trying for at once--shut his eyes, turning
all thoughts and gaze within. He held the posture long.... I have
marvelled again and again at the quickness with which the child-mind
attains to concentration so essential for all original production.
The little ones have no mad emotional lists to sort out and subdue;
their wants are simple "yes" and "no" in so many cases. Indeed, they
are spared the struggle of becoming as little children.... Tom held
the posture, until I was actually tense from the strain of waiting and
keeping my thoughts from calling his.
It was a picture--sun-whitened hair, long yellow lashes, brown body
with a bit of babe's softness left to it, and glorious sunlight. He
opened his eyes at last saying that he had the door, where the light
was, almost opened, when a fly bit him.
I thought of the perfection of the instance of the mind's
waywardness--the coming of the Master spoiled by a fly bite.... Tom
will search for his Star every day. It is strange that he is closer
to the hill-pastures around Bethlehem, under seven, than for years
afterward.
To learn concentration in mid-life after the world "has been put
through a man," is an ordeal at best; and yet we are by no means
masters of ourselves, nor capable of significant achievement until the
brain can be stilled at will of its petty affairs (the first aim of
concentration) and becomes the glad servant of the "giant" within.
A little later I saw Tom on the back of a huge black walk-trot
saddle-horse of show quality--passing up the Lane at a fast clip, his
feet half way to the stirrups, holding on to the saddle with one hand,
the bridle-rein in the other. A year or two ago I should have been
afraid to permit that, but we manage now to relieve the young ones of
a large part of our fears for their welfare. Children have enough to
overcome from their parents. Frequently the New Age young people have
to master their heredity before they begin upon themselves.
Life is a big horse to ride, so often a black horse. It is well to
start children free and unafraid. We do not let them dwell in thought
of pain. We do not permit tears. We inform them early that to be sick
is a confession of uncleanness, that lying is for the use of cowards
only, and that to be cruel marks the idiot.
We are occasionally serious over repeated failures, but we laugh over
things done well. Tennis has unfolded marvellous possibilities in the
training of will force. Children are shown that there is a mystic
quality to all the perfect games--that the great billiardists and
tennis and baseball players perform feats in higher space, whether they
know it or not. There is the essential ideal first in the making of the
athlete as in the making of the poet. The great moments of play require
faculties swifter and more unerring than the human eye or hand or mind.
Ask the master of any game if he had time to think in pulling off the
stroke that won. It is inspiration that he uses quite the same as the
poet in his high moments.
Education is the preparation of the mind to receive and answer to
inspiration from a plane above. The more you develop merely the brain
of a child, the more he is detached from the great principles of being,
the more also is he closed to the real, and subjected to the danger of
actual lesion and sickness. The more you develop the spirit of a child,
or rather give the significant One within an opportunity to come forth
and _be_ the child, the more you make for beauty, health, goodness and
glory of bodily life.... A lucky day when you start really to associate
with your children, luckier still when you undertake the work of
teaching them incidental to your own work. Then and there, you begin to
realise that children are close to a source of things that you cannot
touch. Presently you realise that they are teaching you....
Day after day I have studied and practised the development of the
child from within outward. I have seen the capacity to synthesise and
assimilate mere mental matters developed in a year, by training the
mind from the centre of origins outward, that mental training alone
could never accomplish. The mind itself becomes vigorous and avid and
capacious and majestically swift. It is trained to express its true
self. That is power--that is king-play. This sentence covers the whole
matter:
_The perfect way to develop the mind of the child is to teach him to
sit and listen at the feet of his own master, the Soul._
The right to live and to bring the laughter of power to the days must
be won afresh each morning. No two days alike. We make ourselves
impossible to children of the New Age by trying to confine them in the
laws and rules of yesterday. The young people whom I serve live in
a different intensity. Their interest flags if I repeat, if I fall
into familiar rhythms. Continually they spur me on. I think, after
all, great teaching is the capacity to feel what the younger minds are
thinking. If we are too coarse to catch the first warning of their
resistance, they slip farther and farther from our grasp.
It would not seem possible to hold American young people with spiritual
affairs; yet this is done daily. We call the Unseen--the great gamble.
I have shown how all else betrays--how all matter is a mockery at the
last--that even love and friendship fail for those who are called to
weep and worship wholly at the tomb of the body.... The truth is out:
The beginnings of real teaching is in making the Unseen interesting and
dramatic.
We dwell upon the mystic white lines which connect all things--the
sources of daring and beauty and creativeness. I ask my young people
where they were--when they did any rare and improved bit of work, when
they felt like great comrades, met some magnanimous impulse, arose to
superb instants of play, or when in Chapel the big animation touched
us all and set us free. They always answer that they were _out of
themselves_.
That's a secret of the new teaching again--to lift the students out
of themselves. Men take to drink or drugs for this same reason: men
and women set out on the great adventures, pleasures and quests for
this. We hunger and toil for this freedom; we suffer and adore--to get
out of ourselves. Mental teachings tie us in more firmly. The teaching
here--and no two days alike--is to startle and encourage the young
minds to arise and live and breathe in that lovelier and more spacious
dimension which at least borders upon the Unseen. The doors open and
shut so softly. One does not know he has been out--until he is back
with strange light in his eyes and in his hands a gift from the gods.
The essential spirituality of the new teaching must not be confused
with religious affairs as they are known and exploited in the world.
You cannot teach the New Age religion of the world's kind. It has
its own. No dry as dust sage will do. A snort will answer your
sanctimoniousness; flexible science will reply to the abysses of your
logic.... You must be the consummate artist if never before in your
life, to teach the beauty of the soul to youth. The young workers of
the new social order will never bring forth their great harvests from
your _reflected_ light. You must be spontaneous--you must flood them
with pure solar gold; you must show them by your life and your work,
how you come and go into the Unseen.
There is no rest.... One commands his disciples to go forth at last.
The teacher strides forward faster when they cling. He tells them
one day they must race the gamut to follow him; and the next day he
puts another in his place and begs to be allowed a cushion in the
midst of the children.... We hold them by setting them free--the first
law of love. All unions of the future--in trade and friendship and
matrimony--will be founded upon the principle of freedom; and this is
the essence of the new teaching--to liberate the children into their
larger and God-quickened selves.
No rest and no two days alike.
A Bob White called me this morning across the uncut hayfields at the
edge of the lake-bluff.... His two smooth and patient notes seemed
to contain the secret of putting off all fret and fear and unrest.
He seemed to ask if I had not done this already--had not yet put all
boyish and merely temporal things away? "Not yet?... Not yet?" he
called the question.
I answered that I would try again, and I set out straightway to be
honest once more with the world, with the soil and with myself. I would
begin with the clay again to be clean--to rise and think and dwell in
cleanliness, to think no thought, to perform no action second-rate--to
begin with the Laugh again--the warm laugh of conquest that always
opens some inner door to fresh powers--to arise afresh in the glory
and gamble of the Unseen.... I returned and saw the young ones one by
one--from Tom and John up to the men and women--doing their work. I set
about mine with a laugh and called the day good. The teacher knows best
who is taught.
3