In the night the Master came down to a woman who lay sad and sleepless
in a dark house. He came so near that she felt his holy radiance. Her
soul breathed; her body ceased to tremble; she felt within his sacred
circle. The Master smiled and said:
"Why do you not sleep?"
The woman answered, "I am carried away by thoughts that will not hush.
Night after night I lie here so bitterly close to old dreams. I realise
that they are not worthy, but my brain is full of them."
The Master smiled again. "There is a way to compel the silence of the
brain."
"I have not found it," said the woman.
"Learn to be the soul," the Master said. He suggested a way to
begin--then was gone.
The rest of that night the woman thought of his words. Deeper and
deeper his words sank into her heart. When morning came, a happiness
brooded within; she dressed quickly and went out.... Back of her
little house rose the golden brown hills. She climbed, and at the top
of the nearest, sat down. The peace and purity and fragrance of the
sun-steeped hills filled her soul. For a long time she thought in
silence, then slipping off her loose white sandals, said: "I begin with
the grass. Yes, I begin with my _feet_.... How wonderful you are--so
ready to obey, to give your service at any time! What would happen
if you carried me other than my will? Supposing some day I should be
walking fast to the house of my beloved, when you suddenly took me the
other way!"
She laughed, and added: "You stay with me all my life, and little by
little are carrying me up the shining path to the Father's house. And
yet--how strange! I am not you.... And my knees, how wonderful and
willing--all limber and full of life--helping me in all ways to do all
things--bending gently when I bow in holy communion, expressing joy
through free, easy movements, mute, yet strong before pain! There is
nothing more wonderful in the world than you. Yet--I am not my knees.
"And you, old heart," she added. "You have endured the keenest pain;
you have loved and given yourself, have hated and become black only
through pain to whiten again--old heart of many rendings--until
all life was tragedy, and you almost ceased to beat. Little heart,
sanctuary of the soul--room for _his_ rest.... Yet I am not the heart!
"And the white throat in which the lotus unfolds its mystic petals of
light--I am not the throat!... And the mind, stream for the soul's
fulfilment--listener, runner, interpreter of light--mate of the soul in
all things, ever ready, sparkling with the inner fire,--I am _not_ the
mind. You can hurt me no longer. I am _free_!"
The woman sitting alone upon the hilltop, paused again. "What am I?"
she almost cried.
It was as though the hills, the air and the rising sun joined her in
the answer--"_I Am_, ... Longer than the living flame leaps within, _I
Am_. Longer than sun and planets radiate light, _I Am_. Longer than
worlds give birth to form, _I Am_. I am one with the rocks and the sea,
one with the warmth and light, one with the earth, one with Humanity.
"I am Humanity. _I Am._"
* * * * *
It is only when the Little Girl brings in a bit of fiction that we
remember her years. The brain that even now can polish a detached
incident, or clip into firing-form a bit of humour of the street,
cannot as yet order the narrative to a culminating effect. She is in
her brain, which is only fourteen, struggling with the matters of time
and space, wherein only lie pain and bewilderment.
Art is long. The training of the hand and intellect requires the
years--but not the labour, not the agony, not the mad strain supposed
to prepare one for an artistic career by those who believe mental
equipment to be all.... The key to this whole discussion is the fact
that the brain can be developed more in a year through inner awakening
than in a decade by the usual methods of external impacts alone.... The
ideal education is the balancing of the without with the within--the
tallying of the world without with the world within--the same old
story of the kingdom without clearing its correspondences with the
kingdom within.
The Little Girl's ideal is to do great stories. They challenge her by
their very difficulty. When I see where she stands now, and think of
the far ways we elders went to learn the game; when I see what the
twenty-year-olds are doing now, how they command their mysticism--a
harder task for me than the accomplishment of physical results; when I
see the inner bloom and co-ordination and the inimitable surfaces which
come to all the arts by the development of the soul life first, the
listening for the Master within--I want to get my hands on them all,
upon all the young builders of the New Race. I want at once to awaken
within them the Spectator--the One who cannot be swung back and forth
in the pairs of opposites, who cannot give himself to the partisans,
who has glimpsed the Plan and offers it full adoration, who says
accordingly that the best possible thing that can happen is the thing
that happens next. These are the young Players who will reveal life by
living it--portray life as naturally as breathing, whose equipment is
not possessions, not even brain possessions, but spiritual _en rapport_
with all, oneness with all life.
I remember struggling for effects. These young people breathe
effects. I remember style as a studied attainment. These young people
acknowledge but one style--that is being one's self.... I want to set
many of them free from within outward. In their gladness at the finding
of themselves, they will go forth to include the world; they will bring
to it the compassion which enfolds all, reveals all.... Love the world
well and you will understand it. Love the world well, and you will
write well to it. Give it yourself, and the world is yours.
* * * * *
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