We develop through expression. I find these paragraphs among many of
the Little Girl's for which there is no place here:
* * * * *
... Everything in pouring out one's dreams and thoughts, one's
very soul into words! It is relief, fulfilment; it completes
all thoughts and dreams; it gives them strength. They are
only half-powers if left unexpressed. In the moments of great
outpouring, order forms--the inner order that is lasting and
divine, the order that every man must have running rhythmically
through him, before his great task can be given him by the Master.
If man lives in truth, he lives in order. There is no truth without
order--no order without truth. They are one at the top. There are
no mistakes in all the Holy Universe.
* * * * *
We speak much of the Master. As every artist becomes significant, I
think he is more and more conscious, deep within, of the presence of
one whose word is absolute. The great artist isolates himself from
criticism--that is, he may listen to the observations of a child or the
youngest critic and find values, yet his life is passed in doing things
others cannot do, and for which there are no criteria. He loses the
sense of all laws at the last, in the great ebullition of his soul--to
get its records down. He is not ignited with expression as formerly,
because he _is_ expression. His establishment in flesh is for that, and
no other reason. His Master nears. I think of Tolstoi so intimately and
Carlyle in these things.... We are close, in our best moments, to the
Shop Itself. Kipling touched this mystic arrangement in his inimitable
_L'envoi_, "When earth's last picture is painted----"
More and more life teaches us the treachery of matter, as it teaches
us how to love. One by one the things we turn to, vanish, leaving us
rent and crying out. Thus we learn to turn to the Unseen. We long at
last for our particular archetype who embodies potentially the ideal
of parent and teacher and beloved. The last tearing torrential love
of the flesh is for the mate, the first of our more purely spiritual
aspirations for the Master.... The good days of apprenticeship give us
the basic ideal of him--the pure workmanship, the love of truth, need
for utter comprehension with few words--the love of one another, yet
the absolute essential so hard to learn, to cling to nothing in the
realm of change--all these are incentives to the quest of the Master.
More and more we succeed in turning our love to what we still call the
Unseen from old habit. The very love that you turn to the Master builds
the path by which he comes to you. He can only appear in your own
thought-form....
It comes to us so often that we make our own heavens. So many forget
that we require beauty as well as goodness and truth. Not sages alone,
not saints alone--but artists, workmen and players in beauty, as
well as in love and wisdom. The Master will come to you in your own
thought-form; your heaven will fill your own conception. Saints of the
elder bigotries will have angels with feathers and peasant feet. Those
who have clung so hard to their bodies, must galvanise them again with
rheumatism and senility and mortgage-ridden minds.
I tell them here to be careful what they dream--to take all the loves,
the safe things, love of child and mother and mate, love of comrades,
the passion for dying for another ... to take Nature's perfect
things,--the grains, the fruits, bees, stars, devas, poems--majesty
of mountain, strength of the field, holy breath of sea--the highest
moments of song and thought and meetings ... to take all that is
consummate for the thought-form--to build the coming of the Master
in that--light from the Unseen--to build for eternity.... The Master
can only show you that much of Himself as your own highest picture
contains.... This is the practice of his presence, so liberating to the
minds of dreamers and workmen and mothers.
* * * * *
Steve has done some thinking on the quest of beauty in relation to the
young lovers of the New Race. The rest of the chapter is his writing:
Beauty is the lustre shining from within, because of the sheer
intensity of being. It is proof of spiritual battles won, a gift
earned by ages of renunciation, martyrdom, and self-sacrifice. It
is manifest balance, order and serenity gained from isolation and
self-conquest. The glow seen about the heads of saints is really
there. It is a splendour not of earth, the same ray from which
beauty is drawn.
A certain tragic joy and a terrible serenity, that is mistaken for
melancholy, often goes with beauty. It is the result of turning
back voluntarily for work in the world, renouncing possible bliss
for the service of humanity. Chief among the spiritual victories
mentioned, is this turning back, facing the stream of evolution
again, and all its cold metal, for new work. So its light is a
light from behind--a reflection to the world of the wonders ahead.
Beauty is an indication of the weave of one's higher life,
of developed discrimination, material proof of the perfecting
ordination of the life, will and emotions. All that is beautiful
is good, all that is good must be beautiful. Ugliness is false and
fleeting, a confession of sickness and turmoil within. There can
absolutely be no great love without a sheer worship of beauty, not
for itself, not from the æsthetic standpoint--no temperamental
moth-man ethics--but the calm mastery of its inner meaning, which
is mastery of life itself.
This does not mean that we must love things merely because they are
beautiful, but because of the truth we know to be in them, manifest
in their beauty. Also it means that we must never accept a thing
merely because it is demonstrated, or seek truth for truth's sake.
Beauty is the one lasting criterion.
As soon as we truly see these things, we know the secret of real
love, which is beauty's expression. The lover is no longer lover
only, but love-master--all domination of the sexes then becomes a
slavery of the past. The lover is parent, mate and child in one.
Each is also the other's teacher.
At the beginning these lovers give each other complete freedom,
knowing that nothing can be maintained that is held; that joyous
freedom is its own wise bondage. The finding of the lover is never
the end of the quest as in the world. Rather, it is the beginning.
Never is there a lying back in satisfaction or inconsequence. That
would be failure for themselves as well as their children. Growth
is the goal. Growth goes on after the mating at a rate never before
approached, for each has been opened, liberated. Every relation is
evident alternately in this growth, parent and child, teacher and
pupil, master and disciple, madonna and messiah. At certain high
moments, the other appears as the Master himself; through his eyes
the mysteries of the universe are seen.
The three-ply love yearns to give, knowing that by giving all one
gains all. It yearns to protect, to mother, to love failings and
make them virtues. It loves the failings as well as the gifts,
treasuring all the little humanesses of the loved one, searching
them out zealously. Never are they foolish enough to expect
perfection at first. Every fault is told point-blank, at any cost
of pain or injury to the other. For it is the god-given privilege
of each to bring suffering to the other, because he loves that
other more than life, more than self, more than happiness, and it
is understood that their mutual goal is the priceless heritage,
perfection. Nothing short of perfection remains. For this all else,
even life, is a paltry price. There is no hiding the truth. This is
the supreme test for great loves, great friendships. Both mates are
equal. _Equality_--the word comes to mean more than worship.
This philosophy is justified by the law of sacrifice. That which
we love more than life is ours more wholly than ourselves, by
the great law. In fact, we cannot belong to ourselves; we must
work upon ourselves until we are big enough to cast body mind and
soul in the heart of another, without fear. Separateness--the
pitiful sense of self, has long been the prime illusion of the
world, the cause of all lust, wars and torments. Those who are not
great enough lovers to surrender all to their love find pain and
disparity throughout. They have yet to learn that all that belongs
to the self-willed, only half belongs, for it has not been given
its freedom.
In loves such as the New Age is bringing in, true creativeness is
touched. In worshipping both the soul of her child and that of
her mate more than her own, the mother is given for the moment
a beam from the divine shaft from the Creator. For that moment
she has over-reached herself. Just so is the new love constantly
over-reaching itself in the cause of the loved one, a divine
madness the world has not begun to dream of--to belong and to have,
to be in and through and around the loved one. Thus to over-reach
is to create. The ordinary one must become extraordinary when loved
in this god-like manner. To over-reach oneself--that is the cry
of the New!... To think or act in any way that will hurt the self
becomes impossible then, for the self is truly become the other
lover.
Blindness of passion is far from the nature of things in the new
loves. Or rather such passions have been washed and redeemed
until they are self-governing. There is all the difference
between them and the world idea of passion, as between adoration
and infatuation. Deep waters and deep characters hold to
their channels. Only shallow and frothy currents are loud and
turbulent.... Again it is the three in one. How could one hold a
mad destroying passion for one in whom the parent child and master
are equally dominant? Always the spirit of tenderness is there like
an unseen third. Thus passion has become compassion, and the earth
love is seen truly for the first time partaking of the nature of
the infinite love which holds the universe together. This is the
source of calm, of will-lessness.
The elder generation, judging all things from the standpoint of
the self will, is dumbfounded. Such iron repression among children
is beyond its imagination. The elder generation goes on living
sharkish and predatory lives, experimenting with repression after
too much getting and taking and licentiousness. It concentrates
terribly on repression, throwing up about itself temporary
breastworks, developing cruel red rays of personal will which
at best is but a defiant pugnacity. Its eyes grow red and voice
savage. For the time the gargoyles of the ancient self are locked
in the lower room, but they are not mastered. All personal will is
but a confession of inordination within. Where there is inner order
and beauty, it is not needed, becomes indeed an affront to the most
high.
The beautiful will-lessness which marks the relation of the sexes
of the New Order is the key to the freedom of the future. Tiger and
ape are transformed into white presences--the mutinous slaves of
the earth-self become cosmic servants.
* * * * *
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