IN THE HIGHEST DEGREE.
Five long and fateful years had rolled up the self-inflicted
sacrifices of the man from Kankakee.
In the remote glades of Gingalee lonely Alonzo Leffingwell has finally
completed the curriculum of the fifty-seven Paths in accordance with
schools of Hindustan.
The Western Votary of “Meditation” had attained to the Highest Degree
of “the first Discipline.”
He is now descended from the inaccessible mountain upon which he
received his education in the Lesser Attainments.
He is now released from the “Cave of the Happy Musings of Misery.”
His pilgrimages, penances and prostrations are suspended.
He is temporarily absolved from the Wheel of Chance. He has, as it
were, cut out the “Circle of Transmigration.” He is taking a vacation.
And just here (as Alonzo afterward explained in Kankakee) should be
made some explanation of the wide difference and distinction between
the mystico-theosophic-scholastic courses of Illinois and India.
In the Eastern branch TIME is the essential.
In the Western school Hustle is the key.
In the East forty to fifty years are consumed in mere preparation in
initiatory contemplation, abstraction, introspection and absorption.
Oriental methods call for time without dates, and a hundred years in
the achievement of Gnanum is considered excellent work.
The practice of doubling or “ponying,” which obtains not merely in
Illinois, but which distinguished Western scholarship generally, is
unknown in India.
These methods are, however, invaluable when the American seeks wisdom
in the Indian schools. By thus doubling or doing extra time Alonzo
Leffingwell broke the record.
At first the deprivation of soap, towels and other civilized
accessories appeared important. At times he yearned for a fine-tooth
comb and a safety razor. However, when he had sat for six months
without a change of position, and after he had held up his hands for
several weeks at a stretch, he ceased to feel the need of these
things.
Thus he conquered the Material and attained to the first stages of
Nothingness in five brief years.
These years of Mounting the Spiral were, however, very trying to the
Occidental Man, who had been used to the Spirit of Chicago and the
Push of Illinois. His Oriental education wholly lacked the stimuli of
association and competition.
For months he would have no other company than his own image in the
Sacred Lake by day, and his own reflection in the night time.
For weeks together he heard no sounds nor had any news of outside
life except the growl of a tiger or the laugh of some hyena in the
mountain fastnesses.
This was especially depressing to one who had been reared on the
Morning and Evening editions and to whom yellow journalism was food
and drink.
Anything like a “Scoop” is not likely to occur in Mystic Circles in a
thousand years.
For a long time the life in Gingalee seemed unutterably slow. He found
himself where advertising as an art had not opened up. There was
nothing to “exploit” and nobody to exploit it.
He found that men of his chosen profession were not expected to talk
about themselves nor boast of their successes. At first this was so
oppressive to the Seer from the States that he almost regretted
leaving Kankakee. For, to boast of the length of one’s nails growing
through the Palms would be voted exceedingly bad taste; and to exhibit
satisfaction in the length of time one could meditate upon the
“inspirated breath” would be set down as a weakness unworthy of a
Wise Man.
Alonzo Leffingwell, therefore, practiced his Western methods and took
his Eastern Degrees without announcing it in Headlines. He did not
even send out a circular, nor display a poster.
By close application, however, he accomplished in five years what
would have required fifty years for the native Hindustanee.
He was now, physically speaking, quite another man. He was quite
another being than was he who had fallen at the feet of Imogene
Silesia Sheets that June night in Kankakee. His Physical Vehicle was
now but an underlying skeleton with an overlaid sun-baked skin.
For days together he sat folded up like a jack-knife, or knotted like
a piece of string. He was impervious alike to heat and cold, sunshine
and storm, or mosquitoes and antimires. And as for this whole physical
world, though still in it, he was not of it. He was now, as far as the
appetites and desires of the flesh are concerned, of no possible
pleasure to himself nor to anyone else. Physically, or exoterically
speaking, Alonzo Leffingwell was no more.
All this, however, was but the external, physical, material view.
Esoterically, or astrally speaking, our hero had achieved the supreme
object of Yog, and in reality the young man had never been so much
alive, so joyously youthful, so entirely free, or so recklessly gay.
For it was now Alonzo Leffingwell, the astral man, who at will walked
in and out of the crumpled up physical shell and levitated gaily
through tangled jungle and dreary desert.
It was not the body but the spirit, the ethereal man, which clove the
atmosphere and hied itself away through space, quite independent of
all our clumsy means of locomotion, of our ships and railways, and our
foolish bikes and autos. In this superior state he became a very
active member of the great body politic. He was continually on the
go. He went everywhere and saw everything.
Questions of salary and transportation were done. He had no baggage to
check. He had no hotel bills, no tips to pay. He could no longer be
snowbound nor floodtied. He traveled on schedule time.
He was now equipped for any old state of matter. He was impervious to
dust, dirt, noise, odors and confusion. He was now equal to Chicago.
Liberated, self-supporting and self-propelling, this gay Gnani betook
himself from the gloomy glades of Gingalee. He hied himself joyously
over jungle and desert. He blithely skimmed the sea. He poised himself
above the breakers on his native shore. His eyes were on the setting
sun, his heart in Kankakee.
Nothing asked he now of any man. The exactions of custom houses and
the extortions of cabmen were no more. He had forever escaped the
abbreviated bunk of the Pullman sleeper, and the elongated solicitude
of the Pullman porter.
The annual pass, once so prized by the Kankakee journalist, was now as
nothing. For He-Who-Knows is a perpetual deadhead. He has solved the
annoyances of travel. Steamships and steam cars have no value to him.
Transfers and trolleys trouble him no more.
HE-WHO-KNOWS has indeed solved the question of income and
transportation. He has unlimited credit. He is rapid transit itself.
Alonzo Leffingwell, Freshman Gnani of Gingalee, is master of the lower
levels of space. He is distinctly in it.
His later critics were only reverting to facts when they said that he
was “In the air.”
A Yearning Yankee Yoga,
In youthful yellow Toga,
Yodling sweetly all the livelong year;
Yielding to the yoke of Karma,
Yet so meek he would not harm a
’Squito, sitting, singing on his ear.