not have you miss a breath of her beauty--but upon and within it, I
would build the great dream of the coming of one from the Father's
House. The Coming to you.... Would you hesitate to make ready for that
Guest?... The thousands come in and out and pass to the unprepared
houses. They are mute--suffering is unspoken in their eyes. Even their
faces and hands are unfinished. They leave no gift nor message. Nature
who brought them does not spare them from the infinite causes of death.
... Would you hesitate to go into the wilderness to meet such a
Guest?... But you will not hear the call to the wilderness unless your
heart is listening--unless your limbs are mighty for the Quest--the
little things of life silenced, the passions of the self put away.
There is beauty in the wilderness--the beauty of the Old Mother is there
in the stillness.... Would you not go up into the hills for your great
passion? Would you not lift your arms for the highest; would you not
integrate the fire of martyrdoms in your breast, that you may not be
destroyed by the lustre of that which descends to you? Would you be a
potter's vessel to contain the murky floods of the lowlands--when you
may become an alabaster bowl held to the source of all purity and power?
Do you know that a woman with a dream in her eyes may hold forth her
arms and command heaven as no man, as no mere artist, can do? Do you
know that her arms shall be filled with glory, according to her dream?
Did I say that you must go into the wilderness alone?... There is one to
add his call to yours. There is the other half of your circle. He seldom
comes first. Pan comes first to test you. By the very spirit that gives
you the different love of Nature, you shall know your Lord when he
comes. He is searching, too. Perhaps you shall know him by the Quest in
his eyes. He, too, is looking for the white presences.... You must know
the world--so that you may not be bewildered. You must not be caught in
the brown study of Pan.
This earthy one is very subtle. He will try to take you first. He will
try to rub the dreaming and the Quest from your eyes. He will stand
between you and the white presences yonder in the hills. Sometimes he is
very near to those who try to be simple. There are many who call him a
God still. You must never forget that bad curve of him below the
shoulders. Forever, the artists lying to themselves have tried to cover
that bad curve of Pan as it sweeps down into the haunches of a goat. Pan
is the first devil you meet when you reach that rectitude of heart which
dares to be mother of souls.
Whole races of artists have lied about Pan, because they listened to the
haunting music of his pipes. It calls sweetly, but does not satisfy. How
many Pan has called and left them sitting among the rocks with mindless
eyes and hands that fiddle with emptiness!... Pan is so sad and
level-eyed. He does not explain. He does not promise--too wise for that.
He lures and enchants. He makes you pity him with a pity that is red as
the lusts of the flesh.
You may come to know that red in the breast. It is the red that drives
away the dream of peace.... Yet the pity of him deludes you. You look
again and again, and the curve of his back does not break the dream as
before. You think that because you pity him, you cannot fall; and all
the pull of the ground tells you that your _very thought of falling_ is
a breath from the old shames--your dead, but as yet unburied heritage,
from generations that learned the lie to self.
You touch the hair of the goat, and say it is Nature. But Pan is not
Nature--a hybrid, half of man's making, rather. Your eyes fall to the
cloven hoof, but return to the level, steady gaze, smiling with such
soft sadness that your heart quickens for him, and you listen, as he
says: "All Gods have animal bodies and cloven hoofs, but I alone have
dared to reveal mine...." "How brave you are!" your heart answers, and
the throb of him bewilders you with passion.... You who are so high must
fall far, when you let go.
... And many of your generation shall want to fall. Pan has come to you
because you _dare_.... You have murdered the old shames, you have torn
down the ancient and mouldering churches. You do not require the blood,
the thorn, the spikes, but I wonder if even you of a glorious
generation, do not still require the Cross?... It is because you see so
surely and are level-eyed, that Pan is back in the world for you; and it
is very strange but true that you must first meet Pan and pass him by,
before you can enter into the woodlands with that valid lord of Nature,
whose back is a challenge to aspiration, and whose feet are of the
purity of the saints.
... He is there, or it may be, if you are not through with the world, he
is waiting in the wilderness. You must learn the hardest of all
lessons--to wait. You must pass by all others who are not true to the
dream. You must integrate your ideal of him--as you dream of the Shining
One who will become the third of the Trinity. He must be true to the
laws of beauty that the Old Mother has shown you. If he is less than the
dream, pass on--for though you travel together for years, at the end you
will look into the eyes of a stranger.... They are for those who have no
dreams--the dalliances that dull our senses, the Arrivals for whom
another is waiting.
... Perhaps in that solitary place, you turn to find him beside you.
There is a hush upon the world as you meet his eyes.... The wilderness
is bursting into verdure and singing.... He will not lure you to the low
earth; he will love you best when your arms turn upward in aspiration.
... A whirlpool, a vortex--this is but the beginning of ecstasy.
This is your hour. The flame that glows upon your mighty mating is from
the future. The woman is a love-instrument now, played upon by creative
light. This is the highest mystery of Nature--all hitherto is background
for this hour. The flight of the bee-queens, the lifting of wings
through all the woodland festivals, the turning of comets back to the
sun--such are but symbols. In the distance loom the mountains--and
beyond them is the ocean of time and space.
22
MIRACLES
From within and without for many months, promptings have come to me on
the subject of Order, which mystics denote as the most excellent thing
in the Universe.... I remember once emerging from a zone of war in Asia
to enter a city untouched by it. The order in that city was to me like
the subsiding of a fever. The most terrible picture of disorder that the
world can show is a battlefield of human beings.
Order has to do with peace of mind; disorder everywhere is a waste of
force. In a purely mental sense, the cultivation of Order begins to
appear essential to the worker, as he approaches the height of his
powers and realises that there is so much to do, and that life here is
both brief and precarious. Order, however, is larger than a mere mental
matter. Its abiding-place is in the lasting fabric of man and nature.
Evolution in its largest sense is the bringing of Order out of Chaos.
The word _Cosmos_ means order, as stated once before.
One descends into the terrors of disorder, financial and otherwise, in
building his house. When I look back to the conditions that existed on
this bit of Lake-front three years ago--the frog-hollows, tiling, the
wasting bluffs, excavation, thirty-five cords of boulders unloaded
perversely--the mere enumeration chafes like grit upon surfaces still
sore.... I have sadly neglected the study of house-building in this
book. It would not do now. The fact is, I don't know how to build a
house, but one learns much that one didn't know about men and money. I
sat here in the main, working with my back to the building. At times the
approach of a contractor upon the Study-walk gave me a panic like a
hangman's step; often again as he discussed the weather, all phases and
possibilities, reviewing the past season, before telling what he came
for, I boiled over like a small pot, but noiselessly for the most part.
With penetrative eye, distant but careful observations, I would refer
him to the dream which the architect had drawn.... When the different
contractors came a last time with bills, I would take the accounts and
look studiously into a little book, holding it severely to the light.
After much conning, I would announce that my accounts tallied with
theirs in the main. And when they had departed, finished and paid with
another man's money,--standing alone, tormented with the thought of how
little money really can pay for, I wanted to rush after them and thank
them for going away.
In the evening, when the last workman was gone, I used to venture into
the piling structure. The chaos of it would often bring a fever around
the eyes, like that which a man wakes with, after a short and violent
night. Then on those evenings when something seemed accomplished that
gave a line to the blessed silence of the finished thing, and I found
myself turning in pleasure to it--the thought would come that it wasn't
really mine; that after all the detail remained of paying for it. I used
to go from the building and grounds then--cutting myself clear from it,
as a man would snip with scissors the threads of some net that entangled
him. I don't breathe freely even now in the meshes of possession.
I used to wonder at the confidence and delight which the other members
of the household took in the completing house. They regarded it as the
future home.... One by one the different sets of workmen came and went.
I am in awe of men who plaster houses for a living--and for pennies the
hour. Always they arrive at the very summit of disorganisation--one
house after another through life--to accept money and call their work
paid for.... There is something to play with in masonry--every stone is
different--but to learn order by lathing and plastering! Dante missed it
from his inventions. I do not count the plasterers paid--nor the house
paid for....
One evening I went through the structure when all but the final
finishing was over. I saw it all and was in a daze. The town regarded it
as having to do with me; the establishment was connected with my name;
yet I stood in a daze, regarding the pool and the balcony and the
fireplaces--finding them good.... The lumberman had outlined a plan by
which the years would automatically restore me to my own, but I am
unable still to see how these things are done. I would go to any length
to help him in ways familiar to me, but I could never stake him to a
stone house. And that was not all. I didn't look for the bit of Lake
shore bluff. I merely chose it to smoke on, because it was still--and
presently they called it mine. I didn't look for the architect, yet what
he did, his voice and letters full of unvarying pleasure, I could never
hope to do for him.... Yet here was the stone house--a week or two more
from this night of the dazed inspection, we were supposed to move in.
The old Spanish house in Luzon was quite as real to me. It was in that
verdant and shadowy interior that I first saw the tropical heart of a
human habitation. But there was no wired glass; its roof was the sky. I
remember the stars, the palms and the running water. A woman stood there
by the fountain one night--mantilla, dark eyes and falling water. It
was there in the palm-foliage that I plighted my troth to the
_patio_....
And here was its northern replica--sunken area paved with gold-brown
brick, the gurgle of water among the stones. Some one said that you
could see right through from the road to the Lake, through the rear and
front doors. I wanted it so--a house to see through like an honest face.
Some one said that the whole house could be lit by firelight. I wanted
it so.
"When we move in----" one of the children began.
I shivered.... But of one thing I was certain. If the lumberman didn't
move in, we would....
A certain Order came out of it all. A man should build something beside
his house, while he is at it. That something should enable him to build
another (if he ever _had_ to do it again) without raising his voice;
without losing his faith in men; without binding himself to the place or
the structure by any cords that would hurt more than a day or two if
they were cut.... The house is a home. It wasn't the lumberman who moved
in. The rooms are warm with firelight at this moment ... and yet with my
back still turned upon it and the grinding and rending of chaos ended, I
arise to remark with calmness and cheer that I would rent for indefinite
generations rather than build again.
There is the order of the small man--a baneful thing in its way,
sometimes a terrible and tragic thing. The narrow-templed Order which
has destroyed our forests to make places for rows of sugar-beets. Then
there is the order of Commerce which in multiplying and handling
duplicates of manufacture, has found Order an economical necessity. Let
that be confined to its own word, Efficiency.
The true individual rebels against the narrow-templed Order, rushes to
the other extreme; and we observe a laughable phenomenon--the
eccentricities of genius. In truth these eccentricities merely betoken
the chaos of the larger calibre. Order in the case of the genius is a
superb result, because of the broader surfaces brought under cultivation.
"The growth of the human spirit is from simplicity to complication, and
up to simplicity again, each circle in a nobler dimension of progress.
There is the simplicity of the peasant and the simplicity of the seer.
Between these two lie all the confusion and alarm of life, a passage of
disorder, well designated Self-consciousness."[2]
Cleanliness of the body is said to be one of the first rules for the
following of a certain religious plan of life. This is not the case
exactly; rather one of the first things that occur to a man on the road
to sanctity is that he must keep his body clean; second, that he must
keep his mind clean; third, that he must begin to put his spiritual
house in order. This is a basic principle of occultism. We must prove
faithful in the small things, first.
I rode over to a little cottage occupied by two young men who came here
in the interests of writing careers. They had talent, soul, brain,
balance, the unmistakable ignitions of the New Age. In a word, they were
large-calibred men, whose business in life was to put in order a fine
instrument for expression. Their cottage was not orderly. They did not
seem to mind; in fact, they appeared to disdain such trifles. They were
at the age when men may eat or drink anything and at all times without
apparently disturbing the centres of energy. They were, in fact, doing
large quantities of work every day--for boys. Yet daily in their work, I
was finding the same litter and looseness of which their cottage was but
an unmistakable suggestion. In fact, the place was a picture of their
minds.... We are each given a certain area of possibility. Not one in a
million human beings even roughly makes the most of it. The organisation
of force and the will to use it must be accomplished in childhood and
youth. This driving force is spiritual.
In this sense, all education is religion. Work is that, as well. It is
man's interpretation, not the fault of the religion, that has set apart
six days to toil in the earth and one day to worship God. A man worships
God best in his work. His work suffers if he misses worship one day in
seven, to say nothing of six. I do not mean piety. A feeling of
devoutness does not cover at all the sense I mean. A man's spirituality,
as I would reckon it, has to do with the power he can bring into the
world of matter from the great universe of spiritual force which is God,
or the emanation of God, as all the great religions reverently agree.
I do not mean to bring cults or creeds or hymns or affirmations into the
schools. This driving force which all the great workmen know and bow
before, is above and beyond man-uttered interpretations, above all
separateness, even above anything like a complete expression in matter
as yet. One day the workman realises that he has fashioned something
greater than himself--that he has said or sung or written or painted
something that he did not know he knew, and that his few years of
training in the world did not bring to him. He turns within to do it
again.... I would have the children begin at once to turn within. In awe
and humility, I beg you to believe that as a vast human family, we have
but wet our ankles in an infinite ocean of potentiality designed for our
use; that by giving ourselves to it we become at once significant and
inimitable; that its expression _through us_ cannot be exactly
reproduced by any other instrument; and that if we fail to become
instruments of it, the final harmony must lack our part, which no other
can play.
That which we see by means of an optic nerve is but the stone, but the
pit, of any object, a detached thing, which can be held in mind after
the eye turns away, only by a sensible retaining of memory, as an object
is held in the hand. There is a higher vision--and the word
_imagination_ expresses it almost as well as any other--by which the
thing can be seen, not as a detached object, but in its relation to the
whole.
There is a book on the table. You give it a day or a year. You find your
utmost limitations expanded if it is great enough and you can give
yourself freely enough. This book is no more a mere object upon a board.
Its white lines are as long as the spires of magnetism which stretch up
from the polar centre of the earth to the isolated northern stars.
You have read the book. Its separateness and detachment for you has
ended. That which you held in your hand was but the pit, the stone....
You can read the whole story of the tree in the pit; the whole story of
creation in any stone. The same magnetism that rises in spires from the
poles of the earth and is seen by the optic nerve under certain
conditions of atmosphere, rises from your brow, pours forth from the
finger-ends of man. The actual skull of a human mind is but the centre
of a flame of force, as seen by the truer vision, and the colour and the
beauty of it is determined by its instrumentation of the driving energy
which gives life to all men and things.
Every object and every man tells the same story with its different
texture, with its own tongue. One plan is written in every atom, woven
in and through and around us in a veritable robe of glory.... The
farther a man goes in vision, the more he sees that the plan is for joy;
that the plan is one; that separateness and self-sense is illusion and
pain; that one story is written in every stone and leaf and star and
heart--the one great love story of the universe.
Miracles? They are everywhere; every day to one who enters upon the
higher vision. I heard a young man speak for an hour recently--rising to
superb rhythm, his voice modulated, his mind constructive and inspired.
Three years ago he was inarticulate. No process of intellectual training
could have brought him even the beginnings of mastery in this period--or
in thirty years. He had listened until he was full, and then had spoken.
Miracles every day here. I am sometimes in awe of these young beings who
show me such wisdom, in years when the human child is supposed to be
callow and fatuous, his voice even a distraction.... It is only that
they have come to see the illusion of detached things; to relate and
cohere all together by the use of the power that seeks to flood through
them. I am in awe before them many times. The child that can see
fairies in wood and water and stone shall see so very soon the Ineffable
Seven and the downcast immortals in the eyes of friends and strangers.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] From _Midstream_.
23
MORE ABOUT ORDER
The order of the narrow-templed men is not to be criticised in itself.
In fact it must be accomplished before the fresh complications and the
resulting larger dimensions of faculty may be entered upon. The error
lies in the hardening of the perceptions of children, through the
existing methods of purely mental training; and in the manner of adult
life, wherein the one imperious aim is dollar-making.
The men employed in the building here worked ten hours the day. No man
lives who can do a thing well for ten hours a day as a habit. The last
two or three hours of such a working-day is but a prolongation of strain
and hunger. Here is a little town full of old young men. There is no
help for him who "soldiers," since that is the hardest work. If you look
at the faces of a half-hundred men engaged upon any labour, you will
observe that the tiredest faces belong to those of the structurally
inert--the ones who have to surmount themselves as well as their tasks,
and who cannot forget themselves in their activity.
In many of the modern mills, they called it a fine thing when the labour
hours were shortened from ten to eight. As I see it, the man who is
allowed to do the same thing every second or two for eight hours
presents a picture of the purest tragedy.
Two of the primary causes of human misery are competitive education of
children and the endless multiplication of articles of trade by
mechanical means. Of the first only a thought or two need be added. I
have suggested the spirit of the Chapel, in its upholding of the one
whom I undertook lightly to reprimand for repeating a technical error.
All the others sustained him and waited almost breathlessly for me to
cease, so that I suddenly found myself out of order with one entity, as
it were.
The big plan of unity and brotherhood has been enunciated again and
again--from the tub of Diogenes, from Socrates and his golden-haired
disciple; from that superb slave, Epictetus, whose spirit has since been
a tonic for all races of men; from the deep-hearted emperor
Aurelius--and even before these, whom we have the temerity to call
Pagans. Then the Master Jesus came down, and left the story told more
clearly and perfectly than any.
A loaf of bread may be leavened by yeast over night, but it requires
thousands of years to leaven a planet with a new spiritual power. We
look at the world just now and are inclined to say that it is at its
worst. In truth, this is the hour before daybreak. In every land men are
watching the East. Already some have cried out at the false dawns; and
in their misery afterward have turned back hopelessly to the
strife--immersed themselves again in the long night of war.
But the causes of war are still operative in our midst, and they are
more terrible than trenches in Flanders, because their effects must
still be reckoned with after the madmen of Europe have found their rest.
The idea of Brotherhood has been brooding over the planet for thousands
of years. It tells us that all life is one; that we do the best unto
ourselves by turning outward our best to others, and that which is good
for the many is good for the one; that harmony and beauty and peace is
in the plan if we turn outward from self to service.
Yet behold the millions of children taught at this hour on a competitive
plan that reverses every idealism and shocks every impulse toward unity.
I would count a desperate evil (one to be eradicated if possible by
heroic measure) the first competitive thought that insinuated itself in
the minds of those who come to the Chapel. Yet you and I have suffered
this for years and years in our bringing up; and the millions behind
us--every day, every hour, in every class, they are stimulated by this
baneful energy out of the descent of man. Thus we are still making wars.
The child goes forth established in the immorality of taking what he can
and giving only what he must--against every call, every fragrance, every
flash of light from the new social order and the dream that shall bring
us nearer home as a race.