God is where? What is He? And what are his schemes? Had I been wise I
would have gone about solutionizing wisdomatically, by consulting the
elders and the wise of the tribe. I would have sat at the feet of the
learned and absorbed wisdom. Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, President Roosevelt,
and Professor William R. Harper could have enlightened me.
But being as I am, I went about it like one hunting that which he
really expects to find. When I look for my lost garter I do not go
to the church or university to hear a lecture about it, neither do I
go to the public library to read up on the subject. Instinctively I
move chairs, bureaus, and dressing-cases. I light a match and look to
see if it did not roll into some corner. The same way I went about
finding God. I looked about! I found a world filled with entities. Some
resembled me, some different, some I know not what they were. A being
I discovered called “myself” separated from and struggling with the
world. It was myself that was the most important, because it was I that
felt, it was I that was impressed. It was I that had ambitions; like
Atlas, I carried the world with its problems on my shoulders, and was
afraid to move for fear that I would slip and the world would fall
and the problems would remain unsolved, for it was I that was to solve
them. It was I, I, I. A God could not be found anywhere. There was no
room for one. There was nothing that I saw that would indicate a God
anywhere. There was nothing but objects and space. The objects were
surely the objects and God could not be space.
My struggle with the world was great, and when I thought that I had
almost succeeded in mastering the world it crushed me into a oneness
with all-there-is.
Then I saw entities separated by space, united to each other by space
which separates them. Nothing lives by itself for itself. Everything
lives in the whole. To lose one’s self in the whole is to serve and
gain the service of the whole. This way God revealed himself and
expanded through me and absorbed the world. I saw the oneness of it
all. Then I understood the whole, felt the whole. I saw that problems
are not in life, but it is in the being that is out of harmony with
self yet in perfect harmony with nature. Like a pupil going to school
unwillingly, so is the inharmonious self, trotting along in perfect
harmony with the universal whole. God exists through the gratification
of the desires of the entities of which life consists, they being
charged with a nature that is impressed pleasantly and unpleasantly.
One disintegrates and the other recuperates. It seeks the one and
avoids the other. The sense nature is Life’s guide. Things that are
pleasant for it are absorbed, and things that are not are repulsed by
the vegetable. An animal will not eat anything that will injure his
health. By instinct danger is sensed by all with more accuracy than by
man with his psychic forces. And why not? Are they not a part of God,
even as you and I?
Man also began with these sure and unfailing guides. They led him
through the different periods of development from the protoplasm till
he became man. By seeking pleasurable associations and avoiding the
painful ones he reached the highest pinnacle. It was God evoluting
himself by following his heart’s desires. At this stage it was that man
fell. He ate from the tree of knowledge and was driven out of Eden. He
became wise and was going to do something for himself; his intellect
made him deaf to the callings of his heart. He became ambitious to
look for himself. His scheme was to work out his own evolution and
leave behind the whole that sacrificed and contributed to his making.
He was to build for himself mansions in the sky, put on wings and
fly away, and like the fox in the fable he was rewarded. (A fox once
crossed a creek with a piece of stolen cheese in his mouth; he saw his
reflection in the water, and he opened his mouth to catch the shadow,
thereby losing the morsel he had.) So by grasping with the intellect
man’s sense nature becomes perverted. And he has contracted abnormal
desires. He overeats, overdrinks, overindulges in sex, and that works
for his destruction. Abnormal desires are those you cannot gratify by
gratifying them. The more you indulge them the more your appetite for
them is. He became subject to diseases unknown to any other being,
and no sign of his repentance as yet. He still refuses to confess. He
sees that a mistake has been made, but he is going to redeem himself.
Were he less intellectually wise he would say to himself, “My troubles
came because I listened to the clamors of my intellect. As they are
faulty they guided me wrong. Henceforth I will hearken to Life, which
guided me till now.” But instead of that he reasons that his troubles
came upon him because he did not heed his intellect enough. His ideals
were not sufficiently high, he argued. He will make himself better
by making laws to keep himself in check. He will fine himself for
the gratification of his desires. He will put a license on drink and
establish marriage as a preventive.
But “stolen fruits are sweet”--desires increase by prohibition and
condemnation, and by restriction he became totally depraved. What he
condemns in daytime he indulges in at night. So of all the beings in
life, man, with his high ideals is the only prostitute. His hands,
feet, brain, eyes, nose, mouth, stomach, liver, and sex he uses not for
the purpose to which evolution dedicates them, but for traffic.
In going downtown, I noticed a crowd looking in at a window. I stepped
up and saw a beautiful girl blowing soap bubbles. That would have been
all right if it had been play. Her body would have been nourished by
the exercise, for she would have enjoyed it; but there she was in an
illy ventilated space behind plate glass advertising a soap, that she
might secure money wherewith to buy the things she wanted. It was
degrading her body, and she was a prostitute accordingly.
Life created the brain to overcome difficulties, and the pleasure of
overcoming difficulties is its joy; but to use it in designing the
manufacture of adulterated food, embalmed beef, shoddy clothing, is
prostitution.
And just as the whole person is affected when only one member of his
body is used improperly, so when life has one specie that degrades
itself, God as a whole is thus affected. So, if not for your sake,
then let it be for the sake of the little collie dog I love, I implore
you to cease prostituting yourself, as it hurt’s Fido’s dignity. A
friend of mine, in deploring conditions, hoped that we would revise our
statutes to make it harder to get a divorce. My remark that if I had my
way I would give a divorce to any one who asked for it, was countered
by the inquiry, “Do you want us to be like animals?” In her statement
I found the keynote of the reasonings, also the root of the tragedy of
the human family. Man acts according to what he believes himself to be
and is not, therefore his actions are unnatural. The sense nature is
God himself guiding himself through all that God is.
But man believes that he is not animal; he means that he is not subject
to the universal law, that he can violate the principle of life
and thrive. He thinks he may blaspheme God and avoid the penalty,
consequently he refuses to be guided by Life’s guide. He prefers to
plan, scheme, and to do everything contrary to nature’s promptings, and
if possible repudiate sense nature altogether.
Rent, interest, parasitism, governments, jails, churches, marriage,
abortions, contracepts, doctors, lawyers, preachers, universities,
sheriffs, elections, misery, trouble, and business are all institutions
of the intellectual man. Animals have not got them and have no use
for them. The only reason for their being is it give us an air of
refinement, you know, to have such things.
Marriage does not prevent cohabitation; marriage gives an opportunity
for degradation.
Theoretically marriage curbs passion; in reality it degrades
womanhood--it licenses prostitution.
The father’s and mother’s desire that their daughter marry well is
to make successful commerce of herself so that she will have an easy
life. The girl in school, in the store, in shop, or in the kitchen, is
ambitious to marry so she will not have to work.
“You have married me and have to support me. If you don’t, I will put
you where the dogs won’t get you”--have you heard that? What is that
except to get some one’s support by selling yourself? He is called
a clever young man who marries a rich wife. The dukes, princes, and
barons who flock to our shore are all looking for easy snaps by making
commerce of themselves--selling their titles and throwing themselves
in as a prize. They are prostitutes.
God’s life would be as short as the life of its entities were it not
for that sex sense which works for the perpetuation of life.
Evolution is a sex law. Natural selection, more and more complex
organism, finer and finer reproduction, is God’s method for beautifying
himself in man. Protoplasm did not scheme to have a progeny different
from itself. God in the entity of Mrs. Protoplasm desired to reproduce
himself to something which he was not--and he did.
A woman desires to be mated to a man who possesses qualifications which
make for better progeny--life seeking to excel itself. One flower
selects the co-operation of another not of its kind, and new flowers
come to be. One mineral selects another, and the birth of a new mineral
is the result. New animals, new birds, new stars, and new worlds come
to be from this natural selection. The intellect would call that
selection prostitution, and the reproduction illegitimate, but there
is no illegitimacy in God. Illegitimacy is an institution of the wise,
and the wise are only a small part of Life, the same as the bastard and
the fool. And whenever the wise become too wise God reveals himself in
the guise of a fool to show them that they don’t know the things they
thought they knew.
Goodness and badness are within ourselves, from the very lowest to the
very highest. Does it please or displease us, is the test for goodness
or badness. A thing, a man, an action, cannot be good or bad of itself.
Its relationship to us determines its value. A thing does not please us
because it is good. It does not displease us because it is bad. It is
good because it pleases us; it is bad because it displeases us.
An over-ripe egg and limburger cheese are equally unpleasant to one of
our senses, yet we call the cheese good and the egg bad because its
relationship to our taste is pleasant as to cheese and otherwise in
case of the egg.
Every one has the judge in his own heart. And the judges within
ourselves render decisions, and we act in accordance with the bribe we
receive, and the best of us along with the worst are being constantly
bribed. The bribe always is satisfaction to ourselves. The only
difference is that we are not all pleased alike. Some of us can be
bribed with personal gratification, and some of us get our satisfaction
only in the satisfaction of others. A good man is he whose satisfaction
is the satisfaction of others. A bad man is he whose satisfaction
excludes others. A good man is he who attains pleasure by seeking to
contribute to the pleasure of others. A bad man is one who seeks the
satisfaction of his own wants regardless of the interest of his fellows.
When I lose a thing I am just as much lost to the thing as the thing is
lost to me. Our relationship is gone; we cease to be in communion with
one another.
The soul of man is not lost that it needs be saved. Lost is the soul
which thinketh that it needs saving.
The righteous and pious who condemn and claim that man’s soul is
lost and needs saving are in themselves lost to the extent that they
condemn. So the soul which needs saving is not the one condemned, as
the condemned do not condemn. The condemned do not cast themselves off
from the virtuous. The virtuous cut themselves off from the thing they
condemn, and thereby become lost and need saving. To the extent that
you condemn, to that extent you are cut off from life and are lost; and
moreover, life is hindered in its free action, even in the parts which
are considered virtuous. It is not the sinner that Jesus came to save;
the sinner is not lost. It is the saints who need saving. By condemning
they are cut off from life, and they will be saved only when they
reconcile themselves to whatsoever they condemn.
The sum total of my search is this: had I known enough to look for God
in a wise manner I would have had a problem on my hands. As the balance
is not at all flattering, and to keep my self-respect, I would have
to condemn every other self, that I may place myself above them and
thereby separate myself from God. Going about in the manner I did, I
discovered God is everywhere, God is everything, and his schemes are
to have a good time with himself and by letting life express itself
through me to obey the callings of life through my heart I am at one
with all-there-is--with the prostitute in the church and school, as
well as with the one who sells himself or herself for a crust of bread.
Therein lies the advantage of not being wise.