Part 10

... God pity the good little brain-pans so heavily piled in public schools, and the brave little memories so cruelly taxed. I want to brush all junk away from them, let their souls breathe, let them become as little children, show them how the greatest workmen and the master-thinkers are great and masterful, simply because they have learned how to become as little children.

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17

BEAUTY

We develop through expression. I find these paragraphs among many of the Little Girl's for which there is no place here:

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... 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.

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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.

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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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18

SHUK

I was talking to a group of young artists in Chicago. There was a boy there who seemed disturbed because the others dared to be natural in my presence, and talk about themselves. I was quite at ease, enjoying myself, and getting altogether as much respect as I deserved.... This lad walked with me to the train. I wanted to take him home. I liked his voice and his hand and his mind. I thought at first that he could not mean all he said, but I was wrong about that. Reverence is sometimes very hard to take, but the one who brings it has the pure surface of receptivity. The boy said, as my train pulled out:

"No, I can't come now. There's a month to be spent at home in Michigan, and a season's playing with an orchestra up in the lake resorts, but after that--say October, I'll come to Stonestudy."

That was exactly what he did. He had it all planned months ahead. It's Shuk's[18] way--a mathematical mind, a crystal mind. The theosophists would say that he belonged to the intellectual ray.... We are always better with Shuk in the room. He comes half way to meet our process of lighting up, which is the devotional process; in fact, Shuk incorporated himself in our ideals in exchange for a year or two of living the life at Stonestudy.... These things never die.

[18] Herman S. Schuchert.

A raincoat, a black bag--these are Shuk's possessions, all weight and measure minimised, even to the kind of white paper which wears best and packs best. Shuk means order. A page of his "copy" is a rest to the eye. There is a finished quality to his sentences. My tendency is to rush into a mental clean-up when he enters the room. I'm not impressing these details as his virtues. Shuk's virtues are cosmic. He will presently be telling the big tales, and telling them fast.

As a group, we are learning to come and go from each other. We have learned well not to lean--rather to anticipate the Law and leave the beloved when the tendency to cling becomes too keen.... There is a time to come and a time to go. I always think of the Master Jesus, leaving His disciples--saying that they would not find the Comforter within, if He remained with them always.

Shuk had much to do in bringing home to us this valuable concept. We had a way of thinking the world would come to us on the Lake Erie bluff. It would. It did. But we were getting fat and baronial; a bit fat of brain, perhaps.... Better than that, the gaunt, lean face forever at the window-panes of civilisation.... Comrades are always together. Big meetings, easy partings. One does not know how close he is to another, until their thoughts spark warm over a lot of mileage--the immortality of it all stealing in through the soft airs of night, perhaps.

I teach the young ones to stand alone at every chance. The idea is to make them penetrate for themselves, as swiftly as possible, the main tricks and illusions of matter; to make them see past any doubt that to be worldly-minded is to be inferior. Still they must see this for themselves. I formally renounced parentage in the case of the Little Girl. I take all my authority from the younger boys at frequent intervals--especially when they have been real mates:

"Don't advise with me," I tell them. "Show what you know about living.... Do it your way. If you begin to botch it, I'll come in and be a regular parent again, but the idea is to set you loose."

These matters come out naturally in relation to Shuk. He'll be surprised to read this. None of the young ones ever adequately credit the fact that I do a lot of sitting at their feet.... We could see the world as one piece better with Shuk in the room. His intense listening pulled my eyes constantly. He wanted to know about stories--about writing stories. His presence made us all better workmen because he was so zealous to become one. I had long been absorbed in the romantic side of world-politics, but Shuk decorated the subject with a new romance.... The farther away a country is, the more we know about it from a fiction standpoint. His mental forms are very strong. Shuk and I have practically covered the same run of thoughts in a morning's work--our machines a mile apart--no prearrangement. But this has worked out so often as to cease to be a novelty. The Little Girl's letters have often crossed with mine, carrying the same spiritual unfoldment--a four days' journey distant....

Another realisation related with Shuk's coming, is that I do not belong as the master of a school in the economic sense. There was much detail at Stonestudy, much householder's management required. I wouldn't have given it up, if I had been unable to do that part, but it was a waste of force--wretched economy for me to take charge of such affairs. We plan to support ourselves, but I cannot run a school, apportion tasks, or puzzle devotedly among the meshes of finance. This part of the work in California will doubtless be taken care of by those who do it well and profitably. There have been moments when I wanted to go among all the schools--happen in, stay an hour or a week--until the children and teachers forgot me, so I could find my own among the many.... But again it occurs to me that wiser plans than mine are behind it all. Those who are ready, come; numbers will take care of themselves; all we need to do is to make the most of the nearest, and keep up our song in such accord as we can in the midst of the world's sacrificial madness--many girls' voices now, for the war has plucked the boys....

Some of the things of Shuk's which I chose for this book were about the big war and are not profitable discussions now, but with his paper included in an earlier chapter, and one or two small things here, his quality can be seen. This is a letter to the Old Man:

... I haven't ceased to follow the Wars. Big one inside. Tremendous flights, dizzy careenings, impossible falls. Am tramping noisily through the forbidden garden of Books. Am becoming more and more vividly aware of Life, above actuality, beyond sorrow, interior to joy. Vital and thrilling peace to all your endeavours.... Enclosed a paragraph or two on tallying off the world-war within, with the world-war without:

Evil is stupid mixing of good things into in-harmony. Evil is simply ignorance. Ignorance does not fade away, but must be worked out, worn down. War is evil in this process. Man's higher nature is naturally at war with ignorance, manifesting in his lower nature. If man had always kept at this war against the domination of the lower self, he would never have needed another war to jar and jog him along. But man decided, in ignorance, that he had no cause for war with the lower self. This was his first illusion. The next mistake was natural. Man thought he would get rid of evil by killing off the lower selves of other men. All due to his first error in looking outside instead of in.

It's all wrong to think we must leave our own houses in order to fight the greatest battles conceivable. If we do not accept the fight within ourselves, we shall certainly have the same fight, once or twice removed, forced upon us....

Whatever portion of humankind is chastened and quickened by this big field-war and sea-war, is the first fruits of a nobler race. Man has had countless and continuous opportunities of doing this purifying process to himself in privacy and peace; instead, he has consistently, with rarest exceptions, used his will to serve the lesser self, or deal with the lesser selves of other men. Now, in these years, every man who failed, will learn the lesson, because it will be forced upon him. If our wisdom is not so great and old as we hope, if we have in the long past thrown away our chances, then we shall surely go out and fare as the others fare now--in exactly the right proportion.

Killing another doesn't work as a means of self-correction. Hereafter, I'm interested in correcting myself. There is very little outside work left to do. This is a commonplace, of course, yet it reminds me that the highest wisdom is something grandly simple and easy. Murder is an aggravated waste of both time and opportunity.

Yet I am at peace with nobody, not even myself. Peace ought to be more intense than war, and until it is, we shall have to go through many wars to arrive at any kind of peace. Many slaveries is the price of freedom.

One who fears will be brought up facing monster fears, until he learns next time that his personal fears were too petty to mention. One who has greed and envy will surely be made a pawn in a game of greed so colossal that perhaps, in a future time, he will have no interest in neighbourhood greeds, but will have learned to see and to desire the whole world. His greed has been stretched into a passion for dominion; and the most fascinating field for empire he will discover within himself.

So wherever we stand, we can't lose out. We can choose to do good, better, best--but without choosing, nothing less than all right can happen.

The brighter facts are that all these warring energies, whether of men or ordnance, are the force of one God, energies working out of the muddles men made. Man has disturbed the balance. Man now makes a sacrifice in order to restore equilibrium, to release the powers he misused.

The greatest conceivable struggle must sooner or later come between the higher and lower nature of every living thing. Man is now preparing himself, collectively and individually, for this final conquest. His prime illusion seized him when he turned away from his own faults, to correct the faults of his brother. The secondary illusion is that the brother will not be able to care for his own faults. The third is that we must help our brother correct himself. The fourth is that if he won't do it himself, in the way we say, we will do it for him.

The world (and this means me) is just learning the rudiments of war, just finding out how much vitality man has, how much courage, the stupidity of all fear, the size of the globe, the depth and possibilities of the elements, including the human soul; is perceiving more of life and accepting intenser vibrations than ever before on this terra. All this knowledge will go into the True Peace some day. But in these nearby years, men are prayerfully eager to get back "home," where all these godly lessons may be forgotten.

Real War will positively show man that he must remember what he is taught. When he comes "home," he will enlist immediately in the interior struggle with his lower self. His war with other men will train him to fight with the greatest enemy on earth, his own ignorance.

I have already enlisted in this big war. My first victory was in seizing the fact that the world is me and I am the world and nothing to the contrary. The universe rises and falls with me, subjectively. The goal is to make it--objectively.

I am locked with impatience these days.

After that, comes fear.

I may go to the red fields to learn the nonsense about fear. Of course I can theorise it now perfectly, and practise it at periods. But I want it steadily, the non-wobbling wisdom. Already I have conquered some fatuousness in myself. Out of my jubilation I write to you.... Of course, the Many is not a model to follow. The "Many" is a picture in every man's mind, composed of the inferior things that all other men do.... Inclusion--intensity--love--creativeness--these Stonestudy precepts contain all the story. They are certainly the way out and up and over into Life.

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Shuk has done a little sketch or two on the big Romance of the new social order:

Humour, universality, the highest good will, he writes, are the symbols that flame from the temple of the New Race.... Everywhere appear children of the renovating, re-vitalising, more cosmic tribe. They are easily recognised. The hope of a full and decent future is with them.