Part 13
I happened to be just ready to receive the golden loveliness that the old Mother is always eager to give, that morning. She helped me to feel the goodness of all things--the power and beauty of all, and the great, giving spirit.... Inside I felt keenly the presence of Soul--that was the secret. Soul awakened and breathing, Soul waiting and eager, Soul, the holy quickener.... The heart beat peacefully, the brain hushed all unnecessary thought and listened. I lay down upon the sweet ground there--the body relaxed and forgotten.
Then, from the depths within, I heard the sound of the Soul's voice speaking these words:
"This is the appointed time. Long enough have I sat mute and silent in the darkness. We have learned the lesson. The circle of separateness is complete. We are ready to enter a new globe now, a globe much larger than the one we have known, much more wonderful. In it there are greater tests than we ever had before. But the new tests, instead of being painful, are joyous; not separateness is ahead, but union, oneness in all things.... Long have you gone your way alone, down the road of deafness and blind eyes and pain; and not the way I would have led you, though perfectly right, for it was an education. The blindness and darkness of it has taught us what _not_ to do, therefore we know the path.... Ours were not object lessons; always we have learned through opposites.... To learn the great lesson of listening, we talked much. We told others of the paths they should take long before we thought of following our own. We hated all things, to learn how to love; we took all to ourselves, to learn how to give. We did the things of death, to learn life truly.... We have suffered great pain to know the secret source of the everlasting joy. We feared, in order that we may become fearless, and know the mystery of the dark. We chose the road of separateness to feel the ecstasy of oneness and completion at last. We entered the terrible sphere of time and space to transcend both and be free. We took upon ourselves pounds of tiresome flesh, to make of it a golden symbol of the great spiritual beauty and freedom. We asked for everything at first, but through our desiring and brooding, we learned the most wonderful lesson of all--wanting nothing but to give.
"All is for us. The Path gleams before our eyes--the long, sunlit path leading to the Father's house. I go home with my love by my side. By crying out in agony, and by weeping bitterly we have learned how to _laugh_. The world is needing us; we contain all things. From now on, we live as one in Wisdom, Love and Power."
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23
THE MATING MYSTERY
I thought a great deal about Dreve's love-story in relation to the young people, in relation to the love of humanity, and in relation to the mystical growth of a man denied the mate on earth. In the first place, there must be many great love stories in the coming decades of reconstruction, if for no other reason than that great children are coming in. Such friends and brothers and comrades-of-all-the-earth can only be born through the excellent and adequate love of man and woman. In a recent novel, an old priest of the Gobi tells something of the love story of the future to a young American who is greatly troubled in his romance. I quote three or four paragraphs because this expression in fiction is clearer than I could write it again. Rajananda says:
I have watched your devotion for the woman and it has been a holy thing, my son. You love well. She has become more than earth-woman to you. She has become the way to God. This leads to true _yoga_. Where there is love like yours, there is no lust. Without these trials you could not have known so soon the love that will bring you in good time to her breast. The ways of easily-wedded pairs sink into commonness soon--the dull and dreamless death. It is those who are kept apart, who overcome great obstacles, who learn the greatest thing of all--to wait--who touch the upper reaches of splendour in the love of man and woman, and thus prepare themselves for the greater union and the higher questing which is the love of God together.
The seer must know the hearts of men. Knowledge of love is the knowledge of God. Love is the Wheel of Life; love is the Holy Breath that turns the Wheel. The seer is far from ready for his work in the world, who has forgotten from his breast the love of man and woman. And then, my son, we are almost at the end of the night of the world. The Builders are coming in to take the places of those who have torn down with war and every other madness of self. These Builders must be born of men and women--the New Race--but of men and women who have learned what great love means.
... Listen, my son: in the elder days men put away their women to worship God. The prophets, the seers, the holy men walked alone, and left the younger-souls of the world to bring forth sons. The time was not ripe for the race of heroes, therefore the mere children of men brought forth children. And all the masters spoke of the love of God for man, and the love of man for man, and the love of woman for her child, but no one spoke of the love of man and woman. All the sacred writings passed lightly over that, even the lips of the avatars were sealed. But now the Old is destroying itself in the outer world; the last great night of matter and of self is close to breaking into light; the time for heroes has come, my son, and heroes still must be born of this sacred mystery--the love of man and woman. So all the priests have this message now, all the teachers and leaders of men, even I, old Rajananda who speaks to you, and who has never known the kiss of woman--all are opening to the world the great story, unsealing the greatness of the love of man and woman.... For the Builders are coming, coming to lift the earth--the Saints are coming, my son--old Rajananda hears them singing; the Heroes are coming with light about their heads and their voices beautiful with the Story of God.... And now I must sleep. I go to my daughter, who waits for you.... Once, before you came, she rested my head and filled my bowl in the stone square at Nadiram. Even now she waits for you in the hills of my country--not far from this place, my son----
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In the big expansions of life, in moments of great happiness, or hard-driven by pain--most of us have realised that the higher we rise in human consciousness, the nearer we get to the All. Thousands of people now living have risen, for short periods at least, above the sense of separateness, in which they realised that the finest and most exalted love a man may have is for "the great orphan, Humanity."
The human heart is awakened through the love of one, to the more spacious expression for the world. All life is a learning how to love. The last love of the flesh and the rolling years, before man turns his love from flesh to spirit, is the grand passion of man and woman, yet man does not abandon the woman in turning to Humanity or to the Unseen. Rather, hand in hand, the eyes of the man and woman are uplifted to one star--the Apex of a Triangle perfected.... Yet one must not turn to the Unseen until he has learned the full agony and ecstasy of the seen.
"Love humanity by all means," I tell younger ones, "but learn what love means first. Do not undertake to destroy passion until you have learned its glory and madness. Rather lift passion to adoration, and use it, full-powered, upon that which unfolds forever for your worship. It is not well to kill out a personality until you get one."
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Our youthful reconstructionists are apt to stir the community with opinions or actions, which have to do with their own heart stories and the world's romance. They have a way of confounding the seasoned authorities of pastorate and parish, with embarrassing questions in regard to method and magic in the making of two souls into one. These young people may not be modest according to Elizabethan ideals; in fact, the young women are apt to go half-way in the choice of the man who is to be the father of her children, but this is an essential of innate beauty and fastidiousness. More and more the higher types of the new social order are questers for that single and holy mating which brings nearer the dream of the beautiful and heroic in children, and which gives us a glimpse of a future to die for.
The story of Romance cannot be written nor interpreted in life without its hill-rock, named Liberty. There is no man-made law for love. The first business of human beings is to find their own on earth. All makeshifts part away; all short-range systems scurry past; all comets and asteroids cease to be considered, when a pair of suns whip into each other's attraction. And so it is with a true-mated pair. Those who have dreamed long and kept themselves pure, realise here below for a time the raptures of the elect. The new generation has a sense of this; and while its eyes look hard and daringly for its own, its finer examples preserve an integrity for the one until he is found.
The New Race realises that promiscuity is only a lack of taste. To draw the fulness and redolence from a book or a friend or a lover, from any episode or fabric of life, one must search for the true, as well as the beautiful, and the beautiful as well as the good.... Perhaps that tells it best--it dares to love Beauty, this New Race. It means to bring back the beauty of the body as well as to breathe forth the Soul. Its devil and its danger is Paganism. It loves Nature so well that it is in danger of forgetting that the old Mother is not complete in herself, but a manifest of her Lord Sun....
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As to the liberty of its loves--the New Race realises that one cannot be held, except by vulgar hands, where that one does not want to stay. A mated man and woman turn each other absolutely free, and the first cry of their liberty is toward one immortal nest. Those firmly caught in the pure dream are content to wait for each other. They do not experiment. They realise the long road of romance--a road so long that the three-score and ten is but a caravansary of the night. They build above the flesh if for no other reason than to come into the greater beauty of the flesh. Renouncing nothing, devoted to austerity only for mystical union, carried away in no abandonment, they seek to achieve that command of the body by the mind, and that command of the body and mind by the Soul, which reveals the ultimate truth--that the plan is for Joy; that the best of all things is for men who have mastered themselves; that chastity is the breath and inevitable answer to self-conquest.
The growth of Romance through an ideal mating becomes a fusion at last of all the loves of earth. Connubial blessedness is therefore more reverently to be promoted than procreation, for upon it depends the loveliness of issue. The New Race acts upon the conviction that the love between man and woman is the holiest of earth expressions, rather than the love of mother and child. The first contains the second.
Still no earth love is the end.... Built through austerity and idolatry, through denial and abandon, through madness and martyrdom, through pettiness and chivalry, through pain turning less and less slowly through the years to power, through a little zone of peace at last (the calm before the greater storm) the fervour of man and woman becomes, in the fullness of time, too strong for earth, and in the final and keenest pain, the administry of a higher force begins.... I mean to tell this in a queer way through the next three or four chapters. Straight statements will not contain it quite--for it is _still_ with dream, as yet. Rather I mean to weave the concept for you--fold on fold--so that at the end you will have it, as they do who have listened in Chapel many days.
Flesh is not integrated finely enough to carry the higher ardours of devotion. If the great saints who have learned to pour out their souls in adoration to the Father should turn back to a mere physical expression, they would blast themselves as well as the object of their madness. The awakening of the higher forces of love lifts the eye of the adorer from the breast to the brow of the beloved--from the brow to the Initiatory Star risen at last to meridian.
A new dimension of love is entered upon. All life tells the story. Watch the big birds lift from the sand to the cushion of wings; watch the airplane quicken its speed until it lifts from the monorail.... Machinery of racking power in a falling house, is that great love which has not yet learned to look above the body of the chosen one.
This change is the last and highest pain of romance--the breaking apart of the temporal, for the story of the long road. Man and woman must go apart for the mastery of self, before they are ready for the higher mating. The great love story invariably crosses the mountains of separation. If we cling too long to the less, nature is outraged, beauty is drained. Brief separations are dangerous, because the lovers build recklessly with ideals and the rarest spiritual materials. Meeting again too soon, they encounter an unmiraculous creature face to face. If they had really completed the journey, finished the task apart, they would have come into that tenderness which loves the human frailties of each other, and which sees the manifest of three-score-ten merely as a garment particularly made for a particular journey.
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There is always wrecking work, before a new and wider circle is entered upon. The time will come when men and women shall learn that the magic of going apart is equal to the magic of coming together. In all birth-times, in all transitions, the consciousness of the bearer is changed--often queerly.... One can endure the primitive and the child in the other's mind; one might adore the great play of passion, and all the art of it; one might never weary of fragrance of throat, or magnetism of hand, the inimitable plays and child things--but the mind is forever the slayer of the real....
Remember, there is not a full union possible on the physical plane. The body is the barrier that separates souls. Those who believe they have all of each other in that which they see and hear and touch--have far to come in the real love story. Have you ever asked yourself what physical passion is? It is a frenzy to overcome separation. This separation was necessary for the diffusion of life. It is the outbreath, the going forth, the great generative plan.... Physical passion does not satisfy the agony of the soul; often it only makes the agony more keen. In the early phenomena of all great love stories, there is encountered that blinding, bewildering need _to become the other_--to lose identity, to fly somehow into the breast of the other and be no more. This is keen pain of love but also an intimation of greater union.
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There was a man who had found much of beauty and power, much of the Burning Desert and certain wonderful touches of the peace of the Hill Country--in his story with a certain woman. She loved him in a way more real than he dreamed. Life had shown him much to scoff at. He had been glad to make the most, merely, of an exquisite playwoman. One day she was down town to meet him, but he left her for a business appointment. That afternoon, about everything he had in a material way was swept from him--much to which his ambition had tied itself for several years. The man was badly rocked. He walked the streets--shocked almost to laughter, to find all that he had held for, and held to, plucked from under.... At length he thought of the woman who waited. The laugh of mockery quickened, because he thought of losing her, too--a worldly-heart who would go with the rest--goods that perish.
He knocked at the door where she waited. It was opened swiftly. He did not need to speak.... She seemed above and around him. There was a great still sweetness he had never dreamed of as a man (and could only remember dimly as a child to his mother), arms of tenderness and healing.... He saw that instant in her eyes that nothing of the world ever did nor ever could really separate them. The queerest thing about it all was, that he used a word he never could use before--a word, as he said, that had been so badly worked by the world that it needed a lot of washing before it was fit for him. Yet it came to his lips--_wife_--in a way that showed him also a new meaning to the word _forever_.
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This subject of love and mating is only opened. There is much to say in pages that follow, but now, apropos of nothing, if not this theme, there is a chapter of letters. They somehow contain the spirit of many things I have longed to express. Those to whom they appeal will find the last pages of the book richer because of the insert.
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24
CHAPTER OF LETTERS
I
We come up through many slaveries into freedom. It is the end of a considerable road to be able to stand against the morning sun, saying: "I want nothing but to give----" ... To be able to say this without an answering laugh of mockery in the heart, where old King Desire sits with his dogs.
To be free--that is to be irresistible. Do you want love? You only spoil it when you stipulate what the return shall be--how the proffering of the return shall be ordered and arranged. The great love is giving; great love is incandescence. One must be radiant to be happy. It is so literally. It is so, fold within fold....
One sees gold, looking up from below, and its attraction becomes eminent among all desires for the time. We pass it by and look down, as the spirit of man should look down upon gold, and it becomes a mineral merely. You can enjoy it as you enjoy other people's roses. It bestows itself. Others seek to bestow it upon you.
Hold to nothing in matter. It is slavery. Give yourself laughingly to your work for daily bread without thought of result. Then, and not until then, are you inimitable in your task. Order the performance of your task with mere brain and attach it to your ambitions--you but do what the many accomplish. Your product is multiple, not a perfect cube. It cannot unfold into the Cross. It misses Resurrection. You must be free, even to perform your work in the world. You must be free to be irresistible.... Genius is approach to freedom. It finds its own paths; it cuts itself free from the forms and vehicles of others.
We have known the dark slavery of the opinions of others. Many of us have cast off such bonds, who are still slaves to our own opinions. We learn to stop lying to others before we learn to stop lying to ourselves. Until we are free, we have no opinion that is fit to endure; until we are free, our opinions are coloured and formed in the matrices of personal self, which is subject to death.
It's all so simple. We have to put down what is in our hands to help others. We have to still our own thought to listen to another's saying. We have to silence the self to hear the Master.
This silencing goes on and on in all our work. Pain shows the way.... We must traverse the deserts. We must cross all the rivers. We must see one by one every material thing betray us. This is the Path--money, opinions, ambitions, health, friends, desires, all betray so long as we obstruct their approaches with our own conceptions and our own greeds. We rise one by one above these illusions. The last and greatest is that desire which is born in generation.... All the old reaches its highest perfection in the human love story. All Nature binds one to the loveliness of this tale. It is the way to the Way. Because it is not the Way itself, it appears to end. The great intensities of agony now begin. The soul realises that only the foothills of pain are passed; that here are the mountains, here are the deep valleys that contain the Gethsemanes and timbers for the Cross, and the plan by which the Cross must be morticed and tenoned....
The sea, the mountain, gold, the rose, the child, the peasant's simplicity, the coming of the coolness of evening, the glory of the clay and waterfall, mist and cloud and star, the deep healing winds that come slowly with their heavy fruitage of power from the mountains, the swift winds with the holy breath of the Sea--all these in the breast of the mate.... When this dream is taken, one bleeds, laterally and full-length. One wants to die; thus he overcomes death. He feels the great burden in which all other burdens lose themselves. When he passes this highest series of inland peaks, the distances stretch clear and shining ahead. This the test of faith because you deal with love itself. Your soul, in its earliest advices, tells you that your love of earth is pure.
It is. It is good. It is the highest here.
It is still to be perfected by the races, even by the new races, who must be born bright with its untried magic.... But so long as it is idolatry to that which is subject to change, it is hourly impregnating the life itself with the seeds of pain....
You are called to the love of Souls. Sooner or later you must go. It is the Path. It is the steep path to the Master. You give up all to go this way--and then you laugh to find it all returned in lovelier dimensions. You take your idolatry from the plane of mutation--lift it into the glorious and changeless plateaus of the spirit....
You turn from the Seen to the Unseen.
This is the passage. You are called to go alone a little way--to be worthy of the great Meeting. You carry your gifts of the passage woven into the Seamless Robe of your being. All that impedes day by day you cast aside, as an army making a perilous retreat casts off day by day its impedimenta--until at last you stand naked upon the eminence, and the Voice says, "Be not Ashamed--I am the Beloved...."
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Out of slaveries.... We think at first that God is without--at last we look for Him within. We come from the happiness of the Father's House making our great journey, but our Soul's quest continually is for the happiness again. Yet we must not look back. It is failure to go back. That which we have left unfinished, is not behind, but awaiting ahead.
We are slaves to our bodily health until we learn that the body is superbly fitted for obedience to the Soul; that it comes into its rhythm and beauty only when mastered. Indeed the very process of mastery is to lead it to the Fountain of Youth.
We learn that truly to be rich, we must give continually. We learn by the quickenings of our spirit that white lines run from the brows of all creatures to an apex which is God--that God is all. All is God.... All is one. We are one. We are brothers. One house for all at the end of the Road.... We find the King in our own Souls. We learn from that that all men are Kings. We bow to all Souls. All souls are rays of God. We come at last to see the sons of God in the eyes of passing men.
Our passion now is outpoured. That is joy. We ask nothing but to give, to heal,--to permit the spirit of the Healing Masters to flow through us, but first we clear away the obstructions of the self.
Achieving our own chastity, we perceive the potential chastity in every face. We are deluded no longer. The imbecile cannot hide our eyes from the Flame. All purity must be found within. We have no fault with others when we are cleansed. We see the heroes then, the giants, the runners, the singers, the charioteers.
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