Part 2

To learn concentration in mid-life after the world "has been put through a man," is an ordeal at best; and yet we are by no means masters of ourselves, nor capable of significant achievement until the brain can be stilled at will of its petty affairs (the first aim of concentration) and becomes the glad servant of the "giant" within.

A little later I saw Tom on the back of a huge black walk-trot saddle-horse of show quality--passing up the Lane at a fast clip, his feet half way to the stirrups, holding on to the saddle with one hand, the bridle-rein in the other. A year or two ago I should have been afraid to permit that, but we manage now to relieve the young ones of a large part of our fears for their welfare. Children have enough to overcome from their parents. Frequently the New Age young people have to master their heredity before they begin upon themselves.

Life is a big horse to ride, so often a black horse. It is well to start children free and unafraid. We do not let them dwell in thought of pain. We do not permit tears. We inform them early that to be sick is a confession of uncleanness, that lying is for the use of cowards only, and that to be cruel marks the idiot.

We are occasionally serious over repeated failures, but we laugh over things done well. Tennis has unfolded marvellous possibilities in the training of will force. Children are shown that there is a mystic quality to all the perfect games--that the great billiardists and tennis and baseball players perform feats in higher space, whether they know it or not. There is the essential ideal first in the making of the athlete as in the making of the poet. The great moments of play require faculties swifter and more unerring than the human eye or hand or mind. Ask the master of any game if he had time to think in pulling off the stroke that won. It is inspiration that he uses quite the same as the poet in his high moments.

Education is the preparation of the mind to receive and answer to inspiration from a plane above. The more you develop merely the brain of a child, the more he is detached from the great principles of being, the more also is he closed to the real, and subjected to the danger of actual lesion and sickness. The more you develop the spirit of a child, or rather give the significant One within an opportunity to come forth and _be_ the child, the more you make for beauty, health, goodness and glory of bodily life.... A lucky day when you start really to associate with your children, luckier still when you undertake the work of teaching them incidental to your own work. Then and there, you begin to realise that children are close to a source of things that you cannot touch. Presently you realise that they are teaching you....

Day after day I have studied and practised the development of the child from within outward. I have seen the capacity to synthesise and assimilate mere mental matters developed in a year, by training the mind from the centre of origins outward, that mental training alone could never accomplish. The mind itself becomes vigorous and avid and capacious and majestically swift. It is trained to express its true self. That is power--that is king-play. This sentence covers the whole matter:

_The perfect way to develop the mind of the child is to teach him to sit and listen at the feet of his own master, the Soul._

The right to live and to bring the laughter of power to the days must be won afresh each morning. No two days alike. We make ourselves impossible to children of the New Age by trying to confine them in the laws and rules of yesterday. The young people whom I serve live in a different intensity. Their interest flags if I repeat, if I fall into familiar rhythms. Continually they spur me on. I think, after all, great teaching is the capacity to feel what the younger minds are thinking. If we are too coarse to catch the first warning of their resistance, they slip farther and farther from our grasp.

It would not seem possible to hold American young people with spiritual affairs; yet this is done daily. We call the Unseen--the great gamble. I have shown how all else betrays--how all matter is a mockery at the last--that even love and friendship fail for those who are called to weep and worship wholly at the tomb of the body.... The truth is out: The beginnings of real teaching is in making the Unseen interesting and dramatic.

We dwell upon the mystic white lines which connect all things--the sources of daring and beauty and creativeness. I ask my young people where they were--when they did any rare and improved bit of work, when they felt like great comrades, met some magnanimous impulse, arose to superb instants of play, or when in Chapel the big animation touched us all and set us free. They always answer that they were _out of themselves_.

That's a secret of the new teaching again--to lift the students out of themselves. Men take to drink or drugs for this same reason: men and women set out on the great adventures, pleasures and quests for this. We hunger and toil for this freedom; we suffer and adore--to get out of ourselves. Mental teachings tie us in more firmly. The teaching here--and no two days alike--is to startle and encourage the young minds to arise and live and breathe in that lovelier and more spacious dimension which at least borders upon the Unseen. The doors open and shut so softly. One does not know he has been out--until he is back with strange light in his eyes and in his hands a gift from the gods.

The essential spirituality of the new teaching must not be confused with religious affairs as they are known and exploited in the world. You cannot teach the New Age religion of the world's kind. It has its own. No dry as dust sage will do. A snort will answer your sanctimoniousness; flexible science will reply to the abysses of your logic.... You must be the consummate artist if never before in your life, to teach the beauty of the soul to youth. The young workers of the new social order will never bring forth their great harvests from your _reflected_ light. You must be spontaneous--you must flood them with pure solar gold; you must show them by your life and your work, how you come and go into the Unseen.

There is no rest.... One commands his disciples to go forth at last. The teacher strides forward faster when they cling. He tells them one day they must race the gamut to follow him; and the next day he puts another in his place and begs to be allowed a cushion in the midst of the children.... We hold them by setting them free--the first law of love. All unions of the future--in trade and friendship and matrimony--will be founded upon the principle of freedom; and this is the essence of the new teaching--to liberate the children into their larger and God-quickened selves.

No rest and no two days alike.

A Bob White called me this morning across the uncut hayfields at the edge of the lake-bluff.... His two smooth and patient notes seemed to contain the secret of putting off all fret and fear and unrest. He seemed to ask if I had not done this already--had not yet put all boyish and merely temporal things away? "Not yet?... Not yet?" he called the question.

I answered that I would try again, and I set out straightway to be honest once more with the world, with the soil and with myself. I would begin with the clay again to be clean--to rise and think and dwell in cleanliness, to think no thought, to perform no action second-rate--to begin with the Laugh again--the warm laugh of conquest that always opens some inner door to fresh powers--to arise afresh in the glory and gamble of the Unseen.... I returned and saw the young ones one by one--from Tom and John up to the men and women--doing their work. I set about mine with a laugh and called the day good. The teacher knows best who is taught.

3

CONQUEST OF FEARS

An interesting boy of ten and I have been much together in the open weather. We have learned many things, but nothing more important than what a sham Fear is. I do not mean that we take chances or that it is wise to risk life or limb. Fine discrimination is back of all training in the arts of life; still we certainly have found that Fear is a waster and diminisher of beauty and power--and that it can be mastered.

About the most fascinating thing that life has shown me is the way in which fine examples of the younger generation learn the deeper matters of life--matters of self-mastery which make the very presence of a lad significant to a stranger, and which formerly were supposed to be secrets for the sons of kings alone.

"Do you fear anything?" I ask. "Look deep. Listen deep--do you fear anything?... It's like the pain that tells you of a weakness or disease. Fear is an unerring reminder of a task of conquest ahead for you. That which you fear most is the thing to conquer first."

There had been much of this talk of Fear before a laughable personal experience showed me how much I asked.

I crossed a mesa and came to an abrupt drop-off--two hundred feet sheer. It astonished me. I hadn't experienced anything like this quiver of horror for years. All members and muscles bolted at the thought of advancing closer to the edge. I sat down to think it out. It never had occurred before that I _wasn't_ my nervous system, and must not let it get me down.

The more I thought, the more I perceived that I must do the thing I dreaded so. In fact, I had told trusting young people that they were not their bodies, not their emotions, not even their minds--that these must be made to obey. Here I had a chance to prove if I were less in action than talk. I forced my fluttering young self to the edge.... Dizziness--wobbly limbs, fancied shoves from behind, the call of the huge shadowed space below, a queer sense of parting in mid-air, the body thumping down, another and liberated self gladly spurning the ground--all these symptoms of panic followed swiftly.

I held until calm came, and I then could study this little coil of forgotten fears--a civilised mess.... The weakness was absurdly easy to overcome after the will was once aroused. There's no end or limitation to will force when awakened. The greater the man, the more awe he has for this subject. There's a glow that follows conquest of any kind; the mere call of the will to action brings a sense of power in the heart. There is no way more speedily to dispel pain, anger, passion, fear, or any of these tentacles of personality--than to summon the power of will to instant action. The particular matter of this precipice showed me a trick about calling up the force--priceless to me afterward in bigger tests, and for opening the way of self-conquest to boys.

One must decide what one wants to do--then carry it out to the death. Discrimination, art, all culture and knowledge may be brought to bear in making the decision--but after that, it must be carried out--just that.

Fears belong to the abdomen. You can feel them there. They are quicker than thought. Perhaps you had a twinge of nerves over some sight or sound or odour, before your mind could tell you what you were afraid of.... I have often told the young ones here--listening a bit to my own voice--that there isn't anything living or dead, phantom, shell, or living soul, that has got the authority to make the spirit of man quail.

Courage is spirit.

Most people don't care to try to deal with it; they let it have its way.... Do you recall the fears of the dark room as a child--fear always stealing behind--upstairs alone, the rush to the light, almost screaming tension?... I heard a patter of steps the other evening and knew the whole story--a boy of seven. He had been sent upstairs without a light. I sent him back, told him to stay there until he got himself in hand--to stay in the dark and think the bogie down. He was well afterward.

I have known some under-fire work. A man soon gets himself in hand to look straight at a white-fringed trench. Fear of sharks furnished another test. From a child the deep-sea devourers had an exquisite fascination for me--to be cut in two under brine, white belly, backward mouth, black-rimmed, hairy pig eyes, the double-rows of teeth.... Pacific Islanders swim in the same harbour with fourteen-foot scavengers, careless of whole schools of monsters, yet scurry to their boats at the sight of one solitary, _different_ fin. I had seen the so-called, man-eating brutes, "grey nurses," dim grey horrors with dull black spots. A well-fed imagination also came into play.

I went swimming in the surf with a splendid Australian chap--a doctor home from the trenches.... He left me back in the surf lines and started out to sea. I finished my swim decently in toward North America, and lay on the strand. From time to time off in the sunset I saw my friend's head.... I was glad to grab the beach-comber when he came in.

"It's all perfectly sane and splendid," I said, "and I'm glad to have you back for supper with us, and the billows out yonder are doubtless all that you say, for an afternoon's lie-up, only I venture to ask--what if a grey nurse should happen in from the lower islands?"

"You don't think about them," he said.

That's about all there is to the fear subject. You don't let it get you. There is nothing worth fearing in or above or under the plane of manifestation.... So I tried that out in deep water. The old horrors succumbed like the fear of the precipice, but not so readily, quite. One can imagine keenly in the dim deep; the touch of sea-weed quickens all the monsters of the mind....

There's nothing fit to be afraid of, unless it is the _self_. When we get the ape and the tiger, the peacock and the porpoise, the lizard and the shark and the carcajou of our own natures mastered, there isn't anything left to do but to tally them off outside, a friendly finish with them all. No menagerie is complete as man's, and each of us favours some species from time to time.

I have thought much about fear. In another place I told how we have overcome inertia; how we developed senses through the hard administry of fear and hunger, anger and the rest. Now, however, these must be overcome.... One of the last physical fears to let go in my case is that for the hangman's rope. I think Roger Casement really wanted the axe in preference to the hemp. Steadily facing a repulsion, it surely vanishes.

The point of it all is that you can teach self-command to the children.... I took a girl of fourteen to my precipice--left her there standing on the very edge. After a few minutes I called. Her face was calm as if she had gazed from a porch....

"Did you feel any fear?" I asked.

"Only yours for me," she answered.

It was very true. I had the thing whipped for myself, but it had been hard to leave her there.

Finally I took the smaller boys out for a test. They didn't know I was testing them. Children haven't the fear of height such as we put on. I recalled a score of episodes of my own boy-days, in which I startled the elders by Sam Patch imitations. Also I have put the young ones through some deep water affairs....

You may not be able to get it quite--but all fear is illusion. Every inner beast mastered makes us stronger. These animals within are our cosmos to rule. We do not know how beautiful they are until we lose our fear for them. Boys and girls here are learning these things and putting them in action.

The kingdom of heaven is also within. Fear, passion, anger, poverty, and the like--all represent areas of our own kingdom not yet brought under perfect cultivation.... After the emotional and physical conquests come the psychic ones--hard matters of mastery pertaining to the heart and mind--to know, to do, to dare, to keep silent--then the finding of the hidden treasures of the subconscious, mystic fleets that sail those dim seas, as yet uncharted for most of us.... After that, the Soul. At last we must be potent enough to stand eye to eye in the presence of the King Himself.

From looking steadily over an escarpment of two or three hundred feet drop, to gazing at the world from the forward cockpit of an airplane at two or three thousand feet, isn't such a long step as you would imagine. The fact is, I was in no way terrified in my first flight, and fear certainly crawled me full length as I stood that time at the edge of the mesa. Our young people have the call to test the new dimension of wings. This zeal corresponds in a unique way with the new education. Intellect stays upon the ground. Intuition is the lifting of the wings of the mind.

I had already begun to make friendly visits to an aerodrome at the edge of the Pacific when the following letter came from the Abbot,[2] who is now seventeen and in New York:

... Perhaps Steve told you that I had a ride in an airplane about three weeks ago. Man! 'Tis the place for me! Next summer, soon as school dissipates, I attach my name to the Royal Flying Corps. The psychic effect of a flight is wonderful--like travelling over a very tall bridge. The Atlantic coast for many miles lay in profile as a map, the roads stretched as thin mathematical lines; forests as darker shadows of the earth; New York as a blotch of smoke and curious patchwork. For twenty minutes we sailed around and around, just as you've seen a gull pinion, then we came to earth; waited until it got dark, then up again.... Lights of the aerodrome lay like jewels upon the earth, but up, up we went, faster and higher, the roar of the propeller providing a steady nervous outlet. I could shout my lungs out--I had to relieve myself of the excess thrill.

Then what should happen? Red, a tiny rim, like the disc of a golden dollar, the sun began to lift up from the horizon again. The higher we went, the higher it lifted, until there it hung, as a golden bulb, a swollen orange off in the mighty stretches,--pure, golden,--while below twinkled the town's lights. 'Twas the fullest, richest, most brimming moment I've ever had. The awe of the cosmos overtakes the heart and lays down its stupendous laws. The distance between sun and 'plane seemed a golden pathway that ever could absorb your flight. I was aware only of worshipping God, and that roar of the machine made one think of the roar of the planets, comets, meteors, all the suns, roa-oa-ring. What a romance! Finding the sun!

... No discussion of the fear element whatsoever in the letter....

[2] Fred Jasperson.

The old thrills won't do for the new race. I took a pair of screen-trained young ones to a circus recently and became absorbed at their mild boredom. Alcohol is too slow and coarse for the wastrel tendencies of the modern hour. The sad ones of the new generation use high potency drugs to forget the drag of time and space. A new dimension is required in all things. The young men of the new race make light of our old dreads and are learning winged ways to heaven and to hell.

4

THE STUFF OF COMRADES

I wonder if I can make clearer, by turning a few different facets in this chapter, what we mean by friends, comrades, the spirit of things, and love not as an emotion but as a cosmic force. Many days I have faced a Chapel, as I face this day's work, longing to bring in closer the dream of the new social order, yet dismayed by the limitations of words and my own mind, trained so long in the life of the old.... I would begin to talk, drawing the young minds to mine through an intimate revelation of the heart, then presently lose the sense of effort, even the sense of thought--and an hour would pass in the joy of communal blessedness, because we were one.

Man is not getting larger, though he is continually holding more. The human brain, after it reaches a certain age and size, may gain thereafter a conception of the universe without altering the size of the hat-band. There is a continual condensation at work within us mentally and physically. We take the cream of the thing, and throw the rest away. The wiser and the more inclusive we become, the more we take just the spirit of a thing, and leave the bulk and weight behind.

This is true in our every refinement, in the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the books we read and the friends we gather together. We become harder and harder to suit, because bulk and weight are common, but the spiritual extract of anything is slow to appear for us. The wiser the man, the more fastidious he is, and this does not mean that he is a crank. The excellence of fastidiousness is not in eccentricity but in inclusiveness. In the spirit of the thing, he sees all. From the spirit of the thing, he expresses in his own way any part. He can array whole hierarchies of facts from the spirit of the whole, but mainly he leaves the facts in reference-libraries, where they belong and are quickly available, and stores away in his working faculties just a drop of the _oil_ of a subject or a breath from its essence.

There are those who believe that the soul of man is made up of essences of experiences of thousands of lives--yet the refinement of the soul is so spiritualised that the best surgeon cannot find the little organ. He knows the brain, which is made up of the stored experiences of but one life, but because the soul is so small or so diffused, the surgeon is very apt to say that there is no such organ. And yet, we all know there is knowledge and power behind us, which drives us, in our greater moments, to utterances and action entirely without the scope of the brain. We may call this the soul, or the nth power, or the fourth dimension--the name doesn't matter.... Listen, if I write well to-day--I mean well for me--if I rise to the opportunity at all, it will be because I am writing things which my brain doesn't know.

I yearn to make this still clearer.... The rose, which is the highest evolved of flowers, includes all the evolution of plant-life of its line beneath; the same with gold among the minerals. The fact that each is the highest necessitates that. In the same way, man includes Nature and the lower creatures, in that he is the highest. This is easily proven to you when you recall that a child in the womb passes through all states of creature evolution. That period is, in a wonderful way, a review of the evolution of the world.

The mere fact that the higher one climbs, the farther one can see, proves it again. This is a law. The scent of a rose is the sublimate of all plant odours; and the spirit of man is the refinement of all knowledge and experience beneath.

The higher man ascends, the more inclusive. To heal another, the physician must be able to include the other. Evolution is continual refinement--the drawing unto ourselves of the spirit of bulks of matter. I stood upon a bluff overlooking the ocean recently, and a breath of the south wind awakened in my mind the story of one whole summer; others have listened to forest trees or the humming roar of a distant city, or the rush of a great river, and found in them the aggregate of all Nature's sounds in one tone. This is the magic of the spirit of things.

In all philosophy, there is no difference of opinion as to one fact, that man is unfolding a microcosm within himself, including in his consciousness more and more the Idea of the Universe. The cosmic consciousness, which a few have attained, is the actual perception of the externals of the Plan.

The cream of anything includes all the parts. The cosmic mind must include the essence of all arts and experiences and facts. Just as the rose and the man and the grain of dust are potential with all beneath, the highest man, the cosmic intelligence, is potentially the cosmos in containing the Idea of it.

This idea may be contained in and expressed outwardly by some great single, all-including, all-mastering emotion--such as love. And now we are in a region where there can be no difference of opinion; at least I have never heard disputed what is the greatest thing in the world.