Part 7

Finally, to master the world, one must learn actually to enjoy the mutation of material things, as one of an audience watches the movements on the stage. No longer torn here and there in the small fury of detached affairs, one laughs richly at the progress of the Play. Possessing the spirit of all things within, he realises that nothing he has can really be taken away. No longer identifying himself with material objects, he is at last in touch with the perfect and changeless archetypes. This dispassion, so difficult to reach, at last extends over all world-forms. One ceases to love bodies; one loves souls. The son at the front, the daughter taken to a different house, the empty seat at the table, crash of finance or romance--all but a passing of symbols--Godspeed and a smile. Bit by bit the valiant reaches that profound and almost divine indifference to the external, having bound himself to the real, the enduring, the inner cosmos.

First passion, then dispassion, then compassion--conquest of pairs of opposites until night and day are seen as separate sides of the same globe. So with pain and pleasure and all fluctuations. Day by day, while learning this great secret, the aspirant is forced to die to the thing he loves most. Day by day the thing that he hates and fears most--for that he must live. At last, loves and hates merge together. One is no longer focalised upon a point, but upon a universe. He arrives at the great silence in himself, the static momentum. He no longer moves with the world--the passing show goes by. He transmutes pain into joy--not lying to the self, but because pain of the body is joy of the soul--joy of union, joy of birth that comes from pain.

At last to be the Spectator! To possess the world, to realise the divinity of others, the ineffable equality of Souls. To have all,--the mothering winds of the hills and the holy breath of the sea; to move and laugh and die with all the world.

12

TOM AND THE LITTLE GIRL

The younger boy with us--Tom, now seven, does not find it easy to express himself through writing. He draws well, but that is a talent which I would not recognise so quickly as the expression through words. I mean to send him away to an artist for a time. Tom's imagination is fertile and expansive. He dictates well--wonderful play of colours through his mind. He talked the following to an amanuensis, a year or more ago as he conned over a handful of coloured stones:

"There's a wonderful mystery about stones.... One like a mountain that the fire comes up out of--with white on top ... another like a cap of honey.... Another: this is like a great big mountain, and this is a dog full of food, and he's standing on a dragon, one of those devilish dragons; his tail is curved under him, and a spot on him near his neck. He looks down and he sees the sky, floating. He wonders if he should leap down and get some. There's a great big lake under him. He thinks he has more power than anything in the world--he's looking for more power. He's wondering where it is. See him thinking.

... Here's a volcano at night--see the force, and then the rain beating down behind it--even see fairies dashing by there. Here's a man with his jaw knocked in. Mystery here--a forest at night. This is like a coloured man that's been in a prize-fight, and he's gritting his teeth because he didn't win; he's got a mug-nose too. There's a fried-cake. Another: Here's 'Agra Falls and fairies dashing, and sparkling stones at night. That's in Japan--that's true, look at all the lanterns up there. There's some India--water dashing over a cliff, another like a smooth cliff, nothing to hurt it, just fairies to fly around it--and a door-knob, and there's a hole where owls live...."

* * * * *

Many interesting things appear in these dictations provided Tom's helper effaces himself sufficiently to permit the boy to forget externals. The remaining pages of this chapter is a sketch of Tom's case written by the Little Girl[13] who furnishes an interesting surface of understanding for the complications of this lad. Incidentally her own development is one of the big winnings of Stonestudy work. The Little Girl is now fourteen and this essay will show something of her awakening:

[13] Jane Levington Comfort.

TOM

He is seven, restless as the sea, and just as full of mysteries. Many times I have felt a strong spirit in the body, a healer, a great lover, a dear and compassionate comrade. For a time Tom meant India to me. I could see the blue hills and the wide dusty roads, the cows coming home through the dusk, and the little Indian mothers bringing food and their babies to the feet of a withered, white old man in a big Sannysin robe. Always I seemed one of the mothers, and Tom the master. I used to sit at his feet when he was very small, and listen carefully to his wandering, yet deep and wise words. He seemed to unfold many things to me about myself, and in that way helped me as a teacher would, though he did not know.

For a while Tom's quest was in healing--his small hands were always laid upon our hurts, serious eyes staring upwards. It seemed to awaken the past in his soul. Gradually his bent turned to other things. When we went to the country to live, he saw Nature for the first time. Tom was very much at home with the old Mother. He loved the living things that most children fear; the bees and beetles, the blind little beings that live in the earth and the small, red-tongued garter-snakes. He often spoke of a life he had lived with the snakes--of the big ones that used to love him and curl around his neck. I never could help shuddering a little at the thought, but Tom would explain, "They won't hurt you if you love them. Then they will love you too. Snakes feel just what you feel--if you're afraid of them, they get mad."

Again I would think of India--the great cobras that sit before a pure master, opening their hoods to listen to his chanting. Tom knew what purity meant, a deep-down purity like the earth itself. Why should anything hurt him?... He used to hold the bees in his hands and walk through a cloud of double-winged beetles with utmost carelessness. Many times he has led me through a cloud of them, murmuring, "They won't hurt you." Once he disturbed a honeybee in the late afternoon, drunken and senseless on the fragrant flowers. It stung him. He shook it off his hand and said in a disgusted voice, "That wasn't my bee!"

A little later Tom discovered the Unseen of Nature. I mean that it ceased to be the unseen to him. The fairies opened their mysterious arms, and we saw little of him for a time, so lost was he in their wonder. There was a small rock in the front yard that he used to sit on when he was looking for them. The busy brown gnomes appeared to him first--often rolling pebbles down the cliff, or gathering leaves in their little aprons. Then the tree-nymphs would come to him; so green and fresh and sweet--with bright eyes and coaxing hands. He would follow laughingly what they said and did, always explaining to us later what they _meant_. And he saw the spirits of the water, far out over the lake, mingled with the sunlight. They gave him much, he said, but he would like to have gone out to them. He said that burning wood unlocked the fire fairies--let them out into freedom and light. He loved to build fires on the beach, watching carefully the leaping and spreading of the flames. The salamanders were responsible for the spreading, he thought, and used to watch their little red hands at work. His eyes seemed to melt as they stared so far and deeply into things--way past the _seen_ into that which is nothingness to most of us. And he would come back slowly as though it were hard to detach himself from the enchantment. Always we kept very still at such a time, for fear we hurry him.

Out of the magic and mystery of that summer, out of the warm nights full of stars and peace, and the days of sunlight spent with the beckoning fairies, Tom's soul unfolded another big quest. The fairies were only the start of the Unseen, though we thought at the time that he saw all that a human being could. At last the Master's voice reached his open ears. He answered immediately.

It began with old Indian philosophy. He heard certain reading in the Study one day, and later asked for the book. It was a little book, written in words of one syllable by a Hindu boy, telling how to reach the Feet of the Master. The next morning I found him on his knees before it in the sunlight. At that time Tom was just learning to read. It was hard for him, but he wanted to be alone with the spirit of it. He handed me the book saying, "Please read this page aloud to me."

The young Master was speaking of Discrimination and Onepointedness. Tom's face filled with the wonder of one who has found the thing he has been wanting for a very long time--for ages perhaps. He said, "If you asked me to go and get you a book, and I went, but instead of bringing the book back to you, I took it to the shore and commenced to read, forgetting that you wanted it, that would be the opposite of onepointedness, wouldn't it?" A little later, he said:

"The Master watches you from the hills, all the way up. He knows all that you do. When you do small things, you are taking Him away from yourself; you are not being the _Soul_. Each time you do something great and brave, the Master comes a step nearer. When you become your soul, the Master comes all the way down the hill and tells your brain which way to go--tells you the path, the way home. _Then_ you have earned it. You have got to earn everything, everything that comes to you.... I think that the Master comes and takes you away at night, shows you many things--tries to help you. But pain has to teach the brain, and pain is the lack of soul. It hurts your soul to have you suffer. It hurts the Master too, but they both know that you are learning to be their comrade through your pain."

Tom paused. In his eyes there was that wonderful melting again, and a joy so deep and pure that it made my heart sing.

"It is all meant," he added. "All is meant, but men do not know that the Master is watching. For ages and ages the Master waits so patiently for his _friend_ to come."

"His friend?" I asked.

"Yes. Souls are always comrades. The Master is greater than you are only because he has been longer on the path. He started before you did. He has come up through all that we have. Just think how long my Master has been waiting for me, and I have not even found Him yet."

I looked at the little body of him, at the innocence of the eyes and mouth, all untouched by the world--so pure and yet crying out in pain because he had taken so long on the quest.... His eighth year brought Tom into regular boyhood. The young brain, always before silently giving way to intuition, began to speak for itself. This stage is as important perhaps, but not so beautiful as when the hushedness and glowing of the Unseen touches a child. Here we turned from Tom, and the things that creep into the heart of almost every boy of the same age, crept into Tom's heart. He forgot the fairies--they ceased to call. He forgot the wide roads of peace and purity. He seemed to forget that the Master was still waiting so patiently on the hill for him to open and receive. But we knew better than that.

The development of the brain always robs a child of the inner glowing for a time, but it all comes back again with a great dimension added; the instrument is then keen and direct--a power in itself. We turned from Tom--a young brain standing alone, very conscious of itself, is anything but interesting. At the time we were in the turmoil of departure, each of us thinking in different ways about the long journey just ahead, and the wonder of being at last in California. Tom was more or less his own director those days.

He fell into crime, looted the house of a friend, denied everything. He was sent to his quarters to stay until he found himself again. It took a week exactly, but he found a deep happiness in being alone in the little room before he left it. It did him as much good as the long days in the sunlight ever could; he came out pale and wide eyed, and the breath of a soul was in the room when he entered.

One day out of his long week, I went to him. The sun had gone down behind a nest of grey clouds. Dusk had almost deepened into darkness, but there was no light in his room. He sat there, his eyes staring ahead of him, his hands folded tightly in his lap. I walked in quietly and sat down beside him. I was not even noticed; he was lost in his thought. At last I asked,

"Tom, what did you find so interesting in that cheap business?"

"I haven't found out yet," he said grimly.

"Have you been thinking about it?"

"Sure have. Been thinking all day."

"Has nothing come?"

"No, but it's coming soon. It can't take long if I stay here like this, wishing and pulling every minute."

"Of course it can't."

He continued to stare into the darkness ahead.

"What does it feel like, Tom?" I asked.

"Your soul leaves you.... Your soul won't stay if you are going back."

"Going back?"

"Yes. I mean if you have been big and listened to its voice, and then stop. If you are _less_ than yourself after you've been _more_, your soul won't stay."

"What do you do when your soul leaves you?"

"You walk the Black Path."

He looked a child seraph.

"That path is not interesting, is it?"

"No. You have got to know what it is, got to walk up it a little ways, so that you are not afraid of it any more. When you know a thing, you are not afraid of it any longer. Before you know, it looks all dark to you. Nothing can hurt you when you are not afraid.... It's just the same as with the animals. All the black things that come into you are animals. If they find nothing but love and whiteness inside, they will go away and not even look at you again; but if fear and darkness are there, they get mad and bite."

Leaning forward with a laugh, he added, "You can't cut across from the black path to the white. You've got to go all the way back and start over."

* * * * *

13

THE ABBOT

The Abbot is now seventeen. He is doing well at Columbia. Classes and routine there are mere externals. The Abbot is living a life far more real than appears--a life that few men in America have learned how to live. He has actually arrived at the conviction of the unfathomable riches that lie within. Many occultists and a few great artists have a working knowledge of this kind. We hoped the Abbot could remain at Stonestudy, but his parents wanted some letters after his family name as well as before. Our young man was enjoined to make the best of it. As a matter of fact, he is putting on a lot of brain things that work admirably with the inner activity which we made much of in our work together.

In another book,[14] I told of the Abbot's awakening--how we called him from mysterious regions of silence and mystification, to a more or less adequate expression of material facts. Here was a boy almost overshadowed by his own soul at times, inclined to be half out of the body and not altogether present in the mind, when moving among the sordid affairs of the world--a lad who knew the arrangement of planets and the flow of meteoric matter better than the geography of our own continent; who swung very readily back into memories of other lives, mainly monastic, rather than into the episodes of his own kid-days.

[14] _Child and Country._

I forget just how it was that we first sensed the giant in this boy. In any case, we struck one. The ordinary training that I would give an American youth to breathe the soul of him, was not at all necessary with the Abbot. Rather, pressure was exerted from the first to make him come down into our world, to make him be one of us, to make him see streets and alleys, doorsteps and servant-stairs. They have succeeded better at Columbia in this regard than we were able to do, but the wonder and satisfaction of it all is, that the aroused mystic, the aroused artist, has not receded--but dominates his days and work. I understand that he is considered a sensation in a literary way.

He is not different from his fellows. It is part of our ethics to belong where we happen to be; to do the things that others do, better, if possible, than the customary performance; to begin after that to be our inimitable selves. It is our ideal to move about the world, not to attract attention, to be quiet and calm and efficacious, to be helpful and humorous and wise, to furnish the swift, unerring word or hand or lift in the midst of affairs; to deny ourselves to no one; to hold ourselves superior to no one; to strive laughingly toward the big workmanship, to become Players after the essential apprenticeship, to win the Laugh at last, and that perfect consummation which only comes with utter and instant detachment when the task is accomplished.

* * * * *

The Abbot was sprawled in a Study shadow one summer afternoon, when I suddenly saw him in relation to big sea-tales. Usually we tale-tellers carry our packs. I saw the Abbot with a sea-chest that day. His was not the way of the Arabian fires and the Assyrian camel paths--the word-spinner's usual evolutionary line. He came overseas with his narratives.... I saw him in the next few years making a circle around all the capes, touching all the ports of Asiatic and insular water fronts--a bit of Conrad, a bit of Melville, a bit of Stevenson ... a most sumptuous sea-chest full of shells, corals, coins and trinkets from all the Islands; feather of a woman's fan perhaps, here and there, silks hazy from sea water, crooked knives from Malay Isles, whale-bone and shark's teeth, pearl of the mollusk, a bit of ambergris--just a top tray of the Chest! Deep mystic parchments farther within, a corner for the sacred writings of all the world, a small type mill, a great wad of white paper, the rest mainly traces of a long glide across the ocean floors.

I have learned to go very slow in building a matrix of my own thought about any young man's mind, yet I told the Abbot that day what I saw for him--how he was bound to do the big sea-tales, how we were sick of steam, sick already of the big hydroplanes, sick of all that hurries, all that explodes, all that has the taint of gas; that the world presently would be so sick of noise and explosions and show and speed, that professional soothers would be in great demand, like the Japanese masseurs who wait upon the sleepless; that the sick world would want to read of long, loose, lazy days under canvas, of the few ports left where they haven't set up recruiting offices;--that the world would be in desperate need of sunlight and surf and wide swinging seas--that he must be one of those to usher in the old romance of the sailing craft again.

I told about his sea-chest better than I have told it here, but the Abbot's eyes didn't bulge. Presently, however, he began to grow that way.... His Saturdays and Sabbaths now are spent, not in Morningside Heights, but down among the shipping and across the harbour, where the big world tramps hang out. You will see these things in his letters. I have several of his yarns here, but I am not going to run any of them in this book. They are good yarns, but too intrinsically big yet for the handling of a boy of seventeen. He has too much calibre for his brain so far to carry ten thousand words to superb consummation. I want to spring a big tale presently. I have a lapful of his random letters from days spent down on the water front, and nights under the study lamp:

DEAR OLD WASP:

Morning mists over the lake, the _Pelee_ coming up out of them. Just had a night with John and a corking good run of work. We've been watching the sun go down from Lynster's[15] back lately, and breathing the planetary heave under the stars, with the milky way dipping to the lake before us. This inland place is heavy to take. The weight of agriculture is like a blanket over all. It takes three or four pages to bore up through the cuticle. Me for a get-away to the world soon--to feed up on the hum of feet and voices and cars.... Blackbirds are beginning to blacken the mornings and nights again; touch of Fall and Pine-smoke this morning. Real itchings in the ankles--to you! A wonderful synthesis for us all when we meet up again.... I'd like to roam the world with John. He is a grand pal. Could joke over an oven made out of a tomato-can, as well as eat from a banquet table....

[15] The saddle horse.

A day or two later:

... Black forces strong around Stonestudy last night.... About eight-thirty I rode over on Lynt, to sleep with John. Decided to have a debauch with tea. While I worked on, he gathered the cups and tea and electric tea-kettle together and got things going. He called for me to come and make the tea. He was seated in the big chair with a tableleaf in front of him, and on that was the tea-kettle, boiling.... One leg slipped, and the whole boiling collection went in his lap.... A prince, the way he stood it. The bunch was just coming back from town. Penel' rushed over, and the next was a turmoil right, cries, olive oil, lint, rags, confusion of voices and footsteps--too many people and the little guy sort o' lost his control--but it all came back again. Almost any minute I am looking for the laugh from him. All night I was with him. Penelope, the finished heroine as always. One could see the shades of pain pass over John's face time and again. His nerves jump--but his mouth and eyes are certainly getting a grand hue of steel.... Yours right along.

Another:

Hazy summer about. Blue over the lake with shadows deepening in the distance. Crops drying beneath the sun. Leave it at its height--am headed back for Columbia--where I'll let time shape the winds for farther "going."

School is not harmful to one who _is_ himself. I'll take philosophy, and then be over to tell you who stole your washboard.... It is no struggle, no test, for one to be lit among his own as we are. One's depth of listening is best tested in crowds. We've got to separate--go out and change the continents into tablelands of democracy.

War seems settling on the world for years longer, but there is a bigger order coming out of the incredible chaos. Each must see God and worship through his work to shape the master beauty. Every one's art breaks new roads which lead to one place.

Stories are coming freer every day--I've gotten across. Don't know whether it's the best thing for me. But I've done it, and that's what I wanted to know. It is all preparation. Results are beginnings. I look back now on the summer of '14. It _was_ heaven. It _was_ peace. To look at the cottage lights and hear the voices of rowers through the dusk was a breath from God. It was peace, it was relaxation, a deep resting of tissue for turmoil. Depth and mastery to you.

THIS TO JOHN: