Some of us here have swiftly reviewed certain old slaveries, that we may set free the children of to-day.... They do not have to make the same mistakes we did. I, at thirty-nine, say to those ten and twenty and thirty years younger: "Start where I leave off. I do not relieve you of pain or error or shortsightedness, of passion or pleasure, or anything that arouses or wears down body and soul. Only this I ask you—don't make the same mistakes I did. Let me give you the answer to a few petty and pestiferous lures. I can put you right on them. Begin now to learn your lessons by doing things wrong at first, a holy way to get somewhere, but be a pioneer in your evils; be daring and fastidious and full-powered and discriminating in your faults! Above all, be impersonal in them as soon as possible. Let the winds of the world breeze through. It's all a Laugh." Every process of the world to-day is designed to take away that adorable love and listening of the child to its own soul. Streets, schools, trade, neighbours, houses in rows, priests, pastors, charlatans, all standardise. A thousand teachers in technic for one in the spirit of things; ten thousand teachers of the health of the body (and every one wrong) for one who shows the way to the single and sacred fountain of youth; innumerable voices lifted in fly-dronings of instruction, how to fill the bin and the brain, the bank and the bourse—how to have and to hold and to die holding, and to bury oneself in the midst of—for one who laughs and plays and dares to watch the world go by.... At last to be the Spectator! I tell you now from much living that there is nothing here in the world that is worth fighting for, but the glad tolerance of events, sheer, laughing joy in the Plan.... Every time you adjust your life to the standard of the world, you are doing something that is beneath your soul, and you will suffer for it, and be forced to retrace. Dress for the world, and the world will find its flaws in you. Work for the world according to its specification, and it will defile you. Enter into any of the competitions of the world and your face and your hands and task will be constricted by visible and invisible impediments and barriers, less than the real of you in every detail. Search To cease to hold is the beginning of invincible attraction; want nothing and the treasures of the world are yours. You cannot have health until you are ready to give up life here. Cease to cling, and that which was a body held apart from you, is suddenly a winged creature returning.... There is nothing here but the love story, and the power of that must be spiritual. The madonna of the future will look up, not down at the head upon her breast. Man must overcome mammon; Woman must overcome the mammal. The lovers of the future will look a little time in each other's eyes and much above to a Third who will come nearer and nearer for their adoration.... The friends of the future will sing in their Partings; they shall know the spirit and the breath of camaraderie which knows no death. There is a tendency on the part of our young associates to be extravagant in their speech. Much that they see is beyond their capacity decently to express. A group of us was looking down from a high balustrade. Flowery vines were woven "The sound has texture." It expressed something very real to me; yet there is not power in words to portray the exact feeling. All the objects of nature have their spiritual dimensions also for those who dwell much in the Unseen. These unusual children see the material object merely as an outpost for a challenging mystery; while, to the material mind, the outpost is all, and the lavish adjectives and expressions of the former are deplored as gush or affectation. As a matter of splendid truth, the most marked and potent of all adjectives and expressions are pitifully inadequate to express the lustre and radiance which begins at the point where three dimensions end. The Valley Road Girl came into the Study one day, saying that this chapel book should be called The Hive. We all thought it a wonderful name to work toward, yet the unfolding of possibilities has been steadily interesting since that day. The inner sanctuaries of occult literature commend the students to look to the bees. The pattern of much that man has still to unfold from The most fascinating love episode I ever read was the Nuptial Flight in Maeterlinck's Life of the Bee. The majesty of winging to the sun, the falling back of the weaker-winged suitors, the commanding isolation of sun and sky, fusion under the mighty beat of the wings of the queen, the broken body of the male, the mother's return to the shadow and the labour of the generative wheel—magically, it all opened a vista to the great renunciations, the great passions and aspirations ahead for the human soul, great fusions of the future, marriages truly made in heaven, the inevitable trinity of all matings—the drama of love and death. For her one high noon flight in June, the queen toils through years. She brings back from that superb instant the swarming cities of the future. On and on, she unfolds her fecundity in the dark, a prodigious and Herculean labour; from the human standpoint a task of intolerable pain and monotony. The queen's labour is scarcely more difficult than the tasks assigned to the hosts of Bees appear to remember the light, while working at the opposite side of the wheel. Men, as yet, are detached, lost in the heresies of self and strife. Only a few visionaries have peered beyond the petty reach of the optic nerve, to perceive that this, which we make so much of, is but the hell-portion; that this appearance of ours in pounds is a mere dressing up in materials of earth to endure the dark and low vibration of the wheel's most downward sweep. These few visionaries, always singing the joy of the other arcs of the cycle, somehow keep the dream alive,—the dream that appears already to be the essential blessedness and magic of life in the hive. All mysticism seeks to teach us this single point which the bees seem to have learned so well—to transcend time and space in labour; to put off the sense of separation and strife, to hearken to the soul's own song of equality and sufficing days. We must be pushed to the last reaches of pain before we learn this secret. We have to penetrate Joy is the most potent thing in the universe. The bee-queen mother weaves race after race of progeny out of the incredible dynamics of an instant's joy. Each cell that she fills with life is a living fragment of her nuptial feast. Fusion is ecstasy, parturition is pain. The many become one; that is heaven. The one becomes many again; that is earth and hell. Integration and diffusion—the same story told in the hives and ant-hills, in the strolling winds and swinging seas, in the hearts and marts of men, in matings everywhere. The original idea was to use the title, The Hive, in relation to the happy intensity of Stonestudy days, but our ideal grew to adapt to the name, because of its revelations in regard to the new social order; the pure and instant abnegation of the self to the community; the active acceptance of the precept: That which is good for the one is good for the many, and that which is good for the many is good for the one. We cannot lose ourselves long in our own misery when we realise the glory of yesterday, and the more spacious solar adventure of to-morrow. We cannot continue to feel our own isolation when we perceive a brother in the eye of a stranger, when we perceive the sons of God in the eyes of I have taken the hint from the new race children, that to transcend pain we must make joy of it. Given the hint, one realises that the masters of all ages have told the same story—how to make light of human shadow, how to make lustrous our own darkness. No matter what science says to the contrary, the quest for the Absolute means the same thing; this is the marriage at Cana, the turning of water into wine; this is the passion of the ancient alchemists, to transmute base metals into gold; this is healing; this is regeneration. To make joy out of pain is still more: it is power for world's work; it is the light that one carries among men; it is the fire that makes man remembered by his fellows, that makes man significant in any task. It is loss of the sense of self; the death of the lower for the birth of the higher life; the subjugation of three-score-and-ten for immortality; an adios to the hands that cling, for the stride and rhythm of the Great Companions on the long road. It is not for the saint any more than for the soldier, not for the sage any more than for the politician, not for the poet any more than for the parent. It is not piety, it is power. One learns it best from the children. One becomes as a little child in learning it well. We are learning rapidly these days. These are the days of humanity's passion and pilgrimage. The soul of humanity is passing along the dusty roads of Palestine, for the healing of its own weaknesses, the casting out of its own demons. One who is not carrying a part of the world burdens now, as well as his personal pack, seems forgotten of the gods. It has come to many of us that we dare not take more than a glimpse of our own allotted happiness—that we may not have more than a touch of the beloved's hand in these days of parturition everywhere. But personally and nationally we shall come to that significant crossing where nothing else can be taken from us, where death seems the highest boon, and Master Pain has driven home his most pointed shaft. That is the moment of laughter. Driven to the last ditch we turn and laugh. That is the moment of our expansion for a new kind of heroism. One builds from that deep hour. The ultimate secret is not to identify oneself with that which changes. When these objects shift or break down, or some one takes them away, we suffer the old savage rent. The day comes when we disentangle from the final mesh of possession—cease the idolatry of things; then, and only then, are we rich—possessing the spirit and essence of all things, tallying the universe within according to 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 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. |
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