Will Levington Comfort

QUICKENINGS

A few pages of drift first of all with the younger boys.... There is a lane of Lombardy poplars from the Lake to the interurban car-line—a half mile. It is a lifting walk at any time, but summer evenings are wonderful with all the sounds and scents of a true pastorale—lake-breath and meadow-lands, the whole sky to look at, and the murmuring dissonance of the poplars. Often we walk to the car with passing guests. One evening a guest went away whom we loved very much. A lad of seven, named John, and I walked back from the car alone.

He was ignited. I felt this at last through his hand. I had been thinking about my own things all too long, missing the beginnings of his talk.... He hurried forward in the dusk, speaking in a hushed rapt voice. Because I had missed the first part, I said: "John, I want you to write that—either to-night or to-morrow."

And this is what came in:

The Magic Lane:

It was at dusk. Two people left their tracks in Nature's dust road.

Love is found on that road. It is the road of the mystics.

They leave their love in it; Nature kisses their feet.

Many horses' feet have been kissed on that mystic road.

That mystic road will last forever.

I long to walk upon that road of love.

Love on that road will last forever.

It is all true love.

Our friends have been met on that road of love.

It leads to the Hills of God.

Certain spelling matters have been corrected. We pay little attention to spelling in the work here. The young ones learn by reading and get the proper look of a word altogether too soon in many cases. There was another high moment from John at the same time. The following three lines have stood out from the period with memorable magic:

Wonder

The soft breath of the Mother came in through the window of vines.

The stars were shining like the face of the New Generation.

My spirit was away in the Hills. A noise at the door brought me back——

John then fell into a psychological tangle which we found little profit in following. By the "Mother" he referred to Nature.... The verse period has passed for the time. Around the age of seven, boys change. Often, as in this case, they are not so interesting for a while afterward. John is coming nine now and is writing "action" stories with all the worn and regulation props and settings. The early tendency will return with a dimension added. All transitions are times of disorder, but they are followed by larger areas and truer fulfilments of order. A cloud falls upon the sanctuary, but when it is dispelled, one perceives a lifted dome, bright with its new cloth of gold.

I am struck every day in dealing with young boys how wisdom and beauty and truth can be inculcated in their lives, without pain and strain to them, and with great profit to the teacher. The young mind is quick to change. It has not grown its pharisaical ivory....

The sanction of a boy must be won on a physical basis. A man must know what the boy knows and go him one better. The man must understand boy points of view, but never expect the boy to be puerile. Parents of the past generations have had the steady effrontery to expect very little from children. "Why, they are only children!" has done more to make for vacuousness and drivel than any other visionless point of view, none of which has been missed. There is a difference in ages, to be sure. The child's mind has not massed for use the external impacts of twenty or thirty years of life in the world, but there is also an Immortal within—a singer, hero, builder, or a teacher possibly, eager to manifest through the child's fresh mind, fervid to bring the mind of the child to its subjection, for the expression of its own revelations. Indeed, the parents themselves are enjoined to become as little children. In arriving at this wisdom and humility, they may suddenly find masters in their own children.

There is also a lad here of seven named Tom. Yesterday I found him beside me on the sand, down by the water's edge. I began to tell him about the Inner Light that we all carry. You can talk over a child's head, if your words are choked with mental complications (which is apt to be second-rate talk, anyway), but you seldom are out of reach of a fine child's grasp when you speak of spiritual things. He was sitting cross-legged, folded hands between his knees—a little six pointed star—head and shoulders the three upper points, knees with folded hands between, the three lower. He was bare from the waist up and thighs down, and brown as the honey of buckwheat.... I told him that the seventh and perfect point of his star was within; that if he shut his eyes and kept very still, putting away for the present all his thoughts about himself, his feelings, his wants and his rights—looking into himself as one would look ahead for a lamp in the night, listening deep within, as one would listen for the voice of a loved friend,—I promised that at last he would see what the three wise men saw—the Star in the East. He need only follow that Star and be true to its guidance to come at last to the Cave and the Solar Babe.... After that I hinted that I would come to his feet and listen.

Tom felt that it was worth trying for at once—shut his eyes, turning all thoughts and gaze within. He held the posture long.... I have marvelled again and again at the quickness with which the child-mind attains to concentration so essential for all original production. The little ones have no mad emotional lists to sort out and subdue; their wants are simple "yes" and "no" in so many cases. Indeed, they are spared the struggle of becoming as little children.... Tom held the posture, until I was actually tense from the strain of waiting and keeping my thoughts from calling his.

It was a picture—sun-whitened hair, long yellow lashes, brown body with a bit of babe's softness left to it, and glorious sunlight. He opened his eyes at last saying that he had the door, where the light was, almost opened, when a fly bit him.

I thought of the perfection of the instance of the mind's waywardness—the coming of the Master spoiled by a fly bite.... Tom will search for his Star every day. It is strange that he is closer to the hill-pastures around Bethlehem, under seven, than for years afterward.

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.