The Seekers :: NOTES FIRST MEETING

NOTES FIRST MEETING

Why Are Our Religions Unsatisfying, and What Shall We Do?

I. Conditions To-day:

a. Religions destroy religion. If you are wrong, I might be wrong.

b. Men cling to traditional, half-conscious belief, or build up an ethic or agnostic faith, because man must live by faith.

II. Historic Reasons for Present Conditions:

a. Initiated and popular religion in history:

1. India; castes and the Brahmans.

2. Egypt; secret priesthood, annexed beliefs, and interpretations of myths.

3. Greece; Rome; early Catholicism; the priests.

b. Analysis of initiated and popular belief:

1. Myths of Orpheus; of Moses and the Burning Bush; of the divine parentage of Jesus.

2. The initiated is the religion of poetry and prophecy, of symbols. These, taken literally by the people, become a religion of idols and prose. One is a moving spirit, the other a graven image. Words can be idols.

c. The modern trend:

1. Democratic spirit (since Reformation) destroys initiated religion, keeps popular religion.

2. Science destroys popular myths.

III. What Must We Do To-day?

a. Scientific knowledge destroys popular myths, but does not replace religion:

1. Every scientist has a philosophy or faith.

2. Science fosters new popular delusions, built on its literal facts, such as atheism and scientific superstitions of half-knowledge.

b. There is absolute religious knowledge:

1. Its record in history: Moses, Jesus, etc.

2. Its testimony in our own selves:

(What do we know?)

c. In a democracy every one must attain this knowledge; each must be initiated; every man shall be a prophet.

IV. What Does Each One Believe Concerning God?

(Question for next week.)

SECOND MEETING

God, and the Meaning of Progress

I. The Idea of God a Personal Conviction:

a. A realization to be achieved, but, after that, silence on the subject. Sacredness of the word.

b. Members’ individual ideas of God.

c. My idea stated:

1. God as Self (read from Vedas), as the completion of myself. “I am that I am.”

2. The aspiration toward complete sympathy, consciousness (selfhood) as the aspiration of God, and the aim of progress.

3. The idea of “holiness” meaning “wholeness.”

II. Historic Ideas of God:

a. The inner meaning of polytheism: many aspects of one God.

b. The inner meaning of trinity: the three as one, as the contrast of life, and its unity. A true paradox. Myself, the other Self, and love, the holy spirit.

c. The inner meaning of dualism: the two are two sides of one thing, the negative and the positive. Light makes darkness.

d. Personal, parental, and all other ideas of God are included in our larger view. The unity embraces all ideas and diversities.

III. Progress As the Trend Toward Complete Self:

a. Throughout history the only progress has been toward greater understanding and brotherhood:

1. The value of railroads, telephones, etc.

b. The good is whatever leads toward understanding, sympathy, wholeness.

c. The bad is whatever does not lead thither:

1. The bad is what was once good, and has been passed.

2. Or sometimes it is the necessary result of an experimental progress.

3. Things are not “good” and “bad,” but better and worse. Therefore evil itself is proof of progress.

d. The will toward good is in the world and ourselves.

1. Dissatisfaction is the will toward progress.

2. We use all bad things for the great good that we love.

(This meeting might be divided into two, one on GOD, and one on PROGRESS.)

THIRD MEETING

Matter and Spirit

I. Short Review:

a. What is the aim of life?

b. How do you explain good and bad?

II. Are Matter and Spirit Antagonistic, or Like Good and Bad, to be Explained Through Each Other?

a. All matter has shape or idea:

1. Matter takes the shape of spirit.

2. We know only the spirit, or idea, because all things come to us through our senses.

3. Pure matter, if it exist, is a thing we cannot experience.

III. Matter is the Medium Through Which Spirit Expresses Itself:

a. Expression is the means for reaching understanding.

b. All expression, at present, is through so-called material means.

IV. Spirit Can Do All Things in the Future:

a. “Immovable” physical conditions are the result of will or spirit in the past.

1. Our ancestors.

2. The mental beginnings of all physical ills.

b. Spirit force is the only shaping force in a universe of spirit or will.

1. One can, therefore, control the physical.

2. One can shape one’s destiny.

FOURTH MEETING

Evolution

I. The Place of Evolution in a Religious Enquiry:

a. We must believe in that, or in special creation.

1. Every religion has a theory of creation.

2. Evolution is a theory of creation.

b. It may throw light on the means of progress.

II. Evolution Means Descent of All Creatures from a Common One-celled Ancestral Form:

a. Physical proof of the theory:

1. In likeness of structure.

2. In rudimentary organs.

3. In geological records.

4. In the Law of Recapitulation.

III. Theories of the Process of Evolution:

a. Natural Selection:

1. Variations in all directions, and adaptation.

2. Adaptation a struggle for life.

a. For place.

. For food.

?. For protection, through imitative color or form.

3. The value of artificial selection as partly showing us the processes of natural selection.

4. What natural selection fails to explain.

b. The theory of Sexual Selection, and its shortcomings.

c. The auxiliary theory of Isolation.

IV. The Philosophical Significance of Evolution:

a. Evolution a self-evolving of uncreated life.

1. Wish, desire, love cause all change and creation.

2. Progress is from within, of our own will.

3. Change or re-birth necessitates death.

a. Death makes room for young.

. We die for the sake of life.

b. Evolution and the aim of life:

1. Fitness and harmony the test of life.

2. It goes from likeness to unlikeness and recognition.

3. Pain, disease, death and changing standards of good and bad are the path of progress toward wholeness and understanding.

c. Evolution the simplest, clearest proof of relationship.

[Note.—For reference and illustrations, the first volume of Romanes’ “Darwin and After Darwin” is more convenient to use and show than Darwin’s own works.]

FIFTH MEETING

Prayer

I. A Communion, Not a Begging:

a. In a world that goes toward its own desire—which is also ours—it is folly to ask one’s vast Self for anything.

b. Prayer is a momentary consciousness of the vast Self which is God.

II. The Value of Prayer:

a. To be conscious, by an effort, of the vast oneness, gives us renewed calmness and strength.

b. To pray for what we can be is to call forth the power to be it.

c. Prayer puts us in a state of mind in which we draw upon the endless source of power and possibility:

1. The value, therefore, of prayer before sleep.

III. The Manner of Prayer:

a. By conscious words that give the communion.

b. By an occasional state of mind.

c. By every creative action.

d. By the whole attitude of our life.

SIXTH MEETING

Immortality

I. Importance to Us of an Opinion Concerning Death and Immortality:

a. We know we must die soon:

1. Speak of the numberless generations of life.

b. We live according to our expectations:

1. Relation throughout history of beliefs concerning immortality and of the morality of peoples.

2. Good and bad effects of belief in heaven and hell.

II. Knowledge Concerning Immortality:

a. What is Knowledge?

1. The relativity of all knowledge.

2. Knowledge through conviction loses force when there is disagreement.

3. Knowledge through analogy is like circumstantial evidence.

b. We know:

1. That matter and force do not die.

a. We know of nothing that is positively mortal.

2. That life works in a certain direction.

3. That death and re-birth are the means of moving in that direction, i.e., of progress.

4. That this progress is of the spirit or self.

5. That we are forever a part of the world, related to the whole.

6. As we know nothing but consciousness or self, we believe it must be immortal, though we have no proof.

III. The Theory of Race-immortality as an Ideal:

a. It is more improbable than self-immortality.

1. All planets die.

2. The last generation, dies, too.

b. It is not true immortality:

1. The thing we cannot transmit is the Self which loves and seeks.

IV. Memory and Personality:

a. Admission of ignorance and indifference. Why?

1. Everything is a memory and a prophecy, since everything exists forever, and advances.

2. The body is a memory.

3. Memory must continue at least in its results on the self, if not more definitely.

b. Love and Meeting:

1. Love may have other satisfactions than we dream of.

2. We are all one, and cannot be separated.

V. “I Am” Expresses Immortality:

a. Each least thing is eternal and universal.

SEVENTH MEETING

The Meaning of Beauty

I. Beauty is the Symbol of Completeness and Harmony:

a. This is the reason beauty delights us:

1. It pictures the aim and desire of our whole life.

b. The smallest thing can be as a universe in itself, if it be complete and harmonious, i.e., perfect:

1. A drop as well as a planet; a dog, in his way, as well as a man; a day as well as a century.

II. The Good, the True and the Beautiful Have the Same End, and Are Sought, Respectively, by Philosophy, Science and Art:

a. Philosophy seeks the whole at once, therefore can never reach that completeness.

b. Science seeks individual truths, not the moral truth, or aim:

1. Darwin, the philosophical scientist.

c. Art gives us that completeness, our aim, symbolized in a small and definite shape.

III. Genius is the Common Human Quality, Distinct from Talent:

a. The Genius differs not in kind, but in degree, from his fellows.

b. The desire for understanding and completeness, present in some measure in all, is genius.

c. The understanding in the spectator is akin to the genius in the artist.

IV. Talent is the Power of Expression:

a. To see all things as distinct wholes, impersonally.

b. The skill to portray, and to handle material.

c. Genius and talent vary in degrees of relation in different artists’ work:

1. The great idea, imperfectly executed.

2. The small idea in perfect form.

V. Art as the Symbol of Completeness and Creative Expression:

a. The sublime lie of the Symbol, truer than fact:

1. The effect of removal from life, of unreality, in relation to beauty. It seems more self-sufficient.

b. A complete vision must not take sides:

1. When art is partisan, for something, it is also against something. Complete representation.

c. Creative art gives us the joy of play, of creation:

1. Play—interplay—is the progress and will of life, and work but a name for the disagreeable but necessary part of the game.

EIGHTH MEETING

Art

I. Reason for Æsthetic Enquiry:

a. Art (creation) is the service of religion.

b. Laws of beauty (completeness) may give us laws for life.

c. Will prepare us to deal more sanely and surely with the involved problems of conduct.

II. Art in the Novel:

a. Completeness in the story:

1. Exclusion of unimportant and irrelevant matter.

a. The “story-teller” in us all.

. The distractions of real life, with its far-relatedness.

?. The “outside” event in melodrama too like life.

2. Exclusion of author’s one-sided moral verdict.

3. Must not be “for” some characters, and “against” others.

b. Understanding of Life in novel:

1. False simplicity of poetic justice, of all good, and all bad.

2. Cant phrases offend because they appear imitative, not sincere.

3. Psychological and dramatic treatment:

a. Dramatic writer trusts reader’s insight.

. Action is more convincing than description of motive.

4. Humor and wit:

a. Humor is knowledge of human nature, its contrasted greatness and littleness.

. Wit is a juggling of words into contrasted or incongruous effects.

?. Both are a bringing together of the incongruous, in a paradox of unity.

NINTH MEETING

Art (Continued)

I. Art in Poetry:

a. Difference between Poetry and Prose:

1. Poetry is “set to music,” and the rhythm carries part of the message.

2. This unreality or distance from life makes it more complete and beautiful in itself.

3. The emotions and imagination picture completeness more easily than the intellect:

a. Because the desire for completeness is a feeling.

b. Completeness and understanding in Poetry:

1. Metaphor and simile a relationing of far-off things.

2. Symbol in Play replaces them:

a. The Fairy-story.

3. Taking sides destroys poetry.

4. Exaggerated and conventional phrases are weak because they are insincere.

II. Art in Music:

a. Music is itself harmony and completeness:

1. The most intangible and removed, it is yet the most satisfying symbol of completeness and harmony.

III. The Opera:

a. Its attempt to combine all the Arts in one harmonious expression.

IV. Art in Painting:

a. Unity or completeness in painting:

1. Point of interest; with radiating lines, balance, and other means of making it prominent.

2. The cycle of colors, complete color, and the contrast of light and darkness.

3. A story, not embodied in the picture itself, but needing words of explanation, spoils unity.

4. Unnecessary detail, detracting from central interest and motive, also spoils unity.

b. Truth in painting:

1. Falseness of photographic truth, because of its lack of unity and purpose.

a. The “out-of-focus” and imaginatively planned photograph sometimes artistic.

2. Perspective, the painter’s vision of the single complete experience.

3. To see beauty in things is to see the truth.

4. “Prettiness,” the result of catering to the shortcomings of the spectator’s taste, is a violation of the artist’s taste or sense of completeness and truth.

5. Knowledge of life (anatomy) is necessary:

a. One must understand life to portray it.

V. Sculpture:

a. The Greek Drama of the visual Arts:

1. The unlifelikeness of the material, the removal from life, makes it more beautiful, and a truer symbol.

b. Expresses idea through attitude of the human form.

VI. Architecture:

a. Like music’s, its appeal is to the emotions, without definite sense or lifelikeness; but speaks as life itself.

b. To be complete, it must express outwardly its inner use and meaning.

c. To be sincere, or true, it must express the spirit of land and people.

[Note.—This ninth meeting might profitably be divided into two.]

TENTH MEETING

Shall We Make an Art of Life?

I. Truth, Goodness and Beauty, but the Greatest of these is Beauty, Which Combines the Other Two:

a. Science is knowledge of facts.

b. Philosophy is vision of truth or aim.

c. Art is using our knowledge to create what we seek. Action and purpose.

II. Art is Self-expression, Creation, Action, Relationing:

a. All life, all being, is action, or self-expression.

b. All power in the world is imaginative, creative thought-power:

1. All things must be imagined before they can be known or done.

III. All Great Action, All Goodness, All Power in Life Follows the Same Laws as Art:

a. Therefore let us discover the laws of all arts, and see whether they can be applied to life.

IV. The Message of All the Arts:

a. All have the same laws:

1. Art is the symbol of completeness in a definite shape.

2. Is self-expression and self-fulfilment.

3. Must leave out the unimportant.

4. Must have variety and many-sidedness.

5. Must not be partisan, and must be sympathetic.

6. Must give the impression of truth.

7. Must be aloof, that is, separate from life, and see things, as it were, from a distance, in their wholeness.

V. Review and Conclusion:

a. Each smallest thing can symbolize the whole:

1. Each human life is a symbol of the complete Self, in a definite shape.

2. Each is deserving of reverence:

a. Reverence is the small self awed before its own vastness.

[Note.—As the eleventh meeting was somewhat of a digression, and as the notes taken were covered in later meetings, it is here omitted.]

TWELFTH MEETING

What is Goodness?

I. Each Life, to be Good or Beautiful, Must be a Symbol of that Perfect or Complete Life for Which We Long:

a. Life—the symbol of complete Self in a definite shape.

b. The good man makes all he knows and touches a complete, harmonious whole:

1. Goodness is always of relation.

2. One cannot be perfect till all are so:

a. Therefore goodness implies modesty.

II. False and True Good:

a. The one law of Love, and its petty, changing codes:

1. True good of changing harmonious relation.

2. False good of outworn custom and rule.

III. The Meaning of Self-expression:

a. The small and large Self:

1. The whole world is the whole of me.

2. Serve, not others only, but others as part of yourself.

b. Self-sacrifice:

1. Giving up one thing for a greater thing.

2. Happiness is whatever we want most.

3. If completeness is the aim of life, then all lesser happiness is sacrificed to it.

4. If life is a drama, a whole, we give up our selfish satisfaction to see that whole self satisfied.

c. Creation is Self-expression, is endless, higher rebirth:

1. All action reveals the actor.

2. Life is a drama, in which we feel ourselves to have equal prominence with others, and conscious power of control:

a. We cannot help having influence.

. Let us shape our influence for the whole.

THIRTEENTH MEETING

Self-fulfilment Through Overcoming Limitations

I. Envy, Its Narrowness and Blindness:

a. Every man serves me who does for me what I cannot do for myself:

1. Each one fills out my shortcomings.

b. Use, instead of coveting.

II. Self-regulation in Despite of Self:

a. The moral sense of beauty, an intellectual sense of completeness, makes us regulate and suppress our desires:

1. Hence we make laws which are substitutes for understanding love.

b. The substitutes necessary until love conquers, are:

1. Justice.

2. Honesty.

3. Duty.

4. Binding by promise.

5. Obedience.

c. Conventions, their changes and their convenience.

III. Some Virtues Changed by Love’s Demands:

a. Revenge, the first expression of Loyalty:

1. Our admiration for such expression in its own early time.

b. Pity, the developer of Feeling:

1. Degenerates into Weakness and Impotence.

2. Is an Insult:

a. A strong man does not pity himself. Should not pity other strong selves.

3. Strong Sympathy, and our common Working for the great Happiness, should replace pity.

c. Reverence for special people, with Fear:

1. Self-reverence means reverence for all selves.

2. Reverence the old—and the young, too.

3. The reverence with love replaces the reverence with fear.

FOURTEENTH MEETING

Loyalty, and Conscious Allegiance to our Individual Aspiration

I. Patriotism; its Meaning:

a. We are children of all we can love and serve:

1. The growth of loyalty, from the family to the world:

a. War as a fighting for peace.

b. Patriotism in its growth, like all progress, must include the small in the large, though in seeming disloyalty:

1. Disloyalty to one’s country cannot be loyalty to the world.

2. But wholesome criticism often seems disloyal:

a. The loyalty of revolutionists.

II. Conscious Choice in Self-development:

a. Know what you want most to be.

b. Eliminate whatever interferes with your choice; make life a work of art, not a haphazard photograph.

1. Concentration.

2. Choose and subordinate your studies for their worth to you.

3. Prefer friends to acquaintances.

4. Do the work at hand (charity at home), and be sure your service harmonizes with your knowledge and your whole life.

5. Never degrade the end by making an end out of the means. (Business, athletics, study, must always be means.)

c. Dare to desire the utmost, unflinchingly:

1. Greatness comes from persistent desire rather than from inborn skill.

d. Youth and old age:

1. Desire and service can continue throughout life.

III. Variety and Rhythm:

a. Varied life with single Aim:

1. Concentrate on one thing at a time, but not on one thing all the time.

2. The meaning and worth of Knowledge.

3. Never be bored, or bore:

a. Sense of humor; and use of silence.

4. Work and play, exertion and rest, must harmonize:

a. Even your pleasures will reflect your character, or taste.

b. Be a rhythm, a measure, a force like music in the life all about you.

[Note.—The fifteenth meeting was spent on Christian Science, and is therefore omitted from the notes.]

SIXTEENTH MEETING

Social Relations

I. The Avoidance of Bitter Partisanship:

a. Take sides, not with persons, but with causes.

b. Use all. Be for all, and against none.

II. Social Sympathy:

a. Humanity as a vast Self:

1. Democracy means we have all the right to be equal:

a. Faith and reverence for self in all.

. Service is larger self-service.

?. Each does his part; hand and head.

2. To keep well, to be satisfied, we must care for the sick and miserable:

a. Starvation.

. Old age.

?. Contagion.

b. To care for the weak strengthens the strong:

1. To destroy the weak is dangerous loss. (Rome and Sparta.)

c. In passing judgment on crimes, hate not persons but their acts:

1. Each acts according to his desire or needs.

2. Punishment as preventive and cure.

III. Truth in Personal Relations:

a. Truth-telling not the whole of Truth:

1. Malicious truth-telling is not truth.

2. Worth of kind, true criticism and praise.

b. Our judgments of people judge us:

1. Our limited understanding.

2. Say: “I am one who hates, or loves,” etc.

c. Whom shall we please, and how?

1. The morality of good manners.

2. Vanity, the pretended worth; and true worth or loveableness.

3. “Prettiness” in manner, pleasing those who cannot understand us.

4. Social frivolity, overdress and luxury, and its result of friendship.

a. Show is for those we do not love. (Resembles “costly material” in art.)

[IV. Women and Work:

a. The true preparation for marriage.

b. Social life and service.

c. Knowledge as mere show; or as power.]

SEVENTEENTH MEETING

Aloofness and Creation

I. Seeing Life as a Spectator, from God’s Point of View:

a. The collective personality:

1. Psychological fact: We are often outside ourselves in tense moments.

2. Getting far away from oneself in self-criticism and judgment.

3. Our reasonableness in crises.

4. All heroism is self-forgetfulness for the sake of the whole.

II. Result in Action and Creative Living:

a. Partnership with whole, or God:

1. We can see and use our personal life as part of whole.

2. We can get above our own sorrow and pain, and use them.

b. This aloofness from self, or being the One, is the root of all morals:

1. Some know this, and make laws; the others are forced to obey.

c. Aloofness is collective experience, or memory, whence we grow toward the good. We live in all time and space.

III. Personal Result of Our Club’s Work:

a. Drawing judgment from the whole.

b. Drawing strength from the whole.

c. Training our lesser desires to serve the whole aim and desire of our life.

d. How shall we attain to fulfilment in our personal life?

1. Money, health, power, etc., as certificates of creative value, to be used for new creation.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Hyphenation and archaic spellings have been retained as in the original. Punctuation and type-setting errors have been corrected without note. Other corrections are as noted below.

Page 37, and he saw that an ==> and we saw that an
Page 91, God,” I answered ==> God,” she answered
page 93, so; but a word itself ==> so; work itself
Page 104, a sense of duty ==> a sense of unity
Page 236, different from each one ==> different for each one
Page 266, if the operator always ==> is the spectator always

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