No mortal can by any other method than love and the service that is rendered through love seek and find the "Holy Grail," which is to say the bliss of spiritual union with his Beloved. Therefore to fly from the responsibilities and the environment in which you are, without regard to the welfare of others, is to defeat your own quest; neither do we claim that you should under all circ.u.mstances remain chained to a post like an unwilling captive, poisoning your mind with resentment and hatred.
There is no one formula which fits all cases--other than that given in love and service. The Golden Rule which tells us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, has another side to its shield, and it may read "Do not permit others to do unto you what you would not do to them." If you seek freedom from a specific environment from no other motive than personal selfishness, you may be doing yourself an injury; but if you are also doing an injury to others by remaining, then you are doubly mistaken in your course.
The way of attainment is not easy, although the formula is simple; it may be briefly but concisely summed up in the vital and important word "unselfishness." "Not mine but thine also," is the watchword of the wise in love. Not possession of the Beloved One, but union with him or her. There is just one big world of difference between these two points of view. More than that, there is the difference of Heaven and h.e.l.l.
CHAPTER XII
"SELLING THE THRONES OF ANGELS"
Great as may seem to the sense-conscious person the pleasure and satisfaction of owning some one, or some thing; of possessing and feeling a proprietorship in the one desired; greater by a million-fold is the pleasure of union which is possible only to those who are themselves free, and who in consequence desire freedom for all others.
This is a truth which the unwise cannot comprehend or concur in, and which they will not believe or trust.
Emerson says: "Every personal consideration that we allow costs us heavenly state. We sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure."
And finally, as regards the s.e.x-function, we would like to impress upon every one, though only those who are fit for the kingdom will understand the truth, namely that the highest manifestation of s.e.x-love is not localized in the organs of procreation. The love that is of the soul fills the breast first of all, and is only felt in the region popularly, but erroneously, supposed to circ.u.mscribe the s.e.x-function, as a secondary and by no means compulsory consideration.
When the s.e.x force has become diffused throughout the entire being, radiating from the solar man, and permeating the mind and thus entering into the mortal body which is only a covering of the mind physical copulation becomes a well-trained servant of the will, and is found to be a natural, but yet secondary complement. s.e.x is not confined to the specialized s.e.x-organs. It permeates the entire being.
The person who has no conception of his reality other than as a physical ent.i.ty has not so much as touched the area of spiritual ecstacy which has been alluded to as "the nectar of the G.o.ds;" and so infinitely fine and perfect is the plan of Creation that he can not do so until he is fit; and never can he be fit as long as he remains upon the sense-conscious plane and seeks by s.e.xual perversity and debauchery and s.e.xual insanities to touch that exquisite perfection of joy which he intuitively knows evades him.
Thus the sensual man is caught is a beneficent trap; a wise and just and merciful Power has so placed the "Holy of Holies," that it cannot be defiled; it cannot be reached; it cannot be desecrated. It is forever removed from the touch of the unworthy. No man can hope to express the creative power, the s.e.xual realization of a G.o.d, through the functions which are not higher in consciousness than those of the animal.
Would you attain to the status of the divine man? If so, do not imagine for a moment that the divine man is less vital than your puny physical powers would suggest. Neither should you imagine that the s.e.x-function, even in its lowest state (lowest because most lacking in love-consciousness), is anything but pure and clean and right and normal in itself; the att.i.tude of the average man and woman invests it with all its uncleanness.
But with all the vile thought which the undeveloped mind has indulged in respecting the s.e.x-relation; with all the man-made laws arrayed against it as though it were criminal, and the teachings of the Church denying its spiritual origin and perpetuation; with women selling it in the public markets for their physical maintenance, nothing less than the fact of the eternality and universality of s.e.x, as the divine fulcrum of manifestation, can account for the fact that the poor little bi-une Love-G.o.d is after all coming to be recognized as the hope and savior of Mankind.
If you would have eternal youth and eternal life and love and wisdom, accept this truth, because nothing else can, or will, save you from the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
Another vague query presents itself to the would-be initiate, and we would like to leave this chapter with no misunderstandings; no misconceptions; no misleading statements, because that which we are here stating is not theory. It is the one eternal, undying, simple and unescapable truth which has withstood the onslaughts of time and ignorance.
The query comes and although it has been answered in previous chapters we will again state it, so that there may be no mistake: If the balance is found in counterpartal s.e.x-union--the one man and the one woman uniting on the solar plane--would not this balance be maintained if only one of the two reached the higher planes of consciousness; in other words, would not the balance be struck by extreme purity on the one hand and extreme impurity on the other?
Again we are reminded that the law of the cosmos is wise; that there are no mistakes nor flaws in the cosmic scheme. The answer is that the union is one of complementaries, and not of ant.i.theses. Each one must be balanced, the nature rounded, the soul awake before union is possible. Thus we are saved from ourselves. We cannot, if we would, really gain at the expense of another, although in temporary things we may appear to do so, because the rich grow richer at the expense of the poor; the tyrant ruler maintains his power at the expense of serfs; but doubt not that _eternal equation_ is perfect.
There is still another query: If true s.e.x-union is of the soul, what is to prevent soul-mates from finding each other at the moment of death, regardless of their fitness for G.o.dhood, and thus circ.u.mventing, as it were, the plan of Creation, which would compel each one to earn the prize of eternal life?
The same law governs the interior planes as the exterior. The realization of consciousness is not a capricious matter any more than is the law of physical growth. A man might be in the presence of untold wealth, but if he had not the consciousness to know and realize values, he would remain poor, even though by a wave of his hand he might command millions. One might give a blind man a check for a million dollars, and if he had no others means of knowing what it was, he might easily imagine it to be worthless. Death does not bestow wisdom. Wisdom is acquired. Love is a self-generator.
If you would follow the law of trans.m.u.tation and acquire the throne of angelhood, get busy within the laboratory of your own mind. Take the crucible of Thought and begin to work interiorly upon the common, everyday things that present themselves in your environment. This is the only way of trans.m.u.tation. Love grows by feeding upon itself, and the sacrifices and the kindnesses that are bestowed in love without thought of personal benefit grow into the flood of golden light and love of the spiritual realms.
The chief virtue in any one"s pursuit of philosophy, or of esoteric wisdom, and in methods of attainment, is found in the fact that such effort is proof of earnest desire to attain. Emerson says that the princ.i.p.al benefit of a college education is to teach the student that he does not need a college education. This estimate of the value of years of study seems at first glance a sarcastic one, but it is not.
If this wisdom can be acquired in no other way, then even so it were well worth the price. If the student can learn that much love is the price of trans.m.u.tation only after exhausting every other method, what does it matter, so that he finally learns it?
_Learn to look into the hearts of men._
At first sight, everything on the busy city street is a part of a moving panorama; but an intimate view, when you get in touch with segregated parts of the panorama, discloses the interior nature; the hopes and the fears; the aspirations and the longings and the heartaches and the joys of the ent.i.ties composing the whole moving picture.
You notice a little female figure; her cheeks are pinked to a hue rivalling the American beauty rose; her lips are carmined like a clowns and her eyebrows penciled too obviously. Her cheap little dress is amateurishly cut in imitation of "the latest." Your first impulse, perhaps, is to scorn her as a "brazen" creature of the streets; but if you will suspend judgment and look a little closer, you may see that her eyes are, in their depths, those of a child, for all her seeming experience. Her brazenness is perhaps only the armor which she has donned to hide a turbulent heart--the dowry of centuries of grandmothers who longed for one glimpse of freedom; of the right to comb their hair as they liked; to powder their faces if they wanted to; to run and jump and laugh and dance and be innocently free and happy without the fear of shocking that bugbear Respectability, and the tyrant Decorum, which insisted that a woman"s legs must be carefully concealed on penalty of being adjudged "immodest."
Those poor reviled, execrated and vigilantly-concealed legs of our fore-mothers! They are crying aloud for vindication, and they will be heard wherever the line of least resistance affords a channel for their freedom. And so, instead of blaming the poor little painted doll of a woman, look into her heart. You will discover that she is bent on having two things long denied womankind--freedom and happiness. If she is foredoomed to failure on the route she has chosen, that is all the more reason why you should withhold censure and give freely of your help and sympathy.
"_Learn to look into the hearts of men._"
Learn to see beneath the appearance. The old Italian organ-grinder doing his best to please you with his wheezy hurdy-gurdy is not just an old organ-grinder. He is also a man with emotions and feelings and longings and hopes identical in substance with your own; no matter if the organ is out of tune. Learn to hear the _spirit_ of the aria or the intermezzo.
And behold! There is a bunch of noisy, dirty, slangy and bold street-arabs--at least that is what they look like from the outside.
But learn to look within. There you will find the cause of their appearance, and when you have found the cause you will sympathize with them. If you can get back to the underlying cause of the manifestations of life, you will never fail to sympathize with the condition you may find, even though you find the cause rooted in crime.
You do not have to agree with the criminal in order to sympathize with his misery. If you have the inner vision, which you must have if you would trans.m.u.te the baser metals into pure gold and find the key to immortal life and love, you will never fail to understand and to sympathize with every point of view. "Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral."
Don"t imagine for one moment that you have to go to the Himalayas to find the inner vision; or that you will obtain the key to the Hidden Mysteries by shutting yourself in a monastery. Wherever you are, you must lose sight of yourself. Not the higher Self of Reality, but the lesser self of the carnal, or sense-conscious plane--the personality that conceals _you_. And above all, you are not to regard this personality as an enemy to be scourged and beaten and reviled. It is, or it should be, a willing, and helpful servant of your soul even as we say "the hand is the servant of the brain." If your hand becomes unruly and does not obey your brain, train it to do so, don"t cut it off, even though the Bible does appear to tell you to--why should the men who wrote in that far-off time know more of Truth than we of a later century?
You may imagine that you need to belong to some "Brotherhood," in order to learn the secrets of alchemical trans.m.u.tation. There is nothing of the Great Wisdom which can be taught you, which you cannot learn of yourself if you will look within and unite with the heart of the world.
There is no wisdom higher than love; and there is no power greater than love; and there is no heaven happier than love and there is no G.o.d holier than love. If you will take this for your creed you will readily see that it is for you to think love into those things that appear to lack it; think purity into those things that appear impure; think unity into those things that appear separated; and taking the lesson home to your own intimate conduct of life, invest the expression of your s.e.x with the pure and lofty and holy power G.o.d gave to it, or refrain from the thought of s.e.x until you can learn to do so.
Says a modern writer: "If you are still so out of tune with the Infinite as to harbor any thought of evil or shame in connection with the specialized organs and functions of s.e.x, let this illumination from on high cast that devil out of your cosmos forever. And if you turn away with soul offended from even "the slimy gendering of the toad," you dishonor G.o.d who once knew no higher creative formula and still blesses it with His fruitful presence."
And finally do not make the too common mistake of confounding brazenness with freedom from shame and self-condemnation.
Whatever of beauty and purity and joy has come to you in this life has come because of the divinity of s.e.x. If you have been wise enough to know this, and have reverenced it and purified your mind in respect to that function of your being, you will not cheapen it by parading the subject before those who have no idealism, any more than you would "cast pearls before swine;" you will not countenance jokes and ribald songs; you will not indulge in promiscuousness; but instead you will fold it within the sacred intimacy of your heart"s divine altar, as something too beautiful, too holy for the garish light of the un-tender day.
If you have taken into your consciousness the divinity of s.e.x, you will desire unity and disdain possession, knowing that whatever of Heaven is vouchsafed Mankind here is but a shadow of the reality of spiritual realization of the function of s.e.x. You will respect the physical body as the handiwork of the Creative Principle of the universe, respecting the sacredness of human life and liberty. You will teach the truth that the law of Life is mathematically just; that nothing will unlock the gates of Eternal Life and Love, except inward honesty; fidelity; unselfishness; spiritual desire.
If we possess these qualities, we are fit for the kingdom of Love and we shall surely enter therein.
Verily Love transforms mere men into immortal G.o.ds.
FINISh