THE HIDDEN SIDE OF THINGS/PART 18

 

FOURTH SECTION

 

HOW WE INFLUENCE OTHERS

 

CHAPTER XVIII

 

BY WHAT WE ARE THE INTERRELATION OF MEN

 

WE have been examining the influences to which we are liable, and we have also considered how, by reactions which we do not notice, we are constantly influencing ourselves. Now we come to the third great branch of our subject, the question of how we influence others. What has been already said is sufficient to show us that invariably we must influence them, whether we wish to do so or not; for if, as we have already seen, all these varied influences are constantly playing upon and affecting us, it is quite clear that what we do in our turn must be part of the influence which is acting on those near us. We are all so closely interrelated that no man can live his life to himself alone, and every thought or action is producing its result on others-- not only because people see our actions in the physical world and imitate them, but because they are affected by the unseen radiation of the vibrations of our thoughts and feelings.

 

We influence people in three ways: by what we are; by what we think and desire; by what we say and do.

 

First by what we are; because what we are expresses itself in our various vehicles, and they are constantly pouring out waves of influence which tend to reproduce themselves-- that is, to infect other people. So whatever we wish other people to be, we ourselves must be first of all. What then is the idea which we should set before ourselves in this matter? Many would say “To be good,” and of course that is the first consideration; but surely we may take that for granted. Anyone who has got so far as even to think about the duty of influencing the world, must by the hypothesis be trying his best to live a good life. Let us then assume the good intention and the earnest endeavour, and let us see what we can do to improve the world around us by our example. I think the first point is the duty of happiness and peace.

 

THE DUTY OF HAPPINESS

 

Let us take happiness first. Unquestionably the Deity means man to be happy. Happiness is a duty; I do not mean merely philosophical calm, though assuredly that is a good thing; I mean active happiness. It is a duty, not only to the Divine Power and to ourselves, but also to others, as I shall presently show; and it is a duty not difficult of accomplishment, if we will only exercise the inestimable faculty of common sense. Yet the majority of men and women are obviously often unhappy; why?

 

Unhappiness is a mental condition, so the suffering which comes from sickness or accident is not strictly part of our subject, yet there is often a mental side even to that, which may be greatly minimised by the application of reason. Eternal Justice rules the world, and therefore nothing can, by any possibility, happen to us that we have not deserved; and as that eternal Justice is also eternal Love, everything that happens to us is intended to help us forward in our development, and is capable of doing so, if we will only take it in the right way and try to learn the lesson which it is meant to teach. Since this is true-- and those who have probed most deeply into the mysteries of life and death know that it is-- to grumble or to repine at suffering is manifestly not only to waste much force uselessly, but also to take an entirely inaccurate and foolish view of life, and to lose what is designed as an opportunity.

 

Let us consider some of the more frequent causes of this prevalent unhappiness, in order to see how it can be avoided. Man has displayed exceeding ingenuity in inverting reasons for being miserable, but most of them can be classed under one or other of four heads-- desire, regret, fear and worry.

 

Desire -- Much unhappiness arises because people are perpetually yearning for what they have not-- for riches, for fame, for power, for social position, for success in all sorts of undertakings. I do not forget that contentment may sometimes denote stagnation, and that what has been called “divine discontent” is a prerequisite to progress. That we should unceasingly endeavour to improve ourselves, to better our position, to augment our power of helpfulness to others-- all this is good and estimable, and tends to our evolution; but most of our discontent is anything but divine, because it is not a desire for improvement and usefulness, but rather a mere selfish craving for the personal enjoyment that we expect to derive from riches or from the exercise of power; and that is why so much misery results from it. Press forward, indeed, as ardently as you will; but be happy in your pressing, be cheery under failure, and never be too busy to hold out a helping hand to your fellow-pilgrim.

 

Among the most poisonous of the manifold forms of this great weed desire, are those called envy and jealousy. If men would only learn to mind their own business and leave other people alone, many fertile sources of unhappiness would disappear. What is it to you that another man has more money or a larger house, that he keeps more servants or owns better horses, or that his wife is able to indulge in more astonishing vagaries of millinery and dressmaking? All these things afford him a certain kind of opportunity-- a test of his capacity for using them aright; he may be succeeding or he may be failing, but in any case you are not his judge, and your business is clearly not to waste your time in criticising and envying him, but to be quite sure that you yourself are fulfilling to the uttermost the duties which appertain to your own state of life.

 

Perhaps of all the passions which poor human nature cherishes, jealousy is the most ridiculous. It pretends to love fervently, and yet objects that any other should share its devotion; whereas unselfish affection but rejoices the more when it finds the object of its adoration universally appreciated. Jealousy loathes, above all things, to see evidence of the fondness of for its idol, and yet it is always eagerly watching for confirmation of its suspicions, and will take any amount of trouble to prove to itself the existence of what most it hates! See then how much utterly unnecessary unhappiness is escaped by the man who is strong enough and sensible enough to mind his own business, and refuses absolutely to be drawn into the meshes either of envy or jealousy.

 

Curb desire and cultivate contentment; let your wants be few and simple and your ambitions for progress and usefulness rather than for possessions; and you will find that you have eliminated one of the most fruitful and potent causes of misery.

 

Regret -- It is pitiable to think how many thousands every day are suffering needless, hopeless, useless agonies of regret. You had money perhaps, and it is gone; you had a position, and you have lost it. That is no reason why you should squander your strength and your time in unavailing lamentation. Start at once to earn more money, to make for yourself another position. “Let the dead past bury its dead,” and turn your thought to the future.

 

Yes, and this is true even though the loss has been caused by your own fault, even though that which you regret be a sin. You may have failed, as many a man before you has failed, but you have no time to waste in remorse. If you have fallen, do not lie mourning in the mud, but get up at once, and go on your way more circumspectly. Set your face forward, and push resolutely ahead. If you fall a thousand times-- well, get up a thousand times and go on again; it is absolutely useless to sink discouraged by the way. There is just as much reason for the thousandth attempt as there was for the first, and if you persevere success is certain, for your strength grows by repeated effort. A Master once said: “The only repentance which is of the slightest value is determination not to commit the same sin again.” The wise man is not he who never makes mistakes, but he who never makes the same mistake twice.

 

The greatest of all regrets, I know full well, is that for “the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still”. Yet even that most sacred of sorrows may be dispelled, if we are willing to take the trouble to understand. When those whom we love pass from the sight of our physical eyes, we are no longer left gazing at a blank wall, clinging with desperate faith to nebulous uncertainty, hoping against hope for some far distant reunion, as were so many of our forefathers.

 

Science now treads where ignorance once resigned, and anyone who is ready to examine the available evidence may convince himself that death is but the stepping from one room into another, the gate of a higher and fuller life, and that we have not in any sense lost our friends, as we so often erroneously say, but have only lost for the time the power to see them. A little patient study of the facts soon enables us to turn from a selfish contemplation of this illusion of our bereavement to the glorious certainty which opens out before those who are so much dearer to us than ourselves; and thus one of the saddest of all forms of unhappiness is at least greatly mitigated, even when not entirely removed.

 

Fear -- I suppose that only those who, like some of the clergy, have had special opportunities of knowing the inner side of men' s lives, can be aware of the extent to which humanity suffers from the fear of death. Many a man who shows a brave front to the world, and laughs and smiles with the best, is yet groaning inwardly all the while under the oppression of a secret horror, knowing that death must come, dreading lest the sword should fall. Yet all this is quite unnecessary, and comes only from ignorance, as indeed does all fear; for those who comprehend death feel no dismay at its approach. They know that man does not die, but simply lays aside his body as one lays aside a worn-out suit of clothes; and to them one process is no more terrible than the other. The man who in this twentieth century does not yet know the facts about death, is merely the man who has not taken the pains to look into the matter, and if he suffers from fear of that which does not exist, he has only himself to blame.

 

Many are haunted by the apprehension of loss of property, of lapsing into poverty. There are thousands who just manage to live upon such income as they can earn, but they feel that if through sickness or from any other cause supplies should fail them, they would at once be plunged into direct distress. Even when this danger is real, nothing is gained by brooding over it; this ever-present anxiety in no way helps them; they are no whit the safer because this terror hovers over them and darkens all their day.

 

These poor souls also should try to understand life, to grasp the purport of this great scheme of evolution of which they find themselves a part; for when once they comprehend a little of its plan they will realise that nothing comes by chance, but that truly all things work together for good, and so pain and trouble and sorrow cannot come unless they are needed, unless they have their part to play in the development that is to be. So they will look forward with hope instead of with fear, knowing that if they loyally do the best they can with each day as it passes, they will have nothing wherewith to reproach themselves, whatever the future may bring forth.

 

Worry -- The same considerations show us the futility of worry and grumbling. If the world be in God' s hands, and if we are all working under His immutable laws, manifestly our business is to do our duty in our corner, and to try to move intelligently along with the mighty stream of advancement; but to grumble at the way in which it is working, or to worry as to how matters will turn out, is obviously the height of folly. How often we hear men say: “If it were not for the unfortunate circumstances which surround me, I should be a very fine fellow indeed; I would soon show you what I could do along this line or along that; but, cramped as I am, how can you expect anything from me?”

 

Now the man who talks in that way has no conception of the meaning of life. What each man would like best, no doubt, would be a set of circumstances which would give him a chance of using such powers as he already possesses, of showing what he can do. But we must remember that Nature wants to develop us in all directions, not in one only; and to that end we often find ourselves thrown into conditions where we must do the very thing that we would say we cannot do, in order that we may learn that lesson and unfold that power, which at present lies latent within us.

 

So instead of sitting down and grumbling that we are under the control of adverse circumstances, our business is to get up and control the circumstances for ourselves. The weak man is the slave of his environment; the strong man learns how to dominate it, which is precisely what he is intended to do.

 

Then again, see how we worry ourselves about what others think of us, forgetting that what we do is no affair of theirs, so long as it does not interfere with them, and that their opinion is, after all, not of the slightest consequence. Our endeavour must be to do our duty as we see it, and to try to help our fellows whenever occasion presents itself; if your conscience approves your action, no other criticism need trouble you. It is to your Father in Heaven that you are responsible for your deeds, not to Mrs. So-and-so, who is peeping through the blind next door.

 

Perhaps the same worthy lady says something spiteful about you, and half-a-dozen kind friends take care to repeat and exaggerate it. If you are foolish you are mightily offended, and a feud is set on foot which may last for months and involve a host of innocent people; and then you actually try to throw the responsibility for all this silly unpleasantness on the shoulders of the neighbour at whose remark you chose to take offence! Use plain common sense for a moment, and just think how ridiculous that is.

 

In the first place, in nine cases out of ten, your neighbour didn't say it at all, or didn't mean it in the sense in which you take it, so that you are probably doing her a gross injustice. Even in the tenth case, when she really did say it and meant it, there was most likely some exasperating cause of which you know nothing; she may have been kept awake all night by a toothache or a restless baby! Surely it is neither kind nor dignified to take notice of a hasty word uttered under the influence of irritation. Of course it was quite wrong of her, and she ought to have exhibited the same angelic charity that you yourself always show; I am not defending her in the least; I am only suggesting that because she has done one foolish thing there is no real reason why you should do another.

 

After all, what harm has she done you? It is not she who is responsible for your annoyance, but your own want of thought. What are her words but a mere vibration of the air? If you had not heard of them you would not have felt offended, and yet her part of the action would have been just the same. Therefore, the feeling of anger is your fault and not hers; you have unnecessarily allowed yourself to be violently excited by something which in reality is powerless to affect you. It is your own pride which has stirred up your passion, not her idle words. Think, and you will see that this is so. Simple, plain common sense, and nothing more; and yet how few people see clearly enough to take it in that way! And how much unhappiness might be avoided if we only used our brains more and our tongues less!

 

These considerations show us that the clouds of unhappiness can be dispelled by knowledge and reason; and it is unquestionably both our interest and our duty instantly and vigorously to set about that dispersion. It is our interest, since when that is done our lives will be longer and more fruitful; “a merry heart goes all the day; a sad one tires in a mile.” Make the best of everything, not the worst; watch for the good in the world, and not for the evil. Let your criticism be of that happy kind which pounces upon a pearl as eagerly as the average atrabilious critic flies at a flaw; and you have no idea how much easier and pleasanter your life will become. There is a beauty everywhere in Nature, if we will only look for it; there is always plenty of reason for gladness, if we will but search for it instead of trying to hunt out causes for grumbling.

 

It is our duty, for it is thoroughly well established that both happiness and misery are infectious. All who have studied these matters know that these waves of matter, finer than we can see, which are continually radiating from us in every direction, carry with them to those around us our feelings of joy or of sorrow. So if you allow yourself to give way to sadness and despondency, you are actually radiating gloom-- darkening God' s sunlight for your neighbours, and making your brother' s burden heavier for him to bear; and you have no right to do this.

 

On the other hand, if you are yourself full of happiness, that radiant joy is poured upon all who come near you, and you become a veritable sun, showering life and light and love in your small circle on the earth, even as the Deity Himself floods them forth through all the universe; and so in your tiny way you are a fellow-worker together with Him.

 

PEACE

 

Behind the active happiness there must be an abiding peace, and this also we must try to radiate. The lack of peace is one of the most lamentable characteristics of our age. There never was a time when man needed more sorely the sage advice of S. Peter: “Seek peace and ensue it,” but the majority know not even in what direction to begin the search, and so they decide that peace is unattainable on earth, and resign themselves to discomfort.

 

Man is living simultaneously in three worlds, the physical, the astral or emotional, and the mental, and he has in each of these a body or vehicle through which he expresses himself. At all these levels, in all these vehicles, there should be peace; yet with most of us that is very far from being the case.

 

On the physical earth, there is hardly a person who is not complaining of something, who is not frequently ill in some way. One man' s digestion is out of order, another has constant headaches, a third finds his nerves breaking down, and so on. In the world of emotion matters are no better, for people are constantly allowing themselves to be shaken and torn by violent feelings, sorrow, anger, jealousy, envy; and so they are quite unnecessarily miserable. Nor are they at peace mentally, for they are perpetually rushing from one line of thought to another, full of worry and hurry, always desiring new things before they have understood or utilised the old.

 

The causes of this universal unrest are three-- ignorance, desire, and selfishness. Therefore, the path to peace consists in conquering these hindrances, and replacing them by their opposites-- in gaining knowledge, self-control and unselfishness. Men often think that the causes of their disquiet are exterior to themselves, that sorrow and trouble press upon them from without, not realising that nothing outside can affect them unless they themselves permit it to do so. None but ourselves can ever hurt us or hinder us, just as no one else can make our progress for us. As has been beautifully said in the East, the path lies within us. If we take the trouble to consider it, we shall see that this is so.

 

To gain peace we must first gain knowledge-- knowledge of the laws under which evolution is working. When we are ignorant of these laws, we are constantly breaking them, constantly pushing aside from the path of the progress of the race in pursuit of some fancied private and personal advantage or pleasure. The steady pressure of the law of evolution forces us back, for our own good, into the path which we have left, we are restless; we struggle against it; we complain of the pain and the trouble as though they had come upon us by mere chance, when all the time it is our own resistance to the guidance of the law that causes us to feel its constraining power.

 

Our health suffers because we so often live unhealthily; we eat the wrong food, we wear unsuitable clothing, we ignore ventilation and exercise, we pass our lives amidst unsanitary conditions, and then we wonder why our heads ache or why our nerves and digestion fail us. The man who knows the laws of hygiene and takes the trouble to obey them avoids these evils.

 

Precisely the same is true with regard to the worlds of thought and emotion; these have their natural laws, and to break those laws means suffering. Unfortunately, many people have the idea that all rules relating to these realms of thought and emotion are arbitrary; religious teachers have made the disastrous mistake of talking about the imposition of punishment for the breach of them, and so have obscured the plain fact that they are just as much laws of nature as those with which we are familiar in physical life, and that what follows upon any infraction of them is not punishment, but merely the natural result. If a man seizes a red-hot bar of iron with the naked hand, he will be burnt; but it would not occur to us to describe the burn as a punishment for taking hold of the bar. Yet we often do so describe results which are just as natural and just as inevitable.

 

Knowledge of the great scheme of evolution and its laws not only shows us how to live so as to earn peace in the future; it also gives us peace here and now in the present, because it enables us to understand the object of life, to see the unity through all its diversity, the glorious final triumph through the mist of apparently hopeless misery and confusion. For when once the scheme is comprehended, its end is no longer a matter of blind faith, but of mathematical certainty; and from that certainty comes peace.

 

To our knowledge we must add self-control-- control, not merely of actions and words, but of desires, emotions and thoughts.

 

For all thoughts and emotions show themselves as waves in the matter of the mental and astral bodies respectively; and in both cases the evil or selfish thoughts are always comparatively slow vibrations of the coarser matter, while the good unselfish thoughts are the more rapid undulations which play only in the finer matter. But a sudden rush of anger or envy or fear overwhelms for a moment the whole of the astral body, and forces it all to swing for that moment at a special rate. This soon calms down, and the body returns to its normal rates of oscillation. But ever after it is a little more ready to respond to the particular rate which expresses that evil passion.

 

Long ago the great Lord Buddha taught His followers that the life of the ordinary man is full of sorrow, because he attaches himself to earthly things that decay and pass away. He desires wealth and power or position, and he is discontented because he does not gain them, or because, having gained them, he finds them slipping from him. Even to his friends he attaches himself wrongly, for he loves the physical body which must change and fade, instead of the real man who lives on through the ages, and so when his friend lays aside the outer vehicle he mourns him as ` dead' and thinks that he has lost him.

 

The whole tendency of our civilisation is to increase desire, to multiply our requirements. Things which were regarded as luxuries by one generation are considered necessities of life by the next, and our desire is ever reaching out in new directions. If we wish for peace; we must learn to limit these desires, to live a simpler life, to be satisfied with comfort without longing for luxury, we must distinguish necessities from superfluities. It is better to decrease our wants and leave ourselves time to rest, rather than to work ourselves to death in the desperate effort to satisfy constantly increasing wants. If we are to have peace, we must certainly control desire.

 

Another fertile source of disquiet is the habit that we have of interfering with other people-- of perpetually trying to make them see and do things as we see and do them. Many of us seem quite unable to hold a conviction on any subject, social, political or religious, without immediately quarrelling with every one whose convictions happen to be different, and getting up a heated argument about the matter. When we learn ungrudgingly to allow others the same freedom of opinion on every subject that we so unhesitatingly claim for ourselves, when we learn to refrain from criticising them because they differ from us, we shall have advanced far along the path which leads to peace.

 

Most of all is it necessary for peace that we should cast aside the personality and acquire unselfishness. So long as we are self-centred, so long as the ` I' is the pivot round which all our universe turns, we insensibly but inevitably expect that it shall be the centre for others as well, and when we find that they are acting without reference to us-- without recognising our paramount claims to consideration-- we become irritable and self assertive, and peace flies far from us.

 

We must realise that we are souls and not bodies; if we identify ourselves (as men usually do) with the physical vehicle, we cannot avoid giving altogether undue importance to what happens to it, and we become, to a large extent, slaves to it and its perpetually changing feelings. It is to avoid such bondage that the Oriental adopts the habit of thought which leads him to substitute for our ordinary phrases: “I am hungry, I am tired,” the more exact statement: “My body is hungry, my body is tired.”

 

It is only one step farther to see that we are equally in error when we say: “I am angry, I am jealous.” The true ` I' is the self behind or within all these vehicles, and that self cannot be angry or jealous, though its astral body may; but it is just as much a mistake for a man to identify himself with the astral vehicle as with the physical. He must not be the slave of any of his bodies mental, astral or physical; these three together make up his personality, the temporary and partial expression of him, but they are not he, any more than the clothes are the man.

 

These four steps, then, must be taken. We must acquire knowledge by study, and having acquired it, we must put it into practice; we must learn to limit our desires and control our emotions, and we must eliminate the lower personality, and identify ourselves as the self behind. We must substitute altruism for egoism; we must realise the God within us before we can attain “the peace of God which passeth all understanding”.

 

That is the path to peace. May that peace rest upon us all.

CHAPTER XIX