THE PERFECTING OF MAN/PART 2

 

SEEKING THE MASTER

 

 

 

 

 

THE Sufis, who are the Mystics of Islam, have one exquisite saying that bears on that Seeking the Master which is our subject today. The Sufi Mystic says: “The ways to God are as many as the breaths of the children of men”. That is true. Many are the different temperaments of men, many their different needs, and the cravings of men’s hearts are as various as the satisfactions they desire. If we look at those many ways, those multifarious searchings for the true life, the life of the Spirit, for the Master who embodies that life, we find that the many ways practically classify themselves into three great divisions, and along the one or the other of these we find the searchers, as they begin to realise the fact that they are really searching.

 

One is moved by an intense desire for knowledge, by the longing to understand, by the intellectual impossibility of happiness for him as long as the world remains an unintelligible puzzle, as long as the problems of life remain unanswered and apparently unanswerable. Then another great class approaches the seeking by an intense love for some person who embodies an ideal, by loyalty and devotion to a leader in whom such a one sees embodied all that he most desires to realise in life. A third great type has the will aroused in them by a realisation of the intolerable anguish of the world, the terrible sufferings that press on so many of our race, the resolute determination to alter all that is alterable, and to refuse to believe that anything which man suffers is beyond the reach of man’s remedy by the application of thought, of love, of activity. Those who are moved to the seeking by this realisation of the sorrows of the world form the somewhat rebellious element in the great band of those who are engaged in the search for the highest. And that way is perhaps the most familiar to myself, because it is along that way I sought and by that way I found. And that which oneself has experienced, the road that oneself has trodden, must always remain the most real, the plainest, the one which it is easiest to explain to others.

 

In the past I have stood in the slums of this vast city at the moment when the closing hour had struck, and when the gin-palaces belched out their flood of drunken, miserable humanity, the men raving, violent and cursing, the women sodden and miserable, clasping to their bosoms babes already poisoned with the curse of drink. I used to go down into the hells of the sweaters, where miserable men and yet more miserable women strive to win the right to starve alive­ - you cannot call it to live. I have heard from the mouths of men a statement which is the sad explanation why economically women’s wages are lower than the wages of men, when against the plea: “We cannot live on this,” there has been reference made to that last sad resource of which none can deprive the woman - the selling of herself for bread. I have tramped through mud and slush at midnight to the meetings of omnibus drivers and tram drivers, the only hour they could find to consult with each other about some remedy for their poor wages. And out of all that there arose so keen a realisation of human suffering, so passionate a desire to find a way in which that suffering might be cured, and finally such a despair of human effort, because these, the results of the misery, were scarcely fit to be builded into any better social state, that out of that there came the intensity of search for some way of redemption that might be found.

 

And so along one or other of these ways a man may come, and truly has it been declared in an eastern Scripture: “By whatever road a man approaches me, on that road do I welcome him, for all roads are mine”.

 

We find coming out in the poets, especially of the closing part of the nineteenth century, the different attitudes of those who seek in some way to remedy the sorrows of the world. You find the robust and cheery optimism of Robert Browning, who sings: “God’s in His heaven; all’s right with the world,” forgetting, it seemed to some of us, that it is not the  God in heaven that is so much needed, as to find the God in the hell of human misery. The words of the old Jewish psalmist strike there a better note of hope when he declares: “If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there also”. And that view that the responsibility is on God may tend to indolence, and then it is evil. But on the other hand one must not forget that there are thousands of the good and the earnest and the devoted, like the men and women in the Church Army and the Salvation Army, and in many another organisation for the helping of the desperately poor, who find in that a source of encouragement and of inspira­tion. One cannot sometimes but wonder at the splendour of the faith that wells up against all reason, as it seems, from the unconquerable depths of the Spirit in the human heart, which is able to believe and work against all difficulty, and to believe in a God of love where the world bears such multitudinous testimony on the other side.

 

And then we find another class, who do not take that view that I called a cheery and robust optimism, a gentler view, the view that Tennyson expresses in his famous In Memoriam, the view which hopes against all seeming and resigns itself to ignorance as the inevitable lot of man. You remember how he voices that which seems to be his own position, and which would scarcely perhaps stimulate to the Seeking the Master:

 

 

 

Oh, yet we trust that somehow good

 

Will be the final goal of ill;

 

To pangs of nature, sins of will,

 

Defects of doubt and taints of blood;

 

 

 

That nothing walks with aimless feet,

 

That not one life shall be destroy’d

 

Or cast as rubbish to the void

 

When God hath made the pile complete;

 

 

 

That not a worm is cloven in vain,

 

That not a moth with vain desire

 

Is shrivell’d in a fruitless fire

 

Or but subserves another's gain.

 

 

 

Behold, we know not anything;

 

We can but trust that good shall fall

 

At last, far off, at last, to all,

 

And every winter change to spring.

 

But it is not all who can remain contented with such a hope, who are content to say: “We cannot know”; and in those stormier natures, such as was my own, in face of the misery seen in those days to which I have alluded, the more passionate words of Myers seemed rather to express our attitude to life:

 

 

 

Were it not thus, O King of my salvation,

 

Many would curse to Thee, and I for one,

 

Fling Thee Thy bliss and snatch at Thy damnation,

 

Scorn and abhor the rising of Thy sun,

 

 

 

Ring with a reckless shivering of laughter,­

 

Mad with the woe which Thou hast seen so long;

 

Question if any recompense hereafter

 

Vails to atone the inexpiable wrong.

 

 

 

That is one of the ways in which man is awaked in order that he may really search; for there are natures whom very hopelessness of outside help throws back upon themselves to find what help may be, who say, in despair perchance and yet not all despairful: “There is no God, O Son, if thou be none”; who realise the beauty of the words of William Kingdon Clifford: “Is it said, ‘Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die’? Nay, rather, let us take hands and help, for today we are alive together”. That will inspire a searching, that will stimulate to effort. The mental muscles are braced up to struggle, to conquer in the end.

 

Those who by any of these ways have reached the point where they feel they must know, or perish, where they feel they must find a perfect ideal or lose all heart to live, where they feel they must find a remedy and not only an anodyne for human pain, they have reached the point where something shall come in their way to stimulate a conscious search for a Master, some perhaps apparently insignificant incident, which, none the less, tells them how they are to seek. Sometimes it is a book taken off a friend’s table while they are waiting  for the coming of a friend, a book, perchance, like Mr Sinnett’s Occult World, like any one of the Theosophical books that are lying about so widely spread at the present day. And they,  picking it up and turning over the pages care­lessly, are caught, and begin to read, and then go on to study, and begin to learn. Sometimes a lecture, the man having strolled in carelessly to get rid of an hour hanging idly on his hands. Sometimes a picture, like the sugges­tive pictures of the great artist Watts. Some­times, where people are not likely to pick up such a book, attend such a lecture, speak to any friends on these great problems, it may even come - as it came to myself - not by book, nor picture, nor lecture, but by a Voice that seemed to ring out within me and yet without me, that was so clearly not my own that, unthinking, I answered in spoken words, as though speaking to one like myself. I was in a City office late one evening, m that strange silence of the City when all the human tide has ebbed away to the suburbs, and you get that utter solitude which only this crowded City knows in the quiet hours of the evening. And in the Voice was something that seemed to me, at the moment, a little stern, clear, firm, exacting: “Are you willing to surrender everything in order that you may know the truth?” And all simply, unquestioningly, I answered “Surely, that is all I need”. But it went on, insistent: “Is there nothing that you hold back? will you let all go?” And again the answer: “There is nothing I will not surrender, if I can only know”. And then the Voice changed into a music, full, as it were, of smiling and benevolent compassion: “Within a very little time the Light shall arise”. And then again the silence fell, and I was left wondering what had occurred. But within one fortnight of that strange happening, Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine was placed in my hands by Mr Stead, then editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, with the request to review it, because it was out of the line of his young men’s writing. I took the two great volumes home and sat down to read them, and read and read, hour after hour, until in very truth the Light had arisen, and I knew that for which I had searched through many weary years in vain. That is three and twenty years ago; and from that hour to this light has been thrown on the path of seek­ing and then of finding; for it is as true in the twentieth century as it was true in the first, and thousands of centuries before, that those “who seek shall find, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened”.

 

So to many, in one or other of the ways, the knowledge comes, knowledge of the great facts I spoke of last week, of Reincarnation, of Karma, which explain the condition of things today, and which, applied to tomorrow, can remedy our social ills. For these give time and means of change; these offer not only the unriddling of the present, but help the creation of a nobler future; for you can apply them to the problems of education, of the most miserable and the most depraved, of criminology, of government, and understand the methods of change as well as the object to be aimed at. And to the seeker there comes first the theory, showing the truths on which the world is based, and by knowledge of the law giving also the means and possibility of change.

 

In addition to those two great fundamental truths, the other two I mentioned - the fact of the existence of the Path, and the fact of the existence of those who have trodden the Path, the Masters - answer to the heart and mind of the seeker, the longing not only to understand but to be an instrument of the working out of the Divine plan in human evolution. They tell the earnest seeker how he may tread the Path, how he may find the Master; and truly then does Light arise in the darkness, for you can see the steps before you for the taking, you realise the goal, although the goal be still out of grasp, even out of sight. When that word has gone out, as you find it in an old Hindu Scripture: “Awake, arise, seek the great Teachers, and attend,” then there comes from the mouth of the seeker the joyful answer “I am awake; I have arisen; I seek the Teachers, and will not cease the search until I find”. Then in the knowledge unrolled before him the whole theory of the seeking is laid down how the man must search, what the man must do, the conditions that he must be willing to accept in the seeking, and the surety of the law that the seeker shall be recompensed by the finding. He discovers in his study that there is a science called the Science of Union, or the Science of Yoga, as it is phrased in the East, for Yoga only means joining, and the Science of the Joining leads to the great truth of the Union; and he sees then, stretching before him, the beginning of the Path, and learns the qualifications wanted for its treading.

 

What is this Yoga? It is neither more nor less than the application of the laws of evolu­tion of the human mind to the individual: the way in which the human mind evolves, clear and definite and under law; then how to apply those laws to the individual case, so as to quicken the evolution of the mind, and enable the man to outstrip his race, in order that thereby he may help it also to quicken its evolution. Yoga, then, means the application of these laws, and it joins to that a Discipline of Life.

 

Now, that Discipline of Life is necessary for those who would apply the laws of a swifter evolution to themselves, for the ordinary laws of nature with which we are surrounded carry us along ordinary evolution, and if we increase the stress and the strain, we must do something to strengthen all those parts of ourselves which are subjected to the strain in the swifter evolu­tion that we are determined to follow. That is the reason for the Discipline of Life. It is not arbitrary; it is not, as some people think, an attempt on the part of the Masters to build up obstacles on the road that leads to Them, obstacles which people will be unwilling or unable to overclimb. It is a necessary guarding of the would-be disciple against the dangers of his swifter progress, because of the great strain on body and on mind that that swifter progress entails. And unless you are able to realise the common-sense of that, unless you will admit, as every seeker for the Master must admit, that he is demanding to do in brief space of time what his race will take hundreds of thousands of years in the accomplishing, and that therefore, if for no other reason, he must prepare an at present unprepared body, an untrained mind, for the huge task to which he is addressing himself - unless he can realise that, it is better not to go further than the point we have already reached - the merest theoretical knowledge of  the fundamental truths, the facts of the Path and of the Masters. When you turn from theory to begin practice, when from learning, as you might learn any science out of text­books, you turn, as it were, to the experiments of the laboratory and begin yourself to handle  the chemicals, yourself to build up the com­pounds, yourself even to make new researches,  then, as you know well enough, the student needs a guide, a teacher, a helper; otherwise,  taking up for himself that which the majority leave aside, unknowing the conditions, he may injure, maim, kill himself, because he is affront­ing dangers that the great majority of the race  leave on one side.

 

Now, the Science of Yoga has its own practices and experiments, and therefore its own dangers. If you believe it possible that there should be such a science, if by study you  have convinced yourself that such a science exists, it is childish to kick against the restrictions which every science places on its students until they have learned and understand; and then they can go forward as they will, for knowledge has justified their independence.

 

This Discipline of Life does, I frankly admit, keep off a certain, even a considerable, number of those who say that they would like to enter on the search which means presently to tread the Path. People sometimes more resent restrictions on their ordinary daily life than they resent things more impalpable, and there­fore less realised. Take, for instance, one very common habit, especially of the western world, and now unhappily penetrating into the East, the habit of taking various forms of alcoholic drink. I admit that for the great majority of men and women of the world, leading the ordinary life of men and not inclined to fall into the excesses which we see amongst the less cultured and less intellectual, very little harm accrues from the taking of a certain small amount of wine or spirit. I admit men can do it all their lives, and women too, with very little harm. Those of them who adopt abstin­ence without desiring to follow Yoga probably do it because they see the harm and the excess drink leads to, and realise that example is better than precept. Those who take it will injure themselves a little. But then they are injuring themselves all the time by insanitary habits, and one, more or less, is not a matter of life and death. It may shorten life a little; it may open a small door to let in disease. But it is quite different when you begin the practice which by seeking leads you to the Master; for part of that practice is what is called Meditation, con­centrated, definite, hard thinking along a par­ticular line, which is intended to stimulate and develop in you organs at present rudimentary, which will not develop in ordinary people in the ordinary course of evolution for a considerable time, although I admit a good many amongst ourselves are just beginning to evolve them. Now those organs are in the physical brain, organs which doctors have lately stated are peculiarly susceptible to any vapour of alcohol, which by it are poisoned, and so are rendered incapable of functioning healthily at all. When you begin deliberately to hasten their evolution from the rudimentary or semi-rudimentary con­ditions up to the activity in which they become the bridge between the physical and the astral worlds, by means of which you bring through certain vibrations to which the rest of the brain does not normally respond, the organs, which are literally the bridges of communication; then, by thus increasing the flow of blood to them by meditation, thus stimulating the minute vessels  which feed them, you will render the danger of inflammation very much greater; it is  madness to do it, if those organs are already suffering from slight alcoholic poisoning, which,  while it goes on without bringing much harm where the organs are left alone, becomes a  source of active and serious danger the moment they are stimulated to growth, the moment  attention is turned towards them in order that they may develop. Hence part of the Discipline of Life for the practical study of Yoga is the entire putting aside of every spirituous liquor.

Another demand which is made, still more annoying in the minds of many - and I grant it is troublesome to those who are very much in contact with their fellows - is the dropping of all forms of flesh food. That does not poison in the same way, but it tends slightly to coarsen the body, and the aim of the student of Yoga is to have a body which will be very strong and very resistant, while at the same time it is very sensitive and very responsive to vibrations from the subtler worlds of matter and of life. You have to deal here with your nervous system and your brain; you have to build those up; and the building depends on the kind of food that you take; and, putting aside all questions of compassion (though they cannot be put aside by those who would seek the Masters of Compassion), and taking only the physical results, apart from any question as to animal suffering and pain, you find that unless your nerves, your brains, are prepared, then the vibrations of subtler matter beating upon them - and you are inviting that beating, remember - will tend to disorganise both, and to render you liable to nervous disorder and to various forms of hysteria.

 

This warning I am bound to give. If you want to see it justified, turn back to the records of Mystics and Saints, whose religions did not impose upon them a strict Discipline of Life. You will find much of unbalanced thought and judgment, much of hysterical emotion, mingled with a splendid insight into the worlds called invisible, and a marvellous response to the powers coming from beings of the higher world. That is so unchallenged, so unchallengeable, that some psychologists have used it as a proof that all religious higher vision is really a form of hysteria, and that all great Saints and Prophets and Teachers of religion are more or less unbalanced, when they have come into touch with the invisible worlds. You know how far Lombroso went in that, and many of his school go as far as he did. If you would search safely, if you would keep your balance, your nervous system strong and sane and healthy, then you must be willing to pay the price that all have paid in the past and are paying in the present, that when they affront those keener vibrations, when they allow them to play upon their body, and especially on the brain and nervous system, they must then take up a life different from that led by men and women of the world, and must be willing to  tune up the instrument on which the melodies of the Spirit presently are to be played.

 

So you may take Yoga practically to cover an application of the laws of mind to swifter individual evolution, and a discipline of life­ - the latter applicable, of course, to those who practice, who do not only study.

 

Then the seeker finds that there are certain Qualifications laid down for the treading of the earlier portion of the Path, that which the Roman Catholic calls the Path of Purgation, which the Hindu and the Buddhist call the probationary or preparatory Path. Those Qualifications are laid down quite plainly and definitely, so that any man may begin to practise them, and the practice of them, with some slight restriction which I will give you in a moment, need not imply that Discipline of Life of which I have been speaking, because it does not, with one exception, lead into a certain definite practice of meditation. These Qualifications are said to be four. First the Power to Dis­criminate between the real and the unreal. I shall go more fully into these next week, but I want to run over them now to show you the line of the preparation. You have to learn to distinguish in everything around you, and in everyone around you, between the permanent element and the impermanent, between the surface and the content, as it were, between the eternal and the transitory. That is the first of the Qualifications, and that leads on necessarily to the second; for when you distinguish between the passing and the lasting, you become some­what indifferent to the things that are ever-changing, while your gaze is steadfastly fixed on that which you recognise as lasting. The second Qualification is what is called Dispassion, or Desirelessness, the absence of desire for the fleeting and the changing, the concentration of desire on the Eternal, on that which Is. The third Qualification is made of the Six Jewels, mental qualities that you must acquire. First, Control of the Mind, that you may be able to fix it steadily on a single thing, to suck out all the contents of that thing, and also to use it as an instrument in the building of character; for your mind is your only instrument, remember, whereby you can create, re-create, yourself. As  the mallet and the chisel in the hand of the sculptor, so is control of the mind moved by will the mallet and chisel in the hand of the man who would create out of the rough marble of his own nature the perfect image of the Divine, that he seeks within that marble. Then Control of Action, which grows out of the mind, and the great virtue of Tolerance. No one who is bigoted, narrow-minded, illiberal, can enter on the Path we seek. Tolerance, broad, all-pervading, that is one of the Qualifications, and it means far more than some of you think. It does not mean the spirit that says: “Oh, yes, you are all wrong, but you can go your own way”. That is not real tolerance; that is rather indifference to your neighbour’s welfare. The real tolerance grows out of the recognition of the Spirit in the heart of each, of him who  knows his own way and takes it “according to the Word”, recognising in each the Spirit that  knows, seeing in each the will of the Spirit that chooses, never desiring in any way to compel  any more than to obstruct; to offer anything we have of value, but never to desire to force it on the unwilling; to place what we believe to be true before the eyes of another, but to feel no  vexation, no anger, no irritation, if to him it is not true; to remember that truth is no truth to anyone until he sees it and embraces it for himself, and that we are so built, our inner nature is so true, that the moment we see a  truth we embrace it. It is not argument, but recognition, with which the Spirit in man meets the unveiled truth; and while the bandage is on the eyes and we cannot see, truth is to us as falsehood, for our nature has not recognised it as truth. That is what tolerance means, holding your own, willing to share it, but ever refusing to impose or to attack. The fourth jewel is Endurance, that strong power which can bear without giving way, which can face all things in the search for truth, and never fall back because of difficulty or of peril; which knows no discouragement, admits no despair, which is sure that truth is findable, and resolute to find it. Every obstacle makes it stronger, every struggle strengthens its muscles, every defeat makes it rise again to struggle for victory. The man needs endurance who would tread the higher path. Then Faith, faith in the God within you, faith in the God manifested in the Master, faith in the One Life whereof we all are manifestations, faith unshaken and unshake­able, so that no doubt may arise. Then Balance, equilibrium. The Song-Celestial says: “Equili­brium is called Yoga”; absence of excitement, absence of passion, the transmutation of excite­ment and passion into the will that points un­swerving to its goal; the power of standing serene while all around are troubled; the power of standing alone where all others have left and have deserted. That perfect balance is the sixth of these jewels of the mind. The fourth Qualification is the desire to be free, the will to be free, in order that you may help.

 

These need not be wholly gained before you find the Master, else were the search well-nigh impossible. All that is meant by saying that these are the Qualifications is that you must aim at them, and try to begin to build them into your character. You build so much better, if you know what you want. You study so much more effectively, if the subjects of your examination are before you. And so these are laid down by the Masters as the Qualifications that those are to develop who desire to find Them and to become Their pupils. The moment we know them we can begin to work at them. The moment we see them we can begin to try to develop them, and only a little development in each is wanted before the search will pass into the finding.

 

But you may say: “How begin, how work at them?” Not by that vague wish to be better than you are, which is all that some people seem to know of the deathless, unconquerable will which forces its way to the Path. The means are very largely meditation, and then the practice in life. There are no other real means, for meditation is concentrated thought, and concentrated thought is, as I have just said, your one instrument when you would re-create yourself. For this meditation to be safely practised, it is necessary to adopt the Discipline above-mentioned. Meditation means that you will for a time withdraw from the world, not for long at first, for it is a strain upon the brain; five or ten minutes in the morning is enough to begin with, and if you have done it well you will find it enough, for you will be tired before the ten minutes are over. For that time you withdraw from the outer world, you shut it right out, you build a wall, as it were, around you, through which the thoughts and the hopes and the fears of the outer world cannot pierce. You go within yourself, into the Holy of Holies within you, and there you sit, in the silence within that wall, to listen for the voice of the Self, to await the coming of the higher man into his kingdom. And when you have built your wall and shut out the outer world, you turn your mind, which is ever wandering about and disturbing you, and fix it on some single idea. Take, if you will, the first of the Qualifications, in many ways the most difficult - dis­crimination. You begin steadily to think of what that means, to think, say, of yourself; you realise that there is much in you that is chang­ing and not permanent; your body is changing; your emotions are changing; your thoughts are changing. Those then belong to the unreal and not to the real, and in your thought you put those aside, sometimes one by one, some­times with the body; you put aside a single sense like that of sight, and try to realise the world as it would be without the sense of sight, or any other sense that you please for the time, to force yourself into realising that it is not yourself. You feel an emotion and put it aside, shut it out, refuse to vibrate in answer to it,  and you see those changing emotions are not yourself. Then those wandering thoughts that change with every breath; you put them aside, and see that changing phantasmagoria of thought is not yourself. And so you shut out part after part, until perchance nothing seems left, for you find that all is changing, and you seek the real and the Changeless. But in that emptiness that you have made, in that void whence  the unreal has disappeared, from which the changing has vanished, and where for a moment you feel disappointed, in that void there arises upon you the higher consciousness, the death­less, the unchanging, the eternal; the Will, of which your changing wishes are the reflection in the lower world; the Wisdom, of which your varying thoughts are the images in the lower world; the Activity, of which your changing actions are the reflection in the lower world. You feel yourself to be Will, Wisdom, Activity, apart from all those changing images. Just as the sun in the heaven is unchanged, but is mirrored as a thousand suns in ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans, so do you know the Sun of the Spirit within you from the broken reflections that you find in the lower self. You gain by meditation the knowledge that you are eternal, and that all the changing things are only the broken images of your real Self.

 

Out of that quiet meditation, out of that great realisation, you go into your outer world of broken images, and you try to live in the Eternal while you are busy in the outer world.  You know you are dealing only with reflections, but reflections of vital import for the building of character and for the helping of men. You know there is something beyond them, and that in yourself, but willingly you go out into the world of men to bring them what you have found in the silence of the chamber of life. You live what in that chamber you have known; you walk in the light which there has risen upon you; you love with the love that grows out of the love of the real, and you become a true worker in the haunts of men. And so, again, it is written: “Yoga is skill in action”, for only, the man who knows the higher can control the lower; only the man who is without desires can see how to work best for the helping of his brethren; only the man who has the will that never changes can be unmoved by the passing wishes that flit through the lower nature.

 

From meditation to work, from the gaining of light to the bearing of it into the world, from the learning of wisdom to the using it among men, from the realisation of right activity to the guiding aright your acts. And as the man thus searches, desiring to find the Master, as he offers to Him the service he is able to render and works with the longing to find Him that so he may serve Him better, then after long seeking and resolute searching he sees awakening in his partial darkness the; Light that is real; he comes to the point where the Master will find him, where truly his feet shall be set on that probationary Path, for which he has been preparing himself during his search.

 

And so we leave him knocking at the door, seeking for the Master, knowing that the door will soon be turned upon its hinges, and that on its threshold the Master shall be found.

 

 

 

NEXT CHAPTER 

FINDING THE MASTER