The Way of Power, L. Adams Beck [beach books txt] 📗

In one point all who have seen agree, namely that Love is the basis of the Law on which the universe moves. I need not refer to this point of view in our own Scriptures. We are all acquainted with the thesis—though the harsh experiences of life leave some of us with, as we think, very good reason to doubt its truth. But why should it be so? Why should love lead us to realization of the powers? Why should St. Paul speaking in the very language of the Fourth Dimension assert it is necessary “that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height––” But all can finish the sentence. Here we must turn to India again—that great commentator on the “occult.” As Max M�ller says of her:

“That which we can study nowhere but in India is the all-absorbing influence which religion and philosophy can exercise on the human mind. So far as we can judge of a large class of people in India, not only the priestly class but the nobility also, not men only, but women, what was real to them was the invisible. What formed the theme of their conversations, the subject of their meditations, was the Real which alone lent some kind of reality to this phenomenal world. This is the side of India which deserves our study because there has been nothing like it in the whole world. This is the highest summit of thought which the human mind has reached.”

And these men and women were a branch of our own race. The language they spoke was drawn from a common source with our European languages. Their thought is our true heritage. It appears to me, considering its immense influence in Asia and also in Europe, that there is none better worth our study. The teaching of India is the unity of the universe and of ourselves with it, and this is really the teaching of the occult. Surveying man, beholding his greedy grasping ego with the desires and appetites which he has been taught to call personality and himself, India declares this ego to be the creator of ignorance and illusion, blinding us to the facts of our own world and the Land behind the Looking Glass, ignorant because it can know only through the channel of its fallible senses and can think only within the bounds of time and space which are its prisons. It is therefore unable to see anything as it is in itself and can visualize it only as it appears when viewed through the narrow slit through which its senses and consciousness command the world. To an organism built differently from ourselves all would appear quite differently and we cannot tell how. Thus we are imprisoned and cut off from the occult which is in truth the Real.

But in every man, hidden under the carapace of this ignorant, false and ape-like self, lies a true self which is immortal because it is a part of what India calls That (because it is indescribable) and which we call God. Very deep down in most of us lies that Self, forgotten save by fits and starts, unrealized, hidden by the objective ego which transacts all our daily business and usurps the throne of the true monarch. But it is there, and until a man recognizes the truth of its existence and essence he walks blinded in a world of false concepts and beliefs created by his ego, totally miscomprehending his relation to the universe and as much beyond as we cannot conceive. The realization of this truth is enlightenment; the man opens blinded eyes and gradually perceives the world, not as it seemed, but as it is, perfect in the beauty of Law, and himself an integral part of it; a relation nearer than any sonship or brotherhood, being Union. He will then gradually learn that what held him apart from his rightful ownership of power was the illusion of individuality which concentrated his desires on such illusory prizes as personal success and all it connotes, on a personal heaven and immortality, and baser preoccupations than these. For desiring these individual possessions he is deflected into the sandy desert of selfishness and is imprisoned more and more terribly in its solitudes of egoism. He has not learned the Law that this ignorance is utter darkness, weakness, and inability to react to and use the great currents of force sweeping around us. This deception of false-selfhood is as alluring and seemingly natural as it is dangerous. Edward Carpenter has a useful analogy:

“Each little leaf on a tree may very naturally have sufficient consciousness to believe that it is an entirely separate being, maintaining itself in sunlight and air, withering and dying when winter comes. It probably does not realize that all the time it is supported by the sap which flows from the trunk, and that in its turn it is feeding the life of the tree; that its self is the self of the whole tree.”

So also beneath the tossing wave-crests is the urge of the illimitable ocean, and the individuality of each leaf, each wave is illusion. There was One, there is One, and but One, and we are a part of it.

Thus, being the tree, the ocean, the cosmic consciousness, we see that India accepts no doctrine of original sin but offers instead that of original power. We are the king who being drugged forgets his kingship in a nightmare of mad desires which though seemingly won can never assuage his divine homesickness with their dance of dying dreams. The Western faiths have recognized their unreality:

“Change and decay in all around I see;

O Thou, who changest not, abide with me.”

But India strikes higher. “I,—man though I be—I myself am the Unchanging. I sit victorious above pain and change for I too am divine! I too am fathered by the starry sky! What I will I can do and be. Death has no power on that immortal Self.”

But how is this great knowledge attained?

The consciousness of this mighty self in us must evolve as the body evolves from lower types on its upward way. As it has taken ages to disengage the divine strength of the Apollo from the brute strength of the ape-man, so it takes time and experiences many and great to give a man the wisdom enabling him to realize and act on the knowledge that within the rocky shell of his false ego lies the Pearl of great price—which is power and realization. And, seeing what time and experiences are needed for so vast a triumph, return again and again to school in some form awaits not only humanity but all life, until it has attained self-realization of the True in itself and therefore in the whole—piercing through the deceptive layers of personality to the inmost kernel of being, which is Divine and universal instead of individual and partial. “For,” says