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

more than if I had been for many years at a University. For I saw and knew the being of all beings, the abyss and the byss. So that I did not only greatly wonder but exceedingly rejoice.”

There is an English instance of the same illumination, if possible more wonderful than that of Boehme. Those who wish to understand the bright illumination of the higher consciousness cannot do better than study the life of William Blake—the great poet, artist and mystic. Every word he wrote, every line he drew, is worth deep consideration, though I admit that for some of his prophetic poems psychological insight akin to his own, however far below it, is needed.

He had his first insight into the Land behind the Looking Glass of the senses between the ages of eight and ten, and ever after that seems to have been free of certain lovely aspects of that strange land, and even to have climbed some of its mountains. Of his first vision it is told that walking on Peckham Rye, near Dulwich, he looked up into a tree and saw it filled with angels for birds, their bright wings radiant as stars in the boughs. Coming home he innocently told what he had seen and was only saved from his indignant father’s thrashing by his mother’s entreaties. A little later, among the haymakers in a field he saw winged figures moving and shining. About the age of twelve he wrote one of his loveliest lyrics. He developed rapidly as an artist and his father decided to apprentice him to the famous engraver Ryland, engraver to the King, in the highest circles of literature and society and of delightful appearance and manners. The elder Blake took his boy to see his future master expecting great things from the interview, but as they left the studio, the boy spoke:

“Father, I don’t like the man’s face. He will live to be hanged.”

Twelve years later Ryland got into embarrassment, committed forgery and was hanged. Gilchrist, Blake’s puzzled biographer, hovers between prophetic gift and natural intuition for an explanation of this strange incident. It needs little explanation to those who know the A B C of the rules of true sight unconditioned by the senses, and it is interesting to compare it with Ramakrishna’s like power. When he was still a young man a beloved brother died, and Blake, by the bedside, saw the freed spirit soar upward, clapping its hands for joy. In a letter to a friend he describes metrically a true vision of the Land behind the Looking Glass, which he saw while living in Sussex.

“In particles bright

The jewels of light

Distinct shone and clear,

And each was a man

Human-formed. Swift I ran,

For they beckoned to me,

Remote by the sea,

Saying: ‘Each grain of sand,

Every stone on the land,

Each herb and each tree,

Mountain, hill, earth, and sea,

Cloud, meteor, and star,

Are men seen afar.’

Till the jewels of light,

Heavenly men, beaming bright,

Appeared as one man …”

And so the vision proceeds until he is lost in its radiant beauty. He may have seen a perfect truth. All things are possible in the Land beyond the senses! It was here that he saw his vision of a flower-spirit’s funeral. “Did you ever see one?” he asked a woman who sat by him.

“Never,” she answered in natural astonishment.

“I have,” he said, “but not before last night. I was walking alone in my garden; there was great stillness among the branches and flowers and more than common sweetness in the air. I heard a low and pleasant sound. At last I saw the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures of the size and color of green and gray grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose-leaf, which they buried with songs and disappeared. It was a fairy’s funeral.” In other words, he could perceive the indwelling spirit in all and recognize it as a part of the spiritual and divine.

He writes to a friend:

“I am under the direction of messengers from heaven daily and nightly. But the nature of such things is not without trouble and care.”

And:

“I have traveled through perils and darkness not unlike a champion. Nothing can withstand the fury of my course among the stars of God.”

And so he goes along the flowery lanes:

“With angels planted in hawthorn bowers,

And God himself in the passing hours:

With silver angels across my way,

And golden demons that none can stay.”

It is most interesting to note that in the visions of the higher consciousness the geography and inhabitants of that lovely and terrible land behind the Veil of the Senses take the shape that will be most familiar to the percipient. It is not so in the ecstasy of the highest consciousness. There the Universal is perceived in blissful union. But Blake will see the winged angels and the figures of the Christian story, beautiful as the pictures of Fra Angelico, moving in blue and crimson against golden backgrounds of pure light, and Ramakrishna will see the Great God of the Himalayas with the young moon in his hair, and both be true and both divine though not the highest form of perception. This must be so until the flesh and its limits are utterly transcended, and I believe Ramakrishna had attained that vision and I cannot deny that Blake may have done so though I do not find any authoritative evidence that he did.

It is easy to understand that for those who see by means and at times when they should not, the things seen may be horrible, revealing terrible depths in their own subconsciousness.

“For all things exist in the human imagination.” So said Blake himself, using the word in its great creative sense which proves us indeed part of the force which “moves the sun and the other stars.”

The death of Blake is one of the most blissful, radiant things ever recorded. “Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst out into singing of the things he saw in heaven.”

I wish I could give more space to the divine simplicity and serenity of his visions. Happy are those who see! Poor and neglected, he livid in the valley of vision, fulfilled with joy anvil beauty.

I might multiply instances. It is from overfulness and not paucity of material that I pass on. I must mention the occult relation of animals to men which is so fully recognized in India, and of which many of us are vaguely and some clearly conscious. When that is understood as it is by the superconscious race beginning and slowly evolving “amid the half-formed creatures round,” our attitude towards the animal world will be completely changed by the new realization and consciousness. I shall give a closing chapter to this. But before quitting this subject of the higher consciousness I will give an interesting quotation from a modern realization of the higher consciousness.

“The subject was in the beginning of his thirty-sixth year. He and two friends had spent the evening reading the poets and especially Walt Whitman. They parted at midnight and he had a long drive. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment. All at once he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame-colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city. The next, he knew the light was within himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning flash of the Brahmic splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of the Brahmic bliss, leaving thenceforward forever one after-taste of heaven. He saw and knew that the cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the universe is so ordered that all things work together for the good of each and all, and that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love. He claims he learned more within the few seconds during which the illumination lasted than in previous years of study, and much that no study could have ever taught. The illumination continued but a few minutes but the effect was ineffaceable. A new and higher order of ideas. Years after, he met a man who had had a large experience in the higher life. His conversations with this man threw a flood of light upon the meaning of what he himself had experienced. He saw the significance of the subjective light in the case of Paul and in that of Mohammed. The secret of Walt Whitman’s transcendent greatness was revealed to him. He came to the conclusion that there exists a family [I should myself say “a group”] living among but scarcely forming a part of ordinary humanity, whose members are spread abroad throughout the advanced races of mankind and throughout the last forty centuries. Their eyes have been opened and they have seen.”

Of this I think there is no doubt, and the more one examines history—especially the history of ideas—the more it will be conceded. Those who have the flash of Brahmic splendor—what Walt Whitman describes as “ineffable light, light rare, untellable, lighting the very light, beyond all signs, description, languages”—are not and cannot be as those who do not know. But their numbers will grow. This is the eventual destination of the whole human race.