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

of Heaven and Eternity.” They share with us these experiences of love, life, and death of which Schopenhauer wrote:

“I should point out how Beginning and End meet together and how closely and intimately Eros is connected with Death: Now Amenthes, as the Egyptians called him, is not only the receiver but the giver of all things. Death is the reservoir of life. Everything comes from Orcus—Everything that is alive now and was once there. Could we but understand the great trick by which that is done all the world would be clear.”

It is interesting in connection with this quotation to note that in the Song Celestial of India, dated about the beginning of our era, this verse occurs:

“Know that That which pervades this Universe is imperishable. This is never born and never dies, nor, after being, may its being cease. This unborn everlasting abiding Ancient is not slain when the body is slain. For to those who are born death is sure, and to the dead birth is sure.”

If Schopenhauer had considered the Indian teachings more deeply than even he did I think he would have understood “the great trick” and have had a soul at rest. So, though they could not put it in that language, the wiser of our ancestors knew that death did not, could not extinguish the psyche of the animal they had loved or dreaded, and on that presumption they spoke and acted.

Again, to those who watch animals with care and understanding it is clear that what we dismiss with ignorant superiority as “mere instinct” covers many mysteries of which we might well covet the key. Pan instructs his children well. They are conscious of Presences to which we are blind. Nature, dumb to us, speaks to them myriad-tongued. It is possible to certain people to have moments of revelation through the consciousness of some animal very completely in touch with them, and though people are chary of talking of experiences scorned by the vast ignorances of mankind, those who have known can assert that knowledge lies along that way,—as surely as on the physical plane we should see, hear, and smell in wholly new flashes of experience if the keenness of the animal sense could be added to ours.

They have their terrors also for us in many a ghostly parable.

In Japan the ghost-foxes clustered under midnight trees with dreadful power upon any human being who opened a chink by which their influences could enter. Hiroshige has recorded with weird brush a gathering of these perilous creatures pallid in pale moonlight, waiting their moment of attack. In China the ghost-tiger slouches through snow to his dreadful work. But the animal-psyche is more often friendly and wise in the tales of all countries. A singing bird guides the way to the imprisoned princess who is the Ideal. The dog, who in life lifted his ears and stared at dangerous presences his master could not see, is swift after death to guard him from them. The cat, dangerous to those outside Realization, employs all her subtlety and wisdom in her master’s aid when she returns as a spirit. And in the ancient belief animals are often shape-changers and can slip in and out of the human body at will. Some of these things are profound parables; others, as we shall learn, are true, when we ourselves have realized the immanence of the Eternal Spirit in all, and the world as it is rather than as it seems.

It is worth while waiting and watching for the sake of even a little understanding of the great truths which underlie the hints I have given. If, as many know, a lonely man or woman can rise to realization of the Love that moves the World through the companionship and understanding of one of “the lower animals” it is time we considered their manifestations more carefully. They know, they see, things we do not, just as we know, we see, things they cannot. Nothing but Realization can bring the necessary fusion.

And there is another form of union which can be gained from the gradual approach made through animal life,—oneness with the life of nature. Here too it is only possible to hint, for words are lacking. What it aims at is Realization of the Universal Spirit manifesting itself in personified forms in nature. Consider what the Greeks aimed at in their high teaching of the Universal Pan,—or All,—of the spirits innate in tree, mountain, rivers, and oceans. How can these things be devoid of an indwelling spirit? Florensky touches this in an essay on “The Humanitarian Roots of Idealism”:

“Are there many people who regard a forest not merely as a collective pronoun and rhetorical embodiment—i.e., as a pure fiction—but as something unique, living? The real unity is a unity of self-consciousness. Are there many who recognize unity in a forest, i.e., the living soul of a forest taken as a whole,—Voodoo, wood-demon, Old Nick?”

Yes, just as in a crowd, a mob, the collective spirit possesses them and is one, moving them to deeds grotesque and terrible, so also the spirit of a forest is one and not the spirit expressed in the individual lives which compose it. They individually resemble the cells of the human body and collectively form a whole as does the body which is the summing up of the cells and has a higher psyche than any one of them.

I have realized this with insight in the great jungles of the tropics, but it is impossible to word why and how one knows what one knows, and to those who do not it is utter foolishness. There is nothing stranger than the contempt of one plane of knowledge for another. Doubtless the solution of all the riddles is simple enough and we have obscured simplicity by our own conceit of complexity.

Bain, says Ouspensky, defines genius as the power of perceiving analogies, and this is a definition which goes deep in the occult, though none can deny that surface analogies are misleading. He proceeds to quote Professor James’s remarkable essay on Fechner as a percipient. I paraphrase, in my own words and with addition.

Fechner asserts that the entire earth we live on must have its own collective consciousness. So must each sun, moon and planet. If so how true was the inspiration of the Greeks in recognizing a great Earth Spirit to which they gave the worship due to a goddess. Fechner sees the Earth as a divine Spirit, the stars as Shakespeare saw them singing in their orbits, “still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim.” So Fechner concludes it is with the human consciousness. Yours is yours and mine is mine. Yet they are known and used together in a higher consciousness than that of the human race into which they enter as constituent parts. To quote Fechner:

“On a certain morning I went out to walk. The fields were green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising. Here and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration appeared on all things. It was only a little bit of earth. It was only one moment of her existence and yet as my look embraced her more and more it seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea but so true and clear a fact that she is an angel—an angel carrying me along with her into heaven. I asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have spun themselves away from life so far as to deem the Earth only a dry clod. But such an opinion as this passes for fantasy.”

Not to those who have assimilated the great Indian teaching of the Unity. They will subscribe to Fechner’s belief that human life and, I would add, animal and plant life are the sense-organs of the Earth-Soul. They know from what bow is loosed that unearthly shaft of beauty and how straight it flies to its mark. They know that together we all stand or fall and therefore it is that to any even partial understanding of the true occult, deep perception with regard to animal life is needed. It is an easier approach than to that of more remote and silent Nature. It has revelations to make far nearer our comprehension. It is as amazing as it is piteous that we have done so little yet to cross the gulf which we have permitted to divide the speechless from the speechful.

It is quite possible to argue that our acquisition of the art of speech with its limitations may have closed to us some other more psychic means of communication and that we have lost as well as gained by taking the line of least resistance. As the development of psychic powers proceeds it becomes certain that this is so. Telepathy and audible vision are not bounded by the feeble intermittent action of mouth and tongue, and it becomes evident that animals whose evolution has proceeded on different lines of development may have certain compensations very difficult for us to comprehend for their much less developed power of reason. Reason by no means has the last word on the Universe. There are points at which it becomes an obstacle, an ally of short-sighted materialism. Wordsworth and greater minds than his have been content to learn from what we proudly call the lower forms of life, and this necessity will be realized more fully as the spiritual thought of the East enkindles our own.

A great perfection in their utterance is achieved in the Song Celestial (the Bhagavad Gita) of India, written probably towards the beginning of our own era. Here is given the vision of Arjuna, the Pandava prince, when Krishna as the Soul of the Universe instructs him. In the precedent division Krishna has revealed to him the secret of the One in All and All in One—the royal, the hidden wisdom—and the Prince passioning with insight prays for a vision of things as they are. He says:

“Of Thy grace to me hast Thou related the supreme mystic tale called The One Over-Self, and thereby my bewilderment is dispelled. If Thou deemest, Lord, that it may be beheld by me, then show to me Thy changeless Self, O Sovereign of the Rule!”

The Lord spake.

“Behold, son of Pritha, the hundreds and thousands of my forms diverse, divine, various of colors and shapes. Behold now, O Wearer of the Hair-Knot, the whole Universe, moving and unmoving solely lodged in this my body and all else that thou art fain to see. But since with this thine own eye thou canst not see me I give thee a divine Eye [the higher consciousness]. Behold my sovereign Rule.”

Thus speaking, the Lord of the Rule showed to Pritha’s son his sovereign form supreme.

Of many mouths and eyes, of many marvelous aspects, of many divine ornaments, with uplifted weapons many and divine, the boundless God facing all ways.

There the son of Pandu beheld the whole universe in its manifold, solely lodged in the body of the God of Gods.

Thereupon the Wealth-Winner, smitten with amaze, his hair standing on end, bowed his head and with clasped hands spake to the God.

“I behold Thee massed in radiance on all sides glittering, scarce discernible, casting forth Splendor like fire and sun immeasurable.

“Thou art the Universe’s Supreme place of ward. Thou art the Warden of everlasting Law.

“As moths with exceeding speed pass into a lighted fire to perish, so pass the worlds with exceeding speed into Thy mouth to perish.”

This is possibly the most interesting statement of the vision of the higher consciousness in Eastern literature. In its vastness it includes all as the infinite must do. But it includes the infinitely little which is also a necessity of the Law, and the smallest thing which creeps or flies or floats its leaves on the