We give our help to all who seek their own ancient wisdom records, so that they may strive toward the fulfillment of their promise to God in the beginning. We surrender all that we have that God’s purpose may be known to man. Freely, for the asking, we give of what we possess, if the purpose is to surrender to God’s will. Amid the shame of the world we seek to discover those about whom a new framework of creation may be established, that wisdom may thereby enter their minds and the illusions of the world be dispelled. It is better to be true to yourself for a single instant, than to be one of a crowd of blind men seeking knowledge in the dunghills of illusion, seeing not the light which is to be found within.
The devic creation moulds the destinies and fortunes of men, and systems of development are at work within humanity, which stretch over a long period of time. Yet men are often unconscious of the events taking place in their own evolution.
There are movements in nature which advance man’s mind into spheres of intelligence, but there are also retrograde movements. This is brought about through the law of cause and effect, or karma. Karmic laws from the remote past move backwards or forwards, according to the character of the individual. There comes a time in the student’s development when both the advance and the retrograde movements are energized and summed up into a concrete whole.
As man’s consciousness changes, he experiences alternating movements, for there is a wonderful rhythm back of beauty’s shield of strength and gentleness, back of the phenomena of male and female, positive and negative, good and evil.
Always there are two forces, which may be expressed as the good and evil of man’s nature, brought into contact with one another and the supremacy of the one dominates and enslaves the character of the other be it good or evil. The dominating power is released from its component whole, and engenders man with his true character of expression, be it progressive for the attainment of Truth, or retrogressive towards ignorance and evil. At the summing up each man will have attained the expression of the wisdom of Truth and the wisdom of evil, and both these conflicting conditions are good for him, for he thus gains a knowledge from experience of the good in evil and the evil in good. When he becomes conscious of these two powers through Yoga practice he seeks, through wisdom experience, to be neither good nor evil, for then he aspires to pursue his path (having these rudiments of knowledge at his command) without being drawn into the experience of either. When this is realized he places himself for the first time consciously upon the middle path which unites the unknown with the known.
At this period man passes out of the conflict of his emotions and seeks to redeem himself and unify his consciousness with that of nature, with the Lord God of Truth, which is within him. Conflict may be going on all around him, but he walks through it unharmed, for he has found peace and from henceforth he cares not what may assail his environment.
People little realize the torture which minds can undergo. There is not only the conflict caused by the thoughts of anger, hatred, and malice which they themselves have thrown out, and which return to bombard their mental screen, but there is also the conflict of the lower side of nature. By unguarded speech certain contacts are made between themselves and earth-bound spirits of evil and despair.
Man makes himself a magnet of attraction and repulsion and, in order to negate such conditions, he must radiate peace through finding it, and to find peace is to find the Lord God of Truth within, which is a process of knowing oneself. Always remember the titanic forces which exist in earth, water, air, and fire, for in each of these elements we find one phase of the nature of our own being, be it constructive or destructive, and we must never forget that man is a universe in himself, having all the qualities within him which he sees in nature about him.
There is the thunder and lightning, there is the fire of the universe, the air and its winds, the water with its turbulent titanic forces, and the earth with its subterranean tremblings. How ignorant is man, not to know the powers which are within him!
Did not Jesus say that he who has faith, even as a grain of mustard seed, can move mountains! This is a Yoga precept, and Yoga also teaches us that faith is energy applied to action. “A small drop of ink, nourished with thought, and expressed by action produces that which makes millions think.” Elsa Barker’s poem, The Call of the Frozen North, was the lash behind Peary in his dash to discover the North Pole, and his second telegram, after he reached civilization, was to Elsa Barker, saying that he had left her poem at the North Pole.
Thoughts are things, but few people are able to put a Titan’s power into a single phrase to inspire men to a greater reverence for God. We find this power, however, in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which symbolizes the soul power in man. Thus the great lords of nature seek to implant ideas in the minds of men, in order that those who come after may be stimulated and carried on the tide of evolution towards the Truth.
The devas would have us exalt nature, and attune our consciousness to her sounding boards, so that she may apprise us of her movements and periods of instruction. We must glorify our great creator and all things in nature and in man, and seek union with the Lord God of Truth within, for each day’s good. The loveliness of the dawn should be the topic of our day, and the beauty and goodness in mankind our theme. We should seek to transfer into the mind the glory and splendor of the immortal work—Truth.
If there is merit in a book it will tend to dispel illusion from the mind, and to generate in the reader some redeeming quality. But alas, man is most interested in the literature of crime and sex. He forgets the beauty of the spirit which underlies all creation. Beauty is to be worshipped in all things, for where she plants her feet the flowers of remembrance cling even to the soiled garments of our minds and bring to birth a greater desire to know real beauty unadorned.
Evil can be so clothed in beauty that she enslaves us, but no adornment can veil her true nature. An artist friend of mine was so entranced by the beauty of face, figure, and costume of a noted courtesan that he fell on his knees before her in adoration. Yet there was another side to her nature, for she brought poverty and family dishonor to many innocent people, yet she possessed the power of recognizing in an instant the good in others. Once, when a Yogi passed down the street in a well known African town, the ladies of easy virtue, very lovely to look on, hid their faces behind their veils, for they recognized the saint.
The Yogi of today, even as the anchorite of old, is often tempted through sheer love of beauty, for there is no period in life when evil, clothed in beauty, seeks not to enter through a weak spot in the character, and the really religious man is the most prone to be ensnared by evil in her white robe of ermine.
I have watched Rodin, the sculptor, run his fingers lightly over the neck of a princess, and then pass his finger over the marble in its nearly completed state, and I have felt the strength of the Titan’s hand behind the lightness of his velvet touch. When she had gone he turned to me and said, opening and shutting his hands, “For many years I was a cutter of stone, and my things were rejected. The collar, which my sitter’s Pomeranian had on today, was fashioned by the cunning brain of Laleek, and was set with semi-precious stones. The value of that would have given me and my sweetheart a year’s freedom from poverty in the days of my strength to carry out the creations close to my heart. But now I am old, and it is difficult to throw up a full life-sized figure.” Then he went on to speak with enthusiasm of the Boston gentleman, his first real patron who gave him, as he said, his first real freedom. Perhaps that was the reason he was always kind to American students.
The Yogi, through his powers of observation, realizes what is going on in his own time, and seeks to aid the artists and sculptors, who have found their own moment in their own time. Rodin, seen from the standpoint of Yoga training, appeared as three different beings, and at times there stepped into him a beautiful Greek youth—his natural man. At such times his powers of suggestion were ripe, and he would mould a child’s foot so that it seemingly appeared in its completeness. The toes were only massed together in a wide sweep, yet you felt that it embodied the complete whole. Details came afterwards; when it was the movement he aimed at, he seemed a giant in whom this beautiful Greek was working. By the movements of his hands you felt the creation that he had built up, and sometimes he would look up and say, “There is no need of speaking or talking, you know what I am after!”
Alas, Rodin stands alone in his time, and sculpture has advanced into another period, for Truth has an ever widening circumference, as beauty unveils her face. It is a great misfortune that Rodin never completed his statue of Nijinsky dancing in the character of a faun. When Nijinsky produced his masterpiece, “The Afternoon of a Faun,” to the music of Debussy, he brought a new note to the notice of civilization which will stand out, as Rodin’s work did in his day.
Sometimes in Rodin you saw the lower, almost peasant being—the passionate and brutal stone cutter, but back of it all you felt his power of attack, which his well-groomed clothes could not cover. Then there was his finer nature of expression, which suggested to you the movement of form in a solid block of marble—something to be released in stone. For the reflection of light, he told me to study Rembrandt’s reflected light, in his own portrait. Rodin always wanted to reflect light from his surfaces, as Rembrandt reflected light in his pictures.
A wonderful thing is the power of energy—the power to search out Truth. Beauty uncovers her face only to those who seek her promises. We are vagabonds in time, wasting our precious moments, until suddenly there comes to us the gleam of the far distant star. That gleam comes from our innermost, in its ancient citadel, where Truth reigns. From this source, hand in hand, come love and beauty to enlighten this darkened world.
There is a morning and an afternoon of remembrance when the Dayspring enters our consciousness. Then is given the message of our ancient periods, when we vibrated to the call of nature and sought to register its directive energy. Arcadian days of remembrance—beauty’s morning—when everything was aglow with the spirit! Then there was peace, and the happy laughter of children, the lowing of the herds, and the sound of the billowing of the grain. Then, above all, there was peace and goodwill towards men.
The afternoon of remembrance takes us into the time of the agony of this world, when there is intolerance, oppression, opposition, and darkness, as if the spirit of all love and light had retreated into the darkness of despair. All is seemingly lost, but over the horizon there appears the rainbow, the symbol of God’s promise to man; and in the midst of this struggle and torment we hear a quiet voice speaking from all eternity saying, “Though the world be shaken to its foundations, I come to bring peace to all who seek to know the sovereign Presence.” The voice seems to echo down the corridors of time, bestowing its beneficence on all who seek to know the holy name. “Peace be unto you, my children, for I bring you Truth, and remembrance of what you are to become, nothing more.” All is silence, yet there remains the memory of the peace and quiet of the Arcadian pastures of our Lord and King, the Lord God of Truth within.
