by Talbot Mundy
But these material arguments, however superficially logical, look less alluring when followed to their conclusion, which is this: that, just as no stream can flow to a point higher than its source, and like begets like, so no material noumenon* can produce spiritual phenomena. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, to quote the New Testament again; and no amount of torturing, tampering with, or studying mere flesh will ever gain a spiritual end.
But matter is deceptive stuff and we, being plunged into it, are easily deceived. No sooner is one material basis found unsuitable on which to build a tower that shall reach the skies than another presents itself, often so subtly disguised as to make the most cautious of us think it is not material at all, but something spiritual, on which we may safely rear our monument of progress.
Yet the world is strewn with proofs that nothing — absolutely nothing based on material cause and effect can endure, or can do anything but crumble. Consider the ancient temples. If beauty and purity of outline may be taken as criterion, then unquestionably the men who designed and built many of those ancient fanes were spiritual thinkers. Yet the ruins of their buildings strew the earth, and most of us are therefore willing to admit that neither their knowledge nor their art was in the stones they wrought, but in the minds of the men themselves.
The spirit and the art endure. It is possible, by purity of purpose and sincere effort, for any of us to become the servants of that spirit and to learn that art; and it would be inevitable then that beauty would adorn our path; whatever we should touch would take on dignity and charm. But equally inevitably, those who should think the spirit and the art were in the thing wrought, gainers though they might be for a while by contemplation of mere consequences, would base their own efforts on false premises and would descend by gradual or rapid stages to unspiritual ugliness. That is why great leaders, great reformers, and great artists have so seldom left behind them others who could carry on their work and carry it to greater heights; the most enthusiastic sometimes are most dazzled by the effects of the leader’s work and, worshiping effects, fall soonest by the way.
“It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing...” — John, 6:63.
We forever put the cart before the horse. In this age of machinery it is fashionable to assert that our progress, such as it is, has been due to machinery. We worship the machine — put faith in it, just as they who saw those marvelous ancient temples rise and change the whole face of their surroundings, came to worship the shrine instead of the Idea and the honesty that gave it birth. The truth is, that increasing intelligence has produced machinery, exactly as increasing spiritual vision would produce a higher art.
I remember three instances that serve to illustrate. In Assam, years ago, when they were building the first railway through the country, thousands of Indian laborers were employed to dig embankments. The means employed was the ancient one of filling baskets with dirt, to be carried on men’s heads, sometimes for the length of half a mile, and dumped — a tedious, slow process that got severely on the nerves of one contractor. He was a rather young man, used to the new efficiency, full of ambition for a useful career, and equally full of scorn for ancient ways. Progress, in his mind, and machinery, were one. He decided to import machinery and, rather accurately gaging the intelligence of the laborers he had to deal with, decided that wheelbarrows would be enough for a beginning.
The wheelbarrows arrived — extremely up-to-date ones made of steel. The obedient laborers studied them with great distaste and worse bewilderment, filled them with rather less earth than they had formerly, put into the baskets in order to reduce the weight as nearly as possible to normal, and carried the wheelbarrows on their heads. Nor could they be persuaded to do otherwise. At the end of the second day they went on strike, arguing with perfect reason from their viewpoint that the contractor had made their work cruelly toilsome. What he had overlooked was that even so simple a sign of progress as a wheelbarrow and its proper use must be a result of progress in a man’s mind, and can never be the cause of it.
A somewhat similar incident occurred in a native state in another part of India. There was famine, and as the result of the distress a commission was appointed to inquire into the causes. The commission in all honesty decided that the ancient ways were at fault; that men whose plows were little better than a forked stick could hardly be expected to produce crops in sufficient abundance to tide them over lean years. It was decided to import good steel plows from the United States, and that was done; the plows were distributed about the countryside, and the peasantry were told that an era of prosperity had dawned — the plows would solve the problem of supply. But to this day the remains of those imported mysteries lie rusting in the fields, and the peasantry still use the ancient implements. The only result accomplished was to convince the peasantry that for inscrutable reasons their rulers had tried to burden them with foreign difficulties in addition to their own — which, they reasonably argued, already were enough.
I was witness of another incident, yet better to the point, in Africa, away off in the wilderness, a good week’s march from rail-head. Those were early days, when colonial government-machinery had been set up but was not yet fully functioning. Much of the local government of outlying districts was left to the tribes themselves, and their jealousies and rivalries led to a vast amount of bickering and murder. Serious cases of dispute were supposed to be submitted to the colonial official, fifty or a hundred miles away, but nothing could convince the natives that the official judgment was not prejudiced, and nearly every legal decision led to worse strife than it cured.
But there was a British sergeant sent to an outlying post in the district I have in mind, whose sole official business was to teach a company of newly raised native police the elements of discipline. He was not exactly an illiterate man, but he had received no more education than he had managed to pick up in the army-school, and the best thing he had learned was how to mind his own business; and the business was, by example, precept and watchfulness, to teach new standards of self-respect to naked recruits. They were of several tribes, and as many prejudices, so he had his hands full.
It dawned after a time on the recruits that there was something in his method, new to their experience, which was better than their own accustomed ways. He taught a new loyalty, to a brotherhood based on a high ideal, and the discipline grew, not because he punished them, for he was very sparing with penalties, but from imitation of his self-respect.
The marvel took place within sight of a dozen villages, whose inhabitants watched the amazing patience and good-humored justice of a stranger who accepted no bribes, played no favorites, and cared for nothing but the welfare of his proteges. He was not like any other stranger they had ever seen; he used to tell his men stories at night over a camp-fire, used to dance for them, sing to them, and — most remarkable of all — although he seemed so fond of them, he took the part of villagers whom they molested in their dawning consciousness of the power that goes hand-in-hand with fraternity.
It was not very long before the neighboring tribes began to bring their own disputes to him for settlement. He told them he had no authority, either to pass judgment or to enforce decisions. They liked that, and insisted all the more that he should act the part of judge. They offered him presents, if he would hold the scales of justice, and when he refused those they were all the more insistent. He told them he knew nothing about judicial procedure, and they answered that they were very glad to hear that, since they sought justice and merely what was right.
At last he yielded, very much against his inclination, and the unprecedented spectacle was seen day after day, of villagers from fifty miles away, whom nothing less than force could have induced to take their quarrels to the constituted courts, arguing their cases before this unauthorized, uneducated sergeant, accepting his decisions without question, and returning to their homes in peace to abide by them. Murders and inter-village fighting almost ceased. Unpaid, unpurchasable, plain, d
isinterested honesty succeeded, where an empire’s legal processes had failed.
The sergeant returned in due course to the Birmingham slums and oblivion; but he had left behind him consequences that no official formulas or red tape could quite undo. The subsequent administration of the country took its tone, to some extent, from that one man’s example, and for years to come his judgments (some of them hugely humorous) were cited as unofficial precedents for official guidance.
Men will ever rebel against machinery. We have machines in politics, in trade and in religion; yet no machine ever contributed one straw to the world’s progress, and every machine is a degrading factor from the moment it becomes anything more than a means to eliminate toil — anything more than a consequence of intelligent and honest thinking.
It is so with Brotherhood. No man, no group of men or nations can create it by decree, or by new intricate machinery. The Brotherhood must come first, out of individual effort to attainment of its high ideal; the means of its expression afterwards. A League of Nations — all the nations — is inevitable when the nations recognize the Universal Law. A dozen men who recognize that Law, and live by it, accomplish more toward true peace than can all the machinery of law-courts and governments ever invented. Theosophists, by living their Theosophy, will sow the seed that can not fail to spring up and ripen into all-inclusive Brotherhood. If a League should be an accompaniment who shall complain? But shall we have the Brotherhood and Justice first, or the machinery?
UNSUNG AS YET
I set my foot on the forest floor
Where all is cool and all is still,
And I will turn back nevermore
To the haunts I knew. I had my fill
Lived, handled, tasted all they prize,
Took, coveted, considered, weighed,
And I know all the honored lies
I, too, had honored had I stayed.
I learned the song of the God for hire,
Of boughten islands for the blest,
In gloom ‘neath dome and gilded spire
Hymned to the roof. My way is best.
For the skies are mine, and the wind is mine,
And down between the breathing trees
Immeasurable beacons shine
A-twinkle in the silences.
All night is full of the friendly speech
Of leaf and earth and flowing stream;
Day’s wide with league and span and reach
Of leisured distances a-dream
Of trails as new as years are long,
Flung across plain and sky-line crest
Unlonely solitude and song
Unsung as yet. My way is best
I know where the future’s freedom’s bred,
Where all things wait on him who loves,
And underfoot, and overhead,
And all around, the homing droves
Of ripples from the storied past
Uplift until the pilgrims scan
New realms of thought and, thinking, cast
New efforts forth for visioned Man.
I feel the sweetness and the thrill -
The summons-forth on Royal Quest,
Harped chords of harmony that fill
A Universe. My way is best.
THE KING CAN DO NO WRONG
TRUTH is King, and is never in the least concerned about the passions of the moment. With all eternity ahead and to look back upon, serenely autocratic in an everlasting Now, Truth rules impartially all the universe including this temporary world of ours.
And the world is quite full of a number of things, not least of them, proverbs. Proverbs are the oldest crystallizations of human thought, and some of them are diamond-hard, reflecting the fires of Truth in whatever light, from whichever angle they are studied. Such proverbs persist. Some fall by the way because men grow weary of them, seeing deeds so short of the ideal. Some lapse into disrespect because other proverbs, with meanings apparently exactly opposite, come into more general use. But all proverbs were originally efforts to express a glimpse of Truth and, however contradictory their meanings seem, all proverbs still are windows, as it were, through which some aspect of infinite Truth may be seen by discerning eyes.
From the dawn of recorded history men have always sought to coin short phrases that should be imperishable guides of conduct — brief, indisputable interpretations of the Higher Law, by use built into the familiar speech. And one of those proverbs was, that familiarity breeds contempt. Popularization of a proverb brings it into eventual disrepute, exactly as the dogmatization of religion foretells its disintegration and collapse. For it is the habit of the human mind to seek to standardize, and to obstruct spiritual progress by legalizing the dead letter of the proverb or the creed.
But nothing stands still; not even Truth. The more determined the effort of man’s lower nature to produce inertia by literal enforcement of the dry husk of a truth, the swifter is the proof that evolution must prevail and that inertia is delusion.
The proper study of mankind is man. In the last analysis there is nothing else that man can study. He must be conscious of himself; and, as consciousness grows, its horizons widen until the task of self-knowledge becomes all-absorbing and all-useful. Not the least interesting discovery to which that study leads is the constant effort of man’s lower nature to smother those rare glimpses of the Higher Law from which it cannot escape, and to corrupt their meaning, by substituting the letter for the spirit and by decreeing Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.
This method of the lower nature is that so anciently and frequently denounced, of setting up false gods, whose ‘image and superscription’* differ hardly, if at all, from a superficial glimpse of Truth. The lower nature is nothing if not hypocritical. It will denounce most fervently those crimes it most loves to commit, and all the worst atrocities are perpetrated in the name of righteousness and progress, the secret of which is simple: evil being the reverse of Truth, as darkness is the opposite of light, it is impossible for evil to exist or to find expression without consciousness of Truth with which to contrast itself.
Evil has no originality, it imitates; and all false gods are counterfeits of true ones. The invention of a lie is contingent on the existence of Truth to be lied about. It is possible to invent a lie about any of the infinite and glorious aspects of Truth; it is possible to believe that lie, and to legalize the belief in it. But the belief is a delusion of the lower nature, subject to the lower law that governs both. It moves as Truth moves, though the action is reversed. As Truth evolves in realms beyond the comprehension of such stuff as dreams are made of, ever ascending to higher and rarer being, the lie about Truth disperses and descends to irrecoverable chaos; until a new glimpse of Truth makes new lies possible and the habit of self-delusion re-begins a downward path.
There was a King of England who proclaimed a truth, to his own undoing, seeking to use Truth for his own ends, instead of letting Truth use him. Whoever is used by Truth is in the everlasting arms of absolute infallibility. Truth being King, there is no error in the formula the King can do no wrong. But he who sets out to reduce the King to human blood and bones and to confine Truth within the limits of a proclamation, levying blackmail in the name of pure Truth, is a traitor whose head is forfeit.
Charles the First, proclaiming that the King rules by divine right and that the King can do no wrong, quite likely believed his own words, but by applying them to his own person he nevertheless betrayed Omnipotence. Belief is quite another thing from knowledge, as the writers of the New Testament strove so diligently to make clear by the discriminating use of words that their translators subsequently bungled. Accident may cause belief to stumble on the right Path, but nothing less than Knowledge holds us there; it is belief — blind faith — that seizes on the letter of the law; the spirit of the law is only grasped by understanding, leading on to Knowledge.
Even in ermine robes and panoply of state Charles the First was not so unlike the rest of us that he was King-less. Had
he understood the truth he uttered; had he allowed that royal Higher Nature, that is ever ready to govern every one of us, to take control of him it is likely he would have been less worried about his personal importance and less inclined to make use of phrases that might be too easily misunderstood; instead, he would have found his true royalty appealing to the Higher Nature that exists in every man. His body and his stupid senses then might not have been a target for his outraged countrymen. They charged him with treason to the State; but the treason he committed was to his own King, by permitting his lower nature to usurp the title of the Higher.
The old Priest-Kings, of whom dim records still remain, made no such error. They strode like Gods among men, and it may be that the crowd mistook their persons for the Truth they served, but the Priest-Kings had no ear for flattery. It was not until the lower nature swamped the Higher and usurped precedence — not until the letter of the Law was reckoned higher than its spirit — not until flesh and bones and the convenience of a moment grew to be considered more important than true Vision, and the pomp and circumstance of earthly power blinded them to the promptings of passionless Truth, that the Priest-Kings disappeared.
Kings are not different from other men, and other men not different from kings, except that the law of Karma, adjusting balances, has cast us each into our proper temporary orbit. All are prone to make the same mistakes. The King’s head fell, but the King’s mistake remained. Men said he needed no successor, seeing they all were kings by a right as divine as that one he had claimed. They spoke the truth, believing and not knowing, many of them doubtless tossing the mockery of the truth from lip to lip in jest. Belief, so vague it hardly yet amounted to belief, was crystallized into a lie more swiftly than running water changes into ice; and on to the ice the snow of dogma fell. The stream still flowed beneath the ice, as beneath every creed flows everlasting Truth; but the surface, like the letter of the law, proved barren, comfortless, unprofitable, cold needing the sun of true Vision to penetrate and melt it.
