The destruction of this illusion, by removing the last barrier of preconceived ideas about their lives, gave me a much clearer view of the state of these people than that which I had got at the beginning, and this insight reached backwards to a new understanding of the other things that I had seen.
I saw now that even the teachers in the highest schools, the commanders of the highest grade —all were in the same gulf of emptiness; not merely in a state of isolation from all other things, outside their particular task, but in a similar state of isolation from the task itself. Not one of them, from the highest to the lowest, lived even in the work to which he or she had been sacrificed.
I have since discovered that this is a condition which is common to all people under the influence of hypnotism, even on the upper earth. The hypnotic subject is not aware of his task, but is aware only of his emotional state towards the master who controls him and makes him perform it.
At that time, however, I looked upon this evident lack of awareness of their work as the final proof of the total enslavement of the people, and it made me long still more poignantly for that other protection that life has built up round itself on the earth—the music of humanity, its rush and its tumult, above all things that joyous, casual laughter of man which is the sunlight of the mind.
Never before had I grasped the deep need that every man has for man’s company, his humour, his rages, his love, and his laughter, all that collection of individual feelings, tendencies, reactions, ideas, that constitute the consciousness of men like us, and is our home as well as our very self, at once our ego and the sheltering circumstances that enfold it.
The sense of brotherhood was being developed in me by the sight of those unfortunate kinsmen of ours who had striven to protect themselves in the opposite way—by retreat from individual life and its tumultuous reactions—but it was being developed in me by an extreme revulsion.
By the time that I had finished my round of visits to their industrial compounds, I was reduced to such a state of mind that I looked on the lassoing brutes, that I had met on the downward journey, as fellow-creatures, in comparison with the human beings who surrounded me.
The industrial compound that had the most real interest for me was, in fact, that in which the enormous spiders had been trained to spin silken webs by a supply of chunks of meat at the end of each task.
How the men had managed to train them to produce their lovely silk webs in captivity I don’t know, but it was certainly not through inducing in them a hypnotic love and submission, for their masters did not dare to go into the big enclosures in which the spiders were working while the brutes were there, and, if anybody approached the iron bars behind which they worked, they showed all the savage ferocity of newly caged tigers. The fact that the sight of their savagery gave me a feeling of joy will be some measure of my dread of the slavery that they, unlike their masters in this lower world, had refused to accept.
The great spiders were indeed the only creatures within the reach of that state that it had not enslaved.
In the snake farms, for instance, that lay behind the city, the dominance of man has been completely established, and, when I was brought there, I was fascinated by the control exercised over these creatures by their keepers, a control so complete that it would make the control of the snake-charmers of India seem feeble and superficial.
The snakes appeared to love their masters; and the long lines of them rolling forward on command was one of the most impressive scenes that I have ever witnessed. The relations between them and their keepers almost gave me the illusion that they were pets, but it was only an illusion, produced by my own associations, for these people are as incapable of having the individual contact with other creatures which creates pets as they are of emotional relations between human individuals.
The sight, however, of the moving coils of green phosphorescent light was a marvellous one, not easily forgotten. For me, at that time, it was an additional revelation, if I needed one, of the strength of the forces that I was up against, but, now that the menace has passed, the memory of its beauty still remains with me.
Another vision that comes to me, as I write, is that of the great fungus farms in which the various forms of edible fungi glowed with green and blue glimmerings, while the dark shapes of the workers gliding amongst them gave an impression of ghosts floating through veils of dim fire.
To the left, as one looked up the lake, the city was surrounded by these fungus farms, as far as the eye could reach, and the effect of their sheets of soft glowing lights, when seen from a hillock beside the city, was extraordinarily beautiful.
These and similar things I saw during my short stay in that underworld city—the capital of a people that has been permanently defeated, a people sprung from a sunlight race that has been permanently deprived of the sunlight, and of all the ardours and ecstasies it brings.
While I moved amongst them, under the shadow of a fate that seemed to me worse than death, their life and all its accompaniments excited in me no feelings but those of fear and repulsion.
Looking back now in calmer mood, I am willing to acknowledge that I may have been unfair and unjust in much of my judgment of them.
Even on earth, under the influence of overwhelming defeat and the panic and hysteria that it brings, nations have been known to hand themselves over to the hypnotic suggestion of their leaders, and, under that hypnotic subjection, to take courses that are abhorrent to the normal instincts of humanity. But no race on earth has ever suffered a defeat as deep as that which has been suffered by these people, a defeat in many ways more dreadful than total annihilation.
With them the dread thing has literally happened, the schlacht ohne morgen, the battle without a morrow—that last and irreparable disaster from which there can be no recovery, no emergence. Yet they live to endure it.
How can a man of the upper earth plumb the depths of emotional hunger of such a people, their craving for consolation, their need to give themselves up to any leader, any system, that could promise relief or refuge from so dreadful a deprivation?
Yet what leader or what system devised on earth could supply such refuge or consolation?
They had abandoned religion. Deprived of that salvation, their leaders, as well as themselves, were emotionally as well as spiritually destitute. What could such leaders give their people, when they cried for life, but a drug that would be potent enough to give them oblivion?
Hypnotic suggestion, which is rooted in the passionate side of human nature, has always been the substitute that such barren leaders have offered.
Those leaders below have merely done to an extreme degree, proportioned to their great need, what similar leaders have done in a small way on earth.
That their achievement is almost an incredible one I cannot deny. Nor can I deny that, as they claim, they may have attained peace—a dreadful peace, passing the understanding of any men on earth in the depth of its withdrawal from the conflict of the emotional storms and tides which are the life of man.
There were times when, under the impact of the mysterious force that emanated from them, I, too, fell under the influence of that peace, and almost believed in it.
There were even times, during my wanderings through that incredible city, with its incredible people, when I felt tempted to yield myself up to the peace to which they seemed to have attained, or to ask to have my will concentrated to such an intensity of life that I might draw into myself all other life in that world below, as the higher grades have done.
But I knew that such a solution could give me no peace or rest. It would be a denial of all my hopes and beliefs in this world and the next. I must go on struggling till I died.
If my father, caught in the web of his own dreams, had surrendered himself totally, I could not save him, but, if he had only surrendered part of his mind, I might yet save him, or, if I could not save him, I might yet touch him before he and I died.
If only I could find him! During all my pere
grinations—on roads, in enclosures, in schools, working-places, eating-places, all their gatherings—I had been watching for him. With his stature he would have been very noticeable amongst them, but I never saw anybody who was in the remotest degree like him—none that could, by the wildest flight of fancy, be imagined even to be such a person as they could have transformed him into. Nor did I come upon any trace of him whatever in any other way.
Whenever I asked about him, I got always the same answer—there could be no such person.
As far as information about him was concerned, I was, at the end of my time in the city, exactly where I had been on the first day I started, with this difference—that, in the end, I realised better how little chance he or I had of rescue or escape.
I was like a trapped wild creature. I could not surrender and I could not escape.
I thought of my pet rabbit that I had found being killed by a stoat when I was a child of three— my first vision of the deadliness of life.
The memory came back to me vividly when, at the end of my wanderings through the city, I received my second call to appear before the Master of Knowledge.
I had blundered after my father into the most ghastly prison-house ever devised by the human mind for humanity, and now, after I had been shown round its cells, I was being called to hear my sentence.
The patient, frightened face of the rabbit as it lay under the stoat came to me, my own screams as I ran to save it, the rush of the stoat at me, and its hiss as my father’s stick broke its back.
Now it was he who was lying under the stoat.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Master of Knowledge
WHEN I WAS brought before the Master of Knowledge the second time my mind was in a state of frozen calm.
The Master was sitting under the same globes of phosphorus light in the same enclosure, or a similar one. When I was brought before him, he looked at me for a few moments without communicating with me.
I let him read my thoughts. The sooner my fate was settled the better.
Almost immediately his message came:
“You have learned nothing from what you have received from our people. You are still unwilling to become one with us.”
“I could not become one with you,” I answered, “without losing all that makes life worth living.”
“You have nothing to lose,” came his answer, “that can make life worth living. There is only one thing that can do that, and that is love of something so great and permanent that you cannot lose it. You have not got that.”
I made no answer. He watched me for a while—then his message came again:
“That is what you also desire, but, having lived your life on the surface of things, you do not even know your own desires.
“I see deep in your mind a need that you are only dimly conscious of, a hunger for depth of life. You are desolated by your own emptiness, starving for something that flows deeply below the surface on which you are floating.”
Again he paused, watching me. I watched him steadily. I had no fear of him. My mind was made up. He could kill me or drive me mad, but, if he was looking into my mind, he would not see fear of his power.
I heard myself speaking in answer to his thoughts.
“It is true that I am starving,” I said, “but it is starvation from lack of the sunlight, and the richness of life of men who live in the sunlight. I loathe the life lived by your people, and I will not share it.”
“You have no understanding of our life,” came his answer, “because it is lived in those depths to which your vision cannot penetrate.
“You have been shown a life deeper than any that you have ever known, and you have seen in it only darkness and silence, austerity and terror. All these I see reflected in your mind, and only these; no glimpse of its richness, its fulfillment. Until you have plumbed the depths, you can know nothing.”
“I do not want to plumb the depths of your life,” I said. “I want to go back to the brightness and joy of my own. Will you let me go?”
He made no answer, but his stare swept my mind like a searchlight. I feared that, if I kept quiet under his gaze, he would hypnotise me.
“What do you want to do?” I cried. “Do you think that you can hypnotise me, with your eyes, or your incantations, into believing what I do not believe? If you cannot do that, what good can it do you to hold me here? If you can read my mind, you must know that, whatever you do or think or send into it, I will never become as one with you.”
“You understand nothing,” came his answer. “Faith and love and joy are all round you, and you cannot see them.”
“And I will not see them,” I said, “not even if they are there. I do not need your faith or love or joy. I have a deeper faith, and I will not give up my individual life in order to see or to possess yours. My life was full of faith and love and joy before I came to your land, and if I could find my father, and he could once again see the sun and feel the rain and tread green grass, I should be infinitely happier than all your automatons, who know no god but fear.”
“Your life,” came his message, “could not have been full of faith before you came to us. If it had been, you would not have left all these things to come here.
“You came here because your life was empty and meaningless as the life of no man or woman can be with us, since they share in all the greatest life there is, and it cannot be taken from them.”
“I came here,” I answered, “because I loved my father and wanted to find him.”
“Such love of little things is meaningless,” came his answer. “Even if the things you love were greater and better than yourselves, and worthy of love, they die and leave you, or you die and leave them desolate. Therefore your lives are empty and miserable.
“Here no man can be left desolate, because each man here loves a thing that cannot die; not himself, nor little men like himself, but something great and permanent that he shares with all. So, in no way can death destroy his peace or leave him empty.
“No one man matters. All the selfishness, vanity, egotism, that wrecked our fathers of old, and that is still in your mind—all that is gone. Our knowledge and our wills are now at one, and we are one through our emotion.”
“Yes,” I cried, “you who are the wills, have seized the power and made the others love you, by emptying their souls and their minds of everything else. You have all the intensity of life. You have robbed them of it and gathered it to yourselves, as our capitalists have gathered the goods of the earth; but the stealing of the goods of the earth from others is a small matter compared to the stealing of the intensities of the soul. No, no, I will never take part in what you are doing. I will neither rob others of their inner life and fire, nor allow others to rob me and call it ‘faith’ and ‘joy.’”
He looked at me for a while, as if digesting my thoughts, then he began to send his message again:
“You understand so little that it seems useless to try to get you to grasp things. Yet it is not right to abandon you without attempting to save you, since you are a human being.
“No man here robs another. No man can rob another, since all men share equally. Those who have a deeper intensity of life give it to the others. Those who have a deeper intensity of knowledge direct the others, not in their work only, since that is but a surface thing, but in their emotion, which is the source of all life.
“That is where your life has gone wrong. You have deep feeling, but you have wasted it on little passing things, because there was no one to direct you, and you are not great enough to direct yourself.
“Man cannot direct himself unless he is at the creative stage, when emotion and mind combine to discover an object of emotion great enough and permanent enough to give full content and direction to the human soul.
“Few men are at that stage, and these few alone can produce that act of will which can save themselves and others. Without such men our people would have perished, as you will perish if you do not become one with us, who hav
e vision and the will that springs from the fusing of vision and emotion.”
“I will not become one with you,” I said quietly. “I will not give my soul into the hands of any leader, however great.
“You may have descended to depths of feeling of which I know nothing. The darkness that surrounds you is so great that, in your efforts to escape from the surface of your life, over which it broods, you may have won to unknown depths of thought and feeling.
“You have risked everything in your effort to escape. You have given everything that is dear to man. To me it seems the last surrender. But I do not judge you. I cannot judge you. I have not been born to your darkness and despair. I am a child of the sunlight of the upper earth. I will not surrender to the darkness. I will not be one with you. We are playing for the greatest stakes that man can play for in this life. You say that you have won. I think that you have lost everything. Only God can judge. But, even if you have won, I would not give up the agonies and exultations and faith of individual life for any peace that you may have reached in the depths to which you have plunged or sunk.”
For a while we stayed without further contact of thoughts; then his message came to me again:
“Your thought of darkness is, like all your other thoughts, superficial.
“You think only of the outer darkness, which matters little.
“The inner darkness that destroys is common to all men, whether they are born here or under the light. No sunlight of the upper earth can save you from that.
“I see the depths of your mind, and they are full of the dread of it.”
“No, no,” I cried, “I am not afraid of it. I will not fly to your refuge from that inner darkness. When the last defeat comes, I shall take it, with God’s help, but I will not defeat myself.
“You shall not drag up that fear again from the depths of my life.
“I will not plunge down with you into the primeval darkness because you have gone mad through fear of it. Now put me to death or let me go.”
Land Under England Page 17
