Soul-finding as Life's Higher Purpose
But curb the beast would cast thee in the mire,
And leave the hot swamp of voluptuousness,
A cloud between the Nameless and thyself,
And lay thine uphill shoulder to the wheel,
And climb the Mount of Blessing, whence, if thou
Look higher, then--perchance--thou mayest--beyond
A hundred ever-rising lines,
And past the range of Night and Shadow--see
The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day
Strike on the Mount of Vision!
--Tennyson, "The Ancient Sage"
One thing that struck my mind forcibly on my return to the Western hemisphere after an absence of several years in the Orient, was the way we busied and over-busied ourselves, whether in work, pleasure, or movement. Few take life easily; most take it uneasily. Few go through its daily business serenely; most go through it nervously, hurriedly, and agitatedly. Our activities are so numerous they suffocate us. It is a life without emotional poise, bereft of intellectual perspective. We are intoxicated by action. We moderns give ourselves too much to activity and movement, too little to passivity and stillness. If we are to find a way out of the troubles which beset us, we must find a middle way between these two attitudes.The need of silence after noise, peace after feverishness, thought after activity, is wide and deep today. Amid all the nostrums and panaceas offered to humanity there is little evidence of the realization of this need.
Anyone who can overcome the extroverting and materializing tendencies of our period has to be an exceptional person. Indeed a general turning towards spiritual life is not a hope for the immediate present but for the distant future. This may sound pessimistic. But it will discourage those only who are oppressed by the reality of time and do not perceive its true nature.
The conditions of modern civilized society are not helpful to mystical self-culture, although they will serve intellectual self-culture. What is first needed is a recognition of the value of retreat, of times and places where every man and woman may periodically and temporarily isolate himself or herself whilst withdrawing attention from worldly affairs and giving it wholly to spiritual ones.
These words will make no appeal to the materialist mentality which still regards all spiritual experiences as the outcome of pathological conditions. Such an attitude, fortunately, has become less sure of itself than it was when first I embarked on these studies and experiments, now more than thirty years ago.
The mystic who sits in an hour-long meditation is not wasting his time, even though he is indulging in something which to the sceptic seems meaningless. On the contrary, his meditation is of vital significance.
It is quite customary to relegate us, the votaries of mysticism, to the asylum of eccentricity, crankiness, gullibility, fraud, and even lunacy. In some individual cases our critics are perfectly justified in doing so. When the mystic loses his straight course, he easily deviates into these aberrations. But to make a wholesale condemnation of all mysticism because of the rotten condition of a part of it is unfair and itself an unbalanced procedure.
Wherever and whenever it can, science puts all matters to the test. Mysticism welcomes this part of the scientific attitude. It has nothing to fear from such a practical examination. But there is a drawback here. No scientist can test it in a laboratory. He must test it in his own person and over a long period.
Owing to the widespread ignorance of the subject, there are some people who are disturbed by various fears of meditation. They believe it to be harmful to mental sanity or even a kind of traffic with Satan. Such fears are groundless. Meditation has been given by God to man for his spiritual profit, not for his spiritual destruction.
I would be failing in a duty to those less fortunate if through fear of being thought a boaster I failed to state that my researches have led me to the certain discovery of the soul.
Any man may become an atheist or an agnostic and doubt the existence of his own soul, but no man need remain one. All that is required of him is that he search for it patiently, untiringly, and unremittingly. Reality eludes us. Yet because common experience and mystical experience are both strongly interwoven out of it, they who persevere in their search may hold the hope that one day they may find it. Men will rush agitatedly hither and thither in quest of a single possession, but hardly one can be induced to go in quest of his own soul. Strange as it may seem to those who have immersed themselves heavily in the body's senses, hard to believe as it may be to those who have lost themselves deeply in the world's business, there is nevertheless a way up to the soul's divinity. That the divine power is active here, in London or New York, and now, in the twentieth century, may startle those who look for it only in Biblical times and in the Holy Land. But human perceptions in their present stage cannot bring this subtler self within their range without a special training. Its activity eludes the brain.
Every man who does not feel this close intimate fellowship with his Overself is necessarily a pilgrim, most probably an unconscious one, but still in everything and everywhere he is in search of his soul.
The soul is perfectly knowable and experienceable. It is here in men's very hearts and minds, and such knowledge once gained, such experience once known, lifts them into a higher estimate of themselves. Men then become not merely thinking animals but glorious beings. Is it not astonishing that man has ever been attracted and captivated by something which the intellect can hardly conceive nor the imagination picture, something which cannot even be truly named? Here is something to ponder over: why men should have forfeited all that seems dear, to the point of forfeiting life itself, for something which can never be touched or smelled, seen or heard.
What is it that has turned man's heart towards religion, mysticism, philosophy since time immemorial? His aspiration towards the diviner life is unconscious testimony to its existence. It is the presence within him of a divine soul which has inspired this turning, the divine life itself in his heart which has prompted his aspiration. Man has no escape from the urge to seek the Sacred, the Profound, the Timeless. The roots of his whole being are in it.
We are neither the originator of this doctrine nor even its prophet. The first man who ventured into the unknown within-ness of the Universe and of himself was its originator whilst every man who has since voiced this discovery has been its prophet. The day will come when science, waking more fully than it is now from its materialistic sleep, will confess humbly that the soul of man does really exist.
Men are free to imprison their hearts and minds in soulless materialism or to claim their liberty in the wider life of spiritual truth. Let them pull aside their mental curtains and admit the life-giving sunlight of truth.
What could be closer to a man than his own mind? What therefore should be more easy to examine and understand? Yet the contrary is actually true. He knows only the surfaces of the mind; its deeps remain unknown.
If the mind is to become conscious of itself, it can do so only by freeing itself from the ceaseless activity of its thoughts. The systematic exercise of meditation is the deliberate attempt to achieve this. Just as muddied water clears if the earth in it is left alone to settle, so the agitated mind clarifies its perceptions if left alone through meditation to settle quietly. There exists a part of man's nature of which ordinarily he is completely ignorant, and of whose importance he is usually sceptical.
What is the truest highest purpose of man's life? It is to be taken possession of by his higher self. His dissatisfactions are incurable by any other remedy. Spinoza saw and wrote that man's true happiness lay in drawing nearer to the Infinite Being. Sanatkumara, the Indian Sage, saw and taught, "That which is Infinity is indeed bliss; there can be no happiness in limited things."
Such is the insecurity of the present-day world that the few who have found security are only the few who have found their own soul, and inner peace.
-- Notebooks Category 1: Overview of the Quest > Chapter 2 : Its Choice > # 1
