itself, which is upheld in consciousness, would disappear or take new,
more interior, more living, and more significant forms, at least for
humanity, if the consciousness of humanity was itself raised to a
superior state. Readers of St. Martin, and of that impressive book of
the late James Hinton, "Man and his Dwelling-place," especially if they
have also by chance been students of the idealistic philosophies, will
not think this suggestion extravagant. If all the world were Yogis, the
world would have no need of those special activities, the ultimate end
and purpose of which, by-the-by, our critic would find it not easy to
define. And if only a few withdraw, the world can spare them. Enough of
that.
Only let us not talk of this ideal of impersonal, universal being in
individual consciousness as an unverified dream. Our sense and
impatience of limitations are the guarantees that they are not final and
insuperable. Whence is this power of standing outside myself, of
recognizing the worthlessness of the pseudo--judgments, of the
prejudices with their lurid colouring of passion, of the temporal
interests, of the ephemeral appetites, of all the sensibilities of
egoism, to which I nevertheless surrender myself so that they indeed
seem myself? Through and above this troubled atmosphere I see a being,
pure, passionless, rightly measuring the proportions and relations of
things, for whom there is, properly speaking, no present, with its
phantasms, falsities, and half-truths; who has nothing personal in the
sense of being opposed to the whole of related personalities: who sees
the truth rather than struggles logically towards it, and truth of which
I can at present form no conception; whose activities are unimpeded by
intellectual doubt, un-perverted by moral depravity, and who is
indifferent to results, because he has not to guide his conduct by
calculation of them, or by any estimate of their value. I look up to
him with awe, because in being passionless he sometimes seems to me to
be without love. Yet I know that this is not so; only that his love is
diffused by its range, and elevated in abstraction beyond my gaze and
comprehension. And I see in this being my ideal, my higher, my only
true, in a word, my immortal self.
--C.C. Massey
Chastity
Ideal woman is the most beautiful work of the evolution of forms (in our
days she is very often only a beautiful work of art). A beautiful woman
is the most attractive, charming, and lovely being that a man can
imagine. I never saw a male being who could lay any claims to manly
vigour, strength or courage, who was not an admirer of woman. Only a
profligate, a coward or a sneak would hate women; a hero and a man
admires woman, and is admired by her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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