It does not take long to see, when we look with a clear vision, that those
who display most power today, and who are productive of the greatest good
to the developing world are not those who are living in fixed relationship
with the outside of life; it is true that those on the outer rim may boast
of perfect physical strength and a perfect brain and a physical beauty,
but the victory today is not from the without, but it is rather for those
who are psychologically practical, mystically enlightened and subtle with
a deep scientific relationship with all nature's finer forces and who know
life not alone as a science or as a philosophy, or as a religion, but as
an art.
The truth must some day beat its way into the developing minds of men that
we are now alive in a great age, and are coming to where the inside power
must become externalized and that those who today stand masters of life,
and those who will continue to become masters of life and leaders in power
and helpfulness, must do it by a development that is not so much
characterized by their objective knowledge as by their subjective holiness
or wholeness.
We must learn what we never seem to have learned before, that the moments
we spend in the external world are not wholly our strongest or sanest
moments and that all external outside action is the crudest form of
energy, and that when we want the _real_, we must turn the clear deep
eye of our nature toward the inner, the silent, and then all our power
seems to well up and meet us, because it is called in from the apparent to
the Absolute of being.
The next great truth is that all the old ways of life are never thrown
away until we have something to live by in the new; old truths never die,
they are always existent, but their methods of expression must be changed
to suit the developing intellectuality and spirituality of man.
In the old thought life prayer was the pathway to the interior world of
power, but today we know that recognition must be the guide to the
interior world of power. Prayer was the pathway of the old forefathers and
prayer in its first inception was a straight road to the center of divine
union, but after the minds of men, befogged between the glamour of the
external and the power of the internal, evolved a form of prayer that led
the race away from its center out into the rim of living, the power
ceased; prayer became full of cant and form, words became meaningless and
non-mystical; the truth that "God is a Spirit and they that worship Him
must worship Him in spirit and in truth" was lost in the increasing
bewilderment of the mind.
After a while humanity, seeing the futility of objective kind of prayer,
ceased its praying, not because it had worn out prayer, not because it had
wandered from its desire of worship and soul communion, but because it had
worn out the old useless method, and found the dross of the letter; no one
stood developed to where he could push faith into a new interpretation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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