"Our life must be lived while we wait for the word that shall solve
the enigma, and the happier, the nobler our life, the more vigorous
shall it become, and we shall have the more courage,
clear-sightedness, boldness to seek and desire the truth.... We
should live as though we were always on the eve of the great
revelation, and we should be ready with welcome, with, warmest and
keenest and fullest, most heartfelt and intimate welcome. And
whatever the form it shall take on the day that it comes to us, the
best way of all to prepare for its fitting reception is to crave
for it now, to desire it as lofty, as perfect, as vast, as
ennobling as the soul can conceive. It must needs be more
beautiful, glorious, and ample than the best of our hopes. For when
it differs therefrom or even frustrates them, it must of necessity
bring something nobler, loftier, nearer to the nature of man, for
it will bring us truth. To man, though all that he value go under,
the intimate truth of the universe must be wholly, pre-eminently
admirable. And though on the day it unveils, our meekest desires
turn to ashes and float on the wind, still there shall linger
within us all we have prepared; and the admirable will enter into
our soul, the volume of its waters being as the depth of the
channel that our expectation has fashioned."
* * * * *
[Sidenote: In Proportion to Power.]
May it not be that the degree to which one is enabled to dominate his
own life in the sense of controlling and selecting and grouping its
outer events is precisely in proportion to the spiritual power that he
has achieved? Nor has this spiritual power any conceivable relation to
what is currently known as occultism, or a thing to be attained by any
series of prescribed outer actions. There has sprung up a species of
literature with explicit directions for "concentration" and "meditation"
and one knows not what,--directions to spend certain hours of the day
gazing upon a ten-penny nail or something quite as inconsequential, and
a more totally demoralizing and negative series of performances can
hardly be imagined. But all this is not even worth denunciation. The
only real spiritual power is that of the union of the soul with the
divine.
"Lift up your hearts."
"We lift them up unto the Lord."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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