It cannot, therefore, be a matter of surprise to the student of
present-day affairs that his ancestors were slow to learn about other
groups what their still earlier ancestors had learned of individuals.
As the circle of man’s interests enlarged, including more and more
fellow-creatures, he began to come more and more into harmonious
relations with the Universe. Out of his personal experience he began
to perceive the mutual interests and the underlying oneness of human
life, and, through that perception, some have now begun to realize the
oneness of all life.
This is the road along which man must travel to reach harmony, and
harmony is rest. It is living in accord with the universal law which
regulates the growth and development of all things as well as their
activities. To the undeveloped savage the whole material universe, so
far as he could see it, was a jumble of inharmonious and unrelated
things—he saw no relation between the different bodies in the heavens
as they circled in their orbits; each created thing seemed to have its
separate existence, which had to be maintained without regard to any
other form of life. But science has shown us that the heavenly bodies,
however huge or remote, are all parts of one great system, under one
perfect law. We know now that, instead of the earth being the center of
the universe, round which all the stars, suns, moons, and other bodies
revolve, it is itself but a tiny unit in a tremendous system of systems.
All of these bodies have been circling in their orbits for untold
millions of years, unaffected by the fact that no man knew of them.
It is not too much to expect that they will continue to perform their
circlings according to those same laws even after science has taught us
all it is possible to discover. Man may profit from his knowledge of
universal laws, but he cannot alter them.
And yet the man of average intelligence even to-day feels that things
universal in relation to humanity and its needs are at “sixes and
sevens,” and that his anxiety and feverish activity are needed to alter
or better them. He still sees men as separate beings with interests
that clash.
It is this failure to understand that every life is bound up for good
with all other lives which leads us to worry about our “personal”
affairs, and thus to miss the rest that clear understanding would
bring.
CHAPTER XLIX
IMAGINARY FEARS
O soft embalmer of the still midnight.
KEATS.
When we learn to confine our attention to “the things that are quite
enough for any man to attempt,” we shall find that there is little real
ground for worry or fretting in our daily life. It is a fact that,
if our work wearies or exhausts us, either we are doing the wrong
thing or else doing it in the wrong way. For the Spirit of Life is
no taskmaster. It is we who make this world a daily grind. It is not
naturally a “vale of tears” nor a “wilderness of woe.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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