Message #59133

[Ahura Mazda]

LETTER XVI
A COUNCIL IN THE FOREST

One night, to repose my soul from the labors I had undertaken, I retired to a pine forest upon the earth, in one of the New England States. Thinking to be alone, I had sought the place; but no sooner had I drifted into meditation than a strange sound fell upon my ears. It was not like the sounds of earth, it was more subtle yet more penetrating; and I knew that I was listening to a song (if you may call it a song) by some of my fellow sojourners in the region beyond the sunlight.
Suddenly with a rush they leaped past me into the clearing, and forming in a circle, they waited. Then I saw a light that was not of earthly origin, the light of a campfire, and I knew that I had been surprised by a band of Indians who were preparing to hold some rite of their old religion.
Though I had not been invited to their ceremony, neither had I invited them to intrude upon my contemplation, so I remained and watched them.
(Yes, there is less secrecy out here, for the reason that there is greater understanding and greater tolerance.)
Soon I was looking on at a strange dance. All in a circle they swung round and round the blazing fire, singing and leaping. I did not know the meaning of the words they sang; but I could read their minds by the thought-images they formed, and I knew that they were celebrating the date—reached by what lunar reckoning I knew not—of some great Indian massacre in which they had taken part a hundred or two hundred years ago.
And the impulse of their dance, the motive power of it, was hatred of the white man who had scattered them and driven them away from their old hunting grounds.
Shocked, yet fascinated by this inner glimpse at the souls of the American aborigines, I watched them.
Though I am not skilled in magic rituals, I soon perceived that there was form and method in this dance, method and form and a hostile purpose.
They were, by exciting themselves and by fixity of thought, trying to excite a scattered company of men in these United States—men of a low grade of intellect but of psychic temperament—to deeds of violence and destruction.
“So that is the way they do it!” I thought.
Then I drew a veil around my thoughts, that they might not be perceived by the beings before me. Yes, I can do that, and so can many men upon the earth.
I could smell the keen fresh odors of the pine grove, and I could feel the rising wind as it swept across the clearing; for the wind seemed to respond to their call and to offer its forces to them. You must know that the elements are impersonal, though semi-personalities inhabit them, and that the elements and these semi-personalities can be used and guided, for purposes good or evil, by any being who has gained that peculiar power in one or many lives.
And looking off in the distance, I could see that the wind as it swept along carried the thoughts and passions of these long dead men, these souls that by reason of their own downward tendencies had not broken away from the attraction of matter, the astral gravitation that makes so many souls earth-bound.
Still looking off and projecting my consciousness in a way I have learned to do, I saw the influence of this magic ritual of revenge and menace as it touched the minds of men far scattered. I saw their thoughts take on suddenly the tinge of hatred, hatred for the civilization in which they had failed to realize their personal desires.
And I knew that on that night and on the morrow, and at intervals for many days, deeds of violence would be committed, that property would be destroyed, and men of order threatened.
My heart was sad, for I had not understood before how real was the danger to my country in these times of crisis from the karma the old settlers had made. Of course they believed they were doing right in ridding themselves and their adopted land from the simple but complex natives, whose civilization was older than the civilization of Europe, and who had loved this land as only those can love a land who have known the freedom of its spaces.
When the magic dance was over, and one by one and two by two the communicants slipped away among the shadows, I strode forward into the circle to have speech with any who should willingly respond to my desire for acquaintanceship.
Suddenly I found myself face to face with a majestic chieftain, wearing one of those long feather bonnets whose every feather marks some deed of daring or achievement. (What a splendid custom was that! What an incentive to action! Truly among the red men, deed won a feather in the cap.)
His face was like that of a hawk, and his eyes were bright with an inner fire, that intensity of feeling and thought commingled which marks the leader and master of men and him alone.
And I said to him in the forms of thought, for I knew no word of his old language:
“I have been an unintentional witness to your ceremony this evening. Will you enlighten me further as to its purpose? for I see that it was directed towards the land of breathing men.”
With a sweep of his authoritative arm he dismissed the few of his companions who had not already moved away among the trees, and we two were alone together.
“I come as a friend,” I said, seeing that he hesitated.
And the word was true; for I saw that whatever harm he mistakenly sought to accomplish, in his soul was the consciousness of justice, that fundamental balance between right and wrong, that proposition of law, which when native in the mind gives it dignity and attracts respect. This was no dabbler in aboriginal and nasty sorcery, but a kind of priest of retribution, a tribal demi-god who might perhaps some day be made constructive and not destructive, an instrument of the great Genius of America of which I have spoken in a former letter, the Weaver of Destiny who has our land in charge.
We measured each other with the eyes, and I cast aside the veil that I had before drawn around my thoughts, that he might see me mind to mind and realize that I respected and to a degree understood him.
“You have seen what you have seen,” he observed.
“And you do not resent my presence?”
“No.”
The fresh odor of the pine grove was keen in my senses, and my new-found companion threw back his head with a splendid motion as if to drink it in.
“Freedom is good,” he said, “and the land was ours.”
So I perceived that by excusing himself and his associates he had perceived that I accused them. Then I knew that I could really commune with him mind to mind, and I was glad; for I ever seek to extend the range of my knowledge and to form acquaintance with those of sturdy will.
“But the land is free to all the world,” I said, “to you and to me, and to those of both our races.”
“We do not see it so,” was his reply.
“But,” I insisted, “are we not now, you and I, enjoying it in freedom?”
It is difficult to translate in words the rapid give and take of our thoughts, the pictures that flashed back and forth between us, as I strove with kindliness and will to make him understand that the welfare of his race did not call for the destruction of mine.
I told him—and the idea was so new to him that, lacking words, I had to draw my story on the canvas of thought in the minutest detail—how the soul that leaves the earth for a time returns to it in another form. And I explained how hundreds upon hundreds of his people, and the most advanced among them, had already come back in material form to that America they had loved before, that they wore white bodies, and could only be distinguished from other white men by the keenness of their eyes, their gait, and certain peculiarities of speech and manner.
He followed my story with astonished, almost painful, intensity; for he knew, with that inner knowledge which on this side of life is almost impossible to deceive, that I spoke honestly and believed that which I told him.
“And do you not deceive yourself?” was his inevitable question.
Then I told him of those recent and former lives of my own which I most vividly remember, and cited proofs that I did not deceive myself.
“But what a life is that of the white man for one of my people?” he demanded.
Then he flashed me picture after picture of the simple white man’s life in America, the schoolhouse with the choking-hot stove and the bad air, the house and home with closed doors and windows, the “meeting-house” where a droning or a noisy preacher prated of things he did not understand, to others who believe or did not believe that they believed him. He held up before me as for ridicule the clothing of the white man in the lower walks of life, the confining and uncomfortable shoes, the binding trousers, the ugly hat that makes bald the head, and the collar. The one he pictured was a paper collar, soiled and wilted at the edges.
Then he showed me—as if to prove the breadth of his observations—an office in a city, with the clerks seated upon stools and bent with aching backs over ledgers that contained figures, figures, long lines of figures that were the symbols of the white man’s wampum, which seemed so trivial when made the principal occupation of a soul that had rejoiced in the red man’s forest.
“And is it for this that they come back to their native land?” he asked.
“But the soul must gain all experience,” I said.
The idea seemed new to him, and he pondered it with knitted brows.
“Why should the soul gain all experience?” he asked.
“That it may return to its God rich in knowledge,” I replied.
“Its God.” At that thought the strange eyes of him lighted, though his face remained immobile.
“Yes,” I said, “for your God and my God are both God.”
“There are many gods,” he replied. “There is the Great Spirit, and there are the others.”
“In the centre of each of them,” I assured him, “there is a spot, a core of the heart that is the same in all, that exists everywhere, and in every heart is one, that knows no division; and that centre is also in your heart and mine and in that of our respective Gods.”
“Did you learn that in one of those hot schoolhouses?” he asked.
“No. I did not learn it even when I was an old man upon the earth, but after I came out here. On earth I rather prided myself on my separateness.”
“Then one can learn new religions out here?” he asked, in surprise.
“If one finds a teacher,” I replied.
“But what need is there of new religions?”
“There is,” I said, “in the core of every religion also that central spot where all are one. And there is in all races,” I pursued, for I saw that he watched with half-belief , “there is in all races a core of unity. The red man is the brother and not the permanent enemy of the white man. So why should you injure the descendants of those who followed what they believed to be right in extending their holdings in this land long ago?”
“But I was not seeking to injure them for injury’s sake.”
“Then I misunderstood the purpose of your magic song.”
“Oh!” he exclaimed. “You caught the feeling of my children, who cannot see beyond feeling. My purpose is only to destroy the present to make way for the old life.”
“But the present is always a stage,” I said, “on the highroad that leads to the future. And my people reincarnated, and yours reincarnated—or so many of them as are ready to go on—shall go on together and in this land. They will form, with those who join them from beyond the seas, a new race. And thanks to the labors of a few among the white men who have studied and appreciated the traditions and civilization of the red man and sought to save them from utter obliteration, the old forest lore will become a part of the inheritance of that new race which is to grow out of the union of yours and mine and the others. And for a part of every year, when the life of the new race is adjusted, the boys and girls and men and women will go out to the wilds and enjoy the freedom of the tent and the society round the campfire, and we shall be brothers—real blood-brothers—at last, and all the old wounds shall be healed. Can you not recognize me as your brother?”
He nodded his head.
“And will you not spread among your people the glad tidings of the new race, in all of whose possessions they will share?”
We stood long looking in each other’s eyes, and I told him more than I could record here if I held the use of your pencil for many hours. In the end he understood me.
It is my belief that he will spread the story among his people, and that one danger will be lessened thereby, to some degree, for the children of the new race.

LETTER XVII
THE IDEAL OF SUCCESS

June 23, 1917.
Put fear out of your hearts. The future will give you no greater lessons than you can master. It is not well to know the future in complete detail. Had the world known during the last ten years all it would be obliged to suffer in this war, would it have made the progress it has made in art, science and commerce? No. Every thought would have been haunted.
You may say that the weaker races (and the stronger ones) would have made better preparation. But a part of this lesson has been not to delay inevitable preparation, and to know in future that a nation which idealizes war and is mostly army, has not cultivated that ideal and that army solely for its own amusement.
If you want to understand national life and individual life, you must look for their dominating ideals. An ideal is a tendency.
What is the dominating ideal of America? Summed in a word, it is success, is it not? Now America is in a great war, and you may be sure that she will leave nothing undone that can make for success in that war, as she has left nothing undone that could make for success in business.
Take your own case. What are your dominating ideals and tendencies? You would say, off-hand, work and study and intellectual companionship, would you not? Very well. As to work, do not fear a future in which good work is pretty sure of at least a living wage. Study? There will always be books to feed your hunger for reading. Companionship? There are too many lonely souls in the world for you ever to be lonely.
What else? You lift your pencil and think. . . . That is about all, is it not?
Now let us return to America. America is not—has not been—a warlike nation, except when threatened by injustice, to herself or others. Will she lose this war? I think not.
But there will be complexities regarding the end of this war.
I want to refer to something I said in a recent letter, that we were organizing on this side of the airy frontier for work for the future of America.
I have spoken of the Genius of this land, a composite entity you may call it, if your imagination is not equal to the task of seeing that you—all of you—are cells in the body of the Genius of America.
Now the Genius of this land has glorious purposes, and she uses you—all of you—for her purposes, as you use the cells of your body, as you are using at this moment the aggregation of cells that form the hand with which you hold your pencil.
In registering yourselves at the call of your country, you are affirming your acceptance of the office of cells in the great body of her. Some of you she must sacrifice in the war for the welfare of the whole, as every day cells die and are born in the body of man, the microcosm.
Extend the idea to the whole human race, and the figure will be still more apt. The genius of the race is suffering now. The process will ultimate in a more perfect health.
You perhaps protest that many of those who are dying are the flower of the race, the young, the fitted to survive. But do you not remember that their souls survive? The essential part of them is not lost, but set free for a greater work. Have you considered that earth-life may be the dream, and the life after death the waking? Sages have considered it before you, and accepted the possibility.
Out here we are hopeful, and very busy. It is because I am so busy that I come to you only occasionally. Do not hurry me, for I do not hurry you.
We have problems to solve out here. As I have said, one of our problems is the great number of Indian souls, red men souls, who went out of life with resentment and revenge in their hearts for the elimination of their race by the white man in America.
Somehow we must placate them, and enlist them on your side. Otherwise they may be a dangerous element for the future. Some of them would like to see your civilization destroyed, as theirs was destroyed, and a few of them are strong enough to do real harm.
The best way to make an enemy harmless is to understand his peculiar qualities, to learn something from the frankness of his enmity, to turn away evil by letting it go off at a tangent. But the Indian souls are not famous for their frankness. Even with me they sometimes conceal their resentment—deep, fundamental—at the “theft,” as they feel it, of the land where they once roamed in freedom.
I advise America to cultivate the free life of the open. I have advised you in a former book that the old woodcraft should be resuscitated and taught to the children. There may come a time when the rudiments of this knowledge will be useful to many of you.
Great changes are coming in the world, a period of adjustment to new conditions. There is a restless element in all adjustment, and national restlessness is like that of puberty; it needs to be minimized by healthful outdoor play, or by work which masquerades as play.
The future will take from the present those elements that are most important for survival.
Do not fear that we shall return to the Dark Ages. Oh, no. We are going into a Light Age. It is only twilight now.

LETTER XVIII
ORDER AND PROGRESS

July 18, 1917.
Our purpose is to make the changes that must come, come gradually. We want to avoid sudden changes.
You in the world have no faint idea of the influence and power we can wield on our side. We can speak to the minds of men without their knowing whence the ideas come. They think, when a sudden idea comes into their minds, that they have evolved it; but sudden ideas generally come from outside. (I put one in your mind this morning, then ran away before you could recognize me. Why did I run away? Because I wanted you to use your own judgment.)
Just at present we are trying to encourage America as to her future—her orderly and peaceful future, after peace is declared in Europe.
You may as well know that there are many out here who are anxious about the future of the world. All men do not cease to worry when they have left their bodies. There are many here who think the world is going to smash. They always had that fear in life whenever things seemed to go wrong; and now they are no less inclined to accept every complexity as an omen of failure and confusion.
All over America there are men and women—and many of them are in pulpits or on platforms—who are croaking away about the destruction of society following this war. Bless your troubled hearts! Society is not going to be destroyed. Some elements in society will be gradually done away with, and good riddance to them! But society has made too great advance, in mechanical and intellectual ways, to permit its structure to be pulled from beneath its feet.
Do not worry. Watch out, but do not worry. As Abraham Lincoln once prevented this country from being territorially divided and thus weakened, so he and others are now working to prevent a spiritual division that would be even more disastrous.
No, we are not going to see your useful inventions and your structures that the future has need of, cast into the rubbish heap by reckless violence and extravagance. What is useful must be conserved. What is useless for the future can be made over into something useful.
Humanity has not been in the habit of taking sudden jumps. It has put one foot regularly before the other, and gone ahead rather steadily. The way of man in the past has been to improve and make over, rather than suddenly to discard its institutions, or even its garments. Only that which is really worn out is cast away. And our financial system, and our social system in general, will be improved and not discarded. Did you think we were going back to wampum? Oh, no!
There is a strong pull from this side, and from those who inhabited your continent, to simplify the life in America. But America is no longer isolate. She has now taken her place in the republic of nations.
Some of the souls who used to be American Indians would like to see America resume wigwams and campfires, because those souls want to come back, and they dread the complexity of modern American life. But there are teachers here—and some of them red teachers—who can instruct the souls behindhand in adaptability.
I have told you that there is an influence tending to draw America backward. But I have not told you to be panicky regarding the fact. There are reactionaries—even in your world.
The influence from this side is subtle. But the majority here who desire to lead the world, desire to lead it forward and not back. The world will go forward.
Yes, the souls you call the “departed” are organizing themselves. They realize that their influence can be more effective if it has a purpose and a program. For a time after the war began there was great confusion out here, but things are becoming more orderly. Minds are becoming more united. Many of us who have common sense and some measure of political judgment give most of our time to lecturing here and there, wherever we can draw a crowd together. That is one reason why you have seen me so seldom of late. I have been busier than ever before. Knowing that a time is coming soon when I can rest from my present labors, I am using my strength as fast as I generate it. For those whom I convince that America and other countries are going forward—must go forward to greater activity—seek to convince others in their turn. No lecturer on earth ever had so busy a month as I have had this last month. I have spoken to hundreds several times every day, going from place to place, from State to State, from city to city. I can speak in San Francisco in the morning, in New York at noon, in New Orleans at two o’clock, in Butte, Montana, in the evening. I am not limited to railway timetables, nor do I pay my fare.
Believe me, we are going to save America, and we are going to save the world. For the Masters are behind us, and they will not let the world be destroyed.
I should not like you to know how near it has been to destruction more than once during the last three years. But the forces of premeditated evil against which we fought so long have been scattered now, and though they have not been destroyed, their effect has been greatly lessened. What we have reason to fear now is the unwisdom of those who believe they wish good to the world—the unwisdom of fanatics and agitators and fuss-budgets of all sorts, stirring up confusion and darkening counsel with their unpractical and conflicting ideas.
Order, order, order! That is what the world must strive for in the period of reaction which will follow this war. The reaction must be reckoned with; but it will be only a brief rest of overwearied hearts, who will again begin building.
It is in that building period that I hope for America, because she will be less tired than the other members of the great world brotherhood. But in America at that time there will be a danger. I tell you that, lest you be taken unawares and relax your attention.
Be watchful, but not over-anxious.
And trust the Masters of Life somehow to lead you through.