by Talbot Mundy
Service does not consist in doing other people’s duty for them, but in so well finishing one’s own that there is nothing of it left to burden others; in such painstaking exercise of self-control that not a creature can be injured by our lapses; in such alert and patient progress on the narrow way that leads between ambition and neglect, that we may lead no fellow-pilgrim off the Path. For it is very much less harmful in the long run to ourselves, to bring disaster on ourselves, than to imperil others.
Danger is a grim word, fraught with meaning. The danger in another’s duty is as grim and sure as that which we know we run if we neglect our own. The fact is, that we cannot do another’s duty and our own as well, and the attempt to prove the contrary entails neglect and oversight, which are the source of half our difficulties and of most of our delay along the Path of Evolution. The desire to do another’s duty very often is a masked form of intolerance or pride; as often, it conceals a mean scorn for another’s weakness; sometimes, it is tyranny, grimacing in the cloak of kindness. It is never quite unselfish for at best it robs another of an opportunity.
The weird, illogical, and blind belief that one short life is all there is of us, is a delusion, under which in one form or another all the nations of the world succumb to hopelessness, or struggle onward in a false hope that some whim of an incomprehensible Destiny may show them a life better worth the living after death shall have imposed the final irony on this one.
Stultified by this delusion and obsessed by the impossible ambition to compress Eternity’s whole panorama into one short earth-life, men grow mad, ascribing all their own discomfort to their fellow-men’s iniquity. They seek to make themselves more comfortable by controlling and compelling others. They quote what have been said to be the words of Jesus— “Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you “; but they neglect to bear in mind that other equally profound and simple caution— “Let your light so shine that they may see your good works.” Duty, in this age and generation, has become a synonym for making other men do what we ignorantly think is theirs, in order that we may feel self-righteous, or may live more lazily, or possibly that we may get to heaven on the wings of other men’s behavior.
It is impossible for anyone to understand another’s duty, let alone to do it. Before we can qualify to sit in judgment of a fellow-man’s neglect, or of his ignorance, or of his ill-will, we must first attain to the ability to see the whole of the procession of preceding lives that he has lived, and then so wisely weigh the interlacing causes and effects of myriads of years that not a single one escapes us.
A sneer at that statement is about the only recourse left to those who cling to the delusion named above that has brought the world to its present pass. But the sneer will not answer the charge that whoever sits in judgment on a fellow-man, or dares to try to do another’s duty, or who makes claim to be better than his fellow, mocks himself and makes himself ridiculous; for either he asserts impossible ability to see the whole procession of past lives, and boasts of sufficient wisdom to review and weigh them all, or else he impudently claims to judge without the facts which hardly the most arbitrary God invented by the stupidest of men would think of doing!
Let him who knows exactly whence he came, and whither he is going, and can prove it, pass such judgments as he sees fit; let him do another’s duty if he has the time. For the rest of us, who immeasurable this life as but an interlude between eternities, in which an endless chain of lives supplies us with the changing circumstance and the environment we need in which to work out our own spiritual progress, there is only just exactly time enough to attain our own self-mastery, and no time at all to spare for criticizing others.
To attempt to do another’s duty is an act of criticism. It implies an assertion of omniscience. It is an arrogant and ignorant concession to the self-esteem that flatters us that we are better than our neighbor, and more wise. Carried to its ultimate, it leads to a confusion of responsibility. The seeds of war are sown when any nation starts to interfere with the duty or the privileges of another; none will gainsay that. But we are prone to overlook the fact that nations are but congeries of individuals, and that the same eternal Laws apply to all of us.
In one sense, and in only one, are we responsible for our neighbor’s duty. He has his rights, and they are neither more nor less than ours. It follows that our duty toward him includes our giving him full room and opportunity to attend to his own affairs, while we attend to our own so thoroughly as not to interfere with him and not to leave neglected details for him to clean up after us.
There is an everyday expression which betrays the common attitude toward life and its problems and lays bare the roots of the ridiculous philosophy with which the greater part of what we call the civilized world today endeavors to console itself. “Life is too short for that!” We have all heard it. Most of us have used the phrase at one time or another. But the truth is, Life is too long for anything but strict attention to our duty and a generous permission to the other man to do his.
If all we had to live was one life — three score years and ten — there might be something in the theory that life is much too short for anything except enjoyment; and that if another does not do his duty, then we may do it for him in order to enjoy immediate comfort of mind or body. But even the Psalmist, who sang of three score years and ten, sang also that “a thousand years are but a moment.” Life is so long — so eternally, incalculably long — that there is time for every act, however apparently insignificant, to reach its full fruition; and there is time for us to meet — to be compelled to meet and be compelled to deal with — all the consequences of the acts that we ourselves commit.
We see around us all the evidence of rebirth, ceaselessly progressing. There are sermons in the stones, and running brooks, and trees. The very nestling, newly hatched, knows whence to expect its food. The tree knows how to grow as soon as it bursts forth in darkness from the seed. Who taught it? Where did it learn the trick of thrusting upward to the light, and how does it know the light is there? Ourselves, possessed of habits that were never taught us since we came adventuring into this short span of years between a cradle and the grave, live, move, and have our being amid circumstances and conditions that we know intuitively how to deal with. Is it possible, or by any thinking mind conceivable, that we could conduct ourselves as men and women without accumulated stores of past experience on which to base our judgment of events as they arise? It is insanity to base our estimate of life and its recurrent problems on the proofless, blind assumption that we have but one short earth-life in which to make our whole experience.
What then is the danger in another’s duty? This: that every injustice brings its retribution on the perpetrator. It is not just to deprive another of the opportunity to work out his experience. And it is unjust to ourselves to rob ourselves by interfering with another, thus misusing time and opportunity that might have been applied to our own problem. So to do another’s duty entails two injustices, and we will have to meet the consequence of both, at some time or another, in this earth-life or another, and then we will have to devote both time and energy to the solution of a difficulty that would certainly have been avoided had we sooner learned the art and the necessity of minding our own business.
Minding our own business is the all-important principle of living. We are what we are — a nuisance to our neighbors very often, and a danger and obstruction to ourselves. It is becoming what we can become that is our duty to our fellow-man; and by becoming better than we are, and better able, from constant practice, to mind our own business wisely, we can become of increasing benefit to ourselves, our neighbor, our nation, the world, and the universe. By trying to do others’ duty, we can only go from bad to worse.
Duty is that which is due — not that which we think, perhaps, may possibly be due before long. Duty, like ourselves, exists in the eternal Now. It is at hand, immediate, in front of us, invariably simple; and it sometimes takes the form of opportunity to learn a littl
e self-control by refraining in thought or word or deed from interference with another.
It must be clear to the most immature human intelligence that no man can be helpful, or anything except a burden to his fellows, until he has acquired the art of orderly self-government. It follows, that our first duty at all times and in any set of circumstances is to control ourselves and so make sure that, whatever else, at all events we do not add to the inharmony around us. It sometimes happens then, although not nearly so often as our vanity would like to persuade us, that after we have exercised our utmost self-control, so giving wisdom opportunity to function, there is just a little surplus left that we may safely offer to the other fellow; but even so, the wisdom born of self-control, will oblige us to make the offer very diffidently. Wisdom will remind us that we are ignorant of many of the facts, and possibly of nearly all of them.
Briefly, our whole duty to our neighbor may be summed up in one sentence of four words: “Mind your own business.” Business is that which ought to keep us busy, even if it does not. If it does not, then our duty is to find out why, and to remedy the failure by giving business more strict attention. That which ought to keep us busy is the instant and unceasing task of learning how to regulate and improve our own character, forever watchful of results as evidenced by deeds, and to the one end that we may become more useful by becoming more spiritual.
The only influence that we should dare to exercise is that which comes from spiritual progress. And that is automatic. It requires no exercise of brain, and no self-assertion to exert the uplifting beneficence of spirituality. In fact, on the contrary, self-assertion is a gross impediment that not only makes us stumble in our effort but assumes far greater proportions, in the eyes of the beholder, than those spiritual qualities that we propose to advertise. There is nothing more insulting to one’s neighbor or more stultifying to oneself than conduct based on a self-flattering claim of spiritual superiority. The moment that we feel ourselves superior to others is the time, of all others, when we most need self-control — and then self-criticism — and then drastic self-direction, bearing well in mind that there are countless future lives in which to meet in full the consequences of the positive and negative commissions and omissions made in this one.
The conclusion of it all is this: that we are here to learn, not how to do our neighbor’s duty, but to do our own — not for our own advantage, but for that of others. The only real blessing we can offer to our fellow-men is self-improvement, to the end that we may not increase inharmony but may exercise an honest, pure, uplifting influence. The basis of all spiritual progress is in self-examination and self-watchfulness. The proof of it consists in deeds that do no injury, depriving no man of his right to equal room and unhampered liberty along the Path of Progress.
OYEZ!
They threw a tinker into Bedford jail lest wise heads should be troubled by his tongue;
They burned the Maid of Orleans to still the voice forever that she claimed to hear;
They gave the hemlock draught to Socrates to drown disturbing truths he taught the young;
They slew Hypatia to kill such courage as makes cowards fear;
They burned the Prophet’s books and said: ‘Henceforth we make a better law from day to day’;
They said: ‘The past is dead and cannot trouble us again, if we forget.
The moment is the goal. There is no higher law that unseen truths obey;
If we but bury consequences deep enough the cause dies too.’ And yet —
They saw the pebble thrown into the pool and watched the unprevented ripples spread;
They calculated cycles of eclipse and timed Orion rising in the sky;
They bragged of a heredity from ancestors a dozen generations dead;
Then tried to take the cash and let the debit go, and failed — and wondered why.
I WILL AND I WILL NOT
A CERTAIN sort of modern scientist is fond of describing the human race as animals, and from his own point of view, which is as circumscribed by material limitations as a frog’s at the bottom of a well, he may be right; but he might just as well, and just as logically, describe animals as men. In fact, the animals might be the better for it — might receive a more intelligent consideration and more mercy from homo sapiens, who is seldom as wise as the pundits of materialism flatter themselves that he is.
From the viewpoint of the sheer materialist, who weighs a dying man to prove that life has no weight whatever and therefore that soul does not exist, there is no soul and evolution is a blind, mechanical procession of events that follows undiscoverable laws with no comprehensible purpose except to develop what must ultimately be destroyed. And if we accept that view there remains but one mystery: why should anyone trouble himself to continue living, or — if we cannot quite force ourselves to such flat depths of cynicism — why not eat, drink, and be immoral, since tomorrow or the next day we must disintegrate into unthinking atoms?
There are strange inconsistencies in human nature, and particularly in scientific human nature, which are easy to immeasurable but very difficult to understand. For instance, one and the same intensely educated biologist will speak of the ‘blind laws’ of nature with as fanatical conviction as the out-of-date enthusiast’s who used to speak of everlasting hellfire; but almost in the same breath he will boast of his own will that differentiates him from the common run of men and makes it possible for him to force his tired brain and his exhausted body in the search after new discoveries. He is willing to divide his neighbors into classes and to publish statistics, which are alleged to prove that about nine-tenths of the human race are his mental inferiors; but he denies that there is any spiritual basis for his theory, and he shuts his eyes deliberately to that very “will” and “will not,” which in practice have made his life-work possible.
The average nature-lover, much better than the most expert analytical naturalist, knows what an animal will or will not do in given circumstances. The differences between the species and genera are much more evident in their behavior than in conformation or in structural anatomy; they have evolved up to a certain point, and at that point they function, always in the same way, always in obedience to the law of their kind. Their will, which is their state of consciousness, obliges them to respond in certain ways to given circumstances; and when one animal — as a dog, for instance, or an elephant — evolves a disposition to act differently from the rest, that individual’s state of consciousness is changing, usually to a slightly higher level. Then, there being no exception possible to law, it follows that exception must become law; the level to which one member of the species has attained becomes possible to all that species, and evolution takes one step forward. Thenceforward the “I will” and “I will not” of all that species has one less limitation. Example being more contagious than disease, it is only a matter of time before the ability of the one becomes the law — the will — the state of consciousness of the entire species.
It is so with men, but with this difference: that men have reached the stage of evolution in which it is possible for them to become aware of it and consciously to direct its progress. Animals evolve unconsciously, the lower species hardly more aware of what compels them than the trees are, or the rocks and rivers. The higher mammals very often are aware of spiritual forces, although only for short periods, amid surroundings and in circumstances that provide the necessary stimulus; and although they give every evidence then to a discerning observer of being conscious of unseen powers whose presence thrills them, they rarely, if ever, appear to change in character in consequence.
My own observation suggests, in fact, the contrary. A lion is never so much a lion as when he has stood for a few minutes staring into infinity, motionless, absorbed in contemplation of the unseen. At such moments his normally keen senses appear to be in a state of suspended function; he can neither hear the sounds that usually alarm him, smell the scents that normally enrage him, nor see what should make him suspicious, were his purely animal c
onsciousness alert. He is alert to something else, and in another way. For a moment he seems aware of the divinity of everything that lives and breathes, and of his own place in the universe.
On many such occasions I have had the opportunity to watch lions in the open, when the weather, his own vitality, and every other circumstance was in the lion’s favor, giving him nothing to think about but the satisfaction of being alive. In such moments the very spirit of pantheism seems expressed, and that wonderful old psalm comes to mind in which the singer adjures: “O all ye beasts, praise ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him forever.”
The moment passes, and the lion always roars — roars as if a glimpse of the reality of things has thrilled him to the marrow — roars and roars — and then reasserts the animal. He is dangerous then. It is as if, in the words of the Bible, the flesh lusteth against the spirit. He reverts to blind laws and the lion’s will, which is to go in search of what he may devour and to slay because he can.
It is the same with wolves. Sometimes, particularly toward evening in fine weather, when they have eaten and slept and played, so that they feel in the pink of condition and their senses are in harmony, they seem to grow conscious of another element. Usually one wolf feels it first, and howls; but the howl is an entirely different note from the hunting-call. Each wolf in turn takes it up until they all howl in chorus, putting all their heart into the music. No observer then, unless afraid, or so prejudiced that he is incapable of recognizing anything except what he has been told he should expect, could mistake that chorus for the usual wolf-cry. It is more like an evening hymn. They throw up their throats and take extraordinary pains to pitch on exactly the right quarter-tone. They are doing something they enjoy, and for the sake of doing it — something that is neither play nor work — an ecstasy.