Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  They are not wolves while they are doing that, but a conscious part of Nature, one with all the rocks and trees and rivers, one with the wind and the twilight, one with Life itself. But it is only for short moments that they can hold to that realization; then they are wolves again, and dangerous, asserting their condition and the fang and claw with which they hold such sway in the forest as is theirs by right of evolution.

  It is only man who can explain to himself what such ecstatic moments mean and can direct himself in order consciously to profit by them. And that is why it is unfair and ignorant to label man an animal, and why, the less a man regards himself as animal, the swifter his advancement to the higher planes of consciousness. We all are spiritual — rocks and trees and rivers, wind and weather, stars — birds, reptiles, beasts; we all evolve; we all work out our destiny exactly from the point at which we stand; but the dividing chasm between man and animal is greater than that between animal and tree, because man alone is able to be conscious of the Soul that guides him.

  The animal’s “I will” is an obedience to the law of his existence that he heeds but does not understand. He is a lion or a sheep, a wolf or a hyena; evolution is directed for him and he spends his life in being what he is, without a discernible trace of will to become something higher. Unless compelled, as a few rare individuals know how to compel, he shows no disposition to imitate anything higher than himself, or even to immeasurable that there is any higher condition than his own. His will is to be wolf or sheep or lion, and to make the most of that, adapting himself as best he can to changing conditions. His “I will not” is his unwillingness to change himself — his inability to do it.

  Man’s “I will” is all too often no more than the animal’s expression of desire. His “I will not” descends too often, and particularly when the individual surrenders to the mean massed instinct of the mob, to the plane on which all consciousness of self-direction ceases and, in common with the vegetables, he exists within his senses and self-rooted to the earth. In such moods men are not superior to animals, but worse, and for this reason: that whoever once has felt within himself and recognized the working of the Higher Law, thereafter is responsible; and he who lets that feeling of responsibility escape him or be crowded out by swinishness and greed commits sin. It is impossible to sin without a consciousness of what sin means.

  Accordingly, a man’s “I will,” if he shall have the right to call himself a man and to enjoy man’s heritage, must entail some higher object than the mere expression of his appetite or his ambition to impose his own desires on others. As an animal, man is a weakling so inferior in strength and obstinacy to the ass, for instance, that no comparison is possible between them. Man’s intelligence, if set to perform the asses’ labor in the asses’ way, still leaves him so inferior to the beast that mere economy would give the ass a higher market value. It is in a man’s unwillingness to be an ass, to be described as one, to be made to work as one, that the hint of his way of salvation lies.

  The meanest man, at intervals at any rate, is conscious of his manhood and aware of a compelling force within himself (he calls it ‘conscience’ oftener than not) that drives him to remorse, and through remorse to self- improvement. Then his “I will” strikes a nobler key, no longer flatted by disgusting appetite but thrilling with authority. He has accepted man’s responsibility — the privilege of self-direction. Self-control and self-improvement follow, and the “I will not” falls like a sword into his right hand — a sword that points every way.

  And “I will not” is equally important with “I will.” The animal within a man is stirred by every evidence of strengthened will. The “I will not” restrains it, and converts the animal emotion into higher forms of energy. No latter-day condition is more noticeable and productive of bewilderment than that increasing education and intelligence bring with them an increasing animality and cleverness in crime; but that is because “thou shalt not” has been allowed to substitute for “I will not,” paternalism (of a sad, short- sighted kind) stalking stupidly where individual responsibility should be the first law of the land and the first concern of educators.

  An man who has responded to the Soul-note in himself (his conscience, if you will) and has deliberately set his face toward the future and the light, has felt — perhaps instantly — in some degree increasing influence upon his fellow men. They begin to regard his word and to accord him the beginnings of authority, most often without knowing why they do it, because few men pause to analyze and to dissect their own reasons for this and that attitude. And if the truth could be set down in cold statistics (we are fortunate, perhaps, to be spared that mathematical indictment of a whole race!) we might be staggered by the revelation of what follows; our belief in human nature would need readjusting drastically before we could resume that buoyant optimism that we need in daily life.

  Let each man analyze himself. Let each discover for himself the need for constant watchfulness. Our memories are not for nothing. There are few of us who need to look back more than one day down the line of zigzag and sporadic evolution to discover that each time we have been conscious of a forward step, however short, our lower nature instantly has sought to take advantage of it, causing us, subtly perhaps, to use the opportunity for self-aggrandizement.

  I remember a black man who set himself deliberately to improve his moral status. The effort was easy to immeasurable, and the result was obvious, although only he knew what extremes of self-denial it had cost him. He had left his native village, as he told me. (He was born in a village of thieves, where murder was considered bravery, and it was a Sikh skin-trader who first suggested to him higher standards of morality.)

  In course of time he came to the attention of a high government official, who employed him and, finding him diligent, caused him to be enlisted in the police force, in which he began with such a splendid record in his favor that he was placed in positions of trust much sooner than was usual with recruits. His “I will” was as ready as the knife he used to wield in the old days in his native village; discipline seemed second nature to him, and his influence among the raw recruits enlisted later than himself was excellent. His “I will not,” however, had not kept pace, and the feel of the new-found influence went like wine to his head. He became a bully, and from that went on to mutiny; and the last I knew of him he was a member of the chain-gang, cleaning township streets.

  Now human nature varies only in degree. As long as we are humans we are subject to the laws that govern human life and conduct. What is possible to one is possible to everyone, and the degree of our advancement can be measured solely by the strength or weakness of our individual self-control. Unlike the animals, we have the power of self-direction; we may exercise our will in the deliberate judgment of ourselves by spiritual standards, steadfastly aspiring to new levels of discretion, sturdily rejecting all inducements to descend again on to the lower plane on which the animal controls us.

  The secret of success is balance. We are all familiar with characters who shine with a resplendent genius and lack, nevertheless, that moral stamina that challenges respect. The jails are full of them. The most of them lack balance — lack the “I will not” to serve as counterweight and regulator to “I will.” Without “I will” we never may attain to that self-government that is our goal, nor ever may evolve into such consciousness as can conceive self-government throughout a universe. Without the “I will not” we never can escape from the attraction of the lower nature, which provides us with an infinite variety of opportunities to resubmerge ourselves into its depths for every forward spiritual step we take.

  The Middle Way — Theosophy — lies midway between animal ambition and the subtler maze of spiritual pride. A man needs balance more than any other faculty, if he would keep the true course, and the surest aid to learning balance is a sense of humor that enables one to laugh at his own erratic judgment and, instead of pitying himself, to pity others whom his own mistakes may have misled. There is no more certain prelu
de to a fall than self-approval; self-condemnation and self-pity are such dead-weights as the strongest cannot bear upward; but a sense of humor is no burden. The ability to laugh at one’s own flounderings, and above all to laugh at one’s own claims to superiority above his fellow men, is a magic talisman that costs nothing, weighs nothing, and occupies no space. Unlike those patent medicines that they used to sell to travelers, it really cures all ills and is available in every accident.

  It is the lack of any sense of humor that has darkened all religion until men fight and go to law about past participles and the dull, dead letter of a printed creed. Paul the Apostle, who did more than any man to compose and formulate the religion since called Christianity, was no apostle of self- righteousness and gloom. One can imagine how he laughed and how he tapped his own breast when he voiced that famous phrase “the evil which I would not, that I do!” And doubtless he would laugh (and at himself) if he could hear the din of the debates over his phrases that have kept men quarreling among themselves for nineteen hundred years. Paul had sufficient sense of humor to preserve himself from bishoprics and too much praise; he earned his own living as a tent-maker; he laid no claim to be immune from limitations and obsessions that beset the rest of us, and he foresaw the evil that he might do while attempting the great benefit he would.

  So, whether we agree with the Apostle Paul in all his teachings, or agree to disagree with him, we may admire the manliness that made him immeasurable his own humanity and saved him from the mire of self-esteem, into which too many of the world’s would-be reformers have slid headlong. Thus far we all may follow him, conceding our intention to do well by all the world but laying no claim to infallibility, our sense of humor coming to our aid to save us from self-praise — such heady stuff that, balance we like Blondin, we should nevertheless lose footing if the least whiff of it were allowed to poison the immediate air.

  “I will” and “I will not” are grand assertions. They include the whole of man’s prerogatives; and neither is complete without the other. The infinite immensity of will, forever broadening as man ascends by purifying and controlling his own character, reveals such realms to revel in as blind and dazzle or bewilder at the first glimpse. Power not subject to restraint — power even over oneself, without the sanity that shall restrain and guide it — is madness, self-destroying and destructive of all else that meets it while its short-lived frenzy lasts.

  Power over oneself can be attained, and must be, before progress becomes possible. But it is power held in trust and the least abuse of it is treason to the Soul — rank sacrilege. “I will” is an expression of the consciousness of power. “I will not” is born of the determination never to betray the trust that power imposes.

  So the two go hand in hand, the will to become one with our Higher Nature and the Higher Law being balanced and restrained by will not to offend or injure. Therein lies the difference between man and animal-man, if he is worthy of the name of man, evolving character and race, and laying down his destiny, by serving others first, himself last — the animal unconsciously obeying laws that seem to him to legalize the theory of self first.

  Animals, in fact, are far from selfish, because their very instinct to protect themselves is based on laws beyond their comprehension that oblige them to protect their offspring and the herd and, consequently, all their ways are suitably conditioned to the state of consciousness at which they have arrived. Nature guides them.

  Man is his own guide. He has attained to spiritual consciousness and may, and can, if he sees fit, take cognizance of spiritual laws and by their aid advance to higher spiritual knowledge, benefiting all humanity and all life less advanced than he is, not by self-assertion but by vigilant self-government that requires each thought and act to be unselfish and constructive. Man, if he will be man, not a major animal, will — must — live, and alone may live, by spiritual service.

  CHANT

  When that caressing light forgets the hills

  That change their hue in its evolving grace;

  When, harmony of swaying reeds and rills,

  The breeze forgets its music and the face

  Of Nature smiles no longer in the pond,

  Divinity revealed! When morning peeps

  Above earth’s rim, and no bird notes respond;

  When half a world in mellow moonlight sleeps

  And no peace pours along the silver beam;

  When dew brings no wet wonder of delight

  On jeweled spider-web and scented lair

  Of drone and hue and honey; when the night

  No longer shadows the retreating day,

  Her purple dawn pursues the graying dark;

  And no child laughs; and no wind bears away

  The bursting glory of the meadow-lark;

  Then — then may be — never until then

  May death be dreadful or assurance wane

  That we shall die a while, to waken when

  New morning summons us to earth again.

  THE MAYA MYSTERY — YUCATAN

  ONE must search the pages of The Secret Doctrine for true light on the history of Yucatan. The Mayas — latter-day descendants of the ancient Itza civilization — themselves preserve a myth, much scoffed at by historians and referred to by the guide-book writers in the smallest print, to the effect that the hero-god Itzamna brought their ancestors through the ocean from the east. The thought of the tourist leaps at once to submarines; he laughs. To others, not so eager to class myth as mere absurdity, there occurs at once the story of lost Atlantis.

  The Yucatan Peninsula is one vast plain, with an area of nearly a hundred thousand square miles, largely covered with dense jungle and virgin forests, and it is nowhere more than five hundred feet above sea-level. With the exception of enormous plantations of henequen-fiber, laid out comparatively recently, there is very little cultivation, owing mainly to lack of surface- water, and the jungle might have continued unexplored for centuries to come were it not for manufacturers of chewing-gum, who send their agents into the forest in search of chicle, from which chewing-gum is made.

  These agents, mostly Mestizos, or half-castes (although some are pure Indian), occasionally bring news of great areas of ancient ruins, and it is to them in the first instance that almost every fresh discovery is due; but they are an uncommunicative breed, and very cautious in their dealings with the alien. From the purely Maya Indian one can learn almost absolutely nothing, his racial recollection of the conqueror’s heel having closed his mind against inquisitors.

  That conqueror’s heel, it may be added, was no imaginary infliction. La Casa del Conquistador Motejo still stands on the south side of the principal public square in Merida, the modern capital. It was the first house built by the Spanish conquerors and its facade bears the escutcheon of the Montejo family; on either side of the entrance, carved in stone and well preserved, are the figures of two Spanish knights, clad in the costume in vogue at the time of the conquest, each with his foot resting on the head of a conquered Maya India. That symbolizes well enough what Mayas have had to endure. There is not much room for doubt that they were suppressed, and by methods more drastic than we moderns fortunately can imagine. They have not yet re-arisen from the effects of it.

  The conqueror did not destroy the Maya buildings, as so often has been charged. There were extensive ruins all over Yucatan before the Spaniards came, and it seems probably that great areas had been abandoned to the jungle long before 1570, owing to lack of water, and possibly owing to a pestilence that may have followed in the wake of drought.

  There are practically no surface-streams, although there are considerable rivers that flow underground and find their way into the limestone caverns with which the whole country abounds. The principal water-supply is from rain preserved in natural cisterns, and it is easy to imagine how a prolonged period of drought may have forced the ancient inhabitants to abandon city after city.

  What the conquerors methodically did destroy was anything in writing or
in sculpture that could help to connect the Mayas with their ancient culture and the storied past. So fanatically and so thoroughly did they obliterate whatever they regarded as unchristian, and therefore damnable, that though the Mayas possessed at that time (1527) an extensive literature, consisting mainly of historic records, in a script at a stage of development apparently about midway between pictograph and letter, not one document or carving now remains to provide a key for modern language-students. The agents of the church were ‘thorough.’ Scientists, comparatively easily, have worked out the system of numbers and dates, and they are continually searching for some carving — enthusiastically hoping for some document — that may explain the code in which the Maya narrative was written. But until now the history, myth, legend, and religion of the Mayas remains for the most part a forgotten mystery, in spite of square miles of monuments that have resisted time and weather — unless it is true, as some say, that among the Indians there are individuals who have preserved the record, handing it on from generation to generation, and who could tell the secret if they chose.

  It is certain that no area in the world possesses such a Wealth of archaeological antiquity as that part of Central America that includes the Yucatan Peninsula, Honduras, and Guatemala. There are expeditions from a number of scientific foundations and universities now studying the jungle-ruins at widely extended points, but those points are like proverbial drops of water in an ocean; there is such abundance of material that one point seems almost as good as any other at which to begin exploring, and there is no guessing where the most important secrets may be brought to light.