by Talbot Mundy
But must we therefore so identify ourselves with death, by act of will or lack of spiritual energy, that we become death’s servants? In an age so given to advertisement that neither creed nor politics nor tooth-paste can resist oblivion without such struggles for publicity as would have paid the whole expense of Caesar’s armies, death is better advertised than are all the other old and new illusions that human flesh is heir to.
Death is as importunate as cigarettes; daily we are asked to make a blind- fold test of it — to choose which death we would prefer to die — instead of testing life with open eyes and choosing which life we shall prefer to live, which half-a-second’s thinking should suggest were much more profitable. Death and taxes, says the many-jawed-machine made myth, are inescapable. But are they? Death of what? Taxes to whom payable?
If we must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s — and we must, as even stars must render overflow of glory to the night — are we thereby identified with Caesar’s dim, inglorious beginning, with his vanity and vices, with his end at the mercy of any accident that stutters through the cogs of human prejudice? If we should render unto God the spirit that is God’s and that we feel within us, who shall tax that? Can death reach that holy thing?
Dying daily is the art of living. It is the art of letting go all prejudices — of refusing to be buried in the shrouds of dogma — of repudiating selfishness. It is the lower self that dies — that lower self which, caught between the prongs of Karma, can, if we permit, provide us with opportunity to learn and put in practice what we have been born into the world to learn and inwardly digest.
That inward WE is not these bodies that we too much value or, in moments of discouragement, accuse like dogs who bite the stick that beats them. Bodies are the suits we wear, in which to strut out parts on life’s amusing stage; and there is no greater mistake than to suppose that the actor should so emerge himself into the part he plays as to forget his own identity.
“I and my Father are one” — not, be it noted, I and my body are one. If we forget that the Eternal Man is deathless, as long as we forget (no longer) we become death’s victims, self-identified with the illusion which we came into the world to conquer; worse than victims, traitors; we submit ourselves to be the instruments of cruelty, deceit, and death, increasing others’ difficulty, adding to the sorrow of the world instead of mastering our share of it, and squandering the overflow of vibrance for the benefit of others. We become bad actors, whimpering for praise, entitled to no better than the rotten eggs of a disgusted audience.
For we forget, sometimes, there is an audience. Each man, as Shakespeare wrote, in urn plays many parts, and it appears to be a law that each of us, in course of time, must don dark buskins and a drab cloak, signifying loneliness. An empty stage, swept of its flowers that paid gay homage to some other actor — properties suggesting affluence and comfort all departed to the wings — dim light and the howling of lonely wind — no opportunity for bombast — silence that makes the house seem empty. Dread presents no opportunity for bombast — silence that makes the house seem empty. Dread presents itself. Sorrow is so encompassing that joy seems like a litter of decaying jetsam on the beach of grief. No support, no prompter — and an audience wholly unseen.
Is that a despicable part to play? It is the greatest part of all, the richest in opportunity. It is a challenge to the actor who is cast for it to fill that stage so full of a divine unconquerable spirit that his victory over desolation charges life anew with faith and hope and sends his audience away refreshed — as earth is stirred to new endeavor by the assault of spring against the tyranny of winter storms. The actor may, if he chooses, so forget his own identity as to assume the very substance of the part and go down under it to earned oblivion. It is his privilege, however, to remember who he is, and who his audience — that unseen audience forever instant to detect good work, forever eager, when the curtain rings down, to applaud: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”
Death, to such an actor, is the open door to Life, not too soon to be entered, since he knows there is no hurry and no need for it. He meets all anguish and adversity as a front-rank fighter, rapier in hand — the rapier of faith; unwilling to betray one trust by grudging one last effort, knowing that every blow he strikes at the world’s belief in purposeless calamity is struck for all eternity and all mankind. He knows, too, that the Lords of Life are cognizant and judging, not the noise he makes and not the fame men give him or withhold. They judge the quality of courage and of faith and good-will that he adds to the relief of tired humanity. Though death to him is Life Triumphant, since he knows that he and his immortal soul are one, and are one with Life Eternal, he refuses to accept release in death until the hour of victory when Life at last enfolds him in such Light that men no longer see him, and the shadow that they thought was he, disintegrates.
For him, that is the curtain. He has played his part. His audience was not the men and women of the world; they, too, are players. For the Lords of Life and for the ever present Brotherhood he did his utmost. He has earned and retires to enjoy their comradeship in another phase of the eternal drama of the progress of the Soul of Man; his knowledge that the Eternal Man can never die, having raised him to the ranks of the Helpers from the undisciplined flocks of the helped.
HAIL AND FAREWELL!
Written upon the death of Katherine Tingley, leader of the Point Loma, California, Theosophical Community Published in The Theosophical Path, September 1929
HAIL AND FAREWELL! You have led beyond that veil through which we follow presently; and you have left your light — no Jack-o’-lantern — golden glowing where it may be seen with the inward eye that measures neither height nor distance but judges values. Hail and farewell!
What is leadership? We, who have trodden the dust and mud of stricken fields, where our friends died gallantly and we were left to wonder for whose profit and to what end they died; we, who have lent enthusiasm to the tumult of the war of words when politics pretended to be Providence and old illusion brayed new panaceas; we, who have prayed in the crowded pews of churches, and have gone forth hungry from a meal of moldy words, to try to understand life’s irony; we, who have been misled too often into ambuscades and have beheld such virtue as we thought we had, yield all its vanity and leave us naked to the hail of discontent; we, who have tasted now and then the bitterness of false ideals sturdily pursued — and of true ideals lip- served, but betrayed; we, who have nevertheless, perceived, though dimly, something of Katherine Tingley’s goal and something of the Spirit that inspired her to lead upward to it, can, it may be, answer better What is Leadership? than they can who have felt themselves too self-sure to be led.
She was no empurpled Caesar, cadging votes and flattering opponents until opportunity revealed an opening into which to thrust the sudden violence of drilled troops craving plunder and the feel of pride. Nor was she a Diogenes, contemptuous of human practice and so proud of theory as to shrink from fact and to hunt by lantern-light for undiscoverable honesty; since she was honest. She had honesty to share, to give away, to pour forth from a hilltop and by day-light — honesty of motive, purpose, method, thought, speech, aim and — last, but not least, tolerance.
Integrity devoid of tolerance is more unkind than tyranny that frankly names itself and forces means to a mistaken end. Hers was the integrity that strikes no bargain with inhumanity in any form. Fanaticism never touched her. Harmony, the essence of her teaching, was no goose-step drum-beat to which everyone must march in step or else be relegated to the pains of purgatory or the dump-heap of the damned. Her sense of harmony was cosmic and included good-will and encouragement for all those not in step with her, who, none the less, strove upward toward glimpsed ideals.
And she knew — no woman in the world knew better — that the surface shows but seldom what goes on within the secret cauldron of the human heart, where spiritual alchemy transmutes a chaos of corrupted hopes and fallen aims into a fertile mold for the reception of the
seed of re-birth. Having faith, in man’s essential divinity as well as in the omnipresence of divine Life, she sowed that seed continually. And because the Truth was in her she was patient and not discouraged by the semblance of delay. Love, which was the secret of her courage and the substance of her efforts, let her not be misled by appearances or baffled by sour ingratitude. She knew, and no amount of ignorance could overwhelm her knowledge. No ingratitude could shake her faith, though it struck repeatedly with all its venom at the brave heart that preferred to suffer indignity and injustice rather than retaliate and injure someone else. So she was one whose meanest enemies if privileged to get to know her, became admirers — even friends.
She led. Truly she led, and not in circles but in spirals. All her way-marks pointed upward. With the natural gifts that were hers, and with the strength of purpose and unflinching will that never failed her, Katherine Tingley might have reaped, had she so chosen, any prizes whatsoever that the world could offer. Personal wealth and what is known as power could have been hers for the merest fraction of the effort that she spent on leading tired humanity toward a nobler goal.
But she was true to her charge. She never flinched from it. She never even wavered. In the face of bitter accusation, mistrust, misunderstanding, apparent defeat and confusing advice from those who loved her but who could not see the outcome that she saw, she steadfastly clung to her principles and trusted wholly in the Law of Universal Brotherhood, that she taught with all her skill, and that she served with all her might, not compromising with convenience, not seeking her own reward but leaving that to the Lords of Life who mete out Justice.
Whatever rewards the world had showered on her, it is sure that Katherine Tingley would have shared them to the last atom with those in need. But the world was a little asleep and, for the most part, missed that opportunity; she was left to lead her loyal cohort ill supplied with funds, and far too much of her abundant energy was used on problems of material supply, whose utmost stringency, however, never made her yield or even think of yielding. She never begged; who gave to her, gave freely and his gift was multiplied to ten times ten by wisdom in the use to which she put it.
This earth is crowded with memorials to men and women who have led in some direction or another, some of them with great zeal and high-flung purpose. Tower on tower, the piles commemorate great merchants; statesmen and soldiers stand in effigy; the great ships, racing to the world’s ends bear the names of famous men, some few of whom led upward; though the great majority were pleased to let themselves be lifted by a tide of popular greed or indignation.
Very few indeed have dared to stand against such tides or cared to lead their little cohort upward while the legions took the long descent in the din of emotion and glamor of prosperous guile. Yet some names stand unsullied, though contemporaries sought by all known means to blacken them, and each of us can number on the fingers of his two hands those who sought unselfishly to lead a people, or a group of peoples, to a higher sense of Brotherhood and Universal Law. And now, lest we dishonor judgement, let us add the name of Katherine Tingley to that list, and build for her a high memorial in our hearts.
She led. Faithfully, truthfully, loyally; tolerantly, generously and with malice toward none, she led whither all may follow, up the middle of the Path of Justice where the effort of each pilgrim earns exactly its own recompense and each one wins his way by merit and no other means. Her appeal was to the heart of all humanity, and she has left her light within men’s hearts that, if they let it not grow dim, it shall inevitably lead them to the view of visions such as she saw, and to victories over all the powers of darkness, such as she has won.
A very great Leader has passed beyond the veil which hides from mortal eyes the secrets of the Life Beyond. Let those who hope to follow on the Path she trod look well to it that they lack not gratitude. No other oil will burn as brightly in the lamp she lit. No other key than gratitude can unlock secret after secret until we, too, following her footsteps, find that we can tread the Middle Way.
THREE SIGNS OF THE TIMES KENNETH MORRIS — FLINDERS PETRIE — SPENGLER
ACCUSTOMED as it is to violence the mind of man enjoys the military metaphor; it likes its similes assembled from the ordnance-list. Such words as ‘cannonade’ and ‘culverin’ suggest a victory and their significance is all heroic, since imagination dims itself toward the other aspect. If I liken Kenneth Morris to a lonely culverin assailing Bigots’ Castle the suggestion should not be extended to include the ‘villainous saltpeter’ and the malice. Year in, year out, he has kept on cannonading the redoubts of ignorance, and now a breach begins to show, through which, it may be, even the ‘authorities’ will march with blaring bands — forgetful of the man who laid that lonely culverin and served it faithfully; ignoring the great general who gave him that fatiguing post; and thoughtful only of the plunder. For there will be plunder when the walls are down and men see history with unobstructed view. There will be riches beyond dream, of food for the intelligence and stimulus for the imagination; treasures from the fabled past that turn out to be beautiful and true; recovered provinces of knowledge in which educators will discern that evocation is a higher calling and the grandeur of the ever-present past is rediscoverable in the hearts of men.
It was H.P. Blavatsky, of course, who fired the first arousing shot. She carried the first entrenchments. Men and women rallied to her, some of whom went down before the shafts of ridicule and slander, or lost the way amid the smoke; and some grew weary. But before H.P. Blavatsky died she had accomplished what she came to do, and had assembled an unconquerable nucleus of followers. The doctrine of the Ancient Wisdom had been re-established in the western world; and under William Q. Judge, and Katherine Tingley, it has been lived and proved and made to flourish.
In the days when Katherine Tingley, demonstrating her ability to lead, appointed Kenneth Morris to a professorship of history at Point Loma, there was probably no other college principal on earth who would have dared to endorse such entirely unorthodox views as his were reckoned by the so-called educators who controlled the text-books and examinations. Those were the days when we had to suppose that the world was created in a week, six thousand years ago, or else be punished for impertinence and infidelity.
But Kenneth Morris had answered H.P. Blavatsky’s trumpet-call while his youthful intelligence was still in process of being cribbed, cabined, and confined within the said-to-be so safe and comfortable walls of orthodoxy -literary, racial, and religious. A preliminary necessary to a powerful explosion is compression. The rule applies throughout dynamics. So it may be that the iron-ribbed doctrines of the public schools of England deserve credit for the consequent effectiveness of the explosion when the spark lit by H.P. Blavatsky fired the youth’s imagination and he wrote a school prize-essay that excluded him forever from the cage of dry-as-dust pol-parroted, polite belief in the incorrigible savagery of the ancients and the ne plus ultra culture of ourselves.
At any rate, he broke forth — flew forth — sang his song — and has been singing ever since beside the sea, in Lomaland, whence his songs and his poems, his wholly unorthodox views and his brilliant survey of history as cyclic evolution, have been spread to all corners of the earth. Children of a quarter of a hundred nations have received from him the spark he caught and cherished from the anvil of the Founder of the Theosophic Movement.
Kenneth Morris saw and wove into a rhythmical, broad-visioned series of lectures the long hidden facts of ebb and flow in history. Not once avoiding the authentic facts as given in The Secret Doctrine and the other writings of the modern Founder of the Theosophical Movement, nor trespassing beyond the pale of record into legend (lest the easily disgruntled critics should accuse him of constructing his own evidence) he took the commonly accepted facts and reinterpreted their meaning with a logic and a clarity of diction that permitted no misunderstanding. Criticasters might find any fault they pleased with his discovery and his elucidation of it, but they could not pretend to misin
terpret it. He had defined the issue, marshaled the acknowledged facts, and thrown a concentrated light on evolution in the history of man.
He accepted the Ancient-Wisdom teaching of the law of cycles; investigating history he applied it, recognising that the law is universal and that, consequently, no phase of existence can escape its government. As tides flow back and forth, the seasons follow one another in their order, and the night embosoms day, so there are days and nights of evolution in which nations feel the impulse of creative energy and rise — until the inescapable, imponderable law removes the energy and they decline, through twilight, into darkness — until energy returns and they again become a force to reckon with.
By illustrations from the pages of recorded history Professor Morris showed, and proved, that the average length of the cycle — from the rise into the clash of world-importance to descent into comparative obscurity — is one hundred and thirty years, the span not varying by more than insignificant degrees accounted for by the discrepancies of records and a margin for opinion as to just exactly when a rise began or a descent was finished.
It was caviare to the general doctrinarian. It stung the pride of the proponents of the Nordic theory of race-supremacy and the philosophers who judge intelligence by color of the epidermis or possession of a craving for machinery, to be invited to agree that Oriental races have attained to higher culture than our own and will again surpass us when the time shall come. And he offended them by speaking of pralaya and manvantara, two terms that suggest esoteric teaching. It was all very well, it might be and perhaps, to assert an unorthodox theory; but to use terms (comprehensible to two-thirds of the world) whose use implied that the ancient ‘heathen’ who invented them knew anything worth knowing, was an insult to men possessed of framed certificates from colleges. Some of those colleges could actually boast four centuries of repetition of the same poll-parrot cries! Great is Diana of the Ephesians! Vox literati vox dei! Was there ever a time in history when they, whose honor and emoluments depended on established theories, did not denounce the man with broader and less marketable views?