Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West. Ameen Rihani
not. Now, it is this attitude, this commercial consciousness, which we have faithfully upheld in precept and practice, that is creating in us a subconscious reaction. This is the source, I maintain, of all our restlessness, our dissatisfaction, our gropings and longings for that something which materialism does not give. The principle of barter leaves us in the end disconsolate, devoid of sympathy, and deploring the lack of sympathy in others.
We are, in a word, drifting away from the path of vision. We no longer find joy, as did the ancients, in pure thought. Pragmatism and utilitarianism are our gods. We would make religion sweep our streets, deodorize our slums. We lament the waste of water in a cataract, the loss of energy in an electric storm. We deplore the futility of an abstract idea, an intellectual image. We would leave nothing for the soul and mind. Even such ideals as are purely spiritual we would materialize to serve a passing and questionable need.
The Sufi, for instance, has evolved a theory of colors with which to guide his path of vision. It makes very pleasant reading in the book of mysticism. To him colors denote different states of soul, and point the way to different goals—to a union, partial or complete, with humanity or divinity, or a progressive union from one to the other, and so forth. How futile to us these arbitrary denotations. But the Sufi, who sees colors with closed eyes, can distinguish all the variations of a chromatic circle as it develops from a point in vermillion. And he finds ineffable joy in beholding the development and verifying, as it were, his progress in the path of union and vision.
"The soul gives sight to the eyes," says a Sanskrit aphorism, "and he who gives sight to the soul is Siva." The Sufi accepts this, changing Allah for Siva. With him, colors are as real to the soul as they are to the naked eye. But the scientist and the esthete of to-day, who have also developed a theory of colors, consider only the material, the physical side of the matter. They can see colors only with the naked eye. They have, therefore, divided them into three classes: namely, the palliative, the stimulative, the excitative. And one lady I know, a very charming personality and very erudite, who commercializes the scientific theory of colors, and looses her vision of the beautiful in the process. Personally, I prefer to hear a discourse on the subject than to see the material exteriorizations of it. Indeed, there are things that are purely for the soul and mind. And whatever beauty and charm they may have, is lost entirely in the materialization.
"A body," says Umapati in a chapter on the Soul's Enlightenment, "lives by union with the soul; so the embodied soul lives by union with pure Thought."
This is the highest, noblest form of spirituality;—the divine essence, which can be attained only by those who follow devotedly the path of vision—those who seek the light that bridges the darkness between eye and soul, and without which there can be no vision. But there is what might be called a workaday spirituality, which is within the reach of all. And we need not be afraid to yield in this to the practical spirit of the times to discover the light within us. For the path of vision, which isolates for a time the individual, brings him in the end, if his patience and devotion do not give way, to complete union, like the Sufi, with humanity and God.
And it will then dawn upon him that to give without expecting a return of any kind, immediate or distant, is as natural as to accept the gifts of the sun and the air and the mountain streams. Indeed, we can be religious without being conscious of it;—we can be religious without religiosity. To invest our heart-capital in the inherent goodness of humanity, to save a drowning swimmer, as Thoreau says, and go our way;—this is the practical workaday spirituality which either points to us the path of vision or unfolds before us, according to our degree of enlightenment, one or more of its hidden secrets. Which is a reward greater and more enduring than anything the world can give. It is the harmony we achieve within us; the satisfaction we feel in a healthy, strength-giving reaction; the knowledge and power that every noble, unselfish deed affords; the only reward, after all, in our triumphs and our only consolation in defeat.
Nay, there is no such thing as defeat for those who achieve harmony within. There is no such thing as disappointment for those who continue to cherish the selflessness of which is born the noblest inner self. There is no such thing as failure for those who invest in the potentialities of the Ideal of the Soul. And no matter how humble and obscure, how poor or how rich in the material things of the earth, the spiritually-bound and spiritually-directed of men, though they may not be counted among the great of history, are the true heroes of the race, the agents of the World-Spirit.
II.
II
THE MYSTICISM OF REALITY
EXPERIENCE is knowledge; but knowledge, when it is sought only as a material resource, is not always a blessing. Experience is wisdom; but wisdom, with those who lack vision, is not always power. Experience is tolerance; but tolerance, when it is induced by apathy, is not in the least a virtue. But even though experience often woos cynicism, breeds complaisance, and engenders cowardice, it has in it, nevertheless, the seeds of knowledge and wisdom and power.
Some one, if not ourselves, is better, to be sure, for what we know. Some one, if not ourselves, is wiser for what we suffer. A thought in the crucible of life melts into the thought of the world; the footsteps of a pioneer become ultimately the highway of a nation; the heroism of an individual becomes the trodden path of a race. Every human action, collective or otherwise, has in it the possibility of a creative or a destructive force. We stop in our work, but we do not know, we can not know, where our work really ends. It may never end, for that matter.
Through the scintellating candor of follies, the mirage of illusions, the unlighted labyrinths of realities, it goes on, with us or without us, perpetuating itself and its fruition. True, we are often lifted by it to cold barren heights, or led into a chamber of horrors. Hence the cowardice that often becomes supreme, the complaisance that often is the harbinger of moral decrepitude.
A diversity of experience, to be sure, enriches life; but its reward, to those who deliberately, self-consciously seek it, seldom measures up with its promise, when our criterion is detached from the higher things of the soul. In spite of which, we continue, after all our realizations or disappointments, to reach for something beyond the realities of experience, in the distances of unknown possibilities. And what were life, indeed, without the horizon of the spirit, and without an eye to see the horizon? What were life without that potentiality of mystery that holds out to us, across the glamors of the mirage and the dusky opacities of reality, when we awaken from the somnambulism of self-consciousness, the nectar of love and assurance and peace.
But we boast nowadays of being free and untramelled; we glory in the right to pursue the light within us, which, under the exigencies of a highly evolutionized society, seldom leads us outside of Self. And we call it the pursuit of happiness. In which forsooth, through the little heart-thrills and heart-aches of experience, we shatter one illusion after another.
And we seldom stop to ask ourselves whether such a course makes for a greater freedom and a healthier consciousness. We often forget too that in the cult of the Ego the worship of unconventionality becomes itself a conventionality most rigid and austere. It is, in fact, the conventionality of the elect—the conventionality supreme.
Now, if life were as simple as a multiplication table, to shatter all its illusions would be the only way to re-form and re-build it on a sounder and more enduring foundation. By all means, we should begin with realities—at the very bottom of stern, bitter realities. But are not the most obvious facts in life liquid or malleable? Is there such a thing as a bald and finite reality, divested of all spiritual or moral or social or physical associations? Is there such a thing as an isolated material fact, which you could dispose of as if it were a banana peel in your way? Why, even the most degenerate of beings is a vital link in the chain of social and spiritual possibilities.
Indeed, every reality is in itself an undying source of myterious growth and decay. Even the theologian, like the scientist, recognizes the