Chapter IV: Part 4

Come, O my beloved! tell me; tell me whether these are your symptoms? No, you need not; I feel you--way down deep in my heart I feel you; it is you who have not felt me knocking at your heart’s door, and you have locked your heart and would not let me enter. I would have fed you, I would have nourished you; I know I would. I know you are Life-hungry, caused by your feeding on symbols instead of the real; it did not nourish you and you are famished.

You have given symbols the place of the real things. You have accepted a thing, the value of which exists in the fact that it is redeemable in something of value; you have become contented with an order which is exchangeable for something you want--for the thing you want--and it does not satisfy you. Should you get a cheque, you would not be content unless there be funds to make it good. If I should present you with a meal-ticket you would not be satisfied unless you could go to the place and get the meal.

Ideas are worthless unless you can realize them; they must be redeemed and acted before they become of value--you must live them. That’s what ails you--you have overeaten on ideas. You have chewed up your meal-ticket, and wonder why you are still hungry.

Instead of acts, which are the food of Life, you have substituted ideas, and Life in you famishes for things vital. You selected the wise to guide you, and they did; you have the wise men to do the thinking for you; you have them prepare beautiful thoughts, pickled, fried, or preserved, and you feed on them. How long would your body last if you fed it on meal-tickets instead of the stuff which a meal-ticket will get? It takes steak, potatoes, and the like to make tissue, muscles, and bone. You thought to be wise is to think wisely, which is true, but you must redeem the thought in acts. Thoughts are the soul of acts--and are worthless in themselves. That is the trouble; you thought there was merit in thinking wisely, and so you thought, and thought, and thought. If wisdom consists in thinking, it matters not the direction thoughts take. So the wise--with grave and serious energy--entered upon thought where no act was possible. A thought may have been valuable when conditions rendered a possibility of realizing action upon it in the end. Thought is worthless when it cannot be put into use.

In your heart I find a foreign substance--an idol of symbol worship. This it is that poisoned your conduct at its very source, and corruption has entered into every activity of life and produced myriad forms of hypocrisy.

In theology you are given dead thoughts of the past and amazing theories of the future, none of which can issue in wise acts of to-day. You go about with religious meal-tickets, yet finding no tables set; for you are supplied with worthless cheques upon the establishments of yesterdays and to-morrows.

What care you for future worlds? It is love and happiness in this world which you are after. What care you for the bones of the past or of the future? It is the living bones and skin that interest me. The Bible is all right, but what of the Bible of to-day? Religion has become a belief instead of a life. Ask the priest of to-day what to do and he will tell you to believe. Then you believe that you are what you thought you would like to be. Jesus said, “Why call you me master and do not my commandments?” and in the name of Him who tells you to do, the church tells you you can believe--but be damned if you _do_; we will not tolerate any nonsense; we have a place for silly fellows like you.

Imagine yourself doing unto others what you would want them to do unto you! How long do you suppose it would be before your friends would have a guardian appointed over you? This belief is the keynote of hypocrisy, which has spread and become the fashion in all branches of activity; and to-day’s unhappiness is the hypocrisy in man’s life made apparent.

Scientific thought takes the same direction--dealing with ideas, theories, classifications, and measurements--things which are not vital to human life and human happiness. Our scientists come forward with pathological explanations and theories concerning degeneracy; with charts, diagrams and skull measurements. They put complicated machines on the little fingers of our school-children to measure the out-go of their precious lives as they bend over the study of dim, dead pages.

In the industrial field, the symbol takes shape in veneers, shellacs and polishes; and men build great temples for their symbol-worship, and construct amazing systems for the accumulation of wealth--systems built for ideas instead of for man; systems that demonstrate such ideas as division of labor, and such a man as the crooked-backed accountant adding up a lifetime of figures, or the dim-eyed sweatshop toiler working out a lifetime of buttonholes. Systems that produce such helpless abortions as millionaires and tramps, systems that change happy, healthy, well-developed human beings into mere adjuncts and gives to the ones who actually produce the lowest caste of all.

Art holds up to us the past--the Greek, the Gothic, the Renaissance; and the artist, driven to copy, neglects to produce the vital and living art of the present.

In reform we go about calling ourselves reformers, not because we live a life of reform, but because we say that we do not believe in the old form. We call ourselves socialists, not because we practice socialism, but because we believe in the socialistic doctrine; and thus we believe we are what we believe we would like to be.

You would object to the name of “scavenger,” because you believe in removing the dung, but you will insist that you be called a good man, because you believe in goodness.

If I should call you a capitalist because you believe in making money, you would probably think I am making sport of your poverty. You would tell me that a capitalist is he who has capital, not he who is seeking to acquire it. Yet you do not hesitate to tag yourself socialist, anarchist, or single-taxist, though you only believe in the theory underlying your ism and do nothing toward living it.

The less you have of a thing, and the less you are the thing, the more you talk about it. Lacking happiness, you talk it. Talking of art is conclusive evidence that you lack art. You talk of love when you feel the absence of love, and you think you have it by proclamation. Words, phrases, clauses, noise! The child calls an engine “choo-choo” because of the sound the machine makes when exhausting steam. The child thinks the function of the engine is to emit a certain kind of noise. So you are impressed with the enthusiasm of your discussions in advocacy of your ism, and you think yourself to be the thing discussed.

This symbol-worship is everywhere. Take the vaudeville; an old soubrette with no voice, no looks--let her cackle “Yankee Doodle,” wave the flag, and she will receive applause for saving the nation.

On three occasions I visited a concert hall in Chicago where they served poor meals and worse music for good prices. The orchestra each time played, by request, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” and the patriotic feeling was demonstrated by the applause.

That’s what ails you. You have been feeding on symbols. You have been trying to make yourself believe you are satisfied with applause, though you are starved for Life-food. You have tried to outgrow and destroy the expression of naturalness through your body and mind. You have cut off every root and branch you could find which was holding you to naturalness, and in their place you put the substitute of symbols. Your mother and father, your uncle and aunt, and grandmothers and grandfathers, your school-teachers and Sunday-school teachers, and preachers, all united in demanding that you leave off naturalness and take on the symbols.

Thus it is that man has lost his connection with Life and gropes in darkness and dwells in death. Nothing short of a complete turning away from this course of action is able to bring him into conjunction with Life as it is intended to express through his body and mind by means of his sensations.

OCCULTISM

The advantage I possess over other people is that so little is expected of me. Some of those who remain my friends, despite my being a fool, and others who love me because I am so amusing to them, talk of concepts which they have formed that cannot be made apparent to me. It may be that some day I, too, will develop an additional sense whereby I may learn to realize what to me at present is unrealizable.

My senses--those I am conscious of--seem to be working all right, though my being a fool may account for the untenableness of some of the conclusions I draw from observation. My sense of smell, when dealing with boiled cabbage, asserts a degree of insubordination that requires a decided gratification for the sense of taste to overcome. A fool therefore becomes aware of things not only from an impression due to the concord of the senses, but likewise to dissension in that realm. The illustration of decaying eggs occurs to me also, but I am not such a fool as to introduce my conclusions concerning them in this connection.

So the fool becomes aware of the existence of things from the impression they make on his senses. He sees, feels, smells, hears, and tastes things; he knows then that they are.

Some things affect all my senses, and some things can only affect two, and some but one sense, but all things must impress me; I must sense them in order for me to know of their existence.

A man who is virtuous (knowing that I am not) hearing my statement, asked me if I thought virtue existed, and if it did he wanted to know what sense it affected. And I replied that my sense of humor was awfully affected when he was anywhere near me. He called me a fool! I wonder if he sensed my reply.

If our senses are faulty, or if even one sense is out of order, we fail to conceive that object which is conceived through that sense, and we do not know whether it exists or not. However, if our senses are in well-behaved working order, and we conceive not, we know the object does not exist.

Take a man born blind, never having experienced the sense of sight; it is very difficult for him to imagine what sight is, and it would be very hard to give that man an impression of things you can see and he cannot. If you were to discuss color in the blind man’s presence, all would understand what is being discussed except the blind man. He would wonder what you were talking about. But take a man who lost his sight, while you can lie to him regarding the color of an object, yet he knows that color exists, because he himself experienced it at one time.

Now, suppose that a new sense should develop in man, and supposing that that sense comes to but a few, then the language of those few, when talking about those things conceived by that new sense, would seem strange to the rest of mankind. They would not only not know what you were talking about, but they would not even know what it was that they lacked. This is exactly what has happened.

The elect are having a new sense installed in their anatomy; caballa, or occultism, is its name. This new sense differs from the rest of the senses, in that it has no distinct place of abode in the human make-up. You cannot locate its dwelling-place; it has no definite house wherein it lives.

All the other senses have offices, laboratories, and a most complicated diplomatic service and clearing-house, where they do their work. You must have eyes to see, and when you see something, there are messengers in the eyes which notify the brain as to what they see. Besides these, there are offices that are occupied by ambassadors of the other members of the body, stomach, sex, legs, hands, and all other members that make the body complete, have agents on the lookout for the wishes of its master. If your stomach likes a particular kind of food, its ambassador will be on the lookout for it, through the eyes, nose, mouth, etc. If sex predominates you, your ambassadors will sense a good-looking man within a certain radius. If you are blind, it means that you close up shop, that the offices and sub-offices of sight are closed, and so it is with the sense of smell and the other senses. This new sense has no particular place of abode. It has no distinct office with its desks and its laboratory force, where it performs its functions. Caballa or occultism sees without eyes, smells without a nose, feels without feelers.

Now, the reason that the new sense has no home is because this new sense conceives things inconceivable to the other senses; therefore the very home in which it lives must be inconceivable and incomprehensible to the rest of the senses, and while the people have the assurance that it is there, it is invisible, therefore unexplainable to the mass of mankind that have not that sense. The wise men are awfully embarrassed by that fact, for if it had a home like unto the other senses, they could point to its home and say to the masses, “Do you see that bump? This is the home of the new sense; caballa lives there.” Although you cannot explain to the blind man what sight is, by letting him feel your eyes with your hands and then letting him feel his own, you could convince him that he is lacking something which you have. As there is neither hump nor bump to point to, the cabalist cannot explain what that sense is to one who never had it. It is easy to explain a sense to a person who even once had that sense and lost it, but you cannot tell a person who never saw, the difference between lavender and pink.

There have always been occultists, and always others who were not able to understand what it’s all about. The first record I can discover of Caballa is Talmudic. One of the stories of the Talmud tells of a cabalist who saw a bird standing up to his ankles in the sea, his head touching the clouds. The cabalist concluded that he could have some fun going in wading at that spot, but he heard a still small voice dissuading him by the assurance that where the bird was standing it was so deep that a woodchopper had lost an axe seven years before which had not yet touched bottom. This incident shows how difficult it must be to make cabalistic utterances appeal to the unoccult.

Adepts are becoming more numerous. For a long time there were none in Occidental lands. Now Oshkosh vies with Calcutta in the maintenance of New Thought societies, and Kalamazoo with Bagdad. Still the ordinary man and woman contends that the reason the idea remains misty to the practical mind is because there is no idea; that the very wise do not see things which are invisible to common people. Some go so far as to assert that the occultist is not endowed with a superior intelligence but with a diseased mind.

This is cruel enough to place the very wise on the same lowly levels with such fools as I.

At the hotel in a little town where all the guests use a common parlor, there were waiting for “train time” a rabbi, an adept, and a Chicago drummer. The rabbi paced the floor excitedly, and was presently heard to say earnestly, “I see, I see!” Asked what it was he saw, he said, “I see God on his throne in heaven, surrounded by the chosen ones who glorify his name.”

The adept thereupon paced the floor also, and exclaimed “I see, I see!” And in reply to the inquiries of the others, he declared that he saw hell, with all its misery, where those who, while on earth, had lived contrary to the doctrine that “all that pleases must be vile” were being tortured ruthlessly.

Then the drummer declared that he, too saw.

“And what do you see?” the others asked the earthly man of samples.

“I see,” he replied, “a couple of the durndest fools in Illinois.”

He was only a drummer, and I am only a fool.

THE FLY AND THE DONKEY

The school-teacher who criticized my juvenile attempts to write as prettily as the copperplate pattern across the top of the copy-book page went about her task in a kindly spirit. Had she rapped me across the knuckles I should have hated her, I know.

“Napoleon wrote a very poor hand,” she told me, “and he became a great man. He did not become great because his penmanship was bad, but in spite of that fact.”

My sex precluded my becoming a great man, whether my chirography aided or retarded such a destiny. Nevertheless, I received in that lesson a foundation of logic that “comes in handy” every now and then.

So when I heard the story of the Industrious Flies and the Patient Ass, I rejected the reasoning of the wise fly, however satisfactory it may have been to the donkey.

Once there was a man so foolish that he could understand the language of the insects. He owned a donkey.

So it was that on a hot day, an ass pulling a heavy load along a dusty road made no complaint except against the harassments imposed upon her by a swarm of flies. She lashed at the ravenous insects with her tail, made an occasional snap at them with her teeth, and a desultory dart at them with a hoof in her frantic effort to be rid of her tormentors. She laid down on the roadside, breaking the shafts of the wagon, killed some of the flies, but most of the flies got away and jumped on the ass again when she arose. This operation was repeated a great many times. She was a tired beast when she reached her journey’s end several hours behind time, and it was a relief to get into the friendly shelter of a stable, where she might enjoy hay and water, secure from the merciless flies. The wisest of the flies however had accompanied her into the stable, and, perching on the donkey’s best ear, he buzzed his plaint of misery thus.

“Thou dolt and ingrate! All day hast thou manifested displeasure because of the great love we bear thee. We sang to thee our sweetest songs, and our proddings gave thee strength to complete thy journey to this haven of rest. Had it not been for us how couldst thou have reached the succulent fodder which is now thy portion?”

The penitent ass bowed her head in shame before these reproaches.

“I had not estimated your help at its proper value,” she brayed, humbly, “and I beg to be forgiven, miserable sinner that I am!”

Was ever donkey in such manner wooed? I forgot to mention the fact that it was a “she” donkey.

Away back in “the blurred bush of bygones” it was a most important religious ceremonial to eat the flesh of our grandmothers. The priest of that day assured us of eternal damnation did we omit reverent regard for that sacrament, however tough the fiber of the feast.

And the priest of this day tells us that, were it not for him, we would still be dining on grandma.

“See what government has done for you!” shrieks the vehement politician. “It gives you your rights and protects you in them!”

In refusing to admit the claims of priest and politician I lay myself open to the indictment of being the same sort of an ingrate as the wise fly charged the patient donkey with being, but I know the story of Napoleon’s handwriting, and the donkey didn’t.

Whatever progress humanity has made toward decency, considerateness and justice have been accomplished in spite of church and state, and not because of them.

Nevertheless the wise flies keep on buzzing their claims unto the patient donkey, and the ass believes.

Every onward step from cannibalism, slavery, tyranny, injustice, was made against the protest of church and state.

Our truly great have become so only as they have taught us to laugh to scorn the magniloquent claims of authority.

Every form of Magna Charta, in every age, was wrested from some unwilling king, who protested that it was his great love for us that resisted our demands.

Authority maintains its institutions in order to teach the masses patriotism, religion, and wisdom. It behooves us to discount authoritarian definitions if we would attain happiness.

When the wise established institutions to inject wisdom into fools, the foolishness of the fools infected the wisdom of the wise and they became foolish. When the state establishes military academies to train cowards into heroes, the cowardice of the coward is assimilated by the heroes, and they in turn refuse to fight. When great institutions are founded to teach the masses, the masses unlearn the professors, so that they question their own wisdom. While I agree with the wise ones that things will settle themselves all right, I must say that we have progressed in spite of them, and if we would see ourselves as the wise see us, then they must see that we are getting less and less religious, less and less virtuous, less and less patriotic, less and less wise.

We are safe in abjuring authoritarian religion that we may become sanely religious. We must rebel against institutionalized patriotism if we would evince a decent regard for the rightful claims of humanity. We must become less wise and less virtuous from conventional points of view to be truly virtuous and practically wise.

Lest we be as the credulous donkey.

NET BALANCE

The task of taking stock of myself has not proven a pleasant one. I have been trying to figure out what society has granted me, and to what extent I have responded with an equivalent. I find that I wear clothes I did not make. I consume food I did not grow nor prepare. I inhabit a dwelling which I neither designed, built, nor furnished. I enjoy facilities of transportation, though I have built neither roads nor vehicles.

Figure it as I may, I discover my account to be in a bad way. The assets present a goodly array, but they dwindle mightily before the overwhelming formidableness of the list of liabilities. I have been running into debt to society at an alarming rate. Funny I never thought of it until stocktaking day.

Altogether the discovery is disconcerting in the extreme. My conscience is not a satisfactory book-keeper under these conditions. That conscience of mine will not allow my charging up against the liabilities the unction I would lay to my soul that I have been sympathetic, and held high ideals. And, indeed, when I essay to apply the unction I realize that I cannot find my soul. Where had my soul gone? What had become of that much-prized soul? I have lost my soul in this insolvency. I tried to increase my spiritual assets by attaching myself to certain religious organizations, but could find no consolation there, till at last I decided that I ought to go into spiritual bankruptcy and ask for a receiver. In this wide world, where you can get most everything, I have failed to find the spiritual court with jurisdiction that qualifies it for that position. I have searched everywhere, and find to my amazement that all are in the same fix. Society as a whole is spiritually bankrupt--it, too, has lost its soul.

The cause of this strange state of affairs I found to be not due to the direct intention of life to defraud itself, but society’s spiritual auditors made a grave mistake in stocktaking. The trouble seems to be that these functionaries have underestimated the ultimate cost of things. They thought that the price it pays for its labor represents the cost. We have thought that pieces of mud, gold, and silver are equivalent to life, and that by paying a certain wage we had acquitted ourselves of all obligation. Then, by supplanting men in the workshops with women and children, we reduced the cost, because we paid less for about the same stent of work. We thought society economical by putting children at work at mining our coal; that the seventy-five cents paid for their daily efforts represents the cost to society for getting the coal out of the mines. But this is not the cost; it is the price. The cost to society towers away above the price that figures in the commercial account current. The cost of working childhood at coal-mining is the brutalization of the embryo citizen; the killing of the love instinct that is in him, and destroying the possibilities of a glorious manhood. The price has been paid but the big end of the cost is still a liability.

By putting women to work in noisome sweat-shops we cheapen the price of shirt-waists. But we do not reduce the cost. Unfitting the toiler for normal motherhood, we encourage the production of poorly born children from her tired frame, and such progeny are in the account. Look there for the cost. We cannot destroy souls without finding the item writ large in the account at judgment day!

Man must work to enjoy life. When his work is to his liking, and he is fitted to perform the service, the cost is very little, or none at all. Then his work is educative and he develops; it is nourishing and he grows. If he be doomed to monotonous work that calls up no note of joy in his heart, and where no thought is necessary, wherein some muscles are overexerted while others have insufficient play, we make our toiler lopsided, and for his loss of symmetry and unfoldment society must pay, and it is in the account over and above the price we have paid with the dross of money.

When work is pleasure it requires no spielmark requital--the pleasure is its sufficient pay. Where there is not joy in the work no price is sufficient. “It is only by thought that work can be made pleasurable, and it is only by work that thought may be made healthy.”

Society is morally bankrupt. We have sold our birthright for a mess of pottage. The wealth of a nation does not consist of an inventory of its gold and silver coin vaults, nor its gold and silver epaulettes on the trappings of its military and naval heroes, nor its gold and silver trimmings on the apparel of dear Lady Disdain, nor in the gold and silver that flows through the arteries of commerce. The solid assets of society consist of its arts, not in pictures and statues in the museums nor in the monuments in the parks; not in the grandeur of the public buildings, but the pleasure in the lives of the people, made beautiful by devotion to the arts of peace.

Oh, Angels of Heaven and devils from Hades, come and help me to lament the great “I am”! Let us weep crocodile tears for man that built the world. Man has conquered nature, cleared the forests, erected great cities, and civilized a world--and has lost his own soul.

Art for art’s sake; money for money’s sake; knowledge for the sake of knowledge; science for the sake of science; virtue for virtue’s sake--but nowhere anything for Man’s sake. Man built a world and left himself out.

O Divine Mathematics! What a net balance is this!

THE UNIVERSAL SECRET

What is it that everybody knows, and is talking about, and still remains a secret? You don’t know! Well, let me put the question differently. What is it that you discuss with your friend, with your husband, your husband with his friends; girls among themselves, boys among themselves; a respectable man never with a lady; a mother will keep it a secret from her daughter, a father from his son, a teacher from a pupil; something that everybody possesses, yet it is a secret? Well, I will tell you.

It is sex!

Anything pertaining to sex is talked of in whispers in society (for fear the guardian of morality might overhear). It is too vile a subject to be discussed. It is called immoral by church and state, and for that reason you can discuss it with your friends of the same sex behind closed doors, but not of the opposite sex under any condition if you wish to be classed among the respectable. We discussed it at the academy where I was sequestered. We locked the doors and talked about it. Yes, and we did more than that; we--no, I don’t believe I will, until I consult the postmaster-general.

A friend of mine, a little Jew, was telling some stories of the Talmud, among them the ritual of sex. I tolerated it, there being others present. After they had left I told him that if he wanted to tell immoral stories, not to tell them in my house. My friends have told me the same things in a more forceful manner, and I did not think them immoral. The story in itself was not immoral; the immorality consists in that it was told by a person of the opposite sex. The wise by their continuous slander have created a feeling that sex and all its relationship is vile, and is to be dreaded, and is only tolerated as a matter that cannot be helped. How very much nicer, cleaner, and holier it would be if babes could be gotten from the church or government warehouses! How much cleaner and holier we would be were we sexless beings. Some of the wise are even looking for a time when we will evolve to a sexless state. O what a picnic! What a fool God must have been not to know in the first place that he had to wait for some people he made to get wise so they would be able to tell him how to work the game of evolution. But I think that he will not even consider that sexless-state proposition which is being agitated by the wise men. I think that now, like always, he agrees with Rosey, who declares that sex and the use of it is most divine. If there is anything that should be reverenced more than any other thing in the world it is sex. I do not mean motherhood--even the wise have no objection to that. I do not mean womanhood--I mean the organ of sex. The whole universal scheme is sex--it is the holiest of holies.

The use of sex is evolution beginning with protoplasm and on and on until we reach man. Nothing is great that does not contain sex. There is no greatness in art unless sex be there. A painting is not great without it. It is the harmony of music, and poems would be dull without love of some kind. The plumage of the bird and its songs are all for the pleasing of sex. It is the cause of the struggle and happiness of the world.

The miner who spends his life in the mines does so to please a wife, a sweetheart, or his progeny.

The man who goes to war, the man who toils in the shop, he who works on the farm--all are moved by sex. It is divine and holy. Sex is the motive power, from the tiniest amœba to the most complicated organism. The urim and thummim was considered holy. With bare feet and bowed head the high priest approached it. With fear, reverence, and a trembling heart he consulted it, because through it God spake. Words or language that would be adequate for expression there are none; it is only when words fail us, it is only when language would blaspheme, and retard to silence--it is then, and then only, that we can worship the most holy of sanctuaries--sex. Through it God reveals himself.

The earth that possessed us before we were, and whither we shall all of us in due time return, what is it unless it be the sex of the universe. Mother earth we call her, on account of her birth-giving nature. Minus everything attributed to womanhood, she does not nurse us nor possess the breasts of a mother; she is like a mother only in sex. The reception of the seed, the care of it, and the birth of an object is what you see in the earth.

Look everywhere! What do you see? The planting of an acorn and the birth of an oak; the planting of corn seed and the birth of a corn-field. The whole operation is birth and getting ready for birth, and seeing all of this, I feel that there is nothing diviner or more miraculous than sex and the operation of sex. Think of it! A seed planted and when rotten it takes root, and then the birth of a God!

The redemption of the world will be only when sex will be reverenced and honored, and when men and women cease to make traffic of themselves. Then we will not try to put asunder by intellectual rules that which life has joined together by Love.

WHERE I FOUND HIM

God is where? What is He? And what are his schemes? Had I been wise I would have gone about solutionizing wisdomatically, by consulting the elders and the wise of the tribe. I would have sat at the feet of the learned and absorbed wisdom. Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, President Roosevelt, and Professor William R. Harper could have enlightened me.

But being as I am, I went about it like one hunting that which he really expects to find. When I look for my lost garter I do not go to the church or university to hear a lecture about it, neither do I go to the public library to read up on the subject. Instinctively I move chairs, bureaus, and dressing-cases. I light a match and look to see if it did not roll into some corner. The same way I went about finding God. I looked about! I found a world filled with entities. Some resembled me, some different, some I know not what they were. A being I discovered called “myself” separated from and struggling with the world. It was myself that was the most important, because it was I that felt, it was I that was impressed. It was I that had ambitions; like Atlas, I carried the world with its problems on my shoulders, and was afraid to move for fear that I would slip and the world would fall and the problems would remain unsolved, for it was I that was to solve them. It was I, I, I. A God could not be found anywhere. There was no room for one. There was nothing that I saw that would indicate a God anywhere. There was nothing but objects and space. The objects were surely the objects and God could not be space.

My struggle with the world was great, and when I thought that I had almost succeeded in mastering the world it crushed me into a oneness with all-there-is.

Then I saw entities separated by space, united to each other by space which separates them. Nothing lives by itself for itself. Everything lives in the whole. To lose one’s self in the whole is to serve and gain the service of the whole. This way God revealed himself and expanded through me and absorbed the world. I saw the oneness of it all. Then I understood the whole, felt the whole. I saw that problems are not in life, but it is in the being that is out of harmony with self yet in perfect harmony with nature. Like a pupil going to school unwillingly, so is the inharmonious self, trotting along in perfect harmony with the universal whole. God exists through the gratification of the desires of the entities of which life consists, they being charged with a nature that is impressed pleasantly and unpleasantly. One disintegrates and the other recuperates. It seeks the one and avoids the other. The sense nature is Life’s guide. Things that are pleasant for it are absorbed, and things that are not are repulsed by the vegetable. An animal will not eat anything that will injure his health. By instinct danger is sensed by all with more accuracy than by man with his psychic forces. And why not? Are they not a part of God, even as you and I?

Man also began with these sure and unfailing guides. They led him through the different periods of development from the protoplasm till he became man. By seeking pleasurable associations and avoiding the painful ones he reached the highest pinnacle. It was God evoluting himself by following his heart’s desires. At this stage it was that man fell. He ate from the tree of knowledge and was driven out of Eden. He became wise and was going to do something for himself; his intellect made him deaf to the callings of his heart. He became ambitious to look for himself. His scheme was to work out his own evolution and leave behind the whole that sacrificed and contributed to his making. He was to build for himself mansions in the sky, put on wings and fly away, and like the fox in the fable he was rewarded. (A fox once crossed a creek with a piece of stolen cheese in his mouth; he saw his reflection in the water, and he opened his mouth to catch the shadow, thereby losing the morsel he had.) So by grasping with the intellect man’s sense nature becomes perverted. And he has contracted abnormal desires. He overeats, overdrinks, overindulges in sex, and that works for his destruction. Abnormal desires are those you cannot gratify by gratifying them. The more you indulge them the more your appetite for them is. He became subject to diseases unknown to any other being, and no sign of his repentance as yet. He still refuses to confess. He sees that a mistake has been made, but he is going to redeem himself. Were he less intellectually wise he would say to himself, “My troubles came because I listened to the clamors of my intellect. As they are faulty they guided me wrong. Henceforth I will hearken to Life, which guided me till now.” But instead of that he reasons that his troubles came upon him because he did not heed his intellect enough. His ideals were not sufficiently high, he argued. He will make himself better by making laws to keep himself in check. He will fine himself for the gratification of his desires. He will put a license on drink and establish marriage as a preventive.

But “stolen fruits are sweet”--desires increase by prohibition and condemnation, and by restriction he became totally depraved. What he condemns in daytime he indulges in at night. So of all the beings in life, man, with his high ideals is the only prostitute. His hands, feet, brain, eyes, nose, mouth, stomach, liver, and sex he uses not for the purpose to which evolution dedicates them, but for traffic.

In going downtown, I noticed a crowd looking in at a window. I stepped up and saw a beautiful girl blowing soap bubbles. That would have been all right if it had been play. Her body would have been nourished by the exercise, for she would have enjoyed it; but there she was in an illy ventilated space behind plate glass advertising a soap, that she might secure money wherewith to buy the things she wanted. It was degrading her body, and she was a prostitute accordingly.

Life created the brain to overcome difficulties, and the pleasure of overcoming difficulties is its joy; but to use it in designing the manufacture of adulterated food, embalmed beef, shoddy clothing, is prostitution.

And just as the whole person is affected when only one member of his body is used improperly, so when life has one specie that degrades itself, God as a whole is thus affected. So, if not for your sake, then let it be for the sake of the little collie dog I love, I implore you to cease prostituting yourself, as it hurt’s Fido’s dignity. A friend of mine, in deploring conditions, hoped that we would revise our statutes to make it harder to get a divorce. My remark that if I had my way I would give a divorce to any one who asked for it, was countered by the inquiry, “Do you want us to be like animals?” In her statement I found the keynote of the reasonings, also the root of the tragedy of the human family. Man acts according to what he believes himself to be and is not, therefore his actions are unnatural. The sense nature is God himself guiding himself through all that God is.

But man believes that he is not animal; he means that he is not subject to the universal law, that he can violate the principle of life and thrive. He thinks he may blaspheme God and avoid the penalty, consequently he refuses to be guided by Life’s guide. He prefers to plan, scheme, and to do everything contrary to nature’s promptings, and if possible repudiate sense nature altogether.

Rent, interest, parasitism, governments, jails, churches, marriage, abortions, contracepts, doctors, lawyers, preachers, universities, sheriffs, elections, misery, trouble, and business are all institutions of the intellectual man. Animals have not got them and have no use for them. The only reason for their being is it give us an air of refinement, you know, to have such things.

Marriage does not prevent cohabitation; marriage gives an opportunity for degradation.

Theoretically marriage curbs passion; in reality it degrades womanhood--it licenses prostitution.

The father’s and mother’s desire that their daughter marry well is to make successful commerce of herself so that she will have an easy life. The girl in school, in the store, in shop, or in the kitchen, is ambitious to marry so she will not have to work.

“You have married me and have to support me. If you don’t, I will put you where the dogs won’t get you”--have you heard that? What is that except to get some one’s support by selling yourself? He is called a clever young man who marries a rich wife. The dukes, princes, and barons who flock to our shore are all looking for easy snaps by making commerce of themselves--selling their titles and throwing themselves in as a prize. They are prostitutes.

God’s life would be as short as the life of its entities were it not for that sex sense which works for the perpetuation of life.

Evolution is a sex law. Natural selection, more and more complex organism, finer and finer reproduction, is God’s method for beautifying himself in man. Protoplasm did not scheme to have a progeny different from itself. God in the entity of Mrs. Protoplasm desired to reproduce himself to something which he was not--and he did.

A woman desires to be mated to a man who possesses qualifications which make for better progeny--life seeking to excel itself. One flower selects the co-operation of another not of its kind, and new flowers come to be. One mineral selects another, and the birth of a new mineral is the result. New animals, new birds, new stars, and new worlds come to be from this natural selection. The intellect would call that selection prostitution, and the reproduction illegitimate, but there is no illegitimacy in God. Illegitimacy is an institution of the wise, and the wise are only a small part of Life, the same as the bastard and the fool. And whenever the wise become too wise God reveals himself in the guise of a fool to show them that they don’t know the things they thought they knew.

Goodness and badness are within ourselves, from the very lowest to the very highest. Does it please or displease us, is the test for goodness or badness. A thing, a man, an action, cannot be good or bad of itself. Its relationship to us determines its value. A thing does not please us because it is good. It does not displease us because it is bad. It is good because it pleases us; it is bad because it displeases us.

An over-ripe egg and limburger cheese are equally unpleasant to one of our senses, yet we call the cheese good and the egg bad because its relationship to our taste is pleasant as to cheese and otherwise in case of the egg.

Every one has the judge in his own heart. And the judges within ourselves render decisions, and we act in accordance with the bribe we receive, and the best of us along with the worst are being constantly bribed. The bribe always is satisfaction to ourselves. The only difference is that we are not all pleased alike. Some of us can be bribed with personal gratification, and some of us get our satisfaction only in the satisfaction of others. A good man is he whose satisfaction is the satisfaction of others. A bad man is he whose satisfaction excludes others. A good man is he who attains pleasure by seeking to contribute to the pleasure of others. A bad man is one who seeks the satisfaction of his own wants regardless of the interest of his fellows.

When I lose a thing I am just as much lost to the thing as the thing is lost to me. Our relationship is gone; we cease to be in communion with one another.

The soul of man is not lost that it needs be saved. Lost is the soul which thinketh that it needs saving.

The righteous and pious who condemn and claim that man’s soul is lost and needs saving are in themselves lost to the extent that they condemn. So the soul which needs saving is not the one condemned, as the condemned do not condemn. The condemned do not cast themselves off from the virtuous. The virtuous cut themselves off from the thing they condemn, and thereby become lost and need saving. To the extent that you condemn, to that extent you are cut off from life and are lost; and moreover, life is hindered in its free action, even in the parts which are considered virtuous. It is not the sinner that Jesus came to save; the sinner is not lost. It is the saints who need saving. By condemning they are cut off from life, and they will be saved only when they reconcile themselves to whatsoever they condemn.

The sum total of my search is this: had I known enough to look for God in a wise manner I would have had a problem on my hands. As the balance is not at all flattering, and to keep my self-respect, I would have to condemn every other self, that I may place myself above them and thereby separate myself from God. Going about in the manner I did, I discovered God is everywhere, God is everything, and his schemes are to have a good time with himself and by letting life express itself through me to obey the callings of life through my heart I am at one with all-there-is--with the prostitute in the church and school, as well as with the one who sells himself or herself for a crust of bread. Therein lies the advantage of not being wise.

FREE LOVE

Every religion is based on a God of Love.

The saying of Moses in the old testament, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” and what Hillel in the Talmud said, “What is hateful to you do not to your neighbor,” and that which is proclaimed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and the one by Confucius, “Do not to another what you would not desire that he do unto you”--each of these sayings is called the Golden Rule, and they are accepted as a religious principle by a large following. Combined they cover the religion of the world. Why then do not the religious people religiously love? Why does wisdom then fail?

It is not for me to assume the guidance of the good and the wondrous wise; yet, may I not wonder whether the failure of practice to conform to precept may not be a misconception of love by the wise?

Suppose I had been experimenting with a coloring herb for years and had failed to get results. The very first to say that my formula is wrong would be the wise. They would insist that some one else should have the opportunity to try his recipe. I wonder what is wrong with that Love scheme of the wise. Everybody seems to want it. It is talked about by all and no one seems to have it. What’s up? Church and State have ever been repositories of this wisdom, so I blame them for the failure to make it work, and I ask you for the privilege of demonstrating my love formula.

Church and State would make us believe that love is injected by force; it comes, they say, from some mystic where to the chosen few, who alone can furnish that article to those who feel in need of it. Therefore they established institutions, such as Sabbath schools, sewing circles, social settlements, reform clubs, anti-cigarette leagues, anti-vice societies, and the thousand and one others, for the purpose of changing the heart of man. Man will love when his heart is changed, they all say. I cannot imagine any advantage in changing that shape, which required ages to evolve, to a round or star shaped heart. Beware, says Church and State, of getting love or into love by taboo paths. Obey Church and State, that thy days may be long in the sort of happiness which they ladle out to you. Love of any brand that has not the sanction of Church and State is lust and passion. To supply yourself without paying duty you are not only not receiving the genuine article, but are smuggling as well. The punishment for smuggling, if your case comes within the jurisdiction of the Church, is fire, brimstone, torment, ostracism, and other devices that may be summed up under the general head, Hell. Those who declare their allegiance by full payment of the required duties are promised harps of a thousand strings (with sufficient finger equipment to fetch forth heavenly music), golden streets, avenues of jasper and amethyst, radiant halos, rapid-action wings, and a large repertoire of songs. The State likewise has a schedule, whereby both rewards and punishments are not so long delayed.

These penalties, whether in the hereafter in hell or before you have time to get there, are in the name of love, law and order, progress, and good citizenship. After having a fair trial for a few thousand years, I charge them with incompetency, their formula being an entire failure. I have examined their books, and the net balance found is great liabilities and no assets. Man is further away from happiness and love than ever before they took charge. They had good advertising and a fair trial, and have failed to produce results. Man is getting further and further away from Love. Instead of here and there a murder they are slaughtering themselves and each other by the wholesale; strikes, lockouts galore; jails, prisons overcrowded; the soldier’s home, the orphan’s home, the homes for foundlings, the home for the incurable, the home for reformed prostitutes, testify that the people are getting further and further away from brotherly love.

“Reverse!” says Jacob. “The assumption that the mass of mankind is a loveless agglomeration of individuals is false, and accounts for the falsity of our common life. You have been trying to grow your potatoes on top of the stalk instead of underground. They will not grow there. Nature has decided otherwise. If you desire potatoes you must look for them where life has placed them.”

“Reverse your entire plan of life, cast away the things you have taken up; gather up the things you have cast away. Take off the label ‘Evil’ you have placed upon the things you have cast aside and label it ‘Good.’ Seek in the opposite direction for life, and you will find rest, love, and satisfaction.”

There is in the heart of the “masses” a great surging volume of love seeking an outlet. There is in the hearts of these people a vast wealth of love that clamors to be freed from all imposts and repressions. But a sentinel stands in the way preventing expression. There is a taboo on free expression of Love.