Thoughts of a fool
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