The Way of Power - L. Adams Beck (most inspirational books of all time txt) 📗

walk distances almost incredible when I remembered how the least fatigue had ended formerly in sick headache. The next result was that I began to realize in natural sequence that though cutting out certain food-poisons is the foundation stone of the palace of health the building asks for such tools as right exercise, right breathing, right use of hot and cold water for drinking and baths, pure air and sunshine, and all these things I studied and practiced patiently and for a while believed this bodily health was all that mattered for life. That was natural, for I saw clearly the instant advantage it gave over people who had not sufficiently grasped its value to make sacrifices for it—sacrifices which one can afford to laugh at in view of the gain.

Then came one of the penalties of ignorance. I lost strength and discovered I had been living on capital instead of income. In other words I had not been eating the necessary ration of the tissue-forming foods. This may sometimes be an excellent beginning for it runs off the poisons accumulated by wrong feeding, but it is always risky and should be closely watched. So it became necessary to take the thing as a serious study that I might understand food values and their relation to sedentary and active occupations. All this can be done for one now, but I have never regretted that I had to work through it myself. The knowledge was driven in and has been most useful. I recovered strength in a few weeks and then had the luck of meeting a famous doctor, now dead, who blazed a trail for many through the jungle of ignorance in such matters. With his help I cleared up the only remaining difficulty, that of suiting generalities to my own especial needs—a question always important in every diet. I achieved that and had no further difficulties. I fear all this sounds very egotistical, but I have been asked to give details in case they should be useful to others.

Having now a fixed center to work from I had leisure to notice what a surprising change was taking place in my intellectual equipment. I could measure that growth almost daily also. First, in my memory. That had always been good, but now it became unusual, and I noticed it was growing by a process which I called inward sight. That is to say, I saw things rather than remembered them in the ordinary way, and just as when one knows a place the picture is hung once and for all for reference in one’s brain,. so with anything that interested me. I had not to call anything to mind. It was as it were flashed upon me the instant I needed it—like a vision. I memorized nothing but it was always there when I wanted it; and to this day this is so true that I write a whole historical story without doing much more than verify my references and seldom find them mistaken. Perhaps this may be a more common case than I think, but it is a very useful thing and from another aspect provides me with what I call a traveling library of prose and poetry, which I have not memorized but which is always there for use or pleasure. I see a book as a picture—see the printed page and the very paragraphs and can then repeat almost anything I have liked whether for use or for pleasure, things practical as well as things beautiful, if there is a distinction. And this includes the spoken word.

This was the first thing that made the question of clairvoyance clear to me. Memory. I said to myself: If what we call the past can be instantly present to one by inward sight whether intellectually or in the perfect vision of memory calling up and transporting one to a place trodden no more by one’s earthly feet, why may not this strange faculty of presentment stretch forward also into what we call the future and present it as clearly to those who have developed along that line? To memory time and distance offer no barriers. Why may it not work forward as well as backward? The contra argument will be: “Because you have not yet seen the things which are to happen. The impression is not yet made on the brain.” But what of foretelling dreams and prophecies, with which I might fill this article? I did not then know anything of the Oriental teaching of the static quality of time which science now appears to be endorsing—what is called in India the Eternal Now in which past, present and future are One,—but great possibilities loomed dimly upon me like mountains seen for an instant through mist and resumed into it.

I found also a very much increased clearness in following argument, in perception all round, I fear at this time I was ready to make myself a nuisance, for I was young enough to believe that things clearly advantageous should be thrust down everybody’s throat and that virtue demands a persistent bumping of all one’s friends into the paths of peace. I know few things which develop a more maddening fanaticism than this kind of brilliant success. However, I soon outgrew that pugnacious stage and realized that people can only accept things in their own vibration or stage of development and are better left without argument which is meaningless to them. Their time will come as one’s own does when the soil is there to provide for the root of the flower.

But I saw from day to day what a wonderful thing I had hit on. It had cured my physical disability, had doubled every intellectual power I possessed, and had given me the confident expectation that this was only the beginning of what it could accomplish. I was right there. Gradually another aspect of the question dawned upon me. This way of living was the most excellent moral (I hate the word) gymnastic that could be devised. It is no easy thing to live on a plan of one’s own in contradiction to that of the world about one, to be laughed at, chaffed, however kindly, to be told one is a faddist and so forth. That would not be the case now. It was the case then. And there was also the question of giving up foods one had enjoyed for those which at first seemed insipid, and of reducing them to the simplest, most unobtrusive form, that it might not inconvenience others.

But after a while it became strangely delightful to find that I did not mind a bit what people said or thought. I got to know a lot about the subject and began to make it interesting to them when it happened to come up, and there was a pride in being what they called “a mighty good advertisement” for my opinions.

But there is much more to it than that. Chaff rightly directed is the best tonic in the world for the anemic disease of taking oneself seriously, a complaint to which the young and clever are dreadfully prone and from which even the adult and stupid are not wholly exempt. As a remarkable Bishop of London once said: “After having slain the ape and the tiger in oneself there still remains the donkey, who is the most intractable animal of the three.” Chaff and good-humored scorn are an excellent diet for starving out the donkey, and so I found it. But there was more. I do not think anyone knows or realizes the full flavor of life until he has learned to say no to himself with rather more than the same ease with which he can say no to other people’s enjoyments. I had learned the great lesson—it still seems stupendous to me though it may be a truism to some—that with a real end in view any sacrifice becomes a pleasure and in that spirit the very best good is attainable on whatever plane you may choose to seek it. I may add that in Asia this way of living opens many a close-shut door to those who practice it. It is regarded as a virtue there.

And after that and with the early experiences I have described in my first chapter it was not a long step to the question of why all the great faiths have taught abstinence, temperance, fasting, as a very sword and shield in the fight against the dominance of the body. They did not do it to be tiresome and contradictions as had once seemed possible, but because they were all students of psychology; their business was with the Occult, and world-wide, age-long experience had taught them in differing degrees that the real world behind the Looking Glass is not to be entered by those whom the body binds to its caprices. It is the religions that insist on this fact which still keep their hold on their peoples, and the religions that walk in purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day which have lost it; because the reduction of the Occult to a law which every man can perceive and follow daily is the business of all faiths, and in his own heart every man knows this cannot be achieved nor the circle squared unless the body also has sworn allegiance to the quest. It is impossible to know one’s real self and its powers until this is gained, and when it is achieved the rest is not difficult.

And now things rapidly cleared up in my mind. As my force increased I was able to speak easily in public, an effort of which I had always thought with terror hitherto. Not only so, but I can truly say I did not even need preparation nor do I think I could speak if I prepared. I can only note any quotation that occurs to me on the subject (and the subjects are many) and leave the rest to the moment, knowing that the impulse and fulfilment are independent of the brain.

Thus I gradually realized that what is called the Occult is only an extension and wider perception of the powers we know, and that everything is attainable if we leave off talking and get down to business. Do not let your mind spread and splash over. Concentrate on one resolve and exclude others. Take time to be solitary daily. Avoid people who disturb you. Have the body in such training that it no more dares to interpose than a highly trained dog. Cultivate will and perseverance as you can never do with an undisciplined body. The world has had examples of what concentration can do but has not realized the source. It is by such thoughts and practices that man is put in touch with the force of the universe; and he becomes a channel of the sort of power on which he has chosen to concentrate—bad or good.

So I learned that the trained mind becomes a form of reason, and reason blends into the psychic, and delimitations are destroyed so that it becomes difficult to say where each dominion in the trinity of body, mind, and spirit which is man begins and ends.