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THE TEST OF POSSESSIONS
Any organism being born is born out of something. It is present emerging from past; and this always constitutes "nature". Human nature is the accumulated harvest of all that human beings have gone through, have built in their subconscious as habits and customs, have transmuted into the substance of civilization. It is, beyond this, the harvest which spiritual entities, builders of cosmic structures and of species, had produced out of their experiences during previous cycles. Every birth inherits the infinity of the past. Every new experience is lived on the unconscious background of all similar experiences that have ever been. Nature is this infinite all, in the past, brought to a selective focus by a particular type of birth in a particular type of species, of race, of family.
A selective focus. Each individual man is an essence, an expression of creative Intelligence, an Idea of the universal Mind. He is a particular attempt to use a particular section of the past of the universe in order to demonstrate a new present, a new power or Name of God. He is this divine Idea facing a selected set of natural elements, for the purpose of integrating them into an organic whole, of extracting from them a seed of meaning. He is a potential solution to a problem as yet unsolved, a problem constituted by a particular arrangement of natural trends, of unharmonized forces, of left-over threads, of unfinished business.
The new-born individual at the threshold of the first breath at the threshold of any breath! is confronted by the elements of this problem, by a particular field of experience; also, by the tools he is to use, the powers and faculties he can call his own, the potential of cosmic, social, psychic, and organic energies he may tap while on his way to the solution of his problem of destiny.
These are his "possessions". Possessions can be wares, social privileges, and wealth; they can be muscular strength, healthy organs, mental gifts, psychic energies or the negative aspects of these things. In whatever condition he finds them at birth and in the beginning of every cycle of experience and rebirth they constitute the section of nature over which he is put in charge by right of birth. His attitude to these possessions becomes the substance of one of his most basic tests. A man's character is largely determined at the very first by the way in which he meets the test of ownership.
Man is in charge of some section of nature which he owns as a result of the very act of birth. He is put in charge; and this he must come to realize, and to understand. He must accept the responsibility it entails. To refuse it would mean that all the natural and psychic energies of his ancestral past, integrated for his use within the field of his total organism and of his congenital place in society, would be left to follow the course of all nature; which is, to disintegrate. These energies, however, were not integrated without a purpose. He cannot he must not leave them alone. This would be suicide; and there are a great many forms and degrees of committing suicide not the least of which is to refuse truly to be born as a manager of one's possessions.
Nor is the identification with these possessions and powers the positive approach to the test of ownership. The self is so that it can use possessions; not that it might be used by the play of their natural elements and energies. But to use means to use with reference to a goal, a purpose. And the great questions arise: What does the individual own his section of nature for; and, what is the quality of his sense of ownership? What is his relationship to the act of using that which, at any level, he owns by the very fact that he is a self experiencing through earth-nature? These are essential questions that every individualized self must answer before God, and before society. By his answers, he makes or destroys his chances of fulfilling his inner-most destiny.
The substance of an individual's immortality can be extracted only from the total substance of the man's possessions at all levels. He can only say fully and victoriously "I am", if he has known how to say according to the law of spirit, "I own". What is this law of the spirit? It is the law of fruitfulness, of consecrated use, and of non-identification three pillars of the spiritual life, the life of abundance, the life that creates values which do not bind the creator, but provide him with the substance of his immortality in God God, the absolute Full.
To be fruitful and multiply is God's one and only original command. It is so stated in the very first chapter of the Sacred Book of the Western world. Fruitfulness implies the subduing, taming, cultivating, and assimilating of natural energies. It refers to no "Garden of Eden"the secondary creation of a personal deity not to be confused with the creative God of the universal Whole. Man is not born to enjoy nature, to be the pampered son of a rich father and a bounteous mother catering to his every whim. Man is born to solve a problem. Nature is before him with its abundance, its inexhaustible dynamic potency, its infinite treasures of memories, for him to draw from. Nature psychic and physical surrounds man. Will it stifle man with goods and memories, or will man subdue and put to conscious, purposeful use its products?
This is man's essential dilemma. Man is not born to create energy; all conceivable energy is around him. He is born to release it, to use it. Using it, he produces wealth; he creates meaning. Using it, he solves his problem, the problem God delegated to him, that it might be solved through man's efforts.
Fruitfulness is the result of purposeful use. In nature thus, in the past of the universe fruitfulness is unconscious, instinctual. The productive entity (be it plant, animal or primitive man) is not aware of the purpose of its fecundity. Man, in his glorious and tragic today, cannot evade the responsibility of a conscious purpose and remain truly human. He has released from nature awesome powers; nuclear energy from the atom, calculus and the engineer's vision from the collective memory of mankind. These are his possessions. Born with the potentiality thereof, he is using them to what end?
To what end our civilization and our intellect? We cannot answer this question as long as we identify ourselves with this intellect and the products of our "scientific" civilization or our religious tradition. If the rich boy identifies himself and his destiny with his wealth, he lives in total poverty of the spirit. Nature social nature lives him. He may add to the products of his inheritance; yet is it not rather this social inheritance which adds to itself through him, its willing servant or slave? He is a tool for collectivity; and everything that is collective is nature, because it represents the past that is, every achievement of humanity, or of a group, until today.
Spirit deals only with today, not as a prolongation of endless yesterdays, but as the one and only stage upon which the harvests of these yesterdays is to be given a new purpose, a new meaning. Yesterday may bequeath us great gifts, vast possessions. These in themselves are of no value. They are potentiality to be used. Unused, they oppress and stifle the creative "I". No individual should ever be considered great because of what he owns, rather because of the use he makes of whatever he owns.
An individual should identify himself with a purpose, not with the elements of the problem which this purpose defines. If I am born crown-prince of a kingdom, how can I serve the purpose of this birth if I identify myself with the past achievements and traditions of dead kings? As potential king, I am the potential servant of the people. What purpose can I have, save to minister to the new needs of my people in their adjustment to new circumstances, new world-relationships, new challenges of destiny? The crown awaiting me is the challenge of potentiality. It is for me "nature"; nature, whose tendency it is if left alone ever to run down to a dead level. Kingdoms come to an end. Ancestral fortunes soon dissipate. They constitute nature; my opportunity, not my bondage. Following the past, I am bound. Using it for a new purpose, I am creative and spiritually "free".
This does not refer only to actually inherited possessions. All I own today is the inheritance of my past. As I rise every morning I am born again; all I own I inherit from yesterday. And every experience can be, should be a new birth. Every experience truly met releases a new potentiality of gifts, a new wealth of being. By living this experience to the full, I commune whether I know it or not with all men who before me have lived the same type of experience. Their harvest becomes potentially my harvest; their achievements, the pedestal for my achievement.
As I meet my God, I partake in the ecstasy of all men who have ever met their God: this is the true "communion of the Saints". This experience establishes a new range of potentiality for myself. My nature has become enriched by the entire past of human sanctity. Will I enjoy this past, or give it a new fruitfulness, a new purpose, a new meaning my own? Will I identify my "I" with this collective rapture that was, or will I use it as a new "Am" with which I may solve the problem whose solution "I am" in the expectancy of God and of Man?
Spirit-realized individuality is to be understood in terms of distinctness, not of difference. This we have already seen. Likewise possessions have no spiritual value if they consolidate, fortify, make more virulent our pride-bearing differences; if they establish themselves as privileges. Ownership, to the man of the spirit, is a means to make his destiny and purpose more distinct, more clear-cut, more effective. Possessions, to him, can only mean efficiency.
There is no sense in owning anything at any level unless such an ownership increases our capacity for solving the divinely appointed problem our birth has been meant to solve. Any society in which rank and authority depends upon privilege, and not upon acting efficiency, is spiritually dead.
