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THE TEST OF PURITY
Man must act; to live is to act. All actions imply a movement away from a relatively stable basis or state of equilibrium, away from a center. Movement requires an expenditure of energy. Power is released, that had been wound up into star, seed or soul. The nature of the power, the rhythm and quality of the release, its motivation and its aim determine the character of the act.
To release power there must be something through which the release can occur: an instrumentality or mechanism of release an agent, an engine. Where the release of power occurs in nature we speak of "agent". We consider the instrumentality for the release an entity, perhaps an organism. The agent, in the human kingdom, appears with the character of individual selfhood; he becomes a responsible agent, a free agent. When the release of power occurs through a man-made instrumentality we speak of an "engine". Every man-made object-through which energy is set free in an act or motion is an engine; a watch, a turbine, a dynamo and also a symphony, a stage-play, a religious ceremony, a baseball game; yes, even the vast ritual of a nation's business, correlating factories, trains, trucks, office workers according to a complex pattern of unceasing activity or the tragic ritual of war, in its destructive use of energy and substance.
The sun is a natural agent through which power is released. So is the cell, the seed, the plant, the bird at the level of this type of release we call "life". When man thinks and projects his thoughts either directly in the world of mental activity or indirectly through physical instruments operated by tongue or hands, he sets free power at the level of human personality and society; thus, two levels of release, two modes of activity.
In sun and seed the release seems to us compulsive, automatic, controlled by inevitable cosmic laws or instinctual drives based on bio-chemistry. We say there is no consciousness in the agent. In man we witness the appearance, not only of conscious awareness, but of clear motivation, intent and the expenditure of his various energies by means of the inhibiting and releasing power of the will, servant of his conscious individualized ego. He uses these energies as he sees fit. Consciousness, in him, directs the release of power at least some aspects of the power for which man is a releasing agent.
Consciousness Power: the great, the tragic dualism of man. In all the kingdoms of nature some sort of awareness or instinctual consciousness results from the release of power, as an overtone, an after-act product. But man, when he comes to be truly man, un-identified with nature man as a "self", as a spark of divinity is not only after-act consciousness, but before-act consciousness. Not only Epimetheus, but Prometheus. Not only one who remembers, but one who prophesizes a Seer, an Engineer, one who sees ahead and uses future releases of power under control and according to plan.
To be an engineer is man's great and tragic burden God's Signature within him, his inevitable responsibility. It is greatness, because participation in the creative processes of the universe. It is potential tragedy, because, being able to control energy and the "gestures" of energy-become-act, man, the engineer, can also distort the rhythm of all releases of power. He may use them for an activation which violates the natural character of the power itself. He can do this because he is a self a unit of creative consciousness as well as an agent through which the powers of the universe can be released.
As a unit of conscious selfhood he can transform and alter the natural instrumentality through which human power flows out-ward: his organs. He can add to, or subtract from the efficacy of his body and his psyche. He can extend their capacity for power-release by means of man-made engines, or bring upon them sickness and corruption. He can think individual thoughts, transform nature by them, or distort universal Ideas, breed mental monsters to channel the perverted dynamism of his rebellious or demented ego. He may be a Son of God, God-in-Act; or he may oppose the divine Creative Harmony by pitting his will against the vast current of evolution against the universal Plan of the Great Architect of the Universe.
The choice is his, in so far as he is a conscious self. As a self, he stamps the release of his energies with his own inherent character and quality of being. He acts out what he is. He acts in "purity" or in "sin''.
To be pure is to be an agent through whom power is released according to the inherent character and rhythm of that power and in answer to the human need which called for such a release of power, and to no other end and in no other way. It is to use the natural instrumentalities for the release of power according to their intrinsic nature and their fittingness within the universal pattern of evolution. It is to act in terms of inherent necessity.Purity in action is adequacy to the character of the power released. There can be purity in destructive acts as well as constructive act. Catabolic agencies can be just as pure as anabolic ones. Poison can be as purely poisonous as clear water, without the admixture of any elements foreign to its molecular nature (H20), pure in its cleansing and dissolving action.
Likewise, an engine is "pure" that releases a particular kind of power without waste motion and at least with a minimum of residual substances. A human personality is pure that releases its share of the power latent in humanity-as-a-whole without emotional waste of energy and mental confusion. Such a man is what he inherently is, and nothing-but what he inherently is, as an individual self. He is thus a clear agent for the release of human power.
Yet, purity in an individual person implies more than adequacy to function and perfect attunement to the rhythm of the power used. Of man it is asked that he take his place consciously and significantly within the great performance of universal evolution. He must not only play perfectly his own instrument, and release beautiful and vibrant tones that stir; he must also perform his part in the orchestra of humanity his part as it exists in the universal score. Purity for man thus implies the correct rendering of his characteristic melodic line, rhythm or chord in the vast symphony that is "Man"the fulfillment of his function, his destiny, and his "truth".
Truth, spiritual identity, dharma: various words to define immortal selfhood in effective and adequate acts. The truth of an individual consists in all the activities necessary for the complete and correct performance of his life-purpose as an incarnate self. All that is necessary; nothing that is not necessary. In purity and in truth, freedom and necessity become identical.
The individual is spiritually free as he fulfills his essential purpose, and in no other way. He is concretely free as he is allowed by society, and determined by his own will, to perform these acts which are inherent in the character and rhythm of the power for the release of which he was created an agent. For an individual to be free to do anything he might wish or conceive has no meaning in itself. The only freedom is that of performing all the acts that are necessary for one's inherent spiritual purpose.
This purpose is latent in the very character of the powers which are pressing for expression within the individual's own nature. As he understands in truth the character of his powers, he grasps at the same time the nature of his essential life-purpose what he should be free for unless in the excitement attendant to the use of the powers (and this is the great test!) the individual identifies himself with the tidal sweep of, first this power, then that other; thus becoming a helpless sounding-board for the confused ebbs and flows of any and all natural energies which circumstances may arouse in his body and psyche.
In the animal or the plant, purity and truth-in-action are compulsory for 'any one particular animal or vegetable specimen. The plant is rooted in the ground and reaches as deep into the soil as it possibly can in order to establish a foundation for the ascent of its leaves and blossoms toward the life-giving light. The animal, on the other hand, moves about within a set circumference of motion or along a set migratory course and thereby establishes an equally set rhythm for the release of its powers under the sway of instinctual and compulsively unconscious emotions its life-urges.
Man is both plant and animal. He may stretch his desires sun-ward to God and ground them in deep shafts wherein he probes the meaning and reality of power as power; he may spread his experience over a wide surface and orient himself in his world of "maps" in terms of extension and surface-born emotions, of sensations and concepts. But man is more. He is potentially a planet, established in center, secure in cosmic selfhood a planet chorded with companion-planets in a "harmonic series" of releases of power, the "fundamental tone" of which is the sun. Each planet is an agent for the release of one kind of power. As a solid globe the planet is "agent", but it is more; the real planet is the space outlined by its orbit.
This orbit, being an ellipse, has two foci. One, common to all planets (the sun), is the source of the one universal power; the other, which differs for every planetary orbit, is the source of individual selfhood and consciousness. As the solid globe of the planet performs its periodic circuits around these two foci, it channels outward into expression their combined forces. As the one wanes, the other waxes; this in turn, and forever. To be pure is to be an agent for the one solar power. To be true is to be an agent for the differentiating energy of the self. Purity, in reference to power; truth, in reference to the consciousness of self.
In the cyclically altered harmony of power and conscious selfhood, the man whose life is a constant enactment of his inherent destiny moves on like a planet. In essence, in total four-dimensional being, he is the orbital space of his destiny. In act, he is the cyclically revolving globe that focuses this total reality of being into creative expression through an unceasing release of power.
He who lives on and from the surface of reality is only super-plant and super-animal. Consciousness results from action, follows after action; and consciousness is swayed by the ebbs and flows of power, by the changing slope of sunrays throughout the year, by the lunar rhythm of watery substances (sea, sap, and blood), by the magic of unsteady desires that pulse at the beat of the seasons. His life may be pure inasmuch as it gives expression to the nature of the power and the powers of nature. But purity is of little avail to the man who seeks to be truly man except it be united with truth. And truth is known only at the center; one's truth, one's self.
The things that crawl, blossom, or sing on the surface of our globe know only the urge of power; and their lives are molded by power, scanned by the rhythm of power, enslaved by the fatality of power. For whom center is an eternal abode, for whom solid earth has become transparent to orbital space for such a one there can be no lure in power, no glamour in sunshine no desire and no pain in the waxing and waning of life's urges. In him, power and consciousness are harmonized. If power ebbs away, he knows in his inner being the flow of more intense selfhood. His acts are performed in the name of both. Love merges with intelligence; purity, with truth. Their child? Divinity in act. God is Space, focused and defined by forever moving globes. Man is globe: God-in-act. This is man's truth.
There is no test of purity for a tree, a bird, or a tiger. They are compelled to be pure; they are unconscious agents. They grow, they sing, they kill as they must. Power, the dictator, compels; operates their glands and muscles; measures the beats of their hearts. Theirs is the realm of life and life is the surface of divinity; the warmth, the glamour, the desires, the fear, the loveliness, the passion, the horror of all that is born and must die unaware.
The man who is man in truth, because he is established at the center in the marriage of power and selfhood and in freedom from earthly gravitation, is impelled by an inherent necessity to be consciously what he is, to move on forever as definer of space, as orbit-describer, as child of power and consciousness, of love and intelligence. He acts out his phase of divinity as a planet acts out its part in the cosmic polyphony of the solar system.
The test of purity, for such a man, is to be not only pure, but true; not only to release power, but to act out meaning; not only to perform the surface- operations of life the birthing of new organisms, new cultural forms, new songs, and new glamour-intoxicated thrusts skyward but to act out the alchemies of center, the reduction of desires into necessities, or emotions into meaning.
It is a complex test; a drama in several acts. At first, man's soul feeling one with all nature cries out in yearning for light, sings glory-songs to the sun in the choir of trees and beasts. Then, man experiences himself separate; he loses touch with nature. He must stand on his own. The pulse of his desires maddens him. He must extend his field, his kingdom, his world. Power haunts him, taunts him; he must trail it down to its source, pierce the flesh, pierce the earth. Has power no lair; have roots no deeper to go than instincts tell?
Man loses his purity. He wrestles with power; twists it to his passion; lightens his depths with electric fire; sunders the core of atoms with the quest for power; falls perhaps into abysses his ego conjured; explodes with the things he fissioned and the loves he smashed. Or he reaches center and peace. In this peace he knows truth, his truth. To consciously know that truth he had to lose purity; and regain it in the cosmic context of orbital space, in the union of power and self where God acts Himself out through man, the free; in man, the true.
