*
THE TEST OF STABILITY
The fourth great test which man encounters in every cycle of individual experience depends essentially upon the fact that a time always comes when man must put a stop to his effort at compressing the energies of his nature in order to transform them into thought, intelligence and individual values. The engineer builds a dam to hold the waters of the stream so that he may transmute the power of gravitation the running down of all energy into electricity and light; but the dam cannot reach safely above a certain height, or else the pressure of the waters it contains would cause it to collapse. The individual, likewise, must not go on forever increasing the tension of his thinking processes. He must not seek to relate to his self an ever vaster aggregation of dynamic facts and to assimilate experiences wrenched from ever larger fields of nature, lest his mind may burst under the pressure of too much power and too many challenging discoveries.
Man must stop and gather within a solid structure of some kind the booty he has accumulated in his victory over nature. Before he can use intelligence creatively he has to incorporate it into a structure of selfhood a structure which can hold the mass of materials he has gained from experience. The engineer has to consolidate his mastery over nature. He has to anchor his structure of concrete and steel so firmly that he can meet the falling mass of waters with an equally moving mass able to use, under control and to the fullest extent possible, their impact. He must know how and when to stop the down-flow.
A time comes in all things when man must say: enough. He can say it too soon for ever attaining greatness of intelligence and of stature as an individual person. He can say it too late, and see his personality split and shattered by powers he could neither hold steady nor assimilate to his self. He can build his dam too low for illumining with thought a personality hardly able to rise above the collective average of mankind. But he can also get drunk with intelligence and power, and erect psychic "towers of Babel" which require countless workmen to be built, enormous expenditure of power, and a constant effort of management so great as to allow for no peace and to lead ultimately to crystallization, tyranny, and spiritual death.
Man has need of stability. Sooner or later, he must stop in his avid grasping of sensations and experiences, in his attempts to force nature into the expanding net of his intellectual avidity for knowledge and for powers sensational, spectacular powers above all. And this need to come to a stop becomes the substance of his greatest test.
The test of stability is the test of when, where and how to stop. Everything thereafter will depend upon this when, this where and this how. Where a man stops, there will be his foundation: his personality, his home and ultimately the structure of his after-death condition of being. On these foundations, he builds. From these foundations, he goes forth in self-expression, in progeny, in spiritual rebirth. But whatever happens after man has accepted as a fact his having reached bottom will be conditioned by and derived from the depth, the solidity, the potential carrying strength, and the essential character of the foundations thus established. A man says: Enough! and at this very moment he has rooted his self and his destiny in one type of energy and substance or another. He has set the limits of his potential growth.
To ascend in height requires a foundation in depth. Thus, the problem of reaching towering peaks of intelligence, and from the vantage point they offer, being able to encompass a vast panorama of consciousness is first of all a problem of how deep one is willing and ready to go. Depth, here means nearness to center. The substance of one of the great tests man must meet is his willingness, and readiness, to reach center. It is the test of the "midnight Sun" of which Masonry speaks. To reach this midnight Sun one must first pass through the center of the earth. Center is reached by seeking one's own nadir, one's own depth of being the core of one's own "emptiness". For as the Irish poet truly said: Where there is nothing, there is God.
At the center there is "no-thing". The entire world of nature is balanced around emptiness. Gravitation, at its maximum, ceases. Gravity of thought in its utmost depth is . . . laughter. Lazarus, who has known initiatic death and returned from this zero-point of existence to bring men his vision, can best formulate it in a song of laughter as O'Neill so vividly expresses in his great work, "Lazarus Laughed". Levitation is not reached by a stubborn fight against gravitation at the surface of the earthor at the superficial level of human experience and consciousness. Levitation is the proof that man has reached center; that man has accepted fully gravitation. Such acceptation leads the daring and strong soul to center. It leads the weak and the timorous to suffocation and decay.The paradox is, as always, that man must oppose nature while accepting nature. He must know himself as the polar opposite of nature even while he embraces nature and pierces through its mass. He must use nature to overcome nature. He must use gravitation to reach the center where gravitation ceases. The engineer must go along with gravitation if he is to build foundations deep enough to erect a massive and towering dam. He does not deny or fight against the weight of the waters and their down-flow. He increases this weight, he condenses time the natural rate of down-flow ("entropy") into moments of accentuated release, once he has gained the power to control and to use that intensified release of water-weight.
Someday engineers will be born who will not be contented to build foundations deep into the rock-bottom of the earth. They will realize that, farther than the deepest shaft sunk into the surface of substances which have mass and weight, there is "center". For the engineer to reach center is to gain a foundation which dwarfs all now known engineering foundations. To reach center is to reach that core of emptiness round which all masses and all energies are balanced. It is to gain a leverage from which all nature can be moved and controlled.
We have become accustomed now to the concept of atomic fission or fusion and to the frightening power these processes let loose. This power is as nothing compared to that which may be used by the individual who, because he himself is established in being and consciousness at the center of his own nature, can act upon the centers of all things. With ease, with the least exertion, he can affect and rearrange the balance of all that surrounds these centers. For, at the center, all lines of pressure so neutralize each other that there is absolute ease and absolute freedom to move in any direction and that intelligence in which God speaks; for God is the ultimate center of all conceivable universes.
The test of stability! The question is not only upon how deep a foundation one's stability rests. It can be formulated in a more crucial and challenging manner. What kind of stability does one seek: that which consists in an extended base at the surface of things that which is rooted in a relative depth of foundations or the stability established at the center of nature where all gravitation ceases and God is known as supreme, universal "I"?
It is an awesome question. By his answer unconscious though he be of its character a man establishes, in his innermost self, his future. It may mean strength or futility, "liberation" or slavery to powers of the "under-world", the greatest victory or long cycles of tragic re-gathering of energies to the self that has met defeat. No one can make such an answer with his brain or his emotions alone, or on the basis of some traditional religion or philosophy. No one need formulate in words the answer, lest he arouse, too soon perhaps, the powers of the depths. Yet, at the very core of every human self, the answer is formed, conditioning the man's future, determining the individual's basic relationship to nature, his innermost "truth", his essential purpose.
There are men, even entire civilizations, who seek stability by spreading themselves over a wide surface of experience. By interconnecting a great number of superficial data into a network of relations, consciousness may thus feel secure enough to build skyward. The intellect is an agency for associating observed facts and social contacts at the surface of an experience from which have been discarded at the outset the things which do not fit, the things which reach down into the realms where the sun of rationality does not penetrate. Intellectual stability is "map stability": the surveyor goes about covering the widest surface of things and connecting peaks and valleys by lines of orientation. These, projected on paper, constitute a map an abstraction of surface appearances.
Our modern civilization is built upon maps and a map-consciousness. It contents itself to associate sense-perceptions and the results of experiments in terms of measurements of yardsticks, compass, scales, and clocks. Its statistics deal entirely with the surface-being of groups and categories; its laws, with averages and map-expectancy. It seeks or claims to seek a global fulfillment. But the globe it envisions is essentially a shell. It has no living core; no center; no single originating focus.
All the observations of science depend upon what is observable at the surface of planets and of stars; and observability here means light, product of the surface of the sun. Because it deals with surfaces, the modern intellect cannot recognize the meaning of "emptiness" at the center of all there is. It prolongs the concept of mass and surface-gravitation to a theoretical, mathematical center. The substance of this postulated center is not different from that observed at the surface except that it is claimed to be "hotter"! It is ordinary substance that happens to be placed at a particular geometrical point called "center". But it is not the living center of reality.
The living center is a void to our intellect and our perceptions of mass and substance. Through this void, the creative power of the universe speaks. It is the innermost chamber, which is God's dwelling place. Not the "glory" of God projected upon the screen of the sky to illumine all surface-things and all devotees craving for pomp, radiance and miracles; but the "poverty" of God, of which a few great mystics spoke the still, silent voice that resounds through the most ultimate void God in the Empty, whence is born all power and all reality. To reach this center where there is nothing this is the great Crusade; the taking on of the Cross that leads to the deepest hells, foundations for all Resurrections.
Few indeed ever qualify for this crusade, which only steady individuals can pursue through the burning deserts and the frozen midnights of an unspectacular quest. Many lose their way and are heard no longer. The dim presentiment of tragedy warns all but the most daring or the most desperate that there must come a time when it is good to stop before it is too late. To stop; to consolidate one's gains; to establish one's depth where one can still see the glow of noonday light.
Humanity thus, normally, builds between nadir and zenith roots for the nadir, flowers at the zenith, green branches spread to meet the horizon. The issue that differentiates men, spirit and reality, is: "How deep are your roots? How secure are your foundations?"The average man does not even realize there is a center. All he "feels" for is solid ground, rock bottom security. He builds his home; he erects the structure of his personality. And he becomes bound to that which gives him security and structure, incrusted in a particular place, crystallized in a way of life and in an intellectual, social, and moral system which defines once and for all his horizon and his goal. Partaking of both the animals and the plant's natures, a human being can roam over the surface of things, reaching beyond animal-hood in that he remembers and measures the course of his wandering and builds maps; he may also root himself into one geographical spot, grow roots, stem and seed; but, beyond plant-hood he can learn to multiply consciously his seed and to worship in it life the fatherhood or motherhood of god, as he also says in his most reverent moods.
He only is truly "man" who leaves behind the spaces of the earth-surface or the security of the root; who dares dying to the noonday light, that he might reach at the ultimate depth of his own individual being the midnight Sun, in the sublime darkness in which all men are one, all voices are silent, all bondages total into freedom.
At the center, gravitation ceases. Weight is overcome, as the individual willingly accepts all weights to the last, bitter end. From this acceptation, liberation is born. The bitterest hour ends in joy beyond all imaginings. Suffocation gives birth to the endless song of spirit. Unbearable pain slides away to reveal peace the peace no pressure can ruffle, for there is no pressure where all pressures are accepted and balanced. From the center the individual can go forth in any direction God chooses the God that he has become. He is free, because he has made himself into that emptiness through which God forever answers all needs which rise, from the surface of things, to the sky. The sky reflects to the center the needs born of the surface. From the center, through the void and the stillness, the answer comes. Spirit answers as power. That power raises harvests, or stirs the earthquake. Always and forever it answers all needs.
Men who have reached center channel forth these answers. They create, they destroy. Through their eyes that know supreme emptiness, through their hands that can plough the surface of all things, the Eternal One makes Himself known. He it is of whom the Bhagavat Gita speaks, saying: "There dwelleth in the heart of every creature, the Master, Ishwara who by his magic power causeth all things and creatures to revolve mounted upon the universal wheel of time. Take sanctuary with him alone, with all thy soul; by his grace thou shalt obtain supreme happiness, the eternal place . ."**William Q. Judge's translation - by far the best. (United Lodge of Theosophists, Los Angeles, 1920. pg.130. Ch. 18)
