The Inner Life
THE HERALD OF THE NEW AGE | APRIL 1938
EDITORIAL
IS IT WORTHWHILE?
THE FOLLOWING was received in a recent letter that contains food for thought for all our readers, coming as it does at a time when many may be compelled to consider giving up material and financial burdens that are becoming increasingly harder to bear.
“My husband was talking to a customer on Saturday last, who told of a friend who had ‘lost’ everything—life savings, a printing business, a big home on one of the boulevards; and who with his wife had moved out by one of the lakes here in Michigan to a tiny village . . . and found that in reality he had actually ‘lost’ only all the worries he had carried for twenty years.
“He found that by doing constructive odd jobs in the village and for neighbors it gave him and his wife a living, and that they actually had more spare money than when he was striving for the so-called BIG things in the world’s eyes.
“The man telling the story to my husband said he had visited these people and that they had a little cottage fitted up with simple things, and that it was a little heaven of happiness to enter; that they were given so much produce by nearby farmers that they had enough to give to others; that they could fish, keep a lovely little garden, and had at last found the REAL happiness of life and of living.”
She added, “I only pass this on to share the joy it gave us. Isn’t it blessed to hear such things? Husband and I know, too. For once, too, ‘kept up with the Jones’. Then we, too, had to learn what were the worthwhile things of life. Now, . . . well, we rest our body selves when necessary in this little apartment, and are able to share our substance with others who need. We are not really living anywhere else than in the Light of the SUN—of our Lord Christ within.”
Many are being brought more and more to a realization of the absurd unreality of this outer show of things; to see the impossibility of finding true happiness in what the world holds out as most desirable—riches, luxuries, big businesses, big homes, big names, big noises about one in the newspapers.
Many are learning this from so-called failure, because it was impossible for their Higher Selves to teach it while striving for “success;” and it was only after having attained so-called success, and then seeing it collapse like a deflated balloon, that a true meaning and comparison of the two could be shown them clearly and could be fully appreciated.
It reminds us of the story of Everett W. Hill, told by Hubert Kelly, that appeared in the November 1937 American Magazine, and which made a strong impression on us, as it must have made on many readers. After having accumulated a fortune of $2,250,000, and having owned wheatlands, flour mills, hothouses, and the largest chain of refrigeration plants in Oklahoma, which alone netted him, at times, more than $200,000 a year; after living in a mansion with numerous servants, and being his city’s most important and powerful citizen; been president of Rotary International, visited Mussolini, a guest of King Albert, met the Australian Premier, made stirring speeches at home and abroad for world peace which brought thousands, cheering, to their feet—all was swept away in the depression.
The writer of the article found him “living obscurely in a little cottage near an Oklahoma oil field, eating fish and berries, and wandering through the countryside . . . and above all things, writing poetry.”
I TOLD him I was from New York; then explained my mission, apologizing for the early hour and offering to await his convenience.
He smiled and stepped back. “Come in,” he said briskly. “Any time is my time. I don’t make appointments. I’ll talk with you for a week if you’re interested and interesting and really want to sit here.”
“I merely thought you might have something to do,” I said. (He looked so much like a businessman, I was sure he had a couple of letters to dictate.)
He said, “I have nothing to do. I never have anything to do except when I want to do it, and then I don’t have to. If I looked alarmed when you said you were from New York, it was merely because I was afraid you had come in person to offer me a job. Various companies have been after me to go into insurance, refrigeration, milling, and even to go on the lecture platform. If I did, it would belie the very contentment that I have found. Imagine speaking on the joy of freedom to a crowd of self-shackled people, all of whom have sense enough to know that a speaker is contracted—a slave of train schedules and engagements. Bah! I haven’t done anything for the last five years, and I don’t intend to do anything for the next twenty-five. I’m only fifty-two years old—and I figure that I’ve still got a tremendous amount of idleness before me . . . Have a seat.”
He leaned back in a swivel chair at a desk he had saved from the crash of his industry and grinned at me mischievously.
“And you don’t intend to try to make a comeback—recoup your lost fortune?” I blurted out.
He looked at me pityingly and said, “I do not intend to try to make a go-back. Fortunes stand between men and everything worth while. Penniless, I am happier today than I ever was in my life . . . happier, indeed, than anyone I know.”
I think he is happier, too, than anyone I know.
He then relates the life-story of this man, which was most unusual, as he was what most men called a “success” from the time he graduated with honors from high-school. From sheer ability and native intelligence he utilized the driving power in him to accomplish everything that he set out to do, and in 1930 was the sole owner of eighteen ice factories and 100 distributing houses in his state.
Then the crash. He had financed the ice business on his own. Banks, panic-stricken like the rest of us, refused to tide him over. And presently, after fighting frantically for a year, Everett Hill found himself looking at his plants and lumberyards, his bank and hothouses, and wondering in a dazed way who owned them.
He took inventory. Mansion, servants, big cars, and everything of importance were gone. He had left $30 in cash, an old motorcar, his former secretary’s desk and swivel chair, the office sofa, a hookah given to him by a stuffed shirt in Turkey, a Malayan shillalah, an autographed photograph of King Albert of Belgium, and the dancing skirt of a Polynesian flapper. Even his $10,000 art collection was gone.
Everett Hill told me all this as I sat on the salvaged sofa and he at his former secretary’s desk, with the hookah on a shelf, and the war club, photograph, and grass skirt on the wall.
“And then,” I said, “you had a nervous breakdown.”
He replied sharply, “I did no such thing. It was simply that I had confused myself with what I owned. I was the ice chain, the art collection, the lumberyards. When they went, Everett Hill went with them—the man who used to make speeches . . . the man whose name was in the paper. I had never developed my real self. I had developed only things outside of myself, which I called I. If you identify yourself with a big sign with your name on it, and somebody takes down the sign and throws it in a rubbish heap—well, you’re in a rubbish heap. I had spent and lost two and a quarter million dollars. Suddenly it and Everett Hill were gone.”
YES, this man had discovered Reality, although he was not yet able fully to understand it. So he spent most of his time trying to understand it, and as glimpses of it came he would jot down in words in a note-book what expressed itself to him. Sometimes the words rhymed. Once this is what he found he had written:
Deep in my reverie, alone in the dim starlight, Far from the marts of trade, where men know naught of night, With silence for my pillow, and contentment for my bed, Peacefulness for my mantle, and manna for my bread; The stillness encourages dreaming, and calmness soothes my mind, And quietness rules my thought and teaches me to be kind.
What? A man of forty-nine, cast up on the rocks, deciding to be a poet? Absurd. But Everett Hill had not decided anything. The lines sprang from him naturally . . . water gushing from a broken rock.
When at last he came out of the wilderness, he told me, chastened of vanity and fear, he shaved himself, got a haircut, and walked through the streets of Oklahoma City again, free and contented. He met old business acquaintances on the street, smiled and spoke with them a moment, and went on. He would dwell there, he thought, in all simplicity, until he felt like going again into the wilderness.
With a few hundred dollars he received unexpectedly from a little abstract company he had forgotten he had invested in, he rented the red-stone cottage for a few dollars a month, furnished it with the office salvage, and bought some chickens. He didn’t grimly sit down to write—nothing like that. Everett Hill doesn’t believe in trying, but merely in inviting the soul. He rose when he wished, went to sleep when he wished, or not at all . . .
The notebooks grew in number. I have read all of them. They are filled with hundreds of poems, many of them meaningless to me, because they concern Hill so personally and deeply. By many better qualified than I, they have been called really extraordinary, particularly because their author never studied versification, never intended to write verse, and once looked upon poets as some kind of damn fools. This fall a New York publishing house is producing the first volume of Everett Hill’s songs, the first, indeed, he has ever signed. He has sold poems to many publications, but always under an assumed name, which he has not revealed even to his daughter.
“When, on the advice of Edwin Markham, I decided to sell some of my writings, in order to live,” he told me, “I decided not to use the big sign which had been thrown in the rubbish heap. I decided that whatever I did must go on its own merit. I really didn’t care whether I sold it or not, except for the few dollars it might bring me, because I do not think of living in terms of success or failure, but of contentment. I write because I like to. If I don’t want to write, I don’t. One must live without pressure to find one’s self.”
AND so that was the way Everett Hill found himself—and found the true meaning of life. In what his True Self taught him in the poetry he was led to write, he learned to distinguish the real from the seeming, the pure gold from the gloss and the glitter.
In ways such as this does Life itself bring about the soul’s awakening. The vast majority of men are asleep, dreaming their dreams of wealth, power, accomplishment; or of ambition, aspiration, hopes; or of poverty, sickness, suffering, sin, crime, failure, disappointment, discouragement, remorse. And it all seems so very real—until they wake up and become acquainted with their own souls, and are shown, as was Everett Hill and those in our first story, the only truly worthwhile things in this outer life.
And what does it bring to them? It brings an inner peace, contentment, joy, because they have learned that nothing that is lasting and real can be gained from outer things; and that only as they turn within and keep mind and heart fixed on That One there, Who in ever wider measure unfolds to them a new and wonderful world of Reality and enables them to abide in and work from it, can they keep from being drawn back into the tinsel and glitter of the outer world.
Yes, they learn to abide in that inner world and to work from its consciousness, even while their bodies are dwelling in the material world. And that is why they are able truly to help, inspire and bless everyone they contact, as do all those who have found Reality.
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EASTER
WE ARE approaching another Easter, another opportunity for entering a higher consciousness and to learn if we have grown any the past year. Are we conscious of any advancement in spiritual understanding, in our response to the One Life within, that of the Cosmic Christ?
Many students of these teachings are asking themselves that question at this time, and are earnestly hoping they will be able to bring back some awareness of their inner soul life at this most important season of the year. For they realize that along with all nature their souls must have grown and may be ready for one of the minor “initiations,” if not a major one, that takes place in the inner realms each Easter time.
They know that the souls of men, which are the highest expression of the One Life on earth, naturally must have unfolded more of themselves in their human stalks, and that some will reach their blossoming time, and a few even their fruitage time; and they know some evidence will be given those who have earned such blessings.
We are in a most critical period, because of it being the end of an age, when many who call themselves followers of Christ are falling on every side, having failed to withstand the wiles of Satan, the tester; such are the ones who have been lured into the byways, believing the claims of those who represent themselves to be Emissaries of Jesus Christ or of the Great Ones of the Christ Brotherhood.
Such become so caught in the glamour surrounding these false leaders that they know not that their chance of retrieving their way back to the true Path will soon be gone beyond recall this lifetime, and perhaps for another long age. For the longer they follow personalities, no matter who such claim to represent, or even other Masters or Christs, and thus fail to find and prove that they are following only the Loving Christ within, these deluded ones cannot expect to be chosen this Easter time for advancement into a higher consciousness.
But of course these do not expect and are not interested in such evidence of their state of growth—they are satisfied with what they have been told by those whom they are following. However, these words are not for them, but for those who are lovingly and trustingly waiting upon the Lord within, seeking only to please Him, concerned not at all about anything other than being worthy to serve Him in every possible way. Such may know that that desire to serve Him may this Easter time bring to them an inner experience that will be the most precious that has come into their lives.
Let that be sufficient, and just continue to love and serve Him, and He in you may make Himself known in a way that will bring a most wondrous blessing. Do not anticipate. Do not care. Just give yourself wholly to Him, losing yourself in His Love, and you will learn the joy of such surrender.
May that Joy be yours this year—the Joy of the Resurrection—is our dearest wish for every follower of the Inner Christ.
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THOSE who wish to know more about the significance of the Easter season are referred to a very illuminating booklet, “He Is Risen,” listed on page 21 of the Advertising Section.
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THE SCHOOL FOR DISCIPLES’ FUND
WE ARE most happy to learn of the response to the suggestion of the friend in the “Preview” of last month. Daily letters are arriving telling of their prayers for the School and of their seeing it come speedily into manifestation. We are sure that with many hearts thus holding it as a living reality in spirit and speaking the word for it whenever occasion offers, the Law will bring it to pass.
Along with their letters came tangible evidence of their love and desire to help, and it is our purpose to acknowledge each month in the Magazine all such contributions to the Special Fund, which will be held intact for the purpose intended.
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