Relationship With God

The Restoration of Religion

So many people presume to know God and what God approves and disapproves that it is impossible to take up this subject without opening oneself to attack as sacrilegious seems to be nearer to a great thought then to a great machine.  So we are left with the unforgettable and yet, strangely satisfied feeling that what religion is left in our lives will be a very much more simplified feeling of reverence for the beauty and grandeur and mystery of life, with its responsibilities, but will be deprived of the good old, glad certainties and assertion with theology has accumulated and laid over its surface.

When we die, the work we leave behind us continues to influence others and play a part, however small in the life of community in which we live.  In this very real sense, we may say that Louis Pasteur, Luther Burbank and Thomas Edison are still living among us. What if their bodies are dead, since “body” is nothing but an abstract generalization for a constantly changing combination of chemical constituents.

Religion is a way of an individual, personal thing.  Every person must workout his own views of religion and if he is sincere, God will not blame him, however he turns out.  Every man’s religious experience is valid for himself.

I believe, no one can be natural and happy unless he is intellectually sincere with himself, and to be natural is to be in heaven.

Pagan 

Pagan means one who is not a believer.  He is one who starts out with its earthly life as well we can or need to bother about wishes to live intently and happily as long as his life tests, often has a sense of the poignant sadness of his life and faces it cheerily, has a keen appreciation of the beautiful and the good in human life wherever he finds them, and regards doing good as its own satisfactory reward.

The difference in spiritual life between a believer and a Pagan is simply this; the believer lives in a world governed and watched over by God, to whom he has a constant personal relationship and therefore in a world presided over by a kindly father, his conduct is also often uplifted to a level consonant with his consciousness of being a child of God; no doubt a level which is difficult for a human mortal to maintain consistently at all periods of life or of the week or even of the day; his actual life varies between living on human and the truly religious levels.  On the other hand, the pagan lives in the world like an orphan, without the benefit of that consoling feeling that there is always someone in heaven who cares and who will, when the spiritual relationship called prayer is established, attend to his private personal welfare.  It is no doubt a less cheery world; but there is the benefit and dignity of being an orphan who by necessity has learned to be independent, to take care of himself, and to be more mature, as all orphans are.

The suspicion that anything which is coloured or not solidly true is fatal.  There is a price one must be willing to pay for the truth, whatever the consequences, let us have it.  The position is comparable to any psychologically the same as that of a murderer.  If one has committed a murder, the best thing he can do is to confess it.  That is why I say it takes a little courage to become a pagan.  But, one has accepted the worst, one is also without fear.  Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst.

The Christian will not be humble.  He will not be satisfied with the aggregate immortality of his great stream of life of which he is already a part, flowing on to eternity, like a mighty stream which empties into the great sea and changes and yet does not change the clay vessel will ask of the potter, “Why hast thou cast me into this shape and why hast thou made me so brittle?” The clay vessel is not satisfied that it can leave little vessels of its own kind when it cracks up.  Man is not satisfied that he has received this marvelous body, divine body.  He wants to live forever.

Thinking was always dangerous.  More than that, thinking was always allied with the devil. Christian theologians are the greatest enemies of Christian religion.  I could never get over two great contradictions.  The first that the entire structure of the Christian belief hang upon the existence of an apple of Adam had not eaten an apple, there would be no original sin and if there was no original sin, there would be no need for redemption. This is unfair to the teachings of Christ, who never said a word about the original sin or the redemption.  I feel if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to hell.  This is the final fact of my inner consciousness, and for no religion could I deny its truth.

Still more preposterous another preposition seemed to me that, when Adam and Eve ate an apple during their honeymoon, God was so angry that he condemned their posterity to suffer from generation to generation for that little offence but that, when the same posterity murdered the same God’s only Son, God was so delighted that he forgave them all.  No matter how people explain and argues I cannot get over this simple untruth.

When I reasoned with my colleague, “If there were no God, people would not do good and the world would go topsy-turvy”, “Why, replied my colleague “We should lead a decent human life simply because we are decent human beings”, he said.

The world of pagan belief is a simpler belief.  It postulates nothing and is obliged to postulate nothing.  It seems to make the good life more immediately appealing by appealing to the good life alone.  It better justifies doing good by making it unnecessary for doing good to justify itself.  It does not encourage men to do, for instance, a simple act of charity by dragging in a series of hypothetical postulates sin, redemption the cross laying up treasure in heaven, mutual obligation among men on account of a third party relationship in heaven – all so unnecessarily complicated and roundabout, and none capable of direct proof.  If one accepts the statement that doing good is its own justification, one cannot help regarding all theological baits to right living as redundant and tending to cloud the luster of a moral truth.  Love among men should be a final, absolute fact.  We should be able just to look at each other and love each other without being reminded of a third party in heaven.

Revelation 

The revelation of special mystery or divine scheme given to a prophet and kept by an apostolic succession, which was found necessary in all religions to handle exclusively a special, patented monopoly of salvation.  All priest crafts lives on the common staple food of revelation.  The simple truths of Christ teaching on the mount must be adorned and hence we have the “first Adam” and the “second Adam” and so on and so forth.

It is wrong therefore, to speak of a pagan as an irreligious man, irreligious he is only as one who refuses to believe in any special variety of revelation.  A pagan always believes in God but would not like to say so, for fear of being misunderstood.  All pagans believe in God.  He is honest enough to leave the creator of things in a halo of mystery, towards whom he feels a kind of awed piety and reverence of the beauty of this universe, the clever artist try of the myriad things of this creation, the mystery of the stars, the grandeur of heaven and the dignity of human soul he is equally aware.  But that again suffices for him.  He accepts death as he accepts pain and suffering and weighs them against the gift of life and the fresh country breeze and the clear mountain moon and he does not complain.  If the creator of things wants him to die, he gladly dies.  He also believes that “heaven’s way always goes round” and that there is no permanent injustice in this world.  He does not ask for more.

Art as Play and Personality

Art is both creation and recreation.  I am for amateurs in all fields.  I like amateur philosophers, amateur poets, amateur photographers, amateur magicians, amateur architects who build their own houses, amateur musicians and amateur botanists and amateur aviators.  It is spontaneous and in spontaneity alone lies the true spirit of art.

Beauty is something that cannot be accounted for by the struggle for existence and there are forms of beauty that are destructive even to the animals, like the over developed horns of a deer. Darwin saw that he could never account for the beauties of plant and animal life by natural selection, and he had to introduce the great secondary principle of sexual selection.

You cannot produce art by the force of the bay not any more than you can buy real love from a prostitute.  To understand essence of art at all, we have to go back to the physical basis of arts as an overflow of energy.  This is known as an artistic or creature impulse.  The use of the very word “inspiration” shows that the artist himself hardly knows where the impulse comes from.  It is merely a matter of inner urge, like the scientist’s impulse for the discovery of truth, or the explorer’s impulse for discovering a new island.  There is no accounting for it.  We are beginning to see today, with the help of biological knowledge, that the whole organization of our mental life is regulated by the increase or decrease and distribution of hormones in the blood acting on the various organs.  Even anger or fear is merely a matter of the supply of adrenalin. Genius itself, it seems to me, is but an overly supply of glandular secretions.

Adultery is a matter of worms growing our intestine and impelling the man to satisfy his desire.  Ambitions and aggressiveness and love of fame or power are also due to certain other worms giving the person no rest until he has achieved the object of his ambition.  The writing of a book, say a novel, is again due to species of worms which impel and urge the author to create for no reason whatsoever? Between hormones and worms, I prefer to believe in the latter.  The term is more vivid.

Every human activity has a form and expression, and all forms of expression lie within the definition of art.  It is therefore impossible to relegate the art of expression to the few fields of music and dancing and painting.  With this broader interpretation of art, therefore, good form in conduct and good personality in art are closely related and are equally important.

Given that oversupply of energy, there is an ease and gracefulness and attendance to form in whatever we do.  Now ease and gracefulness comes from a feeling of physical competence, a feeling of ability to do a thing more than well to do it beautifully.  The impulse to do a nice job or a neat job is essentially an aesthetic impulse.  Even a neat murder, a neat conspiracy neatly carried out is beautiful to look at, however condemnable that act may be.

Englishman’s monocle was part of style conversation, as a cane is a part of the style of walking. Art has a relationship to morals only in so far as the peculiar quality of a work of art is an expression of the artist’s personality.  An artist with a great personality produces grand art, an artist with a trivial personality produces trivial art, and an artist of delicacy produces delicate art. These we have relationship of art and morality in a nutshell.  Morality, therefore, is not a thing that can be superimposed from the outside.  It must grow from the inside as the natural expressions of the artist’s soul.  The mean hearted artist cannot produce a great painting and a big hearted artist cannot produce a mean picture, even if his life were at stake.  An artist’s work is strictly determined by his personality.

All good forms has a swing, and it is the swing that is beautiful to look at, whether it is the swing of a champion golf players club, or of a man of rocketing to success, or of a football player carrying the ball down the field.  There must be flow of expression, and that power of expression must not be hampered by the technique, but must be able to move freely and happily in it.  There is that swing so beautifully to look in a train going around a curve, or a yatch going at full speed with straight sails.  There is that swing in the flight of a swallow, or of a hawk dashing down on its prey, or of a champion horse racing to the finish “in good form” as we say.

Without that character or personality, a work of art is dead and no amount of virtuosity or mere perfection of technique can save it from lifelessness or lack of vitality.  Without that highly individual thing called personality, beauty itself becomes banal. All art is once and based on the same principle of expression or personality, whether it is acting in a movie picture or painting or literacy authorship.  To cultivate the charm of hat personality is the important basis for all art, for no matter what an artist does, his character shows in his work.  The cultivation of personality is both moral and aesthetic and it requires both scholarship and refinement.

The Art of Writing

There are always professional readers with publishing houses whose business is to attend to the commas, semi-colons and split infinitives.  On the other hand no amount of grammatical or literary polish can make a writer if he neglects the cultivation of a literary personality.

The style is the man.  Style is not a method, a system or even a decoration for one’s writing.  It is but the total impression that the reader gets of the quality of the writers mind, his depth or superficiality, his insight or lack of insight and other qualities like wit, humor, biting sarcasm, genial understanding, tenderness, delicacy of understanding, kindly cynism or cynical kindliness, hard headedness, practical common sense and general attitude towards things.  It is clear that there can be no handbook for developing a “humorous technique” or “three hour course in cynical kindness”, or “fifteen rules for practical common sense” and “eleven rules for delicacy of feeling”.

Clear thoughts expressed in unclear language are the style of a confirmed bachelor. He never has to explain anything to a wife. One never learns anything from a book when he hates the author. A man’s character is partly born and so is his style.  The other part is just contamination. A man without a favorite author is a lost soul.  He remains an unimpregnated ovum and unfertilized pistil.  One’s favorite author or literary lover is pollen for his soul. A favorite author exists in the world for everyman, only he hasn’t taken the trouble to find him. A book is like a picture of life or of a city. The universe is one big book and life is one big school.  The wise man read both book and life.

A good reader turns an author inside out like a beggar turning his coat inside out in search of fleas. The best way of studying any object is to begin by reading books, taking an unfavorite point of view with regard to it. A writer always has an instinctive interest in words as such.  Every word has a life and a personality, usually not recorded by a dictionary.

 A specialist graduates into a scholar when his knowledge broadens and a writer graduates into a thinker when his wisdom deepens.  A scholar’s writings consist of borrowing from other scholars, and the more authorities and sources he quotes, the more of a scholar he appears.  A thinker’s writings consist of borrowing from ideas in his own intestines, and the greater thinker a man is more he depends on his own intestinal juice.  A scholar is like a raven feeding its young that spits out what it has eaten from the mouth.  A thinker is like a silkworm which gives us, not mulberry leaves but silk.

There is a period of gestation of ideas before writing, like the period of gestation of an embryo in its mother’s womb before birth.  When one’s favorite author has kindled the spark in one’s soul and set up current of live ideas in him, that is the “impregnation” when a man rushes into print before his ideas go through this period of gestation, that is diarrhea, mistaken for birth pains.  When a writer sells his conscience and writes things against his convictions, that is artificial abortions and the embryo is always still born.  When a writer feels violent convulsions like an electric storm in his head, and he doesn’t feel happy until he gets the ideas out of his system and puts them down on paper and feels an immense relief, that is literary birth.  Hence a writer feels a maternal affection towards his literary product as a mother feels towards her baby.  Hence writing is always better when it is one’s own, and a woman is always lovelier when she is somebody else’s wife.

The thing called “self” or “personality” consists of a bundle of limbs, muscles, nerves, reason, sentiments, culture understanding, experience, and prejudices.  It partly nature and partly culture, partly born and partly cultivated.  One’s nature is determined at the time of his birth, or even before it.  Some are naturally hard-hearted and mean; others are naturally frank and straight forward and chivalrous and big-hearted, and again others are naturally soft and weak in character, or given over to worries.  Such qualities are in ones “marrow-bones” and the best teacher or wisest parent cannot change one type of personality.

Other qualities are acquired after death through education and experience, but in so far as one’s thoughts and ideas and impressions come from the most diverse sources and different streams of influence at different periods of his life, his ideas, prejudices and points of view presents a most bewildering inconsistency.  One loves dogs and afraid of cats, while another loves cats and is afraid of dogs.  Hence the study of types of human personality is the most complicated of all sciences.

The school of self expression demands that we express in writing only our own thoughts and feelings, our genuine loves, genuine hatreds, genuine fears and genuine hobbies.  These will be expressed without any attempt to hide the bad from the good, without fear of being ridiculed by the world, and without fear of contracting the ancient sages or contemporary authorities. Literary beauty is only expressiveness. I love a liar more than a speaker of truth and an indiscreet liar more than a discreet one.  His indiscretion is a sign of his love for his readers.

I trust an indiscreet fool and suspect a lawyer. The indiscreet fool is a nation’s best diplomat.  He wins peoples heart.

What is Beauty 

The thing called beauty in literature and beauty in things depends so much on change and movement and is based on life.  What lives always has change and movement, and what has change and movement naturally has beauty.

Literary beauty of things arises from their nature, and those that fulfill their nature clothe themselves in beautiful lines.  Therefore, beauty of line and form is intrinsic and not extrinsic. The horse’s hoofs are designed for a quick gallop, the tiger’s claws are designed for piercing on this prey, the stork legs are designed for wading across swamps, and the bear’s paws are designed for walking on ice.  Does the horse, the tiger, the stork or the bear ever think of its beauty of forms and proportions?  All it tries to do is function in life and adapt a proper posture for movement.  But from our point of view, we see the horse’s hoop, the tiger’s claws, the stork’s legs and the bear’s paws have a striking beauty, either in their fullness of contour and suggestion of power, or in their slenderness and strength of line or in their clearness of outlines, or in the ruggedness of their joints.  Their beauty comes from their posture or movement and their bodily shapes are the results of their bodily functions, and this is also the secret of beauty in writing.

The Art of Reading

Reading or the enjoyment of books has always been regarded among the charms of a cultured life and is respected and envied by those who rarely give themselves that privilege.  This is easy to understand when we compare the difference between the life of a man who does no reading and that of a man who does.  The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space.  His life falls into a set routine, he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighborhood.  From this prison there is no escape.  But the moment he takes up a book, he enters a different world and if it is a good book, he comes in contact with the best talkers of the world.  This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the leaders know nothing about.

The readers are always carried away into a world of thought and reflection.  Even if it is a book about physical events, there is a difference between seeing such events in person or living through them, and reading about them in books, for them the events always assume the quality of a spectacle and the reader becomes a detached spectator.  The best reading is therefore that which leads us into this contemplative mood and that which is merely occupied with the report of events.

A scholar who hasn’t read anything for three days feels that his talk has no flavor (becomes insipid) and his own face becomes hateful to look at (in the mirror).  Reading gives a man certain charm and flavor, which is the main aim of reading and only reading with this aim can be called an art.  One doesn’t read to improve ones mind because when one begins to think of improving his min, all the pleasures of reading is gone.

Anyone who reads a book with sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.  This type of reading with a business purpose is no way different from a senators reading up of files and reports before he makes a speech.  Reading for the cultivation of personal charm of appearance and flavor in speech is the only admissible kind of reading.  This charm of appearance must evidently be interpreted as something other than physical beauty.  There are ugly faces that have a fascinating charm and beautiful faces that are insipid to look at.

This is what I would call a beautiful face, a face not made up by powder and rouge, but by the sheer force of thinking.  As for flavor of speech, it all depends on one way’s of reading. Whether one has “flavor” or not in his talk, depends on his method of reading.  If the reader gets the flavor of the books, he will show that flavor in his conversations, and if he has flavor in his conversation, he cannot help also having flavor in his writings.

Hence I consider flavor or taste as the key to all reading.  It necessary follows that taste is selective and individual like the taste for food.  The most hygienic way of eating is, after all, eating what one likes, for than one is sure of digestion.  In reading, as it is eating what is one man’s meat may be another man’s poison.  A teacher cannot force his pupils to like what he likes in reading and a parent cannot expect his children to have the same tastes as themselves.  And if the reader has no taste for what he reads, all the time is wasted.  You can leave the books that you don’t like alone, and let other people read them.

There can be, therefore no books that one absolutely must read. For our intellectual interests grow like a tree or flow like a river.  So long there is a proper sap, the tree will grow any how, and as long as there is fresh current from the spring, the water will flow.  When water strikes a granite cliff, it just goes around it, when it finds itself in a pleasant low valley, it stops and meanders there a while; when it finds itself in a deep mountain pond, it is content to stay there; when it finds itself travelling over rapids, it hurries forward.  Thus without any effort or determined aim, it is sure of reading the sea some day.  There are no books in this world that everybody must read, but only books that a person must read at a certain time in a given place under given circumstances and at a given period of his life.

Even if there is a certain book that everyone must read, like the bible, there is time for it.  When one’s thoughts and experience have not reached a certain point for reading a master piece, the master piece will leave only a bad flavor on his plate.

The same reader reading the same book at difference periods gets a different flavor out of it. All books can be read with profit and renewed pleasure a second time. Reading therefore, is an act consisting of two sides, the author and the reader.  The net gain comes as much from the reader’s contribution through his own insight and experience as from the authors own.

One has to independent and search out his masters who is one’s favorite author, no one can tell, probably not even the man himself.  It is like love at first sight.  The reader cannot be told to love this one or that one, but when he has found the author he loves, he knows it himself by a kind of instinct.

The true art of reading is to just take up a look and read when the mood comes.  To be thoroughly enjoyed, reading must be entirely spontaneous.  Between reading, a good pipe or a good cup of tea makes it still more perfect.  Reading a banned book behind closed doors on a snowy night is one of the greatest pleasures of life.The good reader tolerates misprints when reading history as a good traveler, tolerates bad roads when climbing a mountain, one going to watch a snow scene tolerates a flimsy bridge, one choosing to live in the country tolerates vulgar people and one bent on looking at flowers tolerates bad wind.