A call to become alive to life. The environment, the body, consciousness, the self, the signal. Welcome to Environments call. - Hooded by Personality, we are shadowed away from the glare of the All, and we settle here to our task of control, inside and out, without consciously relating the task of Now to the task of Eternity. But the Eternal Urge is behind us. The only real death is the stoppage of that Eternal Urge. Life is a series of responses to Environment. Living stops when responses stop. We are alive in proportion to the number, strength, and delicacy of our responses. Response means life at Centre at- tested by expression at Surface. CHAPTER I THE SUMMONS Environment knocks at the gateway of the senses. A rain of summons beats upon us all the time. All kinds of invitations to come out, push in at every crack. The air shakes about us with Where are you! It always has. It always will! Everything there is, is trying to get at us all the time ; struggling with our unwillingness, jumping at our bars, batter- ing our walls, shouting against our deafness, shining and dazzling into our blindness ; teasing, fretting, beg- ging, fighting, — it will have us, whether or no! Finding no gate, it tries to break in one. Turned aside, it comes another way. Kept back, it plucks at us with long fingers, threading us out to little tendrils to entangle. Always, all times, scheming to reach us ! Here it raises a bump, there scratches a sore place, catches a thread, starts a blink! Never was suitor more insistent than Environment seeking admission, claiming recognition, signalling to be seen, shouting to be heard ; and through the ages we sit inside of our- selves — deaf, dumb and blind, and will not stir. What happens next Maybe you, sitting inside of yourself — let us say you at Centre, are not deaf, dumb and blind, but eagerly alert for a signal. Perhaps, somehow, from the excitement outside, signal reaches you at Centre and makes you aware of the deaf, dumb and blind, closed gates that front and baffle Environ- ment. Maybe, on your side you stir. Perhaps that is how eyes and ears and gates came to be. You at Centre, realized a need at Surface. You pushed out through the deafness and dumbness and blindness of the Body, making ways to meet the challenging suitor, windows through which to see him, ears through which to hear him. Long ago were these gate-ways made; yet perhaps, now, to-day, this mo- ment, and all moments, Centre still pushes out to see more, hear more, find more of all that Environment has to show and tell. Why? Perhaps even now, though these sense-gates are, and ears and eyes and reachers and welcomers have come to be, they must still be kept ready and open, alive, shiaed up, and willing, because on one side is Environ- ment still striving to sieve through us at every pore, and on the other side are We, greedy, outrushing, clamoring for more and more, of, the more and more there always is. Why? From the very beginning till now, left to ourselves, this urge at Centre never rests. It batters forever at the inner side of our walls, crying Welcome! and dragging down bars, wrenching gates, prying at port- holes, listening at cracks, reaching everywhere, and demanding the utmost and always more of every sense. Thus sense-gates are built because of demand on either side, and they swing both ways, because we want to push out to meet Environment pushing in. Why? We grow impatient, push the gates wider, and tip- toe at our thresholds, signalling with venturous flag to snare our own out of the more and more Envi- ronment shows. Now and then, an imperious instinct warns that somehow this own is not enough, that all is ours, and that whatever anyone has ever had or known, or may ever have or know, we would caU and claim. A sense of life-universal surges through our life-individual. We attack the feast of this table with an insatiable appetite that cries for all. Only when civilization clamps us, the school straight- jackets us, society submerges us, luxury feather-beds us, privation wrings us, Life itself steam-rollers us, do we tend, brow-beaten, stultified and ominous to bur- row inside of ourselves, and refuse signals, till, again deaf and blind and dumb closed gates baffle Environ- ment, and we do not stir. Thus are we taken by an indifference that is death at Centre. Divine hunger is checked by bitter bread. It is as if the horse balked on the Divine road, and we, discouraged, dismount and let him stand. No suffering that life may take in through tortured senses is catastrophe like to the loss of that Eternal Urge, which lashes us to our gates crying Welcome to Environments call. Why? Why? What are we? Please never mind established scientific terminology! Be jocund with me to take a short cut... librarything/author/fryemmaviolamrs
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 22:38:01 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015