Seven days with God

Front matter

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Contents

. SPIRITUAL GEOGRAPHY . MIsconcEPTIONS OF EASTERN LIFE . THe Inwarp Way

. CHRISTIANITY THE CONNECTING LINK BETWEEN

THE EAST AND THE WEST

Chapter I Spiritual Geography

SOME years ago a well-known American clergyman sojourned for a short time with a high type Hindu mystic in California. The brief companionship of those two seekers after divine truth proved mutually agreeable. To the clergyman from whom I heard the story, it was highly profitable. As he told me, it opened his eyes to many things in the realm of the spirit which he had not seen before.

One day, as the American divine stated, he asked his Eastern companion whether he was giving himself daily to lonely and deep spiritual meditation. The Oriental sage appeared greatly surprised. Looking at his Western friend meditatively, he answered, “Here?’ The severely brief, interrogative answer seemed to issue from the depth of a disappointed mind. The tone and manner of the Eastern visitor as he uttered it indicated unmistakably that the part of the world in which he then found himself was no suitable place for pious meditation.

That was by no means an intended slur on California. It was rather the spontaneous and honest reaction to the question of the mind of a man who first opened his eyes, grew up, made his peace with nature, and established his human relations, under other skies than those whose flowing depths hung over the land of his voluntary and temporary exile. The spell of the ancient East was thick upon him. The elements of his character were related to scenes and conditions in that world which strongly governed their operations. And it seemed that the mind of the Hindu mystic communicated its decisive attitude to the mind of his American friend with power and authority; for, as the latter told me, he agreed with him. It would seem strange that a spiritual thinker, who firmly clung to the precept that the Truth was universal and was accessible to the mind that sought it anywhere and everywhere in the world, should have set geographical limits to its divine manifestations. Strange also that a distinguished thinker should have allowed himself to believe that the Western world was off the course of the current of spiritual truth.

But this is an old story. Those familiar with the Old Testament will recall how for hundreds of years the people of Israel always looked to Mount Sinai as the seat of Jehovah. That flaming mountain of the ‘south,’ with its metallic barrenness, intense

SPIRITUAL GEOGRAPHY light, weird solitude, and fearfully violent storms, remained to them the only source of divine revelation. For centuries they could not think of their God without his ‘thunder.’ That hereditary vision of the ‘Mount of God’ led the writer of Job to say, a millennium and a half after Moses, ‘God thundereth marvelously with his voice.’ In the land of their exile, the singers of the chosen people felt as the Hindu mystic did in California. To them Babylon was not the proper locality in which to sing one of the ‘songs of Zion.’ When by the rivers of Babylon they sat and wept, they hung their harps upon the willows and refused to make melody. For, as the Psalmist cries, ‘How shall we sing Jehovah’s song in a foreign land?’ It was long before Israel discovered the richer content of the song which says, ‘Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there.’

The psychology of such cases is normal. It is also unoffensive, provided it does not involve the tendency on the part of a foreigner to cast reflection on the land of his temporary sojourn.

For, as many of us who have been transplanted into a foreign: land realize, in such cases as the one before us, it is the strangeness rather than the spiritual barrenness of an alien race which diverts one’s mind from intensive spiritual thinking. It 1s the foreigner’s keen consciousness of the new world and the new life in which he finds himself immersed — strange social manners, domestic habits, commercial relations, idioms of speech, and the like — that keep him bewilderingly in the outer world. I very much doubt whether a person who immigrates to a country after he is thirty ever will be able so to adjust himself to its customs and manners as to take them for granted and wholly escape their startling challenge. Here the tone of life may not be hostile; still it is strange to that which time and nature have so securely wrought into the structure of one’s mind in those mysteriously impressionable and tender years of life. The clash of the new with the old grows less sharp with the years, but, except in the case of youthful immigrants, it never drops below the threshold of consciousness.

I do not wish at this point to make a comparative estimate of the spirituality of the East and that of the West. Here I wish to state that the difference between these two worlds with reference to this subject, which no doubt exists, has been greatly and falsely exaggerated. In the minds of millions of Easterners as well as Westerners the idea that the West is spiritually barren has become a fixed and, certainly, injurious dogma. To such despairing philosophers, the ‘mechanical’ West appears like a

SPIRITUAL GEOGRAPHY heap of junk. Its life is strong, but possesses neither sweetness nor light. Its atmosphere is acrid with the fumes of factory oil and utterly hostile to spiritual thinking. Its noisy life finds its retreat at heavily laden dinner tables and the reading of commercial statistics and football news. What religion it has it has borrowed from the East and made a very poor use of it. Its aggressiveness in seeking ‘material wealth is mercilessly wearing out its nerves and driving it toward a speedy destruction. It was, no doubt, something like this view of the West which led the American clergyman fully to agree with his Hindu friend that California and, impliedly, the Western world at large, was no place for spiritual meditation. I do not at all think he should have so agreed. Nor do [ think that the above diagnosis of Western life, which no doubt contains much truth, is wholly correct. I am an Oriental by birth and early training, and, to a considerable extent, a mystic. I retain affectionate remembrances of the East and am glad to keep in touch with its life and thought. It is as regards its fundamental instincts a spiritual world and the chief home of mysticism. But, on the other hand, my continuous residence for more than thirty years in the West as a student of its institutions convinces me that its life is not so barren spiritually, nor that it lives religiously entirely on borrowed bread.

In my other publications? I did not refrain from pointing out what seemed to me to be the defects of Western civilization; nor do I feel like shirking such a duty in the present volume. But I deem it also my legitimate duty to confess and proclaim the fact that, as one whose youth was cast in an Oriental | mould, I find human life in the West to rest on the same everlasting arms which sustain the inner life of man everywhere in the world. The same undertones which thrill the deeps of the human soul in the East do their beneficent work also in the inner life of man in the West. Below the shallow stratum of the machinery with which the Westerner deals are the spiritual values by which he lives. He also derives from the Parent-Life.

There can be no doubt, as it seems to me, that the verdict which so many have returned against the West has been largely due to a misunderstanding of the reality of life in both the East and the West. Here the difference in mentality, the method of procedure, and the degree of attainment, have to a ereat extent shaped the judgment of those who consider these two worlds to be spiritually alien to each other. Easterners in general have acquired an incorrect understanding of the word ‘materialism,’ and Westerners in general an incorrect notion of the t See especially my book, Wise Men from the East and from the W est. [6]

SPIRITUAL GEOGRAPHY word ‘mysticism.’ To the former, whoever traffics with the outer world is a greedy materialist, and to the latter, whoever acquires the habit of retiring from the rush and noise of daily life and giving himself periodically to spiritual meditation is a selfpleasing mystic. He is a non-productive member of the human family. The sweet word ‘mysticism’ has become as unpopular in the West as the word ‘materialism’ in the East. 3

And what is still more disturbing is the fact that this difference in judgment has become more than a superficial intellectual theory. It has acquired a deep moral significance. If my own observations, covering many years, are correct — as I have sufficient reason to think that they are — I am led to believe that there are millions of well-intentioned Americans who think, somewhat uncomfortably, that the mystic tones of life which give it its sweetness and light are beyond the hearing of Westerners. To them the East is the only holy of holies where such music is heard. It seems of no use trying to strike such chords in the West; the noises of the external life drown them. There is some truth in this diagnosis, but by no means the whole truth. What truth there is here is no sufficient foundation for the conclusion drawn from it. Many Westerners will be surprised to find that, in spite of all the clatter and noise of life around them, in spite of all eal their alertness and aggressiveness in the commercial and industrial world, the things which make life for them worth living, their friendships sweet, and their homes dear, are those invisible, intangible values which form the mystical core of religion. They will find that they have an inward life which knows no East nor West, but is their own inheritance from the Eternal Spirit; that they have no real reason to say, as I have heard many say, ‘Our mind is hopelessly materialistic; our type of life is not at all fit for deep spiritual culture’; and similar disheartening and untrue things.

No greater calamity can befall a person than to be spiritually a defeatist at heart. No heavier liability can weigh down civilization than those members of society who are confirmed spiritual defeatists. Whatever obstacles there may be in the way, never permit yourself to lose confidence that the conquering Spirit is within you. It can still the harsh noises of life whenever you want them to be stilled, and restore you to the higher fellowship of the sons and daughters of peace. The same Spirit of Being which moved the ancient Oriental writer to speak to the ages is saying now, ‘The commandment which I command thee this day, it is not too hard for thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, and make us

SPIRITUAL GEOGRAPHY to hear it, that we may do it? Nor is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, that we may do it? But the word is nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.”?

That the West is preéminently the world of commerce and industry, that it is giving more of its thought and strength to these things than it should, and that its dominant religion is of Eastern origin, are well-recognized and indisputable facts. But that because of this it is legitimate to conclude that religion is an external attachment to the Western mind, and that commerce and industry are of no spiritual value whatsoever, is a wild assertion. When one thinks of the great religious institutions in the Western world, of its vast missionary enterprises, of its great preachers of religion and its spiritual poets and essayists, one is bound to conclude that beyond its visible activities an invisible spiritual world exists which is native to its own genius. Had its borrowed religion been entirely foreign to its mind, it never could have so effectively responded to its appeal. Spiritual things can only spiritually be discerned. They can be known and owned only through deep spiritual affinity with their essential nature. It was most natural that the

ancient East should discover the fundamentals of religion before Western civilization came into being, and most natural that the youthful West should borrow its Scriptures from the East. It must be admitted also that, at least because of its longer age, the East has acquired a firmer hold on those eternal realities than the West has. Yet, the conclusion is unescapable that the relation between these two worlds is more than that of a giver and a recipient. It is rather that of spiritual kinship and identity of desire for the hidden satisfactions of the soul. The borrower, through what he has received, seems to recognize the fact that he is not a mere beneficiary, but a fellow heir with the lender, of the deeper visions of faith and hope.

In no other way can justice be done both the Fast and the West, in relation to this subject, than through the sincere and generous recognition of this fact.

Chapter II Misconceptions Of Eastern Life

ComPLiMENTary and uncomplimentary misconceptions of a people’s life, whether by those of its own children, or by aliens, is a general human weakness. This is often done without the intention either to extol or to malign, but is due to a lack of sufficient knowledge of the facts. Nor are such unenlightened judgments to be charged only to aliens. Not infrequently the most misleading of the interpreters of a people’s life are those of its own household.

It is obvious that not every American can be trusted to give a correct presentation of American life, and the same may safely be said of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and others as interpreters of the modes of life and thought in their respective countries. In fact, only a small minority of any people can be safely followed as exponents of that people’s life. In a similar manner we may speak of ‘traveled’ persons. The mere fact that a person has traveled, or even lived in a foreign country for a ‘long time,’ is not necessarily a sufficient guaranty that his observations of its life activities and their underlying motives are correct; nor that his conclusions are sound. It all depends upon who the traveler is and what his interests in his travels are. “

Here are two simple examples. In more than one instance I have been asked with much surprise by some Americans — some of whom had traveled in my native land —why I refrain from drinking coffee, that is, from drinking as much as they thought I ought to drink. ‘Your people,’ the state- » ment often is, ‘live on coffee. How does it come that you are so abstemious?’ Now the fact is that, while the aristocrats of Syria and some of the commoners drink coffee daily, the rank and file of the people seldom indulge in such a luxury. Only on festive occasions and when a family has guests, coffee is served. The same applies to the use of wine. The second instance illustrates the idea some Westerners have of the spiritual life of the East. At the close of a meeting at which I had spoken on the social life of the East, a lady said to me, ‘I was much surprised to hear you describe the joyous social life the Easterners live. I had thought they did nothing but meditate on spiritual things.’

I have no intention to undertake in this publication a comparative study of the East and the West. I have attempted that in my other publications. Here I shall touch upon this interesting subject only to the extent to which I deem it necessary to pave the way for the message which the present volume is intended to carry.

The fact that the East is the original home of all the great religions is well known to all thinking people in both the East and the West. The ages in which these religions were born and brought to maturity —a time long antedating the birth of the Western nations — were periods in which introspection and mystical meditation bloomed in a favorable atmosphere. The slowness of progress tended to make earthly things seem unchangeable. The tyranny of rulers and the cruelty of man to man established the conviction that a life of joy and peace must be sought not without, but within and above. To find that beneficent, serene, eternal Reality by way of inward seeking, even to be absorbed by It, was the only wise course for the children of men. The road may be rough, the journey long, the pains many. Yet all these are the throes of a new birth into an eternal order, eternally good. True life is to be found only in the Soul of Being; all else is corruptible and transient. To lose one’s life, or what he calls his life, in the eternal deep of the All is to find it. There can be no dual existence, God’s existence and man’s existence. God is all. Man comes actually into real being when he enters into the life of God. This tangible world, the world of desires and ambitions, is more like a prison than a home. To be attached to it is to be in bondage. Only that which is eternally real — which this world is not — is fit to be the home of [ 13 ]

the Soul. Nor must the seeker after the Truth give himself to explaining this world, scientifically or otherwise. It is not to be explained, but to be explained away. The seeker’s objective must be the Reality which is beyond all visible things. That, once grasped, includes all values. So long as Self is conscious of the desire to possess, whatever the nature of the thing sought may be, it is in bondage and is full of anxiety and fear. Self, so understood, must go. It will remain a perplexed wanderer until it is possessed by the Soul of Being. The way to this supreme bliss is the inward way.

This attitude toward spiritual reality is more characteristic of eastern than of western Asia. The evolution of the Jewish-Christian religion followed a somewhat different course, and, as will be later explained, the mode of practice of this religion differs considerably from that of the Far East. Nevertheless, the later tendencies of the Jewish-Christian religion, such as the longing for ‘the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens,’ the desire on the part of the believer not to live himself, but to have Christ live in him, and the belief that the visible order of things was destined to be destroyed and give way to a permanent spiritual order, touch the borderland of the profounder mysticism of the Far Eastern religions.

Thus, then, whatever value may be attached to this brief explanation, or any other, the fact remains that the Eastern mind is the chief discoverer of religious truth. Be the cause of this the very long and somewhat static history of man in the East, a strong spiritual tendency inherent in him to be introspective, or any other cause or combination of causes, the Easterner was first to sound the profoundest depths of the religious consciousness. Time and scholarship will, no doubt, discredit much of what this ancient man thought was unshakable truth. They will do away with the immense mass of superstitions which have grown around the central truths of his religion like choking weeds and thistles; they will cleanse his ritual of its enervating voluptuousness; they will rid him of self-inflicted torture as an act of devotion, and of caste as a social distinction. All this and more will the critical processes of modern scholarship do for the son of the East. Yet, after the fire of criticism has consumed all the dross which clings to the golden truths of the religions of the East, the residue will emerge with a fresh splendor and will be owned by both the East and the West as the precious heritage of the human soul.

Nevertheless, the Easterner is charitably misjudged by many in the West, as he is uncharitably misjudged by others. The idea that all the Easterners are spiritually minded is, of course, incorrect.

| tan ROARS!

To suppose that those hundreds of millions of Asiatics are given constantly to meditation on the law of the Most High is benevolently to misjudge them. The Easterner as a type is more religious than the Westerner. Yet the fact remains that the hardest task of the prophets of the East has been successfully to lead the rank and file of their people to the fountain-head of pure spiritual truth. On the other hand, the assertions of those ‘advanced thinkers’ of the West, to whom the inward spiritual life is a jungle of confused dreams, that the Eastern religions are merely a ‘mass of myths and legends,’ are unworthy of serious attention. It is not infrequently that retrogression is mistaken for progress.

Once I heard a man, a so-called ‘liberal’ preacher, say to an assembly of people, ‘We are done with Asiatic religions; we are through with the Bible of the Hebrews. Let us have a modern American religion.” Yea and amen! Let us! This is a very laudable ambition, although the said speaker, who represents a type, did not say what sort of ‘modern religion’ he had in mind. But let us, before we let go of the ‘ Bible of the Hebrews,’ and, by the way, of the Christians also, be sure that we have something better than the best that Old Book contains, or at least as good, to take its place. Let us not be like the dog in the fable who dropped the bone in order to grasp the shadow of it.

Let us first be sure that our ‘modern mind’ actually feels the irresistible urge of a new spirit of re- _ ligious prophecy whose truths exceed in their purity and helpfulness those which we find in the ancient Scriptures. Such, for example, as, ‘Fear thou not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God; I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil; for thou art with me. What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God. Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; and in the hidden parts thou wilt make me to know wisdom. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Blessed are the pure in heart. Blessed are the peace makers. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness. Love one another. Love your enemies. Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them. The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control. Overcome evil with good. Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honorable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.’

Now, I do not mean to assume the position of a special pleader for the Bible. For I am inclined to believe that if we can so readily evolve a ‘modern religion’ whose precepts shall touch human life at more points and more beneficently than those of the old Scriptures, we will bless the world from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same, as it never was blessed before. However, I think it would be much wiser for us to give those old precepts an honest and fair trial in actual life before we cast them as rubbish to the void. For otherwise we might not be able to replace them very profitably — to ourselves and those who shall come after us.

But this should not be understood to mean that the Western mind is spiritually destitute. For the evidence is clear that the West has not been a mere recipient, but a creative borrower of Eastern religion. Its interpretation of religion, especially in literature, hymns, and poetry in general, has given religious truth fresh significance and placed it within easy reach of the masses. It has also moralized religion to a greater extent than the East has. It is true that the Western mind has not discovered new religious truths. This, however, cannot be justly ascribed to spiritual sterility. The probability is that the need for a native religious system was not so pressing in the West, because the rich and vital religions of the East, especially Christianity, were ready for the Western peoples to adopt and make their own. What otherwise would have been necessary to evolve had already been brought into being. Just as the East is to-day adopting the discoveries of the West in the field of science, so did the West adopt the discoveries of the East in the field of religion. Its task, therefore, has been to restate and interpret those ancient systems of religion so as to make them fit its own mentality and serve its own peculiar needs. The struggle in this field never was more strenuous than it is to-day. The Old and the New are face to face in the field of honor. The one is armed with the venerable idea of fixity and certainty, the other with that of movement and inquiry. To which is the battle? To neither. It is neither to the Old because of its age, nor to the New because of its youth. The selective processes of experience and of constructive criticism will bring together whatever is true, good, and beautiful in both systems, and thus make of the twain one new order which shall possess both the stability of age and the progressiveness of youth. The future belongs to that form of thought which | [19 ]

possesses spiritual health and belongs to it only so. long as it has that quality. In the religious sphere, as in any other, sacredness inheres in usefulness, and sanctity in utility. aaa

Nor is this sifting and overturning any longer an exclusively Western mode of thought and action. The once static East is now being agitated by the spirit of doubt and inquiry. The old foundations do not seem to be eternally fixed as they once did. Modern knowledge — a Western importation — is beginning to reveal defects and weaknesses in the structure of those ancient foundations and the necessity for their reconstruction. Because of this, however, the East is not being Westernized, although the automobile, the telephone, and the airship are beginning to replace its picturesque, romantic caravans. But it is being slowly transformed into a new East.

Its religious mind, with which we are chiefly concerned here, is beginning to experience the invasion of doubt and agnosticism which modern education has caused in the West. The intelligent classes in the East are beginning to experience real dissatisfaction with their inherited forms of religious faith and to express that dissatisfaction with a new courage. Of course such modes of thought are not entirely new to that part of the world, but are charged with a new spirit of individualism. All of which reveals the interesting fact that, notwithstanding its profound depth, the religious tendency of the Oriental is not beyond the reach of change. In Japan, for an example, where progress along Western lines has gone farther than in any other Eastern country, the departure of the new generation from the religious ways of the fathers has been most alarming to the loyal adherents of the old order. This fear has by no means been abated by the consequent social and political changes which make it seem that the dignity of the institutions of ancient Japan is being seriously impaired. Nor have the educated classes of India been able to escape the spell of the West, even though many of them hate it. They may, as many of them do, curse the ‘Western barbarians’; nevertheless, their speech, their views of the past and the future, their adoption of modern machinery and means of transportation, and other things characteristic of Western life, all indicate that their progress is proceeding along lines somewhat parallel to those of Western progress. They may succeed in resisting the forces which tend completely to Westernize them; they may, as they hope, achieve such triumphs in the field of scientific knowledge as to leave the West far behind them, as it was behind them centuries ago; they may succeed in doing all these things and still remain Hindus. Nevertheless, the indications are that this very progress from which they hope so much is gradually making them different Hindus from what their fathers were and from what their orthodox leaders wish them to be, and bringing them dangerously close in thought to those ‘West- © ern barbarians.’ The only safe course for them here, if they wish to resist change, is to leave Western science and industry alone. But can they?