The Way of Power | Page 9

which has shaped the lives and destinies of more uncounted millions than any other. No one has called the Buddha either nerve-broken or insane, though after that tremendous psychic experience which gained him the name of the Enlightened One he returned from the world of true perception with teachings perfectly staggering to the opinions concerning life and death held by the world at large. And the foremost reason of his triumph in enabling men to discern what really matters from what does not matter a cent was his perfect sanity and cool clarity of brain backing the highest psychic perception and all based upon a disciplined body. That was a thing all men could understand and honor. He had tried luxury and had renounced its poisons. He had tried a cruel asceticism and had cast aside its follies, and so experienced he taught a wise temperance that the body attaining perfect poise may not thrust its revolt in the face of the spirit. According to his doctrine the psychic powers are sooner or later within the reach of every man who follows a certain plainly defined path. They come as inevitably and normally as breathing, but like all other powers are to be used with caution and wisdom and by no means as a show-off or an end in themselves. This wisdom he had learned from the ancient Indian teaching and his own great experience. It is the art of seeing life steadily and whole both within and outside the perception of our physical senses and it cannot be completely mastered until the subjugation and co-operation of the body are made part of the coherent scheme of things. Real life cannot be treated as a thing of little colored patches. It must be seen in its entirety.
I know that to acquire a perfectly working circulation of the blood and mastered appetites may seem a lowly beginning for a great quest but there is an Indian parable which illustrates the value of the infinitely little. A prisoner in a great tower directs his wife to bring to its foot a beetle, a silk thread and a little honey. She is to attach the silk to the beetle, to smear his horns with honey and set him free to climb the tower, following the scent of the honey. He does it. A twine is attached to the silk thread, a rope to the twine and the prisoner is freed. The infinitely little has conquered.
So the ancient wisdom of India perceived long ago, what we are dimly beginning to guess, that if a man desires to storm the strange world of psychic attainment safely he must lay his foundations on the earth as he sees it and make the body his co-operator and not his trampled or pampered slave. For, as says one of the greatest of the ancient books: "He who fasts and he who eats too much, he who does not sleep and he who sleeps too much, he who works too much and he who does not work,--none of these can be adepts." In other words one cannot acquire discrimination, insight and instinct without making a scientific study of the means to that end.
I gained the beginning of this knowledge by experience years before I knew anything of the way charted out in Asia. Fortunately for myself I suffered in youth from violent headaches which obliged me to consider whether there was no means of escape from facing life with such a miserable handicap. Doctors failed in finding their cause or cure and at last I resolved I would give up one food after another in hope of tracking down the offender. I did this and have never had a trace of headache from that day to this, though with as many opportunities for it as most people can boast of.
I was groping blindly for escape from bodily suffering and had not the faintest notion that this change would influence my life psychically and intellectually. It would be handsomer if I could say I had done it from the most exalted motives, but it is perhaps more impressive as showing the colorless and impassive action of law in these matters that such a very ordinary impulse should lead one into such unforeseen paths. For when I came in touch later with the wisdom of the Orient I knew that by a very little hole I had crept in through the thorny hedge that guards the ancient wisdom. It was a tiny beginning, but a beginning.
I do not say for a moment that the world of true wonders lies open before one who has so entered. Life is not like that in any of its spheres. . . . Physically, intellectually and psychically it is always a case of evolution, and