The Way of Power | Page 9

the deceptive Looking Glass of our senses and with
half-dazed eyes brought back word of the strange conditions beyond.
They are very strange because in the world of reality the values are not
ours, our great things are small, our small things great and all our logic
baffled. But the pioneer need not necessarily be unbalanced. Take an
historical example of what is probably the greatest pioneering fact in
the history of psychics; the one 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