THE SUPREME ADVENTURE

The night was full of sounds, sights, odors, textures that he had never sensed before. He smelled the wild oranges from the hillsides, and the raw coffee that lay drying on the great cane mats before the native cabins. His limbs seemed lifted over the rocky ways; he loved the dim contours in the starlight, and the breath of the sea that came with the night-wind. The stars said, “Welcome,” and the hills, “All is well.”

Mother Earth was lying out in more than starlight but not asleep. She was laughing, wise, sweet in eternal youth. Always she had been dear to him, this Flesh Mother. Her storms and terrors she had shown, but never harmed him. He loved her, sea and mountain and plain God-Mother and the Kashmir border the highway ride with the lustrous lady and its sunshine the path through the wood.... What a boy and girl they had been! How he had loved her and the day how he had suffered for it!

And now Bedient knelt upon the stones, uplifted his hands to the starlight, and cried in a low voice: “God bless Beth Truba, and help me to bless her at every turning of her life! God bless Beth Truba for the sensitizing sorrow she gave me, without which this hour could not have been revealed to me!”

... He seemed to be leaping from crest to crest in an ocean of happiness.... Some glorious magnetic Presence strode beside him. The night quivered with mighty energies strange brightenings flashed before his eyes. He wanted nothing but to give.... All was clear to him. Immortality was here and now: This life but a hut upon the headland of interminable continents, yet as much a part of immortality, as the life of the star-clothed Master who blinded Saul on the road to Damascus.

What a symphony the flower, the star, the drop of rain, the rose, the child, the harvest, the voice of love, the soul of Woman, all from the Luminary, God, all His immortal symphony.

He was filled with light as a still, clear harbor at high noon gems and treasure-horns flashing in the depths. He realized God. This was a ray of God that penetrated him the spiritual essence “all science transcending.”

With joy, a sentence he had once heard returned, “Prayer is not catching God’s attention, but permitting him to hold ours!"... Faith and truth are one; Faith is the scaffolding in which the structure of Truth is builded; that which is Faith to us, is Truth to the angels.... As never before, he realized that wisdom comes from the inner light of man, and not from the comprehension of externals.... He knew now the meaning of ecstasy on the faces of the dying, and remembered with confusion and alarm that men of this day were afraid of Death!... How much more should they fear birth birth, the ordeal of the soul the putting on of flesh. Great souls put on flesh to hasten the way of their younger brothers to the Shining Tablelands. That is pure Spirit to lift the weak and show the way to those dim of sight.

Integration of spirit that is power, that is progress. Compared to this, a mere education of the mind is vain and dull a hoarding of facts, as coins are hoarded; a gathering of vanities, as clothes and adornments are gathered together. His soul cried out within him: Teach the Spirit of God. The soul who ascendeth to worship God is plain and true."... Teach the Spirit, break daily new ground of giving and devotion. Growth of Spirit that is blessedness! That is the exalted end of all suffering in the flesh. The world is good; all is good. There is no evil, but the ignorant uses of self-consciousness. Man has fallen into dark ways that belong to the awful ascent from the dim innocence of animals to the lustrous knowledge of God.

Treasure every loving impulse; the number of these is your day’s achievement thus the Voice went on. Love giving; let the throat tighten with emotion for others, and the hand go out to the stranger; love giving, but love more him who receives. Preserve humility in your blessedness. There is nothing to fear, no darkness of destiny, nothing to fear for the growing and humble spirit. Death! It is but the breaking of a rusty scabbard to loose a flashing blade!

“Oh, that I were a hundred men to die before all men to die daily!” he cried out. “But I shall live. I shall live with the poor. I shall feed them the bread of the body; and, if I may, the bread of life. I shall be brother to the poor, and they shall hear of their kingdoms.... Oh, God, help me to utter the glory of life, the sublimity of the human soul!”

And now he saw the terrible need of pity for those who wrap themselves in the softest furs, who feed upon the breasts of doves and drink the spirit of purple and golden grapes those whom the world serves, and who are so arrogant in their regality. He must not forecast the falling of such, but pity them and speak, if they would listen for their need is often greater than that of the menials who cringe before their empty greatness, blinded by their kingly trappings. The world so often betrays them at the end, strips them to nakedness and leaves them to die for they are the cripples, the sick, the blind in spirit.... Delicately he must attend the brutal and arrogant; not hate them, even when he perceives their devastation among the poor. Everywhere to give tokens of his health and power.

His love came back as in lightning, his love came back! Not the love of one that he had known that was good, inevitable, even the restless agony of it. Through the love of one, comes the love of many.... But this was love of the world! It surged over, through him like the fire of the burning bush that did not devour.... He had abstained from evil before, but held the taste for certain evils. Now the taste was gone for every fleshly thing. Wanting nothing, he could love, indeed.

How strange and wonderful! All that he had thought before, and expressed in New York, had seemed his very own the realizations of Andrew Bedient but this night his every thought, almost, had a parallel, from one or another of the great ones who had gone this high way before.... He perceived that he had been old in self-consciousness, so, that, in a way, his New York utterances were stamped with his own individuality. In this greater consciousness he was a child; its glory was beyond words. He could only echo the attempts of those whose lips had faltered with ecstasy.

If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new.

Such was Paul’s clear saying.... The difference between Andrew Bedient at this hour and the self he had been was great as that between the simple consciousness of the ox and the self-consciousness of man.

This was the borderland of Gautama’s Nirvana; this the Living Water, Jesus offered to the woman at the well; this the Holy Ghost that appeared unto the Hebrew saints and prophets Moses, Gideon, Samuel, Isaiah, Stephen; this the genius of Paul, the ecstasy of Plotinus, the paradise of Behmen, the heavenly light of St. John of the Cross; this, the Beatrice of Dante, the Gabriel of Mahomet, the Master Peter of Roger Bacon, the Seraphita of Balzac, the radiant companion of Whitman, and the I of Edward Carpenter.

The light would have killed one who had not integrated spiritual light to reflect it. The light of the Illuminati is terrible to eyes filled with evil. This was the “smile of the Universe” that Dante saw.... He, Andrew Bedient, loved infinitely and was infinitely loved. The words of a hundred saints echoed in his consciousness and out of them all came this command:

Make men to know that this which has come to you, will come to them. The few have gone before you, but the many have not ascended so far.

And now he saw the whole road of man, from the simple consciousness of animals, through human self-consciousness, to the cosmic consciousness of prophets and beyond to Divinity. Always the refinement of matter, and the attraction of light spiritual light. He saw the time when a self-conscious man was the best specimen of the human race. So for cosmic consciousness, the time would come; and as the centuries passed, the earlier would it appear in the life of the evolved.

A clear expression of what had taken place within him now appeared his own expression to make it clear for men. In the summit of self-consciousness, his mind was like a campfire in the night a few objects in a circle of red firelight and shadow. The crown of cosmic consciousness now come, was the dawn of full day upon the plain.

Full day upon the plain distances, contours, the great blooms of space; a swarm of bees, a constellation of suns; the traffic of ants among the dropped twigs of the sand, the communion of angels beyond the veils of heaven; the budding of a primrose, the resurrection of a God and all for men, when the daybreak and the shadows flee away.

He saw that this was the natal hour of the world’s soul-life, and that it would come through the giving spirit of Woman. He saw great souls pressing close to every pure, strong, feminine spirit; the first fruits of the centuries hovering close to great women of the world, praying for bodies to toil with, eager to turn from their heaven to labor for men.... And this was the shekinah of Andrew Bedient the spirit of his message.

His blood ceased to flow; he heard the flight of angels; he was bathed in Brahmic splendor until he could bear no more....

He awoke in the “ambrosia of dawn”; in that strange hush which lies upon the world before fall the floods of rosy red.... He arose, his feet stumbling with ecstasy. Light winged over the hills and afar off, he saw the roofs of the hacienda sharpen with day....

His face was like morning upon a cloud. The natives vanished before him; Falk and Leadley shrank back, wondering what manner of drink he had found in the night.