Will Levington Comfort

“ There are seven centres of ecstasy in the body. Through the mastery of will and love and action, the life-force is lifted to dwell with and awaken these centres. With each awakening, a new power comes—a new joy—a new hill-range crossed toward the Father's House; with each awakening, the beloved within is quickened in consciousness, and the beloved without is held more dear. The wondrous story of regeneration goes on and on, to the love that seeks to give itself utterly. To love—that is all the Soul asks. ”

“ In fact, we cannot belong to ourselves; we must work upon ourselves until we are big enough to cast body mind and soul in the heart of another, without fear. Separateness—the pitiful sense of self, has long been the prime illusion of the world, the cause of all lust, wars and torments. Those who are not great enough lovers to surrender all to their love find pain and disparity throughout. They have yet to learn that all that belongs to the self-willed, only half belongs, for it has not been given its freedom.
In loves such as the New Age is bringing in, true creativeness is touched. ”

“ The new race will stay high all through partings; then they cannot last long—for there is nothing to stay away for. When pain leaves, then all will be ready for the road and the great comrads, horses and the road of greatness. It is all ahead. In the great future—all ahead—my comrads—all comrads—the world will be all comrads!
All our days, as tellers of tales, we try to tell, not stories, so much, as what Romance means to us. The very glory of life is that there are no two pictures the same.... To me, Romance means not to stay! ”

“ Thousands of people now living have risen, for short periods at least, above the sense of separateness, in which they realised that the finest and most exalted love a man may have is for "the great orphan, Humanity."
The human heart is awakened through the love of one, to the more spacious expression for the world. All life is a learning how to love. The last love of the flesh and the rolling years, before man turns his love from flesh to spirit, is the grand passion of man and woman, yet man does not abandon the woman in turning to Humanity or to the Unseen. ”

“ There is always wrecking work, before a new and wider circle is entered upon. The time will come when men and women shall learn that the magic of going apart is equal to the magic of coming together. In all birth-times, in all transitions, the consciousness of the bearer is changed—often queerly.... One can endure the primitive and the child in the other's mind; one might adore the great play of passion, and all the art of it; one might never weary of fragrance of throat, or magnetism of hand, the inimitable plays and child things—but the mind is forever the slayer of the real.... ”

“ Education will mean first of all a turning for power to the Unseen. The quest of the Swan and the Star and the Beloved, are never carried along on the levels and inequalities of the earth—always the uplifted face for the saint and the sage and the seer. Great parents kneel beside their children and beg to be delivered from the heaviness which holds them to the dim shadows, where the child sees face to face. Education will mean finding his intrinsic task for the child—the intensive cultivation of the human spirit from the Soul outward, not alone from the brain inward. ”

“ You cannot teach the New Age religion of the world's kind. It has its own. No dry as dust sage will do. A snort will answer your sanctimoniousness; flexible science will reply to the abysses of your logic.... You must be the consummate artist if never before in your life, to teach the beauty of the soul to youth. The young workers of the new social order will never bring forth their great harvests from your reflected light. You must be spontaneous—you must flood them with pure solar gold; you must show them by your life and your work, how you come and go into the Unseen. ”

“ Against them, tall, selfish, unafraid, stand the poplar trees. The great Mother of the dusk is singing, the God in Nature is singing, and Nature's belongings, all of them, sing in this magical moment. One feels it all in one's self, feels the glory, the romance, the very core-life of the Universe. The matings too, taking place in the grass and air; the matings of the two streams, the two grains of sand; the matings of butterflies, birds and bees. It all flows through one's body like music and honey and sunshine.... ”

“ His wandering days are over—no more quest. The houses rise to his eyes like one long, bleak, uncrested wave from the Arctic Sea.... He means old days, but we—we must never grow old; we must live and ever be full of creation as the cloud is full of lightning. We must, old pal, ride the deserts, drift over seas; we must spill our work as we go, as night spills its stars from a casket. Fill me up with the Pacific in your letters—the big sunlight—the colour of the mountains where they dip and rise to clouds. ”

“ More and more we succeed in turning our love to what we still call the Unseen from old habit. The very love that you turn to the Master builds the path by which he comes to you. He can only appear in your own thought-form....
It comes to us so often that we make our own heavens. So many forget that we require beauty as well as goodness and truth. Not sages alone, not saints alone—but artists, workmen and players in beauty, as well as in love and wisdom. The Master will come to you in your own thought-form; your heaven will fill your own conception. ”

“ Paula Mantone was a kind of white silence. You had to listen keenly for her step and give your attention to her voice. She was utterly feminine—malleable like gold. Even to me, she was the meaning of love. I had no thought of her being my woman, and yet she seemed spiritually to contain some sister who would answer for me. Soldiers worshipped her. I think each saw his own in her presence. It was the finished magic of the Trojan Helen again—every man's desire, as gold contains potentially all the metals, and the rose the essence of all the flowers.... ”

“ They are all our boys! Some are waiting the call to go—but there or here, we are pulling together for the real Fatherland, for the adequite fraternity, under the endless and thrilling magic of the word Equality.
... I can say no more splendid word to you than My Equal: I know of no greater adventure than to become one of the Many. It is true that you and I—the best of us, the Immortal within us each, are of one house—that this is but a far outpost of the journey, Egypt if you like, the husks if you like—but that we have arisen and are on our way home to the Father's House. ”

“ And I thought of the Blessed Damosel leaning over the barrier of heaven with sweet and immortal messages for him who waited below in the very core of earth's agony. In passing, the great lovewomen bridge the Unseen for their lovers, who in their turn give to the world the mighty documents of the human heart. In passing, this woman had become everything to Dreve, so that I, a stranger, felt that he was not alone but twice-powered. All his life was a prayer to her. He brought to her spirit now the greatest gift that man can bring to his mate—the love of the world through her heart. ”

“ There are all kinds of love. The simple man loves simply—himself, his woman, his children and his animals. The love of the cosmic consciousness breaks forth in a deluge upon the race, because it comprehends and includes all beneath. This great outpouring is formed of earth, air, water, fire, sunlight and all winds, all facts, all experiences, all arts, light of the moon and stars and all glowing things under the sun, all sounds and scents and pictures, all ardours, and sympathies and tolerances. ”

“ Rather, hand in hand, the eyes of the man and woman are uplifted to one star—the Apex of a Triangle perfected.... Yet one must not turn to the Unseen until he has learned the full agony and ecstasy of the seen.
"Love humanity by all means," I tell younger ones, "but learn what love means first. Do not undertake to destroy passion until you have learned its glory and madness. Rather lift passion to adoration, and use it, full-powered, upon that which unfolds forever for your worship. It is not well to kill out a personality until you get one." ”

“ As to the liberty of its loves—the New Race realises that one cannot be held, except by vulgar hands, where that one does not want to stay. A mated man and woman turn each other absolutely free, and the first cry of their liberty is toward one immortal nest. Those firmly caught in the pure dream are content to wait for each other. They do not experiment. They realise the long road of romance—a road so long that the three-score and ten is but a caravansary of the night. They build above the flesh if for no other reason than to come into the greater beauty of the flesh. ”

“ Thus we heal from the infinite tears of the changes of matter and dissolution, and lift our love to the Masters and the Immortal Gods. We dare love utterly only that which can contain us. If the Masters loved us with all their power, we would fall in the madness of too much light.... Always, they give us all the love that we can endure.... We give our all to them and expand daily, until we know the passion to break ourselves open in ecstasy, like the king bee under the whirring wings of the queen. ”

“ How could one hold a mad destroying passion for one in whom the parent child and master are equally dominant? Always the spirit of tenderness is there like an unseen third. Thus passion has become compassion, and the earth love is seen truly for the first time partaking of the nature of the infinite love which holds the universe together. This is the source of calm, of will-lessness.
The elder generation, judging all things from the standpoint of the self will, is dumbfounded. Such iron repression among children is beyond its imagination. ”

“ The world was never managed from a senate chamber; the cosmos is not guided by a king. When rulers of the past have become great figures, that greatness usually rested upon their gift of poetry, their love of art or wisdom, or some religious quality.
Poems of twenty words have outlived the might of forty wars. A great book is a higher achievement than a sweeping political move. The dullest changeling with an obsession may set his seal upon a war to the death of ten million men, but in the few lines of a true poem are stored the honey of millenniums of human life. ”

“ I looked at the little body of him, at the innocence of the eyes and mouth, all untouched by the world—so pure and yet crying out in pain because he had taken so long on the quest.... His eighth year brought Tom into regular boyhood. The young brain, always before silently giving way to intuition, began to speak for itself. This stage is as important perhaps, but not so beautiful as when the hushedness and glowing of the Unseen touches a child. Here we turned from Tom, and the things that creep into the heart of almost every boy of the same age, crept into Tom's heart. ”

“ These are the days of humanity's passion and pilgrimage. The soul of humanity is passing along the dusty roads of Palestine, for the healing of its own weaknesses, the casting out of its own demons. One who is not carrying a part of the world burdens now, as well as his personal pack, seems forgotten of the gods. It has come to many of us that we dare not take more than a glimpse of our own allotted happiness—that we may not have more than a touch of the beloved's hand in these days of parturition everywhere. ”

“ Lovers of the New Race seem to have learned the agony of trying to find all in each other, of trying to find the universe eye to eye. They realise at once that man and woman are but the two earth points of a triangle; that they safely may rear their passions and their transfigurations only to the pure point of union above....
A man has found something when he cries "Eureka!" He loves something, when he pours out his heart to it. The first great struggle of the real workman is to find a form that contains him—a form of expression that will not maim his dream. ”

“ It signifies the spirit of the young men and women who have already begun with gladness and fire to clear the débris for the building of the New Age.
They will begin with the soil; they will know and love their own hard part. They will begin with the grass, with the rice, with the millet and the wheat, the clean things, the simple and holy things that the peasants love, with the songs that the peasants sing, the songs of the soil and the rivers and snows—to build upon them the new [55] heaven and the new earth.... Above all, there's a laugh in the word—the laugh of youth and power. ”

“ No matter what science says to the contrary, the quest for the Absolute means the same thing; this is the marriage at Cana, the turning of water into wine; this is the passion of the ancient alchemists, to transmute base metals into gold; this is healing; this is regeneration.
To make joy out of pain is still more: it is power for world's work; it is the light that one carries among men; it is the fire that makes man remembered by his fellows, that makes man significant in any task. It is loss of the sense of self; the death of the lower for the birth of the higher life ”

“ You can never be the great lover of America by hating the rest of the world; no human mind can see what is best, what is even good for America, when the interests of other countries are forgotten. No man's country ever suffered because he turned his love and service to the feet of humanity.
The few who brought the real American impartiality to the European war in the first months, found themselves in the midst of the most challenging chaos that ever reared its head to the light. ”