Hive mind

“ Who is it succeeds in escaping the law of the hive? The loafer, the tramp. On the other hand, who is the man we respect and envy? The man who works for the community, the public-spirited man, as we call him; the unselfish man, the man who labours for the labour’s sake and not for the profit, devoting his days and nights to learning Nature’s secrets, to acquiring knowledge useful to the race. Is he not the happiest, the man who has conquered his own sordid desires, who gives himself to the public good? The hive was founded in dark days before man knew ”

“ These few visionaries, always singing the joy of the other arcs of the cycle, somehow keep the dream alive,—the dream that appears already to be the essential blessedness and magic of life in the hive.
All mysticism seeks to teach us this single point which the bees seem to have learned so well—to transcend time and space in labour ”

“ The external world is like a flower-garden, in which each flower has its peculiar color, perfume and brightness. Your imagination is the working bee of this hive, which resounds with the humming of the senses. The will governs and directs all with perfect harmony, when peaceful order reigns in all its workings. But the moment that the will fails to discharge the duties of its office, the imagination and the senses, like bees deprived of their queen, wander hither and thither without any determined purpose, and the hive is abandoned to inaction or disorder. ”

“ How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people. ”

“ The spirit of the hive is prudent and wise, but never niggardly. In the glad summer days of sunshine and plenty it permits three or four hundred males to exist in the hive—pompous, useless, noisy creatures, who are greedy and dirty, vulgar and arrogant; but, one morning when the flowers are beginning to close earlier and open later, the spirit will quietly issue instructions that every male shall be killed. ”

“ Catch me leaving a good bar-frame Hive, with fixed foundations, for a rotten, old oak out in the open where it may rain any minute! We're all right! It's a 'Patent Guaranteed Hive.' Why do they want to turn us out? Swarming be gummed! Swarming was invented to cheat a worker out of her proper comforts. Come on off to bed!”
The noise died out as the bees settled in empty cells for the night.
“You hear?” said the Queen. “I know the Hive!”
“Quite between ourselves, I taught them that,” cried the Wax-moth. “Wait till my principles develop, and you'll see the light from a new quarter.” ”

“ Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have, I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, invironed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. ”

“ But why should the efforts of men to build a human hive have here been wiped away—here where all nature is wholesome and in seeming unison with regulated human life? The air sparkles buoyantly up to your very eyes—and 164 almost intoxicates you with its life and joy. ”

“ We have only to look back into Nature to see how persistently (without, one must suppose, any promise of future reward after death) a contrary instinct emerges from the establishment of the social bond in nest and herd and hive. ”

“ Consequently, before this sudden moment of intuitive understanding, we saw the world as through a glass darkly, with ourselves as subject and the falsely perceived exterior world as object. After this experience we see things clearly, but we perceive them for what they really are—creations of mind as devoid of genuine substance as the world we create in our dreams or the ocean's waves that we can see but cannot hold. ”

“ The Valley Road Girl, who gave us the title, and helped us to see how the New Race will become in due time the planetary hive, asked not to appear in this book. A letter this morning asks it again. She is in the stress and heat of a series of ordeals, learning what it means suddenly to be parted from friends and the centre of her work. A wise and sensitive young woman—I rather thrill over her sufferings. We don't commiserate; we congratulate, when one is called to a stretch of particularly stiff and solitary going. We know that one must be passionately worthy to take the big-calibred ordeals. ”

“ Both men being persuasive to the extreme, another wave of determined urbanites was installed in the Hive, people specially selected for their acute mental balance, plus an emotional tendency toward seclusiveness. ”

“ To this method of thinking I so far agree, that I own the mind to be insufficient, of itself, to its own entertainment, and that it naturally seeks after foreign objects, which may produce a lively sensation, and agitate the spirits. On the appearance of such an object it awakes, as it were, from a dream: The blood flows with a new tide: The heart is elevated: And the whole man acquires a vigour, which he cannot command in his solitary and calm moments. ”

“ Let us apply it to love, to hatred, to humility, to pride; none of them ever arises in the smallest degree imaginable. Let us change the object as oft as we please, provided still we choose one that has neither of these two relations. Let us repeat the experiment in all the dispositions of which the mind is susceptible. No object in the vast variety of nature will, in any disposition, produce any passion without these relations. ”

“ Mesmerism, hypnotism, the facts of the alteration, the multiplicity, and the annihilation of personality have each brought us their moments of pleasurable terror, and passed thus into the field of general interest. But science can accept no broken chains. For all the thrill of mystery, we may not forget that the hypnotic state is but highly strung attention,—at the last turn of the screw,—and that the alternation of personality is after all no more than the highest power of variability of mood. ”

“ In the hypnotic trance we can easily produce an alteration of the personality, either by telling the subject to forget all that has happened to him since such or such a date, in which case he becomes (it may be) a child again, or by telling him he is another altogether imaginary personage, in which case all facts about himself seem for the time being to lapse from out his mind, and he throws himself into the new character with a vivacity proportionate to the amount of histrionic imagination which he possesses. ”

“ Doubtless, here is one reason among many why such multitudes remain without any definite place in the religions of the land. They hang languidly about the old hive, feebly humming now and then, but feeling no impulse to swarm, and finding no queen-spirit 107to lead them to another home where they might build their proper cells and make their own honey. ”

“ The beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey, it will yield us bees. ”

“ The uncertainty of human events displayed in many surprizing turns of fortune, which befel Natura, on his endeavouring to settle himself in the world: with some proofs of the necessity of fortitude, as it may happen that actions, excited by the greatest virtue, may prove the source of evil, both to ourselves and others, Page 108.
CHAP. IV.
The power of fear over a mind, weak either by nature, or infirmities of body: The danger of its leading to despair, is shewn by the condition Natura was reduced to by the importunities of priests of different perswasions. ”

“ When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I call reason no longer with him. ”

“ If, seeing the parts of a house scattered over a field by a storm, we should confound a sleeper with a rafter, we should take it from its proper place and take away its meaning as a part of the building. All of our knowledge is of relations and not of sensations, as Hume taught. Sensations set the mind to classifying and comparing, and the knowledge it comes to is of relations. Take the sensations the mind has when a red object is presented to the eye. ”

“ Not a breath of air in the vastness of the room, no sound, no blaze of light--only the pale glimmer of the candles hollowing out a gulf of luminous light in the sombre blackness of the brooding night.
"Oh God who art all powerful and just, let not the soul of this man suffer for the sins of his life, for the mind which should have ruled the soul was a wreck and incapable of so ruling." ”

“ Here, then, we have something like a clue to the phenomena—phenomena which, as I have pointed out, are similar to and have much in common with mesmeric sleep, hypnotism or electro-biology. We have already, I hope, succeeded in eliminating from our minds the false theory—the theory, that is to say, experimentally proved to be false—that the will, or the gestures, or the magnetic or vital fluid of the operator are necessary for the abolition of the consciousness and the abeyance of the will of the subject. ”

“ The entrance of the moth into a hive, and the ravages committed by her progeny, forcibly remind one of the sad havoc which sin often makes of character and happiness, when it finds admission into the human heart, and is allowed to prey unchecked, upon all its most precious treasures ”

“ But the experiments of hypnotism go further than this, and show the existence in the subjective mind of powers far transcending any exercised by the objective mind through the medium of the physical senses; powers of thought-reading, of thought-transference, of clairvoyance, and the like, all of which are frequently manifested when the patient is brought into the higher mesmeric state; and we have thus experimental proof of the existence in ourselves of transcendental faculties the full development and conscious control of which would place us in a perfectly new sphere of life. ”

“ Mind-reading is a proven fact, as is hypnotism. Subjects in the hands of a hypnotist will imagine themselves Napoleon, Washington, or any individual suggested, and assume the character and carriage of such individuals, talking, reasoning, and affirming in harmony with the character assumed.
“Why then should we attribute everything of this kind seen at a spirit seance to spirits?”
“Professor Russell is clairvoyant,” said Lissa.
“But clairvoyancy, or psychic force, is not spiritism, and those mediums are either self-deceived or deceive their audiences by their legerdemain. ”

“ The friend passes on the news in similar fashion, and the intelligence soon traverses the whole hive. If it is of an agreeable kind—if, for instance, it concerns the discovery of a store of sugar or of honey, or of a flowering meadow—all remains orderly. But, on the other hand, great excitement arises if the news presages some threatened danger, or if strange animals are threatening invasion of the hive. It seems that such intelligence is conveyed first to the queen, as the most important person in the state. ”

“ Meats had sinned against the hive: this infernal hive, herd, pack, swarm, whichever word expressed what he felt to be the degradation of an interdependent existence. Mankind was become a great complication of machinery fed by gold and directed by fear. ”

“ If, therefore, you permit your mind to be uncultivated and boorish but cherish your body and take thought for it alone, don’t you transfer yourself from the human, into the brute, condition? But let us return to the topic on which we began to speak, for this digression, if I gave way to it, would lead us a 225long way from our purpose. If thou, therefore, yieldest place, and uncoverest thy head, for what do others take you? ”

“ Control the mind, cut off the senses, then you are a Yogi; after that, all the rest will come. Refuse to hear, to see, to smell, to taste; take away the mental power from the external organs. You continually do it unconsciously as when your mind is absorbed; so you can learn to do it consciously. The mind can put the senses where it pleases. Get rid of the fundamental superstition that we are obliged to act through the body. ”

“ Sustained by that inner conviction, he had somehow adapted himself to the strangeness of a life empty of her physical presence. The human being, in a world of pain, like the insect in a world of danger, lives mainly by that same ceaseless, unconscious miracle of adaptation. Dearly though he craved a sight of his father and Christine, he had not asked for leave home. ”

“ One, which we shall have to treat at large in writing of Hume, affects to dispose of both the outward and the inward synthesis—both of the unity of feelings in a subject matter and of their unity in a subject mind—as ‘fictions of thought.’ This method at once suggests the vital question whether a mind which thus invents has been effectively suppressed—whether, indeed, the theory can be so much as stated without a covert assumption of that which it claims to have destroyed. ”