Remembering who we are laarkmaa s guidance on healing the human condition pia orleane - Instantly ac
Remembering Who We Are
Visit to download the full and correct content document: https://textbookfull.com/product/remembering-who-we-are-laarkmaa-s-guidance-on-h ealing-the-human-condition-pia-orleane/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant download maybe you interests ...
Pleiadian Earth Energy Astrology Charting the Spirals of Consciousness Pia Orleane
Published by: Onewater Press 369 Montezuma Avenue Suite 525
Santa Fe, NM 87501
Order books through booksellers, or through Onewater Press at www.laarkmaa.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express permission in writing from the authors. It may not be transmitted or otherwise be copied for private or public use without prior written permission of the publisher, other than for fair use as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews.
The information contained in this book is intended to educate, delight, and expand your understanding. It is not intended to diagnose or treat any medical condition, nor is it intended as medical advice. If you have concerns about your health, please consult with a healthcare professional.
The intent of the authors is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for spiritual, emotional, and physical well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, the authors and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions. Please use your own common sense.
Cover and book design by Chris Molé
Author photos by Judith Pavlik
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013907182
E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-9967835-6-9
Second Edition
Dedicated to all who have enough love and courage to make the necessary changes for human evolution.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
1ENERGY
Everything is Energy
The Energy of Instinct
The Energy of Speech
The Energies of Nature and Technology
2THE SPLIT OF DUALITY
The Conflict of Opposites
Symptoms of Duality
The Split Between Heart and Mind Incorporating Duality into Unity Moving Towards Androgyny
3ASPECTS OF THE THIRD DIMENSION
Overview of Your World
The Mental Aspects of Time and Dimension
The Mental Aspects of Belief and Judgment
Competition or Cooperation?
The Emotional Aspects
The Physical Aspects
Sexuality
The Physical-Etheric Relationship
Moving Light
4 FOUNDATION
The Elements of Foundation
Water
Air
Fire
Earth
A New Foundation
Manifestation
5TOOLS FOR CHANGE
Overview
Restoring Emotional Balance
Using Colors to Balance Emotions
Working With Pain
Increasing Your Will Power
The Importance of Laughter
Asking and Receiving
Laarkmaa’s Heart Meditation
6PURPOSE
Life Purpose
The Purpose of Relationship
7THE SEVEN COMPONENTS OF HEALING
What Is Necessary for Healing?
Energy
Movement
Water
Light
Sound
Nature
Liquid Time
8 THE RAINBOW OF HEALING ESSENCES
The Rainbow Body A Rainbow of Energies
9ACHIEVING HARMONY
The Three Necessary Elements of Harmony
Transparency
Androgyny
Community
10THE TEN CHOICES
Guidelines for Living
The Ten Commandments
The Noble Eightfold Path to Wisdom
The Ten Choices
Our Choices for Evolution
A FINAL NOTE FROM LAARKMAA
AFTERWORD ~ BAD TRAINING
AFTERTHOUGHT
WHAT IS A PERSONAL SYNCHRONIZATION?
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
FOREWORD
This unusual and important book is a creative manifestation stemming from a remarkable collaboration: between a collective of loving and beneficent, interstellar beings known as Laarkmaa, and two humans—a devoted couple, Pia Smith Orleane and Cullen Baird Smith—who are emissaries of Laarkmaa’s wise counsel and the profoundly loving energy frequencies that they bring to share with us here on Earth. Through Pia and Cullen, this book is a bridge between the Pleiadians, who have achieved living in oneness as an entire society, and our human race, our global collective in which we all experience the crippling effects of separation—the belief that we are separate from one another and from our original divine Source. This belief in separation, and the energetic consequences of our behaviors that result from our belief, leaves us feeling stuck and powerless, suffering through all manner of fear and doubt, anger and judgment, victim-consciousness, disease, and the experience of lack.
Laarkmaa has brought forth this book to assist us to heal every one of these conditions, and to show us how we may create for ourselves, individually and collectively, an ongoing and sustained state of loving embrace, compassion, trust, joy, and peace. Their only “agenda” is to help us open to more love, so that we may heal ourselves and the planet, fully transcending all suffering and fear, and join them in oneness. This is nothing less than healing the human condition. From the most dedicated lightworkers—or as Laarkmaa says, “light movers”—to those just awakening on their
spiritual pathways, and for all who are interested in opening their hearts to greater love and healing, this deeply valuable guidance will be welcome, indeed.
Laarkmaa says this book is about health—yet with that one word, they encompass a cornucopia of meaning and opportunity. The health they envision for us involves all aspects of our beings— physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual; healing the whole of ourselves, as we remember more and more of Who We Are.
Laarkmaa emphasizes the energetic foundation of all things, and because, they tell us, everything is energy, they encourage us to greater awareness of the nature of energy in our own bodies and beings. Beyond the common understanding of spiritual healing, for instance, they teach us that much of what we ingest does damage to our spiritual beings—not only harmful food and drink, but also the disharmonious energies we take into our beings through competitive cultural practices, our fear-based nightly news, violent movies, and much more. We are harmed as well by the toxic energies of our own unrestrained and unconscious negative thinking. These disruptive, unaligned energies actually rip and tear our etheric bodies, causing damage to our etheric blueprints, which is then translated into physical disease and aging for us personally.
In addition, because we are a part of All That Is, Laarkmaa tells us that everything we think, feel, say, do, and experience within ourselves affects everyone, everywhere. In order, then, to heal ourselves and the planet, and to participate responsibly in our interstellar relationships, we must change our behaviors; in order to change our behaviors, we must understand the emotional issues that underlie our choices.
This book is deeply about choice. In clear and simple language yet with profound wisdom, Laarkmaa shows us how every moment of our daily life is ripe with opportunities to break free of our behavioral patterns and to choose to create the change required for us to transcend our current levels of limitation. Laarkmaa asks us to engage our hearts fully in our lives, in every choice. They ask us to stretch ourselves, embracing responsibility for change, both in our individual lives and for the evolution of humanity, and also
expanding into conscious participation with the evolution of Earth Herself.
A vastly important area of choice and change for each of us relates to our emotional patterning and habitual reactions. Laarkmaa offers rich new insight on behavioral patterns, through detailed descriptions of how our individual habits of self-judgment and emotional reaction, and our ingrained collective, cultural beliefs, become so established within us. Working deeply to uncover and resolve our hidden, subconscious beliefs that fuel our emotional reactions is essential to healing. Laarkmaa calls this shadow work , and invites us to courageous emotional honesty so that we may learn to create consciously rather than by default, through unconscious thoughts and behaviors.
From their loving Pleiadian perspective, Laarkmaa provides us a comprehensive overview of the aspects of living in the third dimension, with new understandings of the challenges of duality, including the split between the heart and the mind. They show us how to unify and create harmony from opposite polarities, so that, at the deepest levels, we may move beyond our current focus on differences, toward honoring what we share in oneness. In this way, we learn to transform our beliefs from the old paradigms and to release judgment, which are crucial choices for spiritual evolution as well as for healing on all levels within ourselves. Expanding their commentary on our experience in third dimension, Laarkmaa also discusses the mental aspects of time and dimension; the physical aspects of being, including our sexuality; the physical-etheric relationship; and moving light.
One of the beauties of this book is that Laarkmaa shares with us not dry, theoretical concepts, but dynamic, living wisdom and practical approaches to change that enhance our ability to live our lives in beauty, grace, love, truth, and joy. They give us “tools for change,” practical and effective ways to applydeeper understanding in our lives. These useful tools and understandings are expressed simply and in multiple repetitions that assist us to grasp the meaning of what Laarkmaa wishes to convey.
Laarkmaa guides us in how to restore our own emotional balance, in part through their exciting interpretations and exercises using the frequencies and healing qualities of colors and numbers. Throughout the book, they offer new information from various points of view, not only broadening our perspective of the energetic and symbolic significance of colors and numbers individually, but also showing us how to use colors and number frequencies together, merging and blending the energies to enhance our healing process.
Laarkmaa teaches us how to work with pain and how to increase our will power; they address our life purpose, and share with us a wonderful Heart Meditation. Having helped us understand how we have become so unbalanced and diseased, they teach us to use the Elements of Foundation, the Seven Components of Healing, and a Rainbow of Healing Essences, so that we may transform ourselves into the whole and healthy beings we are meant to be.
With penetrating insight, Laarkmaa offers new thinking to expand our concepts of community and living in transparency, and to illustrate the influence of technology and competition in our individual lives and in our collective experience of reality Laarkmaa asks us to widen our limited perspective of androgyny, showing us the importance of fully integrating within ourselves the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine energies and attributes that are a natural part of who we are.
At Laarkmaa’s request, Pia and Cullen have written the tenth chapter. From a Pleiadian-human perspective, these two dedicated and loving “light movers” have created a novel and insightful interpretation of two sets of religious guidelines for living: the Christian tradition’s Ten Commandments and the Buddhist tradition’s Noble Eightfold Path to Wisdom. Expanding beyond that, in a potent summation bringing together the power of intention and the activation of will in service to love and oneness, Pia and Cullen have created a Pleiadian-inspired set of guidelines for conscious living, The Ten Choices, as a reminder of the significance of our own choices in creating the change we wish to see in our lives and on our planet. These are inspiring choices for responsible living in spiritual
maturity, contributing consciously to the well-being of the whole of life.
If it brings your heart joy to imagine a world of cooperation, harmony, and peace, with love, trust, compassion, and joy as constant companions in your feeling states; if it excites you to imagine knowingyourself to be absolutely free and utterly safe, then this book will touch your heart and inspire you to the transformations that each of us must actively choose in order to bring forth this magnificent new reality.
As we sow the seeds of conscious choice for change, we are together creating a harvest of resurrection and joy for all to share. As we approach the whole of our lives as sacred, loving and nurturing ourselves and all things in creation as a part of divine Source; as we do our inner work to resolve our shadows and reclaim our inherent perfection as a part of Source; as we honor ourselves as powerful creators and take responsibility for what we choose to create, we are then resurrecting ourselves, guided by our own heart’s truth and creating our Rainbow bodies of complete unification, wholeness and ascension.
With integrity, grace and generosity of heart, and with enormous love for all of us, Laarkmaa gives us the keys to our own freedom and shares guidance for aligning with universal truth. It is time to step into planetary and even galactic responsibility—and it all begins within each one of us, in every choice we make. Then together, in powerful amplification of what we are creating individually, we may weave threads of conscious intention and loving choice to create a beautiful tapestry of manifested reality, focused through love, that will carry us into the new Earth, as we remember Who We Are; as we heal ourselves and the whole of humanity; and as we finally return in conscious awareness to the our divine origins, in love and oneness with All That Is.
For several years now, people who are interested in human evolution have been asking for Laarkmaa’s next book. Who is Laarkmaa? They are a loving group of Pleiadians, dedicated to guiding humanity, who describe themselves as “one of six and six of one.” Our ability to think of them as a constellation of individual personalities unified within one group can help us to understand how we ourselves are moving away from individuality and into a shared unity. In our first book, Conversations With Laarkmaa, A PleiadianViewoftheNewReality, we told the story of how and why Laarkmaa came to us.
We may be evolving as a species, yet we still have many places where we are blind to our habitual belief systems and patterns of behavior. In fact, these belief systems and habitual patterns are so ingrained that we sometimes cannot find our way out of them. Laarkmaa tells us that if we want to evolve to our fullest potential, if we wish to be healthy, and if we want to experience lives of joy and abundance, we must simply remember Who We Are. Once we remember, everything is possible.
You will probably not discover anything in this book that is completely new. In fact, you may find yourself saying, “I knew that!” We hope that what you find here will feel very familiar and ring true to you. Laarkmaa says that all wisdom is already in our hearts, so every aspect of the truth they share here can be verified through the resonance you feel in your own hearts. The point of this book, according to Laarkmaa, is to help us to remember in order for us to
heal ourselves from the illusions that keep us sick, scared, and separate.
The concepts Laarkmaa presents require few words to explain. Yet they have given us a plethora of words, weaving concepts together from various positions and perspectives in order to be sure we understand. You will find certain themes reappearing over and over again in various chapters. Laarkmaa repeats their wisdom in multiple ways in order for us to integrate their information and to implement the changes we need to make. The concepts will spiral around and around, raising our awareness to new levels and opening us to the possibilities for healing ourselves and our planet. Laarkmaa’s words help us to see beyond our limited perspectives.
These messages have been given to humanity by interstellar beings who do not speak as we do. They communicate through tones, heart to heart, merging with us (Cullen and Pia) to place their messages first into our hearts, and then using what they call “the libraries of our brains” to find words that match their message and express the heart-wisdom they are here to share. They communicate in a way that brings their information to us around and around in spirals that are often repetitive; through the repetitions they remind us that our evolution is also a spiraling process. Each word is imbued with the energy of Laarkmaa’s love. As we have edited this work, we have done our best to keep the purity of the message, yet to transform it into a linear flow that we hope is easy to follow. Because Laarkmaa speaks in spirals, and we humans read in a linear fashion, this has been an arduous process. It has been our heartfelt intention to present these valuable messages in a flow that is clear and easily readable, so that everyone may benefit. We ask you to bear with the repetitions in the book, because Laarkmaa feels they are important.
This book is lovingly offered by our Pleiadian friends to help us remember Who We Are. We no longer need to suffer under the illusions that have caused us fear and separation. We no longer need to judge or compete with one another. When we drop the belief systems that support old paradigms, we open the way to create a world of beauty, love, trust, joy, compassion, and abundance.
Contained within these pages are new ways of thinking, but more importantly, you will find guidelines here on how, through our hearts, we can feel our way towards the truth of Who We Are and who we always have been. We are here in human form with one purpose: to love each other and the world. Laarkmaa tells us that we can distill that purpose into two words that will guide us: BE LOVE.
With these two words in our hearts, we present to you Laarkmaa’s guidance on healing the human condition.
PiaOrleane
LAARKMAA’S INTRODUCTION: REMEMBERING
The focus of this book is to help humans understand how you may evolve into a state of continual health. By focusing on health, you focus on the evolution of humanity through reclaiming your own divinity: you are beings of love. You carry light and love within you, yet you have forgotten that. We share these words with you in order to help you remember Who You Are.
You have within you the strongest force in the universe, the power of love. Yet so often, you allow another force (fear) to govern your thoughts, your actions, and the beliefs you build through your experiences. Within these pages, we will convey to you a pathway that supports your stepping outside of your fears and healing all of your dis-ease. We will show you how to love your shadows until they are dissolved. As you learn the many aspects and elements of love and light that we will share, you will begin to understand that you have a choice, and that you can create healthier, more abundant lives by making that choice.
Currently, humans have a very third-dimensional way of looking at health; you compartmentalize symptoms and pathologized problems rather than looking at the root cause of dis-ease. We have a more universal view, and in our view, health is much simpler than that. Health comes from love. In fact, health islove. Dis-ease comes from fear. In fact, disease is fear. You have not had health explained to
you in this fashion before. The only thing necessary for you to heal is for you to remember Who You Are, for when you remember Who You Are, you can heal all that you are not. You have forgotten that you are divine parts of Source and that you have the power to cocreate total health. To heal, you must remember Who You Are: beings who come from divine love.
There are only two forces in the universe: love and fear. You know this; you have just forgotten. Humans are not aware that all of the complications that make up your lives can be pared down to only these two forces: love and fear. Everything you think, feel, and do comes from and is connected to one of these two elements. One of these forces (love) promotes your health, your abundance, and your total well-being. The other force (fear) causes you dis-ease. One of these forces (fear) traps you in third-dimensional pain and separation. The other force (love) dissolves all fear and frees you to remember your true essence. All of the fears and manifestations of fear that are characterized as anger, grief, greed, jealousy, judgment, frustration, war, etc., are locked within the cells of your body and have kept you in dis-eased states because of the separation these fears have created. We, Laarkmaa, differentiate between emotions (which all stem from fear) and your natural higher vibratory feeling states, which are love, trust, joy, and compassion.
When humans live in love rather than in fear, your bodies do not have to deal with toxic overloads or traumas and issues that have arisen out of karmic choices made through fear, the erroneous choices you made in blind efforts to keep yourselves safe. We are here to share with you that safety and health exist within your own hearts. It is when you allow the presence of fear and all that fear can manifest through your emotions that dis-ease begins.
If you are thinking or acting through unconditional love without any agenda, you are using the greatest force in the universe: true love. If you are thinking or acting with concern, worry, grief, frustration, anger, disappointment, or any of the myriad emotions that often shape the course and direction of human lives, you are acting out of fear. Fear is the ultimate cause of all discomfort within
the human species. You get stuck in your belief systems and confused about what makes you feel safe or what makes you feel “OK.” The only things required for any human to be OK are to accept the truth that you are loveable and to give love continually to everyone you meet and every situation that comes to you. This energy is then reflected back to you, reinforcing the fact that you are loveable. You are designed so that the divine light within each of you may reflect back and forth to one another continually; the constant reflection of love is the true state of ultimate health.
Another word for fear is dis-ease, for fear is nothing other than being “out of ease” with Who You Are. Through fear (or dis-ease), you step away from your divinity, not understanding the divine power that each human carries as part of Source. Each of you is a co-creator, yet humanity at this time sleeps, unaware of your cocreative abilities. You have forgotten your power, and you allow yourselves to be ruled by the many fears that masquerade as misunderstandings and false beliefs. The only true fear, which is the root of all emotions, is the fear of not being loved or not being able to love. That fear comes from the sleep of forgetfulness. You have forgotten that not only can you love and be loved, you are love. Dear Ones, the future humans that you are re-remembering yourselves into being are love . When you experience yourselves as love, and you live your lives through that experience, you are in harmony. You are then operating under the universal principle of the highest power in the universe: love. If you are not operating from that principle, then you are operating out of fear. Acting from fear causes you to move into states of dis-ease. Your physical, mental, and emotional systems alert you that something is out of balance by showing you continual dis-ease. We tell you again, what you call disease (dis-ease) is nothing more than being out of harmony.
Humans need to learn how to dwell consistently in the frequency of love so that you do not misuse your valuable energy or jeopardize your vibratory connections with your etheric selves through vibrating at lower, denser levels that are full of fear. You need to practice moving past any type of fear, directly into the energy of love. A continual return to the state of love provides a higher vibration that
allows your etheric bodies to reflect wholeness to your physical bodies, thereby supporting complete health. We will discuss more about this throughout this book.
The purpose of this book is to give you a broader perspective of the aspects and elements of fear and love and to help you remember Who You Are. The concepts are simple, so they do not require very many words to explain, but we will repeat them throughout the book many times for your integration. Putting the concepts into practice is your work, and we trust that you will find joy in doing so. We will speak about the Split of Duality that has caused you to allow fear into your lives, and how that split causes conflict. We will explain to you how the third-dimensional mental, emotional, and physical aspects keep you constricted, and we will talk about your life’s purpose. We will share with you a rainbow of healing essences, give you a description of the seven components of healing, and help you to create a new foundation for Who You Are becoming. We will tell you how to bring harmony to your world and create more functional and peaceful communities. We have even ordered the chapters to correspond with the energy that mathematically matches what we present. We will include answers to some of your most frequently asked questions in what we share, for so many of you struggle with the same issues. We trust that our perspective will help you move beyond your challenges into a more joyful and connective existence. As we speak to you throughout this book, we will show you how to begin your healing. Healing the human condition is about simply forgetting all that you have believed and remembering the truth of Who You Are. We wish to help you to remember allthat you have forgotten. We love you, and we are here to help.
The first step to remembering is to understand what unity is. The illusions of duality have caused you to forget the principles of unity and to believe that you are separate. In unity, everything is connected. This means that even the two forces, love and fear, are connected in unity. How you relate to these forces and work with them depends upon your perceptions and misperceptions about the power they carry. To comprehend the powers of each, you must understand that both love and fear are forms of energy.
Everything is energy. Everything. You need to understand how energy manifests into form and how to work with all energy in order to be actively involved in co-creation. In your third-dimensional reality, your physical form is the densest manifestation of all energy. Energy goes through a specific process, which you desperately need to understand, in order to come into a physical form. This process begins with energy as intention. Humanity is confused about how intentions are manifested into physical form. You believe that intentions originate in the mind and are then sent into the universe to come into form. Actually, to manifest into form, an intention needs to be directed by your will, channeled through your heart, and then sent to the brain for activation and distribution. Intentions come from the connection between the light of Source and your light, where they meet at your will center (in your physical solar plexus area). As you use your will to focus your intentions, you are able to send the energy of manifestation upwards into your hearts, where you can experience further connection.
Currently in most humans, a block exists between your will centers and your hearts, so intentions bypass the heart and go directly to the mind, where your thought energy often becomes chaotic, without the guidance of will. The mind alone is not a vehicle for creation. Thoughts that originate without the heart’s guidance are disconnected from Source. When this happens, which is the way
most of humanity thinks, the energy of thought is utilized in confused and disconnected ways, manifesting through mental thoughts that are fueled by the emotions, beliefs, and attachments to past and future experiences. This chaotic presentation of thought energy, fired freely without any guidance, direction, or regulation from your will center (your source of light), or any connection to the wisdom of love in your hearts, causes you to co-create a chaotic physicality. Collectively, humanity has agreed to this manner of manifestation, which is why you have such similar and strong beliefs about what is “real.” You have agreed to create it in this way, and you have forgotten that chaotic thoughts powered by misunderstood emotions create a random and chaotic world. You need a clearer understanding of energy and how energy manifests through the application of will and the proper channeling of intentions.
Your physical forms, of course, reflect the sequential actions of how you channel your thoughts. Both what you take in from the collective energies around you and what you generate from the energy of your own thoughts and emotions contributes to the creation of your physical forms, individually and collectively. Creation of health moves from energy in the form of intention, channeled through the will, to the heart, to the mind, and then into physical form. Creation of dis-ease occurs when you move energy in a chaotic and disconnected pattern through your minds without the participation of your hearts or will. Emotions alert you to the fact that you are suffering under illusions of separation and misalignment from the universal energy of unity. Many of you are now experiencing a re-connective process where you are realigning your hearts and minds through the use of your will, disconnecting old patterns in order to step away from the illusions of dis-ease and return to a state of ultimate health. We wish to help you in this process.
Your physical forms are going through purification as you experience places of disharmony in order to return to a state of balance and connection to Source. The secret for success in purification, as we will explain later, is to release all judgments about the process and continually turn your thoughts to love. Focused, will-
directed, heart-guided, intentional thoughts of trust and gratitude will help you to manifest a world filled with love and light rather than a world filled with fear, competition, and conflict. As all of you begin to do this together, you will move more quickly into the experience of harmonious unity for the highest good of all. Remember: you— and everything else—are energy. And allenergy is connected.
The Energy ofInstinct
You arrived on this planet with full knowledge and remembrance of Who You Are as energetic beings. You remembered everything that comprises the seven components of healing, and you remembered how to use the rainbow essences that we will describe later. You remembered them because they are part of you; you remembered them as you brought them into form in thirddimensional physicality. You also arrived with an instinct that was part of who you were then and will always be a part of you. It is the part that you have subsequently forgotten; it is the part that can remind you to continually come back to the energy of love in any given moment, for that is the true basis of your being. Your true basis of being will always be love. However, your environment soon caused you to begin to forget this.
In duality, you forgot that you had the power to choose love, and through choices based on fear, you began to make greater and greater separations, creating an “us” and a “them” out of every single circumstance. Your history and your science are based on viewing the world through separation, and have taught you that your survival depends upon primitive instincts that cause you to respond in aggressive, competitive ways, rather than using cooperation and harmony to make your choices. You even believe that these instincts live in what you call the reptilian part of your brain, as if part of your brain can be separate from the totality of your whole self.
As you developed, you were given teachings through thirddimensional science and education that badly trained you to believe that those competitive instincts were the only instincts that exist. You have been incorrectly taught that aggressive and competitive
behaviors hold the most value for your survival. You have been trained to believe that all of your instincts are based on a response to danger, and that something bad could happen to you if you do not automatically react with fearful flight, competition, or aggression to what you do not understand or what you believe threatens you. This, you call your survival instinct. If you focus only on that definition of instinct, you are missing a large part of Who You Are. You have forgotten the spiritual instincts that are the more potent, powerful, and natural part of being human. We wish to help you to remember that you have a greater instinct beyond what your science has taught you. We wish to help you understand the true and real meaning of that larger instinct. From our perspective, your true instinct is what you were born with: your heart’s awareness of human capabilities, your natural tendencies for cooperation, and your remembrance and awareness of Who You Are as beings of light and love. These natural instinctual aspects were taught and “talked” out of you through the bad training you have received. We will say more in a few moments about how your reality has been “spoken” into being.
All the possibilities that you have hidden away or forgotten still live within your hearts. Real instinct is not simply a matter of how you respond with automatic reactions through your autonomic nervous system. That sort of environmental response is only a small part of the totality of your instinct; you must remember how all of your instinct works in order to respond to your environment as fully functioning humans. The greater part of your instinct gives you the capability for balanced response within your environment, and the choice to always communicate and respond with love, rather than through fear. The choice to respond from a place of love to every circumstance awakens the deepest part of your instinctual heartmemory, reminding you that you will always be safe if you act from love rather than fear. Many of you call your intuitive ability to respond to the guidance of the universe within your environment your “Sixth Sense.” We call this instinct your First Sense (described more fully in Conversations WithLaarkmaa, A Pleiadian View ofthe New Reality) because it should be placed in primary importance
above all your other senses. When you awaken your higher awareness and follow your true instinct, you will find that your First Sense (intuition or intuitive guidance) always points you towards your natural instinct to continually move towards peace, trust, love, joy, and compassion, for the highest good of all. This type of response will always ensure your survival.
We say that you can survive in any situation through using your larger instinct to guide you to act from your true nature, by simply paying attention, cooperating with each other, connecting with Earth, and being willing to receive the energy of universal guidance. If you pay attention to where you are and what is occurring in any present moment, it is impossible to be in danger, for you will always have inner guidance on what to do, and when and how to do it. You will understand what is required, and you will not have the need to compete with or get in the way of other energies that are not harmonious. You sense the energy of others and situations, either joining them instinctively, or simply moving away from them.
Our purpose in communicating with humans now is to help enhance your resonance with the truth. You must have a greater resonance with the energy of truth to begin to remember what you have forgotten. We have told you that infants arrive with their instinct fully intact; their First Sense and all of their other five senses are connected to the heart energy of love, which is connected to truth, joy, compassion, peace, harmony, and a desire for the highest good of all. They are connected to Source. The true nature of human beings lies in this energy of connection and heart-knowing. This is how humans arrive on the planet.
You must dismiss what you have been taught about your natural responses that relegate instinct to a lower vibratory realm, as if it is something to be overcome. You don’t need to overcome competitive urges; you need to awaken to the spirit of cooperation and peace that is your birthright, and then competition will stop quite naturally. Your real instinct has to do with knowing and remembering Who You Are as beings of love and light who have the capacity to notice and cooperate in every present moment. Dismiss what your human parents, teachers, schools, science, and religions have told you
about the necessity of competitive response in your thirddimensional world. Holding on to those beliefs that promote competition for survival only keeps you trapped in a world of separation and pain. Remember instead your natural instincts towards love and cooperation; those things that your society has told you are neither valuable nor real, are the mostvaluable and the mostreal!
As you begin to heal yourselves, you must remember how to utilize your true instinct. Begin by focusing your intention on your First Sense; become aware of it, use it, and you will have a better understanding of Who You Are, and how to better navigate your third-dimensional world.
The Energy ofSpeech
As beings who are waves of light (your etheric bodies) and waves of water (your physical forms are primarily made of water), you are very malleable. You are designed this way in order to interact with all available energies of the universe for greater harmony and creativity. When you arrive on Earth, you are still very fluid and connected to the energetics of your original essence. As children, you are very supple, mentally and physically. Your physical forms become more dense as you allow your thoughts to solidify into patterns of belief. As you get older, you add layer upon layer to those thought patterns, causing your physical forms (as well as your mental states) to become more and more rigid and dense, and therefore more challenging to change.
It happens like this: as young ones, humans must quickly adjust to a variety of sounds that are present in the third dimension, which is a very noisy place, full of creative potential. Sound projects the
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
parents as well as of children themselves. But even the old ones are printed from new type and all the books are illustrated in color by well-known artists—five to eight color plates apiece.
The first book on The Beacon Hill Bookshelf is the book that still is first on children’s bookshelves everywhere throughout America. It is the book which, in a recent wide competition conducted by The Bookman, led all other “juveniles.” Its author was Louisa M. Alcott, and its title is Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Nowadays when you ask people like Hugh Walpole and Frank Swinnerton what American books they have read they have a way of recalling at once that Louisa M. Alcott was one of the first, and—without prejudice to other writers—has remained one of the most memorable. The Beacon Hill Little Women has pictures by Jessie Willcox Smith, and is properly companioned in the series by its sequel, Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys. Reginald Birch has done the pictures for Little Men.
Of the other six books, I must draw your attention especially to two: the one which is published for the first time and one by John Masefield. George F Tucker’s The Boy Whaleman has a place in the series because it deals with the experiences of an American lad more than sixty years ago—almost as far back as Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. Based on fact, Mr. Tucker’s book is a thrilling account of a New Bedford boy’s three years’ voyage on a whaling ship.
Mr. Masefield’s book, Martin Hyde, the Duke’s Messenger, is illustrated by T. C. Dugdale, and is a spirited story of a boy who served the Duke of Monmouth in his attempt to gain the throne of James II. The tale is therefore one of the Monmouth Rebellion, as the rebellion of 1685 in England is most often called. Owing to the distinction with which Mr Masefield writes, this book is one of the very best of adventure stories for boys’ or girls’ reading.
Besides the four books of which I have tried to tell something, the Beacon Hill Bookshelf also holds these four to date:
What Katy Did, by Susan Coolidge. This is the most popular of Susan Coolidge’s books, the story of a girl who would not let illness
and invalidism keep her from doing things.
The Story of Rolf and the Viking’s Bow, by Allen French. Rolf avenges his father’s murder and earns the viking’s bow in a story with incidents drawn from the Icelandic sagas.
Nelly’s Silver Mine, by Helen Hunt Jackson. This book by the author of Ramona is as popular today as forty years ago. It is the story of Rob and Nelly, twins in New England, who take a long journey to a new home in Colorado, where Nelly finds the mine of the title.
A Daughter of the Rich, by Mary E. Waller. The story is a great favorite with girls, who never fail to be interested in the account of a year spent on a farm in Vermont by a rich young city girl. Elizabeth Shippen Green Elliott has made the pictures in color.
AND HERE ARE A FEW OTHERS
Billy Mink, by Thornton W. Burgess, illustrated in color by Harrison Cady. The first volume in a new series of Burgess books which deals with the animals living in and around the Smiling Pool. For boys and girls of four to twelve.
Ruffs and Pompoms, by Beulah King, illustrated by Maurice Day. Finney Foo, the clown doll in the toy shop, goes out into the world to find a smile for the little Chinese Lady and has the strangest adventures that ever happened to a toy. For boys and girls of six to ten.
The Valley of Color-Days, by Helen B. Sandwell, illustrated in color by Alice Bolam Preston. The strange adventures of Jane and David, who were taken in charge by Burr, the fairy, while their parents were away for a few days. For boys and girls of six to ten.
Round the Year in Pudding Lane, by Sarah Addington, illustrated by Gertrude Kay. Twelve original and whimsical tales of the adventures that happened to the Mother Goose children who lived in Pudding Lane. For boys and girls of six to twelve.
The Goblin’s Glen: A Story of Childhood’s Wonderland, by Harold Gaze, illustrated in color by the author. Ruth and Norman and their Uncle Hal are taken by the fairies to unusual regions—the heart of Japan, Cloudland, the Arctic Circle and the Happy Isles. For boys and girls of seven to twelve.
The Friends of Diggeldy Dan, by Edwin P. Norwood, illustrated in color by A. Conway Peyton. The wonderful circus clown and his animal friends go to visit the king of Jungleland. For boys and girls of seven to twelve.
Fifty New Poems for Children. Here are verses about the things every child knows, such as dandelions, swallows, the wind, and the scissors-grinder, mixed with poems about the things of every child’s wish and fancy—cloud houses, magic wall-paper, goblins and ring-aring fairies. The poets include Robert Graves, Katharine Tynan, Eleanor Farjeon, Edith Sitwell, Wilfrid Blair and Madeleine Nightingale.
Egyptian Tales of Magic, by Eleanor Myers Jewett, illustrated in color by Maurice Day. The oldest stories in the world, full of magic and mystery, which make the kings and sailors and priests and peasants of ancient Egypt come alive again before our eyes. For boys and girls of ten to fifteen.
Medicine Gold, by Warren H. Miller. A story of adventure, of big game hunting and fishing and life in the open in the great north woods. Indians figure in the story and there is an exciting mystery ingeniously solved. Mr. Miller is known as a writer of boys’ fiction and of outdoor books for boys.
Scott Burton in the Blue Ridge, by Edward G. Cheyney. You can read this book alone or as the fourth of a series about a young forester. Assigned to government service in North Carolina, Scott plays an exciting part in the settlement of a mountaineers’ feud. The author has worked with the United States Forestry Service and is a professor in and director of the University of Minnesota College of Forestry.
Rat’s Castle, by Roy Bridges. The fascination of pirate gold hangs in the background of a slashing, well-told story.
Fourteen Years a Sailor, by John Kenlon. The Chief of the New York Fire Department tells the picturesque story of his boyhood and young manhood on deep water, including shipwreck on the desolate Crozet Islands.
The Listening Man, by John A. Moroso. A companion volume to the author’s Cap Fallon: Fire Fighter. This book shows how a retired detective of the New York City force still takes an interest in and aids in solving mysteries and in bringing criminals to justice. Cap Fallon is one of the characters. Mr. Moroso is a novelist who, as a New York newspaper reporter, covered many big police stories.
The Boy Scout’s Own Book, edited by Franklin K. Mathiews. This gathers into one volume those articles and stories from Volumes I-IV of The Boy Scouts Year Book having to do particularly with Scouting. A book of especial interest to boys who expect to become Scouts. Joseph A. Altsheler, Henry van Dyke, Robert E. Peary, Dr. Grenfell and Warren H. Miller are a few of the authors represented in the book.
The Boy Scouts Year Book (1924), edited by Franklin K. Mathiews. This year’s book features fiction, though the special article and handicraft features are well maintained. Dan Beard’s how-tomake-it articles, and stories by P. G. Wodehouse, Homer Croy, Dr. W. T. Hornaday, Joseph B. Ames, Richard Connell, Raymond L. Spears and William James are included.
David Blaize of King’s, by E. F. Benson. The story of David Blaize, hero of Mr. Benson’s David Blaize and David Blaize and the Blue Door, at Cambridge.
The Story Key to Geographic Names, by O. D. von Engeln and Jane McKelway Urquhart. Takes geography out of the boredom of lists and figures and tells the stories back of place names.
And for Parents—
New Roads to Childhood and Roads to Childhood: Views and Reviews of Children’s Books, both by Anne Carroll Moore,
supervisor of work with children in the New York Public Library; and A Century of Children’s Books, by Florence V. Barry.
6. The Twentieth Century Gothic of Aldous Huxley i
In that closing chapter, classical in its quality, which rounds off his Antic Hay, Aldous Huxley writes:
“Shearwater sat on his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingly like a man in a nightmare.... From time to time his dog-faced young friend, Lancing, came and looked through the window of the experimenting chamber to see how he was getting on.... The sweat poured off him and was caught as it rained down in a water proof sheet, to trickle down its sloping folds into a large glass receptacle....
“Lancing expounded to the visitors all the secrets. The vast, unbelievable, fantastic world opened out as he spoke. There were tropics, there were cold seas busy with living beings, there were forests full of horrible trees, silence and darkness. There were ferments and infinitesimal poisons floating in the air. There were leviathans suckling their young, there were flies and worms, there were men, living in cities, thinking, knowing good and evil. And all were changing continuously, moment by moment, and each remained all the time itself by virtue of some unimaginable enchantment....
“In his hot box Shearwater sweated and pedalled. He was across the channel now; he felt himself safe. Still he trod on; he would be at Amiens by midnight if he went on at this rate. He was escaping, he had escaped. He was building up his strong light dome of life. Proportion, cried the old man, proportion! And it hung there proportioned and beautiful in the dark confused horror of his desires, solid and strong and durable among his broken thoughts. Time floated darkly past.”
This is not the Aldous Huxley, you will say, of Limbo, or of Crome Yellow, nor even of the collection of tales called Mortal Coils. No, it isn’t. The intelligent child, the studious Oxford youth, the young man in maiden meditation fancy free, have gone somewhere. (We need not mind where.) The person that emerges in their place has a mind vaulted and full of pointed arches. His thoughts are lighted through stained glass, glass that singularly resembles the colored microscopic slides with which Grandfather Huxley was intently preoccupied. It is a Gothic mind with a special twentieth century illumination through the windows of applied science; the lighting is not very satisfactory nor is the source entirely congruous; but this mind-place is one of many and singular pleasures. A sense of airy spaciousness exists, and there is a comfortable feeling that one is not too closely observed, except by God. The delight of sanctuary would be perfect if one were not forced to go outside, now and then. However, there is the sense of escaping, of having escaped—from Grandfather, with his courage and his science and his controversies; from Aunt Humphry Ward with her formula for writing novels; from Laforgue and the French school; from Oxford and the English school; from Applied Religion; and this goes some way to compensate for the necessity of living in London and struggling to build up a strong light dome of life with stories, critiques, poems, books, essays, feuilletons.
iiTo understand Aldous Huxley’s work it is only necessary to have been born too late. This includes practically everybody. But to appreciate his writing requires more of a background than is possessed by those who would make a cult of him. He has nothing to do with cults, though perhaps something with literary cultures. His roots are very far back, the smallest at least as far back as the Elizabethans. Not many can identify the passage in Marlowe from which are taken the two lines on the titlepage of Antic Hay There is more than a suspicion that the grandson of T. H. Huxley is acquainted with Greek and Latin literature and with the spectacles of
the Renaissance. But the alcoves of the Bodleian Library are welllined and not too much frequented. The truth is that Huxley is the child of the nineteenth century far more than of the twentieth, or the seventeenth, or even the first. And the nineteenth century is so much in the foreground as to be most unfamiliar ground for many readers of today. Their backgrounds are too far back, and their foreground is too far forward; the scene is lost in the middle. One of the most significant facts about Aldous Huxley is his almost indiscriminate fondness for the works of Charles Dickens, just as another in his nephewship to Mrs. Humphry Ward. Consider his two grandfathers. The renowned scientist, T. H., whose name is still anathema to the simple fundamentalist, was yet a human, an all too human creature, who, as he told Henry Holt, tried vegetarianism but had to abandon it because he found he could no longer think. The father of Julia Arnold (who became Mrs. Leonard Huxley, Aldous’s mother) was the subject of considerable conversion and re-conversion by the Church of England and the Church of Rome. Julia Arnold was a niece of Matthew Arnold, whose doctrine of sweetness and light wasn’t wasted on a desert air—was, indeed, caught up and echoed with diminishing but sympathetic outcries. As for Mary Arnold, who became Mrs. Humphry Ward, the author of Robert Elsmere was by taste and temperament a scholar whose true monument is possibly her encyclopædia articles on theologians in Spain.
What, then, is the character of a man barely thirty whose horoscope belongs to 1894? His sisters and his cousins and his aunts are not to be left out of the reckoning any more than those of W. S. Gilbert’s admiral. Brought up to admire Wordsworth, Mr. Huxley has lived to enjoy him;[34] a child of eminent Victorians, he has a perspicacious eye for the limitations of Lytton Strachey as a biographer.[35] The inner truth, of course, is something more important than these details of taste, which might be accidental. The inner truth is itself an accident—quite possibly an accident in design. And it is due to the shape of Huxley’s head, not the outer shape but the shape inside—as we have said, all curious vaultings, pointed arches, mediæval, constructed for all the rites of a ceremonious mysticism but constrained by the circumstances of his era and the
exigencies of daily living to be used rather as a laboratory than a cathedral. One must eat. When Grandfather Huxley gave over eating meat, he was unable to think, and his grandson, obliged to use a beautiful brain in journalism and letters, can hardly dedicate it to worship.
“Worship.” The word may seem strange to be used in speaking of the author of Antic Hay, in which there is much genial blasphemy; but what the careless reader may not see is the bitter cry beneath the surface of a stony contempt. The cry is there, nor is it always embittered. “God as a sense of warmth about the heart, God as exultation, God as tears in the eyes, God as a rush of power or thought—that was all right,” reflected Theodore Gumbril Junior. “But God as truth, God as 2 plus 2 = 4—that wasn’t so clearly all right.”[36] And a few moments later the young man is recalling, with passion and pain, the death of his mother. Those familiar with the story of the two dwarfs, Sir Hercules and Filomena, in Crome Yellow[37] know what pathos and tenderness Huxley can command in a narrative of entire simplicity undisturbed by the self-conscious tendency of much of his work. For it is true, as Michael Sadleir said some time ago, that there are (have been?) several Huxleys.[38] But although the artificer in words who is “almost omnipresent” will never vanish, the “amateur in garbage, pierrot lunaire, the cynic in ragtime, the fastidious sensualist” are numbered of days. The young man in his twenties who provoked “consternation and respect” knows as well as Mr. Sadleir that he has no time to waste. His position is clear, being that of a man whose time is being wasted, not by himself but by others; and a man whose impatience is becoming very great. The portrait of Coleman in Antic Hay is perhaps the most concentrated expression of that ... impatience. Of the several attitudes assumed in the world today by gifted writers whose core of feeling is mystical, Huxley’s, I think, has the most courage to commend it. Mr. Sinclair Lewis clicks the shutter of a mental camera; Mr James Branch Cabell tries to glue our eyes to a series of romantically-colored stereoscopic slides; Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer paints in oils; Mr. James Joyce uses chalk on the sidewalks or even on the walls of less advertised, but not less public, places. Huxley, however, has
learned from Dickens the art of caricature. As he draws, his really vast erudition comes crowding through the aisles of his strange and beautiful mind. Like little imps, like twisted gargoyles come to life, figures of the past fling themselves on the haft of his pen, to move it this way and that. A heavier stroke here, to show the semblance of a satyr; this curve a little thinned by pity; a blot here for the spirit made flesh.... So you have gradually assembled his company, grotesque, exaggerated, wretched, bizarre, inhuman-human, like drawings by Cruikshank or Phiz, like illustrations to a new Nicholas Nickleby, or Pickwick, repulsively true, their meaninglessness carrying their deepest meaning. That meaning is so significant that only a mystic can be expected to grasp it. It goes back to the struggle between paganism and Christianity which led into what we call the Dark Ages. Mr. Huxley has looked at his world and seen with disgust—but also with anguish and pity—how the wheel has come full circle, how for the mystical mind a Dark Age is again come upon us. Must, then, the old and crucial warfare be waged all over again? If we are to worship at Greek shrines, he will remind us that Priapus was the god of gardens. And he quotes the Latin of Odo of Cluny[39] to show how excess breeds counter-excess. The whole point with Huxley is his perfect grasp of the historical analogy to the present mood and tense —or tension. He is savage in his picture of London, the modern city, in Antic Hay; unsparing in his representation of the manifestations of the spirit we affect—jazz, prevailing dances, rages in new art, stupidities in experimental science. Possibly his comprehension of the last is his most relentlessly hostile view; he is the grandson of a scientist, a very great thinker, pathetically dependent upon a flesh diet for intellectual accomplishment. Grandfather’s thinking, though possibly not futile, seems to have got no farther than the God of 2 plus 2 = 4. For such a God, the grandson has little use; for such an age as impends over us, he has even less.
This young man has been everywhere and seen everything. He writes, not that he who runs may read, but that he who reads may run. He subtly, but more and more urgently, invites us to flee—the wrath to come? No, the madness already here. Does his generation fancy itself as pagans and revel in its paganism? He will show them
their precedents and quote for them their texts—which they may ponder before passing out to the vomitorium. One might divide Aldous Huxley’s work to date into two classes: and if one class is juvenilia, most certainly the other division, led by Antic Hay, is Juvenalia. The Goth laid waste, even as this young Goth from Oxford is laying waste; and then the Goth built churches. They are the incomparable, those edifices. The son of the Arnolds and the Huxleys, the Oxford scholar, the pupil of London, is preparing for us his twentieth century Gothic.
iii
“Huxley, Aldous Leonard, writer,” recites Who’s Who, “born 26 July 1894; third son of Leonard Huxley, whom see, and Julia Arnold; married, 1919, Maria Nys; one son. Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. Worked on the editorial staff of the Athenæum, 1919-1920; dramatic critic of the Westminster Gazette, 1920-1921. Publications: The Burning Wheel, 1916; The Defeat of Youth, 1918; Limbo, 1920; Leda, 1920; Crome Yellow, 1921; Mortal Coils, 1922. Recreation: reading. Club: Athenæum.”
A short private letter dated 13. vii. 22 adds one or two details. “I was educated very conventionally at Eton & at Oxford (the only break in the process being two or three years of partial blindness, from 17 to 19½, when I learned to read Braille embossed writing). I took English Literature at Oxford, under the professorship of the late Sir Walter Raleigh. I have worked on a good many papers—doing literary journalism, art criticism, music criticism & dramatic criticism. I am a close student of French literature & have many acquaintances in Paris. I travel as much as I can—which is not nearly so much as I should like. My ideal at the moment is to be completely idle for three years—but, alas, I see no prospect of its being fulfilled!” The letter also says, in answer to a specific inquiry about Mortal Coils: “Mortal Coils, like Crome Yellow, was chiefly written in Italy last summer (tho’ there are two stories in it of considerably earlier date)—in extreme heat by the Mediterranean.”
Here is a reminiscence of Huxley written in June, 1922:
“Aldous Huxley had tea with me at the Savoy in February, 1922, when London was being raided by a series of particularly nasty fogs. All the salt exhaled by the neighboring sea is sucked in by these fogs, which apply it patiently to the eyes of London, causing the people sore eyes and a weary outlook. Out of one of these fogs Huxley stepped into the writing room of the hotel, where I instantly recognized him. He is very tall and thin, walks with a visible stoop, and looks about him with the uncertainty of those who are new to the extreme of near-sightedness. One of his eyes is almost all white.
“He is very much interested in America and professes to envy us our exuberance and Henry L. Mencken, which seems to me sheer affectation. He also entertains the view that the invasion of Europe by American soldiery during the late war has caused a revolution in European social intercourse, which is a little more reasonable. I have made a complete record of this conversation in a manuscript book of mine entitled ‘In Georgian England,’ which is unlikely ever to find a publisher.
“About him personally I know only what one can gather from a purely impersonal discussion. He has a slight income, and that was why he was leaving for Italy with his wife, and that was why he was very anxious about an American market, and that was why he was writing some plays which, judging by some play work of his I saw, must be pretty bad. But it should interest you to know that at a luncheon of young Oxford poets to which I was invited he was referred to several times as the most learned man in England.”[40]
Huxley’s personal appearance and agreeable manner have been frequently described[41] and his conversational gift is not aptly epitomized by that very famous English novelist who recently said of him: “He looks clever. He says nothing—he has no need to say anything. It suffices for him to sit silent, looking clever.” The same novelist, a very penetrating analyst of literary powers, added: “But this young man is almost the only ‘white hope’ in English literature at present.” Huxley is at his best, conversationally, in a small company. One of his close friends is Frank Swinnerton whose judgment of
Huxley’s gifts as a writer strongly confirms the novelist’s estimate just quoted.
The Burning Wheel (1916) and The Defeat of Youth (1918) were volumes of poems, as was Leda (1920). Only Leda has been published in America. Although it is not ten years since the appearance of Mr. Huxley’s first book, the first (London) editions of all of them are held at a premium by dealers and collectors. One may pay, for a particular item, anywhere from ten to fifteen pounds in some instances—or certainly not less than $60 or $75 in New York. A first edition of a new Huxley is something to put aside carefully. The distinction is unusual among living writers and, in the case of a man under thirty, possibly unique.
The title poem of Leda is an affair of nearly 600 lines, iambic pentameter with an occasional variant, written in rhymed couplets as a continuous narrative with the occasional “paragraphing” usual in narrative blank verse. The subject is the classical myth of Jupiter’s disguise as a swan:
Couched on the flowery ground
Young Leda lay, and to her side did press
The swan’s proud-arching opulent loveliness ... And over her the swan shook slowly free The folded glory of his wings, and made A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade
To be her veil and keep her from the shame Of naked light and the sun’s noonday flame.
The poems which follow, including the “First Philosopher’s Song,” are among the earliest and most perfect expressions of Huxley’s perception of the futility of science:
But oh, the sound of simian mirth!
Mind, issued from the monkey’s womb,
Is still umbilical to earth.
The deliberate attempt, with a delicate savagery, to hold the mirror up to his generation was begun in “Frascati’s”:
Bubble-breasted swells the dome
Of this my spiritual home, From whose nave the chandelier, Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer. We in the round balcony sit, Lean o’er and look into the pit Where feed the human bears beneath, Champing with their gilded teeth. What negroid holiday makes free With such priapic revelry? What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites? What gods like wooden stalagmites? What steam of blood or kidney pie? What blasts of Bantu melody?
Ragtime.... But when the wearied Band Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand. And there we sit in blissful calm, Quietly sweating palm to palm.
A number of poems written in prose form—though without the special effects of Amy Lowell’s “polyphonic prose” in Can Grande’s Castle—follow. Of these “Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt” is the only one arranged as verse. Preceded by a short foreword it offers us the record of a day in the life of John Ridley. “Ridley was an adolescent, and suffered from that instability of mind ‘produced by the mental conflict forced upon man by his sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the one hand and to experience on the other’ (I quote from Mr. Trotter’s memorable work on Herd Instinct).” It is a study in “the anguish of thinking ill of oneself”:
“Misery,” he said, “to have no chin, Nothing but brains and sex and taste: Only omissively to sin,
Weakly kind and cowardly chaste.”
But of these prose poems the most significant is “Gothic,” fashioned around the nursery couplet:
Upon Paul’s steeple stands a tree As full of apples as can be.
From the opening sentence: “Sharp spires pierce upwards, and the clouds are full of tumbling bells” to the evocative closing image—“he had it in turn as an alms from the grave knight who lies with crossed legs down there, through the clouds and the dizzy mist of bellringing, where the great church is a hollow ship, full of bright candles, and stable in the midst of dark tempestuous seas”—the piece is a true glimpse into that mind which no more resembles the other minds of its day than St. Paul’s resembles a shop on Bond Street.
Much unwisdom has been uttered concerning Huxley’s prose. The applausive enthusiasm of the ordinary Huxley devotee may be dismissed without comment; superficiality (not to say shallowness) may call for pity but certainly not for censure. A misapprehension of what the author was doing in Antic Hay, though common enough and a more serious matter, will rectify with time. A comparison of such poetry as “Leda” to Keats is better ignored than made the subject of delicate differentiation; but what shall we say of these?
“The wittiest man, after Beerbohm, now writing in English.”[42] “His humor is hot as well as shining.”[43] “He is finished and fastidious, sophisticated and diverting.”[44] “There’s no doubt about it. Huxley is brilliant.”[45] Mr. Clement K. Shorter, in the London Sphere, pronouncing Mortal Coils the best book Huxley had yet written, said: “There’s a great deal of brilliancy in it, although one or two of the stories are too chaotic for my taste, and one, ‘Nuns at Luncheon,’ is too morbid. The best are ‘The Gioconda Smile’ and ‘The Tillotson
Banquet.’... One thing is clear, that Mr. Aldous Huxley has a career in front of him and some of his gifts are hereditary.... Mrs. T. H. Huxley had distinct gifts as a poet, and I have a volume of her verse I highly value. The son, Mr. Leonard Huxley, is a man of varied talent and the editor of the Cornhill Magazine. Mr. Aldous Huxley’s talents have taken a widely different turn, but they should carry him far.” If they are to carry him much farther, one grieves for Mr. Shorter, already lagging a little. It was commonly remarked that Crome Yellow derived from Peacock—a modernized Headlong Hall with the slapstick eliminated and the addition of overtones on the (then) current sex motif.
Let us glance at the prose and test some of these characterizations.
Limbo opens with a novelette, “Farcical History of Richard Greenow,” the account of a young man whose mental hermaphroditism explained the fact that in certain states he was Pearl Bellairs, a highly sentimental novelist. The lady takes increasing possession of his faculties; he dies, a conscientious objector to war service, engaged in writing perfervid patriotic appeals to the girls and women of England. “Happily Ever After” deals with an inveterate feminine propensity toward the disguise of love by allurements. “Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers” is a historical precedent offered to Cubists and other innovators in art. “Happy Families,” “Cynthia,” and “The Death of Lully” are all studies in the immature, adolescent attitude toward sex and love; and “The Bookshop” is a study in pity.
In Mortal Coils, “The Gioconda Smile” deals with Miss Spence, who poisons her rival quite vainly. “Permutations Among the Nightingales,” in form a play, is a study in promiscuity. “The Tillotson Banquet,” though longer, is of the same genre as “The Bookshop” in Limbo. “Green Tunnels” is the episode of a young girl’s heartbreaking disappointment. “Nuns at Luncheon” is the effective portrait of a writer of fiction whose god of realism identifies himself to the worshipper only in his aspect of brute. The original, like most Huxley originals, is a composite. For Mr. Huxley is not so much engaged in hitting heads as in hitting what is in the heads.
The novels, Crome Yellow and Antic Hay exhibit the same characteristics and underlying intention as the shorter pieces; they have the added value of unity of form (in Crome Yellow, of time and place as well). Crome Yellow is more varied in its emotional presentation as well as lenient; Antic Hay is sterner, more peremptory—the rapier driven home. But where is the likeness in all this or in any of this, to Max Beerbohm? Mr. Huxley is witty— incidentally. His humor, described as “hot as well as shining,” is no more humor than the work of Mark Twain in The Mysterious Stranger No doubt his prose is a “finished” prose; but “fastidious, sophisticated and diverting”! The picture conjured up by such adjectives is one of an elegant trifler. Yet hardly a man writing can use such uncompromising, Old-Testamentary speech; and if the bulk of Huxleyana is diversion, then Savonarola should be considered with reference to his possibilities as a vaudeville entertainer. And “brilliant.” It is a word from the outermost darkness, spreading darkness around.
Perhaps as a result of these singular misapprehensions, the remark was general, when Huxley’s book of essays, On the Margin, appeared, that here was a volume which might be the work of any gifted young man. Not quite. The display of learning was rather too great for gifted young men to manage, as it were, without parade. Yet the very ones who made the comment—and this writer must number himself among them—could have learned more concerning what a conventional biographer would love calling “the real Aldous Huxley” from a re-perusal of On the Margin than from any other of his books. Said one reviewer: “Mr. Huxley can be fantastic enough, though his is never the fantasy of the cloudy dreamer, but the fantasy of a thinker whose mind is enchanted by the logical development of a happy thought; but his clarity was never better shown than in this collection. Even in his lesser marginalia, he has a winning and graceful conversational manner, whether he be commenting on a quaint book, on pantomime songs, on the contrast
between amorous poetry (of the second class) in French and in English, or upon boredom as a literary inspiration through the ages.... The one thing which Mr. Huxley cannot stand is mistiness and insincerity; and what he means by clarity and sincerity he amply shows in his essays on Edward Thomas, Sir Christopher Wren, Ben Jonson, Chaucer, and the centenary of Shelley’s death.”[46] Here is a greater degree of percipience than has been shown since Mr. Sadleir offered his criticism (now perhaps obsolescent, but penetrating at the time). In fact, the essay on “Sir Christopher Wren” in On the Margin is the single most self-illuminatory bit of writing Mr. Huxley has offered us. Like the great architect of London, Aldous Huxley is a designer who prizes in his work a quality peculiar and individualizing; and as with Wren, the quality is not æsthetic but moral.
It is explicit, for all its unobtrusiveness, in the title story of his new collection, Young Archimedes and Other Sketches. Comedy and irony in various proportions are the material of five of the six tales, but the principal story, in length a novelette, is a charming narrative of a child in Italy, a child with a beautiful forehead and eyes that could flash ripples like the sunshine on clear pale lakes. The young Guido showed an extraordinary penchant for music; but when he was a little older, like Archimedes, his mind turned to the theorems of mathematics; it was evident that his genius was larger. The tragedy of his life in the hands of a grasping woman is told with an affectionate sadness. Undoubtedly this piece of his fiction, austere and tender, will give to thousands of readers a new conception of Aldous Huxley. They will perhaps see that the mind of the child, Guido, is a miniature of the mind of the one who writes about him; and that there is even a profound likeness between both those minds and the one of which Emerson wrote:
The hand that rounded Peter’s dome, And groined the walls of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity....
BOOKS BY ALDOUS HUXLEY
1916 The Burning Wheel. Published in England only
1918 The Defeat of Youth. Published in England only.
1920 Limbo
1920 Leda
1921 Crome Yellow
1922 Mortal Coils
1923 On the Margin
1923 Antic Hay
1924 Young Archimedes and Other Sketches
In England: Little Mexican and Other Stories.
SOURCES ON ALDOUS HUXLEY
In addition to the sources referred to in the text of the chapter or in footnotes, the reader should consult the R ’ G P L for the years since 1920.
7. In Every Home: A Chapter for Women
In addressing this chapter to you, I do what I can to notify other men that they may find it uninteresting. Indeed, as you and I know, if all the truth were told they would find it, many of them, most unpalatable reading. There are things we need not go into, such as the indubitable fact that the success of the home depends solely upon the woman. A man may contribute to it, but he cannot make it; and whatever his behavior, if the woman is steadfast, he cannot absolutely wreck it. The home is a form of government and a form of human society. We are familiar with the larger forms of government men have tried, the best of them only partly successful. But the home has been a complete success, times innumerable. Men may call it a benevolent despotism, but the fact remains. It is perhaps significant that the government of the home is not conducted by the use of the Australian or the Massachusetts ballot. Women have accepted the vote and will use it; but their grasp of certain essentials of society is more clear than men’s, and if the ballot cannot safeguard the home, and the health and welfare and opportunity of children, then government will have to be transformed into something that will.
But this is understood; my purpose is simply to tell of a few books which are, in type, indispensable to the homemaker. The types are really only two: the cook book and the handbook of motherhood. It so happens that there is one volume of each type so complete, so thoroughly tested, so practically perfect that it stands alone on an eminence above all others of its sort—and the best of the others make no pretensions to do more than add wings, columns, buttresses, and chapels to the main edifice. If I could talk about The
