Again we are reminded that the law of the cosmos is wise; that there are no mistakes nor flaws in the cosmic scheme. The answer is that the union is one of complementaries, and not of antitheses. Each one must be balanced, the nature rounded, the soul awake before union is possible. Thus we are saved from ourselves. We cannot, if we would, really gain at the expense of another, although in temporary things we may appear to do so, because the rich grow richer at the expense of the poor; the tyrant ruler maintains his power at the expense of serfs; but doubt not that eternal equation is perfect.
There is still another query: If true sex-union is of the soul, what is to prevent soul-mates from finding each other at the moment of death, regardless of their fitness for godhood, and thus circumventing, as it were, the plan of Creation, which would compel each one to earn the prize of eternal life?
The same law governs the interior planes as the exterior. The realization of consciousness is not a capricious matter any more than is the law of physical growth. A man might be in the presence of untold wealth, but if he had not the consciousness to know and realize values, he would remain poor, even though by a wave of his hand he might command millions. One might give a blind man a check for a million dollars, and if he had no others means of knowing what it was, he might easily imagine it to be worthless. Death does not bestow wisdom. Wisdom is acquired. Love is a self-generator.
If you would follow the law of transmutation and acquire the throne of angelhood, get busy within the laboratory of your own mind. Take the crucible of Thought and begin to work interiorly upon the common, everyday things that present themselves in your environment. This is the only way of transmutation. Love grows by feeding upon itself, and the sacrifices and the kindnesses that are bestowed in love without thought of personal benefit grow into the flood of golden light and love of the spiritual realms.
The chief virtue in any one's pursuit of philosophy, or of esoteric wisdom, and in methods of attainment, is found in the fact that such effort is proof of earnest desire to attain. Emerson says that the principal benefit of a college education is to teach the student that he does not need a college education. This estimate of the value of years of study seems at first glance a sarcastic one, but it is not. If this wisdom can be acquired in no other way, then even so it were well worth the price. If the student can learn that much love is the price of transmutation only after exhausting every other method, what does it matter, so that he finally learns it?
Learn to look into the hearts of men.
At first sight, everything on the busy city street is a part of a moving panorama; but an intimate view, when you get in touch with segregated parts of the panorama, discloses the interior nature; the hopes and the fears; the aspirations and the longings and the heartaches and the joys of the entities composing the whole moving picture.
You notice a little female figure; her cheeks are pinked to a hue rivalling the American beauty rose; her lips are carmined like a clowns and her eyebrows penciled too obviously. Her cheap little dress is amateurishly cut in imitation of "the latest." Your first impulse, perhaps, is to scorn her as a "brazen" creature of the streets; but if you will suspend judgment and look a little closer, you may see that her eyes are, in their depths, those of a child, for all her seeming experience. Her brazenness is perhaps only the armor which she has donned to hide a turbulent heart—the dowry of centuries of grandmothers who longed for one glimpse of freedom; of the right to comb their hair as they liked; to powder their faces if they wanted to; to run and jump and laugh and dance and be innocently free and happy without the fear of shocking that bugbear Respectability, and the tyrant Decorum, which insisted that a woman's legs must be carefully concealed on penalty of being adjudged "immodest."
Those poor reviled, execrated and vigilantly-concealed legs of our fore-mothers! They are crying aloud for vindication, and they will be heard wherever the line of least resistance affords a channel for their freedom. And so, instead of blaming the poor little painted doll of a woman, look into her heart. You will discover that she is bent on having two things long denied womankind—freedom and happiness. If she is foredoomed to failure on the route she has chosen, that is all the more reason why you should withhold censure and give freely of your help and sympathy.
"Learn to look into the hearts of men."