Living the Radiant Life: A Personal Narrative

by George Wharton James

CHAPTER XXII

ABSORPTION IN RELATION TO RADIATION

Most important factors in Living the Radiant Life are Living the Life of Possession and Living the Absorptive Life. To radiate one must possess, and to possess one must absorb. To give largely and well, one must receive largely and well. The Absorptive Life is as essential as the Radiant Life. Out in the great silences are the eloquent voices of God ready to speak to the attentive soul; out in Nature a million voices are ready to impart knowledge to the ignorant. All one has to do to receive is to "ask"; not with the voice but with the whole being. As a sponge absorbs water up to the limit of its capacity, so should man absorb, and then, unlike the sponge, which must be squeezed from without ere it will give off that which it has received, man should radiate from within all that he has received.

There are few people in the world who are true absorbers. We are so full of prejudices, conceits, notions, that we refuse to receive from this, that, or the other source, because, forsooth, we in our pride deem the source unworthy. The true life receives from every source. Call nothing unclean. All things are yours. God is over and in all. Prove all things. Open your heart to all good from whatever source. Stand humbly before God ready to receive. Keep your hands open; your eyes, your ears, your nostrils, your whole nature in a state of active receptivity. Be afraid of nothing. Some one comes and tells you that in this or that he has found spiritual life and help. You, however, have been taught to regard that as a dangerous thing, so you are afraid of it. Arise and be above such fears. Are you a man, a woman, a human soul, made in the image of God and given powers of thought, of discernment, of decision? Or are you a mere puppet to be worked by the string of other men's thoughts, other men's ideas, other men's opinions? Listen for yourself; think for yourself; decide for yourself; act for yourself. If a thing seems right to your own soul do it though the heavens fall and you suffer the condemnation of all mankind. True and rapid progress will never come to the race until individual men learn that they alone are the arbiters of their own destiny.

Go out into Nature, into the silences, into the workshops and the marts of trade and absorb. Listen to every good voice that speaks, and if you are not sure whether the voice is good or not, listen anyhow and "prove" it by the infallible tests of purity, unselfishness, and uplift.

Every human soul may be a wireless telegraph receiver. God is flashing out messages every moment from His million and one instruments all over the universe. They are all kinds of messages—but all from the one spirit, and therefore all spiritual. They appeal to the bodies, the minds, the souls of men, and all you have to do to receive them is to have your receiving apparatus of body, mind, and soul attuned to the sending apparatus of the Loving Sender. Get in tune. Cry out to God: I want all there is. I cast aside all prejudgments, all conceits, all ideas. Let me hear direct from Thee. Go out into the fields and receive from the spirit that is in, over, and about Nature. Every tree, flower, grass, bird, insect, animal, cloud, storm, rock, stream has a message for you if you will but hear it. Love alone can open your heart to receive; it is the key with which the soul and mind and body are set in tune. Get yourself into relationship with Nature. Feel your kinship. God is the Father of every tree as much as he is your Father. Go and claim your family. And claim all the good they possess as your own, for it is yours and merely awaits your taking. As a child you did this with your mother. The nourishment of her breasts, the gentle hush of her voice, the soothing touch of her fingers, the brooding yearning of her love; all these were yours the moment you cried out for them. Mother Nature is as full of the spirit of Love as your physical mother. Indeed the latter is one in spirit with the former. Call out then. Demand, with the simple expectancy of the child, all that you need. Call for it confident that it will come. Expect it, and according to your expectancy it will be given unto you.

But to do this you must be a true child of your Nature Mother. You must confidently lean on her breast, you must confidently blend yourself with her, you must let her touch you as your mother used to touch you when, a helpless babe, you lay in your cradle. Her hand went all over your body, from head to foot, with loving, soothing caress. Let the sun and the breezes touch your body in like fashion. Their fingers will soothe with mesmeric power and at the same time bring health and strength and vigor, and withal, peace. Go and lie down on the bosom of the Earth Mother; feel her pulsating heart, and in time, when you have forgotten your artificiality and pretension, your so-called civilization and culture, and found anew your kinship with the Earth, you will feel the whole power of Nature pulsing through your veins; the fever of your unhealthy blood will be soothed and it will flow naturally and coolly as the sweet sap that ascends to the nourishment of the topmost branch and leaf.

And when life has wounded you, cut you, torn you almost limb from limb, and you feel and see yourself only an almost dismembered trunk, Nature will soothe and heal you. Your wounds will soon be scarred over and the trees, the ferns, the birds, the grasses, the squirrels, the bees, the buds, the blossoms, and the butterflies,—all—will associate with you on equal terms. They will neither laugh at you nor repel you, but as loving friends come and associate with you in sweet and dear kinship. You will walk through the aisled forest temples of God repentant and forgiven for sins of the past, and shame and sorrow will flee away, replaced by the calm joy of the peace that flows into the receiving heart like a river. You will undress and bathe in the sunshine and the pools, the creeks and the rivers, fearless and unabashed, for you will have exposed your soul to the soul of things; real shame has nothing to do with externals.

But, you ask, how am I to begin to observe and thus absorb the good gifts of God into my very life in order that I may live and radiate them to others? Let me help you to begin!

To be satisfied is to stagnate and petrify. In his Rabbi Ben Ezra, Robert Browning has three pregnant lines: