Man in his immersion into cosmic consciousness puts forth profound tests of his oneness and faces life in larger and larger proportions, and as he ascends he carries all with him, so that he can give back to all a profound and heroic response.
Every man is transcendent when the hour dawns for his transcendent self to tremble into action.
With these wider reaches of consciousness the modern transcendentalist finds the larger life and the true way of living, and in this brings the new message of the "One life in all and through all" into the mass mind, and the new song of joy and thanksgiving into their hearts. He is never sad, never agonizing, never renouncing; he has made contact with all life and through this with the universal joy; there is no denial, no separateness,--there is "no more crying," he conquers and ascends not through separateness but through increasing degrees of union. He lives in glad comradeship with God, in joy and perfected self-expression, both in the objective and in the subjective world.
The ancient transcendentalist was always sad, always separate, always worshipping in beatific loneliness, in seclusion and renunciation of the world; the modern supra-man passes from end to end of the pole of being and stops at any point and functions normally. "He stands and works, then kneels and prays." He is lord of the outside external world and partaker of all its divine joys and pleasures, and he is lord of all the deeper reaches of subjective consciousness within himself and the absolute in which he lives, and he brings out from these deeper levels all the intensified power of illumination and revelation, and pours it over his daily pathway illumining it with a glory not its own.
Many olden transcendentalists lived on in entranced states of divine wisdom with diseased flesh and bodies that shrieked with pain, while they mortified and rejected that divine wisdom. The modern transcendentalist brings all his God-consciousness to bear upon his flesh and raises it to the transcendent heights of his own mind and heals it until bone and muscle and tissues gleam and scintillate with a new found beauty and youth.
The olden transcendentalist dragged on in barren cells and dreary poverty in order not to divert his glorified vision of the formless by the beauty of the ever present form; the modern transcendentalist brings his higher laws into play, conquers his poverty and commands around himself the beauty and luxury and freedom of the world of form, and it speaks to him in matchless raiment, luxuriant flowers, gems, material comforts and soft ease. He lives in rapturous companionship with the glory and beauty and majesty of God in the world He has projected from Himself, and with this beneath him, he can rise to the very pinnacle of infinite selfhood.
The olden transcendentalist, ascending into the transcendental heights of his own mind, ascended alone, and from these obscure heights he shed his wisdom back upon the evolving race; he was pioneer in the lands of cosmic consciousness and the first revelator of the path; he showed the race that the path was there to tread, and his messages have fallen as a benediction on the race mind even while he himself bought his wisdom with pain, renunciation and suffering built from the limited recognition of his own mind.
The path winds onward and upward still, but the feet of those climbing it today are led by still waters and in the paths of righteousness. They are no longer in the part but are in the middle of the Divine Channel of God-consciousness. To know one part was the mission of the past; to know all parts and join them in a divine unity is the mission of the present.
The modern transcendentalist does not love life less, he loves it more! The world is alive with a new majesty; the passing multitude, the passing face, every human attribute of life calls forth from him a deeper interpretation; he walks out into the race mind, and with the power of a new word, and a new touch heals it from its infirmity. He does in truth give "absent treatments," and his word is accomplished; the old diseased flesh transmutes in answer to his command. He speaks to the barren walls of poverty and they stretch away into stately halls, for he knows that wherever man posits his consciousness, substance must gather round it; his new words of power and majesty fall like a benediction on the heart of the listening multitudes, and they turn round to face a new tomorrow with a new hope born of a larger understanding.
The transcendentalist walks often in our midst; sometimes he assumes the simplicity of a child to disguise the larger stretches of power within him, but he is out upon the pathway strong and beautiful, wholly replete with promises of perfection, doing the work of the human.