These lines, sublime as they are, will probably be regarded as little short of blasphemous by many of our good friends who, sounding his name, do not understand him; who, worshipping him as the only Man-God, have lost sight of the God in man, the Christ, the potential development of which in all men was the great lesson which the Nazarene sought to convey. They little think that he whose name they sound may perhaps be walking the earth to-day, striving to bring men to the light, but despised and rejected by themselves because in an unrecognized and strange guise, while the same old truths are again trampled upon, since they lack the endorsement of established authority.
The poet, however, shows that he, too broad to be limited by one name, truly understands the mission of Jesus; he, with his own grand teachings of universal brotherhood despised and misunderstood because of their unfamiliar form, is elevated by the sublimity of the truths that inspire himself to the level which gives him the right to address the founder of Christianity as a comrade. He sees, too, with a directness that probably has come to no other modern poet, that there is a band of “Equals” working for the same end, “transmitting the same charge and succession,” through all races, through all ages, and giving vitality to all religions. The free, uninfluenced attitude which he who would grow towards the light must maintain is expressed here with most effective simplicity, as is the end for which THEY are striving—so to saturate the world and all eras with their precepts as finally to lift all mankind into the unity of perfect Brotherhood.
The true mental abnegation is here referred to, just as Krishna in the Bagavad-Gita tries to teach Arjuna. In speaking of the necessity for retiring to the forest so as to attain perfection untroubled by man, he says to Arjuna that the true philosopher will look with equal mind upon all classes of men, upon all systems of thought and all objects of sense, esteeming all alike, inasmuch as they are all one in the Supreme Spirit, and that spirit found in each, so that to retire to the forest is not a necessity. Thus Whitman says that he and all others of the same mind, are indifferent of lands, times, disputes or disputers, allowers of all theologies, because they well know—as occultism teaches—that each theology and each assertion is one facet of the great Truth.
The result of this state of mind is beautifully set forth in the lines which say that amid the bawling and din, reached at by divisions and jealousies on every side that close peremptorily upon us to surround and fetter us, we walk free, unheld by all, because we are fixed upon the immutable rock of the True. This is the imperturbability sought by the ancient Chinese philosophers, who, themselves students of occultism, esteemed that equanimity above all else.
There are various passages throughout Whitman’s poems that intimate a perception, perhaps intuitive, of the existences of the Masters. For instance, he says, “I see the serene company of philosophers,” and in “A Song of the Rolling Earth” are the lines:
“The workmanship of souls is by those inaudible words of the earth,
The masters know the earth’s words and use them more than audible words.”
And again, towards the end of the same poem:
“When the materials are all prepared and ready, the architects shall appear.”
The thought here is identical with that in “Light on the Path” (note to Rule 21, First Section):