The cream of anything includes all the parts. The cosmic mind must include the essence of all arts and experiences and facts. Just as the rose and the man and the grain of dust are potential with all beneath, the highest man, the cosmic intelligence, is potentially the cosmos in containing the Idea of it.
This idea may be contained in and expressed outwardly by some great single, all-including, all-mastering emotion—such as love. And now we are in a region where there can be no difference of opinion; at least I have never heard disputed what is the greatest thing in the world.
There are all kinds of love. The simple man loves simply—himself, his woman, his children and his animals. The love of the cosmic consciousness breaks forth in a deluge upon the race, because it comprehends and includes all beneath. This great outpouring is formed of earth, air, water, fire, sunlight and all winds, all facts, all experiences, all arts, light of the moon and stars and all glowing things under the sun, all sounds and scents and pictures, all ardours, and sympathies and tolerances. Its outpouring is action, and is of itself creative. This is the OM. Such a love leavens and impregnates all things, because it understands and includes all things. It unifies all separateness; it enfolds all intelligence with intuition; it unites all parts.
This brings us to that ancient and unassailable premise of all religions—that God includes every part of the universe in being the spirit of it; that His idea of creativeness is expressed in one great single, all-mastering and including emotion,—which is love. We hear the little children saying it, "God is love."
... We awaken the Ideal in ourselves first by imitating the virtues of others. In the earlier days when to me courage meant physical action, men passed in different fields, leaving an imperishable remembrance. I have often seen the expressions of those I loved and idealised as a boy, live again in the faces of my own children. John T. McCutcheon in Luzon, filling a reel of films, under a volley of fire at Binan, on his knees, working the camera with a whole brigade sprawled behind—gave me one of the finest early building blocks for the courage among men. He also gave me an ideal of cleanliness: One evening, after a vicious day's march, and we were all ravenous, John T. left camp to find a river. There he bathed with government bouquet,—made himself right with himself, even to shaving, before meat and drink. His constraint looked like mastery to me then. Grant Wallace was a big star of that service—ideal in performance of friendship.... Young men at hand now are different. Not one of them lack in grip and grit. They reveal the new thing in courage, the courage that begins where the courage of the soldier ends. These have gone far into the mystery of their own kingdoms—rapidly becoming kings of themselves.
The world doesn't understand them. The Abbot[3] is a sensation in literary matters at Columbia, but unplaced. The Dakotan[3] was said to be unfit for a soldier because he was twenty pounds under weight for his height. He can leap five feet six, run or hike indefinitely, exhaust a cement-mixer, say "stick" in all tongues and "quit" in none. He has the will and wisdom to make himself a new man over night—and yet his Government wants him served up just so, in pounds. There isn't any one loves America more than the Dakotan, whom we now call Steve. Even the young military surgeons will know before long that endurance is a matter of spiritual culture, that courage is spirit—that a man is well because of cleanliness of body and thought and organised will; that he doesn't fail in a pinch because he is evolved; that all the higher forms of life call for speed rather than strength, the levitating force of spirit rather than the gravitating force of flesh, for brain rather than brute.... Comrade stuff is the stuff of souls.... I've studied them long and devotedly. I build my days upon the things these boys show me. Less and less are we different from those who call to our hearts.
These young men do not think themselves out; they are not troubled by misses or personal discrepancies. They simply are themselves. I have perceived that men of dreams and genius and action are in the larger sense free from themselves. The main part of their day's performance is a lifting out of the tangle of emotion and desire, into a large, unrestricted area full of calm daylight, where events and movements are seen in their relation to one another, not in separateness and one at a time, an area also where inspiration is momentarily expected to strike. They do not analyse themselves. They do not hear their own voices. They are not dismayed if they falter or drop from the key. The things that most men do with care, and that occupy so much of the days these young men perform automatically.
My own path was upward through an intense self-consciousness—the American, not the oriental way. I lived with myself all the route. I observed outward conditions and events, domestic, civic and cosmic; but at the same time observed their effects upon myself. I did not know until I was adult that there is a big receptivity of consciousness above this—where intuitions play and weave causes and effects together—where the mind is more like a child's than a man's, or more like a giant's, perhaps—where the big faith comes, and the warm laugh comes, and man surpasses himself, but does not know until afterward, if at all.
Warmth flooded into me as I touched this larger consciousness. It became clear as daylight—that a man is at his best only when out of himself. I saw much of my misery and depression was the result of self-analysis. I was a better man when I let myself go utterly. And this was exactly the thing that happened in moments of danger, moments of romance and friendship, moments of the self hurling itself outward. Capacity for these moments makes the Comrade, and indicates that love which is not a sentiment, but a cosmic force.