| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: realisation. Even now, in some places in the world, the message of
Christ is necessary. No one who lived in modern Russia could
possibly realise his perfection except by pain. A few Russian
artists have realised themselves in Art; in a fiction that is
mediaeval in character, because its dominant note is the
realisation of men through suffering. But for those who are not
artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the actual life
of fact, pain is the only door to perfection. A Russian who lives
happily under the present system of government in Russia must
either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not
worth developing. A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Macbeth by William Shakespeare: And what will you do now? How will you liue?
Son. As Birds do Mother
Wife. What with Wormes, and Flyes?
Son. With what I get I meane, and so do they
Wife. Poore Bird,
Thou'dst neuer Feare the Net, nor Lime,
The Pitfall, nor the Gin
Son. Why should I Mother?
Poore Birds they are not set for:
My Father is not dead for all your saying
Wife. Yes, he is dead:
Macbeth |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: trance. It is not super-consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It
is not due to self-hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane,
sound, rational, common-sense shifting of consciousness from the
phenomena of sense-perception to the phenomena of seership, from
the thought of self to a distinctively higher realm. . . . For
example, if the lower self be nervous, anxious, tense, one can in
a few moments compel it to be calm. This is not done by a word
simply. Again I say, it is not hypnotism. It is by the exercise
of power. One feels the spirit of peace as definitely as heat is
perceived on a hot summer day. The power can be as surely used
as the sun s rays can be focused and made to do work, to set fire
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: he heard that note?
The merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom from all
plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to
laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning
joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our
wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the
house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to
myself, "There is one of us well, at any rate,"--and with a
sudden gush return to my senses.
We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking
in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last,
Walking |
