WHERE I FOUND HIM

God is where? What is He? And what are his schemes? Had I been wise I would have gone about solutionizing wisdomatically, by consulting the elders and the wise of the tribe. I would have sat at the feet of the learned and absorbed wisdom. Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, President Roosevelt, and Professor William R. Harper could have enlightened me.

But being as I am, I went about it like one hunting that which he really expects to find. When I look for my lost garter I do not go to the church or university to hear a lecture about it, neither do I go to the public library to read up on the subject. Instinctively I move chairs, bureaus, and dressing-cases. I light a match and look to see if it did not roll into some corner. The same way I went about finding God. I looked about! I found a world filled with entities. Some resembled me, some different, some I know not what they were. A being I discovered called “myself” separated from and struggling with the world. It was myself that was the most important, because it was I that felt, it was I that was impressed. It was I that had ambitions; like Atlas, I carried the world with its problems on my shoulders, and was afraid to move for fear that I would slip and the world would fall and the problems would remain unsolved, for it was I that was to solve them. It was I, I, I. A God could not be found anywhere. There was no room for one. There was nothing that I saw that would indicate a God anywhere. There was nothing but objects and space. The objects were surely the objects and God could not be space.

My struggle with the world was great, and when I thought that I had almost succeeded in mastering the world it crushed me into a oneness with all-there-is.

Then I saw entities separated by space, united to each other by space which separates them. Nothing lives by itself for itself. Everything lives in the whole. To lose one’s self in the whole is to serve and gain the service of the whole. This way God revealed himself and expanded through me and absorbed the world. I saw the oneness of it all. Then I understood the whole, felt the whole. I saw that problems are not in life, but it is in the being that is out of harmony with self yet in perfect harmony with nature. Like a pupil going to school unwillingly, so is the inharmonious self, trotting along in perfect harmony with the universal whole. God exists through the gratification of the desires of the entities of which life consists, they being charged with a nature that is impressed pleasantly and unpleasantly. One disintegrates and the other recuperates. It seeks the one and avoids the other. The sense nature is Life’s guide. Things that are pleasant for it are absorbed, and things that are not are repulsed by the vegetable. An animal will not eat anything that will injure his health. By instinct danger is sensed by all with more accuracy than by man with his psychic forces. And why not? Are they not a part of God, even as you and I?

Man also began with these sure and unfailing guides. They led him through the different periods of development from the protoplasm till he became man. By seeking pleasurable associations and avoiding the painful ones he reached the highest pinnacle. It was God evoluting himself by following his heart’s desires. At this stage it was that man fell. He ate from the tree of knowledge and was driven out of Eden. He became wise and was going to do something for himself; his intellect made him deaf to the callings of his heart. He became ambitious to look for himself. His scheme was to work out his own evolution and leave behind the whole that sacrificed and contributed to his making. He was to build for himself mansions in the sky, put on wings and fly away, and like the fox in the fable he was rewarded. (A fox once crossed a creek with a piece of stolen cheese in his mouth; he saw his reflection in the water, and he opened his mouth to catch the shadow, thereby losing the morsel he had.) So by grasping with the intellect man’s sense nature becomes perverted. And he has contracted abnormal desires. He overeats, overdrinks, overindulges in sex, and that works for his destruction. Abnormal desires are those you cannot gratify by gratifying them. The more you indulge them the more your appetite for them is. He became subject to diseases unknown to any other being, and no sign of his repentance as yet. He still refuses to confess. He sees that a mistake has been made, but he is going to redeem himself. Were he less intellectually wise he would say to himself, “My troubles came because I listened to the clamors of my intellect. As they are faulty they guided me wrong. Henceforth I will hearken to Life, which guided me till now.” But instead of that he reasons that his troubles came upon him because he did not heed his intellect enough. His ideals were not sufficiently high, he argued. He will make himself better by making laws to keep himself in check. He will fine himself for the gratification of his desires. He will put a license on drink and establish marriage as a preventive.

But “stolen fruits are sweet”—desires increase by prohibition and condemnation, and by restriction he became totally depraved. What he condemns in daytime he indulges in at night. So of all the beings in life, man, with his high ideals is the only prostitute. His hands, feet, brain, eyes, nose, mouth, stomach, liver, and sex he uses not for the purpose to which evolution dedicates them, but for traffic.

In going downtown, I noticed a crowd looking in at a window. I stepped up and saw a beautiful girl blowing soap bubbles. That would have been all right if it had been play. Her body would have been nourished by the exercise, for she would have enjoyed it; but there she was in an illy ventilated space behind plate glass advertising a soap, that she might secure money wherewith to buy the things she wanted. It was degrading her body, and she was a prostitute accordingly.

Life created the brain to overcome difficulties, and the pleasure of overcoming difficulties is its joy; but to use it in designing the manufacture of adulterated food, embalmed beef, shoddy clothing, is prostitution.

And just as the whole person is affected when only one member of his body is used improperly, so when life has one specie that degrades itself, God as a whole is thus affected. So, if not for your sake, then let it be for the sake of the little collie dog I love, I implore you to cease prostituting yourself, as it hurt’s Fido’s dignity. A friend of mine, in deploring conditions, hoped that we would revise our statutes to make it harder to get a divorce. My remark that if I had my way I would give a divorce to any one who asked for it, was countered by the inquiry, “Do you want us to be like animals?” In her statement I found the keynote of the reasonings, also the root of the tragedy of the human family. Man acts according to what he believes himself to be and is not, therefore his actions are unnatural. The sense nature is God himself guiding himself through all that God is.

But man believes that he is not animal; he means that he is not subject to the universal law, that he can violate the principle of life and thrive. He thinks he may blaspheme God and avoid the penalty, consequently he refuses to be guided by Life’s guide. He prefers to plan, scheme, and to do everything contrary to nature’s promptings, and if possible repudiate sense nature altogether.

Rent, interest, parasitism, governments, jails, churches, marriage, abortions, contracepts, doctors, lawyers, preachers, universities, sheriffs, elections, misery, trouble, and business are all institutions of the intellectual man. Animals have not got them and have no use for them. The only reason for their being is it give us an air of refinement, you know, to have such things.

Marriage does not prevent cohabitation; marriage gives an opportunity for degradation.

Theoretically marriage curbs passion; in reality it degrades womanhood—it licenses prostitution.

The father’s and mother’s desire that their daughter marry well is to make successful commerce of herself so that she will have an easy life. The girl in school, in the store, in shop, or in the kitchen, is ambitious to marry so she will not have to work.

“You have married me and have to support me. If you don’t, I will put you where the dogs won’t get you”—have you heard that? What is that except to get some one’s support by selling yourself? He is called a clever young man who marries a rich wife. The dukes, princes, and barons who flock to our shore are all looking for easy snaps by making commerce of themselves—selling their titles and throwing themselves in as a prize. They are prostitutes.

God’s life would be as short as the life of its entities were it not for that sex sense which works for the perpetuation of life.

Evolution is a sex law. Natural selection, more and more complex organism, finer and finer reproduction, is God’s method for beautifying himself in man. Protoplasm did not scheme to have a progeny different from itself. God in the entity of Mrs. Protoplasm desired to reproduce himself to something which he was not—and he did.

A woman desires to be mated to a man who possesses qualifications which make for better progeny—life seeking to excel itself. One flower selects the co-operation of another not of its kind, and new flowers come to be. One mineral selects another, and the birth of a new mineral is the result. New animals, new birds, new stars, and new worlds come to be from this natural selection. The intellect would call that selection prostitution, and the reproduction illegitimate, but there is no illegitimacy in God. Illegitimacy is an institution of the wise, and the wise are only a small part of Life, the same as the bastard and the fool. And whenever the wise become too wise God reveals himself in the guise of a fool to show them that they don’t know the things they thought they knew.

Goodness and badness are within ourselves, from the very lowest to the very highest. Does it please or displease us, is the test for goodness or badness. A thing, a man, an action, cannot be good or bad of itself. Its relationship to us determines its value. A thing does not please us because it is good. It does not displease us because it is bad. It is good because it pleases us; it is bad because it displeases us.

An over-ripe egg and limburger cheese are equally unpleasant to one of our senses, yet we call the cheese good and the egg bad because its relationship to our taste is pleasant as to cheese and otherwise in case of the egg.

Every one has the judge in his own heart. And the judges within ourselves render decisions, and we act in accordance with the bribe we receive, and the best of us along with the worst are being constantly bribed. The bribe always is satisfaction to ourselves. The only difference is that we are not all pleased alike. Some of us can be bribed with personal gratification, and some of us get our satisfaction only in the satisfaction of others. A good man is he whose satisfaction is the satisfaction of others. A bad man is he whose satisfaction excludes others. A good man is he who attains pleasure by seeking to contribute to the pleasure of others. A bad man is one who seeks the satisfaction of his own wants regardless of the interest of his fellows.

When I lose a thing I am just as much lost to the thing as the thing is lost to me. Our relationship is gone; we cease to be in communion with one another.

The soul of man is not lost that it needs be saved. Lost is the soul which thinketh that it needs saving.

The righteous and pious who condemn and claim that man’s soul is lost and needs saving are in themselves lost to the extent that they condemn. So the soul which needs saving is not the one condemned, as the condemned do not condemn. The condemned do not cast themselves off from the virtuous. The virtuous cut themselves off from the thing they condemn, and thereby become lost and need saving. To the extent that you condemn, to that extent you are cut off from life and are lost; and moreover, life is hindered in its free action, even in the parts which are considered virtuous. It is not the sinner that Jesus came to save; the sinner is not lost. It is the saints who need saving. By condemning they are cut off from life, and they will be saved only when they reconcile themselves to whatsoever they condemn.

The sum total of my search is this: had I known enough to look for God in a wise manner I would have had a problem on my hands. As the balance is not at all flattering, and to keep my self-respect, I would have to condemn every other self, that I may place myself above them and thereby separate myself from God. Going about in the manner I did, I discovered God is everywhere, God is everything, and his schemes are to have a good time with himself and by letting life express itself through me to obey the callings of life through my heart I am at one with all-there-is—with the prostitute in the church and school, as well as with the one who sells himself or herself for a crust of bread. Therein lies the advantage of not being wise.