selfless. And we obtain it in the subjection, reduction, analysis, and
destruction of the Self. So on we go, active in science and mechanics,
and social reform.
But we have exhausted ourselves in the process. We have found great
treasures, and we are now impotent to use them. So we have said: 'What
good are these treasures, they are vulgar nothings.' We have said: 'Let
us go back from this adventuring, let us enjoy our own flesh, like the
Italian.' But our habit of life, our very constitution, prevents our
being quite like the Italian. The phallus will never serve us as a
Godhead, because we do not believe in it: no Northern race does.
Therefore, either we set ourselves to serve our children, calling them
'the future', or else we turn perverse and destructive, give ourselves
joy in the destruction of the flesh.
The children are not the future. The living truth is the future. Time
and people do not make the future. Retrogression is not the future.
Fifty million children growing up purposeless, with no purpose save the
attainment of their own individual desires, these are not the future,
they are only a disintegration of the past. The future is in living,
growing truth, in advancing fulfilment.
But it is no good. Whatever we do, it is within the greater will towards
self-reduction and a perfect society, analysis on the one hand, and
mechanical construction on the other. This will dominates us as a whole,
and until the whole breaks down, the will must persist. So that now,
continuing in the old, splendid will for a perfect selfless humanity, we
have become inhuman and unable to help ourselves, we are but attributes
of the great mechanized society we have created on our way to
perfection. And this great mechanized society, being selfless, is
pitiless. It works on mechanically and destroys us, it is our master
and our God.
It is past the time to leave off, to cease entirely from what we are
doing, and from what we have been doing for hundreds of years. It is
past the time to cease seeking one Infinite, ignoring, striving to
eliminate the other. The Infinite is twofold, the Father and the Son,
the Dark and the Light, the Senses and the Mind, the Soul and the
Spirit, the self and the not-self, the Eagle and the Dove, the Tiger and
the Lamb. The consummation of man is twofold, in the Self and in
Selflessness. By great retrogression back to the source of darkness in
me, the Self, deep in the senses, I arrive at the Original, Creative
Infinite. By projection forth from myself, by the elimination of my
absolute sensual self, I arrive at the Ultimate Infinite, Oneness in the
Spirit. They are two Infinites, twofold approach to God. And man must
know both.
But he must never confuse them. They are eternally separate. The lion
shall never lie down with the lamb. The lion eternally shall devour the
lamb, the lamb eternally shall be devoured. Man knows the great
consummation in the flesh, the sensual ecstasy, and that is eternal.
Also the spiritual ecstasy of unanimity, that is eternal. But the two
are separate and never to be confused. To neutralize the one with the
other is unthinkable, an abomination. Confusion is horror and
nothingness.
The two Infinites, negative and positive, they are always related, but
they are never identical. They are always opposite, but there exists a
relation between them. This is the Holy Ghost of the Christian Trinity.
And it is this, the relation which is established between the two
Infinites, the two natures of God, which we have transgressed,
forgotten, sinned against. The Father is the Father, and the Son is the
Son. I may know the Son and deny the Father, or know the Father and deny
the Son. But that which I may never deny, and which I have denied, is
the Holy Ghost which relates the dual Infinites into One Whole, which
relates and keeps distinct the dual natures of God. To say that the two
are one, this is the inadmissible lie. The two are related, by the
intervention of the Third, into a Oneness.
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