Speaker 1: Burden dropping. This to me is life. That if life
be a burden, I will join to make it. But
the burden of a song bailey? Have you heard that
it was good to gain the day? I also say
it is good to fall. Battles are lost in the
same spirit in which they are won, Walt Whitman. We
hear and read much about burden bearing, but of the
better way of burden dropping, very little is heard or known.
Yet why should you go about with an oppressive weight
at your heart when you might relieve yourself of it
and move amongst your fellows heart free and cheerful. No
man carries a burden upon his back, except to necessarily
transfer something from one place to another. He does not
saddle his shoulders with a perpetual burden and then regard
himself as a martyr for his pains. And why should
you impose upon your mind a useless burden and then
add to its weight the miseries of self condolence and
self pity. Why not abandon both your load and your misery,
and thus add to the gladness of the world by
first making yourself glad. No reason can justify and no
logic can support the ceaseless carrying of a grievous load.
As in things material, a load is only undertaken as
a necessary means of transference, and is never a source
of sorrow. So in things spiritual, a burden should only
be taken up as a means towards some good and
necessary end, which, when attained, the burden is put aside.
And the carrying of such a burden, far from being
a source of grief, would be a cause for rejoicing.
We say that bodily mortifications which some religious ascetics inflict
upon themselves are unnecessary in vain, and are the mental
mortifications which so many people inflict upon themselves less unnecessary
in vain. Where is the burden which should cause unhappiness
and sorrow? It does not exist. If a thing is
to be done, let it be done cheerfully, and not
with the inward groanings and lamentations. It is of the
highest wisdom to embrace necessity as a friend and guide.
It is of the greatest folly to scalp upon necessity
as an enemy, and to wish or try to overcome
or avoid her. We need our own at every turn,
and duties only become oppressive loads when we refuse to
recognize and embrace them. He who does any necessary thing
in a niggardly and complaining spirit, hunting the while after
unnecessary pleasures, lashes himself with the scorpions of misery and disappointment,
and imposes upon himself a doubly weighted burden of weariness
and unrest, under which he incessantly groans. Wake thou, o
self to better things, to yonder heights, uplift thy wings,
take up the psalm of life anew, sing the good,
sing of the true, Sing a full victory over wrong.
Make thou a richer, sweeter song. Out of thy doubting
care and pain, weave thou a joyous glad refrain, out
of thy thorns a crown. Weave thou of rare, rejoicing.
Sing thou, Now, I will give my cheerful, unselfish and
undivided attention to the doing of all those things which
enter into my compact with life. And though I walk
under colossal responsibilities, I shall be unconscious of any troublesome
weight or grievous burden. You may say a certain thing,
a duty, a companionship, or a social obligation troubles you
is burdensome, and you resign yourself to oppression with the
thought I have entered into this and will go through it.
But it is heavy and grievous work. But is the
thing really burdensome? Or is it your selfishness that is
oppressing you? I tell you that the very thing with
which you regard as so imprisoning a restriction, is the
first gateway to your emancipation. That work which you regard
as a perpetual curse contains for you the actual blessedness
which you vainly persuade yourself lies in another, an unapproachable direction.
All things are mirrors in which you see yourself reflected,
And the gloom which you perceive in your work is
but a reflection of that mental state which you bring
to it. Bring a right and unselfish state of heart
to the thing, and lo it is at once transformed
and becomes a means of strength and blessedness, reflecting back
that which you have brought to it. If you bring
a scowling face to your looking glass, will you complain
of the glass that it glowers upon you with a
deformed visage? Or will you put your face right and
so get back from the reflector a more pleasing countenance.
It is right and necessary that a thing should be
done when the doing of it is good, and can
only become burdensome in wishing not to do it. The
selfish wish makes the thing appear evil. It is neither
right nor necessary that a thing should be done, then
the doing of it in order to gain some coveted
pleasure is folly, which can only lead to burdensome issues.
The duty which you shirk is your most reproving angel.
The pleasure which you race after is your most flattering enemy.
Foolish man, when will you turn around and be wise?
It is the beneficence of the universe that is everywhere
and at all times, urging its creatures to wisdom, as
it demands coherence of its atoms. The folly and selfishness entails.
Suffering in ever increasing degrees of intensity is preservative and good,
for agony is the enemy of apathy. In the herald
of wisdom, what is painful, what is grievous? What is burdensome?
Passion is painful, Folly is grievous. Selfishness is burdensome. It
is the dark idolatry of self, which, when our thoughts
and actions once are done, demands that man should weep
and bleed and groan. Eliminate passion, folly, and selfishness from
your mind and conduct, and you will eliminate suffering from
your life. Burden dropping consists in abandoning the inward selfishness
and putting pure love in its place. Go to your
task with love in your heart, and you will go
to it light hearted and cheerful. The mind, through ignorance,
creates its own burdens and inflicts its own punishments. No
one is doomed to carry any load. Sorrow is not
arbitrarily imposed. These things are self made. Reason is the
rightful monarch of the mind, and anarchy reigns in his
spiritual kingdom. When his throne is unsurped by passion. When
love of pleasure is the fore heaviness and anguish compose
the rear, you are free to choose. Even if you
are bound by passion and feel helpless. You have bound
yourself and are not helpless. Where you have bound, you
can unbind. You have come to your present state by degrees,
and you can recover yourself by degrees, can reinstate reason
and dethrone passion. The time to avoid evil is before
pleasure is embraced, but once embraced, its train of consequences
should teach you wisdom. The time to decide is before
responsibilities are adopted, but once adopted, all selfish considerations, with
their attendant grumblings, whinings, and complainings, should be religiously excluded
from the heart. Responsibilities lose their weight when carried lovingly
and wisely. What heavy burden is a man weighted with
which is not made heavier and more unendurable by weak
thoughts of selfish desires. If your circumstances are trying, it
is because you need them and can evolve the strength
to meet them. They are trying because there is some
weak spot within you, and they will continue to be
trying until that spot is eradicated. Be glad that you
have the opportunity of becoming stronger and wiser. No circumstances
can be trying to wisdom. Nothing can weary love. Stop
rooting over your own trying circumstances, and contemplate the lives
of some of those about you. Here is a woman
with a large family who has to make ends meet
on a pound a week, She performs all her domestic
duties down to the washing, finds time to attend on
sick neighbors, and manages to keep entirely out of the
two common quagmires, debt and despondency. She is cheerful from
morning to night, and never complains of her trying circumstances.
She is perennially cheerful because she is unselfish. She is
happy in the thought that she is the means of
happiness to others. Were she to brood upon the holidays,
the pretty bobbles, the lazy hours of which she is deprived,
the plays she cannot see, the music she cannot hear,
the books she cannot read, the parties she cannot attend,
the good she might do, the friendships she is debarred
from forming, of the many pleasures which might only be
hers if the circumstances were more favorable. If she brooded. Thus,
what a miserable creature she would be, How unbearably laborious
her work would become, How every little domestic duty would
hang like a millstone about her neck, dragging her down
to the grave, which, unless she altered her state of mind,
she would quickly reach. Killed by selfishness. But in not
living in the vain desires for herself, she is relieved
of all burdens and is happy. Cheerfulness and unselfishness are
sworn friends. Love knows no heavy toil. Here is another
woman with a private income which is much more sufficient,
combined with leisure and luxury. Yet she has called upon
to forfeit a portion of her time, pleasure, and money
to discharge some obligation which she wishes to be rid of,
and which should be to her work, a loving service,
or fostering in her heart some ungratified desire. She is
perpetually discontented and unhappy, and complaints of trying circumstances. Discontent
and selfishness are inseparable companions. Self love knows no joyful
labor of the two sets of circumstances above depicted, and
life is crowded with such contrasted instances, which are the
trying conditions. Is it not true that neither of them
are trying, and that both are blessed or unblest it
accordance with the measure of love or selfishness which is
infused into them. Is it not the root of the
whole matter in the mind of the individual and not
the circumstance. When a man who has recently taken up
the study of some branch of theology, religion, or occultism says,
if I had not burdened myself with a wife and family,
I could have done a great work, And had I
known years ago what I know now, I never would
have married. I know that that man has not yet
found the commonest and broadest way of wisdom, for there
is no greater folly than regret, and he is incapable
of the great work which he is so ambitious to perform.
If a man has such a deep love for his
fellow men that he is anxious to do a great
work for humanity, he will manifest that surpassing love always,
and in the place where he now is. His home
will be filled with it, and the beauty and sweetness
and peace of his unselfish love will follow wherever he goes,
making happy those about him, and transmuting all things into good.
The love that goes abroad to air itself and is
undiscoverable at home is not love. It is vanity. Have
I not seen o pitiful sight, the cheerless home and
neglected children of the misguided missioner and religionists. It is
on such self delusion as this, that self pity and
self martyrdom ever wait, and its self inflicted misery is
regarded by the deluded one as holy in religious burden
which he or she is called upon to bear. Only
a great man can do great work, and he will
be great wherever he is, and will do his noble
work under whatsoever circumstances he may find himself when he
has unfolded and revealed that work. Thou, who art so
anxious to work for humanity, to help thy fellow men,
begin that work at home, Help thyself, thy neighbor, thy wife,
thy child, Do not be deluded, and tell thou doest
with utmost faithfulness, the nearer and the lesser, Thou canst
not do the farther and greater. If a man has
lived many years of his life in lust and selfish pleasure,
it is the order of things that his accumulated errors
should weigh at last heavily upon him. As until they
are thus brought home to him, he will not abandon them,
he will not exert himself to find a better life.
But whilst he regards his self made self, impose burdens
as holy crosses imposed upon him by the Supreme, or
as marks of spiritual virtue, or as loaths with fate circumstances,
or other people have heaped undeservedly and unjustly upon him.
He is but lengthening out his folly, increasing the weight
of his burdens, and multiplying his pains and sorrows. Only
when such a man wakes up to the truth that
his burdens are of his own making, that they are
the accumulated effects of his own acts, will he cease
from unmanly self pity and find the better way of
burden dropping. Only when he opens his eyes to see
that every thought in act is another brick, another stone,
built into the temple of his life, will he develop
the insight which will enable him to recognize his own
unstable handiwork, the unflinching manling as to acknowledge it, and
the courage to build more nobly and enduringly. Painful burdens
are necessary, but only so long as we lack love
and wisdom. The temple of blessedness lies beyond the outer
courts of suffering and humiliat, and to reach it the
pilgrim must pass through the outer courts. For a time,
he will linger in the outer, but only so long as,
through his own imperfect understanding he mistakes it for the inner.
While he pities himself and confound suffering with holiness, he
will remain in suffering. But when casting off the last
unholy rag of self pity, he perceives that suffering is
a means and not an end, that it is a state,
self originated and self propagated. Then converted and right minded,
he will rapidly pass through the outer courts and reach
the inner abode of peace. Suffering does not originate in
the perfect, but in the imperfect. It does not mark
the complete, but the incomplete. It can therefore be transcended.
Its self born cause can be found, investigated, comprehended, and
forever removed. It is true, therefore, that we must pass
through agony to rest, through loneliness to peace. But let
the sufferer not forget it is a passing through, that
the agony is a gateway and not a habitation, that
the loneliness is a pathway and not a destination, And
that a little farther on he will come to the
painless and blissful repose, little by little is a burden
accumulated imperceptibly, and by degrees is its weight increased. A
thoughtless impulse, a gross self indulgence, a blind passion yielded
to and gratified again and again, an impure thought fostered,
a cruel word uttered, a foolish thing done time after time,
and at last the gathered weight of many follies becomes oppressive.
At first, and for a time the weight is not felt,
but it is being added to day after day. And
the time comes when the accumulated burden is felt in
all its galling weight, when the bitter fruits of selfishness
are gathered, and the heart is troubled with the weariness
of life. When this period arrives, let the sufferer look
to himself. Let him search for the blessed way of
burden dropping, finding which he will find wisdom to live better,
purity to live, sweeter, love to live nobler will find
in the reversal of that conduct by which his burdens
were accumulated. Light hearted nights and days, cheerful action, and
unclouded joy come out of the world, come above it,
up over its crosses and graves. Though the green earth
is fair, and I love it. We must love it
as masters, not slaves. Come up where the dust never rises,
but only the perfume of flowers, and your life shall
be glad with surprises of beautiful hours.