Feelgood Theosophy
Welcome to the Feelgood
Lodge
Living is Life
By
Ernest Wood
From
The New Theosophy
Published 1929
The road to the
goal of life is - living. Living is creative work. Creative work
may be mental, emotional or physically material. It
may be for oneself or others, which is only another
way of saying you may have an audience of one or many.
Some people
accept established customs - in dress, manners, business and religion - because
this leaves them leisure to think, and saves them from exhaustion of planning
new ways and going against the stream of ordinary life.
Some on the
contrary accept traditional ways of thinking, because this makes
smooth the path of social intercourse and self-expression
in the corner of society to which they happen to belong, and opens the door to
the enjoyment of the many pleasures which it contains. but
as thinking is for living and living is for undertaking - not mere sensation,
except on the surface - both these lack the character and benefit of creative
work or real living.
Such people go
on for their whole lifetime making the same mistakes, the theorists or
spectators losing the corrective of experimental experience and the butterflies
losing the corrective of interested thought.
But thought and
action combine in creative living, and between these two the emotions become pure
and sweet. Creative living awakens more and more the ego, the "I am",
so that each moment is full of life and growth. The creative liver may be a
statesman, philanthropist, philosopher, interpreter,
scientist, devotee or
artist, with an audience of one or many, with canvas as
small as his own skin or
as large as the world, but whatever may be his métier
he really lives, while the
imitators, the copyists, the conformists are relatively dead
all the time - they
tread the paths of animal, vegetable or mineral life,
not that of man. It is
better to be a man painting on a small canvas than a
human fungus covering the
world.
The objects or
forms which surround us on that road are objects to be lived with. Just as an
architect might find himself in a remote South Sea Island, where he would busy
himself building beautiful and useful houses with the materials from the palm
trees and grasses within his reach, or might find himself in a modern city with
steel girders, and electric machines, cement and iron and glass to his hand,
and there he would build another kind of house, so each man finds himself among
objects with which he can live. The objects do not constitute the life. The
living constitutes the life, for life is dynamic. Perhaps it would be better if
we talked about "my living", instead of
"my life" for living is life.
Life cannot stand still
Feelgood Theosophy
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