Michaelmas

"Our real problem is our own inertia," says Alexis Carrel in his epoch-making book: ‘Man, the Unknown.’ He shows us how, in an age when speed is turning the wheels of life at an ever-increasing rate–when a man can fly round the earth in less than six days and across the Atlantic ocean in 13.5 hours, human beings tend to allow themselves to flow on the stream of existence to their own undoing.

"From the minds of men sharpened by scholastic discipline, sprang science. And strange to say, science was cultivated by those men of the Occident for itself, for its truth and beauty, with complete disinterestedness...Our fathers have made a prodigious effort. Most of their European and American descendants have forgotten the past," He says also: "Science, which has transformed the material world, gives man the power of transforming himself...To progress again, man must remake himself...We cannot undertake the restoration of ourselves and our environment before having transformed our habit of thought."

Here is a scientist, one who, by his work, has been instrumental in saving many lives and relieving a great deal of human suffering, who can see quite clearly that we are ready for a first-class change. He tells us that in the modern world many of our powers of resistance and adaptation are never called into play–they remain potential. And at the same time our minds seem to flop into inertia.

He suggests that the root of the problem is the fact that science has allowed itself to become too mechanistic–all her investigations have tended towards the quantitative; and the qualitative aspect of investigation has not been given its due place. In his enquiry into the full being of man, he points out that all phenomena of clairvoyance and intuition, in fact all that he collects under the term ‘mysticity’, are shunned by most scientists as outside their scope.

This is the very point at which they fail. Carrel pleads for a full knowledge of man–for he shows in detail how man, as an entity, is still unknown to science. He indicates the value of the direct knowing of many mystics, but just falls short of realising their full significance for today. He forges the link but cannot see the full strength and beauty of the other half of the chain.

The fact is that it is the modern mystics who hold the knowledge of how man can shake himself out of his present inertia. The scientist has pointed the way and shown the need. And in amongst the rush of the new technological civilisation, there are those seers and mystics who are instructing those who will receive their teaching, in the re-education of man. Technology offers man a form of freedom he has never had before–freedom to be inert–to float on the tide. Now it rests with man himself tomake a free choice. Will he wallow in this comfortable inertia, will he accept potted knowledge and ready-made opinions from the many sources offering them? Will he, in fact, allow himself to get soft, physically, mentally and spiritually? There is now nothing to compel him in the other direction. But he can make a free choice. He can by an effort of will say ‘No’ to the policy of drift.

How is he, personally, to remake himself? Carrel gives him his answer–he must know himself. This message was written over the door of the Greek Mysteries: "O Man, know Thyself." Carrel gives an introduction to such self-knowledge from the scientific point of view. It is the final indication from the scientific world in its present stage of development. It is just here that the mystic will join hands with the man of science. For self-knowledge is the basis of all true esoteric development. But more, the mystics warn us that what Carrel has said of the world in general is true of the soul in particular. The very strength of the great religions has been one of the factors in the past, which has had a certain compulsion on men’s minds. They have been carried along on a spiritual tide. But now they are left free of this also. The collective strength of the great religions is at an end. Men are, inevitably, and rightly, thinking for themselves. They are only willing to go forward in full freedom. But it is just here that they come into a certain danger because they do not always realise that the outer compulsion must be replaced by an inner effort if there is to be any more human progress.

Now it is this fact which, in the West, we celebrate at the festival of Michaelmas. In the summer we have observed the great up-rush and blossoming of nature. As the season changes, the crops are harvested, the fruits ripen and fall, and the trees lose their leaves. The life of nature seems to recede below ground for the hard winter months. Many people experience a feeling of depression and desolation at so much seeming death. It is indeed a true allegory of the present state of our civilisation. But look–the allegory is complete. At every point where a leaf has fallen there is a bud. Packed up within a minute compass, you may find the leaves and flowers that will lie dormant all the winter, maturing and waiting to burst forth at the call of spring. This is the message of Michaelmas to the soul and spirit of the man of the West. It calls him to pull himself together and work inwardly, to experience the revivified life of the soul in the dying of nature. Those people who have even an inkling of this often experience Michaelmas as a season of extreme exhilaration. They feel as though man had been rather lost in the luxuriance of outer nature during the summer; he has rightly given himself up to the enjoyment of the divine works of nature. But now, on the other hand, he has to turn his attention to the divine within himself. If he does he has the true Michaelmas feeling of exhilaration; if he does not, he may know great heaviness of soul, and sorrow for the departing splendour of summer.

And in this age of freedom in which we now stand, is man to be entirely alone? Can he look to no Higher Powers for help and protection? Indeed he can, but now he must look to them of his own free choice. He can look to them not as intellectual abstractions, but as real beings, who, because of their reality, can be spiritually apprehended, though they may be known by different names in the different religions. And he can look especially to one Being, a Being connected with the strength of the elements, the storms, winds and thunder; a Being who can inspire his thinking when it is turned, in inner freedom, to the things of the spirit. It is to this Being that the mystics of the West have dedicated the third season of the year; they think of him as Leader of the angelic hosts and they call him the Archangel Michael.