In a little hamlet in the mountains at the head of Lake Champlain some years ago I stumbled upon a primitive mill. The power was furnished by a horse that walked with heavy foot up an inclined plane on a slatted, continuously revolving belt. This belt was kept moving downward at precisely the same speed that the heavy-footed, dispirited horse kept moving upward. The belt revolved a cylinder that turned the mill.
The horse with his dull eyes half closed, his ears laid back and his head down, labored on hour after hour, month after month, the picture of dejection and hopelessness. No wonder. Enclosed in his cage, four feet by eight, toiling, eternally toiling, over the same, old slats that crawled downward to neutralize his tired steps, he never advanced—never got anywhere.
Somebody else got the grist—he could not be interested in that. The thing that broke that horse’s spirit and quenched the light in his eye was the feeling that no matter how hard he toiled, he must always remain practically at a standstill. For he was a slave in a treadmill.
Soon after, that dejected horse died. Not because the work was hard but because hope had died. Horses, like men, live their beat only through accomplishment and through change. The hopeless state of mind will kill a horse or a dog, even as it kills the human slave in the industrial treadmill.
The human mind is a strange and complex thing. It grows and becomes broader and more complex only by exercise and expression in hundreds of different directions; and the more complex and versatile it becomes, the more it chafes and frets at being repressed and held in the groove of deadly monotony. When mental growth is done, the purpose of life is thwarted.
The human being is virtually as dead as any other piece of mechanism.
The modern man lives in two worlds. The first is the world of toil—the material world of beefsteak and business – that is the world of endless repetition of unnumbered yesterdays, of throwing the same old shuttle from hand to hand, of weaving the same dull gray warp and woof of life. That is the treadmill existence.
The other world is the world of Thought—the world of mental progress, the ideal world, and at the same time (from the loftier point of view) the real world, because it is the only world that is enduring, the only one that greatly concerns the real man or ego.
What all the world’s “aseeking,” is happiness, and it is in this thought-world alone that the individual may find his supreme joy.
Immersed in the illusion of mere material existence, fighting for mere bread and butter and a place to sleep, practically at a standstill on the soul-deadening treadmill of labor, most men and women of modern commercial life, fall into the perdition of routine and in ceasing to grow, they cease to live in that real world—the world of progressive Thought.
Certainly, contact with the material world is necessary, but it should not dominate. Unquestionably the concentration of mind necessary in bread-winning serves to develop many of the finer powers of the ego.
Work is a blessing and not as many people think—a curse. But concentration should never be kept up year after year, on one object. It ought to be shifted a hundred times, from plane to plane. Life should be a constantly expanding series of new experiments and experiences. Just as muscles and organs if long unused dwindle and become atrophied and even disappear through disease, so the mental faculties, if not called into expression through a change of experiences, become atrophied and useless.
Human unfoldment need have no boundary lines. The man who sets out to explore the geography of his own Soul need have no more fear of coming to the edge of the map and dropping off, than Columbus had. The powers of the inner man are linked to the Infinite; but the money-grub, whose loftier self is still a closed book, doesn’t know this. The faculties by which alone he may perceive it, have atrophied through disuse.
Your possibilities of mental and spiritual unfoldment are infinite but the treadmill existence will dose them to you. You are not the sum of what you put into yourself from without, so much as you are the product of what your experiences and your thinking unfold from within, and draw out of yourself. Knowledge is not power. Only knowledge put to use is power.
The ideal versatile man is made so by fearlessly studying, thinking, investigating, everything in the world of material things, science, religion, sociology, art, philosophy, and occultism. He is made bigger by throwing away every orange after he has sucked it dry. He is full of heterodox opinions and lovable heresies, but he does not vacillate. Like Goethe, Gladstone, Lincoln, Morris, Roosevelt, and a million other big men, he finally finds his GREAT work through experimenting with many lesser lines. He is not dissatisfied but forever unsatisfied. He never stops climbing the ladder of achievement.
The versatile man sometimes “spreads himself too thin” for great financial success, but unquestionably he lives a vastly broader, greater life, than the man whose motto is, “This one thing I do.”
The Swastika | By Grant Wallace (1907)