The whole summer has gone by now and with it the sun and warmth of several months. How nature rejoiced in it all, and yet we are almost into December. I once read some thoughts in an old book which expressed the grandeur of nature: "Behold, the mellow light that floods the Eastern sky. In signs of praise both heaven and earth unite. And from the four-fold manifested Powers a chant of love ariseth, both from the flaming Fire and flowing Water, and from sweet-smelling Earth and rushing Wind."
Here you sense the enormous outpouring of forces from the greatness of cosmic being, where man is so to speak "annihilated" before the wonder of it all, but when the real Man within stands up he breathes the polarizing force that pours from the innermost heart of the sun. Although we are immensely far, in miles, from the solar presence, we may experience its beauty, its strength, just as near us as is the "breath of God."
Many times this summer some friends and I have motored to the seashore and watched the sun go down amid the beautiful sunlit clouds on the horizon. It has been a mighty experience. One can't get enough of the beauty, and it is the same in the early mornings.
One day the atmosphere was strange and smog-like. There was a sparkle of sunshine in everything. Then quite suddenly the sun penetrated the haze in a way that you could look directly upon its redgold face. In the right edge there was distinctly seen a dark spot, a sunspot. One thought filled my mind: this is how the first primitive beings felt and experienced nature millions of years ago! This is how they sensed, as I do now, a close contact with Father Sun. And I thought of man's growth since then as life after life we created our karmic destiny. What have we not all experienced of good and evil? How immense has been our influence and yet, how greatly have we ourselves been influenced by the karma of the greater life to which we all belong? We may not have grasped the meaning of what has happened — our feelings may have time and again overruled the clarity of common sense — but repeatedly we have returned to that which is ourselves, to the Father Sun in our own being that determines the development we undergo.
This is the inner road which marks the progress of evolution. It is our inner divinity which tries to help us emerge beyond the self-adversary, so that we may better judge our noble and ignoble motives. And when we have been irradiated and have seen truth, even to a slight degree, we are no longer the same individuals as before. A new insight has grown strong in our hearts.
We have a long, long road to travel. But what does it matter, it is this life, the one we are living, whatever step we stand on, that is the great joy-filled mystery for us. Yes, even as we watch the majesty of the sun rise and set, something happens within us, a sort of gradual receptivity, an opening of the portals of the soul. And what can give us this experience if not Father Sun, in the great, in the heavens — or, in the small, in the tender little moments of our daily life?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Nobel-prize winner, recognized this. When you read the writings of this fearless man you feel that he has long ago "made up with life" — he has suffered spiritually, intellectually and physically to such a degree that death is no longer a figure of fear and terror. Instead there seems to have grown forth an intrepid, strong feeling for truth within him, such as he had never before known. In a dark world, we see him as an unafraid warrior of spirit, as he, despite all dangers, disseminates his message to a humanity he believes in. May we not regard him as a man who has literally walked through life's many hells, yet who unabashed declares his belief in the future?
He of all men knows that this frightening inhumanity's age is by no means over, and yet he expresses the hallmark of inner timelessness in a little prose poem:
"How easy for me to live with Thee, Lord,
"How easy for me to believe in Thee.
"I gaze with wonder from the mountaintop of human praise back on the road I traveled and that I never alone could have found, a wonderful road through despair to the place where I stand and whence I might send to humanity a reflection of your rays. There is still much lacking to let me reflect them rightly. This you will make possible in the course of time. If it be not given to me to do so, it means you have decided it shall be done by others."
(From Sunrise magazine, December 1972. Copyright © 1972 by Theosophical University Press)