A New Humanity in a New Age

Is our problem that we do not take seriously and literally the often encountered prediction of a new humanity living in a new age? Is it for real? Is it already here, and we are now only living through the dregs of the old and already completely outmoded?

I have to ask myself seriously these questions, as I have been born and bred in an age which has realised all too well that change does not happen by waving a fairy wand in the air and saying a few magic words for the accompaniment. And, if change really is in sight, it will happen slowly and grudgingly, like all the other things we have tried to move along in our life.

Yet, I have to be honest. I have been the witness of too many things which I realized, in each instance with a shock, had been in a gestating state for years, and perhaps even centuries. And it was only now, in a short space of time, that their results had passed some critical threshold of conscious visibility, which had caused me to neglect them in the past. I am not exactly slow in getting off the mark, but things especially connected with the deep patterns of human nature I have always regarded as being especially resistant to sudden change.

But now, frankly, I think we have passed the threshold of a real New Age, and the old has suddenly and visibly become outmoded and no longer valid. Let me cite "worry" as an example of what I am speaking about. I have had for a greater part of my life a wonderful friend who has led me by the hand through events and the discarding of old patterns I would never have thought possible. I was in my mid-thirties when, each time I left him at the end of a visit, he would say to me, and to the others present, "Don't worry, be happy."

I knew what he was saying to me to be the truth, as after my first encounter with this great man I had no more worries. Having met a truly perfected being gave me a confidence in Creation I had never had before, and through the years I have found all the reasons why our habit of worrying is no longer valid - not needed; It is outmoded. The planet and the level of human development has passed the stage where worry was an integral part of daily realistic living.

"What? No problems?"

Yes, that is, not real ones.

"And what about all the massacres going on, and the bombings and killing of the innocent everywhere?"

Yes, but it is now only the last gasps of an outmoded and no longer propelling force. And I know that the very people who are still living through the dying gasps of the outmoded form with all its fairy-tales appended to give it a magic touch of attraction, will be corrected and erased through the victory of a knowledge of love that has reached its highest pinnacle within their own ranks and philosophy. There is no way that the New can be stopped, as all the roots and creative force needed are already in position to dissolve these dying paroxysms of an outlived form from the old humanity in its past dying mode that has now been surpassed.

There is one thing, though, that I could wish for in this crossing over from the old to the truly new. That is that the destruction of beauty that goes on at such a time be limited to the absolutely necessary in the closing of accounts. When I think of the destruction of those two magnificent statues of Buddha carved into the cliff of Afghanistan, I really do feel as though I could cry out with Jesus Christ, "Forgive them, O Lord, for they know not what they do." And what they do not know is that these have been among the dying gasps of the dying forms of a very long age indeed.
Let us be happy that the succeeding one is well en route and will have the soft warmth of pure gold and the diamond sparkle of Reality everywhere.

Fred

In the general period in which I inherited Bobbin, I also acquired a canary. I don’t remember the circumstances at all, but I think if my mental body memory is working well, which it often is these days as it substitutes more and more for the slowing physical body memory, I recall that one of my male friends had a girl friend who owned a canary, and the girl friend moved her home to another city. For some reason even more obscure, it turned out that she could not take her canary with her, nor could her boy friend take it either. So in this period I not only fractured my devotion to dogs with a cat; but at almost the same time took on a bird as well.
I felt no qualms about the canary, as my break-down from being devoted to dogs felt no further crisis in adopting this much smaller bit of living matter clothed in yellow feathers
I do feel a bit shame-faced though about the origin of the bird’s name; which rests without further details as being Fred. His upkeep was very simple and feeding costs frugal in the extreme, certainly in comparison to a dog, or even a cat. We seemed to take to each other without the least ripple of adjustment needed. I was early to bed and Fred apparently even earlier. In fact, I never did try to understand when he was asleep or awake, as his eyes seemed always open when I passed by, even when I returned late at night. Maybe they don’t sleep. I had never thought of that, but that would be very strange indeed considering that they live and breathe.
Fred seemed to thrive on whatever passed his way, but gradually I thought I ought to make a bit of effort to extend the hand of friendship to this very intelligent and good-mannered bit of fluff. I tried to compose a few words of greeting and welcome, hoping that in some way the gist of my sentiments would give him pleasure, and tried not to think of whether I was getting a bit dotty in the absence of any other human habitant in my small apartment.
Those were the days of the hippies, and San Francisco, where I was living, contained as far as I knew the mecca of all hippiedom, the Haight Ashbury district. As one of my closest esoteric friends lived in that sainted domain, I had actually seen one or two of what I suspected were hippies while calling on my friend there. She was invalided at the time, and died not too long after I inherited Fred. I missed her greatly as she had been about the first person initiated into the Chistia Order of Sufis by the great musician and poet, Inayat Khan, when he first landed in San Francisco in response to his Chistia master’s command to go to the West from India and take with him the principles of Sufism and its great love of music and the arts.
Getting back to Fred, I put him in the second spare bedroom and there he reigned unchallenged in the alternating fogs and sunny spells so natural to the Bay Area.
We got along very well together as far as I could tell. Then a small band of hippies attracted by the poetry of Inayat Khan started the train of events which altered completely Fred’s simple life routine, and added a truly unique and very special chapter to my own collection of completely incredible events, which rapidly gathered speed from that time on. In fact, I would make a guess that Bobbin and Fred should have alerted me to the fact that my own life was moving into a sphere of reality which was so far divorced from mathematics and science in which I had specialized, that it has always been a wonder to both me and my friends that the two areas could possibly exist side by side for so many years in intense living and in equally intense harmony with each other. This marked the beginning of deep and constant experiencing of events in daily life and human relationship involving the finest essences of science and mysticism.
One day my telephone rang and the new head of the little mystic group in which I participated was on the line with an unexpected request to make of me. It seems she had been in the office of the little group when a knock at the door introduced four bedraggled young men whom she correctly sized up as hippies, of whose unexpected visit this was her first experience. It seems they had been caught by the beauty of the poetry of Inayat Khan which they had been reading. A bit of research in the San Francisco telephone book had turned up a name which included the magic word Sufi, and an address which was obviously an office of something to do with the Sufis. They went baying at once on the trail, and wanted to know if there were some more books of poetry around written by Inayat Khan.
Next thing I knew my name and address had been given to them with the advice that this would be as close as they could get to their goal if they could make an appointment with me for a conversation.
We duly met, and when I saw what had arrived at my front door I just hoped that my landlord was not around to see what was being admitted into his well-kept and very bourgeois building. After I had gotten over the shock of a close-up view of these four classic examples of hippie dress and care of body and clothing, I wondered how I was going to get out of this gracefully without losing my apartment lease.
So be it. I have never changed an opinion on human nature as fast in all my life as I did in the next few minutes. After a short word of explanation from the fellow who was the obvious leader of the foursome, one of them asked me a question about Inayat Khan. Fortunately I knew the answer, and abandoned immediately my census of their clothes and hairdo. It was something such as I had never witnessed. I wondered if free water had ever run over any part of their bodies or clothing. I would swear that it was very improbable.
Then a second question came from another boy. I can’t remember what he asked, but it had something to do with the formation of Inayat Khan while he studied in the Chistia group in Ajmer. It woke me up with a start, and I forgot all about clothes and unwashed skin and clothing. I never got back to that. We shortly made a date for another meeting the following Saturday. The long and the short of it was that I found myself volunteering to meet with them and several of their friends once a week to take a careful look at the roots of mysticism; about which I knew nothing, but hoped I could bone up during each intervening six days.
I had to limit that group to 35 persons maximum, and after three months went over the same newly minted ground with a second group, and then another , and continued on for a total of three years of the most intense pleasure and very special human functioning I have ever experienced. And during all this was when Fred quite literally made his debut.
One Saturday I was having a private interview with one of the charter members of the first hippie group, who had become a fast and deeply value friend. As Bob asked me another bit of advice on a very puzzling human situation in which he had become involved, I thought I heard a strange sound coming from the spare bedroom in which Fred was housed. As Bob’s conversation was intense and important I dismissed the strange sound from Fred’s room and continued. Then, suddenly, Bob stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked at me.
“Do you hear what I do?” he asked.
Then I did listen, and what I heard was unbelievable. It was Fred whistling the solo part of what I swear was a violin concerto that the good music station of San Francisco had been playing repeatedly for several days. I recognized it, although I had not known that particular violin concerto until it had become a favorite of that radio program. We both listened in amazement while Fred went faultlessly over the theme, again and again.
Not terribly long after that Fred and I moved to London and Fred took up his solo concertizing in South Kensington and of course became famous in a small intimate circle of mystics strangely resembling the ones in which Fred first became the reigning soloist.
But sad. In London I had to hire a new house cleaner, and once when I was away on a business trip she forgot to water Fred. When I returned Fred lay dead in the bottom of his cage.
I was heart-broken, as were several of the London hippies. But Fred established unquestionably one great fact for me. All of animaldom and dogdom and canarydom had had some sort of an evolutionary push that was so general and clear that it witnessed a push in creation that had certainly occurred only recently. Thus I was prepared to accept and build on evidence presented to me much later, which Fred had so neatly provided to me years before.
Dear Fred, I am sure you are now a great leader of orchestras and bewitch the musicians into a harmony such as you projected to Bob and me at my home in San Francisco near the royal domain of hippidom in the Haight Ashbury district.

Bobbin

I am a dog lover. I was given my first dog when I was one year old, for my birthday, by my father. I watched him come into the living room with his arms behind his back. I knew at once that something was up because he never walked with his arms behind his back. When he saw me looking at him with great curiosity he took his arms from their unusual position and in one hand he held something that looked a bit like the fur collar of my mother's overcoat (it was winter at the time but I didn't know what the white stuff was that was lying on the ground outside our house.)

The mop of fur fell or sprang from my father's hand and made a direct line for me, propped up on the couch at the side of the room. It leaped up at me, knocking me over, at which point I let out a scream and my mother came running to inspect for injuries and other fatal signs. None were apparent and I remember no more of that first meeting with my dog, with whom I lived happily, yes, even blissfully, for the next fifteen years until he had to be put away from causes stemming from old age. I was broken hearted and cried for the last time until I went to a movie in which an equally wonderful dog was killed in the course of the action.

I think animals are often among the most beautiful things that exist. I have always loved to share my dogs with my favorite friends with whom I feel I must share the best things in life. Dogs and canaries are about the tops. In fact I still have the same conviction that I grew to believe in profoundly, that the reason people are as frequently really human is due to the fact that so many families have dogs as close friends of the family. Learning the abc's of human decency is simple when you have the constant presence of a dog about as an example of complete, unconditional love and faithfulness.

My dog, Denny ((a thoroughbred Scotch collie) was automatically recognized wherever we lived as the king of the town and respected and loved by all. He also I have to add was a superb fighter and was never known to have been bested, even when protecting me against heavy odds, which could happen on occasion, as my own temperament was not very carefully attuned to running around in harmless surroundings, but more to the natural haunts of my Indian (red skin) and sheep herder friends who lived nearby.

But this is not the story of Denny, but rather of my cat Bobbin, whom I inherited to my astonishment and trepidation, when I was rapidly approaching my thirties, a frightful age I had always felt. He was one of two cats - half-brothers - left homeless when their mistress, one of my most loved friends, died of cancer and had no immediate family left to care for them except for aged mother, who would have been hard put to care for a canary. So Tuffy, the younger, and a real tough, was put away by common consent and I took Bobbin home to a house he knew already but in which he had never lived. He was a very wise animal; even I, a non-cat-lover, could see and grant that. And he had seen so much coming and going of nurses and doctors during the time of my friend's illness and death to know that life was probably due for more unexplained circumstances.

I took Bobbin the short distance to his new home and showed him where he was expected to sleep, put a dish of milk for him and then some water and all this beside a basket with an old piece of blanket which I had rescued from his previous abode. He seemed to sense what was expected and after a brief wander in the garden, came back and curled up as if he had always lived there.

Next morning as I was starting my scales on my piano in the living room, I noticed that Bobbin looked up from his half-curled position on the living room rug and showed modest surprise at my antics and the noise I was creating. Not much later I felt Bobbin jump up onto the end of the piano bench seat on which I was sitting and he looked carefully at what I was doing. He offered no comment. Just deeply interested and concentrated.

As I continued playing the scales rapidly and then the Isidore Philippe exercises which were my great technical mainstay, I noted Bobbin begin to steel himself for action. I was deeply interested in his next move. Slowly he lifted his left paw over onto my right leg and very gently dug his claws ever so tenderly into the skin of my upper hip region. I knew what he wanted at once. I stopped playing and folded my hands on my lap. Then he took the same left paw and placed it on a note in front of him. Slowly he pressed down on the key. When he heard the note sound he looked thoughtfully pleased. Then he did it again, and again, all very deliberately All very assured and thoughtful.

Then he did something totally unexpected. He gracefully jumped onto the keyboard at about middle C and quickly and assuredly ran up and down the keyboard two or three times, rarely playing two notes with the same paw. I am tempted to read some sort of new animal crackers piano prodigy as having been performed, but I have to be honest. Without ado after this brief command appearance he jumped gracefully back down onto the bench beside me and without casting the slightest glance in my direction jumped from there to the floor, proceeded out the open front door and into the garden. Neither of us ever referred to his musical venture. As if in so many words, he let me know that he had mastered the playing of the piano and had no further interest in it.
Soon after this artistic event Bobbin and I moved several miles into a new bay-front property. He took to hunting in the fields behind the row of houses that lined the bay at that point, and one day he did not return from his afternoon hunt. I regretted his going but always felt it was thoughtful of him not to have put me into the position of having to choose between cats and dogs as my favorites in the sub-human species.