Towards democracy

486 Towards Democracy

fatuous attendant and exhibitor of its acrobatic feats (like

a keeper who shows off a monkey).

Remember that if you walk away from it, leaving it as ©

dead, paying it no attention whatever—it will have to follow —

you—it will grow by following, by reaching up to you, from —

the known to the unknown, continually ; It will become at last the rainbow-tinted garment and shining interpreter of Yourself, and incredibly beautiful.

But if you turn and wait always upon it, and its idiotic ©

cares and anxieties, and endless dream-chains of argument —

and imagination—

Feeding them and the microbe-swarms of thought continually, wasting upon them your life-force ;

Why, then, instead of your Mind becoming your true companion and interpreter, it will develop antics and a St. Vitus’ dance of its own, and the form of a wandering lunatic,

Incredibly tangle-haired and diseased and unclean,

In whose features you, in sadness and in vain, will search for your own image—terrified lest you find it not, and terrified too lest you find it.

Therefore quite decisively, day by day and at every juncture, leave your Mind for a time in silence and abeyance ;

With its tyrannous thoughts and demands, and funny little fears and fancies—the long legacy of ages of animal evolution ;

Slipping out and going your own way into the Unseenfeeling with your feet if necessary through the darkness—till some day it may follow you;