The Mountains of Heaven...
A gift, beyond all gifts! I saw a mountain
being taken up and cast into the sea; and where it had been was a great open
place with no part in it dark, so bright the light that shone where once it
was! No part dark where all the shadows flee away! No shadows the light of day
was come! Every outward form of the knowledge of the truth, every surface
figure of it, gone! Even the sky looked bluer, and the grass a newer shade of
green; brighter, more alive! It was like I had been living in a huge
dulled place; and had grown so accustomed to its sorry look, I was unaware that
it had been as a coffin’s pall, covering all the world around about me, with
its dark cloak. Deadened within, wrapped in the encircling shroud of my own
egocentricity, everything I had seen through it had been depleted of its glory;
and, though I knew it not it had deceived me, for by it the truth had been veiled
to me. Then, suddenly, as though with the flick of a switch, the light turned
on, and all became new; the old, gone! With death’s withering shroud removed
all things were made, new! The veil over the mind of all nations taken away in
an instant! And I saw that ‘I’ could remove a mountain,
and cast it into the sea all ‘in the
twinkling of an eye’ if I did but spin about, the other way! Turned about,
and made alive, then where I once saw through the veil, in dread, now I saw, in
freedom! The mountain shrank. No longer had it any power to grip or hold me
cast to the sea of forget: far removed from the sting of death it didn’t exist
for me anymore! Looking again, I heard and saw. Vain
righteousness, my selfish demand to be right, that lust in me that had once
been my shroud, was cast aside! My fig tree, withered! My sanctimonious
mountain, which bore no fruit of life, was removed! And all my once prized
merchandize was, gone! Truth so bright and clear, I could no longer be deceived,
as one dispensation of light, passed: outgrown for another! Oh, glad and happy day that did away with
shadows! In the fullness of time my mind had come of age and the former things
of its infancy not needed any more! Turned, the day of days! A day, grown up! A
day without clouds! Turned, of my beloved, a roe or a young hart upon the
mountains of separation, swallowing up death in victory casting my mountain
into the sea! …And where was any sting there, if death was life? And where was
any grave, if loss was joy? Or, where was any life, where death was a sting to
me? And where was any victory, where loss was not my joy? There, if I was not a
conqueror of myself, and I was ruled by my own shroud, I would be left behind!
A blind captive of a bygone age, tilting windmills!
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