The Theosophical Forum – August 1947

KEEPING ON THE BEAM — Lydia Ross

To keep on the Beam of Intuition in Life's journey, means wise goings on all flights and timely arrivals at all landings.

The man-made birds that today soar freely above and around the earth are something more than just another brain-mind conquest of Nature's forces. The plane, moving into higher levels of the earth's atmosphere, is symbolic of new levels and wider vistas opening up in man's own nature. It must be so; otherwise the human creator would be something less than his creation.

The inventors and pilots of the airplanes may or may not be noted as aspiring individuals. But as integral human elements of the current mental and ethical life, they must feel, in degree, the worldwide urge to find a somewhat freer and higher standard of living. If the passengers mostly bring aboard their own "atmosphere" of routine personal affairs, and only casually look out at the painted picture of a world going by, they are missing the finest thrills of the flight. For the few, however, who enter into the spirit of flying, the plane may give them a lift in more ways than one.

In our endless journey of Destiny, we mere men are being carried along by Mother Earth as she cycles steadily onward and outward into new and grander spaces of Space. Wise old Earth keeps on the Beam of Progress and becomes at home in ever enlarging and finer realms of matter. She is thrilled with renewed life in her fearless journey of planetary adventure with its cosmic cycles of regulated landings for rest and vital renewal.

As we human embryonic planets are ferried along by Mother Earth, each one of us vibrates with delicate inner thrills of the same vital cosmic urge to unfold and expand and become at home in the ever-new and finer realms of our unknown self-hood. In our age-old journey of self-becoming, we have become self-realizing, responsible pilots of our own destiny. The natural charted beam of man's progress is the invisible, voiceless, inner beam of Intuition. It is the individual something, more sure and real than an ace pilot's technical knowledge of flying. It is a mystic beam of living light generated by man's spiritual self. It is the discriminating principle of our sevenfold nature. It is the "wisdom of the Wise" which all great sages and Saviors have evolved by many lives of impersonal and unselfish thought and service for humanity. By aspiration and strong will for self-conquest, they long ago evolved beyond our present level of attainment. As Elder Brothers they show us the way by which we may work out our salvation from the evil of ignorance and its self-imposed suffering. As living men, they understand all the levels of earth life as viewed from the conscious altitude where the Higher Mind merges into the next higher level of spiritual vision. This evolutionary move is as natural and logical a step in progress as is that untimed movement above the field when our passenger plane lifted its little round feet on its take-off from solid earth for the levels of the air.,

Our winged ship soars upward and onward, and we at once feel at home in a free clear level of finer air. The going seems smooth and unhurried. We forget that time and space are measured on a different scale from the familiar one in the picture on the receding landscape a mile or two below. Looking down, the countless details that made up our pattern of daily life are lost in the toy pictures of towns and roads and narrow ribbons of rivers. These are now the details that dot a great moving panorama of hills and mountains and blue ocean expanse which make up the backdrop of our coastal flight.

As this vast panorama slowly unfolds and rolls by, it seems that it surely must picture a continued story of Plan and Purpose so vital and majestic that even the big cities here and there are mere punctuation points.

What, then, does earth life mean? We have caught glimpses of a few shifting scenes of an over-all picture of Mother Earth's playhouse for us. With so marvelous a stage setting, surely "the play's the thing."

Is not the airplane perspective symbolic of that of our spiritual self, patiently overseeing its bewildered human child? We think of Krishna, "tenderly smiling" upon downcast Arjuna weighed down with doubts and fears, whose recorded wisdom in the Gita is yet the traveller's guidebook for the Earth journey.



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