Author’s Preface
Author’s Preface
The widespread breakdown in individual and collective life is due to a loss of confidence. Men are not sure that what they are doing has cosmic backing and support. That sense of uncertainty sends a quiver of hesitancy into all they do. Something has snapped and left life dangling at loose ends.
The Christian scheme, which has been the cement that has held civilization together, has broken down in many minds; hence, life is left without guidance, because it is without goal. When God goes, goal goes. Life turns dead on our hands.
When there are no long-range meanings to life that we are working out, then the present surrenders to itself, is not sustained by anything beyond itself. An African American woman resigning her job said, “Life here is so daily.” Life becomes “one ____ thing after another.” It has no thread of meaning running through it. A student wrote concerning conditions at college, “Things are very contemporary here.” What he was doing and thinking had no cosmic setting, no eternal values. He was a prisoner of the moment. He wanted to breathe something eternally meaningful and universal.
The story is told that Schopenhauer, the philosopher and apostle of pessimism, sat slumped on a park bench, deep in thought. A policeman, mistaking him for a tramp, said to him, “Who are you? And what are you here for?” Schopenhauer slowly replied, “I wish I knew.” He held no key in his hand to unlock the meaning of life, and the uncertainty made him a pessimist.
Amid all this gloom and uncertainty, there is one bright spot—the Christian way. Here life lights up. It regains a sparkle, takes on meaning, goal. Here there seems to be promise of a way out. But the difficulty is that the Christian way has been presented as a way. It is an alternative alongside many others. It deals with the reclaiming and regenerating of the soul now and heaven hereafter. It lacks total meanings for the total life—individual and collective. This does not grip us, for our faith must be everything or nothing. It must control the whole of life or none of it. It must not merely be a way; it must be the Way. And it must be the Way for everything and everybody, everywhere and in every circumstance.
Life must become a single piece, a whole. It must have total meaning. Unless it has total meaning, it becomes a total mess. But when it does gain total meaning, it lights up. A woman with a radiant face said, “I’ve found life is a unit—a whole, all of a piece. And I have the Key.” She had found what we must all find, or have a dead thing called life on our hands. The breakdown in the individual is caused by the breakdown in our scheme of things. We crack up under things because life has no cement. “The men in the armed forces don’t break down,” said a psychiatrist, “they fall to pieces. They were never put together; they were held up by environment, by home, by school, and when these were taken away, they fell to pieces.” Life for them lacked a central cohesion, a lasting cement. People struck by sorrow, disappointment, and temptation go to pieces. They cannot stand up to life. They don’t know how to take it.
Take the increase—the appalling increase—of nervous disorders. It is said that more than half the hospital beds of this country are occupied by patients suffering from mental and nervous diseases. The economic loss from these diseases runs over a billion dollars a year. And what about those who never get to a hospital, but drag themselves about their tasks inwardly defeated and at war with themselves? They are only half alive and making only a 50 percent contribution to life. They are canceling themselves out with inner conflicts. A doctor came to our Ashram and said, “It’s getting worse. Eighty-five percent of the people who come to my office have nothing organically wrong with them. Their trouble is mental and spiritual. They are passing on the sicknesses of their minds and their souls to their bodies. I have come here to get something for myself to give to them.” He found it!
In international matters, we have lost “The Great Design”—some total pattern after which life in its completeness is to be shaped. Hence, we go from one opportunism to another. We patch up peace, and it turns out to be no peace; it is a crazy quilt of experiences here and there. “Life is crazy,” I thought I heard someone say. What he really said was, “Life is hazy.” But life is crazy because it is hazy. We don’t see, for we have lost, or haven’t found, “the Master Light of all our seeing.” When Rear Admiral Richard Byrd lost his bearings in the Antarctic night, the awful realization came over him that he had missed the way, “I knew I was lost, and I felt sick inside.” Men feel mentally, spiritually, and physically sick inside because they know they are lost. They are not sure of the Way. The old landmarks have been obliterated, and they don’t know how to find their way about in a universe of this kind. They are puzzled and hurt and “sick inside.” Even a bold exterior cannot hide the inner emptiness and loss of bearing. Like a blind man tapping with his cane on the sidewalk, so modern man is tapping from event to event by an everyday experimentalism trying to find his way Home. Somebody has said, “There is only one sickness, and that is homesickness.” Whether modern man knows it or not, that is his chief sickness: he is Home-sick. He knows that he has one foot in time and another in eternity, and he doesn’t feel at home in either one. He is afraid of both. He is afraid because he can’t put these two together and make them come out as sense. His sums don’t add up. Something is basically wrong.
What is it? Just one thing and only one thing—modern man isn’t conscious of being on the Way. An airman doesn’t mind clouds when he is “on the beam.” But when he is “off the beam,” he is rightly afraid of clouds; they may hold catastrophe. You can stand anything if you are sure you are on the Way. Can we be sure?
If so, it must not be a dogmatic assurance imposed upon life. That’s out. That is a refuge, and we don’t want a refuge; we want a release. The assurance must be a life assurance, appealing to the whole of life with self-verifying power. It must be as all-pervading, all-dependable, and self-verifying as gravity. It must be more than a weight of probabilities; it must be as self-verifying as love is to the heart. When we find our feet on the Way, we must know that, while we have not arrived at the Goal, nevertheless this is it—the Way.
This book is designed to put our feet upon the Way. It is not an argument, but an adventure. It is an experiment in living. If it doesn’t work, don’t take it. If it does work, then bet your very life upon it. If you do, you will not be working in the dark. As soon as you really get hold of it—or better, when it gets hold of you—you will know that this is the Way. Everything else will become irrelevant.
This book begins, not with those who have attained, but with those who want to attain. “All the prodigal son needed to bring home with him was a good appetite,” someone has said. All you will need to begin with is to want to begin. For this book begins at the lowest rung of the ladder, where defeated men and women live. But it doesn’t stop there; it goes through all the implications of the Way in the total life. It follows much the same pattern as Victorious Living and Abundant Living, but it attempts to go beyond them. It aims to give an advance course in human living. It will, of necessity, cover many things the other two books cover, but with different material and illustrations; and through it all, I trust, there will be a plus. For if there is just one book of the thirteen I have written into which I would like to pour a life message and in which I would like to sum up a life conclusion, it is this one. If I could say what I really want to say in this book, I would be willing to repeat, “Now, Lord; let thy servant depart in peace. I’ve said in life what I wanted to say.” But I suppose that in the end I shall feel that I have not quite said it, for it is so utterly overwhelming and beyond one. And yet, while it is beyond one, it is available, at hand, and can be drawn upon for life now.
I try to tell how. That is the real thing people want to know. At the close of a service-club luncheon address, a leading lawyer came up to me, grasped my hand as in a vise, and said, “Man, how?” Here I have tried to answer that question “how.” Whenever we face a question, I will give a ladder of practical steps on “how.”
The arrangement of the book makes possible a threefold use: (1) as a book of daily devotions, a page a day for a year; (2) as a study book for classes and groups, for the subjects are arranged on a weekly basis; (3) as an ordinary book, it can be read straight through since it is a developing whole; the Way is treated throughout.
Some of the material of this book was given to four Ashrams in the summer of 1944 as a group study. I have discovered that this method is an almost perfect way to write a book. In the give and take—mostly take—of group discussion, you see the relevancies and irrelevancies, and you get a group reaction. Then to go off and write a book with the background of this group-experience—I repeat, it is an almost perfect way. I owe much to these groups.
But this book has been long in incubation. Twelve years ago, when I went across disturbed Manchuria, there were sandbags up at the windows of the train with Japanese soldiers behind them. I said to my Chinese colleague, “If the bandits attack the train, please try to save my notebook, even if everything else is lost.” It was a notebook with notes for a new book on the Way. On shipboard, on my return to India, I began to write on it. But in Singapore, while I was speaking through a Chinese interpreter on the subject of the use of suffering, the Inner Voice said, “This is the subject for your next book.” Out of that quiet Inner Voice came Christ and Human Suffering. The bandits did not get the notes, but the Inner Voice scrapped them! And the Voice was right. I was not really prepared at that time to write on the Way. I glimpsed the message, but it hadn’t taken full possession of me. Now it has.
E. Stanley Jones