If your have been following our dissertation to this point, then you are prepared to undertake another giant step. You may not wish to undertake another giant step. You may not wish to take it, that is up to you entirely, but there is now nothing in the way of your taking it.
This chapter is summed up in the quotation from the poem "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley. It concludes:
"I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my Soul."
Poetry is often the greatest source of spiritual wisdom that we possess. What this poem says is simply, "You are the boss."
There is a hitch, however, because we must understand who is this "you" that is the boss. We have written earlier that this "you" is a spiritual being who is manifested through you Will. That certainly seems to be the quality one would expect to find in a "boss."
This "you" is a being who must Try to unify the outer with the inner world and then to unify the inner world with God. This "you" is the "you" who is found when you have separated it from all that is not "you.":
One teacher put it this way:
"There are really three of you. There is
the ‘you' that everyone knows, the ‘you'
that you know and the ‘you' that God
knows. When the ‘you' that you know is
finally the same as the ‘you' that God
knows, then it can be said, ‘I and my
Father are one.
These two combined are enough. Trying to add the "you" that everyone else knows only spoils the thing. If you lower your sights to become what others think you are, then you miss your higher calling. If on the other hand you try to show those others that they are mistaken, and that you are really striving of be at one with God.....Will, Jesus attempted to do those things and it was not possible for him. The Son of God could not be what everyone wanted him to be and still be with God.
The person you are, the person who is the finest person you can be, is the person who is the captain of your soul. The other personages in your particular personality, the ones that you are not so proud to show to the world, are not masters and they are not the captain of your Soul. The idea is to develop the one and allow the others to simply "go away."
The Hindus have a wonderful trinity in their Theology. There is Brahma, Krishna and Siva. Brahma creates things, while Krishna preserves what is created. Then there is Siva who tries to rid the world of things considered by him to be nonessential.
Things are created by desire; if the desire is strong, progress is made. If desire is weak, then who knows? It applies to my reader as well as to all others in the world. If you desire to learn to pray contemplatively, then you are will on your way to doing so. You will certainly never do so if you do not desire it.
Thus, this desire is the Brahma aspect of the process. Then come the dry periods; those times when we wonder if we have made the proper choices, and only by affirming over and over again that we want to attain this skill can we ever hope to gain it.
This affirmation is the preserver: the Krishna aspect of the experience. But, then come the doubts. We experienced some of these in the Second Room.
At that point comes the mighty Siva or Shiva, as he is sometimes called. His task is to destroy those nonessentials or doubts that would prevent the Creation that is desired and affirmed to come to pass. He is pictured with many arms and swords and daggers but they are not the best weapons he possesses.
Shiva's counterpart in Christian lore is Saint Michael. In most of the old icons that depict him he has a long spear and the tip of it is held at the throat of a very fierce dragon. He is denying the dragon's right to be a dragon. Michael is not slaying the dragon, he is checking his fierceness, denying him his negative influence.
Jesus admonished us in this way when he said, "Resist no evil." Deny evil or negativity and its effect on you. Denial destroys, indifference obliterates, transmutation redeems and that is Shiva's most powerful weapon.
Thus the creator creates through desire.
The preserver preserves through affirmation.
The destroyer destroys through denial.
Developing this "you" that is the caption of your Soul is a task made possible through imaginative knowledge. First, one must accept the fact that this spiritual being is already there within us. Shakespeare wrote, "Assume a virtue though you have it not." What a gift of spiritual gold that is. What this poet has said is the secret of life, the secret of all aspects of the human experience. It is this: if you want something, assume you already have it.
If I wish to be a spiritual person, than I must begin by assuming that I already am. I must shape my actions and my thoughts into those that I imagine to be the actions and the thoughts of a spiritual person. The same secret holds for all things. To be the person you wish to be, assume that you are that person and shape your actions and thoughts accordingly.
If you will now stop and review those things that I have previously expressed in other chapters, you will discover that there is a central thread running through them all that led to this pearl.
Desire creates for you the image of your highest nature. Affirmation occurs through your Will and the attention you have learned to pay to your inner and outer worlds. Your inner world strives to be in harmony with God's love for you. All that prevents you from achieving the highest of your goals is negativity and self-doubt, which can be controlled by transmuting them or starving them to death.
Therefore, you will come to realize that there is a certain hierarchy in our world. The mineral kingdom is the least developed kingdom on earth, and it is subservient to all other kingdoms. The plant kingdom is the first kingdom to use the minerals, but the plant kingdom is subservient to the animal kingdom. The animal kingdom, while placed higher on the scale than the plant kingdom, is nevertheless under the care of human beings.
We are very near to the top of this chain. We are masters of ourselves and all those kingdoms below us. It is only God and His messengers who are more developed than we, and we are created in His likeness.
The end result is simply that nothing controls us except that which we allow to control us. When we and our God work together as one, then we are the happiest of people. This control, which is so needed, comes about as we assume the roles of our highest ideals.
What does this have to do with Prayer? Once again we look to the poets, to David and his Psalm 66:
"I called out to him with my mouth
and his praise was on my tongue.
If I had found evil in my heart
the Lord would not have heard me.
But in truth God has heard me.
He has attended to the voice of my prayer.
Blessed be God who has not rejected
my prayer nor withheld his love from me."
Notice the second verse. It says, "If I had found...." It does not say if God had found evil in my heart. Therefore, it is the transmutation of evil through denying it a place in our thoughts and hearts, by replacing it with something good, that we are able to move toward our goal.
You are the captain of your sol when you decide what you will think and what you will do. You are the captain of your soul when you decide what you will not think and what you will not do. And all of that is done so that you might achieve the realization of the person you would like to be.
I will close with the poem I referred to earlier: