Youth Colum : Live Young

Youth Column

LIVE YOUNG!

- James Dillet Freeman

[From: Angles Sing In Me – James Dillet Memorial Volume – with glad permission of the publishers: Unity Books, Unity School, USA.

It will be our joy and privilege to publish excerpts from the best of Jim Freeman’s writings in subsequent issues of Akhand Jyoti as special spiritual fare for minds and souls of our readers. Jim Freeman (1912 – 2003) was a world-renowned mystic-poet of rare sensitivity. Microfilmed copy of his poem: ‘I Am There’ was left on the Moon by the commander of Apollo XV Mission Col. James B. Irwin in July 1971 – a unique honour to the seer-poet. – Editor]

Ah, to be young forever!

How people have longed for that.

The fountain of youth! The elixir of life! The philosopher’s stone!

Surely somewhere-in the guarded fruit of a forbidden tree, the enchanted waters of a lost well, a secret formula, an occult incantation, the touch of a sorcerer's wand, the creams and potions from beautician’s vat - there is something to free us from the tyranny of time and keep us young forever!

It is an ancient dream.

Today we are voyaging in space. One of the dreams of the space age is that as we move at rocket speeds time will but slowly gain upon us. We may be able to move through time as through space, even go backward and become children again.

Time! One of the dimensions in which we live! It winds forward and backward from the present like a scroll, but as it is unrolled before us it is rewound behind us so that no more than one line is ever visible.

Space seems like a room where we can look around us. But time is like an aperture through which we peer at a peep show.

Today scientists write about space-time and speak of time as if it were the fourth dimension. Time is not the fourth dimension. Time is the cross section of the fourth dimension. It is the only way we three-dimensional creatures can experience the fourth dimension.

Eternity is the fourth dimension. Time and eternity are related as a point is related to a plane or a plane to a cube, if you can remember your geometry. Time is a plane of the cube of eternity. We can see time, but we cannot see eternity.

Now we read the scroll a line at a time. But the scroll is not a line at a time. It is entire - to be grasped at a glance, had we the vision!

To rise beyond the plane of consciousness in which we are caught and see eternity whole - surely this is the true meaning of immortality. This is the nirvana of Buddhists, the samadhi of Hindus, the heaven of Christians.

What is youth?

Part of being young, certainly, is to believe in immortality. No one ever altogether believes he can cease to exist; but when we are young, we are certain that we have forever. Time is no concern; we have our pockets full of it. We spend it like a prodigal or give it away. The hours stretch out before us endlessly. We may fill them furiously with hubbub or the hardest work, or we may spend a summer lounging under a tree but living in the clouds.

When we are young, the most earthbound of us spends part of his time in the clouds. For youth is imagination, a time of quests and questionings, a time when people dream higher than they ever will again. The young are all poets, though they may never scribble a line. Their thoughts are poetry, for they think in dreams. The logic of dreams is not of the mind but the heart. So the young confound their elders, who want them to be reasonable. But because they are not lost in old facts, they sometimes find new truths.

The young are always venturing beyond the ends of the Earth - and not falling off. And only those who dare the deep can scale the height. The young may fall off cliffs but also scale mountains. They may occasionally have wrecks but also set new records.

The generations do outstrip one another,

Would you be young?

What are you doing to outstrip yourself and your contemporaries?

Youth is faith. You cannot be bound by facts and be young. Facts are the fences beyond which knowledge has not yet extended. Someone young is always pushing through the fence and enlarging the clearing.

The young annoy their elders by paying no attention to the "Keep Off the Impossible" signs with which age has littered the place. It could only be a man young and free enough to walk on air who would dare to walk on water.

The young have faith in God within. They feel God stirring. God is imprisoned but He will stand free.

The young are rebels, divine rebels, indignant at the iniquities and iniquities of the world, refusing to submit to the ukases and usages of age.

The young are incomplete, but they have the passion for perfection. This is the keenness of youth. They are the bow of longing fitted with the arrows of desire, bent to the full by the Archer of Life. Youth is a zest for the best.

To the young, forever is a moment and a moment is forever, and they give themselves to living it.

Youth is not a time of life but a time of being alive. When we are young, we never walk if we can run, and we can dance all night - and do, in our thoughts at least. Oh, the dancing thoughts of youth, playing leapfrog with the ways of the fathers, turning cartwheels through ancient complacencies!

To be young is to be full of vigor. This is what we really want when we say we want to be young again. We want to live at full vigor.

Vigor has little to do with age, as youth has little to do with years. Vigor is possible at any age. Some men and women have more vigor at sixty than at twenty and can still outwork, outwalk, outdream, and outthink most striplings. .

Vigor and youth are not gifts vouchsafed us at any age. We win them by being vigorous and youthful. Some are never vigorously young. Some are youthful vigorous always.

In this world where scientists tell us there are no absolutes, is anything more relative than age?

How old was Albert Einstein at seventy? How old was Thomas Edison at eighty? How old was Charles Fillmore at ninety? How old was Pablo Picasso? How old was Robert Frost?

Not long ago a lass of eighty- eight wrote to me, "I am looking forward to old age."

A rose-cheeked, straight-limbed lad of ninety-five laughed when his children introduced us and said: "Don't believe them. They are lying to you. I am not their father. I am their brother. "

Time cannot wither a vital spirit. Age cannot dry up the spring of mind. It is only when we lose faith in our power to grow and settle comfortably down that we begin to be old.

Age complains of youth, "Will it never settle down?" But youth knows that life cannot settle down. Life is a sea voyage. On a sea voyage, to settle down is to sink.

The young do not know what lies ahead. Their powers are untried. They have not found themselves and their meaning.

But which of us has found ourselves and our meaning? You may have made some island port of commonsensible contentment, but is this the port you started for? Is this all you hoped to become? Can you remember the dreams of your youth?

The young know that they have not arrived. But no one has arrived. There is not one area of life where we can say, "All has been done that can be done!" The horizon stretches endlessly in all directions. Youth is the jubilant conviction that yet more is to be found - in you and in the world.

Youth is the power to grow. This is the definition of youth.

Stone lasts for centuries by slowing down its processes of change. Yet even the hardest stone must at last disintegrate in the wild dance of its atoms; its stone-stuff will become the roots and leaves of plants, the bone and blood of beasts.

But life is not like stone.

On a warm summer night, corn grows so fast you can hear it grow. On a sunny afternoon, a muddy-colored wriggler crawls out of a pond, fastens itself to a stem of grass, and while we watch, emerges from its shriveled skin to soar on wings that were not there an hour before-a green-gold dragonfly.

A living thing is like a piece of music. It is not enough to listen to the opening bars or closing chords. You have to hear it played clear through.

You cannot truly take the picture of a living thing. It changes as the shutter clicks.

Will the caterpillar tell you of the butterfly? Or the bullfrog of the polliwog? And how will you know the man? By the babe, or the boy, or the stripling, or the father of the family, or the gray beard?

To live is to change. Nothing alive stands still. A tree may rest in winter but only to gather strength to grow again in spring.

Life is like fire.

In the heart of every living cell, there is a fire. In the heart of everyone alive, there is a fire.

Fire is change. It never stays the same two seconds together. It lives only by growing. What it touches, it consumes; but what it consumes, it transforms.

When it touches a dead branch, the branch is consumed and transformed! The dead branch becomes dancing flame.

So it is with life. When life kindles inanimate clay, clay can lie still no longer. It has to move and grow and turn into a trout or a bird or a tree or a bit of moss or a human being. It becomes alive.

We cannot live like stone. We must live like fire that lives by growing.

This is the secret of the never- flagging, everlasting vigor of the sun. The sun turns its very atom- stuff into fire and quickens the world around it into life.

O God, I pray You, let me like a living sun catch fire with love and burn with Truth, igniting all I ever touch with the same love of Truth that I have!

Of all Earth’s living things, trees have the longest span of life. And of all living things, they have the longest span of growth. If they live a thousand years, they grow a thousand years. Trees never cease to grow. To live is to grow. If we Human beings would lengthen the time of our lives, we must lengthen the time of our growth.

You may think there is a limit to the growth you can make.

This may be true of your body. But you are more mind than body, and you are more spirit than mind. In mind and spirit, who dares set a limit on the growth one may make?

A redwood is tall, taking thousands of years to reach its full height.

Are you less than a redwood?

Has God not said He created us in His image? How tall is the image of God?

What dimensions has your mind? What span has your spirit?

Are you grown up in your Godlikeness?

Oh, what everlasting livingness lies all about us and within us yet to be attained! We are spiritual striplings.

We are children of God. Youth is the power to grow. To grow is to be alive. Would you be alive?

Then live young!

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All World
Gayatri Pariwar

Nov - Dec 2005

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