SEX AS SYMBOL
The Ancient Light in Modern Psychology
BY
ALVIN BOYD KUHN, PH.D.
Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research
purposes. I can be contacted at [email protected].
I will be greatly indebted to the individual who can put me in touch with the
Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following works:
The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Tree of Knowledge, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes - But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Through Science to Religion, Creation in Six Days?, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy, A. B. Kuhn's graduation address at Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn's unpublished autobiography, Great Pan Returns.
"We have only just rediscovered the
precious stone;
we have still to polish it. We cannot yet
compete
with the intuitive clarity of Eastern
vision,"
-- C. G. JUNG: Integration of the
Personality, p. 41.
"All that can be said concerning the
gods must be
by exposition of old opinions and fables: it
being the
custom of the ancients to wrap up in enigma
and
allegory their thoughts and discourses
concerning
nature, which are, therefore, not easily
explained."
--HENRY O'BRIEN: The
p. 302--quoted from Strabo.
TO
ALL THOSE
WHO STRIVE TO SEE
THE MIND OF THE CREATOR
IN ALL THE WORK
OF HIS HAND
THIS
VOLUME IS
SINCERELY DEDICATED
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BRIGHT LEXICON OF DEITY 1
II. DRAMA BEARS MISSHAPEN OFFSPRING
12
III. AND GOD SPAKE UNTO MOSES 22
IV. THE GODS DISTRIBUTE DIVINITY 31
V. LOST DATA OF ANTHROPOLOGY 48
VI. "OLD CHILD" IS HIS
NAME 63
VII. THE TWO SUBTERRANEAN GROTTOES
83
VIII. IN PLUTO'S DARK REALM 98
IX. THE TWO MOTHERS OF THE CHRIST
111
X. IMMANUEL'S LAMP 124
XI. THE
XII. THE CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN
152
XIII. LIGHT FROM AN OLD LAMP 180
XIV. THE LANGUAGE OF LINGAM AND YONI
194
XV. PHALLICISM TRANSFIGURED 215
XVI. LOVE AND HATE 230
XVII. LOVE LOOKS BEYOND DEATH 245
XVIII. ROMANCE IN THE TRYSTING-TENT
260
XIX. THE
XX. WITH UNVEILED FACE 287
XXI. THE OIL OF GLADNESS 300
XXII. MY CUP RUNNETH OVER 322
v
CHAPTER I
THE BRIGHT LEXICON OF DEITY
In a very venerable document, Records
of the Past (XII, 68) we read that in remote days of antiquity geographical
mapping and local naming were instituted according to a plan which has almost
totally escaped recognition in our search for understanding of archaic culture.
It is said there that the names and localities were derived from the features
of an original uranograph, or chart of the heavens, and were transferred from
it to earth and applied to the geography of a country, with a distribution of
the names already localized in the empyrean amongst the places to be named,
according to a scheme of correspondence or analogy. It is declared that
"the mapping out of Egyptian localities according to the celestial Nomes
and scenery is described in the inscription of Khnum-hept, who is said to have
'established the landmark of the south, and sculptured the northern--like
the heaven. . . . He made the district in its two parts, setting up their
landmarks, like the heaven.'" In obvious corroboration of this method we
have the injunction given by deity to Moses in the Bible: "See that thou
make all things after the pattern shown thee in the Mount . . . the pattern of
the heavens."
Charts of the "Holy Land of
Canaan" have been uncovered in early
1
That this systematic procedure back
of primeval naming and topography had any remotest connection with two such
widely separated domains of human ideation as theology and modern
psychoanalysis has of course not been known. Yet it now looms on the horizon of
intelligence that the roots of these sciences are grounded in that ancient
practice. The connection appears superficially remote, but is in reality close
and direct.
It inheres in the basic cosmic
constitution of the creation, wherein the universe of total being, for the
purposes of manifestation or becoming, bifurcated into the duality of
subjective and objective, or spirit and matter. This is the procedure stated
precisely where it ought to have been, as the very first step in cosmic
creation--in the first verse of Genesis. Here it is proclaimed that the
first act in universal creation was the splitting apart of the unity of being
into its two facets or components, consciousness and objective reality. Most
aptly these two segments of whole being were allegorized under the terms
"heaven" for consciousness, or spirit, and "earth" for the
opposite node, matter. We have here the philosophical dichotomy of being, the
substrate of all life in the cosmos. Without the separation and opposition of
cosmic mind and cosmic body there could be no existence and no awareness of it.
Being would remain the Absolute, would remain asleep, if it did not rend apart
its totality into the twoness of polarity. Spirit and matter spring into
activity by concomitant stages of emergence from blank unconsciousness, and
each, so to say, generates itself and its opposite by mutual counteraction or
"hostility." For each is the counterfoil, the countervalence and by
reflection the counterpart of the other. Each is the fulcrum against which the
other can lift itself into reification. Hence intelligence is in the first step
of understanding instructed by the item of knowledge that spirit and matter, or
heaven and earth, mutually balance and mutually interpret each other.
Mind is the active agent, the
creator, and matter, the opposite energy, is the plastic substance of creation.
The two spring simultaneously into existence, the first impressing and shaping
the second
2
according to its original or
archetypal ideas. Hence all material creation is formed over the patterns of
heavenly or spiritual ideation. Divine thoughts may be said to be the molds
into which the energies of divine will pour the fluid essence of substance in
order to shape the universe projected in mind and purpose. Poured in while
liquid or plastic, the matter of substance crystallizes, solidifies, hardens and
thus brings into manifest existence the things of the visible worlds. Therefore
each created object bears the image of the thought that shaped it. Even man was
made in the image of his creator. The universe is the Logos of God, for it
reveals the form of the logical structure of the cosmos. It is the logical
structure concreted in matter.
If, then, the pervading oversoul of
the system wishes to communicate with the intelligences of gradated ranges of
lower being brought into function by its own initial activity, it is perforce
constrained, if not confined, to speaking in the language germane to and
commensurate with the lower ranges of consciousness addressed. For the
enlightenment of inferior by superior intelligence, such a language must be
constituted in the character and nature of symbols known or knowable to the
lower. Therefore higher intelligence must speak to lower in the language of
concretely known objects in the latter's world. Thus it is that the objective
world of any creature's life furnishes the characters and alphabet of the
language it is capable of comprehending. It is the office of the physical world
to provide the symbols which constitute language, for all language must be
concrete at base. There is not a word of remotest abstraction that does not
take its roots in some simply physical or mechanical process. As Carlyle says,
"Thy very attention, is it not merely a stretching toward?" To
express spirit itself, the terms used are all in the meaning of breath or air.
The human mind can conceive of abstractions, such as principles, laws, ideas,
realities of superphysical nature, only with the help of sensually known
objects or phenomena.
One of the most instructive truths
of all time was announced by
3
the great hierophant Hermes
Trismegistus of
"True, without falsehood,
certain and most true, that which is above is as that which is below, and that
which is below is as that which is above, for the performance of the miracles
of the One Thing."
Well had it been for the race of man
if the pertinence of this wisdom-laden pronouncement of the ancient sage had
not been obscured and lost when ignorance smothered sagacity in the third
century of the Christian era. For it embodies the basic principle of all human
culture. There goes with it as its corollary and necessary involvement the
great truth that an immediate analogy subsists between things seen and
realities unseen. It becomes in its primary cogency the key, as it is the
starting point, of all religion, philosophy, morality and psychology, not to
name such ancillary manifestations as mythology, anthropology, poetry, drama,
ritual, folk-lore and celebratory festivals.
The modern world has witnessed, if
somewhat stolidly, a remarkable phenomena. It has seen, perhaps not strictly
the renaissance, but at any rate the recrudescence, of three long buried and
discredited ancient sciences. These are alchemy, astrology and symbolism.
Neither of them has come back to vogue in the same aura of understanding in
which they were esteemed of old. They have reappeared in the modern day resting
on foundations that are for the most part pseudo or spurious. Their true nature
and rationale are by no means known as formerly they were. They rest now on
partial and imperfect theorization. Whatever they possessed of legitimate worth
before their repression has not been reintegrated in their recent resurgence.
Indeed it may be said with reference at any rate to astrology and symbolism
that whereas in olden times they stood grounded on scientific theses of
positive value, they now flourish largely through supposititious motivations.
Their original high science has not been resuscitated with them.
Our concern is definitely with
symbolism. While the rehabilita-
4
tion of this primary science is
still in its infancy, there are cheering signs that it is on the way to be
given more adequate recognition of its pivotal importance. It is one of the
indices of the waking of the modern mind out of the still-lingering obfuscations
of Medievalism that a new science of "semantics" is well started
toward a central place in mental procedure. Yet it is evident that current
understanding has far to go before it will have regained the ancient insight
that discerned in symbolism the prime methodology by which the mind can be
given any substantial degree of realistic grasp of the realities of higher
worlds. Nationalistic languages, with their fixed signs and coins of mental
imagery, are local and temporary. They come and go, and serve a partial segment
of humanity, locking each unit off in cultural isolation. Symbolism is the
one universal and omnipresent language, significant and meaningful everywhere. For
its alphabet is the world of ubiquitous nature. The tree, the seed, the leaf,
the serpent, the beetle, the cow, the fish, water, earth, fire, the flower, the
sun, the star and the dragon-fly deliver the same oration to penetrating
perception in any land. "Nature never did betray the heart that loved
her," sings Wordsworth. And again he adjures us: "Let nature by your
teacher." She can not misteach, for she can not tell two varying stories
of truth. She may indeed have a wide variety of ways of telling her story, but
they all converge eventually upon the one monogram of truth. Life, or God, has
but one law, as ancient sapiency affirms. But it deploys its manifestations out
to concretion in a practically limitless play of variation or differentiation
in the worlds of form. If there is unity, it is a unity behind or beneath an
endless variety. No single expression violates the canons of true meaning. All
things in their several ways illustrate and exemplify the universal, the
eternal. Truth in the absolute may be one. As such it has little
serviceableness for man, who is no dweller in the absolute, but is still a
citizen of the relative. Truth, in manifestation, is many-sided, has many
facets, comes to an epiphany or showing forth at many levels. Strictly, man's
concern is not directly with truth. His prerogative is to deal
5
with the many truths that confront
him, doing his best to rationalize them into an organic structure that
approximates a vision of truth from his level.
As man, made in the image of Creator
God, reflects the dual constitution of all being in his two aspects of mind and
body, consciousness and instrument, function and organism, there is immediately
at hand the ground of understanding the play of psychic forces in and through
his world. Psychology has stumbled along a dark path, blindly trying to find a
formula that would elucidate psychic phenomena in the life of man. Its failure
heretofore has been due to its ignorant insistence on taking man as a unit, or
as possessing a consciousness with but one single focus. It has not known that
it has to take man for what he is,--a generically dual creature, of soul and
body, each with a distinct life of its own and lived on its own plane.
Scripture has well indicated this broad differentiation of his two elements,
when it says that at death the body returns to dust, but the soul to God who
gave it.
6
race is of heaven alone." This
predicates for man a dual constitution, asserting that his body is a product of
earth and that his soul, or spirit, is from the empyrean, with the
unforgettable reminder that he is intrinsically, by virtue of the part of him
that subsists perennially whether in or out of fleshly body, of the race of the
dynasty of imperishable souls, fragments of God's own integral being.
The early Egyptians symbolized the
dual nature of mankind by a dramatization that is one of the sublimest and most
revealing of all ancient hieroglyphs, and whose relevance we should no longer
miss. They depicted man under the symbol of the sun standing, now at morn, now
at eve, on the line of the horizon. Masterly dramatic genius represented man by
the sun, because he has a portion of the sun's identic light, energy and
intelligence in his own being. "Every man has a little sun (of
intelligence) within him," was the averment of the Medieval "Fire
Philosophers," the Illuminati and Therapeutae of occult wisdom. Rather it
should be said that a part of man's constituent nature is a fragment of
the dynamic life of the sun. Precisely like the sun, too, he stands in
incarnation exactly on the horizon line in the evolutionary situation, at the
place where he is half in the heaven world of high consciousness and half in
the lower kingdom of matter, or on earth. "Head in heaven, feet on the
ground," was again the statement of the position occupied by man as
formulated by sage Egyptian knowledge. "Soul in heaven, body on the
earth," was a variant of the same description. Virtually man shares the
life of heavenly creatures whenever he lives in the uplands of his
consciousness, for heaven is a state of exalted consciousness and not a
locality spatially dimensionable. He need not be detached from his body to
enter that superior condition of reality. In the same way the bodily part of
his being partakes of the life of earth. He inhabits earth through the
connection established with it by his senses. Verily man stands on the horizon
line that divides heaven from earth, where also, conversely, the two segments
of his nature are linked together. He enjoys the lofty prerogative of standing
in two worlds at once, and he can pass over the borderline from one
7
to the other by the simple measure
of focusing his consciousness upon the body, or upon the world of noumenal
unseen realities. "The horizon is covered with the tracks of thy
passing," declares the Ritual of the great Book of the Dead. This
is a reference to the continued aeonial passing of the soul back and forth
between body and incorporeal existence for its incarnations. In variant Hebrew
figure, but with kindred meaning, we are the angels ascending and descending
the Jacob's ladder that links earth and heaven, as we emerge from the empyrean,
or fire-land of spirit, to enter earthly body, or reascend thither at the end
of each excursion into actual being. Also in minor relevance, there is implicit
here the meaning that we pass up and down over the boundary line every time we
shift the focus of consciousness from bodily, earthly, physical things to the
interests of ideality.
Standing on the frontier between the
two kingdoms of life, consciousness and objectivity, man is at the most
strategic point of vantage occupied by any creature in evolution. It is deeply
significant that Norse mythology locates man in Midgard, where from his
seat on middle ground he is able to be the two-faced Janus of Roman mythicism,
who stands thus at the opening door (janua) of his evolution and can
look backward over the yesterday of his past, stored in the basement of his
unforgetting subconscious mind, and forward prospectively to his oncoming
future. The Egyptians were not ignorant of this situation, for they make the
eternal pilgrim, the reincarnating soul, the bearer, collector and husbandman
of all the values gained in living experience, utter this terse statement
descriptive of its nature and its task: "I am Yesterday and I am Tomorrow.
The things that have been and the things that will be are in my womb."
Again the soul declares the fact of its everlasting peregrination through the
realms of matter and being when it exclaims, "I am the persistent traveler
on the highways of heaven." "Eternity and everlastingness is my
name," it says again. "The name of my boat is Millions of Years."
But from his midpoint of strategic
position he can, as intimated,
8
gaze out upon two worlds at once,
that of mind and soul in the higher reaches of his conscious life, and that of
sense and feeling in the bodily half of his constitution. Again
Here indeed is the substance of
spiritual ethics, and at the same time the genius and the rationale of modern
psychoanalysis. The unification of the two natures, allegorized as "the
two lands," in man is the entire sum, gist and essence of the effort of
religion in the world. It springs directly out of the basic situation that sets
the religious problem,--the duofold constitution of the human being, involving
a perennial warfare between the two elements, to end in an ultimate
reconciliation or atonement, symbolized by the "wedding" of Old and
New Testament representation, and the birth of the divine child of Christly
consciousness from the marriage. The age-long conflict waged between them till
the consummation of their alliance is the grossly misconceived Battle of
Armageddon, which, says the Book of the Dead, "is fought at
9
the carnal nature can cross the line
and affect the conscious life of the opposite compartment. Man is thus the only
creature in whose life there is the equal admixture of sense and soul. And, as
Browning has so well said--for the benefit of those who decry all things
material--
Nor soul helps flesh more now
Than flesh helps soul.
Soul and flesh must battle each
other through the aeon, for only by such mutual resistance are both able to
generate their potential energies into functional development. But the great
battle must end in mutual accord, since in the happy denouement of victory they
find themselves merged in each other's arms.
The great Armageddon battle, dragged
down from intelligible meaning as allegoric typism of human experience into the
nonsense of supposed objective history in the form of a titanic war of nations
on earthly fields of battle, has been contorted into a sorry caricature of its
true reference. It has held, and always must hold, a central place in any great
system of philosophy, being in Plato's system the mighty conflict between dianoia
and doxa, or true knowledge and "opinion," or between the
soul's unforgettable instinct for truth and the outer mind's mere notion of
things, governed by sense and external influences. Not only in the dominant
Greek philosophies was the struggle centrally related to the entire ethical and
spiritual life of man, but it was vividly depicted on the stage boards of the
Mystery Religions of the ancient world. There the Sun-God, or the
Christ-Messiah, was arrayed in battle with the Titanic or Satanic character,
temporarily overcome by him, to emerge as final victor in the end of the drama.
This outcome typified the eventual triumph of spirit over the thraldom of
matter. Nor is the great struggle less prominent in the Christian scriptures.
In great measure it pervades the whole context of Bible literature, in drama,
apothegm, parable and allegory, but is found in express statement in the
Epistles of St. Paul and elsewhere. The Apostle launches his spear of attack
against the "fleshly lusts which war against the
10
soul." And he appears to lament
his "wretched" human condition, subject to the sway of evil
propensity, when he fain would do good. He perceives "in his members a law
which wars against the law of" his mind, so that he cries out "Who
shall deliver me from the body of this death?" For, he has argued,
"to be carnally minded is death," and man is "dead" in his
trespasses and sins. "The interests of the flesh meant death; the
interests of the soul meant life and peace," he again admonishes. He lists
the weaknesses or vices of humankind as those predominantly which spring from
the promptings of the fleshly side of human nature, with sexual lust,
concupiscence, at the very head. And in his list of virtues that redeem the
soul to her heavenly estate he places continence and chastity at the summit.
11
CHAPTER II
DRAMA BEARS MISSHAPEN OFFSPRING
As said, the ground of moral
conflict in the dual nature of man has long been recognized in theology as the
war between Christ and Satan. Even in the form of the promised reciprocal
bruising of the head of the serpent and the heel of the Son of the woman, it
was understood as Christianity's historical moral battle in the inner nature of
man. But what has not been seen is the recognition that this same ancient
depiction of internal conflict in the bosom of mankind is at once the ground
condition of the comprehension of determinative phenomena in the realm of
psychology. Theology, had it stepped aside from mere intellectual approach and
formulations to investigate the phenomena of moral struggle on the side of
their symptomatic and clinical manifestations in individual reaction, would
have anticipated modern psychoanalytic purview and adopted its technique and
methods of treatment. Or, looking back from the present, modern psychoanalysis
would from the start have known itself to be but an extension of the legitimate
scope and range of theological influences. It amounts to saying, then, that
psychology, when adequately envisaged in relation to the basic content and
nature of its practice, is just a branch of theological religion.
Whereas moral stress, with its
concomitant emotional and intellectual strain, had been esteemed only a
province of religious influence and only loosely and unscientifically subsumed
under that head, being ascribed to motivations such as piety, faith, conscience
and authority, now it is being taken in hand by a secular interest, or science,
and brought under systematic investigation by a religiously neutral psychology.
What would have been--perhaps in
12
a measure really was--a true science
under ancient priestly control, was lost out of religious manipulation during
the fifteen hundred years of the Dark Ages and is only now, in the hands of
profane agency, regaining its pristine scientific character. Healing in general
has had much the same history, having been in antiquity a purely religious
function, but in later centuries emerging as a secular profession, retaining a
fringe of original religious flavor. Dreams, visions, trance, speaking in
tongues, "prophecy," were all formerly matters of religious afflatus,
esteemed generally as emanating directly from God, the gods or daemons. While
they are still accorded a semi-religious characterization, they have become an
integral part of profane science and are removed from the realm of phantasy
religionism, holding a place in the open field of scientific research.
Religion has done mankind little
service--rather a great disservice--in attempting to mark off his life in two
mutually hostile areas, one the holy ground of religion, and the other the
profane territory of worldly interest. The criterion of "holy" and
"sacred" thus employed to introduce a precarious standard of
worth-value in all of man's activities, has vilely misled and hallucinated the
mass mind of many generations. A true philosophy would confer on humanity the
inestimable boon of sanctifying the whole of its life.
This obliteration of a false
evaluation would by no means wipe away the keen intellectual differentiation
that subsists between man's two natures. The perception of difference in
nature, function and rank between the two components of human being need not
entail an unbalanced judgment of values. Unfortunately this is exactly what has
come to pass. The whole science of theology indeed is based on the relation of
the two natures in man to each other. The divine and the worldly elements are
commingled in his constitution, and no interpretation of scripture is possible
without a reference to the fact. Man is a soul and that soul is attached to a
body. But the ascription of "sacred" to the one and of
"sinful" to the other, however naturally it results from the
premises, came only by default of sage philosophical insight.
13
The mistake, which confused and
vitiated the whole view, came from holding the opposite characterizations as
absolute and not merely relative within the total picture. Here lay the germ of
an error which has erected its ugly head to warp and harry the thinking of
millions for sixteen centuries. The body was conceived as absolutely evil,
worldly, sensual, devilish, apart from any consideration of its obvious utility
and beneficence, indeed its indispensability, for all the purposes of normal
evolution. The body was condemned as the parent and ground of all evil in despite
of the knowledge that life could not exist without it. The soul received the
accolade of good character, while the body reaped the contumely of evil. Spirit
was claimed the all-good, matter its enemy. The entire enormity of the ascetic
fanaticism that swept early Christianity like a pestilence arose out of these
philosophical aberrancies.
Drastic correction of misguided
assumption in the case is pressingly needed. Neither matter nor body is to be
flouted as evil. They are not even relatively evil. They are essential parts of
the total good. They are equally as necessary to the ultimate aims of evolution
as is soul itself. Each side of the polarity is impotent without the
countervalence of the other. The evil ascription is only the shadow of
erroneous thought falling upon a thing the function and the ultimate
beneficence of which have been misconstrued through the sheer warping of vision
and the mis-reading of ancient drama. The secret of this gigantic folly comes
to light when it is known that ancient ritual dramatism and allegorism, in
order to portray matter and body in their role of evolutionary service, had to
represent them in their function of providing polar opposition to the force of
spirit-consciousness. For they are the opposite node of the spirit-mind. They
form the negative cathode to spirit, the divine anode. Hence they had to play
the dramatic role of the "opposers" of constructive and creative
mind. But--and here is the core of the miscalculation which led to their
aspersion and disparagement as evil forces--ignorance later construed their
polar opposition in the terms of absolute enmity. As intelligence flew out of
the win-
14
dow, calamitous misconstruction flew
in at the door, and there it has dwelt ever since, defiling the hall of man's
mind in religion with its vile contempt for matter. The stabilizing and
balancing power that holds spirit to the performance of its function was foully
besmirched with philosophical disdain. Shallow minds could not grasp matter's
function as the twin of spirit without falling into the error of imputing evil
to it. Because body had to stand at the opposite side and counterbalance spirit
to give it localization, focus and a point d'appui for the exercise of
its own positive qualities, narrow insight held it in depreciation as the
opponent or enemy of spirit. From being represented dramatically as the
necessary foil or balance of spirit, it became the hostile force, the enemy of
soul. And down on its innocent head tumbled the whole weight of obloquy of
millions of fanatic minds in many religions, notably Christian and Hindu,
piling on it the accumulation of their malignant derogation. Under the lash of
this mad persuasion the poor body of man had to endure the agony of centuries
of brutal crucifixion and mortification in the alleged interests of the divine
soul, which, it was fatuously believed, could not unfurl its wings of ecstasy
as long as the least tinge of bodily enjoyment glued them fast to earth.
When it is seen how the frightful
corruption of understanding, occasioning the hallucinated folly and torture of
millions over the centuries, could ensue as the result of a mere and seemingly
slight misconstruction of the elements of a dramatic depiction of a
philosophical principle, it behooves sincere scholarship to examine the point
with searching care. The blunder was superinduced by the subtle requirements of
dramatic portrayal. To represent the opposition of polarity, spirit and matter
had to be pictured at war with each other. To carry profounder esoteric meaning,
they had to be outwardly represented as battling each other. They had to be
shown as "enemies" seeking to overcome each other. The sad outcome,
for less capable mentality, was that the opposition was remembered, and the
less concrete truth of polarity was lost. The deeper signifi-
15
cance of the opposition of matter to
spirit, and its truly beneficent function in providing spirit with the
resistance it needed in order to cause its latent powers to manifest
themselves, were forgotten. The opposition of matter to the good purpose had
never adequately or decisively been translated over into the terms of a
salutary and beneficent service to the final goal of good. Spirit could not
operate and evolve within the vacuum of its own unopposed inanition. It is by
itself but one half of a polar duality, totally inactive until confronted by
the necessity for active energization against its opposite tension. It could
not deploy its own hidden powers until it was challenged to do so by the
opposite pull of negative matter. Only when linked to matter do its latent
energies come into action, and its own potentialities find overt expression. It
remains wholly helpless or "dead" until the opposition of matter
summons forth its divine qualities to their awakening.
But this intelligent conception of
matter's utility was swamped in that avalanche of ignorance which swept over
philosophy from the fatal third century onward, and was replaced by the sorry
misinterpretation of its function which cast the dark shadow of religious folly
over the whole Medieval mind for centuries. Drama had done its best to fortify
the mind with the just conception of the true place and function of matter and
body in the evolutionary scheme. But the educative purposes of drama miscarried
when the representation ran afoul of massed ignorance and was shattered into
gross misshapen forms. The religious mind lacked the acumen requisite to the
task of understanding that matter had to play its role in the cosmic drama
opposite to spirit without earning thereby the stigma of evil character. It was
unable to discern the true good of matter's service beneath the outward
disguise of spirit's opponent. The mistake made was exactly comparable to what
would be the case if an audience, after witnessing a theatrical play, would
continue to attribute to the actor playing the part of the villain the same
permanent character which he merely personalized for the performance. The
Christian world became so drugged with sin-
16
consciousness that it forgot to
redeem the ritual personifications of good's necessary opposition from the
stigma of evil outside the drama.
It is now clear that the balanced
relationship of the anima of the body and the ego of the man within its
confines in one flesh is not only the ground determinant of the whole of man's
religious interest, his philosophy and moral effort, but that it becomes
specifically the basis of the great human problem of psychology as well. Even
more particularly it becomes the central situation activating the play of the
phenomena manifesting in the realm of psychoanalysis. In brief it can be stated
that when there is mutual compensation, harmonious energization, involving
constant accommodation and readjustment, between the two claimants for
possession of man's body and faculties, there will be the highest degree of
peace and happiness pervading the whole organism. And when there is a failure
in the achievement of this harmonious relationship between the two, there will
be a discord manifested in inner and outer neurotic conditions, psychic
disturbances and eventual bodily disease. In fine, the practical outcome of all
study of psychology, if such study is to save itself from futility, must be the
discovery of the forces in both the physical and the spirito-intellectual sides
of man's life that establish, or, conversely, mar the mutually harmonious
accord in motive and purpose of the two natures composing the human. If Goethe
has sounded a true philosophical note in his affirmation that "two souls,
alas, contend within my breast apart," waging a warfare for dominance over
the sphere of his interests and activities, then the point of ultimate
knowledge and wisdom for mortal man is to discover the terms on which the two
contestants can find a platform of agreement and happy mutuality. For in the
end, as
17
at the same time it is the
psychoanalytic "integration" of the diverse warring elements within
the ego consciousness.
There comes forcefully to mind at
this point that enlightening declaration of the Demiurgus, Jupiter Cosmocrator,
or world architect in the Orphic Greek system, given in Plato's Timaeus, as
rendered by Proclus in his majestic work on The Theology of Plato, as
translated by Thomas Taylor. It is the recording of the speech made to the
legions of angels who were being charged with the message and import of their
prospective mission to earth to become the souls or egos in the highest animal
creatures and to lead them across the area of human evolution to its
culmination at the foothills of divinity in the end of the aeon. The World
Framer outlines their aeonial task and assures them, as requital and
consequence of their successful performance of it, that they will gain immortal
status: "You shall never be dissolved." He instructs them as to the
dual composition of their natures when in the body and says that in the mortal
part there will be buried the seed of an immortal nature, through the growth of
which they will achieve immortality. He tells them that he will himself furnish
the "seed and the beginning" of the immortal part within them, and
that it is then their business to do the rest, to cultivate, nourish and
fructify this seed germ of the imperishable divine. Then occurs the phrase
which elucidates with vivid succinctness what should have been the constant
beacon-light to guide man's evolution throughout history, the clear manifesto
of the mission of souls on earth: it is their task "to weave together
mortal and immortal natures." This pronouncement should have rung with
anvil clearness on the good hard intelligence of man on earth and should have
galvanized his whole worldly striving into the crisp lines of conscious
direction of effort to achieve this goal of a unification of the two contending
beings within his own life. If it had been his common knowledge that he must
ever strive toward this consummation of a reconciliation between his soul life
and his sense life, surely there could have been entertained some sound
expectation that he might have passed from
18
blind groping along his path to a
more skillful concentration of his endeavors upon the object of life. Could the
great objective have been fixed in general knowledge and purpose, it may be
assumed that the course of human history for the last two millennia would have
exhibited something nobler than the nearly untamed sway of animal propensities
in human affairs. Some actual gain might have been registered in the transition
that must eventually take place from subjection of human conduct to brutish
selfishness over to direction by reasoning mind, the Lord of Life. But the
knowledge and the capacity to be thrilled to apply it conscientiously in
history were alike swept away by the deluge of fanatical ignorance that
submerged esoteric wisdom after the third century.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead states
that the ego in the man will bring together "the two sisters of the two
lands," that he "does away with the enmity which is in their
hearts," and will unite them in the bonds of friendly union.
History is just the record of this
"battle of Armageddon," in which the issues of the internal moral and
spiritual conflict between the soul of the animal man and the infant
Christ-mind in evolving humanity will be pitched from the subjective inner
sphere of motivation out upon the plane of physical activity and event. The
doings of kings, armies, legislatures, assemblies, mobs, parliaments, courts,
tyrants and heroes are but the precipitation of the issues of the inner
subjective conflict from the sphere of mental, emotional, sensual or spiritual
origin out upon the stage of overt concrete act. History is the record and
study of these myriad events in their collectivity.
Psychoanalysis works primarily and
practically with the individual. But the problem and the situation are the same
as in man collectively. His outward conduct is the crystallization of the
elements of his inward conflict upon the surface of his life as manifest
19
in his body and in his acts.
Causation arises from the world within, but comes forth in response to
provocation from external occasion. It proceeds from conscious, or unconscious,
inner motivations outward to register its nature in a physical deed or
formation. Plotinus has well phrased it when he says that the inner life of the
soul "publishes itself by the beauty of its works." But likewise,
during the period of its ignorance in infancy, and until it has gained the
poise of wisdom and the love of beauty and goodness, it will also publish the
whimsicalities of childish waywardness and crudity, by the ugliness of its
works.
As man is a miniature replica of the
universe, or what the ancient sages called the Heavenly Man, he, like the
universe, is composed of soul and body in a conjunct relationship, the one, the
soul, functioning within and sustained and nourished by, the other, the body,
precisely as the fiery energy of the candle flame is fed and fueled by its
power to transform the gross elements of its physical substrate into the
likeness of its own glorious soul of fire. This is precisely what St. Paul says
the Christ-soul in us will do to our "vile" bodies, changing them "into
the likeness of his own glorious body." Pope in his terse couplet has well
reminded us of this our basic constitution--if we are made in God's image:
All things are parts of one
stupendous whole,
Of which the body Nature is, and God
the soul.
God, considered for the moment apart
from body and as spirit or mind, is the soul of the universal Being, and
nature, the visible manifest universe, is his body. So man is a soul,
and he, too, has his body. As man is thus a little or miniature cosmos
(microcosm), having his being as one cell within the milieu of the larger
cosmos (macrocosm), he is placed, as the Egyptians so well intimated, on the
border territory, or horizon line, facing the world of nature, the body of
the macrocosm, on the one side, and its invisible soul, the hidden mind
and spirit of the universe, on the other side. And as the outer form reflects
the nature of the hidden conscious creative
20
idea, so, as says Emerson, "man
stands midway betwixt the inner spirit and the outer matter. He sees that the
one reflects and reveals the other, and he becomes a priest and interpreter of
nature thereby." Nature is the mirror of the soul. Paul confirms this in
his remarkable statement that that which may be known of God is manifest.
For, he says, the "invisible things of Him from the creation of the world
are clearly seen, being understood from those things which are made." You
can read God's mind from the observation of his works. God's stupendous
physical body took form over the lines of his primordial creative
thought-forms. For body is formed from the final deposit of matter or substance
in the matrix or mold constructed by divine mind. Soul builds, or as we should
say, out-builds body. The soul, seated within the inner "ark" of
finely attenuated bodies of sublimated matter--"spiritual bodies," as
Paul assures us we possess--projects vibratory radiations outward, carrying the
form and nature of her thought, and these impact upon plastic matter and throw
it into the mold of the idea pattern, where it later hardens. In The Faerie
Queen Edmund Spenser puts this so clearly in his memorable distich:
For of the soul the body form doth
take;
For soul is form, and doth
the body make.
Both the macrocosm and man, the
microcosm, are composed of soul and body. And in every case the body reflects
the mood and mold of the soul that energizes it.
We now have the background to
understand the function of symbols, the enormous part they are now again seen,
as of old, to play in the developing culture of the creature man, as the amber
of meaning preservation and the agents of meaning transmission from mind to
mind.
21
CHAPTER III
AND GOD SPAKE UNTO MOSES
The study is led, then, directly
back to the primary formula of understanding which ordains that as cosmic
creative thoughts shaped the objects of the physical worlds over their patterns
or forms, each object is thus the concrete image of the archetypal idea
originally projected in God's mind, but now manifest to the conscious creature
man through his open senses. Every physical thing or phenomenon is then a
symbol, or the symbol, of the ideation that shaped it. And the primal language,
as well as all later language, is thus--symbolism. The concrete object must be
the only true and perfect symbol of an idea, since it is that idea
crystallized in visible substance before the eye. A picture presented to the
eye is ever the most vivid form of bringing an idea of a distant scene before
the mind.
Symbolism is the language of utmost
clarity and impressiveness, since through a symbol one mind gives another the physical
picture of the thought or idea to be conveyed. And the pronouncement of
culminative importance in the elucidative introduction to valid determinations
is the discernment that if mind on a higher plane, or the mind of a creature
higher in evolution than another (as man above the dog, or the gods above man),
desires to communicate intelligence to mind of lower rank, it must perforce use
as its medium of conveyance the objects known to the lower intelligence in its
world. Higher mind must employ the physical symbols drawn from the
objective world of the lower creature, if it would represent the forms of the
thought it wishes to transmit. Therefore the unconscious must employ in its
efforts to speak to the lower conscious mind of man, the language of nature
symbols. They would be in
22
man's known world the starting point
from which rudimentary meaning could proceed.
It is no overweening gush of
perfervid imagination to assert that the modern re-discovery of the unconscious
is a far greater event in world history than the invention of the airplane or
even the radio. It marks one of the long strides western humanity must take to
lift itself out of the dismal murks of the still lingering Dark Ages. All
merely physical conquests, all acquisitions of mechanical control of cosmic
forces, are both useless and dangerous unless accompanied by the equal
enhancement of inner intelligence, self-discipline and moral refinement.
Material forces become frightful menaces if their human manipulators are
neither wise nor disciplined enough to direct their use into beneficent
channels. Man's magnificent discoveries of nature's powers can all too readily
be made the instruments of his own destruction. If his philosophical
intelligence and discretion do not keep ahead of his discoveries, he may be
doomed.
The scientific recognition of the
unconscious is one of the steps necessary to be taken if human life is to be
redeemed from the throes of haphazard ignorant groping along the evolutionary
path to some larger measure of directed progress through knowledge and
understanding. Appalling in its revelation of the bondage to superstition under
which the human mind has labored through lack of this datum, the discovery is
also heartening in the prospect it announces of escape from superstition in the
future. A thousand obscure or darkly mysterious motivations of conduct of men
and nations, which had to be ascribed formerly to animism, fetishism,
possession, devil instigation, demoniac obsession, witchcraft, glamor and the
like, may now be assigned to the operation of forces uprushing from the
subterranean depths of the unconscious in the individual himself. And these forces
may, as technical interpretative skill develops, be traced to their deep lair,
brought out to observation and studied to the end of rectification and
intelligent control. The restoration of the unconscious to knowledge is the
harbinger of a brighter day for human culture, civilization and happiness.
23
But its discovery--good omen as it
is--has not yet brought with it a full knowledge of its nature and function,
its origin and place in the economy of human evolution, which would vastly
increase the practitioner's adeptness in handling psychopathic cases. The
professional knowledge of it in these respects is as yet hesitant, groping and
tentative or hypothetical, in the main. The modern world of academic
intelligence may be astonished to hear it said that the ancient sages and
philosophers had ample knowledge of the unconscious and dealt more or less
directly and scientifically with it in character stabilization. It was to them
an aspect of philosophy, even religion, and was an integral ingredient of an overall
philosophical attitude and practique, rather than a detached branch of
psychology. The study and treatment of the psyche stood then in far more
intimate relation to philosophy than it does now.
It has been intimated in a
preliminary way that symbolism must be the language used by the mind of a
higher being in the communication of ideas to a lower intelligence. It is this
vital deduction that stands as the basis of the next great scientific
announcement in the field of psychology: symbolism is now known to be the
language employed by the unconscious to impart its ideas to the conscious mind
of the individual. At once the inference from the premises inspires the
question: Is the unconscious then the mind of some being higher than the
personal human? Where is there such a being operating in relation to man? What
is the nature, how is it placed in superior status to man, and how is man
reduced to a position of subserviency and tutelage under it?
Psychoanalysis has deemed that the
unconscious is an epiphenomenon of man's total functionism, an expression of
his life conditioned to play a subterranean role in the area of motivation and
conduct, and uniquely and specifically generated in pre-conscious childhood to
be a life-long agent of underground influence upon the outer life. One theory,
and that of the founder of psychoanalysis himself, is that it is composed of
the native instincts of the animal-human psyche that have been driven
underground by repression.
24
It is the compound of all that one
would naturally like to do, but by conventional taboo, dare not. It is composed
of the repressed motivations that the individual has put out of his mind, but
which he can not put out of his deeper being, and which from time to time reach
up from out those deeper wells of natural incentive in dream or trance.
The entire apprehension of the
rationale of the unconscious has limped along in gross incompetence because the
ancient knowledge of the essential dualism in man's constitution has been lost
or ignored. It must now be realized that only in the light of that basic
dualism can the nature, place and function of the unconscious be understood.
The Bibles of antiquity, venerated
almost to the point of fetishism, have, strangely enough, received a meed of
worship which they have hardly merited, yet failed to receive credit for
containing truly supernal wisdom and the profoundest scientific knowledge.
Accepted largely as books of superhuman origin and contents, they have fallen
short of recognition of the sound principles of true philosophy which they
present. They, for instance, deal voluminously with the element in man's
psychic constitution which is now classified as the unconscious. Plato likewise
discourses upon it, but both Paul and Jesus, speaking from an appreciation of
Mystery dramatism, and even John, delineate its origin and status in the human
economy of consciousness. Each has a statement which, with numberless others of
similar import, outlines its basic character. Paul gave it in his statement of
man's dualism: "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second is the
Lord from heaven." This is paralleled in its companion passage: "The
first Adam was made a living soul; the second Adam was made a quickening
spirit." John's averment that the Christos is "that bread which came
down from heaven, that if a man eat of it he shall hunger no more" posits
the higher personage in the dualism, the divine dweller within the body. Even
the Christian creed speaks of the divine element in man, "who for us men
and for our salvation, came down from
25
heaven, and was made man." The Covenant--the
"broad oaths fast sealed" between the Deity and his sons sent to
earth--has been noticed in Plato's Timaeus, wherein the Demiurgus
promised to plant a heavenly seed of immortal consciousness in the mortal self
of man on earth. But Jesus himself comes forward with a decisive declaration
that he, the Christos, is that seed of immortal life, that Lord from above,
that spirit that descends upon man from the overworld, that heavenly bread of
life that, he says, must be "eaten" by man if he is to be lifted to
the race of the immortals and end by becoming gods. (All the mighty relevance
and truth of these affirmations have been lost for centuries on western
objective-mindedness by the application of them to the Christ as a man and not
to the Christos as the saving principle of divinity gestating for its birth in
human consciousness universally.) In an early chapter of John's Gospel in the
New Testament the dramatic character of Jesus, speaking to his disciples in
their character as natural human beings, and speaking of himself as that
consciousness sent down from above to be their Immanuel, makes a pronouncement
which should long ago have carried basic enlightenment to a Christendom groping
in darkness. He says: "Ye are from beneath; I am from above." This is
perhaps the most sententious and instructive verse in the scriptures, certainly
the most definitive and clarifying. It tells mortals that on their human and
bodily side they came up from beneath, from the animal orders through the long
development of something approximating "Darwinian" evolution of forms
and structure. And it adds to this the priceless datum that, while the body of
man comes to the human estate through this upward line of development from
simple to complex form, there is another part to him that did not reach its
superior status through the experience of a line of growth in the present life
of the race--surely not in unconscious childhood--but is an element that has
become conjoined with the mechanism of the animal brain and nervous system, by
a virtual "descent" from a loftier plane of being. This higher
element did not come "up" from rudimentary state to unfolded
26
powers in the short life of the
individual now in body. On the contrary it was already "up" above the
level of man's register of consciousness, and "came down from heaven"
to tenant for seventy or eighty years the conscious world of the individual's
experience. It did this for two reasons, as expressed by Plotinus: "to
develop her own powers, and to adorn what is below her." In these words
the philosopher means to say that she (the soul, treated as feminine) comes to
earth to continue her own evolution through further experience in the concrete
world, and conjoins with this effort for her own growth the undertaking to lift
up the animal species by a tutelage of its members whose bodies it overshadows
by an immanent attachment of its forces to the organism itself. Even modern
biological science, particularly as stated by Sir Alfred Russell Wallace,
co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of evolution, has positively asserted
that there has nowhere been discoverable in the life of any animal species on
earth a body of experience which could have developed in animals the faintest
germ of reasoning mind. Yet man, physical, tops the ladder of evolution on the
planet and crowns the animal's development with its most complex and
differentiated organs and functions. And in man there suddenly flashes out the
light of memory, imagination and "godlike reason," with the outburst
of human life. The circumstances confronting us in this situation force us to
recognize the truth, heard in Greek philosophy, reiterated in our own
scriptures, yet never solidly grasped, that the element that introduced
intellectuality and spiritual aspiration into the motivations of the highest
animal coming up "from beneath" was an imperishable nucleus of divine
selfhood, a veritable Son of God, a unit fragment of God's own mind, that by
vibrational and other capabilities of organization and nature could "come
down from above" and be linked by a kinship of registry with the higher
potential capacities of the human mind. Our revered, but latterly disdained and
never capably understood, scriptures have been shouting at us greater truth
than we have had the acumen to appreciate.
27
The Christos, coming first as
"a little child," the Krist Kind of the Germans, the Jesu
Bambino of the Italians, was born into the nature of man generically. He
came to share our life, as all sacred books testify, and so he was that seed of
immortal nature that the Demiurgus promised he would implant in us when the
animal side had risen from beneath to the point of refinement of structure and
sensitivity of feeling at which it could register the play of the vibrations of
a truly spiritual, divine or Christly mind. At this point, reached when animal
development had approximated the brain refinement of the first humanity, this
seed of God's own mentality was implanted, linked, coalesced within the
potential unfoldment of the animal's life. More and more of his inherent
capacity for superior genius and goodness was to be developed into manifest
expression as upward progress further refined and sensitized the mechanism of
consciousness. Incubated at first as a mere seed of later growth, coming
gradually to birth as the Christ-child, his powers and faculties slumbered
long, as do the powers of the human infant. The analogy is perfect and quite
illuminating; the infant divinity in us slumbers long in latency, in dormancy,
in unconsciousness, before awakening to recognition of his own innate
endowment. But experience in the outer world gradually evokes latent power into
conscious expression. His faculties are awakened to activity and their keenness
is sharpened. He becomes master of his powers and conscious of his high
destiny. But long he dwells within the unconscious area of the individual
personality, the unknown guest within the mortal house. And he is "the
unconscious" of the psychoanalysts.
He comes to link his life with the
human in order to continue his own quest of life more abundant, the eternal
prerogative of all living creatures, and, secondarily, "to adorn,"
that is, to beautify, spiritualize, divinize, "what is below him," as
Plotinus says. His Covenant oath, given at the time of his departure from
celestial kingdoms, bound him to lift up the animal race. This feature of
ancient teaching is clearly expressed in Jesus' statement, "if I be
28
lifted up, I will draw all men unto me."
Though he stands a full grade above the animal whose body he tenants, he, too,
is marching along in the line of ongoing, and must dip again and again into the
worlds of sense in order to grow further in stature. Indeed he expressly tells
the animal human in the Biblical allegory, the mortal who comes first as his
forerunner and way-opener, that he must come under the baptism of the lower
nature. That is to say, he must undergo the carnal experience in a body which
is seven-eighths water. And, be it affirmed with certitude at last, this is the
only water of baptism ever referred to in any doctrine or ritual of religion!
The animal human is that faithful servant-beast on whose back he is borne in
the end up to and within the gates of the Holy City of full-blown divine
consciousness, or "Jerusalem" above, while the multitudes acclaim his
triumph with exultant hosannas.
It is not too strong an assertion to
declare that the true renaissance of human culture has waited long, and still
waits, upon the general recognition of the presence and the nature of the
indwelling child of divinity within the core of conscious being. The thought
and philosophies of modern man in the west are afflicted with the age's
predilection for mechanistic theories of causation. It seems impossible that
the tendency to view soul activity and phenomena as products of bodily function
and therefore destined to vanish with the demise of the body can be overcome by
the rebirth of ancient knowledge, which took the soul to be an independent entity
that detaches itself from union with body at the latter's disintegration,
retires to mansions of spiritual being and returns in due time to build up a
body again. Recreant to this fundamentum of primeval wisdom, the modern age
persists in maintaining its philosophical position on the wholly untenable
ground of a veritable worship of ancient scriptures combined impossibly with a
rejection of the basic anthropological datum on which alone the true
interpretation of those scriptures can be made and their true meaning
understood. Modern mentality thus stands on the precarious platform of
attempting to use as its guiding light the ancient scriptures whose
29
fundamental theses it stubbornly
repudiates. Thus it has come about that for sixteen centuries the light that
shines in those scriptures has been darkened and nearly extinguished. The holy
writ of the sages of antiquity deals with the history of those fragments of the
God-mind, those Sons of God who undertook the commission of becoming human
souls on earth. And modern religious philosophy attempts to utilize this
munificent literary gift as the prime inspiration for culture--by denying the
very existence of those same souls. Meaningless is the reverence and hollow
worship paid the great scriptures, the true sense and message of which is
completely blocked off from comprehension by the obdurate blindness of
traditional view. While a veritable fetish worship is offered up to these
venerable documents, it is insidiously undermined by the treachery that refuses
acceptance of the fundamental theses and premises by means of which alone the
full gospel of their truth-telling can be brought to the light of
understanding. And this interior self-contradiction of attitude has stood, and
will continue to stand until rectified, at the causative center of the world's
delirium of philosophical confusion. When the world returns to sanity it will
be achieved through the recapture by intelligence of the substrate of archaic
wisdom which fortified the mind with the definite knowledge that there was in
man a conscious entity distinct from the body, yet consubsistent with it,
capable of accumulating and preserving to perpetuity the values won by living.
Until this knowledge is restored there can be little more than a continuance of
the world's groping and stumbling in the twilight.
30
CHAPTER IV
THE GODS DISTRIBUTE DIVINITY
It is an axiom of Greek philosophy
that in the vast hierarchy of beings and intelligences from supreme Deity down
to man each god is as it were a cell unit of the life of one superior divinity
and that the total company of such cells comprising the body of the higher lord
multiplies, magnifies and "distributes" the life of that more exalted
being, in seed form, out over a wider range of creative activity. In this
formulation Greek philosophy quite fully agrees with St. Paul, who says that we
are all members of one body, of which Christ is the head. It seems difficult
for world thought to grasp realistically the cogent force of this teaching. All
living creatures are the component atoms in the life or body of some
tremendously greater being, who lives and moves in and through the activities
of his constitutive elements. Precisely as the oak renews and expands its total
life by the generation and distribution of the seeds of its own being, so a
larger unit of life produces in potential form a multiple progeny of its own
kind in order thus to expand its own measure of total being.
But each fragmented son of parent
being must start from seed potentiality and through a long process of growth
eventually bring its separate life back to the level and completeness of the
progenitor. Thus it comes that life proceeds from the Father and returns unto
him again. Obviously the life of the son is a part of and "in" the
life of the parent, and equally the life of the parent is "in" that
of the son. As the life and being of the progenitor is latent in the seed,
until it is finally brought to awakened consciousness in the later stages of
growth, there is implicit here the entire explanatory formula for understanding
the presence and nature of the uncon-
31
scious in man. The unconscious is
just the unawakened being of the higher parental life and consciousness of
whose unitary selfhood the individual man is one organic cell.
There occurs in a sentence in an
enlightening late work of psychoanalysis by a practicing clinician of wide
experience and deep insight into the science a single word, which falls with
the aptest, though with perhaps altogether unsuspected, relevancy into the
context and support of the thesis of the unconscious here expounded. The work
is The Recreating of the Individual, by Beatrice M. Hinkle, M.D.
Asserting that the unconscious can not carry through any form of expression or
activity that counters the rational judgment of the outer conscious mind, she
writes that under the ban of such repression "the individual remains
unaware of the ancient processes functioning in and influencing his
present life and he cannot evolve beyond them except through greater
self-consciousness or according to the immeasurably slow process of nature
herself."1 This is to say that the present activities of the conscious
mind overlay and keep buried under their constant play a body of innate and
generic motivations which would exercise a control in the direction of the
individual life if they were given free course in the conscious. It may fairly
be presumed that the word "ancient" in the passage quoted carries far
more significance than the author dreamed. This word, used in description of
"processes functioning in and influencing . . . present life" is the
prime clue to the mystery of the unconscious. For ancient indeed is
the unconscious. It is, in reference to the human individual, that part of the
man which is the "Ancient of Days" of the Psalmist. Wordsworth caught
the vision of it when he wrote in his immortal Ode:
The soul that rises with us, our
life star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting, and
cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
_______
1 This and numerous other citations
from Dr. Hinkle's fine work made in this volume are reproduced with her
gracious permission.
32
But trailing clouds of glory do we
come
From heaven, which is our home.
"The sunshine comes and
goes," he says--and so does the soul of man. It comes into expression in
the life and body of a human, and at the end of its cycle goes back to
celestial repose, and it does this time and time again. It has had many births
and "deaths," but never death. It has garnered up the fruits of vivid
experience in the kingdoms of the world and in the bodies of men, and preserved
them in the indestructible treasure house of its inmost spiritual body, which
is safe from the rot of decay, the tooth of moth or the loot of thieves. And it
comes forth for each fresh sally into the daylight of world experience, bearing
the wealth of its deposits of wisdom, knowledge and genius, not to be hoarded,
but to be put out to "usury" in further investment in living, for the
endless enhancement of its own glory in the more abundant life promised it by
its Parent. The central phrase of old theology, "for the glory of
God," bears with more direct pertinence on pivotal meaning than has been
surmised. The onward march of progress does indeed bring an increment of glory
to the son of God within the body of the man. For as the sun-fragment of
divine soul in corporeal man grows in self-consciousness, it increases the
shining texture of that "body of the resurrection," that "robe
of glory" integrated of the essence of solar light, which the soul weaves
for itself in ever more effulgent splendor to be its spiritual temple not made
with hands and in which it may dwell when the earthly tabernacle of this flesh
has been discarded. There is fathomless meaning in Paul's statement that this
mortal shall put on immortality and this corruptible shall be clothed in
incorruption. The climactic guerdon promised by Deity to man is that the
creature shall have immortal life. And to be undying, man must have wrought for
himself a body which when he shall have put it on, will never decay. Hence the
great object of his coming to earth is, as Plato said, to "weave together
mortal and immortal natures," so that the mortal part can inherit
33
immortality through its partaking the
life and nature of the immortal. By charity and wisdom, all the scriptures
affirm, man shall transform, transubstantiate and transfigure his being until
it glows in equal radiance with the glory of the gods whose raiment shines like
the sun. Man will end his earthly career by casting off the "filthy
rags" of fleshly vestments of decay, and come forth arrayed in the glory
of the sun. "I shall clothe thee with light as with a garment," saith
the Lord in the Old Testament. We are to be made "children of the
light," he again says. We are adjured to let our light shine, since we
"are the light of the world." The Christos is the "Lord of
light," "the life and the light of men." This has all been
killed in its thrilling meaning by being shifted away from humanity at large
and allocated--and hence lost--upon the person of one man in history. It was to
be the possession of all the sons of earth who achieved it.
The vital truth about this glory
body, this house from above, with which Paul says he waits to be clothed upon,
is that it is imperishable. Once formed--and Paul says he groans and travails
in pain with us until Christ be "formed" within us--it does not die;
it does not disintegrate. "You shall never be dissolved," promised
the Demiurgus, once the garment of shining Christhood has been woven.
And now comes the denouement of
mighty truth from out these ancient scriptures that becomes the open sesame for
unlocking the hidden mystery of the rationale of the unconscious. The white
raiment of the redeemed is not only composed of solar essence that is
imperishable, but so close is it to the heart of eternal being, so changeless
in its protogonic essentiality, that an impression made upon it is forever
ineradicable. The unconscious never forgets!
Here is an item of cosmic truth that
even the uncertain tentatives of psychological searchings have already brought
out. An impression made upon the innermost part of man which stands nearest to
true being is never erased. The substance of that holy of holies of real being
is changeless first matter. It partakes of the ultimate
34
nature of the real. It is the
primordial mind-stuff. And so the Greeks had a beautiful word for that which
this mind knows, truth. Truth in Greek is aletheia, from a, "not,"
and lethe, "forgetfulness." Truth is therefore that which is
not forgotten, can never be lost. Once gained, it is stored up in the alcoves
of indestructible mind-essence. What the soul has gained of truth, she brings
with her when she comes anew into body. "Truth is from heaven,"
declares Jesus in one of the apocryphal gospels in answer to Pilate's derisive
question, an answer omitted from the four canonical Gospels. Truth is indeed
from heaven, from the overworld of diviner ideality. It is inscribed upon the
imperishable tablets of cosmic mind. What the individual mind grasps of its
eternal principles is never lost. But at each dip of the soul into incarnation
it loses its paradise of knowledge and understanding as it plunges deep into
the heart of matter and is buried in the underworld of sense. Paradise must be
regained each time with the return of the consciousness to the levels of former
development, and new glories won. And so we have the great Plato giving us the
twin doctrines of "the loss of memory of divine things" and
"reminiscence," or recovery of divine memory.
The unconscious mind never forgets;
yet here is Plato saying it suffers the loss of its memory. Is it
contradiction? The Platonic amnesia is only a forgetfulness which is paralleled
and analogized in the life of the oak, which loses its eternal memory or
consciousness when it goes as a seed of future growth into the soil, but
regains its full awareness of life when it attains maturity in the new cycle.
For life must die to be born again, must lose its life to repossess it, must
suffer loss of memory to win eternal memory. Life ever passes from the highest
stage of conscious unfoldment in any cycle back into the embryo of itself to
begin a new cycle. As a seed it can carry, not the adult development of its
powers, but the sheer potentiality of renewing those powers. It enters earth
shorn of all that it had won in the last cycle's effort, save the capability of
renewing and increasing all previous winning. It must start each cycle over
again from beginning. It more quickly each time recapitulates the
35
range of previous development, now
become "instinctive," and then takes new strides forward into
infinite being. Thus all evolution moves forward through what the sage ancient
teachers everywhere called the "eternal renewal" of life. Life
"dies" to be born again. And the wreckage and then the loss of the
intelligible structure of the ancient wisdom came through the failure of philosophic
thought to retain the true reference of the words "die" and
"death." Life, poetized the wise men of old, "dies" when it
goes under the trammels of the flesh in incarnation. "Death" in
theology is then precisely that which goes by the name of "life" in
our world. Says Paul in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans: "The
command that meant life proved death to me." So the ancients regarded this
life as the "death" of the soul under the sluggish waters of the
river of the underworld, the river of forgetfulness--Lethe! But always it was a
"death" from which there was the resurrection. Always the planted
seed died and then germinated and lived again. And thus life went forward to
its ever-expanding conquest of new glories, "through death to life eternal,"
as the Easter hymn sings it. For what the soul loses temporarily at the start
of each cycle of growth, it regains and eventually holds in perpetuity. The
unconscious never forgets!
The pursuit of truth through this
channel leads to the open door of a revelation of one of the great Biblical
allegories so sweeping in its magnitude and relevance that its disclosure may
indeed promise a wholly new regeneration of scriptural interpretation. At first
glimpse no two things would appear to be farther apart and remote from each
other in significance than the unconscious in modern psychology and the ark and
deluge story in the Bible. It happens, however, that the flood allegory in the
Old Testament is the ancient esoteric glyph of the unconscious in the human
constitution! Again this has never been seen because the narrative in Genesis
has been taken as history, or at least quasi-history, and not for what it
really is--the allegory of evolutionary method, as the Genesis story is
the allegory of creational method.
36
Light is gained on this cryptic
scriptural representation by tracing the pivotal words employed in it back to
their archaic or basic meanings. These are "ark," "Noah,"
and "Ararat," as well as the numbers that crept in, seven and forty.
Noah was given seven days in which to build the ark and collect numberless
thousands of animals of every species from all over the earth, manifestly
impossible as actual history, but immensely significant as allegory. It rained
forty days and nights, covering the whole earth to the highest mountain
tops,--again absurd as history. The ark floated on the waters till the flood
subsided, and then the occupants emerged and landed on Mt. Ararat.
Who was "Noah"? It is
evident that though Hebrew in origin, at least found in a Hebrew document of
antiquity, the name "Noah" is built on the stem of the word which in
Greek stood for the rock principle of the universe, Mind, the mental principle
in mankind. Anaxagoras' theory that the world is the production of a cosmic
Mind, or of Nous, is relevant to this determination. The root of the
word is that basic Greek stem, No, and the Greeks called the
intellectual principle in man Noé @horizontal line over e. It is
important to notice that this is feminine in form and grammatical gender. This
is so because, although mind and spirit are commonly typed under masculine
symbolism, yet when the spirit descended into matter and became the soul of a
living organism, it was regarded as feminized through its coming under the
power of matter and body, which are symbolically feminine always. The feminine
ending was placed upon it to indicate that it was mind involved in and
energizing matter. The ancients always affirmed that the soul entered its
"feminine phase" when it incarnated. The Greek feminine ending is the
long é, eta. When the Hebrews used the word they substituted on the No
stem their own feminine singular ending, which is -ah. This gives No-ah,
the principle of mind in body.
It is next to be noted that, in
perfect accord with all ancient philosophy, the mental principle, Noah, was
given three sons. In the arcane allegorism the intellectual ray from God's mind
suffered
37
differentiation from its primal
unity into a triplicity when it established its connection with physical
organisms on three linked planes of higher consciousness. It has been lost out
of studentship that terms corresponding pretty closely to our three words,
spirit, soul and mind, expressed this differentiation. In one Hindu system they
were named atma, buddhi and manas. In astrological pictography
they were represented by the three stars, most significantly known for ages as
"the three kings," in the belt of Orion. They were the lower trinity
of spirit, the reflection in the human microcosm of the cosmic trinity above.
Mind is ever triple in its manifestation. Modern theology posits little
difference between mind, soul and spirit, but the early philosophical and
anthropological systematism knew of the gamut of distinct gradation subsisting
among the three. Spirit held the topmost rank, more ethereal and sublimated in
its nature than the other two, being the pure energy of intuitive knowledge.
Soul was a further projection of that energy into matter, manifesting one step
lower, and standing midway between pure intuition and concrete thinking. Mind
was a still deeper injection of spirit into matter, coming to expression as the
glowing rational power of conscious thought directly conditioned by the
mechanistic function of the brain.
The mind-body problem has been a
perplexing conundrum for human understanding, entangled in the difficulty of
perceiving how an immaterial force can lay hold of and utilize a physical
mechanism. But no longer should this problem offer difficulty to the modern
mind that understands even remotely how the radio wave can blare through its
instrument. It has been said that the repeated note of a violin string,
properly attuned, could destroy a steel bridge. Really the secret of the
mind-body relation has been opened to our unthinking minds ever since a piano
note has been known to rattle a cup in its saucer on the old parlor mantel
across the room. Caruso, the tenor, demonstrated it when, having lightly struck
a delicate drinking glass with a tuning fork to get its pitch, he then
shattered it with the same tone sung from his powerful vocal cords. A thought
38
is just the registry of a vibration
in ethereal matter of great tenuity, projected by that root energy known as
will, and carried by an electric play of force generated by the chemical
constitution of the blood. The human blood has in it the components requisite
for the production of battery current. A modern scientific pronouncement states
that the brain contains four quadrillions of minute dynamos, and these are
charged by electricity carried by the blood and drawn by it out of the vast sea
of static electricity in the air. Each cell of the brain is the seat of the
flash of electric current between the positive and negative poles within it.
These tiny currents can catch and carry the energies of primal will and
thought, as the voice carries the structure of an idea. Life energizing as will
or thought is at once the generator of electric force that can carry into
expression its creative forms of ideas. Immaterial energy such as that of the
mind can lay hold of and move matter and body, for the simple reason that its
every impulse can stir the vital currents that are themselves constitutive of
the very being of matter.
Understanding of the problem was
thwarted as long as the blind conception prevailed that matter was inert,
lifeless substance. Now that it is known that matter is itself a composition of
purely etheric energies, really no longer to be conceived as matter at all, but
spirit itself held in static bondage, the fundamental kinship between mind and
body is readily intelligible. If lines of immaterial force can move the iron
filings around the head of a magnet, it should no longer be a task to know how
life works to accomplish its purposes. There is needed only the mathematically
correct adaptation of structure to vibration rate and wave length to produce
motion. Life manifests through an infinite gradation of such adaptations, be it
in coarse substance or in finer ethereal or "spiritual" matter. And
we have spiritual bodies, more than one of them, archaic science asserted. Each
of these registers energy in its particular form and expression, each one
conditioned by the fineness or coarseness of the material composing its
organism. Sound, as the old philosophers argued, is one; yet it manifests in a
million different sounds, deter-
39
mined by the quality and structure
of the instrument sounded through. Man's very "personality" is based
on this hoary knowledge, since his "person" is the physical
instrument through (Latin, per) which the higher rates of
conscious vibration sound (Latin, son-) out their tones in the
manifest world. The personality is the physical instrument through which the
soul sounds its characteristic note of spiritual being in the world. The spirit
deep within, being a ray of changeless being which is eternally one--however it
manifests in variety--is not subject to division. Hence it is the
"individuality," the regnant king within the personality. It is
further instructive to recall that persona is the Latin word for
"mask." This item illuminates intelligence with the important
knowledge that the physical personality is the mask which the divine
individuality puts on and through which it can sound out its proper keynote in
the total symphony of being.
If the allegory was to be kept true
to profound wisdom it was necessary that "Noah" should have three
sons. The intellectual principle in cosmic operation must manifest in triple
form. This is the explanation of the many figures of triform gods, the Trimurti
of India and the gods with three heads or three faces so often found. It is
likewise the lost meaning behind the legend of the three "Magi" who
come with the Christos in the Christian Gospel narrative. For whenever divine
Mind deploys its forces into creative expression, it generates its three
distinct aspects which stand behind the great doctrine of the Trinity.
And their wives? Not even divine
Thought can create worlds of manifest existence without uniting its energies
with the physical power hidden in the atom of matter. Spirit must
"marry" matter if it is to create concrete universes. The subjective
side of life may know what it wishes to create, but it can not build structures
until it has the material with which to build them. It must therefore link its
directive energy with the latent power in the atom. This is its shakti, or
spouse, through whose motherhood spirit alone can procreate. It became his
wife, his sister, eventually his mother and
40
his daughter, and it is pictured
under all these characters in mythology.
But the great enlightenment comes
with the elucidation of the recondite significance hidden under the symbolism
of the "ark." Here again it is the language root that brings lost
intelligence to view. The "ark" was, last and least of all things, not
a boat or floating structure, save, of course, in a purely figurative
sense, as the "flood" was not a deluge of water. It is all
arcane allegorism, and this is established beyond any possible question. The
true meaning of the "ark" is to be found in its derivation from the
Greek noun, arché, "beginning," which is in turn from the
Greek verb archo, "to begin." It is past all understanding how
the scholars of many centuries have failed to discern either the etymological
background of the "ark" or its implications for the Biblical
interpretation. The fact that it is the first word in the Bible (preceded by
its preposition "in") should in itself have gone far to open blind
eyes to obvious meaning. The Bible thus starts from the point of proper
departure--"in the beginning." The Greek word arché means
beginning, primal state, aboriginal condition of being. It is seen in our words
archaic, archangel, archetypal. God's archetypal ideas were the original
ideas projected in and by his mind to give shape to the universe. So the
"ark" is the primal or beginning state of a thing. For anything of
objective existence to "go into the ark" is, then, its retirement
back into the stage from which it emanated in the beginning of its cycle.
Next, what is the "flood"
or "deluge"? Grievously has ignorance plunged into shameful asininity
over this aspect of the representation. It has nothing actually to do with
water, or rain and water having nothing to do with it. But it has much to do
with flooding, or washing, or washing away, in the sense of a trope. For the
scriptural "deluge" (found in some fifty national mythologies!) is
nothing more or less than the figurative washing away of all created things by
the flood-tide of dissolution which cyclically ensues at the end of each
age of creation. The flood figure of description is imag-
41
inative, a trope; but the washing
away through dissolution is an actual event. It is the dissolution of the
worlds and universes at the end of the age (Greek: teleuten aion, so
tragically mistranslated "end of the world" in the Christian texts of
the Bible), when infinite being absorbs back into its capacious bosom the
disintegrated forms of its last cosmic manifestation, when concrete existence
dissolves back into sheer be-ness. Matter disappears or is washed away from
palpable existence, and spirit retires into the interior core of being. The
cosmos and all its formations dissolve as the creative energy that threw them
into shape runs its given course and subsides into motionlessness and silence.
For life works cyclically, after the analogy of the heart beat and the life
breath. It awakes, and energizes its creative effort in building. In the
evening of its cycle it tires of its labor, and like us made in its image, it
withdraws its energies and rests. When the animating and supporting energy of
creation is withdrawn, the universe it shaped collapses and disintegrates. It
dissolves. Where does it go?--since there is no "place" for it to go
save where it is. It goes where a handful of salt goes when you put it into a
basin of water. It goes into solution. And as the capability of bringing the
salt back from invisible subsistence into visible material form again is always
present, in like fashion can the dissolved universe be recreated in the
beginning arc of the next cycle. The "deluge" is the tide of
dissolution that washes away all forms.
Against this philological and
philosophical background there is now the possibility of seeing at last the
stupendous significance of the ark and flood story. When the structure of solid
substance that housed and gave play to the energies of the life principle
during its active period of creation is washed away--like the giant oak that
has fallen and gone to decay and disappeared in dust--where, if life is not to
come to an end along with the disintegration of its containing vessel, does it
go to be tided over the period of dissolution and "death" till it can
live again in new forms? Whither can it retire to ride out the flood? What can
hold it in integration, or the possibility of new integration, when it has no
mechanism, no
42
organism of manifestation, no point
of support in the realm of space? Life and nature have been confronting us with
the clear answer to this central query through the ages and we have been too
obtuse to see it. We always miss the meaning of the things that are most common
in our belief that the great meanings are to be found in the extraordinary, the
supernatural. Nature and life have shown us where the immaterial immanent
principle of being goes when its physical embodiment disintegrates. For life
provides every one of its creatures with a mechanism by which it can insure the
renewal of its existence after its body dissolves. It withdraws into its
beginning stage, its arché! And this is all included in our small but
stupendously pedagogical reality, the seed. The seed is the
"boat" in which, safe from extinction, the soul of life is tided over
the flood of disintegration of form. Obviously expressed life can not be
preserved in the form of its organic structural fullness of stature, in its
adult body. It can not be preserved in existential embodiment, since body is
dissolved. It must perforce be preserved, then, in purely potential form.
Not it, but only the possibility of it in new form survives. It goes back to
reside again in the ideal form and essence from whence it issued in the
first instance. As it was projected thence once before, or many times, it can
be sent forth again in the round of the cycle.
Here indeed is the answer to many
aspects of life's great riddle. When the worlds of form dissolve away life goes
back into its arché, its beginning. From thence it will begin all over
again, enriched, to be sure, with the capital it has acquired in all previous
adventures. Any student of ancient systems learns to know that the grandiose
view of all life process is that based on the prime fact that life does nothing
but endlessly renew itself. Says the soul of life in the Egyptian scriptures:
"I die, and I am born again, and I renew myself, and I grow young each
day." ("Day" is the term for any period, cycle or age of
manifest existence; "year" is used similarly.) No more majestic
passage than this stands anywhere in the "sacred" literature of
mankind. It is the one assured fact
43
that the human mind must know, to
maintain its sanity and balance, its equanimity and courage under the press and
stress, the strain and pain, of existence in body.
If the revived voice of ancient
wisdom, that is fortified with the concepts of the most sagacious revelation of
truth to man, dare speak to the distracted modern mind and tell it how it has
come to such chaos and wreckage of its philosophy, it can be broadcast in
categorical terms that the seed of all world fatuity was planted in the soil of
the uncritical human thought when about the third century of the Christian
history the great crucial doctrine of the eternal renewal of life, as applied
to the human soul, was lost under the sweeping tide of fanatic ignorance that converted
the allegories and mythologies of sapient philosophical wisdom into alleged
literal sense and historical event. Clement, Origen and the learned
philosophers of the early Church treated the scriptures properly as allegories.
St. Paul declares that the Abraham story in the Old Testament "is an
allegory." But philosophical light gave way to pietistic zealotry
misguided by ignorance, and the world's ancient knowledge that would have
stabilized the human psyche in its course through history was extinguished. The
knowledge that a nucleus of conscious life--the human soul--can retire into its
arché and subsist in latency, and thus be tided over the period of its
non-existence in the inmost depths of immaterial being, to emerge again and
pursue its forward course into the realities of ever more abundant life,--this
is the salt that has lost its savor, the preservative without which man's
psyche must lie in the foul odor of corruption.
As the intellectual principle is the
first to emerge from out the ark of being onto the stage of physical existence,
so it must be the last to re-enter as all things retire into the bosom of
non-being. So Noah enters the ark, after the animals, and his sons and the
son's wives with them. All living creatures, be it noted, must re-enter the
ark.
As to the final term, Ararat, the
lost meaning is simple, once the other clues are found. If life comes to
manifest expression in its day
44
cycles in visible matter, it must be
localized somewhere in visible worlds. Such worlds are planets, primarily. So,
in our case, it is "earth." When life retires to ride out the flood
in its ark, the worlds disappear. The ark is lifted above the earth. Earth
vanishes. But when the flood is over and the dawn of the new day-cycle swings around,
where must the arché land if it is to take hold of matter again and
build of it a new house to live in? Obviously it must come back to earth, it
lands again on earth. And most significantly a study of symbolism and of
language discloses that the cryptic meaning of the word "mount"
("mountain") in the arcane typology of the Bibles, is precisely the
earth. Time and again the earth is referred to as "the mount of the
earth." Much data of studentship can be presented to verify this item. It
is by no means a mere guess, stretching the meaning to fit a preconceived
rendering, in Procrustean fashion. It is the meaning of the term. And it
needs but a moment's glance at the Hebrew language to see that
"Ararat" is itself the word for "earth," juggled a bit. The
present Hebrew word for "earth" is arets. An older form,
states an authority, is not arets, but areth. Practically here is
the English word "earth" itself. The ark lands on the mount of the
earth, and the seeds of life emerge to be planted once more in the garden of
the world.
If a touch of personal reference may
be pardoned in this connection, it is worthy of mention, for the sake of
showing how the interpretation of symbols is the true key to scriptural sense,
and how unerringly its guidance will lead to true meaning, that when, from the
side of symbolism purely, we had worked around to the rendering just
elucidated, and felt that a startling discovery involving considerable
"originality" had been made, imagine our surprise and very intense
amazement when, happening to go over the text of the seventh chapter of Genesis,
we found that the third verse of the story told us precisely the thing we
thought had not been grasped before, and used in doing it the same word that
contained the kernel of our whole abstruse conclusion,--the seed! The verse
runs to the effect that Noah and his household, the animals and
45
fowls, were herded into the ark
"to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth." Had the
clear implication of these words--or that word "seed"--been followed
out to evident conclusions, there would have been no need of our remaining in
gross benightedness as to Biblical meaning for sixteen centuries. The situation
here unfolded must glaringly illustrate the devastation and havoc wrought upon
the Western mind and its culture by the obsessions of ignorance which imposed a
literal or physical meaning upon archaic symbols of recondite truths. Under
this incubus no mind for sixteen hundred years has had the strength of
imagination to rise above the conception of seed as just grains of corn, beans,
larkspur and male fluid. The figure of "seed" as being the glyph for
all renewal of life in evolutionary or cosmic sense, or the mental graph for
the cyclical re-existence of the human soul, was entirely washed away by that
fatal third-century deluge of philosophical doltishness, when Christianity
passed from the hands of the philosophically capable Greeks into those of the
practical-minded, but ignorant, Romans, who soon closed up the last of the
Platonic Academies and doused the ancient gleam of world intelligence under
stupid literalism.
But what has the restored light of
Biblical allegorism to do with psychoanalysis and the unconscious? Pretty
nearly everything vital. It puts a known history behind the unconscious, explains
its origin, its presence in the human psychic constitution, and its nature and
function. It reveals the important part it plays in evolution. It enlightens
with the knowledge that the unconscious is the divine soul itself in the human,
pursuing the course of its cyclical recurrence in the world and preserving the
continuity of its unfoldment throughout the whole. It tells us where the
unconscious got what it possesses, where it found or acquired its present
content and where it gained the higher wisdom that it flashes in dream symbol,
in moments of rare afflatus or intuitive insight, or in subtle intimations of
many types, down upon the conscious mind. And ancient sagacity, supplying us
also with many points of knowledge of concomitant life phenomena in its
postulation of spiritual bodies inter-
46
penetrating the more substantial
physical in the depths of man's make-up, provides us with the rationale for
understanding both how an ego can keep its impressed accruement of wisdom
gained from experience and project it forward into the present existence, as
well as how a "sub"-consciousness can be an actuality of man's
possession apart from and in addition to his normal consciousness.
47
CHAPTER V
LOST DATA OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Not many years ago there could have
been no conception more unintelligible and more impossible of credibility than
the suggestion that man could possess and be influenced by a consciousness that
he was not conscious of. Sheer abstract logic seemed to forbid the predication
of an unconscious consciousness. It was like saying "dark light" or
"wet dryness." But the discovery of the unconscious has come, after
the radio and the true nature of the atom had opened the bound mind of the age
to the possibility of "the impossible."
It may be worth the citation of a
paragraph or two of contemporary expression to accentuate for our dullness of
mind the admitted importance of this discovery in psychology. There occurs a
passage in the work of Dr. Hinkle, already referred to. The Recreating of the
Individual, which states the case for an interior point of view with great
appositeness. She is speaking of the upsurge of interest in psychoanalysis (p.
422):
"In my opinion the significance
of this popular espousal lies in the unconscious recognition that in the
psychoanalytic technic we have an instrument which for the first time makes
possible that further individual human development or creation of self by self
which formerly depended upon the 'grace of God,' and was entirely bound up with
religious creeds."
Here is an intimation based on years
of positive empirical testimony that this new science is one of the greatest of
historical advances from ignorance to knowledge, releasing the human ego from
the stultifying sway of blind belief and giving it the knowledge of a workable
technique for further liberation. Whenever actual
48
knowledge has come to hand, the
former boundless area that had to be covered by religious pietism and helpless
trust has been diminished and the portion recovered from credulity and its
victimization has been happily enlarged. No dissertation is necessary to
demonstrate the value of such a gain. It is the liberation of human life from
former bondage to the unknown.
A recent testimonial manifesto
issued to commemorate the life and work of Sigmund Freud states that his
discovery of the unconscious is close to being the most momentous revelation in
the history of civilized man. To the deep student its preciousness resides in
the fact that it restores to modern thinking that item of the priceless wisdom
of the ancients which postulates the existence and persistence of the divine
soul in humanity. The functioning of soul wisdom and faculty within man but
beneath the surface of his ego consciousness, and "unconscious" because
resident in one of man's interior "spiritual" bodies, the connection
of which with the outer brain and nerve mechanism was generally, but not
wholly, cut off by the play of the outer consciousness, and could at times, as
in sleep, be established and communication set up, was the central item of
archaic knowledge that enabled the ancient mind to ground itself in assured
philosophies of positive value. On top of hundreds of quotable testimonials to
the brilliance of ancient intelligence, one comes to hand in a recent book, The
Crisis of Faith, by Stanley Romaine Hopper. A passage from it will serve
well to introduce the argument for the soul, to which some space must be given.
On page 206 he writes:
"The early humanism of the
Greeks, . . . attained a view of man that was sane, balanced and 'human.' . . .
This wholeness and health of the Greek perspective was grounded on wonder and
in wisdom. . . . With sure intuition the Greek mind turned to this element of
permanency which everywhere transcends the flux or founds it, and established
there its wisdom."1
_______
1 This citation from The Crisis
of Faith, by Stanley Romaine Hopper, and others taken from the same volume,
are used with the permission of its publishers, The Abingdon-Cokesbury Press,
Nashville, Tenn.
49
This tribute to the sanity and
wholesomeness of Greek philosophy is not overdone; possibly it is even modest.
And it lays the finger directly upon the point where lurks the crux of human
understanding of the meaning of life. Of all the ineptitudes and failures of
the philosophic mind the greatest would appear to be that which has blocked the
clear and certain recognition of the truth that no solution satisfactory to
human thinking can ever be worked out on any other basis than the assured
knowledge of the continuing existence and cyclical rebirth of the divine soul
in man. Unless the intelligence of the mortal is fortified with the dependable
conviction that the gain he struggles to achieve in a life will be held for all
the future and become capital in further cycles of existence, he must despair.
This assurance, even the postulation of it, lacking, despair is precisely the
ultimate note already sounded as the only philosophy possible in the view of a
scientifically enlightened thinker like Bertrand Russell. Knowing nothing of
the possibility of the integral part of man's constitution possessing a means
of survival in the inner "ark" of its spiritual nature, he envisages
the ultimate destruction of the race of mortals with the decay of life on the
planet. Uninstructed by the profound ancient philosophy which knew of an inner
core of being that can carry and hold values won, he sees only futility as the
aim and outcome of the evolutionary effort on whose tide man moves forward. On
the grounds of his suppositions life has no purpose beyond the play of the
hour, or of the longer hour of the cycle. At the end of the aeon its work will
indeed be washed away in the flood of dissolution, with no ark to retire into
to betide the deluge. This is the supreme upshot of the modern scientific
envisagement of life's great movement.
Unless man is strengthened by the
certitude that while one part of him, the physical, obviously "returns to
dust," as the Preacher says in the book of Ecclesiastes, another
part, joined temporarily with it, is indestructible and provides a bank of
deposit for all values earned by effort, in which they can be preserved in per-
50
manence, his mind must run
out in despair and his heart sink, beyond the help of any power of hope or
faith. Unless the modern mind can disentangle itself from its helplessness in
the spider-web mesh of its own inadequate presuppositions, due to its lack of
knowledge of basic anthropological elements, and will follow the light of clear
intimation of truth as the ancients did, it can have no hope of sanifying and
sustaining positive understanding. Even modern psychology now avers, from
clinical observation, that unless a mind is philosophically fortified in affirmative
values, it will deteriorate into neurosis and wreckage. The most important
thing in all life, after physical necessities, is philosophy. There is some
evidence that at long last the light of this perception is breaking on
intelligence. In The Crisis of Faith, quoted above, the author sates (p.
203) that
"Scheler holds that the problem
of a philosophical anthropology stands today at the mid-point of all the
philosophical problems. Berdyaev goes further and asserts simply that
philosophy is primarily the doctrine of man. It is easy to see that ethics
depends upon an understanding of the nature of man, and that the civilization
of any particular period is largely determined by it. . . . We are searching
today for a new humanism--for the recovery of an understanding of man in his
wholeness and completeness. In this larger and more intimate sense we need
desperately to be humanized."
It is doubtful whether by extensive
searching a passage could have been found which sketches the form of our real
need in more appropriate terms. Here at last is the modern recognition of what
might have been supposed to be seen by simple facing of the problem of human
life at any time, namely that the attempt to rationalize the world and man's
adjustment to it must proceed blindly until man's own nature and constitution
are known and understood. Universal tragedy and suffering on an enormous scale
have come, over centuries, from the effort of Western mind to take attitudes
and initiate action, or frame policies and institute systems, in total
ignorance of what was once known as to the basic composition
51
of man's organic nature. Thousands
of tomes of Occidental lucubration on history, philosophy, religion and ethics
have fallen far wide of the mark and totally missed true guiding light from the
sheer fact that they were not grounded upon or framed in reference to the
constitution of the creature they were to serve. If Scheler holds that the
problem of a "philosophical anthropology" stands at the center of all
thinking, it is indeed a good augury for a more humanized rationale. It might
perhaps do better, however, to say that our need is for an anthropological
philosophy, one based upon more competent knowledge of anthropology. Naïvely it
can always be asked how a working program for the most favorable human progress
can ever be formulated when a knowledge of the nature and reaction potential of
the creature for whose welfare it is to be applied is not known. How can a
system of outer or inner life be framed to bear man most happily forward on the
stream toward his high goal, if neither the goal nor the equipment and
endowment of the traveler is known? How can a workable formula for the greatest
happiness of man be constructed if the measure and dimensions, the shape and
habitudes, of the man himself are not known? Kant indeed attempted to interpret
the world in the terms of man's psychic constitution. But his knowledge was
wanting in particular data, such as the ancients possessed, and stopped far
short of specific relevance to the actual situation.
Without knowledge all endeavor is
haphazard. There may be faith and hope in ever so large measure. And, oddly
enough, it is not an inch outside the pale of natural causality in the
psychological history of Europe over sixteen hundred years that the religion
that crushed out former knowledge came to insist, as the main reliance for its
millions of purblind devotees, on "faith." It was as inevitable as
geometry. In want of wisdom and knowledge there is nowhere for a mind to go
save to faith, hope and prayer. And just this unfortunate trend took its evil
course to fatal fruition in spite of the adjuration of the most astutely
philosophical writer in the cult's
52
own scriptures, St. Paul, who says
that faith is not enough. "To your faith add knowledge." Plato and
Socrates acquiesce in this declaration of the Apostle.
The egregious and fatal error made
by the theologians, and still perpetrated from a thousand pulpits every
Sabbath, is in holding up faith as a high Christian virtue to be attained by a
victorious Christian apotheosis. It is indeed not so. On the contrary Paul
starts the gamut at its bottom tone, its lowest range,--with faith. Why?
Because faith is instinctively omnipresent in all minds not demented. It is no attainment;
it is given, it is inevitable. In the finale, what can any thinking creature
do, confronting life, but have faith? There is nothing else one can do but
trust the universe of life to be beneficent. If one can not do that, and do it
effortlessly, all other aspiration and striving is of no avail. And in lieu of
any overwhelming demonstration that life is malevolent or malefic, faith is as
natural as sunshine. We start with it, as does the Apostle. We do not end with
it. But it is only the ground platform we stand upon. If we are to build the
structure of our evolution we must proceed from the foundation and move upward.
And to know how to build the superstructure we must have knowledge. From that
will grow wisdom, and from wisdom will blossom virtue and godliness. Here is a
simple item of religious homiletics that has been lost for ages, and the loss
has traced its direful consequences in many a page of appalling religious
history, blotted with bigotry, persecution and slaughter.
From anthropology the ancient sages
drew their basic data on which religion and philosophy could proceed to build
structures of thought and behavior that would accommodate man commodiously to
the play of the forces making for his growth. With such knowledge man could
align his effort harmoniously with the stream of evolutionary life and win true
happiness. The supreme datum supplied by anthropology to ancient thought was of
course the fact that man is a composite creature of two natures, a divine soul
and
53
an animal body,--a god in the body
of an animal, as Plato puts it. The conscious soul of a human is an amalgam or
product of the god and the animal natures in wedding or conjunction. This
consciousness stood on the midground--the "horizon" of the Egyptians,
the "clef in the rock" of the Hebrews--between them. That position
gave it its "human" characterization. As human it was engaged in
traversing the ground of evolution reaching from the summit of the animal's
position to the foothills of the mount of divinity.
The Greek wisdom which Hopper has
justly extolled, he adds (p. 211),
"is basically maieutic, a
criticism of life, teaching men that if they are to care rightly for their
souls, as Socrates says, they must know what they are--what it is to be human.
They must come to know their true condition; they must be made to recognize
as their first task the task of existing as human beings."
Here, it may be said, is the
concentrate, the essence of the problem of philosophy. Obviously the problem of
man can not be confronted, much less solved, as long as the nature of the human
being remains unknown. Ancient teachers imparted their basic datum of
anthropology; the modern mind distracts itself futilely in want of it. As
Hopper again well affirms (p. 203),
"philosophy as it has been
practiced has been one of the best ways of avoiding the issue. . . .
Philosophers have ceased to be philosophiae, lovers of wisdom in the
ancient sense, and in so far have stunted their true work in the world
through diminishing wisdom to science. Their work has become . . . detached. It
touches the surfaces of life as little as possible, rebounding into the
speculative the moment it does so, like a toy balloon. Life is severed from
thought." [Perhaps it would be better to say that thought is severed from
life.] "Philosophy has become what Nietzsche said it was--thought
husbandry--a trade in thought."
To this Nicholas Berdyaev adds:
"Philosophers and scientists
have done very little towards elucidating the problem of man," in the
medieval and modern periods, it should be specified.
54
In these periods, as it only too
evidently appears, the thinking mind had sunk below the power of comprehending
the heights and depths of ancient sapiency.
In the ancient day philosophy was
denominated "divine," for the reason that it supplemented the feeble
efforts of human wonder and speculation with a body of assured knowledge
vouchsafed by perfected men, graduates of this or a previous human evolution,
who had mastered the range of human capability and become Illuminati. The
tradition of the existence of such exalted men standing not at the bottom but
at the summit of the human mountain path is too universal in archaic lore of
all nations to be flouted as childish. Besides we have the age-long regnancy in
the whole world of sagacious writings, or Scriptures, which were never
discredited as tomes of infallible wisdom until the sophomoric intellectuality
of the modern age began to judge them in total incomprehension of their cryptic
methodology and in utter ignorance of their majestic argosy of forgotten truth
and reality. These came from consummate knowledge.
Ancient philosophy was "divine
philosophy" because it established the certitude of the presence of a
divine element in man which would ultimately redeem his life from the
unintelligence and rapacity of the beast to the lordly rulership of truly
divine wisdom and charity. As this element was the agent of human transition to
godhood, philosophy concerned itself primarily with its origin, nature,
struggle and victory in the arena of incarnate life. This history, presented
allegorically and dramatically, makes up the content of the scriptures. These
tomes of "Holy Writ" deal with the career of the divine fragment, a
portion of God's own imperishable unity of mind, after it had migrated from
"heaven" (acceptably understood as a "locale" of exalted
types of consciousness in non-physical states of being) and taken lodgment in
the bodies, distributively, of the most highly evolved animal, to take that
creature across the gulf of humanity up to the feet of divinity, the while it
accomplished its own advancement to more godlike stature. Its coming
55
introduced into the merely
animal-human constitution the seed germ of a deific nature, at once
imperishable and potentially omniscient. It brought the god down to share the
animal life of mortals, coming into "bondage," coming "under the
law" of sin and death (of the body), until the task was done.
Fortified with the knowledge of the
presence of this all-gracious guest in the human constitution, minds nourished
in so adequate a philosophy could bend their life effort to conformity with the
terms of the living problem. They could co-operate intelligently with
evolution. They could build on the solid foundation of a workable philosophy,
having under their feet the ground of positive attitudes and the bases of
fortitude. They could aim at character formation on the strength of the
cheering assurance that no effort was ever wasted or cheated of its count in
the final score. And again philosophy was "divine" in that it linked
the life of man the human with an arm of living deity not outside himself, not
in distant heavens, but immediately at hand in the depths of his own being. It
brought heaven close and set up a Jacob's ladder of accessibility to it. Man
could ascend into celestial glories by the sheer effort to cultivate the
companionship of the divine Friend who had come to earth to be his Emanuel.
While mawkishly driveling over the
"infallible truth" of Holy Writ in Sabbath habitudes of hypnotized
pietism, we have at the same time fallen into actual doubt of the real
existence of the divine soul as the eternal pilgrim through the kingdoms of
nature, the persistent traveler on the highways of heaven. For the most part
our unctuously mouthed averment that the Christ is within us has frittered out
into a pretty poetization, since we invariably end by looking across the
distances to clutch at its localization in the person of the Galilean peasant.
Indeed the central rib of Christianity's structure is not that the Christ mind
came to be incorporated collectively in humanity, but that it came and was
incorporated solely in one man, Jesus of Nazareth. Long buried and lost out of
general
56
knowledge is that prime datum of
anthropology on which a religious philosophy alone could build its mansion
securely. Until that forgotten item is restored human thought can not pursue
the path of truth through the jungle of modern guesses and speculations to
positive ends. Dr. Hopper sees clearly that we must turn back and catch up with
the ancients. Our vaunting presumption of superiority over past ages, in which
we approach the study of the relics of antiquity with a condescension veiling a
real disdain or contempt, has cost us dearly in the prolongation of our own
sojourn in ignorance from which ancient sapiency could all the while have
rescued us. A pretty clear discernment of this situation has dawned upon the
mind of our eminent psychologist, Jung. His vigorous statement on the point
will bear quotation:
"It would be an absurd and
entirely unjustified self-glorification if we were to assume that we are more
energetic or more intelligent than the ancients--our materials for knowledge
have increased, but not our intellectual capacity. For this reason we become
immediately as obstinate and unsusceptible in regard to new ideas as people in
the darkest times of antiquity. Our knowledge has increased, but not our
wisdom. . . . Unfortunately we acquire in school only a very paltry conception
of the richness and immense power of life in Grecian mythology."
Our entire study of ancient life and
culture and our search for the origins of human constructions in past times
have been contorted out of all semblance of truth by our addiction to the word
"primitive." Strong books have lately been written to open our minds
to the sheer tyranny of words and shibboleths. Here is one calamitous example
of it. To be sure, mankind passed through its infantile period in remote days,
and it is legitimate to speak of its earliest dawning of intelligence and its
efforts to interpret life as primitive. In so far as it was left to itself to
grope its way through blind stumbling to incipient knowledge the word
"primitive" is applicable to its products. But there is a phenomenon
presented by antiquity that finds no explanation through the formula of
childish
57
"primitivism." It has been
divined at times and the haunting sense of it has disturbed and confused the
academic mind. But it has never been honestly and logically faced. It is the
significant fact that side by side with the evidences of real primitivism in
many ancient peoples there are found books or scriptures containing bodies of
wisdom and ethical and philosophical systems transcending even our own maturest
attainment. The attribution of infallible truth and sublimest wisdom to the
sacred scriptures of the world, which are of remote ancient origin, has
never been accounted for on any hypothesis consistent with the universal presumptions
of "early primitivism." How could the products of the most exalted
culture and intelligence have come out of primitive childishness? The
presuppositions of the "primitive" theory are shattered into
absurdity by the ghostly presence of the tomes of supernal wisdom found in the
hands of still "primitive" peoples. Egypt is perhaps the best
example. Its Book of the Dead, its Books of Thoth, its Pyramid
Texts and its massed inscriptions, doubtless extant thousands of years
before a period in which the scholars have been pleased to style Egyptian
civilization primitive and even barbaric, stand to this day unapproachable in
the majesty of their truth and sagacity. They are now found to be the fountain
source of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and the whole construction that
has become modern religion of the Occident. We have not yet risen to any just
or full apprehension of their sublime message. Truly it is, as Massey named it,
"The Light of the World." And it is light that to us, because of our
imperfect vision and blind conceit, is still largely darkness. The children of
humanity--but they come bearing the products of perfected maturity! They
already carry what humanity will produce at its acme of evolved culture.
"Primitive ignorance" comes carrying the structures of perfection!
The beginning stage presents to us the end product! The tomes of Egypt's golden
wisdom--thanks to the Rosetta Stone--have shattered at last the
"primitive" theses of ancient study and rendered obsolete the thousands
58
of books tracing cultural origins
through their elaborations. In the shadow of Egypt's sage profundity we are
found to be the babbling children. Why does the world in its present vaunted
maturity cling to the books produced in its childhood? When the world was a
child it spake as a child. Now that it has grown up why does it not put away
its childish things--the "primitive" scriptures? Because it could not
re-create them and can produce nothing even remotely equal to them. Evidently
when the world was a child it spake not only as a child, but also in the
amazing fullness of matured evolution. Struck nearly dumb by its own discovery,
modern psychoanalysis, and Jung, have begun to touch the hem of the garment of
the mighty wisdom that brooded over the ancient mind of child humanity. And
they begin to perceive that virtue is flowing out to them from the touch, the
virtue of truth, wisdom, transfused already with the pervading radiance of the
great "unconscious." More truly than we could have dreamed, Wordsworth
was right:
"The child is father of the man."
For Freud has gone back to childhood
to find the origin and explanation of adult behavior, and Jung has gone back to
the childhood of the race to find the origin and explanation of the adult
behavior of present humanity. And as the sacred scriptures of the race, written
in its childhood, still dominate and guide the life of the world, so Jung finds
that the instincts of the race motivating its life in its childhood still
dominate human conduct, welling up from the depths of the unconscious in dream
and phantasy, even when denied a place in consciousness by the inhibitions of
tradition, social custom and cultural restraint of any sort. And in those
revered scriptures from the race's childhood is found the same lexicon of
symbols employed as that same unconscious still uses to speak in dream and
phantasy to adult humans today. The discovery of the correlation between man's
"unconscious" and the
59
childhood of the race is indeed one
of the most epochal in human history.
Having brought the charge of error
against the ubiquitous theses of "primitivism," we will be challenged
to announce the corrections. The nub and kernel of the mistaken view are to be
located in the assumption that the great and lofty scriptures of most remote
antiquity were written by primitive people. The truth is that they were
composed for primitive people, but not by them. Primitive people could
not create literature of the exalted character which the great scriptures
reveal. They are the creations not of childish immaturity and wonder, but of
the most consummate genius ever displayed in world literature. They are not
works of speculation, but productions of certified knowledge and confirmed
wisdom, of matchless profundity and piercing insight. As moral, intellectual
and spiritual norms they have been measured against the run of human experience
for some thousands of years, and never has that test supported a single
successful impeachment of their veritude. Their message is timeless, their
truth is ageless.
But if they were not written by primitive
people, who in the primitive age possessed the supernal genius to edit them? No
answer to this query is possible as long as we imprison our minds in the narrow
presuppositions of academic orthodoxy. We must break loose from these fetters
and accredit truth instead of "superstition" to the great universal
tradition of antiquity. Omnipresent throughout the ancient world is the legend
that in the golden dawn of humanity's existence divine kings and "mighty
men of renown," yea, the gods themselves, consorted with mankind in its
innocent childhood, and taught it arts and cultures, giving it great books of
wisdom as perennial guides and manuals for a safe treading of the path of human
evolution. It has been assumed that this is a legend, arising out of the
roseate phantasy-producing mind of the racial childhood. Yet even legends are
not created out of total mental vacuity. There is substance behind every
legend. The pres-
60
ence over the whole earth of a
universal tradition bespeaks a certain amount of veridical truth at its
fountain source. Besides, there stand the scriptures which, appearing in the
world's childhood, are not the works of children. It has been assumed that
humanity alone, of all life's progeny, was left without parental guidance,
protection and tutelage. Everywhere life is parented. Its infantile period is
carried through by the adult guidance of parents, guardians and mentors. Is it
to be assumed that man alone is left to shift through his infancy as a race
with no help from the carriers and products of antecedent development? In a
school system an earlier generation turns back to teach the children of its
successor. Wisdom accruing to a grown generation is handed down for the benefit
of the next generation at its start. All the scriptures of the past are at one
in their claim to have been indited by sages and wise ones of superhuman
stature. Here is the invincible evidence that surpassing wisdom and
intelligence presided over the construction of these books. One thing is
certain--they are not the products of primitive ignorance. They are the
creations of consummate genius and majestic artistry.
And if knowledge is an accumulated
acquisition and wisdom an ingrained deposit of the fruitage of right action,
then the authorship of the divinely inspired scriptures must have been the
product of minds that had traversed a long course of evolution. Life never
gratuitously dowers its creatures with qualities, powers or genius that they
have not themselves earned and developed in their experience. It has
limitless largesse to pour upon us, but insists that we prepare the ground and
cultivate the growing vine before the intoxicating wine is ours to quaff. As
Plato's Timaeus assures us, God has himself planted the seed of immortal
divinity within us. Ours is the task of tending and cultivating it to its
maturity. When it is full grown it is the deity-genius within us, guiding,
instructing, enrapturing. It can then write sage scriptures to pass the torch
of wisdom along to future children of the cosmos. Says Heraclitus
61
in one of the most sententious
utterances in all philosophy: "Man's genius is a deity." But it is a
deity that comes at the start of human evolution as a divine infant and has to
await the development of corporeal instrumentalities to give it full conscious
expression in the outer world. To the degree that such conscious expression has
not been implemented by the outer personality it is the "unconscious."
62
CHAPTER VI
"OLD CHILD" IS HIS NAME
"I die, and I am born again,
and I renew myself, and I grow young each day." This is the utterance of
the divine soul in man as voiced in the sublime literature of ancient Egypt.
That literature depicted in forms and analogues of living reality the history
of the god that comes to be the heavenly guest tenanting a human body for a
season. This celestial visitant is no newcomer to try earthly hospitality; he
has been here for similar visits many times. He has died and been born again,
he has renewed his life and grown young as often as he has grown old. Indeed he
is growing younger with each sally out into the adventure of life, for each
excursion takes him deeper into the heart of eternal being, closer and ever
closer to the Center of everlasting life where abides perpetual youth. Length
of days is indeed in his right hand, for he is the Aged One of Heliopolis, the
Ancient of Days. He comes each day as the infant, but he bears with him the
wisdom garnered through his many cycles of birth, growth and death. He returns
to earth until his wheel of birth and death has completed its turning, when he
enters the kingdom of his Father, to go no more out. He is then a glorified
Sahu, clothed in radiant body of solar light, and dwells among the gods. But
antecedent to that climactic Day of the Lord he is the god in the becoming,
hiding his growing light under the bushel of a human personality, toiling,
striving, exhorting to righteousness in the milling scene of earthly life.
The vital truth so long and
disastrously lost, then, is that man, in his essential and indestructible
selfhood, is a soul, which alternately animates physical bodies, gains through
them experience indispensable to its continued evolution, and drops them for
periods
63
of rest in ethereal worlds, during
which it lives in a state of latency, or as the sheer potentiality of
self-renewal.
The light this determination sheds
on psychoanalysis is seen to be the substantial reification or hypostatization
of the great new element of psychology, the "unconscious." Indeed it
brings to this shadowy consciousness nothing less than a positive entification.
It sets it up as a living individual entity, consciously pursuing its way
through the labyrinth of evolution as actually as we conceive the mundane
individual to be doing. It enables us to bring forth this nebulous presence
from out its dusky habitat and to give it definitive form and character, as we
recognize it to be a long familiar personage in our revered scriptures. For at
last the "unconscious" is seen to be the soul, the godlike part of
the dual nature of man. Only from the standpoint of our waking
consciousness that functions directly through the physical mechanism of a brain
is it fittingly denominated the "unconscious." On its own plane it is
not unconscious, but more vividly and widely conscious than the earthly self
can ever be. But it comes here in search of the offices of the outer
personality of man to enable it to achieve an actualization of its
capabilities of consciousness which it could not possibly gain by remaining
continually in sublimated worlds. Consciousness, to be completely evolved, must
be ground to a state of hard realism. This can be effected only in worlds of
concrete experience. The soul must be centered in a physical body to win its
growth. And once in body, it must await the slow evolution of the mechanical
and physiological agencies of brain and nervous system before it can deploy its
full forces outward to untrammeled expression.
From the standpoint of the open
waking consciousness of the individual the soul within is the unconscious. For
it is the Genius behind the scenes of the surface consciousness. It is the
individual's own self--best spelled perhaps with a capital S--conditioned by
the effects of its own long past history, standing in the shadow behind the
curtain and appearing almost to play the part of a deus ex machina to
the personal conscious self. To Socrates and the an-
64
cient philosophers it was their
Daemon, or guardian angel, interposing at times of crucial exigency to warn the
personality against making false or dangerous moves. To the poet it is the
source of his higher "inspiration," the spring of his divine
afflatus. To all it is the rock of character which so clearly marks the
individual's status of high and strong, or low and weak, in evolution. It
stands behind--rather one should say above--in the overworld of the personal
man, and is the generator or holder of that body of fixed qualities and
dispositions which distinguish one person's life from another's. The physical
and emotional personality is, so to say, an antenna of it, extended outward
into the world of factuality in order to help it fend for itself in the arena
of experience. Through the personality it has sensuous contact with the world
in which it is destined to play a notable part. It registers the experience
impressed upon it through the outer instrument and digests in consciousness the
moral substance thereof.
The reservoir of wisdom with which
it stands to guard the outer mind is the accrued deposit of the moral value of
all its past history. Wisdom can come in no other way than as the assimilated
fruit of experience. If it comes otherwise it is unearned, and life bestows
nothing without the expenditure of effort commensurate with the gains to be
won. As a man soweth, so shall he reap. Wisdom is the rich harvest of
seed sown, watered and tended. Modern thought has envisaged a near-divine,
near-omniscient monitor residing in the over-area of man's constitution and
standing ever ready to guard and counsel the personality, but has never even
postulated for that monitor any known or unknown cycle of experience requisite
to have dowered it with such a faculty or such a prerogative. Obviously nowhere
in the present existence of the individual can there be found a body of
experience qualified to endow an interior mind in man with such superior
wisdom, as all experience comes through the personality. Biological science, through
such a representative exponent as Sir Alfred Russell Wallace, has declared that
there can nowhere be found in the line of evolving life from animal to man
65
any chapter of experience sufficient
to have developed human mentality in the highest animal orders. All observation
of the stream of growth negatives the claim. Yet there exists in man's
organization a grade of consciousness that manifests the highest knowledge and
wisdom, exceeding always that of the conscious man himself, and deploying on occasions
of his own strategic choosing resources unknown to the individual on behalf of
the supreme welfare of the personality. And there is left no way for the mind
to account for the presence and exalted genius of this inner mentor save by
postulating for it cycles of living existence and experience in its past, such
as the ancient seers allotted to it. So then for the first time in modern
systematism both philosophy and psychology are confronted with the challenge of
a thesis which, now as of old, can provide the mind with a formula adequate to
rationalize the presence of a god in the life of man, and to account
understandably for his divine status above the merely animal counterpart in the
dual composition.
It is well to adduce several
pronouncements from modern psychoanalysis itself that speak in confirmation of
the diagnosis. One comes to light in the work on psychoanalysis already cited, The
Recreating of the Individual. Says the author, Dr. Hinkle (p. 108):
"The unconscious proper is not
formed or created by the individual in response to culture, but exists a
priori behind all culture."
With the mere substitution, perhaps,
of the word "experience" for "culture," no passage could
hit and express the truth more pointedly. It is not any of Freud's Oedipus or
Electra complexes generated by early infant reactions. It is not the product of
a few years of odd idiosyncratic habitudes or circumstantial pressures, that
warp the mind into unnatural and unwholesome fixations. These are of some
account in the total, but they do not create or condition the unconscious. As
the author of the citation says, that is already there as the old root out of
which a new tree is to spring up. The Book of Daniel in its first
chapters speaks of leaving the stump of
66
the hewn tree in the ground, so that
a new growth may start from it. Elsewhere Dr. Hinkle has noted that the
conscious part of the individual remains "unaware of the ancient processes
functioning in and influencing his present life." Nothing could be more
revealing of ancient truth than such a statement, although its force is largely
lost through default of the knowledge that the "ancient processes"
that still function in and influence the present life of the individual were
the past experience of the individual himself, as well as the collective
experience of the race of his ancestry. The meaning is always made to embrace
racial limits, when it should apply directly to the individual's own history.
The same author says additionally that in the psychoanalytic talk of the
unconscious as being composed of conscious motivations suppressed and driven
underground, we are not here dealing with the "suppression of individual
experience, but with the suppression of racial experience, belonging to an
earlier phase of humanity."
This again reifies an ancient
element in the makeup of present consciousness. But again the exposition
advanced by modern psychology denies to the individual his own previous
experience and the fruit of it, by ascribing his present deep-seated unconscious
to racial heritage. Archaic philosophical acumen chose to believe that the
individual was present anciently when the experience was acquired, that he
indeed gained it for his own eternal possession. He did not come by it through
a vicarious inheritance or through the transmitted blood of ancestry. They
asked how justice could be meted out equably in the world if individuals were
either exalted or saddled with a heritage other than that which they themselves
had created. The human intuition of justice demands that no creature should be
afflicted with the consequences of actions not his own. "The fathers have
eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge," observes a
revered scripture. And it presents a harassing and disturbing anomaly to the
reasoning mind which takes seriously the scriptural pronouncements of Deity as
to absolute and impartial justice in the universe. Then, too, we recall that
67
the same scriptures tell of
"visiting the iniquities of the parents upon the children unto the third
and fourth generation." If in any way these declarations are to be
harmonized with the simple and direct human sense of justice, it must be
assumed that the children involved in these visitations were in line, through
previous faulty action, for the ill fortune that traces to parental
dereliction. Otherwise the simple mind of man must give over the effort to
vindicate the operation of clear justice in the law of inheritance. If you are
afflicted with your forefather's sinful consequences, you will look doubtfully
toward a God whose sense of fairness seems less rigorously true than your own.
A morbid and sin-haunted Christianity has forever refused to face these
corollaries of its announced Biblical canons with untrammeled logic or sincere
intellectual probity. In the most godlike exercise of human judgment a Deity
whose operation of living laws afflicts a soul from the very start of life with
the iniquitous consequences of action not its own, must be categorized as
outside the pale of what man must think of as justice. Since the early
centuries of Christian history the logical and moral issue here involved has
been sedulously evaded. But the ancient philosophers met it and they were able
to maintain their predication of a God of total justice. This they did by
virtue of their knowledge that souls come into an earthly heritage accurately
suited to the needs of their own growth at their status. They could assume that
a soul born into a malformed physical or material legacy inherited his own, and
not his parents' past defects. He falls heir to his own mistakes, not
another's. For he brings back with him into renewed expression--until they are
at last obliterated--the germs of his own waywardness, to flower out afresh in
the new embodiment. The forefathers' physical transmission through the outer
line of descent merely provides the good or bad body conditioned to give the
old soul its appropriate milieu and circumstantial influences which enable it
to work ahead on its own ground.
Lending corroboration to the thesis
that the unconscious is an element in us given a priori, and not the
outgrowth of earthly expe-
68
rience in this life, is another
excerpt from Dr. Hinkle's work (p. 39):
"But psychoanalysis is built
entirely upon the theory of unconscious motives and purposes, different and
antecedent to those known by man in consciousness and upon which his present
conscious manifestations and symptoms rest."
This says in effect that there is in
man, buried below his normal consciousness, another consciousness which knows
more than the man and is greater than the man himself, but which has not been
limited to this man's experience. It has the stored-up experience of all
previous racial history, explains modern psychoanalysis. Well, then, the
situation stands thus: there are two strata of consciousness in man's
constitution, the personal open consciousness and the unconscious. Both carry
the heritage of the past, yet one is conscious of it, the other is not. The one
has it, the other possesses no memory of it. The one has it not, ostensibly
because it is a totally new creation, never in existence before and having no
link with the past. Then, if the other has it, the legitimate obvious inference
is that it is not likewise a new first creation in this life, but that it has a
link with its past, that it is a durable entity treasuring all its previous
experience and that it was a participant in whatever experience it carries in
memory. In a full, frank and fair envisagement of the elements in the situation
this is the only channel of explanation open to logic. If there is in man a
consciousness which retains the memory of the past, and another which does not
have such a memory because it did not share the past, the inescapable inference
is that the entity that does retain the memory did share the experience. It (or
he) is verily "the Ancient of Days," the eternal pilgrim through the
cycles of time and the kingdoms of nature, gathering up and holding the digest
of all experience in faculties of supermind and higher consciousness which
transcend the three-dimensional scope of man's open awareness. As far as he has
not been brought out to expression in the brain consciousness of the outer
69
personality, he dwells in covert
position within the deepest recesses of the individual self, the silent
guardian and watchful daemon, the "higher ego" of the person.
In Dr. Hopper's work already cited, The Crisis of Faith, the author
takes a dozen or more pages to present and support the thesis that the god
whose influence molds the individual's life from the hidden depths is an a
priori reality, given from the start, in relation to the present existence.
Dr. Hinkle likewise is insistent, as
her chief ground of refutation of Freud's central presentments regarding the
infantile sexual motivations of the child, that the main "drive" of
the ego in man is of precisely that character which it would be presumed to be
if the premises were granted that an aged, wise and benevolent soul occupied
the place and performed the function allotted to the unconscious. That is to
say that the unconscious is characterized by an incessant perennial urge toward
the actualization of an ever-enlarging potential "divine" expression
through the personality. She says (p. 31):
"He [man] bears within himself
all the potentiality of individualistic development; the future claims him as
well as the past."
She also quotes the words of
Antigone:
"The moral law is sacred
because it is not a thing of today or of yesterday, but lives forever, and none
knows whence it sprang."
It needs no dramatic flourish,
however, to declare that there is no unfathomable mystery as to the genetic
history of the moral law. The ancient sages give evidence that they were not
ignorant of it. The great Egyptologist, William H. Breasted, in his last work, The
Origin of Conscience, traced its course of development back to remote
Egyptian religious conceptions and cultures. The moral law is the deposit of
the conscious resultant of all experience undergone by that fragment of the
divine mind that tenants one physical body after another, building each in turn
over the model of its inner nature, and carries the everlasting memory of its
past with it. The
70
moral law is framed in an indelible
memory out of the impacts of the consequences of action perpetrated by a
conscious perduring entity able to hold the lessons learned and create from
their ensemble a code of determinative norms. It is just the fixing of the
recognized values accruing from experience upon the consciousness of a
spiritual entity which is able to hold them in perpetuity. For its
"spiritual" body is imperishable, its substance indestructible. And
that which is impressed thereon is retained forever.
The discovery and recognition of the
unconscious in modern psychology is bringing out to open view the data which
corroborate ancient scriptures in their predication of a divine consciousness
in the upper reaches of man's life. Says Dr. Hinkle again (p. 4):
"It is this sense in the
individual man of his potential but unfulfilled greatness that forces him to
become aware of his incompleteness as a human being. It is this state of faulty
development of his psychic capacities that psychoanalysis has brought so
clearly into view, and for the improvement of which, to those interested in and
capable of using its method, it offers a technic--an aid toward the conscious
development of a greater self."
True indeed is all this, since, it
is pertinent to ask, how would the personal entity man be able to register a
sense of his imperfection and shortcoming in the first place if there was not
resident and conscious within him a being possessing familiarity with higher
norms of attainment and standards of perfection by contrast with which the
present performance of the outer man exhibits faultiness and failure? If
psychoanalysis is just discovering this inner mentor, it has taken just about
two millennia for the world to regain what its ancient hierophants of religion
possessed.
The Hopper claim that the divine
element is as "given" a presence in man's make-up as is the body is
again substantiated by a quotation from Dr. Hinkle's work (p. 43):
"Man possesses, independent of
any frustrated pleasure aims, the capacity for individual development and the
need for its fulfillment, as definitely as he possesses the physiological
sexual desire."
71
This statement is part of her
refutation of Freud's position that psychic neuroses and mental disturbances
trace their genesis always to frustrations of the basic sexual instincts.
Disturbances may of course arise from frustration of the life of the outer man;
but it is to the credit of the Jung school and such psychoanalysts as Dr.
Hinkle that they have recognized likewise something of far deeper import,
namely that violent inner tempers will arise from the frustration of the
evolutionary purposes and aims of the indwelling god-ego.
And Dr. Hinkle adds a most
significant statement, which should carry the minds of both theorists and
clinicians to decisive conclusions, when she adds to the above citation the
results of actual empirical practice:
"When the obstacles to this
forward movement are removed, when he is able to achieve some progress toward
the inner goal of his being, then his neurotic symptoms and his psychic
disturbances disappear."
Here, in short, is the specific
demonstration that if the mind of the outer personality of the individual is
not measurably conducting the life so as to minister to the onward progress of
the soul in the subterranean--or superior--recesses of the consciousness, the
soul will register objection, dissatisfaction and disturbance by bringing the
untoward condition to light through neurotic inharmony and unbalance,
wretchedness or pain. Indeed some such situation is the nub and crux of nearly
every drama and novel, representing the desperate or heroic efforts of the soul
to break through a cordon of environing circumstances which have tangled it in
a predicament threatening its expression of diviner qualities or thwarting its
free growth. Lending corroboration of the very highest sort to Dr. Hinkle's
conclusions regarding the voice of the inner god is Jung's repeated affirmation
that people only come to the psychoanalyst if and when they have lost
possession of a positive religious philosophy and that he has not been able to
send them away cured
72
unless he has been able to restore
to them an affirmative mental grasp on basic life meanings.
Dr. Hinkle and Dr. Hopper unite in
asserting that it is this disagreement, this default of the lower mind from the
purposes of the inner, that constitutes the real essence of "sin,"
and in this they are substantially in accord with the early sage Greek
philosophy. Jung is cited (by Dr. Hinkle) as interpreting the psychic discord
or disturbance as a longing of the ego for "rebirth," "the
desire for a necessary psychic birth which uses the symbols of physical birth
to represent the psychological need." This again is startlingly in consonance
with ancient theory. The Platonists, the Neo-Platonists and Jesus of the
Gospels alike lay down the necessity for a new birth--a second birth--of the
soul, Indeed it is general in all archaic religions. The soul can not tolerate
stagnation too long. To be normal and "happy" it must have the sense
of growth and progress, the assurance of making steady advance on the road it
is traveling. This feeling is the perennial condition and prerequisite of its
conscious well-being. The soul has needs that must be ministered unto through
and by the external paraphernalia of the body,--and philosophies of ascetic
religious tendency should never forget this. But also it has interests that
reach to higher worlds and that no amount of sensual gratification can promote.
St. Paul emphasizes that "the natural man" has no cognizance of the
things of the spirit, "neither can he know them, because they are
spiritually discerned." Rather the physical man is to the god within as
soil is to the tree: the base and ground of its ability to expand its life in
the air above. Like the tree the soul can not grow unless it is deeply and
firmly rooted in the life of the physical, but its concern with the physical is
in no sense an ultimate objective. It is but the necessary foundation and
starting point of its own primary business, as it is that of every unit of
conscious being, of advancing from the point of present attainment to wider
consciousness and more abundant life. The soul sustains a relation to the body
that demands its enjoyment of the body's strength, health, buoyancy, comfort
and the fullest
73
and freest flow of its elan. The
failure of ascetic movements to recognize this fact had led to untold psychic
disaster, warping into discord the lives of both the body and the soul and
defeating the purposes of evolution. But the soul did not come to link its life
with that of the body merely to indulge in that enjoyment. That would indeed to
be to take the downward path, to fall into "sin." Its way of growth
runs through the exercise of its own potential powers and faculties in the
development of a higher consciousness, to all of which its happy relation of
harmony with the body is a primary and fundamental condition. The soul builds
the body as the house in which it is to dwell and work, cycle after cycle. Its
prime aim is to build it to be most commodious and comfortable for its tenancy
and in such fashion that to live in it is a delight. But once built and ability
to maintain it in good state established, it would surely be a mistaken
philosophy to assume that the soul's chief business in life was to end with the
fulfillment of its enjoyment of the house. It can not do its work in the world
without a proper house to dwell in, but once the house is constructed, it can
then turn its attention to the higher work it came here to do.
The job of constructing and
accommodating itself to its house, however, is an integral part of its
incarnational mission and takes on a larger measure of importance than might at
first glance be assumed. Its work in spiritual worlds transcending bodily
influences still is greatly affected and conditioned by the need of complete
harmony with the instrument. As the body is the keyboard, so to say, of the
soul's expression, it is essential that there be maintained at all times the
most delicate balance and nicest adjustment of conscious motivation to organic
reaction. And it is now the province of psychoanalysis to diagnose the
conditions of maladjustment between the two factors. The discovery of such
maladjustment and the location of its basic causes is indeed its high function.
The ancients, as is well indicated
in the philosophy of Plato, adjudged virtue to be the individual knowledge of
the art of keeping a perfect balance between the animal man and the indwelling
74
god. Conversely they defined
"sin" as the ignorance that stupidly permitted inharmony and discord
to be generated in the interplay between the two. The soul, they said, stood at
the point of middle ground between the divine spirit above and the animal body
below, and its function was to mediate between the two in such fashion that a
happy blending and merging of their forces was effected. Standing midway
between the two, it could deploy its energies and center its interests and
affections in either direction. It could cultivate the life of the higher
spirit or devote itself to fostering the sensual expression of the animal. Its
own intelligence, be it high or low, was the determinant. The destiny of the
individual was the outcome of its decisions.
It is quite likely that the true
definition of "sin" is to be reached by taking into account the terms
of this philosophical situation. Surely "sin" is that which impedes
the most felicitous and orderly flow of the stream of life forward to greater
being. And obviously in the human world that which would most effectually block
and thwart the movement of "the rivers of vivification," as the
Greeks called them, would be the failure of the soul to perform with deft
intelligence its high function of maintaining that just balance between the god
and the animal in man upon which true growth depends.
"The soul that sinneth, it
shall die," is the strong declaration of the scripture. Since all souls
undergo death in its common meaning of the dissolution of soul from body,
obviously another meaning of the word "death" is here involved. And
this is of the greatest significance for all religious and scriptural
interpretation. The entire understanding of the language of the Bible has been
sadly warped out of line with truth by the failure to read into the words
"death" and "the dead" in the scriptures the same meaning
which was attached to them in the ancient Greek and Egyptian religions. The
great lost light of antiquity comes out in glorious splendor when the original
philosophical meaning is restored to these terms. By "death" is meant
nothing less than what we call our "life" here!
75
And "the dead" of the
scriptures are none other than ourselves, the "living." This is now
established beyond question. For the ancients regarded the life of the soul in
the body as its death, using the term of course in a figurative and relative
sense. In the body the high life of the soul was so reduced in potential
capacity by the sluggish vibrations of the corporeal nature that it lay inert
as in death, and the body was poetized as its prison, grave or tomb. Indeed the
body and tomb are identical in the Greek words for body, soma, and tomb,
sema. The soul was said to go to its death when it "was united to
the ruinous bonds of the body." Socrates says to Cebes that he has
"heard from one of the wise that we are now dead and that the body is our
sepulcher."
This construction is directly in
line with what St. Paul asserts in his Epistles. "To be carnally minded is
death," he says. "Ye are dead in your trespasses and sins," he
adds. And again he states most pointedly that "the interests of the flesh
meant death; the interests of the spirit meant life and peace." The death
referred to in the old books of wisdom was that of the soul, occurring when the
unit of divine consciousness made its descent into the body of man on earth,
there to come "under the law" of birth, growth, maturity and decay.
The whole import of sage writings of the past has been utterly lost by the
ignorant exoteric assumption that the "death" spoken of was that of
the physical body. A thousand irreconcilable perplexities of scriptural
interpretation vanish, and one clear and consistent flash of illuminated
meaning takes their place the moment one reads the old Greek philosophical meaning
back into the terms under discussion. And the whole systematic structure of
archaic theology is restored to glowing significance and the old rendition
vindicated, when St. Paul says in the seventh chapter of Romans: "the
command that meant life proved death to me." The "command" he is
speaking of has never to this date been understood to be the command--which
comes to all souls in the empyrean--to incarnate. What the Apostle says in the
verse immediately preceding this statement is of the utmost elucidative value
76
for all theology, for all
understanding. He says: "When the command came home to me, sin sprang to
life and I died." It gives us final certification as to what is connoted
by "sin." Evidently it is an inclination in the soul that lies
dormant so long as it remains in static suspension of its energies in the
celestial spheres, but which springs to life and activity as soon as the soul
is embodied in a fleshly organism on earth. "Sin" is that disposition
of the mind which can be implemented only by union with the carnal self of the
animal body, and awaits its opportunity to awake to expression when that union
is consummated. Then Paul makes that correlation between "sin" and
"death" which should not have remained a sealed mystery for hundreds
of years, with this passage of his in front of our eyes. "Sin sprang to
life and I died." His "death" was his descent into the world of
carnal mind, the indulgence in which is at last seen as the terrible hobgoblin
that has plagued the Christian conscience with entirely needless morbidity for
these many centuries. "Sin"--be it proclaimed to all the world in
clarion tones--is the soul's indulgence in the life of the flesh. Indeed, with
"the mount" being a symbol for the earth itself, this globe is many
times referred to in the scriptures as the "Mount of Sin." It is
likewise "Mount Sin-ai." Now it is possible to see what the Apostle
meant by saying that "the wages of sin is death." For if sin is the
addiction of the soul to the lusts of the flesh, and residence of the soul in
the flesh is "death" to its higher nature, then continued sin
necessitates continued "death." The longer the soul clings to carnal
affections the longer it must return to earth and body to give play to its
desires--until they are burned out in the fires of purificatory suffering. And
again can be seen in clearer certitude the meaning, so terribly mutilated, of
Paul's apocalyptic utterance: "The last enemy to be overcome is
death." Of a surety it now is obvious that when the soul has at last been
entirely purged of its bent to sin, which drags it again and again back to
earth where alone the instincts of a physical body can give channel to its
carnal leanings, it will
77
have no further need to enter the
"valley of the shadow of death." It then need "go no more
out," as Revelation puts it.
Modern psychology has at last got
around to the vantage point of envisaging the inner conflict in the area of
human consciousness in much the same light as that in which it was viewed by
the ancient Illuminati. It has made discovery of the "Aged One," the
older soul hiding in the covert depths of the individual consciousness, and has
seen the necessity of interpreting the phenomena of psychic disturbance and
mental illness in terms of the phases of the mutual thwarting of the interests
of higher soul by the instincts of the flesh, and those of the flesh by the
cultural restraints imposed by the soul. And at last it stands and works on
solid ground, the title to the authenticity and validity of which is volubly
attested by ancient lore.
Nearly every word of the few
fragments we have left of the writing of Heraclitus is an utterance of prime
value. Among such is his brief sentence: "For all human laws are fed by
one thing, the divine." And further than that, he grounds the roots of the
divine in man in no less high and immediate a ray of the Absolute than the
Logos itself:
"Go hence; the limits of the
soul thou canst not discover, though thou shouldst traverse every way; so
profoundly is it rooted in the Logos."--Fragment 45; Diels.
Clarity might long ago have
supervened upon the mortal conception of divine things if the Occidental mind
had been open to receive the assertion of Greek philosophy that the Logos is a
ray or emanation from Supreme Deity, the spirit a further extended ray from the
Logos, and the soul a still further diffraction, through the medium of matter,
of a ray from the spirit. Use of this outline graph enables thought to fulfill
every requirement in meeting both the theoretical and the empirical problems
involved in the analysis. As Plotinus so capably has blue-printed the scheme of
the universal construct, the emanation of divine energy from the heart of
being,
78
proceeding farther and farther from
initial impulse, pierces ever deeper into matter, losing force as matter grows
denser out on the periphery, until the last wave is just sufficient to enable
the soul to nucleate around its node of power the physical body. So that
Plotinus says that "the soul suspends from it the mundane body,"
which is characterized as "the last of things" in the chain that
reaches from spirit at the top to dense matter at the lower rung.
The outcome also of the great Kant's
elaborated philosophical lucubration was the conclusion that what constitutes
in his system the highest "spirit" in man, "the transcendental
unity of apperception," is "a condition which precedes all experience
and in fact renders it possible." Here is the soul "given," a
priori, again.
Irenaeus, who is not often found
admitting or expressing his agreement with the principles or teachings of the
antecedent pagan philosophies, which in so far as they came into early
Christianity fell under the condemnation of his pen as "heresies,"
puts general ancient philosophical understanding of the triplicity of spiritual
elements in man in splendid clarity in the following (Adversus Haereses, V,
ix, I):
"The perfect man consists of
these three, flesh, soul and spirit. One of these saves and fashions--that is,
the spirit. Another is united and formed--that is, the flesh; while that which
lies between the two is the soul, which sometimes follows the spirit and is
raised by it, but at other times sympathizes with the flesh and is drawn by it
into earthly passions."
This is admirable; and finds
buttressing also in Plutarch:
"But in his [Plato's] Book
of Laws, when he was now grown old, he affirmed, not in riddles and
emblems, but in plain and proper words, that the world is not moved by one soul
. . . but not by fewer than two; the one of which is beneficent, and the other
contrary to it, and the author of things contrary. He also leaves a certain
third nature in the midst between, which is neither without soul nor without
reason, nor void of a self-moving power, but rests upon both of the preceding
principles, but yet so as to affect, desire and pursue the better of
them."
79
Indeed here is seen the basic
formulation of that which became the doctrine of the "mediator" in
Christian theology, the higher and the lower natures in man, with the soul
standing on midground between them, and functioning as the way or the bridge
over which the two might ultimately effect their reconciliation and atonement.
From Erasmus comes an equally direct
statement of the duofold man-god constitution, with the soul mediating between
upper and lower:
"The spirit makes us gods; the
flesh makes us beasts; the soul makes us men."--Enchiridion v.
20--D.
So definitely did ancient insight
comprehend the tripartite division or gradation of man's nature that it
typified the mediatorial function of the middle-man, the human, standing on the
horizon or boundary line between the gross body below and the divine mind
above, by the symbol of the bee, which became the living zoötype of the soul
because of its function in fertilizing female ova in the flower with male
pollen and thus effecting the new birth. The insect performed the mediatorial
function of priest in the marriage of the opposite poles of the plant. So even
the Christos in man was characterized as the High Priest, since he functioned
in the union of male and female elements in man in holy marriage. The soul it
is that mediates between spirit and flesh and unites the logos of the higher
with the atomic mothering and nurturing capabilities of the physical. The soul
is the agent and focal point of the interplay between the two natures.
Now psychoanalysis has discerned the
forms and features of this interplay and speaks of it in the most direct terms.
Here is Dr. Hinkle giving us her statement of it in the vernacular of
psychology (The Recreating of the Individual, p. 50):
"As a matter of fact there is a
constant interplay between the two aspects of human life--the external world
and our own concrete objective tendencies and needs which are a part of it, and
the subjective
80
human creative and transforming
processes lying entirely within the individual psyche."
This is of course likewise the
conflict of the lower man with the higher god, who find themselves co-tenants
of the same domicile. The words of Prof. N. Shaler apply most fitly here:
"It is hardly too much to say
that all the important errors of contact, all the burdens of men or of society,
are caused by the inadequacies in the association of the primal animal emotions
with those mental powers which have been so rapidly developed in mankind."
It is the struggle between the
emotions and the intellect! When has mankind not been keenly aware of it? It is
so much the burden of every day's conscious life that it does not shape itself
out as a concrete and specific problem. It is nearly the whole focus of the
psychological activity of life. How much one should yield to the bent of the
feelings and desires, or how much to check them; how far one should follow the
clear voice of reason, when it counsels adversely to the instinctual
propensities, and how far one should sacrifice obvious present advantage or
pleasure in the interests of deferred greater good;--these are the unending
skirmishes in the vast struggle waged between the animal and the god in the
nature of man on earth. They are the daily combats in the aeonial Battle of
Armageddon. And never have the issues and conditions of the battle been
sufficiently clarified in the world's understanding. The vast and calamitous
ascetic movement aimed at victory for the god by the curt and conclusive method
of crushing out the animal with a tragically mistaken austerity. Epicureanism
and naturalistic hedonism sought a resolution through a free rein to the
instincts, tempered with aesthetic norms. As might always have been known since
Plato's day, the only safe and perfect modus is to be found in the gradual
blending of the two natures through the experiences of both parties in the give
and take of earthly evolution. St. Paul has well indicated this denouement,
when he speaks of the breaking down of the "middle wall of partition
between us," and the making
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of "one new man" out of
the amalgamation of "the twain." Only thus can the great cyclic
conflict be fought out "on the horizon," as it is said to be in the
Egyptian texts. And only thus can the engagement terminate in a manner to
promote the ends of the evolutionary movement, so that both soul and body
acquire the maximum amount of beneficial development from the complications.
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CHAPTER VII
THE TWO SUBTERRANEAN GROTTOES
The intermediate soul, therefore, is
the meeting ground, the arena, of the conflict between soul and body. It is
rent and torn by the tug and pull of opposing motivations, the animal tending
downward toward sensuality and grossness, the spirit striving with the soul to
raise it up out of the mire. The animal self reached upward to intrigue the
soul down into its coarseness and brutish delights; the spirit wrestled
valiantly to entice its lower brother upward by the desirable rewards of
virtue. The great battle was on. All religions have so fully depicted the grim
stress and the crucial issues of the struggle that it needs no considerable
elaboration here. What is needed, however, is the orientation of relevance and
pertinence from the purely theological purview over to its even more pertinent
reference in the field of everyday consequences, particularly as the nub and
core of psychoanalytic technique. It has not been known that the immediate
categories of the psychoanalytic situation were all the while those
time-hallowed fundamenta of the old theology and the Bible texts.
Dr. Hopper, in another passage from
his The Crisis of Faith may be permitted to sum up what has been
presented in the foregoing pages as to the three-ply constituency of our
consciousness, and adduce for our consideration in psychology the practical
outcome of the living action in the three-storied human structure (p. 249):
"It is formally and
structurally, that man may live his life on one of three levels: on the
sub-human, the human, or the divine--below the level of the regulative
control of reason, or within the regulative control of God's will. These levels
of experience are conceived formally;
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but they are lived dialectically.
Each level when chosen is a commitment to a total end." (The italicizing
of below is ours, for a purpose soon to be specified.)
Broadly this is precisely what the
elaborate and recondite Greek Orphic, as well as its parent Egyptian Hermetic,
wisdom promulgated in the ancient day in the arcana of the Mysteries. The sages
of olden time knew of man's threefold composition, and it is obvious that they
knew also the vast involvements of the triplicity for all phases of human
conduct, thought and understanding. Their astute philosophy reveals their
underlying recognition of the interrelated status of the three levels of
conscious life, since indeed their systems and principles can not be
apprehended dialectically without grounding the effort in these formulations.
What they knew is that which has not yet dawned on modern mentation, namely,
that as man lives on, or in, three levels of consciousness, he must have an
organic equipment that will relate him, consciously, with the reality of each
level, and that he must therefore have three separate "minds." He
must possess a sub-human, a human and a super-human, or divine, mind!
Here is the mighty key to the modern
psychoanalytic science without which it yet hobbles ahead in semi-groping.
Circumscribing itself ignorantly within the limits of a twofold segmentation of
consciousness, psychological science has hit and missed in its assumptions.
Conjecture and confusion have come in because it prescribed but one realm of
play for man's "unconscious," whereas there are two quite separate
and different strata of unconscious content and influence. The one lies below
(sub) the ordinary conscious, and the other above (super). The first
is of the earth, physical; the second is "the Lord from heaven,"
spiritual. And the conscious human mind stands between its unconscious
underling and its unconscious overlord. Here in Greek philosophy is the key to
the scriptures. No less is it the key to psychoanalysis. For how can a thing
which concerns the very constitution of mortal man be true in philosophy
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or theology, and then not be the
actuality in the same mortal nature when it is studied through the eyes of
psychic interest?
Man, the strictly human, stands as
the conscious being between two areas of unconsciousness, one
"below," the other "above." His little life is indeed
rounded with--unconsciousness, which presses close in upon him from both above
and below. He is a little gamut of sound and action between two immense silences.
And just as his physical sight extends over only the narrow segment of the
scene upon which his vision can focus, but his cognition can take in in a
secondary awareness further areas on each side of the middle focus without the
gaze falling directly upon them, exactly so his consciousness can reach upward
and downward from his central ground of focus and cover in a secondary type of
recognition some sections of the rim of the great unconscious domains
stretching far below and far above his allotted range of being. His
consciousness is therefore extensible some distance into both the subconscious,
beneath his ordinary status, and the hyperconscious, or world above his
vibratory range. Man's conscious being, then, is a little light set aglow
between two great darknesses, but through the evolving powers of the mental
genius within him he is able to penetrate some distance into both of the two
environing border regions of outer darkness.
The interrelationship of the three
minds in man has never been systematically diagnosed. It is all important. It
is the structural anthropological key to the problem of man. Its exposition
must be attempted. The three minds must be described and classified.
The first step in the elucidation is
taken from a hoary volume, Egypt's venerated Book of the Dead. The
"Speaker" is the soul and he says: "I am Yesterday, Today and
Tomorrow." "I am what hath been, what is and what shall be."
Again he dramatizes his three consciousnesses in saying: "I am Atum in the
morning; I am Ra at noon; I am Khepr at evening." What is meant here is
that of the three elements or conditions of consciousness, one is the deposit
of his actual experience in his past; the second is his conscious
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present awareness; and the third is
a higher consciousness supervening gradually for his future. We are thus
instructed in the great truth that the subconscious mind is the hidden memory
of our past; the conscious is our present awareness; and the superconscious is
the mind that will function in our future. The last is only embryonic,
potential, in seed state, as yet unopened to operative function. It can thus be
seen that man's present consciousness is a point of transition from past to
future, or equally from future to past, and that it is his effort to gain a
state of stability at the neutral point between the two nodes of the movement
of time. As his life and therefore his consciousness are a continuum, they must
entail the union of all three experiences, or a union of the two end moments in
the center. That is, the two end aspects that are not now in overt awareness
must be integrally present, related and incorporated, essential components of
the total deposit of experience in consciousness.
The past has teleological relation
to the future and to the whole, since its meaning is determined by the nature
of the ultimate goal at which the total experience is archetypally aimed. The
future is conditioned by the past, as its ontological product, since it is
built up on the past. The present moment is the resolution of the past into a
mold that at the same time shapes the future.
All this brings out the important
functionism of the three minds. As only one of the three grades of
consciousness can fill the field of awareness, that is, occupy the mind's
attention at one and the same time, owing to the finite limitations and the
single dimensionality of the time concept as applicable to human mentality, it
is both a logical and a practical necessity that the other two must lie in the
unconscious sphere. The mind must retain the memory of its past experience, but
that dare not occupy the field of consciousness at the cost of driving out the
present,--or life would stop. Therefore the experience of the past, held in memory,
must be stored out of the way, so to speak, in the halls of potential memory,
to be available at any time if needed for present uses. This is just as under-
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standable as that a person must have
a room or attic in which to store things accumulated (in the past), so that
while they may be available if needed, they are nevertheless out of the way to
leave free space for present activities and uses. The subconscious, then, is
the attic or storage room in which are packed away the gist of our past careers.
The present is the new moment arising out of the past and receiving the influx
from the future. The brain consciousness then is that poise in the flux, or
that moment at which the content and essence of future development is
registered in open awareness, to be dealt with by the initiative of the
present, and passed back into the storehouse, an addition to what has been
stored there previously.
But the purely temporal aspect of
the movement must be oriented over into the concept of quality. The future can
be, of course, just additional moments or events of the same kind of beads on
the string of time. But it is proper to think of the future as bringing at
least an evolutionary instinct to count on the future to bring higher values to
life than those of the past or present. What the mind of the future will bring
is expected to be something richer and fuller. The play of consciousness for
the coming time will be cast at a higher frequency and shorter wave length than
those in the past. Man is, as it were, but very actually, walking up a gamut of
values, climbing up a golden stairway of realities, much like a cat walking
from left to right over the piano keyboard. Each forward step he takes strikes
a higher-pitched string of consciousness and realization. He awakens from
silence to sound in his world a new and higher note each time he can reach one
key higher in the scale. At each step of advance in his evolution in time, be
it slow or rapid, he is progressing from a lower to a higher tempo or pitch.
The past has resounded or responded to the lower tones; the future will strike
the higher ones. For evolution is tuning up the strings and refining the
mechanism of the physical instrument at each step of ongoing. Present man can
produce sweeter tones and manage completer
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harmonies than past man, and future
man will be able to come ever closer to striking ineffable symphonies.
The past goes into latency--though
it is always re-available--while the future awaits the slow development of the
instrument in order to be brought forth out of latency and be registered on the
surface of the actual. Until this moment it is only potential, awaiting the
perfectibility of the sounding board of brain and nerves. The future thus
emerges out of unconscious potentiality to pass through the gate of the present
moment of actualization into the storehouse of accumulated and partly digested
reality. It is the birth moment of ever advancing stages or registries of real
being. All life progresses from the potential to the actual, and the area of
immediacy in consciousness is the necessary ground whereon that which has been
held in conscious thought in the mind of the great Oversoul of creation can be
projected from the superior plane above the range of man's conscious grasp down
into the open field of actual experience. The superconscious is that segment of
the gamut of God's graded values which lies or extends immediately above the
highest arc of man's responsive reach.
God is the sending generator of
waves of reality; man, as he perfects his instrumentalities of body, mind and
soul, is a poor, a good or a better receiving instrument. The total harmonies
of God's being are thrilling about us all the while. But we are bound in
silence to all of them except those that we have grown able to match in
vibration through the evolving capacities of our organisms. Only these are the
limited though ever expanding glories of reality that we are able to make
actual to ourselves. The Egyptians again solidly portrayed this basic truth by
one of their sagacious "myths." They said that man was imprisoned in
twelve dungeons, one after the other, and that he could only be liberated from
each in turn as he learned to pronounce the name of the god who stood guard at
each dungeon door, and who held the key but would not use it until the prisoner
pronounced his name properly. Name and nature are identical in
this situation, so that man's ability to utter correctly
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the name of a god is the same thing
as being capable of manifesting that god's divine nature through the
personality, the lower mind and self. This is brightly illuminating on the
mental side. This is the meaning of "calling upon the name of the
Lord" in the scriptures, a vastly different and far more demanding thing
than a mere vociferation of the word-name of deity as understood in Christian
rendering. We are, as the Egyptians poetized it, in prison to a faculty that is
as yet unopened and undeveloped. We are freed from limitation only as potential
faculty and power are opened to function through unfoldment. This is as clearly
true as is the simple remark that we are blind until we evolve the faculty of
sight through development of the organs of seeing. No wonder the ancients set
forth man's life in the flesh as an imprisonment, a burial, sleep and death. We
are the captives in a long exile here on earth. We are in bondage to matter,
Hagar, the bondwoman, until brought up out of this land of Egypt, the abode of
flesh and sense. That is what is entailed for the soul in its migration to
earth, its coming "under the law" that prevails not in the world of
spirit, but holds consciousness at low ebb in the realm of body and matter.
This is what it means to be "crucified in the flesh." The Logos was
made flesh--not only in one man, but in all men--and came and dwelt among us,
hiding for the early time his grace and truth under a bushel of matter. This is
our Immanuel, the god imman-ent in us. We are in prison under the
limitations of our still undeveloped potentialities, and the Christos within
us, who brings not only the stored-up capital of his former achievements, but
the potentiality of vastly greater genius to be unfolded in the living process,
is kept on the cross, in darkness and inanity, until we of the outer
personality open the barred doors and let him out to freedom. He abides on the
level immediately over our heads, a resident of a plane the life of which
transcends ours, awaiting the chance to incorporate more and ever more of his
unexploited capability in the world of the actual through the heightened
mechanism of consciousness we slowly learn to provide. He dwells on the plane
above
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us, but is eager to break through
into our world and find thereby a greater actualization of his own powers, as
we prepare the way in the wilderness for him.
This being understood, a glimpse can
now be had into the interlinked operation of the three levels of mentation in
the human constitution, on its purely mechanical side. As Dr. Hopper has said,
one can live in any of the three kingdoms, the sub-human, the human or the
super-human or divine. We can step from one to the other of the two end realms
across the connecting bridge of the human or conscious link. We can rise to
divinity, or sink to animality, by a shift of the focus of interest, desire or
will. The process by which true advance is constantly being made, however, is
clearly to be seen and is the basis of a deeper understanding than has been
given hitherto. The present or human state of the conscious mind is, as said,
the point of meeting, and therefore the point of friction, clash and struggle
between the two natures. It is to be set down categorically at once, however,
that this clash and struggle is not evil, but only the exertion of the
tension necessary to bring out to activity the latent energies of both soul and
sense. (A whole prodigious segment of religious theory and practice has gone
awry, with fatal consequences, as the result of regarding the contention of
soul and body as evil.) It is here on the plane of ordinary daily struggle and
effort, and not in ethereal palaces of mystical realization, that the battle is
fought and the gains made. No bliss will ever be enjoyed in Nirvanic heavens
that has not first been won on earth! For it is the function of the conscious
mind, as the outcome of its insistent, perennial divine urge and aspiration, to
reach upward toward the fuller and sweeter life of the supermind, to catch the
purer tone of its more exalted radiation of divine character, and to bring it
down into its lower station and hold it there. Ordinarily it is only at
infrequent times that the human is able to vibrate consciously in rapport with
that upper divine. These are the high moments, when we are wafted upward as by
an afflatus, when inspiration flows and light flashes. We may thereafter sink
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back into dullness, the glory
departed. But having had one touch and taste of paradise, we will not rest
until we have more; and with each new one there comes a greater skill to
impound and hold the illuminated moment.
That there is a mind in us pointing
to the future is indicated by what the eminent psychologist, Carl G. Jung, has
to say in a footnote (p. 493) of his profound study, The Psychology of the
Unconscious. He here succinctly lays the foundation for the erection of the
two unconscious minds:
"Just as traces of memory long
since fallen below the threshold of consciousness are accessible in the
unconscious, so too there are certain very fine subliminal combinations of the
future, which are of the greatest significance for future happenings in so far
as the future is conditioned by our own psychology."
He says it is impossible for
analysis to concern itself with these intimations pointing to future
happenings. That would be the task of "an infinitely refined synthesis,
which attempts to follow the natural current of the libido." This, he
says, is beyond us, but it "might possibly happen in the unconscious, and
it appears as if from time to time in certain cases significant fragments of
this process come to light, at least in dreams. From this comes the prophetic
significance of the dream long claimed by superstition."
He adds that "the aversion of
the scientific man of today to this type of thinking . . . is merely an
over-compensation to the very ancient and all too great inclination of mankind
to believe in prophecies and superstitions." There will be hearty
agreement with the revulsion of the scientific mind from age-long superstition
and the gullible credulity of uncritical masses, but the literature containing
the authentic record of prophetic dreams and premonitions is too great for
denial of the possibility of projections of the future into consciousness. We
are not too well fortified with a clear rationale of their occurrence, but it
is certain that the future touches us closely and now and again pictures from
its panoramic screen
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pierce the curtain and drop down
into the area of present awareness.
Dr. Hinkle, too, speaks of the
necessity of man's transforming himself through the effort to follow the
"transforming power within life," resident in the unconscious. She
says that man "has now apparently for the first time arrived at the
borderland of that supreme necessity, self-creation, and involved in his
attitude towards this task lies his answer to the great urgent question of the
present time and all time--the future of humanity itself."
The archetypal norms of divine
thought implanted in the creation and suspended above man's head, as it were,
are to be projected downward into conscious recognition in the minds of
thinking beings. The first reception of them is a matter of impression, much
like a photographic print. But the firmer fixing of them upon lower mind is
effected through the operation of a very wonderful law, the law of repetition.
It gains and holds its possessions by means of its power of retaining
impingements made repeatedly upon it. It is possible that it retains all
impressions made upon it, even in the slightest manner; but ordinarily, from the
standpoint of known powers of memory, several repetitions are required to fix
an imprint indelibly upon its sensitive slate. Repetition induces a sort of
automatism in the memory. It is entirely akin to the mind operating in children
and animals, and is therefore not aided by the processes of conscious
intelligence, reason or will. It is just the power of sheer automatic memory.
It is grounded on repetition. What it hears or sees often enough stays with it,
having carved its form upon the "tablet of consciousness."
The rationale and the sum of all
progressive growth for man the human, then, is the effort of his
superconscious, the god within him, to project downward from above the ideal
realities of the noumenal world, the same being the thoughts of God's own
creative mind, stamp them upon the open consciousness of the individual, and
then fix them finally through the force of repetition upon the
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subconscious level of habitude. The
conscious mind, Prometheus-like, catches and draws down a light from out the
upper chamber of the superconscious, ingrains it in its mentation by
repetition, and thus finally plants it firmly in the soil of the subconscious.
Man is in this manner slowly but constantly transferring bits of
"heaven" down to earth, and holding them as his permanent possession.
Habit (from the Latin habere, "to have") is the method by
which we have something. But it is a matter of the gravest import,
whether in the end, owing to the hypnotic power of mental action, it is not to
be said that a habit is something that has us! "A slave to
habit" is one of the commonest phrases. The great majority of our actions
in a day's time are the automatic impulsions of habit. The whole structure of
tradition and custom is the product of habit, or the inertia that binds men to
habits. The maxims of old-fashioned character building, and much in educational
procedure, were based on the effort to form good habits or to cultivate the
mind through memory work.
Evolution proceeds as the conscious
mind exercises its mediatorial office of drawing down divine "fire"
of wisdom and knowledge out of the heaven of the overworld, the ideal empyrean,
and passing it on down to the custodianship of the subconscious, where it
becomes automatized as part of the built structure of the human. Physiology
falls in conclusively with this delineation, since it tells us that the
autonomic nervous system, the organism of the subconscious, is the apparatus
that holds the impressions fixed by habitual practice. It functions in the
ganglia of the spinal cord, we are told. These take over what the brain
consciousness builds up by repetition.
Man's advance in evolution, as far
as the attainment of higher consciousness is concerned, consists, then, in the
ability of the conscious self to capture more and more of the superconscious
potential, to repeat it consciously, and so store it away as a permanent
possession, an increment of living gain. Each time he becomes capable of
registering a higher note in the scale of conscious values
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he takes a step up the ladder of
evolution from man to god. He is climbing up the Jacob's ladder toward the
heavens, the locale of more vivid reality.
There is a grand enlightenment for
intelligence in the consideration of the habit phenomenon in the human economy.
Through habit, more particularly and clearly noted in animals, in whom there is
no free initiative of new action by the deliberative reason, but seen even very
generally in humanity, life is able to achieve a close approach to
invariability and uniformity in its normal procedures. These traits may be
assumed to be requisite and indispensable in so far as the welfare of creature
life may be dependent upon absolute regularity. At any rate the genius that
orders the universe has evidently found it necessary to install regularity and
uniformity into the operative scheme, since they are most amazingly in
evidence. The constancy of life's procedures, movements, activities in
periodicity and rhythm is the one element in the creation that has so
powerfully enchained the human mind. The immutable repetition of cycles, the
endlessly renewed alternation of activity and rest, the diastole and systole of
all pulsations of living energy in the cosmos, have struck the thought of man
with an overwhelming sense of the play of divine mind in the phenomena of the
universe. It is the feature that the human mind builds upon in its
determination that the universe is a cosmos.
Two items of knowledge, then,
combine to instruct us further, both as to the nature of God and as to his laws.
The first is man's constitution in God's image; the second is an immediate
derivative of that, the corollary assumption that if man is like God, then
man's composition and functionism supply to thought an analogical suggestion as
to the make-up of God's being. The astonishing inference then rises to
conception that, as man has the three minds or levels of consciousness, God
must be constituted likewise! And a startling formulation arises out of the
parallel. It is the determination that what we observe in the way of invariable
natural procedure and style "the laws of nature" are just the fixed
habitudes of God's
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subconscious mind! They are
invariable in their regularity because sufficient of God's conscious
energization has from the beginning been expended in establishing them to make
them automatic. They have by habit of God become the actions of his autonomic
"nervous system." Pope's astute discernment that God is the soul of
the universe, while "nature" is its body, must be given the chance to
register its full import here. Like us, God is spirit-soul-mind, and all three
ranges of consciousness function in his great body, the universe. He, too, must
be able to turn over the products of his present consciousness, if conscious
mind is the creating and ever recreating power behind the worlds, to the
automatic unvarying control of his "lower mind" resident in
"ganglia"--the suns--so as to free his conscious self for ever new
exercise of desire and will. The laws of nature, as to which we affirm poetically
that the mind energies of God uphold and perpetuate them, and which we declare
would crash in chaos the moment his mental concentration was relaxed, are
evidently established habitudes of his former conscious regimen of activity.
They are immutable because they have, through repetition, come under the
control of a segment of divine consciousness that holds an aptitude fixed upon
it by initial impact and endless recurrence. It lies below the realm of
freedom. It can not exercise choice. It obeys the will of the conscious part.
It is the anima, the animal part of mind, and its universal function is
to repeat automatisms ingrained upon it. When God says, in the Old Testament,
that he will write his laws in our minds and hearts, he is announcing the great
principle here discussed. Little by little he is able to communicate the
transcendent principia of his exalted being from the higher vibrational key in
the gamut to the next lower stratum of his organic being, and from that to the
one below, until all creature life reflects his nature and in miniature repeats
his procedures. Thus his law pervades the total creation. Our fixed systematic
operations, such as pulse, respiration, food intake and elimination,
metabolism, cell decay and renewal, are all operations that were once for a
limited period consciously ordered and directed
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by intelligence, but were later
turned to automatic actions, to free the conscious. These are the laws of
nature operating in our bodies, as all larger procedures are the laws of nature
operating in the spacious reaches of life beyond our little lives. In both
cases they are under the control of the never-failing subconscious. We think of
God so constantly as Mind or Spirit that we forget he has his body, which is
the physical creation in the large. And that body provides him with the
"nervous" apparatus for a subconscious activity.
This, in fine, elucidates to our
puzzled minds why it is that God can give his attention to the
inconceivably vast range and multitude of all his activities in all his worlds!
They are under the control of his subconscious. They do not require his conscious
attention. For whatever the word may conceivably connote when applied to
the higher level of God's life and being, they are automatic. Our
little, though still marvelous, automatisms are copies of his. We are made in
his image. The profounder and more real implications of this datum in the
scriptures have never been taken at obvious face value. It is the key to
practically the whole science of human understanding of life and its processes
and phenomena.
It is a subsidiary reflection that
it is therefore a matter of inexpressibly serious consequence in the life of
man, collectively and individually, what activities of body or mind he chooses
to make habitual. He has the power of choice and initiative, and these are
virtually the powers of a god. If, through ignorance, which is his handicap
from the start and hobbles him in diminishing degree thereafter, he chooses the
wrong kind of procedures, he fixes upon his subself an inharmonious,
pain-engendering routine. The outcome must in all cases be suffering and
misery. Human suffering has here its origin. The chains of a bad habit can be
broken only by resolute correction of the addiction by conscious re-direction
when the disease or corruption created in the organism has brought the
intelligence and the will in line with a better run of conduct. Pain is the
guardian angel that with inevitable certitude announces
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whether the ingrained habitudes
produce in the organism a life-sustaining harmony or jangle of death-bearing
cacophony. In the end, knowledge, requisite to the making of choices aright, is
the indispensable warden of human happiness. Pain is both our chief protector
and our ultimate educator. Without its timely signals we would be totally at
the mercy of our own follies.
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CHAPTER VIII
IN PLUTO'S DARK REALM
Through lack of this dual
departmentalization or segmentation of the unconscious by modern psychological
science, vast confusion and much futile groping have characterized the
investigation and vitiated the conclusions. Instead of only one unconscious,
there are two. There are two levels, stories, houses, realms of the
unconscious. And it makes a world of a difference to which one a phenomenon
belongs, or to which it is assigned, in psychological practice. The
subconscious is unconscious, because it holds all that has once been in
consciousness, but has been relegated to the domain of the unconscious. Its
content may be good, bad or neutral. It may be the more recent acquisition of
what is fine in the way of new inculcation, or it may be the surviving memory
of past viciousness, or the possibility of its renewal. It may be sublime
philosophical beauty, or the grossest brutality. It is happily true, no doubt,
that in long course, as lofty sentiment and keener wisdom fix permanent habits
of virtue in the sub-area, long dormant bestiality and gross carnalisms will
atrophy off the sensitive plate of the lower mind and pass out into final
oblivion. At any rate they become more and more deeply "sub" and less
readily resurgent. As the poet has put it, the growth of man in righteousness
and wisdom will eventually "let the ape and tiger die" out of his
scope of motivation. Melchizedek, the king of righteousness, will gradually
assert his rulership more completely over the entire kingdom of consciousness,
"Till every foe is vanquished,
And Christ is Lord indeed."
Dr. Hinkle's discerning observations
as to the basic cause of neuroses, psychic disturbances and mental pathology
need to be
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erected into pillars of true
science. So far from having their causal origin merely in civil and social
frustrations of sex yearnings instinctive in infancy, the disturbances are due
to frustrations of a far deeper nature, inhibitions that root in profounder
depths of the psychic constitution of human life than merely bodily sexual
satisfaction or its thwarting. The restraints on sexual expression play their
part, naturally; but this cause of inharmony is slight and superficial in
comparison with the more interior clash between the god and the animal in man's
sphere of consciousness. Mere sexual repressions, though they are active agents
in psychoses of lighter gravity, are not the grounds of the more serious
maladies of the mind. These are the outgrowth of the thwarting by the lower
animal personality and its propensities, of the more vital inner efforts of the
god above to adjust the habits and mechanisms of the body to its evolutionary
aims and trends. He is destined to be the supreme ruler--the King, in the
glorious language of symbolic theology--of the natural man in all respects.
When this first or natural man has at last been raised in status and his
dynamic forces refined and accommodated to the services of their divine
transformer, then he receives the evolutionary reward for his faithfulness and
obedience in the form of a grand enrichment and enhancement of his own
conscious powers. But until that happy stage is reached, and from the start, he
is by no means an obedient and willing subject of his liege. As all the
scriptures reiterate without end, he is a stiff-necked, a stubborn and a
rebellious subordinate. He must be gradually converted. His natural instincts
and propensities must be slowly transformed. They must be turned away from the
service of rapacity and self-interest over to that of a communal fellowship
with the other units of the life order. Organically he is holding the supermind
of the god in a prison, and it is only by converting his gaoler that the
god-soul can liberate itself from the trammels of the flesh and assume full
command within the sphere of the organic life.
The force of this
"conversion" of the lower self "into the likeness of"
"the glorious body" of the higher self has likewise never been
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seen in any adequate degree. The
analogy with the great luminary which is itself the mighty symbol of the divine
self is the revealing talisman. The manner in which the sun lifts up a lower
coarse element such as water furnishes the interpretative hint. The light and
heat of the sun can not through sheer mechanical force lift water upward.
Sunlight has no arms with which to scoop up the liquid. But it does lift up the
water by the agency of its power first to "convert" it from physical
density to ethereal fineness and lightness in the form of vapor, in which state
its gravity is overcome and convection carries it upward. A force of a
"higher" range always has the power to sublimate the substance of a
thing of a "lower" nature. That which can not be done with coarse
matter in its denser composition can be done after the alchemy of sublimation
has been performed upon it. This yields for us a chemical and physical representation
of a great segment of the entire meaning of both the theological content of the
scriptures and the central core of psychological study and science. The sun can
cause water to rise after it has transformed it into a sublimated state.
Likewise the divine soul in man can cause the lower animal nature to rise to
the status and glory of the exalted human and near-divine after it has
transformed it by the continuous impingement upon it of vibrations of finer
nature. This is the interior meaning of all religious "conversion"
ever talked about in the theologies of the world. The soul that is in man is
here on the cosmic mission first to transfigure by sublimation the coarser
nature of physical humanhood and then to lift it up to a level of harmonious
fellowship with itself.
If a statement direct from the ranks
of psychoanalysts themselves were needed to confirm the averment that
disturbances arise chiefly from obstructions put in the way of the divine soul
by the outer personality, it is to be found in a brief sentence from Dr.
Hinkle's book, already cited (p. 435):
"For it is a fact which
psycho-analysis reveals definitely and unmistakably that the actual disturbance
of the individual today is involved with the problem of the soul."
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She says again that the sum of man's
psychological striving is his effort to "differentiate himself from nature."
This is wholly in consonance with the gist of all ancient philosophy. But
if it is his divine intent to "differentiate himself from nature,"
whence comes this direction, this bent, this pull to something beyond nature?
From what part or element of his own constitution springs this lift to a higher
selfhood? It can come only from a conscious intelligence within him that is
already standing above the terrain of the animal part. A thing of a certain
nature can not lift itself beyond itself by its own powers. It can be lifted to
higher status only by the aid of a power already higher than itself, which
reaches down from above, clasps hands with it and raises it up. Since man in
his palpable physical selfhood is himself a creature of the natural order, with
material body as his ostensible being, it is logically necessary that if he is
to be differentiated from nature, to which he belongs by virtue of his body,
the differentiation must be engineered by another part of him, not so palpable
and ostensible, yet dialectically existent, namely the immortal soul within
him. Then, since this work of the spiritual man in elevating carnal man to
diviner kingdoms is the chief business that the total man is to accomplish in
life in the world, it can be seen that interference with the program of its
evolutionary errand will be a matter of central and crucial moment and concern
to the whole movement, and will therefore be the cause of most serious
disturbance in the smooth working of the internal economy of the life.
Jung says that it is of the greatest
importance whether the libido is transferred or inverted. Nature, he writes,
has first claim on man; "only long afterwards does the luxury of intellect
come." He has adduced the very discerning observation that for the first
thirty-five years of life the individual is a child of nature, concerned and
absorbed with the acquisition of the things that give him a place of standing
in the material world. In the second period of thirty-five years he shifts his
interests largely from material matters over to the concerns of the mind and
soul. This is oddly enough a minia-
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ture copy of the life of the
incarnating soul in its total evolution in the human cycle. It is for roughly
the first half of its immersion in fleshly bodies working to establish its
place firmly and stably in its position of rulership of lower physical forces.
During the latter half of its career in the worlds it bends its efforts more
largely and freely to the growth of its own internal forces of intelligence and
spirituality. Wordsworth writes of the great and passionate interest of his
younger life in the domain of outer nature, and then of the "years that
bring the philosophic mind." The allegorical pictograph is even carried
out vividly in the Gospel drama, in which Jesus, the type of the divine soul,
runs away from his mother (nature) at the age of twelve, symbolic of
completion, and devotes himself thenceforth to the "things of his
Father" (spirit).
Here and everywhere in the analysis
there is disclosed the important part played by analogy. Through the employment
of this instrument there is revealed what has so long lain in the darkness of
nescience. Part of the predisposing cause of the Dark Ages of medieval European
history was the loss, along with the refinements of symbolism, allegory and
drama, of the legitimacy of analogy as a truth-finding methodology. The price
civilization has had to pay for this dereliction of intelligence has been far
heavier than anyone has dreamed. It closed the doors of the mind against the
most pellucid lens of possible insight into profound truth. It thus aided the
forces of darkness and obscurantism in their ghastly work of bigotry, persecution
and foul inhumanity.
Even yet we suffer through lack of
it. We have been frightened away from embracing it by the insistent cry that
"analogy proves nothing." Let the refrain be: Of course it proves nothing.
It was never meant to "prove" anything. It does not need to prove anything.
Its function is not "proof" but something possibly of far greater
importance. What it is qualified to do is to sharpen vision and quicken the
mind to acuter perception. It is able to point man's insight from the realm of
the seen to that of things unseen,--concepts, cosmic processes, laws,
principles, categories. Had scientists
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used the law of analogy they would
have been prepared to find without surprise that the atom, when discovered,
would be formed over the pattern of a solar system. If they followed the
implications of analogy now, they would know that death does not end the life
of an inner principle or seed in human beings, but that, like the acorn or any
seed of a garden plant or flower, this life-bearing nucleus will bring itself
to a new period of organic existence in a rebirth in a new cycle. Analogy is
the one aid to seeing provided for the dull human mind.
The strategic importance for
psychoanalytic aims and practices of clarifying the sharp distinction between
the two realms of unconsciousness, the sub- and the super-conscious, can not be
overvalued. It will give the understanding a closer grip on the apprehension of
all ethical values, since it will provide intelligence with the capability of
rating psychic motivations in the category of subconscious fixations, mere
addictions of habit, or in the higher category of fresh releases of insight and
inspiration from the overshadowing god. It is of vital importance to know
whether they are the one or the other. It will furnish the basis of a study of
social and intellectual mores in relation to the pioneer's flash of
higher insight that would dictate a change to new and freer standards. It would
put in our hands the key to the science of human well-being and happiness. It
is the core of all problems in the career of the individual.
Theology has been reduced to the
status of an outcast, and verily it is but a corpse of its once radiant
significance. Yet its doctrines, as still extant, are the empty forms of the
prime truths so badly needed by humanity. The great conflict so variously and
vividly dramatized in the scriptures between rebellious man and patient,
long-suffering and at times wrathful god, is the open sesame that exposes to
sight the complexities of the critical psychic mystery of man's being. The
moral struggle within the breast of man is the pivotal hinge of all
understanding in psychology. It is grounded on the real presence of the higher
element, the god, in the human animal. As said, this inner guest is on the way
to become the pre-
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siding genius of the organism, which
is a microcosm or miniature reduplication of the macrocosmic universe. His
reason, intelligence and wisdom, as the King of Righteousness, are to assume
governorship over the energies that dwell in the "underworld" of the
senses and the feelings, and which, lying below the level of mind, are
irrational and elemental. They move on instinct and not on reason. Their range
of expression constitutes that great "underworld" so ubiquitously
found in all the systematic mythologies of the past, that "nether
world" into which every divine hero descends, there to overcome the
enemies that hold captive the soul-maiden, the psyche, and lead her as his
bride out of the realm of lower darkness, of gloomy night and flitting shades.
This is the rough representation of the drama in folk-lore.
In theology, the sun-hero descends
into the dark realms of Hades, Hell, Sheol or Amenta, to visit "the
spirits in prison" and to bring light "to those that sit in
darkness," or to awaken or revive those that lie, like Lazarus, asleep in
"death." For this darksome lower region is the realm of the
"dead," in which Pluto, Yama, Osiris or Loki rule. The blunder of the
scholastics in mislocating this Amenta, Sheol or Hades in mythology and
theology as elsewhere than right here in this world of living experience is one
of the crudest and costliest mistakes ever perpetrated. It has caused the
untold miscarriage of the knowledge that was designed to enlighten humanity
along its toilsome path of evolution.
The god-soul migrated to earth and
took on a bodily incarnation for the higher purpose of forwarding, under
conditions most aptly ordained to achieve the result, the growth of its seed
potentiality into the likeness of its parent divinity. If the general mind
could once gain the ancient philosophical understanding that these human souls
of ours are integral fragments of the mind-soul-spirit of God himself, seed
units of divine consciousness, and that they are here on their long mission of
evolution in the return cycle to the Father's mansions, earthly life would gain
immeasurably in poise, equanimity and happiness. This being their errand, and
their own
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lives being internally activated by
the pressure of this consciousness by virtue of their sharing a portion of the
divine mind itself, their task is to see that this work is as directly and as
efficiently carried forward as may best be done. Antique documents indeed
disclose that these souls, on leaving their celestial abodes to become, as Paul
says, "a colony of heaven" on earth, expressly bound themselves by
"broad oaths fast sealed" to descend, occupy the bodies of a race of
animal-men and strictly attend to the great evolutionary business of refining
their lower natures up to the point of highest humanhood, or even to touch the
level of godhood just beyond. The successful performance of their mission
would, as Plato's Timaeus sets forth, graduate them into the ranks of
the gods, with the crown of immortal life as their guerdon. As has been seen,
this aeonial work was to end with the weaving together of "mortal and
immortal natures" in one new man, the glorious achievement of the
atonement. "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."
Zealously, then, the divine soul
incorporated in gross body stands guard, as it more fully awakens, to conserve
the best interests of both itself and its animal servant, the body. When the
waywardness of the personality, or its ignorance of wise procedures, or its
recalcitrancy, block the way of progress along the normal path, or when sheer
folly, or sloth or stupidity threaten the success of the enterprise, the godly
soul within must assert its authority or register its protest. This it does in
ways of indirection and subtlety, but at any rate in a fashion to make its
voice of remonstrance heard by the lower self. Some form of inharmony, some
form of psychic disturbance, some pathological condition is engendered. This is
to impress the outer conscious mind. And as Dr. Hinkle asserts, the trouble
lies deeply buried in an internal impasse, which must be dissolved by probing
after, discovering and removing the real core of obstruction, the real nub of
the psychic problem. Psychoanalysis is acting wisely in using the symptoms of
disturbance as vanes of indication and diagnosis of the trouble in its deepest
aspects. The soul within, watching the outer man's hit-and-miss efforts, can
tolerate only so
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much aberration and loss of
incarnational time and opportunity. It is its pledged duty to see that the
external life falls measurably in line with a program that will best further
the long-aim effort, or at least not too seriously jeopardize the chances of
success. Psychoanalysis, Dr. Hinkle says, provides a technique by means of
which the outer consciousness is aided in coming to a recognition of a deeply
obscured inward deadlock, and so is helped to remove an obstruction to the
development of a "greater self" within the human constitution.
Psychoanalysis is built, she says, entirely upon the laying bare, or bringing
to the surface, the unconscious motives and obstructed purposes,
different from and independent of those known consciously. This proves to be
exactly true. The majority of people remain ignorant of the genesis of the
psychic disorders within themselves, and there was no science of diagnosis and
discovery of the sources of disturbance until psychoanalysis came forward to
reveal that they were engendered by the innermost true being of the individual
himself, lying out of sight in the depths of the self and playing the role of
the "silent watcher" and the guardian daemon. We must become
"introvert" enough to probe deeply within the most obscure and hidden
motivations of conduct and feeling. How apt, then, is what Dr. Hinkle says on this
point!:
"For the introvert's real
values lie in the unconscious, in the depths, and must be sought there and not
in the world of sense."
This is to say that the supremely
important, crucial and decisive motivations that seize upon and direct the self
to special exertions at critical junctures in the life spring not from the
vagrant and fickle desires of the personality on the surface, but rather from
what Maeterlinck called the "inconscient superieur" and the
"prospective potency" of the unconscious.
It is indeed unfulfilled need and
unsatisfied yearnings deeply subterranean in the mortal constitution that give
rise to neuroses, as Dr. Hinkle so convincingly states. She rightly sees the
needs and yearnings arise from remoter sources within the psyche than
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the outer mind's sphere of
consciousness. There must therefore be postulated within man's constitution the
presence of a mind or self whose intelligence reaches beyond that of the brain.
There must be predicated a knower within the personality who projects his
message and his wishes outward upon the attention of the conscious mind. He may
do this by symbolic hints, or by precipitating a condition of unbalance and
inharmony within the psychic functioning of the whole person. The task or
function of that more central power resident "below the threshold" is
to see that the outer personality maintains a fairly close rapport, in motive, exertion
and aim, with its own superior purposes. If this is tolerably well
accomplished, there is little need for overt communication between the
submerged monitor and the day consciousness. The hidden god, called by the
Egyptians Amen, "the god in hiding," rests content with the progress
made in the outer sphere of action. But if wreckage is threatened or the outer
faculties remain too long unawakened, the occasion demands his interference,
and protest must be made by way of a message in symbolic language or by
unhappiness generated to provoke inquiry, or new courses of action and new
exertions.
Dr. Hinkle says that the need of the
organism is to win a higher integration of its component elements. Seen
from the ancient mount of knowledge of man's composite nature, the phrase
serves well enough to shape out the truth of the case. Where the aim is, as in
man, to "weave together mortal and immortal natures," the successful
outcome partakes of the character of an integration. The practical thing accomplished
is the harmonious accommodation, under the laws of a harmony of relations
little different from those that govern the symphonization of musical notes
through mathematically attuned vibrations, of the energies of the two natures,
until their combined expression effects a concord instead of a discord. If this
more lovely resultant is not achieved, there is discord within the psyche and
pathological instability or unbalance in the outer person.
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As long, this discerning
psychoanalyst says, as the
"higher psychological functions of humanity remain
bound in a crude, instinctive form, there will be neurotic problems to face,
for the whole effort of the human being is to transcend the instinctive
animal."
Here is the long unrecognized,
unesteemed, ancient philosophy and theology of wise seers of antiquity coming
forth to the light of modern perception after centuries of oblivion. But it can
be released from the jargon of technical psychoanalytic phrasing and expressed
in the form of theological dialectic. As long as the god is too crudely kept in
"durance vile," in bondage under the nescience, the lethargy, the
brutish grossness of the purely animal nature surging up from below, it will
become restive and eventually throw the organism into discordant states by way
of remonstrance. Perhaps also it might be expressed as viewed from the other
side, that the coarse behavior of the sensuous animal nature of the lower man,
overriding and suppressing or blocking the gentler small voice of the god,
throws the relationship between the two components into a painful tension of
unbalance, creating a neurosis. It is important to have Dr. Hinkle's own
phrasing of this elaboration. She says in the same passage (p. 328):
"The many aberrations and
neurotic weaknesses, deviation from the abstract called normal, all reveal in
their very lack of fixed and rigid forms, possibilities of development and
transfigurations from the un-self-conscious animal man to that highly conscious
self-creative man."
This is nothing short of splendid.
As disease is a manifestation of the forces of the organism struggling to
regain a balance called normal health, so neurotic disturbances are upheavals
of internal or submerged native forces of spirit striving to establish a
harmony or balance termed normal mental sanity.
There is warrant for subjecting this
reference to "the abstraction called normal" to a moment's closer
scrutiny. Normality is by no means a mere abstraction, though of course it is
abstractly discerned. The mental abstraction is the perception of a very real
thing. It
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comes back again to the symbol of
the "horizon" of Egyptian literature and the "cleft of the
rock" in Hebrew typology, as well as the "rib" of Adam, generic
man. (For the "rib" was properly a midrib, a line of cleavage run
down the middle of the unified being of God, dividing it apart into its twoness
of spirit and matter, male and female.) All life struggles to maintain its
organic existence on a line or at a point of exact equilibration between the
forces of spirit and matter. It ever stands and builds its bodies, its
vehicles, precisely at the point of neutralization between centripetal and
centrifugal energies, as witness all the stars in their orbits and the
electrons in their path and position around the central proton. The Egyptians
magnificently called the earth, on which such stabilization is achieved,
"the pool of equipoise and propitiation," or balance and final
atonement. The ancient astrology expressed the same idea by means of the sign
of Libra, the balance. All life is eternally, while in manifestation, being
tried in the balance. It can, so to say, only stand still and be localized as
an existent thing when it is held firmly in the immovable status between the
two equally balanced opposite poles or pulls. It stands at the neutral point of
the tension. Says Emerson: "Man stands at the point midway betwixt the
inner spirit and the outer matter." Only when the two energies of spirit
and matter are equilibrated in one organism can the stable permanency be gained
which is requisite for the eventual copulation of their opposing powers, to
give birth to their "sons," the created progeny. The Christos could
not be brought to birth out of the body of virgin matter (Maria) until
that was held in stable relation to the power of the Holy Spirit from
above. So the allegory represented the Christ as being born in a
"stable." And once again a frightfully mangled allegory of supernal
ancient wisdom is redeemed from modern caricature of its original majestic beauty.
So the human mind, in deepest
reflection, has rightly conceived a condition of mean balance between two
extremes in every manifestation of life and activity. It is Plato's splendid
doctrine of the
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"golden mean." Life
expression can be normal only when it is poised at this point of equilibration
between too much and too little. Plato convincingly fixed the character of each
virtue by placing it, when rightly defined, at the exact point of balance
between the excess and the deficiency of the quality in question. Courage was
the precise balance between foolhardy, reckless daring and rank cowardice. This
must be determined in the finale by requisite knowledge of how much is too much
or how little is too little. This judgment, properly exercised, yields final truth,
inasmuch as these determinations are definitely those that must be made by all
constantly. The "normal" in all forms of human conduct is the most
consistently successful result of the best effort to establish those lines and
points of precise balance between right and wrong, good and evil, true and
false, which according to Plato and Socrates, are always resolvable to a merely
quantitative measure of too much or too little. Man is indeed being weighed in
the scales of the balance and, in Egypt's figurism, bathing in the "pool
of equipoise."
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CHAPTER IX
THE TWO MOTHERS OF THE CHRIST
Another most vital determination
reached by psychoanalysis and well stated by Dr. Hinkle is that the crux of the
psychic conflict in the human breast is the effort of something deeper in the
psyche than the animal feeling "to transcend the instinctive animal."
Again modern discovery has merely caught up with ancient proficiency. St. Paul
and Plato, Hermes and Orpheus, the philosophers and the Illuminati, had long
ago set down the terms of this problem. They all delineated the moral effort of
mankind under the terms of the central situation, which set before the second
Adam, the son of the woman, the product of nature's second birthing, the
aeonial task of combating, overcoming, transforming and finally embracing in
union the first Adam, natural man, of the earth, earthy, carnal, sensual animal
man. First comes that which is natural, says St. Paul, then that which is
spiritual. The natural is first on the visible scene of creation, since the
second or spiritual can supervene from out the world of pure conscious
potentiality into the world of actual conscious existence only through the
instrumentalities provided by the preceding physical development. The body must
be here before the royal guest from above can enter as its tenant and use its
agencies. Or, perhaps more scientifically stated, the body must be here before
the soul that is animating its growth can find the proper channel for its
expression.
The victory of the soul is won,
then, by its transcending the instinctive animal. "Instinct" is the
form which activity takes in the animal half of man under the impulsion of the automatism
of the subconscious. The animal lives under the dominion of the
subconscious, since he is not yet man, and man, from the Sanskrit man
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"to think," is the
thinker. The animal is not a thinker, except potentially and rudimentarily. The
body (animal man) is run by instinct, unreasoned automatism. All the functions
are governed by an automatic memory, which does not know how to deviate, or can
not originate deviation. All its conscious energies or motivations lie below
the level of reasoning mind.
The whole moral struggle in man is
envisaged as the warfare between the two natures, the imprisoned potentiality
of soul wrestling against the powers of flesh and blood to acquire dominion
over them, to govern them according to reason and to tame their fierce wild
energies into the service of divine law. To transmute their rapacity of selfish
desire into the offices of the law of love, to swing their jostling forces into
a fellowship of the elements, to make the organism a cosmos under law instead
of a chaos of unintelligent blind powers, is the cyclic assignment of the
second Adam, the Christ. Psychoanalysis has at last probed to the root of man's
happiness and the stability--or instability--of his psychic self in his great
evolutionary labor. And in doing so it finds itself standing side by side with
the lost purport of the revered scriptures of the race. Men of truly divine
stature gave this wisdom to the race in its childhood. They sought to embody it
in the unforgettable forms of universal mnemonics. The only unforgettable
mnemonics are the forms and phenomena of nature. The alphabet of the universal
language of truth is composed of the symbols drawn from nature. The great
Bibles are works written in the language of symbols, with allegory, fable,
parable, myth, drama, number graph and astrograph the primary elaborations. The
tree, the leaf, the seed, the root, the branch, the stump, the stream, the
star, the sun and moon, earth and water, air, fire, aether, the cross, the
circle, the square, triangle, the arch, the ark, the flood, the fish, beetle,
cow, cat, dragon-fly, thunder, lightning, the rainbow and a host of other forms
and phenomena were the characters, the expressive words, of that forgotten
language.
Pause should be made to look at just
two of these, water and the
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fish. An enlightenment that is
almost stunning in the depth of its revelation of hitherto undiscovered meaning
behind such a symbology is in store for the investigating mind. The approach is
through a statement in the mythicism of archaic literature that the Sun-god,
the Christos-Messiah, specifically in Egypt Iusa or Horus, son of Osiris, had
two mothers, of various names. The hint was obscure and baffling until it
was recalled that the mother of life is ever the negative essence, matter
(Latin, mater). It was but a further step then to the realization that
matter--as announced to us in the first chapter of Genesis--is twofold
in form or organization. There is the firmament above and the firmament below.
There are the waters above and the waters below. (Water has already been
disclosed to be the prime symbol of matter.) As water can subsist in two
distinct forms, invisible vapor and visible substance as liquid or ice, so
matter has evolved in two separate and distinct states. It is first, in the
inchoate state, purely essence, not substance; only the potentiality of substance.
It is inorganic, unatomic, invisible, the "great sea" of material
potentiality, mare, Mary. In this state it is "the first
mother," who generates in turn her daughter, organic, atomic,
structuralized and visible substance, the second mother. For she becomes
impregnated with the seed of spirit-mind and is destined to give birth to the
Christos in man's developed body. There is first, then, the inorganic or virgin
mother, unwedded to spirit, and the organic or wedded mother, who finally
produces the god-son. Born originally "of a virgin" any divine
creation or "son of God" must be.
In a flash it was seen that as water
typified the general all-pervading first virgin essence of matter, inorganic,
the fish, as its first and universal creation of an organic structural
constitution, would stand as the type of the second mother, or substantial
matter. The Christ character in the allegorical depiction, then, would be the
"son of the fish," or of the "fish-mother," not of the "water-mother."
Imagine, then, the pertinence of the discovery that many of the goddess mothers
of Sun-gods or Messiahs were actually
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styled "the fish-mother"
of the Son of God! Atergatis and Semiramus were particularly so named. Jonah
allegorism was immediately at hand to harmonize with the interpretation, as
fabling the great fish that ingested, then delivered at his proper destination,
the Christos. Unquestionably "Jonah" is a variant of the divine name,
Jesus, which is found in some twenty-five or more forms in the Old Testament.
One of these is "Joshua," as to which there is not the slightest
possibility of dispute as to its identity with "Jesus." And now comes
an unexpected and astonishing further corroboration. Joshua is "son of
Nun," and Nun is the name of the Hebrew letter "N" and means, of
all things,--"fish." Joshua (Jesus), son of the fish, or fish-mother.
And the Greek world in the first three centuries of Christianity denominated
the Christian Jesus as Ichthys (Ichthus), the Greek word for
"fish." Augustine and Tertullian both expressly name Jesus as the
great fish, and his followers as the "little fishes," (Latin, pisciculi).
Nor is this all--or the most significant detail.
The astrologizing early mythicists
allocated the birthplace of the first or natural man in the sign of Virgo, the
Virgin (matter), and placed the birth of the second or spiritual man, "the
man Christ," in the sign directly, or six months, opposite in the zodiac,
Pisces, a water sign. The New Testament allegory uses bread and fish as the
divine food that the Christ brings wherewith to feed mortal man in order to
immortalize him, in the "miracle" of the feeding of the five
thousand. The sign Pisces is already by name the house of the fishes, but it
was also termed, by association with the opposite sign Virgo, in which the
Virgin carries in her hand the great star Spica, "the head of wheat"
from which the divine bread was to be made, the house of bread. And now comes
the last tremendous revelation of the allegorical and non-historical character
of Biblical lore. "House of bread" in Hebrew is, as any scholar
knows, Bethlehem! There was no other place for the Christos to be born
than in "Bethlehem," the zodiacal "house of bread" and of
fish. And, to round out the thrilling denouement, the first chapter of Luke records
Jesus' birth as occurring just six months after that of John
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the Baptist, who expressly announces
himself as playing the part of the first or natural man, who must come first to
"prepare the way of the Lord," the spiritual Christ. Beyond any
possibility of quibble these six months in Luke's narrative must be
interpreted as the half year on the zodiacal chart and as understandable only
thus, and in no sense historically. This is a momentous disclosure of the
presence of ancient astrological typism in the very heart of the Christian
Gospels.
But the crown of all this revelation
is still to come. One finds all these allegorical transactions already extant
for thousands of years in the literature of old Egypt, and there represented as
taking place in Anu, most astonishingly described in the Book of the Dead as
being "the place of multiplying bread." Could anything be more
thrilling in the whole field of Comparative Religion study? Jesus multiplied
bread and so did Horus, his Egyptian prototype. Horus was earlier Iusa (Jesus).
Horus multiplied bread at Anu. An ancient Greek or Egyptian "U"
becomes "Y" when transferred to English. And so these divine
transactions occurred at the Egyptian Any, the house of bread (and of
fish, no doubt), and when the Hebrew word for "house," beth, is
added, the result is the Gospel Beth-any! As the spiritual man goes down
into matter in his incarnation, in the legendary and allegorical conflict
between the "two brothers," the spiritual and the physical men, it is
the spiritual that decreases and the physical that increases. When the nadir of
descent is reached (and "Sinai" means "point of turning and
returning"), and the reascent is begun, the reverse is true. It is then
the first or natural man who diminishes, while the buried spiritual genius
germinates and increases. And John the Baptist says: "I must decrease, and
he must increase."
Likewise it was at Bethany that
"Lazarus" was raised from the dead by the Gospel Son of God. As, by
reincarnation, a man is reborn and resurrected to new life from the
"dead" state of inertia under the lethal dominance of the instincts
of the flesh and this is accomplished by the new projection of himself into
body as his
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own son, so it is always the divine
son who in all the allegories raises his father from the dead. Could anything
be more staggering, then, than the discovery that "Lazarus" is an old
Egyptian derivative, which with the prefixing of the Hebrew word "El"
for "God," and the Latin masculine terminal -us suffixed
to Asar, the original form of the name of Osiris, gives finally
El-Asar-us, or Lazarus! So the Christ of Egypt raised from the dead his father
Asar, or Osir-is. And this took place at Anu, or (Beth)any.
The identity is even carried out to
the point that there are in both allegories the two women present, whose names
reach similarity in the Gospel Mary and the Egyptian Meri.
Converting all this, which flows
forth from the consideration of just two of the great letters of the ancient
symbolic alphabet, over into its reference to psychoanalysis, it is clearly
enough seen to point to the "raising" or increasing of the divine
element, the unconscious in human life, from its "dead" condition in
its burial or immersing in the flesh of body. The carnal nature that was strong
at the beginning of the human cycle, while the spirit was overlaid and rendered
"sub"-active, must now decrease, while the unconscious higher self,
the savior and redeemer of its brother, must increase. The development requires
the growing domination of the lower by the higher. If the lower is recalcitrant
and blocks the "normal" process of the growth, there is disturbance
within the household of the psyche. Impasses, stubborn obsessions, unrelenting
strength of carnal desire, must be broken and dissipated, to let the soul go
marching on. It is clear as can well be that the diagnosis of psychotic
unbalance and instability must be charted as the complication resulting from
the body's, and even the mind's, interference with the ongoing of the soul.
Neurotic man is out of harmony with his own soul, is blocking the progress of
the "something beyond himself" within him toward its divinely
ordained goal. His condition indeed calls for reintegration. The ancients
unreservedly declared that this reorientation was possible only through
philosophy, which was then honored with the designation of "divine,"
as the philosophy that con-
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cerned itself fundamentally with the
existence, functions and welfare of the divine element in the human
constitution, its descent into the flesh and its redemption therefrom.
Life, for the purposes of its
evolution having projected its conscious units into immersion in the watery
condition of physical bodies--whence the sea as the symbol of life in flesh,
and the "Red" Sea a reference to the blood--apparently must use the
outer physical as its ultimate means for urging the necessity of corrections or
readjustments within the sphere of its corporeal domain. That is to say, that
when there is a deadlock in the psychic field, when the mind or the elementary
instincts become set in rigid postures that are out of accord with the
interests of true progress, the spirit within must break through or break down
the imprisoning fetters by means of some irruption or upheaval in the physical
or mental organism. The inharmony established by the wrong mental or physical
habit will itself sooner or later work its disruptive effects upon the outer
vehicle, and thus call attention to and enforce the needed adjustment. It is
not at all out of line with legitimate evolutionary economy to suppose that
directive life would use the physical instruments to correct the erring mental.
It is the only available resort even among humans to attempt to force a change
of stubborn mental attitudes by an assault on the body. There are junctures and
situations in which nothing will change dogged fixations of mind except an
attack upon the body. The mind can only be reached and influenced through pain
or damage to the body. If obdurate opinion or determination can not be changed
by mental appeal, the only resort life has is to strike at it through the
physical. This alone may in such case bring the mind around to reason. Life
does use this method. And it can readily be seen that this is the ultimate
reason for wars. When all mental approach to difficult problems proves
unavailing, physical force is the only recourse. It will be so until the race
learns to be governed by its intellect and not by its desires.
Psychic inability, nerve collapse,
bodily illness are then the out-
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ward symbols of the soul's
discontent with the lack of true growth that should come through the
concordance of the outer bodily regime of life with the far-projected cosmic
interests of the soul. They should not be treated as abnormalities to be
immediately eradicated. It is a fine observation of Chandler Bennitt in his
valuable work on psychoanalysis, The Real Use of the Unconscious, that
the presence of a fear complex should not be treated as a mere detrimental
symptom to be swept away as quickly as possible or exorcized by mental
manipulation, without regard to what it reveals. Fear should not be abolished
until its prognostic message indicating what is at fault has been rightly interpreted.
It is a sign and index of maladjustment. The important thing is to discover the
defect and mend it, not to get rid of the symptom. Only by such a right
interpretation can it be abolished effectually.
These psychoanalytic considerations
may not appear to be directly connected with the problem of religion. Yet it
can be asserted very strongly that the whole problem of religion is resolvable
into the terms of this philosophical, theological and psychological background.
For the latter stand in immediate correlation with the focal point of all
religion, which is the relation of man, or of a man, to his God. Over this
relation a thousand books penned by Christian theologians and scholars have
expended the most strenuous energies of lucubrated dialectic in support of a
thesis, believed to be the particular gift or pronouncement of the Christian
faith, that made man's acceptance of and surrender to a Supreme Deity allocated
vaguely in cosmic heavens or seated somewhere "behind" all things, the
pivotal element in his soul's salvation. It is safe to say that this conception
of the location, nature and range of the Deity to which man stood in this
fateful relation has been the direct cause of more mental dereliction and
psychic unbalance in the history of the West for sixteen centuries than any
other agency. Misconception and unsound philosophy have presented their bill of
costs to a civilization largely motivated on their predications that is
staggering in its total of wrecked mentality, distracted individual life,
eccentricity of be-
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havior and wide human wretchedness
unequaled in the records of mankind. That a civilization holding sway over
hundreds of millions of persons for some sixteen hundred years should have
entirely misdirected the focus of the psychic effort of its myriad following
upon the wrong location of its guiding Deity, both surpasses belief and defies
the adequate telling. In the vast aggregate of its wastage of human devotion,
this must hold the palm for the most colossal miscarriage of all history.
Always the mind was directed toward a God who was placed at the summit of the
creation, supreme over all and of inconceivable cosmic majesty and power. He
was pictured and described as the One great God of the universe. (Although it
was usually contrived at the same time that he should be represented as a
Person standing in close and intimate relation with each and every individual
human, shrunken almost to the character and proportions of a benevolent
grandfather, with his one arm around one's neck.) The God with whom man was
called upon in all religion to align his life properly was no God within reach
of earth, but one governing the illimitable reaches of cosmos and resident
somewhere in inconceivable form and might and majesty. He was a God whose
beneficent attentions and ministrations poured upon or into the human from
outside, from above. It was almost blasphemy to circumscribe the human
conception of him to such form as could be thought to be an integral and
interior portion of the human himself. That he could be resident within the
boundaries of man's own nature and operative from within outward was an idea
that never came to maturity in the religious mind, albeit it did find some
expression in poetry. Perennially dominant in popular thought was the notion
that religion was the play of forces involved in the relationship between the
mortal person and his God whose residence was somewhere at the summit of cosmic
creation. Never was religion conceived to be the relation between man shallow and
man profound.
Lest it be charged that this
characterization of prevalent and traditional religion is a misstatement of the
case, it is desirable to cite
119
a few out of numberless passages to
support the description. Here is Dr. Hopper (The Crisis of Faith, p.
226) saying, in reference to a statement quoted from Emil Brunner anent man's
being made in God's image, that man manifests
"an existence which points back
or refers to something else. . . . Man's meaning and his intrinsic worth do not
reside in himself, but in the One who stands 'over against him,' in Christ, the
Primal Image, in the Word of God."
Here the Deity is not removed to
cosmic distances but is still kept out of the constitution of man himself,
being allocated to the life of One character in history. It is expressly
declared that the power activating man's salvation does not reside within
himself. It is exterior. Again Dr. Hopper cites Emil Brunner in the statement
that God wills to save us not by "domestic," that is, our own home or
internal, power or genius, but by extraneous righteousness and wisdom, which is
not, says Brunner, a power welling up from within us, not that which originates
on our earth, but that which came down from heaven. Therefore, he goes on, it
is our plain task to look to a righteousness quite outside ourselves and
foreign to our nature. To this end it is first of all necessary in the life of
true religion that "domestic righteousness" should be uprooted and
external influx invited by an attitude of surrender and prayer for help from
God. God indeed stands so far remote from us that if we are ever to gain his
attention to our groveling appeals for mercy, it must be through (the
historical) Jesus, our intercessor with the otherwise inaccessible God.
Then we have Matthew Arnold's famous
phrase defining God: "a power not ourselves that makes for
righteousness." And here is Dr. Hopper again saying that the true center
of the self is not in itself, but lies in God. And he defines true
self-knowledge as the knowledge that not in ourselves is truth to be found, but
outside the self, in God. We are familiar with the prayer-book's weekly
confessional that "in us there is no soundness nor health."
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In short, the power that man is to
know, as his highest culmination of certitude touching his eternal destiny, is
that knowledge unto salvation is not within himself, not even as an attainment,
but must be sought, solicited, entreated and beguiled unto him from divine
sources outside himself, who may be persuaded to vouchsafe it to him finally
irrespective of his own merits or deserts. All man's self-righteousness, even
his whole offering of himself in service to Deity, is profitless; it is as
"filthy rags." Man can be redeemed from his lost estate only by the
free oblation of God's, or his Son's, grace in his behalf. The outcome is
surrender of man to faith in the Infinite God and throwing himself on God's
mercy. It is stated that man's only hope of redemption lies in and through his
relation to God, who is most positively removed outside the pale of man's own
constitution. A thousand citations might be adduced to the same effect.
It is invidious, but necessary, to
declare that all these heaped-up asseverations as to man's dependence upon a
deific power exterior to himself could not have been written but for the fatal
miscarriage of the original Greek philosophic content of early Christianity. It
can likewise be asserted that one breath of restored philosophic wisdom sweeps
them all forever out upon the ashheap of obsolete rubbish. It is oddly true
that, when rightly understood, every one of the assertions under criticism is a
thing of profound truth, yet made disastrously, tragically false by a final
distortion of its meaning by the wrong allocation of the abiding place of Deity
for man. It is of course sublimely true that the pinnacle of man's
self-knowledge is the understanding that his true saving selfhood lies in his
relation to God. But calamity beyond estimate at once rushed in when ignorance
swept away the knowledge that the god with whom he can alone have fellowship
had been placed in immediate conjunction with his own life, embodied indeed in
his own constitution. What God hath joined together let no man put asunder. But
an ignorant and faithless theology did tear asunder what God and life had
joined together, and centuries of theological effort have been turned into a
mocking caricature of truth and sanity as a
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dire result. The upshot has been
that an ecclesiastical power for centuries dominant over the lives and minds of
western humanity has belabored its millions of deluded followers with the
necessity of producing in themselves a veritable psychological self-castration.
It has persuaded, indeed hypnotized them with the conviction that life had laid
heavily upon them the evolutionary charge of saving themselves (from horrendous
eternal fate) by means of a psychological operation the tools and
instruments of which were not all within the scope of their own endowment. It
envisaged for them their redemption from the direst of cosmic calamities
through their consummating a relation with a power which was in no way amenable
to their own initiative or control. It reduced them to the position of
helpless, hopeless, groveling cravens. And it turned their direction of effort
away from, instead of focusing it immediately upon, the power alleged to be
their savior. Human culture at one stroke plunged into futility and rushed
toward certain defeat the moment this twist in human understanding had been
made. It seems quite past belief that it could not be seen that the thousands
of books and millions of sermons dealing with the problem of man's relation to
God would have had the entire crux and dilemma of their difficulty immediately
resolved in clear understanding by the simple philosophical item that the God
with whom man sustained such momentous relation was all the while an integral
part and portion of man's own composition. So that when the problem by its
accepted terms seemed to set man over against an outside power called God, the
difficulty in this across-the-gulf relation could at once be clarified by the
knowledge that the true situation did not set man against an external power,
but only set one element of his own nature over against another equally his
own. And astuter grasp of the whole truth of the matter would have added the
happier knowledge that even the represented antagonism between the two elements
within was only a dramatic mask covering the real fact of the actual mutuality
and entire beneficence of the relation. The placing of God, as the power with
whom man
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was to effect a relation of
reconciliation and atonement, outside the human breast and brain has
been the supreme cultural catastrophe of all history.
Infinite power and mind reside in
the center of cosmos, surely. And this mighty infinitude of power and
intelligence, in its ordering of cosmos, is perpetually affecting the life of
little man. All things flow from it, and it does impinge upon the world of
mankind with the touch of its myriad forces. But with that Infinitude, in
Itself, and as a Whole, man has no relation, none, certainly, that can be
initiated by action from his own end. It is the sheerest imbecility to
predicate the subsistence of such a relation between minor man and the cosmic
God. God is present, as Emerson affirms, in all his parts in every moss
and cobweb. He is present in man and in all about him. But not with God as a
Whole and only with that unit in the life and being of each mortal, does man
stand in close and intimate relation. Only with the infant deity within him can
man have communion. If he can not recognize, cultivate and lay hold of this
much of Deity transcending his own lower animal nature, all his chattering of
rising to share the life of cosmic Godhood is tragic insanity. And the
presumption that such a communion was possible has bred the most frightful
insanity upon the earth.
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CHAPTER X
IMMANUEL'S LAMP
The sane approach to true
understanding is through the realization that God has implanted in each mortal
man a seed fragment of his own life. He has done his utmost to put himself
within the inmost self of every creature. This he can do and has done by
implanting the seed potentiality of his being in each one. More than this he
could hardly do. He brake his own total body into fragments and gave one of
them to each of us. This he did as the one sure way of dowering us with the
capacity and capability of becoming his immortal sons. He has made himself
forever accessible to us by this impartation of sonship, likeness of nature,
adoption by him and final union with his own being. Closer than this he could
not place us or bring us. Better than standing outside of us and listening to
our beseeching, he placed an integral unit of himself immediately within
us, so that we could never be apart from him, never detached from him.
How utterly fatuous, then, and what
age-long heinous folly to instruct millions to overlook the deity immediately
resident within their own native constitution, and direct piteous pleas up to
heaven to draw God's eyes upon them! The whole exertion of human devotion
poured upward to God and the human striving to reach God have been converted
into fantastic fatuity by the ceaseless prodding of the millions at the hands
of ignorant priestcraft to scorn the divinity within the human and to direct
that human to look upward and outward in search of the supreme and absolute
God.
The return to sanity and the
rectification of all inept and withering stupidity in this connection must come
through the recognition, regained from ancient knowledge, that while every
assertion as to
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the dependence of man upon God is
true, vitiation of the meaning must be obviated and thrilling release of power
restored, through the knowledge that the relation between the two elements is a
transaction that takes place wholly in the interior of man's own life. It
transpires within the arena of man's own consciousness, not being a contact
between the man as a whole and another power in no way appertaining to his
scope of being. Man must come again to the possession of the self-knowledge
which assures him that both the human and the divine elements are within his
own range of cultivation. True it must be for him that he can do nothing
without the help of the divine power. The exertions of his merely human self are
in a very real sense futile, without the saving grace of the god. In a
poetic sense they are "as filthy rags." But both the natural man and
the spiritual man are ingredients of himself! The deity that is at hand
to save him is "domestic." It is not extraneous. That it is
has been the fatal falsehood and sad miscarriage of Christian doctrinism. It
has been no less than devastating, calamitous.
Psychoanalysis, arm in arm with
ancient philosophy, comes forward now to correct the falsehood and place man's
redeemer once again within the close reach of the mortal himself. It comes to
make God directly accessible to man again. And it shows how man may reach him
without the abject and stultifying "surrender" of his humanhood, as
the price of buying "grace" from on high. How far afield from truth
and sanity must be that religion which preaches that God would be at pains
through an evolutionary effort covering millions of years with billions of his
creatures to build up such an agency of ongoing as the human consciousness and
its human powers, and then demand that for further advance at the very time
when that consciousness and those powers are gaining strength they should be surrendered
back to him or thrown away as useless! If, however, it is made clear that in
the turn of the cycle of growth, in the changing relation between the two
elements of himself, evolution demands that the human side of him be
subordinated to a
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place of subserviency to the divine
part of him, then understanding can prevail and sanity and intelligence can
direct the movement. The theology of "surrender" can then be held in
true balance and not felt as a tearing of the self apart. It will indeed be seen
in its true light as a more stable integration of the self.
The theological writers have used
the word "man" or its pronoun "he" without regard to Paul's
high-pitched shout at us: "Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus
Christ is within you?" Likewise they have ignored many other scriptural
statements that tacitly or avowedly scream the same mighty truth at us. Always
the insistent exhortation delivered by priestcraft to countless laity was and
is that man should obliterate his humanity in its entirety, that he
should repudiate the whole of his nature, both his meanest and his own best,
and, rejecting himself as a lost creature, turn completely away from himself
and toward God. And this God was unfailingly pointed to as lying outside of,
above, beyond him in infinite transcendence. Even when writers speak of the
necessity of man's self-transcendence, they merely imply the transcending of
himself as a whole through the agency of God's influences exerted upon him from
outside, and not initiated (unless by frantic plea) by man himself. They never
mean that man himself should by his own exertions transcend himself, or that
higher man should transcend lower man, all within the area of his own
capabilities. It is even asserted that God's agencies on man's behalf begin
where man's resources end. Even with Plato's categorical assurance in the Timaeus
(which was for centuries until the coming of Aristotle's works the main
light of Christian scholastic exegesis and theology) that God had implanted in
each human the seeds of his own imperishable divinity and indeed given his
instructions to those conscious units of his own being ere they were dispatched
to earth to be the souls in mortal bodies, Christian understanding never
clearly grasped the implications of this anthropological datum so as to spread
the absolutely crucial intelligence that it was only the mortal part of the
dual creature, man, which was to be put off in
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proportion as the immortal part was
engrafted upon the stem of life.
It is a sad comment necessarily made
on Christian theological ineptitude that while uttering the very words of the
sublimest truth, it still totally missed the ultimate and vital truth of the
language. Never in all history has the shell of the truth been preserved and the
kernel so completely lost as in Christian doctrinism! Here is Augustine, filled
with the sturdy wisdom which he had gained in Manichaeism and while sitting at
the feet of Plotinus, writing the lofty truth (De Civ. Dei, XIV, iv):
"From the soul and from the
body, which are the parts of a man, we arrive at the totality which is man:
accordingly, the life of the soul is not one thing, and that of the body
another: but both are one and the same, i.e., the life of man as man."
With the reservation that of course
Augustine does not mean to wipe out all difference in nature, function and
attributes between soul and body in his assertion of their identity, here is a
Christian statement of the grand truth.
Let us put after it, for comparison,
the passage written in reference to Augustine's statement, from the pen of a
modern writer making an unusually strong apologetic for the Christian system.
It is from Dr. Hopper's The Crisis of Faith, p. 224:
"This definition regards man as
a unit, as a person, as a complex whole--of body, soul and spirit. It is
constant in the Christian view of man. But it is formal and structural, and its
significance does not acquire its full import until this unit, man, is given a
positive orientation towards God, the world and his fellowman such as we find
in the Biblical view of man as an image of God."
Here is truth, as far as words go,
but still the total antithesis of truth in ultimate mental rendering of the
meaning. To be sure, the significant import of the threefold constitution of
man does not come to view until the proper "orientation" of the
elements toward each other is effected. This is considered by the writer of the
passage a point of absolutely vital and final determination. Yet it adds
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not a whit to what is already implicit
and even naïvely seen in the sheer statement of the tripartite composition. If
man has three parts the simplest intellection must assume that the
interrelation of the three is the central thing to be known about them. This is
almost childish in its rudimentary character. But, missing this naïve
discernment, the writer goes on to display his failure of comprehension of the
whole grand import of it all by asserting that the relationship between the
three component elements in man comes to no significance of value until another
relationship, introduced abstractly from outside and superimposed upon the
already total nature of threefold man, is postulated as the central fact of
ultimate and saving import! This is to charge that the equipment which life has
evolved in man and put into his hands for achieving his evolution is not
adequate for the purpose. Life equips man with the means and instrumentalities
for his progress towards life's designed ends and confronts him with the
necessity of forging ahead, with dire punishment the consequence of his
failure. Life holds man responsible for failure in the use of the equipment
provided. Yet, declares the voice of Christian theological lucubration, man's
most sincere and successful endeavor, even his complete fulfillment of his
effort with the tools provided, is failure and defeat. His entire discharge of
the evolutionary task set before him is still nothing either to his credit or
to his victory. He is a miserable beggar still, and if not rescued, without the
least suggestion of his merit or demerit, he is lost. To such unconscionable
miscarriage of sense and logic is Christian theologism driven by its failure to
localize deity within the pale of man's equipment.
This is not to deny for a moment
that there does subsist a relation between threefold man as a unit of being and
the Power manifesting outside his life in the world about him. Every conscious
unit of life or being bears a relation to all other units and to the body,
mind, soul or spirit of the Whole. And this relationship is not
"domestic," but is "extraneous," as Emil Brunner claimed.
But man has no known means of exchanging ideas or maintaining psychic,
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that is, mental or spiritual,
communication, as between one consciousness and another, with the God-mind that
is the central creative power behind the whole cosmos, regarded as external to
himself and treated as a unit consciousness. This supreme mind-power is indeed
"described" by every great philosopher in world thought as the
Unknowable. It is the Infinite. So utterly inaccessible is it to man's puny
mentation that even his attempt to conceive of it is pronounced futile. How
infinitely more futile his effort to communicate with it, as an organic personalized
intelligence, on the basis of any ability to speak to it or to apprehend its
language or thought! That man can "talk with God" in any such sense,
or that this God personalized himself to "talk" to Moses
(regarded as a man, and not man generic or collective) of old, in any
sense conceivable to the human mind, is quite a monstrous absurdity. Sane human
thinking has never accepted it. Rightful conception of what Biblical allegory means
is made possible only when ancient philosophical constructions are apprehended
and in their light it is truly seen that the god (or seed projection of God)
with whom man can communicate is that unit fragment of the divine mind
or consciousness which has been placed within the constitution of the
individual man in its universal distribution among all humans. God placed this
unit germ of himself immediately within the nature of man, for the very purpose
that his own total consciousness need not pay attention to the infinite
myriad needs of the countless creature lives. The idea that--as expressed in
Christian literature throughout the centuries in numberless instances--an
individual human can engage the whole attention of God on his cosmic
throne, considered as the grand unit Total of organic consciousness, is surely
the "all-time low" in mental imbecility. There are no words fitly to
characterize its folly and doltishness. It is the supreme "dunciad"
of history.
Nevertheless it is still sublimely
true that God has provided a way by which a portion of his consciousness is in
attendance upon
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the immediate needs of every
creature. Only it must be conceived and understood with philosophical
rationality and not simpleton folly. It must be understood in the way in which
it is true and not in the supposititious method of its impossibility. God is an
ever-present associate and help in trouble for every one of his creatures, by
virtue of the fact that he has already taken the measure of placing a unit
portion of himself, with the whole of his being potentially latent in it, within
the very organism of the creature. He has sent his "sons" forth to
carry out his work in creation. They are of his identic nature, one with him,
and are in him as he is in them. They are consubstantial with him. Sonship is
theirs through the sheer fact of their being seed emanations or generations
from his own body. They are indeed his own life, projected out from unity into
multiplicity. As the Greeks so clearly expressed it, God distributes his
divine life among all his creatures, since a creature is such only because a
unit of divine life has generated him.
The ancient sages, knowing this,
held it to be blasphemy against God (or the god) for man to "worship"
any power outside himself. Christianity has wrecked this magnificent
perspective and has stultified an enormous percentage of the sincerest effort
of the Occident for sixteen hundred years, by directing man's conscious
aspiration for "God" outside the field of his own area of control.
The havoc and wreckage from this misdirection of serious endeavor in western
world history is past calculation.
To deny the immanent presence of
God's own life and mind within the core of man's being is flatly to reject the
basic teaching of every religion that has inspired the soul of humanity through
all time. It would be to make meaningless the very name of Immanuel, God with
us, God dwelling in us. It would reduce to nonsensical babble the half of all
religious philosophy, the principle of God as immanent deity, and further it
would fly in the face of a positive statement of those scriptures on which the
whole structure of Christian systematism rests,--the Bible. For in the Book
of
130
Ecclesiastes it is unequivocally declared that the soul
is from God. At death, says the Speaker, "the body returns to dust and the
soul to God who gave it."
As a disastrous consequence of
Christian misconception of the lucid ancient meaning of the doctrine of the
immanence of God, there has been unduly prevalent in all Christian history a
chronic hesitancy to commit the governance of man's life and the issues of his
"salvation" wholly into his own hands. The strength and persistence
of this attitude furnishes all needed proof of a calamitous miscarriage of
precious truth. For it bespeaks only too loudly that the term "man"
connoted not man containing God, but man devoid of God. If man of himself could
do nothing to effect his salvation, this very predication could be made only on
the assumption that his nature included no part of God's presence in him. There
has been a fear of letting man stand and wage his evolutionary battle alone.
Always the road to a safe retreat was kept open, so that in case of dire need
he could fall back upon and receive help from God, the great power transcending
him. The half-timid reminders that God is ever present in his entire creation
were minimized, if not positively negated, by the ever-resurgent asseveration
that of himself man can do nothing. God in the end must elect to save him, and
"grace" is a voluntary free gift from God. Man can neither earn it
nor demand it. He can only beg for it. All of which blandly and blindly ignores
the hub truth of the whole situation, that God has already placed all of his
power that the personality of man can hold directly within his organism and all
that man needs to do is to awake to the fact of its presence there and to learn
how to utilize it to highest practical advantage.
The glaring fatuity of the
traditional Christian position is seen in the consideration that from the
premises of the problem, the given terms of the situation from the outset, it
is a chimera of ignorance to assume that man can stand alone, actually
cut off from divine influence. It is now and ever has been impossible for him
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to stand apart from and bereft of
God's presence. For one half of him is God. As he can not dispossess
himself of one half of his organic selfhood, and can not dismantle the
structure of his being, he simply can not stand without God. For God is not
only in him from the beginning, but half of himself is God. To stand outside of
God one would have to destroy oneself. And so he never needs to go outside
himself to find God. Every religion above coarse animism and fetishism has in
perpetual chorus exhorted humanity in its search for God to cease looking
outward and to probe ever more deeply within. This is so true that all too much
of religion has run into exaggerated introversion, where it has grown moldy and
sickly. The argument here is categorical and not debatable. The testimony is
uncontestable and its meaning unequivocal.
This gross distortion of Christian
theology which took the conception of its millions of devotees as to the
accessibility of divinity from its true location within the soul of humanity
and placed it afar in cosmic heavens, has been a predisposing cause, no less
than colossal in effect, of untold suffering in Western life. It has indeed
been one of the chief ingredients in the fear complexes besetting Western cast
of mind, and has under our very eyes led myriads down into mental unbalance and
neurotic derangement. Abnormal religiosity is credited statistically with
sending more inmates to mental sanatoria than even sex abnormality.
Dr. Hopper concludes an unctuous
passage asseverating man's final dependence upon God--conceived as outside
himself, since anthropomorphized and personalized in the Christ of the Gospels,
a historical person--with the sentence (The Crisis of Faith, p. 226):
"Outside of Christ there is no
humanism, properly speaking, but only a perverse humanity."
Humanism, he argues, can not be the
true basis of philosophy, because in the ultimate man must look above, beyond,
outside himself, for the only real ground of his redemption. Yet this is said
seriously, in spite of the fact that this author has written elsewhere
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a sentence that negates and
falsifies the one just quoted--if it is true (p. 235):
"The self is a synthesis of the
finite and the infinite."
The latter is a true and well-knit
declaration. And it throws every word of the first statement into untruth.
Humanism is in the end the only
basis for a rational and correctly grounded philosophy open to man's acceptance
and operation. If all the elements of his problem are not within his
conscious control--if a single one, and that the most vital of all, is not
within his prerogative, but lies outside and beyond his reach in a distant God,
then man is nothing but a marionette with the wires of his activities pulled by
a deus ex machina, and his own effort does, truly and
horrifyingly, not avail him a whit. But this is unthinkable. The human mind must
believe that its own human effort counts. Humanity would be engulfed in
perpetual despair and life would be a persistent mocking irony, cruel and
pitiless, if the mind could believe that effort counted for nothing. To
deprive the human life of the sense of its counting for ultimate good or evil
in every act, since there is the ingrained consciousness of moral
responsibility in every act, would be to rob life of the fundamental dignity
appertaining to it. For without accountability for our acts there could be no
groundwork for dignity. The entire ethics of great revered religious systems
would be a laughing travesty if human effort did not avail. For every such
system exhorts to righteousness and outlines the penalties flowing from unrighteousness.
But the humanism that should replace
a dependence upon transcendental deity must be one that does not leave God out
of the human constitution. The crime of orthodox religionism is in tearing God
out of the human organism; the crime of equally blind humanism is in leaving
God out of it. The first puts deity in the wrong place; the second omits it
altogether. There can be no humanism, but only half-humanism, or more
definitely animalism, if God is left entirely out of the situation. More than
the animal-
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human must be recognized in the
definition of man. The divine-human must be admitted. Taking Dr. Hopper's and
Augustine's own words, that man is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite,
the animal and the god, meeting on the plane of the human, then true humanism
becomes the proper name for the philosophy that unites all the essential
elements of the total problem. So that man need not go out of doors to achieve
his proper and salutary alignment with the ascending scales of reality.
It can so readily be seen how the
whole structure of the ethico-spiritual problem has been contorted into an
endless tangle of semi-true and semi-false presentations by the mere failure to
know and concisely distinguish the two sides of the duality in man's make-up.
It has arisen because theologians continued to place God outside of man,
despite all the many categorical assertions in the sacred scriptures of the
world that he was an element within the area of man's own conscious being. To
aver that man is a hopelessly lost creature, enmired irredeemably in the sin of
his own fallen nature, and that he must go out and seek God upon whom to anchor
securely the hope of his salvation, is precisely like hypnotizing a person and
telling him he must go find his hat, which he has forgotten is on his head all
the while.
The Hindus have an allegory of the
gods in the beginning of human creation. God had agreed to grant his immortal
and divine nature to man, but in order that man should learn to value these
great gifts at their true worth, the question arose, how the supernal gift
should be communicated to him and where located, so as to be accessible, yet
not too easily. One of the celestial hierarchy suggested that it be placed on
the highest mountain top, where man would have to exert himself strenuously and
climb high to obtain it. Another ventured to name the depths of the sea, where
great ingenuity would be required to discover it. Finally God himself settled
the question: "We will put it in the very last place he will ever think of
looking for it--in the hidden depths of his own being."
Of all religions Christianity has
been the most ludicrously self-
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duped. It sends back an echo of
lying mockery to Paul's ringing shibboleth, "Christ in you, the hope of
glory." Christianity is far more harlequin than Diogenes looking with a
lantern to find an honest man. It is going about looking for the lantern which
it is already carrying.
Jesus said peremptorily, Ye shall
have no need of the sun to shine by day, nor the moon by night, for--ye have
light in yourselves! "Let your light shine." Bring it out from under
the bushel of inhibitions and obscurations imposed on it by the carnal nature
and set it on the hilltop of your own being. Ye are the light of the
world; but how great and fatal the surface blindness that fails to recognize
the light in its shining!
Perennial obtuseness has marked the
effusions of pious theologism because in advancing predications concerning the
relation of man to God, the word "man" was used in a sense which from
the start abstracted the divine half of the synthesis of god-man from the total
man. This left man standing as mere animal, which of course needs to look
upward to God for evolutionary help. But man is not mere animal. Let Plato
reassure us: "Through body it is an animal; through intellect it is a
god." What can be the meaning of the many scriptural passages which say
that the sons of God came down to earth to share our mortal nature, if not that
they are incorporated with us in the same organism? Had the true synthetic
conception of man, as embracing (the germ of) deity in his own composite
entification been held intact, the entire course of Occidental history, which
has been a holocaust of frightfulness under Christian guidance--indeed under
Christian compulsion--would have been charted over happier pathways.
A revered scripture asks: "Who
by searching can find out God?" Yet a sacred tome of the Hindus with equal
pertinence places God closer to us than our very flesh: "Closer than
breathing, nearer than hands and feet." Laplace said that he had pointed
the most powerful telescope into all parts of the heavens and no trace of God
could be found. Rather should he have pointed the instrument
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in the opposite direction, not to
the outer objective world but to the inner subjective one. The reason Laplace
did not find God with the telescope was that he looked for God under a wrong
description. Of course he did not find the anthropomorphic Personage he
pretended to be seeking. Yet he was seeing God all the time, seeing his outward
body, or seeing him as Emerson says we see him, in every blade of grass. No
less do we see him in both the worthiness and the ignobility of human thought
and action. This, of course, is in the universal sense, which takes the cosmos
as the personality of God and the whole as his life. More specifically, yet
just as truly, God is twofold, like his reflection and miniature, man. He is
mind and he is body. But it has been a universal habit of human thought to
demean his body, the physical, the material side of life, while glorifying the
"spiritual." In this general sense, then, the things seen and
manifested are his body, as Pope put it, and the unseen order and movement are
his mind at work. But if God has a body, of which solar and stellar systems and
galaxies are the cells and organs, it is, according to human modes of
conception, no less proper to say this is God than to exclude it from the
definition and description of him and to say that only his soul is he. When we
see a man coming down the street, we say, There is the man, or That is the man.
We do not make an arbitrary distinction between his physical and his conscious
self, accepting the one and rejecting the other. We take him as the man, body
and soul. Likewise did Plato, Augustine and the wise ones of old. Not until
errant modern conception takes him in the same way, as the synthesis of his
two--or three--natures, including both his animality and his divinity alike and
wholly within the scope of the term "man," will tragic chaos in
mortal thought be diminished. When that happy amendment of bad philosophy is
consummated, there will be an end to the groveling pleas from morbid and
mawkish religiosity for man to surrender his inherent dignity and to deny and
scorn his own powers to climb the evolutionary ladder. The corrupt Christian
theology, while it has out of one side of its mouth claimed the
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exclusive distinction of being the
religion that has proclaimed the dignity of man the individual, has out of the
other corner with pitiful effectiveness crushed that very dignity by
abstracting the divine leaven out of man's mixed composition and by beating
down his self-sense to the abject level of the worm. This historic hypocrisy
and duplicity of Christianity lacks little of being the most hurtful disservice
rendered to the race by any religion. When corrected, no longer will it be the
sickly fashion to preach to man that he must be saved by God, externally.
Instead he will be told that the man of him will be saved by the god of him,
and the face of humanity will at once be irradiated with the benignant glow of
a new understanding. His mind will be redeemed from its jangling discord with
truth to a grateful and renewing harmony with it.
When to this readjustment in his
conceptual life there is added the discernment in psychology that man's
conscious is the living moment between his stored past and his potential
future, that it is open at all times to the ingress of motivations from both
sides, then also will sane comprehension come to birth and a new range of
intelligent government of psychic states will be brought under conscious
control. At last there will be evolved out of the depths of good human
intelligence the more specific technique of the god's control of the animal in
the human breast. People will be freed more and more from the devastating sweep
of massive emotionalism misdirected by bad philosophies, and will more soberly,
yet more happily, place the hand of philosophical wisdom at the helm of their
life direction. They will know that deep within them dwells the unconscious,
with its greater wisdom available for their guidance, if they learn the better
to lure it down into the conscious.
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CHAPTER XI
THE BATTLE ON THE HORIZON
There is a strange corollary that
runs with the recognition of the dual segmentation or composition of man's
nature. Psychoanalysis has brought out some aspects of it. The duality
manifests in a rather remarkable series of correspondences between the
phenomena on both sides.
It can start from Paul's declaration
that the natural precedes the spiritual. "First that which is natural,
then that which is spiritual," says the Apostle. As must obviously be the
case, the body of God must be formed and in function before his spirit can
manifest its life in any given area of creation. Spirit must be
instrumentalized or implemented if it is to create and animate concrete worlds.
It must first form its instrument with and through which to work.
The clear intimations from these
reconstructions of ancient wisdom following its fatal mutilation at the hands
of medieval benightedness constitute a new mandate for all true religion. The
clarified knowledge provides the magna carta for a religion redeemed from
psychic charlatinism and sanctified hypocrisy, from bigotry, nescience and
insincere motivations, to become again, as of old, the moral and spiritual
beacon of mankind. The new-found correlation or kinship between the modern
discovery of the unconscious and ancient philosophical and psychological
principia invests religion once again with dignity and with a sanctity that
springs from recognition of the deeper intrinsic values now perceived to lie
within the psychic area. The ultimate criterion of sanctity is always that of
utility or beneficence for the whole advance of an evolving entity toward its
destined goal. Things are not sanctified merely by being held in traditional
and often artificial awesomeness.
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They become sacred by being found
contributory to values rated high in the economy of most enduring good.
Foremost of all among the beneficial
agencies which the combined new and old psychic sciences now place afresh at
the service of mankind is the understanding of the vital technique by which
religion must work pointedly and not diffusely toward its high ends. The nub of
a religious striving that will be efficient to the highest degree is now
indicated as centered in the relation between the conscious and the
superconscious. This is the chief point and nodal focus at which the effort
toward a spiritual uplift of the individual must be directed. For here is the
locale of the great aeonial Battle of Armageddon, which the Egyptians so
astutely allegorized as being fought at the meeting-point between the
subconscious and the superconscious, the "horizon" line between them.
Progress and well-being will henceforth be measurable by the amount of the
potential quality of the superconscious or divine nature which can be brought
down "out of heaven" by the conscious, incorporated in its daily
program of self-directed activity and made a permanent possession by
transference through habit to the custody of the subconscious. If man does not
wish to remain bound in the automatic unconscious of his animal mentality, he
must bestir himself to throw off old habitudes and elevate the tenor of his
life by bringing down more luminous and more dynamic potential from the god-ego
dwelling in the area of higher frequencies of vibrational consciousness
awaiting the perfecting of his receptive capacity.
The Old Testament Psalms and
Proverbs and the New Testament books alike strike hard at the human vices
of sloth and lukewarmness. The exigencies of the soul's incarnational situation
and the terms of the covenant entered into with the higher deity before
descending alike demand the ego's close attention to the evolutionary mission
he came here to discharge. The old books continue to insist that the thing is
urgent, that opportunity passes with time and that there are tides in the
affairs of evolution that can not be missed
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without having penalty. Disregard of
opportunity will entail serious consequence. One is enjoined to be
"diligent in business, fervent in spirit" in serving the Lord of
higher consciousness. The business of the inner mind is paramount in the
enterprise. The great human ordinance of the Sabbath was instituted to the end
that one entire day in every seven should be devoted to the interests of the
presiding genius of the organism, following six days given to the secular
matters pertaining to the physical life. A new light indeed might creep over
the face of humanity if this one day was truly consecrated, not to morbid
sentimentalism and groveling pietism but to philosophical enlightenment and the
combined ministration of intelligence and beauty. For "without vision the
people perish," proclaimed the prophet, the true-speaker of old. The
pathway to more radiant and more abundant life runs in one direction and along
one fairly narrow track. It runs atop the ridge of open consciousness lying
between the subconscious and the superconscious. Only on that path has man
accessibility to the god. The only true and right felicity for the mortal lies
in opening as widely as may be the highway between his mortal self and the
deity who has, in a dramatic sense, condescended to come to take up residence
in the upper reaches of his demesne. The only or at least final criterion of
culture is the degree to which the conscious mind can lay itself open in ever
more expanded receptivity to the vibrations of the superconscious. These are
always pitched, so to say, in the octave immediately above its ordinary or
habitual range. Whatever technique will be found to govern the development of
this enhanced capacity or this high art will be the most "practical"
skill and employ the greatest genius in all the area of life. It will embody
the principles of the science of true culture. For it will empower its
practitioner to place himself directly in touch with the flowing currents of
both meaning and value, under the influence of the most dynamic release of
vital quality that life can give to man. It is in truth man's communion with
God.
It must never be forgotten, however,
that the god himself is
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climbing the ladder of evolution,
the same as is the human and the animal. The poverty of modern knowledge in the
field of anthropology consists mainly in the total want of understanding that
man is not a simple unit of organization, but is in reality a composite creature,
compounded of flesh, feeling, thought and spiritual will, each necessarily
subsisting within the organism by virtue of a body of material fineness or
coarseness exactly constituted to express its vibration of life. The highest
grade of this hierarchy of being is of course the leader and the king. And he
is far ahead of his companion travelers. He stands in the higher grade in the
school of evolution. Where he stands his younger associates will stand later
on. What is important for intelligence is that the god requires the experience
of incarnation in order to actualize his as yet undeveloped potential of
reality in the concrete. This is almost a lost canon of understanding, yet it
is strategically close to the nub of all practical wisdom. The god is subject
to the law of being which makes polarization of the two nodes of reality,
spirit and matter, the operative modus of evolving life. As Plotinus has told
us more clearly than anyone else, the soul comes into earthly body in order to
develop her latent capacities into actual faculties. He says: "It is not
enough for the soul merely to exist; she must show what she is capable of
begetting." She remains, he adds, "ignorant of what she
possesses" until she is made aware of her potential riches through her
deployment of them in answer to the exigencies and contingencies met in a life
of actual awareness in a physical body on a planet. That which is real, but as
yet unmanifest in the creatural consciousness, must be actualized, to
follow Plotinus again, in a life of open consciousness. And for this
possibility and this service she is dependent upon her union, for cycle after
cycle, with the negative energies of a physical body.
We find Dr. Hopper (The Crisis of
Faith, p. 257) saying that which is a crucial nub of understanding:
"Men of wisdom ever since
[Socrates] have held that true self-knowledge is the clue to fulness of
life."
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And he adds (p. 259):
"Everything depends on man's
understanding of himself as he relates himself to the Absolute. He must know
himself both inwardly and outwardly against the perspective of the ultimate
meaning of things. He must know himself not merely as one object among other
objects, but as an immediate subject of experience occupying inwardly the
precarious point of infinite commitment."
Here is indeed great truth
expressed, worth deep reflection. The statement that man only comes to know
himself as he relates himself to the Absolute, the core of real being, and that
he must know himself against the background of the ultimate meaning of things,
is downright truth. But the immediate practical implication of this insight has
never been seen or acted upon. If man can not guide his course intelligently
unless he knows, broadly, his ultimate goal, which knowledge alone can
invest his every step with its true meaning, then the deduction is sound, that
philosophy is the most important study his mind can engage in. This was the
insistence of the wise men of old who named philosophy as the kingly or divine
science. It has never been decisively apprehended that the rightness of the
present stride can not be determined if the long perspective of man's path and
the distant vision of the ultimate goal, or, as Aristotle called it, the entelechy,
is not known. To walk--and to have to walk--now, with no knowledge of
whither the walking is to take one, or what is the proper direction of the
walking, is the hazardous predicament of man when he is without philosophy. And
the psychoanalysts tell us from clinical experience, that people who have no
positive philosophy go mad. A world without positive philosophy has gone mad,
again and again. It is not to the credit of Christianity that in the third
century it killed philosophy and substituted faith. Renaissance came when the
shift was made from faith back to (ancient) philosophy. The implications of
this turn in history have never been canvassed. It is a costly dereliction.
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That the race might have in its
childhood the requisite knowledge to guide its historic conduct aright toward a
known distant goal, religion was fashioned to embrace philosophy, and that in
turn embraced anthropology and cosmology. These were accounted necessary to
enable man to orient himself aright in his evolutionary environment. It told
him where he stood, whence he had so far come, whither he was progressing, what
was his set task and what his own equipment to perform it. It told him he was
the human, standing on the horizon line between the heaven of spiritual
immortality and the earth of physical mortality. It told him his present
consciousness was a blend of incipient divine mind with the mind of the
subconscious animal. "An animal's mind shall be given unto him," says
Daniel to the king, and the king always typified the divine in man. Lecky
observes in his famous History of European Morals that in ancient days
"philosophy had become to the educated most literally a religion."
The later decay of religion was brought on and marked by the decadence of
philosophy and the substitution of pietistic unction.
It is a point of great significance
which is brought out in Dr. Hopper's sentence last quoted, that man must know
himself as the subject of experience occupying "the precarious point of
infinite commitment." Brilliant light would be released again for the
human mind if it could recover the principle of truth known to the ancient
Egyptians that the only point at which potential power or quality becomes actual--where
the static electricity of life and mind is transformed into kinetic or power
current--is at the meeting point between the positive node of conscious spirit
and the negative anode of unconscious matter. In this life, described by the
Egyptians as "the lake of equipoise," and in symbolism known as the
zodiacal house of Libra the Balance, life is brought from latency or
unconsciousness out upon the plane of open consciousness, or the actual.
Intelligence should long since have
caught the esoteric hint from the prefix "con" in consciousness.
It means "with" or "together."
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Consciousness comes only when the
two segments or ends of being are linked together in tensional relation and
opposite pull. Reality burgeons forth into actuality at the mid-point of
neutralization. As the scriptures have so forcefully shouted at us, life must
be weighed in the balance, in the scales of the judgment, that from the test
its true being may come forth and be known to and by itself. Life can scarcely
engender consciousness if it does not split asunder into the dual polarity. For
to know itself it must objectify itself to itself, and for this purpose it must
stand itself as matter aside from and over against itself as spirit. There can
be no consciousness unless there is something for it to be conscious of.
Consciousness can not exist in the vacuum of sheer Absoluteness.
The Egyptians denominated the god in
evolution "Lord of the Balance." With conscious power developed he
stands in control of the equilibration between the soul of life and the
physical embodiment and strives to maintain the equipoise between the two
entities. The conscious mind is therefore the ground arena of the battle, the
focal point of the energization.
Psychoanalysis has gained so much of
primal wisdom as goes with the knowledge of the unconscious. Its next great
forward stride must be to establish the principle of the duality in the
unconscious, the subconscious and the superconscious, and the great realization
that the conscious, the prime seat of all value-actualization, is the point of
neutralization between the two poles of man's being. Then the science will be
in position to advance to new accomplishments in practique and more competent
service to the race.
It is quite worth noting what Dr.
Hopper says (p. 248) relative to the threefold constitution of man:
"This distinction will be
clearer if we consider that man, according to this understanding, is not a
static somewhat to be comprehended formally,--as intellect, feeling, will,
etc.,--but that he must be understood as a creature in motion, as
already in course of action. He is a viator, a creature who must go a
way."
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It is amazing that this decidedly
pivotal understanding has not been given insistent accentuation in
philosophical systematism. It is equally amazing that almost nothing has been
made of it even when, as here, it is mentioned. And never have the absolutely
necessary corollaries of the datum been scrutinized and unfolded. A great deal
of philosophical speculation has been a mere shameless dodging of the overt
palpable issue presented by accurate observation of the prime data. Here it is
affirmed, and with great truth, that man is a viator; he is going a way. Never
has it seemed to occur to speculative philosophy that two or more questions
immediately and necessarily stand knocking for answers when this is affirmed.
If he is on his way, whence has he come, whither is he going, and indeed also,
why is he out on the highway at all? Why is he a-journeying and what is his
destination? Ancient cosmology and anthropological science rendered voluble
answers to these questions. Modern philosophy shuns them. Ancient wisdom
comprehended the answers; modern philosophy is poverty-stricken and lacks the
resources for reply.
If man is a viator, as far as modern
acumen goes, he is traveling onward, after some eighty brief summers, to
individual death and extinction! By killing arcane philosophy in the early
centuries, our endowments of millions of dollars for great universities have
brought forth the squeaking mouse of a Bertrand Russell's "philosophy of
despair." The only thing surely known to modern science is that we are
traveling a hard path to--annihilation! Our solar system will cool and
life--our life--become extinct. "We pass this way but once" is the
perennial slogan of average worldly "philosophy" today. Its
corollary, "let us eat, drink and be merry," has set the tune for
common motivation to dance to. As for the post mortem future, religion
vaguely asserts it will be eternal peace and rest. Oblivion, and no more toil,
sweat, blood and tears.
Ancient sagacity knew differently.
The soul was described as "the persistent traveler on the highways of
eternity." The divine soul in man says in the Egyptian books that he is
"stepping onward
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through eternity." Modern
thought has no more extended vision than to depict the soul as saying, "I
am Today." Egypt presents the same soul as saying, "I am Yesterday,
Today and Tomorrow." "Eternity and everlastingness is my name."
The ancient world, instructed by
"just men made perfect" in knowledge and wisdom, knew that man is
indeed a viator through the cycles of time and the kingdoms of matter. Present
vapid religion and jejune philosophy have scarcely the intellectual stamina to
face the relevant questions, whence and whither. And the sorriest matter of all
is the apparent belief that it makes no difference to man's mental stability
whether he knows he is traveling a brief and stony path to death and oblivion,
or whether he is on his way, through storm and sunshine, to an endless
unfoldment of radiant life.
It is perhaps not surprising that
the attitude of complacency in the face of total want of knowledge as to
evolutionary paths, aims and goals should have become an expression of devout
religionism in the modern day. For religion had dropped philosophy in the fatal
third century and has had to fall back upon substitute formulae and mechanisms
of escape and comfort. Prominent among pronouncements as to the
non-philosophical character of modern religion are the two lines of Cardinal
Newman's famous hymn:
"I do not ask to see the
distant scene;
One step enough for me."
Ancient Egypt did not hold with this
sentiment, but, fortified with definite knowledge of man's continuity of life,
lived in the present and faced the future with a cheer and a fortitude based on
something more vital than faith.
In the Mithraic system the soul of
man was represented as saying at one point in the ritual: "I am the star
wandering about with you and flaming up from the depths." In Egyptian the
words "star" and "soul" came to an identity in the word Seb.
In ancient depiction of truth and reality under nature symbols the soul
that came to
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animate the animal man was presented
to thought as veritably a star of divine life, light and energy descending from
the heavens to inhabit a physical body. The symbol of a soul coming down to
earth was the falling star, along with the imagery of the evening sun sinking
into the earth or water.
The logic that supported the ancient
mind in its assurance of the soul's immortality was simple and natural. The
soul was a fragment of the divine life, energy and mind of God himself. As such
it was as indestructible as the whole of which it was a germinal or seminal
portion. As the whole visible world of manifestation was generated and
sustained by the energies of cosmic mind, and mind generated it cyclically and
periodically, surely mind was the eternal force behind the series of appearing
and disappearing manifestations. The worlds might fade away again and again,
but mind remained to create them anew. And the fragments of cosmic mind did not
sally forth into cosmic adventure and undergo the stress and strain of
incarnation merely to throw away all their hard and slowly won gains at the end
of each sojourn in body. The ancients knew how life and mind husbanded and
preserved the fruits and harvests of victories won in the battle with matter.
With the closing up of the Platonic Academies in the fifth century and the
utter suppression of the systems of esoteric philosophy for fifteen centuries
the world of the west was left to drift along the historical road entirely
without the pilotage of guiding wisdom. The horrendous record of those
centuries bears testimony to the fatal consequences of despoiling human life of
an enlightened philosophy.
Psychoanalysis now enters the arena
of human striving after truth and knowledge and its discovery of the
unconscious marks one of the great forward steps out of the murks of medieval
errancy and obfuscation of mind. It supplies empirical data to corroborate what
could be sensed only by enlightened philosophical vision, that the decay of
philosophy precipitates minds into conditions of neurotic instability. This
is the recovery of an item of knowledge that was well established in Plato's
day and is one of the few real advances
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toward higher culture made in the
modern age. Ancient Greek thought regarded the soul in incarnation as having
lost her true bearings under the illusive dominance of fleshly concerns and as
wandering in a fog of ignorance, from which state she was only to be redeemed
to knowledge and true intelligence by philosophy. Philosophy was held to be the
true knowledge of divine things. The soul, it was affirmed, could not relate
itself properly to its task in incarnation if it totally lacked the assurance
of its divine origin, the nature and value of its mission to earth and the
general scheme and purport of its evolutionary enterprise. Philosophy was the
essential foundation of moral rectitude, of equanimity and stability of mind
and of the good life in general.
It is quite important to note what
Chandler Bennitt has to say in his work The Real Use of the Unconscious. He
is discussing healing, but sets it over, as a special technique, against
"understanding," or what could be called philosophy:
"Healing is not understanding.
At long last it is always something less. In the living sense in which I use
understanding, the most final statement of the case is not that we must be
healed if we would understand, nor even that we must understand in order to be
healed; it is that understanding is its own way and its own god where healing
is not, and that as we increasingly understand in our entire being, whatever
must still be left to the specific technique of healing will be less and less a
vital matter. Meanwhile I believe that even in what are accepted therapeutic
issues, it will more and more be recognized that the individual cannot
cooperate in the healing medical realities where their application contravenes
his still more fundamental sense of things."
What Mr. Bennitt here denominates
understanding and again refers to as a "still more fundamental sense of
things" is equivalent to what the ancient sages termed philosophy. His
evaluation of it as a more basic and essential element in the psyche than any
temporary or specific influence employed in healing is a discernment matching
the ancients' knowledge of its place deep in the core of human being. This
observation of Bennitt's should stand as a re-
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buke and corrective for much modern
spiritual-cult preachment and practique. Eccentric religionism has given a
tremendous vogue to the notion that physical healing is the indisputable proof
of the rightness of the cult philosophy in whose name the healing is performed.
Not only is this not so, according to this psychoanalyst, but the vital truth
is that the healing is always less important than the philosophy. The thing of
intrinsic value is always the understanding in its deepmost issues. It is the
eventual determinant of the individual's health or his need of healing.
Understanding is ultimately the ruling factor in the individual's life, and
healing is only an effort to rectify disturbance when understanding has not
held a true grip on the life.
It is evident, on this analysis,
that there lies buried deep in the organism a sense and apperception of values
in incarnational life that transcends by far the welfare of the body and its
illness or health. Again it must be granted that such values must be connected
with a part of man that does not perish with the body. These values do not rise
and fall in any immediate or direct parallelism with the rise and fall of the
condition of the body. They are obviously not fully enhanced by the body's
healthiest state nor deflated by its worst condition. Bennitt ventures to
assert that they verily transcend the issue of life and death alike.
"Our life object is not merely
not to die, nor even to live long and healthily. It is to attain the ultimate
realness . . . our daily aim is further and more deeply to integrate our
existence . . . as we go. It is with these finalities and these practicalities
that I am concerned."
And he adds:
"Greatly as any individual in
trouble may desire to be well, he will do this only for something further. I
automatically assume that any patient has a sense of his business in life as
something beyond health. This business includes his deepest total connection
with reality."
No healing can come, he states
further, through any specific medical or psychological technique, when the
individual's evolution-
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ary status is such that frustrations
and troubles can be handled "only by the realities of advance in a living
understanding, and not merely by those of ill health and cure." And such
guidance from the inner daimon, he says, "can be given only by an
individual who is himself deeply in touch with meaning." Meaning is indeed
the touchstone of the whole matter. The mind that can not discern the forms of
meaning into which the events of life and the cosmos fall is little better than
a piece of flotsam on the moving wave. It is heading for imminent wreckage.
Indeed Bennitt expresses a climactic maxim when he says that "truth must
make not only sense, but significance; it must be not only clear, but
meaningful."
All this is cardinal truth, and well
spoken. Bennitt is on the right track; modern psychology at last is on the
right track. The new science of semantics is an important formulation. Meaning,
even transcending significance, is the keynote of the modern mental
movement. There are issues that lie deeper than even health and success in the
worldly sense, that are not, necessarily, met and satisfied with a healthy body
and a long life. These must be the concern of some other portion of man than
his external self, for health and long life would pretty completely fulfill the
main needs of bodily man. By inference they must appertain vitally to the
history of the ego-soul. And this is the unconscious. The ego has his own
interests. He is wrestling doubtless with the exigencies and crises, the halts,
impasses, deadlocks, obstructions, frustrations that mark his progress on the
upward road. As his life is subterranean to that of the body he tenants, the
symptoms which these contingencies bring to manifestation in some form of
disturbance in the life may not be obvious or clear to the outer mind. Hence
the need of a special technique that probes beneath the surface phenomena to
locate the more esoteric and occult origin of inharmony. This technique is the
special discovery and implement of psychoanalysis.
If the new approach of modern
psychology to spiritual esotericism through the discovery of the unconscious is
not beaten down and obscured and again lost by the oppression of crude
mechanistic
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philosophies so rampant in the age,
this period of history will be catalogued by later analysts as marking the dawn
of the recovery of ancient truth after sixteen centuries of benightedness. For
now again, as in ancient times when wisdom reigned, the part of the divine soul
in human life, in its health and in its ills, is recognized and healing
practice embraces a technique which penetrates to the inner seat of the soul
instead of treating merely the outward superficial symptoms. The body is in
Greek soma and the soul is psyche. Perhaps it is yet a long way
to the place where in the treatment of human maladies psychology based on the
soul will be the most effective curative agency and philosophy the perennial
preventative medicine.
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CHAPTER XII
THE CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN
It has been a maxim of both biology
and philosophy that each individual recapitulates in the early or initial
stages of its growth the entire previous phylogenetic history of the species to
which it belongs and indeed that of all zoölogical evolution. This is to say
that each new individual in the stream of evolving life quickly retraces in its
birth and early growth the biological history of the race from monocell up to
the complex and differentiated forms at the point it itself occupies. The
childhood of the individual then republishes the long-past childhood of the
race. The human foetus clearly exhibits the stages of unicell, multicell, worm,
reptile, bird, vertebrate, mammal and all intermediate forms up to the human as
at present constituted. It would have been thought that the knowledge of a
principle of evolution so pregnant with intimation as this should have yielded
more patent discovery and application than it seems to have done.
That it has come forward as a
principle of elucidation and understanding in the field of psychoanalysis, however,
is one of the robust attestations of the great basic rightness and fruitfulness
of this modern development in psychology. In full view of the profounder
aspects of the human psyche revealed by this new science it will not come as a
surprise that psychoanalytic research has discovered almost the principle keys
and solutions of the complexities of mental problems in the previously
disdained terrain of childhood. The chief clues to the unbalance and
irrationality manifesting in adult life are generally to be traced back to
inhibitions and frustrations in childhood. The experiences undergone even in
infancy are seen to set the stage for abnormalities that come to the surface in
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later life. The child conditions the
man. Childhood comes first and through the intense sensitiveness of its
consciousness to impressions and its durable retention of memories it in
reality gives birth to the adult man. Men and women are but grown children. The
substance of mind can be said to be in childhood quite plastic, hardening and
crystallizing, however, as childhood passes. The impressions made upon it in
its tenderer condition at the start become solidified for permanency and fix
the life habitudes over the pattern of the first molds. He who can bend the
twig has shaped the tree. He who conditions the child has formed the man.
In the course of time it was
destined that psychological investigations should seek the causes of mental
abnormality back in the individual's childhood. The evidences of this
connection were abundant and would not forever miss discovery. The finding was
delayed only by the inveterate recalcitrancy of the modern mind to the wisdom
of the past. Principles announced in the tomes of archaic mastership would all
along have furnished modern research with the fundamenta of discovery and a
true psychological science. For every fresh revelation coming from present-day
study in the field of psychology is but a re-affirmation of data known of old.
Such a splendid work as Jung's The
Psychology of the Unconscious is largely an elucidation of the symbols and
dramatizations found occurring in the dreams of his patients, and all
approached and systematized through a comparative analysis of them with the
stories and formulations of ancient mythology! The world has not yet
appreciated the significance of this correlation. That a psychoanalyst should
have to resort to the allegedly fanciful if not fantastic constructions of such
products of racial child-mindedness as mythology and folk-lore for keys and
formulae by which to reach a comprehension of the dreams of a modern young
woman, has not been measured in its true dimensions of significance. And that
the same psychologist has been able to announce that he has, in life-long
study, found the same set of symbols promenading in the dreams of his modern
patients as he has found in the whole field
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of ancient religious symbolism, in
the Bibles and folk-lore of the nations to remote antiquity, is again a fact
which has not found its true evaluation. The obfuscations of medieval
benightedness still dim our vision and make us slow to recognize great truth
even when we stand in its very doorway.
We stand, then, face to face with
these great determinations: the basic conditioning factors in the individual's
psychological life are established largely in childhood and, for purposes of
later rectification, must be re-located and dealt with through adult correction
of infantile fixations; the propensities and instincts dominating the child
mind, and thus clinching their hold on the whole of the life period of the
individual, are both analogous and directly kindred to the instincts and
proclivities of the race as a whole in its infancy, and are dramatized
in consciousness by the same symbols now as then; and lastly that the whole
battle in consciousness for all individuals is epitomized in the finale by the
formulary that it is the eternal struggle between the reason, knowledge,
intelligence and wisdom of the divine counterpart in man, that comes to open
consciousness in adult life, on the one side, and the instinctive,
natural, irrational, infantile forces of physical life, that dominate in the childhood
period, on the other. Both in the individual and in the race as a whole,
the great Battle of Armageddon goes on between the powers of adulthood and
those of childhood. In the terms of Greek or Platonic philosophy it is the
conflict of the higher dianoia, or thorough knowing, the genius of
divine intelligence in man, with the irrational instincts of the purely animal
nature, which man shares by virtue of his body. The forces that build the body
must have play first; the powers of mind come later to unfoldment, to be the
king and ruler of those natural energies, to employ them for its purposes
rationally determined.
The childhood of the race, as of the
individual, develops the natural man, whom Paul says comes first; the adult
period brings the mind to function, so that the forces of nature may come under
the direction of intelligence and be made the agencies of the creation
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of a cosmos out of an elementary
chaos. Life must first deploy the forces that build the universe physically and
then evolve the mind to direct them in the accomplishment of its purposed ends.
Mind itself must have its genesis in physical nature. It is brought to birth in
the womb of matter. Just as solar energy is neither light, heat nor kinetic
power while in its pure state, but only develops these manifestations of its
nature when brought into contact with a material body, so pure spirit, pure
ideality, is not mind until it is harnessed, so to say, with the elemental
energies found potential in the atomic matter of physical organisms. Mind can
not come to function in pure abstraction, of its own sheer being. It must be
the product of the forces generated in an organism. In short it must be
instrumentalized in and by a brain. Life first builds its physical body, since
only through the implementation of such a structure can it bring its powers of
consciousness to concrete realization to and for itself. And the forces it uses
to build the structure fall below the level of mind and are irrational. They
are denominated in all ancient systems the elementary powers. St. Paul so
clearly says that the race was under the governance of these "elementals
of the earth" and "elementals of the air," or "the elements
of the world," before it developed the rulership of the higher mind. And
most pertinently for the interests of our exegesis he states that this "bondage
to them that by nature are no gods" prevailed in the period of our
evolution "when we were yet children." Then it was, he says, that
"Christ died for us." True indeed, since the "death" of the
Christos or divine mind principle came with its first entry into the life of
body. And until that entry, in the far developed stage of biological evolution,
in the old age of Mother Nature, animal man could have no knowledge of divine
mind. To the truth of this analysis the three or more allegories of aged woman
bearing the Messianic Son of God in the scriptures bear most striking
testimony. The natural man can not know the things of the spirit, declares the
Apostle. And he adds that when we were yet children we did not know God. Surely
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this was so, for the god had not yet
risen to function in the animal organism.
How amazingly the author of the Epistles
set forth the basic principles that are only now being brought to light by
the more enlightened approach of modern psychology! He not only marked out the anthropological
grounds of the psychic conflict in the nature of man, but with the utmost
perspicacity delineated the many varied aspects of the struggle. In what
trenchant terms does he represent the fierce combat between the soul and the
flesh! When he would do good, he says, he perceives in his members a law
which wars against the law of the mind. This conflict is the source of his
wretchedness. He refers to the flesh as "the body of this death." To
be carnally minded is sin and "death." The interests of the spirit
are in opposition to those of the flesh, which he says mean death.
Psychoanalysis has now discovered
that for the maintenance of normal sanity and for the more complete integration
of the individual's life the higher intelligence of adulthood must
"frustrate" the animal instincts of childhood. Here in the proverbial
nutshell is the summary manifesto of the science of psychoanalysis.
"Disturbance" is not abnormal, is not psychopathic, because it is the
function of developing mind to "disturb," even to "frustrate,"
the instinctive automatism of the animal nature springing quickly to life
in the recapitulatory process in early childhood. This pitting of the two
natures against each other in the life of mankind is the ground of the whole
moral problem of the race. The issues of evolution depend upon the course of
the battle, the ebb and flow of the tides of mental and spiritual force.
Ascetic religionism decreed that the animal in man was to be crushed,
smothered, extirpated. But this was false theory and ruinous practice. The
animal is not to be crushed. He is to be domesticated, so that his wild
energies may be turned to the use and advantage of mind, the king. And through
his association with man the thinker his genus is in the course of the cycle to
be elevated to the level now held by the human, while man advances further to
godhood. The gods resident in the inner-
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most recesses of human nature are
divinizing man as man in turn is domesticating and humanizing the animal. In
each case the end result is the neutralizing of conflict between the evolving
faculties of consciousness and the blind instinctual forces of physical energy.
It is mind seeking to harness the wild forces of elementary chaos.
Turning back to study the mind of
childhood, psychoanalysis should not have been surprised to discover that its
phenomena were a miniature replica of those of earliest humanity. Says Jung (Psychology
of the Unconscious, p. 28):
"Consequently it would be true
as well that the state of infantile thinking in the child's psychic life, as
well as in dreams, is nothing but a re-echo of the prehistoric and the
ancient."
Here is one of the main supporting
pillars in the temple of psychoanalysis. To re-examine the infantile mind of
humanity in its early period it was but necessary to look at the infantile mind
in the child. The two sets of phenomena would be found analogous and kindred.
Both bespoke the play of the irrational and instinctive forces. In neither had
mind come to assert rulership. Both were under the governance of Mother Nature.
They had not graduated from her tutelage to enroll in the school of Father
Spirit. As twelve was the number of spiritual perfecting, the Gospel allegory
has it that Jesus deserted his mother at that age and sought "the things
of his Father." The intimation that these higher interests were concerned
with the mind is conveyed in the allegory by the particular that he was found
in the temple in profound disputations with the learned doctors. Nature herself
carries out the force of the analogue in the fact that at the age of twelve, or
at puberty, the child passes from childhood into manhood and begins the active
development of the mind. And again psychoanalysis finds its basic principles
exemplified and vindicated in both nature and the scriptures.
The tracing of parallelism in the
two sides of the analogue revealed the most significant correspondences. The
infantile mind
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of early humanity, lacking mature
reason and piercing intelligence, devised an elaborate series of allegedly
fantastic representations to account for and explain the reality of the world
about it. This process gave rise to the wondrous volume of ancient myths, the
cycles of epic legends, the hero-tales and folk-lore among all nations. The
universal prevalence of such productions is in itself a phenomenon of
extraordinary character. It represented, not, as is mistakenly supposed, the
effort of infantile mentality to explain the mysterious reality in whose bosom
its life was cast, but the discerning inventiveness of mature mind to explain
the mystery to the child humanity in terms suited to its then limited
capacity to understand. The child mind would hardly be able to devise the
elaborated and involved complexities of the Grecian or Egyptian myths. Children
now do not invent Mother Goose and the fairy tales. These are given them by the
elders, being assumed to be in a form suitable for apprehension by the immature
mind. As a matter of fact the myths are most astutely constructed to convey the
profoundest of moral and cosmic truths. Infantile mind could not have
hit upon such marvelous and precise dramatizations of verity. The marvel of
their typical typal accuracy and pictorial fidelity to truth has never yet been
fully seen by students. They obviously were the creations of a genius for
consummate dramatization unparalleled in human history. But as the
representation was designed for the child mind of early mankind, it was
cast in forms that would be appreciable and meaningful to the infantile stage
of the race's mental development.
The analogue of the child's rearing
in early life under the care and tuition of the mother is another of the
numberless instances wherein nature presents in the small a living ideograph of
universal truth or truth in the large. There is no mythology in which the
mother is not the typal representative of the great Mother, Nature. Nature
mothers us and mind or spirit fathers us. Nature develops and provides for us
the physical mechanism of life; spirit comes to birth through it and seats
consciousness on the throne as ruler.
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The mother-forces dominate the
child; the spirit or father-forces rule the adult. The ancient representations
of the mother and child yield a new and profounder significance when viewed in
this light. Both mother and child typify physical nature, operating before the
advent of mind. They speak of nature and her progeny, the physical world. They
tell of the production and preparation of physical life to become the vehicle
of mind, the king. They go before him to prepare his way and to make his paths
straight.
But when he comes he must supersede
their irrational governance with the reign of reason. Their habitual and
instinctive activities must be bent to subserving the offices of intelligence
and conscious design. Their wild and impetuous sweep in given directions must
be curbed and eventually turned into channels of service for the achievement of
goals set by the divine knower within. Their blind elemental forces must be
harnessed to the chariot of cosmic Purpose.
The attempt and effort of conscious
mind in evolving man to administer this "conversion" of elemental
instincts into helpful servants sets the scene and supplies the motive for the
great moral conflict in the breast of humanity. It is the father powers against
the native forces of the mother and the child. As Jung has so well shown, the
instincts of what the Greeks called physis, or nature, predominate in
the first thirty-five years of a human life, but give place in the second
similar period to those of the mind, philosophy and intellectuality. The first
period builds the body and establishes its sustenance, comfort and well-being.
The second advances from those concerns to the matters of life and
consciousness, to the effort to gain knowledge and understanding.
A second and more particular item of
the parallelism between the racial and the individual childhood periods is well
adduced by Jung, citing a passage from the scholar Abraham (Dreams and Myths)
as follows:
"Thus the myth is a sustained,
still remaining fragment from the infantile soul-life of the people, and
the dream is the myth of the individual."
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The assumption that the myth is an
infantile creation because it was extant in the early life of the nations (if
only three or four thousand years back of the present can be considered an
"early" period in the history of humanity) is gratuitous and
conjectural and has arisen only because of the decay of philosophic
enlightenment in the dark ages. A better understanding is formulated in the statement
that the myths were designed and constructed by the loftiest genius for
dramatization of truth and were adapted to yield instruction and enlightenment for
both the infancy and the adulthood of the race and of the individual. Their
truths were ageless and their application universally relevant. They were
designed to be remembered, if not understood, by childhood, and to be
understood by all in their maturity. They were given to the race at an early
stage, because they were intended to stand as guiding light for the whole race
throughout the evolutionary journey. But it is impossible that they could have
been the creation or the product of the child-mind.
They were put forth in the race's
childhood because the mind of childhood is receptive to impressions stamped
upon it and will hold vital truth, even if only the shell of the truth or
meaning is perceived, until the maturing mind can probe into the kernel and
discern the living essence of truth therein. It has not been perceived that the
prime purpose behind the promulgation of the myths was their preservation in
racial memory. They were taught in the childhood of the race, and repeated in
the childhood of the individual in each generation, that first of all they
might be perpetuated. They were constructed in a fashion that rendered them
automatically easy to remember. They were set to poetic meter and rhythm, so
that they held their place in memory like music. And even the scriptures were
constructed on the pattern of number formations, based chiefly on the number
seven. This has come to light in the discovery of the almost universal
prevalence of the chiasmus structure in the Christian Bible and the omnipresent
run of multiples of seven in the numerical values of numberless phrases, verses
and
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other groupings in the Greek and
Hebrew translations of the scriptures.
What is impressed upon the child
mind is hardly ever lost, perhaps never really. Therefore the ancient
impartation of knowledge in allegorical and symbolic and dramatic forms was
made with the motive of transmission and remembrance, so that adulthood in
every generation might not be wanting the ever-significant structures of truth
to redeem to esoteric meaning. And, perhaps of most challenging import is the
great understanding, lost for so long, that nature carries in her phenomena the
eternal pictorialization of living truth. For human understanding the one final
and irrefutable language of truth is the symbolism of nature. For nature is truth
and verity in the concrete. Its every form is a hieroglyph of reality, staring
us in the face. A living creature, with all its habits and characteristics and
traits, is an epiphany of ubiquitous law and universal modus. The life of a
vegetable is an epitome of all life. For there are varying levels and degrees
at which life manifests, rated as higher and lower, and the manifestation at
any of the levels is typal of the one universal procedure.
Hence the masters of ancient
knowledge put forth their sagas of profoundest cosmic truth almost entirely in
the language of nature symbolism. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider
her ways and be wise," might be cited as the key slogan of the teaching of
antiquity. The writings of the sages send the thought of the reader again and
again to the bee, the snake, the bird, the cat, dog, lion, crocodile, ape,
dragon-fly, locust, grasshopper, the tree, the bush, flower, grass, leaf, root,
mountain, river, lake, brook, sea, water, lightning, sun, moon, star, constellation,
summer, winter, month and year. Wheat for bread, the grape for wine, and the
bee for honey stand as the three great symbols of the divine soul in the mortal
body.
The life of the child and of early
humanity alike stand far closer to nature than that of the individual or the
collective adult. The
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child is born in the lap of Mother
Nature and he is bathed within and without by the stream of her ubiquitous
forces. Her influences shape his physical body and the automatic functioning of
her powers carries him along toward maturity. All this being so, it is the
decree of fitness and necessity that any cultural heritage formulated for his
immediate and continuing behoof should be framed and expressed in the language
of nature symbols. For these are the things whose constant objectivity in his
life dowers them with pedagogical power and enlightening significance. Their
known phenomena hold the mirror up to truth, for they are that truth themselves
in the concrete. Through and behind the visible world of actuality there broods
the other world of invisible reality. The visible thing is the only lens
through which the figures and shapes of that deeper reality can be brought to
focus for the human mind. The philosophic aphorism that the things of the outer
world are cast in the image of "those things which are above" is the
statement of man's only means of rising to an apprehension of spiritual
realities. When seen, they are revealed to be not foreign and exotic creations,
but bear the familiar stamp of the known things in the world here below. The
seen world is man's only clue to the realities of the unseen world.
The obvious effort and aim of the
archaic literary constructions then was to embody the principles of truth in a
language and in narrative that would hold the mind close to nature and her
forms and phenomena. This was the language, not of childhood, but for
childhood. But it is equally the language for adulthood, for even now, in
an age of the world considered adult, the same language of symbol and myth
still beats back the efforts of the united acumen of world scholarship to grasp
the esoteric meaning. And it is still claimed that these masterly devices to
purvey the most recondite truth and wisdom were the spontaneous creations of
the race's "child-mind."
The sages availed themselves of the
known capabilities of the mind in the childhood of the world and the childhood
of each suc-
162
cessive generation to achieve the
primary aim of preserving their writings in memory. Both the race and the individual
possess in their childhood a virtually unforgetting memory. For both function
in the realm of the subconscious. The child, the animal and child-humanity all
alike live consciously at the level of the subconscious. Their actions are
directed by instinct and automatism. Mind has not come to play in either of
them as yet. Hence the phenomena of conscious life in all of them display
similarity and are to be measured by the same standard. Their various
manifestations are kindred and analogous. Their activities are motivated by the
autonomic nervous system, their memory is automatic and practically unfailing
and impressions are made everlasting by repetition. The human child of course
stands above the animal, but he nevertheless passes through the animal stage
of evolution and still bears the animal nature with him in his physical
body.
It is now possible to summarize what
this unfoldment has dialectically been leading to. The myths, symbols and
dramas embodying the mighty ancient wisdom had to be given to child humanity in
a form to be eternally remembered. They had to be given in the race's
childhood and to the race in its childhood because humanity was still in
its animal stage and both the animal and the child have automatic powers of
memory. And they had to be framed in a language and under imagery based on
naturographs, because natural phenomena constitute the only universal lexicon
or alphabet of unerring truth. They constitute the only language universally
comprehensible, and, what is still more, the only language capable of yielding
to each level of intellectual capacity and development the truth which that
stage is able to grasp. It teaches simple truth to the simple and profound
truth to the sagacious. In brief summary, truth had to be organized and
indelibly stamped upon the subconscious mind of the race so that it would live
automatically, and be perpetuated for the use of the conscious intelligence
when at a later stage that genius burst into flower in the denouement of
organic evolution.
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What Jung and Abraham and other
students say about the myths of early humanity matching the myth-making power
of the subconscious today (or vice versa), and the dreams of the
under-mind continuing to cast up the wrack of the ancient language of myth and
symbol has pertinent bearing upon the entire subject of mind-analysis. The
repetition of the ancient symbols in modern dreams is interpreted to be the
method adopted by the subconscious--which is the recorded memory of the race's
and the individual's past--for the most part to protest against the willful
suppression by the present conscious mind of the instinctive native
propensities and calls of the natural or animal man for their expression. It is
in brief the form of the first or natural-animal man's protest against the
repression of its instinctual life by the incipient rise of the second or
spiritual man's mind to dominion over the whole life of the organism. As such
it is inevitable, natural and good. The concern of the individual is to manage
it with the least degree of tragic conflict and severe disturbance. It is not
abnormal that disturbance should come. The tragedy is that it should come under
such conditions of unintelligence and unbalance that wreckage should so often
occur.
It is well to note a dialectical
point in the form of Abraham's presentation of the identical function and
status of the myth of the early race and the dream of childhood. It has been an
assertion of this essay that the myth was not produced or created by the
child mind of early humanity. If now the myth and the dream symbol or dream
myth are of parallel order and status, then the parallelism should hold in
respect to their origin or production. It can not be said that the dream of the
child mind in individual childhood is a conscious creation of the child's
genius. It is in reality simply given to the child. It is more of the
nature of a projection into the child's mind by a superior intelligence. The
child mind did not consciously and designedly produce it. It came down "from
above," or out from within. If there is instruction, then, in the law of
cor-
164
respondences, as most certainly
there is, the conclusion is that neither was the myth in early history a
conscious creation of the child mind of infant humanity.
In the light of all this it is of
interest to hear Jung in a further elaboration of the idea dealt with here (Psychology
of the Unconscious, p. 29):
"The conclusion results almost
from itself, that the age which created the myths thought childishly--that is
to say, phantastically, as in our age is still done to a very great extent
(associatively or analogically) in dreams. The beginnings of myth formations
(in the child), the taking of phantasies for realities, which is partly in
accord with the historical, may easily be discovered among children."
It is probably a bit difficult to
allocate a precise or scientific meaning to Jung's use of the words
"childishly" and "phantastically" here and elsewhere.
Always the first word and generally the second carries with it the connotation
of a mental picture that either misses or weirdly caricatures reality. Phantasy
is commonly taken to be the creation of illusion. Its formations do not match
truth or reality. Sometimes a slightly more generous allowance on the side of reliability
is made for phantasy when speaking of the phantasies of the poet as depictions
of the actual. But generally the word carries the imputation of fallacy.
Phantasies are fictions of the mind made in an effort to explain or interpret
reality, but missing its faithful portraiture. They are imaginative failures
and falsities.
Jung confirms this broad definition
of the meaning of phantasy when he says that the mind of childhood is addicted
to "the taking of phantasies for realities." Its imaginings about the
world and life are not true pictures. This can be readily granted without
debate, inasmuch as it is conceded that the mind of the child is not fortified
with the data of experience and the developed powers of the intellect to
interpret things aright, or at least according to the norms of adult mentation.
But when the eminent psychologist goes on to say that, because the child makes
erroneous guesses about reality and conceives with the error of infantile
incapacity, likewise the myth-
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makers of antiquity "thought
childishly--that is to say phantastically, as . . . in dreams," when they
constructed the great myths, it is obvious that he is guilty of a non
sequitor. He convicts himself of bad logic on two counts, both, oddly
enough, brought against this conclusion by himself! For, in the first place he
himself devotes some hundreds of pages in The Psychology of the Unconscious alone,
and more in other works, to an elucidation of psychoanalytic rationale and
interpretation entirely on the basis of constructions supplied by the ancient
myths, which thus are found to be accurate and reliable norms of truth and
reality. And, secondly, his own work, as well as the whole burden of
psychoanalytic science, has validated the authenticity of the dream, when properly
analyzed, as a faithful picture or dramatization of reality. If, in the
ordinary derogatory sense of the terms, it is affirmed that the myth and the
dream are childish and phantastic constructions, then Jung's entire splendid
contribution to psychological science must be written off as similarly childish
and phantastic, for it is based solidly on the truth-telling character of
both the dream and the myth. The dream is the production of an unconscious
faculty now recognized to exercise the most recondite intelligence, not to say
incredible genius in the art of semantic dramatization. Likewise the myths of
ancient formulation are seen by psychoanalysts themselves to be marvelously
astute creations to represent the profoundest conceptions and motions of the
human spirit, which they do with astounding precision and clarity. If both are
"childish and phantastic," then childish phantasy must be elevated to
the rank of the supreme faculty of the human psyche.
Phantasy may reign in the conscious
life of the child, when its imaginations conceived to picture reality widely
miss the mark of truth. But the dream is not the conscious production of the
child, neither is the myth the production of child humanity, that is, humanity
functioning at the child level. The dream is given to the child and the
myth was given to humanity in its childhood. Until
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the study is oriented in line with
this understanding it will not yield true insight or clarification.
Civilized society is shocked from
time to time by the exhibition in certain quarters of the crudest forms of
gross animalism or brutality. Jung says that these always remain germinally in
the unconscious and can surge to the surface when conventional restraints are
temporarily relaxed. Some of them are so gross and bestial in their
manifestation that Jung is led to say that "today we feel for such a thing
nothing but the deepest abhorrence, and never would admit it still slumbered in
our souls." But it is well to note his statement that we go through the
period corresponding to the animal evolution in our childhood, when by analogy
at least we are classified as little savages. He says (p. 35):
"Yet all this does not affect
the fact that we in childhood go through a period in which the impulses toward
these archaic inclinations appear again and again, and that through all our
life we possess, side by side with the newly recruited, directed and adapted
thought, a phantastic thought which corresponds to the thought of the centuries
of antiquity and barbarism. Just as our bodies still keep the reminders of old
functions and conditions in many old-fashioned organs, so our minds, too, bear
the marks of the evolution passed through and the very ancient re-echoes, at
least dreamily, in phantasies."
In childhood we each quickly
recapitulate the age of animal barbarity and thereafter keep it, as it were,
buried in the basement of consciousness, covered over as well as we are able to
contrive it, with the traditional masks and facades of
"civilization." Wars, crime waves and occasional reversions to the
elemental and the primitive at times lift the lid of conventional restraint
sufficiently to allow an upsurge of the native animal forces.
One of the discernments brought out
by Jung in connection with mythology deserves a word of comment. He observes
tersely that the masses never free themselves from mythology. This is hardly
more than a trite notation, since the masses are those who remain
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bound in the commonplace
conventional and traditional, the accepted standards of conduct and thought.
The myths have played their part, perhaps away back in time, in setting the
established mores. Thus the life and influence of the myths are perpetuated
down the ages. In so far, however, as the myths did originally portray, no
matter with what subtle deftness, the realities of man's history, it is
inevitable that they should linger as normative influences over the
consciousness of the masses, even though, as is always the case, the kernel of
their real meaning has been lost, and only their desiccated husks survive. In
this sense it is the fate of the vast majority of mankind to be perpetually
influenced if not ruled by conceptual phantoms! The saving consideration in the
situation, however, is the fact that in large part the phantoms are the wraiths
of truth formerly apprehended, but since lost, and that so long as there is
even the subtlest suggestion of true and vital meaning in the traditional forms
of thought and behavior, the dominance of the mores will not work outright
catastrophe. Even the phantoms of truth have saving grace.
It is admittedly a journey somewhat
afield from the main thesis, but nevertheless of much importance to note what
Jung has wisely observed as to the relation of the myth to history. Speaking of
the "mythical tradition" he says that
"it does not set forth any
account of old events, but rather acts in such a way that it always reveals a
thought common to humanity and once more rejuvenated. Thus for example, the lives and deeds of the
founders of old religions are the purest condensations of typical
contemporaneous myths, behind which the individual figure entirely
disappears."
The very husks and shells of the
myths, still prevalent in universal tradition, are capable, as Jung intimates
here, of "rejuvenation." And this is the hope of humanity. It is
always possible that intelligence may return in sufficient force to revitalize
the myths with their original dynamic potency. This is the need of the world of
culture today. The obstacle that so stubbornly blocks the way to
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this renaissance is the incredible
fact that large sections of what was created as mythology have been crassly and
stupidly mistaken for veridical history itself! Ages of mental hallucination
and ideological folly could have been obviated if the myths had not been
obtruded into the terrain of objective history. Possibly nine-tenths of the
material embodied in the Christian scriptures has been taken for ancient Jewish
history, when in truth the book is almost entirely a collection of aboriginal
mythical constructions. So obvious is this to competent students who have
conscientiously surveyed the field of ancient religion that Kalthoff has
written the following doubtless well-considered paragraph (Entstehung des
Christentums):
"The sources from which we
derive our information concerning the origin of Christianity are such that in
the present state of historical research no historian would undertake the task
of writing the biography of an historical Jesus."
And he strengthens this with another
asseveration (Ibid, p. 10):
"To see behind these stories
the life of a real historical personage would not occur to any man if it were
not for the influence of rationalistic theology."
The Messiahs, Sun-gods, Saviors,
Christs and Jesus figures, of whom there were scores in the religions of early
times, it is to be inferred, were not historical persons in the flesh, but the
typal characters designed to portray man's ever-coming divinity. They were
mythical figures and not men in history. Kalthoff goes on to say that the
divine element in Christ was always considered an inner attribute and
possessed or manifested by the Christ figure in common with humanity, which is
to evolve the same divinity in its own life. He adduces the fact that everywhere
the Christ figure is shown exhibiting "superhuman traits; nowhere is he
that which critical theology wished to make him, simply a natural man, an
historical individual." Well had it been for western civilization if
it had been known that the alleged lives and deeds of the founders of old
religions, as well as the "historical careers" of a score or
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more of Messiahs and Sun-gods and
Christs, were, as Jung says, "condensations of typical contemporaneous
myths, behind which the individual figure entirely disappears." When myth
was converted into "history" the Dark Ages began.
The great need of a distinctive
differentiation between the two forms of the unconscious, the subconscious and
the superconscious, is vividly emphasized when we compare certain of Jung's
statements with one another. We have seen the psychologist saying that all the
memory-record of our past in the animal stage of evolution, with all its
inhuman bestial manifestations that he admits are so revolting that we hesitate
to believe we carry the memory of them in the depths of our being, is buried in
our consciousness and may surge upward from the unconscious. Yet with this
characterization given to the content of the unconscious, Jung is found writing
that
"comparison with the sun
teaches us over and over again that the gods are libido. It is that part of us
which is immortal, since it represents that bond through which we feel that in
the race we are never extinguished. It is life from the life of mankind. Its
springs, which well up from the depths of the unconscious, come, as does our
life in general, from the root of the whole of humanity, since we are indeed
only a twig broken off from the mother and transplanted."
And again he is affirming that
"since the divine in us is
libido, we must not wonder that we have taken along with us in our theology
ancient representations from the olden times. . . ."
Everywhere in psychoanalysis the
unconscious is the seat of the libido. The libido is that inner governor who,
from behind the throne of consciousness, dominates the life and speaks to the
personality in the devious and often obscure language of dreams and symbols. A
hundred times the libido is described as the voice and consciousness of the
past, of the youthful history of the race in its individual recapitulation, the
surging force of the native elemental
170
mind of the race, speaking generally
against the suppression of its drive for recognition and free play by the
restraints of civilization.
Assuredly it can be seen that the
libido is here described in the terms and characters of two things that are at
the very opposite poles of rating in spiritual or cultural values. It is at one
and the same time the memory of our animal past, with all its horrific and
revolting murder-lust and brutality, slumbering in the depths of the
unconscious and capable of resurrection therefrom, and also equally nursed
germinally within us. This is to ignore or erase all difference in grade and
status and nobility between the god and the animal in our constitution and to
make the unconscious the dwelling place of the divine genius as well as the
lair of the beast. Surely it can be seen that it is the voice of the animal
which speaks to us out of the past that we have lived through and compressed
into the subconscious, and that it is the voice of the god which speaks to us
out of the as yet unborn future whose terrain in the superconscious we are
little by little adventuring into. To heed the voice of the animal is to sink back
in retrogression into the repellent past; to hearken unto the voice of the god
is to step forward into more inviting prospects, and to follow rosier pathways
through the meads and uplands of evolution. The terrain of these two regions of
consciousness in the human nature is precisely what was meant by the ancient
Egyptians in their allegorical division of their country into "the two
lands," or "Upper and Lower Egypt," the location and histories
of which have perplexed even such a noted Egyptologist as the late William H.
Breasted and others. The student of Egyptian history will note that time after
time one Pharaoh after another is obliged to fight a war from his capital in
Upper Egypt with the kingdom of Lower Egypt, conquer it afresh and unite it again
"under the double sovereignty of the crowns of Upper and Lower
Egypt." Over and over again a kingdom divided against itself in two
warring parts has to be unified. It has never dawned
171
upon the savants that this is beyond
reasonable probability as history, and points to the trick of allegory. For it
is an exact repicturing of what takes place in the human constitution, where
the two kingdoms, that of the animal and that of the god, are long hostile to
each other and must be reconciled and brought to an atonement, by the stronger
agency of the divine as it wins victory over the "lower Egypt" of the
human realm. Even Paul tells us that a wall of partition between us will be
broken down, enabling the two natures to merge in harmony into a new creature,
"so making peace."
In this connection it is appropriate
to present what Jung has to say as to how the truth embalmed in the myths is to
be apprehended. After remarking, most discerningly, that it is more or less
imperatively demanded that the psychoanalyst should "broaden the analysis
of the individual problems by a comparative study of historical material
relating to them,"--and Jung himself has done this most exhaustively--he
goes on to say that
"It is a well-known fact that
one of the principles of analytic psychology is that the dream images are to be
understood symbolically; that is to say that they are not to be taken
literally, just as they are represented in sleep, but that behind them a hidden
meaning has to be surmised. It is this idea of a dream symbolism which has
challenged not only criticism, but, in addition to that, the strongest
opposition."
What is true here of the dream
symbolism is true also of the mythic symbolism. Jung repeats it--and
underscores it--"it is not literally true, but is true
psychologically." It is easy to understand and pardon a symbologist's
contemptuous fling at uncomprehending scientists and scholastics in his further
comment:
"In this distinction lies the
reason why the old fogies of science have from time to time thrown away an
inherited piece of ancient truth; because it was not literally but
psychologically true. For such discrimination this type of person has at no
time had any comprehension."
Indeed Jung goes so far as to assert
that
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"Dreams are symbolic in order
that they can not be understood; in order that the wish, which is the source of
the dream, may remain unknown."
This pretty well matches the
statement of the Jesus figure in the Gospels that truth was given to them that
are without in parables, lest, hearing, they might understand and be converted,
and seeing, they might believe. This is to imply that the subconscious presents
its symbolic messages furtively, wishing to remain unidentified in connection
with its wish, unwilling to be known as sponsoring such a wish. From the very
fact that such a furtive motive would not be easily ascribable to the god, who
likewise presents his wishes in the higher interests of the personal life, and
would have no reason to dodge recognition, it would be inferable that symbolism
in dreams is a usage of the subconscious or animal memory alone. This, however,
is not the case, since the very highest messages are likewise clothed in the
most complex and recondite forms of symbolism. The god and not the animal is
the consummate craftsman in the formulation of the symbolic dream. Must it be
said that modern psychological science has shown itself totally incapable of
recognizing any difference between the two voices of the god and the beast in
human consciousness?
Great stress is laid by modern
psychology upon what are called "escape mechanisms" and
"retreats from reality into phantasy." Religious devotionalism,
addiction to idealistic philosophies, surrender to mystical experience even in
poetry, music and art, are broadly characterized as houses of refuge from stark
reality. But psychoanalysis itself has endorsed the ancient Egyptian and Greek
division of man's psychic life into its two aspects of immortal divine mind and
lower animal sensuousness, and it would be only a natural question to ask which
of the two is seeking to escape from the other! Since the whole crux of the
moral problem for man is the conflict between the two natures, the analysis of
every phase of the struggle hinges on discovery of which nature in man is
trying to
173
dodge its opponent. Perhaps the
difficulty and the confused intermixture of the two in psychoanalytic
interpretation arises from what is implied in the Egyptian symbol of the
"horizon." Man stands directly upon the "horizon" or
dividing line between the two kingdoms of consciousness, and as so poetically
stated in texts from the hieroglyphic writings, "he cultivates the crops
on both sides of the horizon," "he cultivates the two lands, he
pacifies the two lands, he unites the two lands." "He makes
the two Rheti goddesses, whose hearts are at enmity with each other, to be at
peace." To the soul it is said: "The horizon is covered with the
tracks of thy passing." This is to say that, as man can focus his
consciousness in the world of spiritual realities or equally in that of carnal
sensuality, he keeps continually passing back and forth, or up and down, across
the middle-line of demarcation, the horizon. Hence on the line of open
consciousness, which is directly between the two, god and animal constantly are
intermingling their motivations and propensities, with the result that the
clear distinction between the two is blurred. This may perhaps be the
explanation of the failure of psychology to differentiate between the two
widely separated regions of the unconscious world, the subconscious and the
superconscious. For, as stated before, man's narrow area of consciousness is
closely hemmed in between two dark regions of unconsciousness.
It is possible that in this
situation lies the difficult determination of one of the strange devices of
ancient symbolic representation, one that has too often been most weirdly and
erroneously guessed at,--the crucifixion of the Christ between two thieves. In
human incarnation and evolution the potential Christ principle does step out
upon this line of open consciousness between the two bordering areas of
unconsciousness, and it is not too great a strain on poetic imagery to think of
unconsciousness as stealing away the priceless gift or faculty of
consciousness. Likewise the conditions of stress and strain, suffering and
anguish, that necessarily go with the struggle of the soul as it is torn
between the pulls of the two con-
174
flicting natures, fulfill every
esoteric phase of the meaning of crucifixion. In this position the soul stands
precisely at the point where divine and carnal natures cross each other, and
are at cross purposes each to other. The final meaning of the cross as symbol is
simply the incarnation. The soul is on the cross when it is linked to mortal
body. The loss of this explicit determination is one of the tragic
consequences, as well as attestations, of the debacle of esoteric wisdom in the
third century.
The confusion of modern study just
alluded to as due to the failure to keep the two natures in the human breast
clearly differentiated is again well illustrated in a passage from so
discerning a student as Jung (Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 94):
"It is shameful or exalted,
just as one chooses, that the divine longing of humanity, which is really the
first thing to make it human, should be brought into connection with an erotic
phantasy. Such a comparison jars upon the finer feelings."
And he adds that
"Nature is beautiful only by
virtue of the longing and love given her by man."
Indeed so jarring a realization has
it ever been to the more enlightened thinking of mankind that soul should be
brought under the dominion of flesh and sense that early philosophical understanding
and acceptance of the fact as beneficent has been almost completely banished
and religious sentiment has come to pronounce the soul's connection with mortal
body a thing of evil. Even Plotinus is declared to have proclaimed his sense of
shame at being incarnated in body at all. Centuries of Christian asceticism
were activated by the preachment of the shamefulness of the flesh. Spirit alone
is exalted; matter and body are denied. Nothing can clear this befuddlement
save a return to the sagacious enlightenment that prevailed when the Book of
the Dead was written. It was known then that the soul could not progress to
greater glory if she did not leave
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heavenly mansions of dreamy
blissfulness and have her powers and faculties brought out from sheer latency
into actuality by taking her stand precisely on the horizon line at the focus
of the tension between spirit and matter. Only there could she pass from
unconsciousness to consciousness. Only there, says Plotinus himself, could she
ever develop her own powers and come to know what she herself possesses.
The dynamic force of the realization
that man is a god in the making so impressed Jung at one place that he writes
(p. 96):
"To bear a God within one's
self signifies as much as to be a God one's self."
Yes, in sentiment, but not quite yes
in fact. The penalties for forgetting that man is both the god and the animal
at one and the same time are not minimized by the strength of lofty sentiment.
Man's divinity is as yet mainly potential; it can be realized only through the
fulfillment of Aristotle's entelechy and emerge as end product of a time cycle.
Its actualization is linked to time and growth, and more than that, to the
outcome of a battle with the flesh. Without the battle on the horizon soul
would remain forever inane, an unplanted seed.
A final word will round out the case
for the claim that the failure to distinguish between the two realms of the
unconscious has led to false deductions and confusion. Such a result can be
seen by placing side by side two or three of Jung's statements. He has said
that the divine immortal principle in us is libido and that "the gods are
libido." But he also writes (The Psychology of the Unconscious, p.
105) that
"The phallus is the source of
life and libido, the great creator and worker of miracles, and as such it
received reverence everywhere."
There is no question as to the
reverence in which the phallus was held in the olden time, and strange enough
it symbolized not the lusts of the flesh, but the highest spiritual or divine
element
176
in man. This is all, however, on the
plane of symbolism. For psychology to proclaim that the libido in man is alike
the divine inspiration from the supervening world of spiritual reality and the
force making for physical creation as instrumentalized through the phallus is
to ignore a gap between these two that is impassable to thought. The libido has
practically been broadened to make its meaning cover what might be called the
whole drive of life to get itself expressed in living forms and actions of the
creatures. But it seems to be forgotten that both the animal and the divine
natures in man are making a drive to get each its particular segment of
creative force expressed in the world of life. It hardly seems compatible with
the human notions of dignity and worth to place on the same level of quality
the forces that come to expression in man's life, the one through the
spiritualized intellect, the other through the phallus. All life, in the
monistic sense, is one, and in the absolute sense is all equally
"divine." But in the area of man's perceptual world it is impossible
for the mind to ignore the endless differentiations into which life splits its
unit energies. It must see values as relative one to another and all to the
whole. In its original uses the libido, a Latin word which when encountered in
the text of Cicero's Orations against Cataline in the schools was accustomed to
be translated "lust," certainly was employed to name the tremendous
sweep of appetency that sought to perpetuate life through sexual function. It
was at first largely restricted to the general meaning of "sex."
Although its connotations have since been greatly broadened, it is hardly
legitimate to extend its meaning to make it take in that other element in man's
constitution which in all spiritual and ethical systems has ever been regarded
as its direct opposite, indeed its evolutionary opponent and enemy! Except
symbolically, it is going to be an undertaking marked for failure to ask the
human mind, as it is conditioned by tradition, to affix the character and
attributes of what is conceived as "divine" to the physically
creative energies that find expression through the phallus.
177
Universal usage has allocated the
play of so-called divine forces to the mind and spirit alone. In the world of
relativity it is necessary to make and adhere to patent and obvious
distinctions in rating and value. The libido can hardly be used to name both
the godlike and the bestial natures in the human being.
Not to prolong the matter to the
point of tedium, but for the importance of it all, another citation from Jung
shows the same indecisive delineation of libido (The Psychology of the
Unconscious, p. 105):
"The possibilities of
comparison mean just as many possibilities for symbolic expression, and from
this basis all the infinitely varied symbols, so far as they are libido images,
may properly be reduced to a very simple root, that is, just to libido and its
fixed primitive qualities."
This is a bit indecisive, inasmuch
as it merely says that symbols, "so far as they are libido images,"
may be reduced to libido. But it comes close to saying at the same time that
"all the infinitely varied symbols" are reducible to libido. But
fully one half of ancient symbols have reference directly to the divine element
in the life and not at all to the physically procreative psychology.
Dr. Hinkle has stated that
"symbols dominate to an unbelievable extent man's conduct and behavior, as
well as his thinking; they are the bridge over which he travels from the known
to the unknown." They enable the mind, she elucidates, to conceive the
shape and nature of something lying in an unknown realm, from the hint of its
likeness to something already at hand in the known world. Indeed she states
that this process of working over from the known things in the commonplace
world to true conceptions of things of a different nature unknown to us is
"the source of all cultural progress." What needs to be added, then,
is simply that when we come to interpret the symbols to enhance our limited
understanding, care must be taken to apply their reference discreetly within
the just boundaries of their area of connotation. The longer symbols are
178
studied, the more clearly it is seen
that they constituted a language of ancient ideological communication which
does not lend itself to loose poetic fancying, but carries meanings with almost
mathematical succinctness. The first step toward the Dark Ages was taken when
this precise knowledge of the old symbolic language began to disappear.
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CHAPTER XIII
LIGHT FROM AN OLD LAMP
One of the achievements of this age,
for which it may come to be marked in later historical view, is the restoration
of symbolism to a significant role in the mechanism of culture. We have seen
that the superconscious seldom delivers its messages of approval or warning to
the lower mind in the known language of common speech. It speaks in the
language of symbols and pictorial representations. The discovery of this fact
signalizes a great and really momentous advance in technique for the deeper
cultivation of the human spirit.
It is worth what Dr. Hinkle has to
say as to the desuetude of symbolism before its present re-discovery (The
Recreating of the Individual, p. 137):
"Until now, however, it has
been chiefly a subject of academic interest belonging to a past phase of human
culture and with no vital meaning for the present. Through psychoanalysis we
have come to realize that this ancient process has a present value; and the
mode of interpreting and utilizing the symbol, the way in which we understand
it in relation to the individual, are intimately connected with his future
well-being and development."
Symbols were an integral part of
ancient expression because they were the one universally known, or available,
and only true language of meaning transfer. Symbols were known to be the one
standard means of communication of truth, because the ancients were still in
possession of an important item of usable knowledge, the great fact that the
seen world is the mirror of the reality of the unseen world. Understanding went
into eclipse when this plank in the platform of a primal formulation of
knowledge was taken
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out. Now it is being restored, and
it is found that symbols are the substantial stepping-stones by means of which
the mind can cross the gap between the objective world and the realities of
higher ones. The sages of antiquity knew that if they ventured to construct the
pictures of metaphysical reality over the pattern of the objects and phenomena
of the known world they would never widely miss the truth.
We are face to face here with a
re-discovery as important as that of the unconscious. And it is one that is a
necessary supplement of the other, if the full harvest of benefit is to be
reaped from knowledge of the unconscious. We shall never be able to read the
communications of the inner lord of life to his outer protégé, the conscious
human, without the help of this symbolism. Just as the discovery of the Rosetta
Stone was essential to our regaining Egypt's lost wisdom, so our ability to
translate the language of symbolism is necessary to understand the strange
vernacular in which the Ancient of Days speaks down to us from his seat in the
plane of consciousness just over our heads. He speaks in the language of
meaning-forms and not in that of words. An object or a process from the world
of nature conveys a graph of meaning that often could not be elaborated in less
than a thousand words. The snake, beetle, locust, hawk and bee, the cloud,
rainbow and lightning announce the principles of cosmic law with a definiteness
that no words can match. Words can misrepresent the truth; nature symbols can
not. They discourse upon the straight truth. They can not lead the mind into
sophistry. So reliable and certain is their testimony to verify that whenever
the mind wishes to confirm its insights into truth it cites the harmony of its
deductions with natural fact. If a structure of exposition can be paralleled
with a phenomenon in nature, it is considered to be certified. Poetry is in
large part the sensing and limning of this perceived correspondence. To show
that an inner construction sustains analogical identity with something in outer
creation, proves that it is already accredited, being found extant in the world
of real being.
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A vivid line from one of Goethe's
poems strikes ringing recognition of this truth of symbolism:
"To the capable the world is never
dumb!"
And Schiller, while seemingly turned
around to a wrong orientation to the theme, nevertheless gives out a phrase of
sententious truth when he says:
"I was not yet capable of
comprehending nature at first hand; I had but learned to admire her image
reflected in the understanding, and put in order by rules." (Italics
Dr. Hinkle's in quotation.)
Any one who has learned to admire
nature's image reflected in the understanding has already become, as Emerson
puts it, a priest interpreting the epiphany of creation. This is not an
elementary step preparatory to comprehending nature at first hand, as Schiller
says. It is indeed first-hand comprehension itself. For it is the
interpretation of nature through translation of her forms as alphabet into
ultimate meaning. This is to understand nature, for she is then seen not as
sheer object, but as forms of meaning. The mind so qualified is able to look
not merely at nature, but through nature to discern the
archetypal forms in the divine mind. This is to read God's thoughts after him.
Misguided superficial dialectic
might rise here to expostulate that since, as declared, the entire drive of
religious aspiration is to transcend the natural man and the world that
ensnares him, and to catch and hold the diviner superhuman, it is going against
philosophy and evolution alike to ask the mind to tie itself in ever closer
relation to the natural world. That, says pietistic faith, is the world to be
shunned and escaped. But this is a mistake. To recommend the use of nature as
an alphabet for the reading of higher truth is in no way to involve the mind in
subjection to nature's own play of mindless forces. It is in no sense to enmire
intelligence in her own ground of partial nescience. It is but to use her forms
as
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mnemonics and hieroglyphics of
exalted sense or as the lens of a more penetrating and magnifying insight.
Another statement from Dr. Hinkle
falls in here with much pertinence (p. 441):
"The whole process of psychic
development is seen to follow a kind of spiral movement in which there is a
recurrent return to former states having the closest analogy to the actual
physical conditions experienced. Thus in all psychic development there is a
close relationship with the physical processes, but not an identity."
It is well to observe, with this
reminder, that analogy works through likeness, but does not claim identity.
"Through man's capacity for
psychic creation he has attained a power for individual development which in
its becoming follows like a shadow the actual physical processes lived through,
but which possesses a reality of its own as important for human life as the
actual physical processes are for all organic life. It is this reality so
frequently expressing itself in the language of organic reality which must be
recognized for an understanding of human needs. The light that psychoanalysis
has provided has revealed a new meaning to many of the great intuitions of the
past, and has shown unmistakably that they possess a validity and reality in
relation to the individual life wholly unrealized by thought, but entirely
realizable in the human being."
This is to say that a meaning,
perhaps an actual message from the man's oversoul to his outer intelligence,
comes to him in the form of an analogue with some phase of his actual
experience. The supermind must speak to him in the terms of what has already
had meaning for him. As already set forth, it is impossible that an abstract
idea can be presented to a mind without reference to a previously known
physical object or process. Even an idea must accrete whatever form, structure
or organic outline it is to have from something once known. It has often been
said that the mind can form no picture of a something the likeness of which it
has never seen. It can formulate new pictures, but only out of a new
configuration or combination of elements already imprinted in
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memory. The very categories of
thought, as extensions, quantity, number, dimension, cause, effect, quality,
etc., are abstractions derived from experience with the concrete physical,
which plant these concepts in the intellect. The only pathway open to the mind
is through the physical, whose forms become symbols of the metaphysical.
Symbols, then, are the currency in
the ideal realm. It is not too strong an assertion to say that symbols are not
only the language of conception and impartation in the metaphysical realm, but
that they are therefore the instruments of the soul's highest culture. It has
been claimed that the mathematical symbols, pi, x and the horizontal 8 for
infinity and others, have virtually made higher abstract mathematics possible.
Culture hinges on grasp and communication of ideas and symbols make the
interchange a near-divine art. It has been questioned whether the act of
thinking could be achieved without symbols. An idea would be left formless if
it could not be given suggestive shape over the pattern of fixed
representation. Description could not be achieved if some known object bearing
likeness to the unknown to be described could not be pointed to.
There is evidence of surprising
cogency pointing to the realization that the attainment or the degree of
culture in mankind bears a significant relation to the interest in symbolism. A
cursory canvass of history seems to reveal a distinct and decided parallel
between cultural rise and fall and the vogue and lapse of symbolic methodology.
This is indeed challenging. The ancient period, during which there was extant a
culture sufficiently lofty to inspire the writing of the only books that have
held universal veneration throughout the centuries, obviously was steeped in
symbolic practique. No more valid attestation of this is needed than the
observation that these books themselves purvey symbolism as their chief method
of intellectual expression, as they fairly teem with symbolism. Culture rose or
prevailed hand in hand with symbolism in that era. The great upsurge of Greek
culture was based on and widely
184
utilized symbols, such as Plato's
cave allegory, the myth of Er, King Minos' labyrinth, and others. The mighty
wisdom of old Egypt verily reeked with symbols. The best in Hindu thought
relied largely on symbolic portrayal. The Gospel character of Jesus for the
most part taught in parables.
Up to the third century in
Christianity, while there prevailed a strong trend to Gnosticism and Greek
philosophy in the schools and doctrines of the Church, symbolism and allegorism
held a very high place in exegesis, pre-eminently so in the work of the two
most illuminated of the Patristics, Clement of Alexandria and his pupil,
Origen. Particularly "Origen's allegories" became later a bone of
contention between partisans in the Church and as a result fell under the
fierce denunciation of the orthodox parties and finally were "excommunicated"
by the decrees of Councils about the sixth century. Origen steadfastly
maintained that beneath the letter of scriptural text, to be discerned by a
more cultivated spiritual intuition, lay a deeper stratum of meaning, which was
the true and vital message, supplanting the more obvious literal sense. The
scriptures carried a profounder esoteric implication, concealed "under
glyph and symbol," which the untutored would miss and the initiated would
grasp. The milk for babes was the simple exoteric surface meaning; the meat for
hardier digestion was this more deeply buried occult rendering. Philo laid
great emphasis on this esoteric symbolic methodology. It is indeed a general
characteristic of the body of ancient literature.
But symbolic usage largely
disappeared after the fatal third century in countries under the Christian
banner. For nigh unto eleven centuries little is heard of symbolism, and this
period is precisely that covered by the "Dark Ages" in Occidental
civilization.
Then, to put an end to the dismal
night, came the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
A perusal of John Addington Symond's comprehensive volumes on the Renaissance
in Italy brings to light the astonishing fact that with this great burst of enlightenment
there swept in a great tide of symbolic poetization.
185
The intellectual instinct for
symbolization indeed formed one of the chief currents of the revival itself.
Says Symonds (p. 95):
"Poetry is instruction conveyed
through allegory and fiction. Theology itself, he [Boccaccio] reasons, is a
form of poetry; even the Holy Spirit may be called a Poet, inasmuch as he used
the vehicle of symbol in the visions of the prophets and the Revelation of
St. John."
Symonds speaks of Boccaccio's work
as containing "a full exposition of the allegorical theories with which
humanism started." Another curious passage from Symonds may well be
interpolated here, since it weighs in with a surprisingly pertinent reference
to present postures in culture. He goes on (p. 96):
"The poet, according to this
medieval philosophy of literature, was a sage and teacher, wrapping up his
august meanings in delightful fictions. Though the common herd despised him as
a liar and a falsehood-fabricator, he was, in truth, a prophet uttering his
dark speech in parables. How foolish, therefore, reasons the apologist, are the
enemies of poetry,--sophistical dialecticians and avaricious jurists, who have
never trodden the Phoebean hill, and who scorn the springs of Helicon because
they do not flow with gold! Far worse is the condition of those monks and
hypocrites who accuse the divine art of immortality and grossness, instead of
reading between the lines and seeking the sense conveyed to the understanding
under veils of allegory."
This outcry of Boccaccio against the
stolidity and unresponsiveness to the finer poetic aspects of literary culture
of the fourteenth century well dramatizes the general protest of delicacy of
sensibilities against crassness in all ages. It is one of the noblest yet
plaintively pitiful bleatings of refinement against gross dullness. The point
to be remarked here is that it came from one who performed pioneer labor in the
restoration of intellectual light to a benighted Europe, and that the light
which had been kindled for him and which he beamed further abroad to his age,
was largely generated and carried by the torch of symbolism. The enlightenment
of the Renaissance superinduced, if it was not in great measure superinduced
by, the revived science of symbology.
186
But the Renaissance ran its course,
lighting up the intellectual horizon of some generations with a mellow glow of
great refinement, to be lost eventually in the sweep of the Reformation, the
assertive reaction of the human spirit from centuries of stultifying blind
faith, and the extraversion of interest created by the trend to modern physical
science. The fine discernments and appreciations of cultured intellect
requisite to capture the exalted values in symbolic usage were extinguished and
disappeared. Humanitarian culture fell again to a low status, although the
Renaissance had given too sweet a taste of it ever to be completely smothered
out again. At any rate symbolism was once more submerged in desuetude, except
in so far as it lingered in general poetry and polite literature. Even that
continuation owed nearly all its inspiration to the vigorous breath that fired
the Renaissance flame.
Now, once again, there is the
dawning of the sun of symbolic apperception. What it heralds for humanity this
time is conjectural and precarious. It all depends on the cultural capabilities
of the age. The world has possessed the forms and norms of culture and lost
them. With coarse, crude realism stalking the land, in music, art, drama,
literature and social life, there seems little chance that a revival of
symbolism can take hold and live. The requisite refinements of intellectual
perceptions, the delicate nuances of human sentiment, the quietude and habits
of reflection needed to catch the subtle but powerful force of natural
analogies are lacking or perilously inadequate. The set of the modern mind is
too aggressively extravert to open the way for symbolism to register its values
and show its light. Yet, as always before, the true culture of the world hinges
upon that accomplishment. In this connection nothing is more illuminating than
a fairly lengthy passage from Symonds' work. Speaking of the obstructions in
the path of the fourteenth century revival, he writes (p. 67):
"The meagreness of medieval
learning was, however, a less serious obstacle to culture than the habit of
mind, partly engendered by Christianity, and partly idiosyncratic to the new
races, which prevented stu-
187
dents from appreciating the true
spirit of the classics. While mysticism . . . reigned supreme, the clearly
defined humanity of the Greeks and Romans could not fail to be
misapprehended."
That is, the nice discernments of
symbolic meanings could not be gained against or amid the thick atmosphere of
heavy pietism and ecclesiastical postures of all sorts.
"Poems like Virgil's Fourth
Eclogue were prized for what the author had not meant when he was writing
them; while his real interests were utterly neglected. Against this mental
misconception, this original obliquity of vision, this radical lie in the
intellect, the restorers of learning had to fight at least as energetically as
against brute ignorance and dulness. It was not enough to multiply books and to
discover codices; they had to teach men how to read them, to explain their inspiration,
to defend them against prejudice, to protect them from false methods of
interpretation. To purge the mind of fancy and fable, [when of course
literalized] to prove that poetry apart from its supposed prophetic meaning was
delightful for its own sake, and that the history of the antique nations . . .
could be used for profit and instruction, was the first step to be taken by
these pioneers of modern culture. They had, in short, to create a new mental
sensibility by establishing the truth that pure literature directly contributes
to the dignity and happiness of human beings. The achievement of this
revolution in thought was the great performance of the Italians of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries."
It requires no access of perfervid
unction or over-serious thinking to be aware that this passage describes a
situation the replica of which confronts humanity at this present hour with
issues grave and fateful. It might indeed be said truly that the fate of our
civilization hinges on the fineness or the bluntness of our susceptibility to
the profound intimations of symbolism. The age has given no sign that it has
cultivated the requisite sensitivity to the subtle impingement of the high
values delineated by symbology. There seems little hope that it can rise to the
measure of a successful accomplishment in this field.
Henry Drummond offered to its view
the generic type of such an achievement in his The Natural Law in the
Spiritual World.
188
The book was widely read, a fact
which makes its eventual drop into desuetude and neglect all the more
dispiriting. Had the Christian theologians possessed the open mind to evaluate
the great hint of his book in due and significant measure, the postulates of
religion today would be resting more firmly, not merely, as Gladstone thought,
on the impregnable rock of the Holy Scriptures--esoterically interpreted,--but
on that still more impregnable rock of natural analogy, than they have ever
rested on sheer faith. Will the age fail once again to hold the benignant light
of symbolic truth when psychoanalysis kindles the lamp anew? It is a momentous
question. More centuries of war and woe will follow if the response is feeble.
There has existed for centuries an
inveterate obduracy against allegorism, symbolism and dramatization of truth,
as particularly found in the sacred scriptures. The sage authors of those
scriptures presented majestic truth in no less majestic allegory, myth, drama
and symbol; and the best that even the modern mind can do in the face of it is
to snarl and sneer and snort. To continue the alliteration, to that mind it has
all been a snare. There was no soundness nor health in it. It was perforce
accepted and palliated as the infantile habit of "primitive" peoples.
It could be tolerated in condescension. But this "certain
condescension" worked to a catastrophic end in the total failure of its
possessors to grasp the meaning buried in those superb relics of cryptic wisdom
under allegory and symbol. The creation story, the ark and deluge saga, the
going down into "Egypt," the drying up of the Red Sea (now properly
translated the Reed Sea!) and the exodus of forty years' wandering, the Jonah
idyll and a good thousand other major and minor items of that Bible claimed to
be the highest expression of the moral and ethical grandeur of a civilization
boasting its clear-seeing powers above those of all other times and peoples in
history,--all these items of cardinal meaning in its own holy volume are yet a
totally sealed mystery, not a syllable of their true esoteric meaning properly
read or understood. It should carry some measure of rebuke to modern pride and
vaunting of all-time superiority in intelligence, as well
189
as some degree of humiliation, from
the discernment that the Bible it still extolls is quite incapable of
interpretation without resorting to the keys supplied--and only recently
discovered--from the allegedly primitive Egyptians.
There is a modern tide of concern
with so-called prophecy. The forecasts of the future made by Nostradamus,
Mother Shipton and others have been brought out and given great vogue. To give
any plausible conciseness to their predictions, a deal of help must be supplied
by the reader's imagination. They run much on the order of ancient oracles,
whose messages were vague and flexible enough to cover several possible
alternatives. But there is one such utterance that challenges the attention of
the most incredulous. It was that given by Count Leo Tolstoy in 1910 and
published in advance of the events it predicted. It foretold the Balkan War in
1912, the first World War in 1914 starting in the Balkans, the course of
developments thereafter, and contained in its penetrating vision of the near
future the remarkable statement that a new religion would arise based on
symbolism. It is most impressively set forth.
Likewise the savant who was regarded
as the world's outstanding authority on Orphism, Prof. Vittorio D. Macchioro,
of the University of Naples, in a work entitled From Orpheus to Paul, declared
in positive terms that if religion is to survive and exercise a beneficent sway
over general intelligence, it must return from dogmatic theology to symbolism.
This is sound insight, since the highest metaphysical values in religion can be
adequately expressed only through the language of symbols. Psychoanalysis has
added its corroboration to this conclusion. The divine soul must use symbols to
adumbrate its realities.
It is pretty well established that
among groups or schools that in ancient days labored at the great task of
spiritual culture, the Essenes in the Trans-Jordan region were the most eminent
custodians of true primeval wisdom. The article on them in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica contains the remarkable statement that "they preserved in
their libraries the books of the ancients, and read them not with-
190
out an allegorical
interpretation." The Christian historian-apologist Eusebius makes the
statement, which is surely a vital challenge to all Christian claims, that the Gospels
of the New Testament were old books preserved by the Essenes from remote
antiquity.
Psychoanalysis now opens the door to
the renaissance of symbolism. This may mean as great an advance for mental
science in the domain of self-mastery for the individual as the introduction of
symbols meant for abstract mathematics. It will equip effort at control of
individual action with a technique of known scientific procedure. And now
follows a denouement in this process of investigation that comes with startling
impact upon common realization. Symbolism, the newest feature of psychoanalytic
discovery, is all at once found to stand in the relation of a new intimacy with
an older aspect, indeed one that presided at the very birth of psychoanalysis
itself,--sex. We have said that nature and her phenomena stand as the outer
language speaking the truth of cosmic creation, that nature is truth manifested
in the form of concrete structures. The shape and nature of created things
reveal the archetypal mind that engendered them.
A link that helps join the two
aspects of the theme being developed here may be found in Dr. Hinkle's
discerning pattern of relationship between symbol and reality in her volume
already freely quoted. She writes (p. 240):
"One can gain value from
experience only when it is grasped in its double aspect as symbol and as
reality; not when it is possessed merely as a symbol, and the subjective
content, expressed through the idea of fantasy, is the only reality. Actually
there are two realities, the concrete external fact, and the inner subjective
psychological factor; adaptation and assimilation must take place with
both."
This is extremely well said and
timely. Every object is at once both thing in itself and symbol of another
thing less objective. And the true "being" or "reality" of
a thing is not seen until this double refraction of meaning is discerned. As
Wordsworth has brought out so pointedly in his Peter Bell poem,
191
"A primrose by the river's
brink
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."
Beside standing there in the meadow
it carried to Peter nothing in the line of the majesty, meaning and wonder of
the universal life in which it was a humble participant. But it does seem as if
Dr. Hinkle has here transposed her rating of values and acclaimed by the form
of her language the lesser status of the view of the thing as symbol of deeper
import. She seems to imply that people ordinarily miss its value as objective
reality in the implied more common grasp of its meaning as symbol. This
reverses the general status of the case, for hardly any mind misses the
validity of the thing as object, while very few go beyond this to the reality
of the thing as symbol of subjective experience. Our whole essay is the attempt
to do just that with sex, to take it far beyond its known quality as an object
of sensual experience in the concrete world, and to invest it with its grander
reality as symbol. There is little evidence that this task has been attempted
or achieved before.
Dr. Hinkle herself stands in
position to be accorded credit for taking several notable steps in that very
direction. She has caught some glimpses into the long vista of truth that is
opening out through the analogical approaches, tentative and timorous as they
are, of psychoanalysis to the science of sex as symbol. On page 49 of her work
she writes that by the technique provided by psychoanalysis
"the sexual impulse is raised
to the realm of the symbol and, for humanity in whom creativeness is the never
ending goal, it is a symbol of the highest significance and value."
And she continues:
"One is forced by analytic work
to a realization that the representations of sexual activity are themselves
used as symbols by the human mind to indicate the new goal--the creative urge
toward the fulfilment of a necessary psychic development and attainment, which
all the physi-
192
cal gratification in the world can
not satisfy. Just as men use their sexual powers and achievements as a measure
and symbol of their masculine strength and power on the physical plane, so the
unconscious uses the sexual symbols as the language in which to express
capacities and potentialities on the psychic plane." (Italics ours.)
The last sentence comes close to
being a statement of the theme and thesis of this work. Sex is a great--a very
great--objective reality in and of itself. And there the common mind of
humanity has stopped in dealing with it. It has seemed so substantial and
realistic a value in itself that there was not felt a need to use it as a mental
stepping-stone or stairway to something of more intrinsic value lying ahead in
subjective realms. Now the task is to transcend its value as object and
sensual experience and to delineate its still higher value as a symbolic
language of the most exalted descriptive character.
What Dr. Hinkle has brought out here
is true and vital. The time is destined to arrive, and before too long, when
the principles of analogy and the human mental capacity for analogical insight,
developed to quick apperceptions in periods when symbolism was pursued and
cultivated, but left to atrophy in all other periods, will be developed to an
acute stage again and function like a new genius. The mind will be able to look
at objects in nature's realm and see both of the realities pertaining to them,
to cull both their objective and their subjective influences. It will see them
as the things they are, standing there as objects of experience palpable to
sense. But at the same time it will be able to see them as the Egyptians saw them,
the living language of another world of reality, the world of truth, laws,
ideas. It is the aim here to perform this service for the objective reality
known as sex in human life. Another work will aim to do the like service for a
thousand particular phenomena in the world of nature.
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CHAPTER XIV
THE LANGUAGE OF LINGAM AND YONI
Now sex is one great cardinal aspect
of nature. Among nature symbols those based on sex must play as pivotal and
sweeping a role in thought and philosophy as sex itself plays in life as lived.
The central and almost predominant part sex plays in life is matched by the
Freudian, and again more recent, assignment to it of positively crucial
importance in psychoanalysis. Symbolism is the discovered modus of the
operation of the superconscious; sex is the dominant strain of influence or
motivation in the production of psychic manifestations. Hence sex and symbolism
must be close in affinity. The thesis of this work is the interpretation of sex
as symbol of cosmic truth.
Sex is the greatest word in the
language of symbolism, and it can now be perceived that the intonations of that
word come ringing out to the human mind with a message of meanings the most
awesome and mentally illuminating in the whole history of man's questing for
light on the mysteries of life and nature. Again it will be seen that the
ancients knew this basic fact that only now is receiving some
recognition in modern groping. This knowledge on their part is now certified to
by their use of sex symbols, extended later to sex practices and formularies,
in the religious systems of ancient nations. Their employment of this sort of
symbolism, known as phallicism, has been no less than tragically misapprehended
by stupid medieval and modern assumption in entire failure to grasp the true
motif behind it all. The essay will endeavor to orient the modern attitude to a
more competent understanding of the intrinsic sincerity, natural legitimacy and
exalted significance of phallic symbolism, and to raise it again from its mean
status in the
194
misconceptions of religionists to
its due place of the loftiest sublimity in human consideration. The results
attained by the study will come as the natural corollary of the function of sex
as found at work in the field of psychological science.
Again modern mentality is confronted
with the necessity, for its own better poise and balance, of recovering a lost
ancient comprehension. Again it finds itself in dereliction from the more
perspicacious discernment of antiquity. Again it must bestir itself to regain a
lost possession of the past.
Dr. Hinkle's capable delineation of
the status of sex symbolism in remote days may serve to open this excursion
into the territory to be explored afresh (The Recreating of the Individual, p.
426). She is speaking of the Oriental faiths in the ancient period:
"These religions, unlike the
Christian religion, were not antagonistic to sexuality--indeed we find its
phenomena frankly flourishing along side all their worship and ritual, and
incorporated with them. To these minds sexuality was not impure or unclean and
there seemed no incongruity in the admixture of sexual and religious symbolism.
Indeed in India sexuality itself was made an object through which control and
discipline could be gained by the man."
Christian missionaries professed
great horror and revulsion at finding the lingam and yoni, the male and female
creative organs, and other signs and symbols of "sexuality" and
"immorality" in Buddhic, Hindu and other Oriental temples of
religion. Many a dollar was raised from the faithful at home to help lift the
heathen idolaters out of their deep mire of besotted sexual grossness by
importing to them the same abhorrence of the mention of sex functionism as had
come to be the heritage of New England after several centuries of adamant
Puritanism. The passage quoted just now is indication that at long last the
pall of a wholly unnatural evil stigma laid by the worst of philosophical
distortions upon our Occidental mind for some centuries is beginning to be
lifted, as the lost light of a wholesome paganism dawns upon our
benighted mental horizon. Psychoanalysis indeed might have come earlier if
195
sex had not been pushed down out of
common normal vision under a blanket of hypothecated indecency and evil for too
many centuries. There was offered little chance of the West's coming to
understand the meaning of this segment of our nature as long as it was held
reprehensible for anyone to study the phenomena appertaining to it and to
publish the findings. Now the moral miasmatic mist is lifting, and with the
first release from stigma and opprobrium come the first rich fruits in the
valuable findings of psychoanalysis.
Sex is being morally neutralized, as
a legitimate object of research and understanding. The nightmare of some
sixteen centuries of more or less insane morbidity over it, due to the
frightful perversion of ancient symbolic dramatization of cosmic truth by
phallic representations, and leading to the horrendous asceticisms perpetrated
in the name of "spirituality" by generations of fanatical
religionists, crucifying the sex nature to "save" the immortal
spirit, is at last being dispersed in the awakening of common sense to the
recognition of the natural good function of the sexual instinct.
This side of the Renaissance has
lingered long behind the intellectual and philosophical impulses of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Renaissance and the Reformation are
neither of them completed. What an errant and ignorant Christianity threw out
or extinguished in the third century has by no means all been recovered. To
emphasize vividly what a wrongly oriented Christian philosophy did to an
aboriginal sane view of the natural man's place in the dual economy of life, it
is well to look at a concise statement made by Lecky in his famous old work, The
History of European Morals (Vol. II, p. 291):
"The Greek conception of
excellence was the full and perfect development of humanity in all its organs
and functions, and without any tinge of asceticism. Some parts of human nature
were recognized as higher than others; and to suffer any of the lower appetites
to obscure the mind, restrain the will and engross the energies of life, was
acknowl-
196
edged to be disgraceful; but the
systematic repression of a natural appetite was totally foreign to Greek modes
of thought."
This is a challenging reminder to
those in Christian circles who find it an unfailing pastime to stigmatize
darkly everything pagan. There was balance, there was understanding, there was
philosophical acumen holding the horizon line steadily between excess and
deficiency. Lecky contrasts with this the tragic misconception of Christian
moral codes, which could rise to nothing higher than the persuasion of folly
that for the interests of the spirit it was necessary to kill out the element
of creative impulse and all its works. And the world has ignored, excused, condoned
and palliated, if not even honored, this abject subversion of reason and
sanity, as the product of a holy passion for God. But Socrates and Plato
labored all life long to prove that no amount of holy passion is good unless it
is tempered with the knowledge that enables the human to keep his position
steadily between excess and inadequacy. Holy passion is not only futile but
perilous if it is misguided to the repression of a part of our nature that is
designed to fulfill its function in its most perfect development.
It is well if the modern Occidental
mind can be brought for a moment to remembrance of this chapter of early
Christian history, as it may aid in giving a truer perspective of the road we
have traveled to where we now stand. A work of great value would be a study
which would bring to clear light the genesis of the human sense of shame of the
reproductive functions and organs, with its ghastly brood of developments in
asceticism, mutilation of the body, distortion of the mind and morbid crushing
of natural happiness. In the study it would be brought to view that the usual
laudation of "Christian" and the stigma thrown on "pagan"
must be exactly reversed. In this comparison the laurels for sanity and
wholesomeness must surely go to "pagan." It is indeed no slight
ignominy that falls to the debit of Christianity in this contest. To have
perverted whole segments of human psychic endeavor and natural
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instinct by turning them from the
channels of happy exercise under God's order to the dark recesses of both
morbid repression and guilty expression, must be accounted forever a heavy
stain on the record of the Church of Christ.
A few startling excerpts from
Lecky's work may accentuate the charge succinctly. He writes (Vol. II, p. 321):
"The relation which nature has
designed for the noble purpose of repairing the ravages of death, and which, as
Linnaeus has shown, extends even through the world of flowers, was invariably
treated [by the Christian Fathers] as a consequence of the fall of Adam, and
marriage was regarded almost exclusively in its lowest aspect . . . as an
inferior state. . . . 'To cut down by the axe of Virginity the wood of
Marriage,' was, in the energetic language of Jerome, the end of the
saint."
To reproduce the race was a crime
against Deity.
Taking the Adam-Eve allegory in its
crude literal interpretation, the crabbed mind of early theologism could not
get past the inevitable naïve inferences that sprang from Eve's tempting man to
his fall. Woman had to carry the stigma of the first mother's weakness all
through history. If the divine spirit in man was to stand against further
descent into sin or supine resignation to its established thraldom, the man had
to cut himself free from the woman. Woman had to be cast aside as unclean, as
evil, as the living form of the Tempter. And such was the lot that was thrust
upon her and in which she, with equal morbidity, in large part concurred. Lecky
adds (Vol. II, p. 338):
"The combined influence of the
Jewish writings [as part of Christianity] and of that ascetic feeling which
treated women as the chief source of temptation to man, was shown in those
fierce invectives which form so conspicuous and so grotesque a portion of the
writings of the Fathers, and contrast so curiously with the adulation bestowed
upon particular members of the sex. Woman was represented as the door of hell,
as the mother of all human ills. She should be ashamed at the very thought that
she is a woman. She should live in continual penance, on account of the curses
she has brought upon the world. She should be ashamed of her dress, for it is
the memorial of her fall. She should
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be especially ashamed of her beauty,
for it is the most potent instrument of the daemon. Physical beauty was indeed
perpetually the theme of ecclesiastical denunciations."
To such lengths of literalism and
harlequin grotesqueness had this philosophy gone all askew that "women
were often forbidden by a Provincial Council in the sixth century, on account
of their impurity, to receive the Eucharist into their naked hands."
Against this macabre background the ancient Greeks' love of beauty and
naturalness shines with wondrous luster. Let us take the space to enhance the
contrast. In his second volume (p. 292) Lecky writes, with reference to the
Greek epoch:
"In no other period of the
world's history was the admiration of beauty in all its forms so passionate or
so universal. It colored the whole moral teaching of the time and led the chief
moralists to regard virtue simply as the highest kind of supersensual beauty.
It appeared in all literature, where the beauty of form and style was the first
of studies. It supplied at once the inspiration and the rule of all Greek art.
It led the Greek wife to pray, before all other prayers, for the beauty of her
children. It surrounded the most beautiful with an aureole of admiring
reverence."
One sad consequence of Christian
sickliness of mind may be mentioned in Lecky's words (Vol. II, p. 354):
"The domestic unhappiness
arising from differences of belief was probably almost or altogether unknown in
the world before the introduction of Christianity."
In one more respect the Occidental
world needs to recover the high status of paganism. And once again the mind is
instructed by a shocking object-lesson of appalling costliness in the
destruction of human happiness, in the incredible historical consequences of
such an apparently simple item as the misconstruction of an ancient theological
or cosmic allegory. The rebirth of symbolism comes after its burial in
ignorance for dismal centuries, with its fair promise of release to the bound
mind of ages from the killing force of
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moral and intellectual ineptitudes
unconscionable past all belief. It will be the only magician's wand capable of
healing the diseases of mental infatuation and the hypnotic power of
superstition.
The clue to an understanding of the
whole situation may be drawn out from a piercing introspection into the
implications of an epigrammatic pronouncement of Lecky's (Vol. II, p. 3):
"The eye of the Pagan
philosopher was ever fixed on virtue, the eye of the Christian teacher upon
sin."
If a ribald figure may be pardoned,
the Pagan philosopher sought to elevate man by lifting him from above; the
Christian theologist by kicking him up from below. Doubtless in the large both
directions of force have their dual play. Yet the difference of approach is
suggestive. One aims to keep the spirit of man breathing the pure upper air of
healthy life and enjoying it; the other imprisons it in the dank malarial
atmosphere of ugliness and morbidity. One contemplates an upward urge from
delight in the beautiful and the natural; the other expects it from revulsion
against ugliness. One envisages righteousness and virtue and beauty, and
becomes rapt in the ecstasies of holiness. The other fights in the shadows of
remorse and wretchedness and keeps the eye of the soul riveted on the
despicable, the craven and the repulsive. The one aims to lift up the spirit
through the delights of virtue; the other through disgust with evil.
The subjugation of the mind of
general humanity under the complex of an evil attribution to sex is one of the
most stupendous and challenging phenomena in life's domain. The general mind
does not possess the necessary of an adequate elucidation, since the problem
has its roots deep in aspects of the soul's evolutionary situation or
predicament which lie beyond our ken. They may inhere in and spring from some
of the anthropological and genetic phases of the soul's pilgrimage through the eons.
Orphic books do ascribe the soul's present status and difficulties to
"ancient wrongs" and "Moira's bounds transgressed." They
ascribe its present karmic evils
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to past sins, in part at least. The
soul is said to have bound itself by "broad oaths fast sealed" with
Deity, to discharge its high evolutionary errand on earth, but violated its
oath and fell into dalliance and waywardness. It did not walk on the surface of
the water of life, but sank into the depths of sense and animalism. "They
indulged in their own movement; they took the wrong path . . . and swung as far
away as they were able," says Plotinus.
Whatever the cause, at any rate the
human race has ever stood before its own endowment of sex baffled and
perplexed. Imperiously sex has dominated a major segment of all human
motivation and activity, and has driven mortal man with its implacable
imperative into the continued perpetuation of the race, and from one angle of
view, taunted it with the consequences. Physiologically and psychologically its
slave, man has philosophically been almost entirely bereft of a rationale that
would enable him to mitigate its thraldom, neutralize its ravages, countercheck
its impetuous tyranny, control its expression and normalize both its exercise
and its social acceptance by due comprehension of its proper genre and status
in the human economy. It still can be said that the race is without an adequate
philosophical purview of sex.
Beyond the crude and obvious
recognition of its provision for the propagation of the race and the ascription
to it of a natural beneficence in this function, there is no generally agreed
and fixed category of appraisal in which it should be classified. Even at times
its agency in the production of new humans is not seen as a blessing. It can
legitimately be thought of as dooming souls to lives of mortal wretchedness.
Schopenhauer has well delineated its despotic sway over mankind in the three
volumes of his The World as Will and Idea. It is there depicted as a
nameless despot, as the will of life driving its creatures on to the
fulfillment of its aims. It is pictured as irrational, guided by no principle
or reason, and brushing aside any such principle whenever
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its use by its creatures would stand
to obstruct its sweep to the accomplishment of its own ends. It is painted as
an insatiable hunger and thirst after life, and that not in idea or spirit, but
in existence, in sense and in flesh. To gain its goal of ever more bodies to
live in, it baits its lure to their generation with its irresistible honey and
nectar of bliss and orgiastic ecstasy. And from deep in the profoundest well of
conscious motivation--even from the hidden recesses of the unconscious, in
fact--this inexorable tyrant of life channels human conduct in a direction that
tends ever toward the culmination of all in a paroxysm of transport.
Its faraway reference is
omnipresent, whenever male and female meet. It looks out of the eyes of the
youth and maid from the moment of their first glance. It insinuates its mute but
powerful appeal into every touch of the two polarized opposites, heightening
the lure until both seep into each other's embrace. Its sole "drive"
is to bring spirit and matter, male and female, together for the purpose of new
generation. Every act, word, look and stratagem of conduct, of those who may be
its coadjutors and eventually its victims, is conditioned in reference to its
fateful end of sex union and reproduction. If in life's code of values it could
be assumed that the first and divinest task and end of existence for a living
creature is to generate its seed and perpetuate its stream of ongoing life,
then it might be legitimate to say that all general acts are subsidiary and
subservient to the central consummative act of procreation, and are to be
appraised as good or evil as they fall in or out of line with the movement
leading toward life's renewal.
Whether to hold the tyrant as grim
and beneficent, or grim and maleficent, to rate it good or berate it as evil,
to regard it as enslaving or as liberating, as lovely or repulsive, blessed or
accursed, has been the age-old question with which the incessant pressure of
the great life impulse has confronted mankind from the dawn of reflection. So
we have seen the function of sex pigeon-holed in both the highest and the
lowest categories of thought and regard, as well as in every intermediate shade
and grade between the two. It is at
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one time and in certain propitious
circumstances exalted as the very flower of beauty and of good; at other times
and under altered conditions, it becomes the very horror of shame and
repugnance. It can be viewed in every degree of light and shadow in the gamut's
interval. It can be exalted to the highest rhapsodies of Platonic or poetic
purity and sanctity; a little lower down it can be sensed as good in more
commonplace degree; still father down it can be a matter of indifference,
morally, aesthetically neutral; then it can be mildly repellent, conventionally
taboo; and finally it can be violently distasteful and even loathsome, foul and
bestial. In between it may register a thousand different nuances of tone and
impressionability.
This wide variety and diversity in
the modes of its subjective registry may indeed point to the inference
therefrom that its assessment of good and evil character is a matter merely of
the mood, background, biases, predilection and the general postures of the
minds that stand in judgment on it. Indeed history sanctions this verdict. For
there has never been uniformity in the social appraisal. What has seemed noble
and lofty to some has appeared vicious and depraved to others. Laudation and
reprobation, tolerance and resentment have often greeted the same acts. Even to
the same individual a sexual determination that at one instant seemed haloed
with loveliness can ex post facto be viewed as injudicious and turn to a
canker of remorse. What absolute character or quality the thing has
intrinsically of itself is often the least considered item in the mental view.
Extraneous influences and not the inherent merit or demerit of the case
generally govern the form of the judgment or the reaction. In the end, then,
being virtually the hidden omnipresent motivation behind every situation, it
takes on the infinitely varied coloring of mood, shade and value from the
distinctive connection in which it occurs. So it has never been categorically
judged and catalogued in specific character.
Yet certain broad general attitudes
toward it have taken concrete form in the social life of different nations.
Common convention in
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society has condemned a too free and
open expression of it. Any manifestation of it outside the legitimatized forms
is frowned upon and disgrace is heaped upon the offenders. It receives its
highest sanctions and its virtual apotheosization in the field of romance, in
the phase of courtship and mating, and in parenthood. After marriage the door
is open to indulgence governed only by individual tastes and disciplines. In
religion, art, literature and education its expression is varied and manifold.
Many differentiations make up the general patch-quilt of its variegated vogue
and role in the life of the world. On the whole it is inordinately sensitive to
the vicissitudes of mood, sentiment, moral poses and personal attitudes. In the
main it is maintained in strength and keenness by the imposition of restraint
upon its indulgence and rendered weak and flaccid by inordinate expression.
The deepest inquiry is involved in
the attempt to determine the genesis of the sense of shame that has almost
universally afflicted the ordinary human attitude toward sex. Why the
dialectically unsupportable posture of the human mind, exhibited in its
investing with the mantle of shame and contumely the very organs and functions
that give us our existence, could arise and fix its clammy clutch so
remorselessly and universally upon the world is a problem of the weightiest
moment and needs rational solution.
To strike bottom in this recondite
search it is necessary to resort to the hints and data found only in the tomes
of the archaic anthropological and cosmological wisdom of the early sages. The
old books give us intimations in data that are not too full or explicit. They
tell us that, as in the Timaeus, "twelve legions of
angels"--the true identification at last of the twelve "tribes of
Israel"--were assigned the mission of coming to earth to be the souls of
the highest evolved animal bodies. These souls were units of God's own
spiritual selfhood, seed fragments of his own nature. One might think of them
as units of his mind. They are the "Innocents" of New Testament
allegorism, the designation being a reference to their never before having been
"married,", i.e., linked organically
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to physical bodies in planetary
incarnation. A Hindu name given them is Kumaras, or "virgin
youths," "celibate young men." In Egyptian nomenclature they
were "the Younglings of Shu," or "the younglings in the
egg." They were pure souls, units of divine consciousness, untested in the
conflict with matter, and therefore sent out to be put under the test which all
consciousness must meet, namely, the function of standing as the positive pole
opposed to matter, the negative. This constituted the "temptation" of
Holy Writ, so outrageously misconceived by ignorant literalism. It was a
"temptation" only in the sense of a testing or a trying out against
concrete experience the latent powers of the soul, which could come to an
actualization of its still potential capabilities only by such an ordeal.
The nub of the origin of shame
appertaining to the animal sex nature of man must then be located in the
psychic implications of this situation. Here were units of pure mind and soul
finding themselves plunged into the bodies of animals and under the necessity
of procreating physically, as animals. Or the high-minded souls found
themselves organically attached to bodies which procreated physically and
sexually. If it is possible to project thought into something like the mental
attitudes that would be generated in this evolutionary predicament, some
inkling, however imperfect, may be caught of the reaction of these soul units
to what must have appeared to them as a degradation of their divine status and
condition. Sons of God and consubstantial with him in essence and being as
they, subconsciously at any rate, knew themselves to be, they found themselves
obliged to "become like us in all respects," and particularly to
reproduce in the fashion of animals.
The possible realization of the
force of this contrast is not so remote to us as at first view it might appear,
since these two elements are still present in our nature, or indeed constitute
what we ourselves are. One needs only to recall Plato's definition of man:
"Through body it is an animal; through intellect it is a God"--to
sense the possible mental attitude of the god in us toward his ani-
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mal counterpart in us. The emerging
self-consciousness of the ego-soul became aware of its attachment to the gross
instincts of the animal-soul. The animal functions had for a long time been
performed by the animal unconscious, as they still are. But little by little
the expanding consciousness of the infant god could look down upon these
manifestations of the instinctive life of the body and reflect in some sort
philosophically upon them. Surely, sooner or later, as the nobility of the
innate divine nature asserted itself, the reaction of the god to the sexual
expressions of his own organism would take the form of disgust and revulsion.
Something suggesting what we can only call "cosmic shame" of his
having to perform like the animal would be generated in the mind of the higher
self. Plotinus, as has been noticed, expressed it in a manner almost as drastic
as that of the Christian Fathers, in his confession of shame at having a body
at all. Some modern spiritual cult systems come to nearly the same attitude.
Some even ban sexual expression entirely from their members. The essence of
this predicament is in truth back of the many scriptural statements as to the Christ's
having demeaned, degraded himself by taking on our nature. "He despised
not the virgin's [that is, matter's] womb." Before the rational faculty in
the developing ego-consciousness could dialectically work out the
"naturalness" and beneficence of the cosmic arrangement that tied or
imprisoned soul in bodies, this instinctive revulsion of the god at sight of
the body's performance of the creative acts must have taken deep lodgment in
the ego-mind.
So came the sense of shame of sex.
This is obviously how the genuinely most sacred function in all life on its
physical side fell under the onus and stigma of universal infamy and turpitude.
Plato, Hermes, Orpheus, Zoroaster, the Zend-Avesta, the Bundahish, the
Zohar, the Vedas and Genesis disclose in cryptic form the
story of the birth and growth of sexual shame. It goes to the very roots of the
human constitution. It came as the result of the original compounding in one
organism of the two diverse elements of deity and animality, and their enforced
"marriage." The god conceived
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a feeling of shame at being
subjected to the carnal mode of procreation incident to his incarnation in
animal body.
It is a bit of ancient evolutionary
allegorism that has, like the rest, escaped understanding by modern intelligence,
that the "sons of God," when sent to earth, were variously cautioned
"not to marry the women of that place." They were enjoined to see
that they made "no alliances with the natives of that country." These
odd injunctions leave something to be desired in the way of explicitness.
Nevertheless they can have reference only to two possibilities inherent in the
case. They can point to an avoidance of precisely what did happen, namely, the
asserted miscegenation of the early races of men with the females of the higher
animal species, which bred the several ape types. Or they can be taken
allegorically as being an allusion to the necessity of the soul's not losing
itself in entire identity with the life of the body. The soul was to tenant the
body, build up gradually its rulership over it, hold it in reasonable and
salutary subjection, transform its nature and eventually merge its forces with
it, or "marry" it. The injunction not to marry the women of that
country could therefore be taken as a caution to the souls about to incarnate
to help them hold true to the fulfillment of their oath or covenant, which
bound them not to lose themselves in the animal nature, to successfully
"walk on the water" of the sea of life--water being the exact typal
symbol of the animal nature, the body being seven-eighths water--and not to
sink into the depths of carnal sensuality. It is by no means a stretch of
mental chicanery to make the term "women" mean the physical body of
mankind. For the feminine was ever the symbol-type of the physical side, matter
or body. The man in humanity marries the woman in humanity when soul and body
unite and eventually merge their positive and negative potencies in a new
creation. The entire structure of the moral teaching in Old and New Testaments,
particularly in St. Paul's searching analyses of the Christly virtues and the
carnal vices, rises to ever clearer and more forceful compre-
207
hension if read in the light of
these lost ancient presentments of the anthropological formation of mankind.
Soul was masculine as generative of
plan and action, and body was feminine as performing the function of motherhood
for all life and growth. Body was ever represented as "the wife and
sister" of spirit, not to say also its "mother." And the story
in Genesis is instructive for our theme in that it sets forth that when
the separation of unisexuality in primeval life into the duality of male and
female had been consummated in the garden, then "the eyes of both of them
were opened," and they saw that they were naked, and they were ashamed.
This is the allegorical depiction of the awakened sense of their position when
plunged into incarnation at the level of the beast. It was the soul's reaction
to the realization of its descent from the heaven of spirit to the gross
realism of life in body.
A phrase used by the Greek
philosophers well brings out the recognition of their status. They perceived
that they "had fallen into generation." It brought them "under
the law," as St. Paul puts it, of sin and death. They had plunged into
what the sages of early days denominated "the death of the soul." For
such in fact was that diminished potential of life and consciousness entailed
for the god-unit when it entered into its union with body. "Death, to the
soul," says an exponent of Greek philosophy, "was to descend into
matter and to be entirely subjected to it." This is indeed the
"bondage in Egypt," "that slave pen," as the Moffatt
translation of the Bible renders the phrase in the Old Testament. As souls in
bondage to the flesh, we are the sons of Hagar, the bondwoman. When we awaken
our divinity and engraft it on the body of the physical, we become sons of
Sarai, the freewoman, and thereby enjoy the "liberty of the sons of
God."
Down in the "underworld"
of sense and matter, buried in flesh and goaded to enjoy the lusts thereof, the
god retains enough of the unquenchable fire of divine spirit to be aware, if at
first dimly, of his celestial dignity and high estate. At times the sense of
loss
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of his former home and realization
of the degradation of his life in the sensuous mire of animal reproduction
flash through into his apprehension and generate the shame of his
"fall" into matter. Buried thus in the depths of the "nether world"
of mythology, hiding in the unconscious of man's life, the soul conceives the
feeling that its tenancy of body is a thing of evil designing, low and base.
The body is "of the earth, earthy," and the soul feels the dishonor
of attachment to it. Plotinus advances the theory that the soul recognizes that
its immersion in body arises from some defect in itself, of which it should be
ashamed. If it had lived up to its possible greater perfection, it would not
have needed the physical experience. This, however, is gratuitous. The soul may
be ashamed of its imperfection, but only in the sense in which a seed or
sapling should be ashamed of not being a perfect grown tree. It is on the road
to being such; it is, as Hopper reminds us, a viator. When the Christos has
arisen to his full stature and has asserted his lordship over the entire man,
he becomes the high priest after the order of Melchizedek, the King of
Righteousness, and he presides at the marriage of the two long-warring but
finally reconciled orders of life in one new creative union. And when soul at
last drops the "body of shame" of the perishable flesh, and clothes
itself anew in that glory-body of empyreal light which is from above, then
truly it has put on the wedding garment of the redeemed.
In the Pistis Sophia, the
Gospel of the Gnostic Christians, Salome asks the Christ when his kingdom shall
come on earth. He replies: "When you shall have trampled underfoot the
garment of shame; when that which is without shall be as that which is within;
when there shall be neither male nor female, but the male with the female shall
be as one." This is in full harmony with the postulates of the ancient
teaching, that at the end of the aeon the creative life which had divided into
male and female poles of energy, returns to androgyneity or undifferentiation
for the period of unmanifestation.
This sense of shame wells up from
the unconscious, from the
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Amen, the "god in hiding."
"For a little while" he is made lower than the angels, to be crowned
with glory and honor that even angels have not won. But from his temporarily
submerged place he speaks out in warning and admonition, or praise and
commendation, to the conscious self in the language of symbol. The voice of the
unconscious, in its department of the superconscious, is the voice of Deity,
not absolute and infinite, but Deity undergoing its own evolution, and as
compared with the lower animal self, practically omniscient and infallible. As
Heraclitus has written, "Man's genius is a deity." Here in man's
temple of body it is a deity tied to the inhibitions of an organism of flesh
and sense. While his mind is set to the task of redeeming the animality of the
body to humanhood, he feels at times the meanness of his lowly estate and the
shame of his nakedness is strong.
It still remains anomalous,
logically, that the mind of the race should hold in contempt the functional
mechanism of its own physical perpetuation. The strange quirk of this
predicament is that sex is held in both extreme categories of the lowest and
the highest moral appraisal at one and the same time. It is pretty generally
regarded as low and base, while it is at the other end evaluated in terms of
the highest sanctity. Its position is therefore relative to mood and viewpoint,
or the peculiar cast of philosophy determining the judgment. Motherhood, for
instance, is both celebrated with all the halo of romance, sentiment and
beauty, as in poetry of lyric character, and also made the butt of scurrilous
ribaldry. It is rated according to the dictates of time, circumstance and
subjective standards of conception.
Jung outlines a thesis to account
for the almost universal low rating of sex functionalism which has the merit of
a psychological raison d'être at least. He ventures the idea that the race,
or the human mind, in order to fend itself from the daily impingement of this
insistent force, or to escape its imperious domination, has besmirched it with
infamy, pretending to see in it something vile
210
and unclean, something unspeakable
and unholy. But, says Jung, instead of enabling man to destroy the power of
sexuality in this way, the struggle to defame it has only warped and distorted,
injured and mutilated its expression. For not without destruction of the
individual can such a fundamental instinct be thwarted, he adds. Life itself
has needs and imperiously demands expression of them through the living
instrumentalities provided by nature. All nature answers to this freely and
simply except man, and his failure to recognize himself as an instrument
through which living energy is coursing, and the demands of which must be
obeyed, is the prime cause of much of his misery. Despite his possession of
intellect and self-consciousness he can not without disaster to himself refuse
the task of fulfilling his own needs. His great task is the adaptation of
himself to reality and the recognition of himself as a channel through which a
stream of living energy is flowing outward to the fulfillment of divinely
designed objectives. His blocking them in any way is perilous.
To crush out the sensuous libido
overtly is a sin against life. Jung goes so far as to pronounce it "a sort
of self-murder." The deliberate renunciation of the chance to express the
strong demands of nature "must stifle in himself the wish for it,"
and this is suicidal. The human will, actuated by social compulsions, drives it
inward, when its need is to come forth into expression. This is to
"introvert libido," in Jung's phrase, and disastrous consequences
follow, we are assured.
"Whoever introverts
libido,--that is to say, whoever takes it away from a real object without
putting in its place a real compensation--is overtaken by the inevitable
results of introversion. The
libido which is turned inward into the subject awakens again from among the
sleeping remembrances one which contains the path upon which earlier libido
once had come to the real object." (Psychology of the Unconscious, p.
98.)
This is a fine discernment of
psychology. For this introversion clearly is seen to force the ego back into
subjective fantasy among
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the images of its childhood and
early racial past, the evolutionary fruits of which have already been gathered,
when what it craves is new experiences to further its advance into ever-expanding
life. The suppression holds the spirit bound in old forms, when it cries aloud
for freedom to test new ones. The only salvation from disaster in the
introversion is, as Jung notices, the substitution of a "real
compensation" for the repressed desire. Such would come in the form of a
higher realization on the part of the ego that the thwarting of sensual libido
is altogether in the line of true progress and that the mere sensuous
expression would no longer be advantageous. Such decisions come with the
general growth of knowledge, wisdom and understanding. Animal desire must
gradually be curbed and turned into paths of outlet conducive to the interests
of the ruling soul. The distress and psychopathic reactions in this process are
obviated when the control of libido is thus exercised from within and, so to
say, has the sanction of the whole man. Abnormal psychology results from the
imposition of compulsions and restraints on nature against which the real will
of the individual rebels. So we find Cicero most wisely writing (Tusculanium
Questiones):
"Volition is a reasonable
desire; but whatever is incited to violently in opposition to reason, that is a
lust or an unbridled desire which is discoverable in all fools."
The intellect in man is destined to
be the king and ruler of all things lower than it in the compounding of
elements in the constitution of the human. The forces of libido are to come
under the direction of King Mind. Mind is unfolding its archetypal plans and
designs in the creation of the world and of man and libido must be enlisted in
the work as servant of the higher. The soul possesses the power "whereby
he is able to subdue all things unto himself," as the Bible puts it. He is
able "to put all things under his feet." Libido finds its highest
utility eventually in conformity with the purposes of the mind. This is
beautifully said by Plotinus (Enneads III, 5, 9.):
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"What lies enclosed in the
intellect comes to development in the world-soul as logos, fills it with
meaning and makes it as if intoxicated with nectar."
The mind will eventually stamp its
image and the logical structure of its formulations upon the outer universe,
filling the whole with the ecstatic sense of divine beauty. And in this work
the mind bends the forces of libido to its purposes. In the end libido itself
finds its own apotheosization in becoming the servant of mind.
The old Bay Psalm Book recites that
In Adam's fall
We sinned all.
And Adam's fall was, and still is,
held to be the descent of the angelic spirits into the realm of the flesh and
their participation in fleshly modes of procreation. Upon human sex has been
unloaded the entire obloquy of the "original sin." The grievous sin
of Adam and Eve was their indulgence in sexual union. Their lives were "pure"
before the fatal commingling. The carnal copulation opened their eyes to their
state of sin and shame. Taken allegorically there is philosophical meaning
behind these representations. But, the allegorical sense wholly lost, and
ignorance clutching at superficial understanding, the creation legend in its
weird falsifications has stained the mind of humanity for two thousand years
with the taint of half-insane turpitude that blackens mentally the conception
of every child of the race. For deep in the background of every human
consciousness there still lingers this dark psychological cloud whose miasmatic
moisture was generated by the mental poisoning of every generation in its
childhood, that every child born of the natural method of sexual union is "conceived
in sin." In sickening revulsion from the imputations of this theology, it
is not too censurable, perhaps, except on the grounds of its mental stupidity,
that modern spiritual cults have in many cases held before their women members
the real possibility of their giving birth to children by a wholly spiritual
process. The fault does not lie with nature, the methods
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and processes of which are designed
by God. It is to be located in the human folly that can be bred of ignorance.
As has been pointed out in so many other items of doctrine that came down from
ancient sources, here again is to be noted the wreckage of sanity that has come
again and again in human thinking as the result of failure to understand
archaic methods of representing sublime truth by allegory and symbol. Perhaps
in all history nothing has been so costly to one half of humanity as this
miscarriage of ancient symbology.
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CHAPTER XV
PHALLICISM TRANSFIGURED
Against the fickle and fluctuating
approach to the appraisal of sex made by modern sentiment and feeble
philosophical conception, it is possible, as the result of symbolic
methodology, to set forth a view that will enable the mind to lay the
foundations for erecting a more stabilized and settled judgment on the mooted
question. By the aid of analogical processes it will be possible to anchor the
mind to a cosmic significance in sex that will serve to fix vacillating opinion
and attitudes in a more permanent frame. If it can be shown that sex is at root
the constitutional law of existent being and if its functions can be seen as
the representation of the modus of all creation, an amended view of its
character and beneficence will be gained. This will be of incalculable value to
thinking mankind. This view is to be gained through the avenue of approach
which sees in sex not the end value of itself in itself, but sees it as the
symbol of values in the supersensible world and in cosmic creation which lie
beyond its own sphere of function and experience.
Sex hints at the existence of
criteria of appraisal of its utility and character which lie beyond common ken,
but toward which, by analogy, the phenomena of sex themselves point, and which
the mind, thus aided, may lay hold of if it be astute enough. In brief, however
much sex may mean as immediate experience, its own weightier significance can
better be seen in the light of what it indicates as symbol. The light
that comes into the focus when the telescope of symbolic vision is directed
upon sex as symbol is unimaginably illuminating.
Our work is dedicated to the
proposition that sex, used as symbol, stands as perhaps the most luminous guide
to the human mind on
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all the central problems of life and
thought. Had the early analogical instinct of discerning mind not been killed
out, it might have been known all along that if life is governed by universal
law, the known method of life propagation in the vegetable's, the animal's and
man's world would be an index of all cosmic creation. And if early tomes of
exalted wisdom had not been relegated to the status of infantile or primitive
speculation, the terms and elements of the entire problem of existence could
have been kept inundated with a flood of meaning, for the more explicit
enlightenment of the human faculty.
Theology, as has been seen, was
anciently acclaimed as the "King of Sciences." It had won its exalted
position in antiquity by virtue of its immediate contribution of light to man's
understanding of the meaning of life and the universe. Its principles met and
solved the chief problems of philosophy by dint of the fact that, as conceived
and formulated, it maintained a relation of the closest intimacy with the world
of nature, as well as to man's constitution and life as these were linked with
nature. No more than now was theology a mere nature cult, a worship of the
growth and death of vegetation, an agricultural ritual, as is so tediously
claimed by modern students and writers in the wake of a reading of The
Golden Bough, or other collections of ancient and "primitive"
religious usages. We have read of the worship of Ceres, the goddess of
"grain," and of the "corn myth," and other religions of
planting and harvesting, of the autumn death of the god with the seed sown and
his resurrection in the spring with the germination and upgrowth of that which
was "dead." And not in two thousand years has there been one
scholar's brain clever enough to tell us that these formulated myths of the
dying and germinating seed were not the vaporings of a primitive
nature-worship, but that they were the natural analogue of cosmic and
spiritual principle which govern all creation. It is time that modern
ignorance be rebuked and the blunt declaration be made that the ancients never
worshipped nature--except as Wordsworth or any poet of beauty worshipped
nature.
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But they did something with nature
that the modern is not yet intelligent enough to do: they used her forms and
phenomena as a faithful and enlightening transcript and reflection of
supersensual truth. Ancient religion was kept in basic relation to nature,
through the force of the ancient knowledge that nature was the one
infallible index for the mind's apprehension of the truth in metaphysical
realms.
Theology was never held bound in
nature's domain, but it certainly could fly aloft to the highest realms of
spiritual cognition and could maintain its grip on reality therein by grace of
its keeping its eye always closely fixed on the incontrovertible veritude that
life had exhibited to man's constant gaze in the world of natural fact. The
mind's view of nature would hold its vision steady to truth when it ascended
into the worlds of thought and intuition. It could pick up the laws and
principles which it had abstracted from its observation of life in its manifest
forms and apply them with certitude to the discernment of the structure of the
metaphysical universe. Ancient intelligence had grasped the truth that God had
inscribed his archai, or fundamental laws of being, in and upon the
visible works of his hands. The firmament showed his handiwork and the world
was no less full of his truth than of his glory. Early intelligence was keyed
to an ability to catch the voice of the "tongues in trees," to hear
the "sermons in stones," to read the "books in running
brooks," and to discern the mind of "God in everything."
But the link that connected the mind
of God with his works in human conception was cut by the wave of ignorance that
engulfed Christianity in and after the third century, so that theology has
suffered the loss of its original sanctions in intelligence, and has since
stood bereft of its intelligibility. It has now become an outcast even from the
seats of its own professors. It is today decried and neglected. It is held to
be practically irrelevant to the problems and the struggle of life in the
world. This is because it has been reduced
217
to irrationality and
meaninglessness. Without its guiding star religion has become largely a
psychological extravaganza, a mélange and a mirage of faith, intuition and
wishful thinking falsely denominated prayer. The things of the unseen world are
doubtless more wonderful than those of the seen, as St. Paul exhorts us to
believe. But what has been too quickly forgotten is that the visible world
is the only lens of vision through which man may focus his view upon the unseen
realities. A wise adjuration from the Talmud admonishes us with one of the
most pertinent philosophical maxims ever pronounced. It runs to the effect that
if we would strive to know the invisible world, we must open wide our eyes on
the visible! For there the mind can perceive the analogues, the types, the
reflections of the truth in the invisible worlds.
At some point in the historical
course man lost the ancient analogical faculty. He lost the daring of mind
which enabled him to leap over the great gap between observed physical
phenomena and the structure of the laws that produced them. He lost the genius
of insight whereby he had been able to see one truth in two worlds, the obvious
world of existent form and the inferred world of structure and meaning to which
the outer form stood as clue and key. He had fallen from the philosophical
level to the Peter Bell status. He saw nothing beyond the things under his eye.
His ignorance and blindness cut him off from transferring the form of known
objects over to their meaning-forms in the noumenal world. Nature could not
speak her message to his dull mind.
The modern eye has gazed
continuously upon the movements of sun and moon, for instance, in relation to
the earth, and has utterly missed the astonishing play of a most thrilling love
drama enacted between the two luminaries each month, which was designed to
yield man instruction upon the analogous romance going on between the male
"sun" and female "moon" within the sphere of his own
nature. This one feature of natural phenomena indeed stood to the ancient mind
as the central light on the entire problem envisaged in religion, the relation
of the man to his god. Analogical
218
genius is in the end the key to
man's finest culture. The ancients possessed it. In the fatal incidence of
darkness the faculty has been dulled and lost. The ability to trace
correspondences between the visible and invisible aspects of truth is the great
skill that leads to philosophical sagacity. Correspondence opens the eye of the
mind to discernments that otherwise would remain unseen.
The effort will be made to present
the parallelism between the department of nature known as sex and the higher
cosmic archai with such completeness that there can be no missing the
perception of identity between the two worlds of phenomena and noumena. The
interpretations deduced will go to prove that the two worlds do stand in
parallel relation to each other, or that one reflects the other. The essay
draws upon material that has never been absent from human gaze. It aims to
transport the phenomena from this world to the land of ideas. It purposes to
turn things and processes over into significance. It strives to have them seen
conceptually. It aims to make perception the mother of conception.
It will be found that the ancient
seers of truth built their systems of interpretation and philosophical
conception upon this working principle of analogy. They formulated the
structure of elucidative understanding upon what they saw in the world of
living nature. And, seeing that the modus and pattern of creation in the
physical world was a type and reflection of creation in the whole cosmos, they
introduced phallicism into the sacred literature as the great central
symbol at the heart of all meaning.
Little could they have dreamed that
their representations would ever engender a ghastly misconception, or that an
age would ever supervene so sunk in intellectual languor that it would mistake
the symbol for the thing intended to be symbolized. In phallicism they resorted
to the phenomena and functionism of human-animal procreation to typify the
modus of creation in the large and in the universal. Their procedure was
directed by sheer intellectual intimations and the loftiest of moral
considerations. It had no lesser motive than to aid the feeble powers of the
human mind to grasp
219
the forms of higher realities
through the instrumentality of a vivid picture of something known which bore
likenesses to the thing unknown.
Sex was chosen as the most lucid
mental lens through which the laws of cosmic creation could be discerned in vivid outline upon the screen of human
thought. This was done because the primal fathers of humanity were conversant
with a fact that has not been seen or stated in hundreds of years, namely, that
creation in the total, in the cosmos, is as genuinely an act of sex as
is creation in the life of the creature. All evolution, all cosmic process, is
one all-embracing act of creation. And it is in the highest sense of the words
a sexual creation. Every chapter of the manifestation is a Genesis. Indeed
it was seen of old that all life did was to regenerate itself anew. The
foundation doctrine of ancient theology is "the eternal renewal."
Life in the total acts to perpetuate itself exactly as does life in the single
unit. Life attends to one thing before all others: it dowers every one of its
creatures with the mechanism and the inexorable instinct to reproduce itself.
It has made the generation of seed the all-engrossing prime object of every
living being.
Creation does not mean the mere
beginning of becoming, but covers the whole process. Life is ever in process of
creation, for all life is a never-ending becoming. To be sure, it is not all
one constant progression in a straight line and even pace, but is an
intermittent advance, proceeding in ever repeated cycles. The movement has its
intervals. Each cycle has its genesis, its birth, its upbuilding, its growth,
its zenith of manifestation, and its decline, decay and death as the embodiment
wears down. Each round of the wheel has its beginning and its end. But just as
surely as a human life advances steadily over a long series of minor cycles, and
carries the seed or ark of consciousness and identity of nature from the end of
one revolution to the beginning of another, so does the imperishable principle
of conscious life achieve unbroken continuity by spanning the intervals between
the manifest periods to main-
220
tain its becoming through all. The
cosmic enterprise is a continuous creation. And it is sexual.
Where, then, in the natural scene
would the analogizing genius of the ancient diviners look to find the image and
reflection of the giant cosmic creative act? Where else indeed but in the
natural creative and procreative processes open to view in the life of the
microcosmic unit, man? In his own sphere man is creator, progenitor, father.
Within his own organism and under the direction of his own will and
intelligence he can imitate the Supreme Cosmocrator and renew life. Indeed in
the speech of the Demiurgus to the hosts of souls about to descend into
incarnation, found in Plato's Timaeus, these angelic spirits were
instructed to imitate at their level the procreative function of the Great
Father at the summit of being. "That mortal natures therefore may subsist
and that the universe may be truly all, convert yourselves according to your
nature to the fabrication of animals, imitating the power which I employed in
your creation."
Man was one of the creatures
mentioned in Genesis, "producing seed after its kind,"
creating progeny in his own image. By the invincible imperative of life's own
genius man was led to exercise this generative function, as were all the orders
of life below him in the scale. The penalty for total failure to exercise the
prerogative was set at nothing short of his own total extinction. Reward for the
natural and ordinate exercise of it was the happy consciousness of the
perpetuation and expansion of life itself, the most opulent richness and
aggrandizement of being in every direction. Whether consciously sensed or not,
instinct carried the persuasion that if creation on the part of Supreme Deity
was the prime act of being, then creation on man's part, and up to the summit
of his capacity, must be for him the crowning achievement on the physical side,
for the perpetuation of organic existence, and on the mental side, for the plan
and order of such existence. If man is made in the image of God, reasoned the
early mind pursuing wisdom, it must be that the marvelous mechanism and the
psychic energies engaged
221
in man's kind of procreation furnish
the creature mind with a copy in miniature of the grand universal creative
ordinance. The human creative methodology must be a type-form of the highest
creative procedure, or of all creation. God's creative manual must be like
man's, but at an inexpressibly higher level, both of character and of
magnitude. The feeble human mind is powerless indeed to conceive the difference
in grade, degree, quality and purity, so to speak, between the two modes, the
cosmic and the human-animal. But in spite of that difference the mind must not
falter in its effort to see the higher as conforming to the pattern of the
lower. For so Hermes Trismegistus instructed us. Life's one central law is that
the energy of being generates and animates all things by the one omnipresent
impulsion of creative force and that therefore all creatures partake of the
nature of the one life. All things are the manifest expression of the one
creative impulse, and therefore their existence displays the operation of laws
that are homogeneous throughout. The universe is ruled by one law, which is
never less than identical in all its manifestations and productions, but which
at the same time permits the development of endless modification and infinite
variation in the concrete deposit on the physical periphery of creation. Life
proceeds from a core of similitude and self-identity in unity and runs out in
numberless streams of diversity and multiformity.
Looking, then at the lower
manifestation of creative process open to view in his own life, man the creature,
at his grade of intelligence, would be able to discern in it the features of
creation as a whole. And the seership of antiquity did by this method discern
the clues by which intelligence was able to formulate an integrated structure
of all creative work. These clues have always lain exposed to mental sight.
They are just the particular features of the animal-human creative function
taken as a language of meaning on a higher plane of conception. In his
generative capacity man was no less the analogue of divinity--Christian
philosophy and conditioned sensibilities to the contrary notwithstanding--than
he was acclaimed
222
to be in the mental, spiritual or
intuitional aspects of his selfhood. He must be so, or the affirmation of his
creation in the likeness of God would be true in a partial degree only. It
would not be wholly true. It would be a maimed and mutilated truth. If God has
soul, or is soul, and manifests it in body and in his works, man must carry the
resemblance through the whole of his nature. And his nature is dual, soul and
body. So the functional life of his physical portion must stand as a clue and
guide to comprehension of God's vital economy. The present work rests on the
truth of this dialectical proposition.
It may be considered a rash venture,
an unmitigated presumption, to attempt to envisage God's creative mind through
the mirror of man's procreative functionism. But it is the only approach
available to thinking, and besides it is the one indicated as true and
legitimate by the authority of the books of wisdom accredited and venerated by
the intelligence of the race over the ages. A gain of considerable proportions
for all future culture must be the reward of such an inquiry, if it be only the
uncovering of the lost significance of the mangled subject of phallicism in
those tomes of antiquity. It will be something of undoubted benefit if a
clarification of the motive sanctioning the employment of this phase of
symbology can be achieved. For it has hung like a cloud of infamy upon the sensibilities
of the world for too many centuries. Through the loss of understanding of the
high motive back of the usage, and the ascription of other than the purest of
interests and intents on the part of sages employing it in the composition of
their books, the theme of phallicism has dwelt for long ages under the shadow
of an evil imputation. Most schools of religious thought held sex symbolism to
be a symptom of degeneracy in religion, whether in theory or in practice. It
has come to be rated as, at its worst, outright worship of sex. It has not been
seen in the light and character of typism purely. It has been taken to be sex
worship, and that on the physical fleshly side, not sex as philosophically
understood--the phenomena of universal polarization of spirit and matter,
"male" and "female."
223
Even when not taken in its bald
crudity as veneration of the actual sex forces, it has been supposed to be
concerned with attempts to generate lofty spiritual raptures by certain forms
of sexual expression, as in the alleged practices of Hindu Tantrika
"sex-magic," or other sorts of sex sublimation and transmutation of
sex power into spiritual force.
It has been alleged that by sexual
energizations of one kind or another high psychic faculty may be awakened. Some
social communities and colonies are declared to have practiced formal rites of
a sexual nature with certain advantageous results. Whether natural and salutary
or the contrary, these manifestations have been directly operative in the
province of sex and have been assumed to be aspects of phallicism in religion.
Perhaps, being almost wholly
expressions of human or animal physiological functions, they can be said to
have little more claim to be classed under religion than has eating or
breathing. They are dragged into religion from far out on the periphery. They
belong more properly to physiology, to sociology or the remote fringes of
psychology. Only by that tendency which disposes people of serious tenor to
spread religion out to make it embrace every act on any plane of life interest,
might it be subsumed under the department of religion. If this is what is
intelligently presumed to be meant by the phrase "phallic worship in
religion," there can not be too quickly or too sharply drawn a vital
distinction between the two things, "phallic worship" and
"phallicism."
The first is the worship or cult of
sex as an end, directly or indirectly, in itself, or as means to an end in the
field of sex. The object of worship is sex, as man knows it, physically. The second,
phallicism, on the contrary, is not a worship of sex as in any way an object in
itself. The direction proceeds away from sex on its physical level and ascends
to the loftiest regions of abstract conception. The mind merely uses the facts
of sex as a starting point or as a concrete adjunct to mental formulations, to
help it arrive at a conception of life in its supernal economy. In fact,
although
224
it starts from the physical view of
sex, or what sex presents to thought, it in a moment almost loses sight of that
in the vistas of understanding that the mind is led into by the intimations of
analogy. Or if the original objectivity is retained, it is soon invested with a
glow of significance and a quality of purity never sensed before.
The vast difference between sex
worship and phallic religion is that whole gulf between engrossment in sex for
what it yields physically and interest in its phenomena entirely as symbol of
something far transcending its bodily expression. Sex worship begins with sex and--stops
there. Religious phallicism also begins with sex, and only then on its mental
side, but proceeds from it to the loftiest regions of conceptual ideation. No
more does phallicism mean sex worship than did the Egyptian use of animal
symbolism denote animal worship. Phallicism uses sex as symbol of high truth;
the Egyptians used the characteristic life traits of animals in the same lofty
way.
This study is concerned with sex
only for the sake of its utility as symbol. The need for clarity and the purposes
of exact analogization will demand at times the frankest statements of sex
functionism. The one single intent is to lay out the lower pattern clearly
enough that the perception of the identity of the higher with it may not be
missed. Our concern with physical sex is in this way purely academic. Much will
be gained for the view of sex from all angles if a frank presentment of its
features will serve to establish with a new certainty the sublimest elements of
spiritual religion. Our treatment of the theme is as entirely disinterested as
is the treatment of the nude in art.
We have seen that the very condition
of God's becoming conscious of himself--an a priori postulate of his
creating at all--inhered in the logical necessity of his breaking his primal unity
apart into self and not-self, spirit and matter, positive consciousness and
negative unconsciousness. God therefore threw himself apart
225
into a duality, which is intimated
by the division of life into male and female in the Genesis allegory.
Understanding of this bifurcation of the One into the Twoness is the first
fundament of all philosophical systematism. It is the largest single datum
facing the mind and standing as the basic premise for thought. It is the
cardinal item in the mind's attempt to rationalize the universe of life.
Stolid minds are incapable of true
wonder and go dumb before the everyday actualities. But a mind of philosophical
capability never ceases to marvel at the existent phenomenon of bi-sexuality in
the human race. "Male and female created he them" never loses its
power to stir the cultured mind. The fact may become so commonplace as never to
excite thoughtful consideration at all. The constant presence of the fact
itself wears thin the mind's power to respond with fresh novelty to its
implications. Merged also into practically unconscious mentation is the
recognition that it is the division of life into duo-sexuality that keeps the
world and evolution a-going, that it is the impelling fact back of an immense
segment of all life's activities, that it generates the heat, so to say, that
drives the wheels of progress and fires the aspirations of men, and that it is
at the root of nearly everything in the cycle of living interests. Art, poetry,
the drama, religion in part and now psychology draw their vital breath from the
ramifications of the sex endowment. A schoolboy essay could enlarge upon the
theme that all romanticism in life arises out of the involvements of the sexual
division. It produces the family unit of social and governmental civilization.
It suffuses the entire period of youth of both sexes with the glow and halo of
its seductive influence, so that nearly all the energies of the adolescent
epoch are absorbed in the effort to keep the personality stabilized. The gradual
discovery in one vivid realization after another by the growing boy and girl of
the mutuality of the sex instinct and its mechanism, enjoining upon all mortals
the virtual mandate of throwing themselves into the arms of the "opposite
sex"
226
for the procreation of the race, as
well also for the normal development of the individual life, is a constant,
even if largely suppressed inward experience of massive weight and power. The
sheer fact of sex differentiation never lets go its constraining grip on mind,
imagination and behavior all life long.
The first and later verses of Genesis
find categorical confirmation every time the biologist gazes into his
microscope and catches a tiny cell in the act of multiplying by fission. It
receives corroboration also in the tree-buds, the seeds, the white and yellow
of the egg and the myriad exhibitions of dual sexuality in all nature.
The universe is stabilized at the
neutral point of the pull or tension between the two forces. Matter is of equal
importance with spirit, since its force must equilibrate that of the latter if
there is to be a neutral point. At this neutral point where stabilization is
secured all consciousness and all values demonstrated through it are brought to
birth.
Man is thus confronted with this
most important of all data of knowledge for his life on this planet. His race
is bi-sexual and he must realize that all essential values must be brought out
through his willful exertions for good or ill expressed at the point of the
operative interplay between the positive and negative aspects of every
situation. In all religious and philosophical enterprises the power for good
direction of effort inherent in this knowledge has been lost through the
submergence of the systems that purveyed ancient wisdom. Human counsels have
for centuries lacked the true basic grounds for wise decision. On the other
side, by the oddest quirk of ignorance, the persuasion has everywhere gained
currency that spirit is all-precious and matter is despicable. Untold perversion
of all essential values has followed in the train of this misconception, with
calamitous repercussions in human sufferings past all accounting.
One consequence alone has involved
measureless wretchedness,--the carrying out of the alleged superiority of spirit
over matter in
227
the imposition upon woman, matter's
symbol, of a position of inferiority throughout history. The unmerited
contumely heaped upon matter philosophically has worked over by unconscious
inference and been wreaked upon woman, the material symbol. Not only the flesh
of the body, which warred against the life of the spirit, but as well the
allegorical personalization of the physical side, woman, received the brunt of
the ignominy of being regarded as the force hostile to the spirit's flowering.
Never has this false view of allegory and dramatization been so flagrantly
exhibited in its glaring erroneousness as in this miscarriage of meaning due to
the mind's failure to hold the elements of the problem in sane perspective. That
the weight and stigma of evil imputation should have worked over from the
philosophical typing and heaped its virulence upon the innocent head of woman
in history reveals the sad deficiency in the human mind's grasp of real
meanings. If matter is evil, then by direct and cogent inference, woman too is
evil, as she is the symbol of motherhood, and matter is the universal mother of
life. Matter in fact means mother.
We have already seen, however, that
all this miscalculation, with its dire consequences for womanhood in history,
grew out of the misconstruction of the concept of "evil," in the
foundations of philosophical thought. The mere fact that matter had to be
dramatized as standing in nodal opposition to spirit, for the wholly
beneficent purpose of eliciting spirit's inchoate potentialities, became
transposed over into a supposed hostility to the soul. The result of the
misconception was that a measureless tide of human confusion and unhappiness
swept over the reaches of Western history. It is time that philosophy regain
its sanity and that the sublime knowledge be broadcast once more, that spirit
and matter separate out of their primordial unity, and that the worlds come
into existence on the might of the force that plays between the two in
tensional relation to each other. Again at the end of the aeon they cease their
"enmity" and merge again into each other's being, and the worlds dis-
228
solve. Even when they separate for
mutual interplay they do not lose their grip on each other. They simply slip
into the opposite ends of the field and exert their reciprocal influence on the
whole area between. Life in non-manifestation is one; in manifestation it is
one-in-two, spirit and matter. And the intercommunion of the two begets all
existence.
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CHAPTER XVI
LOVE AND HATE
The world of studentship has never
followed with seriousness or constancy the mighty implications of the
ascription of masculine gender to spirit and of feminine to matter. With the
expectation of finding that an examination of the relationship between male and
female will yield an enlightening theoria of universal creation, the
challenge to inquiry now is to face the data frontally and not only with an
open mind, but with an eye keenly fixed to see what is there. Even then it is
necessary to use the clues and threads of discernment that have been provided
us by ancient insight. It is found, then, that there will be no mistake in
undeviatingly reading spirit or spiritual reference for the male symbol or
personation, and matter or the physical for the female emblemism. The fact that
this usage will prove its unfailing pertinence and dependability, in all cases
with astonishing precision, will come as itself a revelation of no minor moment
to those not conversant with the almost mathematical faithfulness and
reliability of these forms of ancient symbolic method.
The place to begin the examination
is at the point of the breaking apart of the unity into the duality. As to
this, it must constantly be borne in mind that in spite of an act of
bifurcation of itself, Deity does not destroy its eternal oneness. It has not
become two, even though it has cleft its being into two aspects. It has not
become itself and something else not itself. This is logically impossible. It
has converted itself into a duality. It has not become two, in any sense
exterior to itself. It has evolved a twoness within itself. God can not,
dialectically, project anything outside himself, since he is all there is. All
things are and remain inside the being of the Su-
230
preme. God can no more become two
than man is two, from the mere fact of his having, or rather being, both a
spirit and a body. God--and man like him--is a unit, although he is composed of
dual energies. The conflict and tension between positive and negative
polarities is ever necessary to bring the life of God forth to view in concrete
worlds. So life has to set up this stress and pressure within itself. How could
Being lay hold of and so move substance to form its creation if it could not
oppose one arm of itself, so to say, against another arm, so as to be able to
get a grip on the material to be moved into place for the creation?
Figuratively speaking, how could it create if it could not oppose thumb to
fingers, left hand to right, lever against fulcrum, conscious design or will
against objects, mind against matter? Tensional opposition of the two pulls of
a polarized duality is as inevitable as the fact that a coin must have two
sides. There could be no existence, no things, if there was no front and back,
up and down, in and out, to and fro, movement and inertia. Duality, presaging
the subsistence of a strain between the two portions, is an inexorable
postulate of conscious being, and sprang into appearance as soon as life
emerged from the unseen into the visible stage and took organic form.
The interaction begins the moment
the two sides are established as distinct units in the being of the whole. It
takes the form of the only thinkable action that two things can exert toward or
upon each other,--a mutual tugging and pulling. They are set in relation to
each other in much the same way as are two balls of lead tied to opposite ends
of a string and whirled around on a central pivot, with the significant
difference, however, that the "string" is not a "dead"
connection, but a living stream of dynamic forces that are determined by the
powers exerted, positively from the one end and negatively from the other. The
pushing and pulling become the great natural laws of attraction and repulsion.
They are the first and cosmic form of the meaning of the Battle of Armageddon.
As the twoness in tensile opposition is the necessary condition of the
stability of anything, the law is that two opposite poles attract
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each other and two similar poles
repel each other. This must be so, if anything is to cohere and remain itself.
If the two opposite poles repelled each other, the atom and the universe would
collapse. Rather it could not have come into existence in the first instance.
Positive and negative poles must fly into each other's arms, embrace and
multiply, if there are to be worlds.
We have here the ground of one of
the most relevant of ancient philosophical pronouncements. Empedocles'
declaration that the world was engendered and activated throughout by the two
forces of Love and Hate. Love is seen as the attraction and Hate the repulsion.
And by this naming and characterization it is possible for the limited
intellect of man to understand dialectically why the prime essential nature of
God is denominated Love. As he is unit being of all being, the constant motive
of all his expression is the universal attraction of the two portions of his
own Self for each other.
The two nodes of his wholeness can
do nothing else but "love" each other. At the same time the two
similar poles in the countless units of his multiplied manifestation can and
must likewise "hate" each other. Love is the law of God's being--when
he has thrown himself into the dual expression--since the two elements then are
constrained by the unabating attraction toward each other. So then Love becomes
the fulfilling of the law, for no other activity of life transcends or
nullifies this first law of mutual attraction within the framework of the
universe. It is operative in every unit of life, in every fragment, in every
organic system from the atom to the super-galaxies. God can not help
loving--and hating--once he has sundered his totality into spirit and matter.
Then spirit must "love"
matter, and matter spirit! Soul must love body and body soul! Man, intellectual
and spiritual, must love the world of matter. The voice and hands of pious
unintelligent religionism may fly up in horror at the philosophical
determinations that spring immediately into view in the wake of the obvious
dialectic. And well they may, for, properly understood and held in a
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balanced rationale, the true
envisagement of the elements of the problem enforces a view of these things
that does indeed undo and reverse the poor twisted attitudes of orthodox
befuddlement. The first dawn of welcome sanity to break upon the dark night of
centuries of pitiable error is this cock's crow of the resurrected voice of
philosophy proclaiming once again that spirit does love matter.
A happy release of the human spirit
from unnatural constraint under false mental postures will ensue for common
consciousness when it can be freely postulated in thought that the soul does
love the body, and that man, spiritual, does love the world with sufficient
strength that he comes into body to enjoy its delights and meet its tensions.
The strength of the blind pall that has afflicted the clearness of
philosophical vision can be seen by merely reflecting upon the fact that for
centuries the collective brains of the scholarly world have studied the
Biblical assertion that "God so loved the world" without once
discerning the relevance of the central statement there advanced. And God not
only loved the world, but he loved also the flesh with a force that impelled
him to throw the whole of his might, in recurrent cycles of countless years
each, into the effort to expand his own being by plunging his consciousness
into bodies of flesh and matter. For the physical universe is the Logos made
flesh. No exterior force compelled him to become fleshed; so his act must have
sprung from his own volition or desire for such an experience. These
conclusions are the ineluctable products of the reasoning process working upon
the premises given. As man and woman love each other, so spirit and matter love
each other. In nature this "love" complies with every
characterization of Plato's grand predication of balance, moderation and
harmony amid all the divine elements in play. In man, where free will coupled
with initial ignorance comes in to disturb the balances, disturbance and confusion
have crept in. These will be corrected as intelligence awakens.
Plato in The Phaedo and The
Symposium has dissertated upon this matter of the genesis and nature of
love, in a dramatization that has misled shallower thought into a mistaken
interpretation
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of his figure. To depict the
cleaving asunder of God's unit being into the duality, he says that the soul of
man splits apart into two, each part carrying one half of the potentiality of
complete being. One part manifests in male body, the other in female, and the
two separate halves, each suffering the want of completeness in itself,
longingly seek their complementary halves in the world, to unite with them and
thus be made whole. Obviously expounding but at the same time hiding the true
esoteric meaning of his allegory, Plato clearly concealed his deeper sense
under the individual and personal representation. It is surely not in the
purview of Plato's philosophy to deny unitary completeness to the human ego,
whether in man or woman. It is always in his system a full unit, being itself a
fragment of the divine Oversoul. It can not be fractional, a mere half-unit. It
is complete and perfect as a seed unit of divinity. Plato is dramatizing under
the human allegory the truth that the collective being of life splits apart
into the two poles and that their force of attraction for each other
ceaselessly causes each to seek the other throughout the ranges of life. The
individual soulmate idea drawn from Plato's allegory is a flat misconception.
If it was his real belief that the soul in a male body is only one half a
former complete soul, with the other half living somewhere in a female body,
what a tragedy life would present in the nearly complete failure of the two
halves to discover each other! Nature would not be party to a scheme which in
her operative order registered close to ninety-nine percent failure. Plato's
imagery is, as is the sportive punster play on the meaning of words in The
Cratylus, neither amusing diversion nor literal seriousness, but high-pitched
allegorical and dramatic truth, playful on the surface, but grandly meaningful
in the cryptic intent.
Plato almost indubitably drew this
form of portrayal from a line in the Egyptian scripts which says that "the
soul makes the journey through Amenta in the two halves of sex."
Many reports are to the effect that he visited and studied in Egypt. It is
conceded in general that Greece derived the substance and genius of her great
philoso-
234
phies from Egypt. The possibility of
reading anything measurably close to the true meaning of this passage has been
killed in the first place by the utter failure of Western scholarship to locate
the Egyptian Amenta in the proper world. The meaning has been thrust
clear out of its true world and over into another realm where it can have no
pertinence, through the stupid translation of Amenta as the region of
spiritual consciousness after death. It must be asserted as a discovery
of an age-old error and a datum of the most momentous significance in all
antique research, that Amenta is the life on earth, or earth itself, and
not any heavenly abode. Amenta is the home of the living mortal, not the
realm of the shades of the dead. And this is said in the face of the datum of
comparative religion that it was expressly denominated the land of the dead.
The seeming contradiction is
resolved into agreement when it is known, what all studious zeal has never yet
uncovered, that the ancient philosophers and "theologians" by a trope
of occult significance designated the souls living on earth as "the
dead." To them the life in mortal body brought "death" to the
soul. "Who knows," cries Socrates to Cebes in the Gorgias, "whether
to live is not to die, and to die is not to live? For I have heard from one of
the wise that we are now dead and that the body is our sepulcher." And
Paul says that "the command that meant life proved death" to him. In
the wake of Egyptian formulations of truth Greek philosophy very distinctly
regarded the soul while on earth in fleshly body as suffering a death, from
which, to be sure, it would be reborn in its periodic resurrection "from
the dead."
The Egyptian statement, therefore,
concisely affirms that the soul makes its pilgrimage through the cycle of
bodily existences "in the two halves of sex." Yet all the ancient
philosophy stands on the positive assertion that the soul is one and
indivisible. It is that in a human which makes him the individ-ual.
Therefore the division must refer to the incorporation of unitary souls in male
and female bodies. Half the souls are in male, half in female embodiment. As
the Greeks say, "souls are divided about bodies." That is, souls are
235
distributed out amongst bodies. For
again they say that it is the function of gods to "distribute divinity."
Jesus, in taking a loaf and dividing it, distributed the fragments in the
Eucharist, and thereby dramatized the same idea.
Sex appertains to the vehicle of
outward embodiment, not to the soul itself. There are not male and female
souls. The soul is in large part still detached from complete immersion in the
flesh of the body. It projects only a tentacle of itself down into body. It is
the opposite qualities of positive and negative in the mind, the emotions and
the physical senses of the corporeal appurtenance that are drawn by the law of
polarity toward each other across the boundaries of sex. Only in this world and
only then in the realm of bodily affections and proclivities is sex manifest.
In the heaven of higher consciousness where soul resides in its native habitat
there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage, for the soul is without sex.
It is androgyne, the type of the original male-female unity in embryo, not yet
male and female.
Those marvelously preserved
repositories of hoary truth also tell us that at the inception of the human
race, in the initial stages of the soul's incorporation in bodies that grew
ever less tenuous and finally fully fleshed, the race itself was hermaphroditic
in its generative mechanism, and that only after thousands of years did it
effect the full segregation of sex in two bodies of opposite polarization. A
few verses in Genesis are a shorthand brief of this long process.
The sane purport of Plato's subtle
indirection is that the soul of humanity collectively, the World-soul of
Plotinus and the Oversoul of Emerson, goes through its Amenta of
experience in this world about equally split between male and female bodies,
and that each half longs for union with the other under the law of attraction
of opposite natures. But there is another yearning of the soul which is not
specifically activated by the law of sex. It transcends sex. It is just the
longing of one unit of soul consciousness for another unit. Sex does not affect
it, engender it or minister to it. It is that higher
236
divine attraction which urges the
lonely unit to seek union with the whole group. It is the longing of the part
to be united with the integrity of the whole. The part, the fragment, is driven
by the divine impulsion to seek reunion, after each separation, with the whole.
It is cut off from this communion while in the flesh by the walls of the body.
It can communicate with kindred souls only across a gulf. If, however, soul in
male setting can find this congenial response from soul in female body, both
Platonic and romantic love can have play. That union is doubly blessed. With
common humanity it is the physical attraction of opposite sexuality centering
in body that is the main bond of attachment. Generally this is quite quickly
reduced in force, so that there is then the possibility that the higher
Platonic mental and spiritual affinities can come more fully into expression.
Sex attraction still constitutes the strong dynamic in romantic love.
It is difficult to depict the
overwhelming power of this romantic attraction in the psychic realm of mortals.
It manifests as a positive hunger on the part of one for the other. It is a
veritable chemicalization within the blood, and surges through the nervous
system and suffuses the brain. It is a ferment and unrest, an urge that impels
toward embracing, or merging oneself with, the opposite pole. One can know its
carking and corroding virulence only if one has experienced it--as who has not?
Vicariously we can see its potencies reflected in the behavior of animals in
seasons of mating.
Total repression, thwarting and
denial of fulfillment almost disrupts the vital economy of the organism.
Animals show suffering and abnormalities in health. Humans sometimes pine away.
To such a wreckage of her powerful drive for happy expression nature attaches
almost fatal penalties. If, through unsound and unbalanced religious ideologies
or fervors, the soul too stoutly restricts the body's order of animal normality
(for the body is an animal, as Plato says), it has its own resources and its
own ways of striking back at the unwise master. Its own suffering or
derangement entailed by the
237
too rigid denial of its due
expression reacts to the detriment of the soul, whose servant it is.
There is a fell quality to the
mating urge that gives it the force of a natural and unimpeachable authority,
which appears for a time to sweep away every obstacle and override the
obstructing power of every consideration, whether of advantage or injury. It
carries a virtual cosmic sanction with it. Romeo and Juliet, Abélard and
Héloïse, Dante and Beatrice, Hero and Leander, if not just honest John and
plain Jane, feel that the world must stand aside and make way for the course of
this true love. Flesh almost trembles and is consumed under the pulse and throb
of the insatiable longing. It is nature's, life's, God's imperial order to the
two individuals to unite their opposite forces and thus achieve its burning
desire for multiplication of being and expansion of consciousness. It is its
immitigable mandate thrilling out through every tide of blood and nerve
impulse, that it may have more abundant life in the whole of its body. As
Schopenhauer so elaborately and forcefully depicted, it is the will and idea of
the world enacting its program. To insure beyond all possibility of failure
that its evolutionary development should have an unbroken continuance, it
impregnated its creatures with an enormous profusion and overplus of virile
tendency. So dynamic is the voltage of this charge that it wholly disqualifies
the rational element in most cases and drives blindly toward its goal,
unhindered by any rational deterrent. It hypnotizes or paralyzes the reason, so
that no consideration from that side may block it. It puts to sleep every
sentinel that might be standing guard to challenge its right to advance. And it
haloes its objective and emblazons its pathway to it with the most radiant aura
of exaltation, and the most exquisite redolence of delight that life provides out
of its armory of enchantments.
Life has laid upon all its creatures
this royal charge, which none may dodge with impunity. This is the law of sex
in its physical area.
But, because philosophy has been
decried and contemned, man has been too oblivious of that other manifestation
of sex within the
238
boundaries of his own personality
between two other lovers, namely his soul and its body. This is beautifully
portrayed, in addition to the many fine Biblical allegories of it, by the great
Greek myth of Eros and Psyche. Eros is the higher spiritual soul, or Love, who
descended to earth to unite with the mortal body and its animal-human soul. He
hovers over her as she lies asleep, as yet unawakened to conscious recognition
and deployment of her powers. Nothing can awaken her except the impact of those
higher vibrations of a supernal consciousness from above, which are
superinduced by her experiences in the flesh. So Eros bends down and arouses
the sleeping faculties with his kiss. "Virtue" such as passed from
Jesus into the woman who touched the hem of his garment flows down from the
Oversoul when the connection with the latter is established and slumbering
potencies spring into conscious activity from the touch.
The prime office of religion and the
entire rationale of culture is intimated in this allegory. For the central
radix of both religion and culture is this power of the higher Ego in each
person to awaken and transform the dormant faculties and capabilities of the
lower human self. The sons of God were instructed to descend to earth, take
wives from the daughters of men and raise up seed from them. It is all an
allegorical representation of the union of these divine sparks, our souls, with
the animal bodies, which, since they are to be the wombs of birth for the
divinely fathered and humanly mothered Christ-child in every human breast, are
typified as "women," the daughters, not of God, but "of
men." The parenthood of the new-born sons of God is divine on the paternal
side, but natural, earthy, on the side of mother-body. Heaven, as Plato hints,
furnishes the seed of spiritual being for the composition of man, while earth
furnishes the body, the soil or womb in which the divine seed is to be nurtured
to its growth. In the Orphic hymns the souls says: "I am a child of earth
and the starry skies, but my race is of heaven alone."
So the two component halves of man's
life are male and female
239
and the evolution of man is just the
long romance, the wooing, winning and wedding of the two. The allegory, however,
must not be permitted to strangle the reality which it adumbrates. For more and
more clearly it can be seen that this is what has happened time after time in
history and is the fatal feebleness of the human mind that has ever in the end
defeated the spirit of culture. Allegory has been misconceived and flouted
again and again and is still derided and decried in the seats of the
intelligentsia of the modern world. The truth is that, while it is the ultimate
bed-rock method and road to the keenest apperceptions, there exists but rarely
in the individual and never in the mass the downright perspicacity requisite to
apprehend its true illumination. As was the case in the Italian Renaissance,
the general faculty to discern not only the beauty but the enlightening power
of meaning released to the mind by symbols, was wanting and allegory failed
once more. Yet it was not allegory that failed; it was popular crudity and
crassness of mind that caused failure, as it always will. The world sadly needs
to recover the lost faculty or genius for the interpretation of allegory and
for the discovery of the wealth of meaning brought out by analogy. For the
magnificent truth hidden in the ancient scriptures under glyph and symbol will
not yield its purport to the world as long as the general mind remains dumb to
the intimations of allegory and symbol.
Clear down to the present the
scholars have sniffed at allegory. This gesture is due to their inability to
honor it and live with it in sufficient warmth of companionship to catch its
more subtle and recondite power of instruction. The chief requirement is that
the eye of the mind should be trained to hold the allegory not as opaque but as
diaphanous. The condemnation and death of allegory have come through the mind's
incapacity to look through it as a lens and to descry the objects in focus in
that unseen world where truth abides in its noumenal aspect. What must be seen,
then, under the allegory of the two natures in man wooing and wedding each
other is something that demands in the seeing a pro-
240
found and subtly discerned set of
values and meanings that lie altogether in a plane of cognition far above
sense. The idea of marriage in the reference is but the initial push, the
springboard that sends the thought off on its quest of realities that can be
limned only in the highest poise and concentration of the thinking faculty. Two
things, two forces, meet, intercommune and finally wed. But how is one to think
of the soul wedding the psyche and creating a new birth through her? How, must
first be asked, can mental and spiritual entities or radiations meet and wed?
Here is the reality to which the
allegory leads the mind, and mind must be able to follow from signpost to
destination if tropes and symbols are not to leave failure in their wake
perpetually. The highest exercise of the great faculty of imagination must come
into play if the figure is to yield enlightenment. One must imagine, the, while
keeping always in view the assumptions and principles of known natural and scientific
data, that two powers like the soul and the psyche will wed each other by
coming to an identity of vibratory energies, by striking a synchronization of
conscious states which virtually make the two forces one instead of two. They
become alike and flow together into a unity. Their currents of influence are
finally reduced to a mathematical harmony in the wavelengths. This is the most
plausible explanation open to brain thinking on the part of man, and while
doubtless still below the plane of positive empirical knowledge as to how the
subtle forces of mind operate, it soars well above the stolid immovableness of
mass ideation that can think of no marriage save a personal and physical one.
And just this difference measures the enormous gulf that perpetually runs its
fatal chasm between the truly cultured minority and the cruder mass majority.
That gulf is the most impassable obstacle to the progress of the race.
Spirit and matter, soul and body,
each reducible in thought to ultimate whirls of atomic energy, are thrown by
Deity into the relation of juxtaposition and vibrational impact in quite
literal sense. The close relation presupposes, in its degree and kind, as
actual an
241
intercourse between the two elements
as that between man and wife, if a new birth is to be engendered. Love, now
conceived as between soul vibration and sense vibration, then presides at the
very genesis and growth of all culture. For culture is, in essence, the
increasing receptivity of the animal to the behests and influences of the
higher Ego and its becoming enamored of them. Not only does sex force play
between bodies of opposite polarity, but it flashes back and forth between
spirit or mind, masculine, on the one side, and the feminine psyche within the
same body, be it man's or woman's. The marriage spoken of allegorically in the
New Testament and other scriptures is the union St. Paul glorifies as between
soul and its own mortal body. Dr. Hinkle is found confirming this delineation
in a very direct and indeed remarkable way. Speaking of the presence of
feminine characteristics in the sensitive nature of artists, she declares (The
Recreating of the Individual, p. 346):
"The union between these
masculine and feminine entities in the psychic organization of the artist partakes
of the character of the sexual act, although it is an unconscious process of
the nature of which the artist is unaware. But it possesses all the physical
signs of the activity of libido sexualis, and of the nature of his
feelings he is quite aware."
It is significant that the
psychoanalyst here avers that the manifestations of sexual character are
sufficiently in evidence to warrant their description as sex symptoms. But this
author goes even further and denominates the interplay of forces polarized as
masculine and feminine as actually a "psychic coitus." She writes (p.
346):
"I have referred in previous
chapters to the separation of the sexual impulse from its reproductive purpose
in the human race, with the consequent overthrow of nature's limitations and
its use freely in the service of pleasure instead of purpose. As a consequence
of this use, in which reproduction really plays no part for the male, there has
been produced a transference of libido sexualis from the physical to the
psychical realm. Here the artist reveals its transformation into a subjective
phenomenon where a psychic coitus occurs, having for its constant aim not
pleasure but purpose."
242
If the psychiatrist can speak of an
intercourse between male and female components within the psychic range, at
last the esoteric meaning and the amazing truth of an ancient allegory
interspersed throughout all the revered scriptures receives the authentic
voucher of its veracity. Only after some twenty-five hundred years are we
beginning to catch up with what our wise forefathers knew.
A further corroboration of the
validity of the marriage symbol on the plane of psychic energy is given by Dr.
Hinkle. She applies to the higher Ego, the superconscious or evolving deity in
man, the term used in Platonic literature--the puer aeternus (the
"eternal boy," or everlasting youth, he who is ever young). She says
(p. 349):
"In every case, however, the
production of an art work is preceded by what can be called a psychic coitus
between the puer aeternus and the soul within himself, and when, through
some psychic interference or weakness, this idea does not take place, no art
child will be produced."
She goes so far as to label this
orgiastic paroxysm in the sensibilities "a symbolic incest relation"
and "an autoerotic process," the capacity for which sets the artistic
or creative genius apart from more stodgy mankind.
Thus the allegory of primitive truth
is again tardily vindicated. Even an artist must be capable of imitating the
actions of the gods in their fabled intercourse with one another and must be
able to consummate a marriage culminating in intercourse between two polarized
entities within his own scope of being, if he is to bring forth a child of his
art. Simply this on a magnified scale, and carried on through all the later
stages of the individual's evolution, is all that was connoted in and by St.
Paul's allegory of the wedding between the lower psyche, the bride, and the
higher self, the Christ, the Lamb of God slain on the altar of matter from the
beginning of the world-aeon. Naturally the man who had not effected this
marriage within himself, and therefore had no wedding garment on, was thrown
out of the symbolic ceremonial. That wedding garment is verily the immortal
shining body of "white raiment,"
243
being nothing less than the augoeides,
or body of radiant solar effulgence that clothes "the glorified and
the elect,"--the garment of the redeemed. What occurs in miniature in the
daily life of all creative genius is but the transpiring in small cycle of the
great aeonial marriage and climactic blissfulness of soul and sense in the
large cycle of human evolution.
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CHAPTER XVII
LOVE LOOKS BEYOND DEATH
The forces of the psyche, the lower
or animal self, lacking intelligence and reasoning power, must await the
impingement upon themselves of the higher-pitched vibrations of the Erotic
divinity before they can be linked to rational purposes. The Prince Charming
comes down to marry the sleeping beauty, the Princess to be. He is called Charming
because, as ordinary romantic love itself attests, his superior
spirito-intellectual power very literally, yet figuratively too, does enchant
and transform the very soul of the awakened lady. His power to wave his magic
wand of beautiful allurement over her and captivate her is indeed that of a
charmer. To charm is to bring under a magic spell and thenceforth to control
the action of the subject. This is precisely what the spiritual soul does or is
to do in its gradual gaining of ascendancy. Its exalted kingship is won by
virtue of its bringing the multitudinous animal tendencies under its sway
through the power mind exerts over all energies below it in rank. Paul's
statement that the lower self becomes transformed into the likeness of the
higher is the scriptural prototype of the fairy-tale magic as well as of the
integrating power of true light and understanding in psychoanalysis today.
The psyche can not become fecund and
produce the Christ-child as her son without the coming of the bridegroom who will
impregnate her physical potencies with his contribution of the seed of a divine
nature. Nor can he, on his side, become productively Father without union with
her mothering agencies. The great mythical fables of the King of the Gods,
Jupiter or Zeus, carrying off beautiful maidens on a honeymoon impulse is just
the dramatic representation of the cardinal principles of the spirit-matter
relation. The
245
Christ personages or dramatizations
were always the progeny of God's mind or Logos, the Holy Spirit of the
Christian theology, as male parent, descending from above, and of an earthly
maiden, the virgin of the world. The sons of God are our incarnating divine
souls; the women, the virgins of the allegory, are the human bodies. The bride
is the matter of body, pining as she waits for the coming of her Lord.
John Addington Symonds in his lucid
work already quoted, The Renaissance in Italy, pauses to take account of
this ascription of gender to divinities, to abstract qualities and to the
elements of consciousness. He ends by qualifying it as overdrawn poetic,
mystical and in a word silly affectation of classical pedantry. That so
generally astute a student as Symonds proves himself to have been in his fine
analyses of cultural trends should fall into this blunder along with
practically the rest of the scholarly company, is dispiriting. This attribution
of gender or sex to the characters in the myths and in the Olympian and other
pantheons is indeed the most expressive and revealing descriptive methodology practicable.
The predication of male or female nature to energies, qualities, attributes in
the personae of the cosmic dramas was the most direct and plausible manner of
certifying at one stroke their generative or male function or their passive
female and mothering function. It is, as already stressed, the blind spot
before the eye of the modern mind which prevents it from seeing the reality of
sex as operative on the higher levels of mental and spiritual consciousness.
This is the myopia that shuts out the positive veritude of the phenomena
esoterically concealed under ancient allegory and that allows such a capable
mind as Symonds' to cast his slur and slight into his judgment of the masterly
dramatic genius of primordial wisdom. Time and again it is the clue of sex that
opens out the tangled web of abstrusity and mystery inwrought in the great
classical myths. It is not by accident or by the play of infantile simplicity
of early mind, or by "primitive" fancy, that such languages as
Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, even to German, French and Spanish, give
gender
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to every common noun. Symonds should
have penetrated and analyzed that profound usage before he decried the sound
rationality behind the gender of the Gods and their powers. Sex in proper physical
manifestation belongs only to the flesh. But the mental conception of sex as
the eternal interaction between positive and negative life pervades all
thought. Even numbers were given sex by the Pythagoreans. The odd numbers were
masculine, the even feminine. The number one was of no sex, the eternal
androgyne.
The visible material universe is the
feminine, for it is the womb in which all birthing takes place. The body must
likewise be feminine, since it is the mother of whatever spiritual entification
takes place within it. In the Greek the body was soma, which was
identical in incarnational philosophy with the tomb, sema. And in
English womb and tomb are, in the same way cognate. The tomb of
the body, in which the soul went to its captivity and death, was at the same
time the womb of its renewal and resurrection, as the soil is to seed. Soil is
both tomb of death and womb of new birth for the plant.
The definition of sex here must
accommodate a scope of meaning not commonly associated with it. It is sex, but
non-physical or non-physiological. It is sex dialectically considered, yet none
the less sex. It is still the mutual reciprocity of opposites, but now on the
mental plane. It is sex in the sense in which the sun is masculine and the moon
feminine, or day masculine and night feminine, or rivers and winds masculine
and trees feminine, or right masculine and left feminine. Such sex is
determined by the nature or functionism of a thing, whether it is self-procreative
or passive and receptive to outside influence.
It would in the ultimate demand a
genius rather divine than human, of tongue or pen, to put into words the
glamorous charm that the two poles of sex exercise upon each other. The passion
of love is in its purest and strongest form the living manifestation of the
divine nature in the human being. What lesser or different type of magnetic
pull it may exert at lower levels than the human,
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or what more divinely sweet
allurement it may dispense over consciousness at more exalted levels is left
for the speculative imagination to conjure out. It is a presumption that each
grade of life and consciousness feels and experiences it in degree and quality
exactly apportioned to its status and capacity. But at whatever level or degree
it is found in the gamut, its manifestation there is for the creature
experiencing it the supreme impelling force in the life movement.
To give some semi-realistic view of
the nature of sex attraction one is forced to resort to such terms as magnetic
and electric. There will be little violence done to truth if sex is asserted to
be in all forms of its exhibition exactly like the chemical reaction between
elements that have affinities for each other. As two chemicals instantly unite
by the law of their atomic constitution, so the two poles of being coalesce by
a similar compulsion. A force almost as palpable as the pull of a magnet on
iron filings emanates from the opposite sides and lays a grip on its contrary
poles. As matter, which shows itself subject to the law of polarity, is found
in the analysis to be of the nature of an electric force, and not solid
substance at all, likewise the mutual attraction between spirit and matter must
be conceived and defined in terms that describe electricity. And love between
the sexes is as tangible or at least as conceivably a physical force as is
electricity. It can manifest itself in things as empirical as hunger and
homesickness. It can be so strong in its pressure upon the organism that its
exuberant flow in free expression, or its thwarting and repression, may produce
complete happiness, on the one hand, or produce death, on the other.
Indeed love is intimately bound in
with the issues of life and death. This is so well seen in the procreational processes
of many varieties of insects, such as bees, wasps and certain species of
aphids, wherein the act of reproduction, especially on the male parental side,
is immediately followed by death for the generator. Edward Carpenter has
beautifully set forth the aspects of this involvement in his book, The Drama
of Love and Death. So strong and invincible,
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so unrelenting in its grip is the
power of love that sometimes to die in the overt expression of the passion is
felt preferable to living without it. Suicides motivated by thwarted love duly
attest this tragic and melancholy power. It is almost as if life said to its
children: Love and procreate--or die! For it actually does say to some species:
Love and procreate--and die! From which consideration it is pretty
crisply to be seen by even the dim and limited mentality of man that the death
of the organism is of comparative insignificance in the larger ongoing of the
stream of life. And as life ostensibly uses the experience undergone by its living
units in and for the work of instruction of those units, the continuous
unfoldment of organic life in evolution presupposes the continuity of the
consciousness which has had the experience, since it is illogical to assume
that education can accrue to beings vicariously. Logic indicates that there
must be a nucleus of consciousness which can garner up and accumulate,
assimilate and digest, the experiential deposits of continuing existence.
By a marvelous alchemy of
consciousness, as yet only dimly limned by the human mind, yet in a way quite
understandable in the light of ordinary experience, wherein much activity,
itself for gotten in detail, results in a digest of rational conception, a
deposit of wisdom, much as hundreds of tons of crude coal can be distilled into
an ounce of imperishable radium, the enduring Ego, the peregrinating young god,
undergoes the myriad touches of actual life and distills from the mass the
gleaming pearls of everlasting realization and permanent wisdom. Such an
understanding was the ground philosophy of all sapient antiquity, of that
genius that produced the world scriptures, immemorially revered as sacred.
Life comes into existence, affirm
these venerated texts, bearing the fruits of former existences. The soul is
what it is now by virtue of what it--and not something other than itself--has
learned and come to be. Modern biological science has not yet enlarged its view
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of truth to embrace this matured
science of the ancients. It relies on heredity, transmission, shunning the
postulation of forces and entities that do not lie open to physical view. This
is the great gap of failure that inheres in modern scientific effort to produce
a philosophy that meets the questions propounded by observed phenomena. The
great missing segment in the arc of knowledge is the initial principium that
life endlessly oscillates between the two conditions of embodied existence (on
a planet) and disembodied existence in a suspended state, and carries the gains
from one cycle of expression over into the next, and aggregates them for all
eternity.
In the simplest approach to
dialectic it can be asked how life can carry forward its own products and
resultants, if both the consciousness that engendered them and the organism in
which it functioned do not continue to exist. Obviously the organism does not
continue. It is scattered to dust, as Ecclesiastes states. The
perpetuation of the nucleus of consciousness therefore is the only possible
assumption on which retention of gains accruing from experience can be
grounded. Intelligent religion in olden time postulated the existence in man's
make-up of "spiritual" bodies, six of them in all in Egyptian
philosophy, along with the physical, the more atomically sublimated one or ones
of them being composed of the imperishable radiant element of the sunlight. In
these the unit of divine consciousness could subsist when the coarser material
bodies disintegrated, and thus preserve its ripened fruits. Life has some provision
for enabling the consciousness that has harvested wisdom from life to hold it
in perpetuity. Otherwise the value of the labors and sufferings of every soul
in every cycle would be cast to the winds, especially since modern biological
science is by no means agreed as to the possibility of the transmission of
offspring of acquired parental characteristics. Evolution could not be equated
with experience or be seen as the result of it.
The love that has matched its values
against death itself bespeaks a momentous revelation that mankind has been too
slow to catch,--that the attraction and union of sex forces is the supreme
means
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to life's prime objective, and
therefore is to be rated as near the summit in the man-made categories of
sanctities. The verdict of all peoples of high culture when at their most
exalted pitch of refined appreciations has been to this effect.
But so high a thing becomes subject
to a possible degradation correspondingly low, when handled by gross ignorance
and crudity. It is contorted out of beauty by immoderation or unnatural
perversion. A cultured minority alone carries the banner of sexual purity,
while the immature and crass majority drags down the lovely image of sex so
deeply into the mire of lower carnal propensities that it is smeared with the
murk and muck of foulness. Genuine love has always had to fight its way up
through this miasmatic atmosphere of alleged natural baseness to reach the
heights where it can breathe the pure air and bask in the brighter sunshine of
uncontaminated mental wholesomeness and sweetness. Pure religion and undefiled,
high literature, elevated philosophy, beautiful poetry have ever voiced the
praise and acclaimed the sanctity of love and romance. Only less clean hands
have besmirched the grand passion with the imputations of mortal turpitude.
The mutual attraction of the two
poles of sex is the hidden theme of much mythology, and is both the burden and
the gist of the ancient depiction of theological truth. We see it first in the
Greek fable of Narcissus, the youth who, bending over a clear spring, saw his
image reflected in the water, fell in love with it and in his ardor to woo it,
fell into the pool and was drowned. Like the Prodigal Son allegory in the New
Testament this is a construction that adumbrates the sublimest significance for
a grasp of both Greek philosophy and racial genesis. The apologue depicts the
"fall"--more properly the "descent," since it was
deliberate and a normal evolutionary procedure--of the units of divine mind,
the sons of God, into bodily incarnation.
But the feature of the
allegorization that fairly shouts its cardinal import to our dull comprehension
is Narcissus' becoming enamored of his own image in the water below him. In
ancient usage water
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is the universal and unfailing
symbol of matter and the earthly life, since the body which soul inhabits on
earth is itself seven-eighths water in composition. Greek philosophy of the
great Orphic-Platonic school--the source of all Greek wisdom--says in one place
that "it is necessary that the soul should place a likeness of herself in
matter," so as to become more conversant with herself through seeing her
image reflected in the mirroring surface below. This is quite in line with the
discernment already made herein, that spirit must objectify itself to itself,
if it would become conscious of its own nature and being. But the moment that
the sons of God project their creative forces outward and "downward"
and stamp their image upon plastic substance, there is set up the attraction of
polarity between spirit and matter, and the higher is filled with a love and
yearning for union with the lower self. Hence he "inclines downward,"
as the Greeks phrase it, and by the force of the desire is drawn down to
embrace matter and unite his energies with those of body. He thus becomes the
soul in and of these bodies.
The "drowning" refers to
the pretty complete submergence of his entire conscious life, for the initial
period at least, beneath the waves and tides of animal sense and passion that
flood in upon it from its close affinity with the animal body. Chapters in the Book
of the Dead caution the soul against being "drowned" in the
waters of the underworld. Many passages in the Old Testament Psalms have
the soul crying out that the waves have come upon it and the water-floods have
overwhelmed it.
It is most desirable that thought
should face the implications of the allegory, which intimates the strength of
the lure of matter for spirit. It is to be noted that this seduction is strong
enough to draw spirit down out of its home of alleged bliss in celestial
paradise into the domain and under the bondage of matter, a condition which is
dramatized in all religions as the land of dreary exile, desert barrenness and
lonely wandering; a place of miry clay, a swamp, a marsh, a reedy sea (the
proper translation now of the "Red Sea"), a region of murky gloom and
perpetual darkness; in
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short a dreadful dungeon or prison
house, or cave, where the soul is confined as in a veritable tomb of death.
This is the allegorist's attempt to
paint the power of the flesh over the soul, even when in high heaven the pull
of the polarity reaches clear up from earth and entices downward from the
empyrean the very sons of God to seek marriage with the daughters of the earth,
namely, the fleshly bodies of the highest natural evolution. For these bodes
are, collectively, the Virgin Mother, that is, organic matter never before
wedded to spiritual monads, so far unfruitful and unproductive, not ever
impregnated with the seeds of divine mind to become the mothers of divine
birth, and so represented as "barren" in their "old age,"
their long cycles of evolution from primal atom up to organic body. Only
"late in time" are they destined to bring forth, in the developed
brain of highest man, the Christ consciousness and so become the virgin mother
of the gods. This is the first great act in the cosmic flirtation, the first
step in the anthropogenetic cycle of the wooing of spirit and matter, the first
great romantic knight-errantry of the Prince of the Royal Lineage, Son of the
Eternal King, shining in the brightness of his Father's glory, radiant son of
the morning, sallying forth from the heavenly castle to marry the fairest
daughter of the physical creation, and produce through that union the new
heavens and new earth of the Father's eternal kingdom. Nothing less than such a
majestic epic of the soul's descent is the meaning of the fable of Narcissus
and others of like import.
Matching it in our Bible is a drama
of the New Testament, all the singular beauty of which has faded out of sight
by the historization of allegory. It is the incident of the dance before Herod,
of the daughter of Herod's brother, Philip's wife, Herodias, as the result of
which the divine forerunner, John the Baptist, lost his head. This beautiful
bit of cosmic dramatism, like so many others, has been turned by ignorant
incomprehension of its esoteric subtlety into a mere historical intrigue, as
which it stands stripped bare of all its intrinsic majesty and instructiveness.
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A dance, to begin with, is a
movement, the motif, genius and essence of which is rhythm. It is a physical
movement according to measure and interval. It is motion in structural form and
figure and symmetry and balance. Hence it is a perfect representation of the
movement of stellar spheres, of the sweep and circling of physical worlds in
their stately order, of the swirling of electrons in the atom, of the gyrations
of galaxies round the great fixed poles of central stability, where on his
throne sits the King.
What, then, would be the
significance of a female dancing before the King? Whole volumes of splendid
enlightenment in the tomes of antiquity have been missed because interpretation
has not been guided by the ground fact of ancient symbolic language, that the
goddesses and the feminine characters generally typified matter, the physical
side of creation. With this one clear clue the drama becomes elucidated in
resplendent beauty. A woman dancing before the King! What else could it
dramatize but the dance of the physical universe, the sweeping and swinging of
the planets in all the grace and precision of perfect rhythm before the eyes of
the Supreme Generator of it all, figuratively seated above on his throne?
Religions of old invariably used the
figure of the King to typify the divine rulership of mind. Watching the
rhythmic sweep of his physical creation before his entranced gaze, the King
Mind is captivated, till at last he is overcome with desire to rush down and
embrace that lovely form of matter and swing along through the cycles in its
arms. In this we have the dramatic type of the powerful lure exercised upon the
spiritual part by the material half of the creation. It is the Lorelei, the
Circe, the siren call to masculine spirit. If the enchantment and witchery of
maidenhood over the mind of the male is a natural, legitimate and beautiful
thing, then by the same token the lure of matter for spirit--the essential
condition of all generation of new life--is similarly accredited and sanctified
as lovely, salutary and beneficent. There is no possibility of invalidating the
force and relevance of the analogue. If the lower is not ignoble, the upper is
established in a tenfold surer sacrosanctity. If
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there is a natural propriety and
rightness in the reverence paid by knighthood gallantry to womanhood on the
concrete plane of personality in all ages, then the ancient theological
ascription of honor and reverence to matter as the mother of spirit is
summarily vindicated.
And in the same breath the ideologies
that have cast a philosophical odium and obloquy, slight and stigma of evil
character upon matter as inferior and degrading, are proven erroneous and
impertinent. For woman is the type of matter, the eternal Isis, the mother of
life. What the vast massive human sense honors as a thing of nobility can not
be made ignoble. The deference of men to womanhood belies by its very
implication the philosophical derogation of matter. If there is in masculine
nature an instinctive recognition of the inviolable dignity and genuine
sanctity of woman and her function of motherhood, and this impulse manifests
spontaneously with invariable constancy over the whole area of evolving life,
assuredly the high position of the material and maternal side of the cosmic
emanation must be held as vindicated. The mistaken disposition on the part of
most religionism in history to berate and belittle, to brand and defame matter,
to load it with theological odium, has by a series of subtle repercussions on
minds so indoctrinated wrought insidious distortion in the lives of millions.
For every false attitude of the mind must sooner or later develop a
corresponding inharmony in the outer life. All ideal formulations eventually
work out and down into a concrete expression on the physical plane. A theory,
an impulse, an obsession will in the end come to overt outlet in an act, or in
a bodily condition. If activity in the physical world is the long shadow of the
reality of the formations in the noumenal world, projected upon the outer screen
of the phenomenal world, man's natural inclination to adore woman is the
incontestable seal of the queenly status of matter in the philosophical
kingdom.
The whole cast of theology is
basically formulated upon the incarnation and its involvements. It is built
upon the pivotal thesis
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that spiritual beings humbled
themselves under the rulership of matter and physical embodiment for the sake
of carrying life ahead to new expansion of its potentialities. Here at once is
the cosmic counterpart and analogue of the male's self-limitation of his
freedom and the restriction of his activities in marriage. And both are a
standing irrefutable dramatization of the homage of spirit before the throne of
queenly matter. Angels of bright luster have indeed come down out of heaven to
adore the Virgin. They have not despised, but exalted the Virgin's womb. They
have not deemed it unseemly to seek newness of life through the enabling
offices of matter. They have not failed to regard the lowly estate of their
handmaiden, nor hesitated to come under the law of her domain.
Plato's conception that each segment
of the polarity is drawn toward its opposite by the force of an instinct or
hunger for fulfillment of its own lack, being itself only half of the plenary
whole, is as true an account of the mutual attraction as can be given. It is an
involuntary, almost subconscious sweep of urgent inclination, welling out from
deep within and becoming conscious and voluntary after a time. There is a more
or less clearly acknowledged desire for what each lacks and is in the
possession of the other. To come into the presence of the personal living
embodiment and beautiful manifestation of these desirable elements is to fall
into love of them and their possessor. Their power of charm is close to
overwhelming. Emerson has so well portrayed the almost luminous aura that
mystical apperceptions create and fling about the person of the loved object. A
radiance enshrines it, and body, voice and movement fill the adoring heart with
such subtle delight that reason is thrust into abeyance and desire rules the
soul. It is the cosmic first far-off call to the two halves of a divine
unity to come to the epithalamium. It is life bidding its children live and
create. It is an imperious injunction to them to complete their being. It is,
as it were, the coming together of the dry wood and the flame. If the divine
fire is to be rekindled on new fuel, the two must wed and conjoin their powers.
256
The dance of the maiden before the
King has been analyzed for its esoteric meaning. The dance has consistently
held a place of favor in human regard, albeit the ground rationale of that
favor has hardly yet been expounded. It is perennially attractive and fascinating
because it simulates in miniature the universal movement of life as activated
by the mutual interplay between the two opposite forces of soul and sense. It
is the most perfect dramatization possible to the human mind and body of the
cosmic impulse and the universal movement it generates. The movement or the
sight of it engenders psychologically the reflex awareness or feeling of that
primal and pervasive impulse which thrills within the framework of the cosmos
and in which all creatural life participates in degree. It tends to sweep the
spectator or the participant into the tide of the creative stream itself.
Rhythm is the law of the movement of
life. Its appeal to our sensibilities is due to something far deeper and more
elementary than has ever been suspected. Its spell and charm over us springs
from the psychological power of a rudimentary memory. From aeons of conscious
experience there has become lodged within us the so-called unconscious of the
race mind. Our souls, which are units of consciousness that have been for ages
rolling through cycles of alternate embodiment and release, have felt the
impact of the rhythmic beats of the alternating arcs of the cycles until they
have become insensibly attuned to the measure. The tempo of the rhythm has
inwrought itself indelibly into the texture of inmost consciousness, through
the sensible repetition of the impacts. Our souls have themselves caught the
contagion of the rhythm, and they immediately respond to any typal
representation of the form of that rhythm by a spontaneous resurgence of the
innate afflatus which it liberates. The soul has caught the habit of the swing
of the measure, as of a melody, and it is ever stirred to intimations of
deepest reality by the incidence of any form of the movement upon the outer
sense.
The Greek philosophers asserted that
life and consciousness swing alternately out from an interior center of
immovability and same-
257
ness into a circle or cycle of
movement toward endless difference and back again to source. And they thence
assert that this grand cosmic and aeonial rhythm is symbolized and endlessly
imitated by the larger and smaller cycles of outgoing and return undergone by
each unit of living selfhood. All creatures in the scale of being answer to the
thrill and throb of life's universal pulse. All life movement is inescapably
set and timed to the one pervading and omnipresent pulsation, the beat of the
heart of God. And if the consciousness of the individual unit in minor octaves
in the gamut has no formal knowledge of the cosmic systematism, there are
numberless smaller cycles of ebb and flow to keep it continually reminded of
the eternal harmonies.
In a word, if life's larger notes in
the music of the spheres are to be prolonged for our ear, so that we may catch
their crescendo and diminuendo, we have an infinitude of eighths and sixteenths
whose observable striking can keep us sensible of the dance. There is endless
counterpoint in the hymn of advancing life. The vast cycles are composed of and
interfused with multitudinous minor rounds, so that seven smaller wheels must
turn seven times to turn a larger one once, and seven of its revolutions
complete a still grander sweep. Undoubtedly this is the sense behind the
crumbling of the walls of Jericho by the repetition of the priests' blasts on
the ram's horn once a day for seven days and seven times on the seventh day,
accompanied by their sevenfold circling of the walls on the march.
Is it asking too much of human
intelligence to understand that a soul, a node of consciousness equipped to
retain the subliminal memory of all its experiences in going through numberless
repetition of cycles of life and death, should retain the feeling and automatic
memory thus indelibly interwoven into the context of its sensibilities, so as
to be immediately responsive to the thrill of a rhythmic beat? The dance has
always played its part in festival gaiety, in ritual, in religious ceremonial
as well as in the time-measure of all poetry and music, and this for the
all-sufficient reason
258
that these forms not only dramatize,
but themselves in miniature reproduce the actual movement of life which has
ingrained into consciousness the susceptibility to rhythm. And as the run of
beats or notes in each cycle moves toward a climactic denouement in the last
and highest note in the octave, the continued incidence of a rhythm inevitably
carries with it the intimate suggestion of a heightening pleasure moving toward
a consummative stroke. The stupendous philosophical involvements of this aspect
of the phenomenon will be examined in their proper connection.
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CHAPTER XVIII
ROMANCE IN THE TRYSTING-TENT
The constituent movement of life,
then, is an alternate in and out, up and down, to and fro, back and forth
succession repeated in one or another plan of a sevenfold scale and with almost
infinite subcycles of seven interwoven mathematically within the larger cycles.
The larger wheels turn all the smaller wheels, but the smaller and the smallest
preserve the type and pattern of the movements and cadences of the larger. We
have in this scheme the certitude of invariable constancy of the method. All
rhythms are dowered with affective influence by virtue of their being replicas
of the one all-inclusive rhythm which is the primal principle of all living
movement. This is the movement of conscious Mind outward from its inner courts
and mansions of Infinite Being toward and into matter; to effect with its
elemental energies a creative union of its ordered thought, so as to stamp the
laws of cosmic order upon the sea of plastic virgin matter. As Heraclitus has
put it, the two poles of being separate at the initial push of creation, they
march out to their posts at the opposite ends of the polarity, and then under
the force of the mutual attraction they begin to move toward each other to
overcome the desolateness of their separate existence, and then stretch every
nerve to close in toward their blissful reunion.
This ever-insistent yearning for
each other, be it formally conscious or unconscious, is the underlying Drang
nach Leben, as the Germans would express it, the subconscious pressure of
the eternal will to live. In man--and doubtless in less conscious forms in
lower species--it is the unresting power of that energy of consciousness which
came to be recognized as the "libido." It is the prime pressure of
hidden motivation resident in the vast area of the "unconscious."
260
It is present as an immitigable
blind force in the desire nature of man, lying below the level of reason, but
whose inexorable behests man is driven to obey for the fulfillment of his
destiny of larger life and the perpetuation of his kind.
In order to achieve its purposes
beyond possibility of failure the attractive lure of positive and negative
poles was made gloriously beautiful. Its seductive charm was made next to
irresistible. The embodiment of each polar force approaches into the presence
of the other with reverence and awe. A thousand and one colorations and nuances
of the primal urge fleck the area of consciousness as circumstances and
occasions condition the varied play of the life drama. The variety and
contingency contribute immensely to the adventure and zest of the
"game." But the constant and unfailing spring of captivating power in
the lure is not so much what it brings and holds as what it continuously
promises and beckons toward. Every sip at the cup's brim gives the anticipatory
thrill of larger draughts to be drawn from the flowing bowl of life's golden
wine. Present sweetness paints the glowing picture of a still greater ecstasy
at the consummation. This recognition, when it is posited consciously to
thought, is as powerful an incentive to human zeal for larger life as is the
lure of the mating procedures in bird, animal or primitive man. Something deep within
hints at the consummative blessedness lying ahead. The words ecstasy,
transport, rapture all bespeak a transit of feeling beyond the bounds of a
normal state into the throes of an overpowering paroxysm. So that nature ever
leads her children on from joy to joy by holding before them a golden apple of
supreme delight. The two lovers, spirit and matter, sight each other's beauty
from afar and at the first approach. Each step that brings them nearer yields a
more powerful thrill, which breeds a still keener longing for the climactic
merging. At length the two polar energies find themselves sinking into each
other's embrace and melting into each other's intimate being, as a rhapsody of
divinest sweetness fills the whole expanse of consciousness.
All this "poetry" might as
well describe the amorata of two hu-
261
man lovers as depict the
philosophical relationship of spirit and matter in their abstract status. And
the narrative would be equally pertinent in both cases, for the one is a
reflection of the other.
The insistent pressure of the force
shuffling the two polar embodiments toward each other is beyond adequate
description of comprehension just because it is irrational. It is virtually
hypnotic in its seizure of the active will. It is as though life foresaw the
necessity of making her mandate for procreation immune from the reasoning power
of the creature, which might readily find logic and cold calculation of
advantage or disadvantage a substantial interference with her set purpose. The
forces operating in life's behalf have always been called
"elementary." They lie below the level of mind properly defined, and
act independently of the will and the reason, since they appertain to the
autonomic activities of the bodily part of man, from attention to which the
conscious thinking faculty must be released.
The ancient scriptures molded the
entire story of the mating and wedding of spirit and matter, or soul and
body--which is indeed the whole gist of their message--over the analogy of the
two lovers in the human domain. The body, which is the seat and stage of the
great drama, was denominated the tabernacle or meeting place between the god
and his chosen beloved. A vivid gleam of new comprehension is released to
illuminate the mind with a flood of meanings never hitherto grasped, when a
single item of improved scholarship yields a new translation for the old word
"tabernacle" in the Old Testament. It has in later renderings been
translated as "trysting-tent." God and man, or the divine and the
human in man, meet each other at the door of the "trysting-tent," the
house of the mortal body wherein soul and flesh make and keep their fateful
tryst. What is a tryst? A secret meeting between lovers. That between the two
lovers in the religious epic is said to be in secret because it is held down
here on this obscure planet, a "far country" from the celestial
hearth and home, pictured as a strange and for-
262
bidding foreign land, into which the
soul undertakes a peregrination as into a long exile. All the allegories
represent the soul as departing from its homeland of the celestial Eden and the
cosmic metropolis into a remote and barren wilderness. This distant and
inhospitable country was in one phase of depiction the dismal underworld, or
nether earth, of the mythologies. It was the mysterious Amenta of the
Egyptians; and Amenta means "hidden earth" or "earth of
hiding." Amen was the god pictured as in hiding under a canopy. Ta is
earth. Buried deep in the interior of the mortal body, itself "of the
earth, earthy," the meeting and eventual wedding of soul and sense take
place in the secret trysting-tent. There the two have their chance for
acquaintance, for their attractions and repulsions, their final union, with the
birth of the Christ-soul as the child of their nuptials.
This is in outline the allegory of
that event, which is at the same time the miniature of all cosmic event, with
which all religions deal as their cardinal subject and substance. The allegory
has been thumbed and brooded over for two thousand years, and no hint of its
primary significance for all human culture has issued from the whole arena of
theological and philosophical reflection in that time. The entire implication
has been utterly missed.
It needs to be endlessly rehearsed
now that had the clear involvements and intimations of the incarnation doctrine
in religion not been lost from sight, the general mind would have been spared
its indoctrinated posture of affected contempt for the flesh and the soul's
life of sense. The descent of the gods, or sons of God, to earthly incarnation,
which is ever the central theme of the sacred books, would not have become
tainted with evil connotation and damned with the epithet of "the fall of
the angels." Save for the purposes of dramatic representation to
accentuate the "opposition" of matter to spirit in the polarity, the
descent of soul into body in no way merits the least imputation of evil. It
would never have gathered that imputation had not nescience followed all too
closely
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in the wake of pristine knowledge.
That the nature of matter, into whose waiting arms the children of God's mind
had to fall, was altogether good; that its uses and functions were of
indispensable utility to the evolutionary deployment of spirit's own
potentialities; and that a wholly beneficent character and role were to be
granted it in philosophical understanding, were the clear readings of the
arcana in the ancient "science of the soul," and the recondite meaning
of the great ritual drama celebrated in the Mysteries of antiquity. But that
munificent gift of high knowledge from the gods to early man was obscured and
eventually lost under the pall of benightedness that settled upon the Western
mind after the heyday of Platonism in the last centuries B.C. and the first
centuries A.D. No words can competently portray the catastrophic consequences
of this blighting of true vision and the obfuscation of knowledge that was
vouchsafed to guide the race of men more happily on its way through the
darksome labyrinth of this "underworld." Never shall be written the
book that will fully picture this tragedy of nescience, this utter beclouding
of the intellect of the world by the somber shadow of the legend that made the
human body a thing of evil. When the health of the mind was corrupted by the
notion that the flesh, the world of matter and the life of the senses were a
miscarriage of divine intent, a thwarting of divine purpose and an evil
abortion of divine will, the gruesome and sickly malady overspread the entire
life of Western humanity.
The ascription of evil character to
matter and the derogation of spirit's contact with bodies composed of it have
been the core of a corrosive philosophical canker that has infected the
wholesome expression of the free happy spirit of the creature man for these
many centuries. It is the one most direful blot on the open tablet of the
racial mind. It has sadly obstructed the god's effort at our instruction and
must almost make it rue its obligation to give us its rich legacy of divine
capability. The world soul, migrating from heaven to accomplish its assigned
task of converting us from animals to
264
gods, must have viewed with
amazement and grief the spectacle of the near wreckage of its entire plan by
the warping of one single item of its teaching out of its correlations and
perspective and its misreading into bald literalness. That this one item should
have got out of hand and, sweeping into dominance over the minds of the
uncritical masses, have corrupted the true meaning of nearly the whole of the
early deposit of wisdom, must have seriously disconcerted the divine program
based on the human possibilities in the historic enterprise. The essential part
and province of matter had to be portrayed in the books and dramatized in the
ritual. Little could the descending gods have known that this representation,
putting matter in the place of opposition to spirit, but not in the role
of opponent, would fall so far awry of competent comprehension that in the
course of time matter's character as the foil of spirit would become fixed in
philosophical view as a thing of positive evil. That one half of the battery of
divine potency should be stigmatized as evil and held in opprobrious contempt
in the world's mind simply because it was the negative pole of being, was a
miscarriage of intended instruction that must have produced dismay in the
councils of the spiritual hierarchy of the world.
Nor could the divine rulers of
humanity have foreseen to what inordinate lengths the fell sweep of arrant
religionism would carry out a program of eccentric and ruinous action based on
the gigantic misconception. Hardly could it have been conceived that the body,
which had been evolved through long aeons of development to be the handmaiden
of the Lord whom it housed, should ever come to be regarded as so pestilential
a menace to the interests of the soul that its veritable suppression and
mortification would be acclaimed a token of spiritual victory. The approach to
God was mistakenly assumed to run through the mutilation of all the natural
corporeal appetencies and the giving free course only to the motivations of the
spirit. The resultant twisting of human life from wholesome natural joyousness
to a false affectation of holiness has been
265
the heavy price that has had to be
paid for this dismal abortion of the early effort to put the lamps of true
insight into the hands of the first races.
Psychoanalysis has fallen heir to a
portion of this lugubrious fixation. The falsity enters largely into the
composition of the social norms, standards and acceptances that hold the free
expression of the sex force under subjugation and thus cause repressions and
their abnormal brood of complexes. It is one of the strongest of the chains that
cause "frustrations." It thus becomes one of the main bars in the
soul's prison, wherein its freedom is curtailed by the mistaken rules of the
social code.
Woman, who has gathered up in her
actual person enough of this strain of philosophical contempt heaped upon her
cosmic counterpart, matter, to have had her life more seriously than is known
darkened by the long shadow of miscarried dramatism, finds herself thrust into
a subordinate and inferior position, and all through the implications
subconsciously transplanted to her in person from her analogue, the virgin
mother of spirit. And it can be just as truly asserted in the same breath that
the shadow of this philosophical cloud can not be lifted from her path until
the larger shadow of the cloud of philosophical misconception is lifted from
off the name and nature of her prototype matter. When the same theological
honor is paid to matter, as mother of the gods and the worlds, that is now paid
to the "holy mother" in ecclesiastical circles and also to motherhood
on its personal side by the masculine mind, then will woman stand in her true
and honored place. Volumes of psychological research and tabulation could not
present any measurably accurate estimate of the virulence of the blight which
all this disparagement of the entire physical side of human life has spread out
over the area of common consciousness. It has gone far over the boundary of
sanity to kill man's happier life on its natural side.
In summation on this point, how can
it be highly laudable in religion to accord the accolade of eternal dignity and
supreme worth
266
to the fatherhood of spirit, while
the motherhood of matter is trampled in the mire of pitiful human error and
contempt?
So far had this trend been carried
in the early days of Christianity that when creeds and doctrines were to be
formulated the religion mongers actually were impelled to throw the mother
principle entirely out of the Trinity. Perceiving in the course of some
centuries, however, that this lacuna deprived their religion of a potent
psychological leverage to attract men into the ecclesiastical fold, as the
person of the male Jesus met the psychological needs of female devotees, the
monitors of the Church hastened to place the Mother of the Christ, the
"Mother of God"--by this time a personalized woman of history--back
in the niche of highest honor and reverence. All ancient Trinities were Father,
Mother and Son. The Mother was outcast from Christian creedism, but as through
a side door the historical mother was brought in to meet the needs of a
masculine Oedipus complex.
The symbolism of spirit as masculine
and matter as feminine must be apprehended and rationalized as symbolism
purely, and not tied to any reference to men and women in their personal
identities. It is as gross a folly to think that because spirit is typed by the
king, a male, every man is therefore a lord of spiritual light, as it is to
make the error which the world has come all too close to doing, that because
matter is typified by goddesses and women figures, every woman is therefore
sunk in material aims. The mind or soul in each is sexless.
Little has it been discerned that in
the order and nature of the sexual creative procedure among humans there has
been displayed for all the world's edification the complete and luminous
hieroglyph of the cosmic creation in its grand universal scope. The tracing of
this correspondence and the establishment of the validity of the analogue are
the tasks of the study in its remaining section. The perception of this
symbolic index and the use of its data for the lucid dramatization of eternal
truths constituted the motive and
267
utility of the ancient sacred cultus
of phallicism in religion. This analysis and elucidation of phallicism as a
dramatic technique of spiritual science has not as far as known been attempted
hitherto. It is designed to redeem a whole large segment of vital religion from
the onus and obloquy of vile character and mental disrepute cast upon it by an
ignorant misjudgment of its true intent and lofty nobility. The gain for
wholesome human attitudes and purity of mind to be derived from this
reorientation of vision will be of measureless proportions. It will advance the
whole world a long step toward the emancipation of thought from that
vilification of the natural and material side of the living dualism, which has,
as seen, tended to hold the feminine half of the race in a position of
inferiority. The color-stain of nastiness which immoderate or unhallowed
exercise of the human creative function has bred in the vulgar (the word
meaning, of course simply "general") mind has, in lack of the higher
enlightenment, communicated its befouling touch to all treatment of symbolic
phallicism, so that the latter has been held up through centuries of
studentship as a sad miscarriage of ethical and spiritual life. It has been
smudged with the tincture and taint of foulness, as the role of matter has been
smeared with the mud of unworthiness and baseness.
As will be seen in the elucidation,
every item and feature of the creative procedure becomes a semantic key to a
large segment of the philosophical construction. These clues, all drawn
straight from nature's field of marvels and all certified and substantiated by
the veritude of factuality, constitute a code of criteria by which the
soundness of philosophical conceptions may be summarily adjudged. Already there
has been drawn the delineation of one tremendous misprision of philosophical
determination. But a whole series of even greater corrections of deeply
engraven errors in common ideation will be the fruit of our examination of the
more intimate aspects of the outward phenomena.
The study begins, may it be said,
with the beautiful and truly
268
holy arcana of the honeymoon and the
hymeneal ritual; it ends in every instance in the high apotheosization of a
philosophical conception into its sublime final exaltation of meaning.
The false and caricatured view of
phallic religion has found body in the idea that originally pure and lofty
principles of understanding became in time traduced into a merely physical
expression bereft of all transcendental import and reference, or more simply
ended in a gross unspiritual sensualism when the earthly and physical
type-forms were misconceived as the end and not merely the beginning of the
symbol's or the ritual's adumbrative suggestiveness and moving power. The true
envisagement of phallicism, on the contrary, starts from the physical, but does
not linger there. It dwells with that phase no longer than is necessary to
discern in its forms and phenomena the patterns of transcendental ideality, to
which it proceeds by the force of the mind's passionate zest to reach the
truth. To restore its proper direction in the search for verity and to
reintegrate the original fairer and more sane posture of mind in consonance
with the basic archai seen to be operative in the entire sexual area
will be a work of consummate value.
The allegory of "Salome,"
Herodias' daughter, dancing before Herod has been seen to be the type-picture
of the rhythmic movement of matter, the Virgin, in its stately circles before
the king of the cosmos, spirit-mind. The beautiful gyrations fascinate the mind
of the king and entice him to descend to earth to embrace the dancer and swing
along with her in the thrilling rounds of the dance. The music of the spheres
is the lilting melody to which spirit dances. It is the music nature furnishes
for the nuptial gaiety. In order that spirit may feel the alternate throb and
beat of the life impulses as it swings through the cycles bound in matter's
arms, it must be tied in actual linkage to nature's formations and be their
soul. It must catch the inner conscious digest of the outer experience. So the
souls descend, insinuate their powers into bodies, lay hold of the atomic
energies and the elementary forces--denomi-
269
nated the seven beautiful maidens of
fairy legend--and with the universal urge to rhythmic movement throbbing in its
heart and thrilling through its blood, it begins its aeonial intercourse with
matter.
Its first impelling drive is to push
its ray of conscious intelligence as deeply into the womb of matter as it can
penetrate. There is no rational formula available for understanding this
impulse except the statement that it is the divine urge of one polar force
acting according to its nature to merge with its opposite. Perhaps, as in
lover's first shy glances, there is the faintest thrill of anticipatory
pleasure in prospect of union with its complementary part. But this descent of
spirit into matter is one aspect, one arc, of its round of actual being, and
must be adjudged at its due weight and significance in a study of an entire
circle that rounds the view of reality.
It must be said in passing that the
failure of modern study to grant just consideration to the natural analogue of
this tendency in cosmic process has left science bankrupt in its effort to
frame a formula that would express the complex phenomena of nature, what the
Greeks called physis. The science of the present has done well to
recognize, through the aid of Darwin's and Wallace's vanes of intimation, the
great law of nature's life, that is, growth or "evolution." Aristotle
perhaps defined it in more philosophical form when he named it
"entelechy," by which designation he meant that life fulfills a
predetermined destiny at the end of a cycle of development which carries it
from seed to flower, from potential into actualized existence. In the
perception of the fact of unfoldment through growth modern science has found a clear
guiding principle governing the life movement in one arc or segment of the
cycle. But even with this discernment of the method under its eye, it was
left still almost philosophically blind by reason of its failure to take
account of the necessary postulation of a correlative movement, by virtue of a
balance with which the evolutionary impulse or current could alone be envisaged
on sound dialectical bases. This unseen
270
and unexploited principle was the
law--or at any rate the fact--of involution.
With all nature massing on display
before our eyes the ubiquitous perennial host of palpable and ineluctable
exemplifications of the principle, it seems incredible that the vaunted powers
of modern intelligence, miraculous in so many of its probing insights, should
have failed to reckon with an item of natural procedure so simple that its
complete validation seems sufficiently established by the common understanding
that what grows must first have been planted. Children at play shout,
"Whatever goes up is sure to come down." In keeping with the figure,
it may be said that science has foolishly been trying to understand the coming
up without reckoning on the coming down. Since that which is does not come from
nothing, it is obvious that whatever grows must come from its seed
potentiality. Science is faithfully, religiously studying the growth in
complete disregard of the previous planting of the seed. It has been trying to
grasp the rationale of the phenomena manifested in the growth while steadily
refusing to see that the whole nature of that which unfolds into existence is
determined by the character and potentialities hidden in the seed. That which
comes up must first have gone down. This the ancient sages knew. But modern
frames of thought have with stubborn recalcitrancy rejected every intimation
from the side of philosophy, analogy, poetry and pure reason, that points to
the concept of involution antecedent to evolution. Spirit must go down into
matter before it can evolve out of it.
To this obverse arc of the cycle the
early philosophers gave as much consideration as they did to the evolutionary.
The counterbalance of the two was necessary to render comprehension possible.
Just as a ballistic expert would calculate the force of a rebound from a
knowledge of the force of the preceding impact, so the potentialities of the
evolution or entelechy were reckoned in reference to the scope, range and power
of the forces going into physical embodiment. The homely adage of human
affairs--"you only get out of a
271
thing what you put into
it"--applies here, with the slight but significant modification that life
tends to get out a little more than its puts in, by reason of reaping the fruit
of new and additional effort. Life multiplies itself endlessly but in repeated
cycles, in each of which its investment put to usury comes back with increment.
The law of life is that one plants
sheer potentiality and reaps actual power. Effort expended through the run of a
cycle evolves that potentiality into concrete dynamic, expands a minute seed
into a rich granary. Present thought essays to understand the oak without any
reference to the previous oak that generated the acorn. It takes the cycle of
growth to make explicit and actual what was only implicit and latent at the start.
It is sheer ineptitude to consider the one segment of the round and not the
other, or the one without symmetrical relation to the other.
A word in the Bible allegories comes
out to great significance here. Its broad scope and relevance have not been seen
before. It is "multiply." Abraham's seed was to multiply until
it filled the whole earth. Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes to
feed a famished multitude. The creation is to abound and produce life
ever more abundantly. God gave his righteous servants bountiful increase. Anu
in Egypt was described as "the place of multiplying bread"
thousands of years before Christianity was born. Life continually multiplies
each time one seed produces multiple harvest.
But there is one condition that
eternally accompanies the production of increase. That is the cyclical
"death and burial" of the life unit of potentiality in the soil of
the kingdom lying next below its own level, as the vegetable in the mineral,
the animal in the vegetable, the human in the animal and the divine in the
human. The seed of the life of the kingdom just above any given level must
go to its "death" in the dark "underworld" of the plane
below it. There it "dies" in its outer body, or suffers the
disintegration of its form, which goes to the nourishment of its inner undying
germ. The outer decay is only the preliminary and necessary transference
272
of strength and vitality from the
transient over to the permanent core of being. The temporary dies to enrich
the eternal. But it is the transient that starts the eternal on each cycle
of its experience in the actual. It gives it a body through which it can
contact concrete worlds and gain cognizance of the higher and richer values in
the scale of life.
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CHAPTER XIX
THE PHOENIX LIVES AGAIN
So spirit "dies" in
matter, but dies to live again. After the brief "death" of latency it
germinates and lives anew. It "dies" in the effort to involve its
energies in a material organism, and must await the growth of the organism to
deploy those energies again in full scope. In order to become creator of new
life it must entwine its forces with the powers native in matter. In the new
growth thus generated the hidden "meaning" of the involutionary
process comes to light and realizes the entelechy. That which entered the
ground or field of matter as potential energy emerges to view as structure of
organic complexity, revealing pattern.
It is passing strange that the
essence of this formulation has never been abstracted from John's pellucid
representation of it in his verse: "Unless a kernel of wheat fall into the
ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die it bringeth forth much
fruit." Life endlessly enriches and multiplies itself in its creatures,
but it does so by endlessly dying. For its "deaths" are followed by
"resurrections," and each revival results in multiplication of the
original seed that died. That which wishes to be reborn must first
"die."
Life swings eternally back and forth
between the two ends of the gamut, actual organic development at the top of the
cycle and amorphous latency at the bottom. It dies and is reborn and dies and
lives again. It ever lives to die and ever dies to live. "He that loseth
his life shall gain it." Paul dies daily unto one part of his being that
he may live more fully in another. Thales wrote the intensely pertinent truth
that "air lives the death of fire, water lives the death of air," and
so on. Body's death is soul's more abounding life. Soul's "death" is
body's more abundant existence.
274
"He must increase and I must
decrease." Socrates caught the idea that we are "the dead" of
the philosophical texts of old. The most majestic line in all Egyptian wisdom
runs--the soul of man speaking: "I die and I am born again and I renew
myself and I grow young each day." Says Job in the Old Testament: "I
shall die in my nest and I shall renew my youth like the eagle," the
fabled phoenix. A majestic verse is that in the third chapter of Revelation,
which runs: "I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive
again for evermore." For life can not die in any absolute meaning
of the term. It lives forever, yet it ceaselessly alternates back and forth
between the two stages of latency or sleep and full waking activity, which are
in human parlance denominated death and life. The complementary unity of the
two has been ruinously broken by the dearth of true philosophy in the modern
world. "Death" is always relative to "life," and
"life" equally relative to "death."
"And life is ever Lord of
death,
And love can never lose its
own."
On the basis of the allegory of the
soul's descent into matter, like the sun's setting in the west, the
"dead" in Egypt, meaning the incarnated, were called "the
Westerners." They had "gone West" to start a new career in a free
country. The soul of Osiris was said to die on the western side of heaven and
be reborn on the eastern horizon.
Involution, then, is the
"death" of a unit of consciousness as it descends the several steps
through the scales of intensities of atomic organization of matter from
"pure spirit" at the zenith to "deadest" matter at the
nadir of the round. It makes its descent by converting its potencies back into
sheer potentiality as it involves these in the seed. To grow again it must
reverse the process. Going into matter from empyreans of vivid life is to step
from active life into comparative death. Every power is lethalized by going
into dormancy until it is awakened again.
Like evolution, involution is a word
easily and glibly spoken, but
275
its full significance is the
greatest of life's mysteries. How life, or spirit, or at any rate a nucleus of
conscious being involves itself in matter or body--how indeed an immaterial
"principle" of will and intelligence can implant itself in or attach
itself to a physical body, so that the latter becomes its dwelling, its agent,
its servant, is the prime mystery confronting the reflective genius of mankind.
Intelligence must seek an answer to the question: What does it mean when one
says that spirit involves itself in matter or that a soul incarnates in a body?
It almost calls for a new definition of "in." Commonly one thing is
"in" another when it is enclosed more or less completely by it. This
is the physical basis of its meaning. How can wisdom be "in" words,
or beauty be "in" a picture or heroism "in" a deed? Simply
that the things, words, picture, deed express these qualities to the mind. So
the living organism shows evidences of the presence and work of mind, will,
spirit.
Modern view hedges or revolts from
the claim of ancient theology that the soul, an independent entity, descends
from heaven and enters an infant body. This objection springs from the too
literal and "wooden mechanical" conception of what the ancients
postulated. The methodology may sound too crudely simple to be acceptable. What
these ancient seers actually proclaimed behind a veil of outward simplicity was
a recondite and complex spiritual process, that was communicated only in the
arcana of the Mystery Brotherhoods. Modern scientific cast of mind clings
tenaciously to the view that where function is developed in connection with a
mechanism, it is the product of the mechanism, and can not be presupposed as an
existent entity apart from the machine. This is all that human thought can make
of it, if a knowledge of subtler forces in nature is not at hand to correct
naïve conclusions. Such finer intelligence was at hand in the ancient day, but
sedulously safeguarded from the corrupting forces of obscurantism and ignorance
in the councils of the initiated.
The more competent understanding of
the guardians of primeval
276
knowledge predicated the existence
of the soul in the body on a basis of recondite data purveyed in the Mysteries.
Soul, they said, is not a product of the body and its energies. It is
an independent entity; it can subsist, in and of itself, apart from the
body. Out of body it would be a soul, yet not a human soul. In body it is a
human soul. It is an independent entity, but to arrive at that form of
manifestation of its energies in the body of a man which wins for it the
designation of "human" it must be linked to the energic powers of a
human body, by affinities that are confessedly obscure to us. Yet, independent
entity that it is, it does not enter the human body in any crassly physical
way, but by the subtle methods of synchronism of vibrations.
In the first place it is not an
entity in a crude corporeal extensional sense. It is a nucleated focus of
ethereal, spiritual forces of vibrational or supra-electrical dynamism. As an
atom is not a physical something at all, in the common substantial and
mechanical sense, but a swirl of forces in the substrate ether, so the soul is
a whorl of vivific life-force, embodying will and intelligence. Apart from
bodily connection it is, as it were, static. To become kinetic and actual it
must be linked with the powers of the atom released in an organic body. How is
it linked to the latter?
The answer of supreme import for
understanding is available in the radio and in the farmer's heated barn in the
summer. How does a sonata get "in" the radio? By the provision
therein of an electric charge which is able to match the wave-length and
frequencies of the "soul" of the sonata that is in the air and ethers
all around it. This soul of the music can not be converted from static silence
to kinetic manifestation until a mechanism is provided to give synchronous
channel to those sublimated waves. The soul of the music, apart from the
receptive mechanism, is surely in being, as it is thrilling through the air;
yet it can not be said to be in existence. It is not a piece of music actually,
but only the "soul" of music. It is in being potentially, but not
actually. For actual existence it
277
awaits the presence of a mechanism
co-ordinated to its vibratory nature.
The soul must be envisioned in like
fashion. It is a node of spiritual energy, in being, but not existent as a
human soul until a physical brain and nervous organism have been provided of
requisite sensitivity to give play to its sublimated emotions. When such
mechanism has been developed by organic growth and it has reached a point at
which the functional capabilities of the mechanism are synchronized with the
soul's own rates of vibration, the affinity causes the two to leap together, as
it were, into a reciprocity of action. The machine releases the soul's energies
and they in turn energize the machine.
How does the fire, which is
physically non-existent (yet in being) get "into" the farmer's barn
in the heat of July? "Spontaneous combustion" is the phrase for it.
Here the same law is at work. The chemical conditions generated in the heated
moist hay rise to an affinity with the static electricity in the air and the
birth of fire is the result. These two phenomena, the radio and the burned
barn, twit modern science with its failure as yet to comprehend how the soul
comes into the body. Its refractory denial of the independence--not to say the
existence--of the human-divine soul is as crudely stupid as would be the claim
that the sonata in the air emanating from a distant station has no independent
existence, and that it is only the product of your radio when you tune in the
physical rapport at so many points of frequency. Its existence, that is, its
presence in your room is the product of your radio, a function of its
mechanism. But your radio set did not generate it. It merely registered it. It
was generated elsewhere. The soul, too, is not a product, but only a registry
of your brain mechanism. It, too, was generated elsewhere. It "hath had
elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar." It came "from
heaven," asserts every scripture of the aged past. "Heaven,"
then, is but a station whose generating and broadcasting frequencies are
something higher than those commonly capable of registry by the human brain.
But the soul mi-
278
grates from that higher world and
comes to earth expressly for the sake of finding registry in human
consciousness.
It is not a question of whether life
can be, independent of body. It is ever in being; it ever is. The
question that ought to be asked is whether it is in corpore or in
ovo. It passes back and forth eternally from one state to the other. It
steps from sheer being out into existence and again retires. When it is in
existence, for which it must build a material organism, it has the appearance
of being generated by the mechanism and being an epiphenomenon of the machine,
its product. In fact it is merely being liberated to the outer world by the
machine.
This conjunction with a body,
through a synchronous rapport with the energies of the physical, constitutes
the soul's involution, or descent. And the consummation of the gradual linkage
of its nature with that of the body is dramatized as its marriage with the
psyche. The wedding is consecrated through the handicap of upper with lower
affinities at the point where they meet on common ground.
Soul is therefore "in"
matter and body because it has become one with the animating energy of body. It
has become for the body its animating or life-giving principle. Thenceforth it
is not only "in" the body; it becomes indeed the chief creator and
molder of the body. For its formative life springs ever from within and presses
outward. The body takes shape under the nature and over the pattern of the
forces expanding outward from within. Soul builds and shapes the body.
In the end it must be seen that
almost the exact reverse of the dictum of modern science is true,--that the
body is the product of the soul, not the soul the product of the body. The real
truth of course is always to be found on the "horizon" line midway
between the two extreme views. The phenomenon of the visible presence of both
soul and body is the resultant of the meeting and balanced interplay between
the two energies of life, widely differentiated, but
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capable of merging. That is the
great basic datum of knowledge lost since Plato's day.
It may be true to affirm that the
germ of conscious life is "in" matter at all times and ab initio. Matter
itself does contain from everlasting the seed potentiality of conscious mind.
Each atom is an embryonic universe, with mind and matter already segregated in
their eternal polarity. For an atom, as a unit of true being, must manifest the
nature and structure of true being, which ever exhibits the polarity in
interaction. But if the seed germ of soul is in matter from the start, it is
there long in embryo or in latency. It must abide in dormancy until far along
in evolution the sun of conscious mind beams upon it and wakens its unborn
energies to conscious function.
Being in matter seminally, the egg
of mind undergoes a gradual expansion of its hidden faculties into actual
exercise through its response to the exigencies of its evolutionary experience.
It gains a knowledge of its resources of intelligence by having to deploy them
at the beck and call of the stresses and strains thrust upon it by the
vicissitudes of the onward march. Evolution of mind and soul thus comes through
the challenge of experience. This is involved in the "cycle of
necessity" spoken of in the Greek philosophy. Enhanced capacity for
conscious bliss is the soul's abundant reward for its long pilgrimages from its
celestial homeland in dreary exile in far countries.
The great item of knowledge that
throws into a frame of understanding the ancient systems of theology is the
important fact that the consciousness which is innate in the atom, and comes
gradually to more sensible awareness in the mineral, then to somewhat more
vivid sense in the vegetable, and finally into fairly definite feeling of its
existence in the animal, is not capable of developing beyond the stage of a
vague unrealizing subconsciousness into full self-consciousness, through its
own unaided powers. Its nature and status are exactly comparable to the life of
seed or root in the soil in winter. In these the innate capabilities of growth
are latent. Of themselves they can not move out of their dormancy. They have
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to await the rising of the sun of
spring, under whose thrilling rays they bestir themselves to activity.
This situation is an exact analogue
of the great subconscious powers of the psyche. The consciousness that has come
to the point of dim subconsciousness in the animal can of itself go no farther.
It can not of itself attain full self-consciousness. It must await there the
coming of that sun of righteousness which will flash its beams down into the
dim recesses of its being and awaken latent potentials to active expression.
For those latent energies of psyche the coming of those benignant rays is the
glorious appearance of their Prince Charming. For the animal it is the equally
glorious advent of the lord of life who will raise its powers to those of the
self-conscious human. For man, the human, it is the epiphany of the lord of divine
selfhood, the Christ. In every case it is the Coming, the Advent of that power
of consciousness which redeems the life fallen into matter by raising it again
to the kingly estate of full creative self-consciousness. "Nature unaided
fails" was one of the cardinal maxims of the great wisdom. Nature can go
so far, but she can not pass the limits set to her domain. Earth can reach up
to the top of the highest mountain in her kingdom, that of animal
consciousness. But she can not leap from that peak into the heavens unless an
arm of power reaches down from thence, catches hold of her by chains of
synchronized affinities and transports her likewise into the empyrean. This is
figure, but it is more. It is the precise description of the evolutionary drama
being enacted perennially on the stage of mortal existence in the life of man.
The son of God has descended in the
fullness of time to catch up and bear aloft on his capable wings the sleeping
psyche of animal man. He comes down, like April sun, to set the captives free,
to open the eyes of the blind, to release the prisoners from their dungeons, to
lead them forth out of this darksome land of "Egypt" across the
"Red Sea" of bodily blood through the wilderness and the desert into
the Promised Land. As crude flesh and blood can not inherit that diviner
estate, he must first transform them "into
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the likeness of his own glorious
body" of ethereal sun-essence before they can become eligible for
celestial glories. So they ascend with him into the mount of transfiguration
and there they are changed, their faces shining like the sun and their vestures
glowing white as the light.
A great release of meaning for
intelligence here is that the woman, Mother Nature, left to herself, is the
"barren woman." She, like Hannah, Sarah, Elizabeth and others, was
childless until her old age. The Christ must come to fructify the as yet
abortive creation. The fruitless unproductive wastage of the woman over twelve
years was instantly stopped the moment "virtue" from the Christ had
passed into her. She was then to become the mother of the Christ genius.
To achieve the awakening of dormant
godhood in man the animal, life provides the means of transplanting the seed of
the divine potency into the earthly body, which is ruled only by the
subconscious habitudes of nature. The divine seed is transplanted to earth and
buried in the inmost being of the creature. This is the outside agency that
comes to nature's aid when on her own resources she can go no farther. It is
the coming of the gods to help the sons of earth. As the Christmas hymn (Hark!
The Herald Angels Sing) words it, they were
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.
Man, human, waits for the coming of
the Lord Christ, who, as Paul says, shall change our vile body into the
likeness of his glorious body and end by converting us into gods.
All this depicts the incarnation.
The Egyptians, in faithful accord with their addiction to nature symbolism,
portrayed it to the imagination under the term "incubation." Like any
seed, the seed of divine self-consciousness that would convert animal-human
into divine-human, was said to be incubated in the soil of the human
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garden. There it first
"died," but again germinated and shot into the growth of a new cycle.
Involution, then, is the planting of
the seed of Christ-mindedness in the physical body of man the first, so that as
the seed germinates and the plant grows, man may be transformed into the nature
of the second Adam, the Lord from heaven, and enjoy the liberty of the sons of
God.
It is time now to look for the
analogy of the involutionary operation of planting the seed which is to
fructify the barren womb of Mother Nature and generate in her body the fetus of
the Christ-child. And where is it to be found in phallic symbolism? The
revelation that floods in upon the mind through this channel is nothing less
than prodigious. The parallelism is so obvious as to be stunning in the force
of its pertinence, if it has never been contemplated before.
In physical or human procreation the
consummation of the act is the implantation of the seed of the male for its
incubation in the female. Hence the male member was in all ancient symbolism
the physical emblem of the soul descending into its place of meeting with the
germinal potency of the female--matter. It is the sensitive arm that is
projected into the interior core of the potential mother body, and is therefore
the agent for the production and implantation of the seed. The phallus could
not be other than the symbol of the Father's power to generate and project the
seed of new life. As such it was nobly and loftily conceived. Its connotations
are therefore entirely on the spiritual side. It quite fully matches the
functionism of the divine soul in being the extended arm of God's power
reaching deep into the heart of matter to awaken the unfertilized egg of a new
birth therein to be incubated.
From this exalted significance of
the erect male member comes the symbolization of generative fatherhood in such
upright structures as round towers, pillars, obelisks, stone monuments and
shafts, later church spires, in all religious architecture. They stood as mute
spokesman for the mighty procreative power of life, as typed by
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male virility. Spirit projects an
arm of its living power into the waiting womb of matter and deposits its seed
of future life therein. Of this great cosmic operation the phallus, erect for
creative progenation, must perforce be the effective natural symbol. And such it
is. It is the sower of the seed.
Creative imagination, instructed and
guided by the correspondences, must strive to reach comprehensive truth from
the features of the analogy under the eye. The very structure of the male organ
yields further light. First is its equipment of nervous sensitivity. This is at
once illuminative. It is in this regard the counterpart of the soul itself, and
the soul is a fragment of God's own divine mind. God projects a seed fragment
of himself into matter and that is the soul. Then the phallus is the symbol of
that fragment, as being the portion that enters the female.
Physiologically these ideological
parallels seem to be faithfully carried out. The exquisite capabilities of keen
sensitivity bespeak the very innermost soul of life consciousness reaching out
toward the polar opposite. It is as if the god in man projected an organic unit
of his own sensitive soul exteriorly, so as to penetrate the negative node of
life. Invidious as it may at first sight appear, it must be seen, then, that
both the organ and the seminal essence it draws forth, typify the spiritual or
divine creative forces.
There comes to hand on the very day
this page of the manuscript was to be typed a passage from that astonishingly
revealing work of Henry O'Brien, published over a hundred years ago, The
Round Towers of Ireland (p. 101):
"The eastern votaries, suiting
the action to the idea, and that their vivid imagination might be still more
enlivened by the very form of the temple in which they addressed
their vows, actually constructed its architecture after the model of the membrum
virile, which, obscenity apart, is the divinely-formed and indispensable
medium selected by God himself for human propagation and sexual
prolificacy."
O'Brien is one of the few who have
seen with full clarity that ancient sun-worship and ancient phallic worship
were identical in
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significance. The sun was the
embodied essence of God's own emanative and creative power at the cosmic level.
In man the microcosm the phallus carried this representative power, as it was
the agent for the act of procreation on the generative side. Therefore all the
male phallic emblems exploited particularly in religious architecture stood as
representatives of both God and his stellar embodiments, the suns. Another
statement from O'Brien is directly to this effect (p. 111):
"But the Budhists, not content
with this ordinary veneration, or with paying homage in secret to that
symbol of production which all other classes of idolaters equally, though
privately, worshipped--I mean the Lingam--thought they could never carry their
zeal sufficiently far, unless they erected it into an idol of more than
colossal magnitude-and those idols were the Round Towers. Hence the name
Budhism, which I thus define, viz., the species of idolatry which worshipped
Budh (i.e., the Lingam) as the emblem of Budh (i.e., the Sun)--Budh
signifying, indiscriminately, Sun and Lingam."
It should be explained for the sake
of clearness that O'Brien puts strongly the claim that what he spells Budhism
was not named after an alleged human founder, Buddha, but was derived from the
ancient Irish name for the sun, Budh. It is worth noting that he asserts
the word means both the sun and the phallus. Scholars may rail at him for this,
but there is much to support his view. It is almost certainly correct. For the
sake of showing the purity of the motives activating phallic worship, another
brief statement from O'Brien's remarkable work may profitably be inserted here
(p. 112):
"Such was the whole substance
of this philosophical creed, which was not--as may have been imagined--a ritual
of sensuality, but a manual of devotion, as simple in its exercise
as it was pious in its intent--a Sabian veneration and a symbolical
gratitude."
Along with the male organ regarded
and venerated as symbol of generative life the seminal fluid partook of the
same representative value. As to this we find Reitzenstein saying (Die
Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen, p. 20):
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"Among the various forms with
which a primitive people have represented the highest religious consecration,
union with God, belongs necessarily that of the sexual union, in which man
attributes to his semen the innermost nature and power of God. That which was
in the first instance wholly a sensual act becomes in the most widely separated
places, independently, a sacred act in which the god is represented by a human
deputy or his symbol the Phallus."
Indeed analogical industry went so
far as to make of the phallus an image and reflection of God himself.
Correspondences are not wanting. God, so to say, lets the "life" or
creative power go out of his body, go "dead," as it were, in his
periods of inactivity or sleep. In turn he arises, fills his universe with the
life-blood of his creative purpose and generates creative force, ejecting
life-giving streams from his body. He lies down in sleep; he arises for new
work. He veils and unveils his head with an outer screen of matter. He enters
the world of matter, the mother. He plants his seed there. And there are
further analogies which must be held for later exposition. Reitzenstein's
allusion to the phallus as the "human deputy" of God is suggestive of
much. The phallus performs in the human organism what the God power does for
the cosmos as a whole. Its functions are analogous to those of the supreme
Godhead. It is the operator in the small sphere of the same power that God
wields in the large. It can be thought of in this sense as God's son, his own
power in a secondary or transmitted form. Hence indeed it came to be
denominated in some ancient symbological systems as "the boy." It was
the Father's creative majesty in the little edition.
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CHAPTER XX
WITH UNVEILED FACE
The next feature is strikingly
suggestive of further cosmic methodology. The foreskin is found used several
times in the Old Testament, obviously with cryptic connotations. In the fourth
chapter of Exodus there is given the strange incident in which Moses'
wife Zipporah takes a sharp stone and cuts off the foreskin of her son Gershom
and casts it at Moses' feet, saying, "Surely a bloody husband art thou to
me!" The Lord had tried to kill Moses and the son's foreskin is
allegorized as saving the father from the Lord's fateful purpose. Measured by
the yardstick of orthodox presuppositions the "incident" is hardly
amenable to any intelligible rationalization. One has to resort to the
intimations of old Egyptian figurism to gain a clue.
The descent of the soul was always
the mythological equivalent of the "death" of the parent in the old
cycle, and his resurrection or rising again "from the dead" was
prefigured in and as the birth and growth of his son. The father died that he
might live again in and as his own son. The son's birth and glorious youth
resurrected or revived the dead father. Hence there is the great scene at Anu,
where Horus, the Christ, raises from the dead his father Osiris, a scene which
is almost word for word the archetype of the raising of Lazarus at Bethany in John's
Gospel! Indeed the name Lazarus is found to work back to the old name of
Osiris,--Asar. The meaning indicated, then, is that the application by the
mother, nature, of the son's symbol of virile life, the foreskin, to the feet
of the father, who is represented as under sentence or threat of death at
God's hands, could be seen as a variant form of the drama-
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tization of the son's recreative
power restoring the "dead" father to living status.
At another place in Israelite
history the victorious general ordered the foreskins of the soldiers of a
captured army to be heaped in a pile, with the symbolic implications left
obscurely to the interpretative capacity of the reader.
Circumcision was a rite that
dramatized quite realistically the cutting off of the carnal nature in the
process of evolution, as the spiritual nature came to full kingship in the life
of the individual.
The symbolism of the foreskin in its
simple physiological status is, however, quite revealing. It is a veil of flesh
that is, in intercourse, drawn back or retracted from the sensitive head of the
phallus, and again drawn out to cover it. This divestiture and investiture of
the most living part of the organ with each inward and outward movement is most
astonishingly adumbrative of corresponding features of the cosmic creational
processes. It is recounted among the allegories in the Old Testament, in Exodus
34, that when Moses went into the presence of the Lord on Mount Sinai, he
put a veil over his face, but removed it when he came out to reveal the Lord's
message to the people of Israel. It may seem a far cry from this dramatism to
the veiling and unveiling of the glans of the phallus in its sacred function of
generating and implanting the seed of new life in the womb of mother nature.
Yet the analogy is before us and is in close keeping with the whole range of
such gripping parallels. The sensitive head of the divine planter of seed is
uncovered in its entry into the depths of matter and covered again as it is
withdrawn. The head of the organ must surely stand for the spiritual mind of
God. All poetry has limned nature and matter as being impregnated with the mind
of God. God, so to say, uncovers his innermost soul as he thrusts it outward
into the material universe, so that matter may have the thrilling contact with
mind, and he covers it again in withdrawal. He subjects his mind to full and
complete contact with matter in involution, and veils it over again in
evolution.
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All this detail is matched with
marvelous fidelity in what the archaic wisdom discloses of the soul's own
procedure as it descends into matter of body. At each step of descent from
God's pure spiritual presence toward embodiment in flesh, it invested itself in
a coarser vehicle, first spiritual, then ethereal, then aerial, until it
finally reached the physical plane clothed in the coarse garments of
substantial flesh. It put on successively a spiritual body, a psychic body and
ultimately a physical one. On the return to the celestial kingdom it reversed
the investiture into divestiture, first the physical garment, then the psychic
and lastly the spiritual. The soul covered and uncovered its most intimate self
as it involved itself in the womb of matter and later evolved itself therefrom.
If the reader catches the apparently
contrary working of the two procedures compared as analogous, its incongruity
will be seen to be only apparent, when it is explained that Mount Sinai is not
at all the mount of celestial and divine abode, but verily this outer earth,
which is the place or "mount" on which God and man alone meet for
mutual influence. This rendering of the meaning of the term has been
incontrovertibly established elsewhere in our writings.
There is the possibility of
confusion in the handling of the symbolism here, inasmuch as it might be a
question of which garments of the soul constitute its real clothing. The
decision would rest on the outcome of the perennial debate in philosophy over
"realism." Are the soul's real garments those of flesh which it dons
when it incarnates, or those of spirit which it wears when in
"heaven"? It covers itself with the one kind while it uncovers itself
of the other kind. Esoteric philosophy asserted always the eternal durability
of the spiritual bodies, in contrast with the perishable nature of the physical
ones. The higher vestures would then be regarded as the most real ones. As the
foreskin is a veil of flesh, and the fleshly body can be considered less real
than the spiritual ones, the intimation could be that God removes all fleshly veils
from his innermost nature in order to inject his highest spirit into the heart
of matter. It is frequently a peculiarity of symbolic allegorism as used in the
days
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of antiquity that the relevance
works, so to say, both ways, or in both directions. That is to say that in the
case under scrutiny it is possible to think of the soul, from the heavenly
point of departure and of view, as investing itself with material
garments as it descends toward matter, while from the material side it can just
as readily be regarded as divesting itself of spiritual garments. And on
the return arc it can be thought of as divesting itself of material
clothing while it invests itself in spiritual raiment. This possibility
of an apparent direct reversal of meaning is present in so much of the ancient
symbolic depiction of cosmic processes and is the cause of much confusion and
bafflement to scholars and laity alike.
At all events the human mode of
procreation, in the detail of the alternate recession and protraction of the
foreskin in the process of implanting the seed of new birth, confronts
intelligence with a perfect type of cosmic procedure in universal creation. So
to phrase it, the god seeking his own implantation in the mother body of man,
is alternately bared or unveiled to receive the full impressionable force of
contact with the substance of matter as he presses to immerse his nature in her
bosom, and again is covered with his protecting veil as he retires to spiritual
habitat. The analogy challenges the mind and must be taken for what it
intimates in the way of instruction and suggestion. It is necessary to meet the
terms of the analogue fully and frankly in order to discern the astonishing
faithfulness of the correspondence between creative methods at two distinct
levels, human and cosmic. Spirit bares its sensitive being to touch
magnetically the kindred currents of vital force in the opposite node of matter
and covers itself again in withdrawing from the sacred intimacy. When spirit
and matter are to meet each other for a holy communion of their energies, the
veils that shield them normally are removed and their powers meet each other in
naked linkage for a mutual exchange of hidden divine influences,--that life may
have new birth. Only when the interior being of spirit, projected out from the
generative Father of life, meets the similar interior being of matter, can
there be the complete and rich com-
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munion of hidden powers which draw
forth from deepest wells the creative energies of life.
From every point of view it seems
that the classic myth of Ulysses boring out the one central eye of the giant
Polyphemus with the red-hot tip of a pine trunk must be taken as phallic
symbolism. The single eye is lauded in scripture as filling the body with
light. Darkness comes with the double vision. Obviously this can not be taken
in reference to physical light and human vision at all, but has relevance only
in symbolic connotations. The red-hot tip of the pine tree trunk would typify
the male organ, and through it the sex principle, which comes into being only
with the bifurcation of life from primal unity into polar duality. In a very
direct way it can be said that the development of sex through the split into
duality puts out the single eye of spirit. There is to be inwoven no evil
imputation in the dramatism; it is just the method of expressing the tableau of
cosmic operation. The pine was one of the most common of the trees used to
symbolize "the tree of life." Life replaces the single spiritual
vision with that gained from a focus of spirit and matter. In the Egyptian
myths Horus, the Christ, is fabled as losing his eye, as having his eye pierced
by the spear of his opponent, Sut (Satan), or having it plucked out and
swallowed by Sut. (It is always recovered or restored in the alternate swing of
the cycle.) And oddly enough, it is his eye--the singular--and not his eyes. In
this mythology his right eye represented spirit and his left matter. And all
man's vision comes as a balance between spiritual and physical insights. The
likeness of a pine trunk glowing red at the point to the erect member is too
obvious to need accentuation.
Circumcision holds still further
indices of enlightenment. Like animal sacrifice it was actually turned from a
mere symbolic representation for mental illumination alone over into a physical
practice! There is not easily discoverable anywhere in the body of Jewish
sacred or ethical literature an elucidation of the prime significance of this
usage, whether it was hygienic, functional or wholly symbolical in original
intent. On the deepest inquiry into its origin and
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practice, it seems that it is just
another and precarious instance, as hinted, of the stupid conversion of purely
figurative dramatism of a spiritual idea into an actual rite. Illuminated
intelligence devised the dramatic depictions of spiritual truths; it remained
for shut-eye stolidity of mind to convert them into assumed physical
operations. On this basis there can be an understanding of the whole colossal
record of religious ineptitude. It is religion's "Guide to Folly"
indeed. At a fatal epoch literalism fell like a blight over the area of mind
illuminated by the light of former ages and withered the fair verdure of
esoteric cryptography into the sear leaves of dead meaning.
The rite no doubt was a purely
symbolic portrayal of the idea of the soul's uncovering itself upon entry into
the divine communion with the inmost power of the atom of matter. Likewise it
could have been intended to convey the soul's divesting itself of its veil of
matter near the end of each cycle of its life. It would thus suggest the
complete severance of the spiritual soul from its union with body, the
philosophically conceived cause of its fall and its "degradation."
The cutting off the foreskin would thus have connoted the soul's final escape
from the alternate covering and uncovering of itself as it entered or left the
domain of matter, or its final emancipation from union with the flesh. If it
holds any more profound esoteric significance than these direct intimations of
its actual suggestiveness, it must be brought to light by the turning of a
still more recondite key.
If it was intended to signify that
the soul was no longer under the cycle of necessity, no longer bound to the
wheel of involution and evolution (at least in the sort of bodies familiar to
us) and free from further involvement in material limitation, it would carry
much the same significance as that other practice--also a symbolic depiction
carried over into wretched literalness by crazed ignorance--of holy men
"making themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake." In such
an expression is to be caught an inkling of the hidden import of these ancient
formalisms. To render one-
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self a eunuch for any recondite
religious purpose could only have stemmed from the idea that, with the body
thus cut off from the power to generate its reproductive seed, there was
exemplified the soul's final release from the necessity of uniting further with
the body. This was another way of suggesting its return to primal androgyneity,
its pristine hermaphroditism, in which it lay in the time of its residence in
nirvanic dreaminess. In this state it is the One and not the two-in-one, its
polarity only latent, male-female in one, not male and female. In so far
as "marriage" in its theologico-philosophical sense of the union of
spiritual consciousness with physical mechanism is to be regarded as a hardship
and an evil--as unfortunately it was so considered in great part throughout the
whole religious development--its hazardous necessity was at last overcome by
the soul's consummation of its victory, whereupon it could retire to its
heavenly place and be free from further adventures in "matrimony."
This inclination is understandable, in typology at least, for the soul is then
approaching the last stages of her long cycle and yearning for the blessedness
of the return to unity. She is nearing her heaven, where there is neither
marriage nor the disposition for it.
The next observation of the modus of
physical reproduction at the human-animal level is one that yields a great
truth of philosophy when the analogical deductions are traced out. This is the
fact that, as nature instructs us, there is required a pretty effective
frictional contact between the bodily implementations of spiritual and material
life to engender the sensuous response which both attends and produces the
transplantation of the seed of soul into matter's soil. The schematism of
life's methodology in this particular has not been sighted or proclaimed with
sufficient succinctness.
Sense is the first and basic form of
consciousness in its serial awakening and manifestation. Sensation is the first
degree of awareness, and from it, as it yields pleasure or pain, emerges
emotion, the next stage. From emotion arises thought and out of thought at last
comes spiritual intuition. Consciousness would remain forever
"unconscious," undeveloped, if spirit, which is consciousness in po-
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tential, and matter, its polar foil,
were not brought into affective relationship in an interchange of their several
influences. They must be brought together, not alone in naked intimacy, but
with the effective vigor of frictional contact, to awaken the latent energies
in both their natures. They must impinge upon each other with the natural force
of their several opposing powers. Or the active energy of spirit must meet and
wrestle with the inert and passive opposition of matter. The archaic scriptures
picture the impingement of the two upon each other under a variety of typal
representations. It is a friction, a tribulation, a bruising, a wrestling, a
battle. These are all interesting and yield deeper meaning when followed down
to their philological lairs. "Tribulation" is from the Latin tribo,
"to rub." The tribulation which St. Paul says we shall have in
this world results from the abrasions and the scuffing which the soul receives
from its sharp and often painful experiences in the material world. The soul is
knocking roughly against the hard coldness of the world of things and the
necessities laid upon it by physical needs. Crudely stated, it must rub sharply
against all that matter places in its path in mortal existence.
Then there is the figure of
"bruising." With great vividness this is put before the mind in the
great Biblical declaration that God would put enmity between the serpent (of
the lower nature in man) and the seed of the "woman," and that this
enmity should come to view in the reciprocal bruising of the heel of the son of
the "woman" and the head of the reptile throughout the evolution of
humanity. "He shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel,"
said the Cosmocrator to the serpent. Here again is abrasion, friction,
contusion between the two arms of the polarity. As the Christ in man stood
above the low crawling serpent of the carnal nature, the point of contact and
mutual wounding must necessarily by where the lowest extremity, or
"heel," of the upper man came in conflict with the highest point of
the lower self, its "head." This position of relationship was aptly
designated in the ancient zodiacs, in which the feet of the Christ-child, held
in the arms of the mother, the
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Virgin (Virgo), rested just above
the head of the gigantic serpent (Hydra) stretching across seven signs of the
zodiac.
There are many versions of the
wrestling and battling of the two forces, the chief archaeological one being
that universally mistaken for a supposed future historical warfare,--the Battle
of Armageddon. The name was derived from the Egyptian Har-Makhu, the
name given to the Egyptian Christ figure, Horus, "Lord of the Two
Horizons," and the later addition of the Hebrew Adon, "Lord."
As the god who stood on the morning and evening horizons, Horus was depicted as
the divinity in man that stands on the boundary line separating spirit and
matter and there wages the eternal conflict with his twin, the power of
darkness, Sut.
Under whatever form it is
considered, the implication is that out of the conflict and clash of opposite
polar energies there is engendered a heat and a fire which, like the potent
rays of the sun, becomes the immediate productive agency of a new birth,
awakening and calling forth energies till then latent. It is the heat that causes
seeds to germinate. The release of generative heat by fermentation is one of
the chief symbols in old systems. But the generation of life-giving fire by
friction is another equally emphasized. From the warmth of the embrace between
soul and flesh, from the heat of the battle between them, and from the fire of
friction between the two poles of life arises the electric glow of inner
consciousness, from incipient sense, through emotion and thought to spiritual
love. This is one of the most revealing of all the vital truths imparted to
early humanity by the exalted Sages who drew from their fund of near-divine
mastery of knowledge. Out of the marriage and intercourse of spirit and matter
in their incarnational relation the seed of new life is implanted in Mother
Nature's body.
The rich accretion of philosophical
wisdom to be drawn from this ray of phenomenal revelation is worthy of an
extensive elaboration. The direct implications and points of instruction for
systematic thinking are both striking and authoritative. To begin with, it
underlies the absolutely indispensable role of matter in the cosmic
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economy. It thus strikes at the
unconscionable absurdity of those philosophies which rain their barbs of
ideological invective and contumely upon the innocent head of their Antichrist,
matter. But chiefly it confronts the thinking mind with the practical
imperative to understand that all of man's values in the field of emerging
powers of consciousness are brought to birth out of a constant tug of war,
euphemistically dramatized as enmity, between the two poles of life. This broad
fact of truth has been set forth in sufficient amplitude since the day of
Plato, but it seems never to have been admitted into the structure of
philosophy at any time with keen enough perception of its cogency to orient the
academic mind in a correct posture toward the nature and important role of
matter. It has never been evaluated with an appreciation adequate to lift the
pall of odium off the head of matter in philosophical speculation. The
opposition that matter puts up against spirit has not ceased to be signalized
as a thing of evil import and to be decried as a cosmic mishap. Indeed the
battle itself has been characterized as an unfortunate miscarriage of cosmic
strategy due to the interference of an evil principle somehow permitted to
invade the counsels of Infinite Good. Confusion and chaos have arisen in the
theological arena because evil, misconceived in the first place as a principle
independent of the total life of good, has been severed from any necessary
relation to good and placed by itself in a world of hostile motive. Properly
envisaged it should have been known as the twin of good and divinely activated
to co-operate with it in the establishment of values that only by its
opposition could be brought to concreteness. Good can never be established
without the countervalence of "evil." And the values eventually won
out of the conflict are beyond good and evil in their relative aspects in the
phenomenal world. These forces are not two antagonists combating each other for
the mastery of creation. They are the two components of one reality, as
necessary to the stability of that reality as are inside and outside to any
dimensional entity, or front and back to a sheet of paper, or right and left in
any form. Indeed by an insidious tend-
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ency of the mind there has ever been
the proclivity of thought to ally good with up, with front, with inside, with
right hand, and evil with down, with outside, with back and with left hand. Our
very word "sinister" is from the Latin word meaning "left
hand," and the French word for "left," gauche, gives us
in English "gawky," and gaucherie is "awkwardness."
"Dexterous," a word of positive significance, is from the Latin dexter,
meaning "right hand." But these are popular mistranslations into
literal realism of what were purely dramatic modes of depiction of relative
significances in ancient formularies. They are part of the exoteric wreckage
which uncomprehending mentality makes of esoteric truth whenever it is handed
over to the masses ruled by low intelligence. The ascription of
"evil" to any part of the machinery of evolutionary movement is
simply the work of man's limited perspective and belongs in the same category
of error as the blunder that a simpleton's mind might make if he declared the
brake on a vehicle to be evil because it obstructed the forward movement.
Likewise the aim of life is to
generate the "fire" of creation, and the methodology requires the
friction between mutually coordinated forces and mechanisms, but in seeming
opposition. All that is needed is to use this much of philosophical knowledge
to correct the hasty misconceptions of naive judgment. The scriptures have
again and again assured us that God uses the powers of evil for ultimate good,
but unreflective habits of mind allied with superficial observation and
judgment of experience have defeated the recognition of truth.
Mounting even higher in the scale of
philosophical edification is the next reflection to be adduced from the
frictional phenomenon. It follows close on the heels of the item just
amplified, and carries thought forward to a realization of one of the most
potent of all truths. It springs directly as a deduction from the premises of
the situation. It is the great truth that only through the frictional
relation with an actuality outside itself can the latent energies of spirit
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be born in the open field of
manifest expression. Almost
universal is the belief that spirit is all-sufficient unto itself and able to
produce or deploy its powers in independence of all extraneous physical
relation. Let it be proclaimed with the most positive certitude that nature has
negated this folly of shallow philosophy and arrant presumption by her
presentment of truth in the creational procedure.
The method she utilizes under our
observation distinctly attests that spirit is not all-sufficient to its own
purposes, and that its growth and unfoldment into power can not be effected in
independence of its relation with matter. Such has ever been the ideological
predominance of spirit over matter in theology and general supposition that the
legend of spirit's power to actualize its aims grew until it left the matter of
a requisite mechanism for its successful work quite out of consideration. It
has been a stupid miscalculation that spirit could function and blossom, so to
say, in vacuo, and that it could sweep ahead to the evolution of its
genius and powers without regard to any need to be instrumentalized or
implemented by an organic vehicle. Philosophy has feigned to assume that it was
something that could flash its decrees in empty air, or bring its aims to pass
by a sheer fiat of its will, needing no localization in any scheme of organic
development. It was conceived as something that can "blow where it
listeth," without awaiting the slow provision of a structure of
implementation. It was practically conceived as a power that could see without
an eye, hear without an ear and know without a brain. Indeed so far was this presupposition
carried that in religions it became a defamation of its character to speak of
it as in any way dependent for its expression upon ignoble matter. In this
overweening estimate spirit could disrupt and dissolve any material formation
that sought to limit it. To make its manifestations dependent upon the
organization of matter was to reduce it to an ignominious slavery under the
thing which it were blasphemy to mention in the same breath with it.
This errant presumption in the case
must now be seen to be shattered by the evidence life itself presents. Spirit
will in its arc
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of predominance in the cycle gain
the victory over matter. But it will not do so in utter independence of matter
or out of relation with it. It will achieve its high purpose only by the help
and through the agency of matter. It would, as already said, remain an
unplanted seed, a chick in ovo, if its forces were not harnessed to
physical mechanisms. Idealistic philosophy has long needed the balance of this
simple realization to hold it steady against the extravagant fling of
over-laudation of spirit as majestic lord of life.
It should have been more correctly
formulated in philosophy that spirit's ultimate superiority over matter
consists, not in its ability to manifest its powers in complete contempt of
matter, but in its function of organizing matter into mechanisms fitted to give
fullest and freest play to its energies. Spirit is not dependent upon matter
for its being; it is dependent upon it for its manifest existence in the
worlds. The amount of its potency able to be released and set to work in
creative effort is contingent upon the capabilities of the organisms which
alone can transmute purely potential energy into kinetic power. Electricity can
not drive wheels and pull trains until it is harnessed to the requisite
machinery.
Idealistic philosophy has justly
earned this disdain of straight-thinking people because of its failure to
concede the necessary value of matter in affording spiritual faculty its
engines of accomplishment.
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CHAPTER XXI
THE OIL OF GLADNESS
An altogether signal determination
of philosophical truth comes to view as reflection proceeds from its base in
the known creative formula of wider areas of cosmic order. Not only is spirit
seen to be dependent upon its linkage with matter for the actualization of its
designs, but beyond that there is established the even more important fact that
spirit can deploy its energic faculties outward in concrete development only in
response to the call of outer material circumstance and pressure. This is quite
elucidative of the meaning of experience in toto. It is of fundamental
and critical strategic importance in the true living philosophy. It postulates
experience as the indispensable condition of the unfoldment of consciousness.
The great conclusion thus upbuilt is that it takes a call, a challenge, a
provocation from the world outside to draw out the hidden power of the soul.
That which is within in embryonic
potentiality can not be brought out to actual energic operation except in
response to a stimulus from without. The slumbering inner divinity bestirs
itself to activity only at the call of the exigencies of the world without. There
is in life's code a requirement that an intercourse between the periphery of
sense and the interior hub of latent consciousness must bring the latter awake
to awareness of its own nature and resources. Although it can not be considered
a mere product of sensual experience, it yet owes its unfoldment into active
power to the need of answering the call of the exterior world and its
excitations. It will not arise of itself alone out of primal dormancy. The
outer is the magician that evokes the reality of consciousness and all its
faculties from out the apparently empty hat of first inchoate
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being. As Greek philosophy phrases
it, it is the outward experience that "causes the principles to
arise." Mind can not exercise itself in thought, can not formulate its
rules and keen perceptions of logic unless it has the substance and material of
sense data as the ground of thinking processes in the first instance. Thought
can not arise and take form in an empty heaven. It can not germinate until it
has the facts of solid existential reality presented to it in the concrete and
demanding to be dealt with. The mighty challenge they present is that they be
dealt with according to the principles of truth and rectitude set by the
all-ruling cosmic Mind. This lays on the creature mind the obligation to
discover and follow truth as ordained by parent Mind. The soul's apprehension
of truth can not evolve out of pure abstraction. Its base is concreteness. It
must proceed from the concrete to the abstract. Roundness, squareness,
tranquillity, whiteness are not possible conceptions to it until it has
contacted round, square, serene and white objects. This by no means commits it
to adopt a philosophy of sensationalism as the answer to the life riddle. But
it does grant to sense the due measure of credit it deserves for its part in
the genesis of consciousness. Sensual excitations do become the talisman, the
magician's wand of power, which knocks at the door of inchoate consciousness to
awaken it from the sleep of unconsciousness.
Hence all the hue and cry that has
been raised in the ranks of philosophical and religious ideology for centuries
against the life of sense, the world of experience, the flesh with its vilified
lusts and the devil of the tempting lure of material things is seen at last to
be the fruit of a delusion as groundless as it is chimerical. These influences
emanating from the outward side of consciousness and impinging insistently upon
the soul's attention in the early part of the cycle are in no wise hostile to
the interests of the soul's growth, as pious religious persuasion has so long
assumed. The only peril lurking on that side is that the soul, in the first
blind confusion and distraction following its immersion under the host of
motivations of the personal life, may give inordinate attention and undue
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importance to their demands before
its eyes are opened to a balanced view of their contributory service to the
larger plan. As undue valuation of sensual experience is indeed bound to occur
in the period of philosophical immaturity--and this is part and parcel of the
educative experience--the equilibrium between mind and sense will be eventually
regained. As in the case of the planets, chaos and cosmic ruin are avoided by
the exact maintenance of a neutralized state between the centrifugal forces of
sense and the centripetal pull of the spirit. Stability is won precisely at the
point where the two are balanced in equal counterpoise. If either soul or sense
is allowed to gain too heavy a preponderance, the safety of the embodied life
is jeopardized.
Orgies of historical asceticism,
actuated by the overwhelming prepossession of the desirability of crushing the
carnal self in the interests of the soul's purity, have been a pitiable
delusion, drawing in their wake the sorrowful spectacle of self-mortification under
the lash of misguided pietism. A proper philosophy would have erased or
corrected the horror.
The sense experience is wholly
salutary and absolutely vital to the whole plan of spiritual advancement. The
spirit is as dependent upon flesh for its unfoldment of divine capacity as mind
is dependent for its functioning here and now upon mortal body and brain. The
sense life is the lever by which consciousness is raised from the depths of the
underworld of unconsciousness. The evocative ministry of outward environment
and its impacts on the organism are as the sun and genial air to the seed or
young plant in the soil, challenging hidden energies to bestir themselves.
Always the potential inner answers the call of the actual outer.
It is the Upanishads of that
country which has most generally been accredited with having produced the most
subjective philosophical systems in the world, India, that present to us the
true doctrine of the schematic utility of the external life of sense. As summed
up in the sententious pronouncements of Radhakrishnan, eminent Hindu Professor
of Philosophy in Calcutta University, in
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his two splendid volumes on Indian
Philosophy, the doctrine is expressed in one of the most precious of all
dialectic findings, as follows: "To deny the world without is to
destroy the God within." This is the one final statement that goes to
the root of the problem. In intensive study no declaration of similar trenchant
conciseness upon this matter has been encountered. Its omission out of general
philosophical discussion is tantamount to ignoring nearly half the problem
which speculation faces. One half of the problem is the soul, whose kingly
power, buried initially in the depths of the flesh--like the bees' nest of
honey in the decaying carcass of the lion slain by Samson--is to come to full
exercise in the processes of growth; the other half is the outer environment by
contact or conflict with which the soul is to be polished and refined to the
shining perfection of its nature.
It is the cry of all
"spiritual" religion and philosophy, particularly of those schools
that have emanated from India, that to contact God one must go within.
Corollary to this is the idea that the discovery of one's inner divinity may be
facilitated by shutting out as completely as possible the environing world.
These presuppositions have been the conceptual background and nurturing soil of
the great world movements and cults of ascetic practice, contemplation and
systems of spiritual austerities generally. It has been presented as a matter
of simple self-evidence that to find God one must go within where the deific
power dwells in the depths of consciousness. The unexploited riches of divine
being, of boundless knowledge, ineffable bliss, love and infinitude lie within.
Within are the inestimable and inexhaustible treasures of grace, the
measureless resources of magic and miracle. To find them has been the motive of
the siren song of all the metaphysical and mystical programs of religion.
Mysticism has dilated upon this theme without end; religion has baited its most
fetching appeal to the loyalties of its millions of devotees with the lustrous
hues of this subjective Eden and the roseate promises of its easy attainment.
The theory embodies truth in the main.
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The systematism of this entire work
rests upon the postulation that a seed fragment of God's mind has been
deposited within the inner heart of man's being to be awakened to growth
through the repercussions upon it of the exertions of the outer personality. On
that point there is agreement with the primary claims of mystical cultism.
Divergence of view, however, arises the moment the first step is taken in the
direction of an approach to utilization of the great knowledge. It is necessary
to part company with the almost universal predilections and persuasions
governing mystical practice, because of the shallow and unphilosophical
assumptions that have led such practice into errancy and failure, not to add,
enormous fatuity and wreckage. It is one of the most grievous chapters in the
book of human cultural aspiration that the entire utility and advantage of
holding the precious knowledge of God's immanence in man's heart has been
almost totally nullified, and endless eccentricity, miscarriage and tragedy
have been bred in the life of millions, by the failure of philosophy and
religion to balance this cardinal knowledge with the complimentary
understanding that alone can guide devotion to sane usage. Measureless volumes
of consecrated spiritual striving have gone into empty futility for the want of
one item of dialectical intelligence that would have turned effort in the
proper direction and rendered devotion effective for true gain. This priceless
item of necessary comprehension is the knowledge that the God within man's being
is from the start only potentially deific, and that his powers and genius lie
dormant until they are aroused and brought to expression through the long
experience of reaction to the stimuli coming in from the personality and the
world without.
In the tersest possible terms the
truth is that, while God dwells within, man cannot find him there by abandoning
the world without and withdrawing inward to cultivate the divine acquaintance.
If it might be put with laconic bluntness, it has to be said that the God
within is not available to man until he has been brought out and united with
the human part of man. Always spiritual cult
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preachment has been to the effect
that the human and personal part of man must be taken in or lifted up to be
united with the higher or inner part. It is just as true to put it the other
way around.
It can be rejoined, of course, that
one must at any rate go within to find him in order to bring him out. But this
is a mere sophistical thrust and does not controvert the main thesis that the
whole success or failure, utility or damage, of human procedure in the matter
rests on the mental conception of the difference of direction, so to say, in
which man is to approach his God. It makes both immediately and ultimately all
the difference in the world in the prosecution of the individual's evolutionary
mission whether his orientation to the task is rightly facing the realities of
the situation, so that the psychological forces in play may operate
harmoniously, or whether his understanding and procedure based on it are all
askew. There can be little question about the importance of the individual's
knowing whether he is to turn his back, psychologically, on the world, to seek
spiritual aggrandizement within the interior of subjective contemplation, or
whether he is to throw his interest and actualities of life in the world.
Hardly any situation with opposite alternatives could present the possibility
of greater difference in results. The wrong choice in the issue has bred
incalculable suffering among misguided zealots, all the more deplorable because
it was gratuitous.
Philosophical insight has long
predicated the presence of divinity in the human nature. The very doctrine of
the Immanence attests the fact. But possession of the knowledge has ever failed
to generate vital cogency in the life of those proclaiming it because it has
not been held in rational mental balance. The feature always wanting to supply
balanced comprehension has been the realization that the Immanuel in human life
was not full-blown divinity, but godhood in its infancy, in its immaturity, in
its potential form only. The posture taken was forever a wrong maneuver, based
on an expectation that could never be fulfilled.
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It was assumed that if one would but
enter the deep sanctum of deity within the confines of the personality, deity
would be found ready to hold court with human weakness and pleadings, and
extend to the outer man its full resources of infinite wisdom. It seemed
incompatible with earthly estimates of divine character that the god within
should himself need education. Here is offered the solution of a riddle that
has perplexed millions of eager enthusiasts in religious devotionalism from
ancient times to the present. They have closed their eyes on the world and
retired within the reported holy precincts of inner consciousness, expecting to
be welcomed into halls of rapturous delight and regaled with conscious
ecstasies. Instead they have found empty caverns of mental blankness and no
welcome of joyous illumination. The god is there, doubtless; but he is asleep
in his cradle. He is not yet grown to stature; he is still the largely
unawakened seed; he is the Christ-child.
And what is necessary is not that he
be approached and visited from without, but that he be invited to arise and
come out, look upon the world in which it is his karmic obligation to be
immersed, and "develop his powers," as Plotinus so clearly states it,
by prosecuting his further evolution in the milieu of sense and outward event.
His only chance of getting awake to reality lies in his attachment to a body
open to receive impressions from the world outside. He will arise out of the
dormancy of his initial stage only by his reaction to the impact of outer
events upon his sensitive core. He will come to a realization of his innate
genius only as it is challenged to exercise itself in response to the
impingement of external occurrence or circumstance. God indeed he is, yet he
must await the call of the outer world, the shock and brunt of physical
experience, to unfold his latent capacities into conscious employment. In fine
there is demanded the friction between germinal divinity and the concrete world
to bring forth the seminal seeds of new and higher life.
Rightly do the Upanishads of
India decree that to ignore the world without is to destroy the God within. And
with equal
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pertinence does the Talmud declare
that if we will know the invisible world of noumenal reality, we must open wide
our eyes on the visible world of phenomena. The most supremely vital lesson of
practical value needed to be mastered by philosophical studiousness at all
times is that which springs from this investigation. It is the great truth that
the inner deity in the human constitution deploys his hidden powers only in
response to stimuli carried inward to its central seat from the world without.
The inner answers the call of the outer. The soul dwelling within is there to
meet the needs arising from its own body's contact with the world.
In general homiletics it has long
been preached that the world is a school of training, in which the qualities of
soul character were to be drawn forth and built up in the melee of active
events. But this well-discerned common maxim of ethics has not cast its ray of
enlightenment over into the area of philosophical theorization, nor introduced
the lesson of its fine significance in that wider field. Had acumen availed to
effectuate this transference, neither the fanatic effort to nullify the world's
influence, nor the near castration, as it were, of man's natural proclivities,
together with the suppression of wholesome enjoyment of nature's pleasures, nor
the efforts to aggrandize the soul at the expense of the total extinction of
the animal self, could ever have come to their baneful manifestation in the
life of whole civilizations. Instead of these aberrant trends toward abject
self-mortification, there would have been attained a more balanced relation
between the natural man and the second Adam, or the Christ, as the golden mean of
excellence found in the equilibration between the two natures would have been
held in view and used as a sound gauge of philosophical ideology through the
centuries. In that happier case history would have been spared the reading of
that heart-sickening epoch marked by the devastating sweep of the rage for
self-crucifixion and repression of all healthy instincts, bred from the mental
disease of warped philosophical notions.
The nub of the great truth under
discussion has been treasured
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in the core of the word
"education." Its great pertinence has been glimpsed at times and lost
again. It is a "leading out" of germinal capabilities into outward
functioning. All skills and adeptness are to be viewed as having been drawn out
from an inner seat of potential ability. Well might it be punned that "the
mighty comes from the mite." Socrates showed that the unschooled boy taken
at random off the street of Athens knew already the great mathematical
theorems, needing only to have the knowledge "brought out." But
nothing comes out of the tiny seed unless, after planting, it is played upon by
the radiations of a higher vibrational force. The dynamic properties hidden in
its deepest being will only display their strength in answer to the knocking of
the outer life. Not too quickly can the world of intelligence assimilate this
cardinal truth.
The fatally hypnotic obsession of
mystical religion has chiefly been induced by the delusion that spiritual gifts
and faculties could function by a sheer fiat of will and in total disseverance
from any educative process, in which things and events played the part of the
evocative agency. By the million men have called upon the spirit within to
display its majestic power and glorious radiance, on the arrant presumption
that one had but to invite it by the waving of a wand and it would parade forth
its miraculous mastery. To a degree the whole paraphernalia of rite and mummery
in religion has been designed with a view to the superinducing of the
predicated supernal powers of the resident deity.
But the god is not to be summoned by
mummery. He responds to the call of empirical reality. The actual experiences,
the needs, rebuffs, the joys, griefs, hopes and strivings of the personal self
in concrete life penetrate to the inner seat and arouse the god to put forth
his latent strength. The very physical danger that threatens the personality
from time to time is a potent magician to awaken the slumbering energies of the
soul. The divine self-consciousness would never flower into beauty and bear its
fruit in the empty regions of pure spirit. It must draw nourishment for growth
from the soil of physical experience.
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The tree--a notable exemplification
of most cosmic truths--grows only by the effort it exerts to express new growth
far out on the periphery of its form at the end of the branches. Life likewise
grows by the effort it expends to propagate itself far out on the exterior
boundaries of its material embodiment. The tree grows in stature by its new
exertions each season in extending its reach further away from its heart.
Similarly life gains by a correlative activity in pushing its conceptual
formations fully out into concrete manifestation. Activity remote from the
central heart of being redounds to the enhancement of the innermost nucleus of
conscious life. By a mystery the deepest center of being receives an increment
of growth as a repercussion from the contactual experience of its physical
extensions far out on its frontiers. The fruits of empirical living are by a
magical process carried back to the inner granary and harvested there for
perennial use. Both the tree and the permanent inner counterpart of life in man
grow by what each does in the outer leaf of personality. Their work in the
personality, even though that personality perishes in the autumn, builds up the
central deposit of accrued gain at the end of each cycle in the imperishable
part. Deep within the organism the ego of both tree and man reaps and garners
the fruits of what it labors to produce out on its farthest limbs. Periodically
life swings outward to plunge into concrete experience; in the same rhythm it
swings back again, carrying with it the harvested fruits from the fields and
gardens of objective history. Each gleaning of product is added to the
permanent store of wisdom and faculty. It plants its seed, enriched in
potential capacity, over and over again, and each time that it consummates its
cycle of added growth it redeems a further portion of nature's subconscious
life to spiritual self-consciousness.
The planted seed, or soul
incarnated, is the light which God sends out to do his will in the worlds. He
plants himself potentially and the germinating and burgeoning of the grounded
seminal essence in the course of the cycle's growth localizes the execution of
his will in the outer rim of the creation. He makes himself operative
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in the outer soil of sensuous
existence. The divine light is borne outward in the seed, a hidden deific fire,
destined to come to glowing flame in the round of unfoldment. God, at home,
gains by what his emissaries, his "children of the light," win and
bring back from their conquests far out on the frontiers of spiritual dominion.
The common poetism that falls so often from the lips of spiritual cult
addictions--"we are sparks from a central divine fire"--is apt in its
delineation of our nature in relation to the One Creative Force. But equally
relevant is that other description: "We are seeds from the tree of Life
and Knowledge." The living energy reposing in the bosom of the seed is
verily a fiery potency, merely lying dormant till aroused by the touch of
vivific rays. The two metaphors blend into one in the finale. A seed is the
embodiment of pent-up fire, as the Chaldean Oracles declare that "all
things are the product of one central Fire, every way resplendent." The
central Forge sends out its sparks, emits its light, darts its thunderbolt or
shoots its rays to the outermost boundary, where they throw inert matter into
activity, organize structural growth and in the end return with accrued gains
to the primal hearth.
Well does the scripture say that the
Tree of Life is planted on both sides of the river of water, for its roots are
watered by the stream of moving life that flows on the border between spirit
and matter and are nourished equally by the sustenance they draw from both the
physical and the spiritual sides of life. As the Book of the Dead writes
it, the soul "cultivates the crops on both sides of the horizon,"
where the realms of sense and soul have their frontiers in common, and man can
cultivate both the wheat and the tares, to be separated in the harvest.
Once planted, the germ of sentient
life finds itself confronted with the special conditions that environ it. Its
first task is to send its roots as deeply as possible down into the soil, that
it may be able to draw thence the elemental energies and the physical
sustenance it requires for the establishment of its position firmly in the
kingdom below it. Only thus can it maintain itself in security
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against the perils that threaten it.
Under the pressure of the forces playing upon it, the life spark exerts itself
to neutralize, parry or overcome the influences that might destroy it. This is
its answer to the outer call. The necessities laid upon incipient consciousness
to fend for itself are its educators. They are the provocatives of evolution.
It has become a recognized principle
in modern biological science--one of nine new formulations since Darwin's
day--that unfoldment of growth only brings to manifestation a pattern of
structure predetermined and germinal in the organism from the start.
Environment does not determine either the direction or the form of the
development; it simply provides good or poor conditions for the unfoldment of a
pattern already set. Therefore it is seen that evolution's course to a divinely
known, because divinely conceived, end is the coming to form of the ideal
structure planned in deific mind ab origine. The part played by
environment, less vital as determinant of form, but all important as agency for
the actual deployment, is the provocation, so to say, of the latent energies of
growth to active exertion. The inner nature only unfolds itself at the
challenge of the outer world.
Here again it becomes apparent that
an intercourse between inner spirit and outer matter is the essential
methodology at work. Inner life's effort to accommodate itself to peripheral
forces and conditions provides incentive to exertion, by which
self-consciousness and self-knowledge are won. When at an advanced stage the
inner self comes to clear perception of its nature and its mission, it gains
the power to initiate action, from which point onward it learns more skillfully
to manipulate environing conditions to its own behoof and for its own rational
ends. The day on which consciousness steps over the last boundary between
unconscious automatism under nature and conscious self-determination under
mind, is the gala day in the life of Self. For then mind assumes control of the
"seven elementary powers," and begins to superimpose divine will upon
their activities. Thus the whole order of creation is made anew--
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a new heaven and a new earth are
brought into being. For creation steps from the realm of the subconscious habitual
over into that of the consciously different. The order of the elementals, under
whose control St. Paul says we live until we adopt the mind of Christ, is ended
and the order of mind begins,--at the symbolic age of twelve. The Christ then
comes out from under the rule of his Mother--Nature--and turns his attention to
the Father's--Mind's--business.
It is Nature's office and
prerogative to mother the seeds of spiritual implantation. Her duty is to
produce life prolifically. The declaration of Isis on the status at Sais is:
"I am the goddess Isis, the mother of all living; no man hath lifted my
robe, and the fruit I bore is Helios,"--the suns of mind. In nature's
ample bosom the very suns are born. So also the sun of divine intelligence is
born in her lap, in the physical body and brain of man. Her work is to bring
forth. And so ubiquitously does she perform her function in every nook and
cranny of the organic worlds, that she was given the opprobrious name of the
Great Harlot. She was everywhere yielding up her body to impregnation for
life's purposes. Ancient philosophies designated her efforts to produce living
birth even before the gods had fecundated her with the seeds of their mental
creation as the Great Abortion. Nature unaided by mind was destined to fail.
But when she received the germs of deific mind, her abortion was stopped. Then
she bore the sons of God.
It would seem as if nothing could
render plainer or more cogent the analogical conclusion written all through the
phenomena of creational method. Inner values, faculties, powers, are to be
drawn out by excitation from the outer rim. Outer man is not to retire inward
to commune with inner man, for inner man is not yet awakened. He must be
aroused from sleep and summoned forth to meet outer man in the affairs of the
world. He must germinate and grow, as any seed, under the stimulating goad of
impacting forces. God sent his sons into the world not that they should keep
their light hidden under a bushel, but that they should bring it out
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and set it aglow on the hill of open
manifestation for all the world to behold. Infinite chapters of morbid delusion
in world history would have been more sanely written if this true view of man's
approach to divinity had not been beclouded by the heavy fog of nescience.
The repercussions of the phallic
analogies so far considered have been little short of momentous for the
correction of various philosophical theses by the native force of truth from
the physical realm. One of the effects of such rectification of bad
philosophies has been to redeem nature and the life of soul immersed in it from
the intellectual contempt which a badly distorted religionism has thrown upon
it for centuries. Not inimical to the highest interests of the divine soul, but
performing a service of intrinsic friendliness in its behalf, matter is rescued
at last from the preposterous contumely which misguided ascetic proclivities
had heaped upon it from the earliest times. The actor's mask of villainous
character has been torn off the face of the three dramatic figures, the world,
the flesh and the devil, and the trio stand revealed as friends acting under a
sadly misleading disguise. Matter, the eternal target of piety's obloquy, has
been shown to be no more deserving of religious contempt than is one's mother.
And the procreative mechanism of animals and humans has been revealed in a new
light, as being the instructive analogue of all creation.
But still higher service is provided
for introspective vision as a deeper view of the natural process focuses
reflection upon some of the most vivid and dramatic ideological intimations
that can come under human inquiry. Indeed these more searching analogies point
the mind at last to the final answer to the supreme riddles of human thought,
to the location and character of that ultimate reality toward which
consciousness is striving. Anything which promises so much as this is worthy
the utmost consideration. It will be seen that a reverent attitude toward the
teaching of nature in this great field will not fail to bring a reward of
precious edification.
It is hardly conceivable that any
doctrine of Christian theology
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could have so incredibly misled the
minds of millions for centuries as the doctrine of "the shed blood"
of the Christ has done. Taken in its literal and historical application to a
man of flesh, whose physical blood was allegedly drained out on a wooden cross
to save from sin millions already dead and other millions yet unborn, the
teaching has reduced the mental view of generations to maudlin idiocy. How such
a local and personal transaction could have repercussions beyond its own circle
of cause and effect and radiate an influence both past and future affecting the
destinies of countless millions of mortals entirely apart from their own
exertion or merit, had been a conundrum of ecclesiastical manufacture whose
idiosyncrasy has been matched only by its total dearth of intelligibility.
Flatly it has been alleged that God's wrath at man's waywardness, disobedience
and sin could be appeased only through the satisfaction of his divine blood
lust by the bleeding death of his "only-begotten" Son in a physical
body, suffering vicariously for the true culprit. The promulgation of a
doctrine of this sort, instinctively repugnant to the human sense of right and
reason, has afflicted untold myriads of minds for long ages with downright
dementia. Yet in the same breath it can be said that, like all other doctrines
adopted by early Christianity from pagan sources and frightfully distorted by literal
translation, it is in truth a sublime presentation of veritude. Its real
significance is only to be reclaimed from senselessness by consideration of its
implications on the ground of phallic symbolism.
In the venerable literature of old
Egypt there is a passage occurring several times in a slightly altered form,
which must stand as the clue to the profounder meaning of the idea of man's
salvation through the "shed blood of Christ," or "of the
gods." In one place it is the great God Tem who is spoken of; in another
it is Atum, and elsewhere again it is the "beetle-god," Kepher. In
any of these cases it is God, the Creator, the divine Cosmocrator, who is
referred to. In The Book of Knowing the Evolutions of Ra and of Overthrowing
Apep, the God, Neb-er-tcher (the God in his totality),
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makes a long declaration to the
effect that he came into being in the form of Khepera and that he created all
things from out of Nu (limitless space and primal matter), emanating at last
the two deities, Shu and Tefnut, brother and sister. The significant statement
he makes is that "I had union with my closed hand and I embraced my shadow
as my wife . . . and I sent forth from myself issue in the form of the gods Shu
and Tefnut." These two in turn brought forth Seb and Nut (earth and
heaven), and these latter finally produced Osiris and Isis (God and nature) and
"the whole multitudinous offspring in the earth." (At one place the
symbolism is changed to the creation of living things from the tears that fell
from the eyes of the God in weeping.) But again the reference is to blood in
seminal form in the passage in which it is said that the God Kepher rolled
his phallus about in his hand, and from the drops of flood which fell
upon the earth were formed the Gods Hu and Sa (spirit and matter), the
progenitors of mankind. With still greater directness the symbolism confronts
us with the inescapable obviousness of its reference, when the account recites
that "the God Temu once in Heliopolis took the form of a man who masturbated.
He thrust his phallus into his hand and worked it about in it, and two
children, a brother and a sister, were produced, Shu and Tefnut."
The abstruse but clear and positive
significance of this cryptic allegorism of ancient Egypt has not been
discerned. It is nothing short of momentous for the understanding of cosmic
process in creation, or at any rate for man's approach to an intelligent view
of it. Symbols and figures are designed primarily to aid the dull mind of man
in formulating thought about things that lie in dimensional apperception beyond
his knowing range.
It is a beginning of understanding
if one considers the gender which the word "hand" has been given in
most if not all languages, primarily, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish. Is
it surprising that the word is feminine? Not if it is reflected that what is
really represented in the Egyptian cryptogram is virtually an intercourse
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between male spirit and female
matter--as always. If the phallus is male, the opposing frictional agent, hand,
would fall into the female categorization. And so it is found to be. This is
wonderful enough.
The God Kepher(a), the
"beetle-god," whose hieroglyph was the sacred scarabaeus, was styled
often "the masturbating god." Before prudery raises its hands in
pious revulsion at the designation, let it be understood that the Egyptians
faced nature frankly and used her forms and phenomena as types of things the
loftiest the human mind can cognize or aspire to cognize. Thus they used the
physiological possibility of self-extraction of seminal seed to typify the
lofty conception of God's ability to reproduce from himself the seeds of
creation. Further to picture this abstruse procedure they used the Egyptian
scarab or beetle as a living symbol, because, strangely enough, this beetle was
declared by them to reproduce by the male alone without the participation of
the female. The male scarab ensconced himself in the earth near the edge of the
Nile waters and in a moon cycle of twenty-eight days came forth reborn as his
own son. Archaic literature speaks voluminously of the sons of God as being
"mind-born." The myth of the generation of Pallas Athena, Goddess of
Wisdom, directly from the forehead of Jove, carries the same connotation. For
the production of archetypal creative ideas the God-Mind needs no immediate
implementation by matter. The Father produces his mental children directly from
his brain alone. (This chances to be the nub of the great "Filioque
dispute" over which the early Christian movement split into Greek and
Roman Catholic Churches.)
What must be contemplated in the
Egyptian depiction in the broadest general view is the great fact here
accentuated in unmistakable clarity, that the deific being exercises creative
function by means of a frictional intercourse between the two focal nodes of
his life, the spiritual, represented by his phallus, and the physical, typed by
his operative hand. It aids in the reduction of all creative process to a
formula which gains enormous elucidative force by its
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reference to known creative method
on the human plane if this prime principle is kept forever in view. Cosmic
creation, precisely like the human, is engendered by an intercourse between
male and female, from the highest plane to the lowest. God, spirit, and matter
or nature, marry and beget their offspring, the universal family of worlds. God
and Mother Nature are in sexual relation for the ends of creation, but at such
a level of elevation and magnitude as it is impossible for the feeble mind of
man to follow. All it can do is to conceive cosmic operation in the general
terms of its own realistic grasp of creation as known in its experience. But it
is an immense gain if man is intelligent enough to conceive cosmic creation as
of the same nature and pattern as that which he knows and in which he
participates.
But shining out in the most glowing
splendor is the revelation in the Egyptian glyph of a great and elusive mystery
of meaning never divined by Christian theologians in the phrase, "the
blood of the Gods," as the propitiation offered for man's salvation. Never
once in the eighteen centuries of theological lucubration has it dawned upon
the darkened minds of scholars that divine "blood," as the agent of
human redemption, was to be understood as blood in the seminal form. The
common recognition that male seminal fluid is the concentrated essence of the
blood, had never once occurred to any mind as the clue to the esoteric meaning
of the word. And this befell in spite of many allusions in the Old Testament to
the blood as containing "the life of the soul." The Israelites were
more than once enjoined to refrain from killing and eating the animals
"that have the blood in them," for "in the blood is the life of
the soul."
What, then, is the "shed blood
of the Gods" and of Christ, and what the meaning of the theological dogmas
in which it is the central element? A world's history would have run in
different course had this clarification been held beyond the third century.
Alas! It was swept away in that flood tide of ignorance that overwhelmed the
Christian movement from the third century onward.
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Picture the difference between the
true and the false conception of the meaning of "the shed blood" as
man's savior! In the view of ignorant literalism it came to mean the few pints
of holy gore that were drained out of the limp body of the man Jesus on the
cross on Golgotha! Can one adequately visualize the stultification of mind
necessary to accredit the concept that those pints of liquid, shall we say
gathered in a bowl, were efficacious to save the mortal race of beings on this
planet?
But if we look at the earlier
conception, framed with esoteric subtlety, how the picture comes all aglow with
intelligible and sublime meaning! The blood of Christ is now analogized as the seminal
life essence of divine beings, drawn or projected forth from their own
natures as the procreating seed of life for their children, the living products
of God's eternal renewal of his life in successive generation. As the blood, in
seminal concentration, carries the life-engendering powers, the self-ejection
of the young gods' divine seed into the body of Mother Nature was their act of
expending, sacrificing, shedding their own sustaining blood so that through
that oblation the "sons of men" might also have participation in the
eternity of divine nature. The gods poured out their "blood" that
men, too, might have eternal life. From this the human men were debarred until
the sacrifice of the higher divinities opened the way by forming a link of
relationship between their lower status and the higher deific being by the
implantation of the latter's potential seed in the lower forms. Thus they
became the "children of the promise," and "heirs by adoption"
of the divine life theretofore removed from them by an unbridged and impassable
gulf, but now made viable by the God's outreaching hands. The sacrifice by the
sons of God of their own generative seed-blood bridged the abyss, so that, as
the Roman religion aptly allegorized it, they became the Pontifex Maximus, or
"Chief Bridge-Builder" between God and man.
Not for a moment, however, should it
be overlooked in what precise way the Gods drew out their seminal essence of
blood. It
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was not by an act of sheer fiat of
mind, but by the operation of an intercourse, frictional in nature, between
polar opposites within the range of total life. The ejection of deific creative
substance was generated in the first instance by the interior repercussions
arising from the frictional contact between the organ of spiritual sensibility
and the active physical hand of God. Always it is spiritual energies in
intercourse with material opposition that educes the creative germinal powers.
Further corroboration of the
interpretation of "blood" as seminal essence, the condensed and
distilled electric life-power of the blood, is found in other mythical
"stories" of creation and allegorical structures narrating "the
creation of mankind." In many of these accounts it is set forth that mankind
was created from "the blood of the Gods" mixed with earth. Literal
stupidity could go no farther in the interpretation of this genetic formula
than to take it as meaning the mingling of divine blood in some substantial
form with physical earth. But it seems incredible that in all the centuries
there has never been mental astuteness sufficient to see that the moment a
literal meaning is read into such portrayals in the scriptures of old the sense
is wrecked and absurdity stalks through every page.
The mixture spoken of as generating
humankind was compounded of the life essence in the constitution of the Gods
which corresponds to blood in human bodies, for the divine contribution,
and of the earthly elements in the body of man, making the mortal addition. The
"blood" of the Gods is that electric fluid essence that carries the
unthinkably high voltage of dynamic mental and spiritual powers. This may still
be a totally inadequate description, but it is about the best that language can
do in the effort. It is at any rate to be conceived as a substance more
ethereal than air, yet actual substance, whose highly charged streams of
current are capable of carrying the incredible voltages of vivific power and
intelligence ranging far beyond electricity. The Greeks called these currents
of living force "rivers of vivification," and they indeed are streams
of divine energy flowing from the throne of God. The
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"blood of the Gods" is an
infinitely refined sub-atomic essence in and through which the life principle
of the Gods darts and flashes, as currents of a cruder electricity course
through the blood stream of mortals. Yet it is literally the "blood of the
Gods," but from our point of view, it is blood raised to exalted powers of
sublimation and vivification.
The scriptures several times iterate
that the "fire" of spirit, brought down in mythology and theology by
Prometheus and Lucifer, went down into the sea which is on the borders of the
earth and turned its waters into blood. Here is another great symbolical
treasure chest of biological meaning that has eluded the comprehension of
savants for ages. The statements are symbolic references to the zoölogical fact
that the blood in man's veins is the resultant product of ages of evolution of
what was originally sea water! All earth life began on the seashore. The plasma
in primitive life bodies was salt water. As the line of evolving life worked
from the water out into the air on land, the interior sea water lymphs and
fluids gradually took the form of what is now blood. It is still of the same
chemical composition as sea water, chemical analysis now announces! And
precisely this "sea" in human veins and tissues is that "Red
Sea" which the sons of God, his children Israel, had to
"cross" in their immersion in it during their long residence in
bodies composed of it in incarnate life.
The production of mankind from the
mixed blood of the deities and earth would resolve the original meaning given
to the name "Adam." It is everywhere given as meaning "red
earth." Earth mixed with blood would be red earth. It is purely a glyph
for the creature compounded of the two elements, divine "blood" from
heaven and gross matter of earth. Originally that is precisely what man is. One
part of him, the physical, is of the earth, earthy; the other, the incorporeal,
is of the life or "blood" of divinity from above. The mixture is "the
Adam," as the Hebrew puts it. It is therefore the name which correctly
defines the nature of man, who is both symbolically and really this "child
of earth and the starry
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skies," as described in the
Orphic wording. And this is why Jesus, as type of perfect man, was at the same
time son of God and son of man in his composite being. It is told in old
Egyptian and Chaldean accounts of the formation of mankind that the Gods poured
out seven thousand gallons or pitchers of their red wine, to be mixed with the
dust of the earth for the formation of humanity. Elsewhere the figure
represents God or the Gods as molding man out of clay mixed with divine blood. A
slightly varied form of the same allegory is seen in the Gospels, when Jesus,
seeking a substance wherewith to anoint the eyes of the blind man, stoops down
and mixes his spittle with the clay of the ground. Spittle here is a mild
substitute for the stronger "blood," although, as coming from the
head, it carries a measure of the symbolic meaning of life essence. Wine, as
the "spiritized" blood of the grape and capable of giving man a
divine intoxication, became a cognate symbol with blood. So that the miracle of
Jesus changing water into wine at the marriage feast in the Gospels is another
dramatization of the same deific transformation undergone by man the human by
transfusing his blood with the divine wine of immortal being.
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CHAPTER XXII
MY CUP RUNNETH OVER
It remains now to approach the
climactic portraiture of philosophical adumbration in the scope of sexual
symbolism. The task is faced with a keen sense of the inadequacy of means and
expressive resources to limn the vast chart of significance that is
suggestively outlined in the pursuit of symbolic determinations. It seems next
to impossible to catch and hold for steady reflection the overpowering flashes
of interpretative light that coruscate from the surface of the symbolic mirror
as the mind moves over it from one angle and perspective to another. It breaks
upon thought almost like a veritable sun of truth, into whose dazzling
effulgence one is not able to concentrate the gaze, yet by whose radiance one
sees and knows things in their myriad forms of truth. These final aspects of
creative phenomena release such a brilliant flood of light upon ultimate
conclusions in philosophy that the former dimness of speculative vision in the
search for truth must by contrast appear most lamentable indeed. It turns out
that philosophers have searched and pried into every dark corner and recess of
speculative inquiry for the answer to philosophical problems of ultimate
meaning and ultimate reality, when nature had been holding plainly before them
all the while the direct and positive outline of the truth they sought afar.
It is necessary to start from known
creative process in the human. From the great fundamental fact that the
generative seed is emanated as the result of frictional movement between polar
opposites, the examination proceeds to note the next significant detail in the
creative formula. It is the transcendent fact that the seminal seed is
generated and produced as the climactic outcome of a relatively
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long series of involutionary and
evolutionary passages in the frictional movement and is projected forth for
incubation in the body of matter by an orgiastic transport of bliss. Nothing
less than tremendous are the analogical implications flowing from these ground
data.
The first formulation in the
analysis is a determination that needs nothing to enhance the perception of its
weighty bearing on evolutionary rationale. There is at once in view the
observation that as it requires friction with matter to awaken dormant powers
of spirit-soul, each successive dip of spirit into involution and return
through evolution increases the strength and vividness of the awakening powers.
Scrutiny of the processes of growth everywhere discloses the fact that advance
in the stature and unfoldment of latent capacities in both the range and
intensity of conscious life accrues by successive rhythmic stages. Hence it can
be predicated that there will be a deepening intensity of enjoyment or
sharpness of realization in consciousness at each infusion of the soul into body
and resurrection therefrom. Each new try at life in the flesh should
schematically yield keener delight and more zestful appreciation of living
reality for the peregrinating soul. This is in all probability the case,
although the soul, at least in early stages, does not possess a sufficiently
conscious memory of past events to have a basis of comparison with present
experience. It is rational, however, to assume by the force of omnipresent
analogy with the growth of conscious faculty in all life process, that each
stage of ongoing carries the expression of a successively higher note in a
continuous crescendo. On its evolutionary side life never presents a
diminishing, but always a rising swell of conscious realization. It is
indubitable that Creator-Mind designed life to grow ever sweeter at each
succeeding step in its rhythmic dance.
This broad generalization has been
seen and dilated upon in philosophy, poetry and sentimental religionism, yet
rather mystically than dialectically. What has just as definitely not been
seen, however, is the fact lying a little farther ahead in the analogical per-
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spective, that the successive
enhancements of living zest and delight in the whole evolutionary march are
bound to go on to a culmination of rhapsodic transcendency in a final paroxysm
of blissfulness that terminates the whole serial order with the projection of
the seed. The expulsion of the seed by the force of ecstatic consciousness
closes the cycle of the creational period. Nature must keep her rhythm, and
rapturous consummation must be followed by recession of life forces into
conservation and recuperation to build up for a succeeding expression in
course.
Never has the human mind envisaged
this schematism of life method with sufficient reflective discernment to draw
from it its overwhelmingly cogent suggestiveness for determination of truth.
There stands before the mental view the mighty graph of the natural truth that the
production of the seed of future life is conjoined with the supreme ecstasy of
consciousness. In the first flush of realization of this fact arises the
recognition that nature must hold the creation and planting of seed as the
supreme and climactic end of her exertions. She has indicated the pre-eminence
of this function in her economy by the inescapable demonstration that she
accompanies it with the one overpowering transport of bliss in the whole of
man's experience, with the obvious intent of making it impossible of failure.
The one thing with which the Creator-Mind could take no chances of miscarriage
or failure was the provision for continued reproduction of living forms, to
give conscious units their abundant chance at experience. The generation of new
life must be put beyond any possible thwarting. Hence the lure to its
fulfillment, the sheer delight of it, was made sensationally powerful.
The instructive function of the
examination of these particulars is great indeed. The supreme deductions for
both religion and philosophy flow from the implications of the premises. In the
first place the essential constituent of the answer to all the pressing
philosophies of pessimism and doubt, cynicism and despair, is immediately
provided. That the living stream moves on to expanding volume and heightened
zest in consciousness is at once the rebuttal of the
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whole case for a negative view of
life. Life is moving steadily forward, even in spite of jolts and apparent
recession, to more abundant and joyous values. It even can envision a goal,
ever nearing, of unspeakable bliss. The philosophy of doubt rests on want of
reflection on nature's ways. Nature moves consistently toward sweeter delight
and a crowning denouement of happiness. The scriptures have been in line with
this pronouncement of nature and have encouraged the faltering spirit of
mankind with their publication of its sure fulfillment in the latter days.
Then the patent inferences from the
data in view swell to voluminous refutation of the lugubrious doctrinism of
errant religious piety, that this life is for the most part not only a labor
and a sorrow, but even a deception and dream hallucination of the soul, and
that the mortal human must count on sin, sadness and suffering as the normal
lot of the believer as he sojourns in this vale of tears, looking beyond to
that other world of the after-life for the true joys and eternal happiness
denied in the life in body. This negative view of life, generated by a maudlin
and morbid misconception of sanctity and miscarried philosophical ideas, is decisively
rebuked and flouted by the principles exhibited in nature's teachings.
A religion that can not localize the
value of life in the living experience of it, but builds only on its negation
and postpones realizations to its end, the while decrying and suppressing the
divine instinct for its enjoyment, is in nature's court adjudged a false and
pernicious system, if it is not already denounced by the negative fruit it has
always borne. A true and salutary faith is one that places affirmative value in
the life it essays to explain and beautify. The human mind is already committed
to defeat in its dialectical enterprise if it is not able to rationalize
affirmatively the experience it lives through, but must seek escape by denying
reality to the experience itself.
It seems unthinkable that a
philosophy of skepticism which turned away from earth in denial of its values
and taught millions to reach forward to a hypothetical heaven of roseate
coloring should
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have gained a nearly universal vogue
for centuries. Yet such in fact has been the extraordinary outcome of ages of a
jaundiced religiosity. Reason and logic yielded at last to the promptings of a
twisted and melancholy view of earth life, with the fateful consequence that
myriads lived their lives under hard philosophical durance, refusing validity
to the actual experience, and thus losing earth while courting heaven, and
delaying heaven by failure to lay the essential foundations for it in the life
here. It was a case of the crow losing the piece of cheese already in his bill
in his foolish effort to reach and grasp the shadow of it in the water.
The grand apical truth that now
gleams forth to intelligence from the principia of creative function is the
stupendous certification to thought that all living values accruing to ego
consciousness throughout the long course of earlier vicissitudes are brought to
crowning height and supreme intensity of realization in a tempestuous sweep of
ecstatic fulfillment which alone is able to project the seed from the interior
depths of life's secret reservoir. The great aeonial struggle and intercourse
between spirit and matter ends its cumulative course and terminates the cycle
of effort in triumph, with the exultant outburst of exuberant joy, as if for
victory won in the generation of the seed for the next more radiant cycle.
The outer consciousness of the
individual ego may not have overt knowledge that his every experience along the
way is a moment and a movement in his progressive march to the mount of final
rapture. Nevertheless the inner soul has a dim sense and a steadfast intuition
of cumulative value won at each step. It has vague yet unquestioned presage and
heralding of the coming consummative event. But since this inward guidance is
for a long time inarticulate to the outer mind, the Sages of antiquity took
pains to inculcate the ground fact of it in their sacred books, and portrayed
their philosophical structures of evolutionary truth in the open language of
phallicism, so that none could miss nature's instruction. Some grandiose
attainment to crown the long ordeal of earthly striving the mass mind has
seized upon, for the expectation
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of a heaven of bliss at the terminus
of earth's path is the highest promise in every religion. Under its
semi-delusive persuasion the confident expectation has for centuries been
harbored that the gala day of rapture beyond any known on earth will supervene
after the demise of the body and in that other world where faith awaits
sorrow's end and joy's perennial reign. The original true knowledge that the
heyday of bliss is to be attained here on earth in the last of the soul's
visits to the planet has been submerged under the confused ideas that gained a
foothold among the masses when nature's method of life renewal was lost out of
common ken.
It was designed by the Sages that
the human mind and heart should be fortified with a basis of courage and cheer
in threading its way through the tortuous labyrinth of earthly life. To this
end there were incorporated in the scriptures assurances of a surpassing reward
at the end of the march. The glory that men shall attain at the "end of
the age" (viciously mistranslated the "end of the world"), when
they shall rise as gods among the immortals and shine in robes of solar
raiment, is constantly held before human eyes. But only in meager measure has
this assurance come home to recognition as an actual possible achievement of
our future. That a great and glorious "Day of the Lord," as the
Christian Bible phrases it, is to dawn for all men in the consummation of their
growth to deity, is the religious persuasion of all. But so vague and nebulous,
so vacuous and tenuous is it, that it has not borne realistic fruit in the life
of intelligent people. It has sunk to the level of sentimental poetism and
pietism, and has commanded little serious credence and no sure trust. It is
little more than a sanctimonious tradition.
But however lost now from realistic
grasp, it was originally a stable acceptance grounded on instinctual sense of
truth. The great and ineffable Day of the Lord is coming to all, but it will
come to each in the last phases of his incarnational sojourn in the body. It
will come as the climactic culmination of the whole series of lives on earth,
bringing the ripened fruits of the whole career of
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effort in mortal bodies. It will be
the rhapsodic consummation of all values sought and cherished in the life
struggle, as if all value were concentrated in one moment of transcendent
bliss.
There is little possibility of the
finite mind's gaining a lively realization of the actuality of this stupendous
event crowning all experiential significance, save through the help of phallic
analogy. Each contact of soul with matter's inertia and each retirement from
the immersion in sense brings an enhanced keenness of rich experience. Life
grows more intense and vivid with each turn of the wheel of outgoing and
return. As virtue gains sway in the motivations, as the apperception of beauty,
truth and goodness deepens, grows ever more tender, the whole psychic nature of
humankind will rise ever nearer to the point of climactic strength, at which
there will ensue an access of blessedness and completion,--a "painless
orgasm," as Plato termed it, ending the human cycle. The soul will in that
culmination end its earthly career and enter the kingdom of the gods and the
heavens, as Revelation says, "to go no more out." The night
(or incarnation) may be filled with weeping, "but joy cometh in the
morning." The long night ends as the day of the new light and love breaks
upon the world of liberated consciousness.
This is possibly as much as pen can
do to state the oversweeping tide of living elation that swings in upon
consciousness as the divine impulse rises from greater to greater strength in
mind and heart, and finally breaks all bounds in a swell of enchanted
blessedness that overflows the brim of the mortal cup of being. It is as if all
life united in a paean and transport of delight to celebrate the creation of
the seed of future life. This indeed is the great oblation, when the gods,
through paroxysms of compassionate love, pour out the essence of their
life-blood that countless hosts of new children of God may receive the germ of
immortal life and the nucleus of divine mind for their eternal benison, and
that life may be multiplied for myriads of its creatures. This sacrifice bears
no con-
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notation of giving up happiness
already won. It means the "making sacred" (sacra, "sacred,"
and ficio, "to make") of life that had not yet been elevated
to immortal status.
Long and sedulously has the
philosophical quest been directed to locate the thing called "ultimate
reality." Earnestly it has sought through the maze of sensual, emotional
and intellectual states for that which bears the stamp of true, as against
false, being. Persistently it has striven to lay hold of that which is not
fluid, is not evanescent, not subject to change and decay, that which, as
Heraclitus put it, "abides amidst the flux" of things that pass. In
the world all things are in process of change into something else. Where and
what is that which changes not, that abides in stable unity with itself? When
that can be grasped and held, then will God, true being and the ultimate
reality be known. Always it has been assumed that when this final real is
apprehended man's evolution back to Deity will be accomplished, his struggle
ended, victory won and an eternity of Nirvanic bliss assured.
To this fatuous persuasion of
shallow philosophical thinking the phallic analogue gives a quite definite
negative. It proclaims an opposite philosophy which, if viewed aright, becomes
the solvent of all such questions of ultimates, finalities and reals. The brain
of man has long been harassed, or obsessed, with the naive assumption that
there will come a time, at the apocalyptic end of the cycle, when blessedness
will be established for aye. The movement of growth and advance will come to a
halt and all things will rest in static fixity; man will reach a final condition
of rest and beatitude and remain therein forever.
Phallic symbolism points to a
different story. It tells of no final achievement, no ultimate eternal.
What it bespeaks is a climactic attainment at the cycle's end, but no abiding
state of everlasting rest, all evolutionary effort at an end. Life is never
going to renounce its privilege of electing to move forward to larger
dimension. Larger rounds will follow smaller. But at each round's end, it
must pause to recoup its spent forces, retiring into the inner arks for
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sleep and inactivity to gain its
rest. What nature tells the reflective mind is that the cycle will end in a
crowning achievement of rapture, a transport of ineffable joyousness, which
will fulfill every instinct of divine aspiration in the high tide of complete
realization of all that the cycle can offer, and in the production of the
Christ-child consciousness of a new order of being, which will be the seed for
the next higher stage of life's endless gamut. Not an eternity of static rest,
but a moment of ec-static bliss crowning the long frictional intercourse
between the opposite poles, will be the soul's guerdon for its well-fought
battle and trial of the cycle's history. Then a long sleep and an awakening on
a new morn for cosmic adventure in worlds transcending those it has conquered.
The soul will never sigh for other worlds to conquer; it will always have them
ahead. Nor will it ever sink into ignobility in the inane perpetuity of static
inactivity. In the swing of the eternal rhythm between active conscious labor
and struggle to the equally delightful interlude of rest and sleep at each
cycle's end, the immortal soul goes onward in life's dance. Work and rest,
waking and sleeping, summers of growth and winters of hibernation, youth's high
adventure of the morning and age's pensive reflection at eventide, onward moves
the fragment of God's conscious being in the everlasting shuttle of birth and
death.
Not until the human mind wins a grip
on the knowledge that life does not reach a haven of high attainment to stop
and dwell there forever, but that it ends each effort at hill-climbing in a
moment of triumph to rest a while and then begin a still higher effort on the
following morn, will its inner counsels be blessed with perennial gladsomeness.
To contemplate the successive ends of the cycles in consummative bliss will be
health to the navel and marrow to the bones of the adventuring spirits of God.
But to contemplate the final ending of the cycles themselves with the close of
this one, would be to quench the native ardor of divine mind for new conquest,
higher advance, further growth, more thrilling self-discovery and increase of
life zest to endless time.
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And this sad fatality is indeed what
has befallen the race of mortals in the long period since the third century,
when the vista of continuity in the individual's unit of conscious life was
obscured and the view shortened to the single stretch of this one day.
Philosophy is indeed the critical determinative in human history. Tragedy
attends every slightest misconception. The greatest of all historical tragedies
was the fatal plunge of the mind from ennobling philosophy into the rabid
zealotry of fanatic faith from about the third century. Its catastrophic
consequences still harass and defeat us.
And now the great philosophical
answer as to where supreme reality resides in the human sphere of effort or
attainment rises also out of the milieu of phallic indication. All the while
philosophies were seeking this answer in strained dialectic and rational
questing the reply was being flaunted in front of them in the orgiastic
culmination of the creative act. As the tentative delightfulness of lovers'
first tender approaches point to a fulfillment in a moment of climactic ecstasy
in the union to come, so the partial and tentative pleasures and joys along the
way point to a grand denouement of rapture in a conclusive experience. The
"value" of any experience is to be appraised or rated according to
its place and contribution, its part and function, in the scale of rising
powers of appreciation,--what it contributes to the generation of that
climactic exaltation. Even as an insignificant skirmish in the early indecisive
part of a long war receives its final estimate of value in victory in the
weight it contributed to the final triumph, exactly so the allocation of value
to any experience along the way must be adjudged in measuring its part in the
cyclical denouement. All minor events win their value not as isolated units,
but in the context. Their worth is fourth dimensional and must be sought in the
view of whole processes. As Aristotle so clearly showed, value is inwrought,
even hidden, in the entelechy, the revelation of perfection at the cycle's end,
toward which all effort, even failure, is pointing and striving throughout. The
rash essay of the human mind
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to locate finalities, perfections
and ultimates had better yield at last to prudent understanding. The attempt to
fix on final goals, or a final goal, is philosophically futile.
"Final" can apply only in a relative and tentative way at any time,
and only in reference to each cycle's conclusion. There is no absolute
"final." The mind had best disabuse itself of this fatuity. The value
of any experience is in what it contributes to the enhanced character of the
next experience, and that to the next. As John Dewey sententiously has written:
The meaning of growth at any stage of it is to be found in more growth later
on. And Tennyson has voiced it in his line in In Memoriam, that life
ever goes "from more to more."
The place to look for values, then,
is in the immediate experience itself, but understood as tentative in present
appearance and awaiting succeeding events to disclose its fuller significance,
awaiting indeed the cycle's culmination to have its highest meaning unveiled.
In every event there is something that, while the event itself seems to pass
without particular distinction into the flux, lives to determine the shape of
all succeeding experience. Its value lies in what it is at the moment,
evanescent as that may seem as it flits by, but viewed in the light of what its
moment hands on to the future and the climax. It is a stone in the structure,
but that structure considered as building through a movement.
The one supreme gift promised the
creature by his Maker is eternal life. In the building of what life becomes
every moment is a real accession. Eternal life is the one promise haloed with
more than golden glory. It is the climactic reward. It is all of what life can
offer its children. And each circling of the movement is promised to be a
growing experience of joyousness, to be capped by a veritable apotheosization
of consciousness.
As the highest note in an octave on
the piano strikes the first and lowest note in the octave next above its seven,
it is possible to see here, by analogy, a quite important elucidation for
systematic thinking. To an octave on the instrumental keyboard would correspond
a range of life covered by a creature in its given cycle. And
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this would again parallel a power or
range of consciousness of a given extent or manifested in a given
dimensionality. Humanity functions in what is commonly considered a
three-dimensional consciousness. The fourth dimension is predicated, described
and declared as a possibility of the future as consciousness expands through
unfoldment of hidden capacity. It seems altogether likely, then, that when the
run of development in the human cycle has reached its culminating point and
strikes the apical note in its series, it rings the first bell in the series
next above it. This is to say that the consciousness expressed in a given cycle
reaches a high point at which it is projected over into the introductory stage
of the next higher dimension of awareness. The climactic surge of being in each
cycle gives the conscious unit a foretaste of the higher blessedness it will
become capable of knowing in the next round.
There is yet to be accentuated the
law of life that makes rhythm the method and modus of all progress. The final
running over of the cup of supernal ecstasy is the last of the whole long
series of rhythmic beats. Sexual phenomena accurately match, and therefore are
truly symbolic of, cosmic procedure in the large. Life is rhythmic in every pulse
and movement; sex is likewise rhythmic in every manifestation. The zest, the
poignant sweetness and the transport increase, not in a steady heightening ,
but in alternate ebb and flow, culminating when the highest wave matches the
superior tone of life on the upper level and merges by that affinity into its
nature.
From the implications of this
observation philosophy may profit immeasurably. For the analogical shadow falls
over into the larger zone of creature life and limns for us the broad truth
that the experiences of the life period--as well as of the whole cycle of life
periods through which the individual consciousness must pass--themselves unfold
according to a rhythmic measure, both of time and pitch. In large part the
individual is not openly aware of these pulse-beats, the alternate diastole and
systole, or ebb and flow of qualitative surge. He may be aware of periods of
depression alternating with times of exaltation, but he is not likely to be
men-
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tally cognizant of the pattern of
successive beat to set measure running throughout his career. But the whole of
human and other life is set to rhythm; and so it is to be expected that the
structure of a time movement will be manifest in sex, the basic analogue. Such
in verity is the case, and hardly anywhere more obviously. The access of
delight rises in successive tides, each higher swell following a momentary
recession, to break at last on the beach of consciousness in a long sweep of
delirious abandon.
This is the story of man's incarnate
existence. Each life carries the wave one note higher in the scale, followed by
cadence, until the last tone catches up the blend of all the antecedent notes
in one grand harmony, and the cup of human gladness floods over the brim in
unbounded largesse of being.
The chart of creational action
dissolves the errant philosophical dream of a final static heaven of bliss
forever enduring in unchanging sameness. It teaches rather the flowing river of
life's tides in an unending stream, with each forward surge lifting the
consciousness a tone higher in the scale of happiness, as each season's
crowning ecstasy draws forth the seed of the next cycle. It must be concluded
that life does not sustain high bliss at a constant even pitch. Apparently such
unrelieved intensity of vibration would exhaust its vital reservoir of
strength. Life's song of gladsomeness is not one sustained note, but a melody
of successive notes, for which again our music is an apt and accurate analogue.
Instead, it gives itself in and through the creatures that embody it one
climactic moment of exuberant joyousness after another, the succession of such
high moments revealing the structure of the melody. To the limited
consciousness of lower life whose reach extends over the long-drawn ring of but
one note, the grand overture of the ensemble is not known. Yet even it is made
aware of the presence of structural pattern in the successive notes through its
knowledge of the scale in minor gamuts in nature and in its own world. For
larger notes are themselves composed of whole scales within their arc, wheel
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within wheel. Each wave, large or
small, rises to its crescendo of bliss and breaks into foam with it.
Life is thus an endless succession
of surges, beats, breaths, throbs, pulsations, each of which is itself both an
involution from the world of noumena into that of phenomena, and an evolution
in reverse order, with an accumulative sum of gathered bliss overflowing the
golden goblet at each cycle's end. At each new consummation of a round life feels
its head anointed with the oil of gladness and its chalice brimming over.
In the Greek word which gives us our
"ecstasy" there is a fine hint of deep relevance. It is from ec (ek,
ex), "out," and stasìs, "standing." It is quite
definitely a reference to the actual experience of the soul in its culminative
event on earth. Its transport of joyousness is exuberant beyond all bounds,
because it is caused by its release from the body, so that it does literally
"stand outside of," or beside itself, with joy. Likewise the same
connotation goes with the Greek word for the "resurrection," anastasis.
It is the "standing up" (ana) or the rising of the
immortal soul out of the encasement of the body.
The soul's joy in this final act of
leaving the shell of life, which during its sojourn here had been its prison,
tomb and sepulcher--at the same time that it had been also its womb of a new
birth--is so rapturous that it verily becomes a "transport" that
carries it into higher worlds.
Implicit in the phallic symbolism also
is the answer to the great query,--why does God create at all? Why does he
bring into existence worlds in which evolution proceeds from one glory to
another, but through deep valleys of pain and conflict? Standing firmly on the
ground of the sexual analogy one perceives the obvious answer to the great
Sphinx riddle. The grand motive of deific creation must be the analogue of
man's own motive in parenthood, but magnified and exalted beyond any reach of
the human's circumscribed powers of realization. God's creations must be to him
acts of parenthood, of like nature with those of his children, if on a scale
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and at a height unthinkably
prodigious. The throbbing contact of his own spirit with his material hand
yields overmastering delight to him as to his children, who are made in his
likeness. All arcane tomes of wisdom assert that God creates for "Lila,"
delight, pleasure, play, "the sport of the Gods." And sport and
play constitute, even in our tongue, "recreation." And here is the
amazing linkage of the key ideas in the whole matter. In the rapturous delight
of creation, it is true that God, life, is re-creating itself. Puritanic
severity will still, perhaps, flout the idea that God may be considered to take
recreation, enjoy himself, find pleasure, in his paternal acts of creation. Yet
here is obviously one case in which pagan philosophy kept a healthy attitude
and Christian religionism took a morbid view. If men are gods in miniature or
in the making, their instinctual motivations must give clues that hold for
greater gods. If man finds growth, pleasure, delight in play and recreation,
so, too, at his unimaginable level, must God. The climactic transport of the
phallic analogue sets its inviolate seal upon the correctness of this
fundamental archetypal principle.
In its high cosmic sense the
consummative bliss figured in human creative method is that grand coronal,
"that far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves" of
Tennyson's illumined forecast. If the entire process of world formation,
carrying on the long intercourse between spirit and matter, is an act of
creation, it can confidently be expected to have its sublime denouement in its
one consummate moment of procreative sacrifice, else the most meaningful pronouncement
alike in the Hebrew, the Egyptian, the Greek and the Christian scriptures is a
falsity. Man is made in the image of his Designer, who could not negate the
cardinal archai of his own nature when he generated from himself his
limitless progeny. Man is the likeness of his Parent, and he carries parental
life on into new manifestation. What he experiences, the Generator experiences
or has experienced, in grander dimensions, at more elevated heights. And out of
this dialectic of ancient premises of knowledge comes to view that other
crucial ingredient of the wisdom formula, that the
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ineffable and transcendent being of
the Father can be known only to those to whom the Son reveals him. No man hath
seen or will see the Father. No man can look upon the face of God. To human
eyes it is given only to see the likeness of the Infinite in the character of
the finite revelation. What the meager powers of the human mind permit it to
know of universal creative method must be divined by an act of adumbrative genius
which can see the parental nature in the filial counterpart or reflection.
Therefore man's apprehension of cosmic creation must take its departure from
study of his own progenerative functionism. And standing on this ground it is
impossible not to assume that the Father's boundless creation is an act of
intercourse between the male and female elements of his own being. Egypt
was content to announce out of its files of secret wisdom that Deity drew forth
the seed of its life by acts of frictional relation with matter, and left it to
the developing genius of the race to understand at what an inconceivable pitch
of transcendency above human procreation the cosmic intercourse was to be
raised in contemplation. He who would come forth to charge that the predication
of similarity of method between the known human-animal creation and the unknown
act of the eternal Father blasphemes the divine nature by traducing it to the
mean level of the lower, is merely wanting in imaginative power to lift the
analogy from gross to supernal plane. It is the human type of creation, but is
not at the human level. It must be conceived, as best finite mind can, at
heights of majestic apotheosis and transfiguration. At such an exalted level
the whole conception becomes transfigured from base imputation and evil
ascriptions into reflections of unthinkable purity and beauty.
Plato speaks of the philosopher's
ability to rise to a point of realization of divine order, harmony, beauty and
joyousness in the contemplation of the works of the Cosmic Mind at which he
sinks into the ecstasies of a "painless orgasm." And he also calls
the exalted raptures of high contemplation which possess him who thinks God's
thoughts after him "a divine mania," which he says is better
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than staid reason. The enlightened
philosophers of the Greek tradition knew they were speaking of divine raptures
and transports in the image of phallic phenomena.
Likewise the Orphic-Platonic
references to separations, partitions, exsections and mutilations of the Gods
carried out in the implications of the myths of Kronos, Saturn and Jupiter, in
which the allegory represents Saturn as dirempting his Father, Kronos, of his
creative organs, and Jupiter performing a like "exsection" in turn
upon his Father Saturn, all bespeak phallic foundation. Fathomless as must in
reality be the esoteric import of such a mythic construction, it is at least
apparent that the figure carries high truth. It can be taken as a delineation
of the passing on of creative power from generation to generation in the upper
hierarchical order of divinities. Doubtless deeper mystery is involved in the
imagery. In Egypt, Sut, the power of darkness, steals and shallows Horus' eye.
Likewise in altered figure he plucks away Horus' genitals. Here again the creative
power passes from spiritual over to material grasp. We have seen how in the Timaeus
of Plato the Demiurgus, Jupiter, passes his generative power on to us his
creatures. We are instructed to fabricate animal beings, using the power that
he used in our generation. We are to procreate as he created. Our creation is
in the image of his.
Each lower rank of beings was
endowed to carry on the work of endless creation at its plane and station and
in the likeness of its own superior progenitor. All creation is of the
same pattern and material matrix of the range below and is there mothered in
its growth. There can be no progenation without the union of the two polar
energies. The matter or mother side lies barren and unproductive until
fructified by the father's, or spirit's, bestowal of fecundation. The woman
could pour out her life-blood and bring down the egg of new life in each cycle;
but it was a wastage and abortion, until she received a life-giving essence
flowing out from the side of spirit, the seminal blood of God. She remained
virgin
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until fructified by the power of the
Holy Spirit. The sacred scriptures, in which these primordial archai of
truth were embalmed in myth and allegory, fell under the dark ignorance and the
feeble intellect of mass religionism and suffered corruption of their luminous
meanings into dark enigmas and silly caricatures. The darksome shadow of human
ignobility, too, flung its sinister pall over the scene, until the pure light
that should have made lustrous the mind's grasp of essential truth and
increased the sum of happiness by its radiation of purity and beauty, was
defiled in a murky cloud of sin and evil.
Thus was brought into human life the
tragic element of discord between wholesome natural delight and lugubrious
religious sentimentalism. No system of spiritual culture would take down the
bars of discipline and moral control of the animal propensities exercised in
their restraint by the will enlightened by a knowledge of the laws of
temperance. But neither would a true religion, countenancing a healthy
naturalism, crush the normal free expression of life in happiness. Too slow has
been the awakening of reason from the hypnotic sleep inflicted upon it by early
centuries of morbid pietism. Too crassly has every instinct on the natural side
been classed as "pagan" and tainted thus with the stigma of unholy
and "unchristian." Only now is it coming to the light how grievously
the massed imputation of evil to the whole of sex has bred an infectious malady
throughout the body of mental life in the world. Clearly discerned it is now
that an errant philosophical quirk, even a mere mishandling of ancient
symbolical imagery and writing, has thrown the whole mentality of the West
under the obsession of a noxious fixation. In the clutches of that morbid
delusion vast areas of conscious experience have been inundated with the
miasmatic effluvia of gloom. Natural lightsomeness and buoyancy that should
enchant the soul in its visits to the gardens of the world have been sternly
crushed under the pharisaical poses of warped pietistic tradition. The healthy
mind of mankind has been
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deplorably distorted into false
conceptions which have bred inharmony and disease.
The emendations in broad philosophical
ideation that are indicated by the inquiry must be made. A new start must be
undertaken by flinging off at last the fetters that have bound the mind in a
posture of hostility to phallic symbolism and by bringing the mind to confront
reality and envisage nature in friendly spirit. The pall of evil and sin must
be lifted from the body of sex, while of course franker treatment of it is kept
healthy by purity of mind and discipline and balance maintained in all handling
of it. Whatever labels of lowness and intrinsic baseness may have become
agglutinized to sex from its detached sensual connotations in the purely
profane mind must be torn off its front. Instead of accepting the character of
meanness fixed upon it by secular ignobility, a certain measure at least of the
high sanctity that aureoles it in the light of lofty philosophical
understanding and phallic analogy, must be enticed downward and made to envelop
it again on the plane of common thought. And the asserted impurity attaching to
it in social view should be dissipated by the downward sweep of the vision of
purity gained from contemplation of its cosmic essence on the more exalted
levels. Such perhaps was the high intent of the Sage formulators of the phallic
analogies at the outset in remotest past time.
In the eyes of ancient wise men the
physical body of the mortal was a perfect copy, miniature and epitome of the
cosmic structure of life and creation. Hence both it and its functions were
considered to be the one true clue and key to life's deepest mystery. Standing
at the core of the organism of life, phallic phenomena had therefore to be
placed in a central position in every system of philosophy or religion that
aimed at harmonizing the human mind with the realities of the living process.
No more direct and effective psychological stimulus toward an inner esoteric
grasp of the cosmic elan, the divine libido, was seen open to the genius
of mankind than the presentation of truth in local aspect, as incentive and
magical goad
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to the pursuit of truth in eternal
manifestation. Surely nothing could be conceived and formulated with the design
of awakening slumbering insight to living reality more radically suggestive and
theurgically dynamic than the impartation of the primal knowledge that man's own
body was in itself the world in miniature, the microcosm, and that its
processes prefigured in entirety the great economy of the universe. Flowing
from this code item in basic systematism was the immediately significant
deduction that in the sane and temperate exercise of the bodily functions man
was imitating the life of the Gods. In short the aim of phallic symbolism
undoubtedly was to help the human mind apotheosize the bodily function with the
reflected light of cosmic significance.
Much would be gained for general
wholesomeness of life, for dignity and purity in social consensus, throughout
the long range of racial evolution, if a posture of greater reverence were
traditionalized by release of the enlightening involvements hidden in the
analogical purview. From the mires of unholy brutish sensuousness, from the
smudge of low human motivations, from the wanton revels of bestial grossness,
into which the sacred procreative instinct and function have been dragged by
the sweep of the carnal mind of the unawakened creature, redemption of general
cultural purity could be vastly advanced by the inculcation of the knowledge
that in the activity of sex man is enacting over again the sublime ritual of
divine creation. It is likely true that only as the ordinary exercise of
the creational prerogative is elevated, purified and sanctified by the deeper
apperception that it is life's holiest ritual, enacting at man's level the
highest work of Godhood, will it be exalted above sheer animalism in tone and
quality. Only thus will something of diviner sacredness enshrine it.
High romantic poetry, the lyric
dramas of love, the enrapt philosophies of cosmic grandeur have at least
embroidered the fringe of the cosmic vision. And in these moments of uplifted
understanding, all sex is seen as the ineffable drama of cosmic creation. The
very Gods pour out their life-blood to project the seed of future
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life and they do it out of their
unutterable love of the worlds their oblation aims to redeem. Only the
knowledge that the happy exercise of the function is a holy ritual imitative of
the identical prerogative of the Gods themselves will sanctify the enjoyment.
Happy the world of humanity if in the exercise of its creative power it knows
itself to be repeating, at its proper place in the hierarchy of being, the
great sacrificial oblation of the Gods!
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