A good intro into the essence of Kuhn's writings re Christianity can be found
in the books of Tom Harpur,
especially the one about the Pagan Christ.

of your love! Let your great love and your knowledge be in

accord with the meaning of the earth. Let not your virtue

fly far from terrestrial things and beat its wings against the

eternal walls. . . Bring back towards the earth the virtue

which goes astray--yea, towards the flesh and towards

life; that it may give a meaning to the earth, a human

meaning . . ."--Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra

One of the most widely disseminated systems of Indian thought, Buddhism, grounds its basic view of life on its thesis that the cause of all of man's wretchedness on the earth is his craving for life. Somehow, it is asserted, there was generated in him the desire to experience sensation and the feeling and consciousness of existence, to enjoy the concrete sense of being. And it was this yearning after the awareness of existence that direpted him out of a condition of absolute and unconditioned being and precipitated him into the realm of limitation and painfully conditioned experience.

The implication of this postulate is unmistakably apparent: that like Adam and Eve in Paradise he should never have abandoned, by forfeit of its terms of blessedness, the primal Edenic state, but somehow should have repressed the insensate desire for conscious existence, the initial offense against the benison of non-existence.

The world of the middle twentieth century is dangerously divided between the two great sectors of East and West. At the moment of writing the schism is marked by a differentiation in the philosophies of economics, government, politics and other elements in less conspicuous degree. It is a challenging question, however, whether the fundamental cause of cleavage between Orient and Occident is not still and always the difference in the profoundest conceptions entertained in the realm of mental and spiritual philosophy. Always in human history it has been the case that surface conditions, physical, economic, material, stand conspicuously forward in the public eye and appear to be the big issues pressing for solution. So they come to be regarded as the prime factors of causation.

Generally, however, their ostensible importance reflects a superficial and shallow envisagement of the actualities. For, on deeper scrutiny, they will mostly be seen to be themselves only the manifestations, the outcropping symptoms of more deeply underrunning strata of ideological conceptions. Out of the heart--and it should be added--out of the mind, are the issues of life. Thought is now recognized to be the primal creative energy in the cosmos. Thought, mind, gives the initial propulsion, and also sets the mold, as Plato so sagaciously set forth in his scheme of the archetypal

v

ideaforms, for the shape of things to come in the creation. Therefore, it is in all likelihood true that the great wall of division between East and West is still constructed of the great stones of philosophical ideality, with their psychological coefficients.

It seems hardly beyond dispute that the preamble enunciated in the first paragraph of this Prologue, stating the primary postulate of the Hindu philosophy, carves out in the sharpest possible outlines the central, the basic and the critical difference between the thought structure of Orient and Occident. And looking at that keystone proposition in the philosophical edifice of Eastern reflection, it is a grave question whether the West is not warranted in regarding it, from the standpoint of its own generally affirmative evaluation of life, as a baleful menace and outright peril to its future security and welfare.

The West postulates the supreme value of the life lived here by units of conscious being in physical bodies: the East denies it. It needs no particular depth or perspicacity of mind to perceive in this situation the essential irreconcilability of the two views, or modes of thought, and likewise to discern the precariousness in the impact of the two ideologies, the sensitive rawness in the enterprise of furthering coexistence or the interblending of the two. When two hemispheres of the world, hitherto in long isolation from each other, are now suddenly thrown into close association, the possibility of their harmonious reciprocation of differing modes and codes of motivation for life conduct will inevitably be difficult in proportion to the depth of the abyss between the contrary views. The meeting of the East and West is one of the gigantic world phenomena of the present epoch in human history, and it promises to become not only a most engaging problem confronting the philosophic mind, but as well the most grimly challenging and practically critical task for the world's statesmanship. It is indeed fraught with the ominously intense and vital issues of historical destiny for the entire world.

It sharply, then, behooves the philosophical acumen of the West, in particular, to examine the principles, in Greek terms, the fundamental archai, of the Eastern ideology, with a view to evaluating it as sound and salutary in its impact on the West's own affirmative emphasis on life's value, or as perilous to its way of thought and life. The ideologies of the two hemispheres of the world are now

vi

and will be increasingly in clash. Whether the conflict is to be controlled and directed with wisdom adequate to softening the impact and effecting an eventual rapprochement toward harminization and synthesis, is a question and a problem pregnant with the portent of destiny.

The Orient, India in particular, has contrived to spread abroad the legend of the East's consummate achievements of the highest and purest spiritual systems in the world. Yet when the West looks at these systems and finds them so negative to its own estimate of positive value, so lagging in the drive for aggressive activity, it is taken aback and made hesitant to counterbalance the inflow of Indian philosophy in its counsels and its motivations. It sees that the difference in ideological modes complicates every effort on its part to work together with the East toward desirable ends by hitching it in a team with a horse that will not pull when it pulls. The East--as witness India's invariable posture of neutrality on practically every matter calling for vigorous and often necessarily risky action--clamps a brake on aggessive policy. There must be times and situations in which only swift positive action can stave off disaster and save the day. The East's inherent committal to indecision and passivism thus becomes, from the West's point of view, a constant and dangerous liability.

Two influences are at work to delay the recognition of the West's peril from the infusion of Eastern thought codes into its psychic life. The first is the West's general obsession by the common religious tradition or persuasion of the sanctity, amounting almost to immunity from critique, of anything labeled and rated in the category of "spiritual." Its own religious tradition has rendered it obsequiously deferential to the name and psychic implications of "spirituality." The appellative disarms suspicion or distrust. It becomes a freely accepted passport to any interest or movement flaunting its shibboleth. However slow and reluctant the average citizen of the West may be to accord welcome to Eastern ideas, he is not likely to apprehend danger from systems whose chief characterization has been broadcast as "spiritual."

The second is the want, so far, of more studied acquaintance of Western people, both lay and academic, with the true nature, bent and import, and therefore the real potential for harm, of the Hindu philosophies. In spite of extensive delving into the East's religious

vii

literature, Western study has not been penetrating enough to catch the full force of the realization of the ultimate destructive potential lurking in its pervasive negativism. It is not clearly seen that the final outcome of this philosophy is the destruction of man. Since man's drive for existence is predicated as the cause of the misery of existence, the logic of Eastern thought demands that he still his craving for life and desperately strive to ceave to live. He is insistently urged to break the chain of causation of life's woes and bring them to an end--by ending himself. To live involves the conscious entity in dolorous and unending woes. Therefore the constant burden of Hindu philosophical lucubration is a seeking of ways to "kill out" with fell intensity of purpose, all the manifestations of the consciousness of life possible to and through man's organic equipment of body and brain, all his sensations, feelings, thoughts, and hush their raucous cacophony of a consciousness dialectically rated as false. The motive for such a crushing of the outward cognitions of existence is asserted to be that the inner core of being of the unit life may relapse into the condition of causeless and consciousless being, undisturbed by the outer turmoil and strains of living. Thus in the final outcome of all its thinking, the philosophy of India rests on the proposition that it is better not to be. An echo of this affirmation is found in The Light of Asia in the sentence: "No wonder the infant weepeth, being born." Its philosophy is a threnody. It greets life with the salutation of a wail. Buddhism pipes but the one note in the chanting of its Hymn of Life: "Sorrow and the cause of sorrow," and seeks not any joy in life, but the end of sorrow, and can see no way of attaining it save by the end of its own existence. "To both Jainism and Buddhism life is a calamity to be avoided at all costs," writes the greatest of living Hindu philosophers today, Radhakrishnan, Vice President of India. Max Mueller, renowned early Orientalist, has registered the amazing fact that India is the one nation in history that has refused to accept life on life's own terms.

If, as the rest of the human family has instinctively felt or been universally persuaded, this life has been generated as a gift and boon of Infinite Being, ultimately if not at every moment potentially dynamic for blessedness, then the negative posture of Hindu ideation comes as near as anything could to being the cardinal sin against the spirit of the creation. Never does Indian philosophy

viii

postulate bliss as either the current experience or the end reward of an evolution of life toward it as a goal. It is life itself that blocks us off from bliss; a lingering in the time dimension inhibits the attainment of timelessness. Bliss can arise only from the ceasing of life. The road to the consummation of ananda runs through the land of denial, of negation. "Negative thinking is the highest form of understanding," avers Jiddu Krishnamurti, true to the tradition of his native country. God projected his creation, looked it over and pronounced it good. As far as human participation in it is concerned, India flatly disagrees with God: it declares that man's life in the world is not good. India does not join in the Psalmist's address to God: "What is man that thou are mindful of him?" but--if it addresses or even acknowledges a God at all--tacitly charges the divine Power with having precipitated his creature, man, into a purlieu of abomination without cause or purpose adequate to justify its pains.

Indian thought indeed has never dreamed it an obligation of the human mind to rationalize man's life in the world. It simply passed judgment on it, and that negative. Its droning monotone of condemnation has bred only one spur to human action in the spirit of aggression, and that has been the incitement toward exertion of effort to escape. Transcending even the Christian cry of "salvation," its one inspiring call to action has been the shibboleth of "liberation." India seems to consider that life has caught man in a trap, or that man has by some fault or dereliction trapped himself, and the sole philosophical motive is to effect an escape from this predicament.

The Occident must take accurate stock of this influence and estimate its possible deleterious effects on its own life. Under a sort of initial glamor and the witchery of a novel and in many ways enticing philosophy, the West has rather generously manifested a cordial receptivity to the Oriental systems. Indeed in circles of mystical occultism the philosophy has been welcomed, embraced and elevated to a place of transcendence over all forms of Christian or Western tradition. What may be the injurious effect at this critical juncture in world affairs of the injection of the sedative and narcotic power of negativism, detachment, passivism and ultra-subjectivism into the counsels of Western incentives to action, looms now as a question of the utmost gravity for Western polity.

ix

India has never to any perceptible degree taken the most tentative step toward relating, much less integrating, spiritually with the life in the world. To be spiritual is just to be dissociated from the world. Its operative slogan expressing the goal of spirituality is yoga, union. Yet here again the concept is wrenched away from its mundane reference, so that yoga is made to be a union of consciousness with superconsciousness, not the union of consciousness with its instrument, its prime objective in migrating to earth.

Egyptian naturalistic religion, Hebraic esoteric Kabalism, Greek rational and mystical philosophy emphasized as the consummative achievement of human consciousness "the union of the above and the below." But India scorns the below, and somehow expects the union to be all above. This is an illegitimate mesalliance, a union of an unnatural and impossible kind. For the two things assumed by it to be the parties and partners in the union are both on the same side, the positive side, both of the essence of spirit, whereas the only union that life makes is the linking together of the two opposite forces of the polarity, spirit and matter.

India strains by repressive practices to sever the link between soul and body and thus to free the spirit from the thongs of the body. This is in defiance of life and nature which aim to wed the two in a union for the generation of new life. The philosophy that would disintegrate this union of polarity is the real delusion of errant human thinking. Soul was sent to earth to marry its body, so that through its tie with an appropriate engine of atomic power it might deploy its noumenal energies out in creative accomplishment. The true union, or yoga, is designed to be consummated not by detachment, but by attachment to an instrument made dynamic by its composition from atomic units. Spirit comes to earth to give physical implementation to its archetypal purposes by linking itself with its coefficient of atomic energy. In India's own pantheon every god had his sakti, or energy coefficient, without whose arm of power he was, as any would-be father without his wife, unable to generate a new birth of life. The significance of the allegorical marriage of the Sons of God and the daughters of men in ancient dramatic typology was apparently wholly lost on Indian systematism. The mate that soul takes unto itself must not be of its own gender, but its opposite. The marriage of the Bride and the Lamb can be no

x

homosexual abnormality. Spirit moves down to earth to wed matter, not to scorn it, to crucify it, to flee its embrace.

The potentialities for the virtual reorientation and sanification of all human philosophy through the acceptance of this ground-fact of all understanding must be overwhelmingly apparent.

It does not seem to have become a postulate of thought that the life and consciousness of each unit or cell in the body of the cosmos must be, however rudimentary, dim and shadowy, an inceptive expression of what the total cosmic Being feels, desires, thinks and wills. If each unit is the Total in seed potentiality, then the forms of its push to outward expression of its life must be of the nature and pattern of its cosmic Parent. Therefore what man, the creature, feels, thinks and wills, must reflect the motivations of the Whole. This certifies the principle of the ancient wisdom that the experience of the part, either tiny or stupendous, is in and a part of the experience of the Total. If the part desires to live, it is in that sphere and segment of its body the desire of the Supreme Life to live. In and through each cell the universal Father seeks to experience the Lila, the delight of conscious existence, and through the cells of his body he gives himself that delight.

If presumptuously we begin to attribute a mistaken and unworthy motive to the activities of the All-Power, we simply throw down to Infinite Wisdom the gauntlet of our childish impertinence. Each part, the tiniest, is a new-born seed potential of the All. But it is a portion of the All, that All itself renewing itself in germ and ovo, and destined in a time development to enjoy the infinite life of the All. It is a new projection of the life of the All motivated, as Sri Aurobindo now so positively expresses it, by the desire of the Infinite to multiply his own consciousness by increase of Being. For one of these child growths to stand on the philosophy that the yearning for life is the one basic cause of all evil, is for it to throw up into the face of the Absolute Life the accusation of acting contrary to good purpose. For in asserting that it is wrong for the cell unit to exist, the privilege of life is denied to the Whole of which the units are the constituent parts. India's negative philosophy thus denies to Infinite Being the boon of having life and that more abundantly.

The right of Life to increase its capacity for delight in existence must be both the first and the final ground and postulate of all

xi

philosophy. The word Lila is perhaps the greatest single word in the human lexicon--or the divine. It is the ultimate answer to all inquiries of the speculative prying mind of man bent irrepressibly on satisfying its hunger for knowledge of the why of existence. Life exists; and we exist, because a Consciousness-Power that originates, constitutes and consummates all that is and ever will be, wishes and wills Lila, delight of life, for itself and for its numberless creatures through whom it multiplies its being and increases its capacity for delight. However falsely, inadequately, ignorantly the creature, man, in his imperfect state misconceives and misapplies the phrase, it is true that the end answer to the insistent why of all the universe is inescapably the cry of the Church: it is the will of God. When the working of that will brings eventualities that shock the human sense of right and goodness, our tiny minds revolt from the acceptance of the idea that this is God's Lila or ours, and we call it evil. Our thought refuses to be reconciled to the understanding that God wills and creates evil. Yet all this abhorrence registers the failure of our partial and immature potential of knowledge to comprehend the entirety, the organic wholeness and synthetic unity of life in its vastness. We are as yet unable to view the cosmic operation in its immensity, but see it only in its minutiae and its particularity. Now we see in part and through a glass darkly. We see things only in their immediate relativities. Our myopic vision, limited to a short range of relationships, can not see things in larger context. We see things out of proportion, out of focus, too near to discern how in proper focus the "evil" elements blend into a synthesis that is beautiful and good.

One Scriptural passage does not establish any proposition as final truth. Nevertheless, with our universal attribution of a divine wisdom to the sacred Scriptures (of the West), there does stand in this volume of Holy Writ at least one positive and unequivocal statement that God does create evil. In Isaiah (46:7) the text runs: "I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and I create evil: I the Lord do all these things." Two things must be held in mind in evaluating a passage like this: first, that "evil" is a human concept and thus is subject to a partial or erroneous conception of its true nature; second, that as the result of our limited range of view, and our imperfect powers of understanding, the necessities for stress and strain involved in the polarized relation of consciousness

xii

and instrument are difficult for us to comprehend. Polarity is the prime law of all manifest existence, and while it has been envisaged in abstract theorization, it has not been accorded its vital place in concrete thinking. Clearly recognized in the scientific field, it has not been carried into the counsels of theology and philosophy. In his created universe the Lord of Life has made objectively visible his intent and his nature. If we would know him, and through him ourselves, his children and the inheritors of his nature, indeed made in his image and likeness, we must brood over his works. For the works reveal the worker.

India has persistently exhorted us to deny the works, turn our eyes away from them and to seek peace and bliss in detachment from the life in which they become manifest. The attitudes, therefore, of East and West are almost diametrically at variance as to the primary direction of human effort, as well as to its objectives. The clash of the two movements of thought in the years ahead will bring into sharp focus the crucial issues of human destiny.

In India as in other lands, the wisdom and the precepts of a lofty primeval revelation have been viciously transmogrified into forms of gross popular superstitions. As pertinent to India this degeneration of high truth into crude misconception is testified to by no less an authority than Radhakrishnan, the eminent Hindu philosopher and statesman. With the grave issued involved, it therefore becomes the self-defensive concern of the West to subject the siren Eastern philosophies to the most searching of probings in order that Occidental psychic modality may be spared the injurious consequences of its adulteration from the narcotic influence of seductive negativism. Happily a more piercing introspection of the primordial and archetypal groundwork of India's philosophy in the Vedas and the Upanishads discloses that the doctrine of maya, or illusion, and both the non-reality and the evil nature of the life in the world, are in fact not the true teaching of India's aboriginal wisdom.

It therefore becomes an enterprise charged with the mightiest import for world life for ages in the future, that the West should acquaint itself familiarly with the message of India's True Voice.

xiii

The Biblical statement that God so loved the world that he dispatched his only begotten Son into it, not to condemn it, but to save it, silhouettes in sharp contrast the attitude of religions, both Eastern and Western, which has been invariably a condemnation and calumniation of the world. In the ideology of religion the world has been constituted as the first member of the diabolical trinity of evil powers malignantly conspiring to capture and subvert the divine soul of man,--the world, the flesh and the devil. For centuries the priestly hierarchy has exhorted its piously conditioned following to keep themselves unspotted from the world. And for many centuries the religion bearing the name of Christianity has so insistently accentuated this dour note of evil influence emanating from the world that thousands upon thousands of its men abandoned life in the cities, towns and villages of Europe to seek nepenthe from the world's foul contact in isolated hermitage in the Arabian, Syrian, Egyptian or Numidian deserts, living without benefit of cleanliness, comfort or companionship in caves and hovels. Likewise the venerable religious systems of India, the "mother of spirituality," have habituated their votaries to seek retreat from the world and the life of the outer senses in remote Himalayan solitudes. Even in later Western civilizations the impulse to cultivate the latent powers of the inner spirit in detached colonies in secluded localities still operates to a degree. Wordsworth's fine sonnet, The World Is Too Much With Us, finds still a hearty response over an extensive field of modern cultural idealism. The extravert direction imparted to the mind and consequently to the soul by the unrelieved impingement upon the members of urban communities is considered, and not without abundant reason, to militate against the soul's unfoldment of its divine powers. The world's concerns and their insistent demands upon time and nerve energy leave little opportunity to cultivate true godliness amid the rasping distraction of earthly interests and duties. In short, the influence of the world is believed always to be so potent as to threaten destruction to the pure nature of the soul, to befog its pure light and to crush down its divine sensitivity. The celestial light is buried under a

1

bushel of mundane concerns and can not glow brightly from the hilltop for all to see.

Considering the great power of venerated Scriptures to set the norms for religious ideology, one is struck by the trenchant verses of the seventeenth chapter of John's Gospel in the New Testament, in which Jesus, so to say, sends in to his heavenly Father the report on his cosmic mission which he at this time felt he had successfully terminated. He precedes his report by asserting that he "came forth from the Father, and am come into the world; again I leave the world, and go to the Father." He had come into the world, only to have it receive him, not to have in fact received crucifixion at its hands. He had reminded his people that "in the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." He says that he has completed the work which his Father gave him to do among the men of the world; he has glorified God in the world in the sight of men, and is about to return to his true home in the empyrean. "And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world." Then he prays the Father that he should not take these children out of the world; "but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil," because in reality "they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world." He asserts that he has communicated to them a radiance of the Father's glory, which immunizes them from the deleterious impact of the world's sordid interests. It is notable in passing that, while he holds the world to be a possible evil influence upon the soul, yet he prays the Father not to take the people out of it; rather to shield them while in it. All spiritual cultism might well take a hint from this feature of Jesus' presentation.

On the basis of hundreds of Scriptural and philosophical allusions to the world's malignant influence, religious philosophy has taken its posture of hostility to "the world." Many denominational groups still hold it a canon of sanctified living to forbid participation in certain lighter activities of secular life, such as dancing, games, amusements, diversions or recreation, even condemning modern mechanical appliances easing physical labor as baneful to the soul. Not in the engrossments in the world outside, but in the inner sanctuary of the spirit, religion has contended that the true interests of the divine nature of man are to be exercised, developed and glorified. The Quaker pattern of sitting in silence, shutting out the world, until the inner voice of the spirit speaks out of the eternal

2

depths of being, well illustrates the general religious posture. Outside is the froth, the scum, the flotsam and jetsam, the hurly-burly of chaotic meaningless activity; only within is to be discovered the reality and the glory of transcendent being. Hence religion has almost universally set the outer world at odds with the inner, and has erected ideologically a great wall and a moat of separation between the two, seeking to withdraw the unit of soul consciousness across the gulf, to lift the communicating drawbridge and so to seclude the soul within the safe ramparts of the spiritual castle of life. Thus to fend the soul off from the contamination of the world in its spiritual ivory tower has been the ethical and spiritual objective of most religion.

Yet, with trillions of other worlds into which to send his beloved Son, God so loved this one that he commissioned him to descend upon this minute speck of atomic dust in the cosmic universe. And that tiny world which God so loved and refused to condemn, religion has never ceased to hate and vilify.

And never has religious philosophy disclosed the remotest intimation as to why God was moved to send his beloved offspring into this low place of defilement, nor has it made an attempt to account for the Creator's great love of it. This, the fundamental question that the human mind must, now or eventually, answer, has been left wholly untouched. To this question, when thrown in its face, religion has given an answer that is no answer--that it is a blasphemy to question the inscrutable workings and counsels of the divine mind. Yet, as psychology now demonstrates, a rational answer to that insistent query is an indispensable element in human happiness and the maintenance of the human mind in sanity. Said the great and ever-memorable Dr. Robert W. Norwood, of St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York: "No man can be happy in this life until he knows why he is on the earth." And the third chapter of Proverbs most categorically declares that understanding of the meaning of life is the one supreme and essential element for the salutary existence of a soul on this globe. Religion has never faced the question with which its own position has implicitly challenged it: if this world is such a noxious region, such a pestilential menace to the purity of the soul's life, why did the All-Father send his beloved children, these potential sons of his, down to suffer humiliation, hardship, virtual exile and imprisonment, defilement

3

and "death" in it? That is the prime question to which all instinctive human interest demands an answer. Both religion and philosophy stand bankrupt until they come forth with a rational answer to that irrepressible inquiry.

To be sure, religion has come forward with a form of answer: our two first parents, given the choice of enjoying eternal felicity in Paradise, the celestial garden of delight, succumbed to temptation, chose to disobey God's command not to partake of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil set apart in the garden, and in consequence God had to exact punishment from them and all their future progeny, by driving them out of the delectable garden and sending them down into this wretched planet, this "sorrowful star," where toil and pain should be the terms of their "Egyptian bondage" in the dark underworld. Then God, in pity, sent his only Son as a sacrificial victim, led as a lamb to the slaughter, to redeem his stupidly-blundering wayward children, to help them in durance vile regain Paradise.

That indeed is the answer of the churches, the accredited and established exponents of religion. But it leaves still unanswered the central query: why were God's innocent children, in the very first moment of their infancy, fledgelings and untried and undeveloped, in any legitimate procedure subjected to a temptation which they could only be expected to have gained the wisdom to resist intelligently at the far completion and perfection of their evolution, instead of at the innocent beginning, when no life is wise. Never has the ecclesiastical hierarchy explained rationally why such a temptation was necessary in the first place, with such an issue as the possibility of a mistake entailing eternal consequences of dire fate hanging upon the choice, in a universe presided over by omniscient Power and Love. Never has it elucidated why an all-beneficent Father should set a stumbling-block in the way of his infant children, sure to catch their feet and cause their fall. Why God should set a baited trap in the pathway to ensnare the very first steps of his progeny the churchly councils have never ventured to tell us.

No child at the start of life knows anything about either obeying or disobeying its parents. It is at that stage neutral as to morality. Completely unmoral, it has no power or choice to be moral or immoral. Children are at the animal stage and act from native instinct. They are incapable of making ethical decisions. And any

4

parent who severely punishes his child for failure to act on the principles which govern adult behavior stands under the severest form of even human condemnation. Yet all Christianity has based its high claims on the theological asseveration that God condemned his children to eternal damnation for having committed a cardinal sin in the first moment of their conscious existence.

Ringing down the centuries in all the temples, cathedrals and synagogues of the religions has reverberated the endless cry: "the world is very evil." Even St. Paul adjures us to keep ourselves unspotted from the world. Though holding the conception in intelligent balance, the great Greek philosophy represents the world as a place where the soul runs imminent risk of having its feet caught in the viscous mire of sensuality, and might have great difficulty in extricating itself without detriment. The conception can be validated when properly held as legitimate figurism. For in profound understanding the Greeks dramatized the soul's experience on earth as a plunge out of superphysical existence into a body of sluggish inert matter. But when taken realistically in the bald literalism of its wording, the concept becomes deadly ruinous to all sane apprehension of its reference.

India in particular has gone so far in its derogation and devaluation of the earthly life as to assert virtually that it is a mistake for the soul to be on the globe at all. In this world it is in the wrong place. India has been reluctant to concede any real value to earth-life in the scheme of things. It has hesitated to include it in the beneficent order of creation. Swinging far over to denial of good in the mundane experience, its philosophies and its religions have loudly extolled the necessity of the soul's effecting its escape from the order of existence suffered here. Not the enjoyment of life, but escape from it, has been the dominant burden of Oriental religion.

Testimony to this effect is found in one of the celebrated Max Mueller's works, Theosophy or Psychological Religion (page 68):

"So far as we can judge, a large class of people in India, not only the priestly class, but the nobility also, not only men but women also, never looked upon this life on earth as something real. What was real to them was the invisible, the life to come. What formed the theme of their conversations, the subject of their meditations, was the real that alone lent some kind of reality to this unreal phenomenal world . . . . This is the side of the life of ancient India which deserves our study, because there has been nothing like

5

it in the whole world, not even in Greece or in Palestine . . . . Why would the ancient inhabitants of India not have accepted their lot?"

This work will be in the large an intensive effort to subject that Hindu position to an exhaustive critique, since it must be assumed that the world-wide consequences of the philosophical indoctrination of a large portion of the globe, now both East and West, with the belief that life is wholly evil and must be escaped, have been, are and will continue to be colossally calamitous.

Along with the earth, the world, came under condemnation also the thing called matter, and the human body itself, as being composed of that vile substance that brought impurity and defilement on the soul. The world and the flesh became the stock enemies of the spirit. Never has religion ceased its thunder against the infernal trinity. Endlessly the soul is exhorted to rise in its divine might and crush underfoot these three agencies of the initial curse on man's life in the world. The allegory of the soul's fall into sin, wrongly conceived, poses the question as to how and why spirit units of God's own intelligence, sons of his own being, came to be entangled in the inertia of matter, to suffer the hardships of a material existence in a world denounced as wholly vile. Religion has failed to give the answer which the human hunger for understanding resolutely demands. That philosophy once held and can still render the answer it will be the effort of this essay to establish.

In its rebound from the stigmatization of earth and matter as the prime evils, all religion has swung far over to the exaltation of "spirit." As matter and the bodily flesh became the synonyms of evil, all good was identified with spirit. To be good religiously was to be spiritual. And in all ages of more advanced civilization there arose one cult after another, each promulgating some new program by which the soul of man might better overcome the besetting thraldom of matter and its world and rise out of bondage under what St. Paul calls "the elements of the world" to freer communion with the spirit of God.

In America the period from about 1850 to 1880 gave rise to a veritable flood of movements whose central inspiration was the "spiritual" motif, which heavy derogation of matter as concomitant undertone. This period gave birth first to Spiritualism in its modern status, then to "Christian Science," Theosophy in a new resurgence of Platonism and Hermeticism, Medieval Rosicrucianism in new

6

vestures, the exploitation of hypnotism under Quimby in New England, this developing into the very great sweep of "New Thought," and crowning all came on the intellectual horizon the gleaming cloud of Emersonian Transcendentalism, irradiated with the golden sunlight of Oriental mysticism. With these as openers of the way, soon thereafter came the incursion of Hindu Vedantism and Oriental spiritual philosophy, purveyed by migrant Swamis and Yogis who could boast of a name ending with Ananda, Bliss.

In practically every one of these impulses the keynote was one and the same: deny and suppress the interests of the world, the body, the flesh and matter, and exalt the spirit. Each asserted the valuelessness of the things of the world, the deceptive nature of the physical senses, the peril yielding to the appetencies of the animal body, the delusive character even of the mind. Wholeness, peace, salvation and eventual bliss were to be won only in the super-realm of the spirit. Redemption from the incubus of mortal consciousness was to be achieved by denying all thought of materiality and filling the area of consciousness with only the affirmation of the sole existence and reality of spirit. With this went also the conception of man as a being of pure spirit, his apparent materiality being the creation of a false ideation. On the thesis that thought is the sole creative power, man might readily become the creator of his own universe of being by merely entertaining positive thought and denying all discord and imperfection. One could lay the axe at the root of all evil by refusing to give it a birthright in creative thought, must as one denies existence to a mosquito by covering the stagnant marsh surface with a coating of oil. Spiritual thought was the "oil of gladness" that denied existence to the germs of evil. Wrong ideation has bred the evil entities; change wrong ideation to right, and the evils will wilt and vanish. Values that are ignorantly associated with material things and contingent upon them are fleeting and essentially false. They form a veil of deception over our eyes. They shut us off from the vision of truth and reality. As Browning says, the flesh is a wall that stands between us and divinity, so that its heavy imperviousness must be dissolved or made translucent to the passage of the divine light through to us below. We must withdraw, if not physically, then in sublimated consciousness, from the noxious atmosphere of the gross world and aspire to a pure and blessed life in spirit.

7

The streaming thousands of cenobites who during some ten horrendous centuries fled the evil worldliness of Europe to find peace of soul in desert solitudes in the Near-East were surprised to find the imps of Satanic worldliness and fleshly lust haunting and taunting them in spite of the resolute denial of their power. And still today novices and neophytes enter convents and take orders and veils under the continuing persuasion that retreat from secular activities and associations and interests in the busy world will bring purification and sanctification of their souls. And still a vast segment of modern Western life is now caught in the sweep of interest in the philosophies extolling the supremacy of the spirit and pouring vituperation upon the world and matter.

Since this vast movement from an exterior focus of religious value to an inner realm took place in lands dominated by Christianity, it is of great interest to locate the motivating cause of the phenomenon, whether in the religion of Christianity itself or from influences encroaching upon it. The hierarchy of that faith would rush forward with an indignant denial of any accusation that it does not offer an adequate spiritual philosophy and a spiritual culture. Yet despite this protestation it is hardly to be denied that in reifying, personalizing and finally historicizing the Christ principle in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christian theology has diverted the direction of man's quest for the blessedness of contact with deity away from the inner seat of that divinity in man himself and outward to a man in history. It may talk volubly enough about the immanent Christ along with the historical Jesus, but the latter, not the former, has been the cornerstone of the faith; and with the masses always an objectified and personalized incarnation of deity will dominate devotion and allegiance and hold them move convincingly than any subjectively realized mystical principle can ever do. Always the figure and the realistic conception of the Galilean drew the eyes and minds across the sea and the centuries to the living picture of the hypostatized Man of Sorrows, allegedly paying with his own mangled body on the Golgathan cross-tree for our sins and our depravity. It presents no difficult problem in psychology to discern that this centering of all spiritual sancrosanctity upon the person of Jesus left far too large a vacuum in the subjective life of the Christian masses. Christianity thus inevitably drove its following into the worship of a deity remote in time and place, when all

8

the while the deity accessible to man is "closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet." The theology that sets the derivation of spiritual grace from one man in history automatically makes the divinizing of the individual a matter of imitation of a paragon, whereas it must always, at any rate finally, be the conquest of man's own divinity. It is a simple statement of the conditions of the entire problem to say that the divine nature that is to glorify man is a seminal essence of Godhood potentially realizable within himself. Christianity directed its people to the worship of a Christ in Galilee two thousand years ago and has profited by the psychological repercussion of the contemplation of an ideal perfection. How much more efficacious would have been the outcome of such massive adoration if the objective had been clearly pictured as an actual divinization directly attainable by the individual himself, can only be conjectured, as history has not had the chance to record the trial.

This very situation in the life of religion outlined itself clearly to the mind of perhaps the most eminent of modern psychologists, Carl G. Jung and he gave expression to his perspicacious discernment in the most forthright terms, which it were well we should heed:

"The Imitatio Christi will forever have this disadvantage; we worship a man as a divine model, embodying the perfect meaning of life, and then out of sheer imitation we forget to make real the profound meaning present in ourselves.

If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experience, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know, on the other hand, that God is a mighty power within my own soul, at once I must concern myself with him."

It can be safely affirmed that this excerpt states with absolute conciseness the nub of the basic problem of religion. Is man to be redeemed from animality by any volume of adoration of a distant cosmic idealization, assumed in the case of Christianity to have been embodied historically once for all in a given personality; or is he to rise in the scale of being and expansion of consciousness by developing a seed of potential divine perfection already implanted within his own constitution? The future history of mankind hinges heavily on its sufficiently clear perception of the realities of the evolutionary situation to make the proper choice of the right one of these objectives.

9

The tremendous exodus out of orthodox denominationalism into the ranks of the spiritual cult movements enumerated some pages back is conspicuous evidence of a turn toward the second alternative mentioned in the preceding paragraph. In no other way can the emergence of so many sporadic movements toward the cultivation of the Christos within, as distinct from the Jesus of history, be adequately accounted for. And these movements, surging in nearly all cases out of the body of Christianity itself, welled forth on the tide of an impulse generated as if by a fresh discovery of the Christ principle in the human constitution, entirely separate from the life of the man-Christ in Judea. It must be accounted a most singular circumstance, repugnant to the Christian claim that the religion is the cultus of the divine nature in man, to note the sheer fact that hundreds of surges of sincere spiritual expression apparently had to abandon the church of Christ in order to give full play to the recognition and development of the Christ immediately within the self. It must be incontestable that the localization of the incarnation of deity in the one historical man-Christ twenty centuries ago has inevitably diminished the authenticity, and therefore the sincerity and zeal of the Christian quest and cultus of the Christ consciousness in all the run of history. It can not have been otherwise in the outcome: that while the mind centers all its devotion, as at Christmas, Passion Week and Easter, upon the Galilean figure, the infant Christ-child of our own divine potential lies unnoticed, asleep in his cradle in the chambers of our hearts.

Oft quoted is the verse of Angelus Silesius, a Christian mystic of late Medieval times:

Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,

But not within thyself, thy soul will be forlorn;

The cross on Golgotha thou lookest to in vain,

Unless within thyself it be set up again.

Yea, if the Christ-love be not born within the open consciousness of living mortals and become active as a leaven in the lump of human society, not a thousand Bethlehem births can avail to save humanity. One epic and heroic life in Judea is, as a tail, powerless to wag the dog of human carnal grossness and stolid spiritual inertia. But, as Jung says, the tiniest scintilla of the divine fire flashing out within the forge of human ideation can be fanned to a flame that will enlighten and reshape the life of the world.

10

It must be taken as a cynical commentary on Christianity that periodically in its history one group after another has come to the realization of the presence of the Christ nature immediately in the constitution of man himself, and has been so galvanized into newness of life by the recognition as to regard the discovery as something outside the pale of Christianity. The Renaissance in Italy in the fourteenth century was to a degree an impulse of this nature, and the Protestant Reformation was likewise a move toward the possibility of direct communion with the Christ in the heart.

It can with full truth be said that all human culture and refinement, all civilization in fact, springs from the potentiality inherent in man of binding closer this communion between the two natures in man's life, the developed animal and the, as yet, imperfectly developed Christhood. For these two are, and are to be, copartners in the evolution of humanity. Plato gives us this definition of man: "Through body it is an animal; through intellect it is a god." Man, declared the ancient sages, is a god inhabiting the body of an animal. All potential culture is grounded on the possibility of taming the wildness of the animal by the loving-kindness of the god. The deity must domesticate its beastly elemental. Nearly all religion has been activated by the presumption that its function is to help the animal rise up to the capabilities of an association with the god, whereby its brutishness may be transfigured into seraphic love. But religion has been almost completely guiltless of any recognition that on his side the god is on earth in animal body, not only to tutor the animal into a more angelic transformation of nature, but, in his own interest, to find through association with its lower companion an outlet for the exploitation of his own latent capacities in his upward progression to higher status. The nearly total failure of religious philosophy to take into account this duality in the elemental constitution of man, its failure to know man as a compound of god and animal, the two mediated by the human entity which comes to birth on the borderline between the two, has made of religion an ineffective, because unbalanced, cultural enterprise in the psychological domain.

It will be well to recall a few statements from the most eminent philosophers that the kernel of a divine nature is latent in the constitution of man. The wise Socrates, facing the imminent return of his soul to the invisible world, asks Cebes if it is not the certain

11

conclusion of all philosophical reasoning "that the soul is in the very likeness of the divine and intelligible and intellectual and uniform and indissoluble and unchangeable" nature of the gods, and will at death rejoice to rejoin the company of the immortal deities. Leading the splendid movement to revive the great Platonic philosophy six and a half centuries after the master's day, Plotinus speaks as follows:

"The wise man recognizes the idea of the god within him. This he develops by withdrawal into the holy place of his own soul. He who does not understand how the soul contains the beautiful within itself seeks to realize beauty by laborious production. His aim should rather be to concentrate and simplify and so to expand his being; instead of going to the manifold, to forsake it for the One, and so to float upwards toward the divine fount of being whose stream flows within him.

I am weary already of this prison-house, the body, and calmly await the day when the divine nature within me shall be set free from matter."

Epictetus, the Roman slave-philosopher, adjures "never to say that you are alone, for . . . God is within and your genius is within." Heraclitus, before Plato's time, declared that "man's genius is a deity." Jacob Boehme, shoemaker-mystic of the late sixteenth century, wrote:

"The holy and heavenly man, hidden in the monstrous (external man) is as much in heaven as God, and heaven is in him, and the heart or light of God is begotten and born in him. Thus is God in him and he in God. God is nearer to him than his bestial body."

The voice of God speaketh within man, he declares, "and if thou canst for a while cease from all thy thinking and willing, thou shalt hear unspeakable words of God."

Coming to our own sagely reflecting Emerson, we hear him reiterate the concept of the divine philosophy:

"Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. From within or from behind a light shines through upon things . . . . When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love . . . . Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible . . . . It is indefinable, immeasurable, but we know that it pervades and contains us. We know that all spiritual being is in man . . . . Let man then learn . . . . that the sources of nature are in his own mind."

12

But in the exuberance of his zest to bespeak the immanence of divine grandeur at the heart of our being, the philosopher did not pause here, as the utterances found in his essay on Nature indicate he might have done, to remind us that, as the sources of nature are in the woven fabric of our minds, so too is the pattern of our thought and understanding already woven into the context of nature. This reciprocal counterpart of the truth this essay will endeavor to elucidate.

Famous is Robert Browning's poetic passage:

Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise

From outward things; whate'er you may believe,

There is an inmost center in us all

Where truth abides in fulness; and around

Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in.

This perfect, clear perception,--which is truth--

A baffling and perverting carnal mesh

Binds it, and makes all error; and to know

Rather consists in opening out a way

Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape,

Than in effecting entry for a light

Supposed to be without.

Assenting fully to the fundamental fact here expressed, in a strict analysis one might challenge the statement in the first lines that truth takes no rise from outward things. If the truth in our minds and the truth reflected in outer nature are the natural counterparts of each other, are in effect two representations of the same thing, why should not truth spring up to us from outward things? One must ask how Browning could let this negative assertion escape him, when he must have known that the outer world of natural things has been the most dynamic and prolific source of inspiration for poetry itself. It is to nature herself--where else?--that poetry and philosophy and art instinctively resort to tap the springs of insight and afflation. Here Wordsworth:

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach us more of man,

Of moral evil and of good

Than all the sages can.

And hark! How blithe the throstle sings!

He, too, is no mean preacher;

Come forth into the light of things;

Let nature be your teacher.

13

Indeed the weight of all literary authority is so diametrically the contrary to Browning's statement as to constitute direct contradiction. For actually it is precisely from outward things that truth does take its rise for man. It could take no rise out of a vacuum. It takes its rise from man's immersion in nature and under the influence of nature. The realization of truth is potential in man; but it awaits the challenge of external objectivity to awaken and spur it on to its deployment. To accentuate this aspect of the religious philosophy is an integral part of the purpose of this work. For it is one of the essential elements of truth that the subjective systems here examined have signally failed to recognize.

Walt Whitman, lyric singer of the inner godhood in our common human nature, asserts that no man "has begun to think how divine he himself is." "Divine I am inside and out; and I make holy whatever I touch." ". . . . and that there is no God any more divine than yourself." This indeed strikes a common chord with the statements of the ancient sages that man blasphemes both God and himself when he worships any power outside himself.

Volumes could not contain the whole of the literature testifying to the universal recognition of the presence of potential divine transcendence of being in the dual constitution of man. Thus indubitably established, the universal recognition will serve as our point of departure for an exegesis that must go far to effect a quite drastic reorientation of all understanding of "spiritual truth," and institute a new and more balanced rationalization of the entire theme. Going further than that, nothing less than a complete volte face in all religious philosophy and attitude is implicit in the elucidations to be presented in this discussion. As to the factuality of the presence or immanence of a nuclear unit of divine being in the constitution of man there can be no question or dispute. But from that point on it is to be demonstrated that nearly all the theory and practique long prevalent and dominant in general spiritual religionism as to the methodology of man's utilization of the divine segment in his nature has been tragically misconceived and injuriously mishandled.

14

Yes, as Browning put it, the great evolutionary task set for the creature man is to bring out a light of divine glory of consciousness that is being slowly enkindled within him. Our path is dark, the poet implies, until we are able to illuminate it with the rays of a great spiritual refulgence for which we effect an outlet from hidden recesses within ourselves. We do not seek to kindle that flame, all subjective spiritual philosophy declares, by importing a light found outside ourselves to illumine the inner darkness. On the contrary we discover a great light within our own conscious depths, and by careful tending and skillful refueling, we learn to increase its glow to ever-intensified brilliance.

It must be made clear that confusion has been bred and expressed itself in Browning's passage and multitudinously elsewhere through the phraseology used. The inner light is loosely spoken of as either being made to shine within the depths of the individual consciousness, or as being "brought out" to shine through and from the person who has enkindled it. From one angle this distinction is of great moment; from a broad point of view it is only a matter of the appropriateness of a figure. IT is in consonance with the view advanced here that it is more fitting to speak of our task of bringing out the light within, than to think merely of enkindling the light in the interior depths, and, as if that were the final achievement, letting it shine there. The terms employed in a debate or treatise can all too easily lead to confusion if their connotations are not clearly predetermined. What is to be understood basically in the situation is that an inner light of perception that illumines the mind is brought to shining in the area of consciousness and from that fount of generation shines out in the whole expression of the individual life. It is made to shine out in the real sense that the splendid character it brings to view in outward conduct does emerge out of hitherto dark nescience in to the open light of conscious motivation. The "out" direction can only refer to something describable in this fashion. The "in-ness" of it so constantly cherished by devotees must refer to the conscious effort to achieve it and the sense of having made it a real possession. It is advanced here as a matter of ultimately great psychological moment, whether one thinks of

15

the enlightenment process as working inward or outward. In the simplest of words it is to be said that so much unctuous "spiritual" literature speaks of "going within" to find the light, in the belief that one must go within to get away from distracting interests outside which will defeat the power to set the inner light aglow. There is indeed a pertinent view of the process which makes it akin to one's shutting oneself in the house in order to escape disturbing noises outside. But in the case in question this analogue outreaches its validity in that it fails to take into account that the noise outside is itself an integral element of the total situation; in the one consideration that it is in part at least to exercise the function of driving the consciousness within; in another, that it serves as a challenge from outside to the soul within to come forth and do something about the noise itself. It fails to recognize that the external noise has a legitimate cosmic reason for being there, that it can not therefore be simply condemned as evil and treated as a thing to be escaped. As intimated vast psychological consequences flow from the attitude thus taken as to the mere direction in which the process is channelled. It can obviously be contended that one can not bring out what has not first been generated within, and that is entirely valid on the side of the subjective direction so strongly preached by the spiritual cults. But where that contention falls short of validity is in its failure to recognize that the enkindling of the light within can not be done in total disseverance of relationship and interplay with the concerns located outside. The generation of the light can come only through the intercommunion of the conscious energies exerted within and without. On the basis of the wisest philosophies of the ages, that statement must stand as the summation of the truth of the matter. And obviously the issue of enormous good or evil hinges on the recognition of this truth. In the end it becomes a thing of vital moment both to the individual and to the world whether one kindles the inner light merely to bask deliciously in its glow, or uses it to enlighten one's chart of active participation in the community of world life. When so much of the spiritual philosophy is bent in the direction of introversion, it is highly needful at the start to lay definite stress upon the extrovert direction. Browning clearly intimates this right direction. If the supernal beams are imprisoned within, it is the obvious psychological task of man to open barred windows and let them stream out.

16

It is true that all life does build and grow from inner germinal source-spring outward to conscious manifestation. The Scriptural injunction is to "let your light shine," with correlative caution against keeping it hidden or buried.

The first item in the indictment of traditional or conventional philosophy of the "inner light" comes from the notation that such view naively overlooks the consideration that nowhere in the cosmos, physical or metaphysical, can it be supposed that light can be generated, made to shine and be kept shining, without being fed by fuel. And always the fuel for the fire which generates light, even as in the superethereal elements that feed the solar fire, is of the essence of cruder matter, as is seen in the wood-sticks on the hearth, the oil or coal in a furnace, and the tallow beneath the candle flame, or indeed the physical food that keeps alive the flame of life in our bodies. Never in hundreds of books on the soul-light philosophy does one find the slightest notice of the necessity of material fuel for the inner spiritual fire. It seems never to have occurred to any theorist in this field. And as the bulky mass of this literature has insistently urged that we pull our focus of interest ever more completely away from outward things in the effort to fire up the soul in the inmost depths of our subjective kingdom, the question and challenge as to how this great light is to be supplied with fuel, when cult practice severs the energies of spirit from contact with the coarser experiences of earth, which a balanced philosophy recognizes to be the proper fuel for the burning, must be fully met.

Matter, lower in rank though equal in importance with spirit, is always the base, the sustenance of spirit. But so clamorously has matter been derogated as hostile to spirit that the dependence of the higher principle upon it for sustenance and the instrumentalization of its powers has been almost entirely left out of account. As surely as the candle flame can not be kept alive without the fuel supplied by the coarser tallow, which by its more potent chemical energies it can trasfigure into the likeness of its own glorious body, as St. Paul says, so neither can this radiance of spiritual light within the depths of conscious being be kept aglow without being able to draw up and transmute into its own essence the physical experience undergone by virtue of soul's interconnection with body. Spiritual cult philosophy has seemingly taken if for granted that the inner God-light can be generated and brought to white heat, so to say, in

17

a vacuum. For it expressly preludes its prescription for the enkindling of that light with the instructions to destroy all physical-sensual and intellectual forms of experience, the very elements that must be the natural fuel for the spiritual flame. From the very start it is to be deprived of the fuels which alone could serve to nourish it into its brightness. It is true that the electric light-bulb does glow and last longer in a vacuum, but,--lest this be seized upon as a natural confutation of the thesis here expounded--it is not to be forgotten that the power that generates the light in the vacuum is inducted into the bulb from outside, and is itself the conversion of a "lower" or "coarser" energy into light. It is the universal law of the cosmos that always "higher" life feeds upon, consumes and converts, by sublimation process, energies ranked as lower and grosser in essence. The lamp of the spirit within must be fed with the sacrificial oil of the life of sense, emotion and thought lived daily in the flesh. And, by analogy, soul science is as unwise to rail against the iniquitous influences of the flesh as the lamplight would be to express its repugnance to the oil under its wick. So confused has been the interpretative effort in the Scriptural field that this conspicuous connotation of the "oil" symbolism has not been clearly brought through to understanding at all. The coming of the Christos into our human nature is represented under the figure of the anointing of our heads with oil, because the Christ-mind that is to apotheosize us is poetized as a divine flame (cf. The tongues of fire touching the head of Jesus at the Jordan baptism and those of the disciples at Pentecost) coming to its glorious burning in our heads. And oil is the fuel for fire.

As the unfoldment of the case against false assumptions and erroneous methodology in handling the conception of the inner divine light will enunciate the ineptitude of all derogation of the body, matter, the flesh, the senses and even the mind, as detrimental instead of beneficial to the life of the spirit itself, the first hint in support of our basic affirmations will be presented in the material composing an advertisement-notice of the Vedanta Society, taken at random from a current magazine. It aims to present a concise condensed statement of Vedanta religion. A clause in one of the sentences makes it worth citation.

"Vedanta is chiefly a search for the Spirit, the Real Being, and the purpose of the philosophy is to reveal to man what he really is.

18

The body and mind are adjuncts, the necessary means, to the achievement of the spiritual element; but beyond them is the ever-shining light of man's consciousness; his 'I Am' self-consciousness is God consciousness."

Here is advertised the all-dominant motive of cultivating the divine spirit within. But there is that statement which, in fairness to the truth of a more advanced conception, it was deemed desirable to insert in the notice, that the body and the mind, so fiercely assailed and calumniated as the arch enemies of the spirit, are necessary adjuncts and indispensable means to the achievement of spirituality. This single sentence at once hails into court before the bar of simple logic the principle of the eternal condemnation of the flesh, the senses and the mind in the philosophy of "spiritual" religion. For if it is conceded that they are necessary adjuncts and the very means of spiritual evolution, their derogation as alleged enemies of the spirit is immediately seen as insane folly. If spirit itself is a glorious development, then it is asinine to berate the means and accessories by which it is exalted to beauty and kingly power. The physical body of man is obviously the instrument in, by and through which the divine soul of the mortal is implemented to its rebirth, growth and final divinization. What must have been the strange hypnotizing power of a persuasion in religion that has disposed the minds of millions for centuries to revile the body that performs so marvelous a function for the divine principle of goodness in the mundane race! What warped mentality must have bent the counsels of religion to deprecate as foul and vile, and even denounce as the source of human depravity, the awesome marvel of our bodily organism and its noble function as the mother, the nurse, the guardian of the infant soul born and coming to its adulthood in the home of the flesh! So closely allied is this fatal delusion with the concomitant persuasion of the "spiritual" religions that the senses and the mind obstruct the path of the soul's advance to perfection, that this issue must share the brunt of the present critique.

Of course the power that man must utilize to lift himself in the scale of being is a power operative within his own constitution. Christianity cut itself off from direct connection with this dynamo of influence when it segregated the source of the power off in its embodiment in one historical person only. Where else could have been localized a power capable of divinizing lowly human nature than

19

in the corporate body of humanity itself? Surely it could not have been placed outside the individual or the collective organism in whose life it was to be a fermenting leaven. How could man either save himself or be saved other than by the use of a power susceptible of cultivation within his own life, or other than by the discovery, exploitation, exercise and development of a power amenable to his own control? Life never expands or evolves save by the unfoldment of powers germinally innate in the organic being of its own creatures. The legend for which Christianity notably is responsible, that the human race is to be saved by a power sent down from heaven on one historical occasion and localized in the sole body of one historical person, is of all fatuities of theological obscurantism the one closest to a devastating irrationality.

This observation is thrown into sharp accentuation when we recall a myth found in one of the Hindu Upanishads. The story runs that the Lord called a council of the spiritual hierarchy of the world and spoke of a new race that he was about to generate on the earth, stating that he designed to place in its hands the creative power of the gods. He called for opinions as to how the power might best be invested in the new race, so as to safeguard it from misuse through the ignorance and waywardness of the people untrained in wisdom. "Man is a curious creature and he will surely discover the power and in his childishness misuse it to his injury. Where can it be hidden so as to be secure from his prying?" One archangel advised that it be placed on the top of the highest mountain peak. Another suggested that it would be better hidden in the profoundest ocean depths. At last the Lord bethought himself of a happy expedient: "I'll conceal it in the inmost depths of man's own nature, the last place he will ever think of looking for it."

Yes, the God-power is within us, making us potentially co-creators of the universe with God himself. All too slow have we been in discovering the presence or immanence of the mighty potency in ourselves. Religion has too insistently directed our gaze to seek it afar. Socrates told us plainly that each man harbored within him his overshadowing daimon, his guardian angel, and we still wonder if perhaps the Athenian philosopher was not entertaining a wraith of his own hallucinated fancy and not a true angel. At any rate we take it as an item of curious Greek speculation and hold it at arm's length, when truly the statement covers the most important fact in our existence.

20

To be sure, our divinity is lodged within us, deep down in the heart's core of our conscious being, but from the start implanted there as the mere seed of a potential development. So far it is possible to stand with the New Thought and spirit-cult philosophies. They are right in placing paramount emphasis on the necessity--and the glorious privilege--of recognizing that presence within us and living up to the highest capabilities of a technique that will put us in more effective relation to it. But from this point on, it is practically impossible to go along with the operational theory and the active practique of the idealists. Their envisagement and consequently their modus of operation of the forces in the case are all sadly and disastrously askew. A rectification of their codes and modes in the matter must be attempted.

The basic error of their procedure is discerned to be their naïve belief that all one has to do is to penetrate a little deeper than the surface level of daily consciousness and there will be found the god, fully matured and ready to exercise the entire repertoire of his divine power and majesty, only needing to be recognized and hailed. The common cult idea is that to awaken the inner deity to the full exercise of his godliness in and through us it is only necessary to call loudly enough upon him and he will forthwith arise and come forth. It is widely circulated as an open sesame technique that the practice of yoga breathing, sitting in certain postures, deep concentration--but more often the complete emptying--of the mind, will greatly facilitate the process or conduce to its effective working. Prayer and deep meditation are urged as aids to success. The methodology is predicated on the idea that the god is immanent in all his power, strength and glory, awaiting only to be summoned forth. All that is needed is that one should recognize him, or, as Christian phraseology has it, believe on him, and all his wealth of bounteous being will be immediately released for man to use to his advantage.

It is important to note that along with this ground assumption there went always the concomitant persuasion that a practically indispensable adjunct to successful courting of the indwelling deity was the operation of completely emptying the mind, or the total area of consciousness, of all ordinary forms of feeling and of thought, to make the field a complete blank, so that the god could then have unobstructed access to the entity below, or the latter have clear approach to the god. The method was to clear

21

away all rubbish of daily thought from the mind, and hold it steady as a clean slate on which the deity might better inscribe his own higher apperceptions of being. Emptying the mind of all its contents, deadening the senses, stilling all emotion, one might with much hope of reward sit and wait for the higher genius of the inner self to deliver its edifying messages. In the silence and the mental void suddenly the forms, apparitions, the ghosts and wraiths of divine truth could be expected to appear. Glowing in supernal light will shape themselves the outlines and figures of eternal reality. And the sitter will have consummated his yoga and met his god. He will have linked himself with the divine and himself become divine. He will have completed his earthly evolution and won the glorious crown of immortal life with the gods.

It is granted that of course a first step toward true theurgy is the individual's arriving at the certain knowledge, beyond mere speculation, that potential divinity is resident within him and awaits cultivation. But while this recognition is basic primarily, it is a mistake to expect the operation of magic or a perfected accomplishment from this one step alone. It merely puts one in line to begin the process of cultivating one's divinity. Just as a child entering primary school needs more than one recognition of the awakening of his slumbering divine genius than mere recognition of its presence within. The task calls for the perfect development and full functioning of every normal capability and faculty of the entire complement of powers engendered by evolution on the lower human side.

The most hurtful mistake is the too-simple assumption that the divine entity is in man in any other form than, from the first, potentially; except in so far as it has in the case of any individual been brought along to an advanced stage of development. It is at any rate, at any stage always potential of greater unfoldment in the progression ahead of it. The great and central item of theology that seems to have dropped almost into complete desuetude in current religion is the fact that the divine nature was implanted in man's constitution in the beginning as a seed. How can any potency be implanted in any organic development except as a seed? The one universal law of manifest life is growth. There can not be growth unless it is started from seed or shoot. The task of man is

22

not to discover the all-perfect God in full stature, a finished entity, within himself. His labor is to recognize his gardener's husbandry in the tending, cultivation and maturing of a seedling seminally implanted in the physical garden-bed of his body and his life. It is there from the start only potentially. The Christ within is a child, first to be brought from gestation to birth at the Christmastide of man's own awakening to the recognition of his parenthood of the august infant, and then to be reared, trained, educated to the brilliance of its full divinity. The Christmas note of jubilation should be, not the barren celebration of the birth of a babe in far Bethlehem two thousand years ago, but the present birth in one's own life of the infant Christ nature. Christmas festivity should leave its celebrants with the sensational realization that mankind has brought to birth and henceforth has to raise an infant god within the body. Christmas should mean that every man has taken a divine child to raise and educate. We are each assigned the task of bringing a young god to his maturity. He is still the Christ-child in most of us, a little bigger grown in a few of us.

23

But what is the technique of his education? How are we to awaken his latent divinity? This is both the immediate and the ultimate question.

First we must realize that he has been sent down here to go to school, to attend the seminary of earth, whose head master is experience. The particular seat he has to occupy in the schoolroom is his own body and its environment. In his body and the place it occupies in the world he will have his instruction. The body and its needs for sustenance and health will be his lesson assigners and his taskmasters. He will learn only as he meets and masters the daily run of events and extracts their lessons for the weaving of the patterns of wisdom in his consciousness. His education was arranged in the divine government of the worlds to be his tutelage on this planet, because here was a schoolroom in which every appurtenance, every ornament, every pedagogical provision was itself an eloquent, if mute oracle of the goodness, the beauty and the truth of being, a knowledge and experience of which were to be the sum and crown of the achievement of his education. For this world had been created aforetime by his omnipotent Father, and created to be an embodiment and expression of the attributes of its Author's own supernal nature and being, which are the perfections of goodness, beauty and truth. All its living objects and its continuing events reflect and dramatize the laws and principles of the Father's nature, for the earth is a unit cell of the universe and that universe is his body. The physical worlds are instinct and vibrant with the pulsating life and the idea-patterns of the Creator Mind. The world is full of gods, as Thales said in ancient Greece. The heavens declare his glory and the earth showeth his handiwork.

All this mighty revelation is to be absorbed, inwoven into the substance and texture of the young god's own being as he dwells life after life in the midst of this gigantic cinema of his Father's epiphany of glory. For a long period of his childhood he will drink in unconsciously, unreflectively, the potent influences impacting him in his earthly home. He will instinctively feel the ministering benignance of the nature in whose lap he has been laid. Nature is his cherishing mother, his sustainer and guardian. Later, as his self-

24

awareness and his powers of conscious perception and reflection begin to unfold, he will learn to watch, observe and moralize upon the form and then the meaning of all the moving scenario that passes in the yearly round of nature's cycles. He will gradually register in the depth of consciousness an ever keener realization of the order and integral unity of the world panorama. As he moves on from instinctive sense of nature's providential goodness to speculative philosophy at the mental level, he will come at last to a rational understanding that he and the nature that encompasses his life are one and the same expression of creative mind, the one at the physical level, the other in the rarefied air of consciousness. He will discern that the world has been framed over the design of his Father's thought, in the image and likeness of which design his own mind is to frame the pattern of its creative work at his lower station. This recognition carries in all its import the power of redeeming his life from aimless drifting with the natural stream of the all-embracing cosmic life and empowers him to assume the conscious intelligent direction of the onward flow of his own evolution. It evokes from latency into conscious activity his soul faculties as the impact of his experience with the world without challenges dormant powers to come awake. Mainly through his very body the birth of self-consciousness and the evolvement of untried capabilities take place. His body and the world do exactly for him what the sun, the soil, the heart and moisture do for the seed in the garden. They evoke slumbering power in the unplumbed depths of his being. If he was not immersed in the ground-bed of the world and his body, he would remain an unplanted seed. These give him his birth and nourish him to maturity. Every birth must emanate from its mother's womb, and for the soul unit, the physical body is that womb. Said Jesus in a beautiful analogy, "unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." Not for twenty centuries has it been known that the ancient sages who indited the Bibles of divine wisdom referred to the long dormant condition of the soul when it was lodged in earthly body as its "death." But without this "death," as Jesus declares, it could have no rebirth and therefore no further growth. It would remain forever in the dormancy of purely celestial life. To rise higher in the scale of conscious being it has to endure the recurrent pangs of birth forever renewed. The philosophy that urges

25

escape from the world and the body would simply deny the soul its natural chance to be reborn at a higher level.

Probably the most succinct and positive declaration of the dialectical necessity of the central doctrine of all religion, the incarnation, has come from the pen of Plotinus, who must be ranked high in the roll of the world philosophers. He was the inheritor of the great Platonic wisdom, which had flashed out in brilliance over half a millennium before, but had gone into eclipse under philosophical obscurantism in the second century and needed a renaissance. The paragraph quoted from his Enneads is regarded in our purview as one of the most notable passages in all philosophy:

"Thus, although the soul have a divine nature, or being, though she originate in the intelligible world, she enters into a body. Being the lower divine, she descends here below by a voluntary inclination, for the purpose of developing her powers and to adorn what is below her. If she flee promptly from here below, she does not need to regret having become acquainted with evil and knowing the nature of vice, nor having had the opportunity of manifesting her faculties and to manifest her activities and deeds. Indeed the faculties of the soul would be useless if they slumbered continuously in incorporeal being without ever becoming actualized. The soul herself would remain ignorant of what she possesses if her faculties did not manifest by procession; for everywhere it is the actualization that manifests the potentiality. Otherwise the latter would be completely hidden and obscured; or rather it would not really exist, and would not possess any reality. It is the variety of sense-effects which brings to light the greatness of the intelligible principle, whose nature publishes itself by the beauty of its works."

A little father on he pens a sentence which adds tremendous dialectical force to the truth of his pronunciamento given above:

"Likewise it was not sufficient for souls (merely) to exist; they also had to reveal what they were capable of begetting."

And, the logic implies, they could not beget if they remained aloft in worlds of ethereality. This repeats in the dress of Greek systematism what Jesus says, that the unplanted seed can bear no fruit. That this enunciation and the principle back of it have not been acknowledged throughout the history of Christendom as the basic fundamental of all doctrinism bespeaks the loss that was suffered when narrow bigotry closed the Platonic academies in the fifth century.

26

And if the passage stands as a sharp rebuke to much rigid dogmatism of orthodox Christianity, it even more sharply negatives most of the warped predications of the spiritual cult philosophy. So drastically does it reverse the "spiritual" preachments, that it locates the hub of life values right here in the flesh, the very place where those preachments proclaim that values should be shunned. It makes the life in the flesh the seat of destiny. While the cult philosophy denies reality to the things and the experience of this life, it avers that only here is reality to be found. And while cult philosophy stigmatizes the senses as the purveyors of falsehood, it asserts that only through the variety of sense-effects is the grandeur of the "intelligible principle" made manifest to consciousness. It indicts the spiritual religionism on many charges of gross violation of cardinal truth.

The luminous philosophy of ancient Egypt--luminous because it is made translucent with the light of nature-types of spiritual truth--tells us that the soul is a unit seed of God's mind, conceived in heaven, but given birth on earth. Certainly this must be the truth, since the conception is by the Father who is spirit, and the birth is from the Mother, who is matter. Says the dramatic character of the soul in the Orphic ritual: "I am a child of earth and the starry skies; but my race is of heaven alone." As the Emerald Tablet of Hermes phrases it,

"the Sun is the father, the Moon -- or earth -- is its mother, the Wind carries it in its belly, its nurse is the Earth. This is the father of all perfection, or consummation of the whole world. Its power is integrating; if it be turned into earth. It ascends from earth to heaven and descends again to earth, and receives the power of the superiors and the inferiors. So thou hast the glory of the whole world. This is the strong force of all forces, overcoming every subtle and penetrating every solid thing. So the world was created. Hence were all wonderful adaptations, of which this is the manner."

And three especially of the ten statements of "the truth about the self" laid down by Hermes are too magnificent to be omitted from quotation:

"Filled with understanding of its perfect law, I am guided moment by moment along the path of liberation.

"In all things great and small I see the beauty of the divine expression.

"The kingdom of spirit is embodied in my flesh."

27

"In my flesh shall I see God," cries Job. And no less positively another Scriptural passage runs: "The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." It is time that those who heap up denunciation on the world and the flesh know how ignorantly they revile the very temple of the spirit. The philosophies that proclaim the desirability of escape from the body stand sternly rebuked by the greatest wisdom ever given to humanity, that of Hermes, Thrice-Greatest.

In the books of this sage Hermetic philosophy the divine soul, making its entry upon the earth, utters the declaration of its purpose and mission in migrating from the dreamy blissfulness of the spirit world to this land of a more realistic grade of consciousness: "Lo, I come that I may feed upon the bread of Seb, of the food of earth." Seb, his name carrying the cryptic significance of the creative number seven, is the god of the earth. Therefore, the "bread of Seb" is, like the manna of the Old Testament, that nutriment which the soul abstracts from the very ground of earthly experience. Also he says that he comes in order that he may bathe in the pool beneath the two divine sycamore trees of heaven and earth. As in the case of the divine nucleus represented by Jesus in the Christian allegory, the unit of potential Christ consciousness had to come down out of heaven and be immersed in the waters of the earthly baptism, which waters, be it known at last, are just the blood of physical human bodies. The immersion is dramatically administered by a forerunner called "the Baptist." For this body blood is indeed that "Red Sea" which "Israelite" souls had to cross on their long journey from "Egyptian" darkness up the hill of evolution to the "Promised Land" of higher blessedness.

By now it should be evident how great an error is committed in promulgating a philosophy that advises the human entity to turn away from contact with the earth and its influences, designed of a certainty to be salutary, and to negate psychologically the validity of all mundane experience. Such an attitude gains no sanction from the tomes of the great Sages of the early time. It is the spurious product of shallow understanding and gullible pietism.

What has been overlooked entirely is that to turn the mind away from the actualities of the world experience, with the expectation of finding more stable and enduring satisfactions in the depths of consciousness, is only to meet with a disappointing futility. For

28

that is only to plunge the mind into the vacuity of an empty cavern. It is quite the same as pulling the babe away from feeding upon the natural food from its mother's breasts, and expecting it to draw its nourishment from the sterile air. If one turns the mind from concrete objectivity to bask atop the hills of an inner divine subjectivity, the rueful upshot will be the fruitless groping of a mind in a void.

It is right here that spiritual cult theory and practice have perpetrated their most harmful blunder and most positively committed themselves to error. The divine power is within, and is to be implemented from within. But all procedure that aims to exalt it by nullifying the outer mind and seeking the soul's gold in the vacuum of an alleged inner consciousness of greater reality is marked decidedly as vain and nugatory. So positively is it untrue to predicate the soul's divinization through withdrawal from contact with the outer world, that the exact reverse of this theory is the truth which mans needs to follow. Perhaps an enlightened philosophy is soon to proclaim, as the long-lost truth of a sound soul-science, that the true cultus of the divine intelligence is man consists not in severing the links of conscious relation to the actualities of the earthly experience and retreating within the secluded depths of detached consciousness. Precisely on the contrary, that true soul-science is cultivated and perfected by going outside and establishing a living psychic relation with the external world. That this flies directly in the face of the vast literature of New Thought and the admonitions of the self-realization preachments denouncing the external world, is only too apparent. That it is the demonstrable truth is nevertheless maintained.

The difference in direction--going without instead of going within--is the difference between focusing the soul's energies upon blankness in the one case and upon the precise and mutely articulate images of reality in the other. Contrary to all the claims of religious theory, the forms and paradigms of real being are not found residing ethereally in the higher rarefied areas of human consciousness. They are not lying there in a superior world, merely awaiting the time when the mind will stop shutting off the soul's access to them. That interior domain is a blank, a void, until such time as the outer mind, learning to build up the images of supernal truth from its sublimation, or subjectification of the phenomenal

29

objects seen in the concrete world, supplies the upper region with the figured elements of real conceptions. Only then does the void begin to have content. Not inside, but outside in the world, has the creator mind placed the crystallized forms of the divine ideation for man's behoof. To preach the cult of discovering them by withdrawing the consciousness from the outer world into the vacant abyss of inner subjectivity is to direct our search for them precisely to the region where they are not to be found. They lie constantly out in the world under our eyes; and what egregious folly it is then to direct the mind away from them to stare fruitlessly into vacancy! Philosophy must recover the balance and sanity to point the search for truth toward the ground where it is found to lie, renouncing the fatuous seeking of them in a vacuous fairyland hypothecated by the tortured processes of unsound philosophical lucubration.

For, as said, nature is the body of God and the laws of nature are the automatic workings of his subconscious mind. In gazing out upon nature, the eye and then the mind will be observing the first creative or archetypal thoughts of the divine ideation, rendered solid and stable for human reflection and study. The objects and phenomena of nature are the operations of the cosmic intelligence made concrete and objective. They reveal the cosmic rationale of the great Noumenon. It could be poetically said that nature caught God's thoughts on the wing as they were projected from his mind and froze them into substantial form in matter. It has indeed been written that the forms of nature are the congealed thoughts of God. How decisively we are learning now that matter is divine force, divine spirit, petrified!

Herein comes to view a needed correction in the position of general academic philosophy upon a point kindred to the one under discussion. One reads endlessly that what the senses and the mind perceive in nature is not the reality, but the "mere" appearance of a reality that lies "behind." It seems necessary to take direct issue with this idea and especially with the phrase used,--mere "appearance." The view makes of concrete objectivity a mere shadow world, a false pretense at real being. The material object-form of a thing is not the reality of the thing, but an unreal image of it, the real thing being all the while an idea-form in the creative mind.

Our quarrel is with the wrong connotation this view assigns to the word "appearance" and its unwarranted accentuation by the

30

adjective "mere." The contention is that the concrete material object is the real appearance and in no sense a false representation of a real thing hiding behind it. It is the positive, most substantial and actual appearance to human view of an ideal conception that was invisible to us until it made its appearance physically and stood out there concreted in form of substance that made it perceptible to our senses. The appearance is in no wise a phantom of a reality haunting us, but the actual coming to view of what was only noumenal and as such imperceptible as long as it remained a subjective mind-form in creative thought. The use of "appearance" in the sense of only a seeming-to-be of something not really present is here vigorously disputed. And there is no warrant in truth for accompanying it by the adjective "mere". If a thing positively appears out of invisibility into visibility, like an actor appearing on a stage from behind the curtain, by what warrant is it referred to as a "mere" appearance? Would one say that at his proper cue the actor merely appeared? Why is the hint of unreality injected into the statement of the fact that in the phenomenal world of objectivity the ideal forms of God's thoughts appear, or make their appearance to our view, when previously they had been imperceptible! What is "mere" about it, when it is the very solidification before our eyes of what was until then only a thought form of cosmic mind? The objective world is surely not a "mere appearance" of true being, but that true being itself, having appeared in our world out of the heavens of divine ideation. It was hardened into concrete objectivity and placed here to be seen.

What becomes clear on the postulates of the greatest wisdom attained by the human mind, or the wisdom vouchsafed to early humanity by high exponents of the divine mind, is that there must be a complete reversal of direction in the quest for spiritual illumination and the consummation of the mystical apotheosis of consciousness. Not in the vacuity of the inner mind, but out in the world of living forms are to be found the monographs of God's prescience. The world he has created is the world that reveals the thought-pattern over which he designed that which came to be. There visibly are displayed the noumena which turned into phenomena in our world of dense substance. We have in utter folly termed the phenomena unreal and the noumena alone real. This makes a house that is only pictured in an architect's mind, or drawn

31

in blueprint, the real house, and the same house later standing fully created in wood, stone, brick or concrete, the unreal house, the ghost or "mere" shadow of the real house. Do we not only have to ask which one would accommodate real living? Determined from the standpoint of life in this world, surely the material house is the real one. From the standpoint of God's view, he being the thinker and creator, both the purely noumenal and the congealed actual house are real, since one has no warrant for pronouncing either thoughts or things unreal. Gerald Massey, profound student of ancient Egyptology, points out the odd closeness of the words "think" and "thing." And it seems to be clear that both derive from the Egyptian hieroglyph which is the symbol and the word for life, the great ankh cross. (The nk spelling did become ng in Greek.) In the cosmic creative process God's "thinks" became "things."

This whole question of reality or unreality has been involved in endless and needless confusion for the rather simple reason that the discussion has never specified which world is being considered as the home of reality. Life and its productions exist in two worlds, or, as philosophers might insist, they subsist in the noumenal world and exist in the physical. Life, if it is to become manifest to itself and its creatures--which are modes of itself--breaks apart into the two phases or aspects of consciousness and matter. Its creations are generated in consciousness, or noumenally conceived. Then by a process analogous to a reduction of temperature, which "freezes" them into "solidity," they are concreted in matter, which, now we know, is simply pure energy made static. That which is to be a material thing when "staticized" is first a formation in the energy waves of thought. How can there be any question of its reality in either phase of its being? It is first real as a thought, or as a real thought; later it is real as an object, a real thought objectified, and therefore a real object. It was a real thought; now it is a real object. Reality is a categorical attribute of things that are. What folly to maintain that they are real when in one world or in one form, and unreal when in another world or form! The philosophical maneuver of denying reality to the objects of God's creation when they have become substantially objectified to his own and to our consciousness, must some day be seen to be a weird misconception born of a most singular quirk of the human thinking process.

All these considerations bear strongly upon the matter of the

32

culture of the divinity in human nature. But the bases of a still more rigorous criticism are yet to be outlined. Perhaps the most flagrant mistake or omission in spiritual cult philosophy is its total failure to include in its rationale the place and function of the great law of polarity, absolutely basic for all manifestation, and therefore basic as a predicate for reality either noumenal or phenomenal. If this universal principle is left out, no competent rationalization of living experience is possible at all. A philosophy formulated without it is no philosophy. And it must be said in respect to this item that the "spiritual" philosophies miss the mark of true conception by a long mile. Because, in preaching at us the withdrawal of our conscious effort from objective reality in order to gain contact with an allegedly truer reality in subjectivity, they actually ask us to tear ourselves apart, to rend our being in twain, to rip ourselves asunder. They ask us to dismantle our integrity, to destroy the unity of our selfhood. In the first place, this is something that can not be done. In the second place the effort based on the false presupposition that it can be done and is desirable will entail disaster.

For life here, or anywhere it becomes manifest, is and must be polarized. The cryptic meaning of that great old Egyptian symbol, the ankh, is that life is the result of polarization, for it conjoins the two symbols of spirit and matter. Neither consciousness nor material existence is possible without it. No consciousness is possible to a completely unitary being. Unity must be broken apart into duality, if consciousness is to arise. For consciousness must be segregated from objectivity and then be confronted with something to be conscious of. This necessitates the existence of matter, body and the world. Spirit can have no birth or growth if it is not kept in the relation of polar opposition to matter. All values are born out of the tensional relation between spirit and matter. If spirit is, or could be, torn away from its connection with matter, the tension is dissolved and the worlds and consciousness both disappear. The universe is sustained in being on a web of force that stretches from spirit at the "top" to matter at the "bottom" of the scale, and that tensional force is the warp and woof of all existence. It is that dynamism which Einstein and now Hlavaty (recently declared to have proved Einstein's theory) have found to be the essence and the ground of all world appearance. It is the preaching of ignorance, the counsel of folly, to base man's divinization on the presumption

33

that it can be achieved or furthered by the attempt to pull the spirit away from its close and essential association with matter and body. It is asking both spirit and matter to renounce and dissolve their kinship, which is a twinship. The wisdom of ancient Egypt has told us that spirit and matter, the soul and the world, are twins. They must grow up together, brother and sister, yet man and wife. (Isis was both the wife and sister of Osiris, as was Juno of Jupiter.)

We have here at last the meaning of the allegory of the wheat and the tares in the Christian Gospels. True enough it is that the two can not be separated until the harvest. If you pull up the tares when they are growing close beside the wheat, you uproot the wheat along with them. If evil were taken out of the world, there would be no fulcrum against which to anchor the leverage for good. In the harvest at the cycle's end both relapse back into their primordial unity, and disappear as separate entities.

On the solid rock of this principle of universal polarity the preachment of the philosophy of spiritual detachment breaks in wreckage. It is seen to be little better than mystical moonshine. It ammounts to semi-pious intellectual fol-de-rol and is misleading and far from innocuous psychologically. The effort to abstract the consciousness from world objectivity--doomed to certain failure factually--can lead a mind so far from contact with reality as to rob all experience of its designed salutary pedagogical value. One can reify a dreamy persuasion until it is turned from fantasy into a hallucination of verity. The possibility of self-hypnotization is always a potential menace to balance and sanity. If we can escape actuality by relapsing into dream, it is certified that we can miss reality by dwelling continually in the dream fantasy. The soul is on earth to receive the full impact of actuality, without which its divine capability could never be brought out to conscious mastery. To sink back while on earth into the dreaminess to escape which it fled from heaven, is to counter the motive and reverse the procedure which life is pursuing in its drive for its own aggrandizement.

If the god-power is within the constitution of man it must be evident that the human body is the laboratory in which all the seed latency of future power and divine genius is to be evolved to full expression. The body, says St. Paul, is the temple of the living God. The Egyptians called it "the crucible of the great house of flame."

34

How far askew is that posture of mind which teaches the evil character of the body! For some ten or more centuries Christianity held it in contempt and tried to mortify it, imitating Indian philosophy, which aimed to kill it. Christianity based much of its condemnation of Paganism on the latter's wholesome reverence for the body, and Paganism is still berated for its alleged revel in the grossness of bodily sensuality. It is not at all realized now that it takes a far profounder and more sanely balanced philosophy to allocate the flesh to its proper place and function in a universal economy of good than merely to decry it as the low enemy of spirit and revile it accordingly.

The shortsightedness of the negative view of the world and our life in it is accentuated again by the reflection, apparently little pondered in religious circles, that the mental posture of earthly detachment and effort at absorption in a heavenly consciousness runs counter to the simple logic of the incarnational situation, when it is known that these souls of humans had been long enough in the heaven state of consciousness to have grown weary of its inactivity and inanity, and voluntarily (as says Plotinus) came here to exchange it for the more real sense of existence and the chance to exercise untried powers which heaven could never cultivate. If the disembodied soul consciousness is so blessed and blissful, so rhapsodically preferable to the drab real-sense experiences here, it is a legitimate question to ask why they did not stay up there. What prevailed upon them to leave that delectable homeland that now they are said to yearn so longingly to regain?

That, be it declared with great pointedness, is the question that the escapist philosophies have apparently never seriously asked, much less have ever competently answered.

35

Until an answer is given to the insistent query as to why the souls of men are on the earth no philosophy pertaining to the mundane life is possible. The codes of escapism are exhortations to man to jump out of reality and land in a vacuum.

It comes as the unconscionable upshot of such a creed that if there is a legitimate ground for the withdrawal tactic, then earth life for the hosts of celestial souls immersed in it is an inadvertence, a mistake, an unjustifiable hardship inflicted on all caught in its current, a blundering miscarriage of some creative design. Cult ideology shades its eyes against the strong searching light of the ineluctable fact of the divine economy, in whose strategic moves earth life is no mistake, is entirely necessary and beneficent from every angle, for the one and all-sufficient reason that gods can not be born, bred and reared in heaven. Conceived they can be there, in the depths of the cosmic mind; but not there born or raised to maturity. For heaven can provide for their birthing no matter to be their mother. Planted on earth they must be. So to presume to tear them loose from their rootage in the soil-bed of human nature is dialectically equivalent to the folly of pulling up a garden plant out of the ground to hasten its growth. To expect a soul to grow without letting its roots hold deeply in the ground of earthly body is the same as to expect a candle to glow without its tallow, or the fire to burn without its wood. Again sage Egypt admonishes us sharply: "Head in heaven, feet on the earth; soul in heaven, body in the deep deep grave" of inert matter.

Just as in winter we long for the summer warmth and in summer we equally yearn for the coolness of winter, so it is that when we are here on earth we long for the vividly imagined bliss of heaven and bend our philosophies to accord with the yearning. But the other phase of the situation is not thought of or given weight in religious philosophy. Yet it must be true that when the soul has had its sufficiency of rest in the dreamy unreality of subjective consciousness in worlds above, it must long to be again where the contact with veridical sense experience gives to existence an engaging charm and zest. It must long for escape then from the inane passivity and enforced inactivity that can become morbid. It must yearn

36

to arise from sleep, throw off dull sloth and give play to the powers that else would remain in unwholesome stagnation. This, the positive aspect of the philosophy of life, seen only in the light of the knowledge of the dual and polarized state of being in manifestation, finds scarcely a single note of emphasis in whole libraries of cult literature. It is reasonable to assert that a philosophy which wholly ignores this balance of forces that stabilizes the world of life must be a blind and dangerous guide.

The legendary "rebellion of the angels," for which they were cast out of heaven to suffer hardship on earth in the Miltonian tradition, has been frightfully mangled in popular conception. It is commonly represented as an evil movement of hostility to the powers of God himself, a revolt against the divine rulership of the cosmos. A more recondite scrutiny of the allegory discloses that it was in reality simply a revolt against the gossamer vacuousness of the celestial life, against the ennui, prolixity and dreary tedium of the heavenly existence, motivated by eager longing for the more vivid experience of sense and the novel adventure of the ego-consciousness, all of which was impossible apart from union with physical body on a planet. It is not perhaps a rash surmise to suggest that this is the significance of the statement in Revelation that one sweep of the dragon's tail brushed out one third of the angels of heaven. The dragon, who is identical with "Satan, that old serpent that deceiveth the whole world," is the ancient allegorical figure typifying the lower sense nature in man, and it is indeed the strong sweep of this element which springs up and assails the soul from the side of body, that draws down the hosts of angels for a more actualized sense of being than heaven can give. Against the background of this determination of earthly motive for the descent of the angels, the systems of cult teaching emphasizing the evil of earth and exhorting escape by tugging and pushing the soul back up to heaven before the efficacious influences of earth can have accomplished their beneficent offices, are most clearly seen in all the flagrancy of their ineptitude.

As it was this yearning for sensuous self-consciousness that lured the angels down to earth, and earth and body gave them the freedom to revel in the luxury of physical existence, where their own fledgeling powers could be put to the trial, the sense of physical enjoyment became the polar opposite of the life of the spirit. And

37

because it was the opposite node to spirit, popular ignorance in the end misconceived it and set it up as the opponent, the adversary of the spirit. Hence it was this impulse to revel in the delight of free action in their own right that came to be denominated the "sin," the "carnal sin" of our first angelic parents. St. Paul makes this overwhelmingly clear when (in Romans 7) he makes the remarkable statement that when "the command" (wrongly translated "commandment" in most versions, corrected in the Moffatt translation) came home to him, sin sprang to life and he "died," the command (meaning the heavenly mandate to incarnate) that gave him earthly life proving to be a veritable "death" to his soul--precisely as Greek theosophies had always represented it. Just ahead of this he had said that the law of sin and death has power over a man "only so long as he liveth." All this strongly certifies that we have here at last the right approach to the true comprehension of the original theological connotation of the redoubtable thing called "sin." At base and stripped of all weird misconception of morbid pietism, it is just the soul's delight in its freedom to revel here on earth in a fling of its creative power in a little universe of its own, its physical body and its circle of mundane activity. It must be a shock and rebuke to somber pietism that Paul himself in this same chapter asks if the soul's revel in sense life is evil, and thunders out the negative answer, "God forbid." And he ends by pronouncing the whole "fall of the angels" "holy, just and for our good." He urges us in fact to "make use of this good thing."

In Plato's Timaeus is reported verbatim the speech made by the Creator Logos, the Greek Demiurgus, or Jupiter, to the legions of angels assembled to hear their commission of creational duty on earth. They are expressly told that they are being despatched to the earth to supervise the creation of "three races" who are necessary to the completion of the divine work on the earth. They are told to "convert yourselves according to your nature to the fabrication of animals [animate beings], using in their creation the powers which I used in your generation." For this creation the mundane animal evolution would provide the physical bodies; the cosmic Lord says that of the part of these dual beings which will be indestructible and immortal, he himself "will furnish the seed and the beginning," meaning the divine nucleus of soul energy. Then he concludes by commanding these angels to go down to earth, enter

38

the prepared animal bodies and "weave together mortal and immortal natures." "The underworld awaits your coming" is a statement made to these angels in another Scripture. This is the celestial assignment of the soul to its great evolutionary task, which entails its descent to earth, the uniting of its spiritual potential with the bodily forces of the highest animal races ready to receive and house such a heavenly visitant, and then the consummating the great achievement of effecting a final harmonization and union of the two natures, the animals' and its own, in "one new man, so making peace," as St. Paul delineates it.

How then, let spiritual cultism answer, can the soul effectuate this mighty consummation if it abandons the body, flees from it as a loathsome thing, renounces or ignorantly shuns all natural association with it, and battles to return to heaven before the great aeonial labor has been accomplished? This is the philosophy of truancy from the school of life. In this phase indeed is perhaps best expressed the gist of all the philosophies which negate all positive value to life and recommend psychological escape from it: they rebel against the complete course of education in life's school and exhort all pupils to truancy. India in particular seems to have most unanimously lauded this recalcitrancy, this intransigence to life's obvious obligation, as Max Mueller has remarked.

This, and not the angelic rebellion in heaven, must be accounted the real revolt against the authority of God. If God sends us out to school--since we can not learn by staying at home--it is the simple sum of our duty that, all instruction and discipline being arduous, onerous and to a degree painful--albeit also zestful and rewarding--we should attend faithfully, heed our great instructor, experience, and stick to the assignment until the commission is fulfilled. Of course human nature, if left to its own predilection, would prefer dreamy idleness and mystic musing to the tedious task of self-development and learning. But even common human judgment decides that this is not the way of the valiant spirit, not the true path up the scale of being. The philosophies counseling short cuts back to heaven will have to bend to acceptance of the tutelage of earth. The road to the mountain top, shining in the distance, runs through the valleys of lowly earth.

India has been named as the land in which the cult of negative value to the life experience and escape from it has been most sig-

39

nally stressed. The Buddhistic and other religious philosophies of the Hindu people assert that the soul is on earth because of its ignorance. But instead of following the natural course of logic to the conclusion that, because it is in childish ignorance, the soul should diligently apply itself to the tutelage of earthy experience and learn to supplant ignorance with intelligence, Indian thought can only seem to discern that the remedy is for the soul to flee the assignment and escape. It seems never to have been able to achieve the logical goal of understanding that the soul is sent here precisely to overcome that aboriginal ignorance, and that the victory when attained amply compensates for all strain and suffering endured in the process. This inability of the Hindu mind to accept the mundane existence as salutary stems, as intimated before, from failure to include in its philosophical systemology any rational accounting for the condition of ignorance in the first place. The dearth of this specific knowledge, a grasp of which could illumine this dark lacuna in Indian ideology, is definitely testified to by Max Mueller, eminent scholar already cited. He writes:

"The question how nescience laid hold of the human soul and made it imagine that it could live or move or have its true being anywhere but in Brahman, remains as unanswerable in Hindu philosophy as, in Christianity, the question how sin first came into the world."

The crux of all dialectic of "spiritual" and escapist philosophy is centered at the point where the desire for liberation is seen in conflict with the necessity for the incarnation of soul in the first place. A philosophy which simply drives its devotees to seek release for their bondage--if truly it is such--is as unbalanced and hence likely to be as irrational as is the medical practice which hurries to treat the surface symptoms of disease without discovering and removing the cause. Also it is as egregiously marked by folly and ignorance as would be the school boy's unremitting effort to escape the "durance vile" of the school and its tasks, in total failure to recognize the good purposes which induce his parents and the state to subject him to his days and years of "imprisonment" at hard labor. Further it is unassailable logic to declare that if the pupil in life's academy centers his whole effort intensively on the business of effecting his

40

escape, he will miss the total instruction for which attendance at the school was instituted. To his sorrow he will later learn that all he escapes is honor, promotion and the joy of eventual graduation summa cum laude. He will but prolong, with a worse accentuation of its hardships, his tenure of tutelage. Again citing St. Paul, it is useless to kick against the pricks.

The bent to erect into a competent religious philosophy the soul's natural desire to escape the hard travail on earth and revert to the delicious ease of Devachan, or the unconsciousness of Nirvana, must be interpreted as simply the exaltation of desire, unrelated in any balanced way to the other arcs and phases of the cycle of incarnation and release. It is by analogy simply the natural desire of unenlightened and unheroic man to be freed from the arduous and spiritless dragging on of his life in an ill-conditioned body, without balancing it against the evolutionary gains which are both the justification and the vindication of the incarnation. Torn out of its niche in the ever-recurrent rounds and viewed out of relation to the total beneficence of the whole involvement, the failure of zest for the experience and the longing for surcease of its woes in the more ethereal realms are elevated into the dominant principles of a religious philosophy. It is thus condemned by its shortsightedness and unbalance.

But the final verdict on its utter incompetence is rendered to logic in the realization that in sheer dialectic it is evident that if the motive of escapism can be edified into a sound defensible philosophy of life, there can not be found anywhere just grounds on which to base either the necessity or the beneficence of the soul's migration to earth in the first place or at all. If life is an unrequited evil and hardship gratuitously imposed on the soul, then there can be no philosophy formulated that either explains or validates it. If it can not be explained as a scheme of demonstrable good, no philosophy is possible in connection with it. In the last blunt words that can express it, if the drive to escape it is the supreme recommendation of the best thought the human mind can entertain about it, then it can not be deemed good. The only justification of escapist philosophy is that the experience here is not good but wholly evil. And if evil, then the question confronts man as to how he is to rationalize his being tossed about from heaven to earth by the power of some demoniac force that puts him periodically in a direful im-

41

prisonment, from which his noblest aspiration is the yearning to make his escape.

The Buddhist system, in analysing the so-called chain of the causation of suffering, lays all to the desire of the soul for the enjoyment of the sense and feeling of life. The hunger for the objects of desire causes the soul to be born again and again, and each birth prolongs the sorrow and suffering. Therefore if the soul is to be rid of the cause of continual sorrow and suffering, it must root out of its heart the craving for the sense of life. The life instinct must be overcome and destroyed. This further deepens and darkens the negative, self-annihilating philosophy of the Hindu mentality. The doleful upshot of such a philosophy, which fastens the tag of evil on the life experience, is that in fact it leaves life without a philosophy. As intimated earlier, in strict truth a thing which is pronounced an unrelieved evil can not properly have a philosophy covering it. By basic derivation philosophy means a love of wisdom. But does not a philosophy which proclaims life an unmitigated evil renounce or forfeit all claim to wisdom? The human mind can not be expected to love a thing categorized as evil. The negative philosophy of India fails to lift earth life into the category of good. The mind can truly be said to love the pursuit of truth only when its searching yields and understanding of the positive and affirmative values of the thing studied. If reflection fails to bring comprehension of positive values in the life on earth, it renounces its claim to be called a philosophy. Escapist doctrine simply confesses its failure to measure up to the stature of a philosophy at all.

If the soul hungers for life, it also hungers for knowledge. And ultimately the basic knowledge that the human mind demands and must have is some rational answer to the question why man as a conscious entity is on this planet. The "sacred" Scriptures can be truly holy to earth citizens if they tell us why the creator-power, intelligence, sent these souls, its sons, out from what they also describe as the glory palace of blessed life to undergo a quite strenuous existence on this rolling globe. A philosophy should not claim the high name until it answers that question, straight, fair and true. One school of religion asserts that it is veritable blasphemy for the child-soul to demand an answer to the great question or to pry curiously into the affairs of the Father's ordering. Another evades the answer on the ground that we do not possess the faculties by which

42

to comprehend the answer if it was given us. Another affirms that we were summarily despatched to earth by an angered Father to penalize us for an initial infraction of an arbitrary restriction on our freedom.

When properly interpreted, the sacred Scriptures enlighten us with the profound knowledge that we were sent out here, in one of the beautiful gardens of delight (Eden) in our Father's kingdom, in order, under the fostering care of our kindly earth-mother, to grow up from soul infancy to adulthood in the image and likeness of our Parent. The Scriptures have stood for centuries holding out this answer for us, and the schools of wisdom in antiquity intelligently studied them, and gave deep instruction to elucidate the great mystery. But in the historical run of world life there swept in upon the peoples of the lands in which the vital heritage of wisdom had been treasured and carefully transmitted, a crushing blight of intelligence so heavy and chilling that it deprived minds of the virile strength to grasp the true sense of the answer. Since that dismal event some two thousand years ago the instinctive quest for this precious knowledge has been only a wild blind groping amid darkness and ignorance.

All the while we can read as clear and concise a statement of the great answer as could well be condensed in a few short sentences, and if we can muster the intelligence to comprehend the words, we indeed can register again that elevated satisfaction and joy that our minds experience when they can digest the substance of truth. Plotinus strove to rekindle the fires of understanding that were so fast sinking down to dead embers and cold ashes, and to him we stand indebted forever for this mastery formulation of the positive answer to the dark riddle of our existence, an answer that repudiates all the gruesome imputation that life here is an evil mischance, and makes clear the grounds of our faith in its beneficence. The reader has already noted his ringing asseveration that but for its contact with and mastery of the evil in the world, the soul would never come to know the power of its mighty wings.

Here stands the answer of Greece's high rationalism to India's dismal negativism and pessimism. Here is the positive assertion and dialectic of life's basic goodness and the justification of its stressful modality, thrown out to stem the tide of defeatism and hopelessness that was sweeping in over the more westerly areas of

43

the Hellenic world with the spread of the persuasion that life is only an unredeemed evil to be annulled and escaped. The famous phrase coined by Sir Gilbert Murray, eminent English scholar in the field of Greek philosophy, "the loss of nerve" in the Hellenic world, vividly expresses the incidence to the intellectual blight that was so far advanced in Plotinus' day of the second century. Under the benignant influence of a philosophy that rated and rationalized life as wholly good, and its hard experience salutary, the human spirit could face the mundane task with a resolute valor born of inner certitude. The soul in the human could front life's challenge with cheer, with courage, with fortitude.

But with the invasion of the popular thought by the dour gospel of the evil of life, the springs of zest and "nerve" for the adventure of soul in body were drained dry, and the battle for life was transformed early into a desperate abandon and a struggle to win back the rhapsodies of heaven. The "bread of Seb," or food of earth, to partake of which the soul, in Egypt's great Bible, had so eagerly set out from heaven, was turned "moldy," and the divine "beer" which it had come down to drink had turned "sour". And by what! By the injection in the living essence of human thought of a poisonous tincture of the philosophy of the evil of life. The impact of this untoward idea is naturally such that it chills and kills the mind's instinctive glow of eager adventure, of hope, of zest for the experience.

The aim under this persuasion being consciously to stifle and quench the fires of worldly interest which seek outward expression, there must result a smothering and dampening of all life's outgoing energies. The effort to subdue the vigor of extrovert tendency must bear fruit of a bitter taste. The law of the circulation of the blood testifies by unfailing analogy that corruption and disease follow upon any checking of the free flow of the streams that carry life's impulses outward. For the voluminous tragedy of human ill that has stricken the society of mortals in Western history since the decay of the robust healthy Greek philosophy of the Platonic era, let the religions crying the negation of all values in the earth life bear the heavy onus of responsibility. If there is now any sincere desire to lift modern life out of its deep-grained corruptions to a level of dynamic vigor and health, to restore to it a more valiant spirit that will quicken again the pulse-stroke of the heart of our

44

existence, the most direct move as means to that end is to establish again the Greek academies that were closed by Justinian in the fifth century.

Stupidly and blindly the orthodoxies of our day will cry out against the "return to Paganism." The rebuke to this folly is that the great light did shine in Pagan times, and under Christianity we have had the Medieval "Dark Ages," during which the light obscured in Christian lands was kept burning in Mohammedan and Jewish academies and cloisters. The Italian Renaissance was a glorious upflash of its light from the smoldering embers. The Protestant Reformation carried its spirit some way into religion. But for the full free upflow again of the heroic nerve-pulse generated by the knowledge of the good purposes of the soul's periodic visits to earth we still must wait. Likewise we wait for a civilization that manifested the beauty, grace, sanity and wholesomeness of life such as flourished when the Platonic wisdom was cultivated. Much of the moral of this essay would be lost also if there is failure to note that the great truth enunciated in Plotinus' gratifying citation gives the coup de grace to all the spiritual-cult philosophy that emphasizes the withdrawal of the soul as far as possible from the flesh. The Greek philosophy inspired a healthy life because it was animated by the foundation truth that the soul was on earth to make common cause with the body in the evolutionary interests of both, neither to flee, escape nor crush the body, but indeed to woo, win and wed it, for the mutual parentage of the god in man.

The dialectical dilemma facing the spirit-cultists is drawn in sharp lines with the reflection that if spiritual life disengaged from body is the ideal of consummate good for the soul, what then is soul doing on earth at all? If its best interests are subserved when it is free of the flesh, by what misdirection of cosmic policy, or by what dire necessity, is it drawn down out of celestial felicity at all? If the untrammeled life of the soul in spirit existence is the all-perfect environment for it, why does life not permit it to remain there in beatific tranquility forever?

To this key question spiritual and mayavic philosophy has no answer. For that we have to go to the old Egyptian and the later Greek Wisdom. If heaven life is completely adequate for the soul's blessedness, there can be no justification of the enforced migration of souls to earth. And if we dare not assume that earth life decreed

45

for the soul is entirely good and to be lived to the full without distrust of its beneficent ends, then we are forbidden to postulate that the universe is under the rule of an omniscient Power in every way benevolent. And if we are not permitted to lay down this postulate, religion itself is not possible.

Some form of spiritual exaltation to the ineffable heights of conscious felicity is indicated for the soul in the apotheosis of its nature at the end of the cycle. But the unconscionable error of spiritual philosophy has been in thinking that the flesh stood as a barrier in the way of that consummation, and that it was only necessary to crush down the flesh for the soul to step unobstructed into its heaven. This presumption aligned the flesh in the ranks of opposition to the soul as its enemy, when the truth is that the soul can attain its Paradise only through the humble offices of the body. If the physical organism was not in some way positively essential to the soul's evolution to godhood, there is no warrant in philosophy for its being sent here to tenant the house of the animal at all. This is the final and decisive challenge to the vogue and the adequacy of the mayavic and escapist codes of thought. A verse from Alfred Tennyson embodies this philosophy:

"God lent the house of a beast to the soul of the man;

And the man said 'Am I your debtor?'

And God said, 'Make it as clean as you can,

And then I will send you a better.'"

And beyond all estimation must be the total psychological consequences for the worlds of both East and West of the depressant influence of these systems that negate the value of our life, berate and crucify the body and urge escape as the prime blessedness. The natural atmosphere in which the conscious ego of man can flourish and develop in happy and healthy state is that of positive and affirmative attitudes toward the experience now being undergone. It is not mere poetic figurism to say that such a psychic posture of perennial affirmation is as vital to the soul's life as is sunshine to the plant. Deprived of it the spirit languishes and may wither. The gratuitous imposition on the mind of the inculcation that all that we behold of this fair earth and our existence in the midst of its garden of beauty is not real, is maya, illusion, a deception that we must evade by a constant negation of its registered influences, can spell nothing but a pernicious corruption of the soul's energetic effort to relate itself to reality. It must amount in the

46

end to a partial palsy and paralysis of its evolutionary impulse, or involve it in "shoals and quicksands" of frustration and confusion. If this does not come close to rating as a crime against the holy ghost, the divine spirit of life, it would be hard to find anything closer.

Life flows by turns outward and inward in its periodic cyclic impulses. For the soul of man its migration from heaven to earth is its outward movement. The outward expression of its energies in this fashion is an integral part of the processes of its evolutionary advance. Its highest good is to be attained by carrying the outward sweep to its farthest limits as the pendulum swings on that arc. Anything that checks or interferes with the movement must be accounted harmful, potentially dangerous. Surely a philosophy that aims to reverse the direction of the flow in the sweep of the outgoing manifestation must risk involving the entity in being crushed by the onrushing current. Also the attempt to throw the outward cycle back into the inward direction before the former has completed its work, will in the same way invite calamity. In fact there is in occult literature the tradition of those groups of angels who, being ordered to incarnate on earth in animal bodies suitable as vehicles for the expression of their faculties, refused and in consequence were "punished" by being forced down at a later time into less suitable bodies. Indian literature has called them the "unwilling Nirvanees." Those conceptions which naively assume that the high interests of spirit are without question to be furthered by lifting the soul as far out of relation to the body as possible--as in some Hindu systems to master the technique of entrancing it entirely-suffer from ignorance of what the soul is intended to effectuate in its conjunction with body. The philosophy of life must be solidly grounded on the rationale of the incarnation. Spirit-cultism seems to think it can ignore this central axis of the situation entirely. The plan of life in the progressive arc of its cycle is generated by throwing the mind into the spirit of the movement outward toward the periphery. Anything that thwarts that outgoing swing is productive of disorder in the movement. To affirm in the very midst of the outgoing sweep that only the opposite direction is good is again to tune the movement to discord. This would be equivalent to urging the rising sap of the tree in the spring to turn back and retreat unto the root and ground where it hibernated in the winter.

47

It must be considered a matter of great moment in the history of world philosophy when a Hindu philosopher, and one rated as perhaps the greatest seer and thinker in the modern period, takes a stand on the dialectics of the spiritual life that comes close to reversing the age-long traditional attitude of Indian thought on the pivotal philosophical questions with which this essay is dealing. It is a definitely unique event when a Hindu expositor accords to the life of the body, its senses and feelings, and to the mind a place of equal value with the postulated intuitions of the transcendental consciousness and the supermind. This epochal phenomenon is, however, what one finds in the books of Sri Aurobindo Ghose, particularly as set down in perhaps his chief work, The Life Divine. It is most refreshing to note a Hindu treatment of maya doctrine that regards this recondite and abstruse conception as an integral attribute of the cosmic Brahman from all eternity, and not as something introduced surreptitiously and as if by some inadvertence of deity or delinquency of man, adventitiously. And similarly it is cheering to find the great sage drawing, as it were, the sting of deception from the head of this doctrine that has beclouded the minds of so many millions of earth's citizenry.

For maya, he asserts, is the web which omnipotent deity weaves to give itself the experience of enjoying the work of its creation. Maya is that mode of being into which deity casts itself to generate the consciousness through which the delight which it seeks in world-building can come home to it. It is, so to say, part of its repertoire, a device it utilizes to accomplish what it desires.

Historians tell us that Christianity swept in on the crest of a wave of credulity that rode westward to Syria and Judea from its point of initial impulse in India. Its general Hindu character was manifest in its strong bent to deprecate the values of mundane existence and experience, to taint it with the imputation of hostility and detriment to the interests of the soul and to besmirch it with the obloquy of evil nature. In consequence religious interest tended to switch its focus and arena from the world of nature and the life in body over to the hypothecated glories of the supermind and the celestial coefficient of consciousness. The hope of miracle and

48

spiritual magic supplanted the confidence in natural law and the day-to-day beneficence of world experience. "Great pan was dead," the early Christians shouted, fiercely exulting in the belief that a fanatical zealotry and paroxysms of pietistic supernaturalism would open the gates of Paradise on their entranced vision and obviate for them the necessity of progressing over the long road of evolution to divinity under nature's rigid ordinances. The old dispensation of the severity of law and exact justice was abrogated, they proclaimed, and all old things were to be swept away and a new heaven and a new earth would burst upon their gaze as the great surge of the love of Christ and the mercy of God renewed all hearts. When earth, the body and its interests became as filthy rags in the sight of God, heaven became the cynosure of all enraptured eyes, till not even the lion's gory claws could dim those ecstatic visions of the beatific glory in the skies.

If the vile body and the deceptive interests of the world blocked off the soul's approach to this celestial blessedness, the lion's rending paw was a welcome opener of the door to Eden regained. And ever since, both in East and West, the fundamental idea of the conception of sainthood has been a withdrawal of all interest in secular events and world life and a burying of the soul in a life of abstraction and introversion. Experience gained through the ordinary means of the ego's contact with the external fringe is a contamination of the spirit. Only within the deeper recesses of the soul, and these only capable of being discovered when the gaze is lifted from the world, are the enduring treasures of the divine mind to be found. Deep within man's consciousness lay the enchanted kingdom of heaven, where omniscient knowledge, light and bliss bathed the soul in felicity. And, said modern and much ancient spiritual science, this state of blessedness was to be induced by the practice of closing off the consciousness from the world without and concentrating it upon the vacancy within, until the forms of truth and the ecstasies of seraphic beatitude supervene from out the inner holy of holies. Not out in the world, but in the silence of the inner temple of consciousness could man hear the divine voice. So the resurgent sweep of the Oriental philosophy gave us a new edition of the "voice of the silence." And a flood of manuals detailing the formulas for engaging in meditation has poured over the Western world, with thousands sitting in postures calculated to ease the

49

body into tranquility, the better to permit the consciousness to clear its slate of all distracting elements from the side of the senses and the body. The Biblical injunctions, "be still and know that I am God," was echoed as the key shibboleth of every cult regimen, with the tacit implication that God could never be known in his world, in his work, in the music of the spheres, the ripple of brooks, the thunder tones of his storms, the crashing of his waves or the sighing of the wind in his pines. The physical universe was tabbed the enemy of the spirit and had to be shut out, the soul detached from its contacts, if cosmic benignance was to be experienced.

With all this came a definition, new to the Occident, of the self of the individual. Our true ego is not the complex of body, feelings, mind and spirit that gave the Westerner the proper conception of his being. It is the spirit alone. And to arrive at a true envisagement of his real egoity, the individual must learn to conceive of himself as that pure unit of radiance detached from all association with these lower and inferior appurtenances. He must achieve the concept of himself as a unit of spirit in the abstract, subsistent in vacuo. An extreme elaboration of the ideology even went so far as to deplore the fact that pure spirit debased and defiled itself the moment it made conjunction with putrid matter. The "malignancy of matter" took its place as a fundamental of the yoga science. And from this unbalanced view arose that theological aberration of intellectual sanity which has steeped the Western mind in morbid moronism, the fall of man from Paradise and its affiliate, the pall of sin consciousness. The real ego, then, is not the body, its sensations, its brain's ideas, or its modes of consciousness at all. It is the core of consciousness that is left when it has detached itself from the clinging spider's web of all these outer appendages. The ego is its real self when, having divested itself of all these obstructing trappings, it stands alone in the void and the silence.

What more need be said in refutation of these elements of a conjured "spiritual science" than that they are out of place, are a total missing of the mark and an utter impertinence when urged as a philosophy to be utilized for final good in the outward-moving arc of the cycle, when soul moves outward and "downward" to unite its energies with the universal atomic power to be found only in matter and the flesh? They have no relevance, no truth, nor are they practicable, except detrimentally, ruinously, to life in its cycle of mani-

50

festation in physical forms. They stand in direct contravention to evolution in this phase of its operation. Not withdrawal, detachment and soul isolation, but attachment, even to the point of union with matter in a final orgiastic rapture, is the way to authentic blessedness for the spirit-unit of man's divine sonship while it is on the earth. As Egypt has said, the soul migrates here (Paul says "we are a colony of heaven" settled on earth) to exchange the too ethereal ambrosia and nectar of heaven for "the bread of Seb," a more substantial nutriment for the rigors of adventure in matter's realm.

All that spiritual philosophy strains to achieve by detachment and sublimation of consciousness here on earth is completely out of harmony with the cosmic motive of the downward move to incarnation, because these objectives are set for the second and reverse phase of the round. All that the "occult" aspiration seeks to realize here by withdrawal from outward focus of life interest will be naturally achieved toward the later stages of the movement back to the empyrean. Then the raucous voices of the senses, the feelings, even at last the mind, will be stilled without any of the unnatural repressions imposed by misguided zealotry on the natural self. The arrant persuasion of mystic religionism that the soul's highest interests are to be served by forcefully detaching it from those connections it came here for the very purpose of effecting and profiting by, ends by turning the quest and the cultus of spiritual truth quite upside down. Soul came, or was sent here, in quest of earthly values which it could not get in heaven. To preach down, to deny and to vilify those values and the instrumentalities of their realization is to defeat the ends of the incarnation itself. The surcease from mortal pain, the release from the domination of consciousness by outer sense, the attainment of the peace that passeth understanding, come without strain as the migrant soul approaches the completion of its cycle. To inject these motives into the midst of the fleshly arc of the cycle when the purposes of the mundane pilgrimage are not to be fulfilled by detachment but by positive union with the physical forces, is a miscarriage of practical philosophy repugnant to the spirit of life and hostile to its prime interest.

If the general voice of Indian philosophy has consistently sounded the theme of detachment and negation over so many centuries, this in itself is to be scrutinized as a strange and portentous

51

circumstance, because, as it now transpires under more critical scrutiny, this note was not at all in harmony with the tenor of the venerable Vedic scripts of the divine wisdom. These hoary texts did not decry and denounce the world, nature and matter. On the contrary, they rated them as the other half, or opposite pole, of the spiritual energies and accorded them as the other half, or opposite pole, of the spiritual energies and accorded them equality of rank and importance with the spiritual. So positive was this evaluation that Radhakrishnan, eminent Hindu philosopher-statesman of present day India, in his great work on Indian Philosophy, sums up the exposition of this aspect of the Upanishad systems by saying that, according to the Vedic wisdom, for the human "to deny the world without is to destroy the god within." This single affirmation, if given the weight it legitimately should exert, would instigate a complete reversal of most Hindu spiritual bent and shift the main focus of Oriental philosophy from mystical heavens back to mother earth. The orientation of emphasis and relocation of value which it makes necessary could inaugurate a new and happier epoch in all world religion.

The view expressed by the sentence was grounded on the consideration of the great law of polarity which places the soul in affirmative relation to the negative force of matter and the body. Its coming into body to stand as the positive pole of the balance between itself and body made it entirely dependent upon its partner in the twinship for the actualization of its living potential. Its own highest faculties were, as Plotinus has so clearly demonstrated, to be brought to manifestation only out of the tension which life ever establishes between the pole-ends of spirit and matter. To attempt to eliminate or reduce the strength of the pull from either end could only result in a defeat of the purpose cosmically envisaged in the relation.

If this affirmation of the factual beneficence of the incarnation voiced in the primeval Indian philosophy is found to be substantiated, it is now receiving, after endless reiteration of an opposing view negative to earth experience, strong endorsement and a renaissance of its influence through the exposition of Radhakrishnan's illustrious compeer in philosophy, Sri Aurobindo. In his great work referred to, The Life Divine, he reiterates the pronouncements of India's Upanishadic wisdom, asserting the positive value of the earth experience, of nature and of matter. "Matter, too, is Brah-

52

man," he quotes from the Upanishads. The testimony of the senses is, equally with the voice of the spirit, a valid ingredient in the being of the universal Atman. Some of the trenchant sentences from his pen must be introduced to demonstrate how decisively the affirmation of the value of the world life is asserted in the writings of a most eminent Hindu thinker. The massive verdict of what he announces is virtually to declare that the philosophies urging man to seek the forms of truth within the depths of his own inner area of abstraction is to seek for them just where they will not be found.

It is to be made clear that sitting in quiet and reflecting deeply upon the problems with which life confronts the mind is not to be overtly condemned an necessarily a false or futile practice. Reflection in the silence which deep thinking requires is virtually a prerequisite for any philosophic enterprise and an essential form of exercise for spiritual culture. Profound thought in meditative silence is not the object of any attack in this connection. What is under critique is the body of theoretical correlatives that have been made accessory to the dialectic of the yoga cult practice, especially in popularized Hindu conceptions, chiefly the presumption that the outer world must be shut out of consciousness because it is alleged to be a hindrance to the apprehension of truths as to which its sensual testimony speaks always a false message. The position here to be reasserted with the strong support of Aurobindo's incisive dialectic is that, while silence is a proper and propitious adjunct, an influence favorable to profound realizations, the silence itself is not to be considered a magic-land in which the forms of truth lie in a darkness that is to be pierced by the light shining in an emptied mind. That is to say that silence itself is not a voice of truth, or a magical agent of its revelation. It is simply an aid to contemplation, not itself an utterer of verity. Indeed unless the mind of the contemplative brings into its cloistered retreat the elements for the fruitful exercise of faculty, it is as likely as not to leave thought as blank as its own emptiness. The true magic-worker in the case is not the silence, but the power which the ancient seers always termed the great "magician," the power of mind. The negative spiritual ideology would still the very power by which the ego might work the magic of its divinization.

And silence is by no means certified as the only or even the best external condition or agency for the soul's exaltations. Music

53

is not silence, and music can lift the ego-consciousness to sublime heights, when silence would leave it stolid and inert. Many an individual would testify that music has bathed his soul in an aura of cathartic afflation which no other mode of spiritual stimulus could yield it. The shrilling song of a meadow-lark on a May morning can do for a receptive spirit what silent brooding could never do. The morning threnody of the winter wind outside the house or the murmuring breeze in the boughs of a pine tree speak a magic language that silence could never utter. Mind is a faculty of consciousness that can perform its function only when it has factual data to work upon. The cult theory is that it is a hindrance because it blocks the path to a higher mode of consciousness. It is difficult to understand how that faculty which enables a living entity to safeguard its own safety, to make its choice of good action over evil, to follow the dictates of wisdom and reject those of folly, to grow intelligent instead of remaining ignorant, can be in any way an obstacle to the soul's highest good. If there is to be developed a conscious power higher than that of the mind, it must come forth to function only after all "lower" faculties have been evolved to the limit of their capabilities, and not through the reaching down of a higher to "kill" the ones below it. Powers developed at all levels are to subsist and function beside each other in a harmony, and the deployment of the last power is to gather up and synthesize all preceding it as the perfected chord of the cycle's whole gamut of tones. Only in the sense that the earliest and lowest modes of conscious being are finally assimilated into the consummative blending of all tones in an ultimate harmony can it be said that an evolving ego uses a higher power to kill a lower.

For the mind to gain proficiency in the power to focus its point of consciousness upon one thing, it must have some one thing to fix it upon. It can not focus on vacancy, although even this extreme of futile practice has at times been urged in Hindu systems. For the most part, only vacancy of mind has been the net result of the great cult effort to make the mind one-pointed. When abstraction is carried to its utmost limit, nothing is left to meditate upon.

Aurobindo states all this so clearly that henceforth there will be no excuse for further exploitation of untenable views in the case.

"Our mind works best and with a firm confidence when it is given a substance to work on, or at least to use as a base for its

54

operation, or when it can handle a cosmic Force of which it has acquired knowledge . . . It is sure of its place when it has to deal with actualities; this rule of dealing with objective or discovered actualities and proceeding from them for creation is the reason for the enormous success of physical science."

And who shall say nay to the correlative assertion that the small success of passive in-pointed meditation is due to the fact that the effort is made to have the mind work on fantasy or in vacancy, with nothing to serve as the point of focus? So here the great modern Hindu sage takes a stand against the claim that the mind blocks the outflow of a more dynamic inner mode of consciousness. He is party to the opposite assertion that to close off the mind from outer actuality and to go within for the discovery of forms of eternal truth, is to go precisely away from where those forms are to be found. For, says this profound thinker, in turning the mind from the outer into the inner, the movement goes from the world of form and structure into a world of the formless and the indeterminate. The external world provides for contemplation the actual forms of created reality, which must speak the truth of the cosmic mind. In the inner subjective area there are only such forms as the human at the stage of his present development can project there. And there is no guarantee that the forms he is capable of projecting at the moment owe their origin to anything other than wayward fancy, feeble and erroneous human thinking, or even emotional hysteria or abnormal morbidity. They may or may not match the true forms of being already existent in the world outside. In stepping out of the existent world into that of purely subjective consciousness, one goes away from a world that is part of the cosmos of the divine creation, the world of law and order, and plunges into one that is really no world, but a limbo of every sort of disordered human aberrancy. Yet in it the cult thesis promises us that we shall find reality, as the world of divine creation here can not show it to us.

In going within we go from the world of the many-sided epiphany of deity back toward the world of unity; and the divinity only reveals his glorious nature in the outer many, never in the inner oneness. He can build nothing with but one stone; he must have unlimited smaller stones to enable him to construct his infinitely varied designs. We go from the manifest creation, where the hidden

55

nature of true being is put on display for our instruction and edification, back into the dark void of the unmanifest. In unity of being all is blank uniformity. The mind has nothing, as Aurobindo says, to take hold of, to base any reflection upon. Thought stagnates, as does the body, when it has nothing to supply it with stimulus and nourishment. In going within, we go from things to no-thing.

If truth be told, it is quite likely that this outcome is the experience of practically all, especially in the Occident, who have studiously endeavored to follow Oriental prescription for the practice of meditation in the silence. Many trying it have found this to be the case and give it up, and thenceforth resolved to set their minds to work on specific matters and problems connected with, or suggested by, the actualities of the life in this world,--and found a stable satisfaction from that time onward.

The power which pure subjectivism can exert to derationalize human mentation can be seen as terribly subtle and insidious when it is noted that philosophy of this strain asserts in its extreme application not only that for liberation the mind, in the wake of the senses and the emotions, must be killed out, but that the individual self, too, must be destroyed. We are asked or adjured to abolish ourselves as entities. It is interesting to see what our eminent Hindu philosopher has to say as to that:

"Yet it is in the mind and its form of life and body that we exist on earth; and, if we must abolish the consciousness of mind, life and body in order to reach the One Existence, consciousness and bliss, then a divine life here is impossible."

If a modern Hindu voice utters a refreshing message of sanity on this score, so has a voice of the "Biblical times" that we call ancient, one that has gained a world hearing in the pages of canonized Scriptures. St. Paul beautifully states that "God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God . . . But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us." What God has put in earthen vessels can be relied upon; what we attempt to embody in our thought structures can claim no such certitude. Paul's statement is a much-needed reminder to us that we are humans on earth and not wispy seraphim in heaven. His declaration can be of service in

56

jolting idealist visionaries out of their trance and bringing them back into this world, where divine love has placed them for their education. Always their ideology strains after the heaven state, for the attainment of which naturally they have to predicate and preach the destruction of every vestige of the earth consciousness. But the soul is on earth for express purposes under the ordinances of the cosmic intelligence; to defeat these ends by nullifying the modes of cognition essential to their achievement is to flout and defy the will of the eternal Providence.

Virginia Moore, in her charming survey of the varied attitudes of many peoples toward death, Ho For Heaven, summarizes the sharp contrast between the views of the Greeks and the Hindus as to the dead in two epigrammatic sentences:

"The Hindus despised the body, living or dead. The Greeks loved the body and despised it dead, only because it could no longer support that all-important present consciousness."

This says that the Greeks were in love with life here; the Hindus, on the contrary, hated life in body and bore up with it only under stern, sullen philosophical sufferance. We might search through whole libraries and not find so sententious a statement in support of the position taken in this essay as that penned by Miss Moore. Here is disclosed with perfect frankness the ground and root cause of all of India's earth-hating ideologies. It may be disputed; the characterization may be alleged to be too sweeping, too dogmatic; reservations would diminish the sharpness. Nevertheless this is the conclusion to which a singularly discerning student, along with numberless others, has been led by extensive reading. Her utterance is made not as a personal opinion, but as an accepted fact in the academic world.

As India conceived a shuddering repugnance to the body, the Greeks, says Miss Moore, "had a fundamental horror of living apart from the body." The Greek would rather be a lowly one on earth than a king in the realm of the dead. The moments of life here were precious jewels that could be made to sparkle with the sunny glint of joyous realizations of the magnitude and majesty of being.

If earth life be not arbitrarily ruled out as a fulcrum on which to base the lever for the uplifting of living values, and heaven alone be elected to that function, it is pertinent to institute a comparison

57

which would speak in almost shouting tones of the historical demonstration of the salutary influence of the Greek love of life and body, in contrast to the less wholesome result of the Hindu distaste for the life here. It is indeed seldom that history comes out with so unequivocal an object lesson on the theme that a people's philosophical attitudes and traditions set the stamp of their character on the life of whole nations or civilizations.

The Greeks loved life in the body and therefore loved the body that kept that life aglow and the earth that sustained the body. Therefore they are the nation acclaimed in world history as the people who brought the human body to its highest point of health and beauty, as the outward and visible evidence of the spirit's inward joyousness. The Hindus despised life and body and the earth which supported both. In consequence life was so burdensome that the mind developed a veritable loathing of it. The body suffered neglect, if not overt crucifixion, and speaking at large, lacked beauty. The world and the flesh lay under a cloud of constant mental disapprobation, while a despised and neglected earth barely sustained life in the millions of bodies even in a tropical land. Philosophical truths or errors can thus become matters verily of life or death to whole civilizations.

58

The wholesome influences that the soul seeks in incarnation are here on earth, else she would not have been sent here to receive the baptism of their benignant unction. To come here to obtain them, and then through fallacious persuasions to turn away from them and shut them out, is to pursue a jungle by-path to folly and disaster. To miss the influences of earth in their realistic form is to miss the fostering ministrations of the soul's true mother. Because of the nearly universal plague of religious doctrinism scorning earth and the body, we have lived for centuries in the shell of a negative tradition so solidly encrusted around us that we have never been able to receive or recognize the benign and salutary impact of nature's gracious forces. We have isolated ourselves from nature and so have broken the line of current of health that would have flowed from her dynamic springs for our life's renewal. In being sent here from on high, we have been thrust into our earth-mother's lap to partake of just such nutriment. We have been inserted, so to say, between the pages of the book of living reality in whose sentences have been inscribed the reading lessons of eternal verity, and we have not yet learned how to read the script. Out in the open field of nature, and not in the hazy and misty recesses of the brooding mind, stand the great letters of the primer of life instruction.

It may be timely to answer the prospective question as to how souls came here. If their presence here is a supportable fact, it will be wondered why the rationale of this prime item of truth has not been the quest of universal inquiry. The reason for its being kept so deep in shadow is that the great literature which had embalmed the clues to the secret, the mythologies, the Mystery rituals, the esoteric instruction in the Academies, the books of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Plutarch, the Kabalah, the Hermetic writings, the Orphic Hymns, The Chaldean Oracles, The Book of Nabothean Agriculture, the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, the Talmud and the Bible had never been read with either the keys or the power to discern their true cryptic purport. The blind violence of the Christianized Roman powers that closed the Platonic Academies in the Hellenic world, threw away the keys that might have unlocked their inner casket of mystery. The Italian Renaissance

59

pried open the lock and raised the lid, but not far enough to give a full clear view of the precious treasure.

How did the forms of truth come to be out there in nature? The answer is simple: the divine mind conceived them and put them there. They are there because they are the precipitated end products of its thinking. They are the physical echo of the uttered words of God's voice, his divine Word, his Logos, frozen in solid matter. The ringing tones of his voice carried the form of his divine ideas outward and ended their course in the arms of matter. His archetypal ideas were snagged by the inertia of matter and held bound in the world of visible tangible forms; and here they stand before us.

Yet these utterances of eternal truth are the very things that the errant spiritual cult votaries have for centuries been calling the deceptive husks of illusion. These things, they keep harping, give us a false message. Our senses and minds are the agencies of deception; they convey to us an untrue report on verity. India has built up her philosophies on the claimed necessity of our blotting them out. Greece, on the other hand, in the wake of hoary Egyptian sagacity, has more rationally declared that we must see the ideal truth which they adumbrate and be instructed thereby. Now the Hindu Aurobindo swings from the Indian tradition and agrees with the Greeks. This can have propitious repercussions for all the world.

If the mind of God created the world by its thinking, the world and its constituent forms embody his thoughts, his intellectual designs, his mental formulation of the cosmos to be. It must be accounted a tragic circumstance that in all the centuries of spiritual endeavor the chief forces of religion have urged us to look not at the visible work that openly reveals his mind-forms, but away from them in the dark purlieus of the humanly incompetent mind. Odd it must be considered that religious science has never directed the human thought energies to study God's handiwork. It could always have been presumed that from inspection of his finished production could be divined the nature of the mind that created it.

Yet is has been loudly proclaimed as almost the central principle of the many "new-thought" movements that "thought is creative." Man creates himself and his personal world over the pattern of what he thinks. Yet this and kindred movements failed

60

to point out what should have been the most immediate practical outcome of their philosophy: that God's created works must then reflect the order of his mind. They should have proclaimed that the Logos of creation lay before us in the open book of nature and that we must learn there to read what God has written.

Unsound religious theory, however, made the mistake of confusing the two worlds being created, the macrocosm, or God's world, and the human's little world, the microcosm. It leaped far ahead to the egregious and unwarranted conclusion that if thought is the creative force, then man by his thought could alter the universe, that is, the macrocosm, and so remake the world over his thought pattern. It did not reflect that the thought which created and recreates the world is God's thought, and therefore is not subject to change by man's puny intellection. The universe over which a man's thought is creative is the little universe compressed within the confines of his physical body and its immediate environment. In that world his mind can wield the magical wands of creative power. The universe is God's body and in and over it the divine mind wields the formative power. It is hardly man's prerogative to complicate the natural forces by injecting his mental decrees into their ordained regularity. But God grants full right to his sons to create their own universes, although he has distinctly told them that their creation must be over the pattern of his and employ the same principles he has used in his world building. And in order that they may have full and unrestricted opportunity to learn the configuration of his creation, as a model for their own lesser one, he has set them in the midst of his world, in which, if they will but note it, every operation bespeaks the thought that generated it, and in which every brook, tree and insect announces a principle of God's work. Even man himself will find that he is embraced in the orbit of the worlds. God is sovereign Lord over his domain; we are to imitate his work, as Plato said, but in our subordinate kingdom. "My mind to me my kingdom is," can be man's shibboleth; but my mind is not the lord in God's greater kingdom. We are cells in his immense body, it is true; but our rulership is over our cell, with a limited influence reaching out to touch other cells close to us. We do not dominate God's cosmic body.

Had our intelligence been equal to the task of rightly interpreting the Scriptures that were designed to be our guiding light,

61

we could long ago have been instructed where to look for the patterns over which we are to model our minor creations. For in those Scriptures the Lord orders us to build up a tabernacle in which he may be raised up,--since he had buried his creative seed deep in matter in our constitution, and therefore to us he must look to be raised in these cells of his being. And in building this house not made with hands we are instructed to "see that thou build it after the pattern that I have shown thee in the mount, the pattern of the heavens." The heavens are not in this passage the skies above our heads; they are the worlds of noumenal supernal consciousness, the heavens of divine thought. But, says God, I have shown thee the reflected image and pattern of this divine thought in the mount. And where and what is that mount? Stupid literalism grossly took it to be a hill in the triangle between Egypt and Arabia,--Mount Sinai. A more discerning interpretation locates it in the heights of illumined cosmic consciousness. But it has just been indicated that those are the "heavens." So the "mount" must be somewhere else. And, sure enough, to the blank astonishment of purblind exegetists, it transpires at last that the Biblical "mount" is just our lowly earth itself. The temptation, the divine sermon, the transfiguration, the crucifixion and the ascension, all of which are enacted in the flesh, take place "on the mount." The ark landed on Mount Ararat, and Ararat is from the Hebrew arets, the word for earth itself. The Latin word for world is mundus, the mound, the mount, earth.

So here on earth God has shown us the pattern-design of his creation, and by misreading his Scriptural instructions we have turned our gaze into the heavens, straining to read there the messages of the cosmic thought, when the pattern of it was all the while revealed to us in the world we were led to scorn and eschew. God has set the forms of his thought before us in the world, and we have sat with eyes closed, shutting out the very model that we were instructed to copy. All we need to do is to observe, study, meditate upon the visible nature, and the soul, the meaning and the glory of God's creative Logos will shine out to us in ever clearer tones of beauty.

Not hanging in the attic of our inner astral or supramental consciousness are those forms of the divine noumenon, but out there in nature, waiting to deliver their grand message when we have

62

learned to read their hieroglyphs. God in the Old Testament says that he will inscribe his laws in our hearts and in our minds will he write them. But how? He can not well write anything in a vacuum. He confronts our very eyes with these forms and those operations which reflect his laws, and from what our eyes can behold our minds and hearts can transfer the imprint onto their inner tablets of rationalization and memory. Divine ideas are not ghost pictures haunting people's auras. They are the actual physical and material realities into the midst of which our lives have been thrown, so that by constant contact we must eventually conform our ideation to the pattern held before us in the mount of earth. By daily association with them it is inevitable that sooner or later our intelligence will absorb their significance, will awaken to the realization that the world shows us the design of God's eternal law. For every physical object in this world there exists in the cosmic noumenal world a spiritual truth or law corresponding to it. The world is a mirror of God's mind. Spiritual law is the natural law, operating at a higher level.

Emerson tells us that "man stands midway betwixt the inner spirit and the outer matter. He sees that the one reflects the other, that the world is a mirror of the soul; and he becomes a priest and interpreter of nature thereby." Shakespeare reminds us that there are

Tongues in trees, sermons in stones,

Books in running brooks, and God in everything.

Not alone the burning bush in the Moses story, but every common shrub is aflame with God. "God is present in all his parts in every moss and cobweb," repeats Emerson. St. Paul writes that

"that which may be known of God is manifest; for the invisible things of him from the foundation of the world are clearly seen, being understood from those things which are made, even his eternal power and Godhood."

Hardly a century ago Henry Drummond gave us his The Natural Law in the Spiritual World, which should have introduced an era of enlightenment in all religion, but has now sunk back into desuetude and oblivion. But the most direct and potent of all intimations on this score has stood unnoticed in the Talmud of the Jews for many centuries: "If thou wilt know the invisible, open wide

63

thine eyes on the visible." We have noted Hermes' great pronouncement that that which is below is a copy of that which is above. And in this connection it is imperative to correct the errant conception which has inspired a wrong approach to the handling of this truth of ancient sagacity. Cult philosophy has fatuously striven to work the procedure of extracting the educative value from the formula by starting the mental movement from heaven to earth. But this is taking it in the wrong direction. It has prescribed the going within, or above, where nothing is visible, to discover the clues to the meaning of what is already visible. This is folly; it is impossible. We must proceed from the known to learn about the unknown, the invisible. From the objects and processes that can be observed and studied on earth we shall be able by analogy to formulate the principles of the divine order of being in the noumenal world above. Surely ancient sagacity did not ask us to gauge the visible from looking at the invisible. Paul says that these "invisible things of God" are clearly seen. Surely not where they are invisible! Where then! In the visible creation that his hands have made, which consists of those invisible things made visible.

For nearly a century the modern resurrectors of the archaic wisdom have been mouthing the shibboleth of this truth in the form of "as above so below." There is no question of its truth as thus stated; but there is a very serious question of its applicability and its usefulness in this form. From the point of view of man on earth it is practically meaningful and workable only when put in the reverse form: as below so above. Surely if one thing is like a second, the second must be like the first. But if one is visible and the other invisible, it is workable for actual enlightenment only if the procedure is from the one seen to the other unseen.

At one stroke the reversal of the direction in which the comparison is handled brings all religion back to earth for its meanings. The reoriented view shows that the pathway to heaven runs through the valley of earth. The Jacob's ladder by which soul-angels ascend and descend between heaven and earth rests its base on the earth.

Paul enjoins us to let that same mind be in us which was in the Christ principle. Man is made in the image and likeness of his Father creator, and therefore man's mind must reflect the same ideation as the intellect of its parent. But where has that ideation

64

already been manifested, put on view? In the forms and phenomena of nature. If we would see them where they are, we must look for them in the open field of the visible creation. It needs only that we put on the spectacles of the proper clarity and mental focus and we shall see the glory and the majesty of the supernal light of truth that nature reflects. God has expressed and therefore revealed himself in nature, his handiwork. He has put his soul into his work. Look there and one can greet that soul. The vision will transfigure the beholder. As St. Paul beautifully puts it:

"And we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image, from glory unto glory."

He who can feel God's presence only in a temple may be uplifted on a Sabbath; he who can discern him in nature can be transfigured every day in the week.

It registered as one of the most engaging truths the mind could ever come to apprehend when it came clear that our so-called laws of nature are the fixed activities of God's subconscious mind. This can be grasped as obvious truth if we reflect that the memory capability of mind is simply the strengthening of an impression or thought through repetition. God's primal conscious thoughts became permanently impressed on primordial matter through repetition or steady holding. Thoughts, like actions, become automatic by repetition. That is, they reproduce themselves without further attention from conscious mind. Life always subsists where a unit of consciousness functions in a body which polarizes and supports and instrumentalizes it. As the body is the product of the mind that it feeds, the result is that life everywhere imposes its modes and forms of thought upon the body. By repetition it causes the body to express and carry out what it aims to do and to be. So the fixed lines of thought become the fixed laws, the habitudes of the body. The body becomes the mind's kingdom of expression, its showground of epiphany. So those laws of life and mind which God says he will write upon his children's hearts and minds are his own creative archetypal ideas, now solidly materialized in nature. Having repeated them often enough, he turns them over permanently to the care of his automatic memory, his subconscious. He transmits them to the care and keeping of the body, which faithfully

65

executes them. Thus the body becomes the soul's avenue of its urge to express itself in the outer worlds. When the body picks them up and runs on with them, the higher conscious mind is freed to do new thinking for its future planning.

So that it becomes man's task simply to match in his consciousness and constitution the mind of God. This was the gist of Paul's admonition to us. And not inside the void that stretches above the range of our natural faculty, but outside in the world of the concrete actual, are found these forms of divine ideation to which man is to conform the pattern of his creative effort. Man is the child of God and never does this child go inside his own head for guidance and education; always he receives instruction from outside, from an authority and a wisdom above his own. As a child he starts in ignorance. His mind is an unwritten slate until from his tutelage based on study of what he finds external to him in the world, or from the transmitted wisdom of teachers before him, he begins to do his own writing of acquired and self-tested knowledge upon his tablet of understanding. Never can he go inside, sit placidly in expectation and look for the blank slate, so to say, to write itself full of supernal truth. He can not write out of a background of ignorance and vacuity. On his slate he will come in time to write those things which has been discerned in nature and from her abstracted by the mind's power to trace analogies. For there is scarcely any concept, spiritual recognition or cosmic principle, no matter how abstruse and abstract, that is not found expressed through the semantic intermediacy of some natural analogue in the external world. Whatever the human consciousness writes on its slate will be found at base to match, or be matched by, some fact in the world outside. It is impossible that it could match its ideas with those of the cosmic mind in the complete blankness and emptiness of its own initial states.

Man must fill the void of his intelligence with those things that will reproduce in himself a cosmos matching a larger one already formed. Let us hear our Hindu philosopher on this point: "For always mind must be identical with Supermind." He has said that our mind works best when given something substantial to work on. He says again and again that mind must deal with real being. But by a queer misturn of philosophical dialectic and specious logic the world of real being has been declared to be, not the actual world

66

outside, but that potential inner world subsistent in the unfathomable depths or rarefied heights of inner consciousness, which cult theory makes so tenuous that it must almost be described as inner unconsciousness. It in fact, on the presuppositions of cult theory itself, becomes not a world at all, but a void. Real being persists wherever there is a consciousness that can register its actualities. But when man essays to follow it beyond the range of his capabilities he loses touch with it and roams homeless in a barren desert. It can only become for him a world of real being when he can respond consciously to its tempo of vibration. There are untold areas of real being stretching out above man's present reach, but into which he can not roam with profit.

If by the world of real being reference had been unequivocally directed to the objective cosmos outside in nature, the sad wreckage of high philosophy would not have supervened, and we would have known all along where to look for instruction. Yes, the mind must build not in vacuity but in real being. It can not build its own cosmos arbitrarily or without regard to the cosmos to whose frame and design its own must conform. To do otherwise would be for it to step out of its own groove of being, its own line of evolution; in fact to undo itself, wreck and destroy itself. Its great work is to reproduce in itself the cosmos that is. So it must study the cosmos that is, observe its modes, habits, laws, catch its spirit and thus reproduce itself in its likeness.

In somewhat more technical language Aurobindo asserts this same positive fact. If, he says, we strive to lift ourselves out of the present realm of actuality into the unity of the Supreme Consciousness, we find ourselves in a world of indeterminables. In the absolute being there is, and can be, no specific character to anything. It is the world of no-thingness, because it is the world of unity. No part of it is different from any other part; it is homogeneous throughout. It is what the philosophers have called "the Boundless." Aurobindo remarks: "To be shut up in a featureless consciousness of unity, in ignorance of the manifested Brahman, is described also as a blind darkness." It is into this blind darkness that the most lauded forms of spiritual meditation will take one, the more certainly if the aim is to consciously abstract the mind from the actual world of real being into an alleged world of an hypothecated more real being, which turns out to be sheer emptiness.

67

At any rate all meditation must start from and be based on an actual world. It must build with the materials and on the premises furnished by the actual world lying outside. It can not be otherwise, when the soul comes fresh from the point of creation by its Father and has had as yet no experience by which any knowledge, truth or science of being could have been acquired. It starts out from the infancy of consciousness. It has not knowledge, but only the potential knowledge. As Aurobindo observes, it will not have material with which to build until it gathers it from the world outside. And if that world is treated with mental disdain and let go unnoticed, the soul will gather no building materials from it. It is in fact sent here in order to get the building blocks which are units of reality, so that it may be able to construct its miniature universe in harmony with the cosmic plan. It is from outside itself that it will obtain the forms and the pattern of the basic elements which it can ratiocinate into the principles of understanding. The pattern and the forms lie without, though the power that can rate them for meaning is latent within.

This sharp differentiation can chart a new path for culture to follow out of misty vagueness of "spiritual philosophy" into a true soul science. It will for the first time since Aristotle give to the religious effort its proper form and direction. It will save that effort from dissipating its energy out into vacuity. It will enable it to carry its enterprise of grasping real being forward to a far more vivid and realistic sense of accomplishment.

Aurobindo says that the objects of the world, our sense images, are representations of the constructive, creative ideas of God's Mind. They are therefore symbols, as he says, "of a truth which our lives are trying to express." It is a purblind philosophy that ignores them, holds them in contempt and denounces them as testifying falsely to us, when they are the symbols of the truths we were sent here to master, symbols indeed of the laws of our own being. But because India has originated the specious canard that a symbol is not a true thing because it is not the reality of the thing it symbolizes, the thing-in-itself, a world teeming with symbols of truth and reality has been scorned as a world of unreality and untruth. Even if the shallow view can be considered the truth--which it can not be, since the world objects are the things-in-themselves embodied in matter--it would be a slander on real objectivity, be-

68

cause it is unfair to condemn a thing for not being something that it makes no pretense at being, something other than what it is. A world object is a symbol, and it is unjust to condemn a symbol for not being the thing its symbolizes. This would be to denounce a portrait of a man for not being the man himself. Aurobindo confutes attitude when he says that our sense-images are "completely valid," because they represent not fiction or falsity, but real being. This pronouncement is so directly contradictory to the general cry of the invalidity of our sense experience that it merits the rating of epochal. When the function of an image is to represent something which can not be apprehended by sensible perception, it should not be charged with falsity and deception for failing to do more than represent. Its function is faithfully fulfilled in representing. The only fair criterion is whether it does faithfully represent what it stands for. And on this basis the objects of nature fully meet the test of validity.

The fault of so much negative preachment is found in its failure to know that the outer world does with absolute fidelity mirror the inner. It fails to know that nature symbols speak a true language, not a false one; that they are not to be spoken of as "mere" symbols, but symbols of something, and that something a true essence of being. There has been a fatal loss of primal knowledge that the outer and inner worlds are but the two facets of one and the same reality. The science of semantics has passed into desuetude because this inseparable identity of the two phases of reality had been lost sight of. The accepted definition of a sacrament should long ago have awakened the recognition of the verity of nature symbolism: it is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. How is man's mind to conceive the form and meaning of things noumenal and invisible except it receive intimations of their nature from their representatives in the visible area? Human minds are to be populated with ideal forms conceived over the pattern of things presented to experience.

The cult religions of the sort referred to have insistently emphasized mystical exaltation in the inner spheres of consciousness as being the short, sometimes allegedly instantaneous, road to human deification. The slogan has always been "spiritual mysticism," by which the individual unit of consciousness arrives at a realization of the presence of God or of its own identity with the be-

69

ing of God. Through an ineffable mystical afflation the soul rises to an enraptured state, a sublimation of feeling and knowing that floods the self with illumination.

But this fails to discriminate between a mysticism that can be good, fine, real and truly supernal to ordinary human grades of consciousness, and one that can in fact prove to be untrue to verity and miss the mark of genuine upliftment entirely. Mystical experiences can be baneful, senseless, erratic, destructive; they can be delusive, misleading and injurious. Modern psychology says they can often be "pure fantasy," founded on no basis of reality at all. Mysticism of the sort can lead to "seeing things" that are not in any way related to reality, but are phantoms of an unbridled imagination. It can indeed even lead to mental disorder, dementia, insanity, which in the main is just the matter of seeing things that are dissociated from reality and mistaking them for actual things.

And all this irrational mysticism comes from the courting of fanciful images in "meditation" in the empty halls of the mind, where there is nothing related to reality by which to gauge their authenticity for consciousness. It would be seen and made authoritative in the science of mind that a mysticism that carries its own credentials of divine sanction is always one that is grounded directly upon an actual base in natural reality. A large segment of the affectional life in humans is and must be of the mystical sort. Whatever affects us emotionally and aesthetically is of mystical order. The distinction as to whether the exalted feelings are wholesome and salutary, or the opposite, is to be discovered by noting whether they spring from baseless fancy, of purely subjective origin, or from the experience with actualities. Such forms of mysticism as the moving power of music, the emotion of friendship, the love of beauty, romantic passion, love of nature, feelings generated by the awesomeness of natural phenomena, the highest transports of delight, joy, wonder, awe, the noblest elevations of feelings, our divinest upliftments,--all these are forms of a mysticism that draws its genuineness from sources undeniably real. Music, nature, a loved person, an object's beauty, nobility of character, warmth of devotion are solid realities, components of the environment that is meant to generate wholesome influences in the human psyche. In such high mystical moments the living nature retains its regulative hold on the mounts of the mind by keeping them tied to reality. If the

70

introvert method, as it aims deliberately to do, cuts its tie with its bases in reality, it risks drifting or darting off into by-paths of errant fancy, which all too readily hypostatizes its creations as realities. The heroic aspiration of the noble human spirit is to march "in tune with the infinite." It might be said that a humbler and more practical ambition would be to keep the human life "in tune with the actual." To be sound and truly cathartic, mysticism must maintain its direct connection with the verities of the earth and the objective nature. As long as this link is maintained the influences flowing from the original precipitation of the divine ideas into embodied forms will be beneficent. But if the currents from the actual creation be cut off, if the psyche be uprooted from its supporting ground-bed in nature, the fruit of the psychological tree of life will be hybrid at best and unnourishing. To be maintained in health, minds must be kept rooted in the actual world. For this they migrated to earth. Here they behold God's thoughts actualized. And if it be remembered that one's own mentation, if it be wayward, can hypnotize one, with the dire result of making an imagined fiction world turn into a real world for the subject, the danger of tragic mental aberrancy looms large.

It becomes increasingly evident that the great prevalence of psychic neurosis in the present world can be traced largely to the gross and massive tendencies in the religious culture to exalt the spirit and disparage matter, the world and the body, which thus destroy the healthful relation between the two ends of the polarity in the individual's life. It is true enough for restatement that millions of people have wrecked their lives by accepting the religious infatuation that nature and life itself are hostile to the interests of their immortal souls.

71

One of the most marked phenomena of twentieth century history undoubtedly is the rapprochement now taking place between the religious philosophies of the Orient and Occident. It is to be questioned whether an adequate study of this event has been undertaken in the field of psychology. A full survey of the incursion of Hindu spiritual systems into the Western world has been made by Mr. Wendell Thomas in his Columbia University degree dissertation, Hinduism Invades America, to be cited later. In an edition of an ancient Chinese classic called The Secret of the Golden Flower, published some years ago, some pertinent comment appears in a Foreward by Dr. Richard Wilhelm, which it is desirable to quote:

"The relation of the West to Eastern thought is a highly paradoxical and confusing one. On one side, as Jung points out, the East creeps in among us by the back door of the unconscious, and strongly influences us in perverted forms; and, on the other, we repel it with violent prejudice as concerned with a fine-spun metaphysics that is poisonous to the scientific mind.

If any one is in doubt as to how far the East influences us in secret ways, let him but briefly investigate the fields covered today by what is called 'occult thought.' Millions of people are included in these movements and Eastern ideas dominate them all. Since there is nowhere any sign of a psychological understanding of the phenomena on which the ideas are based, they undergo a complete twisting and are a real menace in our world.

A partial realization of what is going on in this direction, together with the Westerner's native ignorance and mistrust of the world of inner experience, build up the prejudice against the reality of Eastern wisdom . . . . Mastery of the inner world, with a relative contempt for the outer, must inevitably lead to great catastrophe. Mastery of the outer world, to the exclusion of the inner, delivers us over to the daemonic forces of the latter, and keeps us barbaric despite all outward forms of culture. The solution can not be found either in deriding Eastern spirituality as impotent, or by mistrusting science as a destroyer of humanity. We have to see that the spirit must lean on science as its guide in the world of reality, and that science must turn to spirit for the meaning of life . . . .

The reshaping of values in progress today forces the modern mind out of a nursery world of collective traditions into an adult's world of individual choice. He knows that his choice and his fate now turn upon his understanding of himself. Much has been taught him in recent years about the hitherto unsuspected elements in his psyche, but the emphasis is all too often on the static side alone."

72

The view presented here certainly can not be considered unbalanced; it points to the high value of Oriental spirituality. Yet it characterizes the sweep of Hindu ideologies into the West as fraught with grave menace. It intimates in its last words what is perhaps the weightiest charge against the Eastern philosophies, that they strain to abstract the consciousness of humanity out of the flow of its evolution in a time process and fix it in a static immobility, making bliss synonymous with motionlessness and the destruction of time.

Deep in the heart of the Eastern spiritual systemology is the great doctrine of maya, a word practically synonymous with illusion. If, as Dr. Wilhelm avers, the Oriental thought contains an element poisonous to the scientific mind, it streams forth mainly from this element in the Eastern dogmatism. Since this doctrine, which received its most authoritative exposition and promulgation in the system of the sage Sankaracharya, has set the character of nearly all Hindu systematism, it is purposed here to subject it to as searching a scrutiny as possible, in as much as its influence weighs heavily in determining vital issues for the future of world life. It will enter deeply into a large portion of the discussion throughout.

As an example of how it has been employed in the formulation of the dogmas of various cult systems, we may present Mr. Wendell Thomas's condensed summarization of the teachings of the modern Swami Vivekananda:

"Reduced to clear outline the argument runs as follows: God is the only reality. The world is quite separate from God. Hence the world is unreal. Now the function of religion is to give men true escape from the world into God."

He follows this shortly with the statement:

"There is not an orthodox Hindu cult that does not regard the world as the result of an undesirable causal cycle, and reality as the realm of painless bliss. The highest good, then, is obviously some kind of escape from the world into bliss . . . the advaita or acosmic pantheism of Sankara gives the simplest and most uncompromising presentation of this ideal."

He also cites another of those Swamis who have brought Hinduism to America, Yogananda, as holding that "there is no value in the finite, in life itself."

73

Speaking of maya, Aurobindo writes:

"If maya creates its forms, yet erects a superstructure which has nothing to do with reality, is not true, or potential in reality . . . it makes things that are not possible, or in accordance with it."

This restates the idea enunciated above. If in our use of the gift of fancy our mind constructs forms that have no basis in actual verity, it creates impossible things, spurious creatures. Such illegitimate formations, such hybrid products, should be seen as the real illusion. And it is an illusion that can go on into delusion. The mind that attempts this sort of creation of its own world, having as a preliminary emptied itself of all forms derived from experience with the outer world, will build over no pattern related to reality, will build without substantial bricks, and will end by building monstrosities and chimeras. The folly of perpetrating such a miscarriage when God, the cosmic mind, has revealed to us the pattern of his living truth in the forms he has created in the world, must be evident.

The great and basic question now arises: why has philosophy so universally pronounced our life here an illusion? By what warrant does it call our life here maya? For directly negating this position in philosophy stands the universal verdict of human experience that all the show of things in the world is entirely real. It is by no means a naive belief that our life here is our chance to gain whatever glory life in the large has to offer its creatures. Yet philosophy has insisted that the consciousness that life develops in us is unreal, is deceptive, an illusion. Our limited sensory and mental equipment it avers, shuts us off from the real world. They are an obstruction to our perceiving and knowing the real world. Our life here is a dream, not a reality, and our paraphernalia for contacting the physical creation about us, in which our lives are cast, prevents our waking out of the dream. We are like somnambulists, acting our parts in a dream.

So India, in primis, asks us to be rid of the equipment of sense, of emotion and of mind, all of which keeps us in the dream. It would persuade us that if we can throw these off, inhibit their inhibitions, we may stand free from the delusion of the dream.

But Aurobindo asks (as every sane mind must ask) why and how did unreality come to be a product of the operation of the cos-

74

mic mind? The question confronts thought again with the old, old problem of the origin of evil, how it got inwoven into the texture of eternal good. And Aurobindo answers:

"Even the illusionist must admit that Maya, the power of self-illusion in Brahman, is potentially eternal in potential being; and then the sole question is its manifestation or non-manifestation."

Then he says that we have to assume that the power of Supreme Being imposes this life as an experience of illusion on itself!

And why should it do such a thing, which seems to intimate it is attempting to indulge its freedom of action by imposing a delusion on itself? Does not philosophy run out into fantastic nonsense in presenting such a solution seriously? Can we rationally conceive of life entertaining the purpose of hypnotizing itself, casting over its own eyes a veil through which all its experience here would appear in the unreal forms and colors of a dream? Certainly it must be assumed to be rational to think that the experience here would not be one that deludes, but one that would yield reality and true satisfactions.

Well, then, can philosophy supply the answer to the alternative question: why would the eternal consciousness subject itself to the illusory play? And Aurobindo answers it; as the German philosopher Fichte answered it; as ancient philosophy answered it: life indulges in this creative play because it gives it delight, because it yields enjoyment to the consciousness disporting itself in the play. Agreeing with all archaic wisdom, Aurobindo says that life's motive in creation is Lila, translated as the play, the sport, the joy, the recreation of God. The eternal Consciousness-Force (as Aurobindo terms it) is free to do what it pleases. And, says the philosopher, as part of its play, it pleases to put its seed units, by which it eternally renews its sense of self-existence, under limitation,--in effect to put chains on itself.

Again we have to ask why. And again the final, the only competent answer comes: for Lila, for delight. The Hindu thinker sums it up:

"If, then, being free to move or stand still, to throw itself into forms or to retain the forms in itself, it indulges its power of movement and formation, it can only be for one reason,--for Delight."

And he elucidates:

75

"The world, then, is the play of the mother of things, moved to cast herself forever into infinite forms and avid of eternal outpouring experiences. If we look at World-Existence, rather in the relation of the self-delight of eternally existent Being, we may regard, describe and realize it as Lila, the play, the child's play, the poet's joy, the actor's joy, the mechanician's joy, of the Soul of things, eternally young, perpetually inexhaustible, creating and recreating himself in himself for the sheer bliss of self-creation; of that self-representation, of God himself at play, himself the play, himself the player, himself the playground."

Here at last, in the most forthright terms, is the answer to the great riddle of existence, and it is stated by one of the most astute minds of the modern age and in full agreement with ancient seership. Yet the answer, to naive mentation, appears irrational, arbitrary, even whimsical and fantastic, particularly in view of the realization, never very far out of mind, that this experience which gives the gods delight entails suffering, even for the young god-units that undergo it. So that the eternal question retains the dilemma which it forever presents to human thinking, for the answer given by philosophy sets up an obvious clash between a motive of delight and an experience of suffering, virtually arguing that life extracts delight out of suffering. If for play God imposes suffering upon himself or even upon his children, then somehow suffering must yield delight or itself be of the essence of delight.

But this word suffering needs a better analysis and definition, as it is found used in theologies. From the Latin sub-(suf)fero, it means to carry on under limitation, or simply to undergo experience. It need not necessarily involve the unit of experience in what the word suffering commonly connotes, the experience of pain and distress. The ancient understanding puts it in clearer and far more acceptable light. It means simply that the unit of potential divine life, which we call a soul, is and remains only potential until it unfolds latent capabilities into actual faculties and powers, which can only accrue to it as the result of an experience that subjects it to a tension and a pressure between the two poles into which its original unity is split apart, the only condition that implements the conversion of its potential into actually conscious being.

This is philosophy's final and adequate answer to any and all questions challenging the logic of "suffering" in a scheme of total good. If life's original unity is not broken apart into the duality of

76

consciousness and object, it will remain unconscious of itself. It will do or be nothing. It will remain forever static; will never enjoy the delight of feeling, seeing itself grow, never know the joy of living, conquering, expanding in power. It would remain eternally asleep. On the contrary, its law, under which it binds itself, requires it to alternate perpetually between periods of sleep and periods of waking, periods of activity and periods of rest. By such a rhythm it accentuates to its consciousness the realistic experience of each node by way of contrast with its opposite. Each phase gives to the other its sense of actuality, the source of the creative delight--Lila.

Says Aurobindo on this: "The world-existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva, which multiplies the body of God numberlessly to the view." If God is to give himself the delight of further growth, he must do so by multiplying the number of fragments into which from the first two and the three, he subdivides his being to endless multiplicity and multiformity. From his unity he projects numberless seeds of himself and gives to each the potential of infinite growth. The multiplication and growth of the countless units of his body infinitely increase the dimensions of his own life, his glory and magnitude. But, for each unit to grow, to have birth and growth, it must undergo (etymologically suffer) the experience which is necessary to awaken its latent capacities into self-conscious becoming. And, says Aurobindo, "the only being is becoming." Polarity is the sole awakening power, the ineluctable way for being to actualize becoming. The human mind can philosophize truly and to sound conclusions only when this principle is integrated in the premise of thought. Once it is grasped and given due weight, the sole remaining source of wonder is why this experience of becoming should ever have been, in philosophy, tabbed with the name of "illusion." For if the experience can not be categorized as real, we can then have no experience of reality, since this is all the chance at life we have. To get rid of this grade of existence, in order to gain a truer reality, now appears to stand out in all the glaring crudity of its folly. To throw away what we have, with nothing to replace it but an empty void, seems too illogical to be even debated.

And Aurobindo comes forward here with the statement that this world experience, which cult religion so bitterly denounces, is positively part of the eternal Brahman itself, and is therefore a part of eternal reality. God's own experience with matter, shared

77

through our experience with it, is part of the reality of ever-existent being. It is not separate from it and contrary and hostile to it. Brahman projects his self-being out into these many forms of expression, not that he may have less abundance of life, but surely that he may have more. You can not multiply an ear of corn unless you plant its many grains. And this world is the Eden in which God plants us, the seeds of his great being. It should signify everything of moment in the authentication of this philosophical dialectic, that the Gan Eden, in which God planted his children, means "the Garden of Delight."

Through his seed units God undergoes this experience so that he may convert more and ever more of his latent unknown and untried potential of life and being into actualized self-knowledge. And although the ordeal of birth and growth of these cells in his body is necessarily attended with a certain stress and strain--as their birth-throes--still the joy of feeling the emergence of his powers and faculties is the rich reward of delight that arises from the experience. In this view the "ordeal of life" takes on the vivid hues of thrilling adventure, as every step is haloed with the joyous surprise of unexpected discovery of new genius. The only intrinsic source of lasting joy is the sense of mastery over new powers. As the process moves onward, the expectation of further revelations and ampler satisfactions generates a zest that then enhances and quickens the drama to heightened tempo. This goes on until, as India so clearly indicates, the soul undergoing the experience approaches as an end goal, a state of transcendent bliss,--ananda.

But the unbalanced handling of the maya philosophy errs in its presumption that this bliss is to be won simply by annulling, killing out, suffocating the run of physical experience, on the presupposition that if these "less real" modes of consciousness were pushed out of the way, the divine bliss would at once supervene in fulness. It is Aurobindo who makes the correction of this false assumption, in according to lower grades of active sense-life their full validity, indeed their indispensable utility in the scheme of progression. Not through its invalidation by an unwarranted dialectic, and crying for its eradication to release into consciousness a more radiant dynamism, but by "making use of this good thing," using Paul's words, is the road of evolutionary advance to be traversed.

With the Indian philosopher's masterly diagnosis we can per-

78

haps now see better what this maya in reality is, catching the corrected view that it is not in any way an experience of deception. He says that it is potential eternally in Brahman, so that Brahman can resort to its use at any time. The derivation of the word illusion becomes all-important here. It stems from the Latin word meaning to play, ludo, with the past tenses formed on the stem lus-. Illusion is the play activity, the play-exercise of God's mind in creation. It is the joyous thrill of trying his hand at creation. We, made in his image, derive our most genuine delight, pleasure and satisfaction from the labors of construction. The topmost joy in human life is the gratification we feel in having accomplished something masterfully, to have unfolded a new power. So Brahman uses its freedom to throw its energies into the tensional relation between positive and negative polarity, so that out of the exertion his potential being may evolve through becoming. In this, as observed, is the solid answer to the baffling question of philosophy. Seldom, if ever, has it been set forth so lucidly as we saw it in the passage quoted from Plotinus.

Confuting whole volumes of Hindu philosophical exposition, Aurobindo says that while the pure existent is a fact of the universal reality, that is, being detached from all circumscription by matter, "the movement of pure being down into matter for the purposes of becoming is also a fact." This straightforward assertion flatly contradicts the asseverations of its non-reality, which also imply its non-factuality. Aurobindo's thesis is that if the experience is integrally in Brahman, as he declares it is, its reality can not be impugned. And whatever it may be to higher creatures, gods, solar logoi, thrones, principalities, powers, archangels of the hierarchy, it is certainly real to us. The completely naive approach to the problem would seem to warrant our saying that if it is not real to the being undergoing it, it can hardly be rated as an experience. And for whom else would it be real? It would appear unthinkable that the entire mass-volume of human experience here should be an experience of unreality. If by any quirk of logic it might be held to be so, then it must be postulated that evolution has planned that we are to grow and unfold divinity through an experience of unreality. That elevates unreality to a place of grand utility in the cosmos. This dialectical strait is the predicament in which this negative philosophy of maya-illusion has involved itself. Can evolu-

79

tion be conceived as having employed falsehood and deception to promote life's conquest of reality? This is what the maya doctrine asks the mind to accept.

There are, however, several senses in which the word "play" can be considered, and it is not too easily determined which one is foremost in the ancient sages' use of the word. Aurobindo has gone straight with the ordinary meaning of play as recreation, sport, free active exercise. Perhaps also the meaning which would describe the creation as the play of the motions of God's mind, as we speak of the play of lights and shadows on a scene, is implicit. This would be a legitimate rendering of the word in its ancient usage. But it seems possible to read into it also the play of God, in the sense of his playing a part, acting a character, representing through his acting some deep true elements or aspects of reality which his outer show merely dramatizes. If the meaning of "play" is taken in this sense, there is at least a specious figurative warrant for philosophical thought to regard the outer creation as a mayavic curtain hiding a more real being behind it. But it goes no farther than to permit one to say that the outer show of phenomena is only relatively unreal. And that in the end concedes nothing to the maya doctrine, since to everything below the absolute truth and reality are only relatively true and real, as well as relatively untrue and unreal.

What is certainly important to notice is that this play of Brahman's mental creative activity carries no connotation of deception. Illusion, in the properly balanced sense of the term, it may possibly be, as granted in the preceding paragraph. But delusion it assuredly is not. Shallow handling of the concept in philosophy has taken illusion to be equivalent to delusion. This is a glaring blunder. The implications of the profound ancient philosophy have pointed the direct way to a capable understanding of the term maya. This word, beginning with the M that is found in all names of characters representing the motherhood of life, is the name of nearly all the mothers of the many Christ-figures in national religions: Maya, Maia, Mary, Moira, Myra, Myrrha, Miriam, May. This stands as a robust datum that challenges the philosophical denunciation of the world, matter, the body, the flesh. For, whether it be rated as a deception or a reality; it is clear that in the philosophy behind mythology it is considered that the experience of reality in the body on earth brings the Christhood in humanity to its birth.

80

If the voice of a recondite ancient seership speaks truly in this depiction, then it is decisively proclaimed that, so far from being a delusion of the soul, the maya illusion is actually the maieutic, (how fittingly the word falls in here!) or mid-wife principle that brings our Christ nature to its birth! All diatribe and abuse of the matter element of the duality meets its rebuff and refutation in this item of the sagas of old-time wisdom. And the item establishes the truth that, if it is still in any way permissible to characterize the mundane experience as an illusion, then illusion again must be considered as wholly beneficent. Mythology furnishes the conclusive testimony that maya is the prolific alma mater of our Christhood! Let those who take their beliefs from priesthood without critical examination know that the despised berated evil element of matter is what they worship when they pay adoration to the Holy Mother and recite their "Hail Mary" salutations.

Pious indoctrinated belief and maya cult philosophy never stop to reckon the disastrous psychological consequences of their illusion and detachment ideologies upon human society. Whether it segregates the individuals devoted to it physically from the world, as in the migration of thousands into the Eastern deserts in the early centuries of Christianity, or merely results in the abstraction of mental interests from the life of the world, it in any case takes its devotees out of the world. Aurobindo points directly to this danger. He is speaking of those who have claimed to find liberation from all worldly interests:

"If his inexorable removal through the very act of illumination is the law, then the world is condemned to remain eternally the scene of unredeemed darkness, death and suffering."

This is to point to the observation that if the grandiose exaltation of the spiritual consciousness amounts in the end to the sainted individual grasping his own salvation, letting the devil take the hindmost of those still mired in the pit of earth, there will never be a reclamation of the world out of its low wretchedness. Each human, as he graduates into sanctification, would abandon the world to its own evil. How would the world ever be lifted up?

Also Aurobindo observes that if we detach our life from the life and plan of the world, we will be able to make no integration of world meaning. When we take ourselves out of the context of

81

world life, which in the divine plan is the nursery ground of our spiritual growth, we are in no position to learn life's meaning, to make a correlation of the elements of its experience. The significance of the world and of life can not emerge out of events when either spirit or matter is detached from each other's influences. They bear meaning only when in interrelation. "The harmony of the two tendencies is the condition of all life that aims to be really divine," affirms our philosopher. And he rebukes the Indian philosophies that ignore the presence of God in nature and in the world. We can with confidence seek God in nature; we can find nature embodying God's thoughts, because he says:

"Prakriti [nature] turns back to perceive Purusha [spirit]. The world seeks after the Self; God having entirely become Nature, Nature seeks to become progressively God."

Again:

"For Life, these things that seem to deny God, to be the opposite of Satchitananda [Existence-Consciousness-Bliss] are real, even if they turn out to be temporary. They are the very material of her [Life's] workings."

And let a dark and lugubrious theology take note of his next statement:

"These [evils] are not the punishment for a fall, but the condition of a progress. They are the first elements of the world he has to fulfill; the price he has to pay for the crown which he hopes to win; the narrow way by which nature escapes out of matter into consciousness; they are at once her ransom and her stock . . . . for out of these false relations and by their aid the true view is to be found."

By the ignorance we have to cross over death, he has said.

"It would be, then, not when he has excised the evil in Nature out of herself by an act of moral surgery, or parted with life by an abhorrent recoil, but when he has turned it into a more perfect life, lifted the small things of human limitation into the great things of the divine vastness, transformed suffering into beatitude, converted evil into its proper good, translated error and falsehood into the secret truth, that the sacrifice will be accomplished, the journey done, and heaven and earth, equalized, join hands in the bliss of the Supreme."

Here we have the voice of a true philosopher, an oracle uttering sage wisdom that has disastrously been beclouded for an aeon of history. In the light that these words cast on the scene of human

82

life we can see only too clearly what would happen if, by some hallucinatory mind-magic, we were able to lift or abstract ourselves out of the experience which is ours on this plane, at this stage of our peregrination through the long cycles that will carry us on to the heights of ineffable being. And what will be the disappointment of those who urge us to cast off the fetters that bind us to the life of body and of sense and of mind! "In getting rid of the ignorance of the Ego and its resultant limitations we do indeed eliminate the dualities; but we eliminate along with them our own existence in the cosmic movement."

The challenge to an irrational excess of subjective monistic persuasion, the rebuke to unjustified claims for the benefits of a spiritual detachment from the physical life, is here voiced for a welcome sanification of the general religious mind. Duality, we have seen from the first verse of Genesis on through the venerable Egyptian and the later Greek systems, is the essential condition for the birth and evolution of consciousness in creature life. The ultra spiritual-subjective philosophies aim to dissolve the duality, and so to release the ego-spirit that is, at one end, tied in with the non-egoic matter. Fatuously this thought looks simply to the release of the spirit bound--injuriously, as it claims--under the heavy darkness of matter and the flesh. What a sagacious philosopher unfolds to the holder of this view is that the only possible outcome of the presumptive liberation of the spirit nucleus from its "bondage" in matter would be the extinction of the unit of consciousness that is supposed to be liberated. It is in a fair degree of analogical exactness comparable to the action of a person imprisoned in a house, who decided that he can free himself by blasting that house with a charge of dynamite: he goes out of existence with the house. True enough, as the thinker states it, we succeed in eliminating the dualities, we nullify the tension of opposites, but only at the cost of our own annihilation. Consciousness has arisen out of the tension generated in the duality; eliminate the tension and consciousness goes out like a lamp with it. Such an elimination of our sense of existence would be rationally desirable only if the consciousness was left to enjoy the release from the strain. But with the destruction of the tension, what is left is a blank. The philosophies here brought under critique come close to announcing their preference for a blanking out of all existence-consciousness, the annihilation of any life at all.

83

Existence is declared an evil, its burden a suffering. The only good of a creature caught in its meshes is to destroy the sense of it; and this destruction is so welcome to the earth-hater as to be acceptable even if it involves the annihilation of the entity desiring it. What good its destruction would be when no entity would be left to recognize its absence, logic seems incompetent to tell us.

The negation philosophies appear to have no stomach, no patience for the long, slow and in some part necessarily painful march of human progress from the beast level through the human arc up to the divine. It is bent wholly and solely on annihilation of the consciousness that arises out of the tension of polarity. And who can gauge the fatuity of the philosophy which aims at supernal felicity by destroying the grade of consciousness through which presumably the felicity could alone be enjoyed? The rebuttal of this logic would be in saying that the aim is not to destroy the consciousness by which the bliss may be enjoyed, but to destroy a lower form of consciousness which is blocking the way to the more blessed realization. A rational expectation would be that in due course of evolution a lower and more inhibiting grade of consciousness may be transcended by the emergence of a higher and more joyous grade. But this sane formulation of the process is just what the Hindu negativist systems and the maya philosophies expressly reject. They clamor for the destruction of those modes of consciousness--sense, emotion, thought--the full and perfected development of which are the means, and the indispensable ones, by which such true advance to higher state could be achieved. These present capabilities of our consciousness are not seen as useful adjuncts, or wayside stations along the road of progress, but are all discredited and spurned as anti-utilitarian enemies of the spirit, imprisoners of the self, and constitute a maya-illusion in their totality. They are accorded no function of usefulness in a scheme of growth to enhanced being, but are declared to be the enemies of the spirit.

84

The liberation philosophy contends that all our experience is unreal because it is only relative to a larger and truer reality, the true reality. In a proper balance of the conception no one disputes this. No wise thinker would claim that our mode of consciousness, or our grade of experience here, is in any sense the experience of absolute reality, certainly not in its form of absolute finality. No one asserts that our life in the present is the be-all and end-all of potential being. To do so would destroy all the meaning that goes with the word "evolution." It would cut us off from prospect of a future in any way grander than our present.

Yet that our form of life is an essential element in the conscious evolution of reality for both the Brahman and for his creatures is certified by Aurobindo in unmistakable terms:

"The movement, on the contrary, is the field of the relative, and yet by the very definition of the relative all things in the movement contain, are contained in, and are the Absolute."

At the extreme opposite of the claim that all our experience is an unreality, a dream, an illusion, he declares that it is the heart's core of reality.

"The movement in time, the movement in space, is real. Space and time are real. What is, is the eternal invisible succession of time, carrying on its stream a progressive movement of consciousness, also invisible. Duration, then, eternal succession of movement and change in time, is the sole Absolute. Becoming is the only being."

It is the old debate between Heraclitus and Parmenides over again. And the modern Hindu gives the palm to Heraclitus: the life that is moving is the true being, not the life bound in eternal motionlessness. As Dr. Wilhelm said, the Oriental philosophy has put too much emphasis on the static side alone. Life not only wishes to be, but to express itself, and this it can not do if it is bound in eternal silence and immobility. As Plotinus said, it is not enough for souls merely to exist; they must show what they are capable of begetting. Life must be free to act. Its values come to its creatures on the wing. The joy is in the sweep and swing of the movement up hill and down dale.

85

The mind hugging its maya belief can not endure the thought that any self-limitation of the free spirit of life can be salutary for soul's progress, or a necessary instrumentality for it. Progress out of limitation toward wider liberty does not satisfy it; it wants immediate release from the tension implicit and indispensable in becoming. It is impatient with the slow ascent of the ladder, or the keyboard, of existence and believes that the long treadmill of gradual progression is unnecessary. It thinks that the grand apotheosis of ecstatic consciousness can be consummated in one fell rush upon the citadel of divine glory. It can not tolerate the idea of life's taking one step at a time.

But hear Aurobindo:

"And first, if there were not this factor of the successions of Time, there would be no change or progress; a perfect harmony would be perpetually manifest [would this not rather be unmanifest?] coeval with other harmonies in a sort of eternal moment, not successive to them, in a movement from past to future. We have instead the constant succession of a developing form in which one strain rises out of another that preceded it, and conceals in itself that which it has replaced" [and the promise of the one to follow it].

Here is the point-blank refutation of the philosophies that would eliminate time and evolution out of the cosmic procedure in the unfoldment of life. Also again, hitting the claims that the experience here is not of real being, but a maya, Aurobindo says:

"Those forms have been created not outside, but in the divine existence, Spirit-Force and Bliss; not outside, but in and as a part of the working of the divine Real-Idea. There is therefore no reason to suppose that there can not be any real play of the higher divine consciousness in a world of forms, or that forms and their immediate support, mental consciousness, energy-vital Force and formal substance, must necessarily distort that which they represent. It is possible, even probable, that mind, body and life are to be found in their pure forms in the divine truth itself; and there in fact as subordinate activities of this consciousness, and part of the complete instrumentation by which the Supreme Force always works. Mind, life and body must be capable of divinity."

"This earthly life need not necessarily by forever a wheel of half-joyous, half agonized effort; attainment may also be intended and the glory and joy of the Lord made manifest on earth."

If mind, life and body also hold the capability of divinity, it is time that the droning dirge of their imperfection, their transitoriness, their illusory and evil character give place to a joy-song ex-

86

pressing appreciation of the gracious service they render in the evolutionary economy. That which the philosopher puts forth here suggestively as a high probability, and almost in an apologetic tentative voice,--even at that exceptional for a Hindu mind--was stated with unabashed positiveness by the ancient sages. Surely attainment of the highest grades of conscious being and joyous life is intended in the scheme of organic process; its very stresses promise that. And the glory of the Lord of Creation is to be made manifest on earth. The philosophies of old prescribed the definitive laws of life and the discipline of consciousness by which humans might grow toward divine estate without impaling themselves constantly on the spikes of suffering.

And Aurobindo depicts vividly the illogicality and final futility of the maya philosophy when he summons our thought to the inescapable fact that

"even when it knows that they [world objects] are not things in themselves, it is obliged to deal with them as if they were things in themselves. Otherwise it could not subject them to its own characteristic activities."

Here, it would seem, the mayavic creed and claims receive their knock-out blow. In a world wherein the elan vital is manifesting positive values this code of ideas asks its believers to take a mental pose of negation and denial toward the things which all the while their very existence requires that they accept as real. What must be the chaos inbred in a mind which daily asserts the non-reality of houses, bread and milk, yet finds it is every day dependent upon these things for very existence! And what the folly of denying the real being of one's own body!

The actual and veridical being of the material world is forthrightly asserted by Aurobindo:

"And, as we have already discovered that matter is only substance-form of Force, so we shall discover that material Force is only energy-form. Material Force is in fact a sub-conscious operation of Will . . . We may say, therefore, that it is a sub-conscious Mind, or Intelligence, which, manifesting Force as its driving power, its executive Nature, its Prakriti, has created this material world."

Here is corroboration of our elucidation that the laws of nature are the operations of the sub-conscious mind of the universal creator.

87

If this is so, it at once and in finality negates all philosophies that draw sharp lines of separation between the ideal world of real being and the asserted unreal world of spurious material objectivity. This conclusion is certified by the fact that the activities of the subconscious mind are simply the previous activities of the divine conscious mind made automatic by repetition. This is what Aurobindo implies when he says that the things of the world that seem to deny God and the Supermind are nevertheless also in the Brahman, a part of real being. So he says that material force, creating material things, is a sub-conscious operation of Will. This is a timely discernment that can be brought in to guide thought to correct conclusions in its attempt to rationalize the earthly life.

The philosopher himself asks, what, then, is Life? And what relation does it bear to the Supermind? By what necessity does it come into being? And he recalls that there has come ringing down the centuries the ancient cry that life is a delusion, a delirium, an insanity, from which we have been incessantly exhorted to flee by posting our minds in an attitude of total negation of the life here. Why, he asks, has the Eternal wantonly inflicted this evil? Why has he brought into being this terrible all-deluding maya? His answer may sound unrealistic and a little-over wordy and pedantic to most. Nevertheless it deals with the factuality of the case as clearly as it is possible for the human understanding to grasp and rephrase it:

"And, however brute and void of sense it seems to us, it is yet, to the secret experience of consciousness hidden within it, delight of being, offering itself to this secret consciousness as subjects of sense in order to tempt that hidden godhood out of its secrecy. Being manifest as substance, force-in-being cast into form, into a figured self-representation of the secret self-consciousness, delight offering itself to its own consciousness as an object,--what is this to Sat-chit-ananda? Matter is Sat-chit-ananda represented to his own mental experience as a formal basis of objective knowledge, action and Delight of existence."

Then he uses a figure of representation which is singularly in accord with a dramatization employed in the Old Testament. Saying that the Overmind sends matter as a "delegate" to the ignorance manifested at the lower grade, he pictures matter as a sort of protective screen thrown over the consciousness of that grade, permitting it to enjoy the universal light in a moderate subdued de-

88

gree, when it could not receive the full force of the blinding light of the Sun of divine glory. This poetically limns what is as correct a way of thinking about it as any we can conceive. A similar figurism is obviously behind the trope used in the Psalms (84), "the Lord God is a sun and a shield." Also it seems to be the thought in the allegory in the Scripture in which the Eternal tells Moses, the type of man, that he will hide him in a cleft of the rock, and, as the Eternal's "glory" passes by, he will place his hand over man's eyes so that the human sight will not be blinded by the blazing effulgence of the undimmed divine light. The divine hand will be removed when the glory has passed. It needs little ingenuity in symbolism to correlate the "hand" emblem with matter. Matter is the "eternal feminine," life's universal mother; and hand is found to be of the feminine gender in nearly all, if not all languages. But the main earthly symbol of matter is water, the actual mother of the biological chain of life on the globe. And so the figurism of the Old Testament not only mitigates the overpowering brilliance of the divine glory by the coverage of God's hand over man's eyes, but also encloses man in a cloud of vapor (water), when God comes down to commune with his children on Mount Sinai, definitely a glyph of ancient usage for the earth itself. Matter is definitely that "shield" which the cosmic mind-fire providentially interposes between its pure and unmitigated energy and the consciousness that can as yet function only in the lower and dimmer chambers of existence. So Aurobindo's depiction of matter as deity's "delegate" to a lower grade that can not apperceive pure spirit-forms and must therefore have such forms represented in concrete objectivity, is entirely, if poetically, valid.

Swinging over to a different figure he refers to Purusha (spirit) and Prakriti (matter) as respectively the soul and the executive force of nature; they together produce a harmony, as they are the two balancing energies of one and the same power. This being so, he says "there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of one over the other."

Here are words of such vital import to man's sane balance of mind in his effort at rationalization of his life experience that their full realization would have salvaged humanity from centuries of misguided religious fanaticism, bigotry and superstition, and from today could inaugurate a brighter and less horrendous era in world

89

life. Had their sound message been purveyed, grasped and applied in philosophical thought in the past centuries, this cry that Aurobindo catches ringing down the ages, "the world is very evil," would have been silenced from the beginning, and the insensate denial of the world's good would have been supplanted by a just and happy appreciation of its present and its ultimate beneficence. There can be no refutation of the assertion that in that case human life would have been both happier and nobler.

In lack of this understanding of the equilibration of the two forces of spirit and matter, the major effort in world religion has been almost totally a blind attempt to disrupt the eternal, or aeonial, polarity, to disengage the positive pole, spirit, from its tension with its negative, matter. All the while the ends of the entire evolutionary scheme are to be subserved by keeping the two in the polar relation "until the harvest." Only perhaps in the light of this scientific approach to the situation will the folly of exalting and straining to effectualize the one by attempting mistakenly and perforce vainly to crush down and silence the other, be realized at last. Happily for the future of religious significations, Aurobindo comes forward with the resounding assertion that there can be no disturbing or relaxing the polar balance between the heavenly and the earthly. And perhaps now in the spirit of Tennyson's "ring out the old, ring in the new," the old bleating cry of the evil of the world may now be drowned out by the clarion carol of the world's high function of good.

The discerning philosopher elucidates that the "many," which it has been the habit of a dour theology to berate because they stand at variance with the eternal unity, are just the one, which has broken itself up into multitude for the cosmic purpose of giving to each unit seed-portion of itself the chance to grow up through a self-realizing experience under the birth-strains of polarity. Only thus can it multiply its own being, for thus it can bring more hosts of its own units from ignorance and initial powerlessness up to the consummation of the divine Sat-chit-ananda, or the ultimate trinity of being, existence-consciousness-bliss. It superficially gives the appearance of existence plunging into an apparent non-existence; consciousness going into an apparent unconsciousness; delight of being sinking down into a cosmic insensibility and "deadness," from which a diviner ray has to rescue it. (It has been the inveterate

90

propensity of shallow theologization to mistake this apparent downward plunge for a real fall of soul into darkness.) Over the centuries the feeble efforts of the human mind to explain this seeming calamity to life have become crystallized in the unfortunate and inept theological doctrine of the "fall into sin." Never with adequate conciseness was it recognized that the split of primal life energy into duality was in no true sense a "fall into matter," to be viewed as a dire miscarriage and catastrophe, but that it was the precipitation of the conditions necessary for the soul units' adventure for the birth and self-discovery of their divinity. The bifurcation and polarization were necessary because under cosmic law a good quality can emerge only out of the repercussion of wrestling with its opposite, evil.

Hence all the systems that decry the evil nature of matter, sense, the world and the flesh are now, in a rectified view, to be seen as unbalanced and naively childish presuppositions. The positive truth is that these elements are the base of our life and the source of our power to grow. We climb ill, Aurobindo courageously asserts, if in our advance from cruder levels to more ethereal and radiant heights "we forget our base." His words are so notable that full quotation is warranted:

"Life, in its self-unfolding must also rise to ever new provinces of its own being. But if in passing from one domain to another, we renounce what has already been given us, from eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God integrally nor satisfy the conditions of his self-manifestation. We do not become perfect, but only shift the field of our imperfection, or at most attain a limited altitude. However high we may climb, even though it be to the Non-Being itself, we climb ill if we forget our base. Not to abandon the lower to itself, but to transfigure it in the light of the higher to which we have attained, is true divinity in nature. Brahman is integral and unifies many stages of consciousness at a time; we also, manifesting the nature of Brahman, should become integral and all-embracing."

A further amplification of the central idea here expressed in such forthright terms is also quite worth citing:

"The integral view of the nature of Brahman avoids these consequences. Just as we need not give up the bodily life to attain to the mental and spiritual, so we can arrive at a point of view where

91

the observation of the individual activities is no longer inconsistent with our comprehension of the cosmic consciousness or our attainment of the transcendent and supracosmic. For the world transcendence embraces the universe, is one with it and does not exclude it, even as the universe is one with it and does not exclude it, even as the universe embraces the individual, is one with him and does not exclude him. The individual is a center of the whole universe; the universe is a form and definition which is occupied by the entire immanence of the formless and Indefinable."

Since our mentality refuses to attribute anything in the order of life and nature to an arbitrary or whimsical fiat of fate, we are forced to see in the oppositions of spirit and matter, which we so quickly and glibly pronounce evil, the beneficent conditions and provisions for our slow and strenuous progress. So our philosopher elucidates it: "Whatever is created must be of the substance of the utterly Real, and must be Real." This being so, "a vast baseless negation of reality can not be the outcome of eternal truth or the Infinite Existence." But both directly and by implication the maya doctrine asserts a negation of real being. And hardly less than sharply rebuking to these negative postulates is his statement that "all that a timeless eternity of self-awareness sees in itself as truth of being, the conscious power of its being manifests in Time-Reality." Here finally the perpetual cry of the negativists that the human mind will look in vain in the particulars of the time process to discover the great truth of being is bluntly refuted and denied. And against the insistent preachment decrying the value of the world "below," the philosopher launches this positive rebuttal: "It is not denial; it is one term, one formula, of the Infinite and Eternal Existence." Again he confutes the opposing ideas with the statement: "Moreover the experience of soul and Nature as dual is true." The maya cultism has inveterately declared it to be false.

Logical explication of the duality is given in the following:

"An apparent duality is created in order that there may be a free action of Nature working itself out with the support of the spirit; and again a free and masterful action of the spirit, controlling and working out Nature."

Nature here is a limited expression of the cosmic Super-Nature above. And the supreme pronouncement of a virtually conclusive verdict of error in the philosophies denouncing the world and nature is a statement that "what Nature does is really done by spirit."

92

However slowly and mutely rendered, it is ever the voice and the message of the spirit, Purusha, which nature, Prakriti, repeats on earth. The heavens speak and earth echoes the tones. "The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork."

The maya doctrine affirms that we are to destroy our conscious connection with this world by "killing out" the senses, the emotions and the mind, by all of which our conscious attachment to the world is maintained. Shallow thinking has always missed noting the consequences of this prescription. But Aurobindo sees it and points it out.

"If we withdraw back from her workings, then all can fall into quiescence and we can enter into the silence, because she consents to cease from her dynamic activity; but it is in her quiescence and silence that we are quiescent and cease. If we would realize a higher formation or status of being, then it is still through her, through the divine Sakti, the consciousness-Force of the spirit, that it has to be done; our surrender must be to the Divine Being through the Divine Mother."

Here again is wisdom uttering momentous pronouncements of oracular truth, and the world that they can bless has waited only too long to hear them. Religion, in its overweening persuasion that boundless "glory, laud and honor" were to be rendered to mortals to the Supreme Spirit alone, has exalted the Father in heaven, while slapping our equally divine and holy Mother of Life on earth rudely in the face!

"The original status is that of the Reality, Timeless and Spaceless; Space and Time would be the same Reality self-extended to contain the development of what was within it."

Stoutly he affirms that at all times the alleged "evils" have their persistent reality and importance in our present phase of the manifestation, nor can they be a mere mistake of the divine consciousness, happenings without any meaning in the supernal wisdom, without any purpose of the divine joy, power and knowledge to justify their existence.

These citations bring us face to face with the inadequacy of the escapist philosophy to meet the realities of the world situation and to account for them in a rational scheme of exegesis. It all reveals to us the patent fact that escapist philosophy is such just because it

93

can not rationalize apparent evils. If life can be rationalized in a scheme of good, no escapist philosophy is necessary or justified. Failing an insight that would render a wholly rational explication of the world life in full consonance with a conception of good, mayavic postulates are driven to resort to the disingenuous ruse of disqualifying the reality of the experience which seems to present evil aspects, along with the instrumental sources of our evidences of that experience, our senses and our mind. Unable to justify the world experience as good, the negative philosophy ends the debate by virtually throwing the experience itself bodily out of court as insufficient ground for the trial of the case at all. It impugns the evidence as all false. Always its plea is that man is not legitimately qualified to pass judgment on his experience or to determine its true rationale, because his equipment for assessing its real value is inadequate and defective. So the dialectical ruse of asserting that our experience is only to be evaluated through the lens of a higher and more perfect power of consciousness appertaining to a higher world is subtly utilized with considerable speciousness. For centuries this thin "logic" has been put forth by one school of thought after another, without its inherent illogicality being detected. If man needs for his balance and happiness a rationalization of the live problems of existence, he needs them at his own level and in the terms of his own grade of mind power, within the reach of his own comprehension, not in the supposititious or predicated terms of some hypothecated higher consciousness. What archangels and gods may understand far beyond man's capabilities should not be made the standard of judgment or appraisal in man's rationalization of his world. It is his world that he has to rationalize, not that of the gods. Man must be the judge in the court of trial of the values of his mundane experience. And he must render judgment in the terms of his own codes of understanding.

It is, not at any rate directly, no rational elucidation of man's dialectical problems to summon down the Super-conscious mind of the cosmic Logos to supply a supra-rational exegesis, disqualifying man's own faculties. He must have a solution acceptable and satisfying to him at this level. When it is a matter of the poise and mental balance of our life here, philosophy must not put off our answer by referring us to another world of understanding, which we may, if at all, cognize only by cutting off all our conscious connection with

94

the actualities of our present state and mode of being. Aurobindo insists on this, positively asserting the validity of our experience with world objectivity in the formation of our value judgments. The more surely is this to be taken as irrefutable in view of the fact that, as he has pointedly observed, it is impossible that we should attempt to disqualify our own report on our experience at the sense-and-mind level as invalid for judgment. However unreal we may argue and protest our experience to be, we must, as he notes, act as if it is real. So that all sublimated philosophical attitude toward the world as an unreality can be maintained only by means of an artificially superinduced pose much in the nature of a hypnotization. This last word virtually describes in general the philosophical posture of mind generated by negative cult postulates. They can only wield a sway over minds by gaining control of them through the mysterious force of dogmatic mesmerism. This force has long been denominated "auto-suggestion." It had better be called plainly self-hypnotization.

But a philosophy that alone can yield to man its salutary integrating influences must be one that he can grasp with the sharp edge of his normal endowment and through his own keenly awakened faculties. Being a Hindu of deep proficiency in every reach of mental acumen, Aurobindo is aware of this fatal propensity of the human consciousness to charm and hallucinate itself by mental magic, and he warns against confusion and delusion from this source. It can be bluntly affirmed that in a broad sense hundreds of cult movements in the run of history have swept large groups into one great mass hypnotization after another. Under the siren power of emotional surges any scheme of specious rationalization can be accepted as real. If, as the maya cults assert, the truth of life is only to be recognized or realized by a process of abstracting consciousness wholly out of the world which factually presents itself to us, and viewing and judging it from the vantage-point of a transcendental world, it is indeed necessary, as it is not denied, for man to destroy himself as man, in a predicated effort to reorient himself as a being divine and absolute. The outcome, then, of the cult teachings is the destruction of man.

95

Philosophy has signally failed in its high function if it has not been able to assure the cultured world-mind that life is capable of being lived, not only in the hypothetical "eternal now" of a timeless super-mind consciousness, but in the flowing stream of the temporal now, in the full, if relative and imperfect, sense of its effective reality. If life, as it unfolds its potential at the given moment, is not real, then thought and mind would have to be forever postponing the moment of reality to some distant epoch or climactic denouement of our evolution, and the living experience would indeed be robbed of its realized and realizing power by the false and superficial posture of mind set to denial. As Aurobindo so strongly asserts, the present experience with an objectivity that can be characterized as relatively unreal, is all a part of the whole movement of life in the Conscious-Force of Brahman. It is no negative criterion of reality that an ordered manifestation of life in the being of eternal reality finds it necessary to appear in a vast range of differentiated modes of realization to creatures of endless grades of evolved, or unevolved, conscious powers. It is no criterion of reality that is grasped in different ways by different people in different worlds, or by different people in the same world; that it can be apprehended with a fuller and more vivid sense of its true nature by higher creatures than by lower. Reality is wherever and however it appears to the creature experiencing it, although one's reality is not another's. Reality is not to be dismissed as unreality simply because it can not be made absolutely uniform throughout the universe. In effect that is what the absolutist and monistic theorizations predicate as desirable, necessary and--possible.

In relation to the questions examined here the voice of another outstanding Hindu philosopher may be listened to with much profit. In his magnificent two-volume work on Indian Philosophy the eminent philosopher-statesman, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, has outlined the whole structure of Hindu religious thought with a view to its clarification for Western minds in particular. The great question of maya is handled most perspicaciously. "Maya is not a human construction. It is prior to our intellect and independent of it." (Then certainly our philosophy could affect it little.) He

96

equates it with Prakriti, the manifest universe. If maya is prior to and independent of our intellect, it must be objective to our intellect. It is not born out of our intellect, as an illusion would be. Therefore it would seem that maya can not be of the nature of illusion, but is a part of the enginry of reality itself. Being prior to our intellect, it can not be a product of our intellect. This conclusion shakes to their foundations such theorizations as those of Christian Science and kindred idealistic systems which make our own minds the creators of whatever reality encompasses us, whether objective or subjective. It is also the decisive answer to the thesis in philosophy that man's mind is the creator of illusion. The illusion--if such it indeed be--was here before the human mind. In this light Radhakrishnan's declaration that maya is not a human production, being prior to our intellect, takes on especial force and importance. If it divests the doctrine of maya of its humanly generated illusory character, it marks an epoch in the history of religious philosophy.

Maya is Prakriti, the world of becoming, and to this the philosopher adds that "the world of becoming is the supreme reality and that therefore anything that interrupts it is to be rated in the category of unreality, if not of evil. It is closely in accord with Indian thought to rate becoming as evil, for in its processes the life on earth, deprecated by Eastern philosophy as a breach in the continuity of absolute good, is generated. The Indian mind dislikes to think of pure being as suffering any interruption of its static beatitude. If it occurs it is a calamity. The prime aim of Hindu speculative philosophy is to liberate consciousness from the throes of becoming and restore it to its primal state of pure and undisturbed being. In sharp contrast with this view we may now see how far Aurobindo has traveled to arrive at a point where he could say "the only being is becoming." It makes him almost a revolutionary against all previous Indian philosophy.

But do we not face a sharp and crucial clash between the expressed views of the two great philosophers? Aurobindo flies far away from the static aspect of being to say that the only being is becoming; Radhakrishnan now says that the world of becoming is an interruption of being. By unimpeachable logic the two statements would add up to saying that the only being is an interrup-

97

tion of being. Becoming is true being, but becoming interrupts true being. If both philosophers speak truth, then in this case truth clashes with truth, truth destroys itself.

But it is possible that the clash may be found reconcilable if we consider the word "interrupt." It is possible that an entity or a process can interrupt itself without destroying itself. The issue hinges on the particular sense in which the word was used in Radhakrishnan's dialectic. As employed by him it does seem to intimate the negation of being and reality, in fact their destruction. But so drastic a meaning may not need to be assigned to it here. Interruption of being would not necessarily connote destruction, or even opposition to being. It could well and legitimately mean temporary alteration of the mode of being. And this is obviously what it does mean, and this rendering permits the two apparently self-destructive statements to stand. For truly enough it can be affirmed that becoming interrupts being in precisely the same sense in which we would say that waking activity interrupts sleep. The analogy seems adequate and valid on every side, since becoming is to being what waking activity is to sleep. And this relation of becoming to being at the same time opens out a clearer vista into the meaning of the maya conception. It helps us see that maya is the disposition, the posture, the mode into which absolute being projects itself as it awakens out of its sleep condition, called in India pralaya, to undergo the long process of pushing itself from unconsciousness to the unlimited heights of glorious self-consciousness. Maya is the condition of the becoming operation and becoming is true being, again by irrefutable logic maya is the conscious coefficient of true being. This deduction is in sum pretty much what this essay is aimed to establish.

Maya is what the absolute being precipitates itself into when Purusha commits itself to Prakriti for the very sake of achieving for itself new birth and infinite growth of its dormant or unawakened potential. The false presumption of so much "spiritual" philosophy as of religious conception in the large, is that the unit soul-consciousness is forced out of an Elysium of perfect bliss of full being to plunge into a lower limbo of Prakriti and maya, and wander almost like a lost soul through aeons of an unreal experience symbolized by every type of darkness, non-being and forlornness, its

98

one hope of felicity being to find some way of escape back to the Paradise lost. The change of habitat is doubtless true, but every philosophical implication as to its purpose and its rationale in the designs of cosmic mind seems to have been distorted most outrageously awry. The truth is evident that the direful necessity that forces potential god-souls out of Paradise,--in which, contrary to most religious belief, they do not share or enjoy the felicity of all-perfect being, not yet even having entered the stream of becoming--is in its ultimate evaluation neither calamitous nor dire; no more so, at any rate than the necessity which requires an acorn in October to fall from its parent oak down into the damp ground at its base. Souls in the empyrean in their incipient stage, generated by the Father's powers of self-reproduction, are not participants in the bliss of pure being, as naive religious minds have been misled to believe. Their descent to earth does not tear them ruthlessly away from celestial blessedness; it in fact simply initiates the run of experience that will unfold their capability to actualize such felicity. They are but the seeds of life and love and glory in heaven; they must fall into the ground of earth if they are to grow. As it has been fittingly expressed, they emerge at the start out of pure be-ness, to proceed through a long course of becoming to attain unto true being. Religion generally has mistaken the primal be-ness for the perfected being. True being is never an unearned gratuity; if it were so it would be worthless. It must be labored for and won, and all its values spring from the exertion and the winning. True being is what life wins at the end of the process of becoming, not what it is before the process begins. Aurobindo is right: becoming is the only being. And in the proper understanding of the terms, Radhakrishnan is right: life interrupts the being it has attained at any stage in order to attain a greater being. So far is soul's "expulsion" from Paradise not a calamity and a "fall," that it is in truth its cosmic opportunity to enter the stream of becoming. In the simplest possible form of statement, it is their glorious chance to be. India still regards it as dire calamity.

In a stricter use of the words, however, it is important to consider the possible error in Radhakrishnan's position. For the creatures concerned, being can not be interrupted, because it is not yet a going reality. A thing that is not yet running can not be interrupted. And when being is attained, it never will be interrupted,

99

except to produce finer modes of being. Being is the distant objective at which the infant souls aim. In falling from Paradise to earth souls do not fall out of true being, with the sad necessity of climbing back to the happy region whence they fell. They do not so much have to regain Paradise as to gain it for the first time. It was in the ultimate sense not a Paradise lost, because it had not yet been won. It was only the leaving of the parent's home to go out to a distant school where a rigorous education would generate the power to build Paradise of its own as the rich fruitage of sacrifice. Maya is the valley of becoming.

The misconception just elucidated involves Radhakrishnan in the impassable bogs of deeper questions, for it drives him to a negative answer and to a confession of inability to rationalize the "fall" of the soul by the analogy of the planting of the soul-seeds on the earth. He writes (Indian Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 86):

"Philosophy tells us that so long as we are bound by intellect and are lost in the world of the many, we shall not seek in vain to get back to the simplicity of the one. If we ask the reason why there is avidya, or maya, bringing about a fall from vidya, from being, the question can not be answered. [Italics ours]. Philosophy as logic has here the negative function of explaining the inadequacy of all intellectual categories, pointing out how the objects of the world are relative to the mind that thinks them and possess no independent existence . . . . It can not help us directly to the attainment of reality . . . . The supporters of pure monism recognize a higher form than abstract intellect, which enables us to feel the push of reality. We have to sink ourselves in the universal consciousness and make ourselves coextensive with all that is. We do not then so much think reality as live it, do not so much know it as become it."

This passage is most important because it so clearly delineates the basic position of Hindu dialectic in all religious systematism. If a competent critique of it can be instituted, that, too, would be important. Two items involving great principles are here to be scrutinized: the asserted impossibility of answering the question as to why the soul on earth has "fallen" into avidya, ignorance; and the constantly reiterated incompetence of the intellect to acquaint us with reality. The two items are quite definitely related to each other.

Taking up the first, it is odd that Oriental thought has forever bleated its inability to answer the question of the "fall," which is

100

essentially the question as to why souls are on the earth. Most singular it must seem also that India has continued to render this negative answer, when ancient Egypt and Greece, the inheritor of Kamite wisdom, have fully and competently answered the great question. The answer, already specifically outlined in this work, could be elaborated at great length. It may perhaps bear review and new accentuation, briefly.

In the Plotinus passage quoted previously we are told that souls come to earth "by a voluntary inclination, to develop their powers and to adorn what is below them." They are not sent here to suffer the loss, or "sacrifice" of anything precious. They are infant soul units, so named in ancient systems in various ways: in India called Kumaras, "virgin youths," "celibate young men;" in Egypt spoken of as "the younglings in the egg," "the younglings of Shu," the children of Osiris; in the New Testament allegorism denominated them "the Innocents" whom "Herod" tried to destroy in their infancy; in the Greek mythology they are typified by divine heroes in their youth, such as the infant Hercules strangling the two great serpents in his cradle. In the Egyptian allegory the soul itself, personified, states that it takes its position "on the horizon," the borderline between heaven and earth, where spirit and matter are exactly balanced, which equilibration is found only in the body of man. Here it says that it comes to bathe in the divine pool beneath the two divine "sycamores" of heaven and earth, the Pool of the North and the Pool of the South, the Pool of Natron and the Pool of Salt, the Pool of the Sun and the Pool of the Moon, "in order that I may purify this soul of mine in the most high degree." Here is set up the great balance in which all souls are weighed, for elsewhere the divine pool is called "the lake of equipoise and propitiation." This place of equilibration between the two natures which must ever be united in polarity if life is to be existent, is the great balance, the Libra of the zodiac. Repeating that it comes to feed upon the bread of Seb, or the food of the earth, it adds that it has many rebirths in the flesh: "I die, and I am born again, and I renew myself, and I grow young each day." And again it says: "I am Horus, who steppeth onward through eternity." "The name of my boat is Millions of Years." "My name is eternity and everlastingness."

It appears worthy of noting how the philosophy of Egypt and Greece rings with the tone of positive value in its view of life, in

101

the sharpest possible contrast to the sour negative attitude expressive of India's thought. Inasmuch as historians have traced the provenance and the character tone of the religions that have preponderated in the West in the period since Plato's day to the influx and influence of the Hindu philosophy upon the earlier Egypto-Greek systems expressing the positive view of life, this contrast and vast discrepancy must be seen to be a thing of momentous significance in the last twenty-five hundred years of history.

The other item of Radhakrishnan's analysis is the incompetency of the intellect to give man knowledge of reality. India has forever asserted that if the human is to have experience of reality, he must interdict the activity of the intellect and utilize a "higher" power of consciousness, which Radhakrishnan here describes as a feeling of the push of reality, a recognition higher than knowing and which he calls a "living of reality," and finally a "becoming it," so that we contact reality by being it ourselves. Philosophy has wrestled endlessly with this question. It looks very much as if it were all a matter of more precise and specific definition of the term "intellect," as well also of the term "reality." In the Hindu position as stated, the intellect seems to be spoken of as a mental power limited to the work of logic and formal relation of propositions under strict methodological rules, such as those governing mathematics. It seems to be restricted to only a very limited area of the total possible range of mind faculty.

It may be allowed that under this strict definition the intellect is neither a name nor a faculty capable of covering the range of mind-function as a whole. The mind may justly be claimed to have other functions or forms of cognition transcending its purely ratiocinative power. Also the debate continues indecisive probably because the intellect is being condemned or subjected to a critique of incompetence on the ground of failure to fulfill an office which is not properly within its sphere of function, and which it should not be asked or expected to discharge. The specific task of the mind is to give us knowledge of the world of life, to interpret the data of knowledge into terms of value, to give us understanding and that grasp of the relation of things and states of consciousness which we call meaning. These offices are assigned to it for the obvious purpose of enabling us to establish the right relation of our lives to the world, to promote most harmoniously the ends of cosmic intent.

102

Perhaps, then, philosophy, especially Eastern, may have been quite "out of bounds" in its demand that intellect give us the full experience of reality. It certainly has been evolved, and is qualified, to contribute an indispensable element in the sum total of our power to experience reality. Perhaps it may be granted that the function of the intellect is not to give us, at any rate directly, the experience of reality. Feeling, rather than knowing, may be the mode of our contact with being. The function of the intellect is not, in this narrow sense, to feel life; but it certainly is to judge life, appraise it, evaluate it and interpret it in the terms of understanding. Its business is to know, and to interpret the data of knowledge, for the purpose of determining all life action as good or otherwise. Life itself furnishes us with a body of experience, and life has developed the faculty of intellect so that we may know how best to guide the current of our lives in the proper channels. To ask this function to give us the total or ultimate experience is to ask it something lying beyond the boundary of its province, something it is not equipped to give. It is only the judge of action and experience, and must wait until these are brought before it to receive its judgment. A thousand judgments of its intelligence may be the necessary condition precedent to one moment of exalted insight or rapturous communion with whole being in the mystical consciousness so highly extolled by spiritual romanticists.

When, therefore, Oriental or other philosophy rates the intellect as incompetent to afford us the experience of reality, it is simply bringing in an exhibit as evidence which is not denied as sheer fact, but which is wholly immaterial and irrelevant to the argument and has no legitimate place in it. Incidentally it operates to institute a prejudice against the "defendant" by being introduced at all. The possible failure of intellect would consist, not in its failing to give us experience of reality, but in giving us faulty judgment on possibly insufficient data. It must be remembered, too, that in this function the intellect is like a mill,--its business is to grind out judgments from the data fed into its hopper. And it must look to experience for its adequate supply of proper data. Much of the maya creedology seems to assume that the intellect can gather the data for its circumspection and evaluation from the metaphysical world rather than from the physical, for always it disdains the material world.

103

In its contempt of the intellect the Hindu thought has bent its effort in a quite practical way toward the exploitation of means of cognition which it regards as "higher" than the powers of the mind, such as the intuitions, grades of mystical exaltation, states of trance, dream fantasies, abstracted consciousness and the ecstasies of samadhi, which it superinduces by various practices of steady contemplation and fixity of mind. The often vivid character of such experiences give the impression that they bring consciousness closer to the apprehension of reality than does the intellect.

But the obvious fact that life can use other faculties beside and "beyond" the intellect to bring experience to its conscious units should establish no adverse judgment against the intellect, when it is not asked to overstep its proper function. These do not debase the intellect by comparison, for they are not its function, either to equal or excel. And in the end, no matter how far they may "transcend" the intellect, they must themselves still be brought before its court for judgment as to their legitimacy, their right or wrong character, their good or evil influence. They do not condemn it to low or incompetent rating. It has final judgment over them, and may in proper case disallow their claim to render a service higher than its own.

Even with this exemption from the false judgment of an unjust condemnation, the adverse critique of the intellect seems quite unwarranted on more direct grounds. If it is not the faculty by which experience is gained (though certainly it is itself an integral element of the experience), its function of judgment and appraisal of experience value enters so vitally into the context of all experience, and its function of judgment is so powerful an agent of psychological determination, that it stands almost always as the dominant element in the final mode and character of experience itself. It is what the intellect does with or about the experience that determines the final deposit of influence which the experience makes in the bank of life. Certainly without the intellect to assess the final value of experience, all living would be more or less valueless, senseless and indeed chaotic. It is only when it presides over the sum total of events and supplies the principles of relationship by which they are bound together in meaning, that the experience takes on the character of event in the soul's evolution. All experience only rises out of chaos into the category of history for the individual when the

104

intellect steps in to provide an integration which alone yields both meaning and zest and value to the run of history.

We have seen all this too well authenticated in the high philosophies of two, among others, of our great philosophers, Spinoza and Kant, to need fresh elaboration here. Spinoza won the appellative of "the God-intoxicated philosopher," and yet it was he who established the intellect as the faculty instrumental in the highest rhapsodies of the human spirit. The divine mania was not achieved in regions above and beyond the intellect, but through its own direct capabilities. He it was who coined the expressive phrase, "the intellectual love of God." And endless folios of history can be scanned to confirm the verdict that the so-highly exalted principle of love can run into paths of unwisdom, and generate tragedy if not held in line by the mind. At any rate in the purview of such an enlightenment as Spinoza caused to shine in the minds of his readers, the highest raptures of our introvert adventuring would not yield their consummate joyousness without the guidance and supervision of the intellect.

Likewise we have Kant testifying in much the same way to the play of the intellect in the highest ascensions of consciousness into the peaks of spiritual realization. The highest attainable reach of the human consciousness was attained, he found, in the comprehensive summation of all cognitive faculty in what he called the "synthetic unity of apperception." The philosopher saw that it was not alone the conscious events that constituted the reality of human experience, but the final synthesis of these events in an integrated vision of their meaning; and this was the work of the intellect.

It can not be without positive significance also that in the great works of the Neo-Platonic philosophers the highest grades of conscious beings in the cosmic hierarchy, the gods, are not termed "spiritual," but "intellectual and intelligible" grades. The intelligible world is rated highest and the intellectual world next below it. In his notable passage, already quoted, Plotinus begins with the statement that the soul had its divine birth or origin in the "intelligible world."

It is notable also that a modern writer whose books on the exaltations of Oriental mystical practice have been enjoyed by a large reading public, Mr. Paul Brunton, reviewing his experiences in the science of yoga, gives his conclusions in his volume, The Hid-

105

den Teachings Beyond Yoga. Earlier in his career, enraptured with the mystical subjectivism and introversions of Hindu practice, and extolling them highly, he later came to see that they should, as this essay contends, rank always below, and be held in subordination to, intellectual philosophy. He saw that the habitual practice of the meditative exercises under the yoga system left the devotee standing apart from his world, becoming a moral and spiritual Sybarite, a self-centered hedonist, a mystical Epicurean. Several of his statements are so trenchant that they merit citation here:

"I did not know, when I first landed on India's surf-sprayed shores, that I had embarked on a quest which would ultimately carry me even beyond the boundaries of mysticism and the practice of meditation itself, which for so long I had deemed the highest life open to man . . . . I did not know that I had thrown dice with Destiny and that the game was not to be concluded in the manner I had been led to expect, that is, by settling down to an existence which made physical and mental withdrawness in profound contemplation its highest goal and sublimated fulfilment. Yet when the intermittent satisfactions of mental peace entered into conflict with an innate ever-inquiring rationalization, tremendous questions slowly became insistent. I perceived that although the little pool of light in which I walked had indeed grown wider, the area of darkness beyond it was as impenetrable as ever."

"Meditation, to oneself, was a necessary and admirable pursuit, but it did not constitute the entire activity which life was constantly asking of man. For the efflux of time had shown me the limitations of mystics, and more time showed that those limitations were accountable by the one-sidedness of their outlook and the incompleteness of their experience. The more I associated with them in every part of the world the more I began to observe that their defects arose out of sheer shriveled complacency, the hidden superiority complex and the holier-than-thou attitude which they had unjustifiably adopted toward the rest of the world, and also out of the premature assumption of total knowledge of truth, when what they had attained was only partial knowledge. The question was finally forced on me that the perfection of human wisdom would never develop out of any mystical hermitage, and only a synthetic complete culture could offer any hope for its unfoldment . . . The instructive episodes of daily living confronted me with deeper disillusionment; with the limitations and deficiencies of mysticism and the intolerance and defects of mystics . . . I saw that intuition must be put in its proper place and not to be expected to perform miracles. Both had been tested and found wanting. I became acutely aware that mysticism was not enough by itself, to transform or even discipline human character or to exalt its ethical standards towards

106

a satisfactory ideal. It was unable to link itself thoroughly to life in the world. This gap was too serious to be ignored. Even the emotional exaltations of mystical ecstasy--wonderfully satisfying though they be--were fleeting, both in experience and effect, and they proved insufficient to ennoble man permanently. The disdain for practical action and the disinclination to accept personal responsibility which marks the character of real mystics prevented them from testing the truth of their knowledge as well as the worth of their attainments, and left them suspended in mid-air, as it were. Without the healthy opposition of active participation in the world's affairs, they had no means of knowing whether they were living in a world of sterilized self-hallucination or not."

This candid expose of the failure of mysticism by a competent investigator should serve as corrective of so much sycophantic worship paid to India's reputed "spiritual" systems by impressionable but uncritical and inexperienced Westerners. Mr. Brunton's further analysis of the theme presents so much of our own feelings and conclusions with regard to it that another lengthy quotation is not objectionable:

"Meditation, apart from experience was inevitably empty; experience without meditation was mere tumult. A monastic mysticism which scorned the life and responsibilities of the busy world would frequently waste itself in ineffectual beating of the air. The truth obtained by contemplation needed to be tried and tested, not by pious talk, but by active expression; a so-called higher knowledge which failed to appear in homely deeds was badly learnt, and might be nothing more than vacuous vagary. The true sage could be no anemic dreamer, but would incessantly transform the seeds of his wisdom into visible and tangible plants of acts well done. Emotional exaltations won through religious devotion, indeed personal satisfactions, might become dangerous illusions when they failed to find a proper external balance . . . The spiritual dreamer . . . needed to change his attitude toward the despised world of activity, to stand intermittently aside from his dangerous ascetic pride and to broaden and balance his outlook by intellectual culture. A more integral culture was needed, one which could be perfectly rounded by reason, and which could survive the test of every experience. Such a culture could come only from facing the fact that man was here to live actively no less than to meditate passively. The field of his activity was inevitably out there in the external world, not here in the trance world."

It would be difficult to find anywhere a more succinct reduction of the situation here under discussion to its simplest elements of

107

truth. Here is expressed the central axis of all the rationale of understanding of the philosophy of our life. Here is the incontestable refutation of the introvert philosophies which advocate and exalt as man's highest good an escape from the life of the world into the alleged glories of rhapsodic superconsciousness experienced in what virtually are trance states. Not to be missed, too, is the positive testimony that to belittle and deprecate the intellect leads to disaster.

"The practice of meditation did not lead him to self-sufficiency. This was because the external world was always confronting him on his return with the silent demand that it also be thoroughly known and properly understood. Unless, therefore, he inquire deeply into its real nature and unite the resulting knowledge with his mystical perception, he would remain in the twilight and not in the full morning sun, as the entranced mystic thought himself to be. Most mystics in attempting to know themselves metaphorically shut their eyes to the profounder enigmas of the surrounding world, but that act did not lead to its dismissal."

No, the world is not to be dismissed or dissolved by a mere blotting it out of mental vision, and it were time that idealists, mayavists, monists and spiritists recognize it. Mystics miscalculate the pressure of life's drive to give itself, through its creature units, the tensional stress that will evolve its higher potencies, when they think they can evade the necessities involved in the incarnational and evolutionary process. Life will not accomplish its ends through an inane passivity or anemic inactivity on the physical side of its expression. In coming to earth it left dream and fantasy behind, since it was in fact surfeited with that phase of consciousness, and from reaction to it roused itself to come forth and enjoy the fresh relief of facing actuality in the field of self-consciousness. One does not magically disenchant the world's power by mere contemplative intensity. As the Bhagavad Gita proclaims in its figurative drama, the soul, Arjuna, must not stand aloof from the battle, though in weaker mood it would shrink from the ordeal.

108

If the soul, once on earth, attempts through mistaken persuasions to annul the outer world's experience and withdraw into the inner subjective sanctuary, it renounces a degree of its lordship over its consciousness and lays itself open to the haunting by the same phantoms it was beset with in the mystic heavens. Out of his own experience Mr. Brunton testifies to this. Speaking of meditation, he writes:

"When wrongly done or when carried to excess, it becomes a hindrance to philosophical activity, breeding fresh evils, whims and fancies which will need to be overcome."

Then he registers a strong point in the argument:

"The philosophical aim is definitely different from that of mysticism. In the latter the neophyte rises in the scale by repressing thought; here he rises by exerting thought. The one teaches inertia, emptying of the mind, whilst the other teaches activity, the expansion of the mind . . . . The mystic stills the mind in order to get thought control, but once the control is attained, he should begin to think vigorously. Thus he should kill thoughts only to use them better later. Meditation practice must in this more advanced stage be set behind the study of philosophy; the correct order now is to begin with the one and finish with the other."

This is all most apt to a sane view, and might perhaps be summed up by saying that the mistake in the mystic view lies in the aim to gain thought control only to kill thought forever. The mystic does not really aim at thought control, but at thought suppression. Essentially this is the thing reduced to its terms of ribald illogicality, when carried to its ultimate exploitation. It is as if the student were to master all the knowledge and skills of his profession so as never to practice it any more. The practical mind of the non-mystic would seek thought power in order to put it to great use in the interests of progress. But the mystic strives after thought control to end all thought.

Then this author reaches the height of sagacity in saying that when one passes beyond mysticism to the study of philosophy, in which the mind will be called upon to exercise its supreme power to discern the forms of truth,

109

"whereas before he suppressed thought, now he should seek to examine and direct it. Henceforth he will be alert to Nature and note her workings, where before he dismissed her and cared only to turn within."

Here indeed is fine grist for the mill that grinds out this essay. Precisely as this effort has already elucidated, the true sage goes deep within himself to learn the use of that miraculous lens of truth discernment, his developed instrument, the mind, and then turns it, not further into profound vacuity, but outward upon the world where the supermind of the cosmos has already written the characters of the creative ideation in the forms of Nature.

And in another passage he utters a truth of such transcendent import that it is impossible to stress it too heavily, when he exposes the terrible danger from the sweep of powerful feeling unregulated by the intellect:

"Strong gusts of emotionalism therefore provide a barricade against which the attacks of reason are futile. Emotion unchecked by reason is one of the great betrayers of mankind."

He adds that the philosophical student can not afford such emotional luxuries, since he knows that when feeling dominates the consciousness it inhibits the intellect. And as the mind is (says Brunton, in the face of all mystical doctrine) his chief instrument for gaining truth, he must by no means crush it out, but sharpen it to keenest edge, so that it may be the surest instrument to serve him in his conflict between reason on the one side and indulgence in emotion and passion on the other.

Then Brunton brings out another reflection of great astuteness and certainly of critical significance in the debate. Considering the so-highly-extolled flights of mystical ecstasies, he sets forth the truth that throws back in abject defeat the great argument, rather the sheer protestation, that the exalted afflations of the ego-consciousness are something high above thought, beyond the province of the intellect, and are things to which the intellect can not introduce man. He says:

"They, too, are really nothing more than thoughts, however unusual in character they may otherwise be. Hence there is no difference between the word spiritual and the word mental. All conscious life is thought life. The most spiritual man lives in thoughts as much as the most materialistic man . . . The riddle of life can be solved with man's present resources."

110

Here is corroboration for our earlier contention that man must engineer his successful progress with the resources provided for his use by life at the level where he stands, and must not be expected to call down from the empyrean the agencies of life at levels far transcending his own.

Of course in the dictionary sense it is not quite allowable to say that there is no difference between the meanings of spiritual and mental. But in the broad use of the terms in yoga, the statement is warranted. The real dialectical issue here is that the difference is not that one province of consciousness, the mind, is mental, and a higher province, the soul, is spiritual. Both sorts of conscious activity, says Brunton, are mental; they both have to do with mind, are exercised through mind. But in common ideation, the alleged higher state of soul consciousness, called spiritual, is so designated in reference to a marked difference in the nature and contents of the ideas and feelings reflected upon the mind. Brunton would doubtless allow this as a traditional differentiation, but probably did not note it because he felt it was minor and inconsequential. Surely he is right in asserting that all these ranges of the power of mind and intuition are in the province of the mind. It must be permissible to say that many of the realizations of mystical uplift are in the higher reaches or regions of the mind's gamut of activity. But even that can be objected to as a gratuitous concession to tendencies of common uncritical thinking and indoctrination.

Brunton's last sentence just quoted is so directly a refutation of the "orthodox" position in mayavic philosophy that it becomes indeed a notable utterance. If the riddle of life can not be solved with man's present resources, God is then asking of his children something that he has given them no fit tools to accomplish. How silly it would be if life, evolution, expected man to achieve given tasks for which the required tools were not placed in his hands! It is the egregious folly of all these philosophies negating man's competence to achieve his destiny, that they not only proclaim the inadequacy of the ordinary range of faculty, the intellect in particular, but aver that if man is to escape the direful consequences of this inadequacy, he must destroy them altogether. This is put forth on the theory that if they are not left to clutter up and obscure the area of consciousness, then completely competent divine faculty will have a chance to deploy into action, and perform blissfully what the imperfect inferior faculties failed to do.

111

But must it not be seen as insensate folly to act on the idea that if life's instrumentalities at a given stage of evolution seem inadequate to attain the end goal, the "logical" thing to do is to crush them out? Would not common instinct, instead, dictate the desirability of improving them? Would a carpenter or machinist, hampered by poor tools, act on the presumption that all he has to do is to throw away the imperfect ones he has and a geni out of heaven will automatically supply perfect ones? What assurance has man ever picked up from his contact with life and nature that if he casts away his present endowment of faculties and powers, a perfect repertoire of instrumentalities will automatically supervene? Always the ideological absurdity remains in any claim that man must, or can, achieve an evolutionary task for which he has not the present equipment. He can not be expected to work with what he has not. If his present resources are not adequate to what life demands of him, the blunt truth is that he is lost. He can not look to the heavens to send magic raining down upon him for his salvation if he disdains to use or destroys the equipment life gave him.

It must not be overlooked, too, as an argument of some weight, that if yoga practices or meditative intensities can in any way superinduce states of consciousness transcending the purely intellectual characterization, these capabilities must themselves be considered to lie within the range of the human mental capability, even though, in common usage, they be not denominated as of the mind, but rather of the spirit. This is the point which Brunton emphasized, in claiming a greater breadth for the term mental. And it is a legitimate claim. Why, then, go on urging us to effectuate a transcendence of the mind and intellect, when the powers we would use in making the transcendence are themselves still mental? Is it not infinitely more sensible to urge us to use the mind in the whole great range of its powers? Much more must be said on this theme when discussion touches the claims put forth for the intuition, as distinct from mind.

It is not, of course, to be claimed that the riddle of life can be solved in all its final completeness with what man has to use at present. The view that looks for a solution of life's great enigma as a matter of the successful achievement of a stated specific task of definite limited magnitude, like the completion of a course in college, is a faulty one. The accomplishment of absolutes, finalities

112

and ultimates is hardly in the province of man's life or in the reach of his accoutrement. Life goes on and on; solution of a lower-grade or simpler problem qualifies him to labor at a more complex one. But what can be positively asserted in the discussion is that the capabilities for solving the present phase of a problem in his evolution must be adequate for that task, his present resources must include those capabilities. Else his progress could not continue. This would seem to dispose of another of those baseless and specious arguments of the mystical schools of thought.

But again it is a sane and true observation of Brunton's, and one of prime importance, when he says that the quest of truth and reality, unaided by philosophy, can run riot in sheer emotionalism and lead a soul to disaster. He asserts that the qualities of reason, critical balance of judgment, thoughtful relation of feeling to the reality of the world, are conspicuously wanting among mystics. And he also notes that if the realm of supramental truth is open to mystical discovery and experience, there ought to be fair unanimity in the reports which mystics bring of the enraptured wonders of that Beulah land. On the contrary, he avers, mystics betray by word and deed that they have found or achieved no such uniformity, no identity of experience. Their exaltations are recorded as utterly individual, and carry certainty only to the individual experiencing them. Neither do men of vision or men of faith agree, says Brunton. And we must ask with him what is the guarantee that can assure us that what they see and feel is the real truth, or truth at all? Their testimony may carry no more acceptable warrant of truth than the reports of sensitives, spiritists and psychics in the realm of psychology generally. Goethe he cites as saying that mysticism was the "scholastic of the heart and the dialectic of the feelings." The experience is almost purely one of feeling, and feeling is hardly amenable to fixed laws by which its truth or falsity can be gauged, whereas thought does come under this category. Brunton even asks why an extraordinary inward peace should be sufficient title to certify the authority of a truth held concomitantly with it. It must be clear that even the highest, most rhapsodic elevations of mystical feeling can not qualify to stand as criteria of truth, beyond the certitude which they bring to the individual himself. Such criteria, if there be any, must be supplied by the laws of thought and the principles of truth, which philosophy must be challenged to

113

furnish. Ammonias in his school at Alexandria taught mysticism, but always in correlation with philosophy, Brunton advises. Plotinus, his famous pupil, rated as one of the world's great mystics, certainly built his profound system upon the basic principles of philosophy.

This testimony from a Westerner who has ascended to the heights and plumbed the depths of Hindu yoga should count weightily in the critique of the dominant philosophies of the Orient. Measured at least by his own experience and the normal standards of valuation, he came to see that its highest afflations of mystical uplift, possessing as they naturally would a certain unique and challenging appeal to our deepest susceptibilities, nevertheless fell short of supplying adequate answers--if any answers at all--to those fundamental questions which the human mind ever demands for its stability and its more valiant waging of the battle of life. He found that such mysticism did but temporize with the deepest soul of man, supplying not the everlasting peace and poise of enraptured communion with the eternal unconditioned unity of being, but only the enticing diversion of ephemeral transports. They could be taken up and pursued for a time in the fashion of any sensationally engaging new interest, and they brought certain realizations well worth the knowledge, no doubt. But they could not last at any high and perennially fresh pitch of zest and piquancy, for man's ecstasies are never permanent or steadily persistent. A high moment sweeps in upon us, delivers its message and is gone, leaving us the richer for its largesse of exalted insight. But the unction is preserved not in its living poignancy of feeling,--which the organism can not sustain beyond the moment--but in the memory and in the thinking principle it outlined in momentary grand light. Rom Landau, in his God Is My Adventure, has well said that a brilliant illumination of the psyche or a new revelation of truth that lifts one to the heights, if it only touch the emotions without affecting the intellect, simply can not last. He does not disqualify its good service, but declares it can not persist in its original power. Not all commitments even to the intellect endure with steady permanency. But they are stored at least subconsciously in the memory of their value for all later cogitation in the bank of the mind. So that in spite of all the protestations of the mystics, and

114

the enraptured eulogies of transcendental experiences of the sort, it remains true, as Mr. Brunton in his sincere "confession" has set forth, that those more enduring and ultimately more soul-nourishing satisfactions which the ego seeks under the divine push of inward being, are to be absorbed and treasured in the intellect.

Emotion and feeling are not to be decried outright. They have their proper function and it is a high one. Feeling is in fact one of the four component tones in the song of conscious life. If it were left out the harmony would never be complete. The four notes are sounded, one each in or through the four grades of consciousness, sensation, emotion, thought and spiritual intuition. A new element or influence in consciousness, to be inwoven into the texture of the life, must send its radiation through all four of the levels or planes of the individual life. If it is a new sensation, it must then impinge on the feelings, then sweep up into the mind and finally affect the spirit. If it is an emotion, it must induce a new sensation below it, a new idea and a new spiritual recognition above it. If it is a thought it must touch the feelings and the body sense below and reach up to the soul. And if it is a soul's awakening to new wholeness of understanding or rapture, it will assuredly flood down upon the mind, the feeling and the sense. In this way only does man become an integral unit of the life energy, or maintain the integrity of his life. This is the necessary integration that psychology insists upon for the completeness and stability of the individual.

Emotion, then, is one of the four ingredients essential to the wholeness of our experience. It is not to be decried. It is to be steadied, purified, ennobled. Neither, then, is intellect to be decried. Neither is sensation, nor mystical elations. Each has its place in composing the full chord, which would be defective if any one was lacking. And what is of great moment in the survey is the fact that, if any one is missing, the final force released by any high realization is not likely to come through to consciousness in its richest and purest tonicity. The chord must ring out all the four tones in harmony. Mystical philosophies here under critique have insisted that only the top note of the chord must be sounded by the highest tonal instrument, mystical feeling, demanding at the same time that the three lower vibrations be entirely silenced. The evident truth is that the supreme beauty and most penetrating sweetness of the conscious realization are only produced by the unison of

115

the four, not by the one top note alone. If analogy could speak with force on the point, the harmony of the four voices conjoined is a truer and more beautiful rendition than the soprano alone, sweet as that may be.

Speaking of the number four, Plutarch (Morals III, 110) says:

"Of this number the soul of man is composed; of mind, knowledge, opinion and sense are the four that complete the soul; from which all sciences, all arts, all rational faculty derive themselves. For what our mind perceives, it perceives after the manner of a thing that is one, the soul itself being a unity."

That all four ingredients of man's conscious life are indispensable to his well being and successful on-going is made clear by B. A. G. Fuller, dissertating on Greek philosophy in his splendid History of Philosophy:

"To the Hellenic mind man was primarily a natural fact, allotted, along with other facts, his specific nature and place in the universe, and enabled by the world process which had produced him to live happily and completely within the bounds imposed by that place and nature. Supernatural sanctions to a supernatural destiny were not necessary to right living and well being. Nor, on the other hand, was there any conflict between an essentially lower and an essentially higher nature to oppose a fundamental obstacle to self-fulfillment and happiness. Man had a single, though composite, character. Nothing with which nature had endowed him was alien to his best interests or a stumbling-block to his perfection. His good lay in as complete and as generous as possible an adjustment of the claims of all his various instincts and desires and interests. All were entitled to contribute their due part to his happiness and to receive their due share in it.

"Since, then, all right action and its reward in happiness was, for the Greeks, a matter of a purely intellectual determination of the exact measure and proportion in which the four grades of consciousness were intermixed in actual living, the dialectic irrefutably placed mind action--not spiritual illumination--as the center and base of all determination of life, character and destiny. No matter how high and blissful its rapture, it had to ask the mind to determine what were best for the earthly domicile it inhabited. And those raptures themselves depended largely upon the proper regimes of bodily discipline and habit, which it was the function of the mind to regulate."

Mystical theory has gone on interminably decrying the intellect, even declaring it an obstacle in the path. The greatest phil-

116

osophers, fortunately, have put themselves on record as to this item. We have lightly touched upon Spinoza's contribution to this feature of the discussion. More extended quotations could be made from his Ethics to very great advantage. What is brought out is that, not only can the intellect not be dispensed with, scorned, silenced in the hope of evoking the magical spiritual realizations and raptures, but the true exaltations of consciousness to the thrilling rapports and insights and visions can not supervene unless and until the intellect has exercised itself to the near-perfect mastery of its powers. In very truth the highest of the afflations are nothing other than the work of the intellect itself, performing its proper function with such alacrity and clarity that its swift motions appear to come as the play of some higher faculty, which has commonly been accorded the name of intuition. In the lightning flash of its mercurial activity one does see truth as if it lay outlined under the eye; and that is the meaning of intuition, from the Latin in-tueor, "to look upon" directly. Intuition differs from the apprehension of truth by the reason that by it one sees truth by direct looking, whereas by reason one arrives at it through a process of logical deductions from antecedent propositions. What is seen by immediate observation needs no proof by reason or logic. On this basis intuition has always been rated a higher faculty than the intellectual processes.

But let us hear what some of the great philosophers, who lifted their minds to the lucid vision of integrated truth, have had to say about the processes by which they attained to the heights of illuminated vision.

In his exegesis of the great Aristotle's philosophical system, our historian of philosophy, B. A. G. Fuller expounds the prime function of the intellect as "the task of fitting the pieces together." The pieces are the phenomena and events in the run of world experience. This indeed is the only way in which a creature that finds itself launched on the moving stream of life could hold its place in the line of march, or even secure its safety. Without an instrument to perform this function there would be no chance to seek anything higher than sheer physical existence. Without such intelligence the entity would be but a floating chip, powerless to orient his position in line with the free movement of the current.

In altiloquent terms the mystic proponents laud and magnify the proclaimed inundation of mind, first emptied of banal earthly

117

contents, by the flash and sweep of the beatific vision, the ecstatic realization and the supramental knowledge. This, as has been seen, is on their claim a downflow from the empyrean of supernal consciousness, and descends when the lower human mentality has been stilled. It is, they assert, in no way dependent upon the exercise of the brain-mind, which, so far from being a preparatory stage to the outcropping of the inner power, is actually the chief obstacle that stands in its way and must therefore be by-passed. In Fuller's words we have Aristotle's dictum on this matter, and implicit in his luminous view as now presented is a veritable overturn of all the cult philosophy in vogue:

"Now, before the truth can 'flash' upon the intellect in such wise that we cry triumphantly 'I have it,' 'I know,' our minds have to go through all this preparatory pother of synthetic judgment, trains of thought and so-called 'discursive reasoning.' We have to puzzle, argue, knit our brows and rack our brains before we see all at once how the pieces fit, or get sudden inspiration as to how the picture as a whole, or some portion of it, hangs together. Human reasoning, then, is a process; a means toward an end; an actualization of the potential; not an end in itself containing its own reward."

Here is forceful and straight rebuke to the unfounded asseverations of the mystics. To their vauntings that intuition gains nothing from the prior use and training of the intellect, and indeed flashes best when the mind is in abeyance, the answer can be given in Fuller's strong sentence: "He who will scorn the mind will never know the sweep of intuition." Here is the dynamic truth that will jar and jolt an ignorant cult of folly-ridden introvert ideology out of its fatuous dream of floating aloft in roseate Edens of mystical bliss by ignoring and flouting the mind. What the votaries of such ideologies will get out of their straining aspirations, instead of true visions of reality, will be chimerical phantoms of sensual hedonism.

Leaping from Aristotle to Spinoza, we hear Fuller expounding the latter's view of intuition:

"The final form of knowledge Spinoza calls intuition. By this we are not to understand some new faculty superseding reason, by which we are fused with an indescribable Reality transcending the categories of logical thought. Spinoza's intuition is not the mystical ecstasy of Plotinus, or Erigena or Master Eckhardt. Nor is it the sort of pious 'hunch' with which some modern intuitionists think to evade reason as a final authority, when the results of reason wound

118

their feelings, upset their preconceived notions or run counter to their desires . . . . It is an intellectual vision, attained by reason alone, of a reality that is through and through intelligible . . . . it sums up and sees in a single glance the whole system of ideas and truths logically implied by the nature of reality . . . . The thing, the thought, the emotion, the feeling, the love, the thrill of ecstasy, the starry heavens and the moral law, are no less present, no less living, no less poetic, no less charged with value, no less sublime, for being understood."

It is a question if mystical philosophy does not receive its most deadly thrust from the sublime but cutting sarcasm of these last words of Fuller's. For it shows them guilty, in their disdaining the intellect, of acting on the predication that the highest attainments of human consciousness are hindered by understanding, are the better for not being understood. Here at all events we have a source of accepted high authority positively and categorically throwing straight contradiction into the face of the endlessly reiterated asseverations of the mystic claimants. The intellect, the reason, which their philosophy berates and decries, is here declared to be the foundation and pillar of the whole possibility of the intuition which they place so far above the intellect.

"On the contrary, to the happiness that comes from experiencing them is added the new . . . . supreme happiness of knowing their causes and their necessary place in the infinite being of God."

And then follows the clear pronouncement of the climactic truth about this item in philosophic discussion that should enable all parties to comprehend the true status of the problem at last. Fuller says that this is a description of intuition that is not a denial of reason, but its sublimation.

In this last word is to be found the resolute of all debate, all partisan and partial views. The error perpetually committed by the mystical claimants, especially of the Orient, has been to regard and treat intuition as a faculty or level or grade of consciousness entirely separate from and independent of the mind, even a power with which the mind was at enmity, or to which it was an obstacle needing to be removed. The Spinozistic view regards intuition, not at all as a faculty independent of the mind, so that when it functions we can drop the use of the mind, inhibit its working and substitute the intuition in its place. In his view intuition is simply the con-

119

summation and perfection of the mind's own function. This is implied in Fuller's use of the word "sublimation." Intuition is the intellect sublimated, subtilized, apotheosized at its supreme level of perfection in a higher dimensional grade of consciousness. Intuition can be said to be the divine efflorescence of the intellect at the summit of its perfected powers. This must be so, since in the gamut of life's stages and tones of expression each higher faculty or reach of consciousness grows out of the perfection of the faculty generated by the grade below it. As the vegetable grows out of the refinement of the mineral, the animal out of the vegetable, the human out of the animal, so this intuitional vision, man's near approach to the divine estate above him, grows out of the intellect when that flowers out in its perfection.

A direct statement that corroborates this view is found in a work, The Christian Answer, by George F. Thomas. "The faculty of reason is not superseded, but raised to a higher level of vision under the influence of the divine inspiration." Christianity, he says, is opposed to the modern humanistic belief in the autonomy of reason in so far as that belief flatters the pretensions of men to discover the nature and purpose of God without the aid of revelation.

"But it insists that the deepest truths about God and his purpose are revealed to men in and through all their faculties of reason, imagination, conscience and feeling."

Again he eulogizes reason as "the candle of the Lord lighted by God and lighting men to God." The eminent psychologist, Jung, writes that "the soul is fructified by the intellect."

In his Ethics Spinoza gives the intellect its high and indispensable rating in the economy of the unfolding life:

"It is therefore extremely useful in life to perfect as much as we can the intellect or reason, and in this alone does the supreme happiness or blessedness of man consist; for blessedness is nothing else than the satisfaction of mind which arises from the intuitive knowledge of God . . . . Wherefore the ultimate aim of a man who is guided by reason, that is his greatest desire by which he endeavors to moderate all others, is that by which he is brought to conceive of his intelligence . . . . To know adequately the things which are within the power of the mind is to know God."

Again he discourses in similar strain:

120

"Inasmuch as the intellect is the better part of us, it is certain that, if we wish to seek what is truly profitable to us, we should try above all things, to perfect it as far as we can. Our highest good indeed should consist in intellectual perfection."

Plato in his Laws allocates to the mind the highest function in the rulership of life:

"If there were any man so sufficient by nature, being by divine Fortune happily engendered and born, that he could comprehend this, he would have no need of laws to command him. For there is not any law or ordinance more worthy and powerful than knowledge; nor is it fitting that mind, provided it be truly and really free by Nature, should be a subject or slave to any one, but it ought to command all."

Greek philosophy defined the divine coefficient of man's conscious life as a "pure fire infused with reason."

From Anaxagoras we find the high function of the intellect set forth in a way that should end all petty disposition of mystics to belittle mind's supreme service in the life of man: "All things were confused one among another; but Mind divided and reduced them to order." As Mr. Brunton states, the enraptured mystic does not concern himself with any ordered systematism of the relation or the meaning of the elements of world existence. It is enough for him that he sits bathed in complacency and titillated with his inward "phantoms of delight."

In exactly similar vein the Greek philosophy makes intelligence the cause of the order that exists in the soul, and as far as it has it, in the world. According to Plato intelligent soul is thus placed in the world to be the cause of the proportional structure and stable order of the universe. The great principle announced by the Platonic school, that the order of the world is sustained by the cosmic mind, is thus seen to be the logical base for the postulation of a mental power behind the phenomenal universe. Without the operation of such a cosmic intellect, there would be no possibility and no ground for the prevalence of the exact measure and proportion in which all multitudinous things in the world are sustained and stabilized. A universe running without the supervision of mind could be only a chaos. Intimations of beauty spring from our perception of this exactitude in the measure and proportion and balance with which all things are mingled in the world, after the primal

121

unity of being has divided itself into infinite multiplicity, which sets for it the stupendous task of commingling the multitudinous elements in that due balance which insures the beneficent orderliness of the manifest existence.

Water being the symbol of the body in which soul has to live in incarnation, Heraclitus, great Greek philosopher before Plato, expresses the soul's "natural propensity for the downward way," meaning its cosmic urge to incarnation, in his terse statement that "souls like to get wet." And, once here in body, divulsed from the higher dimensional consciousness of the upper spheres, and immersed in the surging waves of sense and emotion sweeping in on it from the side of the body, the soul would be subject, as the Greek philosophy has so capably established, to a life of chaos, unless man developed some power to distinguish between the diverse elements of his experience and could by it order his life with judicious judgment. That potential saving power is the reason. The soul would be overwhelmed in the flux of unrelated events if it did not develop a faculty by which it can guide its way safely through the surging waters of sense. So Heraclitus says: "The senses reflect the flux alone, but the reason sees through the flux to the Logos."

122

We have ancient wisdom speaking to us volubly and in beautiful figure in Plutarch's dissertation (Morals III, 573):

"All of which Plato endeavors to illustrate by a similitude of the chariot horses of the soul, the one whereof being more unruly, not only kicks and flings at him that is more gentle and tractable, but also thereby so troubles and disorders the driver himself, that he is forced sometimes to hold him hard in and sometimes again to give him his head,

'Lest from his hands the purple reins should slip,' as Simonides speaks."

And a sanity all too wanting in philosophies bent to crush the "lower" passions in the fell rush to take the kingdom of heaven by storm, is found in Plutarch's Morals (Vol. III, 490), the sober good sense of which is recommended to all cults preaching the spiritual aim of religion, in disparagement of the physical life.

"Of all which things man does in some measure participate . . . . For he is contained by habit and nourished by Nature; he makes use of reason and understanding; he wants not his share of the irrational soul; he has also in him a native source and inbred principle of the passions, not as adventitious but necessary to him [italics ours], which ought not therefore to be utterly rooted out, but only pruned and cultivated. For it is not the method and custom of reason . . . . to destroy and tear up all the passions and affections indifferently, good and bad, useful and hurtful together; but rather--like some kind and careful Deity who has a tender regard to the growth and improvement of fruit trees and plants--to cut away and clip off that which grows wild and rank, and to dress and manage the rest that it may serve for use and profit. For neither do they who fear any violent commotion of their passions go about utterly to destroy and eradicate, but rather wisely to temper and moderate them. And as they who use to break horses and oxen do not go about to take away their goings, or to render them unfit for labor and service, but only strive to cure them of their unluckiness and flinging by their heels, and to bring them to be patient of the bit and yoke, so as to become useful; after the same manner reason makes very good use of the passions after they are well subdued and made gentle, without either tearing in pieces or over-much weakening that part of the soul which was made to be obedient to her. But much more useful than these in their several kinds are the whole brood of passions, when they become attendants to reason,

123

and when, being assistant and obedient to virtue, they give life and vigor to it."

Here is wisdom which, all things seem to warrant the saying, Greece possessed and India lacked. Greece saw the beneficent use of the lower nature in its relation to the higher; India could only think of crushing down and extinguishing the life of the senses and even of the mind. As far as the outward expression of the two philosophies goes, Plutarch's lucid illustration of the function of the passional nature stands as direct contradiction of the major body of Hindu yoga doctrine.

In another passage (Morals III, 91) Plutarch elucidates how God uses the body of man to make himself known both to others and to himself. Each higher principle of the cosmic consciousness, he says, employs a lower essence as its instrument, and through the lower power, though it limits and compresses the diviner potential, brings its hidden capacities to view. His statement is notable and of such majestic dignity as to be worthy of citation:

"It is true, whilst man, in that little part of him, his soul, lies struggling and scattered in the vast womb of the universe, he is an obscure and unknown being; but, when once he gets hither into this world and puts a body on, he grows illustrious and from an obscure becomes a conspicuous being; from a hidden an apparent one . . . . For the birth or generation of individuals gives not any being to them which they had not before, but brings that individual into view."

In our humble view it seems time that wisdom such as this should, like the obscure being of man which it descants upon, be brought from dark recesses of ancient sapiency out into the view of modern man. For here is wisdom that would resolve a thousand points of confusion in modern thought and rebuke a thousand cult teachings of warped truth which in the folly of ignorance turn the mind to enmity against the world of life.

Here can be caught a deeper meaning to the commonplace sense of the doctrine of manifestation in theology. The physical worlds are in reality God himself in manifestation, bringing his hidden nature forth to view both to himself and those of his creatures on the scene. Plutarch says that the sun, taken to be Apollo, was called Delius (conspicuous) and Pythius (known) because it was in open view of all. But the ruler of the lower invisible kingdom was

124

called Hades (invisible). The basic fact underlying all philosophy is the knowledge that the great life of the universe alternately brings itself from the state of non-existence or unmanifestation out to existence and becoming. All negation attaches to the first state, and all positive being to the second. It is to be assumed that each condition is most delightful to the conscious mind operating the cycles of its life as the one succeeds the other. But it would certainly stand approved by reason that a philosophy which puts all rich positive value in the cycle of non-existence, decrying and denying all value to existence, is unbalanced and illogical, or worse. If it be submitted to the naive common judgment of all thinking people, the decision must be that something is better than nothing, that existence is better than non-existence. Life must enhance itself by its own positive attitudes; it can not advance on negation. India comes perilously close to affirming in her philosophy that Hamlet's question, to be or not to be, is best answered in the negative. Existence has no rewards sufficiently compensatory for its strains and ills. Life is best crushed before it begins.

It is true the Greeks associated the idea and the very term of "death" with the life in the body. They even defined matter as "privation." Spirit was accorded the highest rank in the order of value; matter was the essence of non-being. Yet the utterly real being arose, they held, from the alternate rotation and the commingling of the two, never inhered in the one alone, in detachment from the other.

There is a subtle, yet very definite difference between the words real and actual. They are in general usage taken pretty much as synonyms. In philosophical parlance, however, there subsists a distinction that should be clearly apprehended for the better understanding of basic problems. It can be assumed that all being is real, whether it is inactive in the non-manifest arc of its cycles, or active and conscious in the manifest arc; just as man is real whether he be asleep or awake. So the cycles introduce no distinction in the status of being as to its reality or non-reality. But they do introduce a distinction between the reality of being and its actuality. As sharply as man can analyze this distinction, the cycles of manifestation precipitate the conscious essence of being from a condition of sheer potentiality out into a condition of self-conscious actualization of its unborn potential. Manifestation, as Plutarch

125

says, does not add to being anything that it lacked before; it only made its unknown reality actual to itself. Actuality, it was noted, is the key word in the luminous passage earlier quoted from Plotinus. Souls, he said, could not know what their prospective possessions of faculty were until they were actualized in the objective, the self-conscious, form of reality, inferring that they would have remained unknown if retained forever in the purely subjective state of reality. Only the objectified reality is the actually real, it might be put. There are infinite grades of reality in the cosmos; only the tiny segment of that infinite gamut of which the creature can be self-conscious can be said to be his reality, only the part that he has actualized. Infinite reaches of higher reality stretch beyond him, which he has not yet actualized. To him only that is real which he has actualized, made himself conscious of and acquainted with.

Hindus gave supreme reality only to the subjective potential, and denied it to the objective actual. The resolution of endless debate in philosophy could have been achieved if this distinction had been clearly accentuated in the past. The worlds and the divine life manifesting in them oscillate forever between the two ends of the gamut lying between the positive state and privation. Also, what seems indicated and has not been brought out in the exposition, is that each swing of the pendulum from positive to negative state, from active to inert, likewise changes the polarity in the sense that to whatever consciousness life possesses in each arc, that grade would seem to be the positive and its opposite the negative. This would make it possible to say that to heavenly inhabitants their sort of consciousness would seem to be real and earth consciousness a want of reality. But to us on earth this experience seems real and we think that death will abolish its reality.

What the great Aristotle contributed to this clarification is too charged with clear understanding to be passed over. His analysis starts from the consideration of change in the living order of the universe. Nothing remains what it now is; all things are in process of change or transition from what they are to something else. On this observation has been based largely the accusation of the idealist and monistic schools in philosophy that all things here are unreal, and that reality is to be found only in the states of consciousness assumed to have play in the unmanifest cycles, where change is frozen to immobility in static inertia.

126

But Aristotle resolves this too simple analysis with more recondite particularity. Says he, change passes always from one state to another under definite ordained procedures, and it is the entire structure pattern drawn out by the total sweep of the movement of change that constitutes the reality, which is not to be found in any one static moment of the process. The oak sapling is not what the giant tree will be; the boy is not what he will be as a man. The full revelation of what each created thing will be only comes to view in the final stages of growth in the cycle or cycles. Life reveals itself in the cycle's end, or only then in complete fulness. The Greek word for end being telos, he named his theory entelechy, the idea that the end stage actualizes the potential implicit in the beginning. Change, he says, passes always to or from a climax, it is either anabolic or katabolic, growth or decay. A potential thing is realized at its climax, becomes fully entitled to the designation of real, when it becomes actualized in its consummation of growth. It may be, in one sense, real when it is yet only potential; but it is not actually real until it has brought out all its inner life to fruitage. At stages of advance toward its entelechy it is actual as far as it has gone, but still only potential in the ground it has yet to traverse. Its actuality is always a mixture of hule (hyle), substance, and an intellectually preconceived form in the ideal or noumenal world. The two ingredients in the mixture are matter, which holds the potentiality, and form, which, when manifested in the concrete, is the actuality which comes to view in the entelechy. The two are purely relative to each other, and can have no existence apart from each other. When their polarized relation is dissolved (and Indian philosophy insistently urges its dissolution), the being that was coming to its entelechy ceases its becoming and relapses back into sheer be-ness, retaining only its potentiality for later becoming. Aristotle in his De Generatione et Corruptione (Concerning Generation and Decay) says: "Although there is a matter of the perceptible bodies, a matter of which the so-called 'elements' come to be, it has no separate existence, but is always bound up with a contrariety." Those who deny the existence or reality of matter are denying to God's creative ideas and purposes the opportunity and the reality of their actualization in the worlds.

The mystics who presume to eliminate time and evolution from their interpretative scheme, are undermining the conditions

127

necessary for the realization of the entelechy, and would by obviating these "limitations" on the free spirit lift consciousness in one ecstatic leap into the realm of unconditioned being. This is folly, for they do not realize that, as has been said, "time is the moving image of eternity." If philosophy is so avid to postulate the experience of climactic exaltations and apotheosizations without giving the process time to unfold the pattern of the forms, it puts itself arbitrarily and artificially out of harmony with the ordained processes of universal life. Such philosophy answers no questions about the meaning of life; it declares life evil and counsels escape from it.

Nature, so lavishly reviled by idealistic theory, could be looked upon with something more than mere poetic appreciations of its beauty, if Aristotle's enlightened view of it was generally reflected upon. The world of nature, he says, is that realm of existence in which we have for the first time form and matter mixed. It is the first scene on which the idea-forms of the creation appear to a sensible creature.

As nature is a composite of matter-potential and ideal reality in life's first and hence rudimentary conjunction of the two, nature, as manifesting matter more conspicuously than the mind-forms hidden in it, came through dearth of profounder understanding, under the condemnation of religious ideology. Matter became the devil, the evil genius of the world, and has had to bear the brunt of religion's eternal obloquy and vilification for centuries. Canon Farrar, in his Lives of the Fathers (Vol. II, 217) gives so lucid and graphic a picture of this attitude that it is well to hear it:

"The causes that led to asceticism were manifold; but the deepest cause which, heretical as it is, exercised a strong, though half-unconscious, influence over many Christians in the early centuries was the Zoroastrian, Dualistic, Manichean and Gnostic conception of the inherent corruption and malignancy of matter. The body, which the gift of the Indwelling Spirit had elevated into a temple of the Holy Ghost, was regarded as a polluting tomb. It was treated as the source of all evils; and because it is a duty to subdue the appetites of the flesh, it was most erroneously regarded as meritorious to crush the body in which they originate."

Here is the declaration of one of the great modern lights of the Church that it is a great error to crush the body, which he also declares to be the temple of the soul, following the Christian founder, St. Paul. If he is right in his statement, then Christianity for a long

128

ten centuries acted out an erroneous policy, since the crushing of the body was a dominant motive of its activity from about the fifth to the fifteenth century. The long and tragic story of this impulse to crucify the flesh, a hallucination which under false austerities ground down both the souls and bodies of millions of Christians, has never been written in all its glaring luridness. It is quite closely allied with the mysticism here discussed, as regimes of self-denial were instituted with the idea of profiting by Porphyry's expressive phrase, "to cause the body to sit as lightly as possible about the soul." Fasting in particular was practiced to render the nervous system and the psychic faculties more sensitive to the conditions which would bring spiritual visions and phenomena of occult character. The Essenes in their monastic colonies in the Jordan Valley and Syria were perhaps the most amazingly successful practitioners of these ascetic measures in the religious field.

Stanley Romaine Hopper (The Crisis of Faith, 107) speaks of a mysticism which turned the spirit inward upon its own impotence. What else could the spirit find within itself, if it had once torn out of its inner citadel all the contents of the feelings and the mind from which it might have drawn support and strength? A doctrine that urges it to invite or entice downward into its cognizance the divine apocalypse by first denuding itself of all its incentives to growth through knowledge of the creation which it can acquire only from the world, must be adjudged an illogical teaching. Hopper goes on to arraign this age-old self-deification, which he says results from the withdrawal of the self from the objective world, in the fatuous attempt of the meditator to elevate himself to super-human estate, in which the self is lost in the pursuit of beatific goals predicated upon the insatiable longing of the self for the infinite.

Commenting upon Amiel's reference to mystical afflations as "this bedazzlement with the infinite," Hopper agrees with him that it is a snare and a delusion. And Friedrich Schlegel (The Philosophy of Life, 40) says that "the Henosis of Plotinus intoxicates me like a philtre," until, as Hopper adds, "extinction overtakes him and the colored air-bubble has burst in the infinite space and the misery of thought has sunk to rest in the changeless repose of an all-embracing nothing." Hopper speaks of the mystical practices as tending to induce narcissism. The spirit of man, he says, may relate itself either to existences outside itself and depersonalize itself as it identi-

129

fies itself with its object; or it may also be possible to relate itself to objects no less real for being reified in the imagination, created by subjective fantasy, which have neither tangibility nor substance, and are pure figments of the mind. An incalculable quantity of the objects of religious devotion are undoubtedly of this sort. It should in every sphere of man's life be his object to hitch his mind to reality. Religion has gone so far in the contrary direction as to tie the mind to an infinite variety of bogies and chimeras.

The French Pascal speaks in most uncompromising terms upon the false premises of mysticism (in Pensees, 464): "All philosophers have said in vain, 'Retire within yourselves, you will find your god there.' We do not believe them, and those who believe them are the most empty and the most foolish." And again (Pensees 430): "It is in vain, O men, that you seek within yourselves the remedy for your ills. All your light can only reach the knowledge that not in yourselves will you find truth or good." This, however, needs the qualification that man will find truth, light, knowledge and overshadowing peace within himself (how could he get these outside himself?) when through continuing experience he brings out the potential within himself, not by casting out the fruits of his mundane living, but by relating his innate divine genius properly with the forms of truth impinging upon his life from the external world.

Canon Farrar's work, Lives of the Fathers, goes into elaborate detail to narrate the fantastic extravagances of subjective visionings, entrancings, alleged visitations of the spirits of ancient dead, and volumes of the same abound in the mystical literature of Christianity, from Augustine and Martin down to the present. The scientific secular psychopathic approach to the investigation of such phenomena today divests this chapter of religious abnormality of most of its unctuous spiritual glamor and reduces its authority as a credential of divine influence drastically. The hallowed saints as well narrate assaults upon them by demons and devils as visitations by angels. Much of early mystical afflatus was generated by gazing in rigid concentration on the bones of earlier Christian saints, in the fashion of Hindus staring at their navel. So that the Emperor Julian was constrained to dub the Roman Christians "Bone Worshippers."

There is little profit in pursuing this line further, but as a true

130

historical demonstration of the lengths of unbalance to which the religious abhorrence of matter and the flesh can carry humans, the following passage from Farrar's "Fathers" is worthy of notice:

"A strong glimpse of the irregularities of the fourth century may be derived from the enchantments of the Council of Gangra. The date of this Council is uncertain, but it was probably held about 379 A. D., and was intended to check the errors and extravagances of the followers of Eustathius of Sebaste. We learn from its canons that there were some who not only blamed marriage, but said that a woman living with her husband cannot be saved; that others separated themselves from the communion of married priests and refused to partake of elements which they consecrated; that they embraced a life of virginity from horror of the married state; and that they insulted married persons. We also find anathemas against women who, under the pretence of religion, wore men's clothing, cut off their hair and forsook their children. These canons are undoubtedly genuine and are contained in the codes of the Greek and Latin Churches."

The length to which the story of such reactions under the influence of combined mysticism and asceticism has gone is close to incredible.

Beatrice M. Hinkle, in her fine work, The Integration of the Individual (449), speaking of psychoanalysis and its advantages over religion, in that religion gives the promise of felicity in a future life, while psychoanalysis offers not faith in a future, but self-knowledge by which the individual can steer his course most directly toward felicity here and now, by finding the transforming power within himself, does not fail to remind us that in using those very powers of the psyche which make possible our elevation to higher states of being, we can be most easily tricked and deceived "in this tragic play of hide and seek with ourselves." Mystic philosophy has reversed the true and fixed order of beneficent economy as between man and his world: it adjures man to turn away from the forms of the physical creation outside him as having no meaning or message, or a lying one, and to go within the unconditioned depths of his own consciousness to find truth and light. This reverses the true direction. He finds, as many of the psychologists are now saying, his inner world, in so far as he has not filled it with the truths reflected from their prototypal images in the external world, to be either an empty hall or peopled with some truths, some half-truths

131

and numberless phantoms and fancies born of his unintelligence and spontaneous run of free imagination, not organized on any rational basis and unrelated to reality. This is no less than devastating to the psyche.

While Christian and Hindu asceticism, bred from the concept of this diabolical "malignancy of matter," went on for centuries stifling, mutilating the body, Greece brought that body to its highest point of strength and beauty. Greek philosophy well understood the limitations which the flesh imposed upon soul; indeed it referred to the body under the cryptic symbolism of the soul's prison-house, grave, tomb, as the Egyptians had called it the mummy-case and the bird-cage of the soul. The soul resided in the body in analogically the same conditions as a bird in its cage. In the body the soul lay, till awakened and resurrected, in "death."

Nevertheless the Greeks never understood the soul's imprisonment in body in the bald literal and realistic sense in which the Christians took it. Greek philosophical perspicacity saw through the recondite esotericism to the positive meaning behind it. The body might be poetized as a prison, a tomb; but competent sagacity discerned that it was at the same time the window which life had opened out upon the sunlight of reality. Prison it might be thought, but still it was known to be a whole miniature world in itself, a microcosm of the total world, a universe over which the infant deity implanted at its heart could have real practice in the exercise of sovereignty for the evolution of his kingship over all the elements. Death-house it might be called; but it was a mortuary whose doors would in the anastasis, or resurrection, open wide to let the imperishable "mummy," like Lazarus, arise and come forth in Easter radiance to life eternal. The body, lowly animal as it is, was still the faithful beast on whose back the divinity in man would ride up to and through the gates of the holy Jerusalem of celestial glory, with hosannas resounding through the skies. The erudite Greeks knew the mighty temptation soul had to undergo from the side of body; but they knew that without such wrestling with the seductions of the flesh, soul would waste away in inanition. No disastrous negativism or condemnation, therefore, motivated their attitude toward the body. With a balanced understanding dictating their posture toward it, they sought to impose upon it the exact measure and proportion of due restraint of its fierce lusts and passions, while

132

developing to the full its magnificent mechanism of power and its natural charm.

Dean Milman, author of perhaps the finest History of Christianity (p. 26), pays the Greeks a high tribute, lauding their religion, which, he says, had so elevated the popular mind with salutary philosophy that it brought the human bodily development to its highest peak of perfection.

S. R. Hopper, already quoted, says that the lofty 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 in wonder and in wisdom. The wonder of the modern world, said Chesterton, is that the wonder of the world has gone out of it."

Quoting Heraclitus' terse statement that "man is kindled and put out like a light in the nighttime," Hopper says that "with sure intuition the Greek mind turned to this element of permanence which forever transcends the flux, or founds it, and established there its wisdom." "For all human laws are fed by one thing, the divine," he had been assured by this same Heraclitus.

What John Addington Symonds says about the influence of the revival of study of the Greek classics upon the great Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth century in Europe will be enlightening to all modern readers.

"The study of Greek implied the birth of criticism, comparison, research. Systems based on ignorance and superstition were destined to give way before it. The study of Greek opened philosophical horizons far beyond the dream-world of the Churchmen and the monks; it stimulated the germs of science . . . . and indirectly led to the discovery of America. The study of Greek resuscitated a sense of the beautiful in art and literature. It subjected the creeds of Christianity, the language of the Gospels, the doctrines of St. Paul to analysis, and commenced a new era for Biblical inquiry . . . . Since the reawakening faith in human reason, reawakening belief in the dignity of man, the desire for beauty, the audacity and passion of the Renaissance received from Greek studies their strongest and most vital impulse."

These are words loaded with fateful challenge to a decadent world blindly now seeking a secure path through its darkness. It would seem that when a tribute of such splendid character and such benignant influence in world history can be accorded a nation of

133

people, the philosophy which both expressed their greatness and made them great above other nations, should be closely studied by the world for its present behoof. Writers assure us that early Christianity would have died out in a generation if its fervors and fanatical zealotry had not been tempered and rationalized by the introduction of elements of the sage Greek philosophy, largely through that master of the Greek Mystery religions, St. Paul.

Some idea of that balance of philosophical acumen which saved the Greeks from sinking down, with India and with Christianity, to abject self-mortification under false conceptions of the body's "enmity" to soul may be gleaned from Fuller's analysis of Greek thought in the Introduction to his History of Philosophy. The Greeks aspired and longed to win the state of freedom and deathlessness enjoyed by the gods; but they entertained no overweening fatuous notions that they could magically overcome human mortality and rise to godhood by some simple contemplative broodings, and the mental denial of the reality of the life here. Referring to man, Fuller writes:

"For him to aspire to the blessed and deathless life of the gods was to seek to usurp the divine prerogative and was insolence of the worst sort. 'Seek not to become Zeus; mortal things befit a mortal.'"

Again the Greeks balance and sanity are shown in what follows this sentence. Fuller says he will in a moment have to refer to another voice in Greek religion that defies this admonition, by telling man that he is really divine and bidding him regain his Edenic status.

"But underlying the concept of Pindar's--the idea that nature has called each form of being to a particular station in which it must be contained, and has set upon it bounds which it must respect if it would not go wrong and meet with retribution--is dominant in Greek religious thought and fundamental in Greek ethics."

Here the Greek mind recognized that if there was to be order and harmony in the universe, each creature had to be held, though with freedom in its own allotted measure of self-initiated action, to its own assigned sphere, which formed one unit in a greater cosmic structure, the smooth working of the whole depending upon the steady action of each component element in its proper place and

134

function. If, so to say, any unit along the line, in eager haste to reach the goal "toward which the whole creation moves," stepped out of its place and rushed in reckless impetuosity toward the head of the column, it was clear that chaos would be precipitated in the world order. The over-avid unit would not only disorder the whole progression, but would wreck itself in the mad endeavor. In the eternal balance of things a wise restraint even on the most laudable motives was as virtuous as the divine urge for the good life. What the Greeks sought always was that golden mean between the excess and the deficiency of any good quality. This is the stanchest principle of practical wisdom in the ethical code of mankind. So again it is to the intellect that resort must be had when it is a matter of deciding where lies that median point between too much and too little of any element in a problem.

Rated high among earth's coterie of greatest minds is the German poet-philosopher Goethe. He, too, and probably from Greek sources, had caught the sane view of man's allotment among the orders of created beings, and the necessity under which he labored to fulfil his evolutionary task assigned by Fate. And in a beautiful poetic expression he, too, warns against our striving and straining to "become Zeus" or assail the kingdom of heaven by violence.

There is enough to know about the earthly sphere;

The Beyond from sight forever is debarred!

A man's a fool to grope with blinking eyes,

Dreaming in clouds above his fellow men.

Let him stand firmly here and look around,

To the capable the world is never dumb!

Why must he ramble through eternity?

First let him gain and utilize the known!

Roam down the pathway of his earthly days;

When spirits haunt him, let him go his way,

Though at the moment still unsatisfied,

Find joy or torment striding to his goal!

And we have already heard Mr. Brunton speak in derogatory terms of those socially useless contemplatives, bent on reaching the bliss of Devanchan and the surcease of Nirvana "with blinking eyes, dreaming in clouds above their fellow men."

An odd but logical way of stating the ethical principle of the golden mean is given by the Jewish Medieval scholar Maimonides:

135

"If there is any one who is, in regard to principle, in equal distance from two extremes in all his doings, he is called a wise man, a physician of the soul, because he restores her to health and keeps her in the right course."

The great "weighing in the balance," that equilibration of spirit and matter which ancient wisdom declared to be the necessary basis of all progression, is well substantiated by Fuller's exposition of the philosophy of Plotinus:

"The way of redemption is long and gradual. It may take aeons of incarnation to traverse it, and there are no short cuts in the long windings of its ascent. Sudden conversions, shortcuttings such as seemed to be promised by the Mystery Religions, irrelevant and premature ecstasies, reunions with the One in outbursts of irrational emotion, have no place in the system. In the end, to be sure, the soul will be wrapped away and united with the divine in an indescribable ecstasy; but she must first pledge herself for that last flight by a long and rigorous discipline, not only moral but intellectual. Without this long and careful training she would not be strong enough to attain the heights upon which redemption dwells, or to bear the splendors of the beatific vision these revealed to her."

When one reads the literature of nearly all the modern cults announcing and promising the rhapsodies of mystical communion and the consummate genius of seership as the reward of a proffered course of study covering a few months, one realizes how the venerable philosophy of the ancient initiates and semi-divine teachers has been traduced to banality. It has been travestied and caricatured into something matching the modern run of magical mechanical gadgets that substitute inventive ingenuity for real exertion. The rewards of steady devotion and achievement in the field of spiritual progress are hardly to be overlauded. But the cults present an unbalanced and an untrue picture of the possibilities in the case, deceiving their followers with the prospects of quick results, which can hardly come save in the course of many journeys of the soul through the incarnate valley.

Some of the more rabid schools of cult indoctrination simply ignore the time element altogether, promising climactic fulfilment and evolutionary consummation on the condition of sufficient intensity of resolute determination, alleged to be achievable at any instant the heroic will to its attainment can be mustered. This boldness springs from the presumption that a quantitative experience

136

requiring longer time can be equated by a heightened qualitative one, almost eliminating the time element as a factor necessary for growth. It is a commonplace expression among devotees of yoga philosophy that one can hasten one's evolution. If this means that intensive effort, spurred by a fervent zeal for truth and light, and directed by sound intelligence, can lead one most directly, without undue wasting of time and opportunity, on to the steps ahead, it can be accepted as a rational proposition. But if, as it so generally does, it expresses the belief that a short period of practice of some prescribed run of meditations and yoga exercises will obviate the necessity of the full development of every occult potentiality and quickly elevate one to arhatship and Nirvanic consciousness, it is of all follies the most treacherous and baseless.

The wise admonition of Plotinus should be nailed on the walls of those cult temples to give their votaries a sobering sense of their vaunting presumptions in this mighty science of the spirit, which is infinitely more recondite and searching than they are ready to believe. Most of them essay to reach the loftiest heavens without offering the most elementary requirements on the intellectual side, which Plotinus, seconded by Aristotle and Spinoza in particular, affirms are indispensable. The legend has gained wide vogue that forces of consciousness asserted to transcend the intellect will achieve in a trice what the imperfect intellect could not arrive at in ages. Perhaps it could be agreed that of course the imperfect intellect could not achieve consummative spiritual states, certainly not as long as it is kept--imperfect. But the intellect can be perfected to high efficiency. And so the semi-hysterical prodding of the spirit goes on in these groups, with results that are really the proper subject of study in a psychiatric clinic.

137

Integrally related to the last excerpt quoted from Fuller's work is a further exposition of Plotinus' thought, which again dialectically relates the evolution of the soul to its mundane environment and experience. It is profoundly true and basic for understanding:

"Furthermore, man has a body and senses, and a sensible experience crowded with individual data, and it is through perception that he gets his first contacts with the external world and his first incentive to think. His intellectual processes are not self-initiating and self-supporting. Sensible experience pushes the button that sets the active parts of the intellect to work realizing the truth it potentially contains. This operation consists in abstracting their common and universal characteristics--in other words their forms."

This stands as one of the most concise and compact statements of how soul grows from its contact with the earthly realities in the midst of which it lives.

And an answer and rebuttal which Fuller supplies to the arrant claims that the intellect is not of prime utility in the redemptive process is quite noteworthy:

"If the will, then, were enlightened by an accurate knowledge of the true good, it would spontaneously, necessarily and freely prefer, choose and pursue it."

It has forever been contended that knowledge is not in any case a guarantee of virtuous conduct, that we continually do evil, knowing better. The alcoholic, for instance, knows full well he ought not to drink, yet continues to do so. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, we say. But it is to be noted what Fuller precisely says here: "if the will were enlightened by an accurate knowledge of the true good." One may have knowledge, but still lack the rich possession of an enlightened will. It is perhaps not so much true that the spirit is willing and the flesh weak, as that the spirit, that is, resolute will made dynamic by enlightened intelligence, is weak and the flesh willing. Nothing will stop the human soul that is truly enlightened and its spirit fired with resolution!

For this reason and under such condition, it may be conceded,

138

perhaps, that mere intellectual knowledge may not galvanize the will into robust rulership of the desires, impulses and passions, and it is unreasonable to expect that mental acquaintance with a fact should work miracles of moral regeneration at one stroke. The experience which time brings is always the final educator of the will. It takes the play of all the four elements of consciousness in mutual interaction over sufficiently long periods to settle a moral gain securely in character.

But one thing is sure, and Fuller's comment is right: the will will not spontaneously or automatically choose and pursue the good until it has been enlightened by accurate knowledge. Or, more surely still, it will not pursue the good, either freely or under evolutionary pressures, unless it is enlightened. The most excellent aspect of fine character is the dependable stabilized motive and sincere desire to do good. But, as touched on before, the determination of what the good thing is brings the problem ever back to the door of the intellect. A survey of the exalted Greek philosophy would readjust the lost relation of values generally held to prevail between good motive and the intellect in the field of ethical philosophy today. All emphasis is placed on the disposition to do good, the will to the good, the common assumption being that if one avows such excellent disposition, it will insure a constant right choice of action. The intellect, the knowledge which alone will determine what is the good thing, is only incidentally taken into account. In the Greek analysis of the factors involved in the life of goodness and virtue the intellect is virtually the sole, at any rate the determining influence from first to last. Good intent and virtuous disposition are a feeble and wobbly foundation for goodness, standing alone. Good will is better than evil mind, it goes without saying. Nevertheless goodness unshepherded by keen intelligence possesses no guarantee against blind and erroneous action, unwitting blunder. Much of history's foulest inhumanity has been perpetrated by people and parties ignorantly inspired by unintelligent motives that were by them interpreted as good. Unintelligent "good" purposes have splattered all the pages of history with lurid stains of blood. Goodness is never safe from inflicting injury until it is also intelligent. The unctuous proclivity of spiritual sects to slander the intellect has undoubtedly been productive of immense evil in all ages of the world.

139

This matter is one of such general and practical interest and concern and the subject of so much discussion and Sabbath-school homiletics that it seems good to present what Fuller has further to say in its elucidation. The world-soul, he says, is naturally predisposed, or by evolutionary stress turned, toward the achievement of the good. He says:

"Descending now to man, we find that he, too, is self-determined to the good. How contrary this is to religion, which asseverates that man is by nature incurably evil! He can not choose or will any course of action that he does not think, at the moment, will attain a desired end and satisfy a want. But, unfortunately, the human will, unlike the divine, is not enlightened and determined by an accurate knowledge of what the truly desirable end and the deepest wants really are. Because of his material nature and his attachments to the physical and temporal world, man has no clear vision and no undivided love of the sovereign good. His eye is caught on every side by the relative and contingent goods, satisfactions of the moment, gratification of the senses, worldly success and the like, which divide the life of which God is the proper object, and scatter it in a thousand conflicting drives upon as many different satisfactions."

Commenting on the doctrinism of the great Aquinas, Fuller says in the same vein:

"Since we have only an indirect knowledge of its nature, gained by reason and revelation, our choices must often miss the mark and lead us away from God rather than toward him."

And he gives the ultimate conclusion of the ethical problem as Greek Platonism worked it out: "An evil choice is simply a mistaken choice." Perhaps this must ever seem to us to be too thin and abstract an analysis to be the truth. But this is because we see wrong decisions acted out under the drive of such massive emotional impulsions that we regard the motive as the gross evil rather than the principle involved in the act. But after all, the wrong thing done was a decision or a choice made by the intellect, or in default of it. The passion, the greed or the subtle desire was only the force driving the intellect on to make its good or evil choice. What was done ill was perpetrated by a miscalculation of the intellect. Sin is therefore an error of the intellect. If intellect, better intellect, is needed to correct those errors, how imbecile the philosophy which urges its extinction that truth may flow in!

140

In the end, then, the mistake in wrong action is much the same at base as the mistake in solving a mathematical problem. And the attainment of proficiency in bringing off true good comes ultimately through the cultivation of skill in the mental determinations of right action. The modern mind needs badly to recover this insight of the Greek wisdom.

An exceedingly sound view of the need of philosophy in the counsels of the present, but by no means inapt to all epochs of the historical period, is found in Romaine Hopper's The Crisis of Faith, previously quoted:

"Scheler holds that the problem of a philosophical anthropology stands today at the midpoint of all the philosophical problems. Berdyaev goes farther and asserts simply that philosophy is primarily the doctrine of man. It is easy to see that ethics depends upon our 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."

He then laments the prevalence today of an academic philosophy that in effect does not philosophize in the true sense of the term, or in a way to affect our society beneficently.

"Philosophy as it has been practiced has been one of the best ways of avoiding the issue. Philosophy also has aimed at 'objective' truth. Philosophers have ceased to be lovers of wisdom in the ancient sense, and in so far have stinted their true work in the world through diminishing wisdom to science, their work has become esoteric and 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, and philosophers become specialists, men of science, men of one knowledge. Philosophy has become what Nietzsche said it was--thought husbandry (Denkwirklichschaft), a trade in thought."

Perhaps this is a little indefinite, and provided thought be sound and good, one must hesitate to condemn "trade in thought." Speculation need not be decried either, if it be discerning and sifts out the chaff. Neither is esotericism to be outlawed. But it is true that "life has been severed from thought;" perhaps rather that thought has been severed from life. That, indeed, is largely what

141

this work is aiming to show in the case of Indian philosophy: it virtually abstracts thought so far away from the life in the world that it professedly seeks to destroy that life altogether.

At what tremendous risk the intellect would be left out of the conscious life of individuals and society can be graphically seen in the light of the two following statements, the first from Susanne K. Langer's Philosophy in a New Key, the second quoted by Alfred Korzybski from a work of Charles S. Pierce.

"For a single higher conception can be a marvelous leaven in the heavy amorphous mass of human thought."

"It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fulness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty."

Imagination might be brought in to aid us to realize that in fact, from the knowledge side, we enter life practically blind, and live only vegetatively, by impulsive instinctual reaction to experience, until the intellect begins to give us knowledge of things, then of relationships to each other and to ourselves. These insights that together go on to increase understanding may be thought of indeed as the first windows which we are able to open out into the light of things, and at the same time let light enter our house of consciousness, enabling us to walk both within and without the house more safely and happily, without stumbling and injury. Truly, as the Greeks and the Egyptians stated, we walk in a dark cave until the light of rational understanding is generated by the glow of the innate germinal divine mind within us. To decry the full development of the intellect is to proclaim, hail and perpetuate the reign of darkness.

In his The Philosophy of Spinoza Richard McKeon expounds the Dutch philosopher to the effect that "the real evils of the world are not poverty, neglect, pain or any of the unavoidable accidents of life, but the perturbations of the mind." As the whole science of psychiatry, an enormous area of medical practice today, is grounded on "perturbations of the mind," the significance of Spinoza's thesis can be readily assented to.

That knowledge is essential to order and happiness in life is

142

again testified to by another eminent thinker, the philosopher-educator John Dewey.

"The construction of ideals in general and their sentimental glorification are easy; the responsibilities both of studious thought and of action are shirked. The affections, desires, purposes, choices are going to endure as long as man is man; therefore, as long as man is man there are going to be ideas, judgments, beliefs about values . . . . But these expressions of our nature need direction, and direction is possible only through knowledge. When they are informed by knowledge they themselves constitute in their directed activity intelligence in operation.

A notable excerpt from McKeon's "Spinoza" is quite apropos of the discussion.

"To act according to one's nature and essence is virtue, but that is to act only in terms of adequate ideas; therefore to act absolutely according to virtue is to act under the guidance of reason. Virtue then is understanding, [This completely accords with the Greek philosophy] and the endeavor to understand is in turn referred to as the first and only basis of virtue, since it is identical with the endeavor to preserve oneself."

This dialectic, already a most telling refutation of mystical claims that ignore the intellectual function in achieving blessedness, is grandly climaxed by a further development of its implications:

"Virtue is to act according to the laws of one's own nature; such action will further one's own power to act, and the sign of that increased power is pleasure. Clearly virtue and pleasure will be achieved most certainly if the mind acts always according to adequate ideas. If one is to act best, all the difficulties of knowing the truth must be faced . . . . To understand, then, is the absolute virtue of the mind."

All emotion, all passion, therefore, comes from inadequate knowledge. Do we need any stronger peg on which to hang our educational pleas? The Wisdom of Solomon (8:17) says that "to be allied with wisdom is immortality. By means of her I shall obtain immortality, and leave behind me an everlasting memorial to them that come after me." Would any partisans of the mystic way argue that wisdom can come otherwise than by mind? Could wisdom come if the mind was abolished,--as India urges us to do?

143

A point-blank denial of the mystics' claim that supreme ecstasies and cognitions are open to man through a faculty transcending the mind and functioning when mind is entirely put away, is found in a statement by Dalton L. Scudder, in a work reviewing Tenent's theological philosophy:

"Lastly, both intuitional and mystical theology appeal to a specific cognitive faculty by means of which the religious object is perceived. Analytic and genetic psychology does not find any such unique faculty in the case of the milder type of religious experience; and in the case of mysticism it is unable to distinguish this higher faculty of cognition from the subliminal functions of the mind. Anaesthetics and happiness both produce the cosmic consciousness and metaphysical revelations. No antecedent reason is available to distinguish the latter revelations as illusory and the former as veridical. Certainly no weight can be given to the assertions of special faculty."

This stands as a forthright rebuttal of the unfounded postulation that the intuitive faculty is a specifically distinct power of consciousness above the intellect. As our argument has expounded it earlier, what has been hypostatized by mystical enthusiasts as such a super-faculty is only the more mercurial operation of the mind's own power. In exalting supermind, they are exalting mind itself.

In dealing with the relation of science and religion in his fine work, Religion in an Age of Science, Edwin A. Burtt consummates his exposition with the following sententious declaration:

"Both have their being in the human mind. Like quarrelsome brothers they must be brought to sit at the same table; they can not be permanently insulated in separate rooms. Mysticism takes one away from social life, takes thought away from earthly things and attaches it to things beyond the temporary world. The ideal of flight into another world of values than this of ordinary sense experience cannot really maintain itself unpoisoned."

Here again the presuppositions of mystical theory are met with a straightforward contradiction. And this rebuke to such theory receives remarkable corroboration from Spinoza himself (Theo. Pol. VI, iii, 85):

"But on the contrary, when we know all things to be ordained and ratified by God, and the operations of nature to follow from God's essence, and the laws of nature to be eternal decrees and voli-

144

tions of God, we must perforce conclude that we know God better and the will of God, in the degree that we know natural things better and understand more clearly in what manner they operate according to the eternal laws of nature."

Here once more the direction in which our understanding must go to find the indices of God's nature and being is exactly reversed from that in which the mystics would have us go. For the philosopher says we will become the better acquainted with God's thought the more we observe and reflect on natural objects.

Fuller dissertates on Plato's ideal archetypal forms which are the projections of God's creative thought, giving the great Academician's views that those forms existed in their pure and perfect essence in the celestial or noumenal realms, and that earthly objects distort and disfigure their pristine form and beauty. Aristotle veered somewhat away from his master's view, asserting that the mundane objects were the concrete embodiments of the primordial forms. Fuller says that the latter view has gained against the Platonic. He says that some eminent scholars "regard the forms not as metaphysical principles existing in and for themselves apart from the sensible world, but as logical essences which are enacted nowhere save in the particular objects exemplifying them."

He instances gravitation as such a principle, saying that apart from the gravitating objects it has no enacted existence.

"Nevertheless in spite of its independence, in one sense, of its material embodiments, the Idea gets all its punch and substantial being from the bodies that incorporate and enact it."

This surely brings the concept of reality back to earth in a form that can not be challenged. Apart from the physical order ideal reality is an unrealized value. It can mean something to creature consciousness only in its particular manifestations.

If we apply these considerations to the relation of the Platonic Ideas to the sensible world, we find ourselves not in a three-story but in a one-story universe. The only really liveable floor is the ground floor. What we took to be an elevation of the house above the first floor is only the extended plan of the first and only story. Fuller reports Aristotle insisting that nowhere save in the material, sensible house has the form and true being of the house positive existence. "The plan of the whole house can be realized only in the material of which the house is built . . . . The forms are no less true,

145

no less valuable, no less the goals of scientific and moral activity for being realizable only in material stuff of the sensible universe." "The Forms are only the script of the play; the presentations of them are only given on the plane of the flux of sense."

Fulfilment of the highest longing for love, then, is not to be attained by abstracting oneself from the world, but in bringing the relations of love down into this enacted consciousness.

The direct statement that the ground floor of the universe, the plane of physical embodiment of the noumenal types, is the first and only story uncompromisingly blasts the inflated protestations of the mystics that all true values and reality itself are to be caught only when we have destroyed the ground floor and still somehow can manage to maintain ourselves, sans sense, feeling and mind, in the ethereal tower above all lower floors. It is permitted to ask them how they expect to uphold the upper stories of their house after they have destroyed the lower ones. An upper becomes such only by virtue of its resting upon a lower.

If the Forms of divine thought are only the script of the play, the divine Architect's ideal conception of his universe-to-be, and the physical objects are themselves those Forms now hardened to concretion in our world, then what Susanne K. Langer says about the function of our senses, so anathematized by spiritual cultism, has ringing import for us:

"The senses, long despised and attributed to the interesting but improper domain of the devil, were recognized as man's most valuable servants, and were rescued from their classical disgrace to wait on him in his new venture. They were so efficient that they not only supplied the human mind with an incredible amount of food for thought, but seemed presently to have transacted most of its cognitive business in handling the knowledge that sensory experience was deemed the only knowledge that carried any affidavit of truth; for truth became identified, for all vigorous minds, with empirical fact."

What does this tell us but that in following the illusive mystifications of supramental doctrines we turn away from the only authentic roots of true ideas to seek them in the realm in which their certification rests upon no sounder foundation than human fantasy and unreliable sense of hedonism? The truth found shadowed in nature carries the authentication of divine mind, since its objects are divine thoughts in material form. But on what standard of

146

certification are the multifarious and random visions and seizures of mystic introversion to be judged for truth? Precisely because these sporadic emotions can not be subjected to empirical judgment of the senses, they forever lack authority to command man's mental allegiance. Not only do they thus lack the credentials as data for knowledge, but they have been found to border closely on the phenomena of self-deception, illusion and downright hallucination. Their chief credentials seem to be hedonistic, they "prove" themselves in the feelings of pleasure they yield. But from the Epicureans down to the present it has been debated whether pleasure can claim the function of a true umpire in the moral battle. For there are pleasures high and pleasures low, and in between; and when and whether the reaction of pleasure can be safely relied upon is itself a moot question. Pleasures of lofty tone and quality may be in the bright stars calling us upward; others less noble may be the siren lure leading us down the primrose path to wreckage.

As between the created objects of the cosmic intelligence confronting us outwardly and the unaccountable, eccentric and precarious configurations that form themselves in the realm of the human subjective area of consciousness, to affirm that the latter constitute man's most authentic revelation of God and reality rather than the former, would seem to be of all things most erroneous. And a belief that categorizes the senses as our constant deceivers instead of recognizing them as our faithful and most amazing servants, would likewise appear to be the product of unconscionable folly.

Fuller, discussing Plato's solution of this problem of a hedonistic criterion of our psychic experience, says that to determine what pleasures are preferable and in harmony with the purpose of evolution, we must appeal to something beyond their immediate pleasurableness; and, he tells us, this something Plato finds in wisdom and reason, not in feeling.

In corroboration of our assertion that the precipitations of hysteria and strained asceticism are as likely as not to be apparitions of fancy, Fuller gives the following:

"The untutored mind is naive and soft-headed. In its operations it scarcely distinguishes fact from fancy, dreaming from waking. It swallows everything it is told. Hence it is forever shying at shadows, growling at reflections, pursuing will-o'-the-wisps and

147

clinging to phantoms. Now and then it may happen to lay hold of a truth, but it does so at random, on irrational grounds and with no sense of the difference between the real and the illusory."

If the area of consciousness in which the enraptured mystical experiences are to be generated is to such degree subject to hallucinations, it would again appear conclusive that it is the last ground on which either religion or philosophy should venture in their quest for real experience.

Plato attributed ultimate reality to the Forms of divine thought; Aristotle held that they were real only in their earthly subsistence. This difference, which is most germane to the present discussion, is well stated by Edwin A. Burtt, in his Types of Religious Philosophy (p. 51):

"The first major difference between Plato and Aristotle . . . . is that for the latter the world of sense experience may not be impugned as deceitful and shadowy; it is real and substantial as such. The changes which obviously go on in it are to be seriously accepted and adequately explained, rather than, as in a large measure with Plato, branded as evil and unreal. The changeless Forms, in his view, are not to be contemplated instead of the changing entities of perception, as the true reality behind the flux; they are to be conceived as immanent principles guiding the changes that transpire and as providing an explanation of their occurrence. And this causal efficacy of form in accounting for change is the second major difference.

"Plato, at least in some of his assertions about the forms, portrays them as patterns existing in a transcendent realm separate from the objects of sense experience. These objects more or less vainly imitate the forms, but that participation is not a temporal process--still less is it identical with the observable changes which take place in all objects--and hence the forms do not account for those changes. Aristotle allows no such dualism of two separate realms in the universe, one real but impotent, the other unreal, but undergoing interesting alterations. He thinks of the forms as embedded in the experienced objects and actively controlling the changes which can be observed in them.

"Corresponding to these differences in Aristotle's general conception of the world is an equally important difference in his theory of knowledge. His ideal of science, to be sure, is determined mainly by the Greek mathematicians who had been a profound influence in his master's [Plato's] thinking; it is the systematic demonstration of detailed truths about the world as flowing from the first principles whose truth has already been apprehended. But Aristotle held, in

148

opposition to Plato, that the first steps toward knowledge are not to be taken by turning away from sense perception, in disquiet at the instability of its disclosures. Knowledge is won, rather by building upon perception itself. This humble activity, aided by memory and by what Aristotle calls the 'common sense,' produces experience which already partly reveals the embedded forms, at least as habitual rules of action which we follow in dealing with objects that have become familiar as a result of these processes. Experience, thus won, provides a necessary foundation for the activity of reason. This faculty grasps the universal principle exhibited in any case of repeated change, and thus carries the quest for knowledge to perfection. Aristotle gives the name 'induction' to such operations as those when they cooperate in eliciting clear apprehensions of truth which may later be used as principles of scientific demonstration. Induction is not itself a part of science, but since it starts from the material of sense perception and keeps in intimate touch with the changes which the latter undergoes, the principles established permit the explanation of change rather than, as with Plato, requiring denial of it as unreal."

This long excerpt has been included because it states the crucial and highly momentous difference between these two great and influential thinkers, difference which the failure of European philosophy to resolve in balanced understanding cost Western history incalculable consequences in the determination of the idealistic or ideological systems of thought which dominated the Christian civilization over some twenty centuries. As, according to Plato, ideas rule the world, the rulership of Christian Europe could have brought happier eventualities than its history records, in religious bigotry, superstition, misuse of power, wars and persecution, had Aristotle's more competent exegesis of the "Forms", as expressing their reality here on earth, rather than in the heavens of divine noumena, been generally accepted. A few items of Burtt's exposition deserve some elaboration for added clarification of important principles.

It is of great moment that Aristotle takes his stand, confirming the position of this essay, that the world objects are not to be impugned as deceitful and shadowy. In his famous "cave allegory" Plato represents the forms as being perceived here only as shadows. The real forms are, he analogizes, outside the cave opening, and man, bound in the cave with his back to the entrance of the light and unable to turn around to see them directly outside the cave mouth, can see only the shadows cast by the forms on the wall in

149

front of him. Thus, infers Plato, man can not ever see the forms themselves, but only their shadows on the wall. Hence they are blurred, indistinct, their outlines confused, their expression untrue to reality.

As poetic figure, perhaps, the analogy is legitimate, but, as Aristotle saw, analogy here as elsewhere, can not be taken in too absolute literalness. Aristotle, we think, translates the allegory in truer form. He rebels against the imputation of imperfection, and certainly of evil character, to the shadows. With him they are not shadows in any true sense, but the solid precipitations of something that in human estimation must be held the less substantial of the two, the divine ideas. Indeed, from the human point of view, Aristotle's approach to the interpretation would completely reverse Plato's dramatization. It would consider the original noumenal Forms outside the cave mouth as invisible to man (for he can not see a thought, even if he could turn around to behold them out there in the light). After all it is the darkness of the cave that helps to make the shadow visible! Plato's imposition on man of the inability to turn around to behold them directly is no doubt to typify our limitation of cognitive dimension in our cave. From Aristotle's point of view, since man can not see the invisible Forms in their noumenal state, it has been necessary for the creative thought to arrange their presentation to his limited faculties in a form of materialized substantiality, if they are to become objects of perception at all. A paramount question which philosophy should long ago have asked and answered is as to what warrant the human mind has ever had for presuming to deny to the Forms in this condition the authentic title to reality. From every naive point of view, the objects here are not the shadows but the real things themselves, so that we can look at them and exclaim "See what God hath wrought!" And Plato's "Ideas" are not the realities but the shadows. How can it ever be supposed that man can bring himself to think that what is forever invisible and intangible to him is to be considered the utterly real, while the perceptible things of his world are only wraiths? And again on the naive view he might be justified in asking how it was that Plato expected us to believe that a mere thought-structure can cast a shadow. To frame a real answer to that query would definitely demand a knowledge of something in the science of atomic physics as to which we can only surmise as yet,

150

though we do have now the bases for a pertinent answer that only a few years ago would have been laughed out of court. Verily the question how God's ideas became the forms of this world is standing at the door of the human mind, knocking.

What Aristotle stands on, of course, is that the reality ascribed to Plato's divine noumena is not lost, but fully retained, when by creative operation the cosmic thought-forms take on matter and body, and stand revealed to us in our world. He means that while they may be allowed to be poetized as shadows in the sense that no merely physical object can adequately speak the language of thought, still their outline and the patterns of their changing processes bespeak to a thinking mind, with its capability of reason from analogy, their full cognitive message. This is the nub of the great Stagirite's philosophy and its point of departure from his master's system. It launched the division between the two main schools of philosophical exegesis ever since. For presumably the issue eternally arraying two leading systems of thought against each other in religion and philosophy is whether the real essence of being, for which man searches with unremitting persistence, is the objective reality of things perceptible to his senses, or the subjective reality of consciousness. Plato posited this reality as inherent in the subjective world; Aristotle located it here on earth.

Idealists have in the main held with Plato; positivists have veered to Aristotle's position. But at bottom it is only a contention over whether a thing, a world, is more real in its original mental conception than it is when the conception has hardened in material form. Is it real in its noumenal beginning or in its phenomenal end! It all amounts to asking whether truth hidden in a thought is more real than when disclosed in concrete manifestation. It becomes in the finale a choice of the relative value of the answers to the two questions: What hath God thought? And what hath God wrought? Since what he hath wrought is what he first thought, the eternal debate would seem to be ended by the merging of the two in a common identity. He who at the flip of a coin chooses heads, gets the tails also, for the two sides equally appertain to the coin. Hermes Trismegistus, reputed author of old Egypt's amazing wisdom, really announced the grounds for reconciliation of the great debate on his famous Emerald Tablet:

151

"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 perfection of the miracle of the One Thing."

It is the aeonial task of evolving man to consummate the discernment of this identity. For in the final stages of the process of enlightenment, man discerns also that he himself is identical with the God mind that thought and the object that God wrought. India herself stood originally on this recognition, for it is affirmed in the epigrammatic phrase believed to summarize the gist of Hindu philosophy, tat tvam asi, "Thou art That." But Hindu philosophy itself proved faithless to the high commitment entrusted to it in the beginning, and tragically and with direful consequences to itself and the world, severed the link of connection between the soul and the world and has ever since endeavored to detach the spirit entirely from the beneficent influences of its world, precluding thus the possibility of its finding itself in harmony with its cognate counterpart That.

The next point of difference between the two Greek philosophers is in Aristotle's rebuttal of Plato's argument that world objects are not to be taken as real because they are in a constant flux of change. A thing can not be real, if it can not remain the same, or maintain its identity with itself. It can not be real if it is constantly turning into something other than itself. It looks like a formidable argument. How did Heraclitus, and after him Aristotle meet it? So far was the phenomenon of change from failure to reveal the reality of things that it was precisely this change process, these philosophers showed, that transcribed the reality for man to read. A changeless thing, they affirmed, was as dead. It could tell no story about itself. But in changing from state to state it disclosed the "plot;" it gave out the meaning behind its existence. The Ideas existent in the noumenal creation may be stabilized in their spiritual home "above;" but down here their raison d'etre is unfolded in a temporal and progressive order and sequence. The ideal Forms may be held in their composite unity in the mind of God, but to man's limited purview they must be presented as in a cinerama, one stage after another. Not the thing as seen at any one moment--a mere cross section of it--but the thing that takes a whole moving drama of changing scenes to reveal its continuity and true form, is the thing in its wholeness. As Browning put it: "In heaven the

152

rounded circle; on earth the broken arc." But give the earthly arcs the time--which mystics never like to allow--to connect their fragments in full circle, and finally the whole reality of the thing runs its course to completion.

Hence all the stigma and dialectical besmirching that the shallow philosophies have cast upon the element of change, is along with the calumniation of matter and the senses, repudiated by Aristotle, in divergence from Plato. Change is not to be impugned as the mark and evidence of either unreality or evil. How can it be held to be evil when it is the very revelator of the reality of the world that would without it remain undisclosed? Aristotle's view, then, grounds in wisdom the recommendation that we should seek the forms of truth as they are imaged right here in our concrete world, and rendered legible in the changing phenomena of nature, rather than attempt to visualize those forms in the noumenal state, obviously a blind and foredoomed futility.

It is obvious also that Aristotle has a quarrel with the phrase which the idealists use by ingrained habit "the reality behind the flux." This seems to rest on the idea that the patent visible physical manifestation is only a false front, a blank dead opaque unreality, and that the true reality is an idea or set of ideas hiding behind the outer objective facade, and for the matter of that, not only not revealed by the material front, but concealed, obscured, marred and even destroyed by it. Aristotle would locate the true reality not behind, but in the flux; not distorted and muddied by it, but clearly revealed by it to a competent intelligence and a keen analogical genius. It would admittedly not be revealed to a bumpkin or a dunderhead; nor would it be readily perceptible even to a philosopher who gazed at nature's cinematograph with an eye made opaque by a mind darkened with the fixed curtain of belief that nature and the world misrepresented and maligned the truth. Only a mind quickened to intensive clarity of apprehension by the assurance that every object and procedure of the outer creation is mutely but faithfully oracular of truth is qualified and primed to read the open book of the world and glean its enchanting story. The noumenal forms are not to be found behind, but in the phenomena. The latter are the noumena transfixed for our scrutiny. As Aristotle inferred, the Forms are no less real for being found down here instead of in heaven.

153

As Fuller brings out, these forms coming to view in earthly phenomena, though open to our sensual perception, are nevertheless not "seen" by the senses. Mere sensual agency is not adequate to bring the Forms to view. The senses fully perform their function in simply presenting to our view the objects dramatizing the forms. It is not the eye but the mind that must "see" the Forms haloing the objects. The mind must interpret what the eye observes. This process is rationalization, and is itself sufficiently mystical. To bring this faculty, this skill, this technique to its highest proficiency is the prime and central function of the great power of mind, the function and power of the intellect,--the faculty and power mystical cultism cries against and marks for destruction.

So Fuller sums up by saying "these forms and formulae are not perceived by the senses; they are apprehended by the intellect." Though we can not discern the forms by the senses, he yet affirms that there is no other source than the senses through which we can contact them,--that there is no other source for any experience whatever. Instead, then, of deriding and condemning the senses, we have to depend on them as the ground-spring of any conscious realization at all.

Fuller enlarges upon the specific mental science needed to enable us to discover the forms embodied in objective phenomena. We must, he says, develop the "knack" or the genius of thinking through the sense images to the eternal truths they adumbrate. From the modes of activity and the patterns of change the mind can prefigure the shape of truth constructs. And finally an alert mind can so clearly discern the links and threads of relationship subsisting between the various elements of the structure that it can bring all knowledge to a synthesis and unity.

"Before we can be really said to know, we must bind into a single organized whole the different forms and laws discovered by thinking through and understanding the phenomena. Only on such a unified vision of Reality can the aspiration toward knowledge and truth come to rest."

This task calls for the resuscitation of a great lost arcane science, that of the true semantics of analogy and symbolism. It is simply the science of reading the ideas embodied in phenomena by the power of a constructive imagination, which can be cultivated to amazing proficiency by proper knowledge and the possession of

154

certain archaic keys to the science. Every worldly fact mirrors, because it embodies, a noumenal causal idea; by intensive looking and profound reflection the heavenly idea may be reconstructed from its mundane embodiment.

The final crown of the mind's work upon the data which the world furnishes it is that of organic interrelation and integration of all the data in a comprehensive view, or synthesis. This is the synthetic unity of apperception of Kant's system. By this effort, as Fuller says, the mind passes from the forms to the first principle of the whole. The mind's enterprise in this task is what the Greeks meant by "philosophy." And this is the kingly function of the intellect, despised by mystical propensity.

The world of ideas, Fuller explains, is itself a many-in-one, the forms including or implying each other. This would have to be so if it is true that every object represents a divine ideaform. When we correlate objects we are really correlating ideal forms. As the multifarious objects together constitute the world whole, so the individual ideas together round out the unit pattern. But the Aristotle concept asserted that the ideaform had no real being "unless it is concretely enacted in particular objects." If this be true, then God's thoughts are not real until they have found embodiment in the concrete world. This would elevate positive philosophy to the seat of universal authority in the human thought domain. But it would not abolish the relative reality of the ideas as ideas. It would reserve the final award of reality to the completion of the process of manifestation, when, as Hermes said, both aspects of the reality united to achieve the miracle of the One. Herein is the rationalization of the world, the possibility of all understanding. St. Paul illustrates the truth in his analogy of the body and its many parts: the meaning only comes to view in the action of all the parts as a unit. A principle of truth is thus a formula which includes and summarizes the diverse parts and functions of an organism in one final end purpose. Real being is a synthesis of interrelated forms which fulfils the mind's demand for clear understanding. Things can have no real meaning in isolation; only in relation to other things in the complex and finally to the integrated whole can the real nature of anything be envisaged. Real being, Aristotle asserted, was not to be sought in abstract universals and monistic predications. It is localized and can be discovered only in the particular objects,--the

155

very place where idealist theory proclaims it can never be found. Real being is here, in our world (among others), in the particular, the individual and the concrete. Otherwise how could the creature life, immersed in these worlds, participate in real being? Negative philosophy persists in asseverating that we will open the door to reality only by annihilating the world of particulars.

A summarization of the truth of the discussion Aristotle embodied in his dictum: "No Form without matter; no matter without Form,"--so far at least as the sensible world is concerned. Perhaps he drew too rigid a line between the two states of the existence of a divine idea. It perhaps goes too far to say that an idea has no existence unless it turns to rock, so to say. What he obviously means to convey, however, is true, that the idea-products of God's mind do not come to their form of real being, finished being, until they stand hardened in matter, objectified to consciousness.

In all this discussion is involved the great question posed and examined by Kant as to the innate ideas, whether the forms of truth and the archai of reason were inherent in the nature of the mind itself or were imprinted on the mind by the impact of external forms and processes upon it; whether true ideas were universal and necessary, or fortuitous and contingent; or, as Kant put it, a priori or a posteriori; prior to experience or consequent upon it. A large segment of philosophical thought, reasoning from the assumed basic predication that universal ideas could not be derived from the flux of changing sense objects, which reported truth not truthfully, but all in distortion,--the shadow not the reality--held that the divine ideaforms were, like the spider's filament, spun out of the essence of the mind itself, as a function of the rational soul, independent of sense and outer experience. It was this position that Aristotle disputed, asserting that the soul, though it might possess an aptitude for the eternal forms of truth, being the child of a Parent whose thoughts were those truths, nevertheless came to experience with an open, clean and unconditioned mind, and was destined to form its mental pictures over the patterns it discerned in the world in which it found itself.

Out of this debate came the formulation of the thesis that would have closely matched Aristotle's conclusions: that the logical order and connection of ideas is a counterpart of the actual order and connection of things. The inner subjective logicality of reason

156

was exactly correspondent to the preconceived logicality of the relations of existing things. Obviously if the external creation is the noumenal precipitated to earth, this correspondence must be perfect. Certainly the two aspects of the same thing must match.

The German poet Schiller refers to the correspondence between mind and the world order in saying that he was long in coming to comprehend nature at first hand; he "had but learned to admire her image reflected in the understanding and put in order by rules."

So Aristotle turns the mind back upon the panorama of the world, as the objectified body of living truth itself, which truth must necessarily be discerned and meditated upon through the initial efforts of the reprobated sense perceptions. It is directly from the norms, the habitual roles and rules and laws of the operating creation that the ideal archai, or primordial principles of the cosmic order are to be grasped. When man develops sufficient genius to rationalize the phenomena of the changing world, he will not have to resort to the intellectually disingenuous ruse of excusing his ignorance by denying reality to the phenomena. The world is the ground-base of our experience and to negate its real existence is to cut the very ground from under our mental capability of ever attaining understanding. And idealists will have to learn that the mere action of the human mind will not dissolve the real being of things.

157

Aristotle's view that reality emerges only when the mind has achieved a synthetic vision is authenticated by a sententious statement of Dr. William E. Hocking, former head of the philosophy department of Harvard University, in his Science and the Idea of God (p. 42): "There is no cure for mental disease without consulting the total meaning of the world." And again he states:

"But whether we use the word or not, the emotional basis of Humanism takes us beyond the human scene altogether, and requires us to concern ourselves with the nature of the cosmos . . . . Man is made for the infinite, with all that is surveyable and enclosed, his fervors are finite and burn down to an ash. The infinite restores him to himself."

"Society dare forget nothing of that total in which its destiny is entangled."

And Fuller sums up the gist of Greek philosophy in saying that "we can not decide what the end of life should be."

To any thinking person it becomes immediately and glaringly obvious that in all human endeavor the effort to engage in activity without knowing what it will eventuate in spells in the first place gross irrationality, and then inevitable confusion, waste exertion, failure and loss. So the spectacle of the whole race rather lackadaisically expending its energies daily in occupations and engrossments that virtually only serve to keep it going, but with no sense of specific direction, with no goal in sight that would seem to justify the living ordeal,--all this impresses the reflective mind as anomalous and irrational indeed. It pretty much makes humans squirrels in a revolving cage. The unphilosophical mind sees life as a treadmill with no escape save in death, and no purpose that carries beyond that event.

All that the general unreflective mind consoles itself with are the common traditional maxims and shibboleths of orthodox religion. It is massively believed that life is lived here with tolerable rectitude, a future of psychic happiness will requite the soul for hardships endured. There is a vague confidence that our egos somehow, somewhere survive and will not be burdened with the

158

strains suffered on earth. But assured knowledge that the life here is an integral arc of a universal and continuous experience whose successive stages will elevate the soul to a condition of blissful super-existence has pretty nearly vanished from general intelligence. The divine genius in man has not been cultivated to enable him to read the script of truth written by nature in symbolic language. He has not been adept enough to extract from life and its world their message to his intelligence. The gigantic polymorph of world existence remains an insoluble riddle, and history can not articulate its oracular message.

In this benighted condition the peoples have grasped at what has been termed revelation, the same being a quantum of venerable and venerated literature of ostensibly superhuman provenance allegedly vouchsafed to very early mankind by beings of our own perfected evolution, or graduates of a former cycle on other planets, known as gods or demigods. Indubitably the sacred Scriptures of ancient civilizations emanated from some indisputably high source of transcendent wisdom, for they have won an approval and solid homage from the best intelligence of all races from remote antiquity to the present, and high minds recognize in them a grasp of truth transcending the best purely human capability. They still have power to elevate the intellect and cheer the spirit of man by their piercing insight and their promised guerdon of blessedness for virtue.

But tragically either the generality of mankind has drifted far away from an original receptivity to their message, or it has not yet emerged from a state of childhood nescience and become mature enough to apprehend the dynamic force of those vital Scriptures, for it has to be sadly recorded that the great wisdom of that body of "holy writ" has never been clearly and lucidly perceived by the race as a whole or indeed by any interpreters however learned. The Bibles of old, though conned with incredible assiduity and virtually worshipped as tomes of infallible truth, remain still sealed treasure chests of unknown purport. They still await the discovery of the lost keys to their intricate symbolic lock mechanisms. In the meantime the blundering efforts to render their cryptic significations at the level of ignorant amateurism and gross stupidity have fixated the mass consciousness of millions over the centuries with arrant misconceptions so crassly alien to truth that the common mentality

159

of the world, both East and West, has suffered a veritable derationalization that has immeasurably darkened earth life.

It is not even known to the present day how those hoary volumes of sapient literature aimed to present their oracles of lofty truth and recondite wisdom so that man in his evolutionary development might apply his intelligence to discern and translate their meaning. Their mode of portraying truths, the outcome of a certain knowledge in the possession of their authors, in reality was the mechanism of a science which comprehended the grasp of truth in all its aspects. This science rested on the basic principle that the outer world was cosmic truth in visible representation. To portray truth then it was only necessary to employ natural forms to illustrate the ideas and the principles. Abstract concepts were presented in the form of their physical analogues. From observing the physical outlines of ideas in objects and processes in the living world, the sluggish intellect of early man would come to apprehend the essential nature of the ideas themselves. By constant association with the natural world the human mind would come to familiarity with the spiritual reality that world adumbrated. Certainly the mind, the purpose, the form of God's intent must show out in that which he has created.

The Christian theology has held that God revealed his nature only in his Son, the man Jesus. It is necessary to understand this in the full range of its truth. By failure to enlarge the scope of its import Christianity has imposed upon its quantum of power a fatal limitation, the confinement of the divine Sonship to one man of flesh in history. It did well in identifying the Son with the Logos; but the Logos is just this cosmic mind projecting itself out into the creation, and giving form to the universe. This reads a new meaning into the term and the concept of "Son," making it cosmic and universal in its range instead of local and humanly personal. God has revealed himself in his Son, the logical structure of creation. It is not too crass a way of stating it to say that the universe created by God's mind is the Son. It imposed a fatal blight on human thought to restrict the conception to one personality in human form and at the human level.

If, then, God has revealed himself in the Logos, his Son, and that Logos-Son is the created universe, it is to that world that we must look to study the creative mind of God. And this is definitely

160

the motive that dictated the methodology employed in the composition of the Scriptures. The clear purpose and the method it prescribed were to match spiritual, moral and intellectual forms of truth with their natural analogues. If the forms of truth expressed in literature, in drama, myth and allegory, rune and ritual, were sensed by man, the learner, to reflect a constant harmony, nay an identity, with the reality of the external world life, they would commend themselves to his intelligence and take root in his psychic constitution, thus aligning his life with the pattern and order of the cosmic ideation. To instill in his mind or stamp on his consciousness the principia of eternal veritude by daily contact with their daily tangible manifestation was one of the reasons why God's sons were sent into the world. It follows, then, that the whole process of the unfoldment of the human power to apprehend truth would be implemented through the gradual development of a propensity into the stature of a faculty for sensing analogies. By the perfecting of this faculty the human mind would come in the end to the exercise of its divine genius in the habit of discerning the primal creative archetypes in every natural fact. Wherever he looked he would descry the laws and the forms of truth mutely instructing him. In the continuation of the practice mortal mind would find itself aglow with an inner illumination, a veritable aurora of understanding, which is that apotheosization of the human intellect which Plotinus, Aristotle and Spinoza have extolled as the climactic product of all human mental activity.

Not by shutting out the visible world to find the divine forms of truth in the inner void, but by taking into its heart the forms that it finds already under its eye does the mind of the creature rise to its deification. With this realization centuries of that mind's obscuration will pass into the history of tragedy, and a new sunrise of human intelligence will break on the world. Mystic presumptions allied with ignorance have for long millennia severed the cord of the benignant relation of man's mind with the universe in which he is immersed, depriving it of the natural food for its healthy activity. His mind, like any flower in the garden, must imbibe the substance for its growth from the soil in which it is rooted. Mystical hallucinations take no reckoning of the fact that divine soul is rooted in a natural garden, and this obstinacy holds in the face of the Scriptural statement that God placed his human family in the Garden of

161

Eden. As the road of the soul to its beatitude swings down through the valley of earth, so the road of understanding in philosophy must run down through the physical foundation of the soul's life, the world of nature. We can understand spirit only as we understand matter and its operations in nature. Philosophy of the mystical propensity has, on the contrary, strained to lift up its towers of higher consciousness while undermining the very foundations on which they must rest.

The modern discovery of the structure and potency of the atom bears the happy augury of forcibly divulsing the dogged human mind at last from the postures of traditional errancy in which religion has fixed it over too many dolorous centuries. It will achieve this felicitous outcome by focusing that errant mind all afresh on the domain of matter and nature, as the source-springs of the truth it has been seeking in misinterpreted Scriptural revelation and in destructive religious mysticism that despised and flouted nature. The enforced return of the mind of humanity to nature will mark the return of world intelligence to the primal foundations of all possible enlightenment. If religion and its potentially true and beneficent exaltations in mystical experience are to wield their ennobling influence in world life, they will have to link themselves anew with the dynamic currents of inspiration that can flow only from the realm of nature.

Nature must henceforth be the great theme of human study. No mightier subject can be found, for nature is the physical body of God. In our fixated beliefs we have hugged to our souls the persuasion that it was our religious duty and our most exalted virtue to try to fathom the mind of God, while holding it almost too indecorous, if not too sinful, to look at his body. His spirit was worshipped, his body demeaned. This can now be seen to be a folly and a missing of the mark. But we have hardly known that it was God's body we were looking at when we gazed upon the world. Surely we would treat it with deeper reverence if we knew this as a fact.

Christianity has boasted in a gloating manner that its influence has brought an epochal blessing to the world by putting an end to Pagan naturalism and supplanting it with ecclesiastical theologies accentuating the spirit of God. The Pagans, forsooth, could not rise above animistic and materialistic conceptions because they could not conceive of divinity as spiritual, but clung to it as the

162

natural order. Christianity broadcast the cry, Great Pan is dead! The advent of the knowledge that Christ had come to supplant Pan was and is yet the claim of Christianity. And this knowledge, it was asserted, would lift humanity out of heathen blindness and enlighten it with the gift of the Christ spirit. Disastrously mistaken as this belief was, it achieved only the complete severance of the mind from its ground of supernal intelligence in which the Pagan philosophy had striven to keep it firmly rooted. With its roots torn out of the earth, the mental genius of man perforce languished and wilted, having nothing but the food of emotionalism and sickly fantasy to draw on for its logical sustenance. Nature was scorned and its illuminating power lay unused. If the human mind is not supposed to glean the meaning of the world from observing and studying it, of what use can his divinely ordained experience in the world be to him, or what purpose can his mission to earth subserve in the cosmic economy? To answer this central question in all human inquiry the Oriental mystic philosophy has never uttered a single word for elucidation. If we want an answer we must turn to Greece and Egypt. The evidence of the close association of the Greek people with nature has been presented. As to the Egyptians the only excerpt available bearing directly on the point has been found in a brief statement from the great modern Egyptologist, William H. Breasted, in his History of Egypt (p. 89), but it should be sufficiently authoritative to establish the item: "The Egyptian was passionately fond of nature and of outdoor life." John Dewey, in his The Quest for Certainty (p. 51), adds his testimony to that already noticed as to the Greek fellowship with nature:

"Greek thought never made a sharp separation between the rational and perfect realm and the natural world. The latter was indeed inferior and infected with non-being and privation. But it did not stand in any sharp dualism to the higher and perfect reality. Greek thinking accepted the senses, the body and nature with natural piety and found in nature a hierarchy of forms, leading degree by degree to the divine. The soul was the realized actuality of the body, as reason was the transcendent realization of the intimation of ideal forms contained in the soul. The senses included within themselves forms which needed only to be stripped of their material accretions to be true stepping-stones to higher knowledge."

Dewey's last sentence here confirms the view expressed throughout this essay that the world objects are the archetypal

163

forms embodied in matter. The mind needs but to exercise and train its divine faculty of imagination to render the material vesture translucent and so to find itself gazing at the truth-forms in themselves.

The discussion should by no means leave unnoticed the extremely pertinent point that a life of close daily association with nature, in the case of the Greeks and the Egyptians, did not in the least degree cripple the wings of the soul so as to prevent it soaring aloft in the higher spiritual flights. It assuredly did not bind it down to earth, as Orientalism and ascetic Christianity asserted it would. On this issue we hear the voice of our eminent modern psychologist, C. G. Jung in a notable utterance. He is speaking of the cults of early Christianity and Mithraism, and says that they aimed to impose a moral restraint on the animal impulses, to effectuate which they labored to make a transformation of the natural sexual forces into a sublimated religious engrossment,--which the psychologist pauses to say is a "sentimental and ethically worthless pose." He says that this transformation of libidinous interest was in great measure due to the Mithraic worship, "which was a nature religion in the best sense of the word." He subjoins in a note that the passing out of Mithraism was due largely to its emphasis on nature worship, "because the eyes of that time were blinded to the beauty of nature." Jung cites Augustine as writing: "These men were themselves undone through love of her [creation]; while the primitive Christians exhibited throughout an antagonistic attitude to the beauties of this world." Augustine has expressed himself strongly to the effect that the only true Christliness was a love of the divine nature within the heart, and he scores the love of natural beauty as sinful.

It was a perception of the analogically mutual relation between nature and the idea-world that inspired the writing of Henry Drummond's work that had its fairly brilliant day of general popularity some sixty years ago, The Natural Law in the Spiritual World. It is a discerning survey of prominent aspects of this parallelism and it had the potentiality of an epochal upheaval in religious thought. That it flashed for a period and then passed into oblivion is voluble testimony to the still lingering dusk of the Medieval Dark Ages. In spite of the transcendent marvels of our physical science we are still theologically, intellectually, philosophically in the murks of

164

those Dark Ages. Nothing will lift us out of the shadows onto the peaks of light but our eventual recognition of the allegorical composition of the still dominating Scriptures and the reconstitution of the basic science of analogy, the true semantics.

It could hardly be argued rationally that it will detract from the sanctifying power of spiritual conceptions if one can see also their perfectly mirrored reflection in the objects and phenomena on the earth. The Greeks, Fuller intimates, instead of losing the vividness and effective power of mystical truths by looking downward toward the earth, had their grasp of spiritual realities doubly strengthened by finding them equally authenticated in the two worlds. As Wordsworth sings:

The pansy at my feet

Doth the same tale repeat.

When Thales declared that the world is full of Gods he testified to the Greeks' possession of a piercing insight into the logical structure of the natural world. It was the Greeks, not we, who could look upon nature with the x-ray vision and see into her interior heart, to discern there the forms of the Logoic mind in the phenomena she presented. To them nature was the handiwork of the gods, whom they rated as the subordinate powers of the infinite God himself. And the close physical association with her and, even more, their mental affinity with her procedures, enabled the Greeks to draw into themselves, body and soul, the salutary influences which she imparts.

It is pertinent to recall for a moment Fuller's observation that we will be able to recapture the Greek intimacy with nature only by harking back to our childhood. For it has been a truly epochal achievement of Jung, the psychologist of our day, to have arrived at the characterization of the divine seed potential in humanity as "the child." At Christmas what is commemorated is the birth of the divine child. Likewise the glamor of Wordsworth's masterpiece of philosophical allegorism, his Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. From Recollections of Early Childhood, lingers appealingly in the cultural consciousness of our time, yet fails to awaken us to the effective realizations of its flashing purport. The child-mind, he poetizes, still retaining some glow of the heavenly light out of which it came to earth, sees all nature irradiated by this light as it shim-

165

mers over the face of nature. So he apostrophizes the child at play as the open-eyed Seer among his elders:

Thou whose exterior semblance doth belie

Thy soul's immensity;

Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep

Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,

That deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,

Haunted forever by the eternal mind,--

Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest,

Which we are toiling all our lives to find,

In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;

Thou, over whom thy Immortality

Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a slave;

A Presence which is not to be put by;

Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,

Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke

The years to bring the inevitable yoke,

Thus blindly with thyself at strife?

Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,

And custom hang upon thee with a weight

Heavy as frost and deep almost as life!

It is of course to be noted that the child has this glow and halo about all natural things when he can not yet recognize it or theorize about it. From the intellectually conscious point of view, he is not the philosopher at all, but the natural mystic, being afflated with light and buoyancy without realizing that he is thus blessed. He is bathed in a lingering felicity, but hardly thinks to tell himself so.

The picture of childhood was introduced by Fuller and it has pertinence to the theme from the fact that the Greek attitude toward nature was akin to that of childhood. Rather strangely the Scriptures themselves accentuate the high rating of child-mindedness. To enter the kingdom of heaven it is declared necessary to be childlike. It would seem to predicate by logic that the Periclean Greeks were racially in the childhood period, since their association with nature was close, spontaneous and fresh. It is hardly likely that it was consciously philosophical, or that the analogical significance of natural forms was grasped by more than a few of the philosophers. Nevertheless there must have been an underrunning consciousness of the kinship of the mind with what nature gave to

166

thought. To a race as given to reflection at a high level of mental acuity as the Greeks, the discernment of the ever manifest parallelism between natural phenomena and their noumenal analogues could not but have been constantly evident to thought. Their literature is replete with figures, tropes and poetic naturegraphs.

Fuller's positive assertion that Christianity, in contrast to the Greek religion, was essentially an introvert movement may come with some surprise to many. Christianity has become the religion predominantly of the West, and the West is rated as extrovert in its attitude toward life. For Fuller to categorize the objectively oriented materialistic West as introvert in its religion seems incongruous. Yet it is basically a true observation. It must be remembered that Christianity arose in an Eastern land, one that for several centuries before the upsurge of the faith that became Christianity had been inundated by a great wave of mystical influence sweeping westward from Asia, from India. Dualism and subjectivism came in with Zoroastrianism. The dualist philosophy sharply set the earthly physical elements and interests of man over against his spirit as its enemies. Hence the introvert direction of all theological systematism and spiritual motivation was inevitable.

On the other side the Christian embodiment of the Christos divinity in the man Jesus of Nazareth made it in a sense the most extravert religion of all, since this move located divinity outside all other men. So that indeed the extravert and the introvert elements of the faith cross and clash incongruously. Its history shows the curve of trends now in the one direction, again in the other. The point essentially germane to our analysis is that it did historically turn the interests of Western humanity away from the world of nature, and thus for two millennia it has insulated both the body and the spirit of Occidental man from magnetic contact with the most immediate source of his inner nutriment. To have caused a third of the human family to miss for so long the salutary influences of truth must be accounted no minor calamity to be charged to Western religion.

Next there is a sagacious discernment of Spinoza, referring to the Old Testament literature:

"As the prophets perceived the revelations of God by the aid of the imagination, they could indisputably perceive much that is

167

beyond the boundary of the intellect . . . . It is clear, then, why the prophets perceived and taught nearly everything parabolically and enigmatically and expressed all spiritual truths in bodily terms; indeed these characteristics agree best with the nature of the imagination."

In saying that the analogical methodology agreed best with the nature of the imagination, all that can be implied is that the imagination can construct no images of abstract spiritual truth save as it can find some natural basis in the phenomenal world to suggest to it form and substance for its fabrications. The mind's metaphysical formulations are ever the shadows or specters of its objective knowledge, though idealistic philosophy has it precisely the contrary.

Spinoza shows no contempt for the physical world when he says that to make use of things and take delight in them as much as possible is the part of the wise man. He carries this further in stating that even the knowledge of individual things leads to a knowledge of God. The most ephemeral thing or circumstance is more than "mere appearance," since the most trivial thing, to be at all, must be pertinent to the reality of all. "To understand the nature of anything is to participate in the nature of God." To such clear envisioning of the factual reality of our experience the introversionist presumptions are totally blind. And there is his famous passage which can bear endless republication:

"Since nothing could be or be conceived without God, it is evident that all things in nature involve and express the conception of God as the reason for their essence and perfection, so that we acquire greater and more perfect knowledge of God in proportion as we understand natural things more; the greater our knowledge of natural phenomena, the more perfectly we understand the essence of God, the cause of all things. It follows from this farther that man is perfect or the reverse in proportion to the nature and perfection of the object which he loves before all things; he is necessarily most perfect and participates most in the highest blessedness who loves above all else the intellectual knowledge of God, the most perfect being, and delights particularly in it."

The intelligibility of the world is not separate from the world itself, is one of Spinoza's observations; so that even the changes which things undergo contain elements of eternal truth. The mind itself becomes eternal to the extent that it seizes upon the eternal principles illustrated by material objects.

168

In his Morals and Dogma (p. 25) Albert Pike, the Masonic writer, has a strong statement on the teaching power of nature:

"The first Scriptures of the human race were written by God on the earth and heavens. The reading of these Scriptures is Science. Familiarity with the grass and trees, the insects and the infusoria, teaches us deeper lessons of love, of faith, than we can glean from the writings of Fenelon and Augustine. The great Bible of God is ever open before mankind."

He quotes Galen:

"Listen to me as to the voice of the Eleusinian hierophant, and believe that the study of Nature is a mystery no less important than theirs, no less adapted to display the wisdom and power of the great Creator. Their lessons and demonstrations were obscured, but ours are clear and unmistakable."

Galen was wrong, however, in thinking that the arcana of the Eleusinian Mysteries were so divorced from analogical foundations in nature as to deserve his strictures. Pike himself testifies to this on the same page:

"The Mysteries were a sacred Drama, exhibiting some legend significant to nature's changes, of the visible Universe in which the Divinity is revealed, and whose import was in many respects as open to the Pagan as to the Christian. Nature is the great Teacher of man; for it is the revelation of God. It neither dogmatizes nor attempts to tyrannize by compelling to a particular creed or special interpretation. It presents its symbols to us and adds nothing by way of explanation. It is the text without the commentary; . . . . the earliest instructors of mankind not only adopted the lessons of Nature, but as far as possible adhered to her method of imparting them . . . . To employ Nature's universal symbolism, instead of technicalities of language, rewards the humblest inquirer, and discloses its secret to every one in proportion to his preparatory training and his power to comprehend them."

This is well said, and it is followed by the statement that the symbolic natural representations implied no hostility to philosophy, "because philosophy is the great expounder of symbols." He adds the extremely pertinent and necessary qualification that "ancient interpretations were often ill-founded and incorrect." It indeed has been true that the faulty and bizarre misinterpretations of ancient symbolism and allegory have given partisan scholars the excuse to decry the whole of the ancient semantic and analogical science as

169

fantastic fol-de-rol. The unfortunate business of basing dogma on unsound rendering of symbolic structures, he says, has been fatal to beauty of expression and has also led to assumed infallibility and the intolerance it breeds. A further statement adds that the harmonies of heaven correspond to those of earth and the eternal Life accomplishes its evolutions in accordance with the same laws as those ruling the life of a dog. "God has arranged all things by weight, number and measure," he quotes from the Scriptures.

It is hardly a diversion from the main line of the discussion to dilate a moment on Pike's assertion that the interpretation of ancient symbols has too often been ill-founded and incorrect. For the genius of antiquity expressed itself and its supreme message through the mechanism of symbols, and the miscarriage of the age-long effort to bring their true significations through to proper understanding has permitted a canker-worm of ignorance and superstition to gnaw at the vitals of world intelligence and sanity. Pike is not alone in referring to the failure of symbolic science. Plutarch (Morals), dissertating at length and in particularity on the cryptic sense of the symbols and the nature of the gods, says that while symbols guide the understanding to the knowledge of things divine,

"Some, not being able to reach their true meaning, have slid into downright superstition; and others again, while they would fly the quagmire of superstition, have fallen unwittingly upon the principle of atheism."

The tragic consequences of the philosophical derogation of matter and the ascription of evil character to nature and the world, and the separation of the two worlds, the material and the spiritual, into two compartments of the human mind, are expressed tersely by John Dewey, (The Quest For Certainty, 308) as follows: "The antagonism between the actual and the ideal, the spiritual and the natural, is the source of the deepest and most injurious of all enmities." As making for a return to sanity in religion, these words deserve to be framed in gold and hung on every church wall. They reach even beyond the field of religion and are supremely challenging to the whole world of culture. They state in effect that the almost universal addiction of religion to exalt spirit, while degrading and vilifying material things, has wrought untold injury to mankind in the psychological domain. It has divided man's house against itself, splitting his psyche, so to say, into two mutually

170

antagonistic segments, causing him to frown on his natural life of worldly interests as detrimental to his spiritual uplift and making his spiritual life a thing apart, abstracted wholly away from his predominant total of worldly interest and activity. The popular clerical admonition to be in the world but not of it, attests this feature of bad psychology. As truth is basic and paramount in all final reckoning, humans have the first obligation to understand that they, their imperishable souls, are definitely sent into the world to be of it. And the more judiciously and harmoniously the soul settles itself into its proper place in the physical world, the better it will be for its welfare both now and all down the future. All in all, it would be hard to discover a religious influence more deleterious to mankind than this warping of the religious mind under the persuasion that the world, matter and nature are at enmity with the soul.

The religiously inspired differentiation between the sacred and the secular in popular thought has borne disastrous consequences. The dualism of holy and profane has made of much of life a jarring jangle. All such divisions have thrown our life into a mid-point where it is jostled back and forth between two loyalties. To engage in the daily secular activities of our lives, under the mental pall that these activities are iniquitous to our spiritual welfare, is to introduce a warfare in the psychic core of our being. It is understandable that the two areas of interest are to be entered into in a somewhat different posture of mind, as lighter moods are more fitting to certain of our actions and graver ones to others. But that all life interests are not to be regarded as essentially sacred in the total sum of our experience, is a miscarriage of general sane human ideation. It causes humans to live by far the larger portion of their lives under a psychic cloud. It spreads the miasma of the sin consciousness out to the farthest limit of our existence.

Dewey found himself wrestling with this express problem and rendered his reaction to it as follows:

"The philosophy which holds that the realm of essence subsists as an independent realm of Being also emphasizes that this is a realm of possibilities; it offers this realm as a true object of religious devotion. But by definition such possibilities are abstract and remote. They have no concern nor traffic with natural and social objects that are concretely expressed. It is not possible to avoid the impression that the idea of such a realm is simply the

171

hypostatizing in a wholesale way of the fact that actual existence has its own possibilities. But in any case devotion to such remote and unattached possibilities simply perpetuates the otherworldliness of religious tradition, although its other world is not one supposed to exist. Thought of it is a refuge, not a resource. It becomes effective in relation to the conduct of life only when separation of essence from existence is cancelled; when essences are taken to be possibilities to be embodied through action in concrete objects of secure experience."

The philosopher's terms of expression, somewhat abstruse and recondite, may not be clear or readily comprehended. His "essence" is the substance of that unconditioned world in which the mystics proclaim that their experience of bliss is enjoyed. It stands for "real being" in contrast to the "unreality" of our sensual and mental experience here. He is asserting that those who proclaim it as a possibility of experience are logically inconsistent, since their own definition, as he calls it, describes it as an experience not possible to us with our available equipment or faculty, but that it is to be attained by the cancelling out or actual destruction of all our present equipment. He holds it to be irrational to strive and strain after the attainment of an experience from under which you first cut the possibility of its attainment by destroying the very faculty by which it might be brought to experience.

Dewey's entire philosophy is the philosophy of the practical, in the sense that our gains must be won at the level where we stand and with the equipment that we have, not by means of a mentally hypostatized instrumentation of some remote perfection which we at present have no powers or faculties to implement. The expectation of a future metamorphosis of being is not irrationally held as an ideal, it must be granted. But the point Dewey makes--and it is crucial and decisive in the issue--is that any conceivable realization of the infinitely remote possibility entertained in the postulation of the consummative state can not be made in any connection with our natural existence at our station. It is abstract and remote; the gap between existential actualities and abstract conceptualities is practically infinite; and, as he says, the dream of the actualization now of infinite and unconditioned experience that can only be abstractly conceived, could be realized only by the cancellation of the infinite gulf of separation that yawns between the two states. Indeed, though Dewey does not stop to think of it, it

172

is a real question whether the gap between the conditioned actual and the hypothecated unconditioned real, that is, between the relative and the absolute, can be thought of as being ever bridged! It is the commonest axiom of philosophical theory that the finite can never comprehend--much less experience--the infinite; the relative grasp the absolute. The mystical persuasion virtually stands on the presumption that it is possible for man at his present stage to achieve this impossibility; so to say, leap out of the conditioned relative mode of existence and dimension of consciousness into the absolute and unconditioned being, assumedly by some extraordinary miracle of inhibiting his present modes of conscious life--sense and intellect--and thus freeing his ego from the limitations which are now his agents for the actualization of his present life.

The direct upshot of Dewey's analysis is that it makes the mystical position a vain and calamitous reaching for the moon, in fact for infinite galaxies, when the soul's true business is to mingle with the earth on the friendliest of terms and draw from it the sustenance needed for an experience of growth in finite values positively more glorious than any Nirvanic insensibility. It may be said with full truth that the dream of religion, that merely by a mystical "conversion" the conditioned consciousness of our earthly existence is to be by God's miraculous grace transmuted into an eternal unconditioned swirl of unalloyed and uninterrupted bliss, is a frightfully delusive mirage, a perilous will-o'-the-wisp. It ignores life's eternal law of rhythm and periodicity. It takes no account of life's other law of manifestation through polarity and its retirement into non-manifestation--and non-consciousness--when the polarity is neutralized at the cycle's end. The mystico-ideal philosophies simply take their stand on the proposition that of the two opposite nodes of the polarity, the one giving birth to consciousness and enriching it with ever-expanding power, the other extinguishing it, the extinction is the one final real blessedness, the former a false, cruel and evil unreality. India has stood on this platform. Greece, all the while, has given the world the true resolution of the matter: life brings to realization its supreme values through an alternation of the two in a systole and diastole rhythm, and a balancing and equilibration of the two in successive impulses, as the human body is borne along by the alternate movement of the two legs in walking.

173

The study requires that basic ground be laid for the understanding of the great ruling principle which makes the oneness of the duality of all life the prime datum for philosophy. Indian thought, for whatever reason, revolts against the duality, sees no good in it, and urges our dissolution of it by some mode of mental hypnotization,--since one of the most direct steps prescribed for the achievement of escape from this dually-conditioned existence is to master "the four states of trance." Instead of rationalizing the stress of the duality as the modality of evolutionary good, it advises negation and escape. But to a philosophy which "accepts the universe" and seeks to understand it as the rationale for effecting the good purposes of life, the opposition of positive and negative forces is seen to be the basis and support of the whole creation, and is therefore accredited as good, to be experienced for benefit, not escaped. With the eye of rationality the philosopher can discern the presence and the working efficacy of Infinite Being--God--in the duality, and therefore does not have to denounce it as evil. As poets say that God is in the whirlwind, in the thunder, in the fire, the hail, the sun and the rain, so philosophy can say that the infinite life is in the tension of opposites everywhere. Both ends, both pull and resistance, are equally God, or of God. We find this stated epigrammatically by Heraclitus: God, he says, is "day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger." The opposites are identical, at least in purpose. Rather perhaps it is meant to be stated that what is effected by the interrelation of the two is the real essence of the forces at work. Heraclitus elaborates the conception: "Mortals are immortals, and immortals are mortals, one living the other's death and dying the other's life." The meaning of this odd form of statement is that in the eternal swing of the cycles, as potential life units plunge downward into matter and again return with enrichment, there is always a balance, an equilibration. It is a see-saw operation; as one end goes down, the other goes up. As immortals incarnate, they become mortals, and the immortal part "dies" to give life to mortals; as the mortal part dies, it gives life again to the immortal part. As a star sets in the west, another rises in the east. With St. Paul we see that as man dies

174

daily unto the old Adam, the fleshly nature with its lusts, he is born anew in the spirit of the Christhood. Everything, says Heraclitus, runs an up-and-down course. Every cycle registers the movement of two streams going in opposite directions, so that life is engendered at the point where they cross, and is thus crucified or put on the cross. The Greeks called the two streams the upward and the downward ways. We call the one force positive, the other negative. Their forces must be neutralized, or balanced, else there could be no stability. The stars and planets hold to their fixed orbits because they are stabilized at the precise station at which the centripetal and the centrifugal forces are exactly balanced; similarly the protons and the electrons in the atom. The established peace and serenity of the physical universe, giving eternal silence and apparent immobility in the midst of cosmic energies of inconceivable might, are the results of the exactly balanced tensions of spirit and matter. Fuller, commenting, says that individual objects are subject to the same law. All things follow the two ways, being pulled in opposite directions at the same moment. The opposite pulls create a state of counterbalance and equilibrium, which enable the objects to persist in spite of ceaseless changes taking place within them. Heraclitus says: "Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is in an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre." Things change, giving ground to the philosophy that denies reality to the phenomena and locates it only in changeless being,--the contention of Parmenides in his debate with Heraclitus. But Heraclitus announced, and Aristotle endorsed, that the divine law of order and purpose in the run of the changes was ever the fixed and changeless reality "behind" the changes. This law of the cosmic order Heraclitus calls the Logos of the universe.

The German philosopher Fichte, elaborating the formulation of Heraclitus, finds that as regards man, consciousness would itself disappear if the tension between soul and body was relaxed, as all power would be gone from the bow if the tautness of the cord was relaxed. No music could be produced from an untensed harp string. So an untensed life could generate no morality and no spirit, hence no good. The very possibility of good is thus seen to depend on relating it tensionally with opposition. Good must then be defined as the product of the life energy constantly working to effect a stable

175

precipitate out of the opposition of its two-polar aspects. Morality Fuller expounds, rests upon the ego's contrasting itself with something not itself. If there was no force of vice and evil to contend with, there would be no merit, no virtue, no spiritual victory. How could the dramatic hero be glorified if he had no desperate villain to overcome? "To him that overcometh" are the seven great rewards promised in Revelation. They--be it noted--are not promised to him that fatuously thinks to escape all trials by dissolving the duality.

The extravagances of mystical presumption tend to make of what is called spiritual development or realization something that runs very close to philosophical subjectivism, if not to solipsism itself. This is the name for the belief that the individual I-consciousness is the sum and essence of all existence and being, making it identical with the whole. When the Hindu system affirms to the individual Tat tvam asi, "thou art that," it makes the individual consciousness equate the totality of being. It empowers the separate ego to stand forth and say, "I am the universe." Fuller points out the psychological perils of accepting such a thesis, if it were a real possibility of demonstration in any practical way. He says in this connection: "A duty toward a mere figment of my imagination would rest on insanity pure and simple." And in discussing Hegel's philosophy, he writes: "Not to rebel against life but to love it as it is, with all its limitations and vicissitudes, is to overcome fate and to transmute it into freedom." It is doubtful if any more direct and succinct precept of human wisdom than this brief formulation could be made. The practical moral of all philosophy is implicit in it. And it refutes the bizarre presuppositions of the mystical theorists. Again he states that the multiplicity, the variety, the opposition are all subservient to some higher principle, in which they are all ultimately reconciled, and to the beneficent action of which they are all necessary.

In this light Hegel says that objective nature becomes the manifestation of a companionable spirit akin to our own and in whose image we are created. This, it will be seen, matches the Greek view.

The monistic idealists prate of the blessedness of our attainment of the ultimate unity through the abolition of the duality. So it is good to hear Hegel expound that eternal sameness would be

176

meaningless except in contrast to the change and diversity of sensual experience in conditional existence. The rational genius must have diversion and engaging interest in rationalizing the many episodes that actual life strings together. Unity is a linking together the meaning of many things. Without a multiplicity of separate events to weld together, unity, says Hegel, would be a blank. It would mean nothing. Hence the existence of the One and the many is interdependent.

And in his chapter on Schopenhauer Fuller makes the categorical statement which, if true, should forever silence the mouthings of the mystics:

"It is in our immediate experiences that we reach the rock bottom of reality. There is nothing behind or beyond, or deeper than sensation. All our so-called getting behind or beneath sensible experience is really constructing upon experience."

The true wisdom expressed in the first sentence here and elaborated in the others is the prime item of knowledge that could redeem the extreme mystics to sanity. The whole system of philosophy could well build upon it. The reflective mind should long ago have asked itself how it will ever be possible for man to derive the utmost of benefit from his living experience on the globe if he does not release the whole ardor of his spirit for full participation in its actualities. What must be the psychic damage constantly inflicted on his ego if he approaches or partakes of every experience in perpetual attitude of negation of its value? If he is afflicting his very soul with the unrelieved conviction of his sinful attitude in all he does, he poisons the well-springs of his life in their depths. Certainly life will not shed its infinite blessedness upon soul and body when they are contorted into diseased conditions by self-accusation in abject morbidity of spirit. Surely life will not scatter its largesse abroad upon those who hold its blessings in disdain and contempt. And life will endeavor in vain to reach with its good gifts those who squint their vision to focus their gaze not upon the outer sphere of actual events, but somewhere "behind" or "beyond" or "beneath" what the senses and the mind present. They presume to be looking through the unreal to find the real behind it; in so doing they risk missing any reality at all. It may become obvious some happy day that nature, if it is to yield us its meaning, must be looked at, not looked away from.

177

Fuller comments again:

"Life is forever present. It is never over, it is never about to be. It is always there. Past and future, in so far as the one is dead and gone and the other yet unborn, have no reality of their own. Their only reality is in pleasant memories or anticipations given in the present content of consciousness . . . . All existence, then, is concentrated in a present moment, and is now."

A moment's sober thinking should long ago have made it a matter of the simplest recognition that there is only one "time" in which consciousness can have experience, obviously the time that, at any moment, then is. If we say that we live in the past or the future, we mean only that at the moment which is always a present we indulge in retrospection or in imagination. Memory and anticipation are activities of a present consciousness and, contrary to common thought, do not nullify the present. They merely determine the subjects of present conscious activity. This may seem a simple matter of commonplace knowledge, yet it has not been sufficiently taken into account to correct errant programs of cult religions. In its effort to extinguish the senses and the intellect to make way for the incursion of rhapsodies of superconsciousness, what mystical presumption actually does is to deaden the normal contact of the individual consciousness with the present. All that such a "philosophy" does is to fill the present consciousness with idealistic dream pictures of a hypothecated future which have no more reality than what the imagination gives them. Common sense would assert that such "dreaming" is a waste of precious present time. It does not enable a person to escape his world, it simply fills his present life with fantasy. One merely spoils his present by attempted to escape it through visualizing the future. Philosophy will never bring its devotees to the solid ground of correct envisagement of life's drama and a wholesome orientation of the psychic nature toward it, until it drives home the blunt simple truth that life can be lived in only one time, the present, and lived then under the terms imposed by the interrelation of external environment and inner intelligence. Any thought system that would wrench the ego out of this setting in the cosmic order and try to adjust it to altered conditions self-generated by the individual mentality is indulging in a sort of sorcery. It is trying to manipulate states of mind by processes matching those of witchcraft.

178

In a notable passage in his The Quest For Certainty. (p. 138), John Dewey makes the challenging statement that, apart from the real but limited service which they perform in giving us aesthetic pleasure,

"Ideas are worthless except as they pass into actions which rearrange or reconstruct in some way, be it little or large, the world in which we live. To magnify thought and ideas for their own sake apart from what they do, is to refuse to learn the lesson of the most authentic kind of knowledge . . . . to praise thinking above action because there is so much ill-conditioned action in the world, is to help maintain the kind of world in which action occurs for narrow and transient purposes. To seek after ideas and to cling to them as means of conducting operations . . . . is to participate in creating a world in which the springs of thinking will be clear and everflowing."

On the basic analogy of our creation in God's image, if the creation would not be established except God bring his ideas to physical manifestation, likewise our creative effort would come to nought unless we carried out our ideas to concrete results. Action at the physical level is ultimately the only escape from stagnation of the life stream and the foul corruption that stagnation breeds. To dream on when action alone will keep the life forces in healthy movement is to live in futility and privation.

Plato speaks of the intelligible principle of the cosmos as trying to establish all that was invisible in the foundations of the visible. If the astral galaxies and all life riding on them are God's creation, it can not well be otherwise. The creation is his effort to bring his will to pass. It could hardly merit the name of creation if it proceeded no farther than the thought-form stage, held invisibly in his mind. Its actualization had to be achieved by precipitating it into matter. In the purely noumenal form it could be and mean nothing to his children. We could not read his mind unless we saw his handiwork.

179

If, then, the physical objects are the very ideas of God standing before us in all their divine intelligibility, the question invoked by reflection is: why has mankind so completely failed to catch their message of divine truth? Why has the human intelligence failed even to know that nature was all the while delivering this mighty discourse to it? Why has the language of nature so signally failed of translation?

The answer is involved and abstruse. But it brings to the fore in the discussion the next great item for consideration--symbolism. This item is an integral element in the whole science of the ancient arcana of wisdom. The use of symbols was the prime method employed in the construction of ancient books, so that real skill in the interpretation of symbols is therefore the necessary equipment for their successful rendition. If all nature is the mute, but mutely eloquent dialect of God's ideas, then every object in nature is a divine thought still whispering its meaning. To be able to look at an object or to witness the unrolling of a phenomenon and to see the idea it voices, not behind or beyond it, but directly in it, is ultimately the supreme employment of the genius of mankind. Subjectivism preaches the attainment of the intuition of life's meaning by looking away from life objectified, to find it in life still wholly subjectified. On the open view this would appear to be the extreme of irrational folly. Man has not ordinarily any faculty by which he can objectify, and thus have cognition of, subjective forms either cosmic or human. We can not see thought-forms. Hence the open road to understanding of life's meanings is to look at what life has objectified in visible forms and catch the ideal intention from them.

It is precisely at this point that idealism has most flagrantly erred. As even Plato declared--and so set the philosophical fashion--it has been persistently asserted that the world objects deceive the observing mind, that they distort the veridical forms of truth. This posture is artificial, the result of a specious doctrine endlessly reiterated. It needs to be met with direct and positive refutation. It is widely admitted even by its exponents and practitioners that the claimed powers of man to discern ethereal, mental and spiritual forms in subatomic matter are most erratic, unreliable and precarious. They completely lack certitude and exactness. Exploitation of phenomena in that realm tends to be as fantastic as our experience in dreams. The very realm in which it is asserted that we

180

will find truth and knowledge in their purest forms of veritude, is just the place where they will be found least veracious. On the other side the objective world, in which the ideas are alleged to be least clearly and reliably envisaged, presents them in infallible clarity. For this is the realm in which God's voice has spoken the true message of his mind. The world of nature can not tell the story untruly. A fictitious idealism has turned the philosophical world upside down. It urges souls to dodge the experience which they were sent here to be instructed by.

In descanting on the heavenly natures which descend from the celestial spheres and run the risk of "contamination" of their virgin purity from "mixing" their divine nature with human passions, Plutarch says that Plato first or in the greatest degree among the philosophers:

"joined both of these principles together, attributing to God the causality of all things that are according to reason, and yet not depriving matter of a necessary and passive concurrence; but acknowledging that the adorning and disposing of all this sensible world does not depend on one single and simple cause, but took its being from the conjunction and fellowship of matter with reason."

The deep discernment of ancient philosophers recognized and without exception proclaimed the emergence of truth and real being from out of the union of the superior subjective order with the inferior material base of existence. As the law of polarity demonstrated, full being is to be predicated of neither end of the tension alone, but comes out of the equilibration of the two forces. The manifested universe is the Logos, the Son of God; and a son is always the product of sexual polarization or union of the two creative energies. To put it more explicitly, the universe is the product of the fatherhood of God in copulation with the motherhood of matter. The child expresses the mean product of the elements contributed by both parents. Hence our mundane consciousness is the mean generated by the interblending of the spiritual energies of reason with the atomic energies of matter. Idealism always tends to leave matter out of the combination. But if this were possible, there would be no present existence or consciousness either to philosophize or be philosophized about. Says G. R. G. Mure in a work on Aristotle's philosophy: "The essence of Aristotle's teaching is the unity of subject and object." Aristotle called the divine ideas

181

logoi enuloi, "logical principles embodied in matter." "Thought turned wooden" might be a permissible literal translation of the phrase. "The mean is what possesses the contrasting quantities in equipoise," it is stated in The Analytics. The philosopher even goes so far as to affirm that a sense is a logos. Again it is declared that a form (mental divine idea) achieves its destiny and receives its proper embodiment only when perceived. Here one has to recall Berkeley's dictum as to the reality of any object: esse est percipi; to be is to be perceived.

The principle of union of opposites brings into prominence the element of ratio and proportion. The Greek thought made of measure and proportion, which with us are sheer quantitative values, essentially moral qualities. That is, the proportion in which the ingredients entering into the constitution of anything were mingled, was the factor determining its nature and its mode of being. "The reason (Latin ratio) for anything is this ratio of its compounds." In the living processes, all things being compounded of the four elements, fire, air, water, earth, the nature of things changed as the ceaseless flux of the elements alternated in prescribed rhythms. All four elements pass into one another in cycles, and always the coming-to-be of one is the passing away of another. This can be seen in the origin and life history of the heavenly bodies. Fire passes into air, air into water and water into earth, and in the dissolution process the order is reversed. Similar transmutations of elementary essence account for the coming to be of all things, and explain growth and decay.

Fire is the only one of the four that is not corruptible, and all things emanate out of one primordial fire, of which they are modifications, and return to it. Ur is the original word for fire, and so it was out of Ur of the Chasadim, or the seven archangelic Fires, that the first father principle, Abram, came, to go "west," the direction pointing from spirit to matter. In the process each successive stage or step was for the sake of and found its meaning in the next. Any development is a mid-stage between two levels partakes of the nature of the one above it and of the one below. In this situation man, the human, partakes, through body, of the nature of the animal order, and through intellect, of that of the gods above him. That is the reason why the typical divinized human, the Christ, is portrayed in drama and allegory as both Son of God and Son of

182

Man. The highest virtue is the perfectly balanced and proportioned mixture and harmonization of the two natures. How in accord with the Greek principles St. Paul expresses this datum, speaking of the Christos: "For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; having abolished in his flesh the enmity, for to make in himself of the twain one new man, so making peace"! A whole new charter of the reconditioning of Hindu religionism is to be found in Paul's phrase: "having abolished in his flesh the enmity." For it would instruct the Hindu mind that right here in the flesh the "enmity" between spirit and matter is to be reconciled in a harmonious union of the two. No longer would there be need or justification for the abolition of the flesh, to be rid of it as an enemy of the spirit, when it is understood that only by the spirit's union with it will new growth be won. The dissolving of the dividing wall and the merging of the two natures in a new creation is what is meant by the atonement and reconciliation of (the) man with (the) god in humanity.

From the standpoint of psychoanalysis it is interesting to note how Jung, the psychologist, rationalizes the relation between the spirit and the physical body in our life. The soul, being the positive node of the polarity, with body the negative, is dramatized as thus being bound in and under the cyclical rhythms of its vehicle. The physical world, and hence the human body, is the kingdom of the mother, or matter, principle. The body, independent of the mind, is ruled by the so-called "unconscious" element of the psyche. If the mind-soul permits itself too long to be carried on by the swirling cycles of instinctive automatic motions and passions of the body, it may be considered to be thus bound in its prison of the unconscious and the sensuous life of the "mother." To win its freedom it must assert the divine prerogative of the rulership of reason, its own dormant powers of thought, and break out of the "vicious" cycle of physical automatism on the "mother" side.

"Only he can break through this magic circle who has the courage of the will to live, and the heroism to carry it through. Only the overcoming of the obstacles of reality brings deliverance from the mother, who is the continuous and inexhaustible source of life for the creator, but death for the cowardly, timid and sluggish."

In its deepest import poetry is the exercise of the genius which flowers to its highest artistry in the discernment of the divine nou-

183

menal forms in the earthly phenomena. It is the insight which sees the divine in the natural. It interprets nature in the terms of the cosmic logoi. It sees in nature the reflection, and not the vague confused shadow of the universal reason. It is by the sharpening of its analogical faculty that it comes to discern the spiritual in the natural, or discerns that the natural is the spiritual, hardened in matter. We find Plutarch saying: "For generation is the production of an image of the real substance upon matter, and what is generated is an imitation of what is in truth."

Mure, in his Aristotle says that

"The eye for an effective metaphor is in fact a mark of genius and unteachable. And in devoting most space to illustrating that form of metaphor which depends upon analogy,--as when old age is described as Life's sunset--Aristotle means, perhaps, to mark the manifestation within the poet's imaginative world of that hierarchic order of analogous stages which pervades the whole Aristotelian universe."

Miss Langer quotes M. W. Urban (Language and Reality):

"It is not true that whatever can be expressed symbolically can be better expressed literally."

This is the rebuke administered to unimaginative factual prose-minded attitude toward existence by sensitive genius which appreciates the hidden values of beauty and meaning in nature. The conceptions of the human mind would be a drab, bleak and barren poverty of consciousness if they could not be haloed with a true mystical aura and experience the discovery of expansive intimations.

All this takes us into the next phase of the elucidation,--that poetry is in itself philosophy under a veil. Naturally this must be so, for if poetry is the sensing of the basic correspondence between the outward manifestation of the forms and the forms themselves, it is a delineation of the fundamental archai of the creation, which is philosophy. So Aristotle says (De Poetica): "Hence poetry is something more philosophical and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals; whereas those of history are singulars."

Urban, just quoted, writes again:

"But when all is said and done, it remains true that poetry is covert metaphysics, and it is only when its implications, critically

184

interpreted and adequately expressed, become part of philosophy that an adequate view of the world can be achieved."

Miss Langer says that the symbols embody basic ideas of life and death, of man and the world, and are naturally sacred. But, catastrophically, naive thinking does not distinguish between the symbol and its abstract counterpart, or divine its inner import. Then this writer, in her Philosophy in a New Key, articulates one of the most significant principles in all this field of understanding: "Our metaphysical symbols must spring from reality." They must come into the mind from their connection with the real life of the world, else they may spring from fantasy and darken the mental view. They must be part and parcel of that infinite essence with which we are to attune our lives.

Like poetry, art also wins its edifying power over the human spirit by being cognate with the natural order and designed to depict the inner elan and meaning of that order. Fuller tells that Aristotle, as would be evident, did not agree with Plato's idea that art is base because it is only an imitation of nature. It is inspiring because it is such an imitation, contended the Stagirite. Perhaps art, however, only attains its high power of uplift when it is a divination of what is universal and eternal in the particulars it portrays, adumbrative of what in nature is true, expressing in sensible terms the ideal which nature silently proclaims.

Dewey makes the profound observation that "symbols afford the only way of escape from submergence in existence." This might suggest to the Hindu mind a better way of escape than self-destruction! Unquestionably symbols help the mind to gain that degree of understanding of the run of events which enables it to maintain its poise and equanimity amid the constant succession of things which in their isolation can furnish the thought with no principle of rationalization. A symbol, expertly envisaged, points to meaning, and it is meaning alone that can fortify mind with the power to participate in the manifold of experience without becoming an idle drifter or totally lost. To be carried along on the transmission belt of events without having a view of order, plan or purpose, or at least an eventuality that will have meaning, is only to wander aimlessly in a thicket. A symbol affords the thought a link by which events can be tied together to engage the interest and so feed the hunger of the rational nature with satisfying food. It is

185

no mere poetism to say that the reasoning faculty must be fed with proper rational diet, as the body with physical food. Man's life is cast among things. His intercourse with things is only redeemed from banality and deadness by virtue of his knowing something of the relation things bear to the ultimate and total meaning and purpose of the creation, as Dr. Hocking has said. The nature of a thing, said Socrates, involves the presupposition of its purpose or end in the total of things. The teleological significance of any object or event must therefore wait on time to unfold it. The meaning of some one bolt, bar, rod, lever, wheel, valve, pin or ratchet in a printing press can be known only when its essential contribution to the running of the machine as a whole is known; and even that comes to meaning only when the purposes of a newspaper or book are known. And confronting mankind is the still further step toward knowing the true purposes and ends of newspapers and books. The regress goes on until it brings man face to face with the end question of all: what is the total meaning of human life, what the essence and purport of the universe. All actions, moments and events in life are contributory to some evident design, something that the supreme entelechy comprehends. What this is is the task of philosophy to discover.

As man is a miniature copy of the universe, his experience may point by analogy to the corresponding, if infinitely surpassing, experience of higher Logoi and creative god powers. When a man makes something designed to serve a specific purpose, he can be thought of as a small god, throwing a number of cosmic elements into a compound to effect the desired result. It yields him the feeling of a creator, and psychologically it is the most satisfying perhaps of all self-generated feelings. It represents at its inferior level and degree the creative Lila or joy of God. That there is a very god within every man, eager to gain his majority and enjoy the sense of his creative potential to regulate and rule a portion of the complex of events in his corner of the universe is well stated by the Roman philosopher Seneca:

"There is no need to lift up your hands to heaven or to pray the servant of the temple to admit you to the ear of the idol that your prayers may be heard the better. God is near thee; he is with thee. Yes, Lucilius, a holy spirit resides within us, the observer of good and evil, and our constant guardian. And as we treat him, he

186

treats us; no good man is without a god--that a god dwells in the breast of every good man is certain."

This is echoed in the Upanishads of India: "The one supreme power through which all things have been brought into being is one with the inmost self in each man's heart." "God's dwelling place is the heart of man." "Thou are the sheath of Brahman." The inner immortal self and the great cosmic power are one and the same. Man comes to have the rudiments of a sagacious understanding of what his residence on this planet may mean only when he has gained the firm realization that he, dually segmented in consciousness and body, compounded of spirit and matter, is himself a seed portion of the totality of life. As seed of a larger growth, he faces a process of evolution, for, as a seed, his existence is forever meaningless apart from cycles of growth. Any philosophy that deals with life on terms that take no account of growth and development in a time process is a fatal mirage.

187

The work up to this point has been a fairly scrutinizing survey of the general theses of the idealist-mystical-monistic philosophy. The treatment has been fairly comprehensive and exhaustive, and it has brought the force of considerable high authority in philosophical world thought to bear upon the pertinent issues in support of the severe strictures enunciated against the extravagances of the mystical position. It is felt, however, that the crucial determination involved in the study will wield such potent influence in shaping the future fortunes of humanity, now that the great message of the Orient has reached over to touch and vitally affect the positive and energetic life of the West, that a still more searching inspection of the massive inculcations of Eastern subjective and negative persuasions about our life is eminently in point. The meeting of Hindu thought structures with the Occidental mind is doubtless the most momentous phenomenon manifesting in the world of ideology today, and unquestionably the most crucial issues hinge upon the outcome of the fusion. If left unchallenged by a competent critique, there is the imminent possibility that the invasion of Oriental passivism and pessimism into the psychic life of the West may palsy and cast over its thought area the pall of fatalism and lethalistic resignation. Historic tragedy might all too easily flow from the deadening influences of thought formulas minimizing the value of the physical life and material interests.

A philosophy that frankly stands on a denial of any and all value to the earthly life for man is without hesitation to be considered a deadly menace to all incentive and the will to accomplish notable things for the upliftment of world life. There is abundant warrant, then, to justify as piercing an inspection of the principles at stake as it is possible to give them. The portion of the work so far done can well stand as "introduction" to a further and deeper analysis of pivotal elements of the Hindu philosophy. The treatment so far has been somewhat cursory; the great questions must be more thoroughly canvassed.

As the solid achievements of rationalistic effort gain in validity and the slow but empirically substantial progress is registered in

188

psychology, the vast area of wild free pietistic, mystic and emotional religion is by so much curtailed, and the area of "scientific" causation and natural rationale extended. The possibility is not negligible that the tremendous extension of the field of human motivation into one area of the "unconscious" phase of the psyche in man may provide some firm ground for a critique of India's negative and nihilistic attitudes not available before. Even a "snap" judgment on the validity of Hindu philosophies, arrived at by purely external and earthly standards, would seem prima facie to indicate that Hindu thought tears Indian life far away from wholesome relation to the life of the world, the body and nature. It might be said that one can see by merely looking that Indian life is "in the world, but not of it," to an extraordinary degree. Indian thought, seared deep upon the Indian consciousness by ages of uninhibited traditional bent, has made Indian life almost alien to the warm friendly embrace of mother earth and her beneficent influences, which the Egyptians and the Greeks imbibed so deeply and refreshingly. Scorned and trodden under foot by Hindu mentality, mother earth has had her own karmic requital in refusing the abundance of her agricultural bounty to sustain the half-starved Hindu body.

The great issue is whether the Oriental subjectivism and detachment from the concerns of physical existence that is sweeping so surreptitiously into Western religion is salutary or deleterious. It is the obligation of Western studentship to weigh the problem and evaluate its issues by the norms of the best intelligence available. So our work so far may be considered to be a formulation of the principles on which a more exhaustive critique could be based.

A lengthy citation from R. Wilhelm, with Jung's endorsement, presented earlier in the study emphasized the menace of the invasion of Oriental thought in the West. Probably the Occident's best defense against the insidious thrusts of the unearthly metaphysics of India is to be found in the robust use of the mind, the intellect. Perhaps sensing this as an obstacle to its encroachments on the West, the Eastern movement comes directly armed with a weapon to countervail against it,--the negation and disqualification of the mind. For incessantly it cries the incompetence of the mind to lead us into truth. This is what led Wilhelm to say that Eastern philosophy creeps in upon us by the back door of the

189

"unconscious." The alleged supramental faculty called intuition is to supplant the mind. In fact it is alleged to supervene only after one has destroyed his mind faculty.

To envisage the peril to Western balance of mind from the Orient, knowledge of a startling fact in the history of Indian thought is itself of the greatest importance. From consideration of it is gained an understanding of the source and nature of the evil influence exerted upon us by a philosophy which in the light of this item is seen to be a melange of misconceptions and distortions of primal w