My thanks go to Juan Schoch who by his work brought me into contact with the Vitvan material (School of the natural order - Website), Gerald Massey's research on Egypt, the pagan origin of Christanity, and Alvin Boyd Kuhn, the pupil of Massey who has written extensively on the meaning of symbols in myth. Also, Godfrey Higgins work Anacalypsis can be found at members.tripod.com/~pc93 Martin Euser Webmaster --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Message from Juan: Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. Join gnosis284 - Send e-mail to: gnosis284-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Refs: enlightenment-engine, members.tripod.com/~pc93 I am looking for contributions: texts, comments, etc. I (Juan) can be contacted at: pc93@enlightenment-engine.net Do not remove this notice. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BRIGHT LEXICON OF DEITY 1
II. DRAMA BEARS MISSHAPEN OFFSPRING 12
III. AND GOD SPAKE UNTO MOSES 22
IV. THE GODS DISTRIBUTE DIVINITY 31
V. LOST DATA OF ANTHROPOLOGY 48
VI. "OLD CHILD" IS HIS NAME 63
VII. THE TWO SUBTERRANEAN GROTTOES 83
VIII. IN PLUTO'S DARK REALM 98
IX. THE TWO MOTHERS OF THE CHRIST 111
X. IMMANUEL'S LAMP 124
XI. THE BATTLE ON THE HORIZON 138
XII. THE CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN 152
XIII. LIGHT FROM AN OLD LAMP 180
XIV. THE LANGUAGE OF LINGAM AND YONI 194
XV. PHALLICISM TRANSFIGURED 215
XVI. LOVE AND HATE 230
XVII. LOVE LOOKS BEYOND DEATH 245
XVIII. ROMANCE IN THE TRYSTING-TENT 260
XIX. THE PHOENIX LIVES AGAIN 274
XX. WITH UNVEILED FACE 287
XXI. THE OIL OF GLADNESS 300
XXII. MY CUP RUNNETH OVER 322
In a very venerable document, Records of the Past (XII,
68) we read that in remote days of antiquity geographical mapping and local
naming were instituted according to a plan which has almost totally escaped
recognition in our search for understanding of archaic culture. It is said there
that the names and localities were derived from the features of an original
uranograph, or chart of the heavens, and were transferred from it to earth and
applied to the geography of a country, with a distribution of the names already
localized in the empyrean amongst the places to be named, according to a scheme
of correspondence or analogy. It is declared that "the mapping out of Egyptian
localities according to the celestial Nomes and scenery is described in the
inscription of Khnum-hept, who is said to have 'established the landmark of the
south, and sculptured the northern--like the heaven. . . . He made the
district in its two parts, setting up their landmarks, like the heaven.'" In
obvious corroboration of this method we have the injunction given by deity to
Moses in the Bible: "See that thou make all things after the pattern shown thee
in the Mount . . . the pattern of the heavens."
Charts of the "Holy Land of Canaan" have been uncovered in early
Egypt with evidence of their existence as much as three hundred years
before the alleged Israelite exodus, which would add presumptive evidence
that this promised land of peace and abundance was allegorical before it was
historical. Hundreds of pages of data strengthening the case for the prevalence
of this customary schematism in archaic religion are assembled in Godfrey
Higgins' notable old work, The Anacalypsis.
1
That this systematic procedure back of primeval naming and
topography had any remotest connection with two such widely separated domains of
human ideation as theology and modern psychoanalysis has of course not been
known. Yet it now looms on the horizon of intelligence that the roots of these
sciences are grounded in that ancient practice. The connection appears
superficially remote, but is in reality close and direct.
It inheres in the basic cosmic constitution of the creation,
wherein the universe of total being, for the purposes of manifestation or
becoming, bifurcated into the duality of subjective and objective, or spirit and
matter. This is the procedure stated precisely where it ought to have been, as
the very first step in cosmic creation--in the first verse of Genesis.
Here it is proclaimed that the first act in universal creation was the
splitting apart of the unity of being into its two facets or components,
consciousness and objective reality. Most aptly these two segments of whole
being were allegorized under the terms "heaven" for consciousness, or spirit,
and "earth" for the opposite node, matter. We have here the philosophical
dichotomy of being, the substrate of all life in the cosmos. Without the
separation and opposition of cosmic mind and cosmic body there could be no
existence and no awareness of it. Being would remain the Absolute, would remain
asleep, if it did not rend apart its totality into the twoness of polarity.
Spirit and matter spring into activity by concomitant stages of emergence from
blank unconsciousness, and each, so to say, generates itself and its opposite by
mutual counteraction or "hostility." For each is the counterfoil, the
countervalence and by reflection the counterpart of the other. Each is the
fulcrum against which the other can lift itself into reification. Hence
intelligence is in the first step of understanding instructed by the item of
knowledge that spirit and matter, or heaven and earth, mutually balance and
mutually interpret each other.
Mind is the active agent, the creator, and matter, the opposite
energy, is the plastic substance of creation. The two spring simultaneously into
existence, the first impressing and shaping the second
2
according to its original or archetypal ideas. Hence all
material creation is formed over the patterns of heavenly or spiritual ideation.
Divine thoughts may be said to be the molds into which the energies of divine
will pour the fluid essence of substance in order to shape the universe
projected in mind and purpose. Poured in while liquid or plastic, the matter of
substance crystallizes, solidifies, hardens and thus brings into manifest
existence the things of the visible worlds. Therefore each created object bears
the image of the thought that shaped it. Even man was made in the image of his
creator. The universe is the Logos of God, for it reveals the form of the
logical structure of the cosmos. It is the logical structure concreted in
matter.
If, then, the pervading oversoul of the system wishes to
communicate with the intelligences of gradated ranges of lower being brought
into function by its own initial activity, it is perforce constrained, if not
confined, to speaking in the language germane to and commensurate with the lower
ranges of consciousness addressed. For the enlightenment of inferior by superior
intelligence, such a language must be constituted in the character and nature of
symbols known or knowable to the lower. Therefore higher intelligence must speak
to lower in the language of concretely known objects in the latter's world. Thus
it is that the objective world of any creature's life furnishes the characters
and alphabet of the language it is capable of comprehending. It is the office of
the physical world to provide the symbols which constitute language, for all
language must be concrete at base. There is not a word of remotest abstraction
that does not take its roots in some simply physical or mechanical process. As
Carlyle says, "Thy very attention, is it not merely a stretching toward?"
To express spirit itself, the terms used are all in the meaning of breath or
air. The human mind can conceive of abstractions, such as principles, laws,
ideas, realities of superphysical nature, only with the help of sensually known
objects or phenomena.
One of the most instructive truths of all time was announced
by
3
the great hierophant Hermes Trismegistus of Egypt in the
inscription on the famous Emerald Tablet:
"True, without falsehood, certain and most true, that which is
above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is
above, for the performance of the miracles of the One Thing."
Well had it been for the race of man if the pertinence of this
wisdom-laden pronouncement of the ancient sage had not been obscured and lost
when ignorance smothered sagacity in the third century of the Christian era. For
it embodies the basic principle of all human culture. There goes with it as its
corollary and necessary involvement the great truth that an immediate analogy
subsists between things seen and realities unseen. It becomes in its primary
cogency the key, as it is the starting point, of all religion, philosophy,
morality and psychology, not to name such ancillary manifestations as mythology,
anthropology, poetry, drama, ritual, folk-lore and celebratory
festivals.
The modern world has witnessed, if somewhat stolidly, a
remarkable phenomena. It has seen, perhaps not strictly the renaissance, but at
any rate the recrudescence, of three long buried and discredited ancient
sciences. These are alchemy, astrology and symbolism. Neither of them has come
back to vogue in the same aura of understanding in which they were esteemed of
old. They have reappeared in the modern day resting on foundations that are for
the most part pseudo or spurious. Their true nature and rationale are by no
means known as formerly they were. They rest now on partial and imperfect
theorization. Whatever they possessed of legitimate worth before their
repression has not been reintegrated in their recent resurgence. Indeed it may
be said with reference at any rate to astrology and symbolism that whereas in
olden times they stood grounded on scientific theses of positive value, they now
flourish largely through supposititious motivations. Their original high science
has not been resuscitated with them.
Our concern is definitely with symbolism. While the
rehabilita-
4
tion of this primary science is still in its infancy, there are
cheering signs that it is on the way to be given more adequate recognition of
its pivotal importance. It is one of the indices of the waking of the modern
mind out of the still-lingering obfuscations of Medievalism that a new science
of "semantics" is well started toward a central place in mental procedure. Yet
it is evident that current understanding has far to go before it will have
regained the ancient insight that discerned in symbolism the prime methodology
by which the mind can be given any substantial degree of realistic grasp of the
realities of higher worlds. Nationalistic languages, with their fixed signs and
coins of mental imagery, are local and temporary. They come and go, and serve a
partial segment of humanity, locking each unit off in cultural isolation.
Symbolism is the one universal and omnipresent language, significant and
meaningful everywhere. For its alphabet is the world of ubiquitous nature.
The tree, the seed, the leaf, the serpent, the beetle, the cow, the fish, water,
earth, fire, the flower, the sun, the star and the dragon-fly deliver the same
oration to penetrating perception in any land. "Nature never did betray the
heart that loved her," sings Wordsworth. And again he adjures us: "Let nature by
your teacher." She can not misteach, for she can not tell two varying stories of
truth. She may indeed have a wide variety of ways of telling her story, but they
all converge eventually upon the one monogram of truth. Life, or God, has but
one law, as ancient sapiency affirms. But it deploys its manifestations out to
concretion in a practically limitless play of variation or differentiation in
the worlds of form. If there is unity, it is a unity behind or beneath an
endless variety. No single expression violates the canons of true meaning. All
things in their several ways illustrate and exemplify the universal, the
eternal. Truth in the absolute may be one. As such it has little serviceableness
for man, who is no dweller in the absolute, but is still a citizen of the
relative. Truth, in manifestation, is many-sided, has many facets, comes to an
epiphany or showing forth at many levels. Strictly, man's concern is not
directly with truth. His prerogative is to deal
5
with the many truths that confront him, doing his best to
rationalize them into an organic structure that approximates a vision of truth
from his level.
As man, made in the image of Creator God, reflects the dual
constitution of all being in his two aspects of mind and body, consciousness and
instrument, function and organism, there is immediately at hand the ground of
understanding the play of psychic forces in and through his world. Psychology
has stumbled along a dark path, blindly trying to find a formula that would
elucidate psychic phenomena in the life of man. Its failure heretofore has been
due to its ignorant insistence on taking man as a unit, or as possessing a
consciousness with but one single focus. It has not known that it has to take
man for what he is,--a generically dual creature, of soul and body, each with a
distinct life of its own and lived on its own plane. Scripture has well
indicated this broad differentiation of his two elements, when it says that at
death the body returns to dust, but the soul to God who gave it. St. Paul adds
his declaration of light and truth when he dissociates man into two entities, a
"first man" who, he says, is "of the earth, earthy," and a "second man" who--and
here it is that modernity has not been able, to its profound confusion, to
follow the Apostle--"is the Lord from heaven." Again he posits the existence of
two men in us in his statement that "the first Adam" was made (merely) a living
soul, an organic breathing animal creature, while "the second Adam," or the
Christos, was made a far more vital thing, "a quickening spirit." Then comes
Plato with his trenchant declaration that man is twofold: "Through body it is an
animal; through intellect it is a God." And crowning all we have Heraclitus'
significant definition and description of the human: "Man is a portion of cosmic
fire, imprisoned in a body of earth and water." Also out of the majestic wisdom
of Grecian Orphism, the foundation of the whole later structure of Hellenic
light and philosophy, comes the ringing proclamation of the Initiate in the
Eleusynian Mysteries,--the soul of man speaking: "I am a child of earth and
the starry skies; but my
6
race is of heaven alone." This predicates for man a dual
constitution, asserting that his body is a product of earth and that his soul,
or spirit, is from the empyrean, with the unforgettable reminder that he is
intrinsically, by virtue of the part of him that subsists perennially whether in
or out of fleshly body, of the race of the dynasty of imperishable souls,
fragments of God's own integral being.
The early Egyptians symbolized the dual nature of mankind by a
dramatization that is one of the sublimest and most revealing of all ancient
hieroglyphs, and whose relevance we should no longer miss. They depicted man
under the symbol of the sun standing, now at morn, now at eve, on the line of
the horizon. Masterly dramatic genius represented man by the sun, because he has
a portion of the sun's identic light, energy and intelligence in his own being.
"Every man has a little sun (of intelligence) within him," was the averment of
the Medieval "Fire Philosophers," the Illuminati and Therapeutae of occult
wisdom. Rather it should be said that a part of man's constituent nature is
a fragment of the dynamic life of the sun. Precisely like the sun, too, he
stands in incarnation exactly on the horizon line in the evolutionary situation,
at the place where he is half in the heaven world of high consciousness and half
in the lower kingdom of matter, or on earth. "Head in heaven, feet on the
ground," was again the statement of the position occupied by man as formulated
by sage Egyptian knowledge. "Soul in heaven, body on the earth," was a variant
of the same description. Virtually man shares the life of heavenly creatures
whenever he lives in the uplands of his consciousness, for heaven is a state of
exalted consciousness and not a locality spatially dimensionable. He need not be
detached from his body to enter that superior condition of reality. In the same
way the bodily part of his being partakes of the life of earth. He inhabits
earth through the connection established with it by his senses. Verily man
stands on the horizon line that divides heaven from earth, where also,
conversely, the two segments of his nature are linked together. He enjoys the
lofty prerogative of standing in two worlds at once, and he can pass over the
borderline from one
7
to the other by the simple measure of focusing his consciousness
upon the body, or upon the world of noumenal unseen realities. "The horizon is
covered with the tracks of thy passing," declares the Ritual of the great
Book of the Dead. This is a reference to the continued aeonial passing of
the soul back and forth between body and incorporeal existence for its
incarnations. In variant Hebrew figure, but with kindred meaning, we are the
angels ascending and descending the Jacob's ladder that links earth and heaven,
as we emerge from the empyrean, or fire-land of spirit, to enter earthly body,
or reascend thither at the end of each excursion into actual being. Also in
minor relevance, there is implicit here the meaning that we pass up and down
over the boundary line every time we shift the focus of consciousness from
bodily, earthly, physical things to the interests of ideality.
Standing on the frontier between the two kingdoms of life,
consciousness and objectivity, man is at the most strategic point of vantage
occupied by any creature in evolution. It is deeply significant that Norse
mythology locates man in Midgard, where from his seat on middle ground he
is able to be the two-faced Janus of Roman mythicism, who stands thus at the
opening door (janua) of his evolution and can look backward over the
yesterday of his past, stored in the basement of his unforgetting subconscious
mind, and forward prospectively to his oncoming future. The Egyptians were not
ignorant of this situation, for they make the eternal pilgrim, the reincarnating
soul, the bearer, collector and husbandman of all the values gained in living
experience, utter this terse statement descriptive of its nature and its task:
"I am Yesterday and I am Tomorrow. The things that have been and the things that
will be are in my womb." Again the soul declares the fact of its everlasting
peregrination through the realms of matter and being when it exclaims, "I am the
persistent traveler on the highways of heaven." "Eternity and everlastingness is
my name," it says again. "The name of my boat is Millions of Years."
But from his midpoint of strategic position he can, as
intimated,
8
gaze out upon two worlds at once, that of mind and soul in the
higher reaches of his conscious life, and that of sense and feeling in the
bodily half of his constitution. Again Egypt does not lack the aptest of figures
to portray this advantage, for it says of the soul, "He cultivates the crops on
both sides of the horizon." "He cultivates the two lands." Verily man is all too
busy cultivating the wheat and the tares, or the crops sown by the higher mind
and the random weeds that spring up voluntarily from the lower sense nature.
Little wonder that it is enjoined in Biblical allegory that he must let both
crops grow until the harvest. The Book of the Dead expands the figure
into one of the most illuminating asseverations of man's true work and function
in the world, when it says: "He cultivates the two lands; he pacifies the two
lands; he unites the two lands."
Here indeed is the substance of spiritual ethics, and at the
same time the genius and the rationale of modern psychoanalysis. The unification
of the two natures, allegorized as "the two lands," in man is the entire sum,
gist and essence of the effort of religion in the world. It springs directly out
of the basic situation that sets the religious problem,--the duofold
constitution of the human being, involving a perennial warfare between the two
elements, to end in an ultimate reconciliation or atonement, symbolized by the
"wedding" of Old and New Testament representation, and the birth of the divine
child of Christly consciousness from the marriage. The age-long conflict waged
between them till the consummation of their alliance is the grossly misconceived
Battle of Armageddon, which, says the Book of the Dead, "is fought at
midnight," and again, "is fought on the horizon." Midnight is the "horizon"
between one day and the next, and obviously the battle must be fought on that
line of both division and contact between the two natures. That frontier runs
directly through the central point of man's being and his organization. He
stands astride that line, with one foot, so to speak, in the kingdom on either
side. He is the channel or pathway by which the forces of either the spiritual
or
9
the carnal nature can cross the line and affect the conscious
life of the opposite compartment. Man is thus the only creature in whose life
there is the equal admixture of sense and soul. And, as Browning has so well
said--for the benefit of those who decry all things material--
Nor soul helps flesh more now
Than flesh helps soul.
Soul and flesh must battle each other through the aeon, for only
by such mutual resistance are both able to generate their potential energies
into functional development. But the great battle must end in mutual accord,
since in the happy denouement of victory they find themselves merged in each
other's arms.
The great Armageddon battle, dragged down from intelligible
meaning as allegoric typism of human experience into the nonsense of supposed
objective history in the form of a titanic war of nations on earthly fields of
battle, has been contorted into a sorry caricature of its true reference. It has
held, and always must hold, a central place in any great system of philosophy,
being in Plato's system the mighty conflict between dianoia and doxa,
or true knowledge and "opinion," or between the soul's unforgettable
instinct for truth and the outer mind's mere notion of things, governed by sense
and external influences. Not only in the dominant Greek philosophies was the
struggle centrally related to the entire ethical and spiritual life of man, but
it was vividly depicted on the stage boards of the Mystery Religions of the
ancient world. There the Sun-God, or the Christ-Messiah, was arrayed in battle
with the Titanic or Satanic character, temporarily overcome by him, to emerge as
final victor in the end of the drama. This outcome typified the eventual triumph
of spirit over the thraldom of matter. Nor is the great struggle less prominent
in the Christian scriptures. In great measure it pervades the whole context of
Bible literature, in drama, apothegm, parable and allegory, but is found in
express statement in the Epistles of St. Paul and elsewhere. The Apostle
launches his spear of attack against the "fleshly lusts which war against
the
10
soul." And he appears to lament his "wretched" human condition,
subject to the sway of evil propensity, when he fain would do good. He perceives
"in his members a law which wars against the law of" his mind, so that he cries
out "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" For, he has argued, "to
be carnally minded is death," and man is "dead" in his trespasses and sins. "The
interests of the flesh meant death; the interests of the soul meant life and
peace," he again admonishes. He lists the weaknesses or vices of humankind as
those predominantly which spring from the promptings of the fleshly side of
human nature, with sexual lust, concupiscence, at the very head. And in his list
of virtues that redeem the soul to her heavenly estate he places continence and
chastity at the summit.
11
As said, the ground of moral conflict in the dual nature of man
has long been recognized in theology as the war between Christ and Satan. Even
in the form of the promised reciprocal bruising of the head of the serpent and
the heel of the Son of the woman, it was understood as Christianity's historical
moral battle in the inner nature of man. But what has not been seen is the
recognition that this same ancient depiction of internal conflict in the bosom
of mankind is at once the ground condition of the comprehension of determinative
phenomena in the realm of psychology. Theology, had it stepped aside from mere
intellectual approach and formulations to investigate the phenomena of moral
struggle on the side of their symptomatic and clinical manifestations in
individual reaction, would have anticipated modern psychoanalytic purview and
adopted its technique and methods of treatment. Or, looking back from the
present, modern psychoanalysis would from the start have known itself to be but
an extension of the legitimate scope and range of theological influences. It
amounts to saying, then, that psychology, when adequately envisaged in relation
to the basic content and nature of its practice, is just a branch of theological
religion.
Whereas moral stress, with its concomitant emotional and
intellectual strain, had been esteemed only a province of religious influence
and only loosely and unscientifically subsumed under that head, being ascribed
to motivations such as piety, faith, conscience and authority, now it is being
taken in hand by a secular interest, or science, and brought under systematic
investigation by a religiously neutral psychology. What would have been--perhaps
in
a measure really was--a true science under ancient priestly
control, was lost out of religious manipulation during the fifteen hundred years
of the Dark Ages and is only now, in the hands of profane agency, regaining its
pristine scientific character. Healing in general has had much the same history,
having been in antiquity a purely religious function, but in later centuries
emerging as a secular profession, retaining a fringe of original religious
flavor. Dreams, visions, trance, speaking in tongues, "prophecy," were all
formerly matters of religious afflatus, esteemed generally as emanating directly
from God, the gods or daemons. While they are still accorded a semi-religious
characterization, they have become an integral part of profane science and are
removed from the realm of phantasy religionism, holding a place in the open
field of scientific research.
Religion has done mankind little service--rather a great
disservice--in attempting to mark off his life in two mutually hostile areas,
one the holy ground of religion, and the other the profane territory of worldly
interest. The criterion of "holy" and "sacred" thus employed to introduce a
precarious standard of worth-value in all of man's activities, has vilely misled
and hallucinated the mass mind of many generations. A true philosophy would
confer on humanity the inestimable boon of sanctifying the whole of its
life.
This obliteration of a false evaluation would by no means wipe
away the keen intellectual differentiation that subsists between man's two
natures. The perception of difference in nature, function and rank between the
two components of human being need not entail an unbalanced judgment of values.
Unfortunately this is exactly what has come to pass. The whole science of
theology indeed is based on the relation of the two natures in man to each
other. The divine and the worldly elements are commingled in his constitution,
and no interpretation of scripture is possible without a reference to the fact.
Man is a soul and that soul is attached to a body. But the ascription of
"sacred" to the one and of "sinful" to the other, however naturally it results
from the premises, came only by default of sage philosophical
insight.
13
The mistake, which confused and vitiated the whole view, came
from holding the opposite characterizations as absolute and not merely relative
within the total picture. Here lay the germ of an error which has erected its
ugly head to warp and harry the thinking of millions for sixteen centuries. The
body was conceived as absolutely evil, worldly, sensual, devilish, apart from
any consideration of its obvious utility and beneficence, indeed its
indispensability, for all the purposes of normal evolution. The body was
condemned as the parent and ground of all evil in despite of the knowledge that
life could not exist without it. The soul received the accolade of good
character, while the body reaped the contumely of evil. Spirit was claimed the
all-good, matter its enemy. The entire enormity of the ascetic fanaticism that
swept early Christianity like a pestilence arose out of these philosophical
aberrancies.
Drastic correction of misguided assumption in the case is
pressingly needed. Neither matter nor body is to be flouted as evil. They are
not even relatively evil. They are essential parts of the total good. They are
equally as necessary to the ultimate aims of evolution as is soul itself. Each
side of the polarity is impotent without the countervalence of the other. The
evil ascription is only the shadow of erroneous thought falling upon a thing the
function and the ultimate beneficence of which have been misconstrued through
the sheer warping of vision and the mis-reading of ancient drama. The secret of
this gigantic folly comes to light when it is known that ancient ritual
dramatism and allegorism, in order to portray matter and body in their role of
evolutionary service, had to represent them in their function of providing polar
opposition to the force of spirit-consciousness. For they are the opposite node
of the spirit-mind. They form the negative cathode to spirit, the divine anode.
Hence they had to play the dramatic role of the "opposers" of constructive and
creative mind. But--and here is the core of the miscalculation which led to
their aspersion and disparagement as evil forces--ignorance later construed
their polar opposition in the terms of absolute enmity. As intelligence flew out
of the win-
14
dow, calamitous misconstruction flew in at the door, and there
it has dwelt ever since, defiling the hall of man's mind in religion with its
vile contempt for matter. The stabilizing and balancing power that holds spirit
to the performance of its function was foully besmirched with philosophical
disdain. Shallow minds could not grasp matter's function as the twin of spirit
without falling into the error of imputing evil to it. Because body had to stand
at the opposite side and counterbalance spirit to give it localization, focus
and a point d'appui for the exercise of its own positive qualities,
narrow insight held it in depreciation as the opponent or enemy of spirit. From
being represented dramatically as the necessary foil or balance of spirit, it
became the hostile force, the enemy of soul. And down on its innocent head
tumbled the whole weight of obloquy of millions of fanatic minds in many
religions, notably Christian and Hindu, piling on it the accumulation of their
malignant derogation. Under the lash of this mad persuasion the poor body of man
had to endure the agony of centuries of brutal crucifixion and mortification in
the alleged interests of the divine soul, which, it was fatuously believed,
could not unfurl its wings of ecstasy as long as the least tinge of bodily
enjoyment glued them fast to earth.
When it is seen how the frightful corruption of understanding,
occasioning the hallucinated folly and torture of millions over the centuries,
could ensue as the result of a mere and seemingly slight misconstruction of the
elements of a dramatic depiction of a philosophical principle, it behooves
sincere scholarship to examine the point with searching care. The blunder was
superinduced by the subtle requirements of dramatic portrayal. To represent the
opposition of polarity, spirit and matter had to be pictured at war with each
other. To carry profounder esoteric meaning, they had to be outwardly
represented as battling each other. They had to be shown as "enemies" seeking to
overcome each other. The sad outcome, for less capable mentality, was that the
opposition was remembered, and the less concrete truth of polarity was lost. The
deeper signifi-
15
cance of the opposition of matter to spirit, and its truly
beneficent function in providing spirit with the resistance it needed in order
to cause its latent powers to manifest themselves, were forgotten. The
opposition of matter to the good purpose had never adequately or decisively been
translated over into the terms of a salutary and beneficent service to the final
goal of good. Spirit could not operate and evolve within the vacuum of its own
unopposed inanition. It is by itself but one half of a polar duality, totally
inactive until confronted by the necessity for active energization against its
opposite tension. It could not deploy its own hidden powers until it was
challenged to do so by the opposite pull of negative matter. Only when linked to
matter do its latent energies come into action, and its own potentialities find
overt expression. It remains wholly helpless or "dead" until the opposition of
matter summons forth its divine qualities to their awakening.
But this intelligent conception of matter's utility was swamped
in that avalanche of ignorance which swept over philosophy from the fatal third
century onward, and was replaced by the sorry misinterpretation of its function
which cast the dark shadow of religious folly over the whole Medieval mind for
centuries. Drama had done its best to fortify the mind with the just conception
of the true place and function of matter and body in the evolutionary scheme.
But the educative purposes of drama miscarried when the representation ran afoul
of massed ignorance and was shattered into gross misshapen forms. The religious
mind lacked the acumen requisite to the task of understanding that matter had to
play its role in the cosmic drama opposite to spirit without earning thereby the
stigma of evil character. It was unable to discern the true good of matter's
service beneath the outward disguise of spirit's opponent. The mistake made was
exactly comparable to what would be the case if an audience, after witnessing a
theatrical play, would continue to attribute to the actor playing the part of
the villain the same permanent character which he merely personalized for the
performance. The Christian world became so drugged with sin-
16
consciousness that it forgot to redeem the ritual
personifications of good's necessary opposition from the stigma of evil outside
the drama.
It is now clear that the balanced relationship of the anima of
the body and the ego of the man within its confines in one flesh is not only the
ground determinant of the whole of man's religious interest, his philosophy and
moral effort, but that it becomes specifically the basis of the great human
problem of psychology as well. Even more particularly it becomes the central
situation activating the play of the phenomena manifesting in the realm of
psychoanalysis. In brief it can be stated that when there is mutual
compensation, harmonious energization, involving constant accommodation and
readjustment, between the two claimants for possession of man's body and
faculties, there will be the highest degree of peace and happiness pervading the
whole organism. And when there is a failure in the achievement of this
harmonious relationship between the two, there will be a discord manifested in
inner and outer neurotic conditions, psychic disturbances and eventual bodily
disease. In fine, the practical outcome of all study of psychology, if such
study is to save itself from futility, must be the discovery of the forces in
both the physical and the spirito-intellectual sides of man's life that
establish, or, conversely, mar the mutually harmonious accord in motive and
purpose of the two natures composing the human. If Goethe has sounded a true
philosophical note in his affirmation that "two souls, alas, contend within my
breast apart," waging a warfare for dominance over the sphere of his interests
and activities, then the point of ultimate knowledge and wisdom for mortal man
is to discover the terms on which the two contestants can find a platform of
agreement and happy mutuality. For in the end, as St. Paul asserts, "the wall of
separation between us" will be broken down and the two will effect a final
union, "making of the twain one new man, so making peace." This is the Hindu
yoga (union), the Christian at-one-ment, or attunement, and
17
at the same time it is the psychoanalytic "integration" of the
diverse warring elements within the ego consciousness.
There comes forcefully to mind at this point that enlightening
declaration of the Demiurgus, Jupiter Cosmocrator, or world architect in the
Orphic Greek system, given in Plato's Timaeus, as rendered by Proclus in
his majestic work on The Theology of Plato, as translated by Thomas
Taylor. It is the recording of the speech made to the legions of angels who were
being charged with the message and import of their prospective mission to earth
to become the souls or egos in the highest animal creatures and to lead them
across the area of human evolution to its culmination at the foothills of
divinity in the end of the aeon. The World Framer outlines their aeonial task
and assures them, as requital and consequence of their successful performance of
it, that they will gain immortal status: "You shall never be dissolved." He
instructs them as to the dual composition of their natures when in the body and
says that in the mortal part there will be buried the seed of an immortal
nature, through the growth of which they will achieve immortality. He tells them
that he will himself furnish the "seed and the beginning" of the immortal part
within them, and that it is then their business to do the rest, to cultivate,
nourish and fructify this seed germ of the imperishable divine. Then occurs the
phrase which elucidates with vivid succinctness what should have been the
constant beacon-light to guide man's evolution throughout history, the clear
manifesto of the mission of souls on earth: it is their task "to weave
together mortal and immortal natures." This pronouncement should have rung
with anvil clearness on the good hard intelligence of man on earth and should
have galvanized his whole worldly striving into the crisp lines of conscious
direction of effort to achieve this goal of a unification of the two contending
beings within his own life. If it had been his common knowledge that he must
ever strive toward this consummation of a reconciliation between his soul life
and his sense life, surely there could have been entertained some sound
expectation that he might have passed from
18
blind groping along his path to a more skillful concentration of
his endeavors upon the object of life. Could the great objective have been fixed
in general knowledge and purpose, it may be assumed that the course of human
history for the last two millennia would have exhibited something nobler than
the nearly untamed sway of animal propensities in human affairs. Some actual
gain might have been registered in the transition that must eventually take
place from subjection of human conduct to brutish selfishness over to direction
by reasoning mind, the Lord of Life. But the knowledge and the capacity to be
thrilled to apply it conscientiously in history were alike swept away by the
deluge of fanatical ignorance that submerged esoteric wisdom after the third
century.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead states that the ego in the
man will bring together "the two sisters of the two lands," that he "does away
with the enmity which is in their hearts," and will unite them in the bonds of
friendly union. St. Paul precisely matches this with his statement that the wall
of separation between the two natures will be broken down, and the two will
blend in "one new man," "having abolished the enmity" between them.
History is just the record of this "battle of Armageddon," in
which the issues of the internal moral and spiritual conflict between the soul
of the animal man and the infant Christ-mind in evolving humanity will be
pitched from the subjective inner sphere of motivation out upon the plane of
physical activity and event. The doings of kings, armies, legislatures,
assemblies, mobs, parliaments, courts, tyrants and heroes are but the
precipitation of the issues of the inner subjective conflict from the sphere of
mental, emotional, sensual or spiritual origin out upon the stage of overt
concrete act. History is the record and study of these myriad events in their
collectivity.
Psychoanalysis works primarily and practically with the
individual. But the problem and the situation are the same as in man
collectively. His outward conduct is the crystallization of the elements of his
inward conflict upon the surface of his life as manifest
19
in his body and in his acts. Causation arises from the world
within, but comes forth in response to provocation from external occasion. It
proceeds from conscious, or unconscious, inner motivations outward to register
its nature in a physical deed or formation. Plotinus has well phrased it when he
says that the inner life of the soul "publishes itself by the beauty of its
works." But likewise, during the period of its ignorance in infancy, and until
it has gained the poise of wisdom and the love of beauty and goodness, it will
also publish the whimsicalities of childish waywardness and crudity, by the
ugliness of its works.
As man is a miniature replica of the universe, or what the
ancient sages called the Heavenly Man, he, like the universe, is composed of
soul and body in a conjunct relationship, the one, the soul, functioning within
and sustained and nourished by, the other, the body, precisely as the fiery
energy of the candle flame is fed and fueled by its power to transform the gross
elements of its physical substrate into the likeness of its own glorious soul of
fire. This is precisely what St. Paul says the Christ-soul in us will do to our
"vile" bodies, changing them "into the likeness of his own glorious body." Pope
in his terse couplet has well reminded us of this our basic constitution--if we
are made in God's image:
All things are parts of one stupendous whole,
Of which the body Nature is, and God the soul.
God, considered for the moment apart from body and as spirit or
mind, is the soul of the universal Being, and nature, the visible
manifest universe, is his body. So man is a soul, and he, too, has his
body. As man is thus a little or miniature cosmos (microcosm), having his being
as one cell within the milieu of the larger cosmos (macrocosm), he is placed, as
the Egyptians so well intimated, on the border territory, or horizon line,
facing the world of nature, the body of the macrocosm, on the one side,
and its invisible soul, the hidden mind and spirit of the universe, on
the other side. And as the outer form reflects the nature of the hidden
conscious creative
20
idea, so, as says Emerson, "man stands midway betwixt the inner
spirit and the outer matter. He sees that the one reflects and reveals the
other, and he becomes a priest and interpreter of nature thereby." Nature is the
mirror of the soul. Paul confirms this in his remarkable statement that that
which may be known of God is manifest. For, he says, the "invisible
things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood
from those things which are made." You can read God's mind from the observation
of his works. God's stupendous physical body took form over the lines of his
primordial creative thought-forms. For body is formed from the final deposit of
matter or substance in the matrix or mold constructed by divine mind. Soul
builds, or as we should say, out-builds body. The soul, seated within the inner
"ark" of finely attenuated bodies of sublimated matter--"spiritual bodies," as
Paul assures us we possess--projects vibratory radiations outward, carrying the
form and nature of her thought, and these impact upon plastic matter and throw
it into the mold of the idea pattern, where it later hardens. In The Faerie
Queen Edmund Spenser puts this so clearly in his memorable
distich:
For of the soul the body form doth take;
For soul is form, and doth the body make.
Both the macrocosm and man, the microcosm, are composed of soul
and body. And in every case the body reflects the mood and mold of the soul that
energizes it.
We now have the background to understand the function of
symbols, the enormous part they are now again seen, as of old, to play in the
developing culture of the creature man, as the amber of meaning preservation and
the agents of meaning transmission from mind to mind.
21
The study is led, then, directly back to the primary formula of
understanding which ordains that as cosmic creative thoughts shaped the objects
of the physical worlds over their patterns or forms, each object is thus the
concrete image of the archetypal idea originally projected in God's mind, but
now manifest to the conscious creature man through his open senses. Every
physical thing or phenomenon is then a symbol, or the symbol, of the ideation
that shaped it. And the primal language, as well as all later language, is
thus--symbolism. The concrete object must be the only true and perfect symbol of
an idea, since it is that idea crystallized in visible substance before
the eye. A picture presented to the eye is ever the most vivid form of bringing
an idea of a distant scene before the mind.
Symbolism is the language of utmost clarity and impressiveness,
since through a symbol one mind gives another the physical picture of the
thought or idea to be conveyed. And the pronouncement of culminative importance
in the elucidative introduction to valid determinations is the discernment that
if mind on a higher plane, or the mind of a creature higher in evolution than
another (as man above the dog, or the gods above man), desires to communicate
intelligence to mind of lower rank, it must perforce use as its medium of
conveyance the objects known to the lower intelligence in its world.
Higher mind must employ the physical symbols drawn from the objective world of
the lower creature, if it would represent the forms of the thought it wishes to
transmit. Therefore the unconscious must employ in its efforts to speak to the
lower conscious mind of man, the language of nature symbols. They would be
in
man's known world the starting point from which rudimentary
meaning could proceed.
It is no overweening gush of perfervid imagination to assert
that the modern re-discovery of the unconscious is a far greater event in world
history than the invention of the airplane or even the radio. It marks one of
the long strides western humanity must take to lift itself out of the dismal
murks of the still lingering Dark Ages. All merely physical conquests, all
acquisitions of mechanical control of cosmic forces, are both useless and
dangerous unless accompanied by the equal enhancement of inner intelligence,
self-discipline and moral refinement. Material forces become frightful menaces
if their human manipulators are neither wise nor disciplined enough to direct
their use into beneficent channels. Man's magnificent discoveries of nature's
powers can all too readily be made the instruments of his own destruction. If
his philosophical intelligence and discretion do not keep ahead of his
discoveries, he may be doomed.
The scientific recognition of the unconscious is one of the
steps necessary to be taken if human life is to be redeemed from the throes of
haphazard ignorant groping along the evolutionary path to some larger measure of
directed progress through knowledge and understanding. Appalling in its
revelation of the bondage to superstition under which the human mind has labored
through lack of this datum, the discovery is also heartening in the prospect it
announces of escape from superstition in the future. A thousand obscure or
darkly mysterious motivations of conduct of men and nations, which had to be
ascribed formerly to animism, fetishism, possession, devil instigation, demoniac
obsession, witchcraft, glamor and the like, may now be assigned to the operation
of forces uprushing from the subterranean depths of the unconscious in the
individual himself. And these forces may, as technical interpretative skill
develops, be traced to their deep lair, brought out to observation and studied
to the end of rectification and intelligent control. The restoration of the
unconscious to knowledge is the harbinger of a brighter day for human culture,
civilization and happiness.
23
But its discovery--good omen as it is--has not yet brought with
it a full knowledge of its nature and function, its origin and place in the
economy of human evolution, which would vastly increase the practitioner's
adeptness in handling psychopathic cases. The professional knowledge of it in
these respects is as yet hesitant, groping and tentative or hypothetical, in the
main. The modern world of academic intelligence may be astonished to hear it
said that the ancient sages and philosophers had ample knowledge of the
unconscious and dealt more or less directly and scientifically with it in
character stabilization. It was to them an aspect of philosophy, even religion,
and was an integral ingredient of an overall philosophical attitude and
practique, rather than a detached branch of psychology. The study and treatment
of the psyche stood then in far more intimate relation to philosophy than it
does now.
It has been intimated in a preliminary way that symbolism must
be the language used by the mind of a higher being in the communication of ideas
to a lower intelligence. It is this vital deduction that stands as the basis of
the next great scientific announcement in the field of psychology: symbolism
is now known to be the language employed by the unconscious to impart its ideas
to the conscious mind of the individual. At once the inference from the
premises inspires the question: Is the unconscious then the mind of some being
higher than the personal human? Where is there such a being operating in
relation to man? What is the nature, how is it placed in superior status to man,
and how is man reduced to a position of subserviency and tutelage under
it?
Psychoanalysis has deemed that the unconscious is an
epiphenomenon of man's total functionism, an expression of his life conditioned
to play a subterranean role in the area of motivation and conduct, and uniquely
and specifically generated in pre-conscious childhood to be a life-long agent of
underground influence upon the outer life. One theory, and that of the founder
of psychoanalysis himself, is that it is composed of the native instincts of the
animal-human psyche that have been driven underground by repression.
24
It is the compound of all that one would naturally like to do,
but by conventional taboo, dare not. It is composed of the repressed motivations
that the individual has put out of his mind, but which he can not put out of his
deeper being, and which from time to time reach up from out those deeper wells
of natural incentive in dream or trance.
The entire apprehension of the rationale of the unconscious has
limped along in gross incompetence because the ancient knowledge of the
essential dualism in man's constitution has been lost or ignored. It must now be
realized that only in the light of that basic dualism can the nature, place and
function of the unconscious be understood.
The Bibles of antiquity, venerated almost to the point of
fetishism, have, strangely enough, received a meed of worship which they have
hardly merited, yet failed to receive credit for containing truly supernal
wisdom and the profoundest scientific knowledge. Accepted largely as books of
superhuman origin and contents, they have fallen short of recognition of the
sound principles of true philosophy which they present. They, for instance, deal
voluminously with the element in man's psychic constitution which is now
classified as the unconscious. Plato likewise discourses upon it, but both Paul
and Jesus, speaking from an appreciation of Mystery dramatism, and even John,
delineate its origin and status in the human economy of consciousness. Each has
a statement which, with numberless others of similar import, outlines its basic
character. Paul gave it in his statement of man's dualism: "The first man is of
the earth, earthy; the second is the Lord from heaven." This is paralleled in
its companion passage: "The first Adam was made a living soul; the second Adam
was made a quickening spirit." John's averment that the Christos is "that bread
which came down from heaven, that if a man eat of it he shall hunger no more"
posits the higher personage in the dualism, the divine dweller within the body.
Even the Christian creed speaks of the divine element in man, "who for us men
and for our salvation, came down from
25
heaven, and was made man." The
Covenant--the "broad oaths fast sealed" between the Deity and his sons sent to
earth--has been noticed in Plato's Timaeus, wherein the Demiurgus
promised to plant a heavenly seed of immortal consciousness in the mortal self
of man on earth. But Jesus himself comes forward with a decisive declaration
that he, the Christos, is that seed of immortal life, that Lord from above, that
spirit that descends upon man from the overworld, that heavenly bread of life
that, he says, must be "eaten" by man if he is to be lifted to the race of the
immortals and end by becoming gods. (All the mighty relevance and truth of these
affirmations have been lost for centuries on western objective-mindedness by the
application of them to the Christ as a man and not to the Christos as the saving
principle of divinity gestating for its birth in human consciousness
universally.) In an early chapter of John's Gospel in the New Testament the
dramatic character of Jesus, speaking to his disciples in their character as
natural human beings, and speaking of himself as that consciousness sent down
from above to be their Immanuel, makes a pronouncement which should long ago
have carried basic enlightenment to a Christendom groping in darkness. He says:
"Ye are from beneath; I am from above." This is perhaps the most sententious and
instructive verse in the scriptures, certainly the most definitive and
clarifying. It tells mortals that on their human and bodily side they came up
from beneath, from the animal orders through the long development of something
approximating "Darwinian" evolution of forms and structure. And it adds to this
the priceless datum that, while the body of man comes to the human estate
through this upward line of development from simple to complex form, there is
another part to him that did not reach its superior status through the
experience of a line of growth in the present life of the race--surely not in
unconscious childhood--but is an element that has become conjoined with the
mechanism of the animal brain and nervous system, by a virtual "descent" from a
loftier plane of being. This higher element did not come "up" from rudimentary
state to unfolded
26
powers in the short life of the individual now in body. On the
contrary it was already "up" above the level of man's register of consciousness,
and "came down from heaven" to tenant for seventy or eighty years the conscious
world of the individual's experience. It did this for two reasons, as expressed
by Plotinus: "to develop her own powers, and to adorn what is below her." In
these words the philosopher means to say that she (the soul, treated as
feminine) comes to earth to continue her own evolution through further
experience in the concrete world, and conjoins with this effort for her own
growth the undertaking to lift up the animal species by a tutelage of its
members whose bodies it overshadows by an immanent attachment of its forces to
the organism itself. Even modern biological science, particularly as stated by
Sir Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of
evolution, has positively asserted that there has nowhere been discoverable in
the life of any animal species on earth a body of experience which could have
developed in animals the faintest germ of reasoning mind. Yet man, physical,
tops the ladder of evolution on the planet and crowns the animal's development
with its most complex and differentiated organs and functions. And in man there
suddenly flashes out the light of memory, imagination and "godlike reason," with
the outburst of human life. The circumstances confronting us in this situation
force us to recognize the truth, heard in Greek philosophy, reiterated in our
own scriptures, yet never solidly grasped, that the element that introduced
intellectuality and spiritual aspiration into the motivations of the highest
animal coming up "from beneath" was an imperishable nucleus of divine selfhood,
a veritable Son of God, a unit fragment of God's own mind, that by vibrational
and other capabilities of organization and nature could "come down from above"
and be linked by a kinship of registry with the higher potential capacities of
the human mind. Our revered, but latterly disdained and never capably
understood, scriptures have been shouting at us greater truth than we have had
the acumen to appreciate.
27
The Christos, coming first as "a little child," the Krist
Kind of the Germans, the Jesu Bambino of the Italians, was born into
the nature of man generically. He came to share our life, as all sacred books
testify, and so he was that seed of immortal nature that the Demiurgus promised
he would implant in us when the animal side had risen from beneath to the point
of refinement of structure and sensitivity of feeling at which it could register
the play of the vibrations of a truly spiritual, divine or Christly mind. At
this point, reached when animal development had approximated the brain
refinement of the first humanity, this seed of God's own mentality was
implanted, linked, coalesced within the potential unfoldment of the animal's
life. More and more of his inherent capacity for superior genius and goodness
was to be developed into manifest expression as upward progress further refined
and sensitized the mechanism of consciousness. Incubated at first as a mere seed
of later growth, coming gradually to birth as the Christ-child, his powers and
faculties slumbered long, as do the powers of the human infant. The analogy is
perfect and quite illuminating; the infant divinity in us slumbers long in
latency, in dormancy, in unconsciousness, before awakening to recognition of his
own innate endowment. But experience in the outer world gradually evokes latent
power into conscious expression. His faculties are awakened to activity and
their keenness is sharpened. He becomes master of his powers and conscious of
his high destiny. But long he dwells within the unconscious area of the
individual personality, the unknown guest within the mortal house. And he is
"the unconscious" of the psychoanalysts.
He comes to link his life with the human in order to continue
his own quest of life more abundant, the eternal prerogative of all living
creatures, and, secondarily, "to adorn," that is, to beautify, spiritualize,
divinize, "what is below him," as Plotinus says. His Covenant oath, given at the
time of his departure from celestial kingdoms, bound him to lift up the animal
race. This feature of ancient teaching is clearly expressed in Jesus' statement,
"if I be
28
lifted up, I will draw all men unto me." Though he stands a full
grade above the animal whose body he tenants, he, too, is marching along in the
line of ongoing, and must dip again and again into the worlds of sense in order
to grow further in stature. Indeed he expressly tells the animal human in the
Biblical allegory, the mortal who comes first as his forerunner and way-opener,
that he must come under the baptism of the lower nature. That is to say, he must
undergo the carnal experience in a body which is seven-eighths water. And, be it
affirmed with certitude at last, this is the only water of baptism ever referred
to in any doctrine or ritual of religion! The animal human is that faithful
servant-beast on whose back he is borne in the end up to and within the gates of
the Holy City of full-blown divine consciousness, or "Jerusalem" above, while
the multitudes acclaim his triumph with exultant hosannas.
It is not too strong an assertion to declare that the true
renaissance of human culture has waited long, and still waits, upon the general
recognition of the presence and the nature of the indwelling child of divinity
within the core of conscious being. The thought and philosophies of modern man
in the west are afflicted with the age's predilection for mechanistic theories
of causation. It seems impossible that the tendency to view soul activity and
phenomena as products of bodily function and therefore destined to vanish with
the demise of the body can be overcome by the rebirth of ancient knowledge,
which took the soul to be an independent entity that detaches itself from union
with body at the latter's disintegration, retires to mansions of spiritual being
and returns in due time to build up a body again. Recreant to this fundamentum
of primeval wisdom, the modern age persists in maintaining its philosophical
position on the wholly untenable ground of a veritable worship of ancient
scriptures combined impossibly with a rejection of the basic anthropological
datum on which alone the true interpretation of those scriptures can be made and
their true meaning understood. Modern mentality thus stands on the precarious
platform of attempting to use as its guiding light the ancient scriptures
whose
29
fundamental theses it stubbornly repudiates. Thus it has come
about that for sixteen centuries the light that shines in those scriptures has
been darkened and nearly extinguished. The holy writ of the sages of antiquity
deals with the history of those fragments of the God-mind, those Sons of God who
undertook the commission of becoming human souls on earth. And modern religious
philosophy attempts to utilize this munificent literary gift as the prime
inspiration for culture--by denying the very existence of those same souls.
Meaningless is the reverence and hollow worship paid the great scriptures, the
true sense and message of which is completely blocked off from comprehension by
the obdurate blindness of traditional view. While a veritable fetish worship is
offered up to these venerable documents, it is insidiously undermined by the
treachery that refuses acceptance of the fundamental theses and premises by
means of which alone the full gospel of their truth-telling can be brought to
the light of understanding. And this interior self-contradiction of attitude has
stood, and will continue to stand until rectified, at the causative center of
the world's delirium of philosophical confusion. When the world returns to
sanity it will be achieved through the recapture by intelligence of the
substrate of archaic wisdom which fortified the mind with the definite knowledge
that there was in man a conscious entity distinct from the body, yet
consubsistent with it, capable of accumulating and preserving to perpetuity the
values won by living. Until this knowledge is restored there can be little more
than a continuance of the world's groping and stumbling in the
twilight.
30
It is an axiom of Greek philosophy that in the vast hierarchy of
beings and intelligences from supreme Deity down to man each god is as it were a
cell unit of the life of one superior divinity and that the total company of
such cells comprising the body of the higher lord multiplies, magnifies and
"distributes" the life of that more exalted being, in seed form, out over a
wider range of creative activity. In this formulation Greek philosophy quite
fully agrees with St. Paul, who says that we are all members of one body, of
which Christ is the head. It seems difficult for world thought to grasp
realistically the cogent force of this teaching. All living creatures are the
component atoms in the life or body of some tremendously greater being, who
lives and moves in and through the activities of his constitutive elements.
Precisely as the oak renews and expands its total life by the generation and
distribution of the seeds of its own being, so a larger unit of life produces in
potential form a multiple progeny of its own kind in order thus to expand its
own measure of total being.
But each fragmented son of parent being must start from seed
potentiality and through a long process of growth eventually bring its separate
life back to the level and completeness of the progenitor. Thus it comes that
life proceeds from the Father and returns unto him again. Obviously the life of
the son is a part of and "in" the life of the parent, and equally the life of
the parent is "in" that of the son. As the life and being of the progenitor is
latent in the seed, until it is finally brought to awakened consciousness in the
later stages of growth, there is implicit here the entire explanatory formula
for understanding the presence and nature of the uncon-
scious in man. The unconscious is just the unawakened being of
the higher parental life and consciousness of whose unitary selfhood the
individual man is one organic cell.
There occurs in a sentence in an enlightening late work of
psychoanalysis by a practicing clinician of wide experience and deep insight
into the science a single word, which falls with the aptest, though with perhaps
altogether unsuspected, relevancy into the context and support of the thesis of
the unconscious here expounded. The work is The Recreating of the Individual,
by Beatrice M. Hinkle, M.D. Asserting that the unconscious can not carry
through any form of expression or activity that counters the rational judgment
of the outer conscious mind, she writes that under the ban of such repression
"the individual remains unaware of the ancient processes functioning in
and influencing his present life and he cannot evolve beyond them except through
greater self-consciousness or according to the immeasurably slow process of
nature herself."1 This is to say that the present activities of the conscious
mind overlay and keep buried under their constant play a body of innate and
generic motivations which would exercise a control in the direction of the
individual life if they were given free course in the conscious. It may fairly
be presumed that the word "ancient" in the passage quoted carries far more
significance than the author dreamed. This word, used in description of
"processes functioning in and influencing . . . present life" is the
prime clue to the mystery of the unconscious. For ancient indeed is
the unconscious. It is, in reference to the human individual, that part of the
man which is the "Ancient of Days" of the Psalmist. Wordsworth caught the vision
of it when he wrote in his immortal Ode:
The soul that rises with us, our life star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
_______
1 This and numerous other citations from Dr. Hinkle's fine work
made in this volume are reproduced with her gracious permission.
32
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From heaven, which is our home.
"The sunshine comes and goes," he says--and so does the soul of
man. It comes into expression in the life and body of a human, and at the end of
its cycle goes back to celestial repose, and it does this time and time again.
It has had many births and "deaths," but never death. It has garnered up the
fruits of vivid experience in the kingdoms of the world and in the bodies of
men, and preserved them in the indestructible treasure house of its inmost
spiritual body, which is safe from the rot of decay, the tooth of moth or the
loot of thieves. And it comes forth for each fresh sally into the daylight of
world experience, bearing the wealth of its deposits of wisdom, knowledge and
genius, not to be hoarded, but to be put out to "usury" in further investment in
living, for the endless enhancement of its own glory in the more abundant life
promised it by its Parent. The central phrase of old theology, "for the glory
of God," bears with more direct pertinence on pivotal meaning than has been
surmised. The onward march of progress does indeed bring an increment of
glory to the son of God within the body of the man. For as the
sun-fragment of divine soul in corporeal man grows in self-consciousness, it
increases the shining texture of that "body of the resurrection," that "robe of
glory" integrated of the essence of solar light, which the soul weaves for
itself in ever more effulgent splendor to be its spiritual temple not made with
hands and in which it may dwell when the earthly tabernacle of this flesh has
been discarded. There is fathomless meaning in Paul's statement that this mortal
shall put on immortality and this corruptible shall be clothed in incorruption.
The climactic guerdon promised by Deity to man is that the creature shall have
immortal life. And to be undying, man must have wrought for himself a body which
when he shall have put it on, will never decay. Hence the great object of his
coming to earth is, as Plato said, to "weave together mortal and immortal
natures," so that the mortal part can inherit
33
immortality through its partaking the life and nature of the
immortal. By charity and wisdom, all the scriptures affirm, man shall transform,
transubstantiate and transfigure his being until it glows in equal radiance with
the glory of the gods whose raiment shines like the sun. Man will end his
earthly career by casting off the "filthy rags" of fleshly vestments of decay,
and come forth arrayed in the glory of the sun. "I shall clothe thee with light
as with a garment," saith the Lord in the Old Testament. We are to be made
"children of the light," he again says. We are adjured to let our light shine,
since we "are the light of the world." The Christos is the "Lord of light," "the
life and the light of men." This has all been killed in its thrilling meaning by
being shifted away from humanity at large and allocated--and hence lost--upon
the person of one man in history. It was to be the possession of all the sons of
earth who achieved it.
The vital truth about this glory body, this house from above,
with which Paul says he waits to be clothed upon, is that it is imperishable.
Once formed--and Paul says he groans and travails in pain with us until Christ
be "formed" within us--it does not die; it does not disintegrate. "You shall
never be dissolved," promised the Demiurgus, once the garment of shining
Christhood has been woven.
And now comes the denouement of mighty truth from out these
ancient scriptures that becomes the open sesame for unlocking the hidden mystery
of the rationale of the unconscious. The white raiment of the redeemed is not
only composed of solar essence that is imperishable, but so close is it to the
heart of eternal being, so changeless in its protogonic essentiality, that an
impression made upon it is forever ineradicable. The unconscious never
forgets!
Here is an item of cosmic truth that even the uncertain
tentatives of psychological searchings have already brought out. An impression
made upon the innermost part of man which stands nearest to true being is never
erased. The substance of that holy of holies of real being is changeless first
matter. It partakes of the ultimate
34
nature of the real. It is the primordial mind-stuff. And so the
Greeks had a beautiful word for that which this mind knows, truth. Truth in
Greek is aletheia, from a, "not," and lethe,
"forgetfulness." Truth is therefore that which is not forgotten, can never
be lost. Once gained, it is stored up in the alcoves of indestructible
mind-essence. What the soul has gained of truth, she brings with her when she
comes anew into body. "Truth is from heaven," declares Jesus in one of the
apocryphal gospels in answer to Pilate's derisive question, an answer omitted
from the four canonical Gospels. Truth is indeed from heaven, from the overworld
of diviner ideality. It is inscribed upon the imperishable tablets of cosmic
mind. What the individual mind grasps of its eternal principles is never lost.
But at each dip of the soul into incarnation it loses its paradise of knowledge
and understanding as it plunges deep into the heart of matter and is buried in
the underworld of sense. Paradise must be regained each time with the return of
the consciousness to the levels of former development, and new glories won. And
so we have the great Plato giving us the twin doctrines of "the loss of memory
of divine things" and "reminiscence," or recovery of divine memory.
The unconscious mind never forgets; yet here is Plato saying it
suffers the loss of its memory. Is it contradiction? The Platonic amnesia is
only a forgetfulness which is paralleled and analogized in the life of the oak,
which loses its eternal memory or consciousness when it goes as a seed of future
growth into the soil, but regains its full awareness of life when it attains
maturity in the new cycle. For life must die to be born again, must lose its
life to repossess it, must suffer loss of memory to win eternal memory. Life
ever passes from the highest stage of conscious unfoldment in any cycle back
into the embryo of itself to begin a new cycle. As a seed it can carry, not the
adult development of its powers, but the sheer potentiality of renewing those
powers. It enters earth shorn of all that it had won in the last cycle's effort,
save the capability of renewing and increasing all previous winning. It must
start each cycle over again from beginning. It more quickly each time
recapitulates the
35
range of previous development, now become "instinctive," and
then takes new strides forward into infinite being. Thus all evolution moves
forward through what the sage ancient teachers everywhere called the "eternal
renewal" of life. Life "dies" to be born again. And the wreckage and then the
loss of the intelligible structure of the ancient wisdom came through the
failure of philosophic thought to retain the true reference of the words "die"
and "death." Life, poetized the wise men of old, "dies" when it goes under the
trammels of the flesh in incarnation. "Death" in theology is then precisely that
which goes by the name of "life" in our world. Says Paul in the seventh chapter
of the Epistle to the Romans: "The command that meant life proved death
to me." So the ancients regarded this life as the "death" of the soul under the
sluggish waters of the river of the underworld, the river of
forgetfulness--Lethe! But always it was a "death" from which there was the
resurrection. Always the planted seed died and then germinated and lived again.
And thus life went forward to its ever-expanding conquest of new glories,
"through death to life eternal," as the Easter hymn sings it. For what the soul
loses temporarily at the start of each cycle of growth, it regains and
eventually holds in perpetuity. The unconscious never forgets!
The pursuit of truth through this channel leads to the open door
of a revelation of one of the great Biblical allegories so sweeping in its
magnitude and relevance that its disclosure may indeed promise a wholly new
regeneration of scriptural interpretation. At first glimpse no two things would
appear to be farther apart and remote from each other in significance than the
unconscious in modern psychology and the ark and deluge story in the Bible. It
happens, however, that the flood allegory in the Old Testament is the ancient
esoteric glyph of the unconscious in the human constitution! Again this has
never been seen because the narrative in Genesis has been taken as
history, or at least quasi-history, and not for what it really is--the allegory
of evolutionary method, as the Genesis story is the allegory of
creational method.
36
Light is gained on this cryptic scriptural representation by
tracing the pivotal words employed in it back to their archaic or basic
meanings. These are "ark," "Noah," and "Ararat," as well as the numbers that
crept in, seven and forty. Noah was given seven days in which to build the ark
and collect numberless thousands of animals of every species from all over the
earth, manifestly impossible as actual history, but immensely significant as
allegory. It rained forty days and nights, covering the whole earth to the
highest mountain tops,--again absurd as history. The ark floated on the waters
till the flood subsided, and then the occupants emerged and landed on Mt.
Ararat.
Who was "Noah"? It is evident that though Hebrew in origin, at
least found in a Hebrew document of antiquity, the name "Noah" is built on the
stem of the word which in Greek stood for the rock principle of the universe,
Mind, the mental principle in mankind. Anaxagoras' theory that the world is the
production of a cosmic Mind, or of Nous, is relevant to this
determination. The root of the word is that basic Greek stem, No, and the
Greeks called the intellectual principle in man Noé @horizontal line over
e. It is important to notice that this is feminine in form and grammatical
gender. This is so because, although mind and spirit are commonly typed under
masculine symbolism, yet when the spirit descended into matter and became the
soul of a living organism, it was regarded as feminized through its coming under
the power of matter and body, which are symbolically feminine always. The
feminine ending was placed upon it to indicate that it was mind involved in and
energizing matter. The ancients always affirmed that the soul entered its
"feminine phase" when it incarnated. The Greek feminine ending is the long é,
eta. When the Hebrews used the word they substituted on the No stem
their own feminine singular ending, which is -ah. This gives No-ah,
the principle of mind in body.
It is next to be noted that, in perfect accord with all ancient
philosophy, the mental principle, Noah, was given three sons. In the arcane
allegorism the intellectual ray from God's mind suffered
37
differentiation from its primal unity into a triplicity when it
established its connection with physical organisms on three linked planes of
higher consciousness. It has been lost out of studentship that terms
corresponding pretty closely to our three words, spirit, soul and mind,
expressed this differentiation. In one Hindu system they were named atma,
buddhi and manas. In astrological pictography they were represented
by the three stars, most significantly known for ages as "the three kings," in
the belt of Orion. They were the lower trinity of spirit, the reflection in the
human microcosm of the cosmic trinity above. Mind is ever triple in its
manifestation. Modern theology posits little difference between mind, soul and
spirit, but the early philosophical and anthropological systematism knew of the
gamut of distinct gradation subsisting among the three. Spirit held the topmost
rank, more ethereal and sublimated in its nature than the other two, being the
pure energy of intuitive knowledge. Soul was a further projection of that energy
into matter, manifesting one step lower, and standing midway between pure
intuition and concrete thinking. Mind was a still deeper injection of spirit
into matter, coming to expression as the glowing rational power of conscious
thought directly conditioned by the mechanistic function of the
brain.
The mind-body problem has been a perplexing conundrum for human
understanding, entangled in the difficulty of perceiving how an immaterial force
can lay hold of and utilize a physical mechanism. But no longer should this
problem offer difficulty to the modern mind that understands even remotely how
the radio wave can blare through its instrument. It has been said that the
repeated note of a violin string, properly attuned, could destroy a steel
bridge. Really the secret of the mind-body relation has been opened to our
unthinking minds ever since a piano note has been known to rattle a cup in its
saucer on the old parlor mantel across the room. Caruso, the tenor, demonstrated
it when, having lightly struck a delicate drinking glass with a tuning fork to
get its pitch, he then shattered it with the same tone sung from his powerful
vocal cords. A thought
38
is just the registry of a vibration in ethereal matter of great
tenuity, projected by that root energy known as will, and carried by an electric
play of force generated by the chemical constitution of the blood. The human
blood has in it the components requisite for the production of battery current.
A modern scientific pronouncement states that the brain contains four
quadrillions of minute dynamos, and these are charged by electricity carried by
the blood and drawn by it out of the vast sea of static electricity in the air.
Each cell of the brain is the seat of the flash of electric current between the
positive and negative poles within it. These tiny currents can catch and carry
the energies of primal will and thought, as the voice carries the structure of
an idea. Life energizing as will or thought is at once the generator of electric
force that can carry into expression its creative forms of ideas. Immaterial
energy such as that of the mind can lay hold of and move matter and body, for
the simple reason that its every impulse can stir the vital currents that are
themselves constitutive of the very being of matter.
Understanding of the problem was thwarted as long as the blind
conception prevailed that matter was inert, lifeless substance. Now that it is
known that matter is itself a composition of purely etheric energies, really no
longer to be conceived as matter at all, but spirit itself held in static
bondage, the fundamental kinship between mind and body is readily intelligible.
If lines of immaterial force can move the iron filings around the head of a
magnet, it should no longer be a task to know how life works to accomplish its
purposes. There is needed only the mathematically correct adaptation of
structure to vibration rate and wave length to produce motion. Life manifests
through an infinite gradation of such adaptations, be it in coarse substance or
in finer ethereal or "spiritual" matter. And we have spiritual bodies, more than
one of them, archaic science asserted. Each of these registers energy in its
particular form and expression, each one conditioned by the fineness or
coarseness of the material composing its organism. Sound, as the old
philosophers argued, is one; yet it manifests in a million different sounds,
deter-
39
mined by the quality and structure of the instrument sounded
through. Man's very "personality" is based on this hoary knowledge, since his
"person" is the physical instrument through (Latin, per) which the
higher rates of conscious vibration sound (Latin, son-) out their
tones in the manifest world. The personality is the physical instrument through
which the soul sounds its characteristic note of spiritual being in the world.
The spirit deep within, being a ray of changeless being which is eternally
one--however it manifests in variety--is not subject to division. Hence it is
the "individuality," the regnant king within the personality. It is further
instructive to recall that persona is the Latin word for "mask." This
item illuminates intelligence with the important knowledge that the physical
personality is the mask which the divine individuality puts on and through which
it can sound out its proper keynote in the total symphony of being.
If the allegory was to be kept true to profound wisdom it was
necessary that "Noah" should have three sons. The intellectual principle in
cosmic operation must manifest in triple form. This is the explanation of the
many figures of triform gods, the Trimurti of India and the gods with three
heads or three faces so often found. It is likewise the lost meaning behind the
legend of the three "Magi" who come with the Christos in the Christian Gospel
narrative. For whenever divine Mind deploys its forces into creative expression,
it generates its three distinct aspects which stand behind the great doctrine of
the Trinity.
And their wives? Not even divine Thought can create worlds of
manifest existence without uniting its energies with the physical power hidden
in the atom of matter. Spirit must "marry" matter if it is to create concrete
universes. The subjective side of life may know what it wishes to create, but it
can not build structures until it has the material with which to build them. It
must therefore link its directive energy with the latent power in the atom. This
is its shakti, or spouse, through whose motherhood spirit alone can
procreate. It became his wife, his sister, eventually his mother and
40
his daughter, and it is pictured under all these characters in
mythology.
But the great enlightenment comes with the elucidation of the
recondite significance hidden under the symbolism of the "ark." Here again it is
the language root that brings lost intelligence to view. The "ark" was, last and
least of all things, not a boat or floating structure, save, of course,
in a purely figurative sense, as the "flood" was not a deluge of water.
It is all arcane allegorism, and this is established beyond any possible
question. The true meaning of the "ark" is to be found in its derivation from
the Greek noun, arché, "beginning," which is in turn from the Greek verb
archo, "to begin." It is past all understanding how the scholars of many
centuries have failed to discern either the etymological background of the "ark"
or its implications for the Biblical interpretation. The fact that it is the
first word in the Bible (preceded by its preposition "in") should in itself have
gone far to open blind eyes to obvious meaning. The Bible thus starts from the
point of proper departure--"in the beginning." The Greek word arché means
beginning, primal state, aboriginal condition of being. It is seen in our words
archaic, archangel, archetypal. God's archetypal ideas were the original
ideas projected in and by his mind to give shape to the universe. So the "ark"
is the primal or beginning state of a thing. For anything of objective existence
to "go into the ark" is, then, its retirement back into the stage from which it
emanated in the beginning of its cycle.
Next, what is the "flood" or "deluge"? Grievously has ignorance
plunged into shameful asininity over this aspect of the representation. It has
nothing actually to do with water, or rain and water having nothing to do with
it. But it has much to do with flooding, or washing, or washing away, in the
sense of a trope. For the scriptural "deluge" (found in some fifty national
mythologies!) is nothing more or less than the figurative washing away of all
created things by the flood-tide of dissolution which cyclically ensues
at the end of each age of creation. The flood figure of description is
imag-
41
inative, a trope; but the washing away through dissolution is an
actual event. It is the dissolution of the worlds and universes at the end of
the age (Greek: teleuten aion, so tragically mistranslated "end of the
world" in the Christian texts of the Bible), when infinite being absorbs back
into its capacious bosom the disintegrated forms of its last cosmic
manifestation, when concrete existence dissolves back into sheer be-ness. Matter
disappears or is washed away from palpable existence, and spirit retires into
the interior core of being. The cosmos and all its formations dissolve as the
creative energy that threw them into shape runs its given course and subsides
into motionlessness and silence. For life works cyclically, after the analogy of
the heart beat and the life breath. It awakes, and energizes its creative effort
in building. In the evening of its cycle it tires of its labor, and like us made
in its image, it withdraws its energies and rests. When the animating and
supporting energy of creation is withdrawn, the universe it shaped collapses and
disintegrates. It dissolves. Where does it go?--since there is no "place" for it
to go save where it is. It goes where a handful of salt goes when you put it
into a basin of water. It goes into solution. And as the capability of bringing
the salt back from invisible subsistence into visible material form again is
always present, in like fashion can the dissolved universe be recreated in the
beginning arc of the next cycle. The "deluge" is the tide of dissolution that
washes away all forms.
Against this philological and philosophical background there is
now the possibility of seeing at last the stupendous significance of the ark and
flood story. When the structure of solid substance that housed and gave play to
the energies of the life principle during its active period of creation is
washed away--like the giant oak that has fallen and gone to decay and
disappeared in dust--where, if life is not to come to an end along with
the disintegration of its containing vessel, does it go to be tided over the
period of dissolution and "death" till it can live again in new forms? Whither
can it retire to ride out the flood? What can hold it in integration, or the
possibility of new integration, when it has no mechanism, no
42
organism of manifestation, no point of support in the realm of
space? Life and nature have been confronting us with the clear answer to this
central query through the ages and we have been too obtuse to see it. We always
miss the meaning of the things that are most common in our belief that the great
meanings are to be found in the extraordinary, the supernatural. Nature and life
have shown us where the immaterial immanent principle of being goes when its
physical embodiment disintegrates. For life provides every one of its creatures
with a mechanism by which it can insure the renewal of its existence after its
body dissolves. It withdraws into its beginning stage, its arché! And
this is all included in our small but stupendously pedagogical reality, the
seed. The seed is the "boat" in which, safe from extinction, the soul of
life is tided over the flood of disintegration of form. Obviously expressed life
can not be preserved in the form of its organic structural fullness of stature,
in its adult body. It can not be preserved in existential embodiment, since body
is dissolved. It must perforce be preserved, then, in purely potential
form. Not it, but only the possibility of it in new form survives. It goes
back to reside again in the ideal form and essence from whence it issued
in the first instance. As it was projected thence once before, or many times, it
can be sent forth again in the round of the cycle.
Here indeed is the answer to many aspects of life's great
riddle. When the worlds of form dissolve away life goes back into its arché,
its beginning. From thence it will begin all over again, enriched, to be
sure, with the capital it has acquired in all previous adventures. Any student
of ancient systems learns to know that the grandiose view of all life process is
that based on the prime fact that life does nothing but endlessly renew itself.
Says the soul of life in the Egyptian scriptures: "I die, and I am born again,
and I renew myself, and I grow young each day." ("Day" is the term for any
period, cycle or age of manifest existence; "year" is used similarly.) No more
majestic passage than this stands anywhere in the "sacred" literature of
mankind. It is the one assured fact
43
that the human mind must know, to maintain its sanity and
balance, its equanimity and courage under the press and stress, the strain and
pain, of existence in body.
If the revived voice of ancient wisdom, that is fortified with
the concepts of the most sagacious revelation of truth to man, dare speak to the
distracted modern mind and tell it how it has come to such chaos and wreckage of
its philosophy, it can be broadcast in categorical terms that the seed of all
world fatuity was planted in the soil of the uncritical human thought when about
the third century of the Christian history the great crucial doctrine of the
eternal renewal of life, as applied to the human soul, was lost under the
sweeping tide of fanatic ignorance that converted the allegories and mythologies
of sapient philosophical wisdom into alleged literal sense and historical event.
Clement, Origen and the learned philosophers of the early Church treated the
scriptures properly as allegories. St. Paul declares that the Abraham story in
the Old Testament "is an allegory." But philosophical light gave way to
pietistic zealotry misguided by ignorance, and the world's ancient knowledge
that would have stabilized the human psyche in its course through history was
extinguished. The knowledge that a nucleus of conscious life--the human
soul--can retire into its arché and subsist in latency, and thus be tided
over the period of its non-existence in the inmost depths of immaterial being,
to emerge again and pursue its forward course into the realities of ever more
abundant life,--this is the salt that has lost its savor, the preservative
without which man's psyche must lie in the foul odor of corruption.
As the intellectual principle is the first to emerge from out
the ark of being onto the stage of physical existence, so it must be the last to
re-enter as all things retire into the bosom of non-being. So Noah enters the
ark, after the animals, and his sons and the son's wives with them. All living
creatures, be it noted, must re-enter the ark.
As to the final term, Ararat, the lost meaning is simple, once
the other clues are found. If life comes to manifest expression in its
day
44
cycles in visible matter, it must be localized somewhere in
visible worlds. Such worlds are planets, primarily. So, in our case, it is
"earth." When life retires to ride out the flood in its ark, the worlds
disappear. The ark is lifted above the earth. Earth vanishes. But when the flood
is over and the dawn of the new day-cycle swings around, where must the arché
land if it is to take hold of matter again and build of it a new house to
live in? Obviously it must come back to earth, it lands again on earth. And
most significantly a study of symbolism and of language discloses that
the cryptic meaning of the word "mount" ("mountain") in the arcane typology of
the Bibles, is precisely the earth. Time and again the earth is referred to as
"the mount of the earth." Much data of studentship can be presented to verify
this item. It is by no means a mere guess, stretching the meaning to fit a
preconceived rendering, in Procrustean fashion. It is the meaning of the
term. And it needs but a moment's glance at the Hebrew language to see that
"Ararat" is itself the word for "earth," juggled a bit. The present Hebrew word
for "earth" is arets. An older form, states an authority, is not
arets, but areth. Practically here is the English word "earth"
itself. The ark lands on the mount of the earth, and the seeds of life emerge to
be planted once more in the garden of the world.
If a touch of personal reference may be pardoned in this
connection, it is worthy of mention, for the sake of showing how the
interpretation of symbols is the true key to scriptural sense, and how
unerringly its guidance will lead to true meaning, that when, from the side of
symbolism purely, we had worked around to the rendering just elucidated, and
felt that a startling discovery involving considerable "originality" had been
made, imagine our surprise and very intense amazement when, happening to go over
the text of the seventh chapter of Genesis, we found that the third verse
of the story told us precisely the thing we thought had not been grasped before,
and used in doing it the same word that contained the kernel of our whole
abstruse conclusion,--the seed! The verse runs to the effect that Noah and his
household, the animals and
45
fowls, were herded into the ark "to keep seed alive upon
the face of all the earth." Had the clear implication of these words--or that
word "seed"--been followed out to evident conclusions, there would have been no
need of our remaining in gross benightedness as to Biblical meaning for sixteen
centuries. The situation here unfolded must glaringly illustrate the devastation
and havoc wrought upon the Western mind and its culture by the obsessions of
ignorance which imposed a literal or physical meaning upon archaic symbols of
recondite truths. Under this incubus no mind for sixteen hundred years has had
the strength of imagination to rise above the conception of seed as just grains
of corn, beans, larkspur and male fluid. The figure of "seed" as being the glyph
for all renewal of life in evolutionary or cosmic sense, or the mental graph for
the cyclical re-existence of the human soul, was entirely washed away by that
fatal third-century deluge of philosophical doltishness, when Christianity
passed from the hands of the philosophically capable Greeks into those of the
practical-minded, but ignorant, Romans, who soon closed up the last of the
Platonic Academies and doused the ancient gleam of world intelligence under
stupid literalism.
But what has the restored light of Biblical allegorism to do
with psychoanalysis and the unconscious? Pretty nearly everything vital. It puts
a known history behind the unconscious, explains its origin, its presence in the
human psychic constitution, and its nature and function. It reveals the
important part it plays in evolution. It enlightens with the knowledge that the
unconscious is the divine soul itself in the human, pursuing the course of its
cyclical recurrence in the world and preserving the continuity of its unfoldment
throughout the whole. It tells us where the unconscious got what it possesses,
where it found or acquired its present content and where it gained the higher
wisdom that it flashes in dream symbol, in moments of rare afflatus or intuitive
insight, or in subtle intimations of many types, down upon the conscious mind.
And ancient sagacity, supplying us also with many points of knowledge of
concomitant life phenomena in its postulation of spiritual bodies
inter-
46
penetrating the more substantial physical in the depths of man's
make-up, provides us with the rationale for understanding both how an ego can
keep its impressed accruement of wisdom gained from experience and project it
forward into the present existence, as well as how a "sub"-consciousness can be
an actuality of man's possession apart from and in addition to his normal
consciousness.
47
Not many years ago there could have been no conception more
unintelligible and more impossible of credibility than the suggestion that man
could possess and be influenced by a consciousness that he was not conscious of.
Sheer abstract logic seemed to forbid the predication of an unconscious
consciousness. It was like saying "dark light" or "wet dryness." But the
discovery of the unconscious has come, after the radio and the true nature of
the atom had opened the bound mind of the age to the possibility of "the
impossible."
It may be worth the citation of a paragraph or two of
contemporary expression to accentuate for our dullness of mind the admitted
importance of this discovery in psychology. There occurs a passage in the work
of Dr. Hinkle, already referred to. The Recreating of the Individual,
which states the case for an interior point of view with great appositeness.
She is speaking of the upsurge of interest in psychoanalysis (p. 422):
"In my opinion the significance of this popular espousal lies in
the unconscious recognition that in the psychoanalytic technic we have an
instrument which for the first time makes possible that further individual human
development or creation of self by self which formerly depended upon the 'grace
of God,' and was entirely bound up with religious creeds."
Here is an intimation based on years of positive empirical
testimony that this new science is one of the greatest of historical advances
from ignorance to knowledge, releasing the human ego from the stultifying sway
of blind belief and giving it the knowledge of a workable technique for further
liberation. Whenever actual
knowledge has come to hand, the former boundless area that had
to be covered by religious pietism and helpless trust has been diminished and
the portion recovered from credulity and its victimization has been happily
enlarged. No dissertation is necessary to demonstrate the value of such a gain.
It is the liberation of human life from former bondage to the
unknown.
A recent testimonial manifesto issued to commemorate the life
and work of Sigmund Freud states that his discovery of the unconscious is close
to being the most momentous revelation in the history of civilized man. To the
deep student its preciousness resides in the fact that it restores to modern
thinking that item of the priceless wisdom of the ancients which postulates the
existence and persistence of the divine soul in humanity. The functioning of
soul wisdom and faculty within man but beneath the surface of his ego
consciousness, and "unconscious" because resident in one of man's interior
"spiritual" bodies, the connection of which with the outer brain and nerve
mechanism was generally, but not wholly, cut off by the play of the outer
consciousness, and could at times, as in sleep, be established and communication
set up, was the central item of archaic knowledge that enabled the ancient mind
to ground itself in assured philosophies of positive value. On top of hundreds
of quotable testimonials to the brilliance of ancient intelligence, one comes to
hand in a recent book, The Crisis of Faith, by Stanley Romaine Hopper. A
passage from it will serve well to introduce the argument for the soul, to which
some space must be given. On page 206 he writes:
"The early humanism of the Greeks, . . . attained a view of man
that was sane, balanced and 'human.' . . . This wholeness and health of the
Greek perspective was grounded on wonder and in wisdom. . . . With sure
intuition the Greek mind turned to this element of permanency which everywhere
transcends the flux or founds it, and established there its wisdom."1
_______
1 This citation from The Crisis of Faith, by Stanley
Romaine Hopper, and others taken from the same volume, are used with the
permission of its publishers, The Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, Nashville,
Tenn.
49
This tribute to the sanity and wholesomeness of Greek philosophy
is not overdone; possibly it is even modest. And it lays the finger directly
upon the point where lurks the crux of human understanding of the meaning of
life. Of all the ineptitudes and failures of the philosophic mind the greatest
would appear to be that which has blocked the clear and certain recognition of
the truth that no solution satisfactory to human thinking can ever be worked out
on any other basis than the assured knowledge of the continuing existence and
cyclical rebirth of the divine soul in man. Unless the intelligence of the
mortal is fortified with the dependable conviction that the gain he struggles to
achieve in a life will be held for all the future and become capital in further
cycles of existence, he must despair. This assurance, even the postulation of
it, lacking, despair is precisely the ultimate note already sounded as the only
philosophy possible in the view of a scientifically enlightened thinker like
Bertrand Russell. Knowing nothing of the possibility of the integral part of
man's constitution possessing a means of survival in the inner "ark" of its
spiritual nature, he envisages the ultimate destruction of the race of mortals
with the decay of life on the planet. Uninstructed by the profound ancient
philosophy which knew of an inner core of being that can carry and hold values
won, he sees only futility as the aim and outcome of the evolutionary effort on
whose tide man moves forward. On the grounds of his suppositions life has no
purpose beyond the play of the hour, or of the longer hour of the cycle. At the
end of the aeon its work will indeed be washed away in the flood of dissolution,
with no ark to retire into to betide the deluge. This is the supreme upshot of
the modern scientific envisagement of life's great movement.
Unless man is strengthened by the certitude that while one part
of him, the physical, obviously "returns to dust," as the Preacher says in the
book of Ecclesiastes, another part, joined temporarily with it, is
indestructible and provides a bank of deposit for all values earned by effort,
in which they can be preserved in per-
50
manence, his mind must run out in despair and his heart
sink, beyond the help of any power of hope or faith. Unless the modern mind can
disentangle itself from its helplessness in the spider-web mesh of its own
inadequate presuppositions, due to its lack of knowledge of basic
anthropological elements, and will follow the light of clear intimation of truth
as the ancients did, it can have no hope of sanifying and sustaining positive
understanding. Even modern psychology now avers, from clinical observation, that
unless a mind is philosophically fortified in affirmative values, it will
deteriorate into neurosis and wreckage. The most important thing in all life,
after physical necessities, is philosophy. There is some evidence that at long
last the light of this perception is breaking on intelligence. In The Crisis
of Faith, quoted above, the author sates (p. 203) that
"Scheler holds that the problem of a philosophical anthropology
stands today at the mid-point of all the philosophical problems. Berdyaev goes
further and asserts simply that philosophy is primarily the doctrine of man. It
is easy to see that ethics depends upon an understanding of the nature of man,
and that the civilization of any particular period is largely determined by it.
. . . We are searching today for a new humanism--for the recovery of an
understanding of man in his wholeness and completeness. In this larger and more
intimate sense we need desperately to be humanized."
It is doubtful whether by extensive searching a passage could
have been found which sketches the form of our real need in more appropriate
terms. Here at last is the modern recognition of what might have been supposed
to be seen by simple facing of the problem of human life at any time, namely
that the attempt to rationalize the world and man's adjustment to it must
proceed blindly until man's own nature and constitution are known and
understood. Universal tragedy and suffering on an enormous scale have come, over
centuries, from the effort of Western mind to take attitudes and initiate
action, or frame policies and institute systems, in total ignorance of what was
once known as to the basic composition
51
of man's organic nature. Thousands of tomes of Occidental
lucubration on history, philosophy, religion and ethics have fallen far wide of
the mark and totally missed true guiding light from the sheer fact that they
were not grounded upon or framed in reference to the constitution of the
creature they were to serve. If Scheler holds that the problem of a
"philosophical anthropology" stands at the center of all thinking, it is indeed
a good augury for a more humanized rationale. It might perhaps do better,
however, to say that our need is for an anthropological philosophy, one based
upon more competent knowledge of anthropology. Naïvely it can always be asked
how a working program for the most favorable human progress can ever be
formulated when a knowledge of the nature and reaction potential of the creature
for whose welfare it is to be applied is not known. How can a system of outer or
inner life be framed to bear man most happily forward on the stream toward his
high goal, if neither the goal nor the equipment and endowment of the traveler
is known? How can a workable formula for the greatest happiness of man be
constructed if the measure and dimensions, the shape and habitudes, of the man
himself are not known? Kant indeed attempted to interpret the world in the terms
of man's psychic constitution. But his knowledge was wanting in particular data,
such as the ancients possessed, and stopped far short of specific relevance to
the actual situation.
Without knowledge all endeavor is haphazard. There may be faith
and hope in ever so large measure. And, oddly enough, it is not an inch outside
the pale of natural causality in the psychological history of Europe over
sixteen hundred years that the religion that crushed out former knowledge came
to insist, as the main reliance for its millions of purblind devotees, on
"faith." It was as inevitable as geometry. In want of wisdom and knowledge there
is nowhere for a mind to go save to faith, hope and prayer. And just this
unfortunate trend took its evil course to fatal fruition in spite of the
adjuration of the most astutely philosophical writer in the cult's
52
own scriptures, St. Paul, who says that faith is not enough. "To
your faith add knowledge." Plato and Socrates acquiesce in this declaration of
the Apostle.
The egregious and fatal error made by the theologians, and still
perpetrated from a thousand pulpits every Sabbath, is in holding up faith as a
high Christian virtue to be attained by a victorious Christian apotheosis. It is
indeed not so. On the contrary Paul starts the gamut at its bottom tone, its
lowest range,--with faith. Why? Because faith is instinctively omnipresent in
all minds not demented. It is no attainment; it is given, it is inevitable. In
the finale, what can any thinking creature do, confronting life, but have faith?
There is nothing else one can do but trust the universe of life to be
beneficent. If one can not do that, and do it effortlessly, all other aspiration
and striving is of no avail. And in lieu of any overwhelming demonstration that
life is malevolent or malefic, faith is as natural as sunshine. We start with
it, as does the Apostle. We do not end with it. But it is only the ground
platform we stand upon. If we are to build the structure of our evolution we
must proceed from the foundation and move upward. And to know how to build the
superstructure we must have knowledge. From that will grow wisdom, and from
wisdom will blossom virtue and godliness. Here is a simple item of religious
homiletics that has been lost for ages, and the loss has traced its direful
consequences in many a page of appalling religious history, blotted with
bigotry, persecution and slaughter.
From anthropology the ancient sages drew their basic data on
which religion and philosophy could proceed to build structures of thought and
behavior that would accommodate man commodiously to the play of the forces
making for his growth. With such knowledge man could align his effort
harmoniously with the stream of evolutionary life and win true happiness. The
supreme datum supplied by anthropology to ancient thought was of course the fact
that man is a composite creature of two natures, a divine soul and
53
an animal body,--a god in the body of an animal, as Plato puts
it. The conscious soul of a human is an amalgam or product of the god and the
animal natures in wedding or conjunction. This consciousness stood on the
midground--the "horizon" of the Egyptians, the "clef in the rock" of the
Hebrews--between them. That position gave it its "human" characterization. As
human it was engaged in traversing the ground of evolution reaching from the
summit of the animal's position to the foothills of the mount of
divinity.
The Greek wisdom which Hopper has justly extolled, he adds (p.
211),
"is basically maieutic, a criticism of life, teaching men that
if they are to care rightly for their souls, as Socrates says, they must know
what they are--what it is to be human. They must come to know
their true condition; they must be made to recognize as their first task the
task of existing as human beings."
Here, it may be said, is the concentrate, the essence of the
problem of philosophy. Obviously the problem of man can not be confronted, much
less solved, as long as the nature of the human being remains unknown. Ancient
teachers imparted their basic datum of anthropology; the modern mind distracts
itself futilely in want of it. As Hopper again well affirms (p. 203),
"philosophy as it has been practiced has been one of the
best ways of avoiding the issue. . . . Philosophers have ceased to be
philosophiae, lovers of wisdom in the ancient sense, and in so far
have stunted their true work in the world through diminishing wisdom to science.
Their work has become . . . detached. It touches the surfaces of life as little
as possible, rebounding into the speculative the moment it does so, like a toy
balloon. Life is severed from thought." [Perhaps it would be better to say that
thought is severed from life.] "Philosophy has become what Nietzsche said it
was--thought husbandry--a trade in thought."
To this Nicholas Berdyaev adds:
"Philosophers and scientists have done very little towards
elucidating the problem of man," in the medieval and modern periods, it should
be specified.
54
In these periods, as it only too evidently appears, the thinking
mind had sunk below the power of comprehending the heights and depths of ancient
sapiency.
In the ancient day philosophy was denominated "divine," for the
reason that it supplemented the feeble efforts of human wonder and speculation
with a body of assured knowledge vouchsafed by perfected men, graduates of this
or a previous human evolution, who had mastered the range of human capability
and become Illuminati. The tradition of the existence of such exalted men
standing not at the bottom but at the summit of the human mountain path is too
universal in archaic lore of all nations to be flouted as childish. Besides we
have the age-long regnancy in the whole world of sagacious writings, or
Scriptures, which were never discredited as tomes of infallible wisdom until the
sophomoric intellectuality of the modern age began to judge them in total
incomprehension of their cryptic methodology and in utter ignorance of their
majestic argosy of forgotten truth and reality. These came from consummate
knowledge.
Ancient philosophy was "divine philosophy" because it
established the certitude of the presence of a divine element in man which would
ultimately redeem his life from the unintelligence and rapacity of the beast to
the lordly rulership of truly divine wisdom and charity. As this element was the
agent of human transition to godhood, philosophy concerned itself primarily with
its origin, nature, struggle and victory in the arena of incarnate life. This
history, presented allegorically and dramatically, makes up the content of the
scriptures. These tomes of "Holy Writ" deal with the career of the divine
fragment, a portion of God's own imperishable unity of mind, after it had
migrated from "heaven" (acceptably understood as a "locale" of exalted types of
consciousness in non-physical states of being) and taken lodgment in the bodies,
distributively, of the most highly evolved animal, to take that creature across
the gulf of humanity up to the feet of divinity, the while it accomplished its
own advancement to more godlike stature. Its coming
55
introduced into the merely animal-human constitution the seed
germ of a deific nature, at once imperishable and potentially omniscient. It
brought the god down to share the animal life of mortals, coming into "bondage,"
coming "under the law" of sin and death (of the body), until the task was done.
Fortified with the knowledge of the presence of this
all-gracious guest in the human constitution, minds nourished in so adequate a
philosophy could bend their life effort to conformity with the terms of the
living problem. They could co-operate intelligently with evolution. They could
build on the solid foundation of a workable philosophy, having under their feet
the ground of positive attitudes and the bases of fortitude. They could aim at
character formation on the strength of the cheering assurance that no effort was
ever wasted or cheated of its count in the final score. And again philosophy was
"divine" in that it linked the life of man the human with an arm of living deity
not outside himself, not in distant heavens, but immediately at hand in the
depths of his own being. It brought heaven close and set up a Jacob's ladder of
accessibility to it. Man could ascend into celestial glories by the sheer effort
to cultivate the companionship of the divine Friend who had come to earth to be
his Emanuel.
While mawkishly driveling over the "infallible truth" of Holy
Writ in Sabbath habitudes of hypnotized pietism, we have at the same time fallen
into actual doubt of the real existence of the divine soul as the eternal
pilgrim through the kingdoms of nature, the persistent traveler on the highways
of heaven. For the most part our unctuously mouthed averment that the Christ is
within us has frittered out into a pretty poetization, since we invariably end
by looking across the distances to clutch at its localization in the person of
the Galilean peasant. Indeed the central rib of Christianity's structure is not
that the Christ mind came to be incorporated collectively in humanity, but that
it came and was incorporated solely in one man, Jesus of Nazareth. Long buried
and lost out of general
56
knowledge is that prime datum of anthropology on which a
religious philosophy alone could build its mansion securely. Until that
forgotten item is restored human thought can not pursue the path of truth
through the jungle of modern guesses and speculations to positive ends. Dr.
Hopper sees clearly that we must turn back and catch up with the ancients. Our
vaunting presumption of superiority over past ages, in which we approach the
study of the relics of antiquity with a condescension veiling a real disdain or
contempt, has cost us dearly in the prolongation of our own sojourn in ignorance
from which ancient sapiency could all the while have rescued us. A pretty clear
discernment of this situation has dawned upon the mind of our eminent
psychologist, Jung. His vigorous statement on the point will bear
quotation:
"It would be an absurd and entirely unjustified
self-glorification if we were to assume that we are more energetic or more
intelligent than the ancients--our materials for knowledge have increased, but
not our intellectual capacity. For this reason we become immediately as
obstinate and unsusceptible in regard to new ideas as people in the darkest
times of antiquity. Our knowledge has increased, but not our wisdom. . . .
Unfortunately we acquire in school only a very paltry conception of the richness
and immense power of life in Grecian mythology."
Our entire study of ancient life and culture and our search for
the origins of human constructions in past times have been contorted out of all
semblance of truth by our addiction to the word "primitive." Strong books have
lately been written to open our minds to the sheer tyranny of words and
shibboleths. Here is one calamitous example of it. To be sure, mankind passed
through its infantile period in remote days, and it is legitimate to speak of
its earliest dawning of intelligence and its efforts to interpret life as
primitive. In so far as it was left to itself to grope its way through blind
stumbling to incipient knowledge the word "primitive" is applicable to its
products. But there is a phenomenon presented by antiquity that finds no
explanation through the formula of childish
57
"primitivism." It has been divined at times and the haunting
sense of it has disturbed and confused the academic mind. But it has never been
honestly and logically faced. It is the significant fact that side by side with
the evidences of real primitivism in many ancient peoples there are found books
or scriptures containing bodies of wisdom and ethical and philosophical systems
transcending even our own maturest attainment. The attribution of infallible
truth and sublimest wisdom to the sacred scriptures of the world, which are of
remote ancient origin, has never been accounted for on any hypothesis
consistent with the universal presumptions of "early primitivism." How could the
products of the most exalted culture and intelligence have come out of primitive
childishness? The presuppositions of the "primitive" theory are shattered into
absurdity by the ghostly presence of the tomes of supernal wisdom found in the
hands of still "primitive" peoples. Egypt is perhaps the best example. Its
Book of the Dead, its Books of Thoth, its Pyramid Texts and
its massed inscriptions, doubtless extant thousands of years before a period in
which the scholars have been pleased to style Egyptian civilization primitive
and even barbaric, stand to this day unapproachable in the majesty of their
truth and sagacity. They are now found to be the fountain source of the Hebrew
and Christian scriptures and the whole construction that has become modern
religion of the Occident. We have not yet risen to any just or full apprehension
of their sublime message. Truly it is, as Massey named it, "The Light of the
World." And it is light that to us, because of our imperfect vision and blind
conceit, is still largely darkness. The children of humanity--but they come
bearing the products of perfected maturity! They already carry what humanity
will produce at its acme of evolved culture. "Primitive ignorance" comes
carrying the structures of perfection! The beginning stage presents to us the
end product! The tomes of Egypt's golden wisdom--thanks to the Rosetta
Stone--have shattered at last the "primitive" theses of ancient study and
rendered obsolete the thousands
58
of books tracing cultural origins through their elaborations. In
the shadow of Egypt's sage profundity we are found to be the babbling
children. Why does the world in its present vaunted maturity cling to the books
produced in its childhood? When the world was a child it spake as a child. Now
that it has grown up why does it not put away its childish things--the
"primitive" scriptures? Because it could not re-create them and can produce
nothing even remotely equal to them. Evidently when the world was a child it
spake not only as a child, but also in the amazing fullness of matured
evolution. Struck nearly dumb by its own discovery, modern psychoanalysis, and
Jung, have begun to touch the hem of the garment of the mighty wisdom that
brooded over the ancient mind of child humanity. And they begin to perceive that
virtue is flowing out to them from the touch, the virtue of truth, wisdom,
transfused already with the pervading radiance of the great "unconscious." More
truly than we could have dreamed, Wordsworth was right:
For Freud has gone back to childhood to find the origin and
explanation of adult behavior, and Jung has gone back to the childhood of the
race to find the origin and explanation of the adult behavior of present
humanity. And as the sacred scriptures of the race, written in its childhood,
still dominate and guide the life of the world, so Jung finds that the instincts
of the race motivating its life in its childhood still dominate human conduct,
welling up from the depths of the unconscious in dream and phantasy, even when
denied a place in consciousness by the inhibitions of tradition, social custom
and cultural restraint of any sort. And in those revered scriptures from the
race's childhood is found the same lexicon of symbols employed as that same
unconscious still uses to speak in dream and phantasy to adult humans today. The
discovery of the correlation between man's "unconscious" and the
59
childhood of the race is indeed one of the most epochal in human
history.
Having brought the charge of error against the ubiquitous theses
of "primitivism," we will be challenged to announce the corrections. The nub and
kernel of the mistaken view are to be located in the assumption that the great
and lofty scriptures of most remote antiquity were written by primitive
people. The truth is that they were composed for primitive people, but
not by them. Primitive people could not create literature of the
exalted character which the great scriptures reveal. They are the creations not
of childish immaturity and wonder, but of the most consummate genius ever
displayed in world literature. They are not works of speculation, but
productions of certified knowledge and confirmed wisdom, of matchless profundity
and piercing insight. As moral, intellectual and spiritual norms they have been
measured against the run of human experience for some thousands of years, and
never has that test supported a single successful impeachment of their veritude.
Their message is timeless, their truth is ageless.
But if they were not written by primitive people, who in
the primitive age possessed the supernal genius to edit them? No answer to this
query is possible as long as we imprison our minds in the narrow presuppositions
of academic orthodoxy. We must break loose from these fetters and accredit truth
instead of "superstition" to the great universal tradition of antiquity.
Omnipresent throughout the ancient world is the legend that in the golden dawn
of humanity's existence divine kings and "mighty men of renown," yea, the gods
themselves, consorted with mankind in its innocent childhood, and taught it arts
and cultures, giving it great books of wisdom as perennial guides and manuals
for a safe treading of the path of human evolution. It has been assumed that
this is a legend, arising out of the roseate phantasy-producing mind of the
racial childhood. Yet even legends are not created out of total mental vacuity.
There is substance behind every legend. The pres-
60
ence over the whole earth of a universal tradition bespeaks a
certain amount of veridical truth at its fountain source. Besides, there stand
the scriptures which, appearing in the world's childhood, are not the works of
children. It has been assumed that humanity alone, of all life's progeny, was
left without parental guidance, protection and tutelage. Everywhere life is
parented. Its infantile period is carried through by the adult guidance of
parents, guardians and mentors. Is it to be assumed that man alone is left to
shift through his infancy as a race with no help from the carriers and products
of antecedent development? In a school system an earlier generation turns back
to teach the children of its successor. Wisdom accruing to a grown generation is
handed down for the benefit of the next generation at its start. All the
scriptures of the past are at one in their claim to have been indited by sages
and wise ones of superhuman stature. Here is the invincible evidence that
surpassing wisdom and intelligence presided over the construction of these
books. One thing is certain--they are not the products of primitive ignorance.
They are the creations of consummate genius and majestic artistry.
And if knowledge is an accumulated acquisition and wisdom an
ingrained deposit of the fruitage of right action, then the authorship of the
divinely inspired scriptures must have been the product of minds that had
traversed a long course of evolution. Life never gratuitously dowers its
creatures with qualities, powers or genius that they have not themselves earned
and developed in their experience. It has limitless largesse to pour upon
us, but insists that we prepare the ground and cultivate the growing vine before
the intoxicating wine is ours to quaff. As Plato's Timaeus assures us,
God has himself planted the seed of immortal divinity within us. Ours is the
task of tending and cultivating it to its maturity. When it is full grown it is
the deity-genius within us, guiding, instructing, enrapturing. It can then write
sage scriptures to pass the torch of wisdom along to future children of the
cosmos. Says Heraclitus
61
in one of the most sententious utterances in all philosophy:
"Man's genius is a deity." But it is a deity that comes at the start of human
evolution as a divine infant and has to await the development of corporeal
instrumentalities to give it full conscious expression in the outer world. To
the degree that such conscious expression has not been implemented by the outer
personality it is the "unconscious."
62
"I die, and I am born again, and I renew myself, and I grow
young each day." This is the utterance of the divine soul in man as voiced in
the sublime literature of ancient Egypt. That literature depicted in forms and
analogues of living reality the history of the god that comes to be the heavenly
guest tenanting a human body for a season. This celestial visitant is no
newcomer to try earthly hospitality; he has been here for similar visits many
times. He has died and been born again, he has renewed his life and grown young
as often as he has grown old. Indeed he is growing younger with each sally out
into the adventure of life, for each excursion takes him deeper into the heart
of eternal being, closer and ever closer to the Center of everlasting life where
abides perpetual youth. Length of days is indeed in his right hand, for he is
the Aged One of Heliopolis, the Ancient of Days. He comes each day as the
infant, but he bears with him the wisdom garnered through his many cycles of
birth, growth and death. He returns to earth until his wheel of birth and death
has completed its turning, when he enters the kingdom of his Father, to go no
more out. He is then a glorified Sahu, clothed in radiant body of solar light,
and dwells among the gods. But antecedent to that climactic Day of the Lord he
is the god in the becoming, hiding his growing light under the bushel of a human
personality, toiling, striving, exhorting to righteousness in the milling scene
of earthly life.
The vital truth so long and disastrously lost, then, is that
man, in his essential and indestructible selfhood, is a soul, which alternately
animates physical bodies, gains through them experience indispensable to its
continued evolution, and drops them for periods
of rest in ethereal worlds, during which it lives in a state of
latency, or as the sheer potentiality of self-renewal.
The light this determination sheds on psychoanalysis is seen to
be the substantial reification or hypostatization of the great new element of
psychology, the "unconscious." Indeed it brings to this shadowy consciousness
nothing less than a positive entification. It sets it up as a living individual
entity, consciously pursuing its way through the labyrinth of evolution as
actually as we conceive the mundane individual to be doing. It enables us to
bring forth this nebulous presence from out its dusky habitat and to give it
definitive form and character, as we recognize it to be a long familiar
personage in our revered scriptures. For at last the "unconscious" is seen to
be the soul, the godlike part of the dual nature of man. Only from the
standpoint of our waking consciousness that functions directly through the
physical mechanism of a brain is it fittingly denominated the "unconscious." On
its own plane it is not unconscious, but more vividly and widely conscious than
the earthly self can ever be. But it comes here in search of the offices of the
outer personality of man to enable it to achieve an actualization of its
capabilities of consciousness which it could not possibly gain by remaining
continually in sublimated worlds. Consciousness, to be completely evolved, must
be ground to a state of hard realism. This can be effected only in worlds of
concrete experience. The soul must be centered in a physical body to win its
growth. And once in body, it must await the slow evolution of the mechanical and
physiological agencies of brain and nervous system before it can deploy its full
forces outward to untrammeled expression.
From the standpoint of the open waking consciousness of the
individual the soul within is the unconscious. For it is the Genius behind the
scenes of the surface consciousness. It is the individual's own self--best
spelled perhaps with a capital S--conditioned by the effects of its own long
past history, standing in the shadow behind the curtain and appearing almost to
play the part of a deus ex machina to the personal conscious self. To
Socrates and the an-
64
cient philosophers it was their Daemon, or guardian angel,
interposing at times of crucial exigency to warn the personality against making
false or dangerous moves. To the poet it is the source of his higher
"inspiration," the spring of his divine afflatus. To all it is the rock of
character which so clearly marks the individual's status of high and strong, or
low and weak, in evolution. It stands behind--rather one should say above--in
the overworld of the personal man, and is the generator or holder of that body
of fixed qualities and dispositions which distinguish one person's life from
another's. The physical and emotional personality is, so to say, an antenna of
it, extended outward into the world of factuality in order to help it fend for
itself in the arena of experience. Through the personality it has sensuous
contact with the world in which it is destined to play a notable part. It
registers the experience impressed upon it through the outer instrument and
digests in consciousness the moral substance thereof.
The reservoir of wisdom with which it stands to guard the outer
mind is the accrued deposit of the moral value of all its past history. Wisdom
can come in no other way than as the assimilated fruit of experience. If it
comes otherwise it is unearned, and life bestows nothing without the expenditure
of effort commensurate with the gains to be won. As a man soweth, so
shall he reap. Wisdom is the rich harvest of seed sown, watered and tended.
Modern thought has envisaged a near-divine, near-omniscient monitor residing in
the over-area of man's constitution and standing ever ready to guard and counsel
the personality, but has never even postulated for that monitor any known or
unknown cycle of experience requisite to have dowered it with such a faculty or
such a prerogative. Obviously nowhere in the present existence of the individual
can there be found a body of experience qualified to endow an interior mind in
man with such superior wisdom, as all experience comes through the personality.
Biological science, through such a representative exponent as Sir Alfred Russell
Wallace, has declared that there can nowhere be found in the line of evolving
life from animal to man
65
any chapter of experience sufficient to have developed human
mentality in the highest animal orders. All observation of the stream of growth
negatives the claim. Yet there exists in man's organization a grade of
consciousness that manifests the highest knowledge and wisdom, exceeding always
that of the conscious man himself, and deploying on occasions of his own
strategic choosing resources unknown to the individual on behalf of the supreme
welfare of the personality. And there is left no way for the mind to account for
the presence and exalted genius of this inner mentor save by postulating for it
cycles of living existence and experience in its past, such as the ancient seers
allotted to it. So then for the first time in modern systematism both philosophy
and psychology are confronted with the challenge of a thesis which, now as of
old, can provide the mind with a formula adequate to rationalize the presence of
a god in the life of man, and to account understandably for his divine status
above the merely animal counterpart in the dual composition.
It is well to adduce several pronouncements from modern
psychoanalysis itself that speak in confirmation of the diagnosis. One comes to
light in the work on psychoanalysis already cited, The Recreating of the
Individual. Says the author, Dr. Hinkle (p. 108):
"The unconscious proper is not formed or created by the
individual in response to culture, but exists a priori behind all
culture."
With the mere substitution, perhaps, of the word "experience"
for "culture," no passage could hit and express the truth more pointedly. It is
not any of Freud's Oedipus or Electra complexes generated by early infant
reactions. It is not the product of a few years of odd idiosyncratic habitudes
or circumstantial pressures, that warp the mind into unnatural and unwholesome
fixations. These are of some account in the total, but they do not create or
condition the unconscious. As the author of the citation says, that is already
there as the old root out of which a new tree is to spring up. The Book of
Daniel in its first chapters speaks of leaving the stump of
66
the hewn tree in the ground, so that a new growth may start from
it. Elsewhere Dr. Hinkle has noted that the conscious part of the individual
remains "unaware of the ancient processes functioning in and influencing his
present life." Nothing could be more revealing of ancient truth than such a
statement, although its force is largely lost through default of the knowledge
that the "ancient processes" that still function in and influence the present
life of the individual were the past experience of the individual himself, as
well as the collective experience of the race of his ancestry. The meaning is
always made to embrace racial limits, when it should apply directly to the
individual's own history. The same author says additionally that in the
psychoanalytic talk of the unconscious as being composed of conscious
motivations suppressed and driven underground, we are not here dealing with the
"suppression of individual experience, but with the suppression of racial
experience, belonging to an earlier phase of humanity."
This again reifies an ancient element in the makeup of present
consciousness. But again the exposition advanced by modern psychology denies to
the individual his own previous experience and the fruit of it, by ascribing his
present deep-seated unconscious to racial heritage. Archaic philosophical acumen
chose to believe that the individual was present anciently when the experience
was acquired, that he indeed gained it for his own eternal possession. He did
not come by it through a vicarious inheritance or through the transmitted blood
of ancestry. They asked how justice could be meted out equably in the world if
individuals were either exalted or saddled with a heritage other than that which
they themselves had created. The human intuition of justice demands that no
creature should be afflicted with the consequences of actions not his own. "The
fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge,"
observes a revered scripture. And it presents a harassing and disturbing anomaly
to the reasoning mind which takes seriously the scriptural pronouncements of
Deity as to absolute and impartial justice in the universe. Then, too, we recall
that
67
the same scriptures tell of "visiting the iniquities of the
parents upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." If in any way
these declarations are to be harmonized with the simple and direct human sense
of justice, it must be assumed that the children involved in these visitations
were in line, through previous faulty action, for the ill fortune that traces to
parental dereliction. Otherwise the simple mind of man must give over the effort
to vindicate the operation of clear justice in the law of inheritance. If you
are afflicted with your forefather's sinful consequences, you will look
doubtfully toward a God whose sense of fairness seems less rigorously true than
your own. A morbid and sin-haunted Christianity has forever refused to face
these corollaries of its announced Biblical canons with untrammeled logic or
sincere intellectual probity. In the most godlike exercise of human judgment a
Deity whose operation of living laws afflicts a soul from the very start of life
with the iniquitous consequences of action not its own, must be categorized as
outside the pale of what man must think of as justice. Since the early centuries
of Christian history the logical and moral issue here involved has been
sedulously evaded. But the ancient philosophers met it and they were able to
maintain their predication of a God of total justice. This they did by virtue of
their knowledge that souls come into an earthly heritage accurately suited to
the needs of their own growth at their status. They could assume that a soul
born into a malformed physical or material legacy inherited his own, and not his
parents' past defects. He falls heir to his own mistakes, not another's. For he
brings back with him into renewed expression--until they are at last
obliterated--the germs of his own waywardness, to flower out afresh in the new
embodiment. The forefathers' physical transmission through the outer line of
descent merely provides the good or bad body conditioned to give the old soul
its appropriate milieu and circumstantial influences which enable it to work
ahead on its own ground.
Lending corroboration to the thesis that the unconscious is an
element in us given a priori, and not the outgrowth of earthly
expe-
68
rience in this life, is another excerpt from Dr. Hinkle's work
(p. 39):
"But psychoanalysis is built entirely upon the theory of
unconscious motives and purposes, different and antecedent to those known by man
in consciousness and upon which his present conscious manifestations and
symptoms rest."
This says in effect that there is in man, buried below his
normal consciousness, another consciousness which knows more than the man and is
greater than the man himself, but which has not been limited to this man's
experience. It has the stored-up experience of all previous racial history,
explains modern psychoanalysis. Well, then, the situation stands thus: there are
two strata of consciousness in man's constitution, the personal open
consciousness and the unconscious. Both carry the heritage of the past, yet one
is conscious of it, the other is not. The one has it, the other possesses no
memory of it. The one has it not, ostensibly because it is a totally new
creation, never in existence before and having no link with the past. Then, if
the other has it, the legitimate obvious inference is that it is not likewise a
new first creation in this life, but that it has a link with its past, that it
is a durable entity treasuring all its previous experience and that it was a
participant in whatever experience it carries in memory. In a full, frank and
fair envisagement of the elements in the situation this is the only channel of
explanation open to logic. If there is in man a consciousness which retains the
memory of the past, and another which does not have such a memory because it did
not share the past, the inescapable inference is that the entity that does
retain the memory did share the experience. It (or he) is verily "the Ancient of
Days," the eternal pilgrim through the cycles of time and the kingdoms of
nature, gathering up and holding the digest of all experience in faculties of
supermind and higher consciousness which transcend the three-dimensional scope
of man's open awareness. As far as he has not been brought out to expression in
the brain consciousness of the outer
69
personality, he dwells in covert position within the deepest
recesses of the individual self, the silent guardian and watchful daemon,
the "higher ego" of the person. In Dr. Hopper's work already cited, The
Crisis of Faith, the author takes a dozen or more pages to present and
support the thesis that the god whose influence molds the individual's life from
the hidden depths is an a priori reality, given from the start, in
relation to the present existence.
Dr. Hinkle likewise is insistent, as her chief ground of
refutation of Freud's central presentments regarding the infantile sexual
motivations of the child, that the main "drive" of the ego in man is of
precisely that character which it would be presumed to be if the premises were
granted that an aged, wise and benevolent soul occupied the place and performed
the function allotted to the unconscious. That is to say that the unconscious is
characterized by an incessant perennial urge toward the actualization of an
ever-enlarging potential "divine" expression through the personality. She says
(p. 31):
"He [man] bears within himself all the potentiality of
individualistic development; the future claims him as well as the
past."
She also quotes the words of Antigone:
"The moral law is sacred because it is not a thing of today or
of yesterday, but lives forever, and none knows whence it sprang."
It needs no dramatic flourish, however, to declare that there is
no unfathomable mystery as to the genetic history of the moral law. The ancient
sages give evidence that they were not ignorant of it. The great Egyptologist,
William H. Breasted, in his last work, The Origin of Conscience, traced
its course of development back to remote Egyptian religious conceptions and
cultures. The moral law is the deposit of the conscious resultant of all
experience undergone by that fragment of the divine mind that tenants one
physical body after another, building each in turn over the model of its inner
nature, and carries the everlasting memory of its past with it. The
70
moral law is framed in an indelible memory out of the impacts of
the consequences of action perpetrated by a conscious perduring entity able to
hold the lessons learned and create from their ensemble a code of determinative
norms. It is just the fixing of the recognized values accruing from experience
upon the consciousness of a spiritual entity which is able to hold them in
perpetuity. For its "spiritual" body is imperishable, its substance
indestructible. And that which is impressed thereon is retained
forever.
The discovery and recognition of the unconscious in modern
psychology is bringing out to open view the data which corroborate ancient
scriptures in their predication of a divine consciousness in the upper reaches
of man's life. Says Dr. Hinkle again (p. 4):
"It is this sense in the individual man of his potential but
unfulfilled greatness that forces him to become aware of his incompleteness as a
human being. It is this state of faulty development of his psychic capacities
that psychoanalysis has brought so clearly into view, and for the improvement of
which, to those interested in and capable of using its method, it offers a
technic--an aid toward the conscious development of a greater self."
True indeed is all this, since, it is pertinent to ask, how
would the personal entity man be able to register a sense of his imperfection
and shortcoming in the first place if there was not resident and conscious
within him a being possessing familiarity with higher norms of attainment and
standards of perfection by contrast with which the present performance of the
outer man exhibits faultiness and failure? If psychoanalysis is just discovering
this inner mentor, it has taken just about two millennia for the world to regain
what its ancient hierophants of religion possessed.
The Hopper claim that the divine element is as "given" a
presence in man's make-up as is the body is again substantiated by a quotation
from Dr. Hinkle's work (p. 43):
"Man possesses, independent of any frustrated pleasure aims, the
capacity for individual development and the need for its fulfillment, as
definitely as he possesses the physiological sexual desire."
71
This statement is part of her refutation of Freud's position
that psychic neuroses and mental disturbances trace their genesis always to
frustrations of the basic sexual instincts. Disturbances may of course arise
from frustration of the life of the outer man; but it is to the credit of the
Jung school and such psychoanalysts as Dr. Hinkle that they have recognized
likewise something of far deeper import, namely that violent inner tempers will
arise from the frustration of the evolutionary purposes and aims of the
indwelling god-ego.
And Dr. Hinkle adds a most significant statement, which should
carry the minds of both theorists and clinicians to decisive conclusions, when
she adds to the above citation the results of actual empirical
practice:
"When the obstacles to this forward movement are removed, when
he is able to achieve some progress toward the inner goal of his being, then his
neurotic symptoms and his psychic disturbances disappear."
Here, in short, is the specific demonstration that if the mind
of the outer personality of the individual is not measurably conducting the life
so as to minister to the onward progress of the soul in the subterranean--or
superior--recesses of the consciousness, the soul will register objection,
dissatisfaction and disturbance by bringing the untoward condition to light
through neurotic inharmony and unbalance, wretchedness or pain. Indeed some such
situation is the nub and crux of nearly every drama and novel, representing the
desperate or heroic efforts of the soul to break through a cordon of environing
circumstances which have tangled it in a predicament threatening its expression
of diviner qualities or thwarting its free growth. Lending corroboration of the
very highest sort to Dr. Hinkle's conclusions regarding the voice of the inner
god is Jung's repeated affirmation that people only come to the psychoanalyst if
and when they have lost possession of a positive religious philosophy and that
he has not been able to send them away cured
72
unless he has been able to restore to them an affirmative mental
grasp on basic life meanings.
Dr. Hinkle and Dr. Hopper unite in asserting that it is this
disagreement, this default of the lower mind from the purposes of the inner,
that constitutes the real essence of "sin," and in this they are substantially
in accord with the early sage Greek philosophy. Jung is cited (by Dr. Hinkle) as
interpreting the psychic discord or disturbance as a longing of the ego for
"rebirth," "the desire for a necessary psychic birth which uses the symbols of
physical birth to represent the psychological need." This again is startlingly
in consonance with ancient theory. The Platonists, the Neo-Platonists and Jesus
of the Gospels alike lay down the necessity for a new birth--a second birth--of
the soul, Indeed it is general in all archaic religions. The soul can not
tolerate stagnation too long. To be normal and "happy" it must have the sense of
growth and progress, the assurance of making steady advance on the road it is
traveling. This feeling is the perennial condition and prerequisite of its
conscious well-being. The soul has needs that must be ministered unto through
and by the external paraphernalia of the body,--and philosophies of ascetic
religious tendency should never forget this. But also it has interests that
reach to higher worlds and that no amount of sensual gratification can promote.
St. Paul emphasizes that "the natural man" has no cognizance of the things of
the spirit, "neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."
Rather the physical man is to the god within as soil is to the tree: the base
and ground of its ability to expand its life in the air above. Like the tree the
soul can not grow unless it is deeply and firmly rooted in the life of the
physical, but its concern with the physical is in no sense an ultimate
objective. It is but the necessary foundation and starting point of its own
primary business, as it is that of every unit of conscious being, of advancing
from the point of present attainment to wider consciousness and more abundant
life. The soul sustains a relation to the body that demands its enjoyment of the
body's strength, health, buoyancy, comfort and the fullest
73
and freest flow of its elan. The failure of ascetic movements to
recognize this fact had led to untold psychic disaster, warping into discord the
lives of both the body and the soul and defeating the purposes of evolution. But
the soul did not come to link its life with that of the body merely to indulge
in that enjoyment. That would indeed to be to take the downward path, to fall
into "sin." Its way of growth runs through the exercise of its own potential
powers and faculties in the development of a higher consciousness, to all of
which its happy relation of harmony with the body is a primary and fundamental
condition. The soul builds the body as the house in which it is to dwell and
work, cycle after cycle. Its prime aim is to build it to be most commodious and
comfortable for its tenancy and in such fashion that to live in it is a delight.
But once built and ability to maintain it in good state established, it would
surely be a mistaken philosophy to assume that the soul's chief business in life
was to end with the fulfillment of its enjoyment of the house. It can not do its
work in the world without a proper house to dwell in, but once the house is
constructed, it can then turn its attention to the higher work it came here to
do.
The job of constructing and accommodating itself to its house,
however, is an integral part of its incarnational mission and takes on a larger
measure of importance than might at first glance be assumed. Its work in
spiritual worlds transcending bodily influences still is greatly affected and
conditioned by the need of complete harmony with the instrument. As the body is
the keyboard, so to say, of the soul's expression, it is essential that there be
maintained at all times the most delicate balance and nicest adjustment of
conscious motivation to organic reaction. And it is now the province of
psychoanalysis to diagnose the conditions of maladjustment between the two
factors. The discovery of such maladjustment and the location of its basic
causes is indeed its high function.
The ancients, as is well indicated in the philosophy of Plato,
adjudged virtue to be the individual knowledge of the art of keeping a perfect
balance between the animal man and the indwelling
74
god. Conversely they defined "sin" as the ignorance that
stupidly permitted inharmony and discord to be generated in the interplay
between the two. The soul, they said, stood at the point of middle ground
between the divine spirit above and the animal body below, and its function was
to mediate between the two in such fashion that a happy blending and merging of
their forces was effected. Standing midway between the two, it could deploy its
energies and center its interests and affections in either direction. It could
cultivate the life of the higher spirit or devote itself to fostering the
sensual expression of the animal. Its own intelligence, be it high or low, was
the determinant. The destiny of the individual was the outcome of its decisions.
It is quite likely that the true definition of "sin" is to be
reached by taking into account the terms of this philosophical situation. Surely
"sin" is that which impedes the most felicitous and orderly flow of the stream
of life forward to greater being. And obviously in the human world that which
would most effectually block and thwart the movement of "the rivers of
vivification," as the Greeks called them, would be the failure of the soul to
perform with deft intelligence its high function of maintaining that just
balance between the god and the animal in man upon which true growth
depends.
"The soul that sinneth, it shall die," is the strong declaration
of the scripture. Since all souls undergo death in its common meaning of the
dissolution of soul from body, obviously another meaning of the word "death" is
here involved. And this is of the greatest significance for all religious and
scriptural interpretation. The entire understanding of the language of the Bible
has been sadly warped out of line with truth by the failure to read into the
words "death" and "the dead" in the scriptures the same meaning which was
attached to them in the ancient Greek and Egyptian religions. The great lost
light of antiquity comes out in glorious splendor when the original
philosophical meaning is restored to these terms. By "death" is meant nothing
less than what we call our "life" here!
75
And "the dead" of the scriptures are none other than ourselves,
the "living." This is now established beyond question. For the ancients regarded
the life of the soul in the body as its death, using the term of course in a
figurative and relative sense. In the body the high life of the soul was so
reduced in potential capacity by the sluggish vibrations of the corporeal nature
that it lay inert as in death, and the body was poetized as its prison, grave or
tomb. Indeed the body and tomb are identical in the Greek words for body,
soma, and tomb, sema. The soul was said to go to its death when it
"was united to the ruinous bonds of the body." Socrates says to Cebes that he
has "heard from one of the wise that we are now dead and that the body is our
sepulcher."
This construction is directly in line with what St. Paul asserts
in his Epistles. "To be carnally minded is death," he says. "Ye are dead in your
trespasses and sins," he adds. And again he states most pointedly that "the
interests of the flesh meant death; the interests of the spirit meant life and
peace." The death referred to in the old books of wisdom was that of the soul,
occurring when the unit of divine consciousness made its descent into the body
of man on earth, there to come "under the law" of birth, growth, maturity and
decay. The whole import of sage writings of the past has been utterly lost by
the ignorant exoteric assumption that the "death" spoken of was that of the
physical body. A thousand irreconcilable perplexities of scriptural
interpretation vanish, and one clear and consistent flash of illuminated meaning
takes their place the moment one reads the old Greek philosophical meaning back
into the terms under discussion. And the whole systematic structure of archaic
theology is restored to glowing significance and the old rendition vindicated,
when St. Paul says in the seventh chapter of Romans: "the command that
meant life proved death to me." The "command" he is speaking of has never to
this date been understood to be the command--which comes to all souls in the
empyrean--to incarnate. What the Apostle says in the verse immediately preceding
this statement is of the utmost elucidative value
76
for all theology, for all understanding. He says: "When the
command came home to me, sin sprang to life and I died." It gives us final
certification as to what is connoted by "sin." Evidently it is an inclination in
the soul that lies dormant so long as it remains in static suspension of its
energies in the celestial spheres, but which springs to life and activity as
soon as the soul is embodied in a fleshly organism on earth. "Sin" is that
disposition of the mind which can be implemented only by union with the carnal
self of the animal body, and awaits its opportunity to awake to expression when
that union is consummated. Then Paul makes that correlation between "sin" and
"death" which should not have remained a sealed mystery for hundreds of years,
with this passage of his in front of our eyes. "Sin sprang to life and I died."
His "death" was his descent into the world of carnal mind, the indulgence in
which is at last seen as the terrible hobgoblin that has plagued the Christian
conscience with entirely needless morbidity for these many centuries. "Sin"--be
it proclaimed to all the world in clarion tones--is the soul's indulgence in the
life of the flesh. Indeed, with "the mount" being a symbol for the earth itself,
this globe is many times referred to in the scriptures as the "Mount of Sin." It
is likewise "Mount Sin-ai." Now it is possible to see what the Apostle meant by
saying that "the wages of sin is death." For if sin is the addiction of the soul
to the lusts of the flesh, and residence of the soul in the flesh is "death" to
its higher nature, then continued sin necessitates continued "death." The longer
the soul clings to carnal affections the longer it must return to earth and body
to give play to its desires--until they are burned out in the fires of
purificatory suffering. And again can be seen in clearer certitude the meaning,
so terribly mutilated, of Paul's apocalyptic utterance: "The last enemy to be
overcome is death." Of a surety it now is obvious that when the soul has at last
been entirely purged of its bent to sin, which drags it again and again back to
earth where alone the instincts of a physical body can give channel to its
carnal leanings, it will
77
have no further need to enter the "valley of the shadow of
death." It then need "go no more out," as Revelation puts it.
Modern psychology has at last got around to the vantage point of
envisaging the inner conflict in the area of human consciousness in much the
same light as that in which it was viewed by the ancient Illuminati. It has made
discovery of the "Aged One," the older soul hiding in the covert depths of the
individual consciousness, and has seen the necessity of interpreting the
phenomena of psychic disturbance and mental illness in terms of the phases of
the mutual thwarting of the interests of higher soul by the instincts of the
flesh, and those of the flesh by the cultural restraints imposed by the soul.
And at last it stands and works on solid ground, the title to the authenticity
and validity of which is volubly attested by ancient lore.
Nearly every word of the few fragments we have left of the
writing of Heraclitus is an utterance of prime value. Among such is his brief
sentence: "For all human laws are fed by one thing, the divine." And further
than that, he grounds the roots of the divine in man in no less high and
immediate a ray of the Absolute than the Logos itself:
"Go hence; the limits of the soul thou canst not discover,
though thou shouldst traverse every way; so profoundly is it rooted in the
Logos."--Fragment 45; Diels.
Clarity might long ago have supervened upon the mortal
conception of divine things if the Occidental mind had been open to receive the
assertion of Greek philosophy that the Logos is a ray or emanation from Supreme
Deity, the spirit a further extended ray from the Logos, and the soul a still
further diffraction, through the medium of matter, of a ray from the spirit. Use
of this outline graph enables thought to fulfill every requirement in meeting
both the theoretical and the empirical problems involved in the analysis. As
Plotinus so capably has blue-printed the scheme of the universal construct, the
emanation of divine energy from the heart of being,
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proceeding farther and farther from initial impulse, pierces
ever deeper into matter, losing force as matter grows denser out on the
periphery, until the last wave is just sufficient to enable the soul to nucleate
around its node of power the physical body. So that Plotinus says that "the soul
suspends from it the mundane body," which is characterized as "the last of
things" in the chain that reaches from spirit at the top to dense matter at the
lower rung.
The outcome also of the great Kant's elaborated philosophical
lucubration was the conclusion that what constitutes in his system the highest
"spirit" in man, "the transcendental unity of apperception," is "a condition
which precedes all experience and in fact renders it possible." Here is the soul
"given," a priori, again.
Irenaeus, who is not often found admitting or expressing his
agreement with the principles or teachings of the antecedent pagan philosophies,
which in so far as they came into early Christianity fell under the condemnation
of his pen as "heresies," puts general ancient philosophical understanding of
the triplicity of spiritual elements in man in splendid clarity in the following
(Adversus Haereses, V, ix, I):
"The perfect man consists of these three, flesh, soul and
spirit. One of these saves and fashions--that is, the spirit. Another is united
and formed--that is, the flesh; while that which lies between the two is the
soul, which sometimes follows the spirit and is raised by it, but at other times
sympathizes with the flesh and is drawn by it into earthly passions."
This is admirable; and finds buttressing also in
Plutarch:
"But in his [Plato's] Book of Laws, when he was now grown
old, he affirmed, not in riddles and emblems, but in plain and proper words,
that the world is not moved by one soul . . . but not by fewer than two; the one
of which is beneficent, and the other contrary to it, and the author of things
contrary. He also leaves a certain third nature in the midst between, which is
neither without soul nor without reason, nor void of a self-moving power, but
rests upon both of the preceding principles, but yet so as to affect, desire and
pursue the better of them."
79
Indeed here is seen the basic formulation of that which became
the doctrine of the "mediator" in Christian theology, the higher and the lower
natures in man, with the soul standing on midground between them, and
functioning as the way or the bridge over which the two might ultimately effect
their reconciliation and atonement.
From Erasmus comes an equally direct statement of the duofold
man-god constitution, with the soul mediating between upper and
lower:
"The spirit makes us gods; the flesh makes us beasts; the soul
makes us men."--Enchiridion v. 20--D.
So definitely did ancient insight comprehend the tripartite
division or gradation of man's nature that it typified the mediatorial function
of the middle-man, the human, standing on the horizon or boundary line between
the gross body below and the divine mind above, by the symbol of the bee, which
became the living zoötype of the soul because of its function in fertilizing
female ova in the flower with male pollen and thus effecting the new birth. The
insect performed the mediatorial function of priest in the marriage of the
opposite poles of the plant. So even the Christos in man was characterized as
the High Priest, since he functioned in the union of male and female elements in
man in holy marriage. The soul it is that mediates between spirit and flesh and
unites the logos of the higher with the atomic mothering and nurturing
capabilities of the physical. The soul is the agent and focal point of the
interplay between the two natures.
Now psychoanalysis has discerned the forms and features of this
interplay and speaks of it in the most direct terms. Here is Dr. Hinkle giving
us her statement of it in the vernacular of psychology (The Recreating of the
Individual, p. 50):
"As a matter of fact there is a constant interplay between the
two aspects of human life--the external world and our own concrete objective
tendencies and needs which are a part of it, and the subjective
80
human creative and transforming processes lying entirely within
the individual psyche."
This is of course likewise the conflict of the lower man with
the higher god, who find themselves co-tenants of the same domicile. The words
of Prof. N. Shaler apply most fitly here:
"It is hardly too much to say that all the important errors of
contact, all the burdens of men or of society, are caused by the inadequacies in
the association of the primal animal emotions with those mental powers which
have been so rapidly developed in mankind."
It is the struggle between the emotions and the intellect! When
has mankind not been keenly aware of it? It is so much the burden of every day's
conscious life that it does not shape itself out as a concrete and specific
problem. It is nearly the whole focus of the psychological activity of life. How
much one should yield to the bent of the feelings and desires, or how much to
check them; how far one should follow the clear voice of reason, when it
counsels adversely to the instinctual propensities, and how far one should
sacrifice obvious present advantage or pleasure in the interests of deferred
greater good;--these are the unending skirmishes in the vast struggle waged
between the animal and the god in the nature of man on earth. They are the daily
combats in the aeonial Battle of Armageddon. And never have the issues and
conditions of the battle been sufficiently clarified in the world's
understanding. The vast and calamitous ascetic movement aimed at victory for the
god by the curt and conclusive method of crushing out the animal with a
tragically mistaken austerity. Epicureanism and naturalistic hedonism sought a
resolution through a free rein to the instincts, tempered with aesthetic norms.
As might always have been known since Plato's day, the only safe and perfect
modus is to be found in the gradual blending of the two natures through the
experiences of both parties in the give and take of earthly evolution. St. Paul
has well indicated this denouement, when he speaks of the breaking down of the
"middle wall of partition between us," and the making
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of "one new man" out of the amalgamation of "the twain." Only
thus can the great cyclic conflict be fought out "on the horizon," as it is said
to be in the Egyptian texts. And only thus can the engagement terminate in a
manner to promote the ends of the evolutionary movement, so that both soul and
body acquire the maximum amount of beneficial development from the
complications.
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The intermediate soul, therefore, is the meeting ground, the
arena, of the conflict between soul and body. It is rent and torn by the tug and
pull of opposing motivations, the animal tending downward toward sensuality and
grossness, the spirit striving with the soul to raise it up out of the mire. The
animal self reached upward to intrigue the soul down into its coarseness and
brutish delights; the spirit wrestled valiantly to entice its lower brother
upward by the desirable rewards of virtue. The great battle was on. All
religions have so fully depicted the grim stress and the crucial issues of the
struggle that it needs no considerable elaboration here. What is needed,
however, is the orientation of relevance and pertinence from the purely
theological purview over to its even more pertinent reference in the field of
everyday consequences, particularly as the nub and core of psychoanalytic
technique. It has not been known that the immediate categories of the
psychoanalytic situation were all the while those time-hallowed fundamenta of
the old theology and the Bible texts.
Dr. Hopper, in another passage from his The Crisis of Faith
may be permitted to sum up what has been presented in the foregoing pages as
to the three-ply constituency of our consciousness, and adduce for our
consideration in psychology the practical outcome of the living action in the
three-storied human structure (p. 249):
"It is formally and structurally, that man may live his life on
one of three levels: on the sub-human, the human, or the divine--below
the level of the regulative control of reason, or within the regulative control
of God's will. These levels of experience are conceived formally;
but they are lived dialectically. Each level when chosen is a
commitment to a total end." (The italicizing of below is ours, for a
purpose soon to be specified.)
Broadly this is precisely what the elaborate and recondite Greek
Orphic, as well as its parent Egyptian Hermetic, wisdom promulgated in the
ancient day in the arcana of the Mysteries. The sages of olden time knew of
man's threefold composition, and it is obvious that they knew also the vast
involvements of the triplicity for all phases of human conduct, thought and
understanding. Their astute philosophy reveals their underlying recognition of
the interrelated status of the three levels of conscious life, since indeed
their systems and principles can not be apprehended dialectically without
grounding the effort in these formulations. What they knew is that which has not
yet dawned on modern mentation, namely, that as man lives on, or in, three
levels of consciousness, he must have an organic equipment that will relate him,
consciously, with the reality of each level, and that he must therefore have
three separate "minds." He must possess a sub-human, a human and a super-human,
or divine, mind!
Here is the mighty key to the modern psychoanalytic science
without which it yet hobbles ahead in semi-groping. Circumscribing itself
ignorantly within the limits of a twofold segmentation of consciousness,
psychological science has hit and missed in its assumptions. Conjecture and
confusion have come in because it prescribed but one realm of play for man's
"unconscious," whereas there are two quite separate and different strata of
unconscious content and influence. The one lies below (sub) the ordinary
conscious, and the other above (super). The first is of the earth,
physical; the second is "the Lord from heaven," spiritual. And the conscious
human mind stands between its unconscious underling and its unconscious
overlord. Here in Greek philosophy is the key to the scriptures. No less is it
the key to psychoanalysis. For how can a thing which concerns the very
constitution of mortal man be true in philosophy
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or theology, and then not be the actuality in the same mortal
nature when it is studied through the eyes of psychic interest?
Man, the strictly human, stands as the conscious being between
two areas of unconsciousness, one "below," the other "above." His little life is
indeed rounded with--unconsciousness, which presses close in upon him from both
above and below. He is a little gamut of sound and action between two immense
silences. And just as his physical sight extends over only the narrow segment of
the scene upon which his vision can focus, but his cognition can take in in a
secondary awareness further areas on each side of the middle focus without the
gaze falling directly upon them, exactly so his consciousness can reach upward
and downward from his central ground of focus and cover in a secondary type of
recognition some sections of the rim of the great unconscious domains stretching
far below and far above his allotted range of being. His consciousness is
therefore extensible some distance into both the subconscious, beneath his
ordinary status, and the hyperconscious, or world above his vibratory range.
Man's conscious being, then, is a little light set aglow between two great
darknesses, but through the evolving powers of the mental genius within him he
is able to penetrate some distance into both of the two environing border
regions of outer darkness.
The interrelationship of the three minds in man has never been
systematically diagnosed. It is all important. It is the structural
anthropological key to the problem of man. Its exposition must be attempted. The
three minds must be described and classified.
The first step in the elucidation is taken from a hoary volume,
Egypt's venerated Book of the Dead. The "Speaker" is the soul and he
says: "I am Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow." "I am what hath been, what is and
what shall be." Again he dramatizes his three consciousnesses in saying: "I am
Atum in the morning; I am Ra at noon; I am Khepr at evening." What is meant here
is that of the three elements or conditions of consciousness, one is the deposit
of his actual experience in his past; the second is his conscious
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present awareness; and the third is a higher consciousness
supervening gradually for his future. We are thus instructed in the great truth
that the subconscious mind is the hidden memory of our past; the conscious is
our present awareness; and the superconscious is the mind that will function in
our future. The last is only embryonic, potential, in seed state, as yet
unopened to operative function. It can thus be seen that man's present
consciousness is a point of transition from past to future, or equally from
future to past, and that it is his effort to gain a state of stability at the
neutral point between the two nodes of the movement of time. As his life and
therefore his consciousness are a continuum, they must entail the union of all
three experiences, or a union of the two end moments in the center. That is, the
two end aspects that are not now in overt awareness must be integrally present,
related and incorporated, essential components of the total deposit of
experience in consciousness.
The past has teleological relation to the future and to the
whole, since its meaning is determined by the nature of the ultimate goal at
which the total experience is archetypally aimed. The future is conditioned by
the past, as its ontological product, since it is built up on the past. The
present moment is the resolution of the past into a mold that at the same time
shapes the future.
All this brings out the important functionism of the three
minds. As only one of the three grades of consciousness can fill the field of
awareness, that is, occupy the mind's attention at one and the same time, owing
to the finite limitations and the single dimensionality of the time concept as
applicable to human mentality, it is both a logical and a practical necessity
that the other two must lie in the unconscious sphere. The mind must retain the
memory of its past experience, but that dare not occupy the field of
consciousness at the cost of driving out the present,--or life would stop.
Therefore the experience of the past, held in memory, must be stored out of the
way, so to speak, in the halls of potential memory, to be available at any time
if needed for present uses. This is just as under-
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standable as that a person must have a room or attic in which to
store things accumulated (in the past), so that while they may be available if
needed, they are nevertheless out of the way to leave free space for present
activities and uses. The subconscious, then, is the attic or storage room in
which are packed away the gist of our past careers. The present is the new
moment arising out of the past and receiving the influx from the future. The
brain consciousness then is that poise in the flux, or that moment at which the
content and essence of future development is registered in open awareness, to be
dealt with by the initiative of the present, and passed back into the
storehouse, an addition to what has been stored there previously.
But the purely temporal aspect of the movement must be oriented
over into the concept of quality. The future can be, of course, just additional
moments or events of the same kind of beads on the string of time. But it is
proper to think of the future as bringing at least an evolutionary instinct to
count on the future to bring higher values to life than those of the past or
present. What the mind of the future will bring is expected to be something
richer and fuller. The play of consciousness for the coming time will be cast at
a higher frequency and shorter wave length than those in the past. Man is, as it
were, but very actually, walking up a gamut of values, climbing up a golden
stairway of realities, much like a cat walking from left to right over the piano
keyboard. Each forward step he takes strikes a higher-pitched string of
consciousness and realization. He awakens from silence to sound in his world a
new and higher note each time he can reach one key higher in the scale. At each
step of advance in his evolution in time, be it slow or rapid, he is progressing
from a lower to a higher tempo or pitch. The past has resounded or responded to
the lower tones; the future will strike the higher ones. For evolution is tuning
up the strings and refining the mechanism of the physical instrument at each
step of ongoing. Present man can produce sweeter tones and manage
completer
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harmonies than past man, and future man will be able to come
ever closer to striking ineffable symphonies.
The past goes into latency--though it is always
re-available--while the future awaits the slow development of the instrument in
order to be brought forth out of latency and be registered on the surface of the
actual. Until this moment it is only potential, awaiting the perfectibility of
the sounding board of brain and nerves. The future thus emerges out of
unconscious potentiality to pass through the gate of the present moment of
actualization into the storehouse of accumulated and partly digested reality. It
is the birth moment of ever advancing stages or registries of real being. All
life progresses from the potential to the actual, and the area of immediacy in
consciousness is the necessary ground whereon that which has been held in
conscious thought in the mind of the great Oversoul of creation can be projected
from the superior plane above the range of man's conscious grasp down into the
open field of actual experience. The superconscious is that segment of the gamut
of God's graded values which lies or extends immediately above the highest arc
of man's responsive reach.
God is the sending generator of waves of reality; man, as he
perfects his instrumentalities of body, mind and soul, is a poor, a good or a
better receiving instrument. The total harmonies of God's being are thrilling
about us all the while. But we are bound in silence to all of them except those
that we have grown able to match in vibration through the evolving capacities of
our organisms. Only these are the limited though ever expanding glories of
reality that we are able to make actual to ourselves. The Egyptians again
solidly portrayed this basic truth by one of their sagacious "myths." They said
that man was imprisoned in twelve dungeons, one after the other, and that he
could only be liberated from each in turn as he learned to pronounce the name of
the god who stood guard at each dungeon door, and who held the key but would not
use it until the prisoner pronounced his name properly. Name and
nature are identical in this situation, so that man's ability to utter
correctly
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the name of a god is the same thing as being capable of
manifesting that god's divine nature through the personality, the lower mind and
self. This is brightly illuminating on the mental side. This is the meaning of
"calling upon the name of the Lord" in the scriptures, a vastly different and
far more demanding thing than a mere vociferation of the word-name of deity as
understood in Christian rendering. We are, as the Egyptians poetized it, in
prison to a faculty that is as yet unopened and undeveloped. We are freed from
limitation only as potential faculty and power are opened to function through
unfoldment. This is as clearly true as is the simple remark that we are blind
until we evolve the faculty of sight through development of the organs of
seeing. No wonder the ancients set forth man's life in the flesh as an
imprisonment, a burial, sleep and death. We are the captives in a long exile
here on earth. We are in bondage to matter, Hagar, the bondwoman, until brought
up out of this land of Egypt, the abode of flesh and sense. That is what is
entailed for the soul in its migration to earth, its coming "under the law" that
prevails not in the world of spirit, but holds consciousness at low ebb in the
realm of body and matter. This is what it means to be "crucified in the flesh."
The Logos was made flesh--not only in one man, but in all men--and came and
dwelt among us, hiding for the early time his grace and truth under a bushel of
matter. This is our Immanuel, the god imman-ent in us. We are in prison
under the limitations of our still undeveloped potentialities, and the Christos
within us, who brings not only the stored-up capital of his former achievements,
but the potentiality of vastly greater genius to be unfolded in the living
process, is kept on the cross, in darkness and inanity, until we of the outer
personality open the barred doors and let him out to freedom. He abides on the
level immediately over our heads, a resident of a plane the life of which
transcends ours, awaiting the chance to incorporate more and ever more of his
unexploited capability in the world of the actual through the heightened
mechanism of consciousness we slowly learn to provide. He dwells on the plane
above
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us, but is eager to break through into our world and find
thereby a greater actualization of his own powers, as we prepare the way in the
wilderness for him.
This being understood, a glimpse can now be had into the
interlinked operation of the three levels of mentation in the human
constitution, on its purely mechanical side. As Dr. Hopper has said, one can
live in any of the three kingdoms, the sub-human, the human or the super-human
or divine. We can step from one to the other of the two end realms across the
connecting bridge of the human or conscious link. We can rise to divinity, or
sink to animality, by a shift of the focus of interest, desire or will. The
process by which true advance is constantly being made, however, is clearly to
be seen and is the basis of a deeper understanding than has been given hitherto.
The present or human state of the conscious mind is, as said, the point of
meeting, and therefore the point of friction, clash and struggle between the two
natures. It is to be set down categorically at once, however, that this clash
and struggle is not evil, but only the exertion of the tension necessary
to bring out to activity the latent energies of both soul and sense. (A whole
prodigious segment of religious theory and practice has gone awry, with fatal
consequences, as the result of regarding the contention of soul and body as
evil.) It is here on the plane of ordinary daily struggle and effort, and not in
ethereal palaces of mystical realization, that the battle is fought and the
gains made. No bliss will ever be enjoyed in Nirvanic heavens that has not first
been won on earth! For it is the function of the conscious mind, as the outcome
of its insistent, perennial divine urge and aspiration, to reach upward toward
the fuller and sweeter life of the supermind, to catch the purer tone of its
more exalted radiation of divine character, and to bring it down into its lower
station and hold it there. Ordinarily it is only at infrequent times that the
human is able to vibrate consciously in rapport with that upper divine. These
are the high moments, when we are wafted upward as by an afflatus, when
inspiration flows and light flashes. We may thereafter sink
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back into dullness, the glory departed. But having had one touch
and taste of paradise, we will not rest until we have more; and with each new
one there comes a greater skill to impound and hold the illuminated
moment.
That there is a mind in us pointing to the future is indicated
by what the eminent psychologist, Carl G. Jung, has to say in a footnote (p.
493) of his profound study, The Psychology of the Unconscious. He here
succinctly lays the foundation for the erection of the two unconscious
minds:
"Just as traces of memory long since fallen below the threshold
of consciousness are accessible in the unconscious, so too there are certain
very fine subliminal combinations of the future, which are of the greatest
significance for future happenings in so far as the future is conditioned by our
own psychology."
He says it is impossible for analysis to concern itself with
these intimations pointing to future happenings. That would be the task of "an
infinitely refined synthesis, which attempts to follow the natural current of
the libido." This, he says, is beyond us, but it "might possibly happen in the
unconscious, and it appears as if from time to time in certain cases significant
fragments of this process come to light, at least in dreams. From this comes the
prophetic significance of the dream long claimed by superstition."
He adds that "the aversion of the scientific man of today to
this type of thinking . . . is merely an over-compensation to the very ancient
and all too great inclination of mankind to believe in prophecies and
superstitions." There will be hearty agreement with the revulsion of the
scientific mind from age-long superstition and the gullible credulity of
uncritical masses, but the literature containing the authentic record of
prophetic dreams and premonitions is too great for denial of the possibility of
projections of the future into consciousness. We are not too well fortified with
a clear rationale of their occurrence, but it is certain that the future touches
us closely and now and again pictures from its panoramic screen
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pierce the curtain and drop down into the area of present
awareness.
Dr. Hinkle, too, speaks of the necessity of man's transforming
himself through the effort to follow the "transforming power within life,"
resident in the unconscious. She says that man "has now apparently for the first
time arrived at the borderland of that supreme necessity, self-creation, and
involved in his attitude towards this task lies his answer to the great urgent
question of the present time and all time--the future of humanity
itself."
The archetypal norms of divine thought implanted in the creation
and suspended above man's head, as it were, are to be projected downward into
conscious recognition in the minds of thinking beings. The first reception of
them is a matter of impression, much like a photographic print. But the firmer
fixing of them upon lower mind is effected through the operation of a very
wonderful law, the law of repetition. It gains and holds its possessions by
means of its power of retaining impingements made repeatedly upon it. It is
possible that it retains all impressions made upon it, even in the slightest
manner; but ordinarily, from the standpoint of known powers of memory, several
repetitions are required to fix an imprint indelibly upon its sensitive slate.
Repetition induces a sort of automatism in the memory. It is entirely akin to
the mind operating in children and animals, and is therefore not aided by the
processes of conscious intelligence, reason or will. It is just the power of
sheer automatic memory. It is grounded on repetition. What it hears or sees
often enough stays with it, having carved its form upon the "tablet of
consciousness."
The rationale and the sum of all progressive growth for man the
human, then, is the effort of his superconscious, the god within him, to project
downward from above the ideal realities of the noumenal world, the same being
the thoughts of God's own creative mind, stamp them upon the open consciousness
of the individual, and then fix them finally through the force of repetition
upon the
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subconscious level of habitude. The conscious mind,
Prometheus-like, catches and draws down a light from out the upper chamber of
the superconscious, ingrains it in its mentation by repetition, and thus finally
plants it firmly in the soil of the subconscious. Man is in this manner slowly
but constantly transferring bits of "heaven" down to earth, and holding them as
his permanent possession. Habit (from the Latin habere, "to have") is the
method by which we have something. But it is a matter of the gravest
import, whether in the end, owing to the hypnotic power of mental action, it is
not to be said that a habit is something that has us! "A slave to habit"
is one of the commonest phrases. The great majority of our actions in a day's
time are the automatic impulsions of habit. The whole structure of tradition and
custom is the product of habit, or the inertia that binds men to habits. The
maxims of old-fashioned character building, and much in educational procedure,
were based on the effort to form good habits or to cultivate the mind through
memory work.
Evolution proceeds as the conscious mind exercises its
mediatorial office of drawing down divine "fire" of wisdom and knowledge out of
the heaven of the overworld, the ideal empyrean, and passing it on down to the
custodianship of the subconscious, where it becomes automatized as part of the
built structure of the human. Physiology falls in conclusively with this
delineation, since it tells us that the autonomic nervous system, the organism
of the subconscious, is the apparatus that holds the impressions fixed by
habitual practice. It functions in the ganglia of the spinal cord, we are told.
These take over what the brain consciousness builds up by repetition.
Man's advance in evolution, as far as the attainment of higher
consciousness is concerned, consists, then, in the ability of the conscious self
to capture more and more of the superconscious potential, to repeat it
consciously, and so store it away as a permanent possession, an increment of
living gain. Each time he becomes capable of registering a higher note in the
scale of conscious values
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he takes a step up the ladder of evolution from man to god. He
is climbing up the Jacob's ladder toward the heavens, the locale of more vivid
reality.
There is a grand enlightenment for intelligence in the
consideration of the habit phenomenon in the human economy. Through habit, more
particularly and clearly noted in animals, in whom there is no free initiative
of new action by the deliberative reason, but seen even very generally in
humanity, life is able to achieve a close approach to invariability and
uniformity in its normal procedures. These traits may be assumed to be requisite
and indispensable in so far as the welfare of creature life may be dependent
upon absolute regularity. At any rate the genius that orders the universe has
evidently found it necessary to install regularity and uniformity into the
operative scheme, since they are most amazingly in evidence. The constancy of
life's procedures, movements, activities in periodicity and rhythm is the one
element in the creation that has so powerfully enchained the human mind. The
immutable repetition of cycles, the endlessly renewed alternation of activity
and rest, the diastole and systole of all pulsations of living energy in the
cosmos, have struck the thought of man with an overwhelming sense of the play of
divine mind in the phenomena of the universe. It is the feature that the human
mind builds upon in its determination that the universe is a cosmos.
Two items of knowledge, then, combine to instruct us further,
both as to the nature of God and as to his laws. The first is man's constitution
in God's image; the second is an immediate derivative of that, the corollary
assumption that if man is like God, then man's composition and functionism
supply to thought an analogical suggestion as to the make-up of God's being. The
astonishing inference then rises to conception that, as man has the three minds
or levels of consciousness, God must be constituted likewise! And a startling
formulation arises out of the parallel. It is the determination that what we
observe in the way of invariable natural procedure and style "the laws of
nature" are just the fixed habitudes of God's
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subconscious mind! They are invariable in their regularity
because sufficient of God's conscious energization has from the beginning been
expended in establishing them to make them automatic. They have by habit of God
become the actions of his autonomic "nervous system." Pope's astute discernment
that God is the soul of the universe, while "nature" is its body, must be given
the chance to register its full import here. Like us, God is spirit-soul-mind,
and all three ranges of consciousness function in his great body, the universe.
He, too, must be able to turn over the products of his present consciousness, if
conscious mind is the creating and ever recreating power behind the worlds, to
the automatic unvarying control of his "lower mind" resident in "ganglia"--the
suns--so as to free his conscious self for ever new exercise of desire and will.
The laws of nature, as to which we affirm poetically that the mind energies of
God uphold and perpetuate them, and which we declare would crash in chaos the
moment his mental concentration was relaxed, are evidently established habitudes
of his former conscious regimen of activity. They are immutable because they
have, through repetition, come under the control of a segment of divine
consciousness that holds an aptitude fixed upon it by initial impact and endless
recurrence. It lies below the realm of freedom. It can not exercise choice. It
obeys the will of the conscious part. It is the anima, the animal part of
mind, and its universal function is to repeat automatisms ingrained upon it.
When God says, in the Old Testament, that he will write his laws in our minds
and hearts, he is announcing the great principle here discussed. Little by
little he is able to communicate the transcendent principia of his exalted being
from the higher vibrational key in the gamut to the next lower stratum of his
organic being, and from that to the one below, until all creature life reflects
his nature and in miniature repeats his procedures. Thus his law pervades the
total creation. Our fixed systematic operations, such as pulse, respiration,
food intake and elimination, metabolism, cell decay and renewal, are all
operations that were once for a limited period consciously ordered and
directed
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by intelligence, but were later turned to automatic actions, to
free the conscious. These are the laws of nature operating in our bodies, as all
larger procedures are the laws of nature operating in the spacious reaches of
life beyond our little lives. In both cases they are under the control of the
never-failing subconscious. We think of God so constantly as Mind or Spirit that
we forget he has his body, which is the physical creation in the large. And that
body provides him with the "nervous" apparatus for a subconscious
activity.
This, in fine, elucidates to our puzzled minds why it is that
God can give his attention to the inconceivably vast range and multitude
of all his activities in all his worlds! They are under the control of his
subconscious. They do not require his conscious attention. For whatever
the word may conceivably connote when applied to the higher level of God's life
and being, they are automatic. Our little, though still marvelous,
automatisms are copies of his. We are made in his image. The profounder and more
real implications of this datum in the scriptures have never been taken at
obvious face value. It is the key to practically the whole science of human
understanding of life and its processes and phenomena.
It is a subsidiary reflection that it is therefore a matter of
inexpressibly serious consequence in the life of man, collectively and
individually, what activities of body or mind he chooses to make habitual. He
has the power of choice and initiative, and these are virtually the powers of a
god. If, through ignorance, which is his handicap from the start and hobbles him
in diminishing degree thereafter, he chooses the wrong kind of procedures, he
fixes upon his subself an inharmonious, pain-engendering routine. The outcome
must in all cases be suffering and misery. Human suffering has here its origin.
The chains of a bad habit can be broken only by resolute correction of the
addiction by conscious re-direction when the disease or corruption created in
the organism has brought the intelligence and the will in line with a better run
of conduct. Pain is the guardian angel that with inevitable certitude announces
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whether the ingrained habitudes produce in the organism a
life-sustaining harmony or jangle of death-bearing cacophony. In the end,
knowledge, requisite to the making of choices aright, is the indispensable
warden of human happiness. Pain is both our chief protector and our ultimate
educator. Without its timely signals we would be totally at the mercy of our own
follies.
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Through lack of this dual departmentalization or segmentation of
the unconscious by modern psychological science, vast confusion and much futile
groping have characterized the investigation and vitiated the conclusions.
Instead of only one unconscious, there are two. There are two levels, stories,
houses, realms of the unconscious. And it makes a world of a difference to which
one a phenomenon belongs, or to which it is assigned, in psychological practice.
The subconscious is unconscious, because it holds all that has once been in
consciousness, but has been relegated to the domain of the unconscious. Its
content may be good, bad or neutral. It may be the more recent acquisition of
what is fine in the way of new inculcation, or it may be the surviving memory of
past viciousness, or the possibility of its renewal. It may be sublime
philosophical beauty, or the grossest brutality. It is happily true, no doubt,
that in long course, as lofty sentiment and keener wisdom fix permanent habits
of virtue in the sub-area, long dormant bestiality and gross carnalisms will
atrophy off the sensitive plate of the lower mind and pass out into final
oblivion. At any rate they become more and more deeply "sub" and less readily
resurgent. As the poet has put it, the growth of man in righteousness and wisdom
will eventually "let the ape and tiger die" out of his scope of motivation.
Melchizedek, the king of righteousness, will gradually assert his rulership more
completely over the entire kingdom of consciousness,
"Till every foe is vanquished,
And Christ is Lord indeed."
Dr. Hinkle's discerning observations as to the basic cause of
neuroses, psychic disturbances and mental pathology need to be
erected into pillars of true science. So far from having their
causal origin merely in civil and social frustrations of sex yearnings
instinctive in infancy, the disturbances are due to frustrations of a far deeper
nature, inhibitions that root in profounder depths of the psychic constitution
of human life than merely bodily sexual satisfaction or its thwarting. The
restraints on sexual expression play their part, naturally; but this cause of
inharmony is slight and superficial in comparison with the more interior clash
between the god and the animal in man's sphere of consciousness. Mere sexual
repressions, though they are active agents in psychoses of lighter gravity, are
not the grounds of the more serious maladies of the mind. These are the
outgrowth of the thwarting by the lower animal personality and its propensities,
of the more vital inner efforts of the god above to adjust the habits and
mechanisms of the body to its evolutionary aims and trends. He is
destined to be the supreme ruler--the King, in the glorious language of symbolic
theology--of the natural man in all respects. When this first or natural man has
at last been raised in status and his dynamic forces refined and accommodated to
the services of their divine transformer, then he receives the evolutionary
reward for his faithfulness and obedience in the form of a grand enrichment and
enhancement of his own conscious powers. But until that happy stage is reached,
and from the start, he is by no means an obedient and willing subject of his
liege. As all the scriptures reiterate without end, he is a stiff-necked, a
stubborn and a rebellious subordinate. He must be gradually converted. His
natural instincts and propensities must be slowly transformed. They must be
turned away from the service of rapacity and self-interest over to that of a
communal fellowship with the other units of the life order. Organically he is
holding the supermind of the god in a prison, and it is only by converting his
gaoler that the god-soul can liberate itself from the trammels of the flesh and
assume full command within the sphere of the organic life.
The force of this "conversion" of the lower self "into the
likeness of" "the glorious body" of the higher self has likewise never
been
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seen in any adequate degree. The analogy with the great luminary
which is itself the mighty symbol of the divine self is the revealing talisman.
The manner in which the sun lifts up a lower coarse element such as water
furnishes the interpretative hint. The light and heat of the sun can not through
sheer mechanical force lift water upward. Sunlight has no arms with which to
scoop up the liquid. But it does lift up the water by the agency of its power
first to "convert" it from physical density to ethereal fineness and lightness
in the form of vapor, in which state its gravity is overcome and convection
carries it upward. A force of a "higher" range always has the power to sublimate
the substance of a thing of a "lower" nature. That which can not be done with
coarse matter in its denser composition can be done after the alchemy of
sublimation has been performed upon it. This yields for us a chemical and
physical representation of a great segment of the entire meaning of both the
theological content of the scriptures and the central core of psychological
study and science. The sun can cause water to rise after it has transformed it
into a sublimated state. Likewise the divine soul in man can cause the lower
animal nature to rise to the status and glory of the exalted human and
near-divine after it has transformed it by the continuous impingement upon it of
vibrations of finer nature. This is the interior meaning of all religious
"conversion" ever talked about in the theologies of the world. The soul that is
in man is here on the cosmic mission first to transfigure by sublimation the
coarser nature of physical humanhood and then to lift it up to a level of
harmonious fellowship with itself.
If a statement direct from the ranks of psychoanalysts
themselves were needed to confirm the averment that disturbances arise chiefly
from obstructions put in the way of the divine soul by the outer personality, it
is to be found in a brief sentence from Dr. Hinkle's book, already cited (p.
435):
"For it is a fact which psycho-analysis reveals definitely and
unmistakably that the actual disturbance of the individual today is involved
with the problem of the soul."
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She says again that the sum of man's psychological striving is
his effort to "differentiate himself from nature." This is wholly in
consonance with the gist of all ancient philosophy. But if it is his divine
intent to "differentiate himself from nature," whence comes this direction, this
bent, this pull to something beyond nature? From what part or element of his own
constitution springs this lift to a higher selfhood? It can come only from a
conscious intelligence within him that is already standing above the terrain of
the animal part. A thing of a certain nature can not lift itself beyond itself
by its own powers. It can be lifted to higher status only by the aid of a power
already higher than itself, which reaches down from above, clasps hands with it
and raises it up. Since man in his palpable physical selfhood is himself a
creature of the natural order, with material body as his ostensible being, it is
logically necessary that if he is to be differentiated from nature, to which he
belongs by virtue of his body, the differentiation must be engineered by another
part of him, not so palpable and ostensible, yet dialectically existent, namely
the immortal soul within him. Then, since this work of the spiritual man in
elevating carnal man to diviner kingdoms is the chief business that the total
man is to accomplish in life in the world, it can be seen that interference with
the program of its evolutionary errand will be a matter of central and crucial
moment and concern to the whole movement, and will therefore be the cause of
most serious disturbance in the smooth working of the internal economy of the
life.
Jung says that it is of the greatest importance whether the
libido is transferred or inverted. Nature, he writes, has first claim on man;
"only long afterwards does the luxury of intellect come." He has adduced the
very discerning observation that for the first thirty-five years of life the
individual is a child of nature, concerned and absorbed with the acquisition of
the things that give him a place of standing in the material world. In the
second period of thirty-five years he shifts his interests largely from material
matters over to the concerns of the mind and soul. This is oddly enough a
minia-
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ture copy of the life of the incarnating soul in its total
evolution in the human cycle. It is for roughly the first half of its immersion
in fleshly bodies working to establish its place firmly and stably in its
position of rulership of lower physical forces. During the latter half of its
career in the worlds it bends its efforts more largely and freely to the growth
of its own internal forces of intelligence and spirituality. Wordsworth writes
of the great and passionate interest of his younger life in the domain of outer
nature, and then of the "years that bring the philosophic mind." The allegorical
pictograph is even carried out vividly in the Gospel drama, in which Jesus, the
type of the divine soul, runs away from his mother (nature) at the age of
twelve, symbolic of completion, and devotes himself thenceforth to the "things
of his Father" (spirit).
Here and everywhere in the analysis there is disclosed the
important part played by analogy. Through the employment of this instrument
there is revealed what has so long lain in the darkness of nescience. Part of
the predisposing cause of the Dark Ages of medieval European history was the
loss, along with the refinements of symbolism, allegory and drama, of the
legitimacy of analogy as a truth-finding methodology. The price civilization has
had to pay for this dereliction of intelligence has been far heavier than anyone
has dreamed. It closed the doors of the mind against the most pellucid lens of
possible insight into profound truth. It thus aided the forces of darkness and
obscurantism in their ghastly work of bigotry, persecution and foul inhumanity.
Even yet we suffer through lack of it. We have been frightened
away from embracing it by the insistent cry that "analogy proves nothing." Let
the refrain be: Of course it proves nothing. It was never meant to
"prove" anything. It does not need to prove anything. Its function is not
"proof" but something possibly of far greater importance. What it is qualified
to do is to sharpen vision and quicken the mind to acuter perception. It is able
to point man's insight from the realm of the seen to that of things
unseen,--concepts, cosmic processes, laws, principles, categories. Had
scientists
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used the law of analogy they would have been prepared to find
without surprise that the atom, when discovered, would be formed over the
pattern of a solar system. If they followed the implications of analogy now,
they would know that death does not end the life of an inner principle or seed
in human beings, but that, like the acorn or any seed of a garden plant or
flower, this life-bearing nucleus will bring itself to a new period of organic
existence in a rebirth in a new cycle. Analogy is the one aid to seeing provided
for the dull human mind.
The strategic importance for psychoanalytic aims and practices
of clarifying the sharp distinction between the two realms of unconsciousness,
the sub- and the super-conscious, can not be overvalued. It will give the
understanding a closer grip on the apprehension of all ethical values, since it
will provide intelligence with the capability of rating psychic motivations in
the category of subconscious fixations, mere addictions of habit, or in the
higher category of fresh releases of insight and inspiration from the
overshadowing god. It is of vital importance to know whether they are the one or
the other. It will furnish the basis of a study of social and intellectual
mores in relation to the pioneer's flash of higher insight that would
dictate a change to new and freer standards. It would put in our hands the key
to the science of human well-being and happiness. It is the core of all problems
in the career of the individual.
Theology has been reduced to the status of an outcast, and
verily it is but a corpse of its once radiant significance. Yet its doctrines,
as still extant, are the empty forms of the prime truths so badly needed by
humanity. The great conflict so variously and vividly dramatized in the
scriptures between rebellious man and patient, long-suffering and at times
wrathful god, is the open sesame that exposes to sight the complexities of the
critical psychic mystery of man's being. The moral struggle within the breast of
man is the pivotal hinge of all understanding in psychology. It is grounded on
the real presence of the higher element, the god, in the human animal. As said,
this inner guest is on the way to become the pre-
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siding genius of the organism, which is a microcosm or miniature
reduplication of the macrocosmic universe. His reason, intelligence and wisdom,
as the King of Righteousness, are to assume governorship over the energies that
dwell in the "underworld" of the senses and the feelings, and which, lying below
the level of mind, are irrational and elemental. They move on instinct and not
on reason. Their range of expression constitutes that great "underworld" so
ubiquitously found in all the systematic mythologies of the past, that "nether
world" into which every divine hero descends, there to overcome the enemies that
hold captive the soul-maiden, the psyche, and lead her as his bride out of the
realm of lower darkness, of gloomy night and flitting shades. This is the rough
representation of the drama in folk-lore.
In theology, the sun-hero descends into the dark realms of
Hades, Hell, Sheol or Amenta, to visit "the spirits in prison" and to bring
light "to those that sit in darkness," or to awaken or revive those that lie,
like Lazarus, asleep in "death." For this darksome lower region is the realm of
the "dead," in which Pluto, Yama, Osiris or Loki rule. The blunder of the
scholastics in mislocating this Amenta, Sheol or Hades in mythology and theology
as elsewhere than right here in this world of living experience is one of the
crudest and costliest mistakes ever perpetrated. It has caused the untold
miscarriage of the knowledge that was designed to enlighten humanity along its
toilsome path of evolution.
The god-soul migrated to earth and took on a bodily incarnation
for the higher purpose of forwarding, under conditions most aptly ordained to
achieve the result, the growth of its seed potentiality into the likeness of its
parent divinity. If the general mind could once gain the ancient philosophical
understanding that these human souls of ours are integral fragments of the
mind-soul-spirit of God himself, seed units of divine consciousness, and that
they are here on their long mission of evolution in the return cycle to the
Father's mansions, earthly life would gain immeasurably in poise, equanimity and
happiness. This being their errand, and their own
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lives being internally activated by the pressure of this
consciousness by virtue of their sharing a portion of the divine mind itself,
their task is to see that this work is as directly and as efficiently carried
forward as may best be done. Antique documents indeed disclose that these souls,
on leaving their celestial abodes to become, as Paul says, "a colony of heaven"
on earth, expressly bound themselves by "broad oaths fast sealed" to descend,
occupy the bodies of a race of animal-men and strictly attend to the great
evolutionary business of refining their lower natures up to the point of highest
humanhood, or even to touch the level of godhood just beyond. The successful
performance of their mission would, as Plato's Timaeus sets forth,
graduate them into the ranks of the gods, with the crown of immortal life as
their guerdon. As has been seen, this aeonial work was to end with the weaving
together of "mortal and immortal natures" in one new man, the glorious
achievement of the atonement. "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and
evil."
Zealously, then, the divine soul incorporated in gross body
stands guard, as it more fully awakens, to conserve the best interests of both
itself and its animal servant, the body. When the waywardness of the
personality, or its ignorance of wise procedures, or its recalcitrancy, block
the way of progress along the normal path, or when sheer folly, or sloth or
stupidity threaten the success of the enterprise, the godly soul within must
assert its authority or register its protest. This it does in ways of
indirection and subtlety, but at any rate in a fashion to make its voice of
remonstrance heard by the lower self. Some form of inharmony, some form of
psychic disturbance, some pathological condition is engendered. This is to
impress the outer conscious mind. And as Dr. Hinkle asserts, the trouble lies
deeply buried in an internal impasse, which must be dissolved by probing after,
discovering and removing the real core of obstruction, the real nub of the
psychic problem. Psychoanalysis is acting wisely in using the symptoms of
disturbance as vanes of indication and diagnosis of the trouble in its deepest
aspects. The soul within, watching the outer man's hit-and-miss efforts, can
tolerate only so
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much aberration and loss of incarnational time and opportunity.
It is its pledged duty to see that the external life falls measurably in line
with a program that will best further the long-aim effort, or at least not too
seriously jeopardize the chances of success. Psychoanalysis, Dr. Hinkle says,
provides a technique by means of which the outer consciousness is aided in
coming to a recognition of a deeply obscured inward deadlock, and so is helped
to remove an obstruction to the development of a "greater self" within the human
constitution. Psychoanalysis is built, she says, entirely upon the laying bare,
or bringing to the surface, the unconscious motives and obstructed
purposes, different from and independent of those known consciously. This proves
to be exactly true. The majority of people remain ignorant of the genesis of the
psychic disorders within themselves, and there was no science of diagnosis and
discovery of the sources of disturbance until psychoanalysis came forward to
reveal that they were engendered by the innermost true being of the individual
himself, lying out of sight in the depths of the self and playing the role of
the "silent watcher" and the guardian daemon. We must become "introvert" enough
to probe deeply within the most obscure and hidden motivations of conduct and
feeling. How apt, then, is what Dr. Hinkle says on this point!:
"For the introvert's real values lie in the unconscious, in the
depths, and must be sought there and not in the world of sense."
This is to say that the supremely important, crucial and
decisive motivations that seize upon and direct the self to special exertions at
critical junctures in the life spring not from the vagrant and fickle desires of
the personality on the surface, but rather from what Maeterlinck called the
"inconscient superieur" and the "prospective potency" of the
unconscious.
It is indeed unfulfilled need and unsatisfied yearnings deeply
subterranean in the mortal constitution that give rise to neuroses, as Dr.
Hinkle so convincingly states. She rightly sees the needs and yearnings arise
from remoter sources within the psyche than
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the outer mind's sphere of consciousness. There must therefore
be postulated within man's constitution the presence of a mind or self whose
intelligence reaches beyond that of the brain. There must be predicated a knower
within the personality who projects his message and his wishes outward upon the
attention of the conscious mind. He may do this by symbolic hints, or by
precipitating a condition of unbalance and inharmony within the psychic
functioning of the whole person. The task or function of that more central power
resident "below the threshold" is to see that the outer personality maintains a
fairly close rapport, in motive, exertion and aim, with its own superior
purposes. If this is tolerably well accomplished, there is little need for overt
communication between the submerged monitor and the day consciousness. The
hidden god, called by the Egyptians Amen, "the god in hiding," rests content
with the progress made in the outer sphere of action. But if wreckage is
threatened or the outer faculties remain too long unawakened, the occasion
demands his interference, and protest must be made by way of a message in
symbolic language or by unhappiness generated to provoke inquiry, or new courses
of action and new exertions.
Dr. Hinkle says that the need of the organism is to win a higher
integration of its component elements. Seen from the ancient mount of
knowledge of man's composite nature, the phrase serves well enough to shape out
the truth of the case. Where the aim is, as in man, to "weave together mortal
and immortal natures," the successful outcome partakes of the character of an
integration. The practical thing accomplished is the harmonious accommodation,
under the laws of a harmony of relations little different from those that govern
the symphonization of musical notes through mathematically attuned vibrations,
of the energies of the two natures, until their combined expression effects a
concord instead of a discord. If this more lovely resultant is not achieved,
there is discord within the psyche and pathological instability or unbalance in
the outer person.
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As long, this discerning psychoanalyst says, as the
"higher psychological functions of
humanity remain bound in a crude, instinctive form, there will be neurotic
problems to face, for the whole effort of the human being is to transcend the
instinctive animal."
Here is the long unrecognized, unesteemed, ancient philosophy
and theology of wise seers of antiquity coming forth to the light of modern
perception after centuries of oblivion. But it can be released from the jargon
of technical psychoanalytic phrasing and expressed in the form of theological
dialectic. As long as the god is too crudely kept in "durance vile," in bondage
under the nescience, the lethargy, the brutish grossness of the purely animal
nature surging up from below, it will become restive and eventually throw the
organism into discordant states by way of remonstrance. Perhaps also it might be
expressed as viewed from the other side, that the coarse behavior of the
sensuous animal nature of the lower man, overriding and suppressing or blocking
the gentler small voice of the god, throws the relationship between the two
components into a painful tension of unbalance, creating a neurosis. It is
important to have Dr. Hinkle's own phrasing of this elaboration. She says in the
same passage (p. 328):
"The many aberrations and neurotic weaknesses, deviation from
the abstract called normal, all reveal in their very lack of fixed and rigid
forms, possibilities of development and transfigurations from the
un-self-conscious animal man to that highly conscious self-creative
man."
This is nothing short of splendid. As disease is a manifestation
of the forces of the organism struggling to regain a balance called normal
health, so neurotic disturbances are upheavals of internal or submerged native
forces of spirit striving to establish a harmony or balance termed normal mental
sanity.
There is warrant for subjecting this reference to "the
abstraction called normal" to a moment's closer scrutiny. Normality is by no
means a mere abstraction, though of course it is abstractly discerned. The
mental abstraction is the perception of a very real thing. It
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comes back again to the symbol of the "horizon" of Egyptian
literature and the "cleft of the rock" in Hebrew typology, as well as the "rib"
of Adam, generic man. (For the "rib" was properly a midrib, a line of cleavage
run down the middle of the unified being of God, dividing it apart into its
twoness of spirit and matter, male and female.) All life struggles to maintain
its organic existence on a line or at a point of exact equilibration between the
forces of spirit and matter. It ever stands and builds its bodies, its vehicles,
precisely at the point of neutralization between centripetal and centrifugal
energies, as witness all the stars in their orbits and the electrons in their
path and position around the central proton. The Egyptians magnificently called
the earth, on which such stabilization is achieved, "the pool of equipoise and
propitiation," or balance and final atonement. The ancient astrology expressed
the same idea by means of the sign of Libra, the balance. All life is eternally,
while in manifestation, being tried in the balance. It can, so to say, only
stand still and be localized as an existent thing when it is held firmly in the
immovable status between the two equally balanced opposite poles or pulls. It
stands at the neutral point of the tension. Says Emerson: "Man stands at the
point midway betwixt the inner spirit and the outer matter." Only when the two
energies of spirit and matter are equilibrated in one organism can the stable
permanency be gained which is requisite for the eventual copulation of their
opposing powers, to give birth to their "sons," the created progeny. The
Christos could not be brought to birth out of the body of virgin matter
(Maria) until that was held in stable relation to the power of the
Holy Spirit from above. So the allegory represented the Christ as being born in
a "stable." And once again a frightfully mangled allegory of supernal ancient
wisdom is redeemed from modern caricature of its original majestic
beauty.
So the human mind, in deepest reflection, has rightly conceived
a condition of mean balance between two extremes in every manifestation of life
and activity. It is Plato's splendid doctrine of the
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"golden mean." Life expression can be normal only when it is
poised at this point of equilibration between too much and too little. Plato
convincingly fixed the character of each virtue by placing it, when rightly
defined, at the exact point of balance between the excess and the deficiency of
the quality in question. Courage was the precise balance between foolhardy,
reckless daring and rank cowardice. This must be determined in the finale by
requisite knowledge of how much is too much or how little is too little. This
judgment, properly exercised, yields final truth, inasmuch as these
determinations are definitely those that must be made by all constantly. The
"normal" in all forms of human conduct is the most consistently successful
result of the best effort to establish those lines and points of precise balance
between right and wrong, good and evil, true and false, which according to Plato
and Socrates, are always resolvable to a merely quantitative measure of too much
or too little. Man is indeed being weighed in the scales of the balance and, in
Egypt's figurism, bathing in the "pool of equipoise."
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Another most vital determination reached by psychoanalysis and
well stated by Dr. Hinkle is that the crux of the psychic conflict in the human
breast is the effort of something deeper in the psyche than the animal feeling
"to transcend the instinctive animal." Again modern discovery has merely caught
up with ancient proficiency. St. Paul and Plato, Hermes and Orpheus, the
philosophers and the Illuminati, had long ago set down the terms of this
problem. They all delineated the moral effort of mankind under the terms of the
central situation, which set before the second Adam, the son of the woman, the
product of nature's second birthing, the aeonial task of combating, overcoming,
transforming and finally embracing in union the first Adam, natural man, of the
earth, earthy, carnal, sensual animal man. First comes that which is natural,
says St. Paul, then that which is spiritual. The natural is first on the visible
scene of creation, since the second or spiritual can supervene from out the
world of pure conscious potentiality into the world of actual conscious
existence only through the instrumentalities provided by the preceding physical
development. The body must be here before the royal guest from above can enter
as its tenant and use its agencies. Or, perhaps more scientifically stated, the
body must be here before the soul that is animating its growth can find the
proper channel for its expression.
The victory of the soul is won, then, by its transcending the
instinctive animal. "Instinct" is the form which activity takes in the animal
half of man under the impulsion of the automatism of the subconscious.
The animal lives under the dominion of the subconscious, since he is not yet
man, and man, from the Sanskrit man
"to think," is the thinker. The animal is not a thinker, except
potentially and rudimentarily. The body (animal man) is run by instinct,
unreasoned automatism. All the functions are governed by an automatic memory,
which does not know how to deviate, or can not originate deviation. All its
conscious energies or motivations lie below the level of reasoning mind.
The whole moral struggle in man is envisaged as the warfare
between the two natures, the imprisoned potentiality of soul wrestling against
the powers of flesh and blood to acquire dominion over them, to govern them
according to reason and to tame their fierce wild energies into the service of
divine law. To transmute their rapacity of selfish desire into the offices of
the law of love, to swing their jostling forces into a fellowship of the
elements, to make the organism a cosmos under law instead of a chaos of
unintelligent blind powers, is the cyclic assignment of the second Adam, the
Christ. Psychoanalysis has at last probed to the root of man's happiness and the
stability--or instability--of his psychic self in his great evolutionary labor.
And in doing so it finds itself standing side by side with the lost purport of
the revered scriptures of the race. Men of truly divine stature gave this wisdom
to the race in its childhood. They sought to embody it in the unforgettable
forms of universal mnemonics. The only unforgettable mnemonics are the forms and
phenomena of nature. The alphabet of the universal language of truth is composed
of the symbols drawn from nature. The great Bibles are works written in the
language of symbols, with allegory, fable, parable, myth, drama, number graph
and astrograph the primary elaborations. The tree, the leaf, the seed, the root,
the branch, the stump, the stream, the star, the sun and moon, earth and water,
air, fire, aether, the cross, the circle, the square, triangle, the arch, the
ark, the flood, the fish, beetle, cow, cat, dragon-fly, thunder, lightning, the
rainbow and a host of other forms and phenomena were the characters, the
expressive words, of that forgotten language.
Pause should be made to look at just two of these, water and
the
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fish. An enlightenment that is almost stunning in the depth of
its revelation of hitherto undiscovered meaning behind such a symbology is in
store for the investigating mind. The approach is through a statement in the
mythicism of archaic literature that the Sun-god, the Christos-Messiah,
specifically in Egypt Iusa or Horus, son of Osiris, had two mothers, of
various names. The hint was obscure and baffling until it was recalled that the
mother of life is ever the negative essence, matter (Latin, mater). It
was but a further step then to the realization that matter--as announced to us
in the first chapter of Genesis--is twofold in form or organization.
There is the firmament above and the firmament below. There are the waters above
and the waters below. (Water has already been disclosed to be the prime symbol
of matter.) As water can subsist in two distinct forms, invisible vapor and
visible substance as liquid or ice, so matter has evolved in two separate and
distinct states. It is first, in the inchoate state, purely essence, not
substance; only the potentiality of substance. It is inorganic, unatomic,
invisible, the "great sea" of material potentiality, mare, Mary. In this
state it is "the first mother," who generates in turn her daughter, organic,
atomic, structuralized and visible substance, the second mother. For she becomes
impregnated with the seed of spirit-mind and is destined to give birth to the
Christos in man's developed body. There is first, then, the inorganic or
virgin mother, unwedded to spirit, and the organic or wedded mother, who
finally produces the god-son. Born originally "of a virgin" any divine creation
or "son of God" must be.
In a flash it was seen that as water typified the general
all-pervading first virgin essence of matter, inorganic, the fish, as its first
and universal creation of an organic structural constitution, would stand as the
type of the second mother, or substantial matter. The Christ character in the
allegorical depiction, then, would be the "son of the fish," or of the
"fish-mother," not of the "water-mother." Imagine, then, the pertinence of the
discovery that many of the goddess mothers of Sun-gods or Messiahs were
actually
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styled "the fish-mother" of the Son of God! Atergatis and
Semiramus were particularly so named. Jonah allegorism was immediately at hand
to harmonize with the interpretation, as fabling the great fish that ingested,
then delivered at his proper destination, the Christos. Unquestionably "Jonah"
is a variant of the divine name, Jesus, which is found in some twenty-five or
more forms in the Old Testament. One of these is "Joshua," as to which there is
not the slightest possibility of dispute as to its identity with "Jesus." And
now comes an unexpected and astonishing further corroboration. Joshua is "son of
Nun," and Nun is the name of the Hebrew letter "N" and means, of all
things,--"fish." Joshua (Jesus), son of the fish, or fish-mother. And the Greek
world in the first three centuries of Christianity denominated the Christian
Jesus as Ichthys (Ichthus), the Greek word for "fish." Augustine
and Tertullian both expressly name Jesus as the great fish, and his followers as
the "little fishes," (Latin, pisciculi). Nor is this all--or the most
significant detail.
The astrologizing early mythicists allocated the birthplace of
the first or natural man in the sign of Virgo, the Virgin (matter), and placed
the birth of the second or spiritual man, "the man Christ," in the sign
directly, or six months, opposite in the zodiac, Pisces, a water sign. The New
Testament allegory uses bread and fish as the divine food that the Christ brings
wherewith to feed mortal man in order to immortalize him, in the "miracle" of
the feeding of the five thousand. The sign Pisces is already by name the house
of the fishes, but it was also termed, by association with the opposite sign
Virgo, in which the Virgin carries in her hand the great star Spica, "the head
of wheat" from which the divine bread was to be made, the house of bread. And
now comes the last tremendous revelation of the allegorical and non-historical
character of Biblical lore. "House of bread" in Hebrew is, as any scholar knows,
Bethlehem! There was no other place for the Christos to be born than in
"Bethlehem," the zodiacal "house of bread" and of fish. And, to round out the
thrilling denouement, the first chapter of Luke records Jesus' birth as
occurring just six months after that of John
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the Baptist, who expressly announces himself as playing the part
of the first or natural man, who must come first to "prepare the way of the
Lord," the spiritual Christ. Beyond any possibility of quibble these six months
in Luke's narrative must be interpreted as the half year on the zodiacal
chart and as understandable only thus, and in no sense historically. This is a
momentous disclosure of the presence of ancient astrological typism in the very
heart of the Christian Gospels.
But the crown of all this revelation is still to come. One finds
all these allegorical transactions already extant for thousands of years in the
literature of old Egypt, and there represented as taking place in Anu, most
astonishingly described in the Book of the Dead as being "the place of
multiplying bread." Could anything be more thrilling in the whole field of
Comparative Religion study? Jesus multiplied bread and so did Horus, his
Egyptian prototype. Horus was earlier Iusa (Jesus). Horus multiplied bread at
Anu. An ancient Greek or Egyptian "U" becomes "Y" when transferred to English.
And so these divine transactions occurred at the Egyptian Any, the house
of bread (and of fish, no doubt), and when the Hebrew word for "house," beth,
is added, the result is the Gospel Beth-any! As the spiritual man
goes down into matter in his incarnation, in the legendary and allegorical
conflict between the "two brothers," the spiritual and the physical men, it is
the spiritual that decreases and the physical that increases. When the nadir of
descent is reached (and "Sinai" means "point of turning and returning"), and the
reascent is begun, the reverse is true. It is then the first or natural man who
diminishes, while the buried spiritual genius germinates and increases. And John
the Baptist says: "I must decrease, and he must increase."
Likewise it was at Bethany that "Lazarus" was raised from the
dead by the Gospel Son of God. As, by reincarnation, a man is reborn and
resurrected to new life from the "dead" state of inertia under the lethal
dominance of the instincts of the flesh and this is accomplished by the new
projection of himself into body as his
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own son, so it is always the divine son who in all the
allegories raises his father from the dead. Could anything be more staggering,
then, than the discovery that "Lazarus" is an old Egyptian derivative, which
with the prefixing of the Hebrew word "El" for "God," and the Latin
masculine terminal -us suffixed to Asar, the original form of the
name of Osiris, gives finally El-Asar-us, or Lazarus! So the Christ of Egypt
raised from the dead his father Asar, or Osir-is. And this took place at Anu, or
(Beth)any.
The identity is even carried out to the point that there are in
both allegories the two women present, whose names reach similarity in the
Gospel Mary and the Egyptian Meri.
Converting all this, which flows forth from the consideration of
just two of the great letters of the ancient symbolic alphabet, over into its
reference to psychoanalysis, it is clearly enough seen to point to the "raising"
or increasing of the divine element, the unconscious in human life, from its
"dead" condition in its burial or immersing in the flesh of body. The carnal
nature that was strong at the beginning of the human cycle, while the spirit was
overlaid and rendered "sub"-active, must now decrease, while the unconscious
higher self, the savior and redeemer of its brother, must increase. The
development requires the growing domination of the lower by the higher. If the
lower is recalcitrant and blocks the "normal" process of the growth, there is
disturbance within the household of the psyche. Impasses, stubborn obsessions,
unrelenting strength of carnal desire, must be broken and dissipated, to let the
soul go marching on. It is clear as can well be that the diagnosis of psychotic
unbalance and instability must be charted as the complication resulting from the
body's, and even the mind's, interference with the ongoing of the soul. Neurotic
man is out of harmony with his own soul, is blocking the progress of the
"something beyond himself" within him toward its divinely ordained goal. His
condition indeed calls for reintegration. The ancients unreservedly declared
that this reorientation was possible only through philosophy, which was then
honored with the designation of "divine," as the philosophy that con-
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cerned itself fundamentally with the existence, functions and
welfare of the divine element in the human constitution, its descent into the
flesh and its redemption therefrom.
Life, for the purposes of its evolution having projected its
conscious units into immersion in the watery condition of physical
bodies--whence the sea as the symbol of life in flesh, and the "Red" Sea a
reference to the blood--apparently must use the outer physical as its ultimate
means for urging the necessity of corrections or readjustments within the sphere
of its corporeal domain. That is to say, that when there is a deadlock in the
psychic field, when the mind or the elementary instincts become set in rigid
postures that are out of accord with the interests of true progress, the spirit
within must break through or break down the imprisoning fetters by means of some
irruption or upheaval in the physical or mental organism. The inharmony
established by the wrong mental or physical habit will itself sooner or later
work its disruptive effects upon the outer vehicle, and thus call attention to
and enforce the needed adjustment. It is not at all out of line with legitimate
evolutionary economy to suppose that directive life would use the physical
instruments to correct the erring mental. It is the only available resort even
among humans to attempt to force a change of stubborn mental attitudes by an
assault on the body. There are junctures and situations in which nothing will
change dogged fixations of mind except an attack upon the body. The mind can
only be reached and influenced through pain or damage to the body. If obdurate
opinion or determination can not be changed by mental appeal, the only resort
life has is to strike at it through the physical. This alone may in such case
bring the mind around to reason. Life does use this method. And it can readily
be seen that this is the ultimate reason for wars. When all mental approach to
difficult problems proves unavailing, physical force is the only recourse. It
will be so until the race learns to be governed by its intellect and not by its
desires.
Psychic inability, nerve collapse, bodily illness are then the
out-
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ward symbols of the soul's discontent with the lack of true
growth that should come through the concordance of the outer bodily regime of
life with the far-projected cosmic interests of the soul. They should not be
treated as abnormalities to be immediately eradicated. It is a fine observation
of Chandler Bennitt in his valuable work on psychoanalysis, The Real Use of
the Unconscious, that the presence of a fear complex should not be treated
as a mere detrimental symptom to be swept away as quickly as possible or
exorcized by mental manipulation, without regard to what it reveals. Fear should
not be abolished until its prognostic message indicating what is at fault has
been rightly interpreted. It is a sign and index of maladjustment. The important
thing is to discover the defect and mend it, not to get rid of the symptom. Only
by such a right interpretation can it be abolished effectually.
These psychoanalytic considerations may not appear to be
directly connected with the problem of religion. Yet it can be asserted very
strongly that the whole problem of religion is resolvable into the terms of this
philosophical, theological and psychological background. For the latter stand in
immediate correlation with the focal point of all religion, which is the
relation of man, or of a man, to his God. Over this relation a thousand books
penned by Christian theologians and scholars have expended the most strenuous
energies of lucubrated dialectic in support of a thesis, believed to be the
particular gift or pronouncement of the Christian faith, that made man's
acceptance of and surrender to a Supreme Deity allocated vaguely in cosmic
heavens or seated somewhere "behind" all things, the pivotal element in his
soul's salvation. It is safe to say that this conception of the location, nature
and range of the Deity to which man stood in this fateful relation has been the
direct cause of more mental dereliction and psychic unbalance in the history of
the West for sixteen centuries than any other agency. Misconception and unsound
philosophy have presented their bill of costs to a civilization largely
motivated on their predications that is staggering in its total of wrecked
mentality, distracted individual life, eccentricity of be-
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havior and wide human wretchedness unequaled in the records of
mankind. That a civilization holding sway over hundreds of millions of persons
for some sixteen hundred years should have entirely misdirected the focus of the
psychic effort of its myriad following upon the wrong location of its guiding
Deity, both surpasses belief and defies the adequate telling. In the vast
aggregate of its wastage of human devotion, this must hold the palm for the most
colossal miscarriage of all history. Always the mind was directed toward a God
who was placed at the summit of the creation, supreme over all and of
inconceivable cosmic majesty and power. He was pictured and described as the One
great God of the universe. (Although it was usually contrived at the same time
that he should be represented as a Person standing in close and intimate
relation with each and every individual human, shrunken almost to the character
and proportions of a benevolent grandfather, with his one arm around one's
neck.) The God with whom man was called upon in all religion to align his life
properly was no God within reach of earth, but one governing the illimitable
reaches of cosmos and resident somewhere in inconceivable form and might and
majesty. He was a God whose beneficent attentions and ministrations poured upon
or into the human from outside, from above. It was almost blasphemy to
circumscribe the human conception of him to such form as could be thought to be
an integral and interior portion of the human himself. That he could be resident
within the boundaries of man's own nature and operative from within outward was
an idea that never came to maturity in the religious mind, albeit it did find
some expression in poetry. Perennially dominant in popular thought was the
notion that religion was the play of forces involved in the relationship between
the mortal person and his God whose residence was somewhere at the summit of
cosmic creation. Never was religion conceived to be the relation between man
shallow and man profound.
Lest it be charged that this characterization of prevalent and
traditional religion is a misstatement of the case, it is desirable to
cite
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a few out of numberless passages to support the description.
Here is Dr. Hopper (The Crisis of Faith, p. 226) saying, in reference to
a statement quoted from Emil Brunner anent man's being made in God's image, that
man manifests
"an existence which points back or refers to something else. . .
. Man's meaning and his intrinsic worth do not reside in himself, but in the One
who stands 'over against him,' in Christ, the Primal Image, in the Word of
God."
Here the Deity is not removed to cosmic distances but is still
kept out of the constitution of man himself, being allocated to the life of One
character in history. It is expressly declared that the power activating man's
salvation does not reside within himself. It is exterior. Again Dr. Hopper cites
Emil Brunner in the statement that God wills to save us not by "domestic," that
is, our own home or internal, power or genius, but by extraneous righteousness
and wisdom, which is not, says Brunner, a power welling up from within us, not
that which originates on our earth, but that which came down from heaven.
Therefore, he goes on, it is our plain task to look to a righteousness quite
outside ourselves and foreign to our nature. To this end it is first of all
necessary in the life of true religion that "domestic righteousness" should be
uprooted and external influx invited by an attitude of surrender and prayer for
help from God. God indeed stands so far remote from us that if we are ever to
gain his attention to our groveling appeals for mercy, it must be through (the
historical) Jesus, our intercessor with the otherwise inaccessible
God.
Then we have Matthew Arnold's famous phrase defining God: "a
power not ourselves that makes for righteousness." And here is Dr. Hopper again
saying that the true center of the self is not in itself, but lies in God. And
he defines true self-knowledge as the knowledge that not in ourselves is truth
to be found, but outside the self, in God. We are familiar with the
prayer-book's weekly confessional that "in us there is no soundness nor
health."
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In short, the power that man is to know, as his highest
culmination of certitude touching his eternal destiny, is that knowledge unto
salvation is not within himself, not even as an attainment, but must be sought,
solicited, entreated and beguiled unto him from divine sources outside himself,
who may be persuaded to vouchsafe it to him finally irrespective of his own
merits or deserts. All man's self-righteousness, even his whole offering of
himself in service to Deity, is profitless; it is as "filthy rags." Man can be
redeemed from his lost estate only by the free oblation of God's, or his Son's,
grace in his behalf. The outcome is surrender of man to faith in the Infinite
God and throwing himself on God's mercy. It is stated that man's only hope of
redemption lies in and through his relation to God, who is most positively
removed outside the pale of man's own constitution. A thousand citations might
be adduced to the same effect.
It is invidious, but necessary, to declare that all these
heaped-up asseverations as to man's dependence upon a deific power exterior to
himself could not have been written but for the fatal miscarriage of the
original Greek philosophic content of early Christianity. It can likewise be
asserted that one breath of restored philosophic wisdom sweeps them all forever
out upon the ashheap of obsolete rubbish. It is oddly true that, when rightly
understood, every one of the assertions under criticism is a thing of profound
truth, yet made disastrously, tragically false by a final distortion of its
meaning by the wrong allocation of the abiding place of Deity for man. It is of
course sublimely true that the pinnacle of man's self-knowledge is the
understanding that his true saving selfhood lies in his relation to God. But
calamity beyond estimate at once rushed in when ignorance swept away the
knowledge that the god with whom he can alone have fellowship had been placed in
immediate conjunction with his own life, embodied indeed in his own
constitution. What God hath joined together let no man put asunder. But an
ignorant and faithless theology did tear asunder what God and life had joined
together, and centuries of theological effort have been turned into a mocking
caricature of truth and sanity as a
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dire result. The upshot has been that an ecclesiastical power
for centuries dominant over the lives and minds of western humanity has
belabored its millions of deluded followers with the necessity of producing in
themselves a veritable psychological self-castration. It has persuaded, indeed
hypnotized them with the conviction that life had laid heavily upon them the
evolutionary charge of saving themselves (from horrendous eternal fate) by means
of a psychological operation the tools and instruments of which were not all
within the scope of their own endowment. It envisaged for them their
redemption from the direst of cosmic calamities through their consummating a
relation with a power which was in no way amenable to their own initiative or
control. It reduced them to the position of helpless, hopeless, groveling
cravens. And it turned their direction of effort away from, instead of focusing
it immediately upon, the power alleged to be their savior. Human culture at one
stroke plunged into futility and rushed toward certain defeat the moment this
twist in human understanding had been made. It seems quite past belief that it
could not be seen that the thousands of books and millions of sermons dealing
with the problem of man's relation to God would have had the entire crux and
dilemma of their difficulty immediately resolved in clear understanding by the
simple philosophical item that the God with whom man sustained such momentous
relation was all the while an integral part and portion of man's own
composition. So that when the problem by its accepted terms seemed to set man
over against an outside power called God, the difficulty in this across-the-gulf
relation could at once be clarified by the knowledge that the true situation did
not set man against an external power, but only set one element of his own
nature over against another equally his own. And astuter grasp of the whole
truth of the matter would have added the happier knowledge that even the
represented antagonism between the two elements within was only a dramatic mask
covering the real fact of the actual mutuality and entire beneficence of the
relation. The placing of God, as the power with whom man
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was to effect a relation of reconciliation and atonement,
outside the human breast and brain has been the supreme cultural
catastrophe of all history.
Infinite power and mind reside in the center of cosmos, surely.
And this mighty infinitude of power and intelligence, in its ordering of cosmos,
is perpetually affecting the life of little man. All things flow from it, and it
does impinge upon the world of mankind with the touch of its myriad forces. But
with that Infinitude, in Itself, and as a Whole, man has no relation, none,
certainly, that can be initiated by action from his own end. It is the sheerest
imbecility to predicate the subsistence of such a relation between minor man and
the cosmic God. God is present, as Emerson affirms, in all his parts in
every moss and cobweb. He is present in man and in all about him. But not with
God as a Whole and only with that unit in the life and being of each mortal,
does man stand in close and intimate relation. Only with the infant deity within
him can man have communion. If he can not recognize, cultivate and lay hold of
this much of Deity transcending his own lower animal nature, all his chattering
of rising to share the life of cosmic Godhood is tragic insanity. And the
presumption that such a communion was possible has bred the most frightful
insanity upon the earth.
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The sane approach to true understanding is through the
realization that God has implanted in each mortal man a seed fragment of his own
life. He has done his utmost to put himself within the inmost self of every
creature. This he can do and has done by implanting the seed potentiality of his
being in each one. More than this he could hardly do. He brake his own total
body into fragments and gave one of them to each of us. This he did as the one
sure way of dowering us with the capacity and capability of becoming his
immortal sons. He has made himself forever accessible to us by this impartation
of sonship, likeness of nature, adoption by him and final union with his own
being. Closer than this he could not place us or bring us. Better than standing
outside of us and listening to our beseeching, he placed an integral unit of
himself immediately within us, so that we could never be apart from him,
never detached from him.
How utterly fatuous, then, and what age-long heinous folly to
instruct millions to overlook the deity immediately resident within their own
native constitution, and direct piteous pleas up to heaven to draw God's eyes
upon them! The whole exertion of human devotion poured upward to God and the
human striving to reach God have been converted into fantastic fatuity by the
ceaseless prodding of the millions at the hands of ignorant priestcraft to scorn
the divinity within the human and to direct that human to look upward and
outward in search of the supreme and absolute God.
The return to sanity and the rectification of all inept and
withering stupidity in this connection must come through the recognition,
regained from ancient knowledge, that while every assertion as to
the dependence of man upon God is true, vitiation of the meaning
must be obviated and thrilling release of power restored, through the knowledge
that the relation between the two elements is a transaction that takes place
wholly in the interior of man's own life. It transpires within the arena of
man's own consciousness, not being a contact between the man as a whole and
another power in no way appertaining to his scope of being. Man must come again
to the possession of the self-knowledge which assures him that both the human
and the divine elements are within his own range of cultivation. True it must be
for him that he can do nothing without the help of the divine power. The
exertions of his merely human self are in a very real sense futile,
without the saving grace of the god. In a poetic sense they are "as filthy
rags." But both the natural man and the spiritual man are ingredients of
himself! The deity that is at hand to save him is "domestic." It
is not extraneous. That it is has been the fatal falsehood and sad miscarriage
of Christian doctrinism. It has been no less than devastating, calamitous.
Psychoanalysis, arm in arm with ancient philosophy, comes
forward now to correct the falsehood and place man's redeemer once again within
the close reach of the mortal himself. It comes to make God directly accessible
to man again. And it shows how man may reach him without the abject and
stultifying "surrender" of his humanhood, as the price of buying "grace" from on
high. How far afield from truth and sanity must be that religion which preaches
that God would be at pains through an evolutionary effort covering millions of
years with billions of his creatures to build up such an agency of ongoing as
the human consciousness and its human powers, and then demand that for further
advance at the very time when that consciousness and those powers are gaining
strength they should be surrendered back to him or thrown away as useless! If,
however, it is made clear that in the turn of the cycle of growth, in the
changing relation between the two elements of himself, evolution demands that
the human side of him be subordinated to a
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place of subserviency to the divine part of him, then
understanding can prevail and sanity and intelligence can direct the movement.
The theology of "surrender" can then be held in true balance and not felt as a
tearing of the self apart. It will indeed be seen in its true light as a more
stable integration of the self.
The theological writers have used the word "man" or its pronoun
"he" without regard to Paul's high-pitched shout at us: "Know ye not your own
selves, how that Jesus Christ is within you?" Likewise they have ignored many
other scriptural statements that tacitly or avowedly scream the same mighty
truth at us. Always the insistent exhortation delivered by priestcraft to
countless laity was and is that man should obliterate his humanity in its
entirety, that he should repudiate the whole of his nature, both his meanest
and his own best, and, rejecting himself as a lost creature, turn completely
away from himself and toward God. And this God was unfailingly pointed to as
lying outside of, above, beyond him in infinite transcendence. Even when writers
speak of the necessity of man's self-transcendence, they merely imply the
transcending of himself as a whole through the agency of God's influences
exerted upon him from outside, and not initiated (unless by frantic plea) by man
himself. They never mean that man himself should by his own exertions transcend
himself, or that higher man should transcend lower man, all within the area of
his own capabilities. It is even asserted that God's agencies on man's behalf
begin where man's resources end. Even with Plato's categorical assurance in the
Timaeus (which was for centuries until the coming of Aristotle's works
the main light of Christian scholastic exegesis and theology) that God had
implanted in each human the seeds of his own imperishable divinity and indeed
given his instructions to those conscious units of his own being ere they were
dispatched to earth to be the souls in mortal bodies, Christian understanding
never clearly grasped the implications of this anthropological datum so as to
spread the absolutely crucial intelligence that it was only the mortal part of
the dual creature, man, which was to be put off in
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proportion as the immortal part was engrafted upon the stem of
life.
It is a sad comment necessarily made on Christian theological
ineptitude that while uttering the very words of the sublimest truth, it still
totally missed the ultimate and vital truth of the language. Never in all
history has the shell of the truth been preserved and the kernel so completely
lost as in Christian doctrinism! Here is Augustine, filled with the sturdy
wisdom which he had gained in Manichaeism and while sitting at the feet of
Plotinus, writing the lofty truth (De Civ. Dei, XIV, iv):
"From the soul and from the body, which are the parts of a man,
we arrive at the totality which is man: accordingly, the life of the soul is not
one thing, and that of the body another: but both are one and the same, i.e.,
the life of man as man."
With the reservation that of course Augustine does not mean to
wipe out all difference in nature, function and attributes between soul and body
in his assertion of their identity, here is a Christian statement of the grand
truth.
Let us put after it, for comparison, the passage written in
reference to Augustine's statement, from the pen of a modern writer making an
unusually strong apologetic for the Christian system. It is from Dr. Hopper's
The Crisis of Faith, p. 224:
"This definition regards man as a unit, as a person, as a
complex whole--of body, soul and spirit. It is constant in the Christian view of
man. But it is formal and structural, and its significance does not acquire its
full import until this unit, man, is given a positive orientation towards God,
the world and his fellowman such as we find in the Biblical view of man as an
image of God."
Here is truth, as far as words go, but still the total
antithesis of truth in ultimate mental rendering of the meaning. To be sure, the
significant import of the threefold constitution of man does not come to view
until the proper "orientation" of the elements toward each other is effected.
This is considered by the writer of the passage a point of absolutely vital and
final determination. Yet it adds
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not a whit to what is already implicit and even naïvely seen in
the sheer statement of the tripartite composition. If man has three parts the
simplest intellection must assume that the interrelation of the three is the
central thing to be known about them. This is almost childish in its rudimentary
character. But, missing this naïve discernment, the writer goes on to display
his failure of comprehension of the whole grand import of it all by asserting
that the relationship between the three component elements in man comes to no
significance of value until another relationship, introduced abstractly from
outside and superimposed upon the already total nature of threefold man, is
postulated as the central fact of ultimate and saving import! This is to charge
that the equipment which life has evolved in man and put into his hands for
achieving his evolution is not adequate for the purpose. Life equips man with
the means and instrumentalities for his progress towards life's designed ends
and confronts him with the necessity of forging ahead, with dire punishment the
consequence of his failure. Life holds man responsible for failure in the use of
the equipment provided. Yet, declares the voice of Christian theological
lucubration, man's most sincere and successful endeavor, even his complete
fulfillment of his effort with the tools provided, is failure and defeat. His
entire discharge of the evolutionary task set before him is still nothing either
to his credit or to his victory. He is a miserable beggar still, and if not
rescued, without the least suggestion of his merit or demerit, he is lost. To
such unconscionable miscarriage of sense and logic is Christian theologism
driven by its failure to localize deity within the pale of man's
equipment.
This is not to deny for a moment that there does subsist a
relation between threefold man as a unit of being and the Power manifesting
outside his life in the world about him. Every conscious unit of life or being
bears a relation to all other units and to the body, mind, soul or spirit of the
Whole. And this relationship is not "domestic," but is "extraneous," as
Emil Brunner claimed. But man has no known means of exchanging ideas or
maintaining psychic,
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that is, mental or spiritual, communication, as between one
consciousness and another, with the God-mind that is the central creative power
behind the whole cosmos, regarded as external to himself and treated as a unit
consciousness. This supreme mind-power is indeed "described" by every great
philosopher in world thought as the Unknowable. It is the Infinite. So utterly
inaccessible is it to man's puny mentation that even his attempt to conceive of
it is pronounced futile. How infinitely more futile his effort to communicate
with it, as an organic personalized intelligence, on the basis of any ability to
speak to it or to apprehend its language or thought! That man can "talk with
God" in any such sense, or that this God personalized himself to "talk"
to Moses (regarded as a man, and not man generic or collective) of old,
in any sense conceivable to the human mind, is quite a monstrous absurdity. Sane
human thinking has never accepted it. Rightful conception of what Biblical
allegory means is made possible only when ancient philosophical
constructions are apprehended and in their light it is truly seen that the god
(or seed projection of God) with whom man can communicate is that unit
fragment of the divine mind or consciousness which has been placed within the
constitution of the individual man in its universal distribution among all
humans. God placed this unit germ of himself immediately within the nature of
man, for the very purpose that his own total consciousness need not pay
attention to the infinite myriad needs of the countless creature lives. The idea
that--as expressed in Christian literature throughout the centuries in
numberless instances--an individual human can engage the whole attention of
God on his cosmic throne, considered as the grand unit Total of organic
consciousness, is surely the "all-time low" in mental imbecility. There are no
words fitly to characterize its folly and doltishness. It is the supreme
"dunciad" of history.
Nevertheless it is still sublimely true that God has provided a
way by which a portion of his consciousness is in attendance upon
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the immediate needs of every creature. Only it must be conceived
and understood with philosophical rationality and not simpleton folly. It must
be understood in the way in which it is true and not in the supposititious
method of its impossibility. God is an ever-present associate and help in
trouble for every one of his creatures, by virtue of the fact that he has
already taken the measure of placing a unit portion of himself, with the whole
of his being potentially latent in it, within the very organism of the creature.
He has sent his "sons" forth to carry out his work in creation. They are of his
identic nature, one with him, and are in him as he is in them. They are
consubstantial with him. Sonship is theirs through the sheer fact of their being
seed emanations or generations from his own body. They are indeed his own life,
projected out from unity into multiplicity. As the Greeks so clearly expressed
it, God distributes his divine life among all his creatures, since a
creature is such only because a unit of divine life has generated
him.
The ancient sages, knowing this, held it to be blasphemy against
God (or the god) for man to "worship" any power outside himself.
Christianity has wrecked this magnificent perspective and has stultified an
enormous percentage of the sincerest effort of the Occident for sixteen hundred
years, by directing man's conscious aspiration for "God" outside the field of
his own area of control. The havoc and wreckage from this misdirection of
serious endeavor in western world history is past calculation.
To deny the immanent presence of God's own life and mind within
the core of man's being is flatly to reject the basic teaching of every religion
that has inspired the soul of humanity through all time. It would be to make
meaningless the very name of Immanuel, God with us, God dwelling in us. It would
reduce to nonsensical babble the half of all religious philosophy, the principle
of God as immanent deity, and further it would fly in the face of a positive
statement of those scriptures on which the whole structure of Christian
systematism rests,--the Bible. For in the Book of
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Ecclesiastes it is unequivocally
declared that the soul is from God. At death, says the Speaker, "the body
returns to dust and the soul to God who gave it."
As a disastrous consequence of Christian misconception of the
lucid ancient meaning of the doctrine of the immanence of God, there has been
unduly prevalent in all Christian history a chronic hesitancy to commit the
governance of man's life and the issues of his "salvation" wholly into his own
hands. The strength and persistence of this attitude furnishes all needed proof
of a calamitous miscarriage of precious truth. For it bespeaks only too loudly
that the term "man" connoted not man containing God, but man devoid of God. If
man of himself could do nothing to effect his salvation, this very predication
could be made only on the assumption that his nature included no part of God's
presence in him. There has been a fear of letting man stand and wage his
evolutionary battle alone. Always the road to a safe retreat was kept open, so
that in case of dire need he could fall back upon and receive help from God, the
great power transcending him. The half-timid reminders that God is ever present
in his entire creation were minimized, if not positively negated, by the
ever-resurgent asseveration that of himself man can do nothing. God in the end
must elect to save him, and "grace" is a voluntary free gift from God. Man can
neither earn it nor demand it. He can only beg for it. All of which blandly and
blindly ignores the hub truth of the whole situation, that God has already
placed all of his power that the personality of man can hold directly within his
organism and all that man needs to do is to awake to the fact of its presence
there and to learn how to utilize it to highest practical advantage.
The glaring fatuity of the traditional Christian position is
seen in the consideration that from the premises of the problem, the given terms
of the situation from the outset, it is a chimera of ignorance to assume that
man can stand alone, actually cut off from divine influence. It is now
and ever has been impossible for him
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to stand apart from and bereft of God's presence. For one half
of him is God. As he can not dispossess himself of one half of his
organic selfhood, and can not dismantle the structure of his being, he simply
can not stand without God. For God is not only in him from the beginning, but
half of himself is God. To stand outside of God one would have to destroy
oneself. And so he never needs to go outside himself to find God. Every religion
above coarse animism and fetishism has in perpetual chorus exhorted humanity in
its search for God to cease looking outward and to probe ever more deeply
within. This is so true that all too much of religion has run into exaggerated
introversion, where it has grown moldy and sickly. The argument here is
categorical and not debatable. The testimony is uncontestable and its meaning
unequivocal.
This gross distortion of Christian theology which took the
conception of its millions of devotees as to the accessibility of divinity from
its true location within the soul of humanity and placed it afar in cosmic
heavens, has been a predisposing cause, no less than colossal in effect, of
untold suffering in Western life. It has indeed been one of the chief
ingredients in the fear complexes besetting Western cast of mind, and has under
our very eyes led myriads down into mental unbalance and neurotic derangement.
Abnormal religiosity is credited statistically with sending more inmates to
mental sanatoria than even sex abnormality.
Dr. Hopper concludes an unctuous passage asseverating man's
final dependence upon God--conceived as outside himself, since anthropomorphized
and personalized in the Christ of the Gospels, a historical person--with the
sentence (The Crisis of Faith, p. 226):
"Outside of Christ there is no humanism, properly speaking, but
only a perverse humanity."
Humanism, he argues, can not be the true basis of philosophy,
because in the ultimate man must look above, beyond, outside himself, for the
only real ground of his redemption. Yet this is said seriously, in spite of the
fact that this author has written elsewhere
132
a sentence that negates and falsifies the one just quoted--if it
is true (p. 235):
"The self is a synthesis of the finite and the
infinite."
The latter is a true and well-knit declaration. And it throws
every word of the first statement into untruth.
Humanism is in the end the only basis for a rational and
correctly grounded philosophy open to man's acceptance and operation. If all
the elements of his problem are not within his conscious control--if a
single one, and that the most vital of all, is not within his prerogative, but
lies outside and beyond his reach in a distant God, then man is nothing but a
marionette with the wires of his activities pulled by a deus ex machina,
and his own effort does, truly and horrifyingly, not avail him a
whit. But this is unthinkable. The human mind must believe that its own
human effort counts. Humanity would be engulfed in perpetual despair and life
would be a persistent mocking irony, cruel and pitiless, if the mind could
believe that effort counted for nothing. To deprive the human life of the
sense of its counting for ultimate good or evil in every act, since there is the
ingrained consciousness of moral responsibility in every act, would be to rob
life of the fundamental dignity appertaining to it. For without accountability
for our acts there could be no groundwork for dignity. The entire ethics of
great revered religious systems would be a laughing travesty if human effort did
not avail. For every such system exhorts to righteousness and outlines the
penalties flowing from unrighteousness.
But the humanism that should replace a dependence upon
transcendental deity must be one that does not leave God out of the human
constitution. The crime of orthodox religionism is in tearing God out of
the human organism; the crime of equally blind humanism is in leaving God
out of it. The first puts deity in the wrong place; the second omits it
altogether. There can be no humanism, but only half-humanism, or more definitely
animalism, if God is left entirely out of the situation. More than the
animal-
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human must be recognized in the definition of man. The
divine-human must be admitted. Taking Dr. Hopper's and Augustine's own words,
that man is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the animal and the god,
meeting on the plane of the human, then true humanism becomes the proper name
for the philosophy that unites all the essential elements of the total problem.
So that man need not go out of doors to achieve his proper and salutary
alignment with the ascending scales of reality.
It can so readily be seen how the whole structure of the
ethico-spiritual problem has been contorted into an endless tangle of semi-true
and semi-false presentations by the mere failure to know and concisely
distinguish the two sides of the duality in man's make-up. It has arisen because
theologians continued to place God outside of man, despite all the many
categorical assertions in the sacred scriptures of the world that he was an
element within the area of man's own conscious being. To aver that man is a
hopelessly lost creature, enmired irredeemably in the sin of his own fallen
nature, and that he must go out and seek God upon whom to anchor securely the
hope of his salvation, is precisely like hypnotizing a person and telling him he
must go find his hat, which he has forgotten is on his head all the
while.
The Hindus have an allegory of the gods in the beginning of
human creation. God had agreed to grant his immortal and divine nature to man,
but in order that man should learn to value these great gifts at their true
worth, the question arose, how the supernal gift should be communicated to him
and where located, so as to be accessible, yet not too easily. One of the
celestial hierarchy suggested that it be placed on the highest mountain top,
where man would have to exert himself strenuously and climb high to obtain it.
Another ventured to name the depths of the sea, where great ingenuity would be
required to discover it. Finally God himself settled the question: "We will put
it in the very last place he will ever think of looking for it--in the hidden
depths of his own being."
Of all religions Christianity has been the most ludicrously
self-
134
duped. It sends back an echo of lying mockery to Paul's ringing
shibboleth, "Christ in you, the hope of glory." Christianity is far more
harlequin than Diogenes looking with a lantern to find an honest man. It is
going about looking for the lantern which it is already carrying.
Jesus said peremptorily, Ye shall have no need of the sun to
shine by day, nor the moon by night, for--ye have light in yourselves! "Let your
light shine." Bring it out from under the bushel of inhibitions and obscurations
imposed on it by the carnal nature and set it on the hilltop of your own being.
Ye are the light of the world; but how great and fatal the surface
blindness that fails to recognize the light in its shining!
Perennial obtuseness has marked the effusions of pious
theologism because in advancing predications concerning the relation of man to
God, the word "man" was used in a sense which from the start abstracted the
divine half of the synthesis of god-man from the total man. This left man
standing as mere animal, which of course needs to look upward to God for
evolutionary help. But man is not mere animal. Let Plato reassure us: "Through
body it is an animal; through intellect it is a god." What can be the meaning of
the many scriptural passages which say that the sons of God came down to earth
to share our mortal nature, if not that they are incorporated with us in the
same organism? Had the true synthetic conception of man, as embracing (the germ
of) deity in his own composite entification been held intact, the entire course
of Occidental history, which has been a holocaust of frightfulness under
Christian guidance--indeed under Christian compulsion--would have been charted
over happier pathways.
A revered scripture asks: "Who by searching can find out God?"
Yet a sacred tome of the Hindus with equal pertinence places God closer to us
than our very flesh: "Closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet."
Laplace said that he had pointed the most powerful telescope into all parts of
the heavens and no trace of God could be found. Rather should he have pointed
the instrument
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in the opposite direction, not to the outer objective world but
to the inner subjective one. The reason Laplace did not find God with the
telescope was that he looked for God under a wrong description. Of course he did
not find the anthropomorphic Personage he pretended to be seeking. Yet he was
seeing God all the time, seeing his outward body, or seeing him as Emerson says
we see him, in every blade of grass. No less do we see him in both the
worthiness and the ignobility of human thought and action. This, of course, is
in the universal sense, which takes the cosmos as the personality of God and the
whole as his life. More specifically, yet just as truly, God is twofold, like
his reflection and miniature, man. He is mind and he is body. But it has been a
universal habit of human thought to demean his body, the physical, the material
side of life, while glorifying the "spiritual." In this general sense, then, the
things seen and manifested are his body, as Pope put it, and the unseen order
and movement are his mind at work. But if God has a body, of which solar and
stellar systems and galaxies are the cells and organs, it is, according to human
modes of conception, no less proper to say this is God than to exclude it from
the definition and description of him and to say that only his soul is he. When
we see a man coming down the street, we say, There is the man, or That is the
man. We do not make an arbitrary distinction between his physical and his
conscious self, accepting the one and rejecting the other. We take him as the
man, body and soul. Likewise did Plato, Augustine and the wise ones of old. Not
until errant modern conception takes him in the same way, as the synthesis of
his two--or three--natures, including both his animality and his divinity alike
and wholly within the scope of the term "man," will tragic chaos in mortal
thought be diminished. When that happy amendment of bad philosophy is
consummated, there will be an end to the groveling pleas from morbid and mawkish
religiosity for man to surrender his inherent dignity and to deny and scorn his
own powers to climb the evolutionary ladder. The corrupt Christian theology,
while it has out of one side of its mouth claimed the
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exclusive distinction of being the religion that has proclaimed
the dignity of man the individual, has out of the other corner with pitiful
effectiveness crushed that very dignity by abstracting the divine leaven out of
man's mixed composition and by beating down his self-sense to the abject level
of the worm. This historic hypocrisy and duplicity of Christianity lacks little
of being the most hurtful disservice rendered to the race by any religion. When
corrected, no longer will it be the sickly fashion to preach to man that he must
be saved by God, externally. Instead he will be told that the man of him will be
saved by the god of him, and the face of humanity will at once be irradiated
with the benignant glow of a new understanding. His mind will be redeemed from
its jangling discord with truth to a grateful and renewing harmony with
it.
When to this readjustment in his conceptual life there is added
the discernment in psychology that man's conscious is the living moment between
his stored past and his potential future, that it is open at all times to the
ingress of motivations from both sides, then also will sane comprehension come
to birth and a new range of intelligent government of psychic states will be
brought under conscious control. At last there will be evolved out of the depths
of good human intelligence the more specific technique of the god's control of
the animal in the human breast. People will be freed more and more from the
devastating sweep of massive emotionalism misdirected by bad philosophies, and
will more soberly, yet more happily, place the hand of philosophical wisdom at
the helm of their life direction. They will know that deep within them dwells
the unconscious, with its greater wisdom available for their guidance, if they
learn the better to lure it down into the conscious.
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There is a strange corollary that runs with the recognition of
the dual segmentation or composition of man's nature. Psychoanalysis has brought
out some aspects of it. The duality manifests in a rather remarkable series of
correspondences between the phenomena on both sides.
It can start from Paul's declaration that the natural precedes
the spiritual. "First that which is natural, then that which is spiritual," says
the Apostle. As must obviously be the case, the body of God must be formed and
in function before his spirit can manifest its life in any given area of
creation. Spirit must be instrumentalized or implemented if it is to create and
animate concrete worlds. It must first form its instrument with and through
which to work.
The clear intimations from these reconstructions of ancient
wisdom following its fatal mutilation at the hands of medieval benightedness
constitute a new mandate for all true religion. The clarified knowledge provides
the magna carta for a religion redeemed from psychic charlatinism and
sanctified hypocrisy, from bigotry, nescience and insincere motivations, to
become again, as of old, the moral and spiritual beacon of mankind. The
new-found correlation or kinship between the modern discovery of the unconscious
and ancient philosophical and psychological principia invests religion once
again with dignity and with a sanctity that springs from recognition of the
deeper intrinsic values now perceived to lie within the psychic area. The
ultimate criterion of sanctity is always that of utility or beneficence for the
whole advance of an evolving entity toward its destined goal. Things are not
sanctified merely by being held in traditional and often artificial
awesomeness.
They become sacred by being found contributory to values rated
high in the economy of most enduring good.
Foremost of all among the beneficial agencies which the combined
new and old psychic sciences now place afresh at the service of mankind is the
understanding of the vital technique by which religion must work pointedly and
not diffusely toward its high ends. The nub of a religious striving that will be
efficient to the highest degree is now indicated as centered in the relation
between the conscious and the superconscious. This is the chief point and nodal
focus at which the effort toward a spiritual uplift of the individual must be
directed. For here is the locale of the great aeonial Battle of Armageddon,
which the Egyptians so astutely allegorized as being fought at the meeting-point
between the subconscious and the superconscious, the "horizon" line between
them. Progress and well-being will henceforth be measurable by the amount of the
potential quality of the superconscious or divine nature which can be brought
down "out of heaven" by the conscious, incorporated in its daily program of
self-directed activity and made a permanent possession by transference through
habit to the custody of the subconscious. If man does not wish to remain bound
in the automatic unconscious of his animal mentality, he must bestir himself to
throw off old habitudes and elevate the tenor of his life by bringing down more
luminous and more dynamic potential from the god-ego dwelling in the area of
higher frequencies of vibrational consciousness awaiting the perfecting of his
receptive capacity.
The Old Testament Psalms and Proverbs and the New
Testament books alike strike hard at the human vices of sloth and lukewarmness.
The exigencies of the soul's incarnational situation and the terms of the
covenant entered into with the higher deity before descending alike demand the
ego's close attention to the evolutionary mission he came here to discharge. The
old books continue to insist that the thing is urgent, that opportunity passes
with time and that there are tides in the affairs of evolution that can not be
missed
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without having penalty. Disregard of opportunity will entail
serious consequence. One is enjoined to be "diligent in business, fervent in
spirit" in serving the Lord of higher consciousness. The business of the inner
mind is paramount in the enterprise. The great human ordinance of the Sabbath
was instituted to the end that one entire day in every seven should be devoted
to the interests of the presiding genius of the organism, following six days
given to the secular matters pertaining to the physical life. A new light indeed
might creep over the face of humanity if this one day was truly consecrated, not
to morbid sentimentalism and groveling pietism but to philosophical
enlightenment and the combined ministration of intelligence and beauty. For
"without vision the people perish," proclaimed the prophet, the true-speaker of
old. The pathway to more radiant and more abundant life runs in one direction
and along one fairly narrow track. It runs atop the ridge of open consciousness
lying between the subconscious and the superconscious. Only on that path has man
accessibility to the god. The only true and right felicity for the mortal lies
in opening as widely as may be the highway between his mortal self and the deity
who has, in a dramatic sense, condescended to come to take up residence in the
upper reaches of his demesne. The only or at least final criterion of culture is
the degree to which the conscious mind can lay itself open in ever more expanded
receptivity to the vibrations of the superconscious. These are always pitched,
so to say, in the octave immediately above its ordinary or habitual range.
Whatever technique will be found to govern the development of this enhanced
capacity or this high art will be the most "practical" skill and employ the
greatest genius in all the area of life. It will embody the principles of the
science of true culture. For it will empower its practitioner to place himself
directly in touch with the flowing currents of both meaning and value, under the
influence of the most dynamic release of vital quality that life can give to
man. It is in truth man's communion with God.
It must never be forgotten, however, that the god himself
is
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climbing the ladder of evolution, the same as is the human and
the animal. The poverty of modern knowledge in the field of anthropology
consists mainly in the total want of understanding that man is not a simple unit
of organization, but is in reality a composite creature, compounded of flesh,
feeling, thought and spiritual will, each necessarily subsisting within the
organism by virtue of a body of material fineness or coarseness exactly
constituted to express its vibration of life. The highest grade of this
hierarchy of being is of course the leader and the king. And he is far ahead of
his companion travelers. He stands in the higher grade in the school of
evolution. Where he stands his younger associates will stand later on. What is
important for intelligence is that the god requires the experience of
incarnation in order to actualize his as yet undeveloped potential of reality in
the concrete. This is almost a lost canon of understanding, yet it is
strategically close to the nub of all practical wisdom. The god is subject to
the law of being which makes polarization of the two nodes of reality, spirit
and matter, the operative modus of evolving life. As Plotinus has told us more
clearly than anyone else, the soul comes into earthly body in order to develop
her latent capacities into actual faculties. He says: "It is not enough for the
soul merely to exist; she must show what she is capable of begetting." She
remains, he adds, "ignorant of what she possesses" until she is made aware of
her potential riches through her deployment of them in answer to the exigencies
and contingencies met in a life of actual awareness in a physical body on a
planet. That which is real, but as yet unmanifest in the creatural
consciousness, must be actualized, to follow Plotinus again, in a life of
open consciousness. And for this possibility and this service she is dependent
upon her union, for cycle after cycle, with the negative energies of a physical
body.
We find Dr. Hopper (The Crisis of Faith, p. 257) saying
that which is a crucial nub of understanding:
"Men of wisdom ever since [Socrates] have held that true
self-knowledge is the clue to fulness of life."
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And he adds (p. 259):
"Everything depends on man's understanding of himself as he
relates himself to the Absolute. He must know himself both inwardly and
outwardly against the perspective of the ultimate meaning of things. He must
know himself not merely as one object among other objects, but as an immediate
subject of experience occupying inwardly the precarious point of infinite
commitment."
Here is indeed great truth expressed, worth deep reflection. The
statement that man only comes to know himself as he relates himself to the
Absolute, the core of real being, and that he must know himself against the
background of the ultimate meaning of things, is downright truth. But the
immediate practical implication of this insight has never been seen or acted
upon. If man can not guide his course intelligently unless he knows, broadly,
his ultimate goal, which knowledge alone can invest his every step with
its true meaning, then the deduction is sound, that philosophy is the most
important study his mind can engage in. This was the insistence of the wise men
of old who named philosophy as the kingly or divine science. It has never been
decisively apprehended that the rightness of the present stride can not be
determined if the long perspective of man's path and the distant vision of the
ultimate goal, or, as Aristotle called it, the entelechy, is not known.
To walk--and to have to walk--now, with no knowledge of whither the walking is
to take one, or what is the proper direction of the walking, is the hazardous
predicament of man when he is without philosophy. And the psychoanalysts tell us
from clinical experience, that people who have no positive philosophy go mad. A
world without positive philosophy has gone mad, again and again. It is not to
the credit of Christianity that in the third century it killed philosophy and
substituted faith. Renaissance came when the shift was made from faith back to
(ancient) philosophy. The implications of this turn in history have never been
canvassed. It is a costly dereliction.
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That the race might have in its childhood the requisite
knowledge to guide its historic conduct aright toward a known distant goal,
religion was fashioned to embrace philosophy, and that in turn embraced
anthropology and cosmology. These were accounted necessary to enable man to
orient himself aright in his evolutionary environment. It told him where he
stood, whence he had so far come, whither he was progressing, what was his set
task and what his own equipment to perform it. It told him he was the human,
standing on the horizon line between the heaven of spiritual immortality and the
earth of physical mortality. It told him his present consciousness was a blend
of incipient divine mind with the mind of the subconscious animal. "An animal's
mind shall be given unto him," says Daniel to the king, and the king always
typified the divine in man. Lecky observes in his famous History of European
Morals that in ancient days "philosophy had become to the educated most
literally a religion." The later decay of religion was brought on and marked by
the decadence of philosophy and the substitution of pietistic
unction.
It is a point of great significance which is brought out in Dr.
Hopper's sentence last quoted, that man must know himself as the subject of
experience occupying "the precarious point of infinite commitment." Brilliant
light would be released again for the human mind if it could recover the
principle of truth known to the ancient Egyptians that the only point at which
potential power or quality becomes actual--where the static electricity
of life and mind is transformed into kinetic or power current--is at the meeting
point between the positive node of conscious spirit and the negative anode of
unconscious matter. In this life, described by the Egyptians as "the lake of
equipoise," and in symbolism known as the zodiacal house of Libra the Balance,
life is brought from latency or unconsciousness out upon the plane of open
consciousness, or the actual.
Intelligence should long since have caught the esoteric hint
from the prefix "con" in consciousness. It means "with" or
"together."
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Consciousness comes only when the two segments or ends of being
are linked together in tensional relation and opposite pull. Reality burgeons
forth into actuality at the mid-point of neutralization. As the scriptures have
so forcefully shouted at us, life must be weighed in the balance, in the scales
of the judgment, that from the test its true being may come forth and be known
to and by itself. Life can scarcely engender consciousness if it does not split
asunder into the dual polarity. For to know itself it must objectify itself to
itself, and for this purpose it must stand itself as matter aside from and over
against itself as spirit. There can be no consciousness unless there is
something for it to be conscious of. Consciousness can not exist in the vacuum
of sheer Absoluteness.
The Egyptians denominated the god in evolution "Lord of the
Balance." With conscious power developed he stands in control of the
equilibration between the soul of life and the physical embodiment and strives
to maintain the equipoise between the two entities. The conscious mind is
therefore the ground arena of the battle, the focal point of the
energization.
Psychoanalysis has gained so much of primal wisdom as goes with
the knowledge of the unconscious. Its next great forward stride must be to
establish the principle of the duality in the unconscious, the subconscious and
the superconscious, and the great realization that the conscious, the prime seat
of all value-actualization, is the point of neutralization between the two poles
of man's being. Then the science will be in position to advance to new
accomplishments in practique and more competent service to the race.
It is quite worth noting what Dr. Hopper says (p. 248) relative
to the threefold constitution of man:
"This distinction will be clearer if we consider that man,
according to this understanding, is not a static somewhat to be comprehended
formally,--as intellect, feeling, will, etc.,--but that he must be understood as
a creature in motion, as already in course of action. He is a viator, a
creature who must go a way."
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It is amazing that this decidedly pivotal understanding has not
been given insistent accentuation in philosophical systematism. It is equally
amazing that almost nothing has been made of it even when, as here, it is
mentioned. And never have the absolutely necessary corollaries of the datum been
scrutinized and unfolded. A great deal of philosophical speculation has been a
mere shameless dodging of the overt palpable issue presented by accurate
observation of the prime data. Here it is affirmed, and with great truth, that
man is a viator; he is going a way. Never has it seemed to occur to speculative
philosophy that two or more questions immediately and necessarily stand knocking
for answers when this is affirmed. If he is on his way, whence has he come,
whither is he going, and indeed also, why is he out on the highway at all? Why
is he a-journeying and what is his destination? Ancient cosmology and
anthropological science rendered voluble answers to these questions. Modern
philosophy shuns them. Ancient wisdom comprehended the answers; modern
philosophy is poverty-stricken and lacks the resources for reply.
If man is a viator, as far as modern acumen goes, he is
traveling onward, after some eighty brief summers, to individual death and
extinction! By killing arcane philosophy in the early centuries, our endowments
of millions of dollars for great universities have brought forth the squeaking
mouse of a Bertrand Russell's "philosophy of despair." The only thing surely
known to modern science is that we are traveling a hard path to--annihilation!
Our solar system will cool and life--our life--become extinct. "We pass this way
but once" is the perennial slogan of average worldly "philosophy" today. Its
corollary, "let us eat, drink and be merry," has set the tune for common
motivation to dance to. As for the post mortem future, religion vaguely
asserts it will be eternal peace and rest. Oblivion, and no more toil, sweat,
blood and tears.
Ancient sagacity knew differently. The soul was described as
"the persistent traveler on the highways of eternity." The divine soul in man
says in the Egyptian books that he is "stepping onward
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through eternity." Modern thought has no more extended vision
than to depict the soul as saying, "I am Today." Egypt presents the same soul as
saying, "I am Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow." "Eternity and everlastingness is
my name."
The ancient world, instructed by "just men made perfect" in
knowledge and wisdom, knew that man is indeed a viator through the cycles of
time and the kingdoms of matter. Present vapid religion and jejune philosophy
have scarcely the intellectual stamina to face the relevant questions, whence
and whither. And the sorriest matter of all is the apparent belief that it makes
no difference to man's mental stability whether he knows he is traveling a brief
and stony path to death and oblivion, or whether he is on his way, through storm
and sunshine, to an endless unfoldment of radiant life.
It is perhaps not surprising that the attitude of complacency in
the face of total want of knowledge as to evolutionary paths, aims and goals
should have become an expression of devout religionism in the modern day. For
religion had dropped philosophy in the fatal third century and has had to fall
back upon substitute formulae and mechanisms of escape and comfort. Prominent
among pronouncements as to the non-philosophical character of modern religion
are the two lines of Cardinal Newman's famous hymn:
"I do not ask to see the distant scene;
One step enough for me."
Ancient Egypt did not hold with this sentiment, but, fortified
with definite knowledge of man's continuity of life, lived in the present and
faced the future with a cheer and a fortitude based on something more vital than
faith.
In the Mithraic system the soul of man was represented as saying
at one point in the ritual: "I am the star wandering about with you and flaming
up from the depths." In Egyptian the words "star" and "soul" came to an identity
in the word Seb. In ancient depiction of truth and reality under nature
symbols the soul that came to
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animate the animal man was presented to thought as veritably a
star of divine life, light and energy descending from the heavens to inhabit a
physical body. The symbol of a soul coming down to earth was the falling star,
along with the imagery of the evening sun sinking into the earth or
water.
The logic that supported the ancient mind in its assurance of
the soul's immortality was simple and natural. The soul was a fragment of the
divine life, energy and mind of God himself. As such it was as indestructible as
the whole of which it was a germinal or seminal portion. As the whole visible
world of manifestation was generated and sustained by the energies of cosmic
mind, and mind generated it cyclically and periodically, surely mind was the
eternal force behind the series of appearing and disappearing manifestations.
The worlds might fade away again and again, but mind remained to create them
anew. And the fragments of cosmic mind did not sally forth into cosmic adventure
and undergo the stress and strain of incarnation merely to throw away all their
hard and slowly won gains at the end of each sojourn in body. The ancients knew
how life and mind husbanded and preserved the fruits and harvests of victories
won in the battle with matter. With the closing up of the Platonic Academies in
the fifth century and the utter suppression of the systems of esoteric
philosophy for fifteen centuries the world of the west was left to drift along
the historical road entirely without the pilotage of guiding wisdom. The
horrendous record of those centuries bears testimony to the fatal consequences
of despoiling human life of an enlightened philosophy.
Psychoanalysis now enters the arena of human striving after
truth and knowledge and its discovery of the unconscious marks one of the great
forward steps out of the murks of medieval errancy and obfuscation of mind. It
supplies empirical data to corroborate what could be sensed only by enlightened
philosophical vision, that the decay of philosophy precipitates minds into
conditions of neurotic instability. This is the recovery of an item of
knowledge that was well established in Plato's day and is one of the few real
advances
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toward higher culture made in the modern age. Ancient Greek
thought regarded the soul in incarnation as having lost her true bearings under
the illusive dominance of fleshly concerns and as wandering in a fog of
ignorance, from which state she was only to be redeemed to knowledge and true
intelligence by philosophy. Philosophy was held to be the true knowledge of
divine things. The soul, it was affirmed, could not relate itself properly to
its task in incarnation if it totally lacked the assurance of its divine origin,
the nature and value of its mission to earth and the general scheme and purport
of its evolutionary enterprise. Philosophy was the essential foundation of moral
rectitude, of equanimity and stability of mind and of the good life in general.
It is quite important to note what Chandler Bennitt has to say
in his work The Real Use of the Unconscious. He is discussing healing,
but sets it over, as a special technique, against "understanding," or what could
be called philosophy:
"Healing is not understanding. At long last it is always
something less. In the living sense in which I use understanding, the most final
statement of the case is not that we must be healed if we would understand, nor
even that we must understand in order to be healed; it is that understanding is
its own way and its own god where healing is not, and that as we increasingly
understand in our entire being, whatever must still be left to the specific
technique of healing will be less and less a vital matter. Meanwhile I believe
that even in what are accepted therapeutic issues, it will more and more be
recognized that the individual cannot cooperate in the healing medical realities
where their application contravenes his still more fundamental sense of
things."
What Mr. Bennitt here denominates understanding and again refers
to as a "still more fundamental sense of things" is equivalent to what the
ancient sages termed philosophy. His evaluation of it as a more basic and
essential element in the psyche than any temporary or specific influence
employed in healing is a discernment matching the ancients' knowledge of its
place deep in the core of human being. This observation of Bennitt's should
stand as a re-
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buke and corrective for much modern spiritual-cult preachment
and practique. Eccentric religionism has given a tremendous vogue to the notion
that physical healing is the indisputable proof of the rightness of the cult
philosophy in whose name the healing is performed. Not only is this not so,
according to this psychoanalyst, but the vital truth is that the healing is
always less important than the philosophy. The thing of intrinsic value is
always the understanding in its deepmost issues. It is the eventual determinant
of the individual's health or his need of healing. Understanding is ultimately
the ruling factor in the individual's life, and healing is only an effort to
rectify disturbance when understanding has not held a true grip on the
life.
It is evident, on this analysis, that there lies buried deep in
the organism a sense and apperception of values in incarnational life that
transcends by far the welfare of the body and its illness or health. Again it
must be granted that such values must be connected with a part of man that does
not perish with the body. These values do not rise and fall in any immediate or
direct parallelism with the rise and fall of the condition of the body. They are
obviously not fully enhanced by the body's healthiest state nor deflated by its
worst condition. Bennitt ventures to assert that they verily transcend the issue
of life and death alike.
"Our life object is not merely not to die, nor even to live long
and healthily. It is to attain the ultimate realness . . . our daily aim is
further and more deeply to integrate our existence . . . as we go. It is with
these finalities and these practicalities that I am concerned."
And he adds:
"Greatly as any individual in trouble may desire to be well, he
will do this only for something further. I automatically assume that any patient
has a sense of his business in life as something beyond health. This business
includes his deepest total connection with reality."
No healing can come, he states further, through any specific
medical or psychological technique, when the individual's evolution-
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ary status is such that frustrations and troubles can be handled
"only by the realities of advance in a living understanding, and not merely by
those of ill health and cure." And such guidance from the inner daimon,
he says, "can be given only by an individual who is himself deeply in touch
with meaning." Meaning is indeed the touchstone of the whole matter. The mind
that can not discern the forms of meaning into which the events of life and the
cosmos fall is little better than a piece of flotsam on the moving wave. It is
heading for imminent wreckage. Indeed Bennitt expresses a climactic maxim when
he says that "truth must make not only sense, but significance; it must be not
only clear, but meaningful."
All this is cardinal truth, and well spoken. Bennitt is on the
right track; modern psychology at last is on the right track. The new science of
semantics is an important formulation. Meaning, even transcending
significance, is the keynote of the modern mental movement. There are issues
that lie deeper than even health and success in the worldly sense, that are not,
necessarily, met and satisfied with a healthy body and a long life. These must
be the concern of some other portion of man than his external self, for health
and long life would pretty completely fulfill the main needs of bodily man. By
inference they must appertain vitally to the history of the ego-soul. And this
is the unconscious. The ego has his own interests. He is wrestling doubtless
with the exigencies and crises, the halts, impasses, deadlocks, obstructions,
frustrations that mark his progress on the upward road. As his life is
subterranean to that of the body he tenants, the symptoms which these
contingencies bring to manifestation in some form of disturbance in the life may
not be obvious or clear to the outer mind. Hence the need of a special technique
that probes beneath the surface phenomena to locate the more esoteric and occult
origin of inharmony. This technique is the special discovery and implement of
psychoanalysis.
If the new approach of modern psychology to spiritual
esotericism through the discovery of the unconscious is not beaten down and
obscured and again lost by the oppression of crude mechanistic
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philosophies so rampant in the age, this period of history will
be catalogued by later analysts as marking the dawn of the recovery of ancient
truth after sixteen centuries of benightedness. For now again, as in ancient
times when wisdom reigned, the part of the divine soul in human life, in its
health and in its ills, is recognized and healing practice embraces a technique
which penetrates to the inner seat of the soul instead of treating merely the
outward superficial symptoms. The body is in Greek soma and the soul is
psyche. Perhaps it is yet a long way to the place where in the treatment
of human maladies psychology based on the soul will be the most effective
curative agency and philosophy the perennial preventative medicine.
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It has been a maxim of both biology and philosophy that each
individual recapitulates in the early or initial stages of its growth the entire
previous phylogenetic history of the species to which it belongs and indeed that
of all zoölogical evolution. This is to say that each new individual in the
stream of evolving life quickly retraces in its birth and early growth the
biological history of the race from monocell up to the complex and
differentiated forms at the point it itself occupies. The childhood of the
individual then republishes the long-past childhood of the race. The human
foetus clearly exhibits the stages of unicell, multicell, worm, reptile, bird,
vertebrate, mammal and all intermediate forms up to the human as at present
constituted. It would have been thought that the knowledge of a principle of
evolution so pregnant with intimation as this should have yielded more patent
discovery and application than it seems to have done.
That it has come forward as a principle of elucidation and
understanding in the field of psychoanalysis, however, is one of the robust
attestations of the great basic rightness and fruitfulness of this modern
development in psychology. In full view of the profounder aspects of the human
psyche revealed by this new science it will not come as a surprise that
psychoanalytic research has discovered almost the principle keys and solutions
of the complexities of mental problems in the previously disdained terrain of
childhood. The chief clues to the unbalance and irrationality manifesting in
adult life are generally to be traced back to inhibitions and frustrations in
childhood. The experiences undergone even in infancy are seen to set the stage
for abnormalities that come to the surface in
later life. The child conditions the man. Childhood comes first
and through the intense sensitiveness of its consciousness to impressions and
its durable retention of memories it in reality gives birth to the adult man.
Men and women are but grown children. The substance of mind can be said to be in
childhood quite plastic, hardening and crystallizing, however, as childhood
passes. The impressions made upon it in its tenderer condition at the start
become solidified for permanency and fix the life habitudes over the pattern of
the first molds. He who can bend the twig has shaped the tree. He who conditions
the child has formed the man.
In the course of time it was destined that psychological
investigations should seek the causes of mental abnormality back in the
individual's childhood. The evidences of this connection were abundant and would
not forever miss discovery. The finding was delayed only by the inveterate
recalcitrancy of the modern mind to the wisdom of the past. Principles announced
in the tomes of archaic mastership would all along have furnished modern
research with the fundamenta of discovery and a true psychological science. For
every fresh revelation coming from present-day study in the field of psychology
is but a re-affirmation of data known of old.
Such a splendid work as Jung's The Psychology of the
Unconscious is largely an elucidation of the symbols and dramatizations
found occurring in the dreams of his patients, and all approached and
systematized through a comparative analysis of them with the stories and
formulations of ancient mythology! The world has not yet appreciated the
significance of this correlation. That a psychoanalyst should have to resort to
the allegedly fanciful if not fantastic constructions of such products of racial
child-mindedness as mythology and folk-lore for keys and formulae by which to
reach a comprehension of the dreams of a modern young woman, has not been
measured in its true dimensions of significance. And that the same psychologist
has been able to announce that he has, in life-long study, found the same set of
symbols promenading in the dreams of his modern patients as he has found in the
whole field
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of ancient religious symbolism, in the Bibles and folk-lore of
the nations to remote antiquity, is again a fact which has not found its true
evaluation. The obfuscations of medieval benightedness still dim our vision and
make us slow to recognize great truth even when we stand in its very
doorway.
We stand, then, face to face with these great determinations:
the basic conditioning factors in the individual's psychological life are
established largely in childhood and, for purposes of later rectification, must
be re-located and dealt with through adult correction of infantile fixations;
the propensities and instincts dominating the child mind, and thus clinching
their hold on the whole of the life period of the individual, are both analogous
and directly kindred to the instincts and proclivities of the race as a whole in
its infancy, and are dramatized in consciousness by the same symbols now
as then; and lastly that the whole battle in consciousness for all individuals
is epitomized in the finale by the formulary that it is the eternal struggle
between the reason, knowledge, intelligence and wisdom of the divine counterpart
in man, that comes to open consciousness in adult life, on the one side,
and the instinctive, natural, irrational, infantile forces of physical life,
that dominate in the childhood period, on the other. Both in the
individual and in the race as a whole, the great Battle of Armageddon goes on
between the powers of adulthood and those of childhood. In the terms of Greek or
Platonic philosophy it is the conflict of the higher dianoia, or thorough
knowing, the genius of divine intelligence in man, with the irrational instincts
of the purely animal nature, which man shares by virtue of his body. The forces
that build the body must have play first; the powers of mind come later to
unfoldment, to be the king and ruler of those natural energies, to employ them
for its purposes rationally determined.
The childhood of the race, as of the individual, develops the
natural man, whom Paul says comes first; the adult period brings the mind to
function, so that the forces of nature may come under the direction of
intelligence and be made the agencies of the creation
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of a cosmos out of an elementary chaos. Life must first deploy
the forces that build the universe physically and then evolve the mind to direct
them in the accomplishment of its purposed ends. Mind itself must have its
genesis in physical nature. It is brought to birth in the womb of matter. Just
as solar energy is neither light, heat nor kinetic power while in its pure
state, but only develops these manifestations of its nature when brought into
contact with a material body, so pure spirit, pure ideality, is not mind until
it is harnessed, so to say, with the elemental energies found potential in the
atomic matter of physical organisms. Mind can not come to function in pure
abstraction, of its own sheer being. It must be the product of the forces
generated in an organism. In short it must be instrumentalized in and by a
brain. Life first builds its physical body, since only through the
implementation of such a structure can it bring its powers of consciousness to
concrete realization to and for itself. And the forces it uses to build the
structure fall below the level of mind and are irrational. They are denominated
in all ancient systems the elementary powers. St. Paul so clearly says that the
race was under the governance of these "elementals of the earth" and "elementals
of the air," or "the elements of the world," before it developed the rulership
of the higher mind. And most pertinently for the interests of our exegesis he
states that this "bondage to them that by nature are no gods" prevailed in the
period of our evolution "when we were yet children." Then it was, he says, that
"Christ died for us." True indeed, since the "death" of the Christos or divine
mind principle came with its first entry into the life of body. And until that
entry, in the far developed stage of biological evolution, in the old age of
Mother Nature, animal man could have no knowledge of divine mind. To the truth
of this analysis the three or more allegories of aged woman bearing the
Messianic Son of God in the scriptures bear most striking testimony. The natural
man can not know the things of the spirit, declares the Apostle. And he adds
that when we were yet children we did not know God. Surely
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this was so, for the god had not yet risen to function in the
animal organism.
How amazingly the author of the Epistles set forth the
basic principles that are only now being brought to light by the more
enlightened approach of modern psychology! He not only marked out the
anthropological grounds of the psychic conflict in the nature of man, but with
the utmost perspicacity delineated the many varied aspects of the struggle. In
what trenchant terms does he represent the fierce combat between the soul and
the flesh! When he would do good, he says, he perceives in his members a
law which wars against the law of the mind. This conflict is the source of his
wretchedness. He refers to the flesh as "the body of this death." To be carnally
minded is sin and "death." The interests of the spirit are in opposition to
those of the flesh, which he says mean death.
Psychoanalysis has now discovered that for the maintenance of
normal sanity and for the more complete integration of the individual's life the
higher intelligence of adulthood must "frustrate" the animal instincts of
childhood. Here in the proverbial nutshell is the summary manifesto of the
science of psychoanalysis. "Disturbance" is not abnormal, is not psychopathic,
because it is the function of developing mind to "disturb," even to
"frustrate," the instinctive automatism of the animal nature springing
quickly to life in the recapitulatory process in early childhood. This pitting
of the two natures against each other in the life of mankind is the ground of
the whole moral problem of the race. The issues of evolution depend upon the
course of the battle, the ebb and flow of the tides of mental and spiritual
force. Ascetic religionism decreed that the animal in man was to be crushed,
smothered, extirpated. But this was false theory and ruinous practice. The
animal is not to be crushed. He is to be domesticated, so that his wild
energies may be turned to the use and advantage of mind, the king. And through
his association with man the thinker his genus is in the course of the cycle to
be elevated to the level now held by the human, while man advances further to
godhood. The gods resident in the inner-
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most recesses of human nature are divinizing man as man in turn
is domesticating and humanizing the animal. In each case the end result is the
neutralizing of conflict between the evolving faculties of consciousness and the
blind instinctual forces of physical energy. It is mind seeking to harness the
wild forces of elementary chaos.
Turning back to study the mind of childhood, psychoanalysis
should not have been surprised to discover that its phenomena were a miniature
replica of those of earliest humanity. Says Jung (Psychology of the
Unconscious, p. 28):
"Consequently it would be true as well that the state of
infantile thinking in the child's psychic life, as well as in dreams, is nothing
but a re-echo of the prehistoric and the ancient."
Here is one of the main supporting pillars in the temple of
psychoanalysis. To re-examine the infantile mind of humanity in its early period
it was but necessary to look at the infantile mind in the child. The two sets of
phenomena would be found analogous and kindred. Both bespoke the play of the
irrational and instinctive forces. In neither had mind come to assert rulership.
Both were under the governance of Mother Nature. They had not graduated from her
tutelage to enroll in the school of Father Spirit. As twelve was the number of
spiritual perfecting, the Gospel allegory has it that Jesus deserted his mother
at that age and sought "the things of his Father." The intimation that these
higher interests were concerned with the mind is conveyed in the allegory by the
particular that he was found in the temple in profound disputations with the
learned doctors. Nature herself carries out the force of the analogue in the
fact that at the age of twelve, or at puberty, the child passes from childhood
into manhood and begins the active development of the mind. And again
psychoanalysis finds its basic principles exemplified and vindicated in both
nature and the scriptures.
The tracing of parallelism in the two sides of the analogue
revealed the most significant correspondences. The infantile mind
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of early humanity, lacking mature reason and piercing
intelligence, devised an elaborate series of allegedly fantastic representations
to account for and explain the reality of the world about it. This process gave
rise to the wondrous volume of ancient myths, the cycles of epic legends, the
hero-tales and folk-lore among all nations. The universal prevalence of such
productions is in itself a phenomenon of extraordinary character. It
represented, not, as is mistakenly supposed, the effort of infantile mentality
to explain the mysterious reality in whose bosom its life was cast, but the
discerning inventiveness of mature mind to explain the mystery to the
child humanity in terms suited to its then limited capacity to understand. The
child mind would hardly be able to devise the elaborated and involved
complexities of the Grecian or Egyptian myths. Children now do not invent Mother
Goose and the fairy tales. These are given them by the elders, being assumed to
be in a form suitable for apprehension by the immature mind. As a matter of fact
the myths are most astutely constructed to convey the profoundest of moral and
cosmic truths. Infantile mind could not have hit upon such marvelous and
precise dramatizations of verity. The marvel of their typical typal accuracy and
pictorial fidelity to truth has never yet been fully seen by students. They
obviously were the creations of a genius for consummate dramatization
unparalleled in human history. But as the representation was designed for
the child mind of early mankind, it was cast in forms that would be
appreciable and meaningful to the infantile stage of the race's mental
development.
The analogue of the child's rearing in early life under the care
and tuition of the mother is another of the numberless instances wherein nature
presents in the small a living ideograph of universal truth or truth in the
large. There is no mythology in which the mother is not the typal representative
of the great Mother, Nature. Nature mothers us and mind or spirit fathers us.
Nature develops and provides for us the physical mechanism of life; spirit comes
to birth through it and seats consciousness on the throne as ruler.
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The mother-forces dominate the child; the spirit or
father-forces rule the adult. The ancient representations of the mother and
child yield a new and profounder significance when viewed in this light. Both
mother and child typify physical nature, operating before the advent of mind.
They speak of nature and her progeny, the physical world. They tell of the
production and preparation of physical life to become the vehicle of mind, the
king. They go before him to prepare his way and to make his paths
straight.
But when he comes he must supersede their irrational governance
with the reign of reason. Their habitual and instinctive activities must be bent
to subserving the offices of intelligence and conscious design. Their wild and
impetuous sweep in given directions must be curbed and eventually turned into
channels of service for the achievement of goals set by the divine knower
within. Their blind elemental forces must be harnessed to the chariot of cosmic
Purpose.
The attempt and effort of conscious mind in evolving man to
administer this "conversion" of elemental instincts into helpful servants sets
the scene and supplies the motive for the great moral conflict in the breast of
humanity. It is the father powers against the native forces of the mother and
the child. As Jung has so well shown, the instincts of what the Greeks called
physis, or nature, predominate in the first thirty-five years of a human
life, but give place in the second similar period to those of the mind,
philosophy and intellectuality. The first period builds the body and establishes
its sustenance, comfort and well-being. The second advances from those concerns
to the matters of life and consciousness, to the effort to gain knowledge and
understanding.
A second and more particular item of the parallelism between the
racial and the individual childhood periods is well adduced by Jung, citing a
passage from the scholar Abraham (Dreams and Myths) as
follows:
"Thus the myth is a sustained, still remaining fragment
from the infantile soul-life of the people, and the dream is the myth of the
individual."
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The assumption that the myth is an infantile creation because it
was extant in the early life of the nations (if only three or four thousand
years back of the present can be considered an "early" period in the history of
humanity) is gratuitous and conjectural and has arisen only because of the decay
of philosophic enlightenment in the dark ages. A better understanding is
formulated in the statement that the myths were designed and constructed by the
loftiest genius for dramatization of truth and were adapted to yield instruction
and enlightenment for both the infancy and the adulthood of the race and
of the individual. Their truths were ageless and their application universally
relevant. They were designed to be remembered, if not understood, by childhood,
and to be understood by all in their maturity. They were given to the race at an
early stage, because they were intended to stand as guiding light for the whole
race throughout the evolutionary journey. But it is impossible that they could
have been the creation or the product of the child-mind.
They were put forth in the race's childhood because the mind of
childhood is receptive to impressions stamped upon it and will hold vital truth,
even if only the shell of the truth or meaning is perceived, until the maturing
mind can probe into the kernel and discern the living essence of truth therein.
It has not been perceived that the prime purpose behind the promulgation of the
myths was their preservation in racial memory. They were taught in the childhood
of the race, and repeated in the childhood of the individual in each generation,
that first of all they might be perpetuated. They were constructed in a fashion
that rendered them automatically easy to remember. They were set to poetic meter
and rhythm, so that they held their place in memory like music. And even the
scriptures were constructed on the pattern of number formations, based chiefly
on the number seven. This has come to light in the discovery of the almost
universal prevalence of the chiasmus structure in the Christian Bible and the
omnipresent run of multiples of seven in the numerical values of numberless
phrases, verses and
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other groupings in the Greek and Hebrew translations of the
scriptures.
What is impressed upon the child mind is hardly ever lost,
perhaps never really. Therefore the ancient impartation of knowledge in
allegorical and symbolic and dramatic forms was made with the motive of
transmission and remembrance, so that adulthood in every generation might not be
wanting the ever-significant structures of truth to redeem to esoteric meaning.
And, perhaps of most challenging import is the great understanding, lost for so
long, that nature carries in her phenomena the eternal pictorialization of
living truth. For human understanding the one final and irrefutable language of
truth is the symbolism of nature. For nature is truth and verity in the
concrete. Its every form is a hieroglyph of reality, staring us in the face. A
living creature, with all its habits and characteristics and traits, is an
epiphany of ubiquitous law and universal modus. The life of a vegetable is an
epitome of all life. For there are varying levels and degrees at which life
manifests, rated as higher and lower, and the manifestation at any of the levels
is typal of the one universal procedure.
Hence the masters of ancient knowledge put forth their sagas of
profoundest cosmic truth almost entirely in the language of nature symbolism.
"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise," might be cited as
the key slogan of the teaching of antiquity. The writings of the sages send the
thought of the reader again and again to the bee, the snake, the bird, the cat,
dog, lion, crocodile, ape, dragon-fly, locust, grasshopper, the tree, the bush,
flower, grass, leaf, root, mountain, river, lake, brook, sea, water, lightning,
sun, moon, star, constellation, summer, winter, month and year. Wheat for bread,
the grape for wine, and the bee for honey stand as the three great symbols of
the divine soul in the mortal body.
The life of the child and of early humanity alike stand far
closer to nature than that of the individual or the collective adult.
The
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child is born in the lap of Mother Nature and he is bathed
within and without by the stream of her ubiquitous forces. Her influences shape
his physical body and the automatic functioning of her powers carries him along
toward maturity. All this being so, it is the decree of fitness and necessity
that any cultural heritage formulated for his immediate and continuing behoof
should be framed and expressed in the language of nature symbols. For these are
the things whose constant objectivity in his life dowers them with pedagogical
power and enlightening significance. Their known phenomena hold the mirror up to
truth, for they are that truth themselves in the concrete. Through and behind
the visible world of actuality there broods the other world of invisible
reality. The visible thing is the only lens through which the figures and shapes
of that deeper reality can be brought to focus for the human mind. The
philosophic aphorism that the things of the outer world are cast in the image of
"those things which are above" is the statement of man's only means of rising to
an apprehension of spiritual realities. When seen, they are revealed to be not
foreign and exotic creations, but bear the familiar stamp of the known things in
the world here below. The seen world is man's only clue to the realities of the
unseen world.
The obvious effort and aim of the archaic literary constructions
then was to embody the principles of truth in a language and in narrative that
would hold the mind close to nature and her forms and phenomena. This was the
language, not of childhood, but for childhood. But it is equally
the language for adulthood, for even now, in an age of the world considered
adult, the same language of symbol and myth still beats back the efforts of the
united acumen of world scholarship to grasp the esoteric meaning. And it is
still claimed that these masterly devices to purvey the most recondite truth and
wisdom were the spontaneous creations of the race's "child-mind."
The sages availed themselves of the known capabilities of the
mind in the childhood of the world and the childhood of each suc-
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cessive generation to achieve the primary aim of preserving
their writings in memory. Both the race and the individual possess in their
childhood a virtually unforgetting memory. For both function in the realm of the
subconscious. The child, the animal and child-humanity all alike live
consciously at the level of the subconscious. Their actions are directed by
instinct and automatism. Mind has not come to play in either of them as yet.
Hence the phenomena of conscious life in all of them display similarity and are
to be measured by the same standard. Their various manifestations are kindred
and analogous. Their activities are motivated by the autonomic nervous system,
their memory is automatic and practically unfailing and impressions are made
everlasting by repetition. The human child of course stands above the animal,
but he nevertheless passes through the animal stage of evolution and
still bears the animal nature with him in his physical body.
It is now possible to summarize what this unfoldment has
dialectically been leading to. The myths, symbols and dramas embodying the
mighty ancient wisdom had to be given to child humanity in a form to be
eternally remembered. They had to be given in the race's childhood and
to the race in its childhood because humanity was still in its animal
stage and both the animal and the child have automatic powers of memory. And
they had to be framed in a language and under imagery based on naturographs,
because natural phenomena constitute the only universal lexicon or alphabet of
unerring truth. They constitute the only language universally comprehensible,
and, what is still more, the only language capable of yielding to each level of
intellectual capacity and development the truth which that stage is able to
grasp. It teaches simple truth to the simple and profound truth to the
sagacious. In brief summary, truth had to be organized and indelibly stamped
upon the subconscious mind of the race so that it would live automatically, and
be perpetuated for the use of the conscious intelligence when at a later stage
that genius burst into flower in the denouement of organic evolution.
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What Jung and Abraham and other students say about the myths of
early humanity matching the myth-making power of the subconscious today (or
vice versa), and the dreams of the under-mind continuing to cast up the
wrack of the ancient language of myth and symbol has pertinent bearing upon the
entire subject of mind-analysis. The repetition of the ancient symbols in modern
dreams is interpreted to be the method adopted by the subconscious--which is the
recorded memory of the race's and the individual's past--for the most part to
protest against the willful suppression by the present conscious mind of the
instinctive native propensities and calls of the natural or animal man for their
expression. It is in brief the form of the first or natural-animal man's protest
against the repression of its instinctual life by the incipient rise of the
second or spiritual man's mind to dominion over the whole life of the organism.
As such it is inevitable, natural and good. The concern of the individual is to
manage it with the least degree of tragic conflict and severe disturbance. It is
not abnormal that disturbance should come. The tragedy is that it should come
under such conditions of unintelligence and unbalance that wreckage should so
often occur.
It is well to note a dialectical point in the form of Abraham's
presentation of the identical function and status of the myth of the early race
and the dream of childhood. It has been an assertion of this essay that the myth
was not produced or created by the child mind of early humanity. If now
the myth and the dream symbol or dream myth are of parallel order and status,
then the parallelism should hold in respect to their origin or production. It
can not be said that the dream of the child mind in individual childhood is a
conscious creation of the child's genius. It is in reality simply given to
the child. It is more of the nature of a projection into the child's mind by
a superior intelligence. The child mind did not consciously and designedly
produce it. It came down "from above," or out from within. If there is
instruction, then, in the law of cor-
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respondences, as most certainly there is, the conclusion is that
neither was the myth in early history a conscious creation of the child mind of
infant humanity.
In the light of all this it is of interest to hear Jung in a
further elaboration of the idea dealt with here (Psychology of the
Unconscious, p. 29):
"The conclusion results almost from itself, that the age which
created the myths thought childishly--that is to say, phantastically, as in our
age is still done to a very great extent (associatively or analogically) in
dreams. The beginnings of myth formations (in the child), the taking of
phantasies for realities, which is partly in accord with the historical, may
easily be discovered among children."
It is probably a bit difficult to allocate a precise or
scientific meaning to Jung's use of the words "childishly" and "phantastically"
here and elsewhere. Always the first word and generally the second carries with
it the connotation of a mental picture that either misses or weirdly caricatures
reality. Phantasy is commonly taken to be the creation of illusion. Its
formations do not match truth or reality. Sometimes a slightly more generous
allowance on the side of reliability is made for phantasy when speaking of the
phantasies of the poet as depictions of the actual. But generally the word
carries the imputation of fallacy. Phantasies are fictions of the mind made in
an effort to explain or interpret reality, but missing its faithful portraiture.
They are imaginative failures and falsities.
Jung confirms this broad definition of the meaning of phantasy
when he says that the mind of childhood is addicted to "the taking of phantasies
for realities." Its imaginings about the world and life are not true pictures.
This can be readily granted without debate, inasmuch as it is conceded that the
mind of the child is not fortified with the data of experience and the developed
powers of the intellect to interpret things aright, or at least according to the
norms of adult mentation. But when the eminent psychologist goes on to say that,
because the child makes erroneous guesses about reality and conceives with the
error of infantile incapacity, likewise the myth-
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makers of antiquity "thought childishly--that is to say
phantastically, as . . . in dreams," when they constructed the great myths, it
is obvious that he is guilty of a non sequitor. He convicts himself of
bad logic on two counts, both, oddly enough, brought against this conclusion by
himself! For, in the first place he himself devotes some hundreds of pages in
The Psychology of the Unconscious alone, and more in other works, to an
elucidation of psychoanalytic rationale and interpretation entirely on the basis
of constructions supplied by the ancient myths, which thus are found to be
accurate and reliable norms of truth and reality. And, secondly, his own work,
as well as the whole burden of psychoanalytic science, has validated the
authenticity of the dream, when properly analyzed, as a faithful picture or
dramatization of reality. If, in the ordinary derogatory sense of the terms, it
is affirmed that the myth and the dream are childish and phantastic
constructions, then Jung's entire splendid contribution to psychological science
must be written off as similarly childish and phantastic, for it is based
solidly on the truth-telling character of both the dream and the myth.
The dream is the production of an unconscious faculty now recognized to
exercise the most recondite intelligence, not to say incredible genius in the
art of semantic dramatization. Likewise the myths of ancient formulation are
seen by psychoanalysts themselves to be marvelously astute creations to
represent the profoundest conceptions and motions of the human spirit, which
they do with astounding precision and clarity. If both are "childish and
phantastic," then childish phantasy must be elevated to the rank of the supreme
faculty of the human psyche.
Phantasy may reign in the conscious life of the child, when its
imaginations conceived to picture reality widely miss the mark of truth. But the
dream is not the conscious production of the child, neither is the myth the
production of child humanity, that is, humanity functioning at the child level.
The dream is given to the child and the myth was given to humanity
in its childhood. Until
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the study is oriented in line with this understanding it will
not yield true insight or clarification.
Civilized society is shocked from time to time by the exhibition
in certain quarters of the crudest forms of gross animalism or brutality. Jung
says that these always remain germinally in the unconscious and can surge to the
surface when conventional restraints are temporarily relaxed. Some of them are
so gross and bestial in their manifestation that Jung is led to say that "today
we feel for such a thing nothing but the deepest abhorrence, and never would
admit it still slumbered in our souls." But it is well to note his statement
that we go through the period corresponding to the animal evolution in our
childhood, when by analogy at least we are classified as little savages. He says
(p. 35):
"Yet all this does not affect the fact that we in childhood go
through a period in which the impulses toward these archaic inclinations appear
again and again, and that through all our life we possess, side by side with the
newly recruited, directed and adapted thought, a phantastic thought which
corresponds to the thought of the centuries of antiquity and barbarism. Just as
our bodies still keep the reminders of old functions and conditions in many
old-fashioned organs, so our minds, too, bear the marks of the evolution passed
through and the very ancient re-echoes, at least dreamily, in
phantasies."
In childhood we each quickly recapitulate the age of animal
barbarity and thereafter keep it, as it were, buried in the basement of
consciousness, covered over as well as we are able to contrive it, with the
traditional masks and facades of "civilization." Wars, crime waves and
occasional reversions to the elemental and the primitive at times lift the lid
of conventional restraint sufficiently to allow an upsurge of the native animal
forces.
One of the discernments brought out by Jung in connection with
mythology deserves a word of comment. He observes tersely that the masses never
free themselves from mythology. This is hardly more than a trite notation, since
the masses are those who remain
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bound in the commonplace conventional and traditional, the
accepted standards of conduct and thought. The myths have played their part,
perhaps away back in time, in setting the established mores. Thus the life and
influence of the myths are perpetuated down the ages. In so far, however, as the
myths did originally portray, no matter with what subtle deftness, the realities
of man's history, it is inevitable that they should linger as normative
influences over the consciousness of the masses, even though, as is always the
case, the kernel of their real meaning has been lost, and only their desiccated
husks survive. In this sense it is the fate of the vast majority of mankind to
be perpetually influenced if not ruled by conceptual phantoms! The saving
consideration in the situation, however, is the fact that in large part the
phantoms are the wraiths of truth formerly apprehended, but since lost, and that
so long as there is even the subtlest suggestion of true and vital meaning in
the traditional forms of thought and behavior, the dominance of the mores will
not work outright catastrophe. Even the phantoms of truth have saving
grace.
It is admittedly a journey somewhat afield from the main thesis,
but nevertheless of much importance to note what Jung has wisely observed as to
the relation of the myth to history. Speaking of the "mythical tradition" he
says that
"it does not set forth any account of old events, but rather
acts in such a way that it always reveals a thought common to humanity and once
more rejuvenated. Thus for example, the lives and deeds
of the founders of old religions are the purest condensations of typical
contemporaneous myths, behind which the individual figure entirely disappears."
The very husks and shells of the myths, still prevalent in
universal tradition, are capable, as Jung intimates here, of "rejuvenation." And
this is the hope of humanity. It is always possible that intelligence may return
in sufficient force to revitalize the myths with their original dynamic potency.
This is the need of the world of culture today. The obstacle that so stubbornly
blocks the way to
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this renaissance is the incredible fact that large sections of
what was created as mythology have been crassly and stupidly mistaken for
veridical history itself! Ages of mental hallucination and ideological folly
could have been obviated if the myths had not been obtruded into the terrain of
objective history. Possibly nine-tenths of the material embodied in the
Christian scriptures has been taken for ancient Jewish history, when in truth
the book is almost entirely a collection of aboriginal mythical constructions.
So obvious is this to competent students who have conscientiously surveyed the
field of ancient religion that Kalthoff has written the following doubtless
well-considered paragraph (Entstehung des Christentums):
"The sources from which we derive our information concerning the
origin of Christianity are such that in the present state of historical research
no historian would undertake the task of writing the biography of an historical
Jesus."
And he strengthens this with another asseveration (Ibid,
p. 10):
"To see behind these stories the life of a real historical
personage would not occur to any man if it were not for the influence of
rationalistic theology."
The Messiahs, Sun-gods, Saviors, Christs and Jesus figures, of
whom there were scores in the religions of early times, it is to be inferred,
were not historical persons in the flesh, but the typal characters designed to
portray man's ever-coming divinity. They were mythical figures and not men in
history. Kalthoff goes on to say that the divine element in Christ was always
considered an inner attribute and possessed or manifested by the Christ
figure in common with humanity, which is to evolve the same divinity in its own
life. He adduces the fact that everywhere the Christ figure is shown exhibiting
"superhuman traits; nowhere is he that which critical theology wished to make
him, simply a natural man, an historical individual." Well had it been
for western civilization if it had been known that the alleged lives and deeds
of the founders of old religions, as well as the "historical careers" of a score
or
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more of Messiahs and Sun-gods and Christs, were, as Jung says,
"condensations of typical contemporaneous myths, behind which the individual
figure entirely disappears." When myth was converted into "history" the Dark
Ages began.
The great need of a distinctive differentiation between the two
forms of the unconscious, the subconscious and the superconscious, is vividly
emphasized when we compare certain of Jung's statements with one another. We
have seen the psychologist saying that all the memory-record of our past in the
animal stage of evolution, with all its inhuman bestial manifestations that he
admits are so revolting that we hesitate to believe we carry the memory of them
in the depths of our being, is buried in our consciousness and may surge upward
from the unconscious. Yet with this characterization given to the content of the
unconscious, Jung is found writing that
"comparison with the sun teaches us over and over again that the
gods are libido. It is that part of us which is immortal, since it represents
that bond through which we feel that in the race we are never extinguished. It
is life from the life of mankind. Its springs, which well up from the depths of
the unconscious, come, as does our life in general, from the root of the whole
of humanity, since we are indeed only a twig broken off from the mother and
transplanted."
And again he is affirming that
"since the divine in us is libido, we must not wonder that we
have taken along with us in our theology ancient representations from the olden
times. . . ."
Everywhere in psychoanalysis the unconscious is the seat of the
libido. The libido is that inner governor who, from behind the throne of
consciousness, dominates the life and speaks to the personality in the devious
and often obscure language of dreams and symbols. A hundred times the libido is
described as the voice and consciousness of the past, of the youthful history of
the race in its individual recapitulation, the surging force of the native
elemental
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mind of the race, speaking generally against the suppression of
its drive for recognition and free play by the restraints of
civilization.
Assuredly it can be seen that the libido is here described in
the terms and characters of two things that are at the very opposite poles of
rating in spiritual or cultural values. It is at one and the same time the
memory of our animal past, with all its horrific and revolting murder-lust and
brutality, slumbering in the depths of the unconscious and capable of
resurrection therefrom, and also equally nursed germinally within us. This is to
ignore or erase all difference in grade and status and nobility between the god
and the animal in our constitution and to make the unconscious the dwelling
place of the divine genius as well as the lair of the beast. Surely it can be
seen that it is the voice of the animal which speaks to us out of the past that
we have lived through and compressed into the subconscious, and that it is the
voice of the god which speaks to us out of the as yet unborn future whose
terrain in the superconscious we are little by little adventuring into. To heed
the voice of the animal is to sink back in retrogression into the repellent
past; to hearken unto the voice of the god is to step forward into more inviting
prospects, and to follow rosier pathways through the meads and uplands of
evolution. The terrain of these two regions of consciousness in the human nature
is precisely what was meant by the ancient Egyptians in their allegorical
division of their country into "the two lands," or "Upper and Lower Egypt," the
location and histories of which have perplexed even such a noted Egyptologist as
the late William H. Breasted and others. The student of Egyptian history will
note that time after time one Pharaoh after another is obliged to fight a war
from his capital in Upper Egypt with the kingdom of Lower Egypt, conquer it
afresh and unite it again "under the double sovereignty of the crowns of Upper
and Lower Egypt." Over and over again a kingdom divided against itself in two
warring parts has to be unified. It has never dawned
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upon the savants that this is beyond reasonable probability as
history, and points to the trick of allegory. For it is an exact repicturing of
what takes place in the human constitution, where the two kingdoms, that of the
animal and that of the god, are long hostile to each other and must be
reconciled and brought to an atonement, by the stronger agency of the divine as
it wins victory over the "lower Egypt" of the human realm. Even Paul tells us
that a wall of partition between us will be broken down, enabling the two
natures to merge in harmony into a new creature, "so making peace."
In this connection it is appropriate to present what Jung has to
say as to how the truth embalmed in the myths is to be apprehended. After
remarking, most discerningly, that it is more or less imperatively demanded that
the psychoanalyst should "broaden the analysis of the individual problems by a
comparative study of historical material relating to them,"--and Jung himself
has done this most exhaustively--he goes on to say that
"It is a well-known fact that one of the principles of analytic
psychology is that the dream images are to be understood symbolically; that is
to say that they are not to be taken literally, just as they are represented in
sleep, but that behind them a hidden meaning has to be surmised. It is this idea
of a dream symbolism which has challenged not only criticism, but, in addition
to that, the strongest opposition."
What is true here of the dream symbolism is true also of the
mythic symbolism. Jung repeats it--and underscores it--"it is not literally
true, but is true psychologically." It is easy to understand and pardon a
symbologist's contemptuous fling at uncomprehending scientists and scholastics
in his further comment:
"In this distinction lies the reason why the old fogies of
science have from time to time thrown away an inherited piece of ancient truth;
because it was not literally but psychologically true. For such discrimination
this type of person has at no time had any comprehension."
Indeed Jung goes so far as to assert that
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"Dreams are symbolic in order that they can not be understood;
in order that the wish, which is the source of the dream, may remain
unknown."
This pretty well matches the statement of the Jesus figure in
the Gospels that truth was given to them that are without in parables, lest,
hearing, they might understand and be converted, and seeing, they might believe.
This is to imply that the subconscious presents its symbolic messages furtively,
wishing to remain unidentified in connection with its wish, unwilling to be
known as sponsoring such a wish. From the very fact that such a furtive motive
would not be easily ascribable to the god, who likewise presents his wishes in
the higher interests of the personal life, and would have no reason to dodge
recognition, it would be inferable that symbolism in dreams is a usage of the
subconscious or animal memory alone. This, however, is not the case, since the
very highest messages are likewise clothed in the most complex and recondite
forms of symbolism. The god and not the animal is the consummate craftsman in
the formulation of the symbolic dream. Must it be said that modern psychological
science has shown itself totally incapable of recognizing any difference between
the two voices of the god and the beast in human consciousness?
Great stress is laid by modern psychology upon what are called
"escape mechanisms" and "retreats from reality into phantasy." Religious
devotionalism, addiction to idealistic philosophies, surrender to mystical
experience even in poetry, music and art, are broadly characterized as houses of
refuge from stark reality. But psychoanalysis itself has endorsed the ancient
Egyptian and Greek division of man's psychic life into its two aspects of
immortal divine mind and lower animal sensuousness, and it would be only a
natural question to ask which of the two is seeking to escape from the other!
Since the whole crux of the moral problem for man is the conflict between the
two natures, the analysis of every phase of the struggle hinges on discovery of
which nature in man is trying to
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dodge its opponent. Perhaps the difficulty and the confused
intermixture of the two in psychoanalytic interpretation arises from what is
implied in the Egyptian symbol of the "horizon." Man stands directly upon the
"horizon" or dividing line between the two kingdoms of consciousness, and as so
poetically stated in texts from the hieroglyphic writings, "he cultivates the
crops on both sides of the horizon," "he cultivates the two lands, he pacifies
the two lands, he unites the two lands." "He makes the two Rheti
goddesses, whose hearts are at enmity with each other, to be at peace." To the
soul it is said: "The horizon is covered with the tracks of thy passing." This
is to say that, as man can focus his consciousness in the world of spiritual
realities or equally in that of carnal sensuality, he keeps continually passing
back and forth, or up and down, across the middle-line of demarcation, the
horizon. Hence on the line of open consciousness, which is directly between the
two, god and animal constantly are intermingling their motivations and
propensities, with the result that the clear distinction between the two is
blurred. This may perhaps be the explanation of the failure of psychology to
differentiate between the two widely separated regions of the unconscious world,
the subconscious and the superconscious. For, as stated before, man's narrow
area of consciousness is closely hemmed in between two dark regions of
unconsciousness.
It is possible that in this situation lies the difficult
determination of one of the strange devices of ancient symbolic representation,
one that has too often been most weirdly and erroneously guessed at,--the
crucifixion of the Christ between two thieves. In human incarnation and
evolution the potential Christ principle does step out upon this line of open
consciousness between the two bordering areas of unconsciousness, and it is not
too great a strain on poetic imagery to think of unconsciousness as stealing
away the priceless gift or faculty of consciousness. Likewise the conditions of
stress and strain, suffering and anguish, that necessarily go with the struggle
of the soul as it is torn between the pulls of the two con-
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flicting natures, fulfill every esoteric phase of the meaning of
crucifixion. In this position the soul stands precisely at the point where
divine and carnal natures cross each other, and are at cross purposes each to
other. The final meaning of the cross as symbol is simply the incarnation. The
soul is on the cross when it is linked to mortal body. The loss of this explicit
determination is one of the tragic consequences, as well as attestations, of the
debacle of esoteric wisdom in the third century.
The confusion of modern study just alluded to as due to the
failure to keep the two natures in the human breast clearly differentiated is
again well illustrated in a passage from so discerning a student as Jung
(Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 94):
"It is shameful or exalted, just as one chooses, that the divine
longing of humanity, which is really the first thing to make it human, should be
brought into connection with an erotic phantasy. Such a comparison jars upon the
finer feelings."
And he adds that
"Nature is beautiful only by virtue of the longing and love
given her by man."
Indeed so jarring a realization has it ever been to the more
enlightened thinking of mankind that soul should be brought under the dominion
of flesh and sense that early philosophical understanding and acceptance of the
fact as beneficent has been almost completely banished and religious sentiment
has come to pronounce the soul's connection with mortal body a thing of evil.
Even Plotinus is declared to have proclaimed his sense of shame at being
incarnated in body at all. Centuries of Christian asceticism were activated by
the preachment of the shamefulness of the flesh. Spirit alone is exalted; matter
and body are denied. Nothing can clear this befuddlement save a return to the
sagacious enlightenment that prevailed when the Book of the Dead was
written. It was known then that the soul could not progress to greater glory if
she did not leave
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heavenly mansions of dreamy blissfulness and have her powers and
faculties brought out from sheer latency into actuality by taking her stand
precisely on the horizon line at the focus of the tension between spirit and
matter. Only there could she pass from unconsciousness to consciousness. Only
there, says Plotinus himself, could she ever develop her own powers and come to
know what she herself possesses.
The dynamic force of the realization that man is a god in the
making so impressed Jung at one place that he writes (p. 96):
"To bear a God within one's self signifies as much as to be a
God one's self."
Yes, in sentiment, but not quite yes in fact. The penalties for
forgetting that man is both the god and the animal at one and the same time are
not minimized by the strength of lofty sentiment. Man's divinity is as yet
mainly potential; it can be realized only through the fulfillment of Aristotle's
entelechy and emerge as end product of a time cycle. Its actualization is linked
to time and growth, and more than that, to the outcome of a battle with the
flesh. Without the battle on the horizon soul would remain forever inane, an
unplanted seed.
A final word will round out the case for the claim that the
failure to distinguish between the two realms of the unconscious has led to
false deductions and confusion. Such a result can be seen by placing side by
side two or three of Jung's statements. He has said that the divine immortal
principle in us is libido and that "the gods are libido." But he also writes
(The Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 105) that
"The phallus is the source of life and libido, the great creator
and worker of miracles, and as such it received reverence
everywhere."
There is no question as to the reverence in which the phallus
was held in the olden time, and strange enough it symbolized not the lusts of
the flesh, but the highest spiritual or divine element
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in man. This is all, however, on the plane of symbolism. For
psychology to proclaim that the libido in man is alike the divine inspiration
from the supervening world of spiritual reality and the force making for
physical creation as instrumentalized through the phallus is to ignore a gap
between these two that is impassable to thought. The libido has practically been
broadened to make its meaning cover what might be called the whole drive of life
to get itself expressed in living forms and actions of the creatures. But it
seems to be forgotten that both the animal and the divine natures in man are
making a drive to get each its particular segment of creative force expressed in
the world of life. It hardly seems compatible with the human notions of dignity
and worth to place on the same level of quality the forces that come to
expression in man's life, the one through the spiritualized intellect, the other
through the phallus. All life, in the monistic sense, is one, and in the
absolute sense is all equally "divine." But in the area of man's perceptual
world it is impossible for the mind to ignore the endless differentiations into
which life splits its unit energies. It must see values as relative one to
another and all to the whole. In its original uses the libido, a Latin word
which when encountered in the text of Cicero's Orations against Cataline in the
schools was accustomed to be translated "lust," certainly was employed to name
the tremendous sweep of appetency that sought to perpetuate life through sexual
function. It was at first largely restricted to the general meaning of "sex."
Although its connotations have since been greatly broadened, it is hardly
legitimate to extend its meaning to make it take in that other element in man's
constitution which in all spiritual and ethical systems has ever been regarded
as its direct opposite, indeed its evolutionary opponent and enemy! Except
symbolically, it is going to be an undertaking marked for failure to ask the
human mind, as it is conditioned by tradition, to affix the character and
attributes of what is conceived as "divine" to the physically creative energies
that find expression through the phallus.
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Universal usage has allocated the play of so-called divine
forces to the mind and spirit alone. In the world of relativity it is necessary
to make and adhere to patent and obvious distinctions in rating and value. The
libido can hardly be used to name both the godlike and the bestial natures in
the human being.
Not to prolong the matter to the point of tedium, but for the
importance of it all, another citation from Jung shows the same indecisive
delineation of libido (The Psychology of the Unconscious, p.
105):
"The possibilities of comparison mean just as many possibilities
for symbolic expression, and from this basis all the infinitely varied symbols,
so far as they are libido images, may properly be reduced to a very simple root,
that is, just to libido and its fixed primitive qualities."
This is a bit indecisive, inasmuch as it merely says that
symbols, "so far as they are libido images," may be reduced to libido. But it
comes close to saying at the same time that "all the infinitely varied symbols"
are reducible to libido. But fully one half of ancient symbols have reference
directly to the divine element in the life and not at all to the physically
procreative psychology.
Dr. Hinkle has stated that "symbols dominate to an unbelievable
extent man's conduct and behavior, as well as his thinking; they are the bridge
over which he travels from the known to the unknown." They enable the mind, she
elucidates, to conceive the shape and nature of something lying in an unknown
realm, from the hint of its likeness to something already at hand in the known
world. Indeed she states that this process of working over from the known things
in the commonplace world to true conceptions of things of a different nature
unknown to us is "the source of all cultural progress." What needs to be added,
then, is simply that when we come to interpret the symbols to enhance our
limited understanding, care must be taken to apply their reference discreetly
within the just boundaries of their area of connotation. The longer symbols
are
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studied, the more clearly it is seen that they constituted a
language of ancient ideological communication which does not lend itself to
loose poetic fancying, but carries meanings with almost mathematical
succinctness. The first step toward the Dark Ages was taken when this precise
knowledge of the old symbolic language began to disappear.
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One of the achievements of this age, for which it may come to be
marked in later historical view, is the restoration of symbolism to a
significant role in the mechanism of culture. We have seen that the
superconscious seldom delivers its messages of approval or warning to the lower
mind in the known language of common speech. It speaks in the language of
symbols and pictorial representations. The discovery of this fact signalizes a
great and really momentous advance in technique for the deeper cultivation of
the human spirit.
It is worth what Dr. Hinkle has to say as to the desuetude of
symbolism before its present re-discovery (The Recreating of the Individual,
p. 137):
"Until now, however, it has been chiefly a subject of academic
interest belonging to a past phase of human culture and with no vital meaning
for the present. Through psychoanalysis we have come to realize that this
ancient process has a present value; and the mode of interpreting and utilizing
the symbol, the way in which we understand it in relation to the individual, are
intimately connected with his future well-being and development."
Symbols were an integral part of ancient expression because they
were the one universally known, or available, and only true language of meaning
transfer. Symbols were known to be the one standard means of communication of
truth, because the ancients were still in possession of an important item of
usable knowledge, the great fact that the seen world is the mirror of the
reality of the unseen world. Understanding went into eclipse when this plank in
the platform of a primal formulation of knowledge was taken
out. Now it is being restored, and it is found that symbols are
the substantial stepping-stones by means of which the mind can cross the gap
between the objective world and the realities of higher ones. The sages of
antiquity knew that if they ventured to construct the pictures of metaphysical
reality over the pattern of the objects and phenomena of the known world they
would never widely miss the truth.
We are face to face here with a re-discovery as important as
that of the unconscious. And it is one that is a necessary supplement of the
other, if the full harvest of benefit is to be reaped from knowledge of the
unconscious. We shall never be able to read the communications of the inner lord
of life to his outer protégé, the conscious human, without the help of this
symbolism. Just as the discovery of the Rosetta Stone was essential to our
regaining Egypt's lost wisdom, so our ability to translate the language of
symbolism is necessary to understand the strange vernacular in which the Ancient
of Days speaks down to us from his seat in the plane of consciousness just over
our heads. He speaks in the language of meaning-forms and not in that of words.
An object or a process from the world of nature conveys a graph of meaning that
often could not be elaborated in less than a thousand words. The snake, beetle,
locust, hawk and bee, the cloud, rainbow and lightning announce the principles
of cosmic law with a definiteness that no words can match. Words can
misrepresent the truth; nature symbols can not. They discourse upon the straight
truth. They can not lead the mind into sophistry. So reliable and certain is
their testimony to verify that whenever the mind wishes to confirm its insights
into truth it cites the harmony of its deductions with natural fact. If a
structure of exposition can be paralleled with a phenomenon in nature, it is
considered to be certified. Poetry is in large part the sensing and limning of
this perceived correspondence. To show that an inner construction sustains
analogical identity with something in outer creation, proves that it is already
accredited, being found extant in the world of real being.
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A vivid line from one of Goethe's poems strikes ringing
recognition of this truth of symbolism:
And Schiller, while seemingly turned around to a wrong
orientation to the theme, nevertheless gives out a phrase of sententious truth
when he says:
"I was not yet capable of comprehending nature at first hand; I
had but learned to admire her image reflected in the understanding, and
put in order by rules." (Italics Dr. Hinkle's in quotation.)
Any one who has learned to admire nature's image reflected in
the understanding has already become, as Emerson puts it, a priest interpreting
the epiphany of creation. This is not an elementary step preparatory to
comprehending nature at first hand, as Schiller says. It is indeed first-hand
comprehension itself. For it is the interpretation of nature through translation
of her forms as alphabet into ultimate meaning. This is to understand nature,
for she is then seen not as sheer object, but as forms of meaning. The mind so
qualified is able to look not merely at nature, but through nature
to discern the archetypal forms in the divine mind. This is to read God's
thoughts after him.
Misguided superficial dialectic might rise here to expostulate
that since, as declared, the entire drive of religious aspiration is to
transcend the natural man and the world that ensnares him, and to catch and hold
the diviner superhuman, it is going against philosophy and evolution alike to
ask the mind to tie itself in ever closer relation to the natural world. That,
says pietistic faith, is the world to be shunned and escaped. But this is a
mistake. To recommend the use of nature as an alphabet for the reading of higher
truth is in no way to involve the mind in subjection to nature's own play of
mindless forces. It is in no sense to enmire intelligence in her own ground of
partial nescience. It is but to use her forms as
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mnemonics and hieroglyphics of exalted sense or as the lens of a
more penetrating and magnifying insight.
Another statement from Dr. Hinkle falls in here with much
pertinence (p. 441):
"The whole process of psychic development is seen to follow a
kind of spiral movement in which there is a recurrent return to former states
having the closest analogy to the actual physical conditions experienced. Thus
in all psychic development there is a close relationship with the physical
processes, but not an identity."
It is well to observe, with this reminder, that analogy works
through likeness, but does not claim identity.
"Through man's capacity for psychic creation he has attained a
power for individual development which in its becoming follows like a shadow the
actual physical processes lived through, but which possesses a reality of its
own as important for human life as the actual physical processes are for all
organic life. It is this reality so frequently expressing itself in the language
of organic reality which must be recognized for an understanding of human needs.
The light that psychoanalysis has provided has revealed a new meaning to many of
the great intuitions of the past, and has shown unmistakably that they possess a
validity and reality in relation to the individual life wholly unrealized by
thought, but entirely realizable in the human being."
This is to say that a meaning, perhaps an actual message from
the man's oversoul to his outer intelligence, comes to him in the form of an
analogue with some phase of his actual experience. The supermind must speak to
him in the terms of what has already had meaning for him. As already set forth,
it is impossible that an abstract idea can be presented to a mind without
reference to a previously known physical object or process. Even an idea must
accrete whatever form, structure or organic outline it is to have from something
once known. It has often been said that the mind can form no picture of a
something the likeness of which it has never seen. It can formulate new
pictures, but only out of a new configuration or combination of elements already
imprinted in
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memory. The very categories of thought, as extensions, quantity,
number, dimension, cause, effect, quality, etc., are abstractions derived from
experience with the concrete physical, which plant these concepts in the
intellect. The only pathway open to the mind is through the physical, whose
forms become symbols of the metaphysical.
Symbols, then, are the currency in the ideal realm. It is not
too strong an assertion to say that symbols are not only the language of
conception and impartation in the metaphysical realm, but that they are
therefore the instruments of the soul's highest culture. It has been claimed
that the mathematical symbols, pi, x and the horizontal 8 for infinity and
others, have virtually made higher abstract mathematics possible. Culture hinges
on grasp and communication of ideas and symbols make the interchange a
near-divine art. It has been questioned whether the act of thinking could be
achieved without symbols. An idea would be left formless if it could not be
given suggestive shape over the pattern of fixed representation. Description
could not be achieved if some known object bearing likeness to the unknown to be
described could not be pointed to.
There is evidence of surprising cogency pointing to the
realization that the attainment or the degree of culture in mankind bears a
significant relation to the interest in symbolism. A cursory canvass of history
seems to reveal a distinct and decided parallel between cultural rise and fall
and the vogue and lapse of symbolic methodology. This is indeed challenging. The
ancient period, during which there was extant a culture sufficiently lofty to
inspire the writing of the only books that have held universal veneration
throughout the centuries, obviously was steeped in symbolic practique. No more
valid attestation of this is needed than the observation that these books
themselves purvey symbolism as their chief method of intellectual expression, as
they fairly teem with symbolism. Culture rose or prevailed hand in hand with
symbolism in that era. The great upsurge of Greek culture was based on and
widely
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utilized symbols, such as Plato's cave allegory, the myth of Er,
King Minos' labyrinth, and others. The mighty wisdom of old Egypt verily reeked
with symbols. The best in Hindu thought relied largely on symbolic portrayal.
The Gospel character of Jesus for the most part taught in parables.
Up to the third century in Christianity, while there prevailed a
strong trend to Gnosticism and Greek philosophy in the schools and doctrines of
the Church, symbolism and allegorism held a very high place in exegesis,
pre-eminently so in the work of the two most illuminated of the Patristics,
Clement of Alexandria and his pupil, Origen. Particularly "Origen's allegories"
became later a bone of contention between partisans in the Church and as a
result fell under the fierce denunciation of the orthodox parties and finally
were "excommunicated" by the decrees of Councils about the sixth century. Origen
steadfastly maintained that beneath the letter of scriptural text, to be
discerned by a more cultivated spiritual intuition, lay a deeper stratum of
meaning, which was the true and vital message, supplanting the more obvious
literal sense. The scriptures carried a profounder esoteric implication,
concealed "under glyph and symbol," which the untutored would miss and the
initiated would grasp. The milk for babes was the simple exoteric surface
meaning; the meat for hardier digestion was this more deeply buried occult
rendering. Philo laid great emphasis on this esoteric symbolic methodology. It
is indeed a general characteristic of the body of ancient literature.
But symbolic usage largely disappeared after the fatal third
century in countries under the Christian banner. For nigh unto eleven centuries
little is heard of symbolism, and this period is precisely that covered by the
"Dark Ages" in Occidental civilization.
Then, to put an end to the dismal night, came the Italian
Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A perusal of John
Addington Symond's comprehensive volumes on the Renaissance in Italy brings to
light the astonishing fact that with this great burst of enlightenment there
swept in a great tide of symbolic poetization.
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The intellectual instinct for symbolization indeed formed one of
the chief currents of the revival itself. Says Symonds (p. 95):
"Poetry is instruction conveyed through allegory and fiction.
Theology itself, he [Boccaccio] reasons, is a form of poetry; even the Holy
Spirit may be called a Poet, inasmuch as he used the vehicle of symbol in the
visions of the prophets and the Revelation of St. John."
Symonds speaks of Boccaccio's work as containing "a full
exposition of the allegorical theories with which humanism started."
Another curious passage from Symonds may well be interpolated here, since it
weighs in with a surprisingly pertinent reference to present postures in
culture. He goes on (p. 96):
"The poet, according to this medieval philosophy of literature,
was a sage and teacher, wrapping up his august meanings in delightful fictions.
Though the common herd despised him as a liar and a falsehood-fabricator, he
was, in truth, a prophet uttering his dark speech in parables. How foolish,
therefore, reasons the apologist, are the enemies of poetry,--sophistical
dialecticians and avaricious jurists, who have never trodden the Phoebean hill,
and who scorn the springs of Helicon because they do not flow with gold! Far
worse is the condition of those monks and hypocrites who accuse the divine art
of immortality and grossness, instead of reading between the lines and seeking
the sense conveyed to the understanding under veils of allegory."
This outcry of Boccaccio against the stolidity and
unresponsiveness to the finer poetic aspects of literary culture of the
fourteenth century well dramatizes the general protest of delicacy of
sensibilities against crassness in all ages. It is one of the noblest yet
plaintively pitiful bleatings of refinement against gross dullness. The point to
be remarked here is that it came from one who performed pioneer labor in the
restoration of intellectual light to a benighted Europe, and that the light
which had been kindled for him and which he beamed further abroad to his age,
was largely generated and carried by the torch of symbolism. The enlightenment
of the Renaissance superinduced, if it was not in great measure superinduced by,
the revived science of symbology.
186
But the Renaissance ran its course, lighting up the intellectual
horizon of some generations with a mellow glow of great refinement, to be lost
eventually in the sweep of the Reformation, the assertive reaction of the human
spirit from centuries of stultifying blind faith, and the extraversion of
interest created by the trend to modern physical science. The fine discernments
and appreciations of cultured intellect requisite to capture the exalted values
in symbolic usage were extinguished and disappeared. Humanitarian culture fell
again to a low status, although the Renaissance had given too sweet a taste of
it ever to be completely smothered out again. At any rate symbolism was once
more submerged in desuetude, except in so far as it lingered in general poetry
and polite literature. Even that continuation owed nearly all its inspiration to
the vigorous breath that fired the Renaissance flame.
Now, once again, there is the dawning of the sun of symbolic
apperception. What it heralds for humanity this time is conjectural and
precarious. It all depends on the cultural capabilities of the age. The world
has possessed the forms and norms of culture and lost them. With coarse, crude
realism stalking the land, in music, art, drama, literature and social life,
there seems little chance that a revival of symbolism can take hold and live.
The requisite refinements of intellectual perceptions, the delicate nuances of
human sentiment, the quietude and habits of reflection needed to catch the
subtle but powerful force of natural analogies are lacking or perilously
inadequate. The set of the modern mind is too aggressively extravert to open the
way for symbolism to register its values and show its light. Yet, as always
before, the true culture of the world hinges upon that accomplishment. In this
connection nothing is more illuminating than a fairly lengthy passage from
Symonds' work. Speaking of the obstructions in the path of the fourteenth
century revival, he writes (p. 67):
"The meagreness of medieval learning was, however, a less
serious obstacle to culture than the habit of mind, partly engendered by
Christianity, and partly idiosyncratic to the new races, which prevented
stu-
187
dents from appreciating the true spirit of the classics. While
mysticism . . . reigned supreme, the clearly defined humanity of the Greeks and
Romans could not fail to be misapprehended."
That is, the nice discernments of symbolic meanings could not be
gained against or amid the thick atmosphere of heavy pietism and ecclesiastical
postures of all sorts.
"Poems like Virgil's Fourth Eclogue were prized for what
the author had not meant when he was writing them; while his real interests were
utterly neglected. Against this mental misconception, this original obliquity of
vision, this radical lie in the intellect, the restorers of learning had to
fight at least as energetically as against brute ignorance and dulness. It was
not enough to multiply books and to discover codices; they had to teach men how
to read them, to explain their inspiration, to defend them against prejudice, to
protect them from false methods of interpretation. To purge the mind of fancy
and fable, [when of course literalized] to prove that poetry apart from its
supposed prophetic meaning was delightful for its own sake, and that the history
of the antique nations . . . could be used for profit and instruction, was the
first step to be taken by these pioneers of modern culture. They had, in short,
to create a new mental sensibility by establishing the truth that pure
literature directly contributes to the dignity and happiness of human beings.
The achievement of this revolution in thought was the great performance of the
Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries."
It requires no access of perfervid unction or over-serious
thinking to be aware that this passage describes a situation the replica of
which confronts humanity at this present hour with issues grave and fateful. It
might indeed be said truly that the fate of our civilization hinges on the
fineness or the bluntness of our susceptibility to the profound intimations of
symbolism. The age has given no sign that it has cultivated the requisite
sensitivity to the subtle impingement of the high values delineated by
symbology. There seems little hope that it can rise to the measure of a
successful accomplishment in this field.
Henry Drummond offered to its view the generic type of such an
achievement in his The Natural Law in the Spiritual World.
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The book was widely read, a fact which makes its eventual drop
into desuetude and neglect all the more dispiriting. Had the Christian
theologians possessed the open mind to evaluate the great hint of his book in
due and significant measure, the postulates of religion today would be resting
more firmly, not merely, as Gladstone thought, on the impregnable rock of the
Holy Scriptures--esoterically interpreted,--but on that still more impregnable
rock of natural analogy, than they have ever rested on sheer faith. Will the age
fail once again to hold the benignant light of symbolic truth when
psychoanalysis kindles the lamp anew? It is a momentous question. More centuries
of war and woe will follow if the response is feeble.
There has existed for centuries an inveterate obduracy against
allegorism, symbolism and dramatization of truth, as particularly found in the
sacred scriptures. The sage authors of those scriptures presented majestic truth
in no less majestic allegory, myth, drama and symbol; and the best that even the
modern mind can do in the face of it is to snarl and sneer and snort. To
continue the alliteration, to that mind it has all been a snare. There was no
soundness nor health in it. It was perforce accepted and palliated as the
infantile habit of "primitive" peoples. It could be tolerated in condescension.
But this "certain condescension" worked to a catastrophic end in the total
failure of its possessors to grasp the meaning buried in those superb relics of
cryptic wisdom under allegory and symbol. The creation story, the ark and deluge
saga, the going down into "Egypt," the drying up of the Red Sea (now properly
translated the Reed Sea!) and the exodus of forty years' wandering, the Jonah
idyll and a good thousand other major and minor items of that Bible claimed to
be the highest expression of the moral and ethical grandeur of a civilization
boasting its clear-seeing powers above those of all other times and peoples in
history,--all these items of cardinal meaning in its own holy volume are yet a
totally sealed mystery, not a syllable of their true esoteric meaning properly
read or understood. It should carry some measure of rebuke to modern pride and
vaunting of all-time superiority in intelligence, as well
189
as some degree of humiliation, from the discernment that the
Bible it still extolls is quite incapable of interpretation without resorting to
the keys supplied--and only recently discovered--from the allegedly primitive
Egyptians.
There is a modern tide of concern with so-called prophecy. The
forecasts of the future made by Nostradamus, Mother Shipton and others have been
brought out and given great vogue. To give any plausible conciseness to their
predictions, a deal of help must be supplied by the reader's imagination. They
run much on the order of ancient oracles, whose messages were vague and flexible
enough to cover several possible alternatives. But there is one such utterance
that challenges the attention of the most incredulous. It was that given by
Count Leo Tolstoy in 1910 and published in advance of the events it predicted.
It foretold the Balkan War in 1912, the first World War in 1914 starting in the
Balkans, the course of developments thereafter, and contained in its penetrating
vision of the near future the remarkable statement that a new religion would
arise based on symbolism. It is most impressively set forth.
Likewise the savant who was regarded as the world's outstanding
authority on Orphism, Prof. Vittorio D. Macchioro, of the University of Naples,
in a work entitled From Orpheus to Paul, declared in positive terms that
if religion is to survive and exercise a beneficent sway over general
intelligence, it must return from dogmatic theology to symbolism. This is sound
insight, since the highest metaphysical values in religion can be adequately
expressed only through the language of symbols. Psychoanalysis has added its
corroboration to this conclusion. The divine soul must use symbols to adumbrate
its realities.
It is pretty well established that among groups or schools that
in ancient days labored at the great task of spiritual culture, the Essenes in
the Trans-Jordan region were the most eminent custodians of true primeval
wisdom. The article on them in the Encyclopaedia Britannica contains the
remarkable statement that "they preserved in their libraries the books of the
ancients, and read them not with-
190
out an allegorical interpretation." The Christian
historian-apologist Eusebius makes the statement, which is surely a vital
challenge to all Christian claims, that the Gospels of the New Testament were
old books preserved by the Essenes from remote antiquity.
Psychoanalysis now opens the door to the renaissance of
symbolism. This may mean as great an advance for mental science in the domain of
self-mastery for the individual as the introduction of symbols meant for
abstract mathematics. It will equip effort at control of individual action with
a technique of known scientific procedure. And now follows a denouement in this
process of investigation that comes with startling impact upon common
realization. Symbolism, the newest feature of psychoanalytic discovery, is all
at once found to stand in the relation of a new intimacy with an older aspect,
indeed one that presided at the very birth of psychoanalysis itself,--sex. We
have said that nature and her phenomena stand as the outer language speaking the
truth of cosmic creation, that nature is truth manifested in the form of
concrete structures. The shape and nature of created things reveal the
archetypal mind that engendered them.
A link that helps join the two aspects of the theme being
developed here may be found in Dr. Hinkle's discerning pattern of relationship
between symbol and reality in her volume already freely quoted. She writes (p.
240):
"One can gain value from experience only when it is grasped in
its double aspect as symbol and as reality; not when it is possessed merely as a
symbol, and the subjective content, expressed through the idea of fantasy, is
the only reality. Actually there are two realities, the concrete external fact,
and the inner subjective psychological factor; adaptation and assimilation must
take place with both."
This is extremely well said and timely. Every object is at once
both thing in itself and symbol of another thing less objective. And the true
"being" or "reality" of a thing is not seen until this double refraction of
meaning is discerned. As Wordsworth has brought out so pointedly in his Peter
Bell poem,
191
"A primrose by the river's brink
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."
Beside standing there in the meadow it carried to Peter nothing
in the line of the majesty, meaning and wonder of the universal life in which it
was a humble participant. But it does seem as if Dr. Hinkle has here transposed
her rating of values and acclaimed by the form of her language the lesser status
of the view of the thing as symbol of deeper import. She seems to imply that
people ordinarily miss its value as objective reality in the implied more common
grasp of its meaning as symbol. This reverses the general status of the case,
for hardly any mind misses the validity of the thing as object, while very few
go beyond this to the reality of the thing as symbol of subjective experience.
Our whole essay is the attempt to do just that with sex, to take it far beyond
its known quality as an object of sensual experience in the concrete world, and
to invest it with its grander reality as symbol. There is little evidence that
this task has been attempted or achieved before.
Dr. Hinkle herself stands in position to be accorded credit for
taking several notable steps in that very direction. She has caught some
glimpses into the long vista of truth that is opening out through the analogical
approaches, tentative and timorous as they are, of psychoanalysis to the science
of sex as symbol. On page 49 of her work she writes that by the technique
provided by psychoanalysis
"the sexual impulse is raised to the realm of the symbol and,
for humanity in whom creativeness is the never ending goal, it is a symbol of
the highest significance and value."
And she continues:
"One is forced by analytic work to a realization that the
representations of sexual activity are themselves used as symbols by the human
mind to indicate the new goal--the creative urge toward the fulfilment of a
necessary psychic development and attainment, which all the physi-
192
cal gratification in the world can not satisfy. Just as men use
their sexual powers and achievements as a measure and symbol of their masculine
strength and power on the physical plane, so the unconscious uses the sexual
symbols as the language in which to express capacities and potentialities on
the psychic plane." (Italics ours.)
The last sentence comes close to being a statement of the theme
and thesis of this work. Sex is a great--a very great--objective reality in and
of itself. And there the common mind of humanity has stopped in dealing with it.
It has seemed so substantial and realistic a value in itself that there was not
felt a need to use it as a mental stepping-stone or stairway to something of
more intrinsic value lying ahead in subjective realms. Now the task is to
transcend its value as object and sensual experience and to delineate its still
higher value as a symbolic language of the most exalted descriptive
character.
What Dr. Hinkle has brought out here is true and vital. The time
is destined to arrive, and before too long, when the principles of analogy and
the human mental capacity for analogical insight, developed to quick
apperceptions in periods when symbolism was pursued and cultivated, but left to
atrophy in all other periods, will be developed to an acute stage again and
function like a new genius. The mind will be able to look at objects in nature's
realm and see both of the realities pertaining to them, to cull both their
objective and their subjective influences. It will see them as the things they
are, standing there as objects of experience palpable to sense. But at the same
time it will be able to see them as the Egyptians saw them, the living language
of another world of reality, the world of truth, laws, ideas. It is the aim here
to perform this service for the objective reality known as sex in human life.
Another work will aim to do the like service for a thousand particular phenomena
in the world of nature.
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Now sex is one great cardinal aspect of nature. Among nature
symbols those based on sex must play as pivotal and sweeping a role in thought
and philosophy as sex itself plays in life as lived. The central and almost
predominant part sex plays in life is matched by the Freudian, and again more
recent, assignment to it of positively crucial importance in psychoanalysis.
Symbolism is the discovered modus of the operation of the superconscious; sex is
the dominant strain of influence or motivation in the production of psychic
manifestations. Hence sex and symbolism must be close in affinity. The thesis of
this work is the interpretation of sex as symbol of cosmic truth.
Sex is the greatest word in the language of symbolism, and it
can now be perceived that the intonations of that word come ringing out to the
human mind with a message of meanings the most awesome and mentally illuminating
in the whole history of man's questing for light on the mysteries of life and
nature. Again it will be seen that the ancients knew this basic fact that
only now is receiving some recognition in modern groping. This knowledge on
their part is now certified to by their use of sex symbols, extended later to
sex practices and formularies, in the religious systems of ancient nations.
Their employment of this sort of symbolism, known as phallicism, has been no
less than tragically misapprehended by stupid medieval and modern assumption in
entire failure to grasp the true motif behind it all. The essay will endeavor to
orient the modern attitude to a more competent understanding of the intrinsic
sincerity, natural legitimacy and exalted significance of phallic symbolism, and
to raise it again from its mean status in the
misconceptions of religionists to its due place of the loftiest
sublimity in human consideration. The results attained by the study will come as
the natural corollary of the function of sex as found at work in the field of
psychological science.
Again modern mentality is confronted with the necessity, for its
own better poise and balance, of recovering a lost ancient comprehension. Again
it finds itself in dereliction from the more perspicacious discernment of
antiquity. Again it must bestir itself to regain a lost possession of the
past.
Dr. Hinkle's capable delineation of the status of sex symbolism
in remote days may serve to open this excursion into the territory to be
explored afresh (The Recreating of the Individual, p. 426). She is
speaking of the Oriental faiths in the ancient period:
"These religions, unlike the Christian religion, were not
antagonistic to sexuality--indeed we find its phenomena frankly flourishing
along side all their worship and ritual, and incorporated with them. To these
minds sexuality was not impure or unclean and there seemed no incongruity in the
admixture of sexual and religious symbolism. Indeed in India sexuality itself
was made an object through which control and discipline could be gained by the
man."
Christian missionaries professed great horror and revulsion at
finding the lingam and yoni, the male and female creative organs, and other
signs and symbols of "sexuality" and "immorality" in Buddhic, Hindu and other
Oriental temples of religion. Many a dollar was raised from the faithful at home
to help lift the heathen idolaters out of their deep mire of besotted sexual
grossness by importing to them the same abhorrence of the mention of sex
functionism as had come to be the heritage of New England after several
centuries of adamant Puritanism. The passage quoted just now is indication that
at long last the pall of a wholly unnatural evil stigma laid by the worst of
philosophical distortions upon our Occidental mind for some centuries is
beginning to be lifted, as the lost light of a wholesome paganism dawns
upon our benighted mental horizon. Psychoanalysis indeed might have come earlier
if
195
sex had not been pushed down out of common normal vision under a
blanket of hypothecated indecency and evil for too many centuries. There was
offered little chance of the West's coming to understand the meaning of this
segment of our nature as long as it was held reprehensible for anyone to study
the phenomena appertaining to it and to publish the findings. Now the moral
miasmatic mist is lifting, and with the first release from stigma and opprobrium
come the first rich fruits in the valuable findings of
psychoanalysis.
Sex is being morally neutralized, as a legitimate object of
research and understanding. The nightmare of some sixteen centuries of more or
less insane morbidity over it, due to the frightful perversion of ancient
symbolic dramatization of cosmic truth by phallic representations, and leading
to the horrendous asceticisms perpetrated in the name of "spirituality" by
generations of fanatical religionists, crucifying the sex nature to "save" the
immortal spirit, is at last being dispersed in the awakening of common sense to
the recognition of the natural good function of the sexual instinct.
This side of the Renaissance has lingered long behind the
intellectual and philosophical impulses of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. The Renaissance and the Reformation are neither of them completed.
What an errant and ignorant Christianity threw out or extinguished in the third
century has by no means all been recovered. To emphasize vividly what a wrongly
oriented Christian philosophy did to an aboriginal sane view of the natural
man's place in the dual economy of life, it is well to look at a concise
statement made by Lecky in his famous old work, The History of European
Morals (Vol. II, p. 291):
"The Greek conception of excellence was the full and perfect
development of humanity in all its organs and functions, and without any tinge
of asceticism. Some parts of human nature were recognized as higher than others;
and to suffer any of the lower appetites to obscure the mind, restrain the will
and engross the energies of life, was acknowl-
196
edged to be disgraceful; but the systematic repression of a
natural appetite was totally foreign to Greek modes of thought."
This is a challenging reminder to those in Christian circles who
find it an unfailing pastime to stigmatize darkly everything pagan. There was
balance, there was understanding, there was philosophical acumen holding the
horizon line steadily between excess and deficiency. Lecky contrasts with this
the tragic misconception of Christian moral codes, which could rise to nothing
higher than the persuasion of folly that for the interests of the spirit it was
necessary to kill out the element of creative impulse and all its works. And the
world has ignored, excused, condoned and palliated, if not even honored, this
abject subversion of reason and sanity, as the product of a holy passion for
God. But Socrates and Plato labored all life long to prove that no amount of
holy passion is good unless it is tempered with the knowledge that enables the
human to keep his position steadily between excess and inadequacy. Holy passion
is not only futile but perilous if it is misguided to the repression of a part
of our nature that is designed to fulfill its function in its most perfect
development.
It is well if the modern Occidental mind can be brought for a
moment to remembrance of this chapter of early Christian history, as it may aid
in giving a truer perspective of the road we have traveled to where we now
stand. A work of great value would be a study which would bring to clear light
the genesis of the human sense of shame of the reproductive functions and
organs, with its ghastly brood of developments in asceticism, mutilation of the
body, distortion of the mind and morbid crushing of natural happiness. In the
study it would be brought to view that the usual laudation of "Christian" and
the stigma thrown on "pagan" must be exactly reversed. In this comparison the
laurels for sanity and wholesomeness must surely go to "pagan." It is indeed no
slight ignominy that falls to the debit of Christianity in this contest. To have
perverted whole segments of human psychic endeavor and natural
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instinct by turning them from the channels of happy exercise
under God's order to the dark recesses of both morbid repression and guilty
expression, must be accounted forever a heavy stain on the record of the Church
of Christ.
A few startling excerpts from Lecky's work may accentuate the
charge succinctly. He writes (Vol. II, p. 321):
"The relation which nature has designed for the noble purpose of
repairing the ravages of death, and which, as Linnaeus has shown, extends even
through the world of flowers, was invariably treated [by the Christian Fathers]
as a consequence of the fall of Adam, and marriage was regarded almost
exclusively in its lowest aspect . . . as an inferior state. . . . 'To cut down
by the axe of Virginity the wood of Marriage,' was, in the energetic language of
Jerome, the end of the saint."
To reproduce the race was a crime against Deity.
Taking the Adam-Eve allegory in its crude literal
interpretation, the crabbed mind of early theologism could not get past the
inevitable naïve inferences that sprang from Eve's tempting man to his fall.
Woman had to carry the stigma of the first mother's weakness all through
history. If the divine spirit in man was to stand against further descent into
sin or supine resignation to its established thraldom, the man had to cut
himself free from the woman. Woman had to be cast aside as unclean, as evil, as
the living form of the Tempter. And such was the lot that was thrust upon her
and in which she, with equal morbidity, in large part concurred. Lecky adds
(Vol. II, p. 338):
"The combined influence of the Jewish writings [as part of
Christianity] and of that ascetic feeling which treated women as the chief
source of temptation to man, was shown in those fierce invectives which form so
conspicuous and so grotesque a portion of the writings of the Fathers, and
contrast so curiously with the adulation bestowed upon particular members of the
sex. Woman was represented as the door of hell, as the mother of all human ills.
She should be ashamed at the very thought that she is a woman. She should live
in continual penance, on account of the curses she has brought upon the world.
She should be ashamed of her dress, for it is the memorial of her fall. She
should
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be especially ashamed of her beauty, for it is the most potent
instrument of the daemon. Physical beauty was indeed perpetually the theme of
ecclesiastical denunciations."
To such lengths of literalism and harlequin grotesqueness had
this philosophy gone all askew that "women were often forbidden by a Provincial
Council in the sixth century, on account of their impurity, to receive the
Eucharist into their naked hands." Against this macabre background the ancient
Greeks' love of beauty and naturalness shines with wondrous luster. Let us take
the space to enhance the contrast. In his second volume (p. 292) Lecky writes,
with reference to the Greek epoch:
"In no other period of the world's history was the admiration of
beauty in all its forms so passionate or so universal. It colored the whole
moral teaching of the time and led the chief moralists to regard virtue simply
as the highest kind of supersensual beauty. It appeared in all literature, where
the beauty of form and style was the first of studies. It supplied at once the
inspiration and the rule of all Greek art. It led the Greek wife to pray, before
all other prayers, for the beauty of her children. It surrounded the most
beautiful with an aureole of admiring reverence."
One sad consequence of Christian sickliness of mind may be
mentioned in Lecky's words (Vol. II, p. 354):
"The domestic unhappiness arising from differences of belief was
probably almost or altogether unknown in the world before the introduction of
Christianity."
In one more respect the Occidental world needs to recover the
high status of paganism. And once again the mind is instructed by a shocking
object-lesson of appalling costliness in the destruction of human happiness, in
the incredible historical consequences of such an apparently simple item as the
misconstruction of an ancient theological or cosmic allegory. The rebirth of
symbolism comes after its burial in ignorance for dismal centuries, with its
fair promise of release to the bound mind of ages from the killing force
of
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moral and intellectual ineptitudes unconscionable past all
belief. It will be the only magician's wand capable of healing the diseases of
mental infatuation and the hypnotic power of superstition.
The clue to an understanding of the whole situation may be drawn
out from a piercing introspection into the implications of an epigrammatic
pronouncement of Lecky's (Vol. II, p. 3):
"The eye of the Pagan philosopher was ever fixed on virtue, the
eye of the Christian teacher upon sin."
If a ribald figure may be pardoned, the Pagan philosopher sought
to elevate man by lifting him from above; the Christian theologist by kicking
him up from below. Doubtless in the large both directions of force have their
dual play. Yet the difference of approach is suggestive. One aims to keep the
spirit of man breathing the pure upper air of healthy life and enjoying it; the
other imprisons it in the dank malarial atmosphere of ugliness and morbidity.
One contemplates an upward urge from delight in the beautiful and the natural;
the other expects it from revulsion against ugliness. One envisages
righteousness and virtue and beauty, and becomes rapt in the ecstasies of
holiness. The other fights in the shadows of remorse and wretchedness and keeps
the eye of the soul riveted on the despicable, the craven and the repulsive. The
one aims to lift up the spirit through the delights of virtue; the other through
disgust with evil.
The subjugation of the mind of general humanity under the
complex of an evil attribution to sex is one of the most stupendous and
challenging phenomena in life's domain. The general mind does not possess the
necessary of an adequate elucidation, since the problem has its roots deep in
aspects of the soul's evolutionary situation or predicament which lie beyond our
ken. They may inhere in and spring from some of the anthropological and genetic
phases of the soul's pilgrimage through the eons. Orphic books do ascribe the
soul's present status and difficulties to "ancient wrongs" and "Moira's bounds
transgressed." They ascribe its present karmic evils
200
to past sins, in part at least. The soul is said to have bound
itself by "broad oaths fast sealed" with Deity, to discharge its high
evolutionary errand on earth, but violated its oath and fell into dalliance and
waywardness. It did not walk on the surface of the water of life, but sank into
the depths of sense and animalism. "They indulged in their own movement; they
took the wrong path . . . and swung as far away as they were able," says
Plotinus.
Whatever the cause, at any rate the human race has ever stood
before its own endowment of sex baffled and perplexed. Imperiously sex has
dominated a major segment of all human motivation and activity, and has driven
mortal man with its implacable imperative into the continued perpetuation of the
race, and from one angle of view, taunted it with the consequences.
Physiologically and psychologically its slave, man has philosophically been
almost entirely bereft of a rationale that would enable him to mitigate its
thraldom, neutralize its ravages, countercheck its impetuous tyranny, control
its expression and normalize both its exercise and its social acceptance by due
comprehension of its proper genre and status in the human economy. It still can
be said that the race is without an adequate philosophical purview of
sex.
Beyond the crude and obvious recognition of its provision for
the propagation of the race and the ascription to it of a natural beneficence in
this function, there is no generally agreed and fixed category of appraisal in
which it should be classified. Even at times its agency in the production of new
humans is not seen as a blessing. It can legitimately be thought of as dooming
souls to lives of mortal wretchedness. Schopenhauer has well delineated its
despotic sway over mankind in the three volumes of his The World as Will and
Idea. It is there depicted as a nameless despot, as the will of life driving
its creatures on to the fulfillment of its aims. It is pictured as irrational,
guided by no principle or reason, and brushing aside any such principle
whenever
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its use by its creatures would stand to obstruct its sweep to
the accomplishment of its own ends. It is painted as an insatiable hunger and
thirst after life, and that not in idea or spirit, but in existence, in sense
and in flesh. To gain its goal of ever more bodies to live in, it baits its lure
to their generation with its irresistible honey and nectar of bliss and
orgiastic ecstasy. And from deep in the profoundest well of conscious
motivation--even from the hidden recesses of the unconscious, in fact--this
inexorable tyrant of life channels human conduct in a direction that tends ever
toward the culmination of all in a paroxysm of transport.
Its faraway reference is omnipresent, whenever male and female
meet. It looks out of the eyes of the youth and maid from the moment of their
first glance. It insinuates its mute but powerful appeal into every touch of the
two polarized opposites, heightening the lure until both seep into each other's
embrace. Its sole "drive" is to bring spirit and matter, male and female,
together for the purpose of new generation. Every act, word, look and stratagem
of conduct, of those who may be its coadjutors and eventually its victims, is
conditioned in reference to its fateful end of sex union and reproduction. If in
life's code of values it could be assumed that the first and divinest task and
end of existence for a living creature is to generate its seed and perpetuate
its stream of ongoing life, then it might be legitimate to say that all general
acts are subsidiary and subservient to the central consummative act of
procreation, and are to be appraised as good or evil as they fall in or out of
line with the movement leading toward life's renewal.
Whether to hold the tyrant as grim and beneficent, or grim and
maleficent, to rate it good or berate it as evil, to regard it as enslaving or
as liberating, as lovely or repulsive, blessed or accursed, has been the age-old
question with which the incessant pressure of the great life impulse has
confronted mankind from the dawn of reflection. So we have seen the function of
sex pigeon-holed in both the highest and the lowest categories of thought and
regard, as well as in every intermediate shade and grade between the two. It is
at
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one time and in certain propitious circumstances exalted as the
very flower of beauty and of good; at other times and under altered conditions,
it becomes the very horror of shame and repugnance. It can be viewed in every
degree of light and shadow in the gamut's interval. It can be exalted to the
highest rhapsodies of Platonic or poetic purity and sanctity; a little lower
down it can be sensed as good in more commonplace degree; still father down it
can be a matter of indifference, morally, aesthetically neutral; then it can be
mildly repellent, conventionally taboo; and finally it can be violently
distasteful and even loathsome, foul and bestial. In between it may register a
thousand different nuances of tone and impressionability.
This wide variety and diversity in the modes of its subjective
registry may indeed point to the inference therefrom that its assessment of good
and evil character is a matter merely of the mood, background, biases,
predilection and the general postures of the minds that stand in judgment on it.
Indeed history sanctions this verdict. For there has never been uniformity in
the social appraisal. What has seemed noble and lofty to some has appeared
vicious and depraved to others. Laudation and reprobation, tolerance and
resentment have often greeted the same acts. Even to the same individual a
sexual determination that at one instant seemed haloed with loveliness can ex
post facto be viewed as injudicious and turn to a canker of remorse. What
absolute character or quality the thing has intrinsically of itself is often the
least considered item in the mental view. Extraneous influences and not the
inherent merit or demerit of the case generally govern the form of the judgment
or the reaction. In the end, then, being virtually the hidden omnipresent
motivation behind every situation, it takes on the infinitely varied coloring of
mood, shade and value from the distinctive connection in which it occurs. So it
has never been categorically judged and catalogued in specific
character.
Yet certain broad general attitudes toward it have taken
concrete form in the social life of different nations. Common convention
in
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society has condemned a too free and open expression of it. Any
manifestation of it outside the legitimatized forms is frowned upon and disgrace
is heaped upon the offenders. It receives its highest sanctions and its virtual
apotheosization in the field of romance, in the phase of courtship and mating,
and in parenthood. After marriage the door is open to indulgence governed only
by individual tastes and disciplines. In religion, art, literature and education
its expression is varied and manifold. Many differentiations make up the general
patch-quilt of its variegated vogue and role in the life of the world. On the
whole it is inordinately sensitive to the vicissitudes of mood, sentiment, moral
poses and personal attitudes. In the main it is maintained in strength and
keenness by the imposition of restraint upon its indulgence and rendered weak
and flaccid by inordinate expression.
The deepest inquiry is involved in the attempt to determine the
genesis of the sense of shame that has almost universally afflicted the ordinary
human attitude toward sex. Why the dialectically unsupportable posture of the
human mind, exhibited in its investing with the mantle of shame and contumely
the very organs and functions that give us our existence, could arise and fix
its clammy clutch so remorselessly and universally upon the world is a problem
of the weightiest moment and needs rational solution.
To strike bottom in this recondite search it is necessary to
resort to the hints and data found only in the tomes of the archaic
anthropological and cosmological wisdom of the early sages. The old books give
us intimations in data that are not too full or explicit. They tell us that, as
in the Timaeus, "twelve legions of angels"--the true identification at
last of the twelve "tribes of Israel"--were assigned the mission of coming to
earth to be the souls of the highest evolved animal bodies. These souls were
units of God's own spiritual selfhood, seed fragments of his own nature. One
might think of them as units of his mind. They are the "Innocents" of New
Testament allegorism, the designation being a reference to their never before
having been "married,", i.e., linked organically
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to physical bodies in planetary incarnation. A Hindu name given
them is Kumaras, or "virgin youths," "celibate young men." In Egyptian
nomenclature they were "the Younglings of Shu," or "the younglings in the egg."
They were pure souls, units of divine consciousness, untested in the conflict
with matter, and therefore sent out to be put under the test which all
consciousness must meet, namely, the function of standing as the positive pole
opposed to matter, the negative. This constituted the "temptation" of Holy Writ,
so outrageously misconceived by ignorant literalism. It was a "temptation" only
in the sense of a testing or a trying out against concrete experience the latent
powers of the soul, which could come to an actualization of its still potential
capabilities only by such an ordeal.
The nub of the origin of shame appertaining to the animal sex
nature of man must then be located in the psychic implications of this
situation. Here were units of pure mind and soul finding themselves plunged into
the bodies of animals and under the necessity of procreating physically, as
animals. Or the high-minded souls found themselves organically attached to
bodies which procreated physically and sexually. If it is possible to project
thought into something like the mental attitudes that would be generated in this
evolutionary predicament, some inkling, however imperfect, may be caught of the
reaction of these soul units to what must have appeared to them as a degradation
of their divine status and condition. Sons of God and consubstantial with him in
essence and being as they, subconsciously at any rate, knew themselves to be,
they found themselves obliged to "become like us in all respects," and
particularly to reproduce in the fashion of animals.
The possible realization of the force of this contrast is not so
remote to us as at first view it might appear, since these two elements are
still present in our nature, or indeed constitute what we ourselves are. One
needs only to recall Plato's definition of man: "Through body it is an animal;
through intellect it is a God"--to sense the possible mental attitude of the god
in us toward his ani-
205
mal counterpart in us. The emerging self-consciousness of the
ego-soul became aware of its attachment to the gross instincts of the
animal-soul. The animal functions had for a long time been performed by the
animal unconscious, as they still are. But little by little the expanding
consciousness of the infant god could look down upon these manifestations of the
instinctive life of the body and reflect in some sort philosophically upon them.
Surely, sooner or later, as the nobility of the innate divine nature asserted
itself, the reaction of the god to the sexual expressions of his own organism
would take the form of disgust and revulsion. Something suggesting what we can
only call "cosmic shame" of his having to perform like the animal would be
generated in the mind of the higher self. Plotinus, as has been noticed,
expressed it in a manner almost as drastic as that of the Christian Fathers, in
his confession of shame at having a body at all. Some modern spiritual cult
systems come to nearly the same attitude. Some even ban sexual expression
entirely from their members. The essence of this predicament is in truth back of
the many scriptural statements as to the Christ's having demeaned, degraded
himself by taking on our nature. "He despised not the virgin's [that is,
matter's] womb." Before the rational faculty in the developing ego-consciousness
could dialectically work out the "naturalness" and beneficence of the cosmic
arrangement that tied or imprisoned soul in bodies, this instinctive revulsion
of the god at sight of the body's performance of the creative acts must have
taken deep lodgment in the ego-mind.
So came the sense of shame of sex. This is obviously how the
genuinely most sacred function in all life on its physical side fell under the
onus and stigma of universal infamy and turpitude. Plato, Hermes, Orpheus,
Zoroaster, the Zend-Avesta, the Bundahish, the Zohar, the
Vedas and Genesis disclose in cryptic form the story of the birth
and growth of sexual shame. It goes to the very roots of the human constitution.
It came as the result of the original compounding in one organism of the two
diverse elements of deity and animality, and their enforced "marriage." The
god conceived
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a feeling of shame at being subjected to the carnal mode of
procreation incident to his incarnation in animal body.
It is a bit of ancient evolutionary allegorism that has, like
the rest, escaped understanding by modern intelligence, that the "sons of God,"
when sent to earth, were variously cautioned "not to marry the women of that
place." They were enjoined to see that they made "no alliances with the natives
of that country." These odd injunctions leave something to be desired in the way
of explicitness. Nevertheless they can have reference only to two possibilities
inherent in the case. They can point to an avoidance of precisely what did
happen, namely, the asserted miscegenation of the early races of men with the
females of the higher animal species, which bred the several ape types. Or they
can be taken allegorically as being an allusion to the necessity of the soul's
not losing itself in entire identity with the life of the body. The soul was to
tenant the body, build up gradually its rulership over it, hold it in reasonable
and salutary subjection, transform its nature and eventually merge its forces
with it, or "marry" it. The injunction not to marry the women of that country
could therefore be taken as a caution to the souls about to incarnate to help
them hold true to the fulfillment of their oath or covenant, which bound them
not to lose themselves in the animal nature, to successfully "walk on the water"
of the sea of life--water being the exact typal symbol of the animal nature, the
body being seven-eighths water--and not to sink into the depths of carnal
sensuality. It is by no means a stretch of mental chicanery to make the term
"women" mean the physical body of mankind. For the feminine was ever the
symbol-type of the physical side, matter or body. The man in humanity marries
the woman in humanity when soul and body unite and eventually merge their
positive and negative potencies in a new creation. The entire structure of the
moral teaching in Old and New Testaments, particularly in St. Paul's searching
analyses of the Christly virtues and the carnal vices, rises to ever clearer and
more forceful compre-
207
hension if read in the light of these lost ancient presentments
of the anthropological formation of mankind.
Soul was masculine as generative of plan and action, and body
was feminine as performing the function of motherhood for all life and growth.
Body was ever represented as "the wife and sister" of spirit, not to say also
its "mother." And the story in Genesis is instructive for our theme in
that it sets forth that when the separation of unisexuality in primeval life
into the duality of male and female had been consummated in the garden, then
"the eyes of both of them were opened," and they saw that they were naked, and
they were ashamed. This is the allegorical depiction of the awakened sense of
their position when plunged into incarnation at the level of the beast. It was
the soul's reaction to the realization of its descent from the heaven of spirit
to the gross realism of life in body.
A phrase used by the Greek philosophers well brings out the
recognition of their status. They perceived that they "had fallen into
generation." It brought them "under the law," as St. Paul puts it, of sin and
death. They had plunged into what the sages of early days denominated "the death
of the soul." For such in fact was that diminished potential of life and
consciousness entailed for the god-unit when it entered into its union with
body. "Death, to the soul," says an exponent of Greek philosophy, "was to
descend into matter and to be entirely subjected to it." This is indeed the
"bondage in Egypt," "that slave pen," as the Moffatt translation of the Bible
renders the phrase in the Old Testament. As souls in bondage to the flesh, we
are the sons of Hagar, the bondwoman. When we awaken our divinity and engraft it
on the body of the physical, we become sons of Sarai, the freewoman, and thereby
enjoy the "liberty of the sons of God."
Down in the "underworld" of sense and matter, buried in flesh
and goaded to enjoy the lusts thereof, the god retains enough of the
unquenchable fire of divine spirit to be aware, if at first dimly, of his
celestial dignity and high estate. At times the sense of loss
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of his former home and realization of the degradation of his
life in the sensuous mire of animal reproduction flash through into his
apprehension and generate the shame of his "fall" into matter. Buried thus in
the depths of the "nether world" of mythology, hiding in the unconscious of
man's life, the soul conceives the feeling that its tenancy of body is a thing
of evil designing, low and base. The body is "of the earth, earthy," and the
soul feels the dishonor of attachment to it. Plotinus advances the theory that
the soul recognizes that its immersion in body arises from some defect in
itself, of which it should be ashamed. If it had lived up to its possible
greater perfection, it would not have needed the physical experience. This,
however, is gratuitous. The soul may be ashamed of its imperfection, but only in
the sense in which a seed or sapling should be ashamed of not being a perfect
grown tree. It is on the road to being such; it is, as Hopper reminds us, a
viator. When the Christos has arisen to his full stature and has asserted his
lordship over the entire man, he becomes the high priest after the order of
Melchizedek, the King of Righteousness, and he presides at the marriage of the
two long-warring but finally reconciled orders of life in one new creative
union. And when soul at last drops the "body of shame" of the perishable flesh,
and clothes itself anew in that glory-body of empyreal light which is from
above, then truly it has put on the wedding garment of the redeemed.
In the Pistis Sophia, the Gospel of the Gnostic
Christians, Salome asks the Christ when his kingdom shall come on earth. He
replies: "When you shall have trampled underfoot the garment of shame; when that
which is without shall be as that which is within; when there shall be neither
male nor female, but the male with the female shall be as one." This is in full
harmony with the postulates of the ancient teaching, that at the end of the aeon
the creative life which had divided into male and female poles of energy,
returns to androgyneity or undifferentiation for the period of
unmanifestation.
This sense of shame wells up from the unconscious, from
the
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Amen, the "god in hiding." "For a little while" he is made lower
than the angels, to be crowned with glory and honor that even angels have not
won. But from his temporarily submerged place he speaks out in warning and
admonition, or praise and commendation, to the conscious self in the language of
symbol. The voice of the unconscious, in its department of the superconscious,
is the voice of Deity, not absolute and infinite, but Deity undergoing its own
evolution, and as compared with the lower animal self, practically omniscient
and infallible. As Heraclitus has written, "Man's genius is a deity." Here in
man's temple of body it is a deity tied to the inhibitions of an organism of
flesh and sense. While his mind is set to the task of redeeming the animality of
the body to humanhood, he feels at times the meanness of his lowly estate and
the shame of his nakedness is strong.
It still remains anomalous, logically, that the mind of the race
should hold in contempt the functional mechanism of its own physical
perpetuation. The strange quirk of this predicament is that sex is held in both
extreme categories of the lowest and the highest moral appraisal at one and the
same time. It is pretty generally regarded as low and base, while it is at the
other end evaluated in terms of the highest sanctity. Its position is therefore
relative to mood and viewpoint, or the peculiar cast of philosophy determining
the judgment. Motherhood, for instance, is both celebrated with all the halo of
romance, sentiment and beauty, as in poetry of lyric character, and also made
the butt of scurrilous ribaldry. It is rated according to the dictates of time,
circumstance and subjective standards of conception.
Jung outlines a thesis to account for the almost universal low
rating of sex functionalism which has the merit of a psychological raison
d'être at least. He ventures the idea that the race, or the human mind, in
order to fend itself from the daily impingement of this insistent force, or to
escape its imperious domination, has besmirched it with infamy, pretending to
see in it something vile
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and unclean, something unspeakable and unholy. But, says Jung,
instead of enabling man to destroy the power of sexuality in this way, the
struggle to defame it has only warped and distorted, injured and mutilated its
expression. For not without destruction of the individual can such a fundamental
instinct be thwarted, he adds. Life itself has needs and imperiously demands
expression of them through the living instrumentalities provided by nature. All
nature answers to this freely and simply except man, and his failure to
recognize himself as an instrument through which living energy is coursing, and
the demands of which must be obeyed, is the prime cause of much of his misery.
Despite his possession of intellect and self-consciousness he can not without
disaster to himself refuse the task of fulfilling his own needs. His great task
is the adaptation of himself to reality and the recognition of himself as a
channel through which a stream of living energy is flowing outward to the
fulfillment of divinely designed objectives. His blocking them in any way is
perilous.
To crush out the sensuous libido overtly is a sin against life.
Jung goes so far as to pronounce it "a sort of self-murder." The deliberate
renunciation of the chance to express the strong demands of nature "must stifle
in himself the wish for it," and this is suicidal. The human will, actuated by
social compulsions, drives it inward, when its need is to come forth into
expression. This is to "introvert libido," in Jung's phrase, and disastrous
consequences follow, we are assured.
"Whoever introverts libido,--that is to say, whoever takes it
away from a real object without putting in its place a real compensation--is
overtaken by the inevitable results of introversion. The
libido which is turned inward into the subject awakens again from among the
sleeping remembrances one which contains the path upon which earlier libido once
had come to the real object." (Psychology of the Unconscious, p.
98.)
This is a fine discernment of psychology. For this introversion
clearly is seen to force the ego back into subjective fantasy among
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the images of its childhood and early racial past, the
evolutionary fruits of which have already been gathered, when what it craves is
new experiences to further its advance into ever-expanding life. The suppression
holds the spirit bound in old forms, when it cries aloud for freedom to test new
ones. The only salvation from disaster in the introversion is, as Jung notices,
the substitution of a "real compensation" for the repressed desire. Such would
come in the form of a higher realization on the part of the ego that the
thwarting of sensual libido is altogether in the line of true progress and that
the mere sensuous expression would no longer be advantageous. Such decisions
come with the general growth of knowledge, wisdom and understanding. Animal
desire must gradually be curbed and turned into paths of outlet conducive to the
interests of the ruling soul. The distress and psychopathic reactions in this
process are obviated when the control of libido is thus exercised from within
and, so to say, has the sanction of the whole man. Abnormal psychology results
from the imposition of compulsions and restraints on nature against which the
real will of the individual rebels. So we find Cicero most wisely writing
(Tusculanium Questiones):
"Volition is a reasonable desire; but whatever is incited to
violently in opposition to reason, that is a lust or an unbridled desire which
is discoverable in all fools."
The intellect in man is destined to be the king and ruler of all
things lower than it in the compounding of elements in the constitution of the
human. The forces of libido are to come under the direction of King Mind. Mind
is unfolding its archetypal plans and designs in the creation of the world and
of man and libido must be enlisted in the work as servant of the higher. The
soul possesses the power "whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself,"
as the Bible puts it. He is able "to put all things under his feet." Libido
finds its highest utility eventually in conformity with the purposes of the
mind. This is beautifully said by Plotinus (Enneads III, 5,
9.):
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"What lies enclosed in the intellect comes to development in the
world-soul as logos, fills it with meaning and makes it as if intoxicated with
nectar."
The mind will eventually stamp its image and the logical
structure of its formulations upon the outer universe, filling the whole with
the ecstatic sense of divine beauty. And in this work the mind bends the forces
of libido to its purposes. In the end libido itself finds its own
apotheosization in becoming the servant of mind.
The old Bay Psalm Book recites that
In Adam's fall
We sinned all.
And Adam's fall was, and still is, held to be the descent of the
angelic spirits into the realm of the flesh and their participation in fleshly
modes of procreation. Upon human sex has been unloaded the entire obloquy of the
"original sin." The grievous sin of Adam and Eve was their indulgence in sexual
union. Their lives were "pure" before the fatal commingling. The carnal
copulation opened their eyes to their state of sin and shame. Taken
allegorically there is philosophical meaning behind these representations. But,
the allegorical sense wholly lost, and ignorance clutching at superficial
understanding, the creation legend in its weird falsifications has stained the
mind of humanity for two thousand years with the taint of half-insane turpitude
that blackens mentally the conception of every child of the race. For deep in
the background of every human consciousness there still lingers this dark
psychological cloud whose miasmatic moisture was generated by the mental
poisoning of every generation in its childhood, that every child born of the
natural method of sexual union is "conceived in sin." In sickening revulsion
from the imputations of this theology, it is not too censurable, perhaps, except
on the grounds of its mental stupidity, that modern spiritual cults have in many
cases held before their women members the real possibility of their giving birth
to children by a wholly spiritual process. The fault does not lie with nature,
the methods
213
and processes of which are designed by God. It is to be located
in the human folly that can be bred of ignorance. As has been pointed out in so
many other items of doctrine that came down from ancient sources, here again is
to be noted the wreckage of sanity that has come again and again in human
thinking as the result of failure to understand archaic methods of representing
sublime truth by allegory and symbol. Perhaps in all history nothing has been so
costly to one half of humanity as this miscarriage of ancient
symbology.
214
Against the fickle and fluctuating approach to the appraisal of
sex made by modern sentiment and feeble philosophical conception, it is
possible, as the result of symbolic methodology, to set forth a view that will
enable the mind to lay the foundations for erecting a more stabilized and
settled judgment on the mooted question. By the aid of analogical processes it
will be possible to anchor the mind to a cosmic significance in sex that will
serve to fix vacillating opinion and attitudes in a more permanent frame. If it
can be shown that sex is at root the constitutional law of existent being and if
its functions can be seen as the representation of the modus of all creation, an
amended view of its character and beneficence will be gained. This will be of
incalculable value to thinking mankind. This view is to be gained through the
avenue of approach which sees in sex not the end value of itself in itself, but
sees it as the symbol of values in the supersensible world and in cosmic
creation which lie beyond its own sphere of function and experience.
Sex hints at the existence of criteria of appraisal of its
utility and character which lie beyond common ken, but toward which, by analogy,
the phenomena of sex themselves point, and which the mind, thus aided, may lay
hold of if it be astute enough. In brief, however much sex may mean as immediate
experience, its own weightier significance can better be seen in the light of
what it indicates as symbol. The light that comes into the focus when the
telescope of symbolic vision is directed upon sex as symbol is unimaginably
illuminating.
Our work is dedicated to the proposition that sex, used as
symbol, stands as perhaps the most luminous guide to the human mind
on
all the central problems of life and thought. Had the early
analogical instinct of discerning mind not been killed out, it might have been
known all along that if life is governed by universal law, the known method of
life propagation in the vegetable's, the animal's and man's world would be an
index of all cosmic creation. And if early tomes of exalted wisdom had not been
relegated to the status of infantile or primitive speculation, the terms and
elements of the entire problem of existence could have been kept inundated with
a flood of meaning, for the more explicit enlightenment of the human
faculty.
Theology, as has been seen, was anciently acclaimed as the "King
of Sciences." It had won its exalted position in antiquity by virtue of its
immediate contribution of light to man's understanding of the meaning of life
and the universe. Its principles met and solved the chief problems of philosophy
by dint of the fact that, as conceived and formulated, it maintained a relation
of the closest intimacy with the world of nature, as well as to man's
constitution and life as these were linked with nature. No more than now was
theology a mere nature cult, a worship of the growth and death of vegetation, an
agricultural ritual, as is so tediously claimed by modern students and writers
in the wake of a reading of The Golden Bough, or other collections of
ancient and "primitive" religious usages. We have read of the worship of Ceres,
the goddess of "grain," and of the "corn myth," and other religions of planting
and harvesting, of the autumn death of the god with the seed sown and his
resurrection in the spring with the germination and upgrowth of that which was
"dead." And not in two thousand years has there been one scholar's brain clever
enough to tell us that these formulated myths of the dying and germinating seed
were not the vaporings of a primitive nature-worship, but that they were the
natural analogue of cosmic and spiritual principle which govern all creation.
It is time that modern ignorance be rebuked and the blunt declaration be
made that the ancients never worshipped nature--except as Wordsworth or any poet
of beauty worshipped nature.
216
But they did something with nature that the modern is not yet
intelligent enough to do: they used her forms and phenomena as a faithful and
enlightening transcript and reflection of supersensual truth. Ancient religion
was kept in basic relation to nature, through the force of the ancient knowledge
that nature was the one infallible index for the mind's apprehension of the
truth in metaphysical realms.
Theology was never held bound in nature's domain, but it
certainly could fly aloft to the highest realms of spiritual cognition and could
maintain its grip on reality therein by grace of its keeping its eye always
closely fixed on the incontrovertible veritude that life had exhibited to man's
constant gaze in the world of natural fact. The mind's view of nature would hold
its vision steady to truth when it ascended into the worlds of thought and
intuition. It could pick up the laws and principles which it had abstracted from
its observation of life in its manifest forms and apply them with certitude to
the discernment of the structure of the metaphysical universe. Ancient
intelligence had grasped the truth that God had inscribed his archai, or
fundamental laws of being, in and upon the visible works of his hands. The
firmament showed his handiwork and the world was no less full of his truth than
of his glory. Early intelligence was keyed to an ability to catch the voice of
the "tongues in trees," to hear the "sermons in stones," to read the "books in
running brooks," and to discern the mind of "God in everything."
But the link that connected the mind of God with his works in
human conception was cut by the wave of ignorance that engulfed Christianity in
and after the third century, so that theology has suffered the loss of its
original sanctions in intelligence, and has since stood bereft of its
intelligibility. It has now become an outcast even from the seats of its own
professors. It is today decried and neglected. It is held to be practically
irrelevant to the problems and the struggle of life in the world. This is
because it has been reduced
217
to irrationality and meaninglessness. Without its guiding star
religion has become largely a psychological extravaganza, a mélange and a mirage
of faith, intuition and wishful thinking falsely denominated prayer. The things
of the unseen world are doubtless more wonderful than those of the seen, as St.
Paul exhorts us to believe. But what has been too quickly forgotten is that
the visible world is the only lens of vision through which man may focus his
view upon the unseen realities. A wise adjuration from the Talmud admonishes
us with one of the most pertinent philosophical maxims ever pronounced. It runs
to the effect that if we would strive to know the invisible world, we must open
wide our eyes on the visible! For there the mind can perceive the analogues, the
types, the reflections of the truth in the invisible worlds.
At some point in the historical course man lost the ancient
analogical faculty. He lost the daring of mind which enabled him to leap over
the great gap between observed physical phenomena and the structure of the laws
that produced them. He lost the genius of insight whereby he had been able to
see one truth in two worlds, the obvious world of existent form and the inferred
world of structure and meaning to which the outer form stood as clue and key. He
had fallen from the philosophical level to the Peter Bell status. He saw nothing
beyond the things under his eye. His ignorance and blindness cut him off from
transferring the form of known objects over to their meaning-forms in the
noumenal world. Nature could not speak her message to his dull mind.
The modern eye has gazed continuously upon the movements of sun
and moon, for instance, in relation to the earth, and has utterly missed the
astonishing play of a most thrilling love drama enacted between the two
luminaries each month, which was designed to yield man instruction upon the
analogous romance going on between the male "sun" and female "moon" within the
sphere of his own nature. This one feature of natural phenomena indeed stood to
the ancient mind as the central light on the entire problem envisaged in
religion, the relation of the man to his god. Analogical
218
genius is in the end the key to man's finest culture. The
ancients possessed it. In the fatal incidence of darkness the faculty has been
dulled and lost. The ability to trace correspondences between the visible and
invisible aspects of truth is the great skill that leads to philosophical
sagacity. Correspondence opens the eye of the mind to discernments that
otherwise would remain unseen.
The effort will be made to present the parallelism between the
department of nature known as sex and the higher cosmic archai with such
completeness that there can be no missing the perception of identity between the
two worlds of phenomena and noumena. The interpretations deduced will go to
prove that the two worlds do stand in parallel relation to each other, or that
one reflects the other. The essay draws upon material that has never been absent
from human gaze. It aims to transport the phenomena from this world to the land
of ideas. It purposes to turn things and processes over into significance. It
strives to have them seen conceptually. It aims to make perception the mother of
conception.
It will be found that the ancient seers of truth built their
systems of interpretation and philosophical conception upon this working
principle of analogy. They formulated the structure of elucidative understanding
upon what they saw in the world of living nature. And, seeing that the modus and
pattern of creation in the physical world was a type and reflection of creation
in the whole cosmos, they introduced phallicism into the sacred
literature as the great central symbol at the heart of all
meaning.
Little could they have dreamed that their representations would
ever engender a ghastly misconception, or that an age would ever supervene so
sunk in intellectual languor that it would mistake the symbol for the thing
intended to be symbolized. In phallicism they resorted to the phenomena and
functionism of human-animal procreation to typify the modus of creation in the
large and in the universal. Their procedure was directed by sheer intellectual
intimations and the loftiest of moral considerations. It had no lesser motive
than to aid the feeble powers of the human mind to grasp
219
the forms of higher realities through the instrumentality of a
vivid picture of something known which bore likenesses to the thing
unknown.
Sex was chosen as the most lucid mental lens through which
the laws of cosmic creation could be discerned in vivid
outline upon the screen of human thought. This was done because the primal
fathers of humanity were conversant with a fact that has not been seen or stated
in hundreds of years, namely, that creation in the total, in the cosmos, is
as genuinely an act of sex as is creation in the life of the creature. All
evolution, all cosmic process, is one all-embracing act of creation. And it is
in the highest sense of the words a sexual creation. Every chapter of the
manifestation is a Genesis. Indeed it was seen of old that all life did
was to regenerate itself anew. The foundation doctrine of ancient theology is
"the eternal renewal." Life in the total acts to perpetuate itself exactly as
does life in the single unit. Life attends to one thing before all others: it
dowers every one of its creatures with the mechanism and the inexorable instinct
to reproduce itself. It has made the generation of seed the all-engrossing prime
object of every living being.
Creation does not mean the mere beginning of becoming, but
covers the whole process. Life is ever in process of creation, for all life is a
never-ending becoming. To be sure, it is not all one constant progression in a
straight line and even pace, but is an intermittent advance, proceeding in ever
repeated cycles. The movement has its intervals. Each cycle has its genesis, its
birth, its upbuilding, its growth, its zenith of manifestation, and its decline,
decay and death as the embodiment wears down. Each round of the wheel has its
beginning and its end. But just as surely as a human life advances steadily over
a long series of minor cycles, and carries the seed or ark of consciousness and
identity of nature from the end of one revolution to the beginning of another,
so does the imperishable principle of conscious life achieve unbroken continuity
by spanning the intervals between the manifest periods to main-
220
tain its becoming through all. The cosmic enterprise is a
continuous creation. And it is sexual.
Where, then, in the natural scene would the analogizing genius
of the ancient diviners look to find the image and reflection of the giant
cosmic creative act? Where else indeed but in the natural creative and
procreative processes open to view in the life of the microcosmic unit, man? In
his own sphere man is creator, progenitor, father. Within his own organism and
under the direction of his own will and intelligence he can imitate the Supreme
Cosmocrator and renew life. Indeed in the speech of the Demiurgus to the hosts
of souls about to descend into incarnation, found in Plato's Timaeus,
these angelic spirits were instructed to imitate at their level the
procreative function of the Great Father at the summit of being. "That mortal
natures therefore may subsist and that the universe may be truly all, convert
yourselves according to your nature to the fabrication of animals, imitating the
power which I employed in your creation."
Man was one of the creatures mentioned in Genesis,
"producing seed after its kind," creating progeny in his own image. By the
invincible imperative of life's own genius man was led to exercise this
generative function, as were all the orders of life below him in the scale. The
penalty for total failure to exercise the prerogative was set at nothing short
of his own total extinction. Reward for the natural and ordinate exercise of it
was the happy consciousness of the perpetuation and expansion of life itself,
the most opulent richness and aggrandizement of being in every direction.
Whether consciously sensed or not, instinct carried the persuasion that if
creation on the part of Supreme Deity was the prime act of being, then creation
on man's part, and up to the summit of his capacity, must be for him the
crowning achievement on the physical side, for the perpetuation of organic
existence, and on the mental side, for the plan and order of such existence. If
man is made in the image of God, reasoned the early mind pursuing wisdom, it
must be that the marvelous mechanism and the psychic energies engaged
221
in man's kind of procreation furnish the creature mind with a
copy in miniature of the grand universal creative ordinance. The human creative
methodology must be a type-form of the highest creative procedure, or of all
creation. God's creative manual must be like man's, but at an inexpressibly
higher level, both of character and of magnitude. The feeble human mind is
powerless indeed to conceive the difference in grade, degree, quality and
purity, so to speak, between the two modes, the cosmic and the human-animal. But
in spite of that difference the mind must not falter in its effort to see the
higher as conforming to the pattern of the lower. For so Hermes Trismegistus
instructed us. Life's one central law is that the energy of being generates and
animates all things by the one omnipresent impulsion of creative force and that
therefore all creatures partake of the nature of the one life. All things are
the manifest expression of the one creative impulse, and therefore their
existence displays the operation of laws that are homogeneous throughout. The
universe is ruled by one law, which is never less than identical in all its
manifestations and productions, but which at the same time permits the
development of endless modification and infinite variation in the concrete
deposit on the physical periphery of creation. Life proceeds from a core of
similitude and self-identity in unity and runs out in numberless streams of
diversity and multiformity.
Looking, then at the lower manifestation of creative process
open to view in his own life, man the creature, at his grade of intelligence,
would be able to discern in it the features of creation as a whole. And the
seership of antiquity did by this method discern the clues by which intelligence
was able to formulate an integrated structure of all creative work. These clues
have always lain exposed to mental sight. They are just the particular features
of the animal-human creative function taken as a language of meaning on a higher
plane of conception. In his generative capacity man was no less the analogue of
divinity--Christian philosophy and conditioned sensibilities to the contrary
notwithstanding--than he was acclaimed
222
to be in the mental, spiritual or intuitional aspects of his
selfhood. He must be so, or the affirmation of his creation in the likeness of
God would be true in a partial degree only. It would not be wholly true. It
would be a maimed and mutilated truth. If God has soul, or is soul, and
manifests it in body and in his works, man must carry the resemblance through
the whole of his nature. And his nature is dual, soul and body. So the
functional life of his physical portion must stand as a clue and guide to
comprehension of God's vital economy. The present work rests on the truth of
this dialectical proposition.
It may be considered a rash venture, an unmitigated presumption,
to attempt to envisage God's creative mind through the mirror of man's
procreative functionism. But it is the only approach available to thinking, and
besides it is the one indicated as true and legitimate by the authority of the
books of wisdom accredited and venerated by the intelligence of the race over
the ages. A gain of considerable proportions for all future culture must be the
reward of such an inquiry, if it be only the uncovering of the lost significance
of the mangled subject of phallicism in those tomes of antiquity. It will be
something of undoubted benefit if a clarification of the motive sanctioning the
employment of this phase of symbology can be achieved. For it has hung like a
cloud of infamy upon the sensibilities of the world for too many centuries.
Through the loss of understanding of the high motive back of the usage, and the
ascription of other than the purest of interests and intents on the part of
sages employing it in the composition of their books, the theme of phallicism
has dwelt for long ages under the shadow of an evil imputation. Most schools of
religious thought held sex symbolism to be a symptom of degeneracy in religion,
whether in theory or in practice. It has come to be rated as, at its worst,
outright worship of sex. It has not been seen in the light and character of
typism purely. It has been taken to be sex worship, and that on the physical
fleshly side, not sex as philosophically understood--the phenomena of universal
polarization of spirit and matter, "male" and "female."
223
Even when not taken in its bald crudity as veneration of the
actual sex forces, it has been supposed to be concerned with attempts to
generate lofty spiritual raptures by certain forms of sexual expression, as in
the alleged practices of Hindu Tantrika "sex-magic," or other sorts of sex
sublimation and transmutation of sex power into spiritual force.
It has been alleged that by sexual energizations of one kind or
another high psychic faculty may be awakened. Some social communities and
colonies are declared to have practiced formal rites of a sexual nature with
certain advantageous results. Whether natural and salutary or the contrary,
these manifestations have been directly operative in the province of sex and
have been assumed to be aspects of phallicism in religion.
Perhaps, being almost wholly expressions of human or animal
physiological functions, they can be said to have little more claim to be
classed under religion than has eating or breathing. They are dragged into
religion from far out on the periphery. They belong more properly to physiology,
to sociology or the remote fringes of psychology. Only by that tendency which
disposes people of serious tenor to spread religion out to make it embrace every
act on any plane of life interest, might it be subsumed under the department of
religion. If this is what is intelligently presumed to be meant by the phrase
"phallic worship in religion," there can not be too quickly or too sharply drawn
a vital distinction between the two things, "phallic worship" and "phallicism."
The first is the worship or cult of sex as an end, directly or
indirectly, in itself, or as means to an end in the field of sex. The object of
worship is sex, as man knows it, physically. The second, phallicism, on the
contrary, is not a worship of sex as in any way an object in itself. The
direction proceeds away from sex on its physical level and ascends to the
loftiest regions of abstract conception. The mind merely uses the facts of sex
as a starting point or as a concrete adjunct to mental formulations, to help it
arrive at a conception of life in its supernal economy. In fact,
although
224
it starts from the physical view of sex, or what sex presents to
thought, it in a moment almost loses sight of that in the vistas of
understanding that the mind is led into by the intimations of analogy. Or if the
original objectivity is retained, it is soon invested with a glow of
significance and a quality of purity never sensed before.
The vast difference between sex worship and phallic religion is
that whole gulf between engrossment in sex for what it yields physically and
interest in its phenomena entirely as symbol of something far transcending its
bodily expression. Sex worship begins with sex and--stops there. Religious
phallicism also begins with sex, and only then on its mental side, but proceeds
from it to the loftiest regions of conceptual ideation. No more does phallicism
mean sex worship than did the Egyptian use of animal symbolism denote animal
worship. Phallicism uses sex as symbol of high truth; the Egyptians used the
characteristic life traits of animals in the same lofty way.
This study is concerned with sex only for the sake of its
utility as symbol. The need for clarity and the purposes of exact analogization
will demand at times the frankest statements of sex functionism. The one single
intent is to lay out the lower pattern clearly enough that the perception of the
identity of the higher with it may not be missed. Our concern with physical sex
is in this way purely academic. Much will be gained for the view of sex from all
angles if a frank presentment of its features will serve to establish with a new
certainty the sublimest elements of spiritual religion. Our treatment of the
theme is as entirely disinterested as is the treatment of the nude in
art.
We have seen that the very condition of God's becoming conscious
of himself--an a priori postulate of his creating at all--inhered in the
logical necessity of his breaking his primal unity apart into self and not-self,
spirit and matter, positive consciousness and negative unconsciousness. God
therefore threw himself apart
225
into a duality, which is intimated by the division of life into
male and female in the Genesis allegory. Understanding of this
bifurcation of the One into the Twoness is the first fundament of all
philosophical systematism. It is the largest single datum facing the mind and
standing as the basic premise for thought. It is the cardinal item in the mind's
attempt to rationalize the universe of life.
Stolid minds are incapable of true wonder and go dumb before the
everyday actualities. But a mind of philosophical capability never ceases to
marvel at the existent phenomenon of bi-sexuality in the human race. "Male and
female created he them" never loses its power to stir the cultured mind. The
fact may become so commonplace as never to excite thoughtful consideration at
all. The constant presence of the fact itself wears thin the mind's power to
respond with fresh novelty to its implications. Merged also into practically
unconscious mentation is the recognition that it is the division of life into
duo-sexuality that keeps the world and evolution a-going, that it is the
impelling fact back of an immense segment of all life's activities, that it
generates the heat, so to say, that drives the wheels of progress and fires the
aspirations of men, and that it is at the root of nearly everything in the cycle
of living interests. Art, poetry, the drama, religion in part and now psychology
draw their vital breath from the ramifications of the sex endowment. A schoolboy
essay could enlarge upon the theme that all romanticism in life arises out of
the involvements of the sexual division. It produces the family unit of social
and governmental civilization. It suffuses the entire period of youth of both
sexes with the glow and halo of its seductive influence, so that nearly all the
energies of the adolescent epoch are absorbed in the effort to keep the
personality stabilized. The gradual discovery in one vivid realization after
another by the growing boy and girl of the mutuality of the sex instinct and its
mechanism, enjoining upon all mortals the virtual mandate of throwing themselves
into the arms of the "opposite sex"
226
for the procreation of the race, as well also for the normal
development of the individual life, is a constant, even if largely suppressed
inward experience of massive weight and power. The sheer fact of sex
differentiation never lets go its constraining grip on mind, imagination and
behavior all life long.
The first and later verses of Genesis find categorical
confirmation every time the biologist gazes into his microscope and catches a
tiny cell in the act of multiplying by fission. It receives corroboration also
in the tree-buds, the seeds, the white and yellow of the egg and the myriad
exhibitions of dual sexuality in all nature.
The universe is stabilized at the neutral point of the pull or
tension between the two forces. Matter is of equal importance with spirit, since
its force must equilibrate that of the latter if there is to be a neutral point.
At this neutral point where stabilization is secured all consciousness and all
values demonstrated through it are brought to birth.
Man is thus confronted with this most important of all data of
knowledge for his life on this planet. His race is bi-sexual and he must realize
that all essential values must be brought out through his willful exertions for
good or ill expressed at the point of the operative interplay between the
positive and negative aspects of every situation. In all religious and
philosophical enterprises the power for good direction of effort inherent in
this knowledge has been lost through the submergence of the systems that
purveyed ancient wisdom. Human counsels have for centuries lacked the true basic
grounds for wise decision. On the other side, by the oddest quirk of ignorance,
the persuasion has everywhere gained currency that spirit is all-precious and
matter is despicable. Untold perversion of all essential values has followed in
the train of this misconception, with calamitous repercussions in human
sufferings past all accounting.
One consequence alone has involved measureless
wretchedness,--the carrying out of the alleged superiority of spirit over matter
in
227
the imposition upon woman, matter's symbol, of a position of
inferiority throughout history. The unmerited contumely heaped upon matter
philosophically has worked over by unconscious inference and been wreaked upon
woman, the material symbol. Not only the flesh of the body, which warred against
the life of the spirit, but as well the allegorical personalization of the
physical side, woman, received the brunt of the ignominy of being regarded as
the force hostile to the spirit's flowering. Never has this false view of
allegory and dramatization been so flagrantly exhibited in its glaring
erroneousness as in this miscarriage of meaning due to the mind's failure to
hold the elements of the problem in sane perspective. That the weight and stigma
of evil imputation should have worked over from the philosophical typing and
heaped its virulence upon the innocent head of woman in history reveals the sad
deficiency in the human mind's grasp of real meanings. If matter is evil, then
by direct and cogent inference, woman too is evil, as she is the symbol of
motherhood, and matter is the universal mother of life. Matter in fact means
mother.
We have already seen, however, that all this miscalculation,
with its dire consequences for womanhood in history, grew out of the
misconstruction of the concept of "evil," in the foundations of philosophical
thought. The mere fact that matter had to be dramatized as standing in nodal
opposition to spirit, for the wholly beneficent purpose of eliciting
spirit's inchoate potentialities, became transposed over into a supposed
hostility to the soul. The result of the misconception was that a
measureless tide of human confusion and unhappiness swept over the reaches of
Western history. It is time that philosophy regain its sanity and that the
sublime knowledge be broadcast once more, that spirit and matter separate out of
their primordial unity, and that the worlds come into existence on the might of
the force that plays between the two in tensional relation to each other. Again
at the end of the aeon they cease their "enmity" and merge again into each
other's being, and the worlds dis-
228
solve. Even when they separate for mutual interplay they do not
lose their grip on each other. They simply slip into the opposite ends of the
field and exert their reciprocal influence on the whole area between. Life in
non-manifestation is one; in manifestation it is one-in-two, spirit and matter.
And the intercommunion of the two begets all existence.
229
The world of studentship has never followed with seriousness or
constancy the mighty implications of the ascription of masculine gender to
spirit and of feminine to matter. With the expectation of finding that an
examination of the relationship between male and female will yield an
enlightening theoria of universal creation, the challenge to inquiry now
is to face the data frontally and not only with an open mind, but with an eye
keenly fixed to see what is there. Even then it is necessary to use the clues
and threads of discernment that have been provided us by ancient insight. It is
found, then, that there will be no mistake in undeviatingly reading spirit or
spiritual reference for the male symbol or personation, and matter or the
physical for the female emblemism. The fact that this usage will prove its
unfailing pertinence and dependability, in all cases with astonishing precision,
will come as itself a revelation of no minor moment to those not conversant with
the almost mathematical faithfulness and reliability of these forms of ancient
symbolic method.
The place to begin the examination is at the point of the
breaking apart of the unity into the duality. As to this, it must constantly be
borne in mind that in spite of an act of bifurcation of itself, Deity does not
destroy its eternal oneness. It has not become two, even though it has cleft its
being into two aspects. It has not become itself and something else not itself.
This is logically impossible. It has converted itself into a duality. It has not
become two, in any sense exterior to itself. It has evolved a twoness within
itself. God can not, dialectically, project anything outside himself, since he
is all there is. All things are and remain inside the being of the
Su-
preme. God can no more become two than man is two, from the mere
fact of his having, or rather being, both a spirit and a body. God--and man like
him--is a unit, although he is composed of dual energies. The conflict and
tension between positive and negative polarities is ever necessary to bring the
life of God forth to view in concrete worlds. So life has to set up this stress
and pressure within itself. How could Being lay hold of and so move substance to
form its creation if it could not oppose one arm of itself, so to say, against
another arm, so as to be able to get a grip on the material to be moved into
place for the creation? Figuratively speaking, how could it create if it could
not oppose thumb to fingers, left hand to right, lever against fulcrum,
conscious design or will against objects, mind against matter? Tensional
opposition of the two pulls of a polarized duality is as inevitable as the fact
that a coin must have two sides. There could be no existence, no things, if
there was no front and back, up and down, in and out, to and fro, movement and
inertia. Duality, presaging the subsistence of a strain between the two
portions, is an inexorable postulate of conscious being, and sprang into
appearance as soon as life emerged from the unseen into the visible stage and
took organic form.
The interaction begins the moment the two sides are established
as distinct units in the being of the whole. It takes the form of the only
thinkable action that two things can exert toward or upon each other,--a mutual
tugging and pulling. They are set in relation to each other in much the same way
as are two balls of lead tied to opposite ends of a string and whirled around on
a central pivot, with the significant difference, however, that the "string" is
not a "dead" connection, but a living stream of dynamic forces that are
determined by the powers exerted, positively from the one end and negatively
from the other. The pushing and pulling become the great natural laws of
attraction and repulsion. They are the first and cosmic form of the meaning of
the Battle of Armageddon. As the twoness in tensile opposition is the necessary
condition of the stability of anything, the law is that two opposite poles
attract
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each other and two similar poles repel each other. This must be
so, if anything is to cohere and remain itself. If the two opposite poles
repelled each other, the atom and the universe would collapse. Rather it could
not have come into existence in the first instance. Positive and negative poles
must fly into each other's arms, embrace and multiply, if there are to be
worlds.
We have here the ground of one of the most relevant of ancient
philosophical pronouncements. Empedocles' declaration that the world was
engendered and activated throughout by the two forces of Love and Hate. Love is
seen as the attraction and Hate the repulsion. And by this naming and
characterization it is possible for the limited intellect of man to understand
dialectically why the prime essential nature of God is denominated Love. As he
is unit being of all being, the constant motive of all his expression is the
universal attraction of the two portions of his own Self for each
other.
The two nodes of his wholeness can do nothing else but "love"
each other. At the same time the two similar poles in the countless units of his
multiplied manifestation can and must likewise "hate" each other. Love is the
law of God's being--when he has thrown himself into the dual expression--since
the two elements then are constrained by the unabating attraction toward each
other. So then Love becomes the fulfilling of the law, for no other activity of
life transcends or nullifies this first law of mutual attraction within the
framework of the universe. It is operative in every unit of life, in every
fragment, in every organic system from the atom to the super-galaxies. God can
not help loving--and hating--once he has sundered his totality into spirit and
matter.
Then spirit must "love" matter, and matter spirit! Soul must
love body and body soul! Man, intellectual and spiritual, must love the world of
matter. The voice and hands of pious unintelligent religionism may fly up in
horror at the philosophical determinations that spring immediately into view in
the wake of the obvious dialectic. And well they may, for, properly understood
and held in a
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balanced rationale, the true envisagement of the elements of the
problem enforces a view of these things that does indeed undo and reverse the
poor twisted attitudes of orthodox befuddlement. The first dawn of welcome
sanity to break upon the dark night of centuries of pitiable error is this
cock's crow of the resurrected voice of philosophy proclaiming once again that
spirit does love matter.
A happy release of the human spirit from unnatural constraint
under false mental postures will ensue for common consciousness when it can be
freely postulated in thought that the soul does love the body, and that man,
spiritual, does love the world with sufficient strength that he comes into body
to enjoy its delights and meet its tensions. The strength of the blind pall that
has afflicted the clearness of philosophical vision can be seen by merely
reflecting upon the fact that for centuries the collective brains of the
scholarly world have studied the Biblical assertion that "God so loved the
world" without once discerning the relevance of the central statement there
advanced. And God not only loved the world, but he loved also the flesh with a
force that impelled him to throw the whole of his might, in recurrent cycles of
countless years each, into the effort to expand his own being by plunging his
consciousness into bodies of flesh and matter. For the physical universe is the
Logos made flesh. No exterior force compelled him to become fleshed; so his act
must have sprung from his own volition or desire for such an experience. These
conclusions are the ineluctable products of the reasoning process working upon
the premises given. As man and woman love each other, so spirit and matter love
each other. In nature this "love" complies with every characterization of
Plato's grand predication of balance, moderation and harmony amid all the divine
elements in play. In man, where free will coupled with initial ignorance comes
in to disturb the balances, disturbance and confusion have crept in. These will
be corrected as intelligence awakens.
Plato in The Phaedo and The Symposium has
dissertated upon this matter of the genesis and nature of love, in a
dramatization that has misled shallower thought into a mistaken
interpretation
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of his figure. To depict the cleaving asunder of God's unit
being into the duality, he says that the soul of man splits apart into two, each
part carrying one half of the potentiality of complete being. One part manifests
in male body, the other in female, and the two separate halves, each suffering
the want of completeness in itself, longingly seek their complementary halves in
the world, to unite with them and thus be made whole. Obviously expounding but
at the same time hiding the true esoteric meaning of his allegory, Plato clearly
concealed his deeper sense under the individual and personal representation. It
is surely not in the purview of Plato's philosophy to deny unitary completeness
to the human ego, whether in man or woman. It is always in his system a full
unit, being itself a fragment of the divine Oversoul. It can not be fractional,
a mere half-unit. It is complete and perfect as a seed unit of divinity. Plato
is dramatizing under the human allegory the truth that the collective being of
life splits apart into the two poles and that their force of attraction for each
other ceaselessly causes each to seek the other throughout the ranges of life.
The individual soulmate idea drawn from Plato's allegory is a flat
misconception. If it was his real belief that the soul in a male body is only
one half a former complete soul, with the other half living somewhere in a
female body, what a tragedy life would present in the nearly complete failure of
the two halves to discover each other! Nature would not be party to a scheme
which in her operative order registered close to ninety-nine percent failure.
Plato's imagery is, as is the sportive punster play on the meaning of words in
The Cratylus, neither amusing diversion nor literal seriousness, but
high-pitched allegorical and dramatic truth, playful on the surface, but grandly
meaningful in the cryptic intent.
Plato almost indubitably drew this form of portrayal from a line
in the Egyptian scripts which says that "the soul makes the journey through
Amenta in the two halves of sex." Many reports are to the effect that he
visited and studied in Egypt. It is conceded in general that Greece derived the
substance and genius of her great philoso-
234
phies from Egypt. The possibility of reading anything measurably
close to the true meaning of this passage has been killed in the first place by
the utter failure of Western scholarship to locate the Egyptian Amenta in
the proper world. The meaning has been thrust clear out of its true world and
over into another realm where it can have no pertinence, through the stupid
translation of Amenta as the region of spiritual consciousness after
death. It must be asserted as a discovery of an age-old error and a datum of
the most momentous significance in all antique research, that Amenta is
the life on earth, or earth itself, and not any heavenly abode. Amenta is
the home of the living mortal, not the realm of the shades of the dead. And this
is said in the face of the datum of comparative religion that it was expressly
denominated the land of the dead.
The seeming contradiction is resolved into agreement when it is
known, what all studious zeal has never yet uncovered, that the ancient
philosophers and "theologians" by a trope of occult significance designated the
souls living on earth as "the dead." To them the life in mortal body brought
"death" to the soul. "Who knows," cries Socrates to Cebes in the Gorgias,
"whether to live is not to die, and to die is not to live? For I have heard
from one of the wise that we are now dead and that the body is our sepulcher."
And Paul says that "the command that meant life proved death" to him. In the
wake of Egyptian formulations of truth Greek philosophy very distinctly regarded
the soul while on earth in fleshly body as suffering a death, from which, to be
sure, it would be reborn in its periodic resurrection "from the
dead."
The Egyptian statement, therefore, concisely affirms that the soul makes its pilgrimage through the cycle of bodily existences "in the two halves of sex." Ye