TRUE VOICE
A Critique of Oriental Philosophy
"My brethren, remain faithful to the
earth with all the force
of
your love! Let your great love and your knowledge be in
accord
with the meaning of the earth. Let not your virtue
fly
far from terrestrial things and beat its wings against the
eternal
walls. . . Bring back towards the earth the virtue
which
goes astray--yea, towards the flesh and towards
life;
that it may give a meaning to the earth, a human
meaning . . ."--Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus
Spake Zarathustra
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
* Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. This notice is not to be removed. I can be contacted at pc93@enlightenment-engine.net. I will be greatly indebted to the individual who can put me in touch with the Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following: A. B. Kuhn’s graduation address at Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn’s unpublished autobiography, The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes—But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy.
I also would welcome any contact with someone who has any letters of Kuhn or has any personal knowledge of him. Thank you.
Recently (January 15, 2005) I was contacted by a 15 year old student of Upton High (state and city to be determined) who wanted to interview me in regards to the life of Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam). The interview was conducted and this student asked me if there was anything else. This is what I relayed:
There is a nationally and worldwide known issue of a disabled person in my state (Florida) who is being subjected to attempted murder. Her name is Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo. The courts say that she is in a Persistent Vegetative State when in fact she is not, they lie. Videos were shown on CNN during a live feed that prove she is not comatose. She sits up in a chair. Her husband who lives with another woman for over 9 years and who has two children with this woman is trying to say that Theresa wants to die when in fact he has been denying her rehabilitation and therapy so that she can have her own voice and be back on to the road to her recovery. He has been with several women since he caused Theresa's incident and this is his latest live-in concubine who is in collusion with him to make Theresa dead. His attorneys are attempting to accomplish a heinous starvation/dehydration death on her for the third time. One of his attorneys wrote a book in which he talks about tearing out peoples feeding tubes and says he speaks to them by "soul speak" asking them if they want to die and they tell him along the lines "Yes, I want to die! Please kill me." The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast is holding her hostage for over 4 years. This feeding tube yanker attorney was chairman of the board of this hospice. This is the worst case of domestic terrorism happening in our country right now. While we are off in other countries helping helpless and disabled people the government has been remiss to save a human life from terrorism here in my state. There is a cover-up of mass proportions and I have the evidence on a CD to prove it. This message is to you and all of your classmates and teachers who may be reading this. Please contact others if you know of others who care to stop this murder. Perhaps you, or others, including activist friends, know people who have the power to stop what is happening here in my state or bring greater attention to what is going on. Contact me at pc93@enlightenment-engine.net or call me at 407-925-4141 and I will get whatever information you may need. Help me and others to stop the return of Nazi T4 days in Florida, the rest of the United States of America and the world. We must take a stand and make our voices heard.
Please join my Alvin Boyd Kuhn Yahoo!Group and Gnosis284! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AlvinBoydKuhn/join : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gnosis284/join
TO
ALL THOSE
WHO WOULD CHOOSE
KNOWLEDGE OF THE MEANING
OF LIFE IN PREFERENCE TO ITS
NEGATION
THIS
VOLUME IS
SINCERELY DEDICATED
PROLOGUE
One of the most widely disseminated
systems of Indian thought, Buddhism, grounds its basic view of life on its
thesis that the cause of all of man's wretchedness on the earth is his craving
for life. Somehow, it is asserted, there was generated in him the desire to
experience sensation and the feeling and consciousness of existence, to enjoy
the concrete sense of being. And it was this yearning after the awareness of
existence that direpted him out of a condition of absolute and unconditioned
being and precipitated him into the realm of limitation and painfully
conditioned experience.
The implication of this postulate is
unmistakably apparent: that like Adam and Eve in
The world of the middle twentieth
century is dangerously divided between the two great sectors of East and West.
At the moment of writing the schism is marked by a differentiation in the
philosophies of economics, government, politics and other elements in less conspicuous
degree. It is a challenging question, however, whether the fundamental cause of
cleavage between Orient and Occident is not still and always the difference in
the profoundest conceptions entertained in the realm of mental and spiritual
philosophy. Always in human history it has been the case that surface
conditions, physical, economic, material, stand conspicuously forward in the
public eye and appear to be the big issues pressing for solution. So they come
to be regarded as the prime factors of causation.
Generally, however, their ostensible
importance reflects a superficial and shallow envisagement of the actualities.
For, on deeper scrutiny, they will mostly be seen to be themselves only the
manifestations, the outcropping symptoms of more deeply underrunning strata of
ideological conceptions. Out of the heart--and it should be added--out of the
mind, are the issues of life. Thought is now recognized to be the primal
creative energy in the cosmos. Thought, mind, gives the initial propulsion, and
also sets the mold, as Plato so sagaciously set forth in his scheme of the
archetypal
v
ideaforms, for the shape of things
to come in the creation. Therefore, it is in all likelihood true that the great
wall of division between East and West is still constructed of the great stones
of philosophical ideality, with their psychological coefficients.
It seems hardly beyond dispute that
the preamble enunciated in the first paragraph of this Prologue, stating the
primary postulate of the Hindu philosophy, carves out in the sharpest possible
outlines the central, the basic and the critical difference between the thought
structure of Orient and Occident. And looking at that keystone proposition in
the philosophical edifice of Eastern reflection, it is a grave question whether
the West is not warranted in regarding it, from the standpoint of its own
generally affirmative evaluation of life, as a baleful menace and outright
peril to its future security and welfare.
The West postulates the supreme
value of the life lived here by units of conscious being in physical bodies:
the East denies it. It needs no particular depth or perspicacity of mind to
perceive in this situation the essential irreconcilability of the two views, or
modes of thought, and likewise to discern the precariousness in the impact of
the two ideologies, the sensitive rawness in the enterprise of furthering
coexistence or the interblending of the two. When two hemispheres of the world,
hitherto in long isolation from each other, are now suddenly thrown into close
association, the possibility of their harmonious reciprocation of differing
modes and codes of motivation for life conduct will inevitably be difficult in
proportion to the depth of the abyss between the contrary views. The meeting of
the East and West is one of the gigantic world phenomena of the present epoch
in human history, and it promises to become not only a most engaging problem
confronting the philosophic mind, but as well the most grimly challenging and
practically critical task for the world's statesmanship. It is indeed fraught
with the ominously intense and vital issues of historical destiny for the
entire world.
It sharply, then, behooves the
philosophical acumen of the West, in particular, to examine the principles, in
Greek terms, the fundamental archai, of the Eastern ideology, with a
view to evaluating it as sound and salutary in its impact on the West's own
affirmative emphasis on life's value, or as perilous to its way of thought and
life. The ideologies of the two hemispheres of the world are now
vi
and will be increasingly in clash.
Whether the conflict is to be controlled and directed with wisdom adequate to
softening the impact and effecting an eventual rapprochement toward
harminization and synthesis, is a question and a problem pregnant with the
portent of destiny.
The Orient,
Two influences are at work to delay
the recognition of the West's peril from the infusion of Eastern thought codes
into its psychic life. The first is the West's general obsession by the common
religious tradition or persuasion of the sanctity, amounting almost to immunity
from critique, of anything labeled and rated in the category of "spiritual."
Its own religious tradition has rendered it obsequiously deferential to the
name and psychic implications of "spirituality." The appellative
disarms suspicion or distrust. It becomes a freely accepted passport to any
interest or movement flaunting its shibboleth. However slow and reluctant the
average citizen of the West may be to accord welcome to Eastern ideas, he is
not likely to apprehend danger from systems whose chief characterization has
been broadcast as "spiritual."
The second is the want, so far, of
more studied acquaintance of Western people, both lay and academic, with the true
nature, bent and import, and therefore the real potential for harm, of the
Hindu philosophies. In spite of extensive delving into the East's religious
vii
literature, Western study has not
been penetrating enough to catch the full force of the realization of the
ultimate destructive potential lurking in its pervasive negativism. It is not
clearly seen that the final outcome of this philosophy is the destruction of
man. Since man's drive for existence is predicated as the cause of the misery
of existence, the logic of Eastern thought demands that he still his craving
for life and desperately strive to ceave to live. He is insistently urged to
break the chain of causation of life's woes and bring them to an end--by ending
himself. To live involves the conscious entity in dolorous and unending woes.
Therefore the constant burden of Hindu philosophical lucubration is a seeking
of ways to "kill out" with fell intensity of purpose, all the
manifestations of the consciousness of life possible to and through man's
organic equipment of body and brain, all his sensations, feelings, thoughts,
and hush their raucous cacophony of a consciousness dialectically rated as
false. The motive for such a crushing of the outward cognitions of existence is
asserted to be that the inner core of being of the unit life may relapse into
the condition of causeless and consciousless being, undisturbed by the outer
turmoil and strains of living. Thus in the final outcome of all its thinking,
the philosophy of
If, as the rest of the human family
has instinctively felt or been universally persuaded, this life has been
generated as a gift and boon of Infinite Being, ultimately if not at every
moment potentially dynamic for blessedness, then the negative posture of Hindu
ideation comes as near as anything could to being the cardinal sin against the
spirit of the creation. Never does Indian philosophy
viii
postulate bliss as either the
current experience or the end reward of an evolution of life toward it as a
goal. It is life itself that blocks us off from bliss; a lingering in the time
dimension inhibits the attainment of timelessness. Bliss can arise only from
the ceasing of life. The road to the consummation of ananda runs through
the land of denial, of negation. "Negative thinking is the highest form of
understanding," avers Jiddu Krishnamurti, true to the tradition of his
native country. God projected his creation, looked it over and pronounced it
good. As far as human participation in it is concerned,
Indian thought indeed has never
dreamed it an obligation of the human mind to rationalize man's life in the
world. It simply passed judgment on it, and that negative. Its droning monotone
of condemnation has bred only one spur to human action in the spirit of
aggression, and that has been the incitement toward exertion of effort to
escape. Transcending even the Christian cry of "salvation," its one
inspiring call to action has been the shibboleth of "liberation."
The Occident must take accurate
stock of this influence and estimate its possible deleterious effects on its
own life. Under a sort of initial glamor and the witchery of a novel and in
many ways enticing philosophy, the West has rather generously manifested a
cordial receptivity to the Oriental systems. Indeed in circles of mystical
occultism the philosophy has been welcomed, embraced and elevated to a place of
transcendence over all forms of Christian or Western tradition. What may be the
injurious effect at this critical juncture in world affairs of the injection of
the sedative and narcotic power of negativism, detachment, passivism and
ultra-subjectivism into the counsels of Western incentives to action, looms now
as a question of the utmost gravity for Western polity.
ix
Egyptian naturalistic religion,
Hebraic esoteric Kabalism, Greek rational and mystical philosophy emphasized as
the consummative achievement of human consciousness "the union of the
above and the below." But
x
homosexual abnormality. Spirit moves
down to earth to wed matter, not to scorn it, to crucify it, to flee its
embrace.
The potentialities for the virtual
reorientation and sanification of all human philosophy through the acceptance
of this ground-fact of all understanding must be overwhelmingly apparent.
It does not seem to have become a
postulate of thought that the life and consciousness of each unit or cell in
the body of the cosmos must be, however rudimentary, dim and shadowy, an
inceptive expression of what the total cosmic Being feels, desires, thinks and
wills. If each unit is the Total in seed potentiality, then the forms of its
push to outward expression of its life must be of the nature and pattern of its
cosmic Parent. Therefore what man, the creature, feels, thinks and wills, must
reflect the motivations of the Whole. This certifies the principle of the
ancient wisdom that the experience of the part, either tiny or stupendous, is
in and a part of the experience of the Total. If the part desires to live, it
is in that sphere and segment of its body the desire of the Supreme Life to
live. In and through each cell the universal Father seeks to experience the
Lila, the delight of conscious existence, and through the cells of his body he
gives himself that delight.
If presumptuously we begin to
attribute a mistaken and unworthy motive to the activities of the All-Power, we
simply throw down to Infinite Wisdom the gauntlet of our childish impertinence.
Each part, the tiniest, is a new-born seed potential of the All. But it is a
portion of the All, that All itself renewing itself in germ and ovo, and
destined in a time development to enjoy the infinite life of the All. It is a
new projection of the life of the All motivated, as Sri Aurobindo now so
positively expresses it, by the desire of the Infinite to multiply his
own consciousness by increase of Being. For one of these child growths to stand
on the philosophy that the yearning for life is the one basic cause of all
evil, is for it to throw up into the face of the Absolute Life the accusation
of acting contrary to good purpose. For in asserting that it is wrong for the
cell unit to exist, the privilege of life is denied to the Whole of which the
units are the constituent parts.
The right of Life to increase its capacity
for delight in existence must be both the first and the final ground and
postulate of all
xi
philosophy. The word Lila is
perhaps the greatest single word in the human lexicon--or the divine. It is the
ultimate answer to all inquiries of the speculative prying mind of man bent
irrepressibly on satisfying its hunger for knowledge of the why of
existence. Life exists; and we exist, because a Consciousness-Power that
originates, constitutes and consummates all that is and ever will be, wishes
and wills Lila, delight of life, for itself and for its numberless
creatures through whom it multiplies its being and increases its capacity for
delight. However falsely, inadequately, ignorantly the creature, man, in his
imperfect state misconceives and misapplies the phrase, it is true that the end
answer to the insistent why of all the universe is inescapably the cry
of the Church: it is the will of God. When the working of that will brings
eventualities that shock the human sense of right and goodness, our tiny minds
revolt from the acceptance of the idea that this is God's Lila or ours,
and we call it evil. Our thought refuses to be reconciled to the understanding
that God wills and creates evil. Yet all this abhorrence registers the failure
of our partial and immature potential of knowledge to comprehend the entirety,
the organic wholeness and synthetic unity of life in its vastness. We are as
yet unable to view the cosmic operation in its immensity, but see it only in
its minutiae and its particularity. Now we see in part and through a glass
darkly. We see things only in their immediate relativities. Our myopic vision,
limited to a short range of relationships, can not see things in larger
context. We see things out of proportion, out of focus, too near to discern how
in proper focus the "evil" elements blend into a synthesis that is
beautiful and good.
One Scriptural passage does not
establish any proposition as final truth. Nevertheless, with our universal
attribution of a divine wisdom to the sacred Scriptures (of the West), there
does stand in this volume of Holy Writ at least one positive and unequivocal
statement that God does create evil. In Isaiah (46:7) the text runs:
"I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and I create evil: I
the Lord do all these things." Two things must be held in mind in
evaluating a passage like this: first, that "evil" is a human concept
and thus is subject to a partial or erroneous conception of its true nature;
second, that as the result of our limited range of view, and our imperfect
powers of understanding, the necessities for stress and strain involved in the
polarized relation of consciousness
xii
and instrument are difficult for us
to comprehend. Polarity is the prime law of all manifest existence, and while it
has been envisaged in abstract theorization, it has not been accorded its vital
place in concrete thinking. Clearly recognized in the scientific field, it has
not been carried into the counsels of theology and philosophy. In his created
universe the Lord of Life has made objectively visible his intent and his
nature. If we would know him, and through him ourselves, his children and the
inheritors of his nature, indeed made in his image and likeness, we must brood
over his works. For the works reveal the worker.
India has persistently exhorted us
to deny the works, turn our eyes away from them and to seek peace and bliss in
detachment from the life in which they become manifest. The attitudes,
therefore, of East and West are almost diametrically at variance as to the
primary direction of human effort, as well as to its objectives. The clash of
the two movements of thought in the years ahead will bring into sharp focus the
crucial issues of human destiny.
In
It therefore becomes an enterprise
charged with the mightiest import for world life for ages in the future, that
the West should acquaint itself familiarly with the message of
xiii
CHAPTER ONE
THIS EVIL WORLD
The Biblical statement that God so
loved the world that he dispatched his only begotten Son into it, not to
condemn it, but to save it, silhouettes in sharp contrast the attitude of
religions, both Eastern and Western, which has been invariably a condemnation
and calumniation of the world. In the ideology of religion the world has been
constituted as the first member of the diabolical trinity of evil powers
malignantly conspiring to capture and subvert the divine soul of man,--the
world, the flesh and the devil. For centuries the priestly hierarchy has
exhorted its piously conditioned following to keep themselves unspotted from
the world. And for many centuries the religion bearing the name of Christianity
has so insistently accentuated this dour note of evil influence emanating from
the world that thousands upon thousands of its men abandoned life in the
cities, towns and villages of Europe to seek nepenthe from the world's foul
contact in isolated hermitage in the Arabian, Syrian, Egyptian or Numidian
deserts, living without benefit of cleanliness, comfort or companionship in caves
and hovels. Likewise the venerable religious systems of
1
bushel of mundane concerns and can
not glow brightly from the hilltop for all to see.
Considering the great power of
venerated Scriptures to set the norms for religious ideology, one is struck by
the trenchant verses of the seventeenth chapter of John's Gospel in the New
Testament, in which Jesus, so to say, sends in to his heavenly Father the
report on his cosmic mission which he at this time felt he had successfully
terminated. He precedes his report by asserting that he "came forth from
the Father, and am come into the world; again I leave the world, and go to the
Father." He had come into the world, only to have it receive him, not to
have in fact received crucifixion at its hands. He had reminded his people that
"in the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have
overcome the world." He says that he has completed the work which his
Father gave him to do among the men of the world; he has glorified God in the
world in the sight of men, and is about to return to his true home in the
empyrean. "And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the
world." Then he prays the Father that he should not take these children
out of the world; "but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil,"
because in reality "they are not of the world, even as I am not of the
world." He asserts that he has communicated to them a radiance of the
Father's glory, which immunizes them from the deleterious impact of the world's
sordid interests. It is notable in passing that, while he holds the world to be
a possible evil influence upon the soul, yet he prays the Father not to take
the people out of it; rather to shield them while in it. All spiritual cultism
might well take a hint from this feature of Jesus' presentation.
On the basis of hundreds of
Scriptural and philosophical allusions to the world's malignant influence, religious
philosophy has taken its posture of hostility to "the world." Many
denominational groups still hold it a canon of sanctified living to forbid
participation in certain lighter activities of secular life, such as dancing,
games, amusements, diversions or recreation, even condemning modern mechanical
appliances easing physical labor as baneful to the soul. Not in the
engrossments in the world outside, but in the inner sanctuary of the spirit,
religion has contended that the true interests of the divine nature of man are
to be exercised, developed and glorified. The Quaker pattern of sitting in
silence, shutting out the world, until the inner voice of the spirit speaks out
of the eternal
2
depths of being, well illustrates
the general religious posture. Outside is the froth, the scum, the flotsam and
jetsam, the hurly-burly of chaotic meaningless activity; only within is to be
discovered the reality and the glory of transcendent being. Hence religion has
almost universally set the outer world at odds with the inner, and has erected
ideologically a great wall and a moat of separation between the two, seeking to
withdraw the unit of soul consciousness across the gulf, to lift the
communicating drawbridge and so to seclude the soul within the safe ramparts of
the spiritual castle of life. Thus to fend the soul off from the contamination
of the world in its spiritual ivory tower has been the ethical and spiritual
objective of most religion.
Yet, with trillions of other worlds
into which to send his beloved Son, God so loved this one that he commissioned
him to descend upon this minute speck of atomic dust in the cosmic universe.
And that tiny world which God so loved and refused to condemn, religion has
never ceased to hate and vilify.
And never has religious philosophy
disclosed the remotest intimation as to why God was moved to send his beloved
offspring into this low place of defilement, nor has it made an attempt to
account for the Creator's great love of it. This, the fundamental question that
the human mind must, now or eventually, answer, has been left wholly untouched.
To this question, when thrown in its face, religion has given an answer that is
no answer--that it is a blasphemy to question the inscrutable workings and
counsels of the divine mind. Yet, as psychology now demonstrates, a rational
answer to that insistent query is an indispensable element in human happiness
and the maintenance of the human mind in sanity. Said the great and
ever-memorable Dr. Robert W. Norwood, of St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in
3
and "death" in it? That is
the prime question to which all instinctive human interest demands an answer.
Both religion and philosophy stand bankrupt until they come forth with a
rational answer to that irrepressible inquiry.
To be sure, religion has come
forward with a form of answer: our two first parents, given the choice of
enjoying eternal felicity in Paradise, the celestial garden of delight,
succumbed to temptation, chose to disobey God's command not to partake of the
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil set apart in the garden, and in
consequence God had to exact punishment from them and all their future progeny,
by driving them out of the delectable garden and sending them down into this
wretched planet, this "sorrowful star," where toil and pain should be
the terms of their "Egyptian bondage" in the dark underworld. Then God,
in pity, sent his only Son as a sacrificial victim, led as a lamb to the
slaughter, to redeem his stupidly-blundering wayward children, to help them in
durance vile regain
That indeed is the answer of the
churches, the accredited and established exponents of religion. But it leaves
still unanswered the central query: why were God's innocent children, in the
very first moment of their infancy, fledgelings and untried and undeveloped, in
any legitimate procedure subjected to a temptation which they could only be expected
to have gained the wisdom to resist intelligently at the far completion and
perfection of their evolution, instead of at the innocent beginning, when no
life is wise. Never has the ecclesiastical hierarchy explained rationally why
such a temptation was necessary in the first place, with such an issue as the
possibility of a mistake entailing eternal consequences of dire fate hanging
upon the choice, in a universe presided over by omniscient Power and Love.
Never has it elucidated why an all-beneficent Father should set a
stumbling-block in the way of his infant children, sure to catch their feet and
cause their fall. Why God should set a baited trap in the pathway to ensnare
the very first steps of his progeny the churchly councils have never ventured
to tell us.
No child at the start of life knows
anything about either obeying or disobeying its parents. It is at that stage
neutral as to morality. Completely unmoral, it has no power or choice to be
moral or immoral. Children are at the animal stage and act from native
instinct. They are incapable of making ethical decisions. And any
4
parent who severely punishes his
child for failure to act on the principles which govern adult behavior stands
under the severest form of even human condemnation. Yet all Christianity has
based its high claims on the theological asseveration that God condemned his
children to eternal damnation for having committed a cardinal sin in the first
moment of their conscious existence.
Ringing down the centuries in all
the temples, cathedrals and synagogues of the religions has reverberated the
endless cry: "the world is very evil." Even
Testimony to this effect is found in
one of the celebrated Max Mueller's works, Theosophy or Psychological
Religion (page 68):
"So far as we can judge, a
large class of people in
5
it in the whole world, not even in
This work will be in the large an
intensive effort to subject that Hindu position to an exhaustive critique,
since it must be assumed that the world-wide consequences of the philosophical
indoctrination of a large portion of the globe, now both East and West, with
the belief that life is wholly evil and must be escaped, have been, are and
will continue to be colossally calamitous.
Along with the earth, the world,
came under condemnation also the thing called matter, and the human body
itself, as being composed of that vile substance that brought impurity and
defilement on the soul. The world and the flesh became the stock enemies of the
spirit. Never has religion ceased its thunder against the infernal trinity.
Endlessly the soul is exhorted to rise in its divine might and crush underfoot
these three agencies of the initial curse on man's life in the world. The
allegory of the soul's fall into sin, wrongly conceived, poses the question as
to how and why spirit units of God's own intelligence, sons of his own being,
came to be entangled in the inertia of matter, to suffer the hardships of a
material existence in a world denounced as wholly vile. Religion has failed to
give the answer which the human hunger for understanding resolutely demands.
That philosophy once held and can still render the answer it will be the effort
of this essay to establish.
In its rebound from the
stigmatization of earth and matter as the prime evils, all religion has swung
far over to the exaltation of "spirit." As matter and the bodily
flesh became the synonyms of evil, all good was identified with spirit. To be
good religiously was to be spiritual. And in all ages of more advanced
civilization there arose one cult after another, each promulgating some new
program by which the soul of man might better overcome the besetting thraldom
of matter and its world and rise out of bondage under what St. Paul calls
"the elements of the world" to freer communion with the spirit of
God.
In
6
vestures, the exploitation of
hypnotism under Quimby in
In practically every one of these
impulses the keynote was one and the same: deny and suppress the interests of
the world, the body, the flesh and matter, and exalt the spirit. Each asserted
the valuelessness of the things of the world, the deceptive nature of the
physical senses, the peril yielding to the appetencies of the animal body, the
delusive character even of the mind. Wholeness, peace, salvation and eventual
bliss were to be won only in the super-realm of the spirit. Redemption from the
incubus of mortal consciousness was to be achieved by denying all thought of
materiality and filling the area of consciousness with only the affirmation of
the sole existence and reality of spirit. With this went also the conception of
man as a being of pure spirit, his apparent materiality being the creation of a
false ideation. On the thesis that thought is the sole creative power, man
might readily become the creator of his own universe of being by merely
entertaining positive thought and denying all discord and imperfection. One
could lay the axe at the root of all evil by refusing to give it a birthright
in creative thought, must as one denies existence to a mosquito by covering the
stagnant marsh surface with a coating of oil. Spiritual thought was the
"oil of gladness" that denied existence to the germs of evil. Wrong
ideation has bred the evil entities; change wrong ideation to right, and the
evils will wilt and vanish. Values that are ignorantly associated with material
things and contingent upon them are fleeting and essentially false. They form a
veil of deception over our eyes. They shut us off from the vision of truth and
reality. As Browning says, the flesh is a wall that stands between us and
divinity, so that its heavy imperviousness must be dissolved or made
translucent to the passage of the divine light through to us below. We must
withdraw, if not physically, then in sublimated consciousness, from the noxious
atmosphere of the gross world and aspire to a pure and blessed life in spirit.
7
The streaming thousands of cenobites
who during some ten horrendous centuries fled the evil worldliness of
Since this vast movement from an
exterior focus of religious value to an inner realm took place in lands
dominated by Christianity, it is of great interest to locate the motivating
cause of the phenomenon, whether in the religion of Christianity itself or from
influences encroaching upon it. The hierarchy of that faith would rush forward
with an indignant denial of any accusation that it does not offer an adequate
spiritual philosophy and a spiritual culture. Yet despite this protestation it
is hardly to be denied that in reifying, personalizing and finally
historicizing the Christ principle in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the
Christian theology has diverted the direction of man's quest for the
blessedness of contact with deity away from the inner seat of that divinity in
man himself and outward to a man in history. It may talk volubly enough about
the immanent Christ along with the historical Jesus, but the latter, not the
former, has been the cornerstone of the faith; and with the masses always an
objectified and personalized incarnation of deity will dominate devotion and
allegiance and hold them move convincingly than any subjectively realized
mystical principle can ever do. Always the figure and the realistic conception
of the Galilean drew the eyes and minds across the sea and the centuries to the
living picture of the hypostatized Man of Sorrows, allegedly paying with his
own mangled body on the Golgathan cross-tree for our sins and our depravity. It
presents no difficult problem in psychology to discern that this centering of
all spiritual sancrosanctity upon the person of Jesus left far too large a
vacuum in the subjective life of the Christian masses. Christianity thus
inevitably drove its following into the worship of a deity remote in time and
place, when all
8
the while the deity accessible to
man is "closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet." The
theology that sets the derivation of spiritual grace from one man in history
automatically makes the divinizing of the individual a matter of imitation of a
paragon, whereas it must always, at any rate finally, be the conquest of man's
own divinity. It is a simple statement of the conditions of the entire problem
to say that the divine nature that is to glorify man is a seminal essence of
Godhood potentially realizable within himself. Christianity directed its people
to the worship of a Christ in
This very situation in the life of
religion outlined itself clearly to the mind of perhaps the most eminent of
modern psychologists, Carl G. Jung and he gave expression to his perspicacious
discernment in the most forthright terms, which it were well we should heed:
"The Imitatio Christi will
forever have this disadvantage; we worship a man as a divine model, embodying
the perfect meaning of life, and then out of sheer imitation we forget to make
real the profound meaning present in ourselves.
If I accept the fact that a god is
absolute and beyond all human experience, he leaves me cold. I do not affect
him, nor does he affect me. But if I know, on the other hand, that God is a
mighty power within my own soul, at once I must concern myself with
him."
It can be safely affirmed that this
excerpt states with absolute conciseness the nub of the basic problem of
religion. Is man to be redeemed from animality by any volume of adoration of a
distant cosmic idealization, assumed in the case of Christianity to have been
embodied historically once for all in a given personality; or is he to rise in
the scale of being and expansion of consciousness by developing a seed of
potential divine perfection already implanted within his own constitution? The
future history of mankind hinges heavily on its sufficiently clear perception
of the realities of the evolutionary situation to make the proper choice of the
right one of these objectives.
9
The tremendous exodus out of
orthodox denominationalism into the ranks of the spiritual cult movements
enumerated some pages back is conspicuous evidence of a turn toward the second
alternative mentioned in the preceding paragraph. In no other way can the
emergence of so many sporadic movements toward the cultivation of the Christos
within, as distinct from the Jesus of history, be adequately accounted for. And
these movements, surging in nearly all cases out of the body of Christianity itself,
welled forth on the tide of an impulse generated as if by a fresh discovery of
the Christ principle in the human constitution, entirely separate from the life
of the man-Christ in
Oft quoted is the verse of Angelus
Silesius, a Christian mystic of late Medieval times:
Though Christ a thousand times in
But not within thyself, thy soul
will be forlorn;
The cross on
Unless within thyself it be set up
again.
Yea, if the Christ-love be not born
within the open consciousness of living mortals and become active as a leaven
in the lump of human society, not a thousand
10
It must be taken as a cynical
commentary on Christianity that periodically in its history one group after
another has come to the realization of the presence of the Christ nature
immediately in the constitution of man himself, and has been so galvanized into
newness of life by the recognition as to regard the discovery as something
outside the pale of Christianity. The Renaissance in
It can with full truth be said that
all human culture and refinement, all civilization in fact, springs from the
potentiality inherent in man of binding closer this communion between the two
natures in man's life, the developed animal and the, as yet, imperfectly developed
Christhood. For these two are, and are to be, copartners in the evolution of
humanity. Plato gives us this definition of man: "Through body it is an
animal; through intellect it is a god." Man, declared the ancient sages,
is a god inhabiting the body of an animal. All potential culture is grounded on
the possibility of taming the wildness of the animal by the loving-kindness of
the god. The deity must domesticate its beastly elemental. Nearly all religion
has been activated by the presumption that its function is to help the animal
rise up to the capabilities of an association with the god, whereby its
brutishness may be transfigured into seraphic love. But religion has been
almost completely guiltless of any recognition that on his side the god is on
earth in animal body, not only to tutor the animal into a more angelic
transformation of nature, but, in his own interest, to find through association
with its lower companion an outlet for the exploitation of his own latent
capacities in his upward progression to higher status. The nearly total failure
of religious philosophy to take into account this duality in the elemental
constitution of man, its failure to know man as a compound of god and animal,
the two mediated by the human entity which comes to birth on the borderline
between the two, has made of religion an ineffective, because unbalanced,
cultural enterprise in the psychological domain.
It will be well to recall a few
statements from the most eminent philosophers that the kernel of a divine nature
is latent in the constitution of man. The wise Socrates, facing the imminent
return of his soul to the invisible world, asks Cebes if it is not the certain
11
conclusion of all philosophical
reasoning "that the soul is in the very likeness of the divine and
intelligible and intellectual and uniform and indissoluble and
unchangeable" nature of the gods, and will at death rejoice to rejoin the
company of the immortal deities. Leading the splendid movement to revive the
great Platonic philosophy six and a half centuries after the master's day,
Plotinus speaks as follows:
"The wise man recognizes the
idea of the god within him. This he develops by withdrawal into the holy place
of his own soul. He who does not understand how the soul contains the beautiful
within itself seeks to realize beauty by laborious production. His aim should
rather be to concentrate and simplify and so to expand his being; instead of
going to the manifold, to forsake it for the One, and so to float upwards
toward the divine fount of being whose stream flows within him.
I am weary already of this
prison-house, the body, and calmly await the day when the divine nature within
me shall be set free from matter."
Epictetus, the Roman
slave-philosopher, adjures "never to say that you are alone, for . . . God
is within and your genius is within." Heraclitus, before Plato's time,
declared that "man's genius is a deity." Jacob Boehme,
shoemaker-mystic of the late sixteenth century, wrote:
"The holy and heavenly man,
hidden in the monstrous (external man) is as much in heaven as God, and heaven
is in him, and the heart or light of God is begotten and born in him. Thus is
God in him and he in God. God is nearer to him than his bestial body."
The voice of God speaketh within
man, he declares, "and if thou canst for a while cease from all thy
thinking and willing, thou shalt hear unspeakable words of God."
Coming to our own sagely reflecting
Emerson, we hear him reiterate the concept of the divine philosophy:
"Meantime within man is the
soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part
and particle is equally related; the eternal One. From within or from behind a
light shines through upon things . . . . When it breathes through his intellect,
it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows
through his affection, it is love . . . . Of this pure nature every man is at
some time sensible . . . . It is indefinable, immeasurable, but we know that it
pervades and contains us. We know that all spiritual being is in man . . . .
Let man then learn . . . . that the sources of nature are in his own
mind."
12
But in the exuberance of his zest to
bespeak the immanence of divine grandeur at the heart of our being, the philosopher
did not pause here, as the utterances found in his essay on Nature indicate he
might have done, to remind us that, as the sources of nature are in the woven
fabric of our minds, so too is the pattern of our thought and understanding
already woven into the context of nature. This reciprocal counterpart of the
truth this essay will endeavor to elucidate.
Famous is Robert Browning's poetic
passage:
Truth is within ourselves; it takes
no rise
From outward things; whate'er you
may believe,
There is an inmost center in us all
Where truth abides in fulness; and
around
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems
it in.
This perfect, clear
perception,--which is truth--
A baffling and perverting carnal
mesh
Binds it, and makes all error; and
to know
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendor may
escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without.
Assenting fully to the fundamental
fact here expressed, in a strict analysis one might challenge the statement in
the first lines that truth takes no rise from outward things. If the truth in
our minds and the truth reflected in outer nature are the natural counterparts
of each other, are in effect two representations of the same thing, why should
not truth spring up to us from outward things? One must ask how Browning could
let this negative assertion escape him, when he must have known that the outer
world of natural things has been the most dynamic and prolific source of
inspiration for poetry itself. It is to nature herself--where else?--that
poetry and philosophy and art instinctively resort to tap the springs of
insight and afflation. Here Wordsworth:
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach us more of man,
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.
And hark! How blithe the throstle
sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher;
Come forth into the light of things;
Let nature be your teacher.
13
Indeed the weight of all literary
authority is so diametrically the contrary to Browning's statement as to
constitute direct contradiction. For actually it is precisely from outward
things that truth does take its rise for man. It could take no rise out of a
vacuum. It takes its rise from man's immersion in nature and under the
influence of nature. The realization of truth is potential in man; but it
awaits the challenge of external objectivity to awaken and spur it on to its
deployment. To accentuate this aspect of the religious philosophy is an
integral part of the purpose of this work. For it is one of the essential
elements of truth that the subjective systems here examined have signally
failed to recognize.
Walt Whitman, lyric singer of the
inner godhood in our common human nature, asserts that no man "has begun
to think how divine he himself is." "Divine I am inside and out; and
I make holy whatever I touch." ". . . . and that there is no God any
more divine than yourself." This indeed strikes a common chord with the
statements of the ancient sages that man blasphemes both God and himself when
he worships any power outside himself.
Volumes could not contain the whole
of the literature testifying to the universal recognition of the presence of
potential divine transcendence of being in the dual constitution of man. Thus
indubitably established, the universal recognition will serve as our point of
departure for an exegesis that must go far to effect a quite drastic
reorientation of all understanding of "spiritual truth," and
institute a new and more balanced rationalization of the entire theme. Going
further than that, nothing less than a complete volte face in all
religious philosophy and attitude is implicit in the elucidations to be
presented in this discussion. As to the factuality of the presence or immanence
of a nuclear unit of divine being in the constitution of man there can be no
question or dispute. But from that point on it is to be demonstrated that
nearly all the theory and practique long prevalent and dominant in general
spiritual religionism as to the methodology of man's utilization of the divine
segment in his nature has been tragically misconceived and injuriously
mishandled.
14
CHAPTER TWO
THE IMPRISONED SPLENDOR
Yes, as Browning put it, the great
evolutionary task set for the creature man is to bring out a light of divine
glory of consciousness that is being slowly enkindled within him. Our path is
dark, the poet implies, until we are able to illuminate it with the rays of a
great spiritual refulgence for which we effect an outlet from hidden recesses
within ourselves. We do not seek to kindle that flame, all subjective spiritual
philosophy declares, by importing a light found outside ourselves to illumine
the inner darkness. On the contrary we discover a great light within our own
conscious depths, and by careful tending and skillful refueling, we learn to
increase its glow to ever-intensified brilliance.
It must be made clear that confusion
has been bred and expressed itself in Browning's passage and multitudinously
elsewhere through the phraseology used. The inner light is loosely spoken of as
either being made to shine within the depths of the individual consciousness,
or as being "brought out" to shine through and from the person who
has enkindled it. From one angle this distinction is of great moment; from a
broad point of view it is only a matter of the appropriateness of a figure. IT
is in consonance with the view advanced here that it is more fitting to speak
of our task of bringing out the light within, than to think merely of enkindling
the light in the interior depths, and, as if that were the final achievement,
letting it shine there. The terms employed in a debate or treatise can all too
easily lead to confusion if their connotations are not clearly predetermined.
What is to be understood basically in the situation is that an inner light of
perception that illumines the mind is brought to shining in the area of
consciousness and from that fount of generation shines out in the whole
expression of the individual life. It is made to shine out in the real sense
that the splendid character it brings to view in outward conduct does emerge
out of hitherto dark nescience in to the open light of conscious motivation.
The "out" direction can only refer to something describable in this fashion.
The "in-ness" of it so constantly cherished by devotees must refer to
the conscious effort to achieve it and the sense of having made it a real
possession. It is advanced here as a matter of ultimately great psychological
moment, whether one thinks of
15
the enlightenment process as working
inward or outward. In the simplest of words it is to be said that so much
unctuous "spiritual" literature speaks of "going within" to
find the light, in the belief that one must go within to get away from
distracting interests outside which will defeat the power to set the inner
light aglow. There is indeed a pertinent view of the process which makes it
akin to one's shutting oneself in the house in order to escape disturbing
noises outside. But in the case in question this analogue outreaches its
validity in that it fails to take into account that the noise outside is itself
an integral element of the total situation; in the one consideration that it is
in part at least to exercise the function of driving the consciousness within;
in another, that it serves as a challenge from outside to the soul within to
come forth and do something about the noise itself. It fails to recognize that
the external noise has a legitimate cosmic reason for being there, that it can
not therefore be simply condemned as evil and treated as a thing to be escaped.
As intimated vast psychological consequences flow from the attitude thus taken
as to the mere direction in which the process is channelled. It can obviously
be contended that one can not bring out what has not first been generated
within, and that is entirely valid on the side of the subjective direction so
strongly preached by the spiritual cults. But where that contention falls short
of validity is in its failure to recognize that the enkindling of the light
within can not be done in total disseverance of relationship and interplay with
the concerns located outside. The generation of the light can come only through
the intercommunion of the conscious energies exerted within and without. On the
basis of the wisest philosophies of the ages, that statement must stand as the
summation of the truth of the matter. And obviously the issue of enormous good
or evil hinges on the recognition of this truth. In the end it becomes a thing
of vital moment both to the individual and to the world whether one kindles the
inner light merely to bask deliciously in its glow, or uses it to enlighten
one's chart of active participation in the community of world life. When so
much of the spiritual philosophy is bent in the direction of introversion, it
is highly needful at the start to lay definite stress upon the extrovert
direction. Browning clearly intimates this right direction. If the supernal
beams are imprisoned within, it is the obvious psychological task of man to
open barred windows and let them stream out.
16
It is true that all life does build
and grow from inner germinal source-spring outward to conscious manifestation.
The Scriptural injunction is to "let your light shine," with
correlative caution against keeping it hidden or buried.
The first item in the indictment of
traditional or conventional philosophy of the "inner light" comes
from the notation that such view naively overlooks the consideration that
nowhere in the cosmos, physical or metaphysical, can it be supposed that light
can be generated, made to shine and be kept shining, without being fed by fuel.
And always the fuel for the fire which generates light, even as in the
superethereal elements that feed the solar fire, is of the essence of cruder
matter, as is seen in the wood-sticks on the hearth, the oil or coal in a
furnace, and the tallow beneath the candle flame, or indeed the physical food
that keeps alive the flame of life in our bodies. Never in hundreds of books on
the soul-light philosophy does one find the slightest notice of the necessity
of material fuel for the inner spiritual fire. It seems never to have occurred
to any theorist in this field. And as the bulky mass of this literature has
insistently urged that we pull our focus of interest ever more completely away
from outward things in the effort to fire up the soul in the inmost depths of
our subjective kingdom, the question and challenge as to how this great light
is to be supplied with fuel, when cult practice severs the energies of spirit
from contact with the coarser experiences of earth, which a balanced philosophy
recognizes to be the proper fuel for the burning, must be fully met.
Matter, lower in rank though equal
in importance with spirit, is always the base, the sustenance of spirit. But so
clamorously has matter been derogated as hostile to spirit that the dependence
of the higher principle upon it for sustenance and the instrumentalization of
its powers has been almost entirely left out of account. As surely as the
candle flame can not be kept alive without the fuel supplied by the coarser
tallow, which by its more potent chemical energies it can trasfigure into the
likeness of its own glorious body, as St. Paul says, so neither can this
radiance of spiritual light within the depths of conscious being be kept aglow
without being able to draw up and transmute into its own essence the physical
experience undergone by virtue of soul's interconnection with body. Spiritual
cult philosophy has seemingly taken if for granted that the inner God-light can
be generated and brought to white heat, so to say, in
17
a vacuum. For it expressly preludes
its prescription for the enkindling of that light with the instructions to
destroy all physical-sensual and intellectual forms of experience, the very
elements that must be the natural fuel for the spiritual flame. From the very
start it is to be deprived of the fuels which alone could serve to nourish it
into its brightness. It is true that the electric light-bulb does glow and last
longer in a vacuum, but,--lest this be seized upon as a natural confutation of
the thesis here expounded--it is not to be forgotten that the power that
generates the light in the vacuum is inducted into the bulb from outside, and
is itself the conversion of a "lower" or "coarser" energy
into light. It is the universal law of the cosmos that always
"higher" life feeds upon, consumes and converts, by sublimation
process, energies ranked as lower and grosser in essence. The lamp of the
spirit within must be fed with the sacrificial oil of the life of sense,
emotion and thought lived daily in the flesh. And, by analogy, soul science is
as unwise to rail against the iniquitous influences of the flesh as the
lamplight would be to express its repugnance to the oil under its wick. So
confused has been the interpretative effort in the Scriptural field that this
conspicuous connotation of the "oil" symbolism has not been clearly
brought through to understanding at all. The coming of the Christos into our
human nature is represented under the figure of the anointing of our heads with
oil, because the Christ-mind that is to apotheosize us is poetized as a divine
flame (cf. The tongues of fire touching the head of Jesus at the Jordan baptism
and those of the disciples at Pentecost) coming to its glorious burning in our
heads. And oil is the fuel for fire.
As the unfoldment of the case
against false assumptions and erroneous methodology in handling the conception
of the inner divine light will enunciate the ineptitude of all derogation of
the body, matter, the flesh, the senses and even the mind, as detrimental
instead of beneficial to the life of the spirit itself, the first hint in
support of our basic affirmations will be presented in the material composing
an advertisement-notice of the Vedanta Society, taken at random from a current
magazine. It aims to present a concise condensed statement of Vedanta religion.
A clause in one of the sentences makes it worth citation.
"Vedanta is chiefly a search
for the Spirit, the Real Being, and the purpose of the philosophy is to reveal
to man what he really is.
18
The body and mind are adjuncts, the
necessary means, to the achievement of the spiritual element; but beyond them
is the ever-shining light of man's consciousness; his 'I Am' self-consciousness
is God consciousness."
Here is advertised the all-dominant
motive of cultivating the divine spirit within. But there is that statement
which, in fairness to the truth of a more advanced conception, it was deemed
desirable to insert in the notice, that the body and the mind, so fiercely
assailed and calumniated as the arch enemies of the spirit, are necessary
adjuncts and indispensable means to the achievement of spirituality. This
single sentence at once hails into court before the bar of simple logic the
principle of the eternal condemnation of the flesh, the senses and the mind in
the philosophy of "spiritual" religion. For if it is conceded that
they are necessary adjuncts and the very means of spiritual evolution, their
derogation as alleged enemies of the spirit is immediately seen as insane
folly. If spirit itself is a glorious development, then it is asinine to berate
the means and accessories by which it is exalted to beauty and kingly power.
The physical body of man is obviously the instrument in, by and through which
the divine soul of the mortal is implemented to its rebirth, growth and final
divinization. What must have been the strange hypnotizing power of a persuasion
in religion that has disposed the minds of millions for centuries to revile the
body that performs so marvelous a function for the divine principle of goodness
in the mundane race! What warped mentality must have bent the counsels of
religion to deprecate as foul and vile, and even denounce as the source of
human depravity, the awesome marvel of our bodily organism and its noble
function as the mother, the nurse, the guardian of the infant soul born and
coming to its adulthood in the home of the flesh! So closely allied is this
fatal delusion with the concomitant persuasion of the "spiritual"
religions that the senses and the mind obstruct the path of the soul's advance
to perfection, that this issue must share the brunt of the present critique.
Of course the power that man must
utilize to lift himself in the scale of being is a power operative within his
own constitution. Christianity cut itself off from direct connection with this
dynamo of influence when it segregated the source of the power off in its
embodiment in one historical person only. Where else could have been localized
a power capable of divinizing lowly human nature than
19
in the corporate body of humanity
itself? Surely it could not have been placed outside the individual or the
collective organism in whose life it was to be a fermenting leaven. How could
man either save himself or be saved other than by the use of a power
susceptible of cultivation within his own life, or other than by the discovery,
exploitation, exercise and development of a power amenable to his own control?
Life never expands or evolves save by the unfoldment of powers germinally
innate in the organic being of its own creatures. The legend for which
Christianity notably is responsible, that the human race is to be saved by a
power sent down from heaven on one historical occasion and localized in the
sole body of one historical person, is of all fatuities of theological
obscurantism the one closest to a devastating irrationality.
This observation is thrown into
sharp accentuation when we recall a myth found in one of the Hindu Upanishads.
The story runs that the Lord called a council of the spiritual hierarchy of the
world and spoke of a new race that he was about to generate on the earth,
stating that he designed to place in its hands the creative power of the gods.
He called for opinions as to how the power might best be invested in the new
race, so as to safeguard it from misuse through the ignorance and waywardness
of the people untrained in wisdom. "Man is a curious creature and he will
surely discover the power and in his childishness misuse it to his injury.
Where can it be hidden so as to be secure from his prying?" One archangel
advised that it be placed on the top of the highest mountain peak. Another
suggested that it would be better hidden in the profoundest ocean depths. At
last the Lord bethought himself of a happy expedient: "I'll conceal it in
the inmost depths of man's own nature, the last place he will ever think of
looking for it."
Yes, the God-power is within us,
making us potentially co-creators of the universe with God himself. All too
slow have we been in discovering the presence or immanence of the mighty
potency in ourselves. Religion has too insistently directed our gaze to seek it
afar. Socrates told us plainly that each man harbored within him his
overshadowing daimon, his guardian angel, and we still wonder if perhaps
the Athenian philosopher was not entertaining a wraith of his own hallucinated
fancy and not a true angel. At any rate we take it as an item of curious Greek
speculation and hold it at arm's length, when truly the statement covers the
most important fact in our existence.
20
To be sure, our divinity is lodged
within us, deep down in the heart's core of our conscious being, but from the
start implanted there as the mere seed of a potential development. So far it is
possible to stand with the New Thought and spirit-cult philosophies. They are
right in placing paramount emphasis on the necessity--and the glorious
privilege--of recognizing that presence within us and living up to the highest
capabilities of a technique that will put us in more effective relation to it.
But from this point on, it is practically impossible to go along with the operational
theory and the active practique of the idealists. Their envisagement and
consequently their modus of operation of the forces in the case are all sadly
and disastrously askew. A rectification of their codes and modes in the matter
must be attempted.
The basic error of their procedure
is discerned to be their naïve belief that all one has to do is to penetrate a
little deeper than the surface level of daily consciousness and there will be
found the god, fully matured and ready to exercise the entire repertoire of his
divine power and majesty, only needing to be recognized and hailed. The common
cult idea is that to awaken the inner deity to the full exercise of his
godliness in and through us it is only necessary to call loudly enough upon him
and he will forthwith arise and come forth. It is widely circulated as an open
sesame technique that the practice of yoga breathing, sitting in certain
postures, deep concentration--but more often the complete emptying--of the
mind, will greatly facilitate the process or conduce to its effective working.
Prayer and deep meditation are urged as aids to success. The methodology is
predicated on the idea that the god is immanent in all his power, strength and
glory, awaiting only to be summoned forth. All that is needed is that one
should recognize him, or, as Christian phraseology has it, believe on him, and
all his wealth of bounteous being will be immediately released for man to use
to his advantage.
It is important to note that along
with this ground assumption there went always the concomitant persuasion that a
practically indispensable adjunct to successful courting of the indwelling
deity was the operation of completely emptying the mind, or the total area of
consciousness, of all ordinary forms of feeling and of thought, to make the
field a complete blank, so that the god could then have unobstructed access to
the entity below, or the latter have clear approach to the god. The method was
to clear
21
away all rubbish of daily thought
from the mind, and hold it steady as a clean slate on which the deity might
better inscribe his own higher apperceptions of being. Emptying the mind of all
its contents, deadening the senses, stilling all emotion, one might with much
hope of reward sit and wait for the higher genius of the inner self to deliver
its edifying messages. In the silence and the mental void suddenly the forms,
apparitions, the ghosts and wraiths of divine truth could be expected to
appear. Glowing in supernal light will shape themselves the outlines and
figures of eternal reality. And the sitter will have consummated his yoga and
met his god. He will have linked himself with the divine and himself become
divine. He will have completed his earthly evolution and won the glorious crown
of immortal life with the gods.
It is granted that of course a first
step toward true theurgy is the individual's arriving at the certain knowledge,
beyond mere speculation, that potential divinity is resident within him and
awaits cultivation. But while this recognition is basic primarily, it is a
mistake to expect the operation of magic or a perfected accomplishment from
this one step alone. It merely puts one in line to begin the process of
cultivating one's divinity. Just as a child entering primary school needs more than
one recognition of the awakening of his slumbering divine genius than mere
recognition of its presence within. The task calls for the perfect development
and full functioning of every normal capability and faculty of the entire
complement of powers engendered by evolution on the lower human side.
The most hurtful mistake is the
too-simple assumption that the divine entity is in man in any other form than,
from the first, potentially; except in so far as it has in the case of any
individual been brought along to an advanced stage of development. It is at any
rate, at any stage always potential of greater unfoldment in the progression
ahead of it. The great and central item of theology that seems to have dropped
almost into complete desuetude in current religion is the fact that the divine
nature was implanted in man's constitution in the beginning as a seed. How
can any potency be implanted in any organic development except as a seed? The
one universal law of manifest life is growth. There can not be growth unless it
is started from seed or shoot. The task of man is
22
not to discover the all-perfect God
in full stature, a finished entity, within himself. His labor is to recognize
his gardener's husbandry in the tending, cultivation and maturing of a seedling
seminally implanted in the physical garden-bed of his body and his life. It is
there from the start only potentially. The Christ within is a child, first to
be brought from gestation to birth at the Christmastide of man's own awakening
to the recognition of his parenthood of the august infant, and then to be
reared, trained, educated to the brilliance of its full divinity. The Christmas
note of jubilation should be, not the barren celebration of the birth of a babe
in far
23
CHAPTER THREE
HEAVEN WOOS EARTH
But what is the technique of his
education? How are we to awaken his latent divinity? This is both the immediate
and the ultimate question.
First we must realize that he has
been sent down here to go to school, to attend the seminary of earth, whose
head master is experience. The particular seat he has to occupy in the
schoolroom is his own body and its environment. In his body and the place it
occupies in the world he will have his instruction. The body and its needs for
sustenance and health will be his lesson assigners and his taskmasters. He will
learn only as he meets and masters the daily run of events and extracts their
lessons for the weaving of the patterns of wisdom in his consciousness. His
education was arranged in the divine government of the worlds to be his
tutelage on this planet, because here was a schoolroom in which every
appurtenance, every ornament, every pedagogical provision was itself an
eloquent, if mute oracle of the goodness, the beauty and the truth of being, a
knowledge and experience of which were to be the sum and crown of the
achievement of his education. For this world had been created aforetime by his
omnipotent Father, and created to be an embodiment and expression of the
attributes of its Author's own supernal nature and being, which are the
perfections of goodness, beauty and truth. All its living objects and its
continuing events reflect and dramatize the laws and principles of the Father's
nature, for the earth is a unit cell of the universe and that universe is his
body. The physical worlds are instinct and vibrant with the pulsating life and
the idea-patterns of the Creator Mind. The world is full of gods, as Thales
said in ancient
All this mighty revelation is to be
absorbed, inwoven into the substance and texture of the young god's own being
as he dwells life after life in the midst of this gigantic cinema of his
Father's epiphany of glory. For a long period of his childhood he will drink in
unconsciously, unreflectively, the potent influences impacting him in his
earthly home. He will instinctively feel the ministering benignance of the
nature in whose lap he has been laid. Nature is his cherishing mother, his
sustainer and guardian. Later, as his self-
24
awareness and his powers of
conscious perception and reflection begin to unfold, he will learn to watch,
observe and moralize upon the form and then the meaning of all the moving
scenario that passes in the yearly round of nature's cycles. He will gradually
register in the depth of consciousness an ever keener realization of the order
and integral unity of the world panorama. As he moves on from instinctive sense
of nature's providential goodness to speculative philosophy at the mental
level, he will come at last to a rational understanding that he and the nature
that encompasses his life are one and the same expression of creative mind, the
one at the physical level, the other in the rarefied air of consciousness. He
will discern that the world has been framed over the design of his Father's
thought, in the image and likeness of which design his own mind is to frame the
pattern of its creative work at his lower station. This recognition carries in
all its import the power of redeeming his life from aimless drifting with the
natural stream of the all-embracing cosmic life and empowers him to assume the
conscious intelligent direction of the onward flow of his own evolution. It
evokes from latency into conscious activity his soul faculties as the impact of
his experience with the world without challenges dormant powers to come awake.
Mainly through his very body the birth of self-consciousness and the evolvement
of untried capabilities take place. His body and the world do exactly for him
what the sun, the soil, the heart and moisture do for the seed in the garden.
They evoke slumbering power in the unplumbed depths of his being. If he was not
immersed in the ground-bed of the world and his body, he would remain an
unplanted seed. These give him his birth and nourish him to maturity. Every
birth must emanate from its mother's womb, and for the soul unit, the physical
body is that womb. Said Jesus in a beautiful analogy, "unless a grain of
wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit." Not for twenty centuries has it been known
that the ancient sages who indited the Bibles of divine wisdom referred to the
long dormant condition of the soul when it was lodged in earthly body as its "death."
But without this "death," as Jesus declares, it could have no rebirth
and therefore no further growth. It would remain forever in the dormancy of
purely celestial life. To rise higher in the scale of conscious being it has to
endure the recurrent pangs of birth forever renewed. The philosophy that urges
25
escape from the world and the body
would simply deny the soul its natural chance to be reborn at a higher level.
Probably the most succinct and
positive declaration of the dialectical necessity of the central doctrine of
all religion, the incarnation, has come from the pen of Plotinus, who must be
ranked high in the roll of the world philosophers. He was the inheritor of the
great Platonic wisdom, which had flashed out in brilliance over half a millennium
before, but had gone into eclipse under philosophical obscurantism in the
second century and needed a renaissance. The paragraph quoted from his Enneads
is regarded in our purview as one of the most notable passages in all
philosophy:
"Thus, although the soul have a
divine nature, or being, though she originate in the intelligible world, she
enters into a body. Being the lower divine, she descends here below by a
voluntary inclination, for the purpose of developing her powers and to adorn
what is below her. If she flee promptly from here below, she does not need to
regret having become acquainted with evil and knowing the nature of vice, nor
having had the opportunity of manifesting her faculties and to manifest her
activities and deeds. Indeed the faculties of the soul would be useless if they
slumbered continuously in incorporeal being without ever becoming actualized.
The soul herself would remain ignorant of what she possesses if her faculties
did not manifest by procession; for everywhere it is the actualization that
manifests the potentiality. Otherwise the latter would be completely hidden and
obscured; or rather it would not really exist, and would not possess any
reality. It is the variety of sense-effects which brings to light the greatness
of the intelligible principle, whose nature publishes itself by the beauty of
its works."
A little father on he pens a
sentence which adds tremendous dialectical force to the truth of his
pronunciamento given above:
"Likewise it was not sufficient
for souls (merely) to exist; they also had to reveal what they were capable of
begetting."
And, the logic implies, they could
not beget if they remained aloft in worlds of ethereality. This repeats in the
dress of Greek systematism what Jesus says, that the unplanted seed can
bear no fruit. That this enunciation and the principle back of it have not been
acknowledged throughout the history of Christendom as the basic fundamental of
all doctrinism bespeaks the loss that was suffered when narrow bigotry closed
the Platonic academies in the fifth century.
26
And if the passage stands as a sharp
rebuke to much rigid dogmatism of orthodox Christianity, it even more sharply
negatives most of the warped predications of the spiritual cult philosophy. So
drastically does it reverse the "spiritual" preachments, that it
locates the hub of life values right here in the flesh, the very place where
those preachments proclaim that values should be shunned. It makes the life in
the flesh the seat of destiny. While the cult philosophy denies reality to the
things and the experience of this life, it avers that only here is reality to
be found. And while cult philosophy stigmatizes the senses as the purveyors of
falsehood, it asserts that only through the variety of sense-effects is the
grandeur of the "intelligible principle" made manifest to
consciousness. It indicts the spiritual religionism on many charges of gross
violation of cardinal truth.
The luminous philosophy of ancient
"the Sun is the father, the
Moon -- or earth -- is its mother, the Wind carries it in its belly, its nurse
is the Earth. This is the father of all perfection, or consummation of the
whole world. Its power is integrating; if it be turned into earth. It
ascends from earth to heaven and descends again to earth, and receives the
power of the superiors and the inferiors. So thou hast the glory of the whole
world. This is the strong force of all forces, overcoming every subtle and penetrating
every solid thing. So the world was created. Hence were all wonderful
adaptations, of which this is the manner."
And three especially of the ten
statements of "the truth about the self" laid down by Hermes are too
magnificent to be omitted from quotation:
"Filled with understanding of
its perfect law, I am guided moment by moment along the path of liberation.
"In all things great and small
I see the beauty of the divine expression.
"The kingdom of spirit is
embodied in my flesh."
27
"In my flesh shall I see
God," cries Job. And no less positively another Scriptural passage
runs: "The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it
together." It is time that those who heap up denunciation on the world and
the flesh know how ignorantly they revile the very temple of the spirit. The
philosophies that proclaim the desirability of escape from the body stand
sternly rebuked by the greatest wisdom ever given to humanity, that of Hermes,
Thrice-Greatest.
In the books of this sage Hermetic
philosophy the divine soul, making its entry upon the earth, utters the
declaration of its purpose and mission in migrating from the dreamy
blissfulness of the spirit world to this land of a more realistic grade of
consciousness: "Lo, I come that I may feed upon the bread of Seb, of the
food of earth." Seb, his name carrying the cryptic significance of the
creative number seven, is the god of the earth. Therefore, the
"bread of Seb" is, like the manna of the Old Testament, that
nutriment which the soul abstracts from the very ground of earthly experience.
Also he says that he comes in order that he may bathe in the pool beneath the
two divine sycamore trees of heaven and earth. As in the case of the divine
nucleus represented by Jesus in the Christian allegory, the unit of potential
Christ consciousness had to come down out of heaven and be immersed in the
waters of the earthly baptism, which waters, be it known at last, are just the
blood of physical human bodies. The immersion is dramatically administered by a
forerunner called "the Baptist." For this body blood is indeed that
"
By now it should be evident how
great an error is committed in promulgating a philosophy that advises the human
entity to turn away from contact with the earth and its influences, designed of
a certainty to be salutary, and to negate psychologically the validity of all
mundane experience. Such an attitude gains no sanction from the tomes of the
great Sages of the early time. It is the spurious product of shallow
understanding and gullible pietism.
What has been overlooked entirely is
that to turn the mind away from the actualities of the world experience, with
the expectation of finding more stable and enduring satisfactions in the depths
of consciousness, is only to meet with a disappointing futility. For
28
that is only to plunge the mind into
the vacuity of an empty cavern. It is quite the same as pulling the babe away
from feeding upon the natural food from its mother's breasts, and expecting it
to draw its nourishment from the sterile air. If one turns the mind from
concrete objectivity to bask atop the hills of an inner divine subjectivity,
the rueful upshot will be the fruitless groping of a mind in a void.
It is right here that spiritual cult
theory and practice have perpetrated their most harmful blunder and most
positively committed themselves to error. The divine power is within, and is to
be implemented from within. But all procedure that aims to exalt it by
nullifying the outer mind and seeking the soul's gold in the vacuum of an
alleged inner consciousness of greater reality is marked decidedly as vain and
nugatory. So positively is it untrue to predicate the soul's divinization
through withdrawal from contact with the outer world, that the exact reverse of
this theory is the truth which mans needs to follow. Perhaps an enlightened
philosophy is soon to proclaim, as the long-lost truth of a sound soul-science,
that the true cultus of the divine intelligence is man consists not in
severing the links of conscious relation to the actualities of the earthly
experience and retreating within the secluded depths of detached consciousness.
Precisely on the contrary, that true soul-science is cultivated and perfected
by going outside and establishing a living psychic relation with the
external world. That this flies directly in the face of the vast literature of
New Thought and the admonitions of the self-realization preachments denouncing
the external world, is only too apparent. That it is the demonstrable truth is
nevertheless maintained.
The difference in direction--going
without instead of going within--is the difference between focusing the soul's
energies upon blankness in the one case and upon the precise and mutely
articulate images of reality in the other. Contrary to all the claims of
religious theory, the forms and paradigms of real being are not found
residing ethereally in the higher rarefied areas of human consciousness. They
are not lying there in a superior world, merely awaiting the time when
the mind will stop shutting off the soul's access to them. That interior domain
is a blank, a void, until such time as the outer mind, learning to build up the
images of supernal truth from its sublimation, or subjectification of the
phenomenal
29
objects seen in the concrete world,
supplies the upper region with the figured elements of real conceptions. Only
then does the void begin to have content. Not inside, but outside in the
world, has the creator mind placed the crystallized forms of the divine
ideation for man's behoof. To preach the cult of discovering them by
withdrawing the consciousness from the outer world into the vacant abyss of
inner subjectivity is to direct our search for them precisely to the region
where they are not to be found. They lie constantly out in the world under our
eyes; and what egregious folly it is then to direct the mind away from them to
stare fruitlessly into vacancy! Philosophy must recover the balance and sanity
to point the search for truth toward the ground where it is found to lie,
renouncing the fatuous seeking of them in a vacuous fairyland hypothecated by
the tortured processes of unsound philosophical lucubration.
For, as said, nature is the body of
God and the laws of nature are the automatic workings of his subconscious mind.
In gazing out upon nature, the eye and then the mind will be observing the
first creative or archetypal thoughts of the divine ideation, rendered solid
and stable for human reflection and study. The objects and phenomena of nature
are the operations of the cosmic intelligence made concrete and objective. They
reveal the cosmic rationale of the great Noumenon. It could be poetically said
that nature caught God's thoughts on the wing as they were projected from his
mind and froze them into substantial form in matter. It has indeed been written
that the forms of nature are the congealed thoughts of God. How decisively we
are learning now that matter is divine force, divine spirit, petrified!
Herein comes to view a needed
correction in the position of general academic philosophy upon a point kindred
to the one under discussion. One reads endlessly that what the senses and the
mind perceive in nature is not the reality, but the "mere" appearance
of a reality that lies "behind." It seems necessary to take direct
issue with this idea and especially with the phrase used,--mere "appearance."
The view makes of concrete objectivity a mere shadow world, a false pretense at
real being. The material object-form of a thing is not the reality of the
thing, but an unreal image of it, the real thing being all the while an
idea-form in the creative mind.
Our quarrel is with the wrong
connotation this view assigns to the word "appearance" and its
unwarranted accentuation by the
30
adjective "mere." The
contention is that the concrete material object is the real appearance and in
no sense a false representation of a real thing hiding behind it. It is the
positive, most substantial and actual appearance to human view of an ideal
conception that was invisible to us until it made its appearance physically and
stood out there concreted in form of substance that made it perceptible to our
senses. The appearance is in no wise a phantom of a reality haunting us, but
the actual coming to view of what was only noumenal and as such imperceptible
as long as it remained a subjective mind-form in creative thought. The use of
"appearance" in the sense of only a seeming-to-be of something not
really present is here vigorously disputed. And there is no warrant in truth
for accompanying it by the adjective "mere". If a thing positively appears
out of invisibility into visibility, like an actor appearing on a stage from
behind the curtain, by what warrant is it referred to as a "mere"
appearance? Would one say that at his proper cue the actor merely appeared?
Why is the hint of unreality injected into the statement of the fact that in
the phenomenal world of objectivity the ideal forms of God's thoughts appear,
or make their appearance to our view, when previously they had been
imperceptible! What is "mere" about it, when it is the very
solidification before our eyes of what was until then only a thought form of
cosmic mind? The objective world is surely not a "mere appearance" of
true being, but that true being itself, having appeared in our world out of the
heavens of divine ideation. It was hardened into concrete objectivity and
placed here to be seen.
What becomes clear on the postulates
of the greatest wisdom attained by the human mind, or the wisdom vouchsafed to
early humanity by high exponents of the divine mind, is that there must be a
complete reversal of direction in the quest for spiritual illumination and the
consummation of the mystical apotheosis of consciousness. Not in the vacuity of
the inner mind, but out in the world of living forms are to be found the
monographs of God's prescience. The world he has created is the world
that reveals the thought-pattern over which he designed that which came to be.
There visibly are displayed the noumena which turned into phenomena in our
world of dense substance. We have in utter folly termed the phenomena unreal
and the noumena alone real. This makes a house that is only pictured in an
architect's mind, or drawn
31
in blueprint, the real house, and
the same house later standing fully created in wood, stone, brick or concrete,
the unreal house, the ghost or "mere" shadow of the real house. Do we
not only have to ask which one would accommodate real living? Determined from
the standpoint of life in this world, surely the material house is the real
one. From the standpoint of God's view, he being the thinker and creator, both
the purely noumenal and the congealed actual house are real, since one has no
warrant for pronouncing either thoughts or things unreal. Gerald Massey,
profound student of ancient Egyptology, points out the odd closeness of the
words "think" and "thing." And it seems to be clear that
both derive from the Egyptian hieroglyph which is the symbol and the word for life,
the great ankh cross. (The nk spelling did become ng in
Greek.) In the cosmic creative process God's "thinks" became
"things."
This whole question of reality or
unreality has been involved in endless and needless confusion for the rather
simple reason that the discussion has never specified which world is being
considered as the home of reality. Life and its productions exist in two
worlds, or, as philosophers might insist, they subsist in the noumenal
world and exist in the physical. Life, if it is to become manifest to
itself and its creatures--which are modes of itself--breaks apart into the two
phases or aspects of consciousness and matter. Its creations are generated in
consciousness, or noumenally conceived. Then by a process analogous to a
reduction of temperature, which "freezes" them into
"solidity," they are concreted in matter, which, now we know, is simply
pure energy made static. That which is to be a material thing when
"staticized" is first a formation in the energy waves of thought. How
can there be any question of its reality in either phase of its being?
It is first real as a thought, or as a real thought; later it is real as an
object, a real thought objectified, and therefore a real object. It was
a real thought; now it is a real object. Reality is a categorical attribute of
things that are. What folly to maintain that they are real when in one world or
in one form, and unreal when in another world or form! The philosophical
maneuver of denying reality to the objects of God's creation when they have
become substantially objectified to his own and to our consciousness, must some
day be seen to be a weird misconception born of a most singular quirk of the
human thinking process.
All these considerations bear
strongly upon the matter of the
32
culture of the divinity in human
nature. But the bases of a still more rigorous criticism are yet to be
outlined. Perhaps the most flagrant mistake or omission in spiritual cult
philosophy is its total failure to include in its rationale the place and
function of the great law of polarity, absolutely basic for all manifestation,
and therefore basic as a predicate for reality either noumenal or phenomenal.
If this universal principle is left out, no competent rationalization of living
experience is possible at all. A philosophy formulated without it is no
philosophy. And it must be said in respect to this item that the
"spiritual" philosophies miss the mark of true conception by a long
mile. Because, in preaching at us the withdrawal of our conscious effort from
objective reality in order to gain contact with an allegedly truer reality in
subjectivity, they actually ask us to tear ourselves apart, to rend our being
in twain, to rip ourselves asunder. They ask us to dismantle our integrity, to
destroy the unity of our selfhood. In the first place, this is something that can
not be done. In the second place the effort based on the false
presupposition that it can be done and is desirable will entail disaster.
For life here, or anywhere it
becomes manifest, is and must be polarized. The cryptic meaning of that great
old Egyptian symbol, the ankh, is that life is the result of
polarization, for it conjoins the two symbols of spirit and matter. Neither
consciousness nor material existence is possible without it. No consciousness
is possible to a completely unitary being. Unity must be broken apart into
duality, if consciousness is to arise. For consciousness must be segregated
from objectivity and then be confronted with something to be conscious of. This
necessitates the existence of matter, body and the world. Spirit can have no
birth or growth if it is not kept in the relation of polar opposition to
matter. All values are born out of the tensional relation between spirit and
matter. If spirit is, or could be, torn away from its connection with matter,
the tension is dissolved and the worlds and consciousness both disappear. The
universe is sustained in being on a web of force that stretches from spirit at
the "top" to matter at the "bottom" of the scale, and that
tensional force is the warp and woof of all existence. It is that dynamism
which Einstein and now Hlavaty (recently declared to have proved Einstein's
theory) have found to be the essence and the ground of all world appearance. It
is the preaching of ignorance, the counsel of folly, to base man's divinization
on the presumption
33
that it can be achieved or furthered
by the attempt to pull the spirit away from its close and essential association
with matter and body. It is asking both spirit and matter to renounce and
dissolve their kinship, which is a twinship. The wisdom of ancient
We have here at last the meaning of
the allegory of the wheat and the tares in the Christian Gospels. True enough
it is that the two can not be separated until the harvest. If you pull up the
tares when they are growing close beside the wheat, you uproot the wheat along
with them. If evil were taken out of the world, there would be no fulcrum
against which to anchor the leverage for good. In the harvest at the cycle's
end both relapse back into their primordial unity, and disappear as separate
entities.
On the solid rock of this principle
of universal polarity the preachment of the philosophy of spiritual detachment
breaks in wreckage. It is seen to be little better than mystical moonshine. It
ammounts to semi-pious intellectual fol-de-rol and is misleading and far from
innocuous psychologically. The effort to abstract the consciousness from world
objectivity--doomed to certain failure factually--can lead a mind so far from
contact with reality as to rob all experience of its designed salutary
pedagogical value. One can reify a dreamy persuasion until it is turned from
fantasy into a hallucination of verity. The possibility of self-hypnotization
is always a potential menace to balance and sanity. If we can escape actuality
by relapsing into dream, it is certified that we can miss reality by dwelling
continually in the dream fantasy. The soul is on earth to receive the full
impact of actuality, without which its divine capability could never be brought
out to conscious mastery. To sink back while on earth into the dreaminess to escape
which it fled from heaven, is to counter the motive and reverse the procedure
which life is pursuing in its drive for its own aggrandizement.
If the god-power is within the
constitution of man it must be evident that the human body is the laboratory in
which all the seed latency of future power and divine genius is to be evolved
to full expression. The body, says
34
How far askew is that posture of
mind which teaches the evil character of the body! For some ten or more
centuries Christianity held it in contempt and tried to mortify it, imitating
Indian philosophy, which aimed to kill it. Christianity based much of its
condemnation of Paganism on the latter's wholesome reverence for the body, and
Paganism is still berated for its alleged revel in the grossness of bodily
sensuality. It is not at all realized now that it takes a far profounder and
more sanely balanced philosophy to allocate the flesh to its proper place and
function in a universal economy of good than merely to decry it as the low
enemy of spirit and revile it accordingly.
The shortsightedness of the negative
view of the world and our life in it is accentuated again by the reflection,
apparently little pondered in religious circles, that the mental posture of
earthly detachment and effort at absorption in a heavenly consciousness runs
counter to the simple logic of the incarnational situation, when it is known
that these souls of humans had been long enough in the heaven state of
consciousness to have grown weary of its inactivity and inanity, and
voluntarily (as says Plotinus) came here to exchange it for the more real sense
of existence and the chance to exercise untried powers which heaven could never
cultivate. If the disembodied soul consciousness is so blessed and blissful, so
rhapsodically preferable to the drab real-sense experiences here, it is a
legitimate question to ask why they did not stay up there. What prevailed upon
them to leave that delectable homeland that now they are said to yearn so
longingly to regain?
That, be it declared with great
pointedness, is the question that the escapist philosophies have apparently
never seriously asked, much less have ever competently answered.
35
CHAPTER FOUR
WEDDING IN THE
Until an answer is given to the
insistent query as to why the souls of men are on the earth no philosophy
pertaining to the mundane life is possible. The codes of escapism are
exhortations to man to jump out of reality and land in a vacuum.
It comes as the unconscionable
upshot of such a creed that if there is a legitimate ground for the withdrawal
tactic, then earth life for the hosts of celestial souls immersed in it is an
inadvertence, a mistake, an unjustifiable hardship inflicted on all caught in
its current, a blundering miscarriage of some creative design. Cult ideology
shades its eyes against the strong searching light of the ineluctable fact of
the divine economy, in whose strategic moves earth life is no mistake, is
entirely necessary and beneficent from every angle, for the one and
all-sufficient reason that gods can not be born, bred and reared in heaven.
Conceived they can be there, in the depths of the cosmic mind; but not there
born or raised to maturity. For heaven can provide for their birthing no matter
to be their mother. Planted on earth they must be. So to presume to tear them
loose from their rootage in the soil-bed of human nature is dialectically
equivalent to the folly of pulling up a garden plant out of the ground to
hasten its growth. To expect a soul to grow without letting its roots hold
deeply in the ground of earthly body is the same as to expect a candle to glow
without its tallow, or the fire to burn without its wood. Again sage
Just as in winter we long for the
summer warmth and in summer we equally yearn for the coolness of winter, so it
is that when we are here on earth we long for the vividly imagined bliss of
heaven and bend our philosophies to accord with the yearning. But the other
phase of the situation is not thought of or given weight in religious
philosophy. Yet it must be true that when the soul has had its sufficiency of
rest in the dreamy unreality of subjective consciousness in worlds above, it
must long to be again where the contact with veridical sense experience gives
to existence an engaging charm and zest. It must long for escape then from the
inane passivity and enforced inactivity that can become morbid. It must yearn
36
to arise from sleep, throw off dull
sloth and give play to the powers that else would remain in unwholesome
stagnation. This, the positive aspect of the philosophy of life, seen only in
the light of the knowledge of the dual and polarized state of being in
manifestation, finds scarcely a single note of emphasis in whole libraries of
cult literature. It is reasonable to assert that a philosophy which wholly
ignores this balance of forces that stabilizes the world of life must be a
blind and dangerous guide.
The legendary "rebellion of the
angels," for which they were cast out of heaven to suffer hardship on earth
in the Miltonian tradition, has been frightfully mangled in popular conception.
It is commonly represented as an evil movement of hostility to the powers of
God himself, a revolt against the divine rulership of the cosmos. A more
recondite scrutiny of the allegory discloses that it was in reality simply a
revolt against the gossamer vacuousness of the celestial life, against the
ennui, prolixity and dreary tedium of the heavenly existence, motivated by
eager longing for the more vivid experience of sense and the novel adventure of
the ego-consciousness, all of which was impossible apart from union with
physical body on a planet. It is not perhaps a rash surmise to suggest that
this is the significance of the statement in Revelation that one sweep
of the dragon's tail brushed out one third of the angels of heaven. The dragon,
who is identical with "Satan, that old serpent that deceiveth the whole
world," is the ancient allegorical figure typifying the lower sense nature
in man, and it is indeed the strong sweep of this element which springs up and
assails the soul from the side of body, that draws down the hosts of angels for
a more actualized sense of being than heaven can give. Against the background
of this determination of earthly motive for the descent of the angels, the
systems of cult teaching emphasizing the evil of earth and exhorting escape by
tugging and pushing the soul back up to heaven before the efficacious
influences of earth can have accomplished their beneficent offices, are most
clearly seen in all the flagrancy of their ineptitude.
As it was this yearning for sensuous
self-consciousness that lured the angels down to earth, and earth and body gave
them the freedom to revel in the luxury of physical existence, where their own
fledgeling powers could be put to the trial, the sense of physical enjoyment
became the polar opposite of the life of the spirit. And
37
because it was the opposite node to
spirit, popular ignorance in the end misconceived it and set it up as the opponent,
the adversary of the spirit. Hence it was this impulse to revel in the
delight of free action in their own right that came to be denominated the
"sin," the "carnal sin" of our first angelic parents. St.
Paul makes this overwhelmingly clear when (in Romans 7) he makes the
remarkable statement that when "the command" (wrongly translated
"commandment" in most versions, corrected in the Moffatt translation)
came home to him, sin sprang to life and he "died," the command
(meaning the heavenly mandate to incarnate) that gave him earthly life proving
to be a veritable "death" to his soul--precisely as Greek theosophies
had always represented it. Just ahead of this he had said that the law of sin
and death has power over a man "only so long as he liveth." All this
strongly certifies that we have here at last the right approach to the true
comprehension of the original theological connotation of the redoubtable thing
called "sin." At base and stripped of all weird misconception of
morbid pietism, it is just the soul's delight in its freedom to revel here on
earth in a fling of its creative power in a little universe of its own, its
physical body and its circle of mundane activity. It must be a shock and rebuke
to somber pietism that Paul himself in this same chapter asks if the soul's
revel in sense life is evil, and thunders out the negative answer, "God
forbid." And he ends by pronouncing the whole "fall of the
angels" "holy, just and for our good." He urges us in fact to
"make use of this good thing."
In Plato's Timaeus is reported
verbatim the speech made by the Creator Logos, the Greek Demiurgus, or Jupiter,
to the legions of angels assembled to hear their commission of creational duty
on earth. They are expressly told that they are being despatched to the earth
to supervise the creation of "three races" who are necessary to the
completion of the divine work on the earth. They are told to "convert
yourselves according to your nature to the fabrication of animals [animate
beings], using in their creation the powers which I used in your
generation." For this creation the mundane animal evolution would provide
the physical bodies; the cosmic Lord says that of the part of these dual beings
which will be indestructible and immortal, he himself "will furnish the
seed and the beginning," meaning the divine nucleus of soul energy. Then
he concludes by commanding these angels to go down to earth, enter
38
the prepared animal bodies and
"weave together mortal and immortal natures." "The underworld
awaits your coming" is a statement made to these angels in another
Scripture. This is the celestial assignment of the soul to its great
evolutionary task, which entails its descent to earth, the uniting of its
spiritual potential with the bodily forces of the highest animal races ready to
receive and house such a heavenly visitant, and then the consummating the great
achievement of effecting a final harmonization and union of the two natures,
the animals' and its own, in "one new man, so making peace," as St.
Paul delineates it.
How then, let spiritual cultism
answer, can the soul effectuate this mighty consummation if it abandons the
body, flees from it as a loathsome thing, renounces or ignorantly shuns all
natural association with it, and battles to return to heaven before the great
aeonial labor has been accomplished? This is the philosophy of truancy from the
school of life. In this phase indeed is perhaps best expressed the gist of all
the philosophies which negate all positive value to life and recommend
psychological escape from it: they rebel against the complete course of
education in life's school and exhort all pupils to truancy.
This, and not the angelic rebellion
in heaven, must be accounted the real revolt against the authority of God. If
God sends us out to school--since we can not learn by staying at home--it is
the simple sum of our duty that, all instruction and discipline being arduous,
onerous and to a degree painful--albeit also zestful and rewarding--we should
attend faithfully, heed our great instructor, experience, and stick to the
assignment until the commission is fulfilled. Of course human nature, if left
to its own predilection, would prefer dreamy idleness and mystic musing to the
tedious task of self-development and learning. But even common human judgment
decides that this is not the way of the valiant spirit, not the true path up
the scale of being. The philosophies counseling short cuts back to heaven will
have to bend to acceptance of the tutelage of earth. The road to the mountain
top, shining in the distance, runs through the valleys of lowly earth.
39
nally stressed. The Buddhistic and
other religious philosophies of the Hindu people assert that the soul is on
earth because of its ignorance. But instead of following the natural course of
logic to the conclusion that, because it is in childish ignorance, the soul
should diligently apply itself to the tutelage of earthy experience and learn
to supplant ignorance with intelligence, Indian thought can only seem to
discern that the remedy is for the soul to flee the assignment and escape. It
seems never to have been able to achieve the logical goal of understanding that
the soul is sent here precisely to overcome that aboriginal ignorance, and that
the victory when attained amply compensates for all strain and suffering
endured in the process. This inability of the Hindu mind to accept the mundane
existence as salutary stems, as intimated before, from failure to include in
its philosophical systemology any rational accounting for the condition of
ignorance in the first place. The dearth of this specific knowledge, a grasp of
which could illumine this dark lacuna in Indian ideology, is definitely
testified to by Max Mueller, eminent scholar already cited. He writes:
"The question how nescience
laid hold of the human soul and made it imagine that it could live or move or
have its true being anywhere but in Brahman, remains as unanswerable in Hindu
philosophy as, in Christianity, the question how sin first came into the
world."
The crux of all dialectic of
"spiritual" and escapist philosophy is centered at the point where
the desire for liberation is seen in conflict with the necessity for the
incarnation of soul in the first place. A philosophy which simply drives its
devotees to seek release for their bondage--if truly it is such--is as
unbalanced and hence likely to be as irrational as is the medical practice
which hurries to treat the surface symptoms of disease without discovering and
removing the cause. Also it is as egregiously marked by folly and ignorance as
would be the school boy's unremitting effort to escape the "durance
vile" of the school and its tasks, in total failure to recognize the good
purposes which induce his parents and the state to subject him to his days and
years of "imprisonment" at hard labor. Further it is unassailable
logic to declare that if the pupil in life's academy centers his whole effort
intensively on the business of effecting his
40
escape, he will miss the total
instruction for which attendance at the school was instituted. To his sorrow he
will later learn that all he escapes is honor, promotion and the joy of
eventual graduation summa cum laude. He will but prolong, with a worse
accentuation of its hardships, his tenure of tutelage. Again citing
The bent to erect into a competent
religious philosophy the soul's natural desire to escape the hard travail on
earth and revert to the delicious ease of Devachan, or the unconsciousness of
Nirvana, must be interpreted as simply the exaltation of desire, unrelated in
any balanced way to the other arcs and phases of the cycle of incarnation and
release. It is by analogy simply the natural desire of unenlightened and
unheroic man to be freed from the arduous and spiritless dragging on of his
life in an ill-conditioned body, without balancing it against the evolutionary
gains which are both the justification and the vindication of the incarnation.
Torn out of its niche in the ever-recurrent rounds and viewed out of relation
to the total beneficence of the whole involvement, the failure of zest for the
experience and the longing for surcease of its woes in the more ethereal realms
are elevated into the dominant principles of a religious philosophy. It is thus
condemned by its shortsightedness and unbalance.
But the final verdict on its utter
incompetence is rendered to logic in the realization that in sheer dialectic it
is evident that if the motive of escapism can be edified into a sound
defensible philosophy of life, there can not be found anywhere just grounds on
which to base either the necessity or the beneficence of the soul's migration
to earth in the first place or at all. If life is an unrequited evil and
hardship gratuitously imposed on the soul, then there can be no philosophy
formulated that either explains or validates it. If it can not be explained as
a scheme of demonstrable good, no philosophy is possible in connection with it.
In the last blunt words that can express it, if the drive to escape it is the
supreme recommendation of the best thought the human mind can entertain about
it, then it can not be deemed good. The only justification of escapist
philosophy is that the experience here is not good but wholly evil. And if
evil, then the question confronts man as to how he is to rationalize his being
tossed about from heaven to earth by the power of some demoniac force that puts
him periodically in a direful im-
41
prisonment, from which his noblest
aspiration is the yearning to make his escape.
The Buddhist system, in analysing
the so-called chain of the causation of suffering, lays all to the desire of
the soul for the enjoyment of the sense and feeling of life. The hunger for the
objects of desire causes the soul to be born again and again, and each birth
prolongs the sorrow and suffering. Therefore if the soul is to be rid of the
cause of continual sorrow and suffering, it must root out of its heart the
craving for the sense of life. The life instinct must be overcome and
destroyed. This further deepens and darkens the negative, self-annihilating
philosophy of the Hindu mentality. The doleful upshot of such a philosophy,
which fastens the tag of evil on the life experience, is that in fact it leaves
life without a philosophy. As intimated earlier, in strict truth a thing which
is pronounced an unrelieved evil can not properly have a philosophy covering
it. By basic derivation philosophy means a love of wisdom. But does not a
philosophy which proclaims life an unmitigated evil renounce or forfeit all
claim to wisdom? The human mind can not be expected to love a thing categorized
as evil. The negative philosophy of
If the soul hungers for life, it
also hungers for knowledge. And ultimately the basic knowledge that the human
mind demands and must have is some rational answer to the question why man as a
conscious entity is on this planet. The "sacred" Scriptures can be
truly holy to earth citizens if they tell us why the creator-power,
intelligence, sent these souls, its sons, out from what they also describe as
the glory palace of blessed life to undergo a quite strenuous existence on this
rolling globe. A philosophy should not claim the high name until it answers
that question, straight, fair and true. One school of religion asserts that it
is veritable blasphemy for the child-soul to demand an answer to the great
question or to pry curiously into the affairs of the Father's ordering. Another
evades the answer on the ground that we do not possess the faculties by which
42
to comprehend the answer if it was
given us. Another affirms that we were summarily despatched to earth by an
angered Father to penalize us for an initial infraction of an arbitrary
restriction on our freedom.
When properly interpreted, the
sacred Scriptures enlighten us with the profound knowledge that we were sent
out here, in one of the beautiful gardens of delight (
All the while we can read as clear
and concise a statement of the great answer as could well be condensed in a few
short sentences, and if we can muster the intelligence to comprehend the words,
we indeed can register again that elevated satisfaction and joy that our minds
experience when they can digest the substance of truth. Plotinus strove to
rekindle the fires of understanding that were so fast sinking down to dead
embers and cold ashes, and to him we stand indebted forever for this mastery
formulation of the positive answer to the dark riddle of our existence, an
answer that repudiates all the gruesome imputation that life here is an evil
mischance, and makes clear the grounds of our faith in its beneficence. The
reader has already noted his ringing asseveration that but for its contact with
and mastery of the evil in the world, the soul would never come to know the
power of its mighty wings.
Here stands the answer of
43
the Hellenic world with the spread
of the persuasion that life is only an unredeemed evil to be annulled and
escaped. The famous phrase coined by Sir Gilbert Murray, eminent English
scholar in the field of Greek philosophy, "the loss of nerve" in the
Hellenic world, vividly expresses the incidence to the intellectual blight that
was so far advanced in Plotinus' day of the second century. Under the benignant
influence of a philosophy that rated and rationalized life as wholly good, and
its hard experience salutary, the human spirit could face the mundane task with
a resolute valor born of inner certitude. The soul in the human could front
life's challenge with cheer, with courage, with fortitude.
But with the invasion of the popular
thought by the dour gospel of the evil of life, the springs of zest and
"nerve" for the adventure of soul in body were drained dry, and the battle
for life was transformed early into a desperate abandon and a struggle to win
back the rhapsodies of heaven. The "bread of Seb," or food of earth,
to partake of which the soul, in Egypt's great Bible, had so eagerly set out
from heaven, was turned "moldy," and the divine "beer"
which it had come down to drink had turned "sour". And by what! By
the injection in the living essence of human thought of a poisonous tincture of
the philosophy of the evil of life. The impact of this untoward idea is naturally
such that it chills and kills the mind's instinctive glow of eager adventure,
of hope, of zest for the experience.
The aim under this persuasion being
consciously to stifle and quench the fires of worldly interest which seek
outward expression, there must result a smothering and dampening of all life's
outgoing energies. The effort to subdue the vigor of extrovert tendency must
bear fruit of a bitter taste. The law of the circulation of the blood testifies
by unfailing analogy that corruption and disease follow upon any checking of
the free flow of the streams that carry life's impulses outward. For the
voluminous tragedy of human ill that has stricken the society of mortals in
Western history since the decay of the robust healthy Greek philosophy of the
Platonic era, let the religions crying the negation of all values in the earth
life bear the heavy onus of responsibility. If there is now any sincere desire
to lift modern life out of its deep-grained corruptions to a level of dynamic
vigor and health, to restore to it a more valiant spirit that will quicken
again the pulse-stroke of the heart of our
44
existence, the most direct move as
means to that end is to establish again the Greek academies that were closed by
Justinian in the fifth century.
Stupidly and blindly the orthodoxies
of our day will cry out against the "return to Paganism." The rebuke
to this folly is that the great light did shine in Pagan times, and under
Christianity we have had the Medieval "Dark Ages," during which the
light obscured in Christian lands was kept burning in Mohammedan and Jewish
academies and cloisters. The Italian Renaissance was a glorious upflash of its
light from the smoldering embers. The Protestant Reformation carried its spirit
some way into religion. But for the full free upflow again of the heroic
nerve-pulse generated by the knowledge of the good purposes of the soul's
periodic visits to earth we still must wait. Likewise we wait for a
civilization that manifested the beauty, grace, sanity and wholesomeness of
life such as flourished when the Platonic wisdom was cultivated. Much of the
moral of this essay would be lost also if there is failure to note that the
great truth enunciated in Plotinus' gratifying citation gives the coup de
grace to all the spiritual-cult philosophy that emphasizes the withdrawal
of the soul as far as possible from the flesh. The Greek philosophy inspired a
healthy life because it was animated by the foundation truth that the soul was
on earth to make common cause with the body in the evolutionary interests of
both, neither to flee, escape nor crush the body, but indeed to woo, win and
wed it, for the mutual parentage of the god in man.
The dialectical dilemma facing the
spirit-cultists is drawn in sharp lines with the reflection that if spiritual
life disengaged from body is the ideal of consummate good for the soul, what
then is soul doing on earth at all? If its best interests are subserved when it
is free of the flesh, by what misdirection of cosmic policy, or by what dire
necessity, is it drawn down out of celestial felicity at all? If the
untrammeled life of the soul in spirit existence is the all-perfect environment
for it, why does life not permit it to remain there in beatific tranquility
forever?
To this key question spiritual and
mayavic philosophy has no answer. For that we have to go to the old Egyptian
and the later Greek Wisdom. If heaven life is completely adequate for the
soul's blessedness, there can be no justification of the enforced migration of
souls to earth. And if we dare not assume that earth life decreed
45
for the soul is entirely good and to
be lived to the full without distrust of its beneficent ends, then we are
forbidden to postulate that the universe is under the rule of an omniscient
Power in every way benevolent. And if we are not permitted to lay down this
postulate, religion itself is not possible.
Some form of spiritual exaltation to
the ineffable heights of conscious felicity is indicated for the soul in the
apotheosis of its nature at the end of the cycle. But the unconscionable error
of spiritual philosophy has been in thinking that the flesh stood as a barrier
in the way of that consummation, and that it was only necessary to crush down
the flesh for the soul to step unobstructed into its heaven. This presumption
aligned the flesh in the ranks of opposition to the soul as its enemy, when the
truth is that the soul can attain its
"God lent the house of a beast
to the soul of the man;
And the man said 'Am I your debtor?'
And God said, 'Make it as clean as
you can,
And then I will send you a
better.'"
And beyond all estimation must be
the total psychological consequences for the worlds of both East and West of
the depressant influence of these systems that negate the value of our life,
berate and crucify the body and urge escape as the prime blessedness. The
natural atmosphere in which the conscious ego of man can flourish and develop
in happy and healthy state is that of positive and affirmative attitudes toward
the experience now being undergone. It is not mere poetic figurism to say that
such a psychic posture of perennial affirmation is as vital to the soul's life
as is sunshine to the plant. Deprived of it the spirit languishes and may
wither. The gratuitous imposition on the mind of the inculcation that all that
we behold of this fair earth and our existence in the midst of its garden of
beauty is not real, is maya, illusion, a deception that we must evade by a
constant negation of its registered influences, can spell nothing but a
pernicious corruption of the soul's energetic effort to relate itself to
reality. It must amount in the
46
end to a partial palsy and paralysis
of its evolutionary impulse, or involve it in "shoals and quicksands"
of frustration and confusion. If this does not come close to rating as a crime
against the holy ghost, the divine spirit of life, it would be hard to find
anything closer.
Life flows by turns outward and
inward in its periodic cyclic impulses. For the soul of man its migration from
heaven to earth is its outward movement. The outward expression of its energies
in this fashion is an integral part of the processes of its evolutionary
advance. Its highest good is to be attained by carrying the outward sweep to
its farthest limits as the pendulum swings on that arc. Anything that checks or
interferes with the movement must be accounted harmful, potentially dangerous.
Surely a philosophy that aims to reverse the direction of the flow in the sweep
of the outgoing manifestation must risk involving the entity in being crushed
by the onrushing current. Also the attempt to throw the outward cycle back into
the inward direction before the former has completed its work, will in the same
way invite calamity. In fact there is in occult literature the tradition of
those groups of angels who, being ordered to incarnate on earth in animal bodies
suitable as vehicles for the expression of their faculties, refused and in
consequence were "punished" by being forced down at a later time into
less suitable bodies. Indian literature has called them the "unwilling
Nirvanees." Those conceptions which naively assume that the high interests
of spirit are without question to be furthered by lifting the soul as far out
of relation to the body as possible--as in some Hindu systems to master the
technique of entrancing it entirely-suffer from ignorance of what the soul is
intended to effectuate in its conjunction with body. The philosophy of life
must be solidly grounded on the rationale of the incarnation. Spirit-cultism
seems to think it can ignore this central axis of the situation entirely. The
plan of life in the progressive arc of its cycle is generated by throwing the
mind into the spirit of the movement outward toward the periphery. Anything
that thwarts that outgoing swing is productive of disorder in the movement. To
affirm in the very midst of the outgoing sweep that only the opposite direction
is good is again to tune the movement to discord. This would be equivalent to
urging the rising sap of the tree in the spring to turn back and retreat unto
the root and ground where it hibernated in the winter.
47
CHAPTER FIVE
THE GARDEN OF THE WORLD
It must be considered a matter of
great moment in the history of world philosophy when a Hindu philosopher, and
one rated as perhaps the greatest seer and thinker in the modern period, takes
a stand on the dialectics of the spiritual life that comes close to reversing
the age-long traditional attitude of Indian thought on the pivotal
philosophical questions with which this essay is dealing. It is a definitely
unique event when a Hindu expositor accords to the life of the body, its senses
and feelings, and to the mind a place of equal value with the postulated
intuitions of the transcendental consciousness and the supermind. This epochal
phenomenon is, however, what one finds in the books of Sri Aurobindo Ghose, particularly
as set down in perhaps his chief work, The Life Divine. It is most
refreshing to note a Hindu treatment of maya doctrine that regards this
recondite and abstruse conception as an integral attribute of the cosmic
Brahman from all eternity, and not as something introduced surreptitiously and
as if by some inadvertence of deity or delinquency of man, adventitiously. And
similarly it is cheering to find the great sage drawing, as it were, the sting
of deception from the head of this doctrine that has beclouded the minds of so
many millions of earth's citizenry.
For maya, he asserts, is the web
which omnipotent deity weaves to give itself the experience of enjoying the
work of its creation. Maya is that mode of being into which deity casts itself
to generate the consciousness through which the delight which it seeks in
world-building can come home to it. It is, so to say, part of its repertoire, a
device it utilizes to accomplish what it desires.
Historians tell us that Christianity
swept in on the crest of a wave of credulity that rode westward to Syria and
Judea from its point of initial impulse in India. Its general Hindu character
was manifest in its strong bent to deprecate the values of mundane existence
and experience, to taint it with the imputation of hostility and detriment to
the interests of the soul and to besmirch it with the obloquy of evil nature.
In consequence religious interest tended to switch its focus and arena from the
world of nature and the life in body over to the hypothecated glories of the
supermind and the celestial coefficient of consciousness. The hope of miracle
and
48
spiritual magic supplanted the
confidence in natural law and the day-to-day beneficence of world experience.
"Great pan was dead," the early Christians shouted, fiercely exulting
in the belief that a fanatical zealotry and paroxysms of pietistic
supernaturalism would open the gates of Paradise on their entranced vision and
obviate for them the necessity of progressing over the long road of evolution
to divinity under nature's rigid ordinances. The old dispensation of the
severity of law and exact justice was abrogated, they proclaimed, and all old
things were to be swept away and a new heaven and a new earth would burst upon
their gaze as the great surge of the love of Christ and the mercy of God
renewed all hearts. When earth, the body and its interests became as filthy
rags in the sight of God, heaven became the cynosure of all enraptured eyes,
till not even the lion's gory claws could dim those ecstatic visions of the
beatific glory in the skies.
If the vile body and the deceptive
interests of the world blocked off the soul's approach to this celestial
blessedness, the lion's rending paw was a welcome opener of the door to Eden
regained. And ever since, both in East and West, the fundamental idea of the
conception of sainthood has been a withdrawal of all interest in secular events
and world life and a burying of the soul in a life of abstraction and
introversion. Experience gained through the ordinary means of the ego's contact
with the external fringe is a contamination of the spirit. Only within the
deeper recesses of the soul, and these only capable of being discovered when
the gaze is lifted from the world, are the enduring treasures of the divine mind
to be found. Deep within man's consciousness lay the enchanted kingdom of
heaven, where omniscient knowledge, light and bliss bathed the soul in
felicity. And, said modern and much ancient spiritual science, this state of
blessedness was to be induced by the practice of closing off the consciousness
from the world without and concentrating it upon the vacancy within, until the
forms of truth and the ecstasies of seraphic beatitude supervene from out the
inner holy of holies. Not out in the world, but in the silence of the inner
temple of consciousness could man hear the divine voice. So the resurgent sweep
of the Oriental philosophy gave us a new edition of the "voice of the
silence." And a flood of manuals detailing the formulas for engaging in meditation
has poured over the Western world, with thousands sitting in postures
calculated to ease the
49
body into tranquility, the better to
permit the consciousness to clear its slate of all distracting elements from
the side of the senses and the body. The Biblical injunctions, "be still
and know that I am God," was echoed as the key shibboleth of every cult
regimen, with the tacit implication that God could never be known in his world,
in his work, in the music of the spheres, the ripple of brooks, the thunder tones
of his storms, the crashing of his waves or the sighing of the wind in his
pines. The physical universe was tabbed the enemy of the spirit and had to be
shut out, the soul detached from its contacts, if cosmic benignance was to be
experienced.
With all this came a definition, new
to the Occident, of the self of the individual. Our true ego is not the complex
of body, feelings, mind and spirit that gave the Westerner the proper
conception of his being. It is the spirit alone. And to arrive at a true envisagement
of his real egoity, the individual must learn to conceive of himself as that
pure unit of radiance detached from all association with these lower and
inferior appurtenances. He must achieve the concept of himself as a unit of
spirit in the abstract, subsistent in vacuo. An extreme elaboration of
the ideology even went so far as to deplore the fact that pure spirit debased
and defiled itself the moment it made conjunction with putrid matter. The
"malignancy of matter" took its place as a fundamental of the yoga
science. And from this unbalanced view arose that theological aberration of
intellectual sanity which has steeped the Western mind in morbid moronism, the
fall of man from Paradise and its affiliate, the pall of sin consciousness. The
real ego, then, is not the body, its sensations, its brain's ideas, or its
modes of consciousness at all. It is the core of consciousness that is left
when it has detached itself from the clinging spider's web of all these outer
appendages. The ego is its real self when, having divested itself of all these
obstructing trappings, it stands alone in the void and the silence.
What more need be said in refutation
of these elements of a conjured "spiritual science" than that they
are out of place, are a total missing of the mark and an utter impertinence
when urged as a philosophy to be utilized for final good in the outward-moving
arc of the cycle, when soul moves outward and "downward" to unite its
energies with the universal atomic power to be found only in matter and the
flesh? They have no relevance, no truth, nor are they practicable, except
detrimentally, ruinously, to life in its cycle of mani-
50
festation in physical forms. They
stand in direct contravention to evolution in this phase of its
operation. Not withdrawal, detachment and soul isolation, but attachment, even
to the point of union with matter in a final orgiastic rapture, is the way to
authentic blessedness for the spirit-unit of man's divine sonship while it is
on the earth. As Egypt has said, the soul migrates here (Paul says "we are
a colony of heaven" settled on earth) to exchange the too ethereal
ambrosia and nectar of heaven for "the bread of Seb," a more
substantial nutriment for the rigors of adventure in matter's realm.
All that spiritual philosophy
strains to achieve by detachment and sublimation of consciousness here on earth
is completely out of harmony with the cosmic motive of the downward move to
incarnation, because these objectives are set for the second and reverse phase
of the round. All that the "occult" aspiration seeks to realize here
by withdrawal from outward focus of life interest will be naturally achieved
toward the later stages of the movement back to the empyrean. Then the raucous
voices of the senses, the feelings, even at last the mind, will be stilled
without any of the unnatural repressions imposed by misguided zealotry on the
natural self. The arrant persuasion of mystic religionism that the soul's
highest interests are to be served by forcefully detaching it from those
connections it came here for the very purpose of effecting and profiting by,
ends by turning the quest and the cultus of spiritual truth quite upside down.
Soul came, or was sent here, in quest of earthly values which it could not get
in heaven. To preach down, to deny and to vilify those values and the
instrumentalities of their realization is to defeat the ends of the incarnation
itself. The surcease from mortal pain, the release from the domination of
consciousness by outer sense, the attainment of the peace that passeth
understanding, come without strain as the migrant soul approaches the
completion of its cycle. To inject these motives into the midst of the fleshly
arc of the cycle when the purposes of the mundane pilgrimage are not to be
fulfilled by detachment but by positive union with the physical forces, is a
miscarriage of practical philosophy repugnant to the spirit of life and hostile
to its prime interest.
If the general voice of Indian
philosophy has consistently sounded the theme of detachment and negation over
so many centuries, this in itself is to be scrutinized as a strange and
portentous
51
circumstance, because, as it now
transpires under more critical scrutiny, this note was not at all in harmony
with the tenor of the venerable Vedic scripts of the divine wisdom. These hoary
texts did not decry and denounce the world, nature and matter. On the
contrary, they rated them as the other half, or opposite pole, of the spiritual
energies and accorded them as the other half, or opposite pole, of the
spiritual energies and accorded them equality of rank and importance with the
spiritual. So positive was this evaluation that Radhakrishnan, eminent Hindu
philosopher-statesman of present day India, in his great work on Indian
Philosophy, sums up the exposition of this aspect of the Upanishad systems
by saying that, according to the Vedic wisdom, for the human "to deny
the world without is to destroy the god within." This single
affirmation, if given the weight it legitimately should exert, would instigate
a complete reversal of most Hindu spiritual bent and shift the main focus of
Oriental philosophy from mystical heavens back to mother earth. The orientation
of emphasis and relocation of value which it makes necessary could inaugurate a
new and happier epoch in all world religion.
The view expressed by the sentence
was grounded on the consideration of the great law of polarity which places the
soul in affirmative relation to the negative force of matter and the body. Its
coming into body to stand as the positive pole of the balance between itself
and body made it entirely dependent upon its partner in the twinship for the
actualization of its living potential. Its own highest faculties were, as
Plotinus has so clearly demonstrated, to be brought to manifestation only out
of the tension which life ever establishes between the pole-ends of spirit and
matter. To attempt to eliminate or reduce the strength of the pull from either
end could only result in a defeat of the purpose cosmically envisaged in the
relation.
If this affirmation of the factual
beneficence of the incarnation voiced in the primeval Indian philosophy is
found to be substantiated, it is now receiving, after endless reiteration of an
opposing view negative to earth experience, strong endorsement and a
renaissance of its influence through the exposition of Radhakrishnan's
illustrious compeer in philosophy, Sri Aurobindo. In his great work referred
to, The Life Divine, he reiterates the pronouncements of India's
Upanishadic wisdom, asserting the positive value of the earth experience, of
nature and of matter. "Matter, too, is Brah-
52
man," he quotes from the
Upanishads. The testimony of the senses is, equally with the voice of the
spirit, a valid ingredient in the being of the universal Atman. Some of the
trenchant sentences from his pen must be introduced to demonstrate how
decisively the affirmation of the value of the world life is asserted in the
writings of a most eminent Hindu thinker. The massive verdict of what he
announces is virtually to declare that the philosophies urging man to seek the
forms of truth within the depths of his own inner area of abstraction is to
seek for them just where they will not be found.
It is to be made clear that sitting
in quiet and reflecting deeply upon the problems with which life confronts the
mind is not to be overtly condemned an necessarily a false or futile practice.
Reflection in the silence which deep thinking requires is virtually a
prerequisite for any philosophic enterprise and an essential form of exercise
for spiritual culture. Profound thought in meditative silence is not the object
of any attack in this connection. What is under critique is the body of
theoretical correlatives that have been made accessory to the dialectic of the
yoga cult practice, especially in popularized Hindu conceptions, chiefly the
presumption that the outer world must be shut out of consciousness because it
is alleged to be a hindrance to the apprehension of truths as to which its
sensual testimony speaks always a false message. The position here to be
reasserted with the strong support of Aurobindo's incisive dialectic is that,
while silence is a proper and propitious adjunct, an influence favorable to
profound realizations, the silence itself is not to be considered a magic-land
in which the forms of truth lie in a darkness that is to be pierced by the
light shining in an emptied mind. That is to say that silence itself is not a
voice of truth, or a magical agent of its revelation. It is simply an aid to contemplation,
not itself an utterer of verity. Indeed unless the mind of the contemplative
brings into its cloistered retreat the elements for the fruitful exercise of
faculty, it is as likely as not to leave thought as blank as its own emptiness.
The true magic-worker in the case is not the silence, but the power which the
ancient seers always termed the great "magician," the power of mind.
The negative spiritual ideology would still the very power by which the ego
might work the magic of its divinization.
And silence is by no means certified
as the only or even the best external condition or agency for the soul's
exaltations. Music
53
is not silence, and music can lift
the ego-consciousness to sublime heights, when silence would leave it stolid
and inert. Many an individual would testify that music has bathed his soul in
an aura of cathartic afflation which no other mode of spiritual stimulus could
yield it. The shrilling song of a meadow-lark on a May morning can do for a
receptive spirit what silent brooding could never do. The morning threnody of
the winter wind outside the house or the murmuring breeze in the boughs of a
pine tree speak a magic language that silence could never utter. Mind is a
faculty of consciousness that can perform its function only when it has factual
data to work upon. The cult theory is that it is a hindrance because it blocks
the path to a higher mode of consciousness. It is difficult to understand how
that faculty which enables a living entity to safeguard its own safety, to make
its choice of good action over evil, to follow the dictates of wisdom and
reject those of folly, to grow intelligent instead of remaining ignorant, can
be in any way an obstacle to the soul's highest good. If there is to be
developed a conscious power higher than that of the mind, it must come forth to
function only after all "lower" faculties have been evolved to the
limit of their capabilities, and not through the reaching down of a higher to
"kill" the ones below it. Powers developed at all levels are to
subsist and function beside each other in a harmony, and the deployment of the
last power is to gather up and synthesize all preceding it as the perfected
chord of the cycle's whole gamut of tones. Only in the sense that the earliest
and lowest modes of conscious being are finally assimilated into the
consummative blending of all tones in an ultimate harmony can it be said that
an evolving ego uses a higher power to kill a lower.
For the mind to gain proficiency in
the power to focus its point of consciousness upon one thing, it must have some
one thing to fix it upon. It can not focus on vacancy, although even this
extreme of futile practice has at times been urged in Hindu systems. For the
most part, only vacancy of mind has been the net result of the great cult
effort to make the mind one-pointed. When abstraction is carried to its utmost
limit, nothing is left to meditate upon.
Aurobindo states all this so clearly
that henceforth there will be no excuse for further exploitation of untenable
views in the case.
"Our mind works best and with a
firm confidence when it is given a substance to work on, or at least to use as
a base for its
54
operation, or when it can handle a
cosmic Force of which it has acquired knowledge . . . It is sure of its place
when it has to deal with actualities; this rule of dealing with objective or
discovered actualities and proceeding from them for creation is the reason for
the enormous success of physical science."
And who shall say nay to the
correlative assertion that the small success of passive in-pointed meditation
is due to the fact that the effort is made to have the mind work on fantasy or
in vacancy, with nothing to serve as the point of focus? So here the great modern
Hindu sage takes a stand against the claim that the mind blocks the outflow of
a more dynamic inner mode of consciousness. He is party to the opposite
assertion that to close off the mind from outer actuality and to go within for
the discovery of forms of eternal truth, is to go precisely away from where
those forms are to be found. For, says this profound thinker, in turning the
mind from the outer into the inner, the movement goes from the world of form
and structure into a world of the formless and the indeterminate. The external
world provides for contemplation the actual forms of created reality, which
must speak the truth of the cosmic mind. In the inner subjective area there are
only such forms as the human at the stage of his present development can
project there. And there is no guarantee that the forms he is capable of
projecting at the moment owe their origin to anything other than wayward fancy,
feeble and erroneous human thinking, or even emotional hysteria or abnormal
morbidity. They may or may not match the true forms of being already existent
in the world outside. In stepping out of the existent world into that of purely
subjective consciousness, one goes away from a world that is part of the cosmos
of the divine creation, the world of law and order, and plunges into one that
is really no world, but a limbo of every sort of disordered human aberrancy.
Yet in it the cult thesis promises us that we shall find reality, as the world
of divine creation here can not show it to us.
In going within we go from the world
of the many-sided epiphany of deity back toward the world of unity; and the
divinity only reveals his glorious nature in the outer many, never in the inner
oneness. He can build nothing with but one stone; he must have unlimited smaller
stones to enable him to construct his infinitely varied designs. We go
from the manifest creation, where the hidden
55
nature of true being is put on
display for our instruction and edification, back into the dark void of the
unmanifest. In unity of being all is blank uniformity. The mind has nothing, as
Aurobindo says, to take hold of, to base any reflection upon. Thought
stagnates, as does the body, when it has nothing to supply it with stimulus and
nourishment. In going within, we go from things to no-thing.
If truth be told, it is quite likely
that this outcome is the experience of practically all, especially in the
Occident, who have studiously endeavored to follow Oriental prescription for
the practice of meditation in the silence. Many trying it have found this to be
the case and give it up, and thenceforth resolved to set their minds to work on
specific matters and problems connected with, or suggested by, the actualities
of the life in this world,--and found a stable satisfaction from that time
onward.
The power which pure subjectivism
can exert to derationalize human mentation can be seen as terribly subtle and
insidious when it is noted that philosophy of this strain asserts in its
extreme application not only that for liberation the mind, in the wake of the
senses and the emotions, must be killed out, but that the individual self, too,
must be destroyed. We are asked or adjured to abolish ourselves as entities. It
is interesting to see what our eminent Hindu philosopher has to say as to that:
"Yet it is in the mind and its
form of life and body that we exist on earth; and, if we must abolish the
consciousness of mind, life and body in order to reach the One Existence,
consciousness and bliss, then a divine life here is impossible."
If a modern Hindu voice utters a
refreshing message of sanity on this score, so has a voice of the
"Biblical times" that we call ancient, one that has gained a world
hearing in the pages of canonized Scriptures. St. Paul beautifully states that "God,
who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to
give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God . . . But we have
this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may
be of God, and not of us." What God has put in earthen vessels can be
relied upon; what we attempt to embody in our thought structures
can claim no such certitude. Paul's statement is a much-needed reminder to us
that we are humans on earth and not wispy seraphim in heaven. His declaration
can be of service in
56
jolting idealist visionaries out of
their trance and bringing them back into this world, where divine love has
placed them for their education. Always their ideology strains after the heaven
state, for the attainment of which naturally they have to predicate and preach
the destruction of every vestige of the earth consciousness. But the soul is on
earth for express purposes under the ordinances of the cosmic intelligence; to
defeat these ends by nullifying the modes of cognition essential to their
achievement is to flout and defy the will of the eternal Providence.
Virginia Moore, in her charming
survey of the varied attitudes of many peoples toward death, Ho For Heaven, summarizes
the sharp contrast between the views of the Greeks and the Hindus as to the
dead in two epigrammatic sentences:
"The Hindus despised the body,
living or dead. The Greeks loved the body and despised it dead, only because it
could no longer support that all-important present consciousness."
This says that the Greeks were in
love with life here; the Hindus, on the contrary, hated life in body and bore
up with it only under stern, sullen philosophical sufferance. We might search
through whole libraries and not find so sententious a statement in support of
the position taken in this essay as that penned by Miss Moore. Here is
disclosed with perfect frankness the ground and root cause of all of India's
earth-hating ideologies. It may be disputed; the characterization may be
alleged to be too sweeping, too dogmatic; reservations would diminish the
sharpness. Nevertheless this is the conclusion to which a singularly discerning
student, along with numberless others, has been led by extensive reading. Her
utterance is made not as a personal opinion, but as an accepted fact in the
academic world.
As India conceived a shuddering
repugnance to the body, the Greeks, says Miss Moore, "had a fundamental
horror of living apart from the body." The Greek would rather be a lowly
one on earth than a king in the realm of the dead. The moments of life here
were precious jewels that could be made to sparkle with the sunny glint of
joyous realizations of the magnitude and majesty of being.
If earth life be not arbitrarily
ruled out as a fulcrum on which to base the lever for the uplifting of living
values, and heaven alone be elected to that function, it is pertinent to
institute a comparison
57
which would speak in almost shouting
tones of the historical demonstration of the salutary influence of the Greek
love of life and body, in contrast to the less wholesome result of the Hindu
distaste for the life here. It is indeed seldom that history comes out with so
unequivocal an object lesson on the theme that a people's philosophical
attitudes and traditions set the stamp of their character on the life of whole
nations or civilizations.
The Greeks loved life in the body
and therefore loved the body that kept that life aglow and the earth that
sustained the body. Therefore they are the nation acclaimed in world history as
the people who brought the human body to its highest point of health and
beauty, as the outward and visible evidence of the spirit's inward joyousness.
The Hindus despised life and body and the earth which supported both. In
consequence life was so burdensome that the mind developed a veritable loathing
of it. The body suffered neglect, if not overt crucifixion, and speaking at
large, lacked beauty. The world and the flesh lay under a cloud of constant
mental disapprobation, while a despised and neglected earth barely sustained
life in the millions of bodies even in a tropical land. Philosophical truths or
errors can thus become matters verily of life or death to whole civilizations.
58
CHAPTER SIX
THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT
The wholesome influences that the
soul seeks in incarnation are here on earth, else she would not have been sent
here to receive the baptism of their benignant unction. To come here to obtain
them, and then through fallacious persuasions to turn away from them and shut
them out, is to pursue a jungle by-path to folly and disaster. To miss the
influences of earth in their realistic form is to miss the fostering
ministrations of the soul's true mother. Because of the nearly universal plague
of religious doctrinism scorning earth and the body, we have lived for
centuries in the shell of a negative tradition so solidly encrusted around us
that we have never been able to receive or recognize the benign and salutary
impact of nature's gracious forces. We have isolated ourselves from nature and
so have broken the line of current of health that would have flowed from her
dynamic springs for our life's renewal. In being sent here from on high, we
have been thrust into our earth-mother's lap to partake of just such nutriment.
We have been inserted, so to say, between the pages of the book of living
reality in whose sentences have been inscribed the reading lessons of eternal
verity, and we have not yet learned how to read the script. Out in the open
field of nature, and not in the hazy and misty recesses of the brooding mind,
stand the great letters of the primer of life instruction.
It may be timely to answer the
prospective question as to how souls came here. If their presence here is a
supportable fact, it will be wondered why the rationale of this prime item of
truth has not been the quest of universal inquiry. The reason for its being
kept so deep in shadow is that the great literature which had embalmed the
clues to the secret, the mythologies, the Mystery rituals, the esoteric
instruction in the Academies, the books of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus,
Iamblichus, Proclus, Plutarch, the Kabalah, the Hermetic writings, the Orphic
Hymns, The Chaldean Oracles, The Book of Nabothean Agriculture, the Golden
Verses of Pythagoras, the Talmud and the Bible had never been read with either
the keys or the power to discern their true cryptic purport. The blind violence
of the Christianized Roman powers that closed the Platonic Academies in the
Hellenic world, threw away the keys that might have unlocked their inner casket
of mystery. The Italian Renaissance
59
pried open the lock and raised the
lid, but not far enough to give a full clear view of the precious treasure.
How did the forms of truth come to
be out there in nature? The answer is simple: the divine mind conceived them
and put them there. They are there because they are the precipitated end
products of its thinking. They are the physical echo of the uttered words of
God's voice, his divine Word, his Logos, frozen in solid matter. The ringing
tones of his voice carried the form of his divine ideas outward and ended their
course in the arms of matter. His archetypal ideas were snagged by the inertia
of matter and held bound in the world of visible tangible forms; and here they
stand before us.
Yet these utterances of eternal
truth are the very things that the errant spiritual cult votaries have for
centuries been calling the deceptive husks of illusion. These things, they keep
harping, give us a false message. Our senses and minds are the agencies of
deception; they convey to us an untrue report on verity. India has built up her
philosophies on the claimed necessity of our blotting them out. Greece, on the
other hand, in the wake of hoary Egyptian sagacity, has more rationally
declared that we must see the ideal truth which they adumbrate and be
instructed thereby. Now the Hindu Aurobindo swings from the Indian tradition
and agrees with the Greeks. This can have propitious repercussions for all the
world.
If the mind of God created the world
by its thinking, the world and its constituent forms embody his thoughts, his
intellectual designs, his mental formulation of the cosmos to be. It must be
accounted a tragic circumstance that in all the centuries of spiritual endeavor
the chief forces of religion have urged us to look not at the visible work that
openly reveals his mind-forms, but away from them in the dark purlieus of the
humanly incompetent mind. Odd it must be considered that religious science has
never directed the human thought energies to study God's handiwork. It could
always have been presumed that from inspection of his finished production could
be divined the nature of the mind that created it.
Yet is has been loudly proclaimed as
almost the central principle of the many "new-thought" movements that
"thought is creative." Man creates himself and his personal world
over the pattern of what he thinks. Yet this and kindred movements failed
60
to point out what should have been
the most immediate practical outcome of their philosophy: that God's created
works must then reflect the order of his mind. They should have proclaimed that
the Logos of creation lay before us in the open book of nature and that we must
learn there to read what God has written.
Unsound religious theory, however,
made the mistake of confusing the two worlds being created, the macrocosm, or
God's world, and the human's little world, the microcosm. It leaped far ahead
to the egregious and unwarranted conclusion that if thought is the creative
force, then man by his thought could alter the universe, that is, the
macrocosm, and so remake the world over his thought pattern. It did not reflect
that the thought which created and recreates the world is God's thought, and
therefore is not subject to change by man's puny intellection. The universe over
which a man's thought is creative is the little universe compressed within the
confines of his physical body and its immediate environment. In that world his
mind can wield the magical wands of creative power. The universe is God's body
and in and over it the divine mind wields the formative power. It is hardly
man's prerogative to complicate the natural forces by injecting his mental
decrees into their ordained regularity. But God grants full right to his sons
to create their own universes, although he has distinctly told them that their
creation must be over the pattern of his and employ the same principles he has
used in his world building. And in order that they may have full and
unrestricted opportunity to learn the configuration of his creation, as a model
for their own lesser one, he has set them in the midst of his world, in which,
if they will but note it, every operation bespeaks the thought that generated
it, and in which every brook, tree and insect announces a principle of God's
work. Even man himself will find that he is embraced in the orbit of the
worlds. God is sovereign Lord over his domain; we are to imitate his work, as
Plato said, but in our subordinate kingdom. "My mind to me my kingdom
is," can be man's shibboleth; but my mind is not the lord in God's greater
kingdom. We are cells in his immense body, it is true; but our rulership is over
our cell, with a limited influence reaching out to touch other cells close
to us. We do not dominate God's cosmic body.
Had our intelligence been equal to
the task of rightly interpreting the Scriptures that were designed to be our
guiding light,
61
we could long ago have been
instructed where to look for the patterns over which we are to model our minor
creations. For in those Scriptures the Lord orders us to build up a tabernacle
in which he may be raised up,--since he had buried his creative seed
deep in matter in our constitution, and therefore to us he must look to be
raised in these cells of his being. And in building this house not made with hands
we are instructed to "see that thou build it after the pattern that I have
shown thee in the mount, the pattern of the heavens." The heavens
are not in this passage the skies above our heads; they are the worlds of
noumenal supernal consciousness, the heavens of divine thought. But, says God,
I have shown thee the reflected image and pattern of this divine thought in
the mount. And where and what is that mount? Stupid literalism
grossly took it to be a hill in the triangle between Egypt and Arabia,--Mount
Sinai. A more discerning interpretation locates it in the heights of illumined
cosmic consciousness. But it has just been indicated that those are the
"heavens." So the "mount" must be somewhere else. And, sure
enough, to the blank astonishment of purblind exegetists, it transpires at last
that the Biblical "mount" is just our lowly earth itself. The
temptation, the divine sermon, the transfiguration, the crucifixion and the
ascension, all of which are enacted in the flesh, take place "on the
mount." The ark landed on Mount Ararat, and Ararat is from the Hebrew arets,
the word for earth itself. The Latin word for world is mundus, the
mound, the mount, earth.
So here on earth God has shown us
the pattern-design of his creation, and by misreading his Scriptural
instructions we have turned our gaze into the heavens, straining to read there
the messages of the cosmic thought, when the pattern of it was all the while
revealed to us in the world we were led to scorn and eschew. God has set the
forms of his thought before us in the world, and we have sat with eyes closed,
shutting out the very model that we were instructed to copy. All we need to do
is to observe, study, meditate upon the visible nature, and the soul, the meaning
and the glory of God's creative Logos will shine out to us in ever clearer
tones of beauty.
Not hanging in the attic of our
inner astral or supramental consciousness are those forms of the divine
noumenon, but out there in nature, waiting to deliver their grand message when
we have
62
learned to read their hieroglyphs.
God in the Old Testament says that he will inscribe his laws in our hearts and
in our minds will he write them. But how? He can not well write anything in a
vacuum. He confronts our very eyes with these forms and those operations which
reflect his laws, and from what our eyes can behold our minds and hearts can
transfer the imprint onto their inner tablets of rationalization and memory.
Divine ideas are not ghost pictures haunting people's auras. They are the
actual physical and material realities into the midst of which our lives have
been thrown, so that by constant contact we must eventually conform our
ideation to the pattern held before us in the mount of earth. By daily
association with them it is inevitable that sooner or later our intelligence
will absorb their significance, will awaken to the realization that the world
shows us the design of God's eternal law. For every physical object in this
world there exists in the cosmic noumenal world a spiritual truth or law
corresponding to it. The world is a mirror of God's mind. Spiritual law is the
natural law, operating at a higher level.
Emerson tells us that "man
stands midway betwixt the inner spirit and the outer matter. He sees that the
one reflects the other, that the world is a mirror of the soul; and he becomes
a priest and interpreter of nature thereby." Shakespeare reminds us that
there are
Tongues in trees, sermons in stones,
Books in running brooks, and God in
everything.
Not alone the burning bush in the
Moses story, but every common shrub is aflame with God. "God is present in
all his parts in every moss and cobweb," repeats Emerson. St. Paul writes
that
"that which may be known of God
is manifest; for the invisible things of him from the foundation of the world
are clearly seen, being understood from those things which are made, even his
eternal power and Godhood."
Hardly a century ago Henry Drummond
gave us his The Natural Law in the Spiritual World, which should have
introduced an era of enlightenment in all religion, but has now sunk back into
desuetude and oblivion. But the most direct and potent of all intimations on
this score has stood unnoticed in the Talmud of the Jews for many centuries: "If
thou wilt know the invisible, open wide
63
thine eyes on the visible." We have noted Hermes' great pronouncement
that that which is below is a copy of that which is above. And in this
connection it is imperative to correct the errant conception which has inspired
a wrong approach to the handling of this truth of ancient sagacity. Cult
philosophy has fatuously striven to work the procedure of extracting the
educative value from the formula by starting the mental movement from heaven to
earth. But this is taking it in the wrong direction. It has prescribed the
going within, or above, where nothing is visible, to discover the clues to the
meaning of what is already visible. This is folly; it is impossible. We must
proceed from the known to learn about the unknown, the invisible. From the
objects and processes that can be observed and studied on earth we shall be
able by analogy to formulate the principles of the divine order of being in the
noumenal world above. Surely ancient sagacity did not ask us to gauge the
visible from looking at the invisible. Paul says that these "invisible
things of God" are clearly seen. Surely not where they are invisible!
Where then! In the visible creation that his hands have made, which consists of
those invisible things made visible.
For nearly a century the modern
resurrectors of the archaic wisdom have been mouthing the shibboleth of this
truth in the form of "as above so below." There is no question of its
truth as thus stated; but there is a very serious question of its applicability
and its usefulness in this form. From the point of view of man on earth it is
practically meaningful and workable only when put in the reverse form: as below
so above. Surely if one thing is like a second, the second must be like the
first. But if one is visible and the other invisible, it is workable for actual
enlightenment only if the procedure is from the one seen to the other unseen.
At one stroke the reversal of the
direction in which the comparison is handled brings all religion back to earth
for its meanings. The reoriented view shows that the pathway to heaven runs
through the valley of earth. The Jacob's ladder by which soul-angels ascend and
descend between heaven and earth rests its base on the earth.
Paul enjoins us to let that same mind
be in us which was in the Christ principle. Man is made in the image and
likeness of his Father creator, and therefore man's mind must reflect the same
ideation as the intellect of its parent. But where has that ideation
64
already been manifested, put on
view? In the forms and phenomena of nature. If we would see them where they
are, we must look for them in the open field of the visible creation. It needs
only that we put on the spectacles of the proper clarity and mental focus and
we shall see the glory and the majesty of the supernal light of truth that
nature reflects. God has expressed and therefore revealed himself in nature,
his handiwork. He has put his soul into his work. Look there and one can greet
that soul. The vision will transfigure the beholder. As St. Paul beautifully
puts it:
"And we all, with unveiled
face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the
same image, from glory unto glory."
He who can feel God's presence only
in a temple may be uplifted on a Sabbath; he who can discern him in nature can
be transfigured every day in the week.
It registered as one of the most
engaging truths the mind could ever come to apprehend when it came clear that
our so-called laws of nature are the fixed activities of God's subconscious
mind. This can be grasped as obvious truth if we reflect that the memory
capability of mind is simply the strengthening of an impression or thought
through repetition. God's primal conscious thoughts became permanently
impressed on primordial matter through repetition or steady holding. Thoughts,
like actions, become automatic by repetition. That is, they reproduce
themselves without further attention from conscious mind. Life always subsists
where a unit of consciousness functions in a body which polarizes and supports
and instrumentalizes it. As the body is the product of the mind that it feeds,
the result is that life everywhere imposes its modes and forms of thought upon
the body. By repetition it causes the body to express and carry out what it
aims to do and to be. So the fixed lines of thought become the fixed laws, the
habitudes of the body. The body becomes the mind's kingdom of expression, its
showground of epiphany. So those laws of life and mind which God says he will
write upon his children's hearts and minds are his own creative archetypal
ideas, now solidly materialized in nature. Having repeated them often enough,
he turns them over permanently to the care of his automatic memory, his
subconscious. He transmits them to the care and keeping of the body, which
faithfully
65
executes them. Thus the body becomes
the soul's avenue of its urge to express itself in the outer worlds. When the
body picks them up and runs on with them, the higher conscious mind is freed to
do new thinking for its future planning.
So that it becomes man's task simply
to match in his consciousness and constitution the mind of God. This was the
gist of Paul's admonition to us. And not inside the void that stretches above
the range of our natural faculty, but outside in the world of the concrete
actual, are found these forms of divine ideation to which man is to conform the
pattern of his creative effort. Man is the child of God and never does this
child go inside his own head for guidance and education; always he receives
instruction from outside, from an authority and a wisdom above his own. As a
child he starts in ignorance. His mind is an unwritten slate until from his
tutelage based on study of what he finds external to him in the world, or from
the transmitted wisdom of teachers before him, he begins to do his own writing
of acquired and self-tested knowledge upon his tablet of understanding. Never
can he go inside, sit placidly in expectation and look for the blank slate, so
to say, to write itself full of supernal truth. He can not write out of a
background of ignorance and vacuity. On his slate he will come in time to write
those things which has been discerned in nature and from her abstracted by the
mind's power to trace analogies. For there is scarcely any concept, spiritual
recognition or cosmic principle, no matter how abstruse and abstract, that is
not found expressed through the semantic intermediacy of some natural analogue
in the external world. Whatever the human consciousness writes on its slate
will be found at base to match, or be matched by, some fact in the world
outside. It is impossible that it could match its ideas with those of the
cosmic mind in the complete blankness and emptiness of its own initial states.
Man must fill the void of his
intelligence with those things that will reproduce in himself a cosmos matching
a larger one already formed. Let us hear our Hindu philosopher on this point:
"For always mind must be identical with Supermind." He has said that
our mind works best when given something substantial to work on. He says again
and again that mind must deal with real being. But by a queer misturn of
philosophical dialectic and specious logic the world of real being has been
declared to be, not the actual world
66
outside, but that potential inner
world subsistent in the unfathomable depths or rarefied heights of inner
consciousness, which cult theory makes so tenuous that it must almost be
described as inner unconsciousness. It in fact, on the presuppositions of cult
theory itself, becomes not a world at all, but a void. Real being persists
wherever there is a consciousness that can register its actualities. But when
man essays to follow it beyond the range of his capabilities he loses touch
with it and roams homeless in a barren desert. It can only become for him a
world of real being when he can respond consciously to its tempo of vibration.
There are untold areas of real being stretching out above man's present reach,
but into which he can not roam with profit.
If by the world of real being
reference had been unequivocally directed to the objective cosmos outside in
nature, the sad wreckage of high philosophy would not have supervened, and we
would have known all along where to look for instruction. Yes, the mind must build
not in vacuity but in real being. It can not build its own cosmos arbitrarily
or without regard to the cosmos to whose frame and design its own must conform.
To do otherwise would be for it to step out of its own groove of being, its own
line of evolution; in fact to undo itself, wreck and destroy itself. Its great
work is to reproduce in itself the cosmos that is. So it must study the
cosmos that is, observe its modes, habits, laws, catch its spirit and thus
reproduce itself in its likeness.
In somewhat more technical language
Aurobindo asserts this same positive fact. If, he says, we strive to lift
ourselves out of the present realm of actuality into the unity of the Supreme
Consciousness, we find ourselves in a world of indeterminables. In the absolute
being there is, and can be, no specific character to anything. It is the world
of no-thingness, because it is the world of unity. No part of it is different
from any other part; it is homogeneous throughout. It is what the philosophers
have called "the Boundless." Aurobindo remarks: "To be shut up
in a featureless consciousness of unity, in ignorance of the manifested
Brahman, is described also as a blind darkness." It is into this blind
darkness that the most lauded forms of spiritual meditation will take one, the
more certainly if the aim is to consciously abstract the mind from the actual
world of real being into an alleged world of an hypothecated more real being,
which turns out to be sheer emptiness.
67
At any rate all meditation must
start from and be based on an actual world. It must build with the materials
and on the premises furnished by the actual world lying outside. It can not be
otherwise, when the soul comes fresh from the point of creation by its Father
and has had as yet no experience by which any knowledge, truth or science of
being could have been acquired. It starts out from the infancy of
consciousness. It has not knowledge, but only the potential knowledge. As
Aurobindo observes, it will not have material with which to build until it
gathers it from the world outside. And if that world is treated with mental
disdain and let go unnoticed, the soul will gather no building materials from
it. It is in fact sent here in order to get the building blocks which are units
of reality, so that it may be able to construct its miniature universe in
harmony with the cosmic plan. It is from outside itself that it will obtain the
forms and the pattern of the basic elements which it can ratiocinate into the
principles of understanding. The pattern and the forms lie without, though the
power that can rate them for meaning is latent within.
This sharp differentiation can chart
a new path for culture to follow out of misty vagueness of "spiritual
philosophy" into a true soul science. It will for the first time since
Aristotle give to the religious effort its proper form and direction. It will
save that effort from dissipating its energy out into vacuity. It will enable
it to carry its enterprise of grasping real being forward to a far more vivid
and realistic sense of accomplishment.
Aurobindo says that the objects of
the world, our sense images, are representations of the constructive, creative
ideas of God's Mind. They are therefore symbols, as he says, "of a truth
which our lives are trying to express." It is a purblind philosophy that
ignores them, holds them in contempt and denounces them as testifying falsely
to us, when they are the symbols of the truths we were sent here to master,
symbols indeed of the laws of our own being. But because India has originated
the specious canard that a symbol is not a true thing because it is not the
reality of the thing it symbolizes, the thing-in-itself, a world teeming with
symbols of truth and reality has been scorned as a world of unreality and
untruth. Even if the shallow view can be considered the truth--which it can not
be, since the world objects are the things-in-themselves embodied in
matter--it would be a slander on real objectivity, be-
68
cause it is unfair to condemn a
thing for not being something that it makes no pretense at being, something
other than what it is. A world object is a symbol, and it is unjust to condemn
a symbol for not being the thing its symbolizes. This would be to denounce a
portrait of a man for not being the man himself. Aurobindo confutes attitude
when he says that our sense-images are "completely valid," because they
represent not fiction or falsity, but real being. This pronouncement is so
directly contradictory to the general cry of the invalidity of our sense
experience that it merits the rating of epochal. When the function of an image
is to represent something which can not be apprehended by sensible perception,
it should not be charged with falsity and deception for failing to do more than
represent. Its function is faithfully fulfilled in representing. The only fair
criterion is whether it does faithfully represent what it stands for. And on
this basis the objects of nature fully meet the test of validity.
The fault of so much negative
preachment is found in its failure to know that the outer world does with
absolute fidelity mirror the inner. It fails to know that nature symbols speak
a true language, not a false one; that they are not to be spoken of as
"mere" symbols, but symbols of something, and that something a
true essence of being. There has been a fatal loss of primal knowledge that the
outer and inner worlds are but the two facets of one and the same reality. The
science of semantics has passed into desuetude because this inseparable
identity of the two phases of reality had been lost sight of. The accepted
definition of a sacrament should long ago have awakened the recognition of the
verity of nature symbolism: it is an outward and visible sign of an inward and
spiritual grace. How is man's mind to conceive the form and meaning of things
noumenal and invisible except it receive intimations of their nature from their
representatives in the visible area? Human minds are to be populated with ideal
forms conceived over the pattern of things presented to experience.
The cult religions of the sort
referred to have insistently emphasized mystical exaltation in the inner
spheres of consciousness as being the short, sometimes allegedly instantaneous,
road to human deification. The slogan has always been "spiritual mysticism,"
by which the individual unit of consciousness arrives at a realization of the
presence of God or of its own identity with the be-
69
ing of God. Through an ineffable
mystical afflation the soul rises to an enraptured state, a sublimation of
feeling and knowing that floods the self with illumination.
But this fails to discriminate
between a mysticism that can be good, fine, real and truly supernal to ordinary
human grades of consciousness, and one that can in fact prove to be untrue to
verity and miss the mark of genuine upliftment entirely. Mystical experiences
can be baneful, senseless, erratic, destructive; they can be delusive,
misleading and injurious. Modern psychology says they can often be "pure
fantasy," founded on no basis of reality at all. Mysticism of the sort can
lead to "seeing things" that are not in any way related to reality,
but are phantoms of an unbridled imagination. It can indeed even lead to mental
disorder, dementia, insanity, which in the main is just the matter of seeing
things that are dissociated from reality and mistaking them for actual things.
And all this irrational mysticism
comes from the courting of fanciful images in "meditation" in the
empty halls of the mind, where there is nothing related to reality by which to
gauge their authenticity for consciousness. It would be seen and made
authoritative in the science of mind that a mysticism that carries its own
credentials of divine sanction is always one that is grounded directly upon an
actual base in natural reality. A large segment of the affectional life in
humans is and must be of the mystical sort. Whatever affects us emotionally and
aesthetically is of mystical order. The distinction as to whether the exalted
feelings are wholesome and salutary, or the opposite, is to be discovered by
noting whether they spring from baseless fancy, of purely subjective origin, or
from the experience with actualities. Such forms of mysticism as the moving
power of music, the emotion of friendship, the love of beauty, romantic
passion, love of nature, feelings generated by the awesomeness of natural
phenomena, the highest transports of delight, joy, wonder, awe, the noblest
elevations of feelings, our divinest upliftments,--all these are forms of a
mysticism that draws its genuineness from sources undeniably real. Music,
nature, a loved person, an object's beauty, nobility of character, warmth of
devotion are solid realities, components of the environment that is meant to
generate wholesome influences in the human psyche. In such high mystical
moments the living nature retains its regulative hold on the mounts of the mind
by keeping them tied to reality. If the
70
introvert method, as it aims
deliberately to do, cuts its tie with its bases in reality, it risks drifting
or darting off into by-paths of errant fancy, which all too readily
hypostatizes its creations as realities. The heroic aspiration of the noble
human spirit is to march "in tune with the infinite." It might be
said that a humbler and more practical ambition would be to keep the human life
"in tune with the actual." To be sound and truly cathartic, mysticism
must maintain its direct connection with the verities of the earth and the
objective nature. As long as this link is maintained the influences flowing
from the original precipitation of the divine ideas into embodied forms will be
beneficent. But if the currents from the actual creation be cut off, if the
psyche be uprooted from its supporting ground-bed in nature, the fruit of the
psychological tree of life will be hybrid at best and unnourishing. To be
maintained in health, minds must be kept rooted in the actual world. For this
they migrated to earth. Here they behold God's thoughts actualized. And if it
be remembered that one's own mentation, if it be wayward, can hypnotize one,
with the dire result of making an imagined fiction world turn into a real world
for the subject, the danger of tragic mental aberrancy looms large.
It becomes increasingly evident that
the great prevalence of psychic neurosis in the present world can be traced
largely to the gross and massive tendencies in the religious culture to exalt
the spirit and disparage matter, the world and the body, which thus destroy the
healthful relation between the two ends of the polarity in the individual's
life. It is true enough for restatement that millions of people have wrecked
their lives by accepting the religious infatuation that nature and life itself
are hostile to the interests of their immortal souls.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
MAYA AND LILA
One of the most marked phenomena of
twentieth century history undoubtedly is the rapprochement now taking place
between the religious philosophies of the Orient and Occident. It is to be
questioned whether an adequate study of this event has been undertaken in the
field of psychology. A full survey of the incursion of Hindu spiritual systems
into the Western world has been made by Mr. Wendell Thomas in his Columbia
University degree dissertation, Hinduism Invades America, to be cited
later. In an edition of an ancient Chinese classic called The Secret of the
Golden Flower, published some years ago, some pertinent comment appears in
a Foreward by Dr. Richard Wilhelm, which it is desirable to quote:
"The relation of the West to
Eastern thought is a highly paradoxical and confusing one. On one side, as Jung
points out, the East creeps in among us by the back door of the unconscious,
and strongly influences us in perverted forms; and, on the other, we repel it
with violent prejudice as concerned with a fine-spun metaphysics that is
poisonous to the scientific mind.
If any one is in doubt as to how far
the East influences us in secret ways, let him but briefly investigate the
fields covered today by what is called 'occult thought.' Millions of people are
included in these movements and Eastern ideas dominate them all. Since there is
nowhere any sign of a psychological understanding of the phenomena on which the
ideas are based, they undergo a complete twisting and are a real menace in our
world.
A partial realization of what is
going on in this direction, together with the Westerner's native ignorance and
mistrust of the world of inner experience, build up the prejudice against the
reality of Eastern wisdom . . . . Mastery of the inner world, with a relative
contempt for the outer, must inevitably lead to great catastrophe. Mastery of
the outer world, to the exclusion of the inner, delivers us over to the daemonic
forces of the latter, and keeps us barbaric despite all outward forms of
culture. The solution can not be found either in deriding Eastern spirituality
as impotent, or by mistrusting science as a destroyer of humanity. We have to
see that the spirit must lean on science as its guide in the world of reality,
and that science must turn to spirit for the meaning of life . . . .
The reshaping of values in progress
today forces the modern mind out of a nursery world of collective traditions
into an adult's world of individual choice. He knows that his choice and his
fate now turn upon his understanding of himself. Much has been taught him in
recent years about the hitherto unsuspected elements in his psyche, but the
emphasis is all too often on the static side alone."
72
The view presented here certainly
can not be considered unbalanced; it points to the high value of Oriental
spirituality. Yet it characterizes the sweep of Hindu ideologies into the West
as fraught with grave menace. It intimates in its last words what is perhaps
the weightiest charge against the Eastern philosophies, that they strain to
abstract the consciousness of humanity out of the flow of its evolution in a
time process and fix it in a static immobility, making bliss synonymous with motionlessness
and the destruction of time.
Deep in the heart of the Eastern
spiritual systemology is the great doctrine of maya, a word practically
synonymous with illusion. If, as Dr. Wilhelm avers, the Oriental thought
contains an element poisonous to the scientific mind, it streams forth mainly
from this element in the Eastern dogmatism. Since this doctrine, which received
its most authoritative exposition and promulgation in the system of the sage
Sankaracharya, has set the character of nearly all Hindu systematism, it is
purposed here to subject it to as searching a scrutiny as possible, in as much
as its influence weighs heavily in determining vital issues for the future of
world life. It will enter deeply into a large portion of the discussion throughout.
As an example of how it has been
employed in the formulation of the dogmas of various cult systems, we may
present Mr. Wendell Thomas's condensed summarization of the teachings of the
modern Swami Vivekananda:
"Reduced to clear outline the
argument runs as follows: God is the only reality. The world is quite separate
from God. Hence the world is unreal. Now the function of religion is to give
men true escape from the world into God."
He follows this shortly with the
statement:
"There is not an orthodox Hindu
cult that does not regard the world as the result of an undesirable
causal cycle, and reality as the realm of painless bliss. The highest
good, then, is obviously some kind of escape from the world into bliss . . .
the advaita or acosmic pantheism of Sankara gives the simplest and most
uncompromising presentation of this ideal."
He also cites another of those
Swamis who have brought Hinduism to America, Yogananda, as holding that
"there is no value in the finite, in life itself."
73
Speaking of maya, Aurobindo writes:
"If maya creates its forms, yet
erects a superstructure which has nothing to do with reality, is not true, or
potential in reality . . . it makes things that are not possible, or in
accordance with it."
This restates the idea enunciated
above. If in our use of the gift of fancy our mind constructs forms that have
no basis in actual verity, it creates impossible things, spurious creatures.
Such illegitimate formations, such hybrid products, should be seen as the real
illusion. And it is an illusion that can go on into delusion. The mind that
attempts this sort of creation of its own world, having as a preliminary
emptied itself of all forms derived from experience with the outer world, will
build over no pattern related to reality, will build without substantial
bricks, and will end by building monstrosities and chimeras. The folly of
perpetrating such a miscarriage when God, the cosmic mind, has revealed to us
the pattern of his living truth in the forms he has created in the world, must
be evident.
The great and basic question now
arises: why has philosophy so universally pronounced our life here an illusion?
By what warrant does it call our life here maya? For directly negating this
position in philosophy stands the universal verdict of human experience that
all the show of things in the world is entirely real. It is by no means a naive
belief that our life here is our chance to gain whatever glory life in the
large has to offer its creatures. Yet philosophy has insisted that the consciousness
that life develops in us is unreal, is deceptive, an illusion. Our limited
sensory and mental equipment it avers, shuts us off from the real world. They
are an obstruction to our perceiving and knowing the real world. Our life here
is a dream, not a reality, and our paraphernalia for contacting the physical
creation about us, in which our lives are cast, prevents our waking out of the
dream. We are like somnambulists, acting our parts in a dream.
So India, in primis, asks us
to be rid of the equipment of sense, of emotion and of mind, all of which keeps
us in the dream. It would persuade us that if we can throw these off, inhibit
their inhibitions, we may stand free from the delusion of the dream.
But Aurobindo asks (as every sane
mind must ask) why and how did unreality come to be a product of the operation
of the cos-
74
mic mind? The question confronts
thought again with the old, old problem of the origin of evil, how it got
inwoven into the texture of eternal good. And Aurobindo answers:
"Even the illusionist must
admit that Maya, the power of self-illusion in Brahman, is potentially eternal
in potential being; and then the sole question is its manifestation or
non-manifestation."
Then he says that we have to assume
that the power of Supreme Being imposes this life as an experience of illusion
on itself!
And why should it do such a thing,
which seems to intimate it is attempting to indulge its freedom of action by
imposing a delusion on itself? Does not philosophy run out into fantastic
nonsense in presenting such a solution seriously? Can we rationally conceive of
life entertaining the purpose of hypnotizing itself, casting over its own eyes
a veil through which all its experience here would appear in the unreal forms
and colors of a dream? Certainly it must be assumed to be rational to think
that the experience here would not be one that deludes, but one that would
yield reality and true satisfactions.
Well, then, can philosophy supply
the answer to the alternative question: why would the eternal consciousness
subject itself to the illusory play? And Aurobindo answers it; as the German
philosopher Fichte answered it; as ancient philosophy answered it: life
indulges in this creative play because it gives it delight, because it yields enjoyment
to the consciousness disporting itself in the play. Agreeing with all archaic
wisdom, Aurobindo says that life's motive in creation is Lila, translated
as the play, the sport, the joy, the recreation of God. The eternal
Consciousness-Force (as Aurobindo terms it) is free to do what it pleases. And,
says the philosopher, as part of its play, it pleases to put its seed units, by
which it eternally renews its sense of self-existence, under limitation,--in
effect to put chains on itself.
Again we have to ask why. And again
the final, the only competent answer comes: for Lila, for delight. The
Hindu thinker sums it up:
"If, then, being free to move
or stand still, to throw itself into forms or to retain the forms in itself, it
indulges its power of movement and formation, it can only be for one
reason,--for Delight."
And he elucidates:
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"The world, then, is the play
of the mother of things, moved to cast herself forever into infinite forms and
avid of eternal outpouring experiences. If we look at World-Existence, rather
in the relation of the self-delight of eternally existent Being, we may regard,
describe and realize it as Lila, the play, the child's play, the poet's joy,
the actor's joy, the mechanician's joy, of the Soul of things, eternally young,
perpetually inexhaustible, creating and recreating himself in himself for the
sheer bliss of self-creation; of that self-representation, of God himself at
play, himself the play, himself the player, himself the playground."
Here at last, in the most forthright
terms, is the answer to the great riddle of existence, and it is stated by one
of the most astute minds of the modern age and in full agreement with ancient
seership. Yet the answer, to naive mentation, appears irrational, arbitrary,
even whimsical and fantastic, particularly in view of the realization, never
very far out of mind, that this experience which gives the gods delight entails
suffering, even for the young god-units that undergo it. So that the eternal
question retains the dilemma which it forever presents to human thinking, for
the answer given by philosophy sets up an obvious clash between a motive of
delight and an experience of suffering, virtually arguing that life extracts
delight out of suffering. If for play God imposes suffering upon himself or
even upon his children, then somehow suffering must yield delight or itself be
of the essence of delight.
But this word suffering needs
a better analysis and definition, as it is found used in theologies. From the
Latin sub-(suf)fero, it means to carry on under limitation,
or simply to undergo experience. It need not necessarily involve the unit of
experience in what the word suffering commonly connotes, the experience
of pain and distress. The ancient understanding puts it in clearer and far more
acceptable light. It means simply that the unit of potential divine life, which
we call a soul, is and remains only potential until it unfolds latent
capabilities into actual faculties and powers, which can only accrue to it as
the result of an experience that subjects it to a tension and a pressure
between the two poles into which its original unity is split apart, the only
condition that implements the conversion of its potential into actually
conscious being.
This is philosophy's final and adequate
answer to any and all questions challenging the logic of "suffering"
in a scheme of total good. If life's original unity is not broken apart into
the duality of
76
consciousness and object, it will
remain unconscious of itself. It will do or be nothing. It will remain forever
static; will never enjoy the delight of feeling, seeing itself grow, never know
the joy of living, conquering, expanding in power. It would remain eternally
asleep. On the contrary, its law, under which it binds itself, requires
it to alternate perpetually between periods of sleep and periods of waking,
periods of activity and periods of rest. By such a rhythm it accentuates to its
consciousness the realistic experience of each node by way of contrast with its
opposite. Each phase gives to the other its sense of actuality, the source of
the creative delight--Lila.
Says Aurobindo on this: "The
world-existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva, which multiplies the body of
God numberlessly to the view." If God is to give himself the delight of
further growth, he must do so by multiplying the number of fragments into which
from the first two and the three, he subdivides his being to endless
multiplicity and multiformity. From his unity he projects numberless seeds of
himself and gives to each the potential of infinite growth. The multiplication
and growth of the countless units of his body infinitely increase the
dimensions of his own life, his glory and magnitude. But, for each unit to
grow, to have birth and growth, it must undergo (etymologically suffer)
the experience which is necessary to awaken its latent capacities into
self-conscious becoming. And, says Aurobindo, "the only being is
becoming." Polarity is the sole awakening power, the ineluctable way
for being to actualize becoming. The human mind can philosophize truly and to
sound conclusions only when this principle is integrated in the premise of
thought. Once it is grasped and given due weight, the sole remaining source of
wonder is why this experience of becoming should ever have been, in philosophy,
tabbed with the name of "illusion." For if the experience can not be
categorized as real, we can then have no experience of reality,
since this is all the chance at life we have. To get rid of this grade of
existence, in order to gain a truer reality, now appears to stand out in all
the glaring crudity of its folly. To throw away what we have, with nothing to
replace it but an empty void, seems too illogical to be even debated.
And Aurobindo comes forward here
with the statement that this world experience, which cult religion so bitterly
denounces, is positively part of the eternal Brahman itself, and is therefore a
part of eternal reality. God's own experience with matter, shared
77
through our experience with it, is
part of the reality of ever-existent being. It is not separate from it and
contrary and hostile to it. Brahman projects his self-being out into these many
forms of expression, not that he may have less abundance of life, but
surely that he may have more. You can not multiply an ear of corn unless you
plant its many grains. And this world is the
Through his seed units God undergoes
this experience so that he may convert more and ever more of his latent unknown
and untried potential of life and being into actualized self-knowledge. And
although the ordeal of birth and growth of these cells in his body is
necessarily attended with a certain stress and strain--as their
birth-throes--still the joy of feeling the emergence of his powers and
faculties is the rich reward of delight that arises from the experience. In
this view the "ordeal of life" takes on the vivid hues of thrilling
adventure, as every step is haloed with the joyous surprise of unexpected
discovery of new genius. The only intrinsic source of lasting joy is the sense
of mastery over new powers. As the process moves onward, the expectation of
further revelations and ampler satisfactions generates a zest that then
enhances and quickens the drama to heightened tempo. This goes on until, as
India so clearly indicates, the soul undergoing the experience approaches as an
end goal, a state of transcendent bliss,--ananda.
But the unbalanced handling of the
maya philosophy errs in its presumption that this bliss is to be won simply by
annulling, killing out, suffocating the run of physical experience, on the
presupposition that if these "less real" modes of consciousness were
pushed out of the way, the divine bliss would at once supervene in fulness. It
is Aurobindo who makes the correction of this false assumption, in according to
lower grades of active sense-life their full validity, indeed their
indispensable utility in the scheme of progression. Not through its
invalidation by an unwarranted dialectic, and crying for its eradication to
release into consciousness a more radiant dynamism, but by "making use of
this good thing," using Paul's words, is the road of evolutionary advance
to be traversed.
With the Indian philosopher's
masterly diagnosis we can per-
78
haps now see better what this maya
in reality is, catching the corrected view that it is not in any way an
experience of deception. He says that it is potential eternally in Brahman, so
that Brahman can resort to its use at any time. The derivation of the word illusion
becomes all-important here. It stems from the Latin word meaning to
play, ludo, with the past tenses formed on the stem lus-. Illusion
is the play activity, the play-exercise of God's mind in creation. It is the
joyous thrill of trying his hand at creation. We, made in his image, derive our
most genuine delight, pleasure and satisfaction from the labors of
construction. The topmost joy in human life is the gratification we feel in
having accomplished something masterfully, to have unfolded a new power. So
Brahman uses its freedom to throw its energies into the tensional relation
between positive and negative polarity, so that out of the exertion his
potential being may evolve through becoming. In this, as observed, is the solid
answer to the baffling question of philosophy. Seldom, if ever, has it been set
forth so lucidly as we saw it in the passage quoted from Plotinus.
Confuting whole volumes of Hindu
philosophical exposition, Aurobindo says that while the pure existent is a fact
of the universal reality, that is, being detached from all circumscription by
matter, "the movement of pure being down into matter for the purposes of
becoming is also a fact." This straightforward assertion flatly
contradicts the asseverations of its non-reality, which also imply its
non-factuality. Aurobindo's thesis is that if the experience is integrally in
Brahman, as he declares it is, its reality can not be impugned. And whatever it
may be to higher creatures, gods, solar logoi, thrones, principalities, powers,
archangels of the hierarchy, it is certainly real to us. The completely
naive approach to the problem would seem to warrant our saying that if it is
not real to the being undergoing it, it can hardly be rated as an experience.
And for whom else would it be real? It would appear unthinkable that the entire
mass-volume of human experience here should be an experience of unreality. If
by any quirk of logic it might be held to be so, then it must be postulated
that evolution has planned that we are to grow and unfold divinity through an
experience of unreality. That elevates unreality to a place of grand utility in
the cosmos. This dialectical strait is the predicament in which this negative
philosophy of maya-illusion has involved itself. Can evolu-
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tion be conceived as having employed
falsehood and deception to promote life's conquest of reality? This is what the
maya doctrine asks the mind to accept.
There are, however, several senses
in which the word "play" can be considered, and it is not too easily
determined which one is foremost in the ancient sages' use of the word.
Aurobindo has gone straight with the ordinary meaning of play as recreation,
sport, free active exercise. Perhaps also the meaning which would describe the
creation as the play of the motions of God's mind, as we speak of the play of
lights and shadows on a scene, is implicit. This would be a legitimate
rendering of the word in its ancient usage. But it seems possible to read into
it also the play of God, in the sense of his playing a part, acting a
character, representing through his acting some deep true elements or aspects
of reality which his outer show merely dramatizes. If the meaning of
"play" is taken in this sense, there is at least a specious
figurative warrant for philosophical thought to regard the outer creation as a
mayavic curtain hiding a more real being behind it. But it goes no farther than
to permit one to say that the outer show of phenomena is only relatively unreal.
And that in the end concedes nothing to the maya doctrine, since to everything
below the absolute truth and reality are only relatively true and real, as well
as relatively untrue and unreal.
What is certainly important to
notice is that this play of Brahman's mental creative activity carries no
connotation of deception. Illusion, in the properly balanced sense of
the term, it may possibly be, as granted in the preceding paragraph. But delusion
it assuredly is not. Shallow handling of the concept in philosophy has taken
illusion to be equivalent to delusion. This is a glaring blunder. The
implications of the profound ancient philosophy have pointed the direct way to
a capable understanding of the term maya. This word, beginning with the
M that is found in all names of characters representing the motherhood of life,
is the name of nearly all the mothers of the many Christ-figures in national
religions: Maya, Maia, Mary, Moira, Myra, Myrrha, Miriam, May. This stands as a
robust datum that challenges the philosophical denunciation of the world,
matter, the body, the flesh. For, whether it be rated as a deception or a
reality; it is clear that in the philosophy behind mythology it is considered
that the experience of reality in the body on earth brings the Christhood in
humanity to its birth.
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If the voice of a recondite ancient
seership speaks truly in this depiction, then it is decisively proclaimed that,
so far from being a delusion of the soul, the maya illusion is actually the maieutic,
(how fittingly the word falls in here!) or mid-wife principle that
brings our Christ nature to its birth! All diatribe and abuse of the matter
element of the duality meets its rebuff and refutation in this item of the
sagas of old-time wisdom. And the item establishes the truth that, if it is
still in any way permissible to characterize the mundane experience as an
illusion, then illusion again must be considered as wholly beneficent.
Mythology furnishes the conclusive testimony that maya is the prolific alma
mater of our Christhood! Let those who take their beliefs from priesthood
without critical examination know that the despised berated evil element of
matter is what they worship when they pay adoration to the Holy Mother and
recite their "Hail Mary" salutations.
Pious indoctrinated belief and maya
cult philosophy never stop to reckon the disastrous psychological consequences
of their illusion and detachment ideologies upon human society. Whether it
segregates the individuals devoted to it physically from the world, as in the
migration of thousands into the Eastern deserts in the early centuries of
Christianity, or merely results in the abstraction of mental interests from the
life of the world, it in any case takes its devotees out of the world.
Aurobindo points directly to this danger. He is speaking of those who have
claimed to find liberation from all worldly interests:
"If his inexorable removal
through the very act of illumination is the law, then the world is condemned to
remain eternally the scene of unredeemed darkness, death and suffering."
This is to point to the observation
that if the grandiose exaltation of the spiritual consciousness amounts in the
end to the sainted individual grasping his own salvation, letting the devil
take the hindmost of those still mired in the pit of earth, there will never be
a reclamation of the world out of its low wretchedness. Each human, as he
graduates into sanctification, would abandon the world to its own evil. How
would the world ever be lifted up?
Also Aurobindo observes that if we
detach our life from the life and plan of the world, we will be able to make no
integration of world meaning. When we take ourselves out of the context of
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world life, which in the divine plan
is the nursery ground of our spiritual growth, we are in no position to learn
life's meaning, to make a correlation of the elements of its experience. The
significance of the world and of life can not emerge out of events when either
spirit or matter is detached from each other's influences. They bear meaning
only when in interrelation. "The harmony of the two tendencies is the
condition of all life that aims to be really divine," affirms our
philosopher. And he rebukes the Indian philosophies that ignore the presence of
God in nature and in the world. We can with confidence seek God in nature; we
can find nature embodying God's thoughts, because he says:
"Prakriti [nature] turns back
to perceive Purusha [spirit]. The world seeks after the Self; God having
entirely become Nature, Nature seeks to become progressively God."
Again:
"For Life, these things that
seem to deny God, to be the opposite of Satchitananda
[Existence-Consciousness-Bliss] are real, even if they turn out to be
temporary. They are the very material of her [Life's] workings."
And let a dark and lugubrious
theology take note of his next statement:
"These [evils] are not the
punishment for a fall, but the condition of a progress. They are the
first elements of the world he has to fulfill; the price he has to pay for the
crown which he hopes to win; the narrow way by which nature escapes out of
matter into consciousness; they are at once her ransom and her stock . . . .
for out of these false relations and by their aid the true view is to be
found."
By the ignorance we have to cross
over death, he has said.
"It would be, then, not when he
has excised the evil in Nature out of herself by an act of moral surgery, or
parted with life by an abhorrent recoil, but when he has turned it into a more
perfect life, lifted the small things of human limitation into the great things
of the divine vastness, transformed suffering into beatitude, converted evil
into its proper good, translated error and falsehood into the secret truth,
that the sacrifice will be accomplished, the journey done, and heaven and
earth, equalized, join hands in the bliss of the Supreme."
Here we have the voice of a true
philosopher, an oracle uttering sage wisdom that has disastrously been
beclouded for an aeon of history. In the light that these words cast on the
scene of human
82
life we can see only too clearly
what would happen if, by some hallucinatory mind-magic, we were able to
lift or abstract ourselves out of the experience which is ours on this plane,
at this stage of our peregrination through the long cycles that will carry us
on to the heights of ineffable being. And what will be the disappointment of
those who urge us to cast off the fetters that bind us to the life of body and
of sense and of mind! "In getting rid of the ignorance of the Ego and its
resultant limitations we do indeed eliminate the dualities; but we eliminate
along with them our own existence in the cosmic movement."
The challenge to an irrational
excess of subjective monistic persuasion, the rebuke to unjustified claims for
the benefits of a spiritual detachment from the physical life, is here voiced
for a welcome sanification of the general religious mind. Duality, we have seen
from the first verse of Genesis on through the venerable Egyptian and
the later Greek systems, is the essential condition for the birth and evolution
of consciousness in creature life. The ultra spiritual-subjective philosophies
aim to dissolve the duality, and so to release the ego-spirit that is, at one
end, tied in with the non-egoic matter. Fatuously this thought looks simply to
the release of the spirit bound--injuriously, as it claims--under the heavy
darkness of matter and the flesh. What a sagacious philosopher unfolds to the
holder of this view is that the only possible outcome of the presumptive
liberation of the spirit nucleus from its "bondage" in matter would
be the extinction of the unit of consciousness that is supposed to be
liberated. It is in a fair degree of analogical exactness comparable to the
action of a person imprisoned in a house, who decided that he can free himself
by blasting that house with a charge of dynamite: he goes out of existence with
the house. True enough, as the thinker states it, we succeed in eliminating the
dualities, we nullify the tension of opposites, but only at the cost of our
own annihilation. Consciousness has arisen out of the tension generated in
the duality; eliminate the tension and consciousness goes out like a lamp with
it. Such an elimination of our sense of existence would be rationally desirable
only if the consciousness was left to enjoy the release from the strain. But
with the destruction of the tension, what is left is a blank. The philosophies
here brought under critique come close to announcing their preference for a
blanking out of all existence-consciousness, the annihilation of any life at
all.
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Existence is declared an evil, its
burden a suffering. The only good of a creature caught in its meshes is to
destroy the sense of it; and this destruction is so welcome to the earth-hater
as to be acceptable even if it involves the annihilation of the entity desiring
it. What good its destruction would be when no entity would be left to
recognize its absence, logic seems incompetent to tell us.
The negation philosophies appear to
have no stomach, no patience for the long, slow and in some part necessarily
painful march of human progress from the beast level through the human arc up
to the divine. It is bent wholly and solely on annihilation of the
consciousness that arises out of the tension of polarity. And who can gauge the
fatuity of the philosophy which aims at supernal felicity by destroying the
grade of consciousness through which presumably the felicity could alone be
enjoyed? The rebuttal of this logic would be in saying that the aim is not to
destroy the consciousness by which the bliss may be enjoyed, but to destroy a
lower form of consciousness which is blocking the way to the more blessed
realization. A rational expectation would be that in due course of evolution a
lower and more inhibiting grade of consciousness may be transcended by the emergence
of a higher and more joyous grade. But this sane formulation of the process is
just what the Hindu negativist systems and the maya philosophies expressly
reject. They clamor for the destruction of those modes of consciousness--sense,
emotion, thought--the full and perfected development of which are the means,
and the indispensable ones, by which such true advance to higher state could be
achieved. These present capabilities of our consciousness are not seen as
useful adjuncts, or wayside stations along the road of progress, but are all
discredited and spurned as anti-utilitarian enemies of the spirit, imprisoners
of the self, and constitute a maya-illusion in their totality. They are
accorded no function of usefulness in a scheme of growth to enhanced being, but
are declared to be the enemies of the spirit.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
THE VEIL OF THE ABSOLUTE
The liberation philosophy contends
that all our experience is unreal because it is only relative to a larger and
truer reality, the true reality. In a proper balance of the conception
no one disputes this. No wise thinker would claim that our mode of
consciousness, or our grade of experience here, is in any sense the experience
of absolute reality, certainly not in its form of absolute finality. No one asserts
that our life in the present is the be-all and end-all of potential being. To
do so would destroy all the meaning that goes with the word
"evolution." It would cut us off from prospect of a future in any way
grander than our present.
Yet that our form of life is an
essential element in the conscious evolution of reality for both the Brahman
and for his creatures is certified by Aurobindo in unmistakable terms:
"The movement, on the contrary,
is the field of the relative, and yet by the very definition of the relative
all things in the movement contain, are contained in, and are the
Absolute."
At the extreme opposite of the claim
that all our experience is an unreality, a dream, an illusion, he declares that
it is the heart's core of reality.
"The movement in time, the
movement in space, is real. Space and time are real. What is, is the eternal
invisible succession of time, carrying on its stream a progressive movement of
consciousness, also invisible. Duration, then, eternal succession of movement
and change in time, is the sole Absolute. Becoming is the only being."
It is the old debate between
Heraclitus and Parmenides over again. And the modern Hindu gives the palm to
Heraclitus: the life that is moving is the true being, not the life bound in
eternal motionlessness. As Dr. Wilhelm said, the Oriental philosophy has put
too much emphasis on the static side alone. Life not only wishes to be, but to
express itself, and this it can not do if it is bound in eternal silence and
immobility. As Plotinus said, it is not enough for souls merely to exist; they
must show what they are capable of begetting. Life must be free to act. Its
values come to its creatures on the wing. The joy is in the sweep and swing of
the movement up hill and down dale.
85
The mind hugging its maya belief can
not endure the thought that any self-limitation of the free spirit of life can
be salutary for soul's progress, or a necessary instrumentality for it.
Progress out of limitation toward wider liberty does not satisfy it; it wants
immediate release from the tension implicit and indispensable in becoming. It
is impatient with the slow ascent of the ladder, or the keyboard, of existence
and believes that the long treadmill of gradual progression is unnecessary. It
thinks that the grand apotheosis of ecstatic consciousness can be consummated
in one fell rush upon the citadel of divine glory. It can not tolerate the idea
of life's taking one step at a time.
But hear Aurobindo:
"And first, if there were not
this factor of the successions of Time, there would be no change or
progress; a perfect harmony would be perpetually manifest [would this not
rather be unmanifest?] coeval with other harmonies in a sort of eternal moment,
not successive to them, in a movement from past to future. We have instead the
constant succession of a developing form in which one strain rises out of
another that preceded it, and conceals in itself that which it has
replaced" [and the promise of the one to follow it].
Here is the point-blank refutation
of the philosophies that would eliminate time and evolution out of the cosmic
procedure in the unfoldment of life. Also again, hitting the claims that the
experience here is not of real being, but a maya, Aurobindo says:
"Those forms have been created
not outside, but in the divine existence, Spirit-Force and Bliss; not outside,
but in and as a part of the working of the divine Real-Idea. There is therefore
no reason to suppose that there can not be any real play of the higher divine consciousness
in a world of forms, or that forms and their immediate support, mental
consciousness, energy-vital Force and formal substance, must necessarily
distort that which they represent. It is possible, even probable, that mind,
body and life are to be found in their pure forms in the divine truth itself;
and there in fact as subordinate activities of this consciousness, and part of
the complete instrumentation by which the Supreme Force always works. Mind,
life and body must be capable of divinity."
"This earthly life need not
necessarily by forever a wheel of half-joyous, half agonized effort; attainment
may also be intended and the glory and joy of the Lord made manifest on
earth."
If mind, life and body also hold the
capability of divinity, it is time that the droning dirge of their
imperfection, their transitoriness, their illusory and evil character give
place to a joy-song ex-
86
pressing appreciation of the
gracious service they render in the evolutionary economy. That which the
philosopher puts forth here suggestively as a high probability, and almost in
an apologetic tentative voice,--even at that exceptional for a Hindu mind--was
stated with unabashed positiveness by the ancient sages. Surely attainment of
the highest grades of conscious being and joyous life is intended in the scheme
of organic process; its very stresses promise that. And the glory of the Lord
of Creation is to be made manifest on earth. The philosophies of old prescribed
the definitive laws of life and the discipline of consciousness by which humans
might grow toward divine estate without impaling themselves constantly on the
spikes of suffering.
And Aurobindo depicts vividly the
illogicality and final futility of the maya philosophy when he summons our
thought to the inescapable fact that
"even when it knows that they
[world objects] are not things in themselves, it is obliged to deal with
them as if they were things in themselves. Otherwise it could not subject
them to its own characteristic activities."
Here, it would seem, the mayavic
creed and claims receive their knock-out blow. In a world wherein the elan
vital is manifesting positive values this code of ideas asks its believers to
take a mental pose of negation and denial toward the things which all the while
their very existence requires that they accept as real. What must be the chaos
inbred in a mind which daily asserts the non-reality of houses, bread and milk,
yet finds it is every day dependent upon these things for very existence! And
what the folly of denying the real being of one's own body!
The actual and veridical being of
the material world is forthrightly asserted by Aurobindo:
"And, as we have already
discovered that matter is only substance-form of Force, so we shall discover
that material Force is only energy-form. Material Force is in fact a
sub-conscious operation of Will . . . We may say, therefore, that it is a
sub-conscious Mind, or Intelligence, which, manifesting Force as its driving
power, its executive Nature, its Prakriti, has created this material
world."
Here is corroboration of our
elucidation that the laws of nature are the operations of the sub-conscious
mind of the universal creator.
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If this is so, it at once and in
finality negates all philosophies that draw sharp lines of separation between
the ideal world of real being and the asserted unreal world of spurious
material objectivity. This conclusion is certified by the fact that the
activities of the subconscious mind are simply the previous activities of the
divine conscious mind made automatic by repetition. This is what Aurobindo
implies when he says that the things of the world that seem to deny God and the
Supermind are nevertheless also in the Brahman, a part of real being. So he
says that material force, creating material things, is a sub-conscious
operation of Will. This is a timely discernment that can be brought in to guide
thought to correct conclusions in its attempt to rationalize the earthly life.
The philosopher himself asks, what,
then, is Life? And what relation does it bear to the Supermind? By what
necessity does it come into being? And he recalls that there has come ringing
down the centuries the ancient cry that life is a delusion, a delirium, an
insanity, from which we have been incessantly exhorted to flee by posting our
minds in an attitude of total negation of the life here. Why, he asks, has the
Eternal wantonly inflicted this evil? Why has he brought into being this
terrible all-deluding maya? His answer may sound unrealistic and a little-over
wordy and pedantic to most. Nevertheless it deals with the factuality of the
case as clearly as it is possible for the human understanding to grasp and
rephrase it:
"And, however brute and void of
sense it seems to us, it is yet, to the secret experience of consciousness
hidden within it, delight of being, offering itself to this secret
consciousness as subjects of sense in order to tempt that hidden godhood out of
its secrecy. Being manifest as substance, force-in-being cast into form, into a
figured self-representation of the secret self-consciousness, delight offering
itself to its own consciousness as an object,--what is this to Sat-chit-ananda?
Matter is Sat-chit-ananda represented to his own mental experience as a formal
basis of objective knowledge, action and Delight of existence."
Then he uses a figure of
representation which is singularly in accord with a dramatization employed in
the Old Testament. Saying that the Overmind sends matter as a
"delegate" to the ignorance manifested at the lower grade, he
pictures matter as a sort of protective screen thrown over the consciousness of
that grade, permitting it to enjoy the universal light in a moderate subdued
de-
88
gree, when it could not receive the
full force of the blinding light of the Sun of divine glory. This poetically
limns what is as correct a way of thinking about it as any we can conceive. A
similar figurism is obviously behind the trope used in the Psalms (84),
"the Lord God is a sun and a shield." Also it seems to be the thought
in the allegory in the Scripture in which the Eternal tells Moses, the type of
man, that he will hide him in a cleft of the rock, and, as the Eternal's
"glory" passes by, he will place his hand over man's eyes so
that the human sight will not be blinded by the blazing effulgence of the
undimmed divine light. The divine hand will be removed when the glory has
passed. It needs little ingenuity in symbolism to correlate the
"hand" emblem with matter. Matter is the "eternal
feminine," life's universal mother; and hand is found to be of the
feminine gender in nearly all, if not all languages. But the main earthly
symbol of matter is water, the actual mother of the biological chain of life on
the globe. And so the figurism of the Old Testament not only mitigates the overpowering
brilliance of the divine glory by the coverage of God's hand over man's eyes,
but also encloses man in a cloud of vapor (water), when God comes down to
commune with his children on Mount Sinai, definitely a glyph of ancient usage
for the earth itself. Matter is definitely that "shield" which the
cosmic mind-fire providentially interposes between its pure and unmitigated
energy and the consciousness that can as yet function only in the lower and
dimmer chambers of existence. So Aurobindo's depiction of matter as deity's
"delegate" to a lower grade that can not apperceive pure spirit-forms
and must therefore have such forms represented in concrete objectivity, is
entirely, if poetically, valid.
Swinging over to a different figure
he refers to Purusha (spirit) and Prakriti (matter) as respectively the soul
and the executive force of nature; they together produce a harmony, as they are
the two balancing energies of one and the same power. This being so, he says
"there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of one over the
other."
Here are words of such vital import
to man's sane balance of mind in his effort at rationalization of his life
experience that their full realization would have salvaged humanity from
centuries of misguided religious fanaticism, bigotry and superstition, and from
today could inaugurate a brighter and less horrendous era in world
89
life. Had their sound message been
purveyed, grasped and applied in philosophical thought in the past centuries,
this cry that Aurobindo catches ringing down the ages, "the world is very
evil," would have been silenced from the beginning, and the insensate
denial of the world's good would have been supplanted by a just and happy
appreciation of its present and its ultimate beneficence. There can be no
refutation of the assertion that in that case human life would have been both
happier and nobler.
In lack of this understanding of the
equilibration of the two forces of spirit and matter, the major effort in world
religion has been almost totally a blind attempt to disrupt the eternal, or
aeonial, polarity, to disengage the positive pole, spirit, from its tension
with its negative, matter. All the while the ends of the entire evolutionary
scheme are to be subserved by keeping the two in the polar relation "until
the harvest." Only perhaps in the light of this scientific approach to the
situation will the folly of exalting and straining to effectualize the one by
attempting mistakenly and perforce vainly to crush down and silence the other,
be realized at last. Happily for the future of religious significations,
Aurobindo comes forward with the resounding assertion that there can be no
disturbing or relaxing the polar balance between the heavenly and the earthly.
And perhaps now in the spirit of Tennyson's "ring out the old, ring in the
new," the old bleating cry of the evil of the world may now be drowned out
by the clarion carol of the world's high function of good.
The discerning philosopher
elucidates that the "many," which it has been the habit of a dour
theology to berate because they stand at variance with the eternal unity, are
just the one, which has broken itself up into multitude for the cosmic purpose of
giving to each unit seed-portion of itself the chance to grow up through a
self-realizing experience under the birth-strains of polarity. Only thus can it
multiply its own being, for thus it can bring more hosts of its own units from
ignorance and initial powerlessness up to the consummation of the divine
Sat-chit-ananda, or the ultimate trinity of being,
existence-consciousness-bliss. It superficially gives the appearance of
existence plunging into an apparent non-existence; consciousness going into an
apparent unconsciousness; delight of being sinking down into a cosmic
insensibility and "deadness," from which a diviner ray has to rescue
it. (It has been the inveterate
90
propensity of shallow theologization
to mistake this apparent downward plunge for a real fall of soul into
darkness.) Over the centuries the feeble efforts of the human mind to explain
this seeming calamity to life have become crystallized in the unfortunate and
inept theological doctrine of the "fall into sin." Never with
adequate conciseness was it recognized that the split of primal life energy
into duality was in no true sense a "fall into matter," to be viewed
as a dire miscarriage and catastrophe, but that it was the precipitation of the
conditions necessary for the soul units' adventure for the birth and
self-discovery of their divinity. The bifurcation and polarization were
necessary because under cosmic law a good quality can emerge only out of the
repercussion of wrestling with its opposite, evil.
Hence all the systems that decry the
evil nature of matter, sense, the world and the flesh are now, in a rectified
view, to be seen as unbalanced and naively childish presuppositions. The
positive truth is that these elements are the base of our life and the source
of our power to grow. We climb ill, Aurobindo courageously asserts, if in our
advance from cruder levels to more ethereal and radiant heights "we forget
our base." His words are so notable that full quotation is warranted:
"Life, in its self-unfolding
must also rise to ever new provinces of its own being. But if in passing from
one domain to another, we renounce what has already been given us, from
eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away
or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental
and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God
integrally nor satisfy the conditions of his self-manifestation. We do not
become perfect, but only shift the field of our imperfection, or at most attain
a limited altitude. However high we may climb, even though it be to the
Non-Being itself, we climb ill if we forget our base. Not to abandon the
lower to itself, but to transfigure it in the light of the higher to which we
have attained, is true divinity in nature. Brahman is integral and unifies many
stages of consciousness at a time; we also, manifesting the nature of Brahman,
should become integral and all-embracing."
A further amplification of the
central idea here expressed in such forthright terms is also quite worth
citing:
"The integral view of the
nature of Brahman avoids these consequences. Just as we need not give up the
bodily life to attain to the mental and spiritual, so we can arrive at a point
of view where
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the observation of the individual
activities is no longer inconsistent with our comprehension of the cosmic
consciousness or our attainment of the transcendent and supracosmic. For the
world transcendence embraces the universe, is one with it and does not exclude
it, even as the universe is one with it and does not exclude it, even as the
universe embraces the individual, is one with him and does not exclude him. The
individual is a center of the whole universe; the universe is a form and
definition which is occupied by the entire immanence of the formless and
Indefinable."
Since our mentality refuses to
attribute anything in the order of life and nature to an arbitrary or whimsical
fiat of fate, we are forced to see in the oppositions of spirit and matter,
which we so quickly and glibly pronounce evil, the beneficent conditions and
provisions for our slow and strenuous progress. So our philosopher elucidates
it: "Whatever is created must be of the substance of the utterly Real, and
must be Real." This being so, "a vast baseless negation of reality can
not be the outcome of eternal truth or the Infinite Existence." But both
directly and by implication the maya doctrine asserts a negation of real being.
And hardly less than sharply rebuking to these negative postulates is his
statement that "all that a timeless eternity of self-awareness sees in
itself as truth of being, the conscious power of its being manifests in
Time-Reality." Here finally the perpetual cry of the negativists that the
human mind will look in vain in the particulars of the time process to discover
the great truth of being is bluntly refuted and denied. And against the
insistent preachment decrying the value of the world "below," the
philosopher launches this positive rebuttal: "It is not denial; it is one
term, one formula, of the Infinite and Eternal Existence." Again he
confutes the opposing ideas with the statement: "Moreover the experience
of soul and Nature as dual is true." The maya cultism has inveterately
declared it to be false.
Logical explication of the duality
is given in the following:
"An apparent duality is created
in order that there may be a free action of Nature working itself out with the
support of the spirit; and again a free and masterful action of the spirit,
controlling and working out Nature."
Nature here is a limited expression
of the cosmic Super-Nature above. And the supreme pronouncement of a virtually
conclusive verdict of error in the philosophies denouncing the world and nature
is a statement that "what Nature does is really done by spirit."
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However slowly and mutely rendered,
it is ever the voice and the message of the spirit, Purusha, which nature,
Prakriti, repeats on earth. The heavens speak and earth echoes the tones.
"The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork."
The maya doctrine affirms that we
are to destroy our conscious connection with this world by "killing
out" the senses, the emotions and the mind, by all of which our conscious
attachment to the world is maintained. Shallow thinking has always missed noting
the consequences of this prescription. But Aurobindo sees it and points it out.
"If we withdraw back from her
workings, then all can fall into quiescence and we can enter into the silence,
because she consents to cease from her dynamic activity; but it is in her
quiescence and silence that we are quiescent and cease. If we would
realize a higher formation or status of being, then it is still through her,
through the divine Sakti, the consciousness-Force of the spirit, that it has to
be done; our surrender must be to the Divine Being through the Divine
Mother."
Here again is wisdom uttering
momentous pronouncements of oracular truth, and the world that they can bless
has waited only too long to hear them. Religion, in its overweening persuasion
that boundless "glory, laud and honor" were to be rendered to mortals
to the Supreme Spirit alone, has exalted the Father in heaven, while slapping
our equally divine and holy Mother of Life on earth rudely in the face!
"The original status is that of
the Reality, Timeless and Spaceless; Space and Time would be the same Reality
self-extended to contain the development of what was within it."
Stoutly he affirms that at all times
the alleged "evils" have their persistent reality and importance in
our present phase of the manifestation, nor can they be a mere mistake of the
divine consciousness, happenings without any meaning in the supernal wisdom,
without any purpose of the divine joy, power and knowledge to justify their
existence.
These citations bring us face to
face with the inadequacy of the escapist philosophy to meet the realities of
the world situation and to account for them in a rational scheme of exegesis.
It all reveals to us the patent fact that escapist philosophy is such just
because it
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can not rationalize apparent evils.
If life can be rationalized in a scheme of good, no escapist philosophy is
necessary or justified. Failing an insight that would render a wholly rational
explication of the world life in full consonance with a conception of good,
mayavic postulates are driven to resort to the disingenuous ruse of
disqualifying the reality of the experience which seems to present evil
aspects, along with the instrumental sources of our evidences of that
experience, our senses and our mind. Unable to justify the world experience as
good, the negative philosophy ends the debate by virtually throwing the
experience itself bodily out of court as insufficient ground for the trial of
the case at all. It impugns the evidence as all false. Always its plea is that
man is not legitimately qualified to pass judgment on his experience or to
determine its true rationale, because his equipment for assessing its real
value is inadequate and defective. So the dialectical ruse of asserting that
our experience is only to be evaluated through the lens of a higher and more
perfect power of consciousness appertaining to a higher world is subtly
utilized with considerable speciousness. For centuries this thin
"logic" has been put forth by one school of thought after another,
without its inherent illogicality being detected. If man needs for his balance
and happiness a rationalization of the live problems of existence, he needs
them at his own level and in the terms of his own grade of mind power, within
the reach of his own comprehension, not in the supposititious or predicated
terms of some hypothecated higher consciousness. What archangels and gods may
understand far beyond man's capabilities should not be made the standard of
judgment or appraisal in man's rationalization of his world. It is his world
that he has to rationalize, not that of the gods. Man must be the judge in the
court of trial of the values of his mundane experience. And he must render
judgment in the terms of his own codes of understanding.
It is, not at any rate directly, no
rational elucidation of man's dialectical problems to summon down the
Super-conscious mind of the cosmic Logos to supply a supra-rational exegesis,
disqualifying man's own faculties. He must have a solution acceptable and satisfying
to him at this level. When it is a matter of the poise and mental balance of
our life here, philosophy must not put off our answer by referring us to
another world of understanding, which we may, if at all, cognize only by
cutting off all our conscious connection with
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the actualities of our present state
and mode of being. Aurobindo insists on this, positively asserting the validity
of our experience with world objectivity in the formation of our value
judgments. The more surely is this to be taken as irrefutable in view of the
fact that, as he has pointedly observed, it is impossible that we should
attempt to disqualify our own report on our experience at the sense-and-mind
level as invalid for judgment. However unreal we may argue and protest our
experience to be, we must, as he notes, act as if it is real. So that all
sublimated philosophical attitude toward the world as an unreality can be
maintained only by means of an artificially superinduced pose much in the
nature of a hypnotization. This last word virtually describes in general the
philosophical posture of mind generated by negative cult postulates. They can
only wield a sway over minds by gaining control of them through the mysterious
force of dogmatic mesmerism. This force has long been denominated
"auto-suggestion." It had better be called plainly
self-hypnotization.
But a philosophy that alone can
yield to man its salutary integrating influences must be one that he can grasp
with the sharp edge of his normal endowment and through his own keenly awakened
faculties. Being a Hindu of deep proficiency in every reach of mental acumen,
Aurobindo is aware of this fatal propensity of the human consciousness to charm
and hallucinate itself by mental magic, and he warns against confusion and
delusion from this source. It can be bluntly affirmed that in a broad sense
hundreds of cult movements in the run of history have swept large groups into
one great mass hypnotization after another. Under the siren power of emotional
surges any scheme of specious rationalization can be accepted as real. If, as
the maya cults assert, the truth of life is only to be recognized or realized
by a process of abstracting consciousness wholly out of the world which
factually presents itself to us, and viewing and judging it from the
vantage-point of a transcendental world, it is indeed necessary, as it is not
denied, for man to destroy himself as man, in a predicated effort to reorient
himself as a being divine and absolute. The outcome, then, of the cult
teachings is the destruction of man.
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CHAPTER NINE
THE MOTHER OF REALITY
Philosophy has signally failed in
its high function if it has not been able to assure the cultured world-mind
that life is capable of being lived, not only in the hypothetical "eternal
now" of a timeless super-mind consciousness, but in the flowing stream of
the temporal now, in the full, if relative and imperfect, sense of its
effective reality. If life, as it unfolds its potential at the given moment, is
not real, then thought and mind would have to be forever postponing the moment
of reality to some distant epoch or climactic denouement of our evolution, and
the living experience would indeed be robbed of its realized and realizing
power by the false and superficial posture of mind set to denial. As Aurobindo
so strongly asserts, the present experience with an objectivity that can be
characterized as relatively unreal, is all a part of the whole movement
of life in the Conscious-Force of Brahman. It is no negative criterion of
reality that an ordered manifestation of life in the being of eternal reality
finds it necessary to appear in a vast range of differentiated modes of
realization to creatures of endless grades of evolved, or unevolved, conscious
powers. It is no criterion of reality that is grasped in different ways by
different people in different worlds, or by different people in the same world;
that it can be apprehended with a fuller and more vivid sense of its true
nature by higher creatures than by lower. Reality is wherever and however it
appears to the creature experiencing it, although one's reality is not
another's. Reality is not to be dismissed as unreality simply because it can
not be made absolutely uniform throughout the universe. In effect that is what
the absolutist and monistic theorizations predicate as desirable, necessary
and--possible.
In relation to the questions
examined here the voice of another outstanding Hindu philosopher may be
listened to with much profit. In his magnificent two-volume work on Indian
Philosophy the eminent philosopher-statesman, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, has
outlined the whole structure of Hindu religious thought with a view to its
clarification for Western minds in particular. The great question of maya is
handled most perspicaciously. "Maya is not a human construction. It is
prior to our intellect and independent of it." (Then certainly our
philosophy could affect it little.) He
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equates it with Prakriti, the
manifest universe. If maya is prior to and independent of our intellect, it
must be objective to our intellect. It is not born out of our intellect, as an
illusion would be. Therefore it would seem that maya can not be of the nature
of illusion, but is a part of the enginry of reality itself. Being prior to our
intellect, it can not be a product of our intellect. This conclusion
shakes to their foundations such theorizations as those of Christian Science
and kindred idealistic systems which make our own minds the creators of
whatever reality encompasses us, whether objective or subjective. It is also
the decisive answer to the thesis in philosophy that man's mind is the creator
of illusion. The illusion--if such it indeed be--was here before the human
mind. In this light Radhakrishnan's declaration that maya is not a human
production, being prior to our intellect, takes on especial force and
importance. If it divests the doctrine of maya of its humanly generated
illusory character, it marks an epoch in the history of religious philosophy.
Maya is Prakriti, the world of
becoming, and to this the philosopher adds that "the world of becoming is
the supreme reality and that therefore anything that interrupts it is to be
rated in the category of unreality, if not of evil. It is closely in accord
with Indian thought to rate becoming as evil, for in its processes the life on
earth, deprecated by Eastern philosophy as a breach in the continuity of
absolute good, is generated. The Indian mind dislikes to think of pure being as
suffering any interruption of its static beatitude. If it occurs it is a
calamity. The prime aim of Hindu speculative philosophy is to liberate
consciousness from the throes of becoming and restore it to its primal state of
pure and undisturbed being. In sharp contrast with this view we may now see how
far Aurobindo has traveled to arrive at a point where he could say "the
only being is becoming." It makes him almost a revolutionary against all
previous Indian philosophy.
But do we not face a sharp and
crucial clash between the expressed views of the two great philosophers?
Aurobindo flies far away from the static aspect of being to say that the only
being is becoming; Radhakrishnan now says that the world of becoming is an
interruption of being. By unimpeachable logic the two statements would add up
to saying that the only being is an interrup-
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tion of being. Becoming is true
being, but becoming interrupts true being. If both philosophers speak truth,
then in this case truth clashes with truth, truth destroys itself.
But it is possible that the clash
may be found reconcilable if we consider the word "interrupt." It is
possible that an entity or a process can interrupt itself without destroying
itself. The issue hinges on the particular sense in which the word was used in
Radhakrishnan's dialectic. As employed by him it does seem to intimate the
negation of being and reality, in fact their destruction. But so drastic a
meaning may not need to be assigned to it here. Interruption of being would not
necessarily connote destruction, or even opposition to being. It could well and
legitimately mean temporary alteration of the mode of being. And this is
obviously what it does mean, and this rendering permits the two apparently
self-destructive statements to stand. For truly enough it can be affirmed that
becoming interrupts being in precisely the same sense in which we would say
that waking activity interrupts sleep. The analogy seems adequate and valid on
every side, since becoming is to being what waking activity is to sleep. And
this relation of becoming to being at the same time opens out a clearer vista
into the meaning of the maya conception. It helps us see that maya is the
disposition, the posture, the mode into which absolute being projects itself as
it awakens out of its sleep condition, called in India pralaya, to
undergo the long process of pushing itself from unconsciousness to the
unlimited heights of glorious self-consciousness. Maya is the condition of the
becoming operation and becoming is true being, again by irrefutable logic maya
is the conscious coefficient of true being. This deduction is in sum pretty
much what this essay is aimed to establish.
Maya is what the absolute being
precipitates itself into when Purusha commits itself to Prakriti for the very
sake of achieving for itself new birth and infinite growth of its dormant or
unawakened potential. The false presumption of so much "spiritual"
philosophy as of religious conception in the large, is that the unit
soul-consciousness is forced out of an Elysium of perfect bliss of full being
to plunge into a lower limbo of Prakriti and maya, and wander almost like a
lost soul through aeons of an unreal experience symbolized by every type of
darkness, non-being and forlornness, its
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one hope of felicity being to find
some way of escape back to the Paradise lost. The change of habitat is
doubtless true, but every philosophical implication as to its purpose and its
rationale in the designs of cosmic mind seems to have been distorted most
outrageously awry. The truth is evident that the direful necessity that forces
potential god-souls out of Paradise,--in which, contrary to most religious
belief, they do not share or enjoy the felicity of all-perfect being,
not yet even having entered the stream of becoming--is in its ultimate evaluation
neither calamitous nor dire; no more so, at any rate than the necessity which
requires an acorn in October to fall from its parent oak down into the damp
ground at its base. Souls in the empyrean in their incipient stage, generated
by the Father's powers of self-reproduction, are not participants in the
bliss of pure being, as naive religious minds have been misled to believe.
Their descent to earth does not tear them ruthlessly away from celestial
blessedness; it in fact simply initiates the run of experience that will unfold
their capability to actualize such felicity. They are but the seeds of
life and love and glory in heaven; they must fall into the ground of earth if
they are to grow. As it has been fittingly expressed, they emerge at the start
out of pure be-ness, to proceed through a long course of becoming to
attain unto true being. Religion generally has mistaken the primal
be-ness for the perfected being. True being is never an unearned gratuity; if
it were so it would be worthless. It must be labored for and won, and all its
values spring from the exertion and the winning. True being is what life wins
at the end of the process of becoming, not what it is before the process
begins. Aurobindo is right: becoming is the only being. And in the proper
understanding of the terms, Radhakrishnan is right: life interrupts the being
it has attained at any stage in order to attain a greater being. So far is
soul's "expulsion" from Paradise not a calamity and a
"fall," that it is in truth its cosmic opportunity to enter the
stream of becoming. In the simplest possible form of statement, it is their
glorious chance to be. India still regards it as dire calamity.
In a stricter use of the words,
however, it is important to consider the possible error in Radhakrishnan's
position. For the creatures concerned, being can not be interrupted, because it
is not yet a going reality. A thing that is not yet running can not be
interrupted. And when being is attained, it never will be interrupted,
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except to produce finer modes of
being. Being is the distant objective at which the infant souls aim. In falling
from Paradise to earth souls do not fall out of true being, with the sad
necessity of climbing back to the happy region whence they fell. They do not so
much have to regain Paradise as to gain it for the first time. It was in the
ultimate sense not a Paradise lost, because it had not yet been won. It was
only the leaving of the parent's home to go out to a distant school where a
rigorous education would generate the power to build Paradise of its own as the
rich fruitage of sacrifice. Maya is the valley of becoming.
The misconception just elucidated
involves Radhakrishnan in the impassable bogs of deeper questions, for it
drives him to a negative answer and to a confession of inability to rationalize
the "fall" of the soul by the analogy of the planting of the
soul-seeds on the earth. He writes (Indian Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 86):
"Philosophy tells us that so
long as we are bound by intellect and are lost in the world of the many, we
shall not seek in vain to get back to the simplicity of the one. If we ask the
reason why there is avidya, or maya, bringing about a fall from vidya,
from being, the question can not be answered. [Italics ours].
Philosophy as logic has here the negative function of explaining the inadequacy
of all intellectual categories, pointing out how the objects of the world are
relative to the mind that thinks them and possess no independent existence . .
. . It can not help us directly to the attainment of reality . . . . The
supporters of pure monism recognize a higher form than abstract intellect,
which enables us to feel the push of reality. We have to sink ourselves in the
universal consciousness and make ourselves coextensive with all that is. We do
not then so much think reality as live it, do not so much know
it as become it."
This passage is most important
because it so clearly delineates the basic position of Hindu dialectic in all
religious systematism. If a competent critique of it can be instituted, that,
too, would be important. Two items involving great principles are here to be
scrutinized: the asserted impossibility of answering the question as to why the
soul on earth has "fallen" into avidya, ignorance; and the
constantly reiterated incompetence of the intellect to acquaint us with
reality. The two items are quite definitely related to each other.
Taking up the first, it is odd that
Oriental thought has forever bleated its inability to answer the question of
the "fall," which is
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essentially the question as to why
souls are on the earth. Most singular it must seem also that India has
continued to render this negative answer, when ancient Egypt and Greece, the
inheritor of Kamite wisdom, have fully and competently answered the great
question. The answer, already specifically outlined in this work, could be
elaborated at great length. It may perhaps bear review and new accentuation,
briefly.
In the Plotinus passage quoted
previously we are told that souls come to earth "by a voluntary
inclination, to develop their powers and to adorn what is below them."
They are not sent here to suffer the loss, or "sacrifice" of anything
precious. They are infant soul units, so named in ancient systems in various
ways: in India called Kumaras, "virgin youths," "celibate young
men;" in Egypt spoken of as "the younglings in the egg,"
"the younglings of Shu," the children of Osiris; in the New Testament
allegorism denominated them "the Innocents" whom "Herod"
tried to destroy in their infancy; in the Greek mythology they are typified by
divine heroes in their youth, such as the infant Hercules strangling the two
great serpents in his cradle. In the Egyptian allegory the soul itself,
personified, states that it takes its position "on the horizon," the
borderline between heaven and earth, where spirit and matter are exactly
balanced, which equilibration is found only in the body of man. Here it says
that it comes to bathe in the divine pool beneath the two divine
"sycamores" of heaven and earth, the Pool of the North and the Pool
of the South, the Pool of Natron and the Pool of Salt, the Pool of the Sun and
the Pool of the Moon, "in order that I may purify this soul of mine in the
most high degree." Here is set up the great balance in which all souls are
weighed, for elsewhere the divine pool is called "the lake of equipoise
and propitiation." This place of equilibration between the two natures
which must ever be united in polarity if life is to be existent, is the great
balance, the Libra of the zodiac. Repeating that it comes to feed upon the
bread of Seb, or the food of the earth, it adds that it has many rebirths in
the flesh: "I die, and I am born again, and I renew myself, and I grow
young each day." And again it says: "I am Horus, who steppeth onward
through eternity." "The name of my boat is Millions of Years."
"My name is eternity and everlastingness."
It appears worthy of noting how the
philosophy of Egypt and Greece rings with the tone of positive value in its
view of life, in
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the sharpest possible contrast to
the sour negative attitude expressive of India's thought. Inasmuch as
historians have traced the provenance and the character tone of the religions
that have preponderated in the West in the period since Plato's day to the
influx and influence of the Hindu philosophy upon the earlier Egypto-Greek
systems expressing the positive view of life, this contrast and vast
discrepancy must be seen to be a thing of momentous significance in the last
twenty-five hundred years of history.
The other item of Radhakrishnan's
analysis is the incompetency of the intellect to give man knowledge of reality.
India has forever asserted that if the human is to have experience of reality,
he must interdict the activity of the intellect and utilize a
"higher" power of consciousness, which Radhakrishnan here describes
as a feeling of the push of reality, a recognition higher than knowing
and which he calls a "living of reality," and finally a
"becoming it," so that we contact reality by being it ourselves.
Philosophy has wrestled endlessly with this question. It looks very much as if
it were all a matter of more precise and specific definition of the term
"intellect," as well also of the term "reality." In the
Hindu position as stated, the intellect seems to be spoken of as a mental power
limited to the work of logic and formal relation of propositions under strict
methodological rules, such as those governing mathematics. It seems to be
restricted to only a very limited area of the total possible range of mind
faculty.
It may be allowed that under this
strict definition the intellect is neither a name nor a faculty capable of
covering the range of mind-function as a whole. The mind may justly be claimed
to have other functions or forms of cognition transcending its purely
ratiocinative power. Also the debate continues indecisive probably because the
intellect is being condemned or subjected to a critique of incompetence on the
ground of failure to fulfill an office which is not properly within its sphere
of function, and which it should not be asked or expected to discharge. The
specific task of the mind is to give us knowledge of the world of life, to
interpret the data of knowledge into terms of value, to give us understanding
and that grasp of the relation of things and states of consciousness which we
call meaning. These offices are assigned to it for the obvious purpose of
enabling us to establish the right relation of our lives to the world, to
promote most harmoniously the ends of cosmic intent.
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Perhaps, then, philosophy,
especially Eastern, may have been quite "out of bounds" in its demand
that intellect give us the full experience of reality. It certainly has been
evolved, and is qualified, to contribute an indispensable element in the sum
total of our power to experience reality. Perhaps it may be granted that the
function of the intellect is not to give us, at any rate directly, the experience
of reality. Feeling, rather than knowing, may be the mode of our contact
with being. The function of the intellect is not, in this narrow sense, to feel
life; but it certainly is to judge life, appraise it, evaluate it and interpret
it in the terms of understanding. Its business is to know, and to interpret the
data of knowledge, for the purpose of determining all life action as good or
otherwise. Life itself furnishes us with a body of experience, and life has
developed the faculty of intellect so that we may know how best to guide the
current of our lives in the proper channels. To ask this function to give us
the total or ultimate experience is to ask it something lying beyond the
boundary of its province, something it is not equipped to give. It is only the
judge of action and experience, and must wait until these are brought before it
to receive its judgment. A thousand judgments of its intelligence may be the
necessary condition precedent to one moment of exalted insight or rapturous
communion with whole being in the mystical consciousness so highly extolled by
spiritual romanticists.
When, therefore, Oriental or other
philosophy rates the intellect as incompetent to afford us the experience of
reality, it is simply bringing in an exhibit as evidence which is not denied as
sheer fact, but which is wholly immaterial and irrelevant to the argument and
has no legitimate place in it. Incidentally it operates to institute a
prejudice against the "defendant" by being introduced at all. The
possible failure of intellect would consist, not in its failing to give us
experience of reality, but in giving us faulty judgment on possibly
insufficient data. It must be remembered, too, that in this function the
intellect is like a mill,--its business is to grind out judgments from the data
fed into its hopper. And it must look to experience for its adequate supply of proper
data. Much of the maya creedology seems to assume that the intellect can
gather the data for its circumspection and evaluation from the metaphysical
world rather than from the physical, for always it disdains the material world.
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In its contempt of the intellect the
Hindu thought has bent its effort in a quite practical way toward the
exploitation of means of cognition which it regards as "higher" than
the powers of the mind, such as the intuitions, grades of mystical exaltation,
states of trance, dream fantasies, abstracted consciousness and the ecstasies
of samadhi, which it superinduces by various practices of steady
contemplation and fixity of mind. The often vivid character of such experiences
give the impression that they bring consciousness closer to the apprehension of
reality than does the intellect.
But the obvious fact that life can
use other faculties beside and "beyond" the intellect to bring
experience to its conscious units should establish no adverse judgment against
the intellect, when it is not asked to overstep its proper function. These do
not debase the intellect by comparison, for they are not its function, either
to equal or excel. And in the end, no matter how far they may
"transcend" the intellect, they must themselves still be brought
before its court for judgment as to their legitimacy, their right or wrong
character, their good or evil influence. They do not condemn it to low or
incompetent rating. It has final judgment over them, and may in proper case
disallow their claim to render a service higher than its own.
Even with this exemption from the
false judgment of an unjust condemnation, the adverse critique of the intellect
seems quite unwarranted on more direct grounds. If it is not the faculty by
which experience is gained (though certainly it is itself an integral element
of the experience), its function of judgment and appraisal of experience value
enters so vitally into the context of all experience, and its function of
judgment is so powerful an agent of psychological determination, that it stands
almost always as the dominant element in the final mode and character of
experience itself. It is what the intellect does with or about the experience
that determines the final deposit of influence which the experience makes in
the bank of life. Certainly without the intellect to assess the final value of
experience, all living would be more or less valueless, senseless and indeed
chaotic. It is only when it presides over the sum total of events and supplies
the principles of relationship by which they are bound together in meaning,
that the experience takes on the character of event in the soul's evolution.
All experience only rises out of chaos into the category of history for the
individual when the
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intellect steps in to provide an
integration which alone yields both meaning and zest and value to the run of
history.
We have seen all this too well
authenticated in the high philosophies of two, among others, of our great
philosophers, Spinoza and Kant, to need fresh elaboration here. Spinoza won the
appellative of "the God-intoxicated philosopher," and yet it was he
who established the intellect as the faculty instrumental in the highest
rhapsodies of the human spirit. The divine mania was not achieved in regions
above and beyond the intellect, but through its own direct capabilities. He it
was who coined the expressive phrase, "the intellectual love of God."
And endless folios of history can be scanned to confirm the verdict that the
so-highly exalted principle of love can run into paths of unwisdom, and
generate tragedy if not held in line by the mind. At any rate in the purview of
such an enlightenment as Spinoza caused to shine in the minds of his readers,
the highest raptures of our introvert adventuring would not yield their
consummate joyousness without the guidance and supervision of the intellect.
Likewise we have Kant testifying in
much the same way to the play of the intellect in the highest ascensions of
consciousness into the peaks of spiritual realization. The highest attainable
reach of the human consciousness was attained, he found, in the comprehensive
summation of all cognitive faculty in what he called the "synthetic unity
of apperception." The philosopher saw that it was not alone the conscious
events that constituted the reality of human experience, but the final
synthesis of these events in an integrated vision of their meaning; and this
was the work of the intellect.
It can not be without positive
significance also that in the great works of the Neo-Platonic philosophers the
highest grades of conscious beings in the cosmic hierarchy, the gods, are not
termed "spiritual," but "intellectual and intelligible"
grades. The intelligible world is rated highest and the intellectual world next
below it. In his notable passage, already quoted, Plotinus begins with the
statement that the soul had its divine birth or origin in the
"intelligible world."
It is notable also that a modern
writer whose books on the exaltations of Oriental mystical practice have been
enjoyed by a large reading public, Mr. Paul Brunton, reviewing his experiences
in the science of yoga, gives his conclusions in his volume, The Hid-
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den Teachings Beyond Yoga. Earlier in his career, enraptured with the
mystical subjectivism and introversions of Hindu practice, and extolling them
highly, he later came to see that they should, as this essay contends, rank
always below, and be held in subordination to, intellectual philosophy. He saw
that the habitual practice of the meditative exercises under the yoga system
left the devotee standing apart from his world, becoming a moral and spiritual
Sybarite, a self-centered hedonist, a mystical Epicurean. Several of his
statements are so trenchant that they merit citation here:
"I did not know, when I first
landed on India's surf-sprayed shores, that I had embarked on a quest which
would ultimately carry me even beyond the boundaries of mysticism and the
practice of meditation itself, which for so long I had deemed the highest life
open to man . . . . I did not know that I had thrown dice with Destiny and that
the game was not to be concluded in the manner I had been led to expect, that
is, by settling down to an existence which made physical and mental
withdrawness in profound contemplation its highest goal and sublimated
fulfilment. Yet when the intermittent satisfactions of mental peace entered
into conflict with an innate ever-inquiring rationalization, tremendous
questions slowly became insistent. I perceived that although the little pool of
light in which I walked had indeed grown wider, the area of darkness beyond it
was as impenetrable as ever."
"Meditation, to oneself, was a
necessary and admirable pursuit, but it did not constitute the entire activity
which life was constantly asking of man. For the efflux of time had shown me
the limitations of mystics, and more time showed that those limitations were
accountable by the one-sidedness of their outlook and the incompleteness of
their experience. The more I associated with them in every part of the world
the more I began to observe that their defects arose out of sheer shriveled
complacency, the hidden superiority complex and the holier-than-thou attitude
which they had unjustifiably adopted toward the rest of the world, and also out
of the premature assumption of total knowledge of truth, when what they had
attained was only partial knowledge. The question was finally forced on me that
the perfection of human wisdom would never develop out of any mystical
hermitage, and only a synthetic complete culture could offer any hope for its
unfoldment . . . The instructive episodes of daily living confronted me with
deeper disillusionment; with the limitations and deficiencies of mysticism and
the intolerance and defects of mystics . . . I saw that intuition must be put
in its proper place and not to be expected to perform miracles. Both had been
tested and found wanting. I became acutely aware that mysticism was not enough by
itself, to transform or even discipline human character or to exalt its
ethical standards towards
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a satisfactory ideal. It was unable
to link itself thoroughly to life in the world. This gap was too serious to be
ignored. Even the emotional exaltations of mystical ecstasy--wonderfully
satisfying though they be--were fleeting, both in experience and effect, and
they proved insufficient to ennoble man permanently. The disdain for practical
action and the disinclination to accept personal responsibility which marks the
character of real mystics prevented them from testing the truth of their
knowledge as well as the worth of their attainments, and left them suspended in
mid-air, as it were. Without the healthy opposition of active participation in
the world's affairs, they had no means of knowing whether they were living in a
world of sterilized self-hallucination or not."
This candid expose of the failure of
mysticism by a competent investigator should serve as corrective of so much
sycophantic worship paid to India's reputed "spiritual" systems by
impressionable but uncritical and inexperienced Westerners. Mr. Brunton's
further analysis of the theme presents so much of our own feelings and
conclusions with regard to it that another lengthy quotation is not
objectionable:
"Meditation, apart from
experience was inevitably empty; experience without meditation was mere tumult.
A monastic mysticism which scorned the life and responsibilities of the busy
world would frequently waste itself in ineffectual beating of the air. The
truth obtained by contemplation needed to be tried and tested, not by pious
talk, but by active expression; a so-called higher knowledge which failed to
appear in homely deeds was badly learnt, and might be nothing more than vacuous
vagary. The true sage could be no anemic dreamer, but would incessantly transform
the seeds of his wisdom into visible and tangible plants of acts well done.
Emotional exaltations won through religious devotion, indeed personal
satisfactions, might become dangerous illusions when they failed to find a
proper external balance . . . The spiritual dreamer . . . needed to change his
attitude toward the despised world of activity, to stand intermittently aside
from his dangerous ascetic pride and to broaden and balance his outlook by intellectual
culture. A more integral culture was needed, one which could be perfectly
rounded by reason, and which could survive the test of every experience.
Such a culture could come only from facing the fact that man was here to live
actively no less than to meditate passively. The field of his activity was
inevitably out there in the external world, not here in the trance world."
It would be difficult to find
anywhere a more succinct reduction of the situation here under discussion to
its simplest elements of
107
truth. Here is expressed the central
axis of all the rationale of understanding of the philosophy of our life. Here
is the incontestable refutation of the introvert philosophies which advocate
and exalt as man's highest good an escape from the life of the world into the
alleged glories of rhapsodic superconsciousness experienced in what virtually
are trance states. Not to be missed, too, is the positive testimony that to
belittle and deprecate the intellect leads to disaster.
"The practice of meditation did
not lead him to self-sufficiency. This was because the external world was
always confronting him on his return with the silent demand that it also be
thoroughly known and properly understood. Unless, therefore, he inquire deeply
into its real nature and unite the resulting knowledge with his mystical
perception, he would remain in the twilight and not in the full morning sun, as
the entranced mystic thought himself to be. Most mystics in attempting to know
themselves metaphorically shut their eyes to the profounder enigmas of the
surrounding world, but that act did not lead to its dismissal."
No, the world is not to be dismissed
or dissolved by a mere blotting it out of mental vision, and it were time that
idealists, mayavists, monists and spiritists recognize it. Mystics miscalculate
the pressure of life's drive to give itself, through its creature units, the
tensional stress that will evolve its higher potencies, when they think they
can evade the necessities involved in the incarnational and evolutionary
process. Life will not accomplish its ends through an inane passivity or anemic
inactivity on the physical side of its expression. In coming to earth it left
dream and fantasy behind, since it was in fact surfeited with that phase of
consciousness, and from reaction to it roused itself to come forth and enjoy
the fresh relief of facing actuality in the field of self-consciousness. One
does not magically disenchant the world's power by mere contemplative
intensity. As the Bhagavad Gita proclaims in its figurative drama, the
soul, Arjuna, must not stand aloof from the battle, though in weaker mood it
would shrink from the ordeal.
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CHAPTER TEN
THE LENS OF THE MIND
If the soul, once on earth, attempts
through mistaken persuasions to annul the outer world's experience and withdraw
into the inner subjective sanctuary, it renounces a degree of its lordship over
its consciousness and lays itself open to the haunting by the same phantoms it
was beset with in the mystic heavens. Out of his own experience Mr. Brunton
testifies to this. Speaking of meditation, he writes:
"When wrongly done or when
carried to excess, it becomes a hindrance to philosophical activity, breeding
fresh evils, whims and fancies which will need to be overcome."
Then he registers a strong point in
the argument:
"The philosophical aim is
definitely different from that of mysticism. In the latter the neophyte rises
in the scale by repressing thought; here he rises by exerting thought.
The one teaches inertia, emptying of the mind, whilst the other teaches
activity, the expansion of the mind . . . . The mystic stills the mind in order
to get thought control, but once the control is attained, he should begin to
think vigorously. Thus he should kill thoughts only to use them better later.
Meditation practice must in this more advanced stage be set behind the
study of philosophy; the correct order now is to begin with the one and finish
with the other."
This is all most apt to a sane view,
and might perhaps be summed up by saying that the mistake in the mystic view
lies in the aim to gain thought control only to kill thought forever. The
mystic does not really aim at thought control, but at thought suppression.
Essentially this is the thing reduced to its terms of ribald illogicality, when
carried to its ultimate exploitation. It is as if the student were to master
all the knowledge and skills of his profession so as never to practice it any
more. The practical mind of the non-mystic would seek thought power in order to
put it to great use in the interests of progress. But the mystic strives after
thought control to end all thought.
Then this author reaches the height
of sagacity in saying that when one passes beyond mysticism to the study of
philosophy, in which the mind will be called upon to exercise its supreme power
to discern the forms of truth,
109
"whereas before he suppressed
thought, now he should seek to examine and direct it. Henceforth he will be
alert to Nature and note her workings, where before he dismissed her and cared
only to turn within."
Here indeed is fine grist for the
mill that grinds out this essay. Precisely as this effort has already
elucidated, the true sage goes deep within himself to learn the use of that
miraculous lens of truth discernment, his developed instrument, the mind, and
then turns it, not further into profound vacuity, but outward upon the world
where the supermind of the cosmos has already written the characters of the
creative ideation in the forms of Nature.
And in another passage he utters a
truth of such transcendent import that it is impossible to stress it too
heavily, when he exposes the terrible danger from the sweep of powerful feeling
unregulated by the intellect:
"Strong gusts of emotionalism
therefore provide a barricade against which the attacks of reason are futile. Emotion
unchecked by reason is one of the great betrayers of mankind."
He adds that the philosophical
student can not afford such emotional luxuries, since he knows that when
feeling dominates the consciousness it inhibits the intellect. And as the mind
is (says Brunton, in the face of all mystical doctrine) his chief instrument
for gaining truth, he must by no means crush it out, but sharpen it to
keenest edge, so that it may be the surest instrument to serve him in his
conflict between reason on the one side and indulgence in emotion and passion
on the other.
Then Brunton brings out another
reflection of great astuteness and certainly of critical significance in the
debate. Considering the so-highly-extolled flights of mystical ecstasies, he
sets forth the truth that throws back in abject defeat the great argument,
rather the sheer protestation, that the exalted afflations of the ego-consciousness
are something high above thought, beyond the province of the intellect, and are
things to which the intellect can not introduce man. He says:
"They, too, are really nothing
more than thoughts, however unusual in character they may otherwise be.
Hence there is no difference between the word spiritual and the word mental.
All conscious life is thought life. The most spiritual man lives in
thoughts as much as the most materialistic man . . . The riddle of life can be
solved with man's present resources."
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Here is corroboration for our
earlier contention that man must engineer his successful progress with the
resources provided for his use by life at the level where he stands, and must
not be expected to call down from the empyrean the agencies of life at levels
far transcending his own.
Of course in the dictionary sense it
is not quite allowable to say that there is no difference between the meanings
of spiritual and mental. But in the broad use of the terms in
yoga, the statement is warranted. The real dialectical issue here is that the
difference is not that one province of consciousness, the mind, is mental, and
a higher province, the soul, is spiritual. Both sorts of conscious activity,
says Brunton, are mental; they both have to do with mind, are exercised through
mind. But in common ideation, the alleged higher state of soul consciousness,
called spiritual, is so designated in reference to a marked difference in the
nature and contents of the ideas and feelings reflected upon the mind. Brunton
would doubtless allow this as a traditional differentiation, but probably did
not note it because he felt it was minor and inconsequential. Surely he is
right in asserting that all these ranges of the power of mind and intuition are
in the province of the mind. It must be permissible to say that many of the
realizations of mystical uplift are in the higher reaches or regions of the
mind's gamut of activity. But even that can be objected to as a gratuitous
concession to tendencies of common uncritical thinking and indoctrination.
Brunton's last sentence just quoted
is so directly a refutation of the "orthodox" position in mayavic
philosophy that it becomes indeed a notable utterance. If the riddle of life
can not be solved with man's present resources, God is then asking of
his children something that he has given them no fit tools to accomplish. How
silly it would be if life, evolution, expected man to achieve given tasks for
which the required tools were not placed in his hands! It is the egregious folly
of all these philosophies negating man's competence to achieve his destiny,
that they not only proclaim the inadequacy of the ordinary range of faculty,
the intellect in particular, but aver that if man is to escape the direful
consequences of this inadequacy, he must destroy them altogether. This is put
forth on the theory that if they are not left to clutter up and obscure the
area of consciousness, then completely competent divine faculty will have a
chance to deploy into action, and perform blissfully what the imperfect
inferior faculties failed to do.
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But must it not be seen as insensate
folly to act on the idea that if life's instrumentalities at a given stage of
evolution seem inadequate to attain the end goal, the "logical" thing
to do is to crush them out? Would not common instinct, instead, dictate the
desirability of improving them? Would a carpenter or machinist, hampered by
poor tools, act on the presumption that all he has to do is to throw away the
imperfect ones he has and a geni out of heaven will automatically supply
perfect ones? What assurance has man ever picked up from his contact with life
and nature that if he casts away his present endowment of faculties and powers,
a perfect repertoire of instrumentalities will automatically supervene? Always
the ideological absurdity remains in any claim that man must, or can, achieve
an evolutionary task for which he has not the present equipment. He can not be
expected to work with what he has not. If his present resources are not adequate
to what life demands of him, the blunt truth is that he is lost. He can not
look to the heavens to send magic raining down upon him for his salvation if he
disdains to use or destroys the equipment life gave him.
It must not be overlooked, too, as
an argument of some weight, that if yoga practices or meditative intensities can
in any way superinduce states of consciousness transcending the purely
intellectual characterization, these capabilities must themselves be considered
to lie within the range of the human mental capability, even though, in common
usage, they be not denominated as of the mind, but rather of the spirit. This
is the point which Brunton emphasized, in claiming a greater breadth for the
term mental. And it is a legitimate claim. Why, then, go on urging us to
effectuate a transcendence of the mind and intellect, when the powers we would
use in making the transcendence are themselves still mental? Is it not
infinitely more sensible to urge us to use the mind in the whole great range of
its powers? Much more must be said on this theme when discussion touches the
claims put forth for the intuition, as distinct from mind.
It is not, of course, to be claimed
that the riddle of life can be solved in all its final completeness with what
man has to use at present. The view that looks for a solution of life's
great enigma as a matter of the successful achievement of a stated specific
task of definite limited magnitude, like the completion of a course in college,
is a faulty one. The accomplishment of absolutes, finalities
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and ultimates is hardly in the
province of man's life or in the reach of his accoutrement. Life goes on and
on; solution of a lower-grade or simpler problem qualifies him to labor at a
more complex one. But what can be positively asserted in the discussion is that
the capabilities for solving the present phase of a problem in his
evolution must be adequate for that task, his present resources must include
those capabilities. Else his progress could not continue. This would seem to
dispose of another of those baseless and specious arguments of the mystical
schools of thought.
But again it is a sane and true
observation of Brunton's, and one of prime importance, when he says that the
quest of truth and reality, unaided by philosophy, can run riot in sheer
emotionalism and lead a soul to disaster. He asserts that the qualities of
reason, critical balance of judgment, thoughtful relation of feeling to the
reality of the world, are conspicuously wanting among mystics. And he also notes
that if the realm of supramental truth is open to mystical discovery and
experience, there ought to be fair unanimity in the reports which mystics bring
of the enraptured wonders of that Beulah land. On the contrary, he avers,
mystics betray by word and deed that they have found or achieved no such
uniformity, no identity of experience. Their exaltations are recorded as
utterly individual, and carry certainty only to the individual experiencing
them. Neither do men of vision or men of faith agree, says Brunton. And we must
ask with him what is the guarantee that can assure us that what they see and
feel is the real truth, or truth at all? Their testimony may carry no more
acceptable warrant of truth than the reports of sensitives, spiritists and
psychics in the realm of psychology generally. Goethe he cites as saying that
mysticism was the "scholastic of the heart and the dialectic of the
feelings." The experience is almost purely one of feeling, and feeling is
hardly amenable to fixed laws by which its truth or falsity can be gauged,
whereas thought does come under this category. Brunton even asks why an
extraordinary inward peace should be sufficient title to certify the authority
of a truth held concomitantly with it. It must be clear that even the highest,
most rhapsodic elevations of mystical feeling can not qualify to stand as
criteria of truth, beyond the certitude which they bring to the individual
himself. Such criteria, if there be any, must be supplied by the laws of
thought and the principles of truth, which philosophy must be challenged to
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furnish. Ammonias in his school at
Alexandria taught mysticism, but always in correlation with philosophy, Brunton
advises. Plotinus, his famous pupil, rated as one of the world's great mystics,
certainly built his profound system upon the basic principles of philosophy.
This testimony from a Westerner who
has ascended to the heights and plumbed the depths of Hindu yoga should count
weightily in the critique of the dominant philosophies of the Orient. Measured
at least by his own experience and the normal standards of valuation, he came
to see that its highest afflations of mystical uplift, possessing as they
naturally would a certain unique and challenging appeal to our deepest
susceptibilities, nevertheless fell short of supplying adequate answers--if any
answers at all--to those fundamental questions which the human mind ever
demands for its stability and its more valiant waging of the battle of life. He
found that such mysticism did but temporize with the deepest soul of man,
supplying not the everlasting peace and poise of enraptured communion with the
eternal unconditioned unity of being, but only the enticing diversion of
ephemeral transports. They could be taken up and pursued for a time in the
fashion of any sensationally engaging new interest, and they brought certain
realizations well worth the knowledge, no doubt. But they could not last at any
high and perennially fresh pitch of zest and piquancy, for man's ecstasies
are never permanent or steadily persistent. A high moment sweeps in upon
us, delivers its message and is gone, leaving us the richer for its largesse of
exalted insight. But the unction is preserved not in its living poignancy of
feeling,--which the organism can not sustain beyond the moment--but in the
memory and in the thinking principle it outlined in momentary grand light. Rom
Landau, in his God Is My Adventure, has well said that a brilliant
illumination of the psyche or a new revelation of truth that lifts one to the
heights, if it only touch the emotions without affecting the intellect, simply
can not last. He does not disqualify its good service, but declares it can not
persist in its original power. Not all commitments even to the intellect endure
with steady permanency. But they are stored at least subconsciously in the
memory of their value for all later cogitation in the bank of the mind. So that
in spite of all the protestations of the mystics, and
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the enraptured eulogies of
transcendental experiences of the sort, it remains true, as Mr. Brunton in his
sincere "confession" has set forth, that those more enduring and
ultimately more soul-nourishing satisfactions which the ego seeks under the
divine push of inward being, are to be absorbed and treasured in the intellect.
Emotion and feeling are not to be
decried outright. They have their proper function and it is a high one. Feeling
is in fact one of the four component tones in the song of conscious life. If it
were left out the harmony would never be complete. The four notes are sounded,
one each in or through the four grades of consciousness, sensation, emotion,
thought and spiritual intuition. A new element or influence in consciousness,
to be inwoven into the texture of the life, must send its radiation through all
four of the levels or planes of the individual life. If it is a new sensation,
it must then impinge on the feelings, then sweep up into the mind and finally
affect the spirit. If it is an emotion, it must induce a new sensation below
it, a new idea and a new spiritual recognition above it. If it is a thought it
must touch the feelings and the body sense below and reach up to the soul. And
if it is a soul's awakening to new wholeness of understanding or rapture, it
will assuredly flood down upon the mind, the feeling and the sense. In this way
only does man become an integral unit of the life energy, or maintain the
integrity of his life. This is the necessary integration that psychology
insists upon for the completeness and stability of the individual.
Emotion, then, is one of the four
ingredients essential to the wholeness of our experience. It is not to be
decried. It is to be steadied, purified, ennobled. Neither, then, is intellect
to be decried. Neither is sensation, nor mystical elations. Each has its place
in composing the full chord, which would be defective if any one was lacking.
And what is of great moment in the survey is the fact that, if any one is
missing, the final force released by any high realization is not likely to come
through to consciousness in its richest and purest tonicity. The chord must
ring out all the four tones in harmony. Mystical philosophies here under
critique have insisted that only the top note of the chord must be sounded by
the highest tonal instrument, mystical feeling, demanding at the same time that
the three lower vibrations be entirely silenced. The evident truth is that the
supreme beauty and most penetrating sweetness of the conscious realization are
only produced by the unison of
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the four, not by the one top note
alone. If analogy could speak with force on the point, the harmony of the four
voices conjoined is a truer and more beautiful rendition than the soprano
alone, sweet as that may be.
Speaking of the number four,
Plutarch (Morals III, 110) says:
"Of this number the soul of man
is composed; of mind, knowledge, opinion and sense are the four that complete
the soul; from which all sciences, all arts, all rational faculty derive
themselves. For what our mind perceives, it perceives after the manner of a
thing that is one, the soul itself being a unity."
That all four ingredients of man's
conscious life are indispensable to his well being and successful on-going is
made clear by B. A. G. Fuller, dissertating on Greek philosophy in his splendid
History of Philosophy:
"To the Hellenic mind man was
primarily a natural fact, allotted, along with other facts, his specific nature
and place in the universe, and enabled by the world process which had produced
him to live happily and completely within the bounds imposed by that place and
nature. Supernatural sanctions to a supernatural destiny were not necessary to
right living and well being. Nor, on the other hand, was there any conflict between
an essentially lower and an essentially higher nature to oppose a fundamental
obstacle to self-fulfillment and happiness. Man had a single, though composite,
character. Nothing with which nature had endowed him was alien to his best
interests or a stumbling-block to his perfection. His good lay in as complete
and as generous as possible an adjustment of the claims of all his various
instincts and desires and interests. All were entitled to contribute their due
part to his happiness and to receive their due share in it.
"Since, then, all right action
and its reward in happiness was, for the Greeks, a matter of a purely
intellectual determination of the exact measure and proportion in which the
four grades of consciousness were intermixed in actual living, the dialectic
irrefutably placed mind action--not spiritual illumination--as the center and
base of all determination of life, character and destiny. No matter how high
and blissful its rapture, it had to ask the mind to determine what were best
for the earthly domicile it inhabited. And those raptures themselves depended
largely upon the proper regimes of bodily discipline and habit, which it was
the function of the mind to regulate."
Mystical theory has gone on
interminably decrying the intellect, even declaring it an obstacle in the path.
The greatest phil-
116
osophers, fortunately, have put
themselves on record as to this item. We have lightly touched upon Spinoza's
contribution to this feature of the discussion. More extended quotations could
be made from his Ethics to very great advantage. What is brought out is
that, not only can the intellect not be dispensed with, scorned, silenced in
the hope of evoking the magical spiritual realizations and raptures, but the
true exaltations of consciousness to the thrilling rapports and insights and
visions can not supervene unless and until the intellect has exercised
itself to the near-perfect mastery of its powers. In very truth the highest
of the afflations are nothing other than the work of the intellect itself,
performing its proper function with such alacrity and clarity that its swift
motions appear to come as the play of some higher faculty, which has
commonly been accorded the name of intuition. In the lightning flash of its
mercurial activity one does see truth as if it lay outlined under the eye; and
that is the meaning of intuition, from the Latin in-tueor, "to
look upon" directly. Intuition differs from the apprehension of truth by
the reason that by it one sees truth by direct looking, whereas by
reason one arrives at it through a process of logical deductions from
antecedent propositions. What is seen by immediate observation needs no proof
by reason or logic. On this basis intuition has always been rated a higher
faculty than the intellectual processes.
But let us hear what some of the
great philosophers, who lifted their minds to the lucid vision of integrated
truth, have had to say about the processes by which they attained to the
heights of illuminated vision.
In his exegesis of the great Aristotle's
philosophical system, our historian of philosophy, B. A. G. Fuller expounds the
prime function of the intellect as "the task of fitting the pieces
together." The pieces are the phenomena and events in the run of world
experience. This indeed is the only way in which a creature that finds itself
launched on the moving stream of life could hold its place in the line of
march, or even secure its safety. Without an instrument to perform this
function there would be no chance to seek anything higher than sheer physical
existence. Without such intelligence the entity would be but a floating chip,
powerless to orient his position in line with the free movement of the current.
In altiloquent terms the mystic
proponents laud and magnify the proclaimed inundation of mind, first emptied of
banal earthly
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contents, by the flash and sweep of
the beatific vision, the ecstatic realization and the supramental knowledge.
This, as has been seen, is on their claim a downflow from the empyrean of
supernal consciousness, and descends when the lower human mentality has been
stilled. It is, they assert, in no way dependent upon the exercise of the
brain-mind, which, so far from being a preparatory stage to the outcropping of
the inner power, is actually the chief obstacle that stands in its way and must
therefore be by-passed. In Fuller's words we have Aristotle's dictum on this
matter, and implicit in his luminous view as now presented is a veritable
overturn of all the cult philosophy in vogue:
"Now, before the truth can
'flash' upon the intellect in such wise that we cry triumphantly 'I have it,'
'I know,' our minds have to go through all this preparatory pother of
synthetic judgment, trains of thought and so-called 'discursive reasoning.' We
have to puzzle, argue, knit our brows and rack our brains before we see all at
once how the pieces fit, or get sudden inspiration as to how the picture as a
whole, or some portion of it, hangs together. Human reasoning, then, is
a process; a means toward an end; an actualization of the potential; not an end
in itself containing its own reward."
Here is forceful and straight rebuke
to the unfounded asseverations of the mystics. To their vauntings that
intuition gains nothing from the prior use and training of the intellect, and indeed
flashes best when the mind is in abeyance, the answer can be given in Fuller's
strong sentence: "He who will scorn the mind will never know the sweep
of intuition." Here is the dynamic truth that will jar and jolt an
ignorant cult of folly-ridden introvert ideology out of its fatuous dream of
floating aloft in roseate Edens of mystical bliss by ignoring and flouting the
mind. What the votaries of such ideologies will get out of their straining
aspirations, instead of true visions of reality, will be chimerical phantoms of
sensual hedonism.
Leaping from Aristotle to Spinoza,
we hear Fuller expounding the latter's view of intuition:
"The final form of knowledge
Spinoza calls intuition. By this we are not to understand some new faculty
superseding reason, by which we are fused with an indescribable Reality
transcending the categories of logical thought. Spinoza's intuition is not the
mystical ecstasy of Plotinus, or Erigena or Master Eckhardt. Nor is it the sort
of pious 'hunch' with which some modern intuitionists think to evade reason as
a final authority, when the results of reason wound
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their feelings, upset their
preconceived notions or run counter to their desires . . . . It is an intellectual
vision, attained by reason alone, of a reality that is through
and through intelligible . . . . it sums up and sees in a single glance the
whole system of ideas and truths logically implied by the nature of reality . .
. . The thing, the thought, the emotion, the feeling, the love, the thrill of
ecstasy, the starry heavens and the moral law, are no less present, no less
living, no less poetic, no less charged with value, no less sublime, for
being understood."
It is a question if mystical
philosophy does not receive its most deadly thrust from the sublime but cutting
sarcasm of these last words of Fuller's. For it shows them guilty, in their
disdaining the intellect, of acting on the predication that the highest
attainments of human consciousness are hindered by understanding, are the
better for not being understood. Here at all events we have a source of
accepted high authority positively and categorically throwing straight
contradiction into the face of the endlessly reiterated asseverations of the
mystic claimants. The intellect, the reason, which their philosophy berates and
decries, is here declared to be the foundation and pillar of the whole
possibility of the intuition which they place so far above the intellect.
"On the contrary, to the
happiness that comes from experiencing them is added the new . . . . supreme
happiness of knowing their causes and their necessary place in the
infinite being of God."
And then follows the clear
pronouncement of the climactic truth about this item in philosophic discussion
that should enable all parties to comprehend the true status of the problem at
last. Fuller says that this is a description of intuition that is not a denial
of reason, but its sublimation.
In this last word is to be found the
resolute of all debate, all partisan and partial views. The error perpetually
committed by the mystical claimants, especially of the Orient, has been to
regard and treat intuition as a faculty or level or grade of consciousness
entirely separate from and independent of the mind, even a power with which the
mind was at enmity, or to which it was an obstacle needing to be removed. The
Spinozistic view regards intuition, not at all as a faculty independent of the
mind, so that when it functions we can drop the use of the mind, inhibit its
working and substitute the intuition in its place. In his view intuition is
simply the con-
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summation and perfection of the
mind's own function. This is
implied in Fuller's use of the word "sublimation." Intuition is the
intellect sublimated, subtilized, apotheosized at its supreme level of
perfection in a higher dimensional grade of consciousness. Intuition can be
said to be the divine efflorescence of the intellect at the summit of its
perfected powers. This must be so, since in the gamut of life's stages and
tones of expression each higher faculty or reach of consciousness grows out of
the perfection of the faculty generated by the grade below it. As the vegetable
grows out of the refinement of the mineral, the animal out of the vegetable,
the human out of the animal, so this intuitional vision, man's near approach to
the divine estate above him, grows out of the intellect when that flowers out
in its perfection.
A direct statement that corroborates
this view is found in a work, The Christian Answer, by George F. Thomas.
"The faculty of reason is not superseded, but raised to a higher level of
vision under the influence of the divine inspiration." Christianity, he
says, is opposed to the modern humanistic belief in the autonomy of reason in
so far as that belief flatters the pretensions of men to discover the nature
and purpose of God without the aid of revelation.
"But it insists that the
deepest truths about God and his purpose are revealed to men in and through all
their faculties of reason, imagination, conscience and feeling."
Again he eulogizes reason as
"the candle of the Lord lighted by God and lighting men to God." The
eminent psychologist, Jung, writes that "the soul is fructified by the
intellect."
In his Ethics Spinoza gives
the intellect its high and indispensable rating in the economy of the unfolding
life:
"It is therefore extremely
useful in life to perfect as much as we can the intellect or reason, and in
this alone does the supreme happiness or blessedness of man consist; for
blessedness is nothing else than the satisfaction of mind which arises from the
intuitive knowledge of God . . . . Wherefore the ultimate aim of a man who is
guided by reason, that is his greatest desire by which he endeavors to moderate
all others, is that by which he is brought to conceive of his intelligence . .
. . To know adequately the things which are within the power of the mind is to
know God."
Again he discourses in similar
strain:
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"Inasmuch as the intellect is
the better part of us, it is certain that, if we wish to seek what is truly
profitable to us, we should try above all things, to perfect it as far as we
can. Our highest good indeed should consist in intellectual perfection."
Plato in his Laws allocates
to the mind the highest function in the rulership of life:
"If there were any man so
sufficient by nature, being by divine Fortune happily engendered and born, that
he could comprehend this, he would have no need of laws to command him. For
there is not any law or ordinance more worthy and powerful than knowledge; nor
is it fitting that mind, provided it be truly and really free by Nature, should
be a subject or slave to any one, but it ought to command all."
Greek philosophy defined the divine
coefficient of man's conscious life as a "pure fire infused with
reason."
From Anaxagoras we find the high
function of the intellect set forth in a way that should end all petty
disposition of mystics to belittle mind's supreme service in the life of man:
"All things were confused one among another; but Mind divided and reduced
them to order." As Mr. Brunton states, the enraptured mystic does not
concern himself with any ordered systematism of the relation or the meaning of
the elements of world existence. It is enough for him that he sits bathed in
complacency and titillated with his inward "phantoms of delight."
In exactly similar vein the Greek
philosophy makes intelligence the cause of the order that exists in the soul,
and as far as it has it, in the world. According to Plato intelligent soul is
thus placed in the world to be the cause of the proportional structure and
stable order of the universe. The great principle announced by the Platonic
school, that the order of the world is sustained by the cosmic mind, is thus
seen to be the logical base for the postulation of a mental power behind the
phenomenal universe. Without the operation of such a cosmic intellect, there
would be no possibility and no ground for the prevalence of the exact measure
and proportion in which all multitudinous things in the world are sustained and
stabilized. A universe running without the supervision of mind could be only a
chaos. Intimations of beauty spring from our perception of this exactitude in
the measure and proportion and balance with which all things are mingled in the
world, after the primal
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unity of being has divided itself
into infinite multiplicity, which sets for it the stupendous task of
commingling the multitudinous elements in that due balance which insures the
beneficent orderliness of the manifest existence.
Water being the symbol of the body
in which soul has to live in incarnation, Heraclitus, great Greek philosopher
before Plato, expresses the soul's "natural propensity for the downward
way," meaning its cosmic urge to incarnation, in his terse statement that
"souls like to get wet." And, once here in body, divulsed from the
higher dimensional consciousness of the upper spheres, and immersed in the
surging waves of sense and emotion sweeping in on it from the side of the body,
the soul would be subject, as the Greek philosophy has so capably established,
to a life of chaos, unless man developed some power to distinguish between the
diverse elements of his experience and could by it order his life with
judicious judgment. That potential saving power is the reason. The soul would
be overwhelmed in the flux of unrelated events if it did not develop a faculty
by which it can guide its way safely through the surging waters of sense. So
Heraclitus says: "The senses reflect the flux alone, but the reason sees
through the flux to the Logos."
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE REAL AND THE ACTUAL
We have ancient wisdom speaking to
us volubly and in beautiful figure in Plutarch's dissertation (Morals III,
573):
"All of which Plato endeavors
to illustrate by a similitude of the chariot horses of the soul, the one
whereof being more unruly, not only kicks and flings at him that is more gentle
and tractable, but also thereby so troubles and disorders the driver himself,
that he is forced sometimes to hold him hard in and sometimes again to give him
his head,
'Lest from his hands the purple
reins should slip,' as Simonides speaks."
And a sanity all too wanting in
philosophies bent to crush the "lower" passions in the fell rush to
take the kingdom of heaven by storm, is found in Plutarch's Morals (Vol.
III, 490), the sober good sense of which is recommended to all cults preaching
the spiritual aim of religion, in disparagement of the physical life.
"Of all which things man does
in some measure participate . . . . For he is contained by habit and nourished
by Nature; he makes use of reason and understanding; he wants not his share of
the irrational soul; he has also in him a native source and inbred principle of
the passions, not as adventitious but necessary to him [italics ours],
which ought not therefore to be utterly rooted out, but only pruned and
cultivated. For it is not the method and custom of reason . . . . to destroy
and tear up all the passions and affections indifferently, good and bad, useful
and hurtful together; but rather--like some kind and careful Deity who has a
tender regard to the growth and improvement of fruit trees and plants--to cut
away and clip off that which grows wild and rank, and to dress and manage the
rest that it may serve for use and profit. For neither do they who fear any
violent commotion of their passions go about utterly to destroy and eradicate,
but rather wisely to temper and moderate them. And as they who use to break
horses and oxen do not go about to take away their goings, or to render them
unfit for labor and service, but only strive to cure them of their unluckiness
and flinging by their heels, and to bring them to be patient of the bit and
yoke, so as to become useful; after the same manner reason makes very good use of
the passions after they are well subdued and made gentle, without either
tearing in pieces or over-much weakening that part of the soul which was made
to be obedient to her. But much more useful than these in their several kinds
are the whole brood of passions, when they become attendants to reason,
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and when, being assistant and
obedient to virtue, they give life and vigor to it."
Here is wisdom which, all things
seem to warrant the saying, Greece possessed and India lacked. Greece saw the
beneficent use of the lower nature in its relation to the higher; India could
only think of crushing down and extinguishing the life of the senses and even
of the mind. As far as the outward expression of the two philosophies goes,
Plutarch's lucid illustration of the function of the passional nature stands as
direct contradiction of the major body of Hindu yoga doctrine.
In another passage (Morals III,
91) Plutarch elucidates how God uses the body of man to make himself known both
to others and to himself. Each higher principle of the cosmic consciousness, he
says, employs a lower essence as its instrument, and through the lower power,
though it limits and compresses the diviner potential, brings its hidden
capacities to view. His statement is notable and of such majestic dignity as to
be worthy of citation:
"It is true, whilst man, in
that little part of him, his soul, lies struggling and scattered in the vast
womb of the universe, he is an obscure and unknown being; but, when once he
gets hither into this world and puts a body on, he grows illustrious and from
an obscure becomes a conspicuous being; from a hidden an apparent one . . . .
For the birth or generation of individuals gives not any being to them which
they had not before, but brings that individual into view."
In our humble view it seems time
that wisdom such as this should, like the obscure being of man which it
descants upon, be brought from dark recesses of ancient sapiency out into the
view of modern man. For here is wisdom that would resolve a thousand points of
confusion in modern thought and rebuke a thousand cult teachings of warped
truth which in the folly of ignorance turn the mind to enmity against the world
of life.
Here can be caught a deeper meaning
to the commonplace sense of the doctrine of manifestation in theology.
The physical worlds are in reality God himself in manifestation, bringing his
hidden nature forth to view both to himself and those of his creatures on the
scene. Plutarch says that the sun, taken to be Apollo, was called Delius
(conspicuous) and Pythius (known) because it was in open view of all. But the
ruler of the lower invisible kingdom was
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called Hades (invisible). The basic
fact underlying all philosophy is the knowledge that the great life of the
universe alternately brings itself from the state of non-existence or
unmanifestation out to existence and becoming. All negation attaches to the
first state, and all positive being to the second. It is to be assumed that
each condition is most delightful to the conscious mind operating the cycles of
its life as the one succeeds the other. But it would certainly stand approved
by reason that a philosophy which puts all rich positive value in the cycle of
non-existence, decrying and denying all value to existence, is unbalanced and
illogical, or worse. If it be submitted to the naive common judgment of all
thinking people, the decision must be that something is better than nothing,
that existence is better than non-existence. Life must enhance itself by its
own positive attitudes; it can not advance on negation. India comes
perilously close to affirming in her philosophy that Hamlet's question, to be
or not to be, is best answered in the negative. Existence has no rewards
sufficiently compensatory for its strains and ills. Life is best crushed before
it begins.
It is true the Greeks associated the
idea and the very term of "death" with the life in the body. They
even defined matter as "privation." Spirit was accorded the highest
rank in the order of value; matter was the essence of non-being. Yet the
utterly real being arose, they held, from the alternate rotation and the
commingling of the two, never inhered in the one alone, in detachment from the
other.
There is a subtle, yet very definite
difference between the words real and actual. They are in general
usage taken pretty much as synonyms. In philosophical parlance, however, there
subsists a distinction that should be clearly apprehended for the better
understanding of basic problems. It can be assumed that all being is real,
whether it is inactive in the non-manifest arc of its cycles, or active and
conscious in the manifest arc; just as man is real whether he be asleep or
awake. So the cycles introduce no distinction in the status of being as to its
reality or non-reality. But they do introduce a distinction between the reality
of being and its actuality. As sharply as man can analyze this
distinction, the cycles of manifestation precipitate the conscious essence of
being from a condition of sheer potentiality out into a condition of
self-conscious actualization of its unborn potential. Manifestation, as
Plutarch
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says, does not add to being anything
that it lacked before; it only made its unknown reality actual to itself. Actuality,
it was noted, is the key word in the luminous passage earlier quoted from
Plotinus. Souls, he said, could not know what their prospective possessions of
faculty were until they were actualized in the objective, the self-conscious,
form of reality, inferring that they would have remained unknown if
retained forever in the purely subjective state of reality. Only the
objectified reality is the actually real, it might be put. There are infinite
grades of reality in the cosmos; only the tiny segment of that infinite gamut
of which the creature can be self-conscious can be said to be his reality, only
the part that he has actualized. Infinite reaches of higher reality stretch
beyond him, which he has not yet actualized. To him only that is real which he
has actualized, made himself conscious of and acquainted with.
Hindus gave supreme reality only to
the subjective potential, and denied it to the objective actual. The resolution
of endless debate in philosophy could have been achieved if this distinction
had been clearly accentuated in the past. The worlds and the divine life
manifesting in them oscillate forever between the two ends of the gamut lying
between the positive state and privation. Also, what seems indicated and has
not been brought out in the exposition, is that each swing of the pendulum from
positive to negative state, from active to inert, likewise changes the polarity
in the sense that to whatever consciousness life possesses in each arc, that
grade would seem to be the positive and its opposite the negative. This would
make it possible to say that to heavenly inhabitants their sort of
consciousness would seem to be real and earth consciousness a want of reality.
But to us on earth this experience seems real and we think that death will
abolish its reality.
What the great Aristotle contributed
to this clarification is too charged with clear understanding to be passed
over. His analysis starts from the consideration of change in the living order
of the universe. Nothing remains what it now is; all things are in process of
change or transition from what they are to something else. On this observation
has been based largely the accusation of the idealist and monistic schools in
philosophy that all things here are unreal, and that reality is to be found
only in the states of consciousness assumed to have play in the unmanifest
cycles, where change is frozen to immobility in static inertia.
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But Aristotle resolves this too
simple analysis with more recondite particularity. Says he, change passes
always from one state to another under definite ordained procedures, and it is
the entire structure pattern drawn out by the total sweep of the movement of
change that constitutes the reality, which is not to be found in any one static
moment of the process. The oak sapling is not what the giant tree will be; the
boy is not what he will be as a man. The full revelation of what each created
thing will be only comes to view in the final stages of growth in the cycle or
cycles. Life reveals itself in the cycle's end, or only then in complete fulness.
The Greek word for end being telos, he named his theory entelechy,
the idea that the end stage actualizes the potential implicit in the
beginning. Change, he says, passes always to or from a climax, it is either
anabolic or katabolic, growth or decay. A potential thing is realized at its
climax, becomes fully entitled to the designation of real, when it becomes
actualized in its consummation of growth. It may be, in one sense, real when it
is yet only potential; but it is not actually real until it has brought out all
its inner life to fruitage. At stages of advance toward its entelechy it
is actual as far as it has gone, but still only potential in the ground it has
yet to traverse. Its actuality is always a mixture of hule (hyle),
substance, and an intellectually preconceived form in the ideal or noumenal
world. The two ingredients in the mixture are matter, which holds the
potentiality, and form, which, when manifested in the concrete, is the
actuality which comes to view in the entelechy. The two are purely
relative to each other, and can have no existence apart from each other. When
their polarized relation is dissolved (and Indian philosophy insistently urges
its dissolution), the being that was coming to its entelechy ceases its
becoming and relapses back into sheer be-ness, retaining only its potentiality
for later becoming. Aristotle in his De Generatione et Corruptione (Concerning
Generation and Decay) says: "Although there is a matter of the
perceptible bodies, a matter of which the so-called 'elements' come to be, it
has no separate existence, but is always bound up with a contrariety."
Those who deny the existence or reality of matter are denying to God's creative
ideas and purposes the opportunity and the reality of their actualization in
the worlds.
The mystics who presume to eliminate
time and evolution from their interpretative scheme, are undermining the
conditions
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necessary for the realization of the
entelechy, and would by obviating these "limitations" on the
free spirit lift consciousness in one ecstatic leap into the realm of
unconditioned being. This is folly, for they do not realize that, as has been
said, "time is the moving image of eternity." If philosophy is so
avid to postulate the experience of climactic exaltations and apotheosizations
without giving the process time to unfold the pattern of the forms, it puts
itself arbitrarily and artificially out of harmony with the ordained processes
of universal life. Such philosophy answers no questions about the meaning of life;
it declares life evil and counsels escape from it.
Nature, so lavishly reviled by
idealistic theory, could be looked upon with something more than mere poetic
appreciations of its beauty, if Aristotle's enlightened view of it was
generally reflected upon. The world of nature, he says, is that realm of
existence in which we have for the first time form and matter mixed. It is the
first scene on which the idea-forms of the creation appear to a sensible
creature.
As nature is a composite of
matter-potential and ideal reality in life's first and hence rudimentary
conjunction of the two, nature, as manifesting matter more conspicuously than
the mind-forms hidden in it, came through dearth of profounder understanding,
under the condemnation of religious ideology. Matter became the devil, the evil
genius of the world, and has had to bear the brunt of religion's eternal
obloquy and vilification for centuries. Canon Farrar, in his Lives of the
Fathers (Vol. II, 217) gives so lucid and graphic a picture of this attitude
that it is well to hear it:
"The causes that led to
asceticism were manifold; but the deepest cause which, heretical as it is,
exercised a strong, though half-unconscious, influence over many Christians in
the early centuries was the Zoroastrian, Dualistic, Manichean and Gnostic
conception of the inherent corruption and malignancy of matter. The body, which
the gift of the Indwelling Spirit had elevated into a temple of the Holy Ghost,
was regarded as a polluting tomb. It was treated as the source of all evils;
and because it is a duty to subdue the appetites of the flesh, it was most
erroneously regarded as meritorious to crush the body in which they
originate."
Here is the declaration of one of
the great modern lights of the Church that it is a great error to crush the
body, which he also declares to be the temple of the soul, following the
Christian founder, St. Paul. If he is right in his statement, then Christianity
for a long
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ten centuries acted out an erroneous
policy, since the crushing of the body was a dominant motive of its activity
from about the fifth to the fifteenth century. The long and tragic story of
this impulse to crucify the flesh, a hallucination which under false
austerities ground down both the souls and bodies of millions of Christians,
has never been written in all its glaring luridness. It is quite closely allied
with the mysticism here discussed, as regimes of self-denial were instituted
with the idea of profiting by Porphyry's expressive phrase, "to cause the
body to sit as lightly as possible about the soul." Fasting in particular
was practiced to render the nervous system and the psychic faculties more
sensitive to the conditions which would bring spiritual visions and phenomena
of occult character. The Essenes in their monastic colonies in the Jordan
Valley and Syria were perhaps the most amazingly successful practitioners of
these ascetic measures in the religious field.
Stanley Romaine Hopper (The
Crisis of Faith, 107) speaks of a mysticism which turned the spirit inward
upon its own impotence. What else could the spirit find within itself, if it
had once torn out of its inner citadel all the contents of the feelings and the
mind from which it might have drawn support and strength? A doctrine that urges
it to invite or entice downward into its cognizance the divine apocalypse by
first denuding itself of all its incentives to growth through knowledge of the
creation which it can acquire only from the world, must be adjudged an
illogical teaching. Hopper goes on to arraign this age-old self-deification,
which he says results from the withdrawal of the self from the objective world,
in the fatuous attempt of the meditator to elevate himself to super-human
estate, in which the self is lost in the pursuit of beatific goals predicated
upon the insatiable longing of the self for the infinite.
Commenting upon Amiel's reference to
mystical afflations as "this bedazzlement with the infinite," Hopper
agrees with him that it is a snare and a delusion. And Friedrich Schlegel (The
Philosophy of Life, 40) says that "the Henosis of Plotinus intoxicates
me like a philtre," until, as Hopper adds, "extinction overtakes him
and the colored air-bubble has burst in the infinite space and the misery of
thought has sunk to rest in the changeless repose of an all-embracing
nothing." Hopper speaks of the mystical practices as tending to induce
narcissism. The spirit of man, he says, may relate itself either to existences
outside itself and depersonalize itself as it identi-
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fies itself with its object; or it
may also be possible to relate itself to objects no less real for being reified
in the imagination, created by subjective fantasy, which have neither
tangibility nor substance, and are pure figments of the mind. An incalculable
quantity of the objects of religious devotion are undoubtedly of this sort. It
should in every sphere of man's life be his object to hitch his mind to
reality. Religion has gone so far in the contrary direction as to tie the mind
to an infinite variety of bogies and chimeras.
The French Pascal speaks in most
uncompromising terms upon the false premises of mysticism (in Pensees, 464):
"All philosophers have said in vain, 'Retire within yourselves, you will
find your god there.' We do not believe them, and those who believe them are
the most empty and the most foolish." And again (Pensees 430):
"It is in vain, O men, that you seek within yourselves the remedy for your
ills. All your light can only reach the knowledge that not in yourselves will
you find truth or good." This, however, needs the qualification that man
will find truth, light, knowledge and overshadowing peace within himself (how
could he get these outside himself?) when through continuing experience he
brings out the potential within himself, not by casting out the fruits of his
mundane living, but by relating his innate divine genius properly with the
forms of truth impinging upon his life from the external world.
Canon Farrar's work, Lives of the
Fathers, goes into elaborate detail to narrate the fantastic extravagances
of subjective visionings, entrancings, alleged visitations of the spirits of
ancient dead, and volumes of the same abound in the mystical literature of
Christianity, from Augustine and Martin down to the present. The scientific
secular psychopathic approach to the investigation of such phenomena today
divests this chapter of religious abnormality of most of its unctuous spiritual
glamor and reduces its authority as a credential of divine influence
drastically. The hallowed saints as well narrate assaults upon them by demons
and devils as visitations by angels. Much of early mystical afflatus was
generated by gazing in rigid concentration on the bones of earlier Christian
saints, in the fashion of Hindus staring at their navel. So that the Emperor
Julian was constrained to dub the Roman Christians "Bone
Worshippers."
There is little profit in pursuing
this line further, but as a true
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historical demonstration of the
lengths of unbalance to which the religious abhorrence of matter and the flesh
can carry humans, the following passage from Farrar's "Fathers" is
worthy of notice:
"A strong glimpse of the
irregularities of the fourth century may be derived from the enchantments of
the Council of Gangra. The date of this Council is uncertain, but it was
probably held about 379 A. D., and was intended to check the errors and
extravagances of the followers of Eustathius of Sebaste. We learn from its
canons that there were some who not only blamed marriage, but said that a woman
living with her husband cannot be saved; that others separated themselves from
the communion of married priests and refused to partake of elements which they
consecrated; that they embraced a life of virginity from horror of the married
state; and that they insulted married persons. We also find anathemas against
women who, under the pretence of religion, wore men's clothing, cut off their
hair and forsook their children. These canons are undoubtedly genuine and are
contained in the codes of the Greek and Latin Churches."
The length to which the story of
such reactions under the influence of combined mysticism and asceticism has
gone is close to incredible.
Beatrice M. Hinkle, in her fine
work, The Integration of the Individual (449), speaking of psychoanalysis
and its advantages over religion, in that religion gives the promise of
felicity in a future life, while psychoanalysis offers not faith in a future,
but self-knowledge by which the individual can steer his course most directly
toward felicity here and now, by finding the transforming power within himself,
does not fail to remind us that in using those very powers of the psyche which
make possible our elevation to higher states of being, we can be most easily
tricked and deceived "in this tragic play of hide and seek with
ourselves." Mystic philosophy has reversed the true and fixed order of
beneficent economy as between man and his world: it adjures man to turn away
from the forms of the physical creation outside him as having no meaning or message,
or a lying one, and to go within the unconditioned depths of his own
consciousness to find truth and light. This reverses the true direction. He
finds, as many of the psychologists are now saying, his inner world, in so far
as he has not filled it with the truths reflected from their prototypal images
in the external world, to be either an empty hall or peopled with some truths,
some half-truths
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and numberless phantoms and fancies
born of his unintelligence and spontaneous run of free imagination, not organized
on any rational basis and unrelated to reality. This is no less than
devastating to the psyche.
While Christian and Hindu
asceticism, bred from the concept of this diabolical "malignancy of
matter," went on for centuries stifling, mutilating the body, Greece
brought that body to its highest point of strength and beauty. Greek philosophy
well understood the limitations which the flesh imposed upon soul; indeed it
referred to the body under the cryptic symbolism of the soul's prison-house,
grave, tomb, as the Egyptians had called it the mummy-case and the bird-cage of
the soul. The soul resided in the body in analogically the same conditions as a
bird in its cage. In the body the soul lay, till awakened and resurrected, in
"death."
Nevertheless the Greeks never
understood the soul's imprisonment in body in the bald literal and realistic
sense in which the Christians took it. Greek philosophical perspicacity saw
through the recondite esotericism to the positive meaning behind it. The body
might be poetized as a prison, a tomb; but competent sagacity discerned that it
was at the same time the window which life had opened out upon the sunlight of
reality. Prison it might be thought, but still it was known to be a whole
miniature world in itself, a microcosm of the total world, a universe over
which the infant deity implanted at its heart could have real practice in the
exercise of sovereignty for the evolution of his kingship over all the
elements. Death-house it might be called; but it was a mortuary whose doors
would in the anastasis, or resurrection, open wide to let the
imperishable "mummy," like Lazarus, arise and come forth in Easter
radiance to life eternal. The body, lowly animal as it is, was still the
faithful beast on whose back the divinity in man would ride up to and through
the gates of the holy Jerusalem of celestial glory, with hosannas resounding
through the skies. The erudite Greeks knew the mighty temptation soul had to
undergo from the side of body; but they knew that without such wrestling with
the seductions of the flesh, soul would waste away in inanition. No disastrous
negativism or condemnation, therefore, motivated their attitude toward the
body. With a balanced understanding dictating their posture toward it, they
sought to impose upon it the exact measure and proportion of due restraint of
its fierce lusts and passions, while
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developing to the full its
magnificent mechanism of power and its natural charm.
Dean Milman, author of perhaps the
finest History of Christianity (p. 26), pays the Greeks a high tribute,
lauding their religion, which, he says, had so elevated the popular mind with
salutary philosophy that it brought the human bodily development to its highest
peak of perfection.
S. R. Hopper, already quoted, says that
the lofty humanism of the Greeks
"attained a view of man that
was sane, balanced and 'human.' This wholeness and health of the Greek
perspective was grounded in wonder and in wisdom. The wonder of the modern
world, said Chesterton, is that the wonder of the world has gone out of
it."
Quoting Heraclitus' terse statement
that "man is kindled and put out like a light in the nighttime,"
Hopper says that "with sure intuition the Greek mind turned to this
element of permanence which forever transcends the flux, or founds it, and
established there its wisdom." "For all human laws are fed by one
thing, the divine," he had been assured by this same Heraclitus.
What John Addington Symonds says
about the influence of the revival of study of the Greek classics upon the
great Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth century in Europe will be
enlightening to all modern readers.
"The study of Greek implied the
birth of criticism, comparison, research. Systems based on ignorance and
superstition were destined to give way before it. The study of Greek opened
philosophical horizons far beyond the dream-world of the Churchmen and the
monks; it stimulated the germs of science . . . . and indirectly led to the
discovery of America. The study of Greek resuscitated a sense of the beautiful
in art and literature. It subjected the creeds of Christianity, the language of
the Gospels, the doctrines of St. Paul to analysis, and commenced a new era for
Biblical inquiry . . . . Since the reawakening faith in human reason,
reawakening belief in the dignity of man, the desire for beauty, the audacity
and passion of the Renaissance received from Greek studies their strongest and
most vital impulse."
These are words loaded with fateful
challenge to a decadent world blindly now seeking a secure path through its
darkness. It would seem that when a tribute of such splendid character and such
benignant influence in world history can be accorded a nation of
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people, the philosophy which both
expressed their greatness and made them great above other nations, should be
closely studied by the world for its present behoof. Writers assure us that
early Christianity would have died out in a generation if its fervors and
fanatical zealotry had not been tempered and rationalized by the introduction of
elements of the sage Greek philosophy, largely through that master of the Greek
Mystery religions, St. Paul.
Some idea of that balance of
philosophical acumen which saved the Greeks from sinking down, with India and
with Christianity, to abject self-mortification under false conceptions of the
body's "enmity" to soul may be gleaned from Fuller's analysis of
Greek thought in the Introduction to his History of Philosophy. The
Greeks aspired and longed to win the state of freedom and deathlessness enjoyed
by the gods; but they entertained no overweening fatuous notions that they
could magically overcome human mortality and rise to godhood by some simple
contemplative broodings, and the mental denial of the reality of the life here.
Referring to man, Fuller writes:
"For him to aspire to the
blessed and deathless life of the gods was to seek to usurp the divine
prerogative and was insolence of the worst sort. 'Seek not to become
Zeus; mortal things befit a mortal.'"
Again the Greeks balance and sanity
are shown in what follows this sentence. Fuller says he will in a moment have
to refer to another voice in Greek religion that defies this admonition, by
telling man that he is really divine and bidding him regain his Edenic status.
"But underlying the concept of
Pindar's--the idea that nature has called each form of being to a particular
station in which it must be contained, and has set upon it bounds which it must
respect if it would not go wrong and meet with retribution--is dominant in
Greek religious thought and fundamental in Greek ethics."
Here the Greek mind recognized that
if there was to be order and harmony in the universe, each creature had to be
held, though with freedom in its own allotted measure of self-initiated action,
to its own assigned sphere, which formed one unit in a greater cosmic
structure, the smooth working of the whole depending upon the steady action of
each component element in its proper place and
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function. If, so to say, any unit
along the line, in eager haste to reach the goal "toward which the whole
creation moves," stepped out of its place and rushed in reckless
impetuosity toward the head of the column, it was clear that chaos would be
precipitated in the world order. The over-avid unit would not only disorder the
whole progression, but would wreck itself in the mad endeavor. In the eternal
balance of things a wise restraint even on the most laudable motives was as
virtuous as the divine urge for the good life. What the Greeks sought always
was that golden mean between the excess and the deficiency of any good quality.
This is the stanchest principle of practical wisdom in the ethical code of
mankind. So again it is to the intellect that resort must be had when it is a
matter of deciding where lies that median point between too much and too little
of any element in a problem.
Rated high among earth's coterie of
greatest minds is the German poet-philosopher Goethe. He, too, and probably
from Greek sources, had caught the sane view of man's allotment among the
orders of created beings, and the necessity under which he labored to fulfil
his evolutionary task assigned by Fate. And in a beautiful poetic expression
he, too, warns against our striving and straining to "become Zeus" or
assail the kingdom of heaven by violence.
There is enough to know about the
earthly sphere;
The Beyond from sight forever is
debarred!
A man's a fool to grope with
blinking eyes,
Dreaming in clouds above his fellow
men.
Let him stand firmly here and look
around,
To the capable the world is never
dumb!
Why must he ramble through eternity?
First let him gain and utilize the
known!
Roam down the pathway of his earthly
days;
When spirits haunt him, let him go
his way,
Though at the moment still
unsatisfied,
Find joy or torment striding to his
goal!
And we have already heard Mr.
Brunton speak in derogatory terms of those socially useless contemplatives,
bent on reaching the bliss of Devanchan and the surcease of Nirvana "with
blinking eyes, dreaming in clouds above their fellow men."
An odd but logical way of stating
the ethical principle of the golden mean is given by the Jewish Medieval
scholar Maimonides:
135
"If there is any one who is, in
regard to principle, in equal distance from two extremes in all his doings, he
is called a wise man, a physician of the soul, because he restores her to
health and keeps her in the right course."
The great "weighing in the
balance," that equilibration of spirit and matter which ancient wisdom
declared to be the necessary basis of all progression, is well substantiated by
Fuller's exposition of the philosophy of Plotinus:
"The way of redemption is long
and gradual. It may take aeons of incarnation to traverse it, and there are no
short cuts in the long windings of its ascent. Sudden conversions,
shortcuttings such as seemed to be promised by the Mystery Religions,
irrelevant and premature ecstasies, reunions with the One in outbursts of
irrational emotion, have no place in the system. In the end, to be sure, the
soul will be wrapped away and united with the divine in an indescribable
ecstasy; but she must first pledge herself for that last flight by a long and
rigorous discipline, not only moral but intellectual. Without this long and
careful training she would not be strong enough to attain the heights upon
which redemption dwells, or to bear the splendors of the beatific vision these
revealed to her."
When one reads the literature of
nearly all the modern cults announcing and promising the rhapsodies of mystical
communion and the consummate genius of seership as the reward of a proffered
course of study covering a few months, one realizes how the venerable
philosophy of the ancient initiates and semi-divine teachers has been traduced
to banality. It has been travestied and caricatured into something matching the
modern run of magical mechanical gadgets that substitute inventive ingenuity
for real exertion. The rewards of steady devotion and achievement in the field
of spiritual progress are hardly to be overlauded. But the cults present an
unbalanced and an untrue picture of the possibilities in the case, deceiving
their followers with the prospects of quick results, which can hardly come save
in the course of many journeys of the soul through the incarnate valley.
Some of the more rabid schools of
cult indoctrination simply ignore the time element altogether, promising
climactic fulfilment and evolutionary consummation on the condition of
sufficient intensity of resolute determination, alleged to be achievable at any
instant the heroic will to its attainment can be mustered. This boldness
springs from the presumption that a quantitative experience
136
requiring longer time can be equated
by a heightened qualitative one, almost eliminating the time element as a
factor necessary for growth. It is a commonplace expression among devotees of
yoga philosophy that one can hasten one's evolution. If this means that
intensive effort, spurred by a fervent zeal for truth and light, and directed
by sound intelligence, can lead one most directly, without undue wasting of
time and opportunity, on to the steps ahead, it can be accepted as a rational
proposition. But if, as it so generally does, it expresses the belief that a
short period of practice of some prescribed run of meditations and yoga
exercises will obviate the necessity of the full development of every occult
potentiality and quickly elevate one to arhatship and Nirvanic consciousness,
it is of all follies the most treacherous and baseless.
The wise admonition of Plotinus
should be nailed on the walls of those cult temples to give their votaries a
sobering sense of their vaunting presumptions in this mighty science of the
spirit, which is infinitely more recondite and searching than they are ready to
believe. Most of them essay to reach the loftiest heavens without offering the
most elementary requirements on the intellectual side, which Plotinus, seconded
by Aristotle and Spinoza in particular, affirms are indispensable. The legend
has gained wide vogue that forces of consciousness asserted to transcend the
intellect will achieve in a trice what the imperfect intellect could not arrive
at in ages. Perhaps it could be agreed that of course the imperfect intellect
could not achieve consummative spiritual states, certainly not as long as it is
kept--imperfect. But the intellect can be perfected to high efficiency. And so
the semi-hysterical prodding of the spirit goes on in these groups, with
results that are really the proper subject of study in a psychiatric clinic.
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CHAPTER TWELVE
INTELLECTUAL LOVE OF GOD
Integrally related to the last
excerpt quoted from Fuller's work is a further exposition of Plotinus' thought,
which again dialectically relates the evolution of the soul to its mundane
environment and experience. It is profoundly true and basic for understanding:
"Furthermore, man has a body
and senses, and a sensible experience crowded with individual data, and it is
through perception that he gets his first contacts with the external world and
his first incentive to think. His intellectual processes are not
self-initiating and self-supporting. Sensible experience pushes the button that
sets the active parts of the intellect to work realizing the truth it
potentially contains. This operation consists in abstracting their common and
universal characteristics--in other words their forms."
This stands as one of the most
concise and compact statements of how soul grows from its contact with the
earthly realities in the midst of which it lives.
And an answer and rebuttal which
Fuller supplies to the arrant claims that the intellect is not of prime utility
in the redemptive process is quite noteworthy:
"If the will, then, were
enlightened by an accurate knowledge of the true good, it would spontaneously,
necessarily and freely prefer, choose and pursue it."
It has forever been contended that
knowledge is not in any case a guarantee of virtuous conduct, that we
continually do evil, knowing better. The alcoholic, for instance, knows full
well he ought not to drink, yet continues to do so. The spirit is willing, but
the flesh is weak, we say. But it is to be noted what Fuller precisely says
here: "if the will were enlightened by an accurate knowledge of the
true good." One may have knowledge, but still lack the rich possession of
an enlightened will. It is perhaps not so much true that the spirit is willing
and the flesh weak, as that the spirit, that is, resolute will made dynamic by
enlightened intelligence, is weak and the flesh willing. Nothing will stop the
human soul that is truly enlightened and its spirit fired with resolution!
For this reason and under such
condition, it may be conceded,
138
perhaps, that mere intellectual
knowledge may not galvanize the will into robust rulership of the desires,
impulses and passions, and it is unreasonable to expect that mental
acquaintance with a fact should work miracles of moral regeneration at one
stroke. The experience which time brings is always the final educator of the
will. It takes the play of all the four elements of consciousness in mutual
interaction over sufficiently long periods to settle a moral gain securely in
character.
But one thing is sure, and Fuller's
comment is right: the will will not spontaneously or automatically choose and
pursue the good until it has been enlightened by accurate knowledge. Or, more
surely still, it will not pursue the good, either freely or under evolutionary
pressures, unless it is enlightened. The most excellent aspect of fine
character is the dependable stabilized motive and sincere desire to do good.
But, as touched on before, the determination of what the good thing is brings
the problem ever back to the door of the intellect. A survey of the exalted
Greek philosophy would readjust the lost relation of values generally held to
prevail between good motive and the intellect in the field of ethical
philosophy today. All emphasis is placed on the disposition to do good, the
will to the good, the common assumption being that if one avows such excellent
disposition, it will insure a constant right choice of action. The intellect,
the knowledge which alone will determine what is the good thing, is only
incidentally taken into account. In the Greek analysis of the factors involved
in the life of goodness and virtue the intellect is virtually the sole, at any
rate the determining influence from first to last. Good intent and virtuous
disposition are a feeble and wobbly foundation for goodness, standing alone.
Good will is better than evil mind, it goes without saying. Nevertheless
goodness unshepherded by keen intelligence possesses no guarantee against blind
and erroneous action, unwitting blunder. Much of history's foulest inhumanity
has been perpetrated by people and parties ignorantly inspired by unintelligent
motives that were by them interpreted as good. Unintelligent "good"
purposes have splattered all the pages of history with lurid stains of blood. Goodness
is never safe from inflicting injury until it is also intelligent. The unctuous
proclivity of spiritual sects to slander the intellect has undoubtedly been
productive of immense evil in all ages of the world.
139
This matter is one of such general
and practical interest and concern and the subject of so much discussion and
Sabbath-school homiletics that it seems good to present what Fuller has further
to say in its elucidation. The world-soul, he says, is naturally predisposed,
or by evolutionary stress turned, toward the achievement of the good. He says:
"Descending now to man, we find
that he, too, is self-determined to the good. How contrary this is to religion,
which asseverates that man is by nature incurably evil! He can not choose or
will any course of action that he does not think, at the moment, will attain a
desired end and satisfy a want. But, unfortunately, the human will, unlike the
divine, is not enlightened and determined by an accurate knowledge of what the
truly desirable end and the deepest wants really are. Because of his material
nature and his attachments to the physical and temporal world, man has no clear
vision and no undivided love of the sovereign good. His eye is caught on every
side by the relative and contingent goods, satisfactions of the moment,
gratification of the senses, worldly success and the like, which divide the
life of which God is the proper object, and scatter it in a thousand
conflicting drives upon as many different satisfactions."
Commenting on the doctrinism of the
great Aquinas, Fuller says in the same vein:
"Since we have only an indirect
knowledge of its nature, gained by reason and revelation, our choices must
often miss the mark and lead us away from God rather than toward him."
And he gives the ultimate conclusion
of the ethical problem as Greek Platonism worked it out: "An evil choice
is simply a mistaken choice." Perhaps this must ever seem to us to be too
thin and abstract an analysis to be the truth. But this is because we see wrong
decisions acted out under the drive of such massive emotional impulsions that
we regard the motive as the gross evil rather than the principle involved in
the act. But after all, the wrong thing done was a decision or a choice made by
the intellect, or in default of it. The passion, the greed or the subtle desire
was only the force driving the intellect on to make its good or evil choice.
What was done ill was perpetrated by a miscalculation of the intellect. Sin
is therefore an error of the intellect. If intellect, better intellect, is
needed to correct those errors, how imbecile the philosophy which urges its
extinction that truth may flow in!
140
In the end, then, the mistake in
wrong action is much the same at base as the mistake in solving a mathematical
problem. And the attainment of proficiency in bringing off true good comes
ultimately through the cultivation of skill in the mental determinations of
right action. The modern mind needs badly to recover this insight of the Greek
wisdom.
An exceedingly sound view of the
need of philosophy in the counsels of the present, but by no means inapt to all
epochs of the historical period, is found in Romaine Hopper's The Crisis of
Faith, previously quoted:
"Scheler holds that the problem
of a philosophical anthropology stands today at the midpoint of all the
philosophical problems. Berdyaev goes farther and asserts simply that
philosophy is primarily the doctrine of man. It is easy to see that ethics
depends upon our understanding of the nature of man, and that the civilization
of any particular period is largely determined by it . . . . We are searching
today for a new humanism--for the recovery of an understanding of man in his
wholeness and completeness. In this larger and more intimate sense we need
desperately to be humanized."
He then laments the prevalence today
of an academic philosophy that in effect does not philosophize in the true
sense of the term, or in a way to affect our society beneficently.
"Philosophy as it has been
practiced has been one of the best ways of avoiding the issue. Philosophy also
has aimed at 'objective' truth. Philosophers have ceased to be lovers of wisdom
in the ancient sense, and in so far have stinted their true work in the
world through diminishing wisdom to science, their work has become esoteric and
detached. It touches the surfaces of life as little as possible, rebounding
into the speculative the moment it does so, like a toy balloon. Life is severed
from thought, and philosophers become specialists, men of science, men of one
knowledge. Philosophy has become what Nietzsche said it was--thought husbandry
(Denkwirklichschaft), a trade in thought."
Perhaps this is a little indefinite,
and provided thought be sound and good, one must hesitate to condemn
"trade in thought." Speculation need not be decried either, if it be
discerning and sifts out the chaff. Neither is esotericism to be outlawed. But
it is true that "life has been severed from thought;" perhaps rather
that thought has been severed from life. That, indeed, is largely what
141
this work is aiming to show in the
case of Indian philosophy: it virtually abstracts thought so far away from the
life in the world that it professedly seeks to destroy that life altogether.
At what tremendous risk the
intellect would be left out of the conscious life of individuals and society
can be graphically seen in the light of the two following statements, the first
from Susanne K. Langer's Philosophy in a New Key, the second quoted by
Alfred Korzybski from a work of Charles S. Pierce.
"For a single higher conception
can be a marvelous leaven in the heavy amorphous mass of human thought."
"It is terrible to see how a
single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's
head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery,
hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in
the fulness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual
plenty."
Imagination might be brought in to
aid us to realize that in fact, from the knowledge side, we enter life
practically blind, and live only vegetatively, by impulsive instinctual
reaction to experience, until the intellect begins to give us knowledge of
things, then of relationships to each other and to ourselves. These insights
that together go on to increase understanding may be thought of indeed as the
first windows which we are able to open out into the light of things, and at
the same time let light enter our house of consciousness, enabling us to walk
both within and without the house more safely and happily, without stumbling
and injury. Truly, as the Greeks and the Egyptians stated, we walk in a dark
cave until the light of rational understanding is generated by the glow of the
innate germinal divine mind within us. To decry the full development of the
intellect is to proclaim, hail and perpetuate the reign of darkness.
In his The Philosophy of Spinoza Richard
McKeon expounds the Dutch philosopher to the effect that "the real evils
of the world are not poverty, neglect, pain or any of the unavoidable accidents
of life, but the perturbations of the mind." As the whole science of
psychiatry, an enormous area of medical practice today, is grounded on
"perturbations of the mind," the significance of Spinoza's thesis can
be readily assented to.
That knowledge is essential to order
and happiness in life is
142
again testified to by another
eminent thinker, the philosopher-educator John Dewey.
"The construction of ideals in
general and their sentimental glorification are easy; the responsibilities both
of studious thought and of action are shirked. The affections, desires,
purposes, choices are going to endure as long as man is man; therefore, as long
as man is man there are going to be ideas, judgments, beliefs about values . .
. . But these expressions of our nature need direction, and direction is
possible only through knowledge. When they are informed by knowledge they
themselves constitute in their directed activity intelligence in operation.
A notable excerpt from McKeon's "Spinoza"
is quite apropos of the discussion.
"To act according to one's
nature and essence is virtue, but that is to act only in terms of adequate
ideas; therefore to act absolutely according to virtue is to act under the
guidance of reason. Virtue then is understanding, [This completely
accords with the Greek philosophy] and the endeavor to understand is in turn
referred to as the first and only basis of virtue, since it is identical with
the endeavor to preserve oneself."
This dialectic, already a most
telling refutation of mystical claims that ignore the intellectual function in
achieving blessedness, is grandly climaxed by a further development of its
implications:
"Virtue is to act according to
the laws of one's own nature; such action will further one's own power to act,
and the sign of that increased power is pleasure. Clearly virtue and pleasure
will be achieved most certainly if the mind acts always according to adequate
ideas. If one is to act best, all the difficulties of knowing the truth must be
faced . . . . To understand, then, is the absolute virtue of the mind."
All emotion, all passion, therefore,
comes from inadequate knowledge. Do we need any stronger peg on which to hang
our educational pleas? The Wisdom of Solomon (8:17) says that "to
be allied with wisdom is immortality. By means of her I shall obtain
immortality, and leave behind me an everlasting memorial to them that come
after me." Would any partisans of the mystic way argue that wisdom can
come otherwise than by mind? Could wisdom come if the mind was abolished,--as
India urges us to do?
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A point-blank denial of the mystics'
claim that supreme ecstasies and cognitions are open to man through a faculty
transcending the mind and functioning when mind is entirely put away, is found
in a statement by Dalton L. Scudder, in a work reviewing Tenent's theological
philosophy:
"Lastly, both intuitional and
mystical theology appeal to a specific cognitive faculty by means of which the
religious object is perceived. Analytic and genetic psychology does not find
any such unique faculty in the case of the milder type of religious experience;
and in the case of mysticism it is unable to distinguish this higher faculty of
cognition from the subliminal functions of the mind. Anaesthetics and happiness
both produce the cosmic consciousness and metaphysical revelations. No
antecedent reason is available to distinguish the latter revelations as
illusory and the former as veridical. Certainly no weight can be given to the
assertions of special faculty."
This stands as a forthright rebuttal
of the unfounded postulation that the intuitive faculty is a specifically
distinct power of consciousness above the intellect. As our argument has
expounded it earlier, what has been hypostatized by mystical enthusiasts as
such a super-faculty is only the more mercurial operation of the mind's own
power. In exalting supermind, they are exalting mind itself.
In dealing with the relation of
science and religion in his fine work, Religion in an Age of Science, Edwin
A. Burtt consummates his exposition with the following sententious declaration:
"Both have their being in the
human mind. Like quarrelsome brothers they must be brought to sit at the same
table; they can not be permanently insulated in separate rooms. Mysticism takes
one away from social life, takes thought away from earthly things and attaches
it to things beyond the temporary world. The ideal of flight into another world
of values than this of ordinary sense experience cannot really maintain itself
unpoisoned."
Here again the presuppositions of
mystical theory are met with a straightforward contradiction. And this rebuke
to such theory receives remarkable corroboration from Spinoza himself (Theo.
Pol. VI, iii, 85):
"But on the contrary, when we
know all things to be ordained and ratified by God, and the operations of
nature to follow from God's essence, and the laws of nature to be eternal
decrees and voli-
144
tions of God, we must perforce
conclude that we know God better and the will of God, in the degree that we
know natural things better and understand more clearly in what manner they
operate according to the eternal laws of nature."
Here once more the direction in
which our understanding must go to find the indices of God's nature and being
is exactly reversed from that in which the mystics would have us go. For the
philosopher says we will become the better acquainted with God's thought the
more we observe and reflect on natural objects.
Fuller dissertates on Plato's ideal
archetypal forms which are the projections of God's creative thought, giving
the great Academician's views that those forms existed in their pure and
perfect essence in the celestial or noumenal realms, and that earthly objects
distort and disfigure their pristine form and beauty. Aristotle veered somewhat
away from his master's view, asserting that the mundane objects were the
concrete embodiments of the primordial forms. Fuller says that the latter view
has gained against the Platonic. He says that some eminent scholars
"regard the forms not as metaphysical principles existing in and for
themselves apart from the sensible world, but as logical essences which are
enacted nowhere save in the particular objects exemplifying them."
He instances gravitation as such a
principle, saying that apart from the gravitating objects it has no enacted
existence.
"Nevertheless in spite of its
independence, in one sense, of its material embodiments, the Idea gets all its
punch and substantial being from the bodies that incorporate and enact
it."
This surely brings the concept of
reality back to earth in a form that can not be challenged. Apart from the
physical order ideal reality is an unrealized value. It can mean something to
creature consciousness only in its particular manifestations.
If we apply these considerations to
the relation of the Platonic Ideas to the sensible world, we find ourselves not
in a three-story but in a one-story universe. The only really liveable floor is
the ground floor. What we took to be an elevation of the house above the first
floor is only the extended plan of the first and only story. Fuller reports
Aristotle insisting that nowhere save in the material, sensible house has the
form and true being of the house positive existence. "The plan of the
whole house can be realized only in the material of which the house is built .
. . . The forms are no less true,
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no less valuable, no less the goals
of scientific and moral activity for being realizable only in material stuff of
the sensible universe." "The Forms are only the script of the play;
the presentations of them are only given on the plane of the flux of
sense."
Fulfilment of the highest longing
for love, then, is not to be attained by abstracting oneself from the world,
but in bringing the relations of love down into this enacted consciousness.
The direct statement that the ground
floor of the universe, the plane of physical embodiment of the noumenal types,
is the first and only story uncompromisingly blasts the inflated protestations
of the mystics that all true values and reality itself are to be caught only
when we have destroyed the ground floor and still somehow can manage to
maintain ourselves, sans sense, feeling and mind, in the ethereal tower above
all lower floors. It is permitted to ask them how they expect to uphold the
upper stories of their house after they have destroyed the lower ones. An upper
becomes such only by virtue of its resting upon a lower.
If the Forms of divine thought are only the script of the play, the divine Architect's ideal conception of his universe-to-be, and the physical objects are themselves those Forms now hardened to concretion in our world, then what Susanne K. Langer says about the function of our senses, so anat