SEX AS SYMBOL
The Ancient Light in Modern Psychology
BY
ALVIN BOYD KUHN, PH.D.
Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research
purposes. I can be contacted at pc93@bellsouth.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 works:
The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Tree of Knowledge, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes - But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Through Science to Religion, Creation in Six Days?, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy, A. B. Kuhn's graduation address at Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn's unpublished autobiography, Great Pan Returns.
"We have only just rediscovered the
precious stone;
we have still to polish it. We cannot yet
compete
with the intuitive clarity of Eastern
vision,"
-- C. G. JUNG: Integration of the
Personality, p. 41.
"All that can be said concerning the
gods must be
by exposition of old opinions and fables: it
being the
custom of the ancients to wrap up in enigma
and
allegory their thoughts and discourses
concerning
nature, which are, therefore, not easily
explained."
--HENRY O'BRIEN: The
p. 302--quoted from Strabo.
TO
ALL THOSE
WHO STRIVE TO SEE
THE MIND OF THE CREATOR
IN ALL THE WORK
OF HIS HAND
THIS
VOLUME IS
SINCERELY DEDICATED
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BRIGHT LEXICON OF DEITY 1
II. DRAMA BEARS MISSHAPEN OFFSPRING
12
III. AND GOD SPAKE UNTO MOSES 22
IV. THE GODS DISTRIBUTE DIVINITY 31
V. LOST DATA OF ANTHROPOLOGY 48
VI. "OLD CHILD" IS HIS
NAME 63
VII. THE TWO SUBTERRANEAN GROTTOES
83
VIII. IN PLUTO'S DARK REALM 98
IX. THE TWO MOTHERS OF THE CHRIST
111
X. IMMANUEL'S LAMP 124
XI. THE
XII. THE CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN
152
XIII. LIGHT FROM AN OLD LAMP 180
XIV. THE LANGUAGE OF LINGAM AND YONI
194
XV. PHALLICISM TRANSFIGURED 215
XVI. LOVE AND HATE 230
XVII. LOVE LOOKS BEYOND DEATH 245
XVIII. ROMANCE IN THE TRYSTING-TENT
260
XIX. THE
XX. WITH UNVEILED FACE 287
XXI. THE OIL OF GLADNESS 300
XXII. MY CUP RUNNETH OVER 322
v
CHAPTER I
THE BRIGHT LEXICON OF DEITY
In a very venerable document, Records
of the Past (XII, 68) we read that in remote days of antiquity geographical
mapping and local naming were instituted according to a plan which has almost
totally escaped recognition in our search for understanding of archaic culture.
It is said there that the names and localities were derived from the features
of an original uranograph, or chart of the heavens, and were transferred from
it to earth and applied to the geography of a country, with a distribution of
the names already localized in the empyrean amongst the places to be named,
according to a scheme of correspondence or analogy. It is declared that
"the mapping out of Egyptian localities according to the celestial Nomes
and scenery is described in the inscription of Khnum-hept, who is said to have
'established the landmark of the south, and sculptured the northern--like
the heaven. . . . He made the district in its two parts, setting up their
landmarks, like the heaven.'" In obvious corroboration of this method we
have the injunction given by deity to Moses in the Bible: "See that thou
make all things after the pattern shown thee in the Mount . . . the pattern of
the heavens."
Charts of the "Holy Land of
Canaan" have been uncovered in early
1
That this systematic procedure back
of primeval naming and topography had any remotest connection with two such
widely separated domains of human ideation as theology and modern
psychoanalysis has of course not been known. Yet it now looms on the horizon of
intelligence that the roots of these sciences are grounded in that ancient
practice. The connection appears superficially remote, but is in reality close
and direct.
It inheres in the basic cosmic
constitution of the creation, wherein the universe of total being, for the
purposes of manifestation or becoming, bifurcated into the duality of
subjective and objective, or spirit and matter. This is the procedure stated
precisely where it ought to have been, as the very first step in cosmic
creation--in the first verse of Genesis. Here it is proclaimed that the
first act in universal creation was the splitting apart of the unity of being
into its two facets or components, consciousness and objective reality. Most
aptly these two segments of whole being were allegorized under the terms
"heaven" for consciousness, or spirit, and "earth" for the
opposite node, matter. We have here the philosophical dichotomy of being, the
substrate of all life in the cosmos. Without the separation and opposition of
cosmic mind and cosmic body there could be no existence and no awareness of it.
Being would remain the Absolute, would remain asleep, if it did not rend apart
its totality into the twoness of polarity. Spirit and matter spring into
activity by concomitant stages of emergence from blank unconsciousness, and
each, so to say, generates itself and its opposite by mutual counteraction or
"hostility." For each is the counterfoil, the countervalence and by
reflection the counterpart of the other. Each is the fulcrum against which the
other can lift itself into reification. Hence intelligence is in the first step
of understanding instructed by the item of knowledge that spirit and matter, or
heaven and earth, mutually balance and mutually interpret each other.
Mind is the active agent, the
creator, and matter, the opposite energy, is the plastic substance of creation.
The two spring simultaneously into existence, the first impressing and shaping
the second
2
according to its original or
archetypal ideas. Hence all material creation is formed over the patterns of
heavenly or spiritual ideation. Divine thoughts may be said to be the molds
into which the energies of divine will pour the fluid essence of substance in
order to shape the universe projected in mind and purpose. Poured in while
liquid or plastic, the matter of substance crystallizes, solidifies, hardens and
thus brings into manifest existence the things of the visible worlds. Therefore
each created object bears the image of the thought that shaped it. Even man was
made in the image of his creator. The universe is the Logos of God, for it
reveals the form of the logical structure of the cosmos. It is the logical
structure concreted in matter.
If, then, the pervading oversoul of
the system wishes to communicate with the intelligences of gradated ranges of
lower being brought into function by its own initial activity, it is perforce
constrained, if not confined, to speaking in the language germane to and
commensurate with the lower ranges of consciousness addressed. For the
enlightenment of inferior by superior intelligence, such a language must be
constituted in the character and nature of symbols known or knowable to the
lower. Therefore higher intelligence must speak to lower in the language of
concretely known objects in the latter's world. Thus it is that the objective
world of any creature's life furnishes the characters and alphabet of the
language it is capable of comprehending. It is the office of the physical world
to provide the symbols which constitute language, for all language must be
concrete at base. There is not a word of remotest abstraction that does not
take its roots in some simply physical or mechanical process. As Carlyle says,
"Thy very attention, is it not merely a stretching toward?" To
express spirit itself, the terms used are all in the meaning of breath or air.
The human mind can conceive of abstractions, such as principles, laws, ideas,
realities of superphysical nature, only with the help of sensually known
objects or phenomena.
One of the most instructive truths
of all time was announced by
3
the great hierophant Hermes
Trismegistus of
"True, without falsehood,
certain and most true, that which is above is as that which is below, and that
which is below is as that which is above, for the performance of the miracles
of the One Thing."
Well had it been for the race of man
if the pertinence of this wisdom-laden pronouncement of the ancient sage had
not been obscured and lost when ignorance smothered sagacity in the third
century of the Christian era. For it embodies the basic principle of all human
culture. There goes with it as its corollary and necessary involvement the
great truth that an immediate analogy subsists between things seen and
realities unseen. It becomes in its primary cogency the key, as it is the
starting point, of all religion, philosophy, morality and psychology, not to
name such ancillary manifestations as mythology, anthropology, poetry, drama,
ritual, folk-lore and celebratory festivals.
The modern world has witnessed, if
somewhat stolidly, a remarkable phenomena. It has seen, perhaps not strictly
the renaissance, but at any rate the recrudescence, of three long buried and
discredited ancient sciences. These are alchemy, astrology and symbolism.
Neither of them has come back to vogue in the same aura of understanding in
which they were esteemed of old. They have reappeared in the modern day resting
on foundations that are for the most part pseudo or spurious. Their true nature
and rationale are by no means known as formerly they were. They rest now on
partial and imperfect theorization. Whatever they possessed of legitimate worth
before their repression has not been reintegrated in their recent resurgence.
Indeed it may be said with reference at any rate to astrology and symbolism
that whereas in olden times they stood grounded on scientific theses of
positive value, they now flourish largely through supposititious motivations.
Their original high science has not been resuscitated with them.
Our concern is definitely with
symbolism. While the rehabilita-
4
tion of this primary science is
still in its infancy, there are cheering signs that it is on the way to be
given more adequate recognition of its pivotal importance. It is one of the
indices of the waking of the modern mind out of the still-lingering obfuscations
of Medievalism that a new science of "semantics" is well started
toward a central place in mental procedure. Yet it is evident that current
understanding has far to go before it will have regained the ancient insight
that discerned in symbolism the prime methodology by which the mind can be
given any substantial degree of realistic grasp of the realities of higher
worlds. Nationalistic languages, with their fixed signs and coins of mental
imagery, are local and temporary. They come and go, and serve a partial segment
of humanity, locking each unit off in cultural isolation. Symbolism is the
one universal and omnipresent language, significant and meaningful everywhere. For
its alphabet is the world of ubiquitous nature. The tree, the seed, the leaf,
the serpent, the beetle, the cow, the fish, water, earth, fire, the flower, the
sun, the star and the dragon-fly deliver the same oration to penetrating
perception in any land. "Nature never did betray the heart that loved
her," sings Wordsworth. And again he adjures us: "Let nature by your
teacher." She can not misteach, for she can not tell two varying stories
of truth. She may indeed have a wide variety of ways of telling her story, but
they all converge eventually upon the one monogram of truth. Life, or God, has
but one law, as ancient sapiency affirms. But it deploys its manifestations out
to concretion in a practically limitless play of variation or differentiation
in the worlds of form. If there is unity, it is a unity behind or beneath an
endless variety. No single expression violates the canons of true meaning. All
things in their several ways illustrate and exemplify the universal, the
eternal. Truth in the absolute may be one. As such it has little
serviceableness for man, who is no dweller in the absolute, but is still a
citizen of the relative. Truth, in manifestation, is many-sided, has many
facets, comes to an epiphany or showing forth at many levels. Strictly, man's
concern is not directly with truth. His prerogative is to deal
5
with the many truths that confront
him, doing his best to rationalize them into an organic structure that
approximates a vision of truth from his level.
As man, made in the image of Creator
God, reflects the dual constitution of all being in his two aspects of mind and
body, consciousness and instrument, function and organism, there is immediately
at hand the ground of understanding the play of psychic forces in and through
his world. Psychology has stumbled along a dark path, blindly trying to find a
formula that would elucidate psychic phenomena in the life of man. Its failure
heretofore has been due to its ignorant insistence on taking man as a unit, or
as possessing a consciousness with but one single focus. It has not known that
it has to take man for what he is,--a generically dual creature, of soul and
body, each with a distinct life of its own and lived on its own plane.
Scripture has well indicated this broad differentiation of his two elements,
when it says that at death the body returns to dust, but the soul to God who
gave it.
6
race is of heaven alone." This
predicates for man a dual constitution, asserting that his body is a product of
earth and that his soul, or spirit, is from the empyrean, with the
unforgettable reminder that he is intrinsically, by virtue of the part of him
that subsists perennially whether in or out of fleshly body, of the race of the
dynasty of imperishable souls, fragments of God's own integral being.
The early Egyptians symbolized the
dual nature of mankind by a dramatization that is one of the sublimest and most
revealing of all ancient hieroglyphs, and whose relevance we should no longer
miss. They depicted man under the symbol of the sun standing, now at morn, now
at eve, on the line of the horizon. Masterly dramatic genius represented man by
the sun, because he has a portion of the sun's identic light, energy and
intelligence in his own being. "Every man has a little sun (of
intelligence) within him," was the averment of the Medieval "Fire
Philosophers," the Illuminati and Therapeutae of occult wisdom. Rather it
should be said that a part of man's constituent nature is a fragment of
the dynamic life of the sun. Precisely like the sun, too, he stands in
incarnation exactly on the horizon line in the evolutionary situation, at the
place where he is half in the heaven world of high consciousness and half in
the lower kingdom of matter, or on earth. "Head in heaven, feet on the
ground," was again the statement of the position occupied by man as
formulated by sage Egyptian knowledge. "Soul in heaven, body on the
earth," was a variant of the same description. Virtually man shares the
life of heavenly creatures whenever he lives in the uplands of his
consciousness, for heaven is a state of exalted consciousness and not a
locality spatially dimensionable. He need not be detached from his body to
enter that superior condition of reality. In the same way the bodily part of
his being partakes of the life of earth. He inhabits earth through the
connection established with it by his senses. Verily man stands on the horizon
line that divides heaven from earth, where also, conversely, the two segments
of his nature are linked together. He enjoys the lofty prerogative of standing
in two worlds at once, and he can pass over the borderline from one
7
to the other by the simple measure
of focusing his consciousness upon the body, or upon the world of noumenal
unseen realities. "The horizon is covered with the tracks of thy
passing," declares the Ritual of the great Book of the Dead. This
is a reference to the continued aeonial passing of the soul back and forth
between body and incorporeal existence for its incarnations. In variant Hebrew
figure, but with kindred meaning, we are the angels ascending and descending
the Jacob's ladder that links earth and heaven, as we emerge from the empyrean,
or fire-land of spirit, to enter earthly body, or reascend thither at the end
of each excursion into actual being. Also in minor relevance, there is implicit
here the meaning that we pass up and down over the boundary line every time we
shift the focus of consciousness from bodily, earthly, physical things to the
interests of ideality.
Standing on the frontier between the
two kingdoms of life, consciousness and objectivity, man is at the most
strategic point of vantage occupied by any creature in evolution. It is deeply
significant that Norse mythology locates man in Midgard, where from his
seat on middle ground he is able to be the two-faced Janus of Roman mythicism,
who stands thus at the opening door (janua) of his evolution and can
look backward over the yesterday of his past, stored in the basement of his
unforgetting subconscious mind, and forward prospectively to his oncoming
future. The Egyptians were not ignorant of this situation, for they make the
eternal pilgrim, the reincarnating soul, the bearer, collector and husbandman
of all the values gained in living experience, utter this terse statement
descriptive of its nature and its task: "I am Yesterday and I am Tomorrow.
The things that have been and the things that will be are in my womb."
Again the soul declares the fact of its everlasting peregrination through the
realms of matter and being when it exclaims, "I am the persistent traveler
on the highways of heaven." "Eternity and everlastingness is my
name," it says again. "The name of my boat is Millions of Years."
But from his midpoint of strategic
position he can, as intimated,
8
gaze out upon two worlds at once,
that of mind and soul in the higher reaches of his conscious life, and that of
sense and feeling in the bodily half of his constitution. Again
Here indeed is the substance of
spiritual ethics, and at the same time the genius and the rationale of modern
psychoanalysis. The unification of the two natures, allegorized as "the
two lands," in man is the entire sum, gist and essence of the effort of
religion in the world. It springs directly out of the basic situation that sets
the religious problem,--the duofold constitution of the human being, involving
a perennial warfare between the two elements, to end in an ultimate
reconciliation or atonement, symbolized by the "wedding" of Old and
New Testament representation, and the birth of the divine child of Christly
consciousness from the marriage. The age-long conflict waged between them till
the consummation of their alliance is the grossly misconceived Battle of
Armageddon, which, says the Book of the Dead, "is fought at
9
the carnal nature can cross the line
and affect the conscious life of the opposite compartment. Man is thus the only
creature in whose life there is the equal admixture of sense and soul. And, as
Browning has so well said--for the benefit of those who decry all things
material--
Nor soul helps flesh more now
Than flesh helps soul.
Soul and flesh must battle each
other through the aeon, for only by such mutual resistance are both able to
generate their potential energies into functional development. But the great
battle must end in mutual accord, since in the happy denouement of victory they
find themselves merged in each other's arms.
The great Armageddon battle, dragged
down from intelligible meaning as allegoric typism of human experience into the
nonsense of supposed objective history in the form of a titanic war of nations
on earthly fields of battle, has been contorted into a sorry caricature of its
true reference. It has held, and always must hold, a central place in any great
system of philosophy, being in Plato's system the mighty conflict between dianoia
and doxa, or true knowledge and "opinion," or between the
soul's unforgettable instinct for truth and the outer mind's mere notion of
things, governed by sense and external influences. Not only in the dominant
Greek philosophies was the struggle centrally related to the entire ethical and
spiritual life of man, but it was vividly depicted on the stage boards of the
Mystery Religions of the ancient world. There the Sun-God, or the
Christ-Messiah, was arrayed in battle with the Titanic or Satanic character,
temporarily overcome by him, to emerge as final victor in the end of the drama.
This outcome typified the eventual triumph of spirit over the thraldom of
matter. Nor is the great struggle less prominent in the Christian scriptures.
In great measure it pervades the whole context of Bible literature, in drama,
apothegm, parable and allegory, but is found in express statement in the
Epistles of St. Paul and elsewhere. The Apostle launches his spear of attack
against the "fleshly lusts which war against the
10
soul." And he appears to lament
his "wretched" human condition, subject to the sway of evil
propensity, when he fain would do good. He perceives "in his members a law
which wars against the law of" his mind, so that he cries out "Who
shall deliver me from the body of this death?" For, he has argued,
"to be carnally minded is death," and man is "dead" in his
trespasses and sins. "The interests of the flesh meant death; the
interests of the soul meant life and peace," he again admonishes. He lists
the weaknesses or vices of humankind as those predominantly which spring from
the promptings of the fleshly side of human nature, with sexual lust,
concupiscence, at the very head. And in his list of virtues that redeem the
soul to her heavenly estate he places continence and chastity at the summit.
11
CHAPTER II
DRAMA BEARS MISSHAPEN OFFSPRING
As said, the ground of moral
conflict in the dual nature of man has long been recognized in theology as the
war between Christ and Satan. Even in the form of the promised reciprocal
bruising of the head of the serpent and the heel of the Son of the woman, it
was understood as Christianity's historical moral battle in the inner nature of
man. But what has not been seen is the recognition that this same ancient
depiction of internal conflict in the bosom of mankind is at once the ground
condition of the comprehension of determinative phenomena in the realm of
psychology. Theology, had it stepped aside from mere intellectual approach and
formulations to investigate the phenomena of moral struggle on the side of
their symptomatic and clinical manifestations in individual reaction, would
have anticipated modern psychoanalytic purview and adopted its technique and
methods of treatment. Or, looking back from the present, modern psychoanalysis
would from the start have known itself to be but an extension of the legitimate
scope and range of theological influences. It amounts to saying, then, that
psychology, when adequately envisaged in relation to the basic content and
nature of its practice, is just a branch of theological religion.
Whereas moral stress, with its
concomitant emotional and intellectual strain, had been esteemed only a
province of religious influence and only loosely and unscientifically subsumed
under that head, being ascribed to motivations such as piety, faith, conscience
and authority, now it is being taken in hand by a secular interest, or science,
and brought under systematic investigation by a religiously neutral psychology.
What would have been--perhaps in
12
a measure really was--a true science
under ancient priestly control, was lost out of religious manipulation during
the fifteen hundred years of the Dark Ages and is only now, in the hands of
profane agency, regaining its pristine scientific character. Healing in general
has had much the same history, having been in antiquity a purely religious
function, but in later centuries emerging as a secular profession, retaining a
fringe of original religious flavor. Dreams, visions, trance, speaking in
tongues, "prophecy," were all formerly matters of religious afflatus,
esteemed generally as emanating directly from God, the gods or daemons. While
they are still accorded a semi-religious characterization, they have become an
integral part of profane science and are removed from the realm of phantasy
religionism, holding a place in the open field of scientific research.
Religion has done mankind little
service--rather a great disservice--in attempting to mark off his life in two
mutually hostile areas, one the holy ground of religion, and the other the
profane territory of worldly interest. The criterion of "holy" and
"sacred" thus employed to introduce a precarious standard of
worth-value in all of man's activities, has vilely misled and hallucinated the
mass mind of many generations. A true philosophy would confer on humanity the
inestimable boon of sanctifying the whole of its life.
This obliteration of a false
evaluation would by no means wipe away the keen intellectual differentiation
that subsists between man's two natures. The perception of difference in
nature, function and rank between the two components of human being need not
entail an unbalanced judgment of values. Unfortunately this is exactly what has
come to pass. The whole science of theology indeed is based on the relation of
the two natures in man to each other. The divine and the worldly elements are
commingled in his constitution, and no interpretation of scripture is possible
without a reference to the fact. Man is a soul and that soul is attached to a
body. But the ascription of "sacred" to the one and of
"sinful" to the other, however naturally it results from the
premises, came only by default of sage philosophical insight.
13
The mistake, which confused and
vitiated the whole view, came from holding the opposite characterizations as
absolute and not merely relative within the total picture. Here lay the germ of
an error which has erected its ugly head to warp and harry the thinking of
millions for sixteen centuries. The body was conceived as absolutely evil,
worldly, sensual, devilish, apart from any consideration of its obvious utility
and beneficence, indeed its indispensability, for all the purposes of normal
evolution. The body was condemned as the parent and ground of all evil in despite
of the knowledge that life could not exist without it. The soul received the
accolade of good character, while the body reaped the contumely of evil. Spirit
was claimed the all-good, matter its enemy. The entire enormity of the ascetic
fanaticism that swept early Christianity like a pestilence arose out of these
philosophical aberrancies.
Drastic correction of misguided
assumption in the case is pressingly needed. Neither matter nor body is to be
flouted as evil. They are not even relatively evil. They are essential parts of
the total good. They are equally as necessary to the ultimate aims of evolution
as is soul itself. Each side of the polarity is impotent without the
countervalence of the other. The evil ascription is only the shadow of
erroneous thought falling upon a thing the function and the ultimate
beneficence of which have been misconstrued through the sheer warping of vision
and the mis-reading of ancient drama. The secret of this gigantic folly comes
to light when it is known that ancient ritual dramatism and allegorism, in
order to portray matter and body in their role of evolutionary service, had to
represent them in their function of providing polar opposition to the force of
spirit-consciousness. For they are the opposite node of the spirit-mind. They
form the negative cathode to spirit, the divine anode. Hence they had to play
the dramatic role of the "opposers" of constructive and creative
mind. But--and here is the core of the miscalculation which led to their
aspersion and disparagement as evil forces--ignorance later construed their
polar opposition in the terms of absolute enmity. As intelligence flew out of
the win-
14
dow, calamitous misconstruction flew
in at the door, and there it has dwelt ever since, defiling the hall of man's
mind in religion with its vile contempt for matter. The stabilizing and
balancing power that holds spirit to the performance of its function was foully
besmirched with philosophical disdain. Shallow minds could not grasp matter's
function as the twin of spirit without falling into the error of imputing evil
to it. Because body had to stand at the opposite side and counterbalance spirit
to give it localization, focus and a point d'appui for the exercise of
its own positive qualities, narrow insight held it in depreciation as the
opponent or enemy of spirit. From being represented dramatically as the
necessary foil or balance of spirit, it became the hostile force, the enemy of
soul. And down on its innocent head tumbled the whole weight of obloquy of
millions of fanatic minds in many religions, notably Christian and Hindu,
piling on it the accumulation of their malignant derogation. Under the lash of
this mad persuasion the poor body of man had to endure the agony of centuries
of brutal crucifixion and mortification in the alleged interests of the divine
soul, which, it was fatuously believed, could not unfurl its wings of ecstasy
as long as the least tinge of bodily enjoyment glued them fast to earth.
When it is seen how the frightful
corruption of understanding, occasioning the hallucinated folly and torture of
millions over the centuries, could ensue as the result of a mere and seemingly
slight misconstruction of the elements of a dramatic depiction of a
philosophical principle, it behooves sincere scholarship to examine the point
with searching care. The blunder was superinduced by the subtle requirements of
dramatic portrayal. To represent the opposition of polarity, spirit and matter
had to be pictured at war with each other. To carry profounder esoteric meaning,
they had to be outwardly represented as battling each other. They had to be
shown as "enemies" seeking to overcome each other. The sad outcome,
for less capable mentality, was that the opposition was remembered, and the
less concrete truth of polarity was lost. The deeper signifi-
15
cance of the opposition of matter to
spirit, and its truly beneficent function in providing spirit with the
resistance it needed in order to cause its latent powers to manifest
themselves, were forgotten. The opposition of matter to the good purpose had
never adequately or decisively been translated over into the terms of a
salutary and beneficent service to the final goal of good. Spirit could not
operate and evolve within the vacuum of its own unopposed inanition. It is by
itself but one half of a polar duality, totally inactive until confronted by
the necessity for active energization against its opposite tension. It could
not deploy its own hidden powers until it was challenged to do so by the
opposite pull of negative matter. Only when linked to matter do its latent
energies come into action, and its own potentialities find overt expression. It
remains wholly helpless or "dead" until the opposition of matter
summons forth its divine qualities to their awakening.
But this intelligent conception of
matter's utility was swamped in that avalanche of ignorance which swept over
philosophy from the fatal third century onward, and was replaced by the sorry
misinterpretation of its function which cast the dark shadow of religious folly
over the whole Medieval mind for centuries. Drama had done its best to fortify
the mind with the just conception of the true place and function of matter and
body in the evolutionary scheme. But the educative purposes of drama miscarried
when the representation ran afoul of massed ignorance and was shattered into
gross misshapen forms. The religious mind lacked the acumen requisite to the
task of understanding that matter had to play its role in the cosmic drama
opposite to spirit without earning thereby the stigma of evil character. It was
unable to discern the true good of matter's service beneath the outward
disguise of spirit's opponent. The mistake made was exactly comparable to what
would be the case if an audience, after witnessing a theatrical play, would
continue to attribute to the actor playing the part of the villain the same
permanent character which he merely personalized for the performance. The
Christian world became so drugged with sin-
16
consciousness that it forgot to
redeem the ritual personifications of good's necessary opposition from the
stigma of evil outside the drama.
It is now clear that the balanced
relationship of the anima of the body and the ego of the man within its
confines in one flesh is not only the ground determinant of the whole of man's
religious interest, his philosophy and moral effort, but that it becomes
specifically the basis of the great human problem of psychology as well. Even
more particularly it becomes the central situation activating the play of the
phenomena manifesting in the realm of psychoanalysis. In brief it can be stated
that when there is mutual compensation, harmonious energization, involving
constant accommodation and readjustment, between the two claimants for
possession of man's body and faculties, there will be the highest degree of
peace and happiness pervading the whole organism. And when there is a failure
in the achievement of this harmonious relationship between the two, there will
be a discord manifested in inner and outer neurotic conditions, psychic
disturbances and eventual bodily disease. In fine, the practical outcome of all
study of psychology, if such study is to save itself from futility, must be the
discovery of the forces in both the physical and the spirito-intellectual sides
of man's life that establish, or, conversely, mar the mutually harmonious
accord in motive and purpose of the two natures composing the human. If Goethe
has sounded a true philosophical note in his affirmation that "two souls,
alas, contend within my breast apart," waging a warfare for dominance over
the sphere of his interests and activities, then the point of ultimate
knowledge and wisdom for mortal man is to discover the terms on which the two
contestants can find a platform of agreement and happy mutuality. For in the
end, as
17
at the same time it is the
psychoanalytic "integration" of the diverse warring elements within
the ego consciousness.
There comes forcefully to mind at
this point that enlightening declaration of the Demiurgus, Jupiter Cosmocrator,
or world architect in the Orphic Greek system, given in Plato's Timaeus, as
rendered by Proclus in his majestic work on The Theology of Plato, as
translated by Thomas Taylor. It is the recording of the speech made to the
legions of angels who were being charged with the message and import of their
prospective mission to earth to become the souls or egos in the highest animal
creatures and to lead them across the area of human evolution to its
culmination at the foothills of divinity in the end of the aeon. The World
Framer outlines their aeonial task and assures them, as requital and
consequence of their successful performance of it, that they will gain immortal
status: "You shall never be dissolved." He instructs them as to the
dual composition of their natures when in the body and says that in the mortal
part there will be buried the seed of an immortal nature, through the growth of
which they will achieve immortality. He tells them that he will himself furnish
the "seed and the beginning" of the immortal part within them, and
that it is then their business to do the rest, to cultivate, nourish and
fructify this seed germ of the imperishable divine. Then occurs the phrase
which elucidates with vivid succinctness what should have been the constant
beacon-light to guide man's evolution throughout history, the clear manifesto
of the mission of souls on earth: it is their task "to weave together
mortal and immortal natures." This pronouncement should have rung with
anvil clearness on the good hard intelligence of man on earth and should have
galvanized his whole worldly striving into the crisp lines of conscious
direction of effort to achieve this goal of a unification of the two contending
beings within his own life. If it had been his common knowledge that he must
ever strive toward this consummation of a reconciliation between his soul life
and his sense life, surely there could have been entertained some sound
expectation that he might have passed from
18
blind groping along his path to a
more skillful concentration of his endeavors upon the object of life. Could the
great objective have been fixed in general knowledge and purpose, it may be
assumed that the course of human history for the last two millennia would have
exhibited something nobler than the nearly untamed sway of animal propensities
in human affairs. Some actual gain might have been registered in the transition
that must eventually take place from subjection of human conduct to brutish
selfishness over to direction by reasoning mind, the Lord of Life. But the
knowledge and the capacity to be thrilled to apply it conscientiously in
history were alike swept away by the deluge of fanatical ignorance that
submerged esoteric wisdom after the third century.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead states
that the ego in the man will bring together "the two sisters of the two
lands," that he "does away with the enmity which is in their
hearts," and will unite them in the bonds of friendly union.
History is just the record of this
"battle of Armageddon," in which the issues of the internal moral and
spiritual conflict between the soul of the animal man and the infant
Christ-mind in evolving humanity will be pitched from the subjective inner
sphere of motivation out upon the plane of physical activity and event. The
doings of kings, armies, legislatures, assemblies, mobs, parliaments, courts,
tyrants and heroes are but the precipitation of the issues of the inner
subjective conflict from the sphere of mental, emotional, sensual or spiritual
origin out upon the stage of overt concrete act. History is the record and
study of these myriad events in their collectivity.
Psychoanalysis works primarily and
practically with the individual. But the problem and the situation are the same
as in man collectively. His outward conduct is the crystallization of the
elements of his inward conflict upon the surface of his life as manifest
19
in his body and in his acts.
Causation arises from the world within, but comes forth in response to
provocation from external occasion. It proceeds from conscious, or unconscious,
inner motivations outward to register its nature in a physical deed or
formation. Plotinus has well phrased it when he says that the inner life of the
soul "publishes itself by the beauty of its works." But likewise,
during the period of its ignorance in infancy, and until it has gained the
poise of wisdom and the love of beauty and goodness, it will also publish the
whimsicalities of childish waywardness and crudity, by the ugliness of its
works.
As man is a miniature replica of the
universe, or what the ancient sages called the Heavenly Man, he, like the
universe, is composed of soul and body in a conjunct relationship, the one, the
soul, functioning within and sustained and nourished by, the other, the body,
precisely as the fiery energy of the candle flame is fed and fueled by its
power to transform the gross elements of its physical substrate into the
likeness of its own glorious soul of fire. This is precisely what St. Paul says
the Christ-soul in us will do to our "vile" bodies, changing them "into
the likeness of his own glorious body." Pope in his terse couplet has well
reminded us of this our basic constitution--if we are made in God's image:
All things are parts of one
stupendous whole,
Of which the body Nature is, and God
the soul.
God, considered for the moment apart
from body and as spirit or mind, is the soul of the universal Being, and
nature, the visible manifest universe, is his body. So man is a soul,
and he, too, has his body. As man is thus a little or miniature cosmos
(microcosm), having his being as one cell within the milieu of the larger
cosmos (macrocosm), he is placed, as the Egyptians so well intimated, on the
border territory, or horizon line, facing the world of nature, the body of
the macrocosm, on the one side, and its invisible soul, the hidden mind
and spirit of the universe, on the other side. And as the outer form reflects
the nature of the hidden conscious creative
20
idea, so, as says Emerson, "man
stands midway betwixt the inner spirit and the outer matter. He sees that the
one reflects and reveals the other, and he becomes a priest and interpreter of
nature thereby." Nature is the mirror of the soul. Paul confirms this in
his remarkable statement that that which may be known of God is manifest.
For, he says, the "invisible things of Him from the creation of the world
are clearly seen, being understood from those things which are made." You
can read God's mind from the observation of his works. God's stupendous
physical body took form over the lines of his primordial creative
thought-forms. For body is formed from the final deposit of matter or substance
in the matrix or mold constructed by divine mind. Soul builds, or as we should
say, out-builds body. The soul, seated within the inner "ark" of
finely attenuated bodies of sublimated matter--"spiritual bodies," as
Paul assures us we possess--projects vibratory radiations outward, carrying the
form and nature of her thought, and these impact upon plastic matter and throw
it into the mold of the idea pattern, where it later hardens. In The Faerie
Queen Edmund Spenser puts this so clearly in his memorable distich:
For of the soul the body form doth
take;
For soul is form, and doth
the body make.
Both the macrocosm and man, the
microcosm, are composed of soul and body. And in every case the body reflects
the mood and mold of the soul that energizes it.
We now have the background to
understand the function of symbols, the enormous part they are now again seen,
as of old, to play in the developing culture of the creature man, as the amber
of meaning preservation and the agents of meaning transmission from mind to
mind.
21
CHAPTER III
AND GOD SPAKE UNTO MOSES
The study is led, then, directly
back to the primary formula of understanding which ordains that as cosmic
creative thoughts shaped the objects of the physical worlds over their patterns
or forms, each object is thus the concrete image of the archetypal idea
originally projected in God's mind, but now manifest to the conscious creature
man through his open senses. Every physical thing or phenomenon is then a
symbol, or the symbol, of the ideation that shaped it. And the primal language,
as well as all later language, is thus--symbolism. The concrete object must be
the only true and perfect symbol of an idea, since it is that idea
crystallized in visible substance before the eye. A picture presented to the
eye is ever the most vivid form of bringing an idea of a distant scene before
the mind.
Symbolism is the language of utmost
clarity and impressiveness, since through a symbol one mind gives another the physical
picture of the thought or idea to be conveyed. And the pronouncement of
culminative importance in the elucidative introduction to valid determinations
is the discernment that if mind on a higher plane, or the mind of a creature
higher in evolution than another (as man above the dog, or the gods above man),
desires to communicate intelligence to mind of lower rank, it must perforce use
as its medium of conveyance the objects known to the lower intelligence in its
world. Higher mind must employ the physical symbols drawn from the
objective world of the lower creature, if it would represent the forms of the
thought it wishes to transmit. Therefore the unconscious must employ in its
efforts to speak to the lower conscious mind of man, the language of nature
symbols. They would be in
22
man's known world the starting point
from which rudimentary meaning could proceed.
It is no overweening gush of
perfervid imagination to assert that the modern re-discovery of the unconscious
is a far greater event in world history than the invention of the airplane or
even the radio. It marks one of the long strides western humanity must take to
lift itself out of the dismal murks of the still lingering Dark Ages. All
merely physical conquests, all acquisitions of mechanical control of cosmic
forces, are both useless and dangerous unless accompanied by the equal
enhancement of inner intelligence, self-discipline and moral refinement.
Material forces become frightful menaces if their human manipulators are
neither wise nor disciplined enough to direct their use into beneficent
channels. Man's magnificent discoveries of nature's powers can all too readily
be made the instruments of his own destruction. If his philosophical
intelligence and discretion do not keep ahead of his discoveries, he may be
doomed.
The scientific recognition of the
unconscious is one of the steps necessary to be taken if human life is to be
redeemed from the throes of haphazard ignorant groping along the evolutionary
path to some larger measure of directed progress through knowledge and
understanding. Appalling in its revelation of the bondage to superstition under
which the human mind has labored through lack of this datum, the discovery is
also heartening in the prospect it announces of escape from superstition in the
future. A thousand obscure or darkly mysterious motivations of conduct of men
and nations, which had to be ascribed formerly to animism, fetishism,
possession, devil instigation, demoniac obsession, witchcraft, glamor and the
like, may now be assigned to the operation of forces uprushing from the
subterranean depths of the unconscious in the individual himself. And these forces
may, as technical interpretative skill develops, be traced to their deep lair,
brought out to observation and studied to the end of rectification and
intelligent control. The restoration of the unconscious to knowledge is the
harbinger of a brighter day for human culture, civilization and happiness.
23
But its discovery--good omen as it
is--has not yet brought with it a full knowledge of its nature and function,
its origin and place in the economy of human evolution, which would vastly
increase the practitioner's adeptness in handling psychopathic cases. The
professional knowledge of it in these respects is as yet hesitant, groping and
tentative or hypothetical, in the main. The modern world of academic
intelligence may be astonished to hear it said that the ancient sages and
philosophers had ample knowledge of the unconscious and dealt more or less
directly and scientifically with it in character stabilization. It was to them
an aspect of philosophy, even religion, and was an integral ingredient of an overall
philosophical attitude and practique, rather than a detached branch of
psychology. The study and treatment of the psyche stood then in far more
intimate relation to philosophy than it does now.
It has been intimated in a
preliminary way that symbolism must be the language used by the mind of a
higher being in the communication of ideas to a lower intelligence. It is this
vital deduction that stands as the basis of the next great scientific
announcement in the field of psychology: symbolism is now known to be the
language employed by the unconscious to impart its ideas to the conscious mind
of the individual. At once the inference from the premises inspires the
question: Is the unconscious then the mind of some being higher than the
personal human? Where is there such a being operating in relation to man? What
is the nature, how is it placed in superior status to man, and how is man
reduced to a position of subserviency and tutelage under it?
Psychoanalysis has deemed that the
unconscious is an epiphenomenon of man's total functionism, an expression of
his life conditioned to play a subterranean role in the area of motivation and
conduct, and uniquely and specifically generated in pre-conscious childhood to
be a life-long agent of underground influence upon the outer life. One theory,
and that of the founder of psychoanalysis himself, is that it is composed of
the native instincts of the animal-human psyche that have been driven
underground by repression.
24
It is the compound of all that one
would naturally like to do, but by conventional taboo, dare not. It is composed
of the repressed motivations that the individual has put out of his mind, but
which he can not put out of his deeper being, and which from time to time reach
up from out those deeper wells of natural incentive in dream or trance.
The entire apprehension of the
rationale of the unconscious has limped along in gross incompetence because the
ancient knowledge of the essential dualism in man's constitution has been lost
or ignored. It must now be realized that only in the light of that basic
dualism can the nature, place and function of the unconscious be understood.
The Bibles of antiquity, venerated
almost to the point of fetishism, have, strangely enough, received a meed of
worship which they have hardly merited, yet failed to receive credit for
containing truly supernal wisdom and the profoundest scientific knowledge.
Accepted largely as books of superhuman origin and contents, they have fallen
short of recognition of the sound principles of true philosophy which they
present. They, for instance, deal voluminously with the element in man's
psychic constitution which is now classified as the unconscious. Plato likewise
discourses upon it, but both Paul and Jesus, speaking from an appreciation of
Mystery dramatism, and even John, delineate its origin and status in the human
economy of consciousness. Each has a statement which, with numberless others of
similar import, outlines its basic character. Paul gave it in his statement of
man's dualism: "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second is the
Lord from heaven." This is paralleled in its companion passage: "The
first Adam was made a living soul; the second Adam was made a quickening
spirit." John's averment that the Christos is "that bread which came
down from heaven, that if a man eat of it he shall hunger no more" posits
the higher personage in the dualism, the divine dweller within the body. Even
the Christian creed speaks of the divine element in man, "who for us men
and for our salvation, came down from
25
heaven, and was made man." The Covenant--the
"broad oaths fast sealed" between the Deity and his sons sent to
earth--has been noticed in Plato's Timaeus, wherein the Demiurgus
promised to plant a heavenly seed of immortal consciousness in the mortal self
of man on earth. But Jesus himself comes forward with a decisive declaration
that he, the Christos, is that seed of immortal life, that Lord from above,
that spirit that descends upon man from the overworld, that heavenly bread of
life that, he says, must be "eaten" by man if he is to be lifted to
the race of the immortals and end by becoming gods. (All the mighty relevance
and truth of these affirmations have been lost for centuries on western
objective-mindedness by the application of them to the Christ as a man and not
to the Christos as the saving principle of divinity gestating for its birth in
human consciousness universally.) In an early chapter of John's Gospel in the
New Testament the dramatic character of Jesus, speaking to his disciples in
their character as natural human beings, and speaking of himself as that
consciousness sent down from above to be their Immanuel, makes a pronouncement
which should long ago have carried basic enlightenment to a Christendom groping
in darkness. He says: "Ye are from beneath; I am from above." This is
perhaps the most sententious and instructive verse in the scriptures, certainly
the most definitive and clarifying. It tells mortals that on their human and
bodily side they came up from beneath, from the animal orders through the long
development of something approximating "Darwinian" evolution of forms
and structure. And it adds to this the priceless datum that, while the body of
man comes to the human estate through this upward line of development from
simple to complex form, there is another part to him that did not reach its
superior status through the experience of a line of growth in the present life
of the race--surely not in unconscious childhood--but is an element that has
become conjoined with the mechanism of the animal brain and nervous system, by
a virtual "descent" from a loftier plane of being. This higher
element did not come "up" from rudimentary state to unfolded
26
powers in the short life of the
individual now in body. On the contrary it was already "up" above the
level of man's register of consciousness, and "came down from heaven"
to tenant for seventy or eighty years the conscious world of the individual's
experience. It did this for two reasons, as expressed by Plotinus: "to
develop her own powers, and to adorn what is below her." In these words
the philosopher means to say that she (the soul, treated as feminine) comes to
earth to continue her own evolution through further experience in the concrete
world, and conjoins with this effort for her own growth the undertaking to lift
up the animal species by a tutelage of its members whose bodies it overshadows
by an immanent attachment of its forces to the organism itself. Even modern
biological science, particularly as stated by Sir Alfred Russell Wallace,
co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of evolution, has positively asserted
that there has nowhere been discoverable in the life of any animal species on
earth a body of experience which could have developed in animals the faintest
germ of reasoning mind. Yet man, physical, tops the ladder of evolution on the
planet and crowns the animal's development with its most complex and
differentiated organs and functions. And in man there suddenly flashes out the
light of memory, imagination and "godlike reason," with the outburst
of human life. The circumstances confronting us in this situation force us to
recognize the truth, heard in Greek philosophy, reiterated in our own
scriptures, yet never solidly grasped, that the element that introduced
intellectuality and spiritual aspiration into the motivations of the highest
animal coming up "from beneath" was an imperishable nucleus of divine
selfhood, a veritable Son of God, a unit fragment of God's own mind, that by
vibrational and other capabilities of organization and nature could "come
down from above" and be linked by a kinship of registry with the higher
potential capacities of the human mind. Our revered, but latterly disdained and
never capably understood, scriptures have been shouting at us greater truth
than we have had the acumen to appreciate.
27
The Christos, coming first as
"a little child," the Krist Kind of the Germans, the Jesu
Bambino of the Italians, was born into the nature of man generically. He
came to share our life, as all sacred books testify, and so he was that seed of
immortal nature that the Demiurgus promised he would implant in us when the
animal side had risen from beneath to the point of refinement of structure and
sensitivity of feeling at which it could register the play of the vibrations of
a truly spiritual, divine or Christly mind. At this point, reached when animal
development had approximated the brain refinement of the first humanity, this
seed of God's own mentality was implanted, linked, coalesced within the
potential unfoldment of the animal's life. More and more of his inherent
capacity for superior genius and goodness was to be developed into manifest
expression as upward progress further refined and sensitized the mechanism of
consciousness. Incubated at first as a mere seed of later growth, coming
gradually to birth as the Christ-child, his powers and faculties slumbered
long, as do the powers of the human infant. The analogy is perfect and quite
illuminating; the infant divinity in us slumbers long in latency, in dormancy,
in unconsciousness, before awakening to recognition of his own innate
endowment. But experience in the outer world gradually evokes latent power into
conscious expression. His faculties are awakened to activity and their keenness
is sharpened. He becomes master of his powers and conscious of his high
destiny. But long he dwells within the unconscious area of the individual
personality, the unknown guest within the mortal house. And he is "the
unconscious" of the psychoanalysts.
He comes to link his life with the
human in order to continue his own quest of life more abundant, the eternal
prerogative of all living creatures, and, secondarily, "to adorn,"
that is, to beautify, spiritualize, divinize, "what is below him," as
Plotinus says. His Covenant oath, given at the time of his departure from
celestial kingdoms, bound him to lift up the animal race. This feature of
ancient teaching is clearly expressed in Jesus' statement, "if I be
28
lifted up, I will draw all men unto me."
Though he stands a full grade above the animal whose body he tenants, he, too,
is marching along in the line of ongoing, and must dip again and again into the
worlds of sense in order to grow further in stature. Indeed he expressly tells
the animal human in the Biblical allegory, the mortal who comes first as his
forerunner and way-opener, that he must come under the baptism of the lower
nature. That is to say, he must undergo the carnal experience in a body which
is seven-eighths water. And, be it affirmed with certitude at last, this is the
only water of baptism ever referred to in any doctrine or ritual of religion!
The animal human is that faithful servant-beast on whose back he is borne in
the end up to and within the gates of the Holy City of full-blown divine
consciousness, or "Jerusalem" above, while the multitudes acclaim his
triumph with exultant hosannas.
It is not too strong an assertion to
declare that the true renaissance of human culture has waited long, and still
waits, upon the general recognition of the presence and the nature of the
indwelling child of divinity within the core of conscious being. The thought
and philosophies of modern man in the west are afflicted with the age's
predilection for mechanistic theories of causation. It seems impossible that
the tendency to view soul activity and phenomena as products of bodily function
and therefore destined to vanish with the demise of the body can be overcome by
the rebirth of ancient knowledge, which took the soul to be an independent entity
that detaches itself from union with body at the latter's disintegration,
retires to mansions of spiritual being and returns in due time to build up a
body again. Recreant to this fundamentum of primeval wisdom, the modern age
persists in maintaining its philosophical position on the wholly untenable
ground of a veritable worship of ancient scriptures combined impossibly with a
rejection of the basic anthropological datum on which alone the true
interpretation of those scriptures can be made and their true meaning
understood. Modern mentality thus stands on the precarious platform of
attempting to use as its guiding light the ancient scriptures whose
29
fundamental theses it stubbornly
repudiates. Thus it has come about that for sixteen centuries the light that
shines in those scriptures has been darkened and nearly extinguished. The holy
writ of the sages of antiquity deals with the history of those fragments of the
God-mind, those Sons of God who undertook the commission of becoming human
souls on earth. And modern religious philosophy attempts to utilize this
munificent literary gift as the prime inspiration for culture--by denying the
very existence of those same souls. Meaningless is the reverence and hollow
worship paid the great scriptures, the true sense and message of which is
completely blocked off from comprehension by the obdurate blindness of
traditional view. While a veritable fetish worship is offered up to these
venerable documents, it is insidiously undermined by the treachery that refuses
acceptance of the fundamental theses and premises by means of which alone the
full gospel of their truth-telling can be brought to the light of
understanding. And this interior self-contradiction of attitude has stood, and
will continue to stand until rectified, at the causative center of the world's
delirium of philosophical confusion. When the world returns to sanity it will
be achieved through the recapture by intelligence of the substrate of archaic
wisdom which fortified the mind with the definite knowledge that there was in
man a conscious entity distinct from the body, yet consubsistent with it,
capable of accumulating and preserving to perpetuity the values won by living.
Until this knowledge is restored there can be little more than a continuance of
the world's groping and stumbling in the twilight.
30
CHAPTER IV
THE GODS DISTRIBUTE DIVINITY
It is an axiom of Greek philosophy
that in the vast hierarchy of beings and intelligences from supreme Deity down
to man each god is as it were a cell unit of the life of one superior divinity
and that the total company of such cells comprising the body of the higher lord
multiplies, magnifies and "distributes" the life of that more exalted
being, in seed form, out over a wider range of creative activity. In this
formulation Greek philosophy quite fully agrees with St. Paul, who says that we
are all members of one body, of which Christ is the head. It seems difficult
for world thought to grasp realistically the cogent force of this teaching. All
living creatures are the component atoms in the life or body of some
tremendously greater being, who lives and moves in and through the activities
of his constitutive elements. Precisely as the oak renews and expands its total
life by the generation and distribution of the seeds of its own being, so a
larger unit of life produces in potential form a multiple progeny of its own
kind in order thus to expand its own measure of total being.
But each fragmented son of parent
being must start from seed potentiality and through a long process of growth
eventually bring its separate life back to the level and completeness of the
progenitor. Thus it comes that life proceeds from the Father and returns unto
him again. Obviously the life of the son is a part of and "in" the
life of the parent, and equally the life of the parent is "in" that
of the son. As the life and being of the progenitor is latent in the seed,
until it is finally brought to awakened consciousness in the later stages of
growth, there is implicit here the entire explanatory formula for understanding
the presence and nature of the uncon-
31
scious in man. The unconscious is
just the unawakened being of the higher parental life and consciousness of
whose unitary selfhood the individual man is one organic cell.
There occurs in a sentence in an
enlightening late work of psychoanalysis by a practicing clinician of wide
experience and deep insight into the science a single word, which falls with
the aptest, though with perhaps altogether unsuspected, relevancy into the
context and support of the thesis of the unconscious here expounded. The work
is The Recreating of the Individual, by Beatrice M. Hinkle, M.D.
Asserting that the unconscious can not carry through any form of expression or
activity that counters the rational judgment of the outer conscious mind, she
writes that under the ban of such repression "the individual remains
unaware of the ancient processes functioning in and influencing his
present life and he cannot evolve beyond them except through greater
self-consciousness or according to the immeasurably slow process of nature
herself."1 This is to say that the present activities of the conscious
mind overlay and keep buried under their constant play a body of innate and
generic motivations which would exercise a control in the direction of the
individual life if they were given free course in the conscious. It may fairly
be presumed that the word "ancient" in the passage quoted carries far
more significance than the author dreamed. This word, used in description of
"processes functioning in and influencing . . . present life" is the
prime clue to the mystery of the unconscious. For ancient indeed is
the unconscious. It is, in reference to the human individual, that part of the
man which is the "Ancient of Days" of the Psalmist. Wordsworth caught
the vision of it when he wrote in his immortal Ode:
The soul that rises with us, our
life star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting, and
cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
_______
1 This and numerous other citations
from Dr. Hinkle's fine work made in this volume are reproduced with her
gracious permission.
32
But trailing clouds of glory do we
come
From heaven, which is our home.
"The sunshine comes and
goes," he says--and so does the soul of man. It comes into expression in
the life and body of a human, and at the end of its cycle goes back to
celestial repose, and it does this time and time again. It has had many births
and "deaths," but never death. It has garnered up the fruits of vivid
experience in the kingdoms of the world and in the bodies of men, and preserved
them in the indestructible treasure house of its inmost spiritual body, which
is safe from the rot of decay, the tooth of moth or the loot of thieves. And it
comes forth for each fresh sally into the daylight of world experience, bearing
the wealth of its deposits of wisdom, knowledge and genius, not to be hoarded,
but to be put out to "usury" in further investment in living, for the
endless enhancement of its own glory in the more abundant life promised it by
its Parent. The central phrase of old theology, "for the glory of
God," bears with more direct pertinence on pivotal meaning than has been
surmised. The onward march of progress does indeed bring an increment of glory
to the son of God within the body of the man. For as the sun-fragment of
divine soul in corporeal man grows in self-consciousness, it increases the
shining texture of that "body of the resurrection," that "robe
of glory" integrated of the essence of solar light, which the soul weaves
for itself in ever more effulgent splendor to be its spiritual temple not made
with hands and in which it may dwell when the earthly tabernacle of this flesh
has been discarded. There is fathomless meaning in Paul's statement that this
mortal shall put on immortality and this corruptible shall be clothed in
incorruption. The climactic guerdon promised by Deity to man is that the
creature shall have immortal life. And to be undying, man must have wrought for
himself a body which when he shall have put it on, will never decay. Hence the
great object of his coming to earth is, as Plato said, to "weave together
mortal and immortal natures," so that the mortal part can inherit
33
immortality through its partaking the
life and nature of the immortal. By charity and wisdom, all the scriptures
affirm, man shall transform, transubstantiate and transfigure his being until
it glows in equal radiance with the glory of the gods whose raiment shines like
the sun. Man will end his earthly career by casting off the "filthy
rags" of fleshly vestments of decay, and come forth arrayed in the glory
of the sun. "I shall clothe thee with light as with a garment," saith
the Lord in the Old Testament. We are to be made "children of the
light," he again says. We are adjured to let our light shine, since we
"are the light of the world." The Christos is the "Lord of
light," "the life and the light of men." This has all been
killed in its thrilling meaning by being shifted away from humanity at large
and allocated--and hence lost--upon the person of one man in history. It was to
be the possession of all the sons of earth who achieved it.
The vital truth about this glory
body, this house from above, with which Paul says he waits to be clothed upon,
is that it is imperishable. Once formed--and Paul says he groans and travails
in pain with us until Christ be "formed" within us--it does not die;
it does not disintegrate. "You shall never be dissolved," promised
the Demiurgus, once the garment of shining Christhood has been woven.
And now comes the denouement of
mighty truth from out these ancient scriptures that becomes the open sesame for
unlocking the hidden mystery of the rationale of the unconscious. The white
raiment of the redeemed is not only composed of solar essence that is
imperishable, but so close is it to the heart of eternal being, so changeless
in its protogonic essentiality, that an impression made upon it is forever
ineradicable. The unconscious never forgets!
Here is an item of cosmic truth that
even the uncertain tentatives of psychological searchings have already brought
out. An impression made upon the innermost part of man which stands nearest to
true being is never erased. The substance of that holy of holies of real being
is changeless first matter. It partakes of the ultimate
34
nature of the real. It is the
primordial mind-stuff. And so the Greeks had a beautiful word for that which
this mind knows, truth. Truth in Greek is aletheia, from a, "not,"
and lethe, "forgetfulness." Truth is therefore that which is
not forgotten, can never be lost. Once gained, it is stored up in the alcoves
of indestructible mind-essence. What the soul has gained of truth, she brings
with her when she comes anew into body. "Truth is from heaven,"
declares Jesus in one of the apocryphal gospels in answer to Pilate's derisive
question, an answer omitted from the four canonical Gospels. Truth is indeed
from heaven, from the overworld of diviner ideality. It is inscribed upon the
imperishable tablets of cosmic mind. What the individual mind grasps of its
eternal principles is never lost. But at each dip of the soul into incarnation
it loses its paradise of knowledge and understanding as it plunges deep into
the heart of matter and is buried in the underworld of sense. Paradise must be
regained each time with the return of the consciousness to the levels of former
development, and new glories won. And so we have the great Plato giving us the
twin doctrines of "the loss of memory of divine things" and
"reminiscence," or recovery of divine memory.
The unconscious mind never forgets;
yet here is Plato saying it suffers the loss of its memory. Is it
contradiction? The Platonic amnesia is only a forgetfulness which is paralleled
and analogized in the life of the oak, which loses its eternal memory or
consciousness when it goes as a seed of future growth into the soil, but
regains its full awareness of life when it attains maturity in the new cycle.
For life must die to be born again, must lose its life to repossess it, must
suffer loss of memory to win eternal memory. Life ever passes from the highest
stage of conscious unfoldment in any cycle back into the embryo of itself to
begin a new cycle. As a seed it can carry, not the adult development of its
powers, but the sheer potentiality of renewing those powers. It enters earth
shorn of all that it had won in the last cycle's effort, save the capability of
renewing and increasing all previous winning. It must start each cycle over
again from beginning. It more quickly each time recapitulates the
35
range of previous development, now
become "instinctive," and then takes new strides forward into
infinite being. Thus all evolution moves forward through what the sage ancient
teachers everywhere called the "eternal renewal" of life. Life
"dies" to be born again. And the wreckage and then the loss of the
intelligible structure of the ancient wisdom came through the failure of philosophic
thought to retain the true reference of the words "die" and
"death." Life, poetized the wise men of old, "dies" when it
goes under the trammels of the flesh in incarnation. "Death" in
theology is then precisely that which goes by the name of "life" in
our world. Says Paul in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans: "The
command that meant life proved death to me." So the ancients regarded this
life as the "death" of the soul under the sluggish waters of the
river of the underworld, the river of forgetfulness--Lethe! But always it was a
"death" from which there was the resurrection. Always the planted
seed died and then germinated and lived again. And thus life went forward to
its ever-expanding conquest of new glories, "through death to life eternal,"
as the Easter hymn sings it. For what the soul loses temporarily at the start
of each cycle of growth, it regains and eventually holds in perpetuity. The
unconscious never forgets!
The pursuit of truth through this
channel leads to the open door of a revelation of one of the great Biblical
allegories so sweeping in its magnitude and relevance that its disclosure may
indeed promise a wholly new regeneration of scriptural interpretation. At first
glimpse no two things would appear to be farther apart and remote from each
other in significance than the unconscious in modern psychology and the ark and
deluge story in the Bible. It happens, however, that the flood allegory in the
Old Testament is the ancient esoteric glyph of the unconscious in the human
constitution! Again this has never been seen because the narrative in Genesis
has been taken as history, or at least quasi-history, and not for what it
really is--the allegory of evolutionary method, as the Genesis story is
the allegory of creational method.
36
Light is gained on this cryptic
scriptural representation by tracing the pivotal words employed in it back to
their archaic or basic meanings. These are "ark," "Noah,"
and "Ararat," as well as the numbers that crept in, seven and forty.
Noah was given seven days in which to build the ark and collect numberless
thousands of animals of every species from all over the earth, manifestly
impossible as actual history, but immensely significant as allegory. It rained
forty days and nights, covering the whole earth to the highest mountain
tops,--again absurd as history. The ark floated on the waters till the flood
subsided, and then the occupants emerged and landed on Mt. Ararat.
Who was "Noah"? It is
evident that though Hebrew in origin, at least found in a Hebrew document of
antiquity, the name "Noah" is built on the stem of the word which in
Greek stood for the rock principle of the universe, Mind, the mental principle
in mankind. Anaxagoras' theory that the world is the production of a cosmic
Mind, or of Nous, is relevant to this determination. The root of the
word is that basic Greek stem, No, and the Greeks called the
intellectual principle in man Noé @horizontal line over e. It is
important to notice that this is feminine in form and grammatical gender. This
is so because, although mind and spirit are commonly typed under masculine
symbolism, yet when the spirit descended into matter and became the soul of a
living organism, it was regarded as feminized through its coming under the
power of matter and body, which are symbolically feminine always. The feminine
ending was placed upon it to indicate that it was mind involved in and
energizing matter. The ancients always affirmed that the soul entered its
"feminine phase" when it incarnated. The Greek feminine ending is the
long é, eta. When the Hebrews used the word they substituted on the No
stem their own feminine singular ending, which is -ah. This gives No-ah,
the principle of mind in body.
It is next to be noted that, in
perfect accord with all ancient philosophy, the mental principle, Noah, was
given three sons. In the arcane allegorism the intellectual ray from God's mind
suffered
37
differentiation from its primal
unity into a triplicity when it established its connection with physical
organisms on three linked planes of higher consciousness. It has been lost out
of studentship that terms corresponding pretty closely to our three words,
spirit, soul and mind, expressed this differentiation. In one Hindu system they
were named atma, buddhi and manas. In astrological pictography
they were represented by the three stars, most significantly known for ages as
"the three kings," in the belt of Orion. They were the lower trinity
of spirit, the reflection in the human microcosm of the cosmic trinity above.
Mind is ever triple in its manifestation. Modern theology posits little
difference between mind, soul and spirit, but the early philosophical and
anthropological systematism knew of the gamut of distinct gradation subsisting
among the three. Spirit held the topmost rank, more ethereal and sublimated in
its nature than the other two, being the pure energy of intuitive knowledge.
Soul was a further projection of that energy into matter, manifesting one step
lower, and standing midway between pure intuition and concrete thinking. Mind
was a still deeper injection of spirit into matter, coming to expression as the
glowing rational power of conscious thought directly conditioned by the
mechanistic function of the brain.
The mind-body problem has been a
perplexing conundrum for human understanding, entangled in the difficulty of
perceiving how an immaterial force can lay hold of and utilize a physical
mechanism. But no longer should this problem offer difficulty to the modern
mind that understands even remotely how the radio wave can blare through its
instrument. It has been said that the repeated note of a violin string,
properly attuned, could destroy a steel bridge. Really the secret of the
mind-body relation has been opened to our unthinking minds ever since a piano
note has been known to rattle a cup in its saucer on the old parlor mantel
across the room. Caruso, the tenor, demonstrated it when, having lightly struck
a delicate drinking glass with a tuning fork to get its pitch, he then
shattered it with the same tone sung from his powerful vocal cords. A thought
38
is just the registry of a vibration
in ethereal matter of great tenuity, projected by that root energy known as
will, and carried by an electric play of force generated by the chemical
constitution of the blood. The human blood has in it the components requisite
for the production of battery current. A modern scientific pronouncement states
that the brain contains four quadrillions of minute dynamos, and these are
charged by electricity carried by the blood and drawn by it out of the vast sea
of static electricity in the air. Each cell of the brain is the seat of the
flash of electric current between the positive and negative poles within it.
These tiny currents can catch and carry the energies of primal will and
thought, as the voice carries the structure of an idea. Life energizing as will
or thought is at once the generator of electric force that can carry into
expression its creative forms of ideas. Immaterial energy such as that of the
mind can lay hold of and move matter and body, for the simple reason that its
every impulse can stir the vital currents that are themselves constitutive of
the very being of matter.
Understanding of the problem was
thwarted as long as the blind conception prevailed that matter was inert,
lifeless substance. Now that it is known that matter is itself a composition of
purely etheric energies, really no longer to be conceived as matter at all, but
spirit itself held in static bondage, the fundamental kinship between mind and
body is readily intelligible. If lines of immaterial force can move the iron
filings around the head of a magnet, it should no longer be a task to know how
life works to accomplish its purposes. There is needed only the mathematically
correct adaptation of structure to vibration rate and wave length to produce
motion. Life manifests through an infinite gradation of such adaptations, be it
in coarse substance or in finer ethereal or "spiritual" matter. And
we have spiritual bodies, more than one of them, archaic science asserted. Each
of these registers energy in its particular form and expression, each one
conditioned by the fineness or coarseness of the material composing its
organism. Sound, as the old philosophers argued, is one; yet it manifests in a
million different sounds, deter-
39
mined by the quality and structure
of the instrument sounded through. Man's very "personality" is based
on this hoary knowledge, since his "person" is the physical
instrument through (Latin, per) which the higher rates of
conscious vibration sound (Latin, son-) out their tones in the
manifest world. The personality is the physical instrument through which the
soul sounds its characteristic note of spiritual being in the world. The spirit
deep within, being a ray of changeless being which is eternally one--however it
manifests in variety--is not subject to division. Hence it is the
"individuality," the regnant king within the personality. It is
further instructive to recall that persona is the Latin word for
"mask." This item illuminates intelligence with the important
knowledge that the physical personality is the mask which the divine
individuality puts on and through which it can sound out its proper keynote in
the total symphony of being.
If the allegory was to be kept true
to profound wisdom it was necessary that "Noah" should have three
sons. The intellectual principle in cosmic operation must manifest in triple
form. This is the explanation of the many figures of triform gods, the Trimurti
of India and the gods with three heads or three faces so often found. It is
likewise the lost meaning behind the legend of the three "Magi" who
come with the Christos in the Christian Gospel narrative. For whenever divine
Mind deploys its forces into creative expression, it generates its three
distinct aspects which stand behind the great doctrine of the Trinity.
And their wives? Not even divine
Thought can create worlds of manifest existence without uniting its energies
with the physical power hidden in the atom of matter. Spirit must
"marry" matter if it is to create concrete universes. The subjective
side of life may know what it wishes to create, but it can not build structures
until it has the material with which to build them. It must therefore link its
directive energy with the latent power in the atom. This is its shakti, or
spouse, through whose motherhood spirit alone can procreate. It became his
wife, his sister, eventually his mother and
40
his daughter, and it is pictured
under all these characters in mythology.
But the great enlightenment comes
with the elucidation of the recondite significance hidden under the symbolism
of the "ark." Here again it is the language root that brings lost
intelligence to view. The "ark" was, last and least of all things, not
a boat or floating structure, save, of course, in a purely figurative
sense, as the "flood" was not a deluge of water. It is all
arcane allegorism, and this is established beyond any possible question. The
true meaning of the "ark" is to be found in its derivation from the
Greek noun, arché, "beginning," which is in turn from the
Greek verb archo, "to begin." It is past all understanding how
the scholars of many centuries have failed to discern either the etymological
background of the "ark" or its implications for the Biblical
interpretation. The fact that it is the first word in the Bible (preceded by
its preposition "in") should in itself have gone far to open blind
eyes to obvious meaning. The Bible thus starts from the point of proper
departure--"in the beginning." The Greek word arché means
beginning, primal state, aboriginal condition of being. It is seen in our words
archaic, archangel, archetypal. God's archetypal ideas were the original
ideas projected in and by his mind to give shape to the universe. So the
"ark" is the primal or beginning state of a thing. For anything of
objective existence to "go into the ark" is, then, its retirement
back into the stage from which it emanated in the beginning of its cycle.
Next, what is the "flood"
or "deluge"? Grievously has ignorance plunged into shameful asininity
over this aspect of the representation. It has nothing actually to do with
water, or rain and water having nothing to do with it. But it has much to do
with flooding, or washing, or washing away, in the sense of a trope. For the
scriptural "deluge" (found in some fifty national mythologies!) is
nothing more or less than the figurative washing away of all created things by
the flood-tide of dissolution which cyclically ensues at the end of each
age of creation. The flood figure of description is imag-
41
inative, a trope; but the washing
away through dissolution is an actual event. It is the dissolution of the
worlds and universes at the end of the age (Greek: teleuten aion, so
tragically mistranslated "end of the world" in the Christian texts of
the Bible), when infinite being absorbs back into its capacious bosom the
disintegrated forms of its last cosmic manifestation, when concrete existence
dissolves back into sheer be-ness. Matter disappears or is washed away from
palpable existence, and spirit retires into the interior core of being. The
cosmos and all its formations dissolve as the creative energy that threw them
into shape runs its given course and subsides into motionlessness and silence.
For life works cyclically, after the analogy of the heart beat and the life
breath. It awakes, and energizes its creative effort in building. In the
evening of its cycle it tires of its labor, and like us made in its image, it
withdraws its energies and rests. When the animating and supporting energy of
creation is withdrawn, the universe it shaped collapses and disintegrates. It
dissolves. Where does it go?--since there is no "place" for it to go
save where it is. It goes where a handful of salt goes when you put it into a
basin of water. It goes into solution. And as the capability of bringing the
salt back from invisible subsistence into visible material form again is always
present, in like fashion can the dissolved universe be recreated in the
beginning arc of the next cycle. The "deluge" is the tide of
dissolution that washes away all forms.
Against this philological and
philosophical background there is now the possibility of seeing at last the
stupendous significance of the ark and flood story. When the structure of solid
substance that housed and gave play to the energies of the life principle
during its active period of creation is washed away--like the giant oak that
has fallen and gone to decay and disappeared in dust--where, if life is not to
come to an end along with the disintegration of its containing vessel, does it
go to be tided over the period of dissolution and "death" till it can
live again in new forms? Whither can it retire to ride out the flood? What can
hold it in integration, or the possibility of new integration, when it has no
mechanism, no
42
organism of manifestation, no point
of support in the realm of space? Life and nature have been confronting us with
the clear answer to this central query through the ages and we have been too
obtuse to see it. We always miss the meaning of the things that are most common
in our belief that the great meanings are to be found in the extraordinary, the
supernatural. Nature and life have shown us where the immaterial immanent
principle of being goes when its physical embodiment disintegrates. For life
provides every one of its creatures with a mechanism by which it can insure the
renewal of its existence after its body dissolves. It withdraws into its
beginning stage, its arché! And this is all included in our small but
stupendously pedagogical reality, the seed. The seed is the
"boat" in which, safe from extinction, the soul of life is tided over
the flood of disintegration of form. Obviously expressed life can not be
preserved in the form of its organic structural fullness of stature, in its
adult body. It can not be preserved in existential embodiment, since body is
dissolved. It must perforce be preserved, then, in purely potential form.
Not it, but only the possibility of it in new form survives. It goes back to
reside again in the ideal form and essence from whence it issued in the
first instance. As it was projected thence once before, or many times, it can
be sent forth again in the round of the cycle.
Here indeed is the answer to many
aspects of life's great riddle. When the worlds of form dissolve away life goes
back into its arché, its beginning. From thence it will begin all over
again, enriched, to be sure, with the capital it has acquired in all previous
adventures. Any student of ancient systems learns to know that the grandiose
view of all life process is that based on the prime fact that life does nothing
but endlessly renew itself. Says the soul of life in the Egyptian scriptures:
"I die, and I am born again, and I renew myself, and I grow young each
day." ("Day" is the term for any period, cycle or age of
manifest existence; "year" is used similarly.) No more majestic
passage than this stands anywhere in the "sacred" literature of
mankind. It is the one assured fact
43
that the human mind must know, to
maintain its sanity and balance, its equanimity and courage under the press and
stress, the strain and pain, of existence in body.
If the revived voice of ancient
wisdom, that is fortified with the concepts of the most sagacious revelation of
truth to man, dare speak to the distracted modern mind and tell it how it has
come to such chaos and wreckage of its philosophy, it can be broadcast in
categorical terms that the seed of all world fatuity was planted in the soil of
the uncritical human thought when about the third century of the Christian
history the great crucial doctrine of the eternal renewal of life, as applied
to the human soul, was lost under the sweeping tide of fanatic ignorance that converted
the allegories and mythologies of sapient philosophical wisdom into alleged
literal sense and historical event. Clement, Origen and the learned
philosophers of the early Church treated the scriptures properly as allegories.
St. Paul declares that the Abraham story in the Old Testament "is an
allegory." But philosophical light gave way to pietistic zealotry
misguided by ignorance, and the world's ancient knowledge that would have
stabilized the human psyche in its course through history was extinguished. The
knowledge that a nucleus of conscious life--the human soul--can retire into its
arché and subsist in latency, and thus be tided over the period of its
non-existence in the inmost depths of immaterial being, to emerge again and
pursue its forward course into the realities of ever more abundant life,--this
is the salt that has lost its savor, the preservative without which man's
psyche must lie in the foul odor of corruption.
As the intellectual principle is the
first to emerge from out the ark of being onto the stage of physical existence,
so it must be the last to re-enter as all things retire into the bosom of
non-being. So Noah enters the ark, after the animals, and his sons and the
son's wives with them. All living creatures, be it noted, must re-enter the
ark.
As to the final term, Ararat, the
lost meaning is simple, once the other clues are found. If life comes to
manifest expression in its day
44
cycles in visible matter, it must be
localized somewhere in visible worlds. Such worlds are planets, primarily. So,
in our case, it is "earth." When life retires to ride out the flood
in its ark, the worlds disappear. The ark is lifted above the earth. Earth
vanishes. But when the flood is over and the dawn of the new day-cycle swings around,
where must the arché land if it is to take hold of matter again and
build of it a new house to live in? Obviously it must come back to earth, it
lands again on earth. And most significantly a study of symbolism and of
language discloses that the cryptic meaning of the word "mount"
("mountain") in the arcane typology of the Bibles, is precisely the
earth. Time and again the earth is referred to as "the mount of the
earth." Much data of studentship can be presented to verify this item. It
is by no means a mere guess, stretching the meaning to fit a preconceived
rendering, in Procrustean fashion. It is the meaning of the term. And it
needs but a moment's glance at the Hebrew language to see that
"Ararat" is itself the word for "earth," juggled a bit. The
present Hebrew word for "earth" is arets. An older form,
states an authority, is not arets, but areth. Practically here is
the English word "earth" itself. The ark lands on the mount of the
earth, and the seeds of life emerge to be planted once more in the garden of
the world.
If a touch of personal reference may
be pardoned in this connection, it is worthy of mention, for the sake of
showing how the interpretation of symbols is the true key to scriptural sense,
and how unerringly its guidance will lead to true meaning, that when, from the
side of symbolism purely, we had worked around to the rendering just
elucidated, and felt that a startling discovery involving considerable
"originality" had been made, imagine our surprise and very intense
amazement when, happening to go over the text of the seventh chapter of Genesis,
we found that the third verse of the story told us precisely the thing we
thought had not been grasped before, and used in doing it the same word that
contained the kernel of our whole abstruse conclusion,--the seed! The verse
runs to the effect that Noah and his household, the animals and
45
fowls, were herded into the ark
"to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth." Had the
clear implication of these words--or that word "seed"--been followed
out to evident conclusions, there would have been no need of our remaining in
gross benightedness as to Biblical meaning for sixteen centuries. The situation
here unfolded must glaringly illustrate the devastation and havoc wrought upon
the Western mind and its culture by the obsessions of ignorance which imposed a
literal or physical meaning upon archaic symbols of recondite truths. Under
this incubus no mind for sixteen hundred years has had the strength of
imagination to rise above the conception of seed as just grains of corn, beans,
larkspur and male fluid. The figure of "seed" as being the glyph for
all renewal of life in evolutionary or cosmic sense, or the mental graph for
the cyclical re-existence of the human soul, was entirely washed away by that
fatal third-century deluge of philosophical doltishness, when Christianity
passed from the hands of the philosophically capable Greeks into those of the
practical-minded, but ignorant, Romans, who soon closed up the last of the
Platonic Academies and doused the ancient gleam of world intelligence under
stupid literalism.
But what has the restored light of
Biblical allegorism to do with psychoanalysis and the unconscious? Pretty
nearly everything vital. It puts a known history behind the unconscious, explains
its origin, its presence in the human psychic constitution, and its nature and
function. It reveals the important part it plays in evolution. It enlightens
with the knowledge that the unconscious is the divine soul itself in the human,
pursuing the course of its cyclical recurrence in the world and preserving the
continuity of its unfoldment throughout the whole. It tells us where the
unconscious got what it possesses, where it found or acquired its present
content and where it gained the higher wisdom that it flashes in dream symbol,
in moments of rare afflatus or intuitive insight, or in subtle intimations of
many types, down upon the conscious mind. And ancient sagacity, supplying us
also with many points of knowledge of concomitant life phenomena in its
postulation of spiritual bodies inter-
46
penetrating the more substantial
physical in the depths of man's make-up, provides us with the rationale for
understanding both how an ego can keep its impressed accruement of wisdom
gained from experience and project it forward into the present existence, as
well as how a "sub"-consciousness can be an actuality of man's
possession apart from and in addition to his normal consciousness.
47
CHAPTER V
LOST DATA OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Not many years ago there could have
been no conception more unintelligible and more impossible of credibility than
the suggestion that man could possess and be influenced by a consciousness that
he was not conscious of. Sheer abstract logic seemed to forbid the predication
of an unconscious consciousness. It was like saying "dark light" or
"wet dryness." But the discovery of the unconscious has come, after
the radio and the true nature of the atom had opened the bound mind of the age
to the possibility of "the impossible."
It may be worth the citation of a
paragraph or two of contemporary expression to accentuate for our dullness of
mind the admitted importance of this discovery in psychology. There occurs a
passage in the work of Dr. Hinkle, already referred to. The Recreating of the
Individual, which states the case for an interior point of view with great
appositeness. She is speaking of the upsurge of interest in psychoanalysis (p.
422):
"In my opinion the significance
of this popular espousal lies in the unconscious recognition that in the
psychoanalytic technic we have an instrument which for the first time makes
possible that further individual human development or creation of self by self
which formerly depended upon the 'grace of God,' and was entirely bound up with
religious creeds."
Here is an intimation based on years
of positive empirical testimony that this new science is one of the greatest of
historical advances from ignorance to knowledge, releasing the human ego from
the stultifying sway of blind belief and giving it the knowledge of a workable
technique for further liberation. Whenever actual
48
knowledge has come to hand, the
former boundless area that had to be covered by religious pietism and helpless
trust has been diminished and the portion recovered from credulity and its
victimization has been happily enlarged. No dissertation is necessary to
demonstrate the value of such a gain. It is the liberation of human life from
former bondage to the unknown.
A recent testimonial manifesto
issued to commemorate the life and work of Sigmund Freud states that his
discovery of the unconscious is close to being the most momentous revelation in
the history of civilized man. To the deep student its preciousness resides in
the fact that it restores to modern thinking that item of the priceless wisdom
of the ancients which postulates the existence and persistence of the divine
soul in humanity. The functioning of soul wisdom and faculty within man but
beneath the surface of his ego consciousness, and "unconscious" because
resident in one of man's interior "spiritual" bodies, the connection
of which with the outer brain and nerve mechanism was generally, but not
wholly, cut off by the play of the outer consciousness, and could at times, as
in sleep, be established and communication set up, was the central item of
archaic knowledge that enabled the ancient mind to ground itself in assured
philosophies of positive value. On top of hundreds of quotable testimonials to
the brilliance of ancient intelligence, one comes to hand in a recent book, The
Crisis of Faith, by Stanley Romaine Hopper. A passage from it will serve
well to introduce the argument for the soul, to which some space must be given.
On page 206 he writes:
"The early humanism of the
Greeks, . . . attained a view of man that was sane, balanced and 'human.' . . .
This wholeness and health of the Greek perspective was grounded on wonder and
in wisdom. . . . With sure intuition the Greek mind turned to this element of
permanency which everywhere transcends the flux or founds it, and established
there its wisdom."1
_______
1 This citation from The Crisis
of Faith, by Stanley Romaine Hopper, and others taken from the same volume,
are used with the permission of its publishers, The Abingdon-Cokesbury Press,
Nashville, Tenn.
49
This tribute to the sanity and
wholesomeness of Greek philosophy is not overdone; possibly it is even modest.
And it lays the finger directly upon the point where lurks the crux of human
understanding of the meaning of life. Of all the ineptitudes and failures of
the philosophic mind the greatest would appear to be that which has blocked the
clear and certain recognition of the truth that no solution satisfactory to
human thinking can ever be worked out on any other basis than the assured
knowledge of the continuing existence and cyclical rebirth of the divine soul
in man. Unless the intelligence of the mortal is fortified with the dependable
conviction that the gain he struggles to achieve in a life will be held for all
the future and become capital in further cycles of existence, he must despair.
This assurance, even the postulation of it, lacking, despair is precisely the
ultimate note already sounded as the only philosophy possible in the view of a
scientifically enlightened thinker like Bertrand Russell. Knowing nothing of
the possibility of the integral part of man's constitution possessing a means
of survival in the inner "ark" of its spiritual nature, he envisages
the ultimate destruction of the race of mortals with the decay of life on the
planet. Uninstructed by the profound ancient philosophy which knew of an inner
core of being that can carry and hold values won, he sees only futility as the
aim and outcome of the evolutionary effort on whose tide man moves forward. On
the grounds of his suppositions life has no purpose beyond the play of the
hour, or of the longer hour of the cycle. At the end of the aeon its work will
indeed be washed away in the flood of dissolution, with no ark to retire into
to betide the deluge. This is the supreme upshot of the modern scientific
envisagement of life's great movement.
Unless man is strengthened by the
certitude that while one part of him, the physical, obviously "returns to
dust," as the Preacher says in the book of Ecclesiastes, another
part, joined temporarily with it, is indestructible and provides a bank of
deposit for all values earned by effort, in which they can be preserved in per-
50
manence, his mind must run
out in despair and his heart sink, beyond the help of any power of hope or
faith. Unless the modern mind can disentangle itself from its helplessness in
the spider-web mesh of its own inadequate presuppositions, due to its lack of
knowledge of basic anthropological elements, and will follow the light of clear
intimation of truth as the ancients did, it can have no hope of sanifying and
sustaining positive understanding. Even modern psychology now avers, from
clinical observation, that unless a mind is philosophically fortified in affirmative
values, it will deteriorate into neurosis and wreckage. The most important
thing in all life, after physical necessities, is philosophy. There is some
evidence that at long last the light of this perception is breaking on
intelligence. In The Crisis of Faith, quoted above, the author sates (p.
203) that
"Scheler holds that the problem
of a philosophical anthropology stands today at the mid-point of all the
philosophical problems. Berdyaev goes further and asserts simply that
philosophy is primarily the doctrine of man. It is easy to see that ethics
depends upon an understanding of the nature of man, and that the civilization
of any particular period is largely determined by it. . . . We are searching
today for a new humanism--for the recovery of an understanding of man in his
wholeness and completeness. In this larger and more intimate sense we need
desperately to be humanized."
It is doubtful whether by extensive
searching a passage could have been found which sketches the form of our real
need in more appropriate terms. Here at last is the modern recognition of what
might have been supposed to be seen by simple facing of the problem of human
life at any time, namely that the attempt to rationalize the world and man's
adjustment to it must proceed blindly until man's own nature and constitution
are known and understood. Universal tragedy and suffering on an enormous scale
have come, over centuries, from the effort of Western mind to take attitudes
and initiate action, or frame policies and institute systems, in total
ignorance of what was once known as to the basic composition
51
of man's organic nature. Thousands
of tomes of Occidental lucubration on history, philosophy, religion and ethics
have fallen far wide of the mark and totally missed true guiding light from the
sheer fact that they were not grounded upon or framed in reference to the
constitution of the creature they were to serve. If Scheler holds that the
problem of a "philosophical anthropology" stands at the center of all
thinking, it is indeed a good augury for a more humanized rationale. It might
perhaps do better, however, to say that our need is for an anthropological
philosophy, one based upon more competent knowledge of anthropology. Naďvely it
can always be asked how a working program for the most favorable human progress
can ever be formulated when a knowledge of the nature and reaction potential of
the creature for whose welfare it is to be applied is not known. How can a
system of outer or inner life be framed to bear man most happily forward on the
stream toward his high goal, if neither the goal nor the equipment and
endowment of the traveler is known? How can a workable formula for the greatest
happiness of man be constructed if the measure and dimensions, the shape and
habitudes, of the man himself are not known? Kant indeed attempted to interpret
the world in the terms of man's psychic constitution. But his knowledge was
wanting in particular data, such as the ancients possessed, and stopped far
short of specific relevance to the actual situation.
Without knowledge all endeavor is
haphazard. There may be faith and hope in ever so large measure. And, oddly
enough, it is not an inch outside the pale of natural causality in the
psychological history of Europe over sixteen hundred years that the religion
that crushed out former knowledge came to insist, as the main reliance for its
millions of purblind devotees, on "faith." It was as inevitable as
geometry. In want of wisdom and knowledge there is nowhere for a mind to go
save to faith, hope and prayer. And just this unfortunate trend took its evil
course to fatal fruition in spite of the adjuration of the most astutely
philosophical writer in the cult's
52
own scriptures, St. Paul, who says
that faith is not enough. "To your faith add knowledge." Plato and
Socrates acquiesce in this declaration of the Apostle.
The egregious and fatal error made
by the theologians, and still perpetrated from a thousand pulpits every
Sabbath, is in holding up faith as a high Christian virtue to be attained by a
victorious Christian apotheosis. It is indeed not so. On the contrary Paul
starts the gamut at its bottom tone, its lowest range,--with faith. Why?
Because faith is instinctively omnipresent in all minds not demented. It is no attainment;
it is given, it is inevitable. In the finale, what can any thinking creature
do, confronting life, but have faith? There is nothing else one can do but
trust the universe of life to be beneficent. If one can not do that, and do it
effortlessly, all other aspiration and striving is of no avail. And in lieu of
any overwhelming demonstration that life is malevolent or malefic, faith is as
natural as sunshine. We start with it, as does the Apostle. We do not end with
it. But it is only the ground platform we stand upon. If we are to build the
structure of our evolution we must proceed from the foundation and move upward.
And to know how to build the superstructure we must have knowledge. From that
will grow wisdom, and from wisdom will blossom virtue and godliness. Here is a
simple item of religious homiletics that has been lost for ages, and the loss
has traced its direful consequences in many a page of appalling religious
history, blotted with bigotry, persecution and slaughter.
From anthropology the ancient sages
drew their basic data on which religion and philosophy could proceed to build
structures of thought and behavior that would accommodate man commodiously to
the play of the forces making for his growth. With such knowledge man could
align his effort harmoniously with the stream of evolutionary life and win true
happiness. The supreme datum supplied by anthropology to ancient thought was of
course the fact that man is a composite creature of two natures, a divine soul
and
53
an animal body,--a god in the body
of an animal, as Plato puts it. The conscious soul of a human is an amalgam or
product of the god and the animal natures in wedding or conjunction. This
consciousness stood on the midground--the "horizon" of the Egyptians,
the "clef in the rock" of the Hebrews--between them. That position
gave it its "human" characterization. As human it was engaged in
traversing the ground of evolution reaching from the summit of the animal's
position to the foothills of the mount of divinity.
The Greek wisdom which Hopper has
justly extolled, he adds (p. 211),
"is basically maieutic, a
criticism of life, teaching men that if they are to care rightly for their
souls, as Socrates says, they must know what they are--what it is to be human.
They must come to know their true condition; they must be made to recognize
as their first task the task of existing as human beings."
Here, it may be said, is the
concentrate, the essence of the problem of philosophy. Obviously the problem of
man can not be confronted, much less solved, as long as the nature of the human
being remains unknown. Ancient teachers imparted their basic datum of
anthropology; the modern mind distracts itself futilely in want of it. As
Hopper again well affirms (p. 203),
"philosophy as it has been
practiced has been one of the best ways of avoiding the issue. . . .
Philosophers have ceased to be philosophiae, lovers of wisdom in the
ancient sense, and in so far have stunted their true work in the world
through diminishing wisdom to science. Their work has become . . . detached. It
touches the surfaces of life as little as possible, rebounding into the
speculative the moment it does so, like a toy balloon. Life is severed from
thought." [Perhaps it would be better to say that thought is severed from
life.] "Philosophy has become what Nietzsche said it was--thought
husbandry--a trade in thought."
To this Nicholas Berdyaev adds:
"Philosophers and scientists
have done very little towards elucidating the problem of man," in the
medieval and modern periods, it should be specified.
54
In these periods, as it only too
evidently appears, the thinking mind had sunk below the power of comprehending
the heights and depths of ancient sapiency.
In the ancient day philosophy was
denominated "divine," for the reason that it supplemented the feeble
efforts of human wonder and speculation with a body of assured knowledge
vouchsafed by perfected men, graduates of this or a previous human evolution,
who had mastered the range of human capability and become Illuminati. The
tradition of the existence of such exalted men standing not at the bottom but
at the summit of the human mountain path is too universal in archaic lore of
all nations to be flouted as childish. Besides we have the age-long regnancy in
the whole world of sagacious writings, or Scriptures, which were never
discredited as tomes of infallible wisdom until the sophomoric intellectuality
of the modern age began to judge them in total incomprehension of their cryptic
methodology and in utter ignorance of their majestic argosy of forgotten truth
and reality. These came from consummate knowledge.
Ancient philosophy was "divine
philosophy" because it established the certitude of the presence of a
divine element in man which would ultimately redeem his life from the
unintelligence and rapacity of the beast to the lordly rulership of truly
divine wisdom and charity. As this element was the agent of human transition to
godhood, philosophy concerned itself primarily with its origin, nature,
struggle and victory in the arena of incarnate life. This history, presented
allegorically and dramatically, makes up the content of the scriptures. These
tomes of "Holy Writ" deal with the career of the divine fragment, a
portion of God's own imperishable unity of mind, after it had migrated from
"heaven" (acceptably understood as a "locale" of exalted
types of consciousness in non-physical states of being) and taken lodgment in
the bodies, distributively, of the most highly evolved animal, to take that
creature across the gulf of humanity up to the feet of divinity, the while it
accomplished its own advancement to more godlike stature. Its coming
55
introduced into the merely
animal-human constitution the seed germ of a deific nature, at once
imperishable and potentially omniscient. It brought the god down to share the
animal life of mortals, coming into "bondage," coming "under the
law" of sin and death (of the body), until the task was done.
Fortified with the knowledge of the
presence of this all-gracious guest in the human constitution, minds nourished
in so adequate a philosophy could bend their life effort to conformity with the
terms of the living problem. They could co-operate intelligently with
evolution. They could build on the solid foundation of a workable philosophy,
having under their feet the ground of positive attitudes and the bases of
fortitude. They could aim at character formation on the strength of the
cheering assurance that no effort was ever wasted or cheated of its count in
the final score. And again philosophy was "divine" in that it linked
the life of man the human with an arm of living deity not outside himself, not
in distant heavens, but immediately at hand in the depths of his own being. It
brought heaven close and set up a Jacob's ladder of accessibility to it. Man
could ascend into celestial glories by the sheer effort to cultivate the
companionship of the divine Friend who had come to earth to be his Emanuel.
While mawkishly driveling over the
"infallible truth" of Holy Writ in Sabbath habitudes of hypnotized
pietism, we have at the same time fallen into actual doubt of the real
existence of the divine soul as the eternal pilgrim through the kingdoms of
nature, the persistent traveler on the highways of heaven. For the most part
our unctuously mouthed averment that the Christ is within us has frittered out
into a pretty poetization, since we invariably end by looking across the
distances to clutch at its localization in the person of the Galilean peasant.
Indeed the central rib of Christianity's structure is not that the Christ mind
came to be incorporated collectively in humanity, but that it came and was
incorporated solely in one man, Jesus of Nazareth. Long buried and lost out of
general
56
knowledge is that prime datum of
anthropology on which a religious philosophy alone could build its mansion
securely. Until that forgotten item is restored human thought can not pursue
the path of truth through the jungle of modern guesses and speculations to
positive ends. Dr. Hopper sees clearly that we must turn back and catch up with
the ancients. Our vaunting presumption of superiority over past ages, in which
we approach the study of the relics of antiquity with a condescension veiling a
real disdain or contempt, has cost us dearly in the prolongation of our own
sojourn in ignorance from which ancient sapiency could all the while have
rescued us. A pretty clear discernment of this situation has dawned upon the
mind of our eminent psychologist, Jung. His vigorous statement on the point
will bear quotation:
"It would be an absurd and
entirely unjustified self-glorification if we were to assume that we are more
energetic or more intelligent than the ancients--our materials for knowledge
have increased, but not our intellectual capacity. For this reason we become
immediately as obstinate and unsusceptible in regard to new ideas as people in
the darkest times of antiquity. Our knowledge has increased, but not our
wisdom. . . . Unfortunately we acquire in school only a very paltry conception
of the richness and immense power of life in Grecian mythology."
Our entire study of ancient life and
culture and our search for the origins of human constructions in past times
have been contorted out of all semblance of truth by our addiction to the word
"primitive." Strong books have lately been written to open our minds
to the sheer tyranny of words and shibboleths. Here is one calamitous example
of it. To be sure, mankind passed through its infantile period in remote days,
and it is legitimate to speak of its earliest dawning of intelligence and its
efforts to interpret life as primitive. In so far as it was left to itself to
grope its way through blind stumbling to incipient knowledge the word
"primitive" is applicable to its products. But there is a phenomenon
presented by antiquity that finds no explanation through the formula of
childish
57
"primitivism." It has been
divined at times and the haunting sense of it has disturbed and confused the
academic mind. But it has never been honestly and logically faced. It is the
significant fact that side by side with the evidences of real primitivism in
many ancient peoples there are found books or scriptures containing bodies of
wisdom and ethical and philosophical systems transcending even our own maturest
attainment. The attribution of infallible truth and sublimest wisdom to the
sacred scriptures of the world, which are of remote ancient origin, has
never been accounted for on any hypothesis consistent with the universal presumptions
of "early primitivism." How could the products of the most exalted
culture and intelligence have come out of primitive childishness? The
presuppositions of the "primitive" theory are shattered into
absurdity by the ghostly presence of the tomes of supernal wisdom found in the
hands of still "primitive" peoples. Egypt is perhaps the best
example. Its Book of the Dead, its Books of Thoth, its Pyramid
Texts and its massed inscriptions, doubtless extant thousands of years
before a period in which the scholars have been pleased to style Egyptian
civilization primitive and even barbaric, stand to this day unapproachable in
the majesty of their truth and sagacity. They are now found to be the fountain
source of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and the whole construction that
has become modern religion of the Occident. We have not yet risen to any just
or full apprehension of their sublime message. Truly it is, as Massey named it,
"The Light of the World." And it is light that to us, because of our
imperfect vision and blind conceit, is still largely darkness. The children of
humanity--but they come bearing the products of perfected maturity! They
already carry what humanity will produce at its acme of evolved culture.
"Primitive ignorance" comes carrying the structures of perfection!
The beginning stage presents to us the end product! The tomes of Egypt's golden
wisdom--thanks to the Rosetta Stone--have shattered at last the
"primitive" theses of ancient study and rendered obsolete the thousands
58
of books tracing cultural origins
through their elaborations. In the shadow of Egypt's sage profundity we are
found to be the babbling children. Why does the world in its present vaunted
maturity cling to the books produced in its childhood? When the world was a
child it spake as a child. Now that it has grown up why does it not put away
its childish things--the "primitive" scriptures? Because it could not
re-create them and can produce nothing even remotely equal to them. Evidently
when the world was a child it spake not only as a child, but also in the
amazing fullness of matured evolution. Struck nearly dumb by its own discovery,
modern psychoanalysis, and Jung, have begun to touch the hem of the garment of
the mighty wisdom that brooded over the ancient mind of child humanity. And
they begin to perceive that virtue is flowing out to them from the touch, the
virtue of truth, wisdom, transfused already with the pervading radiance of the
great "unconscious." More truly than we could have dreamed, Wordsworth
was right:
"The child is father of the man."
For Freud has gone back to childhood
to find the origin and explanation of adult behavior, and Jung has gone back to
the childhood of the race to find the origin and explanation of the adult
behavior of present humanity. And as the sacred scriptures of the race, written
in its childhood, still dominate and guide the life of the world, so Jung finds
that the instincts of the race motivating its life in its childhood still
dominate human conduct, welling up from the depths of the unconscious in dream
and phantasy, even when denied a place in consciousness by the inhibitions of
tradition, social custom and cultural restraint of any sort. And in those
revered scriptures from the race's childhood is found the same lexicon of
symbols employed as that same unconscious still uses to speak in dream and
phantasy to adult humans today. The discovery of the correlation between man's
"unconscious" and the
59
childhood of the race is indeed one
of the most epochal in human history.
Having brought the charge of error
against the ubiquitous theses of "primitivism," we will be challenged
to announce the corrections. The nub and kernel of the mistaken view are to be
located in the assumption that the great and lofty scriptures of most remote
antiquity were written by primitive people. The truth is that they were
composed for primitive people, but not by them. Primitive people could
not create literature of the exalted character which the great scriptures
reveal. They are the creations not of childish immaturity and wonder, but of
the most consummate genius ever displayed in world literature. They are not
works of speculation, but productions of certified knowledge and confirmed
wisdom, of matchless profundity and piercing insight. As moral, intellectual
and spiritual norms they have been measured against the run of human experience
for some thousands of years, and never has that test supported a single
successful impeachment of their veritude. Their message is timeless, their
truth is ageless.
But if they were not written by primitive
people, who in the primitive age possessed the supernal genius to edit them? No
answer to this query is possible as long as we imprison our minds in the narrow
presuppositions of academic orthodoxy. We must break loose from these fetters
and accredit truth instead of "superstition" to the great universal
tradition of antiquity. Omnipresent throughout the ancient world is the legend
that in the golden dawn of humanity's existence divine kings and "mighty
men of renown," yea, the gods themselves, consorted with mankind in its
innocent childhood, and taught it arts and cultures, giving it great books of
wisdom as perennial guides and manuals for a safe treading of the path of human
evolution. It has been assumed that this is a legend, arising out of the
roseate phantasy-producing mind of the racial childhood. Yet even legends are
not created out of total mental vacuity. There is substance behind every
legend. The pres-
60
ence over the whole earth of a
universal tradition bespeaks a certain amount of veridical truth at its
fountain source. Besides, there stand the scriptures which, appearing in the
world's childhood, are not the works of children. It has been assumed that
humanity alone, of all life's progeny, was left without parental guidance,
protection and tutelage. Everywhere life is parented. Its infantile period is
carried through by the adult guidance of parents, guardians and mentors. Is it
to be assumed that man alone is left to shift through his infancy as a race
with no help from the carriers and products of antecedent development? In a
school system an earlier generation turns back to teach the children of its
successor. Wisdom accruing to a grown generation is handed down for the benefit
of the next generation at its start. All the scriptures of the past are at one
in their claim to have been indited by sages and wise ones of superhuman
stature. Here is the invincible evidence that surpassing wisdom and
intelligence presided over the construction of these books. One thing is
certain--they are not the products of primitive ignorance. They are the
creations of consummate genius and majestic artistry.
And if knowledge is an accumulated
acquisition and wisdom an ingrained deposit of the fruitage of right action,
then the authorship of the divinely inspired scriptures must have been the
product of minds that had traversed a long course of evolution. Life never
gratuitously dowers its creatures with qualities, powers or genius that they
have not themselves earned and developed in their experience. It has
limitless largesse to pour upon us, but insists that we prepare the ground and
cultivate the growing vine before the intoxicating wine is ours to quaff. As
Plato's Timaeus assures us, God has himself planted the seed of immortal
divinity within us. Ours is the task of tending and cultivating it to its
maturity. When it is full grown it is the deity-genius within us, guiding,
instructing, enrapturing. It can then write sage scriptures to pass the torch
of wisdom along to future children of the cosmos. Says Heraclitus
61
in one of the most sententious
utterances in all philosophy: "Man's genius is a deity." But it is a
deity that comes at the start of human evolution as a divine infant and has to
await the development of corporeal instrumentalities to give it full conscious
expression in the outer world. To the degree that such conscious expression has
not been implemented by the outer personality it is the "unconscious."
62
CHAPTER VI
"OLD CHILD" IS HIS NAME
"I die, and I am born again,
and I renew myself, and I grow young each day." This is the utterance of
the divine soul in man as voiced in the sublime literature of ancient Egypt.
That literature depicted in forms and analogues of living reality the history
of the god that comes to be the heavenly guest tenanting a human body for a
season. This celestial visitant is no newcomer to try earthly hospitality; he
has been here for similar visits many times. He has died and been born again,
he has renewed his life and grown young as often as he has grown old. Indeed he
is growing younger with each sally out into the adventure of life, for each
excursion takes him deeper into the heart of eternal being, closer and ever
closer to the Center of everlasting life where abides perpetual youth. Length
of days is indeed in his right hand, for he is the Aged One of Heliopolis, the
Ancient of Days. He comes each day as the infant, but he bears with him the
wisdom garnered through his many cycles of birth, growth and death. He returns
to earth until his wheel of birth and death has completed its turning, when he
enters the kingdom of his Father, to go no more out. He is then a glorified
Sahu, clothed in radiant body of solar light, and dwells among the gods. But
antecedent to that climactic Day of the Lord he is the god in the becoming,
hiding his growing light under the bushel of a human personality, toiling,
striving, exhorting to righteousness in the milling scene of earthly life.
The vital truth so long and
disastrously lost, then, is that man, in his essential and indestructible
selfhood, is a soul, which alternately animates physical bodies, gains through
them experience indispensable to its continued evolution, and drops them for
periods
63
of rest in ethereal worlds, during
which it lives in a state of latency, or as the sheer potentiality of
self-renewal.
The light this determination sheds
on psychoanalysis is seen to be the substantial reification or hypostatization
of the great new element of psychology, the "unconscious." Indeed it
brings to this shadowy consciousness nothing less than a positive entification.
It sets it up as a living individual entity, consciously pursuing its way
through the labyrinth of evolution as actually as we conceive the mundane
individual to be doing. It enables us to bring forth this nebulous presence
from out its dusky habitat and to give it definitive form and character, as we
recognize it to be a long familiar personage in our revered scriptures. For at
last the "unconscious" is seen to be the soul, the godlike part of
the dual nature of man. Only from the standpoint of our waking
consciousness that functions directly through the physical mechanism of a brain
is it fittingly denominated the "unconscious." On its own plane it is
not unconscious, but more vividly and widely conscious than the earthly self
can ever be. But it comes here in search of the offices of the outer
personality of man to enable it to achieve an actualization of its
capabilities of consciousness which it could not possibly gain by remaining
continually in sublimated worlds. Consciousness, to be completely evolved, must
be ground to a state of hard realism. This can be effected only in worlds of
concrete experience. The soul must be centered in a physical body to win its
growth. And once in body, it must await the slow evolution of the mechanical
and physiological agencies of brain and nervous system before it can deploy its
full forces outward to untrammeled expression.
From the standpoint of the open
waking consciousness of the individual the soul within is the unconscious. For
it is the Genius behind the scenes of the surface consciousness. It is the
individual's own self--best spelled perhaps with a capital S--conditioned by
the effects of its own long past history, standing in the shadow behind the
curtain and appearing almost to play the part of a deus ex machina to
the personal conscious self. To Socrates and the an-
64
cient philosophers it was their
Daemon, or guardian angel, interposing at times of crucial exigency to warn the
personality against making false or dangerous moves. To the poet it is the
source of his higher "inspiration," the spring of his divine
afflatus. To all it is the rock of character which so clearly marks the
individual's status of high and strong, or low and weak, in evolution. It
stands behind--rather one should say above--in the overworld of the personal
man, and is the generator or holder of that body of fixed qualities and
dispositions which distinguish one person's life from another's. The physical
and emotional personality is, so to say, an antenna of it, extended outward
into the world of factuality in order to help it fend for itself in the arena
of experience. Through the personality it has sensuous contact with the world
in which it is destined to play a notable part. It registers the experience
impressed upon it through the outer instrument and digests in consciousness the
moral substance thereof.
The reservoir of wisdom with which
it stands to guard the outer mind is the accrued deposit of the moral value of
all its past history. Wisdom can come in no other way than as the assimilated
fruit of experience. If it comes otherwise it is unearned, and life bestows
nothing without the expenditure of effort commensurate with the gains to be
won. As a man soweth, so shall he reap. Wisdom is the rich harvest of
seed sown, watered and tended. Modern thought has envisaged a near-divine,
near-omniscient monitor residing in the over-area of man's constitution and
standing ever ready to guard and counsel the personality, but has never even
postulated for that monitor any known or unknown cycle of experience requisite
to have dowered it with such a faculty or such a prerogative. Obviously nowhere
in the present existence of the individual can there be found a body of
experience qualified to endow an interior mind in man with such superior
wisdom, as all experience comes through the personality. Biological science, through
such a representative exponent as Sir Alfred Russell Wallace, has declared that
there can nowhere be found in the line of evolving life from animal to man
65
any chapter of experience sufficient
to have developed human mentality in the highest animal orders. All observation
of the stream of growth negatives the claim. Yet there exists in man's
organization a grade of consciousness that manifests the highest knowledge and
wisdom, exceeding always that of the conscious man himself, and deploying on occasions
of his own strategic choosing resources unknown to the individual on behalf of
the supreme welfare of the personality. And there is left no way for the mind
to account for the presence and exalted genius of this inner mentor save by
postulating for it cycles of living existence and experience in its past, such
as the ancient seers allotted to it. So then for the first time in modern
systematism both philosophy and psychology are confronted with the challenge of
a thesis which, now as of old, can provide the mind with a formula adequate to
rationalize the presence of a god in the life of man, and to account
understandably for his divine status above the merely animal counterpart in the
dual composition.
It is well to adduce several
pronouncements from modern psychoanalysis itself that speak in confirmation of
the diagnosis. One comes to light in the work on psychoanalysis already cited, The
Recreating of the Individual. Says the author, Dr. Hinkle (p. 108):
"The unconscious proper is not
formed or created by the individual in response to culture, but exists a
priori behind all culture."
With the mere substitution, perhaps,
of the word "experience" for "culture," no passage could
hit and express the truth more pointedly. It is not any of Freud's Oedipus or
Electra complexes generated by early infant reactions. It is not the product of
a few years of odd idiosyncratic habitudes or circumstantial pressures, that
warp the mind into unnatural and unwholesome fixations. These are of some
account in the total, but they do not create or condition the unconscious. As
the author of the citation says, that is already there as the old root out of
which a new tree is to spring up. The Book of Daniel in its first
chapters speaks of leaving the stump of
66
the hewn tree in the ground, so that
a new growth may start from it. Elsewhere Dr. Hinkle has noted that the
conscious part of the individual remains "unaware of the ancient processes
functioning in and influencing his present life." Nothing could be more
revealing of ancient truth than such a statement, although its force is largely
lost through default of the knowledge that the "ancient processes"
that still function in and influence the present life of the individual were
the past experience of the individual himself, as well as the collective
experience of the race of his ancestry. The meaning is always made to embrace
racial limits, when it should apply directly to the individual's own history.
The same author says additionally that in the psychoanalytic talk of the
unconscious as being composed of conscious motivations suppressed and driven
underground, we are not here dealing with the "suppression of individual
experience, but with the suppression of racial experience, belonging to an
earlier phase of humanity."
This again reifies an ancient
element in the makeup of present consciousness. But again the exposition
advanced by modern psychology denies to the individual his own previous
experience and the fruit of it, by ascribing his present deep-seated unconscious
to racial heritage. Archaic philosophical acumen chose to believe that the
individual was present anciently when the experience was acquired, that he
indeed gained it for his own eternal possession. He did not come by it through
a vicarious inheritance or through the transmitted blood of ancestry. They
asked how justice could be meted out equably in the world if individuals were
either exalted or saddled with a heritage other than that which they themselves
had created. The human intuition of justice demands that no creature should be
afflicted with the consequences of actions not his own. "The fathers have
eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge," observes a
revered scripture. And it presents a harassing and disturbing anomaly to the
reasoning mind which takes seriously the scriptural pronouncements of Deity as
to absolute and impartial justice in the universe. Then, too, we recall that
67
the same scriptures tell of
"visiting the iniquities of the parents upon the children unto the third
and fourth generation." If in any way these declarations are to be
harmonized with the simple and direct human sense of justice, it must be
assumed that the children involved in these visitations were in line, through
previous faulty action, for the ill fortune that traces to parental
dereliction. Otherwise the simple mind of man must give over the effort to
vindicate the operation of clear justice in the law of inheritance. If you are
afflicted with your forefather's sinful consequences, you will look doubtfully
toward a God whose sense of fairness seems less rigorously true than your own.
A morbid and sin-haunted Christianity has forever refused to face these
corollaries of its announced Biblical canons with untrammeled logic or sincere
intellectual probity. In the most godlike exercise of human judgment a Deity
whose operation of living laws afflicts a soul from the very start of life with
the iniquitous consequences of action not its own, must be categorized as
outside the pale of what man must think of as justice. Since the early
centuries of Christian history the logical and moral issue here involved has
been sedulously evaded. But the ancient philosophers met it and they were able
to maintain their predication of a God of total justice. This they did by
virtue of their knowledge that souls come into an earthly heritage accurately
suited to the needs of their own growth at their status. They could assume that
a soul born into a malformed physical or material legacy inherited his own, and
not his parents' past defects. He falls heir to his own mistakes, not
another's. For he brings back with him into renewed expression--until they are
at last obliterated--the germs of his own waywardness, to flower out afresh in
the new embodiment. The forefathers' physical transmission through the outer
line of descent merely provides the good or bad body conditioned to give the
old soul its appropriate milieu and circumstantial influences which enable it
to work ahead on its own ground.
Lending corroboration to the thesis
that the unconscious is an element in us given a priori, and not the
outgrowth of earthly expe-
68
rience in this life, is another
excerpt from Dr. Hinkle's work (p. 39):
"But psychoanalysis is built
entirely upon the theory of unconscious motives and purposes, different and
antecedent to those known by man in consciousness and upon which his present
conscious manifestations and symptoms rest."
This says in effect that there is in
man, buried below his normal consciousness, another consciousness which knows
more than the man and is greater than the man himself, but which has not been
limited to this man's experience. It has the stored-up experience of all
previous racial history, explains modern psychoanalysis. Well, then, the
situation stands thus: there are two strata of consciousness in man's
constitution, the personal open consciousness and the unconscious. Both carry
the heritage of the past, yet one is conscious of it, the other is not. The one
has it, the other possesses no memory of it. The one has it not, ostensibly
because it is a totally new creation, never in existence before and having no
link with the past. Then, if the other has it, the legitimate obvious inference
is that it is not likewise a new first creation in this life, but that it has a
link with its past, that it is a durable entity treasuring all its previous
experience and that it was a participant in whatever experience it carries in
memory. In a full, frank and fair envisagement of the elements in the situation
this is the only channel of explanation open to logic. If there is in man a
consciousness which retains the memory of the past, and another which does not
have such a memory because it did not share the past, the inescapable inference
is that the entity that does retain the memory did share the experience. It (or
he) is verily "the Ancient of Days," the eternal pilgrim through the
cycles of time and the kingdoms of nature, gathering up and holding the digest
of all experience in faculties of supermind and higher consciousness which
transcend the three-dimensional scope of man's open awareness. As far as he has
not been brought out to expression in the brain consciousness of the outer
69
personality, he dwells in covert
position within the deepest recesses of the individual self, the silent
guardian and watchful daemon, the "higher ego" of the person.
In Dr. Hopper's work already cited, The Crisis of Faith, the author
takes a dozen or more pages to present and support the thesis that the god
whose influence molds the individual's life from the hidden depths is an a
priori reality, given from the start, in relation to the present existence.
Dr. Hinkle likewise is insistent, as
her chief ground of refutation of Freud's central presentments regarding the
infantile sexual motivations of the child, that the main "drive" of
the ego in man is of precisely that character which it would be presumed to be
if the premises were granted that an aged, wise and benevolent soul occupied
the place and performed the function allotted to the unconscious. That is to
say that the unconscious is characterized by an incessant perennial urge toward
the actualization of an ever-enlarging potential "divine" expression
through the personality. She says (p. 31):
"He [man] bears within himself
all the potentiality of individualistic development; the future claims him as
well as the past."
She also quotes the words of
Antigone:
"The moral law is sacred
because it is not a thing of today or of yesterday, but lives forever, and none
knows whence it sprang."
It needs no dramatic flourish,
however, to declare that there is no unfathomable mystery as to the genetic
history of the moral law. The ancient sages give evidence that they were not
ignorant of it. The great Egyptologist, William H. Breasted, in his last work, The
Origin of Conscience, traced its course of development back to remote
Egyptian religious conceptions and cultures. The moral law is the deposit of
the conscious resultant of all experience undergone by that fragment of the
divine mind that tenants one physical body after another, building each in turn
over the model of its inner nature, and carries the everlasting memory of its
past with it. The
70
moral law is framed in an indelible
memory out of the impacts of the consequences of action perpetrated by a
conscious perduring entity able to hold the lessons learned and create from
their ensemble a code of determinative norms. It is just the fixing of the
recognized values accruing from experience upon the consciousness of a
spiritual entity which is able to hold them in perpetuity. For its
"spiritual" body is imperishable, its substance indestructible. And
that which is impressed thereon is retained forever.
The discovery and recognition of the
unconscious in modern psychology is bringing out to open view the data which
corroborate ancient scriptures in their predication of a divine consciousness
in the upper reaches of man's life. Says Dr. Hinkle again (p. 4):
"It is this sense in the
individual man of his potential but unfulfilled greatness that forces him to
become aware of his incompleteness as a human being. It is this state of faulty
development of his psychic capacities that psychoanalysis has brought so
clearly into view, and for the improvement of which, to those interested in and
capable of using its method, it offers a technic--an aid toward the conscious
development of a greater self."
True indeed is all this, since, it
is pertinent to ask, how would the personal entity man be able to register a
sense of his imperfection and shortcoming in the first place if there was not
resident and conscious within him a being possessing familiarity with higher
norms of attainment and standards of perfection by contrast with which the
present performance of the outer man exhibits faultiness and failure? If
psychoanalysis is just discovering this inner mentor, it has taken just about
two millennia for the world to regain what its ancient hierophants of religion
possessed.
The Hopper claim that the divine
element is as "given" a presence in man's make-up as is the body is
again substantiated by a quotation from Dr. Hinkle's work (p. 43):
"Man possesses, independent of
any frustrated pleasure aims, the capacity for individual development and the
need for its fulfillment, as definitely as he possesses the physiological
sexual desire."
71
This statement is part of her
refutation of Freud's position that psychic neuroses and mental disturbances
trace their genesis always to frustrations of the basic sexual instincts.
Disturbances may of course arise from frustration of the life of the outer man;
but it is to the credit of the Jung school and such psychoanalysts as Dr.
Hinkle that they have recognized likewise something of far deeper import,
namely that violent inner tempers will arise from the frustration of the
evolutionary purposes and aims of the indwelling god-ego.
And Dr. Hinkle adds a most
significant statement, which should carry the minds of both theorists and
clinicians to decisive conclusions, when she adds to the above citation the
results of actual empirical practice:
"When the obstacles to this
forward movement are removed, when he is able to achieve some progress toward
the inner goal of his being, then his neurotic symptoms and his psychic
disturbances disappear."
Here, in short, is the specific
demonstration that if the mind of the outer personality of the individual is
not measurably conducting the life so as to minister to the onward progress of
the soul in the subterranean--or superior--recesses of the consciousness, the
soul will register objection, dissatisfaction and disturbance by bringing the
untoward condition to light through neurotic inharmony and unbalance,
wretchedness or pain. Indeed some such situation is the nub and crux of nearly
every drama and novel, representing the desperate or heroic efforts of the soul
to break through a cordon of environing circumstances which have tangled it in
a predicament threatening its expression of diviner qualities or thwarting its
free growth. Lending corroboration of the very highest sort to Dr. Hinkle's
conclusions regarding the voice of the inner god is Jung's repeated affirmation
that people only come to the psychoanalyst if and when they have lost
possession of a positive religious philosophy and that he has not been able to
send them away cured
72
unless he has been able to restore
to them an affirmative mental grasp on basic life meanings.
Dr. Hinkle and Dr. Hopper unite in
asserting that it is this disagreement, this default of the lower mind from the
purposes of the inner, that constitutes the real essence of "sin,"
and in this they are substantially in accord with the early sage Greek
philosophy. Jung is cited (by Dr. Hinkle) as interpreting the psychic discord
or disturbance as a longing of the ego for "rebirth," "the
desire for a necessary psychic birth which uses the symbols of physical birth
to represent the psychological need." This again is startlingly in consonance
with ancient theory. The Platonists, the Neo-Platonists and Jesus of the
Gospels alike lay down the necessity for a new birth--a second birth--of the
soul, Indeed it is general in all archaic religions. The soul can not tolerate
stagnation too long. To be normal and "happy" it must have the sense
of growth and progress, the assurance of making steady advance on the road it
is traveling. This feeling is the perennial condition and prerequisite of its
conscious well-being. The soul has needs that must be ministered unto through
and by the external paraphernalia of the body,--and philosophies of ascetic
religious tendency should never forget this. But also it has interests that
reach to higher worlds and that no amount of sensual gratification can promote.
St. Paul emphasizes that "the natural man" has no cognizance of the
things of the spirit, "neither can he know them, because they are
spiritually discerned." Rather the physical man is to the god within as
soil is to the tree: the base and ground of its ability to expand its life in
the air above. Like the tree the soul can not grow unless it is deeply and
firmly rooted in the life of the physical, but its concern with the physical is
in no sense an ultimate objective. It is but the necessary foundation and
starting point of its own primary business, as it is that of every unit of
conscious being, of advancing from the point of present attainment to wider
consciousness and more abundant life. The soul sustains a relation to the body
that demands its enjoyment of the body's strength, health, buoyancy, comfort
and the fullest
73
and freest flow of its elan. The
failure of ascetic movements to recognize this fact had led to untold psychic
disaster, warping into discord the lives of both the body and the soul and
defeating the purposes of evolution. But the soul did not come to link its life
with that of the body merely to indulge in that enjoyment. That would indeed to
be to take the downward path, to fall into "sin." Its way of growth
runs through the exercise of its own potential powers and faculties in the
development of a higher consciousness, to all of which its happy relation of
harmony with the body is a primary and fundamental condition. The soul builds
the body as the house in which it is to dwell and work, cycle after cycle. Its
prime aim is to build it to be most commodious and comfortable for its tenancy
and in such fashion that to live in it is a delight. But once built and ability
to maintain it in good state established, it would surely be a mistaken
philosophy to assume that the soul's chief business in life was to end with the
fulfillment of its enjoyment of the house. It can not do its work in the world
without a proper house to dwell in, but once the house is constructed, it can
then turn its attention to the higher work it came here to do.
The job of constructing and
accommodating itself to its house, however, is an integral part of its
incarnational mission and takes on a larger measure of importance than might at
first glance be assumed. Its work in spiritual worlds transcending bodily
influences still is greatly affected and conditioned by the need of complete
harmony with the instrument. As the body is the keyboard, so to say, of the
soul's expression, it is essential that there be maintained at all times the
most delicate balance and nicest adjustment of conscious motivation to organic
reaction. And it is now the province of psychoanalysis to diagnose the
conditions of maladjustment between the two factors. The discovery of such
maladjustment and the location of its basic causes is indeed its high function.
The ancients, as is well indicated
in the philosophy of Plato, adjudged virtue to be the individual knowledge of
the art of keeping a perfect balance between the animal man and the indwelling
74
god. Conversely they defined
"sin" as the ignorance that stupidly permitted inharmony and discord
to be generated in the interplay between the two. The soul, they said, stood at
the point of middle ground between the divine spirit above and the animal body
below, and its function was to mediate between the two in such fashion that a
happy blending and merging of their forces was effected. Standing midway
between the two, it could deploy its energies and center its interests and
affections in either direction. It could cultivate the life of the higher
spirit or devote itself to fostering the sensual expression of the animal. Its
own intelligence, be it high or low, was the determinant. The destiny of the
individual was the outcome of its decisions.
It is quite likely that the true
definition of "sin" is to be reached by taking into account the terms
of this philosophical situation. Surely "sin" is that which impedes
the most felicitous and orderly flow of the stream of life forward to greater
being. And obviously in the human world that which would most effectually block
and thwart the movement of "the rivers of vivification," as the
Greeks called them, would be the failure of the soul to perform with deft
intelligence its high function of maintaining that just balance between the god
and the animal in man upon which true growth depends.
"The soul that sinneth, it
shall die," is the strong declaration of the scripture. Since all souls
undergo death in its common meaning of the dissolution of soul from body,
obviously another meaning of the word "death" is here involved. And
this is of the greatest significance for all religious and scriptural
interpretation. The entire understanding of the language of the Bible has been
sadly warped out of line with truth by the failure to read into the words
"death" and "the dead" in the scriptures the same meaning
which was attached to them in the ancient Greek and Egyptian religions. The
great lost light of antiquity comes out in glorious splendor when the original
philosophical meaning is restored to these terms. By "death" is meant
nothing less than what we call our "life" here!
75
And "the dead" of the
scriptures are none other than ourselves, the "living." This is now
established beyond question. For the ancients regarded the life of the soul in
the body as its death, using the term of course in a figurative and relative
sense. In the body the high life of the soul was so reduced in potential
capacity by the sluggish vibrations of the corporeal nature that it lay inert
as in death, and the body was poetized as its prison, grave or tomb. Indeed the
body and tomb are identical in the Greek words for body, soma, and tomb,
sema. The soul was said to go to its death when it "was united to
the ruinous bonds of the body." Socrates says to Cebes that he has
"heard from one of the wise that we are now dead and that the body is our
sepulcher."
This construction is directly in
line with what St. Paul asserts in his Epistles. "To be carnally minded is
death," he says. "Ye are dead in your trespasses and sins," he
adds. And again he states most pointedly that "the interests of the flesh
meant death; the interests of the spirit meant life and peace." The death
referred to in the old books of wisdom was that of the soul, occurring when the
unit of divine consciousness made its descent into the body of man on earth,
there to come "under the law" of birth, growth, maturity and decay.
The whole import of sage writings of the past has been utterly lost by the
ignorant exoteric assumption that the "death" spoken of was that of
the physical body. A thousand irreconcilable perplexities of scriptural
interpretation vanish, and one clear and consistent flash of illuminated
meaning takes their place the moment one reads the old Greek philosophical meaning
back into the terms under discussion. And the whole systematic structure of
archaic theology is restored to glowing significance and the old rendition
vindicated, when St. Paul says in the seventh chapter of Romans: "the
command that meant life proved death to me." The "command" he is
speaking of has never to this date been understood to be the command--which
comes to all souls in the empyrean--to incarnate. What the Apostle says in the
verse immediately preceding this statement is of the utmost elucidative value
76
for all theology, for all
understanding. He says: "When the command came home to me, sin sprang to
life and I died." It gives us final certification as to what is connoted
by "sin." Evidently it is an inclination in the soul that lies
dormant so long as it remains in static suspension of its energies in the
celestial spheres, but which springs to life and activity as soon as the soul
is embodied in a fleshly organism on earth. "Sin" is that disposition
of the mind which can be implemented only by union with the carnal self of the
animal body, and awaits its opportunity to awake to expression when that union
is consummated. Then Paul makes that correlation between "sin" and
"death" which should not have remained a sealed mystery for hundreds
of years, with this passage of his in front of our eyes. "Sin sprang to
life and I died." His "death" was his descent into the world of
carnal mind, the indulgence in which is at last seen as the terrible hobgoblin
that has plagued the Christian conscience with entirely needless morbidity for
these many centuries. "Sin"--be it proclaimed to all the world in
clarion tones--is the soul's indulgence in the life of the flesh. Indeed, with
"the mount" being a symbol for the earth itself, this globe is many
times referred to in the scriptures as the "Mount of Sin." It is
likewise "Mount Sin-ai." Now it is possible to see what the Apostle
meant by saying that "the wages of sin is death." For if sin is the
addiction of the soul to the lusts of the flesh, and residence of the soul in
the flesh is "death" to its higher nature, then continued sin
necessitates continued "death." The longer the soul clings to carnal
affections the longer it must return to earth and body to give play to its
desires--until they are burned out in the fires of purificatory suffering. And
again can be seen in clearer certitude the meaning, so terribly mutilated, of
Paul's apocalyptic utterance: "The last enemy to be overcome is
death." Of a surety it now is obvious that when the soul has at last been
entirely purged of its bent to sin, which drags it again and again back to
earth where alone the instincts of a physical body can give channel to its
carnal leanings, it will
77
have no further need to enter the
"valley of the shadow of death." It then need "go no more
out," as Revelation puts it.
Modern psychology has at last got
around to the vantage point of envisaging the inner conflict in the area of
human consciousness in much the same light as that in which it was viewed by
the ancient Illuminati. It has made discovery of the "Aged One," the
older soul hiding in the covert depths of the individual consciousness, and has
seen the necessity of interpreting the phenomena of psychic disturbance and
mental illness in terms of the phases of the mutual thwarting of the interests
of higher soul by the instincts of the flesh, and those of the flesh by the
cultural restraints imposed by the soul. And at last it stands and works on
solid ground, the title to the authenticity and validity of which is volubly
attested by ancient lore.
Nearly every word of the few
fragments we have left of the writing of Heraclitus is an utterance of prime
value. Among such is his brief sentence: "For all human laws are fed by
one thing, the divine." And further than that, he grounds the roots of the
divine in man in no less high and immediate a ray of the Absolute than the
Logos itself:
"Go hence; the limits of the
soul thou canst not discover, though thou shouldst traverse every way; so
profoundly is it rooted in the Logos."--Fragment 45; Diels.
Clarity might long ago have
supervened upon the mortal conception of divine things if the Occidental mind
had been open to receive the assertion of Greek philosophy that the Logos is a
ray or emanation from Supreme Deity, the spirit a further extended ray from the
Logos, and the soul a still further diffraction, through the medium of matter,
of a ray from the spirit. Use of this outline graph enables thought to fulfill
every requirement in meeting both the theoretical and the empirical problems
involved in the analysis. As Plotinus so capably has blue-printed the scheme of
the universal construct, the emanation of divine energy from the heart of
being,
78
proceeding farther and farther from
initial impulse, pierces ever deeper into matter, losing force as matter grows
denser out on the periphery, until the last wave is just sufficient to enable
the soul to nucleate around its node of power the physical body. So that
Plotinus says that "the soul suspends from it the mundane body,"
which is characterized as "the last of things" in the chain that
reaches from spirit at the top to dense matter at the lower rung.
The outcome also of the great Kant's
elaborated philosophical lucubration was the conclusion that what constitutes
in his system the highest "spirit" in man, "the transcendental
unity of apperception," is "a condition which precedes all experience
and in fact renders it possible." Here is the soul "given," a
priori, again.
Irenaeus, who is not often found
admitting or expressing his agreement with the principles or teachings of the
antecedent pagan philosophies, which in so far as they came into early
Christianity fell under the condemnation of his pen as "heresies,"
puts general ancient philosophical understanding of the triplicity of spiritual
elements in man in splendid clarity in the following (Adversus Haereses, V,
ix, I):
"The perfect man consists of
these three, flesh, soul and spirit. One of these saves and fashions--that is,
the spirit. Another is united and formed--that is, the flesh; while that which
lies between the two is the soul, which sometimes follows the spirit and is
raised by it, but at other times sympathizes with the flesh and is drawn by it
into earthly passions."
This is admirable; and finds
buttressing also in Plutarch:
"But in his [Plato's] Book
of Laws, when he was now grown old, he affirmed, not in riddles and
emblems, but in plain and proper words, that the world is not moved by one soul
. . . but not by fewer than two; the one of which is beneficent, and the other
contrary to it, and the author of things contrary. He also leaves a certain
third nature in the midst between, which is neither without soul nor without
reason, nor void of a self-moving power, but rests upon both of the preceding
principles, but yet so as to affect, desire and pursue the better of
them."
79
Indeed here is seen the basic
formulation of that which became the doctrine of the "mediator" in
Christian theology, the higher and the lower natures in man, with the soul
standing on midground between them, and functioning as the way or the bridge
over which the two might ultimately effect their reconciliation and atonement.
From Erasmus comes an equally direct
statement of the duofold man-god constitution, with the soul mediating between
upper and lower:
"The spirit makes us gods; the
flesh makes us beasts; the soul makes us men."--Enchiridion v.
20--D.
So definitely did ancient insight
comprehend the tripartite division or gradation of man's nature that it
typified the mediatorial function of the middle-man, the human, standing on the
horizon or boundary line between the gross body below and the divine mind
above, by the symbol of the bee, which became the living zoötype of the soul
because of its function in fertilizing female ova in the flower with male
pollen and thus effecting the new birth. The insect performed the mediatorial
function of priest in the marriage of the opposite poles of the plant. So even
the Christos in man was characterized as the High Priest, since he functioned
in the union of male and female elements in man in holy marriage. The soul it
is that mediates between spirit and flesh and unites the logos of the higher
with the atomic mothering and nurturing capabilities of the physical. The soul
is the agent and focal point of the interplay between the two natures.
Now psychoanalysis has discerned the
forms and features of this interplay and speaks of it in the most direct terms.
Here is Dr. Hinkle giving us her statement of it in the vernacular of
psychology (The Recreating of the Individual, p. 50):
"As a matter of fact there is a
constant interplay between the two aspects of human life--the external world
and our own concrete objective tendencies and needs which are a part of it, and
the subjective
80
human creative and transforming
processes lying entirely within the individual psyche."
This is of course likewise the
conflict of the lower man with the higher god, who find themselves co-tenants
of the same domicile. The words of Prof. N. Shaler apply most fitly here:
"It is hardly too much to say
that all the important errors of contact, all the burdens of men or of society,
are caused by the inadequacies in the association of the primal animal emotions
with those mental powers which have been so rapidly developed in mankind."
It is the struggle between the
emotions and the intellect! When has mankind not been keenly aware of it? It is
so much the burden of every day's conscious life that it does not shape itself
out as a concrete and specific problem. It is nearly the whole focus of the
psychological activity of life. How much one should yield to the bent of the
feelings and desires, or how much to check them; how far one should follow the
clear voice of reason, when it counsels adversely to the instinctual
propensities, and how far one should sacrifice obvious present advantage or
pleasure in the interests of deferred greater good;--these are the unending
skirmishes in the vast struggle waged between the animal and the god in the
nature of man on earth. They are the daily combats in the aeonial Battle of
Armageddon. And never have the issues and conditions of the battle been
sufficiently clarified in the world's understanding. The vast and calamitous
ascetic movement aimed at victory for the god by the curt and conclusive method
of crushing out the animal with a tragically mistaken austerity. Epicureanism
and naturalistic hedonism sought a resolution through a free rein to the
instincts, tempered with aesthetic norms. As might always have been known since
Plato's day, the only safe and perfect modus is to be found in the gradual
blending of the two natures through the experiences of both parties in the give
and take of earthly evolution. St. Paul has well indicated this denouement,
when he speaks of the breaking down of the "middle wall of partition
between us," and the making
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of "one new man" out of
the amalgamation of "the twain." Only thus can the great cyclic
conflict be fought out "on the horizon," as it is said to be in the
Egyptian texts. And only thus can the engagement terminate in a manner to
promote the ends of the evolutionary movement, so that both soul and body
acquire the maximum amount of beneficial development from the complications.
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CHAPTER VII
THE TWO SUBTERRANEAN GROTTOES
The intermediate soul, therefore, is
the meeting ground, the arena, of the conflict between soul and body. It is
rent and torn by the tug and pull of opposing motivations, the animal tending
downward toward sensuality and grossness, the spirit striving with the soul to
raise it up out of the mire. The animal self reached upward to intrigue the
soul down into its coarseness and brutish delights; the spirit wrestled
valiantly to entice its lower brother upward by the desirable rewards of
virtue. The great battle was on. All religions have so fully depicted the grim
stress and the crucial issues of the struggle that it needs no considerable
elaboration here. What is needed, however, is the orientation of relevance and
pertinence from the purely theological purview over to its even more pertinent
reference in the field of everyday consequences, particularly as the nub and
core of psychoanalytic technique. It has not been known that the immediate
categories of the psychoanalytic situation were all the while those
time-hallowed fundamenta of the old theology and the Bible texts.
Dr. Hopper, in another passage from
his The Crisis of Faith may be permitted to sum up what has been
presented in the foregoing pages as to the three-ply constituency of our
consciousness, and adduce for our consideration in psychology the practical
outcome of the living action in the three-storied human structure (p. 249):
"It is formally and
structurally, that man may live his life on one of three levels: on the
sub-human, the human, or the divine--below the level of the regulative
control of reason, or within the regulative control of God's will. These levels
of experience are conceived formally;
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but they are lived dialectically.
Each level when chosen is a commitment to a total end." (The italicizing
of below is ours, for a purpose soon to be specified.)
Broadly this is precisely what the
elaborate and recondite Greek Orphic, as well as its parent Egyptian Hermetic,
wisdom promulgated in the ancient day in the arcana of the Mysteries. The sages
of olden time knew of man's threefold composition, and it is obvious that they
knew also the vast involvements of the triplicity for all phases of human
conduct, thought and understanding. Their astute philosophy reveals their
underlying recognition of the interrelated status of the three levels of
conscious life, since indeed their systems and principles can not be
apprehended dialectically without grounding the effort in these formulations.
What they knew is that which has not yet dawned on modern mentation, namely,
that as man lives on, or in, three levels of consciousness, he must have an
organic equipment that will relate him, consciously, with the reality of each
level, and that he must therefore have three separate "minds." He
must possess a sub-human, a human and a super-human, or divine, mind!
Here is the mighty key to the modern
psychoanalytic science without which it yet hobbles ahead in semi-groping.
Circumscribing itself ignorantly within the limits of a twofold segmentation of
consciousness, psychological science has hit and missed in its assumptions.
Conjecture and confusion have come in because it prescribed but one realm of
play for man's "unconscious," whereas there are two quite separate
and different strata of unconscious content and influence. The one lies below
(sub) the ordinary conscious, and the other above (super). The first
is of the earth, physical; the second is "the Lord from heaven,"
spiritual. And the conscious human mind stands between its unconscious
underling and its unconscious overlord. Here in Greek philosophy is the key to
the scriptures. No less is it the key to psychoanalysis. For how can a thing
which concerns the very constitution of mortal man be true in philosophy
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or theology, and then not be the
actuality in the same mortal nature when it is studied through the eyes of
psychic interest?
Man, the strictly human, stands as
the conscious being between two areas of unconsciousness, one
"below," the other "above." His little life is indeed
rounded with--unconsciousness, which presses close in upon him from both above
and below. He is a little gamut of sound and action between two immense silences.
And just as his physical sight extends over only the narrow segment of the
scene upon which his vision can focus, but his cognition can take in in a
secondary awareness further areas on each side of the middle focus without the
gaze falling directly upon them, exactly so his consciousness can reach upward
and downward from his central ground of focus and cover in a secondary type of
recognition some sections of the rim of the great unconscious domains
stretching far below and far above his allotted range of being. His
consciousness is therefore extensible some distance into both the subconscious,
beneath his ordinary status, and the hyperconscious, or world above his
vibratory range. Man's conscious being, then, is a little light set aglow
between two great darknesses, but through the evolving powers of the mental
genius within him he is able to penetrate some distance into both of the two
environing border regions of outer darkness.
The interrelationship of the three
minds in man has never been systematically diagnosed. It is all important. It
is the structural anthropological key to the problem of man. Its exposition
must be attempted. The three minds must be described and classified.
The first step in the elucidation is
taken from a hoary volume, Egypt's venerated Book of the Dead. The
"Speaker" is the soul and he says: "I am Yesterday, Today and
Tomorrow." "I am what hath been, what is and what shall be."
Again he dramatizes his three consciousnesses in saying: "I am Atum in the
morning; I am Ra at noon; I am Khepr at evening." What is meant here is
that of the three elements or conditions of consciousness, one is the deposit
of his actual experience in his past; the second is his conscious
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present awareness; and the third is
a higher consciousness supervening gradually for his future. We are thus
instructed in the great truth that the subconscious mind is the hidden memory
of our past; the conscious is our present awareness; and the superconscious is
the mind that will function in our future. The last is only embryonic,
potential, in seed state, as yet unopened to operative function. It can thus be
seen that man's present consciousness is a point of transition from past to
future, or equally from future to past, and that it is his effort to gain a
state of stability at the neutral point between the two nodes of the movement
of time. As his life and therefore his consciousness are a continuum, they must
entail the union of all three experiences, or a union of the two end moments in
the center. That is, the two end aspects that are not now in overt awareness
must be integrally present, related and incorporated, essential components of
the total deposit of experience in consciousness.
The past has teleological relation
to the future and to the whole, since its meaning is determined by the nature
of the ultimate goal at which the total experience is archetypally aimed. The
future is conditioned by the past, as its ontological product, since it is
built up on the past. The present moment is the resolution of the past into a
mold that at the same time shapes the future.
All this brings out the important
functionism of the three minds. As only one of the three grades of
consciousness can fill the field of awareness, that is, occupy the mind's
attention at one and the same time, owing to the finite limitations and the
single dimensionality of the time concept as applicable to human mentality, it
is both a logical and a practical necessity that the other two must lie in the
unconscious sphere. The mind must retain the memory of its past experience, but
that dare not occupy the field of consciousness at the cost of driving out the
present,--or life would stop. Therefore the experience of the past, held in memory,
must be stored out of the way, so to speak, in the halls of potential memory,
to be available at any time if needed for present uses. This is just as under-
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standable as that a person must have
a room or attic in which to store things accumulated (in the past), so that
while they may be available if needed, they are nevertheless out of the way to
leave free space for present activities and uses. The subconscious, then, is
the attic or storage room in which are packed away the gist of our past careers.
The present is the new moment arising out of the past and receiving the influx
from the future. The brain consciousness then is that poise in the flux, or
that moment at which the content and essence of future development is
registered in open awareness, to be dealt with by the initiative of the
present, and passed back into the storehouse, an addition to what has been
stored there previously.
But the purely temporal aspect of
the movement must be oriented over into the concept of quality. The future can
be, of course, just additional moments or events of the same kind of beads on
the string of time. But it is proper to think of the future as bringing at
least an evolutionary instinct to count on the future to bring higher values to
life than those of the past or present. What the mind of the future will bring
is expected to be something richer and fuller. The play of consciousness for
the coming time will be cast at a higher frequency and shorter wave length than
those in the past. Man is, as it were, but very actually, walking up a gamut of
values, climbing up a golden stairway of realities, much like a cat walking
from left to right over the piano keyboard. Each forward step he takes strikes
a higher-pitched string of consciousness and realization. He awakens from
silence to sound in his world a new and higher note each time he can reach one
key higher in the scale. At each step of advance in his evolution in time, be
it slow or rapid, he is progressing from a lower to a higher tempo or pitch.
The past has resounded or responded to the lower tones; the future will strike
the higher ones. For evolution is tuning up the strings and refining the
mechanism of the physical instrument at each step of ongoing. Present man can
produce sweeter tones and manage completer
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harmonies than past man, and future
man will be able to come ever closer to striking ineffable symphonies.
The past goes into latency--though
it is always re-available--while the future awaits the slow development of the
instrument in order to be brought forth out of latency and be registered on the
surface of the actual. Until this moment it is only potential, awaiting the
perfectibility of the sounding board of brain and nerves. The future thus
emerges out of unconscious potentiality to pass through the gate of the present
moment of actualization into the storehouse of accumulated and partly digested
reality. It is the birth moment of ever advancing stages or registries of real
being. All life progresses from the potential to the actual, and the area of
immediacy in consciousness is the necessary ground whereon that which has been
held in conscious thought in the mind of the great Oversoul of creation can be
projected from the superior plane above the range of man's conscious grasp down
into the open field of actual experience. The superconscious is that segment of
the gamut of God's graded values which lies or extends immediately above the
highest arc of man's responsive reach.
God is the sending generator of
waves of reality; man, as he perfects his instrumentalities of body, mind and
soul, is a poor, a good or a better receiving instrument. The total harmonies
of God's being are thrilling about us all the while. But we are bound in
silence to all of them except those that we have grown able to match in
vibration through the evolving capacities of our organisms. Only these are the
limited though ever expanding glories of reality that we are able to make
actual to ourselves. The Egyptians again solidly portrayed this basic truth by
one of their sagacious "myths." They said that man was imprisoned in
twelve dungeons, one after the other, and that he could only be liberated from
each in turn as he learned to pronounce the name of the god who stood guard at
each dungeon door, and who held the key but would not use it until the prisoner
pronounced his name properly. Name and nature are identical in
this situation, so that man's ability to utter correctly
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the name of a god is the same thing
as being capable of manifesting that god's divine nature through the
personality, the lower mind and self. This is brightly illuminating on the
mental side. This is the meaning of "calling upon the name of the
Lord" in the scriptures, a vastly different and far more demanding thing
than a mere vociferation of the word-name of deity as understood in Christian
rendering. We are, as the Egyptians poetized it, in prison to a faculty that is
as yet unopened and undeveloped. We are freed from limitation only as potential
faculty and power are opened to function through unfoldment. This is as clearly
true as is the simple remark that we are blind until we evolve the faculty of
sight through development of the organs of seeing. No wonder the ancients set
forth man's life in the flesh as an imprisonment, a burial, sleep and death. We
are the captives in a long exile here on earth. We are in bondage to matter,
Hagar, the bondwoman, until brought up out of this land of Egypt, the abode of
flesh and sense. That is what is entailed for the soul in its migration to
earth, its coming "under the law" that prevails not in the world of
spirit, but holds consciousness at low ebb in the realm of body and matter.
This is what it means to be "crucified in the flesh." The Logos was
made flesh--not only in one man, but in all men--and came and dwelt among us,
hiding for the early time his grace and truth under a bushel of matter. This is
our Immanuel, the god imman-ent in us. We are in prison under the
limitations of our still undeveloped potentialities, and the Christos within
us, who brings not only the stored-up capital of his former achievements, but
the potentiality of vastly greater genius to be unfolded in the living process,
is kept on the cross, in darkness and inanity, until we of the outer
personality open the barred doors and let him out to freedom. He abides on the
level immediately over our heads, a resident of a plane the life of which
transcends ours, awaiting the chance to incorporate more and ever more of his
unexploited capability in the world of the actual through the heightened
mechanism of consciousness we slowly learn to provide. He dwells on the plane
above
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us, but is eager to break through
into our world and find thereby a greater actualization of his own powers, as
we prepare the way in the wilderness for him.
This being understood, a glimpse can
now be had into the interlinked operation of the three levels of mentation in
the human constitution, on its purely mechanical side. As Dr. Hopper has said,
one can live in any of the three kingdoms, the sub-human, the human or the
super-human or divine. We can step from one to the other of the two end realms
across the connecting bridge of the human or conscious link. We can rise to
divinity, or sink to animality, by a shift of the focus of interest, desire or
will. The process by which true advance is constantly being made, however, is
clearly to be seen and is the basis of a deeper understanding than has been
given hitherto. The present or human state of the conscious mind is, as said,
the point of meeting, and therefore the point of friction, clash and struggle
between the two natures. It is to be set down categorically at once, however,
that this clash and struggle is not evil, but only the exertion of the
tension necessary to bring out to activity the latent energies of both soul and
sense. (A whole prodigious segment of religious theory and practice has gone
awry, with fatal consequences, as the result of regarding the contention of
soul and body as evil.) It is here on the plane of ordinary daily struggle and
effort, and not in ethereal palaces of mystical realization, that the battle is
fought and the gains made. No bliss will ever be enjoyed in Nirvanic heavens
that has not first been won on earth! For it is the function of the conscious
mind, as the outcome of its insistent, perennial divine urge and aspiration, to
reach upward toward the fuller and sweeter life of the supermind, to catch the
purer tone of its more exalted radiation of divine character, and to bring it
down into its lower station and hold it there. Ordinarily it is only at
infrequent times that the human is able to vibrate consciously in rapport with
that upper divine. These are the high moments, when we are wafted upward as by
an afflatus, when inspiration flows and light flashes. We may thereafter sink
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back into dullness, the glory
departed. But having had one touch and taste of paradise, we will not rest
until we have more; and with each new one there comes a greater skill to
impound and hold the illuminated moment.
That there is a mind in us pointing
to the future is indicated by what the eminent psychologist, Carl G. Jung, has
to say in a footnote (p. 493) of his profound study, The Psychology of the
Unconscious. He here succinctly lays the foundation for the erection of the
two unconscious minds:
"Just as traces of memory long
since fallen below the threshold of consciousness are accessible in the
unconscious, so too there are certain very fine subliminal combinations of the
future, which are of the greatest significance for future happenings in so far
as the future is conditioned by our own psychology."
He says it is impossible for
analysis to concern itself with these intimations pointing to future
happenings. That would be the task of "an infinitely refined synthesis,
which attempts to follow the natural current of the libido." This, he
says, is beyond us, but it "might possibly happen in the unconscious, and
it appears as if from time to time in certain cases significant fragments of
this process come to light, at least in dreams. From this comes the prophetic
significance of the dream long claimed by superstition."
He adds that "the aversion of
the scientific man of today to this type of thinking . . . is merely an
over-compensation to the very ancient and all too great inclination of mankind
to believe in prophecies and superstitions." There will be hearty
agreement with the revulsion of the scientific mind from age-long superstition
and the gullible credulity of uncritical masses, but the literature containing
the authentic record of prophetic dreams and premonitions is too great for
denial of the possibility of projections of the future into consciousness. We
are not too well fortified with a clear rationale of their occurrence, but it
is certain that the future touches us closely and now and again pictures from
its panoramic screen
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pierce the curtain and drop down
into the area of present awareness.
Dr. Hinkle, too, speaks of the
necessity of man's transforming himself through the effort to follow the
"transforming power within life," resident in the unconscious. She
says that man "has now apparently for the first time arrived at the
borderland of that supreme necessity, self-creation, and involved in his
attitude towards this task lies his answer to the great urgent question of the
present time and all time--the future of humanity itself."
The archetypal norms of divine
thought implanted in the creation and suspended above man's head, as it were,
are to be projected downward into conscious recognition in the minds of
thinking beings. The first reception of them is a matter of impression, much
like a photographic print. But the firmer fixing of them upon lower mind is
effected through the operation of a very wonderful law, the law of repetition.
It gains and holds its possessions by means of its power of retaining
impingements made repeatedly upon it. It is possible that it retains all
impressions made upon it, even in the slightest manner; but ordinarily, from the
standpoint of known powers of memory, several repetitions are required to fix
an imprint indelibly upon its sensitive slate. Repetition induces a sort of
automatism in the memory. It is entirely akin to the mind operating in children
and animals, and is therefore not aided by the processes of conscious
intelligence, reason or will. It is just the power of sheer automatic memory.
It is grounded on repetition. What it hears or sees often enough stays with it,
having carved its form upon the "tablet of consciousness."
The rationale and the sum of all
progressive growth for man the human, then, is the effort of his
superconscious, the god within him, to project downward from above the ideal
realities of the noumenal world, the same being the thoughts of God's own
creative mind, stamp them upon the open consciousness of the individual, and
then fix them finally through the force of repetition upon the
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subconscious level of habitude. The
conscious mind, Prometheus-like, catches and draws down a light from out the
upper chamber of the superconscious, ingrains it in its mentation by
repetition, and thus finally plants it firmly in the soil of the subconscious.
Man is in this manner slowly but constantly transferring bits of
"heaven" down to earth, and holding them as his permanent possession.
Habit (from the Latin habere, "to have") is the method by
which we have something. But it is a matter of the gravest import,
whether in the end, owing to the hypnotic power of mental action, it is not to
be said that a habit is something that has us! "A slave to
habit" is one of the commonest phrases. The great majority of our actions
in a day's time are the automatic impulsions of habit. The whole structure of
tradition and custom is the product of habit, or the inertia that binds men to
habits. The maxims of old-fashioned character building, and much in educational
procedure, were based on the effort to form good habits or to cultivate the
mind through memory work.
Evolution proceeds as the conscious
mind exercises its mediatorial office of drawing down divine "fire"
of wisdom and knowledge out of the heaven of the overworld, the ideal empyrean,
and passing it on down to the custodianship of the subconscious, where it
becomes automatized as part of the built structure of the human. Physiology
falls in conclusively with this delineation, since it tells us that the
autonomic nervous system, the organism of the subconscious, is the apparatus
that holds the impressions fixed by habitual practice. It functions in the
ganglia of the spinal cord, we are told. These take over what the brain
consciousness builds up by repetition.
Man's advance in evolution, as far
as the attainment of higher consciousness is concerned, consists, then, in the
ability of the conscious self to capture more and more of the superconscious
potential, to repeat it consciously, and so store it away as a permanent
possession, an increment of living gain. Each time he becomes capable of
registering a higher note in the scale of conscious values
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he takes a step up the ladder of
evolution from man to god. He is climbing up the Jacob's ladder toward the
heavens, the locale of more vivid reality.
There is a grand enlightenment for
intelligence in the consideration of the habit phenomenon in the human economy.
Through habit, more particularly and clearly noted in animals, in whom there is
no free initiative of new action by the deliberative reason, but seen even very
generally in humanity, life is able to achieve a close approach to
invariability and uniformity in its normal procedures. These traits may be
assumed to be requisite and indispensable in so far as the welfare of creature
life may be dependent upon absolute regularity. At any rate the genius that
orders the universe has evidently found it necessary to install regularity and
uniformity into the operative scheme, since they are most amazingly in
evidence. The constancy of life's procedures, movements, activities in
periodicity and rhythm is the one element in the creation that has so
powerfully enchained the human mind. The immutable repetition of cycles, the
endlessly renewed alternation of activity and rest, the diastole and systole of
all pulsations of living energy in the cosmos, have struck the thought of man
with an overwhelming sense of the play of divine mind in the phenomena of the
universe. It is the feature that the human mind builds upon in its
determination that the universe is a cosmos.
Two items of knowledge, then,
combine to instruct us further, both as to the nature of God and as to his laws.
The first is man's constitution in God's image; the second is an immediate
derivative of that, the corollary assumption that if man is like God, then
man's composition and functionism supply to thought an analogical suggestion as
to the make-up of God's being. The astonishing inference then rises to
conception that, as man has the three minds or levels of consciousness, God
must be constituted likewise! And a startling formulation arises out of the
parallel. It is the determination that what we observe in the way of invariable
natural procedure and style "the laws of nature" are just the fixed
habitudes of God's
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subconscious mind! They are
invariable in their regularity because sufficient of God's conscious
energization has from the beginning been expended in establishing them to make
them automatic. They have by habit of God become the actions of his autonomic
"nervous system." Pope's astute discernment that God is the soul of
the universe, while "nature" is its body, must be given the chance to
register its full import here. Like us, God is spirit-soul-mind, and all three
ranges of consciousness function in his great body, the universe. He, too, must
be able to turn over the products of his present consciousness, if conscious
mind is the creating and ever recreating power behind the worlds, to the
automatic unvarying control of his "lower mind" resident in
"ganglia"--the suns--so as to free his conscious self for ever new
exercise of desire and will. The laws of nature, as to which we affirm poetically
that the mind energies of God uphold and perpetuate them, and which we declare
would crash in chaos the moment his mental concentration was relaxed, are
evidently established habitudes of his former conscious regimen of activity.
They are immutable because they have, through repetition, come under the
control of a segment of divine consciousness that holds an aptitude fixed upon
it by initial impact and endless recurrence. It lies below the realm of
freedom. It can not exercise choice. It obeys the will of the conscious part.
It is the anima, the animal part of mind, and its universal function is
to repeat automatisms ingrained upon it. When God says, in the Old Testament,
that he will write his laws in our minds and hearts, he is announcing the great
principle here discussed. Little by little he is able to communicate the
transcendent principia of his exalted being from the higher vibrational key in
the gamut to the next lower stratum of his organic being, and from that to the
one below, until all creature life reflects his nature and in miniature repeats
his procedures. Thus his law pervades the total creation. Our fixed systematic
operations, such as pulse, respiration, food intake and elimination,
metabolism, cell decay and renewal, are all operations that were once for a
limited period consciously ordered and directed
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by intelligence, but were later
turned to automatic actions, to free the conscious. These are the laws of
nature operating in our bodies, as all larger procedures are the laws of nature
operating in the spacious reaches of life beyond our little lives. In both
cases they are under the control of the never-failing subconscious. We think of
God so constantly as Mind or Spirit that we forget he has his body, which is
the physical creation in the large. And that body provides him with the
"nervous" apparatus for a subconscious activity.
This, in fine, elucidates to our
puzzled minds why it is that God can give his attention to the
inconceivably vast range and multitude of all his activities in all his worlds!
They are under the control of his subconscious. They do not require his conscious
attention. For whatever the word may conceivably connote when applied to
the higher level of God's life and being, they are automatic. Our
little, though still marvelous, automatisms are copies of his. We are made in
his image. The profounder and more real implications of this datum in the
scriptures have never been taken at obvious face value. It is the key to
practically the whole science of human understanding of life and its processes
and phenomena.
It is a subsidiary reflection that
it is therefore a matter of inexpressibly serious consequence in the life of
man, collectively and individually, what activities of body or mind he chooses
to make habitual. He has the power of choice and initiative, and these are
virtually the powers of a god. If, through ignorance, which is his handicap
from the start and hobbles him in diminishing degree thereafter, he chooses the
wrong kind of procedures, he fixes upon his subself an inharmonious,
pain-engendering routine. The outcome must in all cases be suffering and
misery. Human suffering has here its origin. The chains of a bad habit can be
broken only by resolute correction of the addiction by conscious re-direction
when the disease or corruption created in the organism has brought the
intelligence and the will in line with a better run of conduct. Pain is the
guardian angel that with inevitable certitude announces
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whether the ingrained habitudes
produce in the organism a life-sustaining harmony or jangle of death-bearing
cacophony. In the end, knowledge, requisite to the making of choices aright, is
the indispensable warden of human happiness. Pain is both our chief protector
and our ultimate educator. Without its timely signals we would be totally at
the mercy of our own follies.
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CHAPTER VIII
IN PLUTO'S DARK REALM
Through lack of this dual
departmentalization or segmentation of the unconscious by modern psychological
science, vast confusion and much futile groping have characterized the
investigation and vitiated the conclusions. Instead of only one unconscious,
there are two. There are two levels, stories, houses, realms of the
unconscious. And it makes a world of a difference to which one a phenomenon
belongs, or to which it is assigned, in psychological practice. The
subconscious is unconscious, because it holds all that has once been in
consciousness, but has been relegated to the domain of the unconscious. Its
content may be good, bad or neutral. It may be the more recent acquisition of
what is fine in the way of new inculcation, or it may be the surviving memory
of past viciousness, or the possibility of its renewal. It may be sublime
philosophical beauty, or the grossest brutality. It is happily true, no doubt,
that in long course, as lofty sentiment and keener wisdom fix permanent habits
of virtue in the sub-area, long dormant bestiality and gross carnalisms will
atrophy off the sensitive plate of the lower mind and pass out into final
oblivion. At any rate they become more and more deeply "sub" and less
readily resurgent. As the poet has put it, the growth of man in righteousness
and wisdom will eventually "let the ape and tiger die" out of his
scope of motivation. Melchizedek, the king of righteousness, will gradually
assert his rulership more completely over the entire kingdom of consciousness,
"Till every foe is vanquished,
And Christ is Lord indeed."
Dr. Hinkle's discerning observations
as to the basic cause of neuroses, psychic disturbances and mental pathology
need to be
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erected into pillars of true
science. So far from having their causal origin merely in civil and social
frustrations of sex yearnings instinctive in infancy, the disturbances are due
to frustrations of a far deeper nature, inhibitions that root in profounder
depths of the psychic constitution of human life than merely bodily sexual
satisfaction or its thwarting. The restraints on sexual expression play their
part, naturally; but this cause of inharmony is slight and superficial in
comparison with the more interior clash between the god and the animal in man's
sphere of consciousness. Mere sexual repressions, though they are active agents
in psychoses of lighter gravity, are not the grounds of the more serious
maladies of the mind. These are the outgrowth of the thwarting by the lower
animal personality and its propensities, of the more vital inner efforts of the
god above to adjust the habits and mechanisms of the body to its evolutionary
aims and trends. He is destined to be the supreme ruler--the King, in the
glorious language of symbolic theology--of the natural man in all respects.
When this first or natural man has at last been raised in status and his
dynamic forces refined and accommodated to the services of their divine
transformer, then he receives the evolutionary reward for his faithfulness and
obedience in the form of a grand enrichment and enhancement of his own
conscious powers. But until that happy stage is reached, and from the start, he
is by no means an obedient and willing subject of his liege. As all the
scriptures reiterate without end, he is a stiff-necked, a stubborn and a
rebellious subordinate. He must be gradually converted. His natural instincts
and propensities must be slowly transformed. They must be turned away from the
service of rapacity and self-interest over to that of a communal fellowship
with the other units of the life order. Organically he is holding the supermind
of the god in a prison, and it is only by converting his gaoler that the
god-soul can liberate itself from the trammels of the flesh and assume full
command within the sphere of the organic life.
The force of this
"conversion" of the lower self "into the likeness of"
"the glorious body" of the higher self has likewise never been
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seen in any adequate degree. The
analogy with the great luminary which is itself the mighty symbol of the divine
self is the revealing talisman. The manner in which the sun lifts up a lower
coarse element such as water furnishes the interpretative hint. The light and
heat of the sun can not through sheer mechanical force lift water upward.
Sunlight has no arms with which to scoop up the liquid. But it does lift up the
water by the agency of its power first to "convert" it from physical
density to ethereal fineness and lightness in the form of vapor, in which state
its gravity is overcome and convection carries it upward. A force of a
"higher" range always has the power to sublimate the substance of a
thing of a "lower" nature. That which can not be done with coarse
matter in its denser composition can be done after the alchemy of sublimation
has been performed upon it. This yields for us a chemical and physical representation
of a great segment of the entire meaning of both the theological content of the
scriptures and the central core of psychological study and science. The sun can
cause water to rise after it has transformed it into a sublimated state.
Likewise the divine soul in man can cause the lower animal nature to rise to
the status and glory of the exalted human and near-divine after it has
transformed it by the continuous impingement upon it of vibrations of finer
nature. This is the interior meaning of all religious "conversion"
ever talked about in the theologies of the world. The soul that is in man is
here on the cosmic mission first to transfigure by sublimation the coarser
nature of physical humanhood and then to lift it up to a level of harmonious
fellowship with itself.
If a statement direct from the ranks
of psychoanalysts themselves were needed to confirm the averment that
disturbances arise chiefly from obstructions put in the way of the divine soul
by the outer personality, it is to be found in a brief sentence from Dr.
Hinkle's book, already cited (p. 435):
"For it is a fact which
psycho-analysis reveals definitely and unmistakably that the actual disturbance
of the individual today is involved with the problem of the soul."
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She says again that the sum of man's
psychological striving is his effort to "differentiate himself from nature."
This is wholly in consonance with the gist of all ancient philosophy. But
if it is his divine intent to "differentiate himself from nature,"
whence comes this direction, this bent, this pull to something beyond nature?
From what part or element of his own constitution springs this lift to a higher
selfhood? It can come only from a conscious intelligence within him that is
already standing above the terrain of the animal part. A thing of a certain
nature can not lift itself beyond itself by its own powers. It can be lifted to
higher status only by the aid of a power already higher than itself, which
reaches down from above, clasps hands with it and raises it up. Since man in
his palpable physical selfhood is himself a creature of the natural order, with
material body as his ostensible being, it is logically necessary that if he is
to be differentiated from nature, to which he belongs by virtue of his body,
the differentiation must be engineered by another part of him, not so palpable
and ostensible, yet dialectically existent, namely the immortal soul within
him. Then, since this work of the spiritual man in elevating carnal man to
diviner kingdoms is the chief business that the total man is to accomplish in
life in the world, it can be seen that interference with the program of its
evolutionary errand will be a matter of central and crucial moment and concern
to the whole movement, and will therefore be the cause of most serious
disturbance in the smooth working of the internal economy of the life.
Jung says that it is of the greatest
importance whether the libido is transferred or inverted. Nature, he writes,
has first claim on man; "only long afterwards does the luxury of intellect
come." He has adduced the very discerning observation that for the first
thirty-five years of life the individual is a child of nature, concerned and
absorbed with the acquisition of the things that give him a place of standing
in the material world. In the second period of thirty-five years he shifts his
interests largely from material matters over to the concerns of the mind and
soul. This is oddly enough a minia-
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ture copy of the life of the
incarnating soul in its total evolution in the human cycle. It is for roughly
the first half of its immersion in fleshly bodies working to establish its
place firmly and stably in its position of rulership of lower physical forces.
During the latter half of its career in the worlds it bends its efforts more
largely and freely to the growth of its own internal forces of intelligence and
spirituality. Wordsworth writes of the great and passionate interest of his
younger life in the domain of outer nature, and then of the "years that
bring the philosophic mind." The allegorical pictograph is even carried
out vividly in the Gospel drama, in which Jesus, the type of the divine soul,
runs away from his mother (nature) at the age of twelve, symbolic of
completion, and devotes himself thenceforth to the "things of his
Father" (spirit).
Here and everywhere in the analysis
there is disclosed the important part played by analogy. Through the employment
of this instrument there is revealed what has so long lain in the darkness of
nescience. Part of the predisposing cause of the Dark Ages of medieval European
history was the loss, along with the refinements of symbolism, allegory and
drama, of the legitimacy of analogy as a truth-finding methodology. The price
civilization has had to pay for this dereliction of intelligence has been far
heavier than anyone has dreamed. It closed the doors of the mind against the
most pellucid lens of possible insight into profound truth. It thus aided the
forces of darkness and obscurantism in their ghastly work of bigotry, persecution
and foul inhumanity.
Even yet we suffer through lack of
it. We have been frightened away from embracing it by the insistent cry that
"analogy proves nothing." Let the refrain be: Of course it proves nothing.
It was never meant to "prove" anything. It does not need to prove anything.
Its function is not "proof" but something possibly of far greater
importance. What it is qualified to do is to sharpen vision and quicken the
mind to acuter perception. It is able to point man's insight from the realm of
the seen to that of things unseen,--concepts, cosmic processes, laws,
principles, categories. Had scientists
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used the law of analogy they would
have been prepared to find without surprise that the atom, when discovered,
would be formed over the pattern of a solar system. If they followed the
implications of analogy now, they would know that death does not end the life
of an inner principle or seed in human beings, but that, like the acorn or any
seed of a garden plant or flower, this life-bearing nucleus will bring itself
to a new period of organic existence in a rebirth in a new cycle. Analogy is
the one aid to seeing provided for the dull human mind.
The strategic importance for
psychoanalytic aims and practices of clarifying the sharp distinction between
the two realms of unconsciousness, the sub- and the super-conscious, can not be
overvalued. It will give the understanding a closer grip on the apprehension of
all ethical values, since it will provide intelligence with the capability of
rating psychic motivations in the category of subconscious fixations, mere
addictions of habit, or in the higher category of fresh releases of insight and
inspiration from the overshadowing god. It is of vital importance to know
whether they are the one or the other. It will furnish the basis of a study of
social and intellectual mores in relation to the pioneer's flash of
higher insight that would dictate a change to new and freer standards. It would
put in our hands the key to the science of human well-being and happiness. It
is the core of all problems in the career of the individual.
Theology has been reduced to the
status of an outcast, and verily it is but a corpse of its once radiant
significance. Yet its doctrines, as still extant, are the empty forms of the
prime truths so badly needed by humanity. The great conflict so variously and
vividly dramatized in the scriptures between rebellious man and patient,
long-suffering and at times wrathful god, is the open sesame that exposes to
sight the complexities of the critical psychic mystery of man's being. The
moral struggle within the breast of man is the pivotal hinge of all
understanding in psychology. It is grounded on the real presence of the higher
element, the god, in the human animal. As said, this inner guest is on the way
to become the pre-
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siding genius of the organism, which
is a microcosm or miniature reduplication of the macrocosmic universe. His
reason, intelligence and wisdom, as the King of Righteousness, are to assume
governorship over the energies that dwell in the "underworld" of the
senses and the feelings, and which, lying below the level of mind, are
irrational and elemental. They move on instinct and not on reason. Their range
of expression constitutes that great "underworld" so ubiquitously
found in all the systematic mythologies of the past, that "nether
world" into which every divine hero descends, there to overcome the
enemies that hold captive the soul-maiden, the psyche, and lead her as his
bride out of the realm of lower darkness, of gloomy night and flitting shades.
This is the rough representation of the drama in folk-lore.
In theology, the sun-hero descends
into the dark realms of Hades, Hell, Sheol or Amenta, to visit "the
spirits in prison" and to bring light "to those that sit in
darkness," or to awaken or revive those that lie, like Lazarus, asleep in
"death." For this darksome lower region is the realm of the
"dead," in which Pluto, Yama, Osiris or Loki rule. The blunder of the
scholastics in mislocating this Amenta, Sheol or Hades in mythology and
theology as elsewhere than right here in this world of living experience is one
of the crudest and costliest mistakes ever perpetrated. It has caused the
untold miscarriage of the knowledge that was designed to enlighten humanity
along its toilsome path of evolution.
The god-soul migrated to earth and
took on a bodily incarnation for the higher purpose of forwarding, under
conditions most aptly ordained to achieve the result, the growth of its seed
potentiality into the likeness of its parent divinity. If the general mind
could once gain the ancient philosophical understanding that these human souls
of ours are integral fragments of the mind-soul-spirit of God himself, seed
units of divine consciousness, and that they are here on their long mission of
evolution in the return cycle to the Father's mansions, earthly life would gain
immeasurably in poise, equanimity and happiness. This being their errand, and
their own
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lives being internally activated by
the pressure of this consciousness by virtue of their sharing a portion of the
divine mind itself, their task is to see that this work is as directly and as
efficiently carried forward as may best be done. Antique documents indeed
disclose that these souls, on leaving their celestial abodes to become, as Paul
says, "a colony of heaven" on earth, expressly bound themselves by
"broad oaths fast sealed" to descend, occupy the bodies of a race of
animal-men and strictly attend to the great evolutionary business of refining
their lower natures up to the point of highest humanhood, or even to touch the
level of godhood just beyond. The successful performance of their mission
would, as Plato's Timaeus sets forth, graduate them into the ranks of
the gods, with the crown of immortal life as their guerdon. As has been seen,
this aeonial work was to end with the weaving together of "mortal and
immortal natures" in one new man, the glorious achievement of the
atonement. "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."
Zealously, then, the divine soul
incorporated in gross body stands guard, as it more fully awakens, to conserve
the best interests of both itself and its animal servant, the body. When the
waywardness of the personality, or its ignorance of wise procedures, or its
recalcitrancy, block the way of progress along the normal path, or when sheer
folly, or sloth or stupidity threaten the success of the enterprise, the godly
soul within must assert its authority or register its protest. This it does in
ways of indirection and subtlety, but at any rate in a fashion to make its
voice of remonstrance heard by the lower self. Some form of inharmony, some
form of psychic disturbance, some pathological condition is engendered. This is
to impress the outer conscious mind. And as Dr. Hinkle asserts, the trouble
lies deeply buried in an internal impasse, which must be dissolved by probing
after, discovering and removing the real core of obstruction, the real nub of
the psychic problem. Psychoanalysis is acting wisely in using the symptoms of
disturbance as vanes of indication and diagnosis of the trouble in its deepest
aspects. The soul within, watching the outer man's hit-and-miss efforts, can
tolerate only so
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much aberration and loss of
incarnational time and opportunity. It is its pledged duty to see that the
external life falls measurably in line with a program that will best further
the long-aim effort, or at least not too seriously jeopardize the chances of
success. Psychoanalysis, Dr. Hinkle says, provides a technique by means of
which the outer consciousness is aided in coming to a recognition of a deeply
obscured inward deadlock, and so is helped to remove an obstruction to the
development of a "greater self" within the human constitution.
Psychoanalysis is built, she says, entirely upon the laying bare, or bringing
to the surface, the unconscious motives and obstructed purposes,
different from and independent of those known consciously. This proves to be
exactly true. The majority of people remain ignorant of the genesis of the
psychic disorders within themselves, and there was no science of diagnosis and
discovery of the sources of disturbance until psychoanalysis came forward to
reveal that they were engendered by the innermost true being of the individual
himself, lying out of sight in the depths of the self and playing the role of
the "silent watcher" and the guardian daemon. We must become
"introvert" enough to probe deeply within the most obscure and hidden
motivations of conduct and feeling. How apt, then, is what Dr. Hinkle says on this
point!:
"For the introvert's real
values lie in the unconscious, in the depths, and must be sought there and not
in the world of sense."
This is to say that the supremely
important, crucial and decisive motivations that seize upon and direct the self
to special exertions at critical junctures in the life spring not from the
vagrant and fickle desires of the personality on the surface, but rather from
what Maeterlinck called the "inconscient superieur" and the
"prospective potency" of the unconscious.
It is indeed unfulfilled need and
unsatisfied yearnings deeply subterranean in the mortal constitution that give
rise to neuroses, as Dr. Hinkle so convincingly states. She rightly sees the
needs and yearnings arise from remoter sources within the psyche than
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the outer mind's sphere of
consciousness. There must therefore be postulated within man's constitution the
presence of a mind or self whose intelligence reaches beyond that of the brain.
There must be predicated a knower within the personality who projects his
message and his wishes outward upon the attention of the conscious mind. He may
do this by symbolic hints, or by precipitating a condition of unbalance and
inharmony within the psychic functioning of the whole person. The task or
function of that more central power resident "below the threshold" is
to see that the outer personality maintains a fairly close rapport, in motive, exertion
and aim, with its own superior purposes. If this is tolerably well
accomplished, there is little need for overt communication between the
submerged monitor and the day consciousness. The hidden god, called by the
Egyptians Amen, "the god in hiding," rests content with the progress
made in the outer sphere of action. But if wreckage is threatened or the outer
faculties remain too long unawakened, the occasion demands his interference,
and protest must be made by way of a message in symbolic language or by
unhappiness generated to provoke inquiry, or new courses of action and new
exertions.
Dr. Hinkle says that the need of the
organism is to win a higher integration of its component elements. Seen
from the ancient mount of knowledge of man's composite nature, the phrase
serves well enough to shape out the truth of the case. Where the aim is, as in
man, to "weave together mortal and immortal natures," the successful
outcome partakes of the character of an integration. The practical thing accomplished
is the harmonious accommodation, under the laws of a harmony of relations
little different from those that govern the symphonization of musical notes
through mathematically attuned vibrations, of the energies of the two natures,
until their combined expression effects a concord instead of a discord. If this
more lovely resultant is not achieved, there is discord within the psyche and
pathological instability or unbalance in the outer person.
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As long, this discerning
psychoanalyst says, as the
"higher psychological functions of humanity remain
bound in a crude, instinctive form, there will be neurotic problems to face,
for the whole effort of the human being is to transcend the instinctive
animal."
Here is the long unrecognized,
unesteemed, ancient philosophy and theology of wise seers of antiquity coming
forth to the light of modern perception after centuries of oblivion. But it can
be released from the jargon of technical psychoanalytic phrasing and expressed
in the form of theological dialectic. As long as the god is too crudely kept in
"durance vile," in bondage under the nescience, the lethargy, the
brutish grossness of the purely animal nature surging up from below, it will
become restive and eventually throw the organism into discordant states by way
of remonstrance. Perhaps also it might be expressed as viewed from the other
side, that the coarse behavior of the sensuous animal nature of the lower man,
overriding and suppressing or blocking the gentler small voice of the god,
throws the relationship between the two components into a painful tension of
unbalance, creating a neurosis. It is important to have Dr. Hinkle's own
phrasing of this elaboration. She says in the same passage (p. 328):
"The many aberrations and
neurotic weaknesses, deviation from the abstract called normal, all reveal in
their very lack of fixed and rigid forms, possibilities of development and
transfigurations from the un-self-conscious animal man to that highly conscious
self-creative man."
This is nothing short of splendid.
As disease is a manifestation of the forces of the organism struggling to
regain a balance called normal health, so neurotic disturbances are upheavals
of internal or submerged native forces of spirit striving to establish a
harmony or balance termed normal mental sanity.
There is warrant for subjecting this
reference to "the abstraction called normal" to a moment's closer
scrutiny. Normality is by no means a mere abstraction, though of course it is
abstractly discerned. The mental abstraction is the perception of a very real
thing. It
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comes back again to the symbol of
the "horizon" of Egyptian literature and the "cleft of the
rock" in Hebrew typology, as well as the "rib" of Adam, generic
man. (For the "rib" was properly a midrib, a line of cleavage run
down the middle of the unified being of God, dividing it apart into its twoness
of spirit and matter, male and female.) All life struggles to maintain its
organic existence on a line or at a point of exact equilibration between the
forces of spirit and matter. It ever stands and builds its bodies, its
vehicles, precisely at the point of neutralization between centripetal and
centrifugal energies, as witness all the stars in their orbits and the
electrons in their path and position around the central proton. The Egyptians
magnificently called the earth, on which such stabilization is achieved,
"the pool of equipoise and propitiation," or balance and final
atonement. The ancient astrology expressed the same idea by means of the sign
of Libra, the balance. All life is eternally, while in manifestation, being
tried in the balance. It can, so to say, only stand still and be localized as
an existent thing when it is held firmly in the immovable status between the
two equally balanced opposite poles or pulls. It stands at the neutral point of
the tension. Says Emerson: "Man stands at the point midway betwixt the
inner spirit and the outer matter." Only when the two energies of spirit
and matter are equilibrated in one organism can the stable permanency be gained
which is requisite for the eventual copulation of their opposing powers, to
give birth to their "sons," the created progeny. The Christos could
not be brought to birth out of the body of virgin matter (Maria) until
that was held in stable relation to the power of the Holy Spirit from
above. So the allegory represented the Christ as being born in a
"stable." And once again a frightfully mangled allegory of supernal
ancient wisdom is redeemed from modern caricature of its original majestic beauty.
So the human mind, in deepest
reflection, has rightly conceived a condition of mean balance between two
extremes in every manifestation of life and activity. It is Plato's splendid
doctrine of the
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"golden mean." Life
expression can be normal only when it is poised at this point of equilibration
between too much and too little. Plato convincingly fixed the character of each
virtue by placing it, when rightly defined, at the exact point of balance
between the excess and the deficiency of the quality in question. Courage was
the precise balance between foolhardy, reckless daring and rank cowardice. This
must be determined in the finale by requisite knowledge of how much is too much
or how little is too little. This judgment, properly exercised, yields final truth,
inasmuch as these determinations are definitely those that must be made by all
constantly. The "normal" in all forms of human conduct is the most
consistently successful result of the best effort to establish those lines and
points of precise balance between right and wrong, good and evil, true and
false, which according to Plato and Socrates, are always resolvable to a merely
quantitative measure of too much or too little. Man is indeed being weighed in
the scales of the balance and, in Egypt's figurism, bathing in the "pool
of equipoise."
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CHAPTER IX
THE TWO MOTHERS OF THE CHRIST
Another most vital determination
reached by psychoanalysis and well stated by Dr. Hinkle is that the crux of the
psychic conflict in the human breast is the effort of something deeper in the
psyche than the animal feeling "to transcend the instinctive animal."
Again modern discovery has merely caught up with ancient proficiency. St. Paul
and Plato, Hermes and Orpheus, the philosophers and the Illuminati, had long
ago set down the terms of this problem. They all delineated the moral effort of
mankind under the terms of the central situation, which set before the second
Adam, the son of the woman, the product of nature's second birthing, the
aeonial task of combating, overcoming, transforming and finally embracing in
union the first Adam, natural man, of the earth, earthy, carnal, sensual animal
man. First comes that which is natural, says St. Paul, then that which is
spiritual. The natural is first on the visible scene of creation, since the
second or spiritual can supervene from out the world of pure conscious
potentiality into the world of actual conscious existence only through the
instrumentalities provided by the preceding physical development. The body must
be here before the royal guest from above can enter as its tenant and use its
agencies. Or, perhaps more scientifically stated, the body must be here before
the soul that is animating its growth can find the proper channel for its
expression.
The victory of the soul is won,
then, by its transcending the instinctive animal. "Instinct" is the
form which activity takes in the animal half of man under the impulsion of the automatism
of the subconscious. The animal lives under the dominion of the
subconscious, since he is not yet man, and man, from the Sanskrit man
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"to think," is the
thinker. The animal is not a thinker, except potentially and rudimentarily. The
body (animal man) is run by instinct, unreasoned automatism. All the functions
are governed by an automatic memory, which does not know how to deviate, or can
not originate deviation. All its conscious energies or motivations lie below
the level of reasoning mind.
The whole moral struggle in man is
envisaged as the warfare between the two natures, the imprisoned potentiality
of soul wrestling against the powers of flesh and blood to acquire dominion
over them, to govern them according to reason and to tame their fierce wild
energies into the service of divine law. To transmute their rapacity of selfish
desire into the offices of the law of love, to swing their jostling forces into
a fellowship of the elements, to make the organism a cosmos under law instead
of a chaos of unintelligent blind powers, is the cyclic assignment of the
second Adam, the Christ. Psychoanalysis has at last probed to the root of man's
happiness and the stability--or instability--of his psychic self in his great
evolutionary labor. And in doing so it finds itself standing side by side with
the lost purport of the revered scriptures of the race. Men of truly divine
stature gave this wisdom to the race in its childhood. They sought to embody it
in the unforgettable forms of universal mnemonics. The only unforgettable
mnemonics are the forms and phenomena of nature. The alphabet of the universal
language of truth is composed of the symbols drawn from nature. The great
Bibles are works written in the language of symbols, with allegory, fable,
parable, myth, drama, number graph and astrograph the primary elaborations. The
tree, the leaf, the seed, the root, the branch, the stump, the stream, the
star, the sun and moon, earth and water, air, fire, aether, the cross, the
circle, the square, triangle, the arch, the ark, the flood, the fish, beetle,
cow, cat, dragon-fly, thunder, lightning, the rainbow and a host of other forms
and phenomena were the characters, the expressive words, of that forgotten
language.
Pause should be made to look at just
two of these, water and the
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fish. An enlightenment that is
almost stunning in the depth of its revelation of hitherto undiscovered meaning
behind such a symbology is in store for the investigating mind. The approach is
through a statement in the mythicism of archaic literature that the Sun-god,
the Christos-Messiah, specifically in Egypt Iusa or Horus, son of Osiris, had
two mothers, of various names. The hint was obscure and baffling until it
was recalled that the mother of life is ever the negative essence, matter
(Latin, mater). It was but a further step then to the realization that
matter--as announced to us in the first chapter of Genesis--is twofold
in form or organization. There is the firmament above and the firmament below.
There are the waters above and the waters below. (Water has already been
disclosed to be the prime symbol of matter.) As water can subsist in two
distinct forms, invisible vapor and visible substance as liquid or ice, so
matter has evolved in two separate and distinct states. It is first, in the
inchoate state, purely essence, not substance; only the potentiality of substance.
It is inorganic, unatomic, invisible, the "great sea" of material
potentiality, mare, Mary. In this state it is "the first
mother," who generates in turn her daughter, organic, atomic,
structuralized and visible substance, the second mother. For she becomes
impregnated with the seed of spirit-mind and is destined to give birth to the
Christos in man's developed body. There is first, then, the inorganic or virgin
mother, unwedded to spirit, and the organic or wedded mother, who finally
produces the god-son. Born originally "of a virgin" any divine
creation or "son of God" must be.
In a flash it was seen that as water
typified the general all-pervading first virgin essence of matter, inorganic,
the fish, as its first and universal creation of an organic structural
constitution, would stand as the type of the second mother, or substantial
matter. The Christ character in the allegorical depiction, then, would be the
"son of the fish," or of the "fish-mother," not of the "water-mother."
Imagine, then, the pertinence of the discovery that many of the goddess mothers
of Sun-gods or Messiahs were actually
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styled "the fish-mother"
of the Son of God! Atergatis and Semiramus were particularly so named. Jonah
allegorism was immediately at hand to harmonize with the interpretation, as
fabling the great fish that ingested, then delivered at his proper destination,
the Christos. Unquestionably "Jonah" is a variant of the divine name,
Jesus, which is found in some twenty-five or more forms in the Old Testament.
One of these is "Joshua," as to which there is not the slightest
possibility of dispute as to its identity with "Jesus." And now comes
an unexpected and astonishing further corroboration. Joshua is "son of
Nun," and Nun is the name of the Hebrew letter "N" and means, of
all things,--"fish." Joshua (Jesus), son of the fish, or fish-mother.
And the Greek world in the first three centuries of Christianity denominated
the Christian Jesus as Ichthys (Ichthus), the Greek word for
"fish." Augustine and Tertullian both expressly name Jesus as the
great fish, and his followers as the "little fishes," (Latin, pisciculi).
Nor is this all--or the most significant detail.
The astrologizing early mythicists
allocated the birthplace of the first or natural man in the sign of Virgo, the
Virgin (matter), and placed the birth of the second or spiritual man, "the
man Christ," in the sign directly, or six months, opposite in the zodiac,
Pisces, a water sign. The New Testament allegory uses bread and fish as the
divine food that the Christ brings wherewith to feed mortal man in order to
immortalize him, in the "miracle" of the feeding of the five
thousand. The sign Pisces is already by name the house of the fishes, but it
was also termed, by association with the opposite sign Virgo, in which the
Virgin carries in her hand the great star Spica, "the head of wheat"
from which the divine bread was to be made, the house of bread. And now comes
the last tremendous revelation of the allegorical and non-historical character
of Biblical lore. "House of bread" in Hebrew is, as any scholar
knows, Bethlehem! There was no other place for the Christos to be born
than in "Bethlehem," the zodiacal "house of bread" and of
fish. And, to round out the thrilling denouement, the first chapter of Luke records
Jesus' birth as occurring just six months after that of John
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the Baptist, who expressly announces
himself as playing the part of the first or natural man, who must come first to
"prepare the way of the Lord," the spiritual Christ. Beyond any
possibility of quibble these six months in Luke's narrative must be
interpreted as the half year on the zodiacal chart and as understandable only
thus, and in no sense historically. This is a momentous disclosure of the
presence of ancient astrological typism in the very heart of the Christian
Gospels.
But the crown of all this revelation
is still to come. One finds all these allegorical transactions already extant
for thousands of years in the literature of old Egypt, and there represented as
taking place in Anu, most astonishingly described in the Book of the Dead as
being "the place of multiplying bread." Could anything be more
thrilling in the whole field of Comparative Religion study? Jesus multiplied
bread and so did Horus, his Egyptian prototype. Horus was earlier Iusa (Jesus).
Horus multiplied bread at Anu. An ancient Greek or Egyptian "U"
becomes "Y" when transferred to English. And so these divine
transactions occurred at the Egyptian Any, the house of bread (and of
fish, no doubt), and when the Hebrew word for "house," beth, is
added, the result is the Gospel Beth-any! As the spiritual man goes down
into matter in his incarnation, in the legendary and allegorical conflict
between the "two brothers," the spiritual and the physical men, it is
the spiritual that decreases and the physical that increases. When the nadir of
descent is reached (and "Sinai" means "point of turning and
returning"), and the reascent is begun, the reverse is true. It is then
the first or natural man who diminishes, while the buried spiritual genius
germinates and increases. And John the Baptist says: "I must decrease, and
he must increase."
Likewise it was at Bethany that
"Lazarus" was raised from the dead by the Gospel Son of God. As, by
reincarnation, a man is reborn and resurrected to new life from the
"dead" state of inertia under the lethal dominance of the instincts
of the flesh and this is accomplished by the new projection of himself into
body as his
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own son, so it is always the divine
son who in all the allegories raises his father from the dead. Could anything
be more staggering, then, than the discovery that "Lazarus" is an old
Egyptian derivative, which with the prefixing of the Hebrew word "El"
for "God," and the Latin masculine terminal -us suffixed
to Asar, the original form of the name of Osiris, gives finally
El-Asar-us, or Lazarus! So the Christ of Egypt raised from the dead his father
Asar, or Osir-is. And this took place at Anu, or (Beth)any.
The identity is even carried out to
the point that there are in both allegories the two women present, whose names
reach similarity in the Gospel Mary and the Egyptian Meri.
Converting all this, which flows
forth from the consideration of just two of the great letters of the ancient
symbolic alphabet, over into its reference to psychoanalysis, it is clearly
enough seen to point to the "raising" or increasing of the divine
element, the unconscious in human life, from its "dead" condition in
its burial or immersing in the flesh of body. The carnal nature that was strong
at the beginning of the human cycle, while the spirit was overlaid and rendered
"sub"-active, must now decrease, while the unconscious higher self,
the savior and redeemer of its brother, must increase. The development requires
the growing domination of the lower by the higher. If the lower is recalcitrant
and blocks the "normal" process of the growth, there is disturbance
within the household of the psyche. Impasses, stubborn obsessions, unrelenting
strength of carnal desire, must be broken and dissipated, to let the soul go
marching on. It is clear as can well be that the diagnosis of psychotic
unbalance and instability must be charted as the complication resulting from
the body's, and even the mind's, interference with the ongoing of the soul.
Neurotic man is out of harmony with his own soul, is blocking the progress of
the "something beyond himself" within him toward its divinely
ordained goal. His condition indeed calls for reintegration. The ancients
unreservedly declared that this reorientation was possible only through
philosophy, which was then honored with the designation of "divine,"
as the philosophy that con-
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cerned itself fundamentally with the
existence, functions and welfare of the divine element in the human
constitution, its descent into the flesh and its redemption therefrom.
Life, for the purposes of its
evolution having projected its conscious units into immersion in the watery
condition of physical bodies--whence the sea as the symbol of life in flesh,
and the "Red" Sea a reference to the blood--apparently must use the
outer physical as its ultimate means for urging the necessity of corrections or
readjustments within the sphere of its corporeal domain. That is to say, that
when there is a deadlock in the psychic field, when the mind or the elementary
instincts become set in rigid postures that are out of accord with the
interests of true progress, the spirit within must break through or break down
the imprisoning fetters by means of some irruption or upheaval in the physical
or mental organism. The inharmony established by the wrong mental or physical
habit will itself sooner or later work its disruptive effects upon the outer
vehicle, and thus call attention to and enforce the needed adjustment. It is
not at all out of line with legitimate evolutionary economy to suppose that
directive life would use the physical instruments to correct the erring mental.
It is the only available resort even among humans to attempt to force a change
of stubborn mental attitudes by an assault on the body. There are junctures and
situations in which nothing will change dogged fixations of mind except an
attack upon the body. The mind can only be reached and influenced through pain
or damage to the body. If obdurate opinion or determination can not be changed
by mental appeal, the only resort life has is to strike at it through the
physical. This alone may in such case bring the mind around to reason. Life
does use this method. And it can readily be seen that this is the ultimate
reason for wars. When all mental approach to difficult problems proves
unavailing, physical force is the only recourse. It will be so until the race
learns to be governed by its intellect and not by its desires.
Psychic inability, nerve collapse,
bodily illness are then the out-
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ward symbols of the soul's
discontent with the lack of true growth that should come through the
concordance of the outer bodily regime of life with the far-projected cosmic
interests of the soul. They should not be treated as abnormalities to be
immediately eradicated. It is a fine observation of Chandler Bennitt in his
valuable work on psychoanalysis, The Real Use of the Unconscious, that
the presence of a fear complex should not be treated as a mere detrimental
symptom to be swept away as quickly as possible or exorcized by mental
manipulation, without regard to what it reveals. Fear should not be abolished
until its prognostic message indicating what is at fault has been rightly interpreted.
It is a sign and index of maladjustment. The important thing is to discover the
defect and mend it, not to get rid of the symptom. Only by such a right
interpretation can it be abolished effectually.
These psychoanalytic considerations
may not appear to be directly connected with the problem of religion. Yet it
can be asserted very strongly that the whole problem of religion is resolvable
into the terms of this philosophical, theological and psychological background.
For the latter stand in immediate correlation with the focal point of all
religion, which is the relation of man, or of a man, to his God. Over this
relation a thousand books penned by Christian theologians and scholars have
expended the most strenuous energies of lucubrated dialectic in support of a
thesis, believed to be the particular gift or pronouncement of the Christian
faith, that made man's acceptance of and surrender to a Supreme Deity allocated
vaguely in cosmic heavens or seated somewhere "behind" all things, the
pivotal element in his soul's salvation. It is safe to say that this conception
of the location, nature and range of the Deity to which man stood in this
fateful relation has been the direct cause of more mental dereliction and
psychic unbalance in the history of the West for sixteen centuries than any
other agency. Misconception and unsound philosophy have presented their bill of
costs to a civilization largely motivated on their predications that is
staggering in its total of wrecked mentality, distracted individual life,
eccentricity of be-
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havior and wide human wretchedness
unequaled in the records of mankind. That a civilization holding sway over
hundreds of millions of persons for some sixteen hundred years should have
entirely misdirected the focus of the psychic effort of its myriad following
upon the wrong location of its guiding Deity, both surpasses belief and defies
the adequate telling. In the vast aggregate of its wastage of human devotion,
this must hold the palm for the most colossal miscarriage of all history.
Always the mind was directed toward a God who was placed at the summit of the
creation, supreme over all and of inconceivable cosmic majesty and power. He
was pictured and described as the One great God of the universe. (Although it
was usually contrived at the same time that he should be represented as a
Person standing in close and intimate relation with each and every individual
human, shrunken almost to the character and proportions of a benevolent
grandfather, with his one arm around one's neck.) The God with whom man was
called upon in all religion to align his life properly was no God within reach
of earth, but one governing the illimitable reaches of cosmos and resident
somewhere in inconceivable form and might and majesty. He was a God whose
beneficent attentions and ministrations poured upon or into the human from
outside, from above. It was almost blasphemy to circumscribe the human
conception of him to such form as could be thought to be an integral and
interior portion of the human himself. That he could be resident within the
boundaries of man's own nature and operative from within outward was an idea
that never came to maturity in the religious mind, albeit it did find some
expression in poetry. Perennially dominant in popular thought was the notion
that religion was the play of forces involved in the relationship between the
mortal person and his God whose residence was somewhere at the summit of cosmic
creation. Never was religion conceived to be the relation between man shallow and
man profound.
Lest it be charged that this
characterization of prevalent and traditional religion is a misstatement of the
case, it is desirable to cite
119
a few out of numberless passages to
support the description. Here is Dr. Hopper (The Crisis of Faith, p.
226) saying, in reference to a statement quoted from Emil Brunner anent man's
being made in God's image, that man manifests
"an existence which points back
or refers to something else. . . . Man's meaning and his intrinsic worth do not
reside in himself, but in the One who stands 'over against him,' in Christ, the
Primal Image, in the Word of God."
Here the Deity is not removed to
cosmic distances but is still kept out of the constitution of man himself,
being allocated to the life of One character in history. It is expressly
declared that the power activating man's salvation does not reside within
himself. It is exterior. Again Dr. Hopper cites Emil Brunner in the statement
that God wills to save us not by "domestic," that is, our own home or
internal, power or genius, but by extraneous righteousness and wisdom, which is
not, says Brunner, a power welling up from within us, not that which originates
on our earth, but that which came down from heaven. Therefore, he goes on, it
is our plain task to look to a righteousness quite outside ourselves and
foreign to our nature. To this end it is first of all necessary in the life of
true religion that "domestic righteousness" should be uprooted and
external influx invited by an attitude of surrender and prayer for help from
God. God indeed stands so far remote from us that if we are ever to gain his
attention to our groveling appeals for mercy, it must be through (the
historical) Jesus, our intercessor with the otherwise inaccessible God.
Then we have Matthew Arnold's famous
phrase defining God: "a power not ourselves that makes for
righteousness." And here is Dr. Hopper again saying that the true center
of the self is not in itself, but lies in God. And he defines true
self-knowledge as the knowledge that not in ourselves is truth to be found, but
outside the self, in God. We are familiar with the prayer-book's weekly
confessional that "in us there is no soundness nor health."
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In short, the power that man is to
know, as his highest culmination of certitude touching his eternal destiny, is
that knowledge unto salvation is not within himself, not even as an attainment,
but must be sought, solicited, entreated and beguiled unto him from divine
sources outside himself, who may be persuaded to vouchsafe it to him finally
irrespective of his own merits or deserts. All man's self-righteousness, even
his whole offering of himself in service to Deity, is profitless; it is as
"filthy rags." Man can be redeemed from his lost estate only by the
free oblation of God's, or his Son's, grace in his behalf. The outcome is
surrender of man to faith in the Infinite God and throwing himself on God's
mercy. It is stated that man's only hope of redemption lies in and through his
relation to God, who is most positively removed outside the pale of man's own
constitution. A thousand citations might be adduced to the same effect.
It is invidious, but necessary, to
declare that all these heaped-up asseverations as to man's dependence upon a
deific power exterior to himself could not have been written but for the fatal
miscarriage of the original Greek philosophic content of early Christianity. It
can likewise be asserted that one breath of restored philosophic wisdom sweeps
them all forever out upon the ashheap of obsolete rubbish. It is oddly true
that, when rightly understood, every one of the assertions under criticism is a
thing of profound truth, yet made disastrously, tragically false by a final
distortion of its meaning by the wrong allocation of the abiding place of Deity
for man. It is of course sublimely true that the pinnacle of man's
self-knowledge is the understanding that his true saving selfhood lies in his
relation to God. But calamity beyond estimate at once rushed in when ignorance
swept away the knowledge that the god with whom he can alone have fellowship
had been placed in immediate conjunction with his own life, embodied indeed in
his own constitution. What God hath joined together let no man put asunder. But
an ignorant and faithless theology did tear asunder what God and life had
joined together, and centuries of theological effort have been turned into a
mocking caricature of truth and sanity as a
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dire result. The upshot has been
that an ecclesiastical power for centuries dominant over the lives and minds of
western humanity has belabored its millions of deluded followers with the
necessity of producing in themselves a veritable psychological self-castration.
It has persuaded, indeed hypnotized them with the conviction that life had laid
heavily upon them the evolutionary charge of saving themselves (from horrendous
eternal fate) by means of a psychological operation the tools and
instruments of which were not all within the scope of their own endowment. It
envisaged for them their redemption from the direst of cosmic calamities
through their consummating a relation with a power which was in no way amenable
to their own initiative or control. It reduced them to the position of
helpless, hopeless, groveling cravens. And it turned their direction of effort
away from, instead of focusing it immediately upon, the power alleged to be
their savior. Human culture at one stroke plunged into futility and rushed
toward certain defeat the moment this twist in human understanding had been
made. It seems quite past belief that it could not be seen that the thousands
of books and millions of sermons dealing with the problem of man's relation to
God would have had the entire crux and dilemma of their difficulty immediately
resolved in clear understanding by the simple philosophical item that the God
with whom man sustained such momentous relation was all the while an integral
part and portion of man's own composition. So that when the problem by its
accepted terms seemed to set man over against an outside power called God, the
difficulty in this across-the-gulf relation could at once be clarified by the
knowledge that the true situation did not set man against an external power,
but only set one element of his own nature over against another equally his
own. And astuter grasp of the whole truth of the matter would have added the
happier knowledge that even the represented antagonism between the two elements
within was only a dramatic mask covering the real fact of the actual mutuality
and entire beneficence of the relation. The placing of God, as the power with
whom man
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was to effect a relation of
reconciliation and atonement, outside the human breast and brain has
been the supreme cultural catastrophe of all history.
Infinite power and mind reside in
the center of cosmos, surely. And this mighty infinitude of power and
intelligence, in its ordering of cosmos, is perpetually affecting the life of
little man. All things flow from it, and it does impinge upon the world of
mankind with the touch of its myriad forces. But with that Infinitude, in
Itself, and as a Whole, man has no relation, none, certainly, that can be
initiated by action from his own end. It is the sheerest imbecility to
predicate the subsistence of such a relation between minor man and the cosmic
God. God is present, as Emerson affirms, in all his parts in every moss
and cobweb. He is present in man and in all about him. But not with God as a
Whole and only with that unit in the life and being of each mortal, does man
stand in close and intimate relation. Only with the infant deity within him can
man have communion. If he can not recognize, cultivate and lay hold of this
much of Deity transcending his own lower animal nature, all his chattering of
rising to share the life of cosmic Godhood is tragic insanity. And the
presumption that such a communion was possible has bred the most frightful
insanity upon the earth.
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CHAPTER X
IMMANUEL'S LAMP
The sane approach to true
understanding is through the realization that God has implanted in each mortal
man a seed fragment of his own life. He has done his utmost to put himself
within the inmost self of every creature. This he can do and has done by
implanting the seed potentiality of his being in each one. More than this he
could hardly do. He brake his own total body into fragments and gave one of
them to each of us. This he did as the one sure way of dowering us with the
capacity and capability of becoming his immortal sons. He has made himself
forever accessible to us by this impartation of sonship, likeness of nature,
adoption by him and final union with his own being. Closer than this he could
not place us or bring us. Better than standing outside of us and listening to
our beseeching, he placed an integral unit of himself immediately within
us, so that we could never be apart from him, never detached from him.
How utterly fatuous, then, and what
age-long heinous folly to instruct millions to overlook the deity immediately
resident within their own native constitution, and direct piteous pleas up to
heaven to draw God's eyes upon them! The whole exertion of human devotion
poured upward to God and the human striving to reach God have been converted
into fantastic fatuity by the ceaseless prodding of the millions at the hands
of ignorant priestcraft to scorn the divinity within the human and to direct
that human to look upward and outward in search of the supreme and absolute
God.
The return to sanity and the
rectification of all inept and withering stupidity in this connection must come
through the recognition, regained from ancient knowledge, that while every
assertion as to
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the dependence of man upon God is
true, vitiation of the meaning must be obviated and thrilling release of power
restored, through the knowledge that the relation between the two elements is a
transaction that takes place wholly in the interior of man's own life. It
transpires within the arena of man's own consciousness, not being a contact
between the man as a whole and another power in no way appertaining to his
scope of being. Man must come again to the possession of the self-knowledge
which assures him that both the human and the divine elements are within his
own range of cultivation. True it must be for him that he can do nothing
without the help of the divine power. The exertions of his merely human self are
in a very real sense futile, without the saving grace of the god. In a
poetic sense they are "as filthy rags." But both the natural man and
the spiritual man are ingredients of himself! The deity that is at hand
to save him is "domestic." It is not extraneous. That it is
has been the fatal falsehood and sad miscarriage of Christian doctrinism. It
has been no less than devastating, calamitous.
Psychoanalysis, arm in arm with
ancient philosophy, comes forward now to correct the falsehood and place man's
redeemer once again within the close reach of the mortal himself. It comes to
make God directly accessible to man again. And it shows how man may reach him
without the abject and stultifying "surrender" of his humanhood, as
the price of buying "grace" from on high. How far afield from truth
and sanity must be that religion which preaches that God would be at pains
through an evolutionary effort covering millions of years with billions of his
creatures to build up such an agency of ongoing as the human consciousness and
its human powers, and then demand that for further advance at the very time
when that consciousness and those powers are gaining strength they should be surrendered
back to him or thrown away as useless! If, however, it is made clear that in
the turn of the cycle of growth, in the changing relation between the two
elements of himself, evolution demands that the human side of him be
subordinated to a
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place of subserviency to the divine
part of him, then understanding can prevail and sanity and intelligence can
direct the movement. The theology of "surrender" can then be held in
true balance and not felt as a tearing of the self apart. It will indeed be seen
in its true light as a more stable integration of the self.
The theological writers have used
the word "man" or its pronoun "he" without regard to Paul's
high-pitched shout at us: "Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus
Christ is within you?" Likewise they have ignored many other scriptural
statements that tacitly or avowedly scream the same mighty truth at us. Always
the insistent exhortation delivered by priestcraft to countless laity was and
is that man should obliterate his humanity in its entirety, that he
should repudiate the whole of his nature, both his meanest and his own best,
and, rejecting himself as a lost creature, turn completely away from himself
and toward God. And this God was unfailingly pointed to as lying outside of,
above, beyond him in infinite transcendence. Even when writers speak of the
necessity of man's self-transcendence, they merely imply the transcending of
himself as a whole through the agency of God's influences exerted upon him from
outside, and not initiated (unless by frantic plea) by man himself. They never
mean that man himself should by his own exertions transcend himself, or that
higher man should transcend lower man, all within the area of his own
capabilities. It is even asserted that God's agencies on man's behalf begin
where man's resources end. Even with Plato's categorical assurance in the Timaeus
(which was for centuries until the coming of Aristotle's works the main
light of Christian scholastic exegesis and theology) that God had implanted in
each human the seeds of his own imperishable divinity and indeed given his
instructions to those conscious units of his own being ere they were dispatched
to earth to be the souls in mortal bodies, Christian understanding never
clearly grasped the implications of this anthropological datum so as to spread
the absolutely crucial intelligence that it was only the mortal part of the
dual creature, man, which was to be put off in
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proportion as the immortal part was
engrafted upon the stem of life.
It is a sad comment necessarily made
on Christian theological ineptitude that while uttering the very words of the
sublimest truth, it still totally missed the ultimate and vital truth of the
language. Never in all history has the shell of the truth been preserved and the
kernel so completely lost as in Christian doctrinism! Here is Augustine, filled
with the sturdy wisdom which he had gained in Manichaeism and while sitting at
the feet of Plotinus, writing the lofty truth (De Civ. Dei, XIV, iv):
"From the soul and from the
body, which are the parts of a man, we arrive at the totality which is man:
accordingly, the life of the soul is not one thing, and that of the body
another: but both are one and the same, i.e., the life of man as man."
With the reservation that of course
Augustine does not mean to wipe out all difference in nature, function and
attributes between soul and body in his assertion of their identity, here is a
Christian statement of the grand truth.
Let us put after it, for comparison,
the passage written in reference to Augustine's statement, from the pen of a
modern writer making an unusually strong apologetic for the Christian system.
It is from Dr. Hopper's The Crisis of Faith, p. 224:
"This definition regards man as
a unit, as a person, as a complex whole--of body, soul and spirit. It is
constant in the Christian view of man. But it is formal and structural, and its
significance does not acquire its full import until this unit, man, is given a
positive orientation towards God, the world and his fellowman such as we find
in the Biblical view of man as an image of God."
Here is truth, as far as words go,
but still the total antithesis of truth in ultimate mental rendering of the
meaning. To be sure, the significant import of the threefold constitution of
man does not come to view until the proper "orientation" of the
elements toward each other is effected. This is considered by the writer of the
passage a point of absolutely vital and final determination. Yet it adds
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not a whit to what is already implicit
and even naďvely seen in the sheer statement of the tripartite composition. If
man has three parts the simplest intellection must assume that the
interrelation of the three is the central thing to be known about them. This is
almost childish in its rudimentary character. But, missing this naďve
discernment, the writer goes on to display his failure of comprehension of the
whole grand import of it all by asserting that the relationship between the
three component elements in man comes to no significance of value until another
relationship, introduced abstractly from outside and superimposed upon the
already total nature of threefold man, is postulated as the central fact of
ultimate and saving import! This is to charge that the equipment which life has
evolved in man and put into his hands for achieving his evolution is not
adequate for the purpose. Life equips man with the means and instrumentalities
for his progress towards life's designed ends and confronts him with the
necessity of forging ahead, with dire punishment the consequence of his
failure. Life holds man responsible for failure in the use of the equipment
provided. Yet, declares the voice of Christian theological lucubration, man's
most sincere and successful endeavor, even his complete fulfillment of his
effort with the tools provided, is failure and defeat. His entire discharge of
the evolutionary task set before him is still nothing either to his credit or
to his victory. He is a miserable beggar still, and if not rescued, without the
least suggestion of his merit or demerit, he is lost. To such unconscionable
miscarriage of sense and logic is Christian theologism driven by its failure to
localize deity within the pale of man's equipment.
This is not to deny for a moment
that there does subsist a relation between threefold man as a unit of being and
the Power manifesting outside his life in the world about him. Every conscious
unit of life or being bears a relation to all other units and to the body,
mind, soul or spirit of the Whole. And this relationship is not
"domestic," but is "extraneous," as Emil Brunner claimed.
But man has no known means of exchanging ideas or maintaining psychic,
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that is, mental or spiritual,
communication, as between one consciousness and another, with the God-mind that
is the central creative power behind the whole cosmos, regarded as external to
himself and treated as a unit consciousness. This supreme mind-power is indeed
"described" by every great philosopher in world thought as the
Unknowable. It is the Infinite. So utterly inaccessible is it to man's puny
mentation that even his attempt to conceive of it is pronounced futile. How
infinitely more futile his effort to communicate with it, as an organic personalized
intelligence, on the basis of any ability to speak to it or to apprehend its
language or thought! That man can "talk with God" in any such sense,
or that this God personalized himself to "talk" to Moses
(regarded as a man, and not man generic or collective) of old, in any
sense conceivable to the human mind, is quite a monstrous absurdity. Sane human
thinking has never accepted it. Rightful conception of what Biblical allegory means
is made possible only when ancient philosophical constructions are apprehended
and in their light it is truly seen that the god (or seed projection of God)
with whom man can communicate is that unit fragment of the divine mind
or consciousness which has been placed within the constitution of the
individual man in its universal distribution among all humans. God placed this
unit germ of himself immediately within the nature of man, for the very purpose
that his own total consciousness need not pay attention to the infinite
myriad needs of the countless creature lives. The idea that--as expressed in
Christian literature throughout the centuries in numberless instances--an
individual human can engage the whole attention of God on his cosmic
throne, considered as the grand unit Total of organic consciousness, is surely
the "all-time low" in mental imbecility. There are no words fitly to
characterize its folly and doltishness. It is the supreme "dunciad"
of history.
Nevertheless it is still sublimely
true that God has provided a way by which a portion of his consciousness is in
attendance upon
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the immediate needs of every
creature. Only it must be conceived and understood with philosophical
rationality and not simpleton folly. It must be understood in the way in which
it is true and not in the supposititious method of its impossibility. God is an
ever-present associate and help in trouble for every one of his creatures, by
virtue of the fact that he has already taken the measure of placing a unit
portion of himself, with the whole of his being potentially latent in it, within
the very organism of the creature. He has sent his "sons" forth to
carry out his work in creation. They are of his identic nature, one with him,
and are in him as he is in them. They are consubstantial with him. Sonship is
theirs through the sheer fact of their being seed emanations or generations
from his own body. They are indeed his own life, projected out from unity into
multiplicity. As the Greeks so clearly expressed it, God distributes his
divine life among all his creatures, since a creature is such only because a
unit of divine life has generated him.
The ancient sages, knowing this,
held it to be blasphemy against God (or the god) for man to "worship"
any power outside himself. Christianity has wrecked this magnificent
perspective and has stultified an enormous percentage of the sincerest effort
of the Occident for sixteen hundred years, by directing man's conscious
aspiration for "God" outside the field of his own area of control.
The havoc and wreckage from this misdirection of serious endeavor in western
world history is past calculation.
To deny the immanent presence of
God's own life and mind within the core of man's being is flatly to reject the
basic teaching of every religion that has inspired the soul of humanity through
all time. It would be to make meaningless the very name of Immanuel, God with
us, God dwelling in us. It would reduce to nonsensical babble the half of all
religious philosophy, the principle of God as immanent deity, and further it
would fly in the face of a positive statement of those scriptures on which the
whole structure of Christian systematism rests,--the Bible. For in the Book
of
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Ecclesiastes it is unequivocally declared that the soul
is from God. At death, says the Speaker, "the body returns to dust and the
soul to God who gave it."
As a disastrous consequence of
Christian misconception of the lucid ancient meaning of the doctrine of the
immanence of God, there has been unduly prevalent in all Christian history a
chronic hesitancy to commit the governance of man's life and the issues of his
"salvation" wholly into his own hands. The strength and persistence
of this attitude furnishes all needed proof of a calamitous miscarriage of
precious truth. For it bespeaks only too loudly that the term "man"
connoted not man containing God, but man devoid of God. If man of himself could
do nothing to effect his salvation, this very predication could be made only on
the assumption that his nature included no part of God's presence in him. There
has been a fear of letting man stand and wage his evolutionary battle alone.
Always the road to a safe retreat was kept open, so that in case of dire need
he could fall back upon and receive help from God, the great power transcending
him. The half-timid reminders that God is ever present in his entire creation
were minimized, if not positively negated, by the ever-resurgent asseveration
that of himself man can do nothing. God in the end must elect to save him, and
"grace" is a voluntary free gift from God. Man can neither earn it
nor demand it. He can only beg for it. All of which blandly and blindly ignores
the hub truth of the whole situation, that God has already placed all of his
power that the personality of man can hold directly within his organism and all
that man needs to do is to awake to the fact of its presence there and to learn
how to utilize it to highest practical advantage.
The glaring fatuity of the
traditional Christian position is seen in the consideration that from the
premises of the problem, the given terms of the situation from the outset, it
is a chimera of ignorance to assume that man can stand alone, actually
cut off from divine influence. It is now and ever has been impossible for him
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to stand apart from and bereft of
God's presence. For one half of him is God. As he can not dispossess
himself of one half of his organic selfhood, and can not dismantle the
structure of his being, he simply can not stand without God. For God is not
only in him from the beginning, but half of himself is God. To stand outside of
God one would have to destroy oneself. And so he never needs to go outside
himself to find God. Every religion above coarse animism and fetishism has in
perpetual chorus exhorted humanity in its search for God to cease looking
outward and to probe ever more deeply within. This is so true that all too much
of religion has run into exaggerated introversion, where it has grown moldy and
sickly. The argument here is categorical and not debatable. The testimony is
uncontestable and its meaning unequivocal.
This gross distortion of Christian
theology which took the conception of its millions of devotees as to the
accessibility of divinity from its true location within the soul of humanity
and placed it afar in cosmic heavens, has been a predisposing cause, no less
than colossal in effect, of untold suffering in Western life. It has indeed
been one of the chief ingredients in the fear complexes besetting Western cast
of mind, and has under our very eyes led myriads down into mental unbalance and
neurotic derangement. Abnormal religiosity is credited statistically with
sending more inmates to mental sanatoria than even sex abnormality.
Dr. Hopper concludes an unctuous
passage asseverating man's final dependence upon God--conceived as outside
himself, since anthropomorphized and personalized in the Christ of the Gospels,
a historical person--with the sentence (The Crisis of Faith, p. 226):
"Outside of Christ there is no
humanism, properly speaking, but only a perverse humanity."
Humanism, he argues, can not be the
true basis of philosophy, because in the ultimate man must look above, beyond,
outside himself, for the only real ground of his redemption. Yet this is said
seriously, in spite of the fact that this author has written elsewhere
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a sentence that negates and
falsifies the one just quoted--if it is true (p. 235):
"The self is a synthesis of the
finite and the infinite."
The latter is a true and well-knit
declaration. And it throws every word of the first statement into untruth.
Humanism is in the end the only
basis for a rational and correctly grounded philosophy open to man's acceptance
and operation. If all the elements of his problem are not within his
conscious control--if a single one, and that the most vital of all, is not
within his prerogative, but lies outside and beyond his reach in a distant God,
then man is nothing but a marionette with the wires of his activities pulled by
a deus ex machina, and his own effort does, truly and
horrifyingly, not avail him a whit. But this is unthinkable. The human mind must
believe that its own human effort counts. Humanity would be engulfed in
perpetual despair and life would be a persistent mocking irony, cruel and
pitiless, if the mind could believe that effort counted for nothing. To
deprive the human life of the sense of its counting for ultimate good or evil
in every act, since there is the ingrained consciousness of moral
responsibility in every act, would be to rob life of the fundamental dignity
appertaining to it. For without accountability for our acts there could be no
groundwork for dignity. The entire ethics of great revered religious systems
would be a laughing travesty if human effort did not avail. For every such
system exhorts to righteousness and outlines the penalties flowing from unrighteousness.
But the humanism that should replace
a dependence upon transcendental deity must be one that does not leave God out
of the human constitution. The crime of orthodox religionism is in tearing God
out of the human organism; the crime of equally blind humanism is in leaving
God out of it. The first puts deity in the wrong place; the second omits it
altogether. There can be no humanism, but only half-humanism, or more
definitely animalism, if God is left entirely out of the situation. More than
the animal-
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human must be recognized in the
definition of man. The divine-human must be admitted. Taking Dr. Hopper's and
Augustine's own words, that man is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite,
the animal and the god, meeting on the plane of the human, then true humanism
becomes the proper name for the philosophy that unites all the essential
elements of the total problem. So that man need not go out of doors to achieve
his proper and salutary alignment with the ascending scales of reality.
It can so readily be seen how the
whole structure of the ethico-spiritual problem has been contorted into an
endless tangle of semi-true and semi-false presentations by the mere failure to
know and concisely distinguish the two sides of the duality in man's make-up.
It has arisen because theologians continued to place God outside of man,
despite all the many categorical assertions in the sacred scriptures of the
world that he was an element within the area of man's own conscious being. To
aver that man is a hopelessly lost creature, enmired irredeemably in the sin of
his own fallen nature, and that he must go out and seek God upon whom to anchor
securely the hope of his salvation, is precisely like hypnotizing a person and
telling him he must go find his hat, which he has forgotten is on his head all
the while.
The Hindus have an allegory of the
gods in the beginning of human creation. God had agreed to grant his immortal
and divine nature to man, but in order that man should learn to value these
great gifts at their true worth, the question arose, how the supernal gift
should be communicated to him and where located, so as to be accessible, yet
not too easily. One of the celestial hierarchy suggested that it be placed on
the highest mountain top, where man would have to exert himself strenuously and
climb high to obtain it. Another ventured to name the depths of the sea, where
great ingenuity would be required to discover it. Finally God himself settled
the question: "We will put it in the very last place he will ever think of
looking for it--in the hidden depths of his own being."
Of all religions Christianity has
been the most ludicrously self-
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duped. It sends back an echo of
lying mockery to Paul's ringing shibboleth, "Christ in you, the hope of
glory." Christianity is far more harlequin than Diogenes looking with a
lantern to find an honest man. It is going about looking for the lantern which
it is already carrying.
Jesus said peremptorily, Ye shall
have no need of the sun to shine by day, nor the moon by night, for--ye have
light in yourselves! "Let your light shine." Bring it out from under
the bushel of inhibitions and obscurations imposed on it by the carnal nature
and set it on the hilltop of your own being. Ye are the light of the
world; but how great and fatal the surface blindness that fails to recognize
the light in its shining!
Perennial obtuseness has marked the
effusions of pious theologism because in advancing predications concerning the
relation of man to God, the word "man" was used in a sense which from
the start abstracted the divine half of the synthesis of god-man from the total
man. This left man standing as mere animal, which of course needs to look
upward to God for evolutionary help. But man is not mere animal. Let Plato
reassure us: "Through body it is an animal; through intellect it is a
god." What can be the meaning of the many scriptural passages which say
that the sons of God came down to earth to share our mortal nature, if not that
they are incorporated with us in the same organism? Had the true synthetic
conception of man, as embracing (the germ of) deity in his own composite
entification been held intact, the entire course of Occidental history, which
has been a holocaust of frightfulness under Christian guidance--indeed under
Christian compulsion--would have been charted over happier pathways.
A revered scripture asks: "Who
by searching can find out God?" Yet a sacred tome of the Hindus with equal
pertinence places God closer to us than our very flesh: "Closer than
breathing, nearer than hands and feet." Laplace said that he had pointed
the most powerful telescope into all parts of the heavens and no trace of God
could be found. Rather should he have pointed the instrument
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in the opposite direction, not to
the outer objective world but to the inner subjective one. The reason Laplace
did not find God with the telescope was that he looked for God under a wrong
description. Of course he did not find the anthropomorphic Personage he
pretended to be seeking. Yet he was seeing God all the time, seeing his outward
body, or seeing him as Emerson says we see him, in every blade of grass. No
less do we see him in both the worthiness and the ignobility of human thought
and action. This, of course, is in the universal sense, which takes the cosmos
as the personality of God and the whole as his life. More specifically, yet
just as truly, God is twofold, like his reflection and miniature, man. He is
mind and he is body. But it has been a universal habit of human thought to
demean his body, the physical, the material side of life, while glorifying the
"spiritual." In this general sense, then, the things seen and
manifested are his body, as Pope put it, and the unseen order and movement are
his mind at work. But if God has a body, of which solar and stellar systems and
galaxies are the cells and organs, it is, according to human modes of
conception, no less proper to say this is God than to exclude it from the
definition and description of him and to say that only his soul is he. When we
see a man coming down the street, we say, There is the man, or That is the man.
We do not make an arbitrary distinction between his physical and his conscious
self, accepting the one and rejecting the other. We take him as the man, body
and soul. Likewise did Plato, Augustine and the wise ones of old. Not until
errant modern conception takes him in the same way, as the synthesis of his
two--or three--natures, including both his animality and his divinity alike and
wholly within the scope of the term "man," will tragic chaos in
mortal thought be diminished. When that happy amendment of bad philosophy is
consummated, there will be an end to the groveling pleas from morbid and
mawkish religiosity for man to surrender his inherent dignity and to deny and
scorn his own powers to climb the evolutionary ladder. The corrupt Christian
theology, while it has out of one side of its mouth claimed the
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exclusive distinction of being the
religion that has proclaimed the dignity of man the individual, has out of the
other corner with pitiful effectiveness crushed that very dignity by
abstracting the divine leaven out of man's mixed composition and by beating
down his self-sense to the abject level of the worm. This historic hypocrisy
and duplicity of Christianity lacks little of being the most hurtful disservice
rendered to the race by any religion. When corrected, no longer will it be the
sickly fashion to preach to man that he must be saved by God, externally.
Instead he will be told that the man of him will be saved by the god of him,
and the face of humanity will at once be irradiated with the benignant glow of
a new understanding. His mind will be redeemed from its jangling discord with
truth to a grateful and renewing harmony with it.
When to this readjustment in his
conceptual life there is added the discernment in psychology that man's
conscious is the living moment between his stored past and his potential
future, that it is open at all times to the ingress of motivations from both
sides, then also will sane comprehension come to birth and a new range of
intelligent government of psychic states will be brought under conscious
control. At last there will be evolved out of the depths of good human
intelligence the more specific technique of the god's control of the animal in
the human breast. People will be freed more and more from the devastating sweep
of massive emotionalism misdirected by bad philosophies, and will more soberly,
yet more happily, place the hand of philosophical wisdom at the helm of their
life direction. They will know that deep within them dwells the unconscious,
with its greater wisdom available for their guidance, if they learn the better
to lure it down into the conscious.
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CHAPTER XI
THE BATTLE ON THE HORIZON
There is a strange corollary that
runs with the recognition of the dual segmentation or composition of man's
nature. Psychoanalysis has brought out some aspects of it. The duality
manifests in a rather remarkable series of correspondences between the
phenomena on both sides.
It can start from Paul's declaration
that the natural precedes the spiritual. "First that which is natural,
then that which is spiritual," says the Apostle. As must obviously be the
case, the body of God must be formed and in function before his spirit can
manifest its life in any given area of creation. Spirit must be
instrumentalized or implemented if it is to create and animate concrete worlds.
It must first form its instrument with and through which to work.
The clear intimations from these
reconstructions of ancient wisdom following its fatal mutilation at the hands
of medieval benightedness constitute a new mandate for all true religion. The
clarified knowledge provides the magna carta for a religion redeemed from
psychic charlatinism and sanctified hypocrisy, from bigotry, nescience and
insincere motivations, to become again, as of old, the moral and spiritual
beacon of mankind. The new-found correlation or kinship between the modern
discovery of the unconscious and ancient philosophical and psychological
principia invests religion once again with dignity and with a sanctity that
springs from recognition of the deeper intrinsic values now perceived to lie
within the psychic area. The ultimate criterion of sanctity is always that of
utility or beneficence for the whole advance of an evolving entity toward its
destined goal. Things are not sanctified merely by being held in traditional
and often artificial awesomeness.
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They become sacred by being found
contributory to values rated high in the economy of most enduring good.
Foremost of all among the beneficial
agencies which the combined new and old psychic sciences now place afresh at
the service of mankind is the understanding of the vital technique by which
religion must work pointedly and not diffusely toward its high ends. The nub of
a religious striving that will be efficient to the highest degree is now
indicated as centered in the relation between the conscious and the
superconscious. This is the chief point and nodal focus at which the effort
toward a spiritual uplift of the individual must be directed. For here is the
locale of the great aeonial Battle of Armageddon, which the Egyptians so
astutely allegorized as being fought at the meeting-point between the
subconscious and the superconscious, the "horizon" line between them.
Progress and well-being will henceforth be measurable by the amount of the
potential quality of the superconscious or divine nature which can be brought
down "out of heaven" by the conscious, incorporated in its daily
program of self-directed activity and made a permanent possession by
transference through habit to the custody of the subconscious. If man does not
wish to remain bound in the automatic unconscious of his animal mentality, he
must bestir himself to throw off old habitudes and elevate the tenor of his
life by bringing down more luminous and more dynamic potential from the god-ego
dwelling in the area of higher frequencies of vibrational consciousness
awaiting the perfecting of his receptive capacity.
The Old Testament Psalms and
Proverbs and the New Testament books alike strike hard at the human vices
of sloth and lukewarmness. The exigencies of the soul's incarnational situation
and the terms of the covenant entered into with the higher deity before
descending alike demand the ego's close attention to the evolutionary mission
he came here to discharge. The old books continue to insist that the thing is
urgent, that opportunity passes with time and that there are tides in the
affairs of evolution that can not be missed
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without having penalty. Disregard of
opportunity will entail serious consequence. One is enjoined to be
"diligent in business, fervent in spirit" in serving the Lord of
higher consciousness. The business of the inner mind is paramount in the
enterprise. The great human ordinance of the Sabbath was instituted to the end
that one entire day in every seven should be devoted to the interests of the
presiding genius of the organism, following six days given to the secular
matters pertaining to the physical life. A new light indeed might creep over
the face of humanity if this one day was truly consecrated, not to morbid
sentimentalism and groveling pietism but to philosophical enlightenment and the
combined ministration of intelligence and beauty. For "without vision the
people perish," proclaimed the prophet, the true-speaker of old. The
pathway to more radiant and more abundant life runs in one direction and along
one fairly narrow track. It runs atop the ridge of open consciousness lying
between the subconscious and the superconscious. Only on that path has man
accessibility to the god. The only true and right felicity for the mortal lies
in opening as widely as may be the highway between his mortal self and the
deity who has, in a dramatic sense, condescended to come to take up residence
in the upper reaches of his demesne. The only or at least final criterion of
culture is the degree to which the conscious mind can lay itself open in ever
more expanded receptivity to the vibrations of the superconscious. These are
always pitched, so to say, in the octave immediately above its ordinary or
habitual range. Whatever technique will be found to govern the development of
this enhanced capacity or this high art will be the most "practical"
skill and employ the greatest genius in all the area of life. It will embody
the principles of the science of true culture. For it will empower its
practitioner to place himself directly in touch with the flowing currents of
both meaning and value, under the influence of the most dynamic release of
vital quality that life can give to man. It is in truth man's communion with
God.
It must never be forgotten, however,
that the god himself is
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climbing the ladder of evolution,
the same as is the human and the animal. The poverty of modern knowledge in the
field of anthropology consists mainly in the total want of understanding that
man is not a simple unit of organization, but is in reality a composite creature,
compounded of flesh, feeling, thought and spiritual will, each necessarily
subsisting within the organism by virtue of a body of material fineness or
coarseness exactly constituted to express its vibration of life. The highest
grade of this hierarchy of being is of course the leader and the king. And he
is far ahead of his companion travelers. He stands in the higher grade in the
school of evolution. Where he stands his younger associates will stand later
on. What is important for intelligence is that the god requires the experience
of incarnation in order to actualize his as yet undeveloped potential of
reality in the concrete. This is almost a lost canon of understanding, yet it
is strategically close to the nub of all practical wisdom. The god is subject
to the law of being which makes polarization of the two nodes of reality,
spirit and matter, the operative modus of evolving life. As Plotinus has told
us more clearly than anyone else, the soul comes into earthly body in order to
develop her latent capacities into actual faculties. He says: "It is not
enough for the soul merely to exist; she must show what she is capable of
begetting." She remains, he adds, "ignorant of what she
possesses" until she is made aware of her potential riches through her
deployment of them in answer to the exigencies and contingencies met in a life
of actual awareness in a physical body on a planet. That which is real, but as
yet unmanifest in the creatural consciousness, must be actualized, to
follow Plotinus again, in a life of open consciousness. And for this
possibility and this service she is dependent upon her union, for cycle after
cycle, with the negative energies of a physical body.
We find Dr. Hopper (The Crisis of
Faith, p. 257) saying that which is a crucial nub of understanding:
"Men of wisdom ever since
[Socrates] have held that true self-knowledge is the clue to fulness of
life."
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And he adds (p. 259):
"Everything depends on man's
understanding of himself as he relates himself to the Absolute. He must know
himself both inwardly and outwardly against the perspective of the ultimate
meaning of things. He must know himself not merely as one object among other
objects, but as an immediate subject of experience occupying inwardly the
precarious point of infinite commitment."
Here is indeed great truth
expressed, worth deep reflection. The statement that man only comes to know
himself as he relates himself to the Absolute, the core of real being, and that
he must know himself against the background of the ultimate meaning of things,
is downright truth. But the immediate practical implication of this insight has
never been seen or acted upon. If man can not guide his course intelligently
unless he knows, broadly, his ultimate goal, which knowledge alone can
invest his every step with its true meaning, then the deduction is sound, that
philosophy is the most important study his mind can engage in. This was the
insistence of the wise men of old who named philosophy as the kingly or divine
science. It has never been decisively apprehended that the rightness of the
present stride can not be determined if the long perspective of man's path and
the distant vision of the ultimate goal, or, as Aristotle called it, the entelechy,
is not known. To walk--and to have to walk--now, with no knowledge of
whither the walking is to take one, or what is the proper direction of the
walking, is the hazardous predicament of man when he is without philosophy. And
the psychoanalysts tell us from clinical experience, that people who have no
positive philosophy go mad. A world without positive philosophy has gone mad,
again and again. It is not to the credit of Christianity that in the third
century it killed philosophy and substituted faith. Renaissance came when the
shift was made from faith back to (ancient) philosophy. The implications of
this turn in history have never been canvassed. It is a costly dereliction.
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That the race might have in its
childhood the requisite knowledge to guide its historic conduct aright toward a
known distant goal, religion was fashioned to embrace philosophy, and that in
turn embraced anthropology and cosmology. These were accounted necessary to
enable man to orient himself aright in his evolutionary environment. It told
him where he stood, whence he had so far come, whither he was progressing, what
was his set task and what his own equipment to perform it. It told him he was
the human, standing on the horizon line between the heaven of spiritual
immortality and the earth of physical mortality. It told him his present
consciousness was a blend of incipient divine mind with the mind of the
subconscious animal. "An animal's mind shall be given unto him," says
Daniel to the king, and the king always typified the divine in man. Lecky
observes in his famous History of European Morals that in ancient days
"philosophy had become to the educated most literally a religion."
The later decay of religion was brought on and marked by the decadence of
philosophy and the substitution of pietistic unction.
It is a point of great significance
which is brought out in Dr. Hopper's sentence last quoted, that man must know
himself as the subject of experience occupying "the precarious point of
infinite commitment." Brilliant light would be released again for the
human mind if it could recover the principle of truth known to the ancient
Egyptians that the only point at which potential power or quality becomes actual--where
the static electricity of life and mind is transformed into kinetic or power
current--is at the meeting point between the positive node of conscious spirit
and the negative anode of unconscious matter. In this life, described by the
Egyptians as "the lake of equipoise," and in symbolism known as the
zodiacal house of Libra the Balance, life is brought from latency or
unconsciousness out upon the plane of open consciousness, or the actual.
Intelligence should long since have
caught the esoteric hint from the prefix "con" in consciousness.
It means "with" or "together."
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Consciousness comes only when the
two segments or ends of being are linked together in tensional relation and
opposite pull. Reality burgeons forth into actuality at the mid-point of
neutralization. As the scriptures have so forcefully shouted at us, life must
be weighed in the balance, in the scales of the judgment, that from the test
its true being may come forth and be known to and by itself. Life can scarcely
engender consciousness if it does not split asunder into the dual polarity. For
to know itself it must objectify itself to itself, and for this purpose it must
stand itself as matter aside from and over against itself as spirit. There can
be no consciousness unless there is something for it to be conscious of.
Consciousness can not exist in the vacuum of sheer Absoluteness.
The Egyptians denominated the god in
evolution "Lord of the Balance." With conscious power developed he
stands in control of the equilibration between the soul of life and the
physical embodiment and strives to maintain the equipoise between the two
entities. The conscious mind is therefore the ground arena of the battle, the
focal point of the energization.
Psychoanalysis has gained so much of
primal wisdom as goes with the knowledge of the unconscious. Its next great
forward stride must be to establish the principle of the duality in the
unconscious, the subconscious and the superconscious, and the great realization
that the conscious, the prime seat of all value-actualization, is the point of
neutralization between the two poles of man's being. Then the science will be
in position to advance to new accomplishments in practique and more competent
service to the race.
It is quite worth noting what Dr.
Hopper says (p. 248) relative to the threefold constitution of man:
"This distinction will be
clearer if we consider that man, according to this understanding, is not a
static somewhat to be comprehended formally,--as intellect, feeling, will,
etc.,--but that he must be understood as a creature in motion, as
already in course of action. He is a viator, a creature who must go a
way."
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It is amazing that this decidedly
pivotal understanding has not been given insistent accentuation in
philosophical systematism. It is equally amazing that almost nothing has been
made of it even when, as here, it is mentioned. And never have the absolutely
necessary corollaries of the datum been scrutinized and unfolded. A great deal
of philosophical speculation has been a mere shameless dodging of the overt
palpable issue presented by accurate observation of the prime data. Here it is
affirmed, and with great truth, that man is a viator; he is going a way. Never
has it seemed to occur to speculative philosophy that two or more questions
immediately and necessarily stand knocking for answers when this is affirmed.
If he is on his way, whence has he come, whither is he going, and indeed also,
why is he out on the highway at all? Why is he a-journeying and what is his
destination? Ancient cosmology and anthropological science rendered voluble
answers to these questions. Modern philosophy shuns them. Ancient wisdom
comprehended the answers; modern philosophy is poverty-stricken and lacks the
resources for reply.
If man is a viator, as far as modern
acumen goes, he is traveling onward, after some eighty brief summers, to
individual death and extinction! By killing arcane philosophy in the early
centuries, our endowments of millions of dollars for great universities have
brought forth the squeaking mouse of a Bertrand Russell's "philosophy of
despair." The only thing surely known to modern science is that we are
traveling a hard path to--annihilation! Our solar system will cool and
life--our life--become extinct. "We pass this way but once" is the
perennial slogan of average worldly "philosophy" today. Its
corollary, "let us eat, drink and be merry," has set the tune for
common motivation to dance to. As for the post mortem future, religion
vaguely asserts it will be eternal peace and rest. Oblivion, and no more toil,
sweat, blood and tears.
Ancient sagacity knew differently.
The soul was described as "the persistent traveler on the highways of
eternity." The divine soul in man says in the Egyptian books that he is
"stepping onward
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through eternity." Modern
thought has no more extended vision than to depict the soul as saying, "I
am Today." Egypt presents the same soul as saying, "I am Yesterday,
Today and Tomorrow." "Eternity and everlastingness is my name."
The ancient world, instructed by
"just men made perfect" in knowledge and wisdom, knew that man is
indeed a viator through the cycles of time and the kingdoms of matter. Present
vapid religion and jejune philosophy have scarcely the intellectual stamina to
face the relevant questions, whence and whither. And the sorriest matter of all
is the apparent belief that it makes no difference to man's mental stability
whether he knows he is traveling a brief and stony path to death and oblivion,
or whether he is on his way, through storm and sunshine, to an endless
unfoldment of radiant life.
It is perhaps not surprising that
the attitude of complacency in the face of total want of knowledge as to
evolutionary paths, aims and goals should have become an expression of devout
religionism in the modern day. For religion had dropped philosophy in the fatal
third century and has had to fall back upon substitute formulae and mechanisms
of escape and comfort. Prominent among pronouncements as to the
non-philosophical character of modern religion are the two lines of Cardinal
Newman's famous hymn:
"I do not ask to see the
distant scene;
One step enough for me."
Ancient Egypt did not hold with this
sentiment, but, fortified with definite knowledge of man's continuity of life,
lived in the present and faced the future with a cheer and a fortitude based on
something more vital than faith.
In the Mithraic system the soul of
man was represented as saying at one point in the ritual: "I am the star
wandering about with you and flaming up from the depths." In Egyptian the
words "star" and "soul" came to an identity in the word Seb.
In ancient depiction of truth and reality under nature symbols the soul
that came to
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animate the animal man was presented
to thought as veritably a star of divine life, light and energy descending from
the heavens to inhabit a physical body. The symbol of a soul coming down to
earth was the falling star, along with the imagery of the evening sun sinking
into the earth or water.
The logic that supported the ancient
mind in its assurance of the soul's immortality was simple and natural. The
soul was a fragment of the divine life, energy and mind of God himself. As such
it was as indestructible as the whole of which it was a germinal or seminal
portion. As the whole visible world of manifestation was generated and
sustained by the energies of cosmic mind, and mind generated it cyclically and
periodically, surely mind was the eternal force behind the series of appearing
and disappearing manifestations. The worlds might fade away again and again,
but mind remained to create them anew. And the fragments of cosmic mind did not
sally forth into cosmic adventure and undergo the stress and strain of
incarnation merely to throw away all their hard and slowly won gains at the end
of each sojourn in body. The ancients knew how life and mind husbanded and
preserved the fruits and harvests of victories won in the battle with matter.
With the closing up of the Platonic Academies in the fifth century and the
utter suppression of the systems of esoteric philosophy for fifteen centuries
the world of the west was left to drift along the historical road entirely
without the pilotage of guiding wisdom. The horrendous record of those
centuries bears testimony to the fatal consequences of despoiling human life of
an enlightened philosophy.
Psychoanalysis now enters the arena
of human striving after truth and knowledge and its discovery of the
unconscious marks one of the great forward steps out of the murks of medieval
errancy and obfuscation of mind. It supplies empirical data to corroborate what
could be sensed only by enlightened philosophical vision, that the decay of
philosophy precipitates minds into conditions of neurotic instability. This
is the recovery of an item of knowledge that was well established in Plato's
day and is one of the few real advances
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toward higher culture made in the
modern age. Ancient Greek thought regarded the soul in incarnation as having
lost her true bearings under the illusive dominance of fleshly concerns and as
wandering in a fog of ignorance, from which state she was only to be redeemed
to knowledge and true intelligence by philosophy. Philosophy was held to be the
true knowledge of divine things. The soul, it was affirmed, could not relate
itself properly to its task in incarnation if it totally lacked the assurance
of its divine origin, the nature and value of its mission to earth and the
general scheme and purport of its evolutionary enterprise. Philosophy was the
essential foundation of moral rectitude, of equanimity and stability of mind
and of the good life in general.
It is quite important to note what
Chandler Bennitt has to say in his work The Real Use of the Unconscious. He
is discussing healing, but sets it over, as a special technique, against
"understanding," or what could be called philosophy:
"Healing is not understanding.
At long last it is always something less. In the living sense in which I use
understanding, the most final statement of the case is not that we must be
healed if we would understand, nor even that we must understand in order to be
healed; it is that understanding is its own way and its own god where healing
is not, and that as we increasingly understand in our entire being, whatever
must still be left to the specific technique of healing will be less and less a
vital matter. Meanwhile I believe that even in what are accepted therapeutic
issues, it will more and more be recognized that the individual cannot
cooperate in the healing medical realities where their application contravenes
his still more fundamental sense of things."
What Mr. Bennitt here denominates
understanding and again refers to as a "still more fundamental sense of
things" is equivalent to what the ancient sages termed philosophy. His
evaluation of it as a more basic and essential element in the psyche than any
temporary or specific influence employed in healing is a discernment matching
the ancients' knowledge of its place deep in the core of human being. This
observation of Bennitt's should stand as a re-
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buke and corrective for much modern
spiritual-cult preachment and practique. Eccentric religionism has given a
tremendous vogue to the notion that physical healing is the indisputable proof
of the rightness of the cult philosophy in whose name the healing is performed.
Not only is this not so, according to this psychoanalyst, but the vital truth
is that the healing is always less important than the philosophy. The thing of
intrinsic value is always the understanding in its deepmost issues. It is the
eventual determinant of the individual's health or his need of healing.
Understanding is ultimately the ruling factor in the individual's life, and
healing is only an effort to rectify disturbance when understanding has not
held a true grip on the life.
It is evident, on this analysis,
that there lies buried deep in the organism a sense and apperception of values
in incarnational life that transcends by far the welfare of the body and its
illness or health. Again it must be granted that such values must be connected
with a part of man that does not perish with the body. These values do not rise
and fall in any immediate or direct parallelism with the rise and fall of the
condition of the body. They are obviously not fully enhanced by the body's
healthiest state nor deflated by its worst condition. Bennitt ventures to
assert that they verily transcend the issue of life and death alike.
"Our life object is not merely
not to die, nor even to live long and healthily. It is to attain the ultimate
realness . . . our daily aim is further and more deeply to integrate our
existence . . . as we go. It is with these finalities and these practicalities
that I am concerned."
And he adds:
"Greatly as any individual in
trouble may desire to be well, he will do this only for something further. I
automatically assume that any patient has a sense of his business in life as
something beyond health. This business includes his deepest total connection
with reality."
No healing can come, he states
further, through any specific medical or psychological technique, when the
individual's evolution-
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ary status is such that frustrations
and troubles can be handled "only by the realities of advance in a living
understanding, and not merely by those of ill health and cure." And such
guidance from the inner daimon, he says, "can be given only by an
individual who is himself deeply in touch with meaning." Meaning is indeed
the touchstone of the whole matter. The mind that can not discern the forms of
meaning into which the events of life and the cosmos fall is little better than
a piece of flotsam on the moving wave. It is heading for imminent wreckage.
Indeed Bennitt expresses a climactic maxim when he says that "truth must
make not only sense, but significance; it must be not only clear, but
meaningful."
All this is cardinal truth, and well
spoken. Bennitt is on the right track; modern psychology at last is on the
right track. The new science of semantics is an important formulation. Meaning,
even transcending significance, is the keynote of the modern mental
movement. There are issues that lie deeper than even health and success in the
worldly sense, that are not, necessarily, met and satisfied with a healthy body
and a long life. These must be the concern of some other portion of man than
his external self, for health and long life would pretty completely fulfill the
main needs of bodily man. By inference they must appertain vitally to the
history of the ego-soul. And this is the unconscious. The ego has his own
interests. He is wrestling doubtless with the exigencies and crises, the halts,
impasses, deadlocks, obstructions, frustrations that mark his progress on the
upward road. As his life is subterranean to that of the body he tenants, the
symptoms which these contingencies bring to manifestation in some form of
disturbance in the life may not be obvious or clear to the outer mind. Hence
the need of a special technique that probes beneath the surface phenomena to
locate the more esoteric and occult origin of inharmony. This technique is the
special discovery and implement of psychoanalysis.
If the new approach of modern
psychology to spiritual esotericism through the discovery of the unconscious is
not beaten down and obscured and again lost by the oppression of crude
mechanistic
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philosophies so rampant in the age,
this period of history will be catalogued by later analysts as marking the dawn
of the recovery of ancient truth after sixteen centuries of benightedness. For
now again, as in ancient times when wisdom reigned, the part of the divine soul
in human life, in its health and in its ills, is recognized and healing
practice embraces a technique which penetrates to the inner seat of the soul
instead of treating merely the outward superficial symptoms. The body is in
Greek soma and the soul is psyche. Perhaps it is yet a long way
to the place where in the treatment of human maladies psychology based on the
soul will be the most effective curative agency and philosophy the perennial
preventative medicine.
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CHAPTER XII
THE CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN
It has been a maxim of both biology
and philosophy that each individual recapitulates in the early or initial
stages of its growth the entire previous phylogenetic history of the species to
which it belongs and indeed that of all zoölogical evolution. This is to say
that each new individual in the stream of evolving life quickly retraces in its
birth and early growth the biological history of the race from monocell up to
the complex and differentiated forms at the point it itself occupies. The
childhood of the individual then republishes the long-past childhood of the
race. The human foetus clearly exhibits the stages of unicell, multicell, worm,
reptile, bird, vertebrate, mammal and all intermediate forms up to the human as
at present constituted. It would have been thought that the knowledge of a
principle of evolution so pregnant with intimation as this should have yielded
more patent discovery and application than it seems to have done.
That it has come forward as a
principle of elucidation and understanding in the field of psychoanalysis, however,
is one of the robust attestations of the great basic rightness and fruitfulness
of this modern development in psychology. In full view of the profounder
aspects of the human psyche revealed by this new science it will not come as a
surprise that psychoanalytic research has discovered almost the principle keys
and solutions of the complexities of mental problems in the previously
disdained terrain of childhood. The chief clues to the unbalance and
irrationality manifesting in adult life are generally to be traced back to
inhibitions and frustrations in childhood. The experiences undergone even in
infancy are seen to set the stage for abnormalities that come to the surface in
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later life. The child conditions the
man. Childhood comes first and through the intense sensitiveness of its
consciousness to impressions and its durable retention of memories it in
reality gives birth to the adult man. Men and women are but grown children. The
substance of mind can be said to be in childhood quite plastic, hardening and
crystallizing, however, as childhood passes. The impressions made upon it in
its tenderer condition at the start become solidified for permanency and fix
the life habitudes over the pattern of the first molds. He who can bend the
twig has shaped the tree. He who conditions the child has formed the man.
In the course of time it was
destined that psychological investigations should seek the causes of mental
abnormality back in the individual's childhood. The evidences of this
connection were abundant and would not forever miss discovery. The finding was
delayed only by the inveterate recalcitrancy of the modern mind to the wisdom
of the past. Principles announced in the tomes of archaic mastership would all
along have furnished modern research with the fundamenta of discovery and a
true psychological science. For every fresh revelation coming from present-day
study in the field of psychology is but a re-affirmation of data known of old.
Such a splendid work as Jung's The
Psychology of the Unconscious is largely an elucidation of the symbols and
dramatizations found occurring in the dreams of his patients, and all
approached and systematized through a comparative analysis of them with the
stories and formulations of ancient mythology! The world has not yet
appreciated the significance of this correlation. That a psychoanalyst should
have to resort to the allegedly fanciful if not fantastic constructions of such
products of racial child-mindedness as mythology and folk-lore for keys and
formulae by which to reach a comprehension of the dreams of a modern young
woman, has not been measured in its true dimensions of significance. And that
the same psychologist has been able to announce that he has, in life-long
study, found the same set of symbols promenading in the dreams of his modern
patients as he has found in the whole field
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of ancient religious symbolism, in
the Bibles and folk-lore of the nations to remote antiquity, is again a fact
which has not found its true evaluation. The obfuscations of medieval
benightedness still dim our vision and make us slow to recognize great truth
even when we stand in its very doorway.
We stand, then, face to face with
these great determinations: the basic conditioning factors in the individual's
psychological life are established largely in childhood and, for purposes of
later rectification, must be re-located and dealt with through adult correction
of infantile fixations; the propensities and instincts dominating the child
mind, and thus clinching their hold on the whole of the life period of the
individual, are both analogous and directly kindred to the instincts and
proclivities of the race as a whole in its infancy, and are dramatized
in consciousness by the same symbols now as then; and lastly that the whole
battle in consciousness for all individuals is epitomized in the finale by the
formulary that it is the eternal struggle between the reason, knowledge,
intelligence and wisdom of the divine counterpart in man, that comes to open
consciousness in adult life, on the one side, and the instinctive,
natural, irrational, infantile forces of physical life, that dominate in the childhood
period, on the other. Both in the individual and in the race as a whole,
the great Battle of Armageddon goes on between the powers of adulthood and
those of childhood. In the terms of Greek or Platonic philosophy it is the
conflict of the higher dianoia, or thorough knowing, the genius of
divine intelligence in man, with the irrational instincts of the purely animal
nature, which man shares by virtue of his body. The forces that build the body
must have play first; the powers of mind come later to unfoldment, to be the
king and ruler of those natural energies, to employ them for its purposes
rationally determined.
The childhood of the race, as of the
individual, develops the natural man, whom Paul says comes first; the adult
period brings the mind to function, so that the forces of nature may come under
the direction of intelligence and be made the agencies of the creation
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of a cosmos out of an elementary
chaos. Life must first deploy the forces that build the universe physically and
then evolve the mind to direct them in the accomplishment of its purposed ends.
Mind itself must have its genesis in physical nature. It is brought to birth in
the womb of matter. Just as solar energy is neither light, heat nor kinetic
power while in its pure state, but only develops these manifestations of its
nature when brought into contact with a material body, so pure spirit, pure
ideality, is not mind until it is harnessed, so to say, with the elemental
energies found potential in the atomic matter of physical organisms. Mind can
not come to function in pure abstraction, of its own sheer being. It must be
the product of the forces generated in an organism. In short it must be
instrumentalized in and by a brain. Life first builds its physical body, since
only through the implementation of such a structure can it bring its powers of
consciousness to concrete realization to and for itself. And the forces it uses
to build the structure fall below the level of mind and are irrational. They
are denominated in all ancient systems the elementary powers. St. Paul so
clearly says that the race was under the governance of these "elementals
of the earth" and "elementals of the air," or "the elements
of the world," before it developed the rulership of the higher mind. And
most pertinently for the interests of our exegesis he states that this "bondage
to them that by nature are no gods" prevailed in the period of our
evolution "when we were yet children." Then it was, he says, that
"Christ died for us." True indeed, since the "death" of the
Christos or divine mind principle came with its first entry into the life of
body. And until that entry, in the far developed stage of biological evolution,
in the old age of Mother Nature, animal man could have no knowledge of divine
mind. To the truth of this analysis the three or more allegories of aged woman
bearing the Messianic Son of God in the scriptures bear most striking
testimony. The natural man can not know the things of the spirit, declares the
Apostle. And he adds that when we were yet children we did not know God. Surely
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this was so, for the god had not yet
risen to function in the animal organism.
How amazingly the author of the Epistles
set forth the basic principles that are only now being brought to light by
the more enlightened approach of modern psychology! He not only marked out the anthropological
grounds of the psychic conflict in the nature of man, but with the utmost
perspicacity delineated the many varied aspects of the struggle. In what
trenchant terms does he represent the fierce combat between the soul and the
flesh! When he would do good, he says, he perceives in his members a law
which wars against the law of the mind. This conflict is the source of his
wretchedness. He refers to the flesh as "the body of this death." To
be carnally minded is sin and "death." The interests of the spirit
are in opposition to those of the flesh, which he says mean death.
Psychoanalysis has now discovered
that for the maintenance of normal sanity and for the more complete integration
of the individual's life the higher intelligence of adulthood must
"frustrate" the animal instincts of childhood. Here in the proverbial
nutshell is the summary manifesto of the science of psychoanalysis.
"Disturbance" is not abnormal, is not psychopathic, because it is the
function of developing mind to "disturb," even to "frustrate,"
the instinctive automatism of the animal nature springing quickly to life
in the recapitulatory process in early childhood. This pitting of the two
natures against each other in the life of mankind is the ground of the whole
moral problem of the race. The issues of evolution depend upon the course of
the battle, the ebb and flow of the tides of mental and spiritual force.
Ascetic religionism decreed that the animal in man was to be crushed,
smothered, extirpated. But this was false theory and ruinous practice. The
animal is not to be crushed. He is to be domesticated, so that his wild
energies may be turned to the use and advantage of mind, the king. And through
his association with man the thinker his genus is in the course of the cycle to
be elevated to the level now held by the human, while man advances further to
godhood. The gods resident in the inner-
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most recesses of human nature are
divinizing man as man in turn is domesticating and humanizing the animal. In
each case the end result is the neutralizing of conflict between the evolving
faculties of consciousness and the blind instinctual forces of physical energy.
It is mind seeking to harness the wild forces of elementary chaos.
Turning back to study the mind of
childhood, psychoanalysis should not have been surprised to discover that its
phenomena were a miniature replica of those of earliest humanity. Says Jung (Psychology
of the Unconscious, p. 28):
"Consequently it would be true
as well that the state of infantile thinking in the child's psychic life, as
well as in dreams, is nothing but a re-echo of the prehistoric and the
ancient."
Here is one of the main supporting
pillars in the temple of psychoanalysis. To re-examine the infantile mind of
humanity in its early period it was but necessary to look at the infantile mind
in the child. The two sets of phenomena would be found analogous and kindred.
Both bespoke the play of the irrational and instinctive forces. In neither had
mind come to assert rulership. Both were under the governance of Mother Nature.
They had not graduated from her tutelage to enroll in the school of Father
Spirit. As twelve was the number of spiritual perfecting, the Gospel allegory
has it that Jesus deserted his mother at that age and sought "the things
of his Father." The intimation that these higher interests were concerned
with the mind is conveyed in the allegory by the particular that he was found
in the temple in profound disputations with the learned doctors. Nature herself
carries out the force of the analogue in the fact that at the age of twelve, or
at puberty, the child passes from childhood into manhood and begins the active
development of the mind. And again psychoanalysis finds its basic principles
exemplified and vindicated in both nature and the scriptures.
The tracing of parallelism in the
two sides of the analogue revealed the most significant correspondences. The
infantile mind
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of early humanity, lacking mature
reason and piercing intelligence, devised an elaborate series of allegedly
fantastic representations to account for and explain the reality of the world
about it. This process gave rise to the wondrous volume of ancient myths, the
cycles of epic legends, the hero-tales and folk-lore among all nations. The
universal prevalence of such productions is in itself a phenomenon of
extraordinary character. It represented, not, as is mistakenly supposed, the
effort of infantile mentality to explain the mysterious reality in whose bosom
its life was cast, but the discerning inventiveness of mature mind to explain
the mystery to the child humanity in terms suited to its then limited
capacity to understand. The child mind would hardly be able to devise the
elaborated and involved complexities of the Grecian or Egyptian myths. Children
now do not invent Mother Goose and the fairy tales. These are given them by the
elders, being assumed to be in a form suitable for apprehension by the immature
mind. As a matter of fact the myths are most astutely constructed to convey the
profoundest of moral and cosmic truths. Infantile mind could not have
hit upon such marvelous and precise dramatizations of verity. The marvel of
their typical typal accuracy and pictorial fidelity to truth has never yet been
fully seen by students. They obviously were the creations of a genius for
consummate dramatization unparalleled in human history. But as the
representation was designed for the child mind of early mankind, it was
cast in forms that would be appreciable and meaningful to the infantile stage
of the race's mental development.
The analogue of the child's rearing
in early life under the care and tuition of the mother is another of the
numberless instances wherein nature presents in the small a living ideograph of
universal truth or truth in the large. There is no mythology in which the
mother is not the typal representative of the great Mother, Nature. Nature
mothers us and mind or spirit fathers us. Nature develops and provides for us
the physical mechanism of life; spirit comes to birth through it and seats
consciousness on the throne as ruler.
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The mother-forces dominate the
child; the spirit or father-forces rule the adult. The ancient representations
of the mother and child yield a new and profounder significance when viewed in
this light. Both mother and child typify physical nature, operating before the
advent of mind. They speak of nature and her progeny, the physical world. They
tell of the production and preparation of physical life to become the vehicle
of mind, the king. They go before him to prepare his way and to make his paths
straight.
But when he comes he must supersede
their irrational governance with the reign of reason. Their habitual and
instinctive activities must be bent to subserving the offices of intelligence
and conscious design. Their wild and impetuous sweep in given directions must
be curbed and eventually turned into channels of service for the achievement of
goals set by the divine knower within. Their blind elemental forces must be
harnessed to the chariot of cosmic Purpose.
The attempt and effort of conscious
mind in evolving man to administer this "conversion" of elemental
instincts into helpful servants sets the scene and supplies the motive for the
great moral conflict in the breast of humanity. It is the father powers against
the native forces of the mother and the child. As Jung has so well shown, the
instincts of what the Greeks called physis, or nature, predominate in
the first thirty-five years of a human life, but give place in the second
similar period to those of the mind, philosophy and intellectuality. The first
period builds the body and establishes its sustenance, comfort and well-being.
The second advances from those concerns to the matters of life and
consciousness, to the effort to gain knowledge and understanding.
A second and more particular item of
the parallelism between the racial and the individual childhood periods is well
adduced by Jung, citing a passage from the scholar Abraham (Dreams and Myths)
as follows:
"Thus the myth is a sustained,
still remaining fragment from the infantile soul-life of the people, and
the dream is the myth of the individual."
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The assumption that the myth is an
infantile creation because it was extant in the early life of the nations (if
only three or four thousand years back of the present can be considered an
"early" period in the history of humanity) is gratuitous and
conjectural and has arisen only because of the decay of philosophic
enlightenment in the dark ages. A better understanding is formulated in the statement
that the myths were designed and constructed by the loftiest genius for
dramatization of truth and were adapted to yield instruction and enlightenment for
both the infancy and the adulthood of the race and of the individual. Their
truths were ageless and their application universally relevant. They were
designed to be remembered, if not understood, by childhood, and to be
understood by all in their maturity. They were given to the race at an early
stage, because they were intended to stand as guiding light for the whole race
throughout the evolutionary journey. But it is impossible that they could have
been the creation or the product of the child-mind.
They were put forth in the race's
childhood because the mind of childhood is receptive to impressions stamped
upon it and will hold vital truth, even if only the shell of the truth or
meaning is perceived, until the maturing mind can probe into the kernel and
discern the living essence of truth therein. It has not been perceived that the
prime purpose behind the promulgation of the myths was their preservation in
racial memory. They were taught in the childhood of the race, and repeated in
the childhood of the individual in each generation, that first of all they
might be perpetuated. They were constructed in a fashion that rendered them
automatically easy to remember. They were set to poetic meter and rhythm, so
that they held their place in memory like music. And even the scriptures were
constructed on the pattern of number formations, based chiefly on the number
seven. This has come to light in the discovery of the almost universal
prevalence of the chiasmus structure in the Christian Bible and the omnipresent
run of multiples of seven in the numerical values of numberless phrases, verses
and
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other groupings in the Greek and
Hebrew translations of the scriptures.
What is impressed upon the child
mind is hardly ever lost, perhaps never really. Therefore the ancient
impartation of knowledge in allegorical and symbolic and dramatic forms was
made with the motive of transmission and remembrance, so that adulthood in
every generation might not be wanting the ever-significant structures of truth
to redeem to esoteric meaning. And, perhaps of most challenging import is the
great understanding, lost for so long, that nature carries in her phenomena the
eternal pictorialization of living truth. For human understanding the one final
and irrefutable language of truth is the symbolism of nature. For nature is truth
and verity in the concrete. Its every form is a hieroglyph of reality, staring
us in the face. A living creature, with all its habits and characteristics and
traits, is an epiphany of ubiquitous law and universal modus. The life of a
vegetable is an epitome of all life. For there are varying levels and degrees
at which life manifests, rated as higher and lower, and the manifestation at
any of the levels is typal of the one universal procedure.
Hence the masters of ancient
knowledge put forth their sagas of profoundest cosmic truth almost entirely in
the language of nature symbolism. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider
her ways and be wise," might be cited as the key slogan of the teaching of
antiquity. The writings of the sages send the thought of the reader again and
again to the bee, the snake, the bird, the cat, dog, lion, crocodile, ape,
dragon-fly, locust, grasshopper, the tree, the bush, flower, grass, leaf, root,
mountain, river, lake, brook, sea, water, lightning, sun, moon, star, constellation,
summer, winter, month and year. Wheat for bread, the grape for wine, and the
bee for honey stand as the three great symbols of the divine soul in the mortal
body.
The life of the child and of early
humanity alike stand far closer to nature than that of the individual or the
collective adult. The
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child is born in the lap of Mother
Nature and he is bathed within and without by the stream of her ubiquitous
forces. Her influences shape his physical body and the automatic functioning of
her powers carries him along toward maturity. All this being so, it is the
decree of fitness and necessity that any cultural heritage formulated for his
immediate and continuing behoof should be framed and expressed in the language
of nature symbols. For these are the things whose constant objectivity in his
life dowers them with pedagogical power and enlightening significance. Their
known phenomena hold the mirror up to truth, for they are that truth themselves
in the concrete. Through and behind the visible world of actuality there broods
the other world of invisible reality. The visible thing is the only lens
through which the figures and shapes of that deeper reality can be brought to
focus for the human mind. The philosophic aphorism that the things of the outer
world are cast in the image of "those things which are above" is the
statement of man's only means of rising to an apprehension of spiritual
realities. When seen, they are revealed to be not foreign and exotic creations,
but bear the familiar stamp of the known things in the world here below. The
seen world is man's only clue to the realities of the unseen world.
The obvious effort and aim of the
archaic literary constructions then was to embody the principles of truth in a
language and in narrative that would hold the mind close to nature and her
forms and phenomena. This was the language, not of childhood, but for
childhood. But it is equally the language for adulthood, for even now, in
an age of the world considered adult, the same language of symbol and myth
still beats back the efforts of the united acumen of world scholarship to grasp
the esoteric meaning. And it is still claimed that these masterly devices to
purvey the most recondite truth and wisdom were the spontaneous creations of
the race's "child-mind."
The sages availed themselves of the
known capabilities of the mind in the childhood of the world and the childhood
of each suc-
162
cessive generation to achieve the
primary aim of preserving their writings in memory. Both the race and the individual
possess in their childhood a virtually unforgetting memory. For both function
in the realm of the subconscious. The child, the animal and child-humanity all
alike live consciously at the level of the subconscious. Their actions are
directed by instinct and automatism. Mind has not come to play in either of
them as yet. Hence the phenomena of conscious life in all of them display
similarity and are to be measured by the same standard. Their various
manifestations are kindred and analogous. Their activities are motivated by the
autonomic nervous system, their memory is automatic and practically unfailing
and impressions are made everlasting by repetition. The human child of course
stands above the animal, but he nevertheless passes through the animal stage
of evolution and still bears the animal nature with him in his physical
body.
It is now possible to summarize what
this unfoldment has dialectically been leading to. The myths, symbols and
dramas embodying the mighty ancient wisdom had to be given to child humanity in
a form to be eternally remembered. They had to be given in the race's
childhood and to the race in its childhood because humanity was still in
its animal stage and both the animal and the child have automatic powers of
memory. And they had to be framed in a language and under imagery based on
naturographs, because natural phenomena constitute the only universal lexicon
or alphabet of unerring truth. They constitute the only language universally
comprehensible, and, what is still more, the only language capable of yielding
to each level of intellectual capacity and development the truth which that
stage is able to grasp. It teaches simple truth to the simple and profound
truth to the sagacious. In brief summary, truth had to be organized and
indelibly stamped upon the subconscious mind of the race so that it would live
automatically, and be perpetuated for the use of the conscious intelligence
when at a later stage that genius burst into flower in the denouement of
organic evolution.
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What Jung and Abraham and other
students say about the myths of early humanity matching the myth-making power
of the subconscious today (or vice versa), and the dreams of the
under-mind continuing to cast up the wrack of the ancient language of myth and
symbol has pertinent bearing upon the entire subject of mind-analysis. The
repetition of the ancient symbols in modern dreams is interpreted to be the
method adopted by the subconscious--which is the recorded memory of the race's
and the individual's past--for the most part to protest against the willful
suppression by the present conscious mind of the instinctive native
propensities and calls of the natural or animal man for their expression. It is
in brief the form of the first or natural-animal man's protest against the
repression of its instinctual life by the incipient rise of the second or
spiritual man's mind to dominion over the whole life of the organism. As such
it is inevitable, natural and good. The concern of the individual is to manage
it with the least degree of tragic conflict and severe disturbance. It is not
abnormal that disturbance should come. The tragedy is that it should come under
such conditions of unintelligence and unbalance that wreckage should so often
occur.
It is well to note a dialectical
point in the form of Abraham's presentation of the identical function and
status of the myth of the early race and the dream of childhood. It has been an
assertion of this essay that the myth was not produced or created by the
child mind of early humanity. If now the myth and the dream symbol or dream
myth are of parallel order and status, then the parallelism should hold in
respect to their origin or production. It can not be said that the dream of the
child mind in individual childhood is a conscious creation of the child's
genius. It is in reality simply given to the child. It is more of the
nature of a projection into the child's mind by a superior intelligence. The
child mind did not consciously and designedly produce it. It came down "from
above," or out from within. If there is instruction, then, in the law of
cor-
164
respondences, as most certainly
there is, the conclusion is that neither was the myth in early history a
conscious creation of the child mind of infant humanity.
In the light of all this it is of
interest to hear Jung in a further elaboration of the idea dealt with here (Psychology
of the Unconscious, p. 29):
"The conclusion results almost
from itself, that the age which created the myths thought childishly--that is
to say, phantastically, as in our age is still done to a very great extent
(associatively or analogically) in dreams. The beginnings of myth formations
(in the child), the taking of phantasies for realities, which is partly in
accord with the historical, may easily be discovered among children."
It is probably a bit difficult to
allocate a precise or scientific meaning to Jung's use of the words
"childishly" and "phantastically" here and elsewhere.
Always the first word and generally the second carries with it the connotation
of a mental picture that either misses or weirdly caricatures reality. Phantasy
is commonly taken to be the creation of illusion. Its formations do not match
truth or reality. Sometimes a slightly more generous allowance on the side of reliability
is made for phantasy when speaking of the phantasies of the poet as depictions
of the actual. But generally the word carries the imputation of fallacy.
Phantasies are fictions of the mind made in an effort to explain or interpret
reality, but missing its faithful portraiture. They are imaginative failures
and falsities.
Jung confirms this broad definition
of the meaning of phantasy when he says that the mind of childhood is addicted
to "the taking of phantasies for realities." Its imaginings about the
world and life are not true pictures. This can be readily granted without
debate, inasmuch as it is conceded that the mind of the child is not fortified
with the data of experience and the developed powers of the intellect to
interpret things aright, or at least according to the norms of adult mentation.
But when the eminent psychologist goes on to say that, because the child makes
erroneous guesses about reality and conceives with the error of infantile
incapacity, likewise the myth-
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makers of antiquity "thought
childishly--that is to say phantastically, as . . . in dreams," when they
constructed the great myths, it is obvious that he is guilty of a non
sequitor. He convicts himself of bad logic on two counts, both, oddly
enough, brought against this conclusion by himself! For, in the first place he
himself devotes some hundreds of pages in The Psychology of the Unconscious alone,
and more in other works, to an elucidation of psychoanalytic rationale and
interpretation entirely on the basis of constructions supplied by the ancient
myths, which thus are found to be accurate and reliable norms of truth and
reality. And, secondly, his own work, as well as the whole burden of
psychoanalytic science, has validated the authenticity of the dream, when properly
analyzed, as a faithful picture or dramatization of reality. If, in the
ordinary derogatory sense of the terms, it is affirmed that the myth and the
dream are childish and phantastic constructions, then Jung's entire splendid
contribution to psychological science must be written off as similarly childish
and phantastic, for it is based solidly on the truth-telling character of
both the dream and the myth. The dream is the production of an unconscious
faculty now recognized to exercise the most recondite intelligence, not to say
incredible genius in the art of semantic dramatization. Likewise the myths of
ancient formulation are seen by psychoanalysts themselves to be marvelously
astute creations to represent the profoundest conceptions and motions of the
human spirit, which they do with astounding precision and clarity. If both are
"childish and phantastic," then childish phantasy must be elevated to
the rank of the supreme faculty of the human psyche.
Phantasy may reign in the conscious
life of the child, when its imaginations conceived to picture reality widely
miss the mark of truth. But the dream is not the conscious production of the
child, neither is the myth the production of child humanity, that is, humanity
functioning at the child level. The dream is given to the child and the
myth was given to humanity in its childhood. Until
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the study is oriented in line with
this understanding it will not yield true insight or clarification.
Civilized society is shocked from
time to time by the exhibition in certain quarters of the crudest forms of
gross animalism or brutality. Jung says that these always remain germinally in
the unconscious and can surge to the surface when conventional restraints are
temporarily relaxed. Some of them are so gross and bestial in their
manifestation that Jung is led to say that "today we feel for such a thing
nothing but the deepest abhorrence, and never would admit it still slumbered in
our souls." But it is well to note his statement that we go through the
period corresponding to the animal evolution in our childhood, when by analogy
at least we are classified as little savages. He says (p. 35):
"Yet all this does not affect
the fact that we in childhood go through a period in which the impulses toward
these archaic inclinations appear again and again, and that through all our
life we possess, side by side with the newly recruited, directed and adapted
thought, a phantastic thought which corresponds to the thought of the centuries
of antiquity and barbarism. Just as our bodies still keep the reminders of old
functions and conditions in many old-fashioned organs, so our minds, too, bear
the marks of the evolution passed through and the very ancient re-echoes, at
least dreamily, in phantasies."
In childhood we each quickly
recapitulate the age of animal barbarity and thereafter keep it, as it were,
buried in the basement of consciousness, covered over as well as we are able to
contrive it, with the traditional masks and facades of
"civilization." Wars, crime waves and occasional reversions to the
elemental and the primitive at times lift the lid of conventional restraint
sufficiently to allow an upsurge of the native animal forces.
One of the discernments brought out
by Jung in connection with mythology deserves a word of comment. He observes
tersely that the masses never free themselves from mythology. This is hardly
more than a trite notation, since the masses are those who remain
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bound in the commonplace
conventional and traditional, the accepted standards of conduct and thought.
The myths have played their part, perhaps away back in time, in setting the
established mores. Thus the life and influence of the myths are perpetuated
down the ages. In so far, however, as the myths did originally portray, no
matter with what subtle deftness, the realities of man's history, it is
inevitable that they should linger as normative influences over the
consciousness of the masses, even though, as is always the case, the kernel of
their real meaning has been lost, and only their desiccated husks survive. In
this sense it is the fate of the vast majority of mankind to be perpetually
influenced if not ruled by conceptual phantoms! The saving consideration in the
situation, however, is the fact that in large part the phantoms are the wraiths
of truth formerly apprehended, but since lost, and that so long as there is
even the subtlest suggestion of true and vital meaning in the traditional forms
of thought and behavior, the dominance of the mores will not work outright
catastrophe. Even the phantoms of truth have saving grace.
It is admittedly a journey somewhat
afield from the main thesis, but nevertheless of much importance to note what
Jung has wisely observed as to the relation of the myth to history. Speaking of
the "mythical tradition" he says that
"it does not set forth any
account of old events, but rather acts in such a way that it always reveals a
thought common to humanity and once more rejuvenated. Thus for example, the lives and deeds of the
founders of old religions are the purest condensations of typical
contemporaneous myths, behind which the individual figure entirely
disappears."
The very husks and shells of the
myths, still prevalent in universal tradition, are capable, as Jung intimates
here, of "rejuvenation." And this is the hope of humanity. It is
always possible that intelligence may return in sufficient force to revitalize
the myths with their original dynamic potency. This is the need of the world of
culture today. The obstacle that so stubbornly blocks the way to
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this renaissance is the incredible
fact that large sections of what was created as mythology have been crassly and
stupidly mistaken for veridical history itself! Ages of mental hallucination
and ideological folly could have been obviated if the myths had not been
obtruded into the terrain of objective history. Possibly nine-tenths of the
material embodied in the Christian scriptures has been taken for ancient Jewish
history, when in truth the book is almost entirely a collection of aboriginal
mythical constructions. So obvious is this to competent students who have
conscientiously surveyed the field of ancient religion that Kalthoff has
written the following doubtless well-considered paragraph (Entstehung des
Christentums):
"The sources from which we
derive our information concerning the origin of Christianity are such that in
the present state of historical research no historian would undertake the task
of writing the biography of an historical Jesus."
And he strengthens this with another
asseveration (Ibid, p. 10):
"To see behind these stories
the life of a real historical personage would not occur to any man if it were
not for the influence of rationalistic theology."
The Messiahs, Sun-gods, Saviors,
Christs and Jesus figures, of whom there were scores in the religions of early
times, it is to be inferred, were not historical persons in the flesh, but the
typal characters designed to portray man's ever-coming divinity. They were
mythical figures and not men in history. Kalthoff goes on to say that the
divine element in Christ was always considered an inner attribute and
possessed or manifested by the Christ figure in common with humanity, which is
to evolve the same divinity in its own life. He adduces the fact that everywhere
the Christ figure is shown exhibiting "superhuman traits; nowhere is he
that which critical theology wished to make him, simply a natural man, an
historical individual." Well had it been for western civilization if
it had been known that the alleged lives and deeds of the founders of old
religions, as well as the "historical careers" of a score or
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more of Messiahs and Sun-gods and
Christs, were, as Jung says, "condensations of typical contemporaneous
myths, behind which the individual figure entirely disappears." When myth
was converted into "history" the Dark Ages began.
The great need of a distinctive
differentiation between the two forms of the unconscious, the subconscious and
the superconscious, is vividly emphasized when we compare certain of Jung's
statements with one another. We have seen the psychologist saying that all the
memory-record of our past in the animal stage of evolution, with all its
inhuman bestial manifestations that he admits are so revolting that we hesitate
to believe we carry the memory of them in the depths of our being, is buried in
our consciousness and may surge upward from the unconscious. Yet with this
characterization given to the content of the unconscious, Jung is found writing
that
"comparison with the sun
teaches us over and over again that the gods are libido. It is that part of us
which is immortal, since it represents that bond through which we feel that in
the race we are never extinguished. It is life from the life of mankind. Its
springs, which well up from the depths of the unconscious, come, as does our
life in general, from the root of the whole of humanity, since we are indeed
only a twig broken off from the mother and transplanted."
And again he is affirming that
"since the divine in us is
libido, we must not wonder that we have taken along with us in our theology
ancient representations from the olden times. . . ."
Everywhere in psychoanalysis the
unconscious is the seat of the libido. The libido is that inner governor who,
from behind the throne of consciousness, dominates the life and speaks to the
personality in the devious and often obscure language of dreams and symbols. A
hundred times the libido is described as the voice and consciousness of the
past, of the youthful history of the race in its individual recapitulation, the
surging force of the native elemental
170
mind of the race, speaking generally
against the suppression of its drive for recognition and free play by the
restraints of civilization.
Assuredly it can be seen that the
libido is here described in the terms and characters of two things that are at
the very opposite poles of rating in spiritual or cultural values. It is at one
and the same time the memory of our animal past, with all its horrific and
revolting murder-lust and brutality, slumbering in the depths of the
unconscious and capable of resurrection therefrom, and also equally nursed
germinally within us. This is to ignore or erase all difference in grade and
status and nobility between the god and the animal in our constitution and to
make the unconscious the dwelling place of the divine genius as well as the
lair of the beast. Surely it can be seen that it is the voice of the animal
which speaks to us out of the past that we have lived through and compressed
into the subconscious, and that it is the voice of the god which speaks to us
out of the as yet unborn future whose terrain in the superconscious we are
little by little adventuring into. To heed the voice of the animal is to sink back
in retrogression into the repellent past; to hearken unto the voice of the god
is to step forward into more inviting prospects, and to follow rosier pathways
through the meads and uplands of evolution. The terrain of these two regions of
consciousness in the human nature is precisely what was meant by the ancient
Egyptians in their allegorical division of their country into "the two
lands," or "Upper and Lower Egypt," the location and histories
of which have perplexed even such a noted Egyptologist as the late William H.
Breasted and others. The student of Egyptian history will note that time after
time one Pharaoh after another is obliged to fight a war from his capital in
Upper Egypt with the kingdom of Lower Egypt, conquer it afresh and unite it again
"under the double sovereignty of the crowns of Upper and Lower
Egypt." Over and over again a kingdom divided against itself in two
warring parts has to be unified. It has never dawned
171
upon the savants that this is beyond
reasonable probability as history, and points to the trick of allegory. For it
is an exact repicturing of what takes place in the human constitution, where
the two kingdoms, that of the animal and that of the god, are long hostile to
each other and must be reconciled and brought to an atonement, by the stronger
agency of the divine as it wins victory over the "lower Egypt" of the
human realm. Even Paul tells us that a wall of partition between us will be
broken down, enabling the two natures to merge in harmony into a new creature,
"so making peace."
In this connection it is appropriate
to present what Jung has to say as to how the truth embalmed in the myths is to
be apprehended. After remarking, most discerningly, that it is more or less
imperatively demanded that the psychoanalyst should "broaden the analysis
of the individual problems by a comparative study of historical material
relating to them,"--and Jung himself has done this most exhaustively--he
goes on to say that
"It is a well-known fact that
one of the principles of analytic psychology is that the dream images are to be
understood symbolically; that is to say that they are not to be taken
literally, just as they are represented in sleep, but that behind them a hidden
meaning has to be surmised. It is this idea of a dream symbolism which has
challenged not only criticism, but, in addition to that, the strongest
opposition."
What is true here of the dream
symbolism is true also of the mythic symbolism. Jung repeats it--and
underscores it--"it is not literally true, but is true
psychologically." It is easy to understand and pardon a symbologist's
contemptuous fling at uncomprehending scientists and scholastics in his further
comment:
"In this distinction lies the
reason why the old fogies of science have from time to time thrown away an
inherited piece of ancient truth; because it was not literally but
psychologically true. For such discrimination this type of person has at no
time had any comprehension."
Indeed Jung goes so far as to assert
that
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"Dreams are symbolic in order
that they can not be understood; in order that the wish, which is the source of
the dream, may remain unknown."
This pretty well matches the
statement of the Jesus figure in the Gospels that truth was given to them that
are without in parables, lest, hearing, they might understand and be converted,
and seeing, they might believe. This is to imply that the subconscious presents
its symbolic messages furtively, wishing to remain unidentified in connection
with its wish, unwilling to be known as sponsoring such a wish. From the very
fact that such a furtive motive would not be easily ascribable to the god, who
likewise presents his wishes in the higher interests of the personal life, and
would have no reason to dodge recognition, it would be inferable that symbolism
in dreams is a usage of the subconscious or animal memory alone. This, however,
is not the case, since the very highest messages are likewise clothed in the
most complex and recondite forms of symbolism. The god and not the animal is
the consummate craftsman in the formulation of the symbolic dream. Must it be
said that modern psychological science has shown itself totally incapable of
recognizing any difference between the two voices of the god and the beast in
human consciousness?
Great stress is laid by modern
psychology upon what are called "escape mechanisms" and
"retreats from reality into phantasy." Religious devotionalism,
addiction to idealistic philosophies, surrender to mystical experience even in
poetry, music and art, are broadly characterized as houses of refuge from stark
reality. But psychoanalysis itself has endorsed the ancient Egyptian and Greek
division of man's psychic life into its two aspects of immortal divine mind and
lower animal sensuousness, and it would be only a natural question to ask which
of the two is seeking to escape from the other! Since the whole crux of the
moral problem for man is the conflict between the two natures, the analysis of
every phase of the struggle hinges on discovery of which nature in man is
trying to
173
dodge its opponent. Perhaps the
difficulty and the confused intermixture of the two in psychoanalytic
interpretation arises from what is implied in the Egyptian symbol of the
"horizon." Man stands directly upon the "horizon" or
dividing line between the two kingdoms of consciousness, and as so poetically
stated in texts from the hieroglyphic writings, "he cultivates the crops
on both sides of the horizon," "he cultivates the two lands, he
pacifies the two lands, he unites the two lands." "He makes
the two Rheti goddesses, whose hearts are at enmity with each other, to be at
peace." To the soul it is said: "The horizon is covered with the
tracks of thy passing." This is to say that, as man can focus his
consciousness in the world of spiritual realities or equally in that of carnal
sensuality, he keeps continually passing back and forth, or up and down, across
the middle-line of demarcation, the horizon. Hence on the line of open
consciousness, which is directly between the two, god and animal constantly are
intermingling their motivations and propensities, with the result that the
clear distinction between the two is blurred. This may perhaps be the
explanation of the failure of psychology to differentiate between the two
widely separated regions of the unconscious world, the subconscious and the
superconscious. For, as stated before, man's narrow area of consciousness is
closely hemmed in between two dark regions of unconsciousness.
It is possible that in this
situation lies the difficult determination of one of the strange devices of
ancient symbolic representation, one that has too often been most weirdly and
erroneously guessed at,--the crucifixion of the Christ between two thieves. In
human incarnation and evolution the potential Christ principle does step out
upon this line of open consciousness between the two bordering areas of
unconsciousness, and it is not too great a strain on poetic imagery to think of
unconsciousness as stealing away the priceless gift or faculty of
consciousness. Likewise the conditions of stress and strain, suffering and
anguish, that necessarily go with the struggle of the soul as it is torn
between the pulls of the two con-
174
flicting natures, fulfill every
esoteric phase of the meaning of crucifixion. In this position the soul stands
precisely at the point where divine and carnal natures cross each other, and
are at cross purposes each to other. The final meaning of the cross as symbol is
simply the incarnation. The soul is on the cross when it is linked to mortal
body. The loss of this explicit determination is one of the tragic
consequences, as well as attestations, of the debacle of esoteric wisdom in the
third century.
The confusion of modern study just
alluded to as due to the failure to keep the two natures in the human breast
clearly differentiated is again well illustrated in a passage from so
discerning a student as Jung (Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 94):
"It is shameful or exalted,
just as one chooses, that the divine longing of humanity, which is really the
first thing to make it human, should be brought into connection with an erotic
phantasy. Such a comparison jars upon the finer feelings."
And he adds that
"Nature is beautiful only by
virtue of the longing and love given her by man."
Indeed so jarring a realization has
it ever been to the more enlightened thinking of mankind that soul should be
brought under the dominion of flesh and sense that early philosophical understanding
and acceptance of the fact as beneficent has been almost completely banished
and religious sentiment has come to pronounce the soul's connection with mortal
body a thing of evil. Even Plotinus is declared to have proclaimed his sense of
shame at being incarnated in body at all. Centuries of Christian asceticism
were activated by the preachment of the shamefulness of the flesh. Spirit alone
is exalted; matter and body are denied. Nothing can clear this befuddlement
save a return to the sagacious enlightenment that prevailed when the Book of
the Dead was written. It was known then that the soul could not progress to
greater glory if she did not leave
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heavenly mansions of dreamy
blissfulness and have her powers and faculties brought out from sheer latency
into actuality by taking her stand precisely on the horizon line at the focus
of the tension between spirit and matter. Only there could she pass from
unconsciousness to consciousness. Only there, says Plotinus himself, could she
ever develop her own powers and come to know what she herself possesses.
The dynamic force of the realization
that man is a god in the making so impressed Jung at one place that he writes
(p. 96):
"To bear a God within one's
self signifies as much as to be a God one's self."
Yes, in sentiment, but not quite yes
in fact. The penalties for forgetting that man is both the god and the animal
at one and the same time are not minimized by the strength of lofty sentiment.
Man's divinity is as yet mainly potential; it can be realized only through the
fulfillment of Aristotle's entelechy and emerge as end product of a time cycle.
Its actualization is linked to time and growth, and more than that, to the
outcome of a battle with the flesh. Without the battle on the horizon soul
would remain forever inane, an unplanted seed.
A final word will round out the case
for the claim that the failure to distinguish between the two realms of the
unconscious has led to false deductions and confusion. Such a result can be
seen by placing side by side two or three of Jung's statements. He has said
that the divine immortal principle in us is libido and that "the gods are
libido." But he also writes (The Psychology of the Unconscious, p.
105) that
"The phallus is the source of
life and libido, the great creator and worker of miracles, and as such it
received reverence everywhere."
There is no question as to the
reverence in which the phallus was held in the olden time, and strange enough
it symbolized not the lusts of the flesh, but the highest spiritual or divine
element
176
in man. This is all, however, on the
plane of symbolism. For psychology to proclaim that the libido in man is alike
the divine inspiration from the supervening world of spiritual reality and the
force making for physical creation as instrumentalized through the phallus is
to ignore a gap between these two that is impassable to thought. The libido has
practically been broadened to make its meaning cover what might be called the
whole drive of life to get itself expressed in living forms and actions of the
creatures. But it seems to be forgotten that both the animal and the divine
natures in man are making a drive to get each its particular segment of
creative force expressed in the world of life. It hardly seems compatible with
the human notions of dignity and worth to place on the same level of quality
the forces that come to expression in man's life, the one through the
spiritualized intellect, the other through the phallus. All life, in the
monistic sense, is one, and in the absolute sense is all equally
"divine." But in the area of man's perceptual world it is impossible
for the mind to ignore the endless differentiations into which life splits its
unit energies. It must see values as relative one to another and all to the
whole. In its original uses the libido, a Latin word which when encountered in
the text of Cicero's Orations against Cataline in the schools was accustomed to
be translated "lust," certainly was employed to name the tremendous
sweep of appetency that sought to perpetuate life through sexual function. It
was at first largely restricted to the general meaning of "sex."
Although its connotations have since been greatly broadened, it is hardly
legitimate to extend its meaning to make it take in that other element in man's
constitution which in all spiritual and ethical systems has ever been regarded
as its direct opposite, indeed its evolutionary opponent and enemy! Except
symbolically, it is going to be an undertaking marked for failure to ask the
human mind, as it is conditioned by tradition, to affix the character and
attributes of what is conceived as "divine" to the physically
creative energies that find expression through the phallus.
177
Universal usage has allocated the
play of so-called divine forces to the mind and spirit alone. In the world of
relativity it is necessary to make and adhere to patent and obvious
distinctions in rating and value. The libido can hardly be used to name both
the godlike and the bestial natures in the human being.
Not to prolong the matter to the
point of tedium, but for the importance of it all, another citation from Jung
shows the same indecisive delineation of libido (The Psychology of the
Unconscious, p. 105):
"The possibilities of
comparison mean just as many possibilities for symbolic expression, and from
this basis all the infinitely varied symbols, so far as they are libido images,
may properly be reduced to a very simple root, that is, just to libido and its
fixed primitive qualities."
This is a bit indecisive, inasmuch
as it merely says that symbols, "so far as they are libido images,"
may be reduced to libido. But it comes close to saying at the same time that
"all the infinitely varied symbols" are reducible to libido. But
fully one half of ancient symbols have reference directly to the divine element
in the life and not at all to the physically procreative psychology.
Dr. Hinkle has stated that
"symbols dominate to an unbelievable extent man's conduct and behavior, as
well as his thinking; they are the bridge over which he travels from the known
to the unknown." They enable the mind, she elucidates, to conceive the
shape and nature of something lying in an unknown realm, from the hint of its
likeness to something already at hand in the known world. Indeed she states
that this process of working over from the known things in the commonplace
world to true conceptions of things of a different nature unknown to us is
"the source of all cultural progress." What needs to be added, then,
is simply that when we come to interpret the symbols to enhance our limited
understanding, care must be taken to apply their reference discreetly within
the just boundaries of their area of connotation. The longer symbols are
178
studied, the more clearly it is seen
that they constituted a language of ancient ideological communication which
does not lend itself to loose poetic fancying, but carries meanings with almost
mathematical succinctness. The first step toward the Dark Ages was taken when
this precise knowledge of the old symbolic language began to disappear.
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CHAPTER XIII
LIGHT FROM AN OLD LAMP
One of the achievements of this age,
for which it may come to be marked in later historical view, is the restoration
of symbolism to a significant role in the mechanism of culture. We have seen
that the superconscious seldom delivers its messages of approval or warning to
the lower mind in the known language of common speech. It speaks in the
language of symbols and pictorial representations. The discovery of this fact
signalizes a great and really momentous advance in technique for the deeper
cultivation of the human spirit.
It is worth what Dr. Hinkle has to
say as to the desuetude of symbolism before its present re-discovery (The
Recreating of the Individual, p. 137):
"Until now, however, it has
been chiefly a subject of academic interest belonging to a past phase of human
culture and with no vital meaning for the present. Through psychoanalysis we
have come to realize that this ancient process has a present value; and the
mode of interpreting and utilizing the symbol, the way in which we understand
it in relation to the individual, are intimately connected with his future
well-being and development."
Symbols were an integral part of
ancient expression because they were the one universally known, or available,
and only true language of meaning transfer. Symbols were known to be the one
standard means of communication of truth, because the ancients were still in
possession of an important item of usable knowledge, the great fact that the
seen world is the mirror of the reality of the unseen world. Understanding went
into eclipse when this plank in the platform of a primal formulation of
knowledge was taken
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out. Now it is being restored, and
it is found that symbols are the substantial stepping-stones by means of which
the mind can cross the gap between the objective world and the realities of
higher ones. The sages of antiquity knew that if they ventured to construct the
pictures of metaphysical reality over the pattern of the objects and phenomena
of the known world they would never widely miss the truth.
We are face to face here with a
re-discovery as important as that of the unconscious. And it is one that is a
necessary supplement of the other, if the full harvest of benefit is to be
reaped from knowledge of the unconscious. We shall never be able to read the
communications of the inner lord of life to his outer protégé, the conscious
human, without the help of this symbolism. Just as the discovery of the Rosetta
Stone was essential to our regaining Egypt's lost wisdom, so our ability to
translate the language of symbolism is necessary to understand the strange
vernacular in which the Ancient of Days speaks down to us from his seat in the
plane of consciousness just over our heads. He speaks in the language of
meaning-forms and not in that of words. An object or a process from the world
of nature conveys a graph of meaning that often could not be elaborated in less
than a thousand words. The snake, beetle, locust, hawk and bee, the cloud,
rainbow and lightning announce the principles of cosmic law with a definiteness
that no words can match. Words can misrepresent the truth; nature symbols can
not. They discourse upon the straight truth. They can not lead the mind into
sophistry. So reliable and certain is their testimony to verify that whenever
the mind wishes to confirm its insights into truth it cites the harmony of its
deductions with natural fact. If a structure of exposition can be paralleled
with a phenomenon in nature, it is considered to be certified. Poetry is in
large part the sensing and limning of this perceived correspondence. To show
that an inner construction sustains analogical identity with something in outer
creation, proves that it is already accredited, being found extant in the world
of real being.
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A vivid line from one of Goethe's
poems strikes ringing recognition of this truth of symbolism:
"To the capable the world is never
dumb!"
And Schiller, while seemingly turned
around to a wrong orientation to the theme, nevertheless gives out a phrase of
sententious truth when he says:
"I was not yet capable of
comprehending nature at first hand; I had but learned to admire her image
reflected in the understanding, and put in order by rules." (Italics
Dr. Hinkle's in quotation.)
Any one who has learned to admire
nature's image reflected in the understanding has already become, as Emerson
puts it, a priest interpreting the epiphany of creation. This is not an
elementary step preparatory to comprehending nature at first hand, as Schiller
says. It is indeed first-hand comprehension itself. For it is the
interpretation of nature through translation of her forms as alphabet into
ultimate meaning. This is to understand nature, for she is then seen not as
sheer object, but as forms of meaning. The mind so qualified is able to look
not merely at nature, but through nature to discern the
archetypal forms in the divine mind. This is to read God's thoughts after him.
Misguided superficial dialectic
might rise here to expostulate that since, as declared, the entire drive of
religious aspiration is to transcend the natural man and the world that
ensnares him, and to catch and hold the diviner superhuman, it is going against
philosophy and evolution alike to ask the mind to tie itself in ever closer
relation to the natural world. That, says pietistic faith, is the world to be
shunned and escaped. But this is a mistake. To recommend the use of nature as
an alphabet for the reading of higher truth is in no way to involve the mind in
subjection to nature's own play of mindless forces. It is in no sense to enmire
intelligence in her own ground of partial nescience. It is but to use her forms
as
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mnemonics and hieroglyphics of
exalted sense or as the lens of a more penetrating and magnifying insight.
Another statement from Dr. Hinkle
falls in here with much pertinence (p. 441):
"The whole process of psychic
development is seen to follow a kind of spiral movement in which there is a
recurrent return to former states having the closest analogy to the actual
physical conditions experienced. Thus in all psychic development there is a
close relationship with the physical processes, but not an identity."
It is well to observe, with this
reminder, that analogy works through likeness, but does not claim identity.
"Through man's capacity for
psychic creation he has attained a power for individual development which in
its becoming follows like a shadow the actual physical processes lived through,
but which possesses a reality of its own as important for human life as the
actual physical processes are for all organic life. It is this reality so
frequently expressing itself in the language of organic reality which must be
recognized for an understanding of human needs. The light that psychoanalysis
has provided has revealed a new meaning to many of the great intuitions of the
past, and has shown unmistakably that they possess a validity and reality in
relation to the individual life wholly unrealized by thought, but entirely
realizable in the human being."
This is to say that a meaning,
perhaps an actual message from the man's oversoul to his outer intelligence,
comes to him in the form of an analogue with some phase of his actual
experience. The supermind must speak to him in the terms of what has already
had meaning for him. As already set forth, it is impossible that an abstract
idea can be presented to a mind without reference to a previously known
physical object or process. Even an idea must accrete whatever form, structure
or organic outline it is to have from something once known. It has often been
said that the mind can form no picture of a something the likeness of which it
has never seen. It can formulate new pictures, but only out of a new
configuration or combination of elements already imprinted in
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memory. The very categories of
thought, as extensions, quantity, number, dimension, cause, effect, quality,
etc., are abstractions derived from experience with the concrete physical,
which plant these concepts in the intellect. The only pathway open to the mind
is through the physical, whose forms become symbols of the metaphysical.
Symbols, then, are the currency in
the ideal realm. It is not too strong an assertion to say that symbols are not
only the language of conception and impartation in the metaphysical realm, but
that they are therefore the instruments of the soul's highest culture. It has
been claimed that the mathematical symbols, pi, x and the horizontal 8 for
infinity and others, have virtually made higher abstract mathematics possible.
Culture hinges on grasp and communication of ideas and symbols make the
interchange a near-divine art. It has been questioned whether the act of
thinking could be achieved without symbols. An idea would be left formless if
it could not be given suggestive shape over the pattern of fixed
representation. Description could not be achieved if some known object bearing
likeness to the unknown to be described could not be pointed to.
There is evidence of surprising
cogency pointing to the realization that the attainment or the degree of
culture in mankind bears a significant relation to the interest in symbolism. A
cursory canvass of history seems to reveal a distinct and decided parallel
between cultural rise and fall and the vogue and lapse of symbolic methodology.
This is indeed challenging. The ancient period, during which there was extant a
culture sufficiently lofty to inspire the writing of the only books that have
held universal veneration throughout the centuries, obviously was steeped in
symbolic practique. No more valid attestation of this is needed than the
observation that these books themselves purvey symbolism as their chief method
of intellectual expression, as they fairly teem with symbolism. Culture rose or
prevailed hand in hand with symbolism in that era. The great upsurge of Greek
culture was based on and widely
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utilized symbols, such as Plato's
cave allegory, the myth of Er, King Minos' labyrinth, and others. The mighty
wisdom of old Egypt verily reeked with symbols. The best in Hindu thought
relied largely on symbolic portrayal. The Gospel character of Jesus for the
most part taught in parables.
Up to the third century in
Christianity, while there prevailed a strong trend to Gnosticism and Greek
philosophy in the schools and doctrines of the Church, symbolism and allegorism
held a very high place in exegesis, pre-eminently so in the work of the two
most illuminated of the Patristics, Clement of Alexandria and his pupil,
Origen. Particularly "Origen's allegories" became later a bone of
contention between partisans in the Church and as a result fell under the
fierce denunciation of the orthodox parties and finally were "excommunicated"
by the decrees of Councils about the sixth century. Origen steadfastly
maintained that beneath the letter of scriptural text, to be discerned by a
more cultivated spiritual intuition, lay a deeper stratum of meaning, which was
the true and vital message, supplanting the more obvious literal sense. The
scriptures carried a profounder esoteric implication, concealed "under
glyph and symbol," which the untutored would miss and the initiated would
grasp. The milk for babes was the simple exoteric surface meaning; the meat for
hardier digestion was this more deeply buried occult rendering. Philo laid
great emphasis on this esoteric symbolic methodology. It is indeed a general
characteristic of the body of ancient literature.
But symbolic usage largely
disappeared after the fatal third century in countries under the Christian
banner. For nigh unto eleven centuries little is heard of symbolism, and this
period is precisely that covered by the "Dark Ages" in Occidental
civilization.
Then, to put an end to the dismal
night, came the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
A perusal of John Addington Symond's comprehensive volumes on the Renaissance
in Italy brings to light the astonishing fact that with this great burst of enlightenment
there swept in a great tide of symbolic poetization.
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The intellectual instinct for
symbolization indeed formed one of the chief currents of the revival itself.
Says Symonds (p. 95):
"Poetry is instruction conveyed
through allegory and fiction. Theology itself, he [Boccaccio] reasons, is a
form of poetry; even the Holy Spirit may be called a Poet, inasmuch as he used
the vehicle of symbol in the visions of the prophets and the Revelation of
St. John."
Symonds speaks of Boccaccio's work
as containing "a full exposition of the allegorical theories with which
humanism started." Another curious passage from Symonds may well be
interpolated here, since it weighs in with a surprisingly pertinent reference
to present postures in culture. He goes on (p. 96):
"The poet, according to this
medieval philosophy of literature, was a sage and teacher, wrapping up his
august meanings in delightful fictions. Though the common herd despised him as
a liar and a falsehood-fabricator, he was, in truth, a prophet uttering his
dark speech in parables. How foolish, therefore, reasons the apologist, are the
enemies of poetry,--sophistical dialecticians and avaricious jurists, who have
never trodden the Phoebean hill, and who scorn the springs of Helicon because
they do not flow with gold! Far worse is the condition of those monks and
hypocrites who accuse the divine art of immortality and grossness, instead of
reading between the lines and seeking the sense conveyed to the understanding
under veils of allegory."
This outcry of Boccaccio against the
stolidity and unresponsiveness to the finer poetic aspects of literary culture
of the fourteenth century well dramatizes the general protest of delicacy of
sensibilities against crassness in all ages. It is one of the noblest yet
plaintively pitiful bleatings of refinement against gross dullness. The point
to be remarked here is that it came from one who performed pioneer labor in the
restoration of intellectual light to a benighted Europe, and that the light
which had been kindled for him and which he beamed further abroad to his age,
was largely generated and carried by the torch of symbolism. The enlightenment
of the Renaissance superinduced, if it was not in great measure superinduced
by, the revived science of symbology.
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But the Renaissance ran its course,
lighting up the intellectual horizon of some generations with a mellow glow of
great refinement, to be lost eventually in the sweep of the Reformation, the
assertive reaction of the human spirit from centuries of stultifying blind
faith, and the extraversion of interest created by the trend to modern physical
science. The fine discernments and appreciations of cultured intellect
requisite to capture the exalted values in symbolic usage were extinguished and
disappeared. Humanitarian culture fell again to a low status, although the
Renaissance had given too sweet a taste of it ever to be completely smothered
out again. At any rate symbolism was once more submerged in desuetude, except
in so far as it lingered in general poetry and polite literature. Even that
continuation owed nearly all its inspiration to the vigorous breath that fired
the Renaissance flame.
Now, once again, there is the
dawning of the sun of symbolic apperception. What it heralds for humanity this
time is conjectural and precarious. It all depends on the cultural capabilities
of the age. The world has possessed the forms and norms of culture and lost
them. With coarse, crude realism stalking the land, in music, art, drama,
literature and social life, there seems little chance that a revival of
symbolism can take hold and live. The requisite refinements of intellectual
perceptions, the delicate nuances of human sentiment, the quietude and habits
of reflection needed to catch the subtle but powerful force of natural
analogies are lacking or perilously inadequate. The set of the modern mind is
too aggressively extravert to open the way for symbolism to register its values
and show its light. Yet, as always before, the true culture of the world hinges
upon that accomplishment. In this connection nothing is more illuminating than
a fairly lengthy passage from Symonds' work. Speaking of the obstructions in
the path of the fourteenth century revival, he writes (p. 67):
"The meagreness of medieval
learning was, however, a less serious obstacle to culture than the habit of
mind, partly engendered by Christianity, and partly idiosyncratic to the new
races, which prevented stu-
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de