In The Exile of
the Soul, students of occultism will discover a key to the mysteries of
man's being and to the basic relationship of the individual to his fellows.
Mr. Mitchell,during his years of research in ancient and modern religions and
philosophies, came upon what he found to be the interlocking fragments of an
ancient truth relating to man's constitution, origin and ultimate destiny. This
truth he presented in The Exile of the Soul with all the vigour and
directness of his unusual mind.
Roy Mitchell's work
on this great subject was not finished at the time of sudden death in July 1944
at his summer home in the Berkshires, near Canaan, Connecticut, where he was
enjoying a sabbatical year from his duties as Professor of Dramatic Art at New
York University. He had planned several more chapters dealing with the application
of this truth in other fields of human endeavour, but enough is here given to
put into the hands of sincere students, a very valuable working guide.
Roy Mitchell never
asked for belief; his attitude was, "Here is an ancient idea which works
for me - it works in the realms of psychology, philosophy, religion, humanism,
art, mathematics, mysticism - for it is the Ariadne's thread which I can follow
- to me it has revealed a new and deeper understanding of all occult teachings
and a richer awareness of the actuality of the Brotherhood of Man. Take it,
use it and see if it does not work for you also".
This stimulating
and evocative work reveals a portion only of Roy Mitchell's rare genius as a
teacher. This found its finest expression in his group talks and in his work
with individual students. He believed in humanity, believed with all his great
heart and soul that hidden behind the masks of personalities, an infinitely
finer and richer Self was concealed; he addressed himself to that Self in others
-he evoked that Self. The ties of affectionate regard and respect which bound
him and his many friends together were of that enduring nature which are established
'when deep calls unto deep'.
"Son, things
of this kind are not taught, but are brought to remembrance by the God, when
he pleaseth".
HERMES TRISMEGISTUS.
This work was published
by the Blavatsky Institute as a memorial to Mr. Roy Mitchell who was the founder
and guiding genius of the Institute.
Biology, ancient
as well as modern, has taken count of three classes of phenomena. The first
are the phenomena of the thinking soul. These are the noetic functions. The
fact that modern biological writers call them psychic should deceive nobody.
It only means that some writer looking in a lexicon for a Greek word for soul
took the first word he found , "psyche", regardless of its suitability.
If he had been a better thinker he would have kept on until the found the word
"Nous" which means thinking or rational soul. Psyche means the animal
or irrational soul. The second class of phenomena are those of animate nature.
Just where animate nature ends and inanimate nature begins is still a matter
of doubt to biologists. By animate they describe whatever lies between noetic
and physicochemical phenomena. In the best terminology these functions would
be called psychic. The biologist, a little off key as usual, calls them vital.
Vital is a word that, as we shall see, has other connotations. It is however,
the accepted name for a series of phenomena, and, in the form "vitalist",
stands for a school of opinion, and I shall have to use it. The third class
of phenomena are the physicochemical ones of so called inanimate nature.
Biologists, ancient
and modern, are regimented according to the way in which they view these classes,
the way in which they group them and the relative importance they assign to
them.
Animists are those
who give first importance to the intelligent soul but deny the separate existence
of the psychic or vital functions. These latter they say are no more than lower,
unconscious functions of the noetic power. Recognizing thus only soul and body
they declare that the body is directly guided and controlled by the thinking
soul. As a scientific theory of life animism is comparatively recent. Its great
exponent was the German physiologist Stahl (1660-1734). After his death it was
continued by some of his pupils and had a revival in the last century, under
E. Chauffard. It is the theory of life most easily aligned with theology, and
has been largely influenced by theological considerations.
Monism is the opposite
pole. It is like animism in that noetic and psychic functions are confused and
identified. It differs from animism in that its followers give first importance
to the body. Monists in addition to confusing thought and feeling, commit the
further error of assimilating all phenomena, psychic and noetic to general forces
in nature which govern plants and animals. They tend to deny the existence of
individual souls. In the beginning of modern science the monistic or mechanistic
biologists saw the body as a complex of chemical apparatus, of pipes, pumps,
retorts, levers, etc., etc., and interpreted soul as an illusion growing out
of the activity of these. They have gradually approximated more closely to vitalism
with the difference that they call the vital factors directional ones, and deny
them actual entity. Monism corresponds to the Charvaka school of ancient and
modern India. Biological monism is a reaction from theology.
The third possible
position is called vitalism. It takes count of the three classes of phenomena,
noetic, psychic and physicochemical, as entitled to separate consideration.
It says there is a vital (or psychic factor) between the thinking soul and the
physical body by means of which the body is governed and directed. In modern
times vitalism arose out of the obvious failure of the animistic doctrine of
Stahl, and has numbered among its exponents Bordeu, Grimaud, Barthez, Johannes
Muller, Liebig, Candolle the botanist, Flourens and Dressel. Its origin, however,
as a theory of life goes back into furthest antiquity. It is the doctrine of
the oldest occult schools, of religions at their inception, of the mystery systems,
and is taught by Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato, Aristole, the Neo-Platonists,
Galen, Paracelsus, Van Helmont, Agripa and others. Vitalism is neither a leaning
towards nor a reaction from theology but has maintained its course regardless
of current fashion.
The great objection
the vitalists bring against animism is the philosophical one that animism requires
the impossible conception of the thinking soul acting directly on the material
body. Vitalists argue that the functions of the soul are reflective, volitional
and conscious whereas the phenomena of the body are automatic, involuntary and
unconscious. The only means of communication, they declare, can be through a
vital principle which is distinct from thought.
Although the intentions
of the animists and the monists are diametrically opposed, say the vitalists,
their conclusions are particularly identical. The animist throws down all barriers
between thinking and feeling. The monist destroys the barriers between felling
and physiological action. The animist posits a soul that performs all functions
from the highest intuitional ones down to the lowest gleam of consciousness
observable in plant and animal life. The monist posits a body that can by physicochemical
action explain all functions from the simplest chemical ones up to (and for
some monists including) the functions of thought. They both - excluding the
utter mechanists of course - have a spiritual principle which animates all living
creatures and both schools have a body which is purely materialistic. The dispute
between them is which is the cause and which the effect. Does the thinking soul
of man merely clothe itself with a body it does not understand, or does the
body generate a kind of motion which is to be understood as mind?
Neither, says the
vitalist. Pythagoras taught that between Nous, the thinking soul, and
soma, the body, there is a feeling or sensitive soul which he called
psyche. Plato says there can be no understanding of man until we have
made the difference between the divine rational soul which is immortal and the
irrational soul which is mortal. Aristotle enunciating the ideas of his time
took count of Nous, the intellectual soul, and psyche, the irrational
or vegetative soul. The Egyptian priests had a passional or desire soul which
they called ab-hati standing between the immortal soul, the ba,
and the body or chat. The Hindu schools have a thinking soul Jivatma
(the living, divine principle) or antahkarana (the cognitive soul) and
a body called Sthula sharira. Between the soul and body they have an
animal soul called Kama-rupa. Their symbol for the thinking soul is Vishnu
and for the animal soul, Shiva.
Galen, physician
to Marcus Aurelius, and the medical writer whose system continued in Europe
until the Renaissance, took count of (1) mind, (2) what he called animal, vital
and natural spirits, and (3) body. Paracelsus, the reformer of mediaeval medicine
taught the existence of a (1) thinking soul, (2) the Olympic spirits or vital
forces of animal life, and (3) the body. Van Helmont the alchemist, physician
and philosopher was a vitalist and refused to admit that the soul directly directs
the body. The gap between soul and body he filled with a sensitive or feeling
soul ruling a hierarchy of entities that correspond to the animal-vital natural
series of Galen and to the Olympic spirits of Paracelsus.
In the ranks of modern
biologists, the monists,whose great emphasis is on body and bodily function
are vastly in the majority. The animists have dwindled to a mere handful. The
vitalists remain but are widely different in their allegiances. At one pole
are those who maintain an animistic vitalism that almost loses the vital principle
in the thinking soul. At the other are those who maintain a monistic vitalism
which almost loses the vital principle in the physiological processes.
The steady trend
of modern biology is, however, in the direction of vitalism and as experimentation
goes on there are increasing analogies for, and demonstrations of, the existence
of a lesser soul and of whole ranges of souls inferior to that again as the
occultists have always contended. In common with the other sciences which are
gradually turning back to the older philosophies and vindicating occult theories,
biology is returning to a vitalist theory of man through what is called pluri-vitalism.
Pluri-vitalism is
the secondary doctrine we saw in Galen, Paracelsus and Van Helmont. These occultists
argued that the functions of the body are governed by a multitude of lives,
cellular, corpuscular and organic. Galen's doctrine of three kinds of spirits
was that the animal spirits preside over the nervous system, the vital spirits
govern most of the other functions and that the natural spirits regulate the
liver and can be incorporated thus in the blood. Paracelsus' Olympic spirits,
which, as we shall see, derive their names from the earth gods of the Greek
Olympus, are forces peculiarly of this earth stream of evolution, and control
the functions of the liver, heart and brain. They exist also, says Paracelsus,
in all other living forms of nature. Van Helmont, in placing below the thinking
immortal soul a sensitive mortal soul, gave the sensitive soul as its agent
an aura vitalist or principal archaeus (The Hindu prana,
and the true vital element). This latter he says has its seat at the pylorus,
or orifice that empties the stomach. Below this again, Van Helmont placed the
lesser individual lives he called blas or vulcans in each organ.
The Kabbalists, the Egyptians, the Alchemists and all ancient schools placed
the seat of the true psyche or feeling soul in the heart and said that its fluid
vehicle, by which it pervades the body, is the blood. This is, by the way, the
reason for the Jewish practice of slaughtering a food animal in such a way as
to bleed it.
It was the fashion
a generation ago to ridicule these classifications. Experiment has shown, however,
that they are a valid terminology for phenomena since demonstrated. It has long
been known that the lowest creatures are complete lives in their various parts.
Plants propagated by cuttings have all the qualities of their parental stock.
Worms cut into many parts complete themselves. In 1901 at Turin the biologist
Locke kept the heart of a rabbit alive for several hours. Since then the heart
of a man has been kept beating eighteen hours after the man's death. The experiments
have been continued with muscles, glands, cells, tissues, nerves, brain itself,
demonstrating the old belief that each organ and each lesser centre of life
has a separate existence. In the phrase of the Montpellier vitalist, Bordeu,
each part of the body is "an animal in an animal".
The body of man is
therefore the field of activity of a vast number of beings of whom the soul
is only one - albeit the highest and capable of becoming the governing one.
The thinking soul is the potential ruler of a great colony of entities extending
from a sensitive soul or psyche down to the lowest cell life. The mechanistic
biologist is loath to call these lesser lives entities. The furthest he will
go is to call them vital properties but the march of discovery is forcing him
back to the idea that each, as a spiritual entity - however low its manifestation
- is a fiery life. Moreover he is being driven by analogous advances in psychology
and physics to realize that the co-ordination of these - so frequently inimical
to each other - is not not the work of the thinking soul but of a soul below
the level of our consciousness. The present fashion in biology is to refuse
to consider the vital soul as an active agent. A trifle afraid of each other,
biologists take refuse in evasive sayings. They say it is a directional factor,
an "ideal plan in the process of being carried out". Which of course
entails the concept of an Ideal Planner, a sort of diffuse and non-individualized
God, who only enters HIs plan as a vague force or energy. They argue that the
vital properties in each organ are modes of activity inherent in the living
substance and that these modes are derived from the arrangement of the molecules
of the substance. Whether the arrangement is fortuitous, as the chemists have
held, or is the careful work of the divine Molecule-Arranger they cannot agree.
That the Planner and Molecule-Arranger might enter His plan as many individual
souls - however humble -would be mythological and pagan. It might land them
before their university senates on charges of pantheism or even witchcraft.
It will be observed
in all the foregoing, the confusion arises out of the problem of the thinking
soul. Thousands of phenomena show that it is not the efficient governor of the
body. It knows nothing of the normal functioning of the organs. The beating
of the heart, the coursing of blood, the chemistry of the conversion of food
into renewed tissues, the expansion and contraction of the lungs, the processes
of glandular secretion, the peristaltic action of the intestines, all go on
without us. If the noetic soul were the direct ruler and knower of these functions
we should have no occasion for debate about them. The proof that the thinking
soul is external to these activities is to be found in the fact that it is unconscious
of them..
Even the phenomena
of death do not, for the vitalist, require the soul. Death for the animist is
the withdrawal of the thinking soul. Death for the monist is the breakdown of
the machine. For the vitalist death is the withdrawal of the animal entity.
Withdrawal of the noetic soul alone, while the psychic entity survives, is insanity.
Man minus a thinking
soul would be a problem completely assimilable to all the problems of animal
life. His introduction into the animal scheme renders the latter abnormal. The
early animists, when pressed for an explanation of the fact that the soul could
do so little with the physical functions, borrowed from theology a reply which
theology had long ago borrowed from occult philosophy and said "The soul
is prevented by the consequences of original sin from guiding and directing
the body".
Despite the ridicule
the answer elicited it contained a clue to the solution of the problem. The
animal order to which the human body belongs is a symmetrical and ordered whole
- a stream of lives proceeding according to a plan. The thinking soul is the
anomaly. It is the governor who does not govern. It is the deluded being who
does not know the nature of its own forces. It is the thinker that now identifies
itself with governance and now realizes its impotence. It is is the thinker
that cannot determine between these three - the soul as the director of the
body, the body as the creator of the soul, or the soul as to co-inhabitater
with a lower entity of a body which is itself the creation of a great number
of still lower lives. The whole confusion is brought about, seemingly, by the
effort of the thinker to identify himself with an order of beings to which he
does not belong.
When we understand
the thinker in man as an onlooker, and the real present ruler of the body as
a sensitive and passional soul, the confusion begins to clear.
THE
PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEM
The science of psychology,
whose function it is to describe and explain the states of consciousness, has
the same problem of the dual soul of man as that which confronts the biologist.
The nature of the psychologist's research, however, requires him to approach
it from another side.
Psychology was once a branch of philosophy and proceeded by introspective and
philosophical methods. It was given its present name by a writer named Goelemus
who is not distinguished in its annals except for the fact that it fell to his
lot to go to the Greek lexicon for the word meaning "the lore of the thinking
soul" and to come back with a word meaning "the lore of the unthinking
soul". As we shall see, Goelemus was more fortunate than were those biologists
who were similarly careless with their Greek.
Modern psychology was drawn into the field of science at the time when materialistic
scientists were greatly in the ascendant and were most sure that the explanation
of all the phenomena of consciousness could be found in the nature of physical
matter. The natural sciences of astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry and biology
all proceed on the assumption that the phenomenal universe is a reality which
can be understood without reference to life or consciousness. The special concern
of modern science is with a realm of effects. It may assume that these effects
are causes and succeed in gaining a wide knowledge of them. An hypothesis may
be intrinsically wrong and still be valid for working purposes. Chemistry proceeded
in its routine operations under Dalton's atomic hypothesis and can continue
to do so in spite of the fact that a few years ago the atomic theory had to
be replaced by the electronic. So also, physics proceeded successfully for two
hundred years on Newton's gravitational theory only to be advised a few days
ago that its basis has to be thrown into the discard. Psychology has not fared
quite so well. When it took on the scientific method it could not as the physicist
does, for instance, relate all things to energy and matter. Energy and matter
are part of the spectacle and can be viewed apart from life. Psychology, however,
assumed the task of using the limited means of science in order to view the
spectator himself.
So it has hung between sky and earth, refusing to be considered a branch of
metaphysics and never quite gaining respect as an exact science. The most materialistic
of its apostles have undertaken again and again and in a variety of ways to
align it with chemistry and explain consciousness by the qualities of matter
-saying that consciousness is a derivative of matter. Unhappily, however, for
all their endeavours they have never produced a working hypothesis that covers
the whole field of their science as Newton's did for physics or Dalton's for
chemistry. The psychological theories work admirably for certain limited groups
of facts but fail hopelessly to solve quite as important groups. The failure
is due to the fact that psychologists are undertaking to prove the functions
of the spectator by the functions of the spectator - to prove something by itself.
A philosopher can, within the terms of his method, succeed in this; a scientist
never can.
Thus it happens that Professor William James, leader of the physical school
of psychologists, summing up the advances of psychology as a science, says :
"Psychology is but a string of raw facts, a little gossip and wrangle about
opinions, a little classification and generalization on the merely descriptive
level, a strong prejudice that we have states of mind and that our brain conditions
them, but not a single law in the sense that physics shows us laws." This
in 1892 and, except for a greater quantity of descriptive material psychology
has scarcely moved since then.
It is still engaged in warfare over its basic definitions. What is consciousness
? The majority of psychologists say "mind", and refuse to admit that
there can be any other form of consciousness than mind. Their chief reason for
declaring that consciousness is mind is that nothing can be known to them until
it becomes a thought. Which is the equivalent of telling a physicist that there
can be nothing but mental matter and energy because energy and matter have to
be imaged in mind before they can be examined This adherence to the dogma of
the necessary identity of consciousness and mind has sterilized the entire research
and leaders among the psychologists have not been slow to tell their fellows
so. Professor Edward Montgornery says :
"Psychology as a science of self-originated and self-acting conscious existence
.. can only lead to nihilistic results; such a science constructed without reference
to an abiding extra-conscious source of actuation and ernanation will
end in vacancy." And Montgornery goes on to argue that the states outside
the conscious mind are not necessarily mind at all.
This is why, when the student tries to arrive at a general idea of current psychological
theory he comes constantly on the use of the word "mind" as describing
factors that have no place in mind
Broadly speaking, modern psychology agrees (or disagrees) on the following classification
of the levels of consciousness.
Above conscious mind is one group of phenomena. Then comes conscious mind. Then
below it two groups. Let us examine them in this order .
Above mind, what is called supra-liminal mind, or supra-conscious mind. The
existence of this as a separate group is in dispute. It is the field of intuitions,
of conscience and of the recognition of duty. Some psychologists see it as the
connecting link between the Ego and the God, the field of our conceptions of
eternal verity and the means of our power to know verity. Other psychologists
repudiate it altogether. They do not believe in intuitions, forgetting that
all the basic assumptions of science itself rest on intuition. All mathematical
assumptions are intuitions. The idea that consciousness exists in all persons
is an intuition. With the means at his disposal the scientist cannot prove scientifically
that consciousness exists in any other person than himself. This realm above
conscious mind is the world of archetypes in the older philosophers. I shall
return to it in later articles. The Eastern philosopher calls it Buddhi-Manas.
Then comes conscious
mind. It is called sometimes "the lighted circle". Thomson Jay Hudson
named it "objective mind" and said some wise and a great many foolish
things about it. It is the realm of mental awareness, and is that part of mind
in which the consciousness or Ego is normally focussed. Any image in it may
depart from it - slip out of it - any time. The Hindus call this Manas and never
make the mistake of confusing it with consciousness. It is matter in its own
plane and only one of the grades of matter in which consciousness can manifest
itself.
Below conscious mind is that which is commonly called the subconscious mind.
Myers called it the subliminal consciousness. Hudson called it subjective but
confused it with so many other qualities as to make his description unserviceable.
It is the plane of half-forgotten fragments of thought, of lost (but recoverable)
memories, of characteristic impulses, of what are modernly called complexes
( called by the Buddhist skandhas or confections) . It is the plane also
of emotions which are hybrid unions of thought and passion, the desire-saturated
odds and ends of past thoughts which are the principal creators of moods. The
Eastern philosopher calls this twilight plane Kama-Manas. In occult science
the combination of all its elements is called personality, the mask through
which Egos on earth see each other.
Below the level of subconscious mind is a fourth division which links the three
levels of mind with the forces of the body. It is the plane of instinct, of
reflexes and of automatic and involuntary function. It is also the repository
of muscular and functional habits that have been acquired consciously at some
time in the past, and the method of their acquirement forgotten. The Eastern
philosopher calls this level Kama. Some psychologists have called it "unconscious
mind". Psychologists themselves are at war over it, and in it is the whole
crux of modern psychology .
Some psychologists, Ladd for instance, while admitting the factors of consciousness
it describes, ridicule the name. They say there can be no such thing as unconscious
mind. It is a contradiction in terms. To talk of unconscious mind is to talk
of unconscious consciousness or of non-existent existence. It is inconceivable,
they say.
And so it is in the sense in which its inventors use it. None the less there
are such functions as are thus described, and of them the Ego is undoubtedly
unconscious. What active and efficient consciousness can exist in a man of which
he is not conscious ? The inevitable answer stares the psychologists in the
face, but they will not accept it for the same reason that the biologists would
not accept vitalism. This lower consciousness that stands between Ego and body
is one of which the Ego is unconscious because it is not his consciousness.
It is the consciousness of a separate and lower entity.
Modern psychologists are facing the same old impasse that Stahl faced
two hundred years ago, when he ascribed all human functions above the chemico-physical
ones to the thinking soul of man, and Bordeu laughed his theory into oblivion.
Stahl tried to stretch the concept of soul beyond its workable limits. The psychologists
are stretching their concept of mind to an extent which makes their research
sterile, as Montgomery assured them they would. The instinctive activities below
mind are undoubtedly forms of consciousness but they are not mental consciousness.
This was the doctrine of the older philosophers. Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato
and Plotinus taught it. So did the Church Fathers, Clement, Origen and Tatian.
It was the doctrine also of Emmanuel Swedenborg who declared that man is a trinity,
that there is an internal man who is celestial, a reasoning man who is spiritual
and an external man who is the natural entity - natural because he is a part
of nature. The distinction between the Ego and the lower entity or animal soul
has been testified to many times by scientists like Wigan, Brown-Sequard, Proctor
and by Carl Du Prel in his Philosophy of Mysticism.
This idea of a duality is the very foundation of the most fertile of all psychological
departments of research - hypnotism. In no other field can the psychologist
gather the unequivocal data he does in hypnotic experiment - ugly and all as
it is in its method. It is now an axiom of hypnotism that the one essential
characteristic of hypnotic states is that the Ego must be unconscious of what
is occurring. That is, after the somnambulistic period he should have no memory
of what has occurred. The only possible explanation of all the phenomena of
such conditions is that the conscious Ego, by consent, surrenders the entity
of whose activities he is unconscious, to the will of the operator. He does
not merely surrender himself. If he did he would be conscious of it and would
prove that consciousness by retaining a memory of it. Neither does the Ego merely
surrender the body. The subject in a hypnotic state is a going organism possessed
of all automatic and involuntary functions, all reflexes and all instincts.
For the duration of the trance state this lower entity obeys the operator as
he would his own Ego. Perhaps a little better.
We come now on a curious thing. It is as illuminating for the occult student
as it is confusing for the scientist. The entity whom the hypnotist controls
possesses mind. Not all functions of mind. There are certain ones it does not
possess, but on the other hand it uses those it does possess, to a higher degree
of efficiency than is manifested by the subject of the experiment in his normal
state.
Because the subject under hypnotic influence exhibits mental powers, the psychologist
assumes that in some mysterious way only the memory of the Ego has been inhibited
and that everything else remains. But an examination of the kind of mind manifested
by hypnotized subjects shows that it lacks precisely that kind of mind which
is peculiarly the mental characteristic of the Ego. The entity under the control
of the hypnotist is unable to discriminate. It is unable to observe a series
of facts and draw a general conclusion from them. It does not, in other words,
manifest inductive reason. The mind which the controlled entity exhibits is
entirely reproductive and recollective. The subject cannot think what the Ego
has not thought before. It can draw on the storehouse of thoughts, words and
actions existing in the subconscious mind above it, the submerged rubbish-heap
of bygone intellection, but it cannot invent new things. It cannot initiate.
Invention is done for it by the hypnotist who has taken the place of its normal
inventor, the Ego. A hypnotized subject will get drunk on water because he is
told it is alcohol, and will sober up on brandy because he is told it is an
antidote to alcohol. If the Ego is musical the subject of a hypnotic trance
will be musical; if the Ego is philosophical the subject will be philosophical
- not otherwise.
It would seem therefore as if the subconscious mind can be drawn upon by either
of two beings, the Ego who created it, or the animal soul for whose use and
endowment, according to the old philosophers, the thoughts were made.
So much for the demonstrations contained in hypnotic suggestion. The hypothesis
of unconscious mind as a lower entity is also the explanation of autosuggestion
in its forms of Christian Science, faith-healing, habit-curing and mental therapeutics.
The reason why the hypnotist, is more successful than the Ego himself in making
the lower being do what he is told, is that the hypnotist is detached and has
no sentimental or habitual misgivings. He is a successful hypnotist because
he does not change his mind.
It is the explanation - and H. Blavatsky offered it half a century ago -of the
phenomena of the séance room. The lower entity - the elemental
or animal soul - is, in the vast majority of cases, the visitant who floods
psychic literature with his puerile recollections of earth and his ante-mortem
theories of post-mortem states. Just as we saw him in the hypnotist's laboratory,
he cannot, after death, reason inductively. He can offer fragmentary memories
or corroborate what the sitters put into his mind. This is why a revenant
can create the externals of a disembodied entity but can so rarely transcend
the automatisms of earth life. He is the animated bhuta or pisacha
of Eastern occultism, the shell of Theosophical literature.
Freud's psychoanalytic system, which owes far more to mediaeval and Renaissance
occultists than its author might care to admit, offers valuable testimony to
the independent existence of the lower soul, and the active part it plays in
demanding from the Ego the intellectual reinforcement it needs for the fulfilment
of its desires. The Ego - Freud's "censor"-is not only the creator
of ideas for his own use, but he is also most frequently the creator of ideas
that have no other purpose than the satisfaction of the desires of the lower
being. This is the reason for the desire-saturation of the elements in the subconscious
realm of mind, the ideas that have slipped out of the Ego's field of conscious
knowledge and form the reservoir of animal mind in man. The fact that Freud,
misreading his data, proposes an animal ethic for the divine soul, only demonstrated
that psychologists, like other men, do not know what to do with facts when they
get them.
Behaviourism, the enfant terrible of modern psychology , is for the most
part a study of the relation of the animal soul to the body. It disagrees with
occult science in the same way that all materialistic science does, and proceeds
on the assumption that bodies are real and soul is not. It says that the body
of man by its muscular reflexes and visceral
twitchings begets the illusion of all higher faculties. Even misinterpreted
thus, the Behaviourist data are valuable to the student. Watson's identification
of emotions and powers with specific centres in the body is a restoration of
the ancient doctrine of the body as a mirror of soul-function. Like so many
other schools of psychology , however, Behaviourism survives by denying the
existence of phenomena its theory will not explain. It offers a plausible theory
of living persons but it gets into trouble when it is confronted with the problems
of dead persons, and with the other psychological phenomena of séance
rooms. Behaviourists know they will never persuade anybody that visceral twitchings
in the present body can continue in an after world after the physical viscera
have ceased to twitch. Neither can it say with authority that visceral twitchings
in the medium enable her to know that somebody's deceased mother's cousin was
named Edward. Nobody wants to be a failure, so, rather than fail, Behaviourism
repudiates psychic phenomena altogether.
It has become apparent to the student of occult philosophy that the principal
cause of the psychologist's quandary is his refusal to admit the materiality
of any other planes than the physical. The Eastern psychologist has no such
problem. For him the world of desire or Kama is a definite realm of matter
interior to and interpenetrating the highest state of physical matter as water
interpenetrates a solid. His world of mind or manas is a still subtler
plane interior to the plane of desire and interpenetrating it and the physical
planes as air interpenetrates liquids and solids. Interior to all these is a
still subtler plane of radiant matter called Buddhi, that stands in the same
relation to the three below it as light does to gases, liquids and solids. A
soul in Eastern psychology is an essence, a Jiva, as immaterial as the
Western scientist would ask, but possessed of the power of manifesting in any
of the planes - in the radiant world of Buddhi as a cognitive spiritual
being, in manas as an intellective, form-making creator, in kama as a
sensitive, feeling soul, as the souls of animals are. The fundamental fact about
him is that he is not the plane in which he operates. He is spirit; it is matter.
In all of which the Eastern psychologist may be as wrong as Newton and Dalton
were and still he might supply Western psychology with a working hypothesis.
The identification of consciousness or awareness exclusively with mind is an
absurdity and responsible for the absurdities in which psychology is enmeshed.
The Ego is obviously a being making forms in mind. Quite as obviously the lower
entity is another being living a passional life in the realm below mind and
borrowing his intellectual elements from a Jiva who is for some reason his instructor.
The sodden, forgotten world between the two is the debris of lives of incompetent
and misused instruction. Subconscious mentality is a disorderly tangle of forms
on which Ego and animal draw at will. When years ago Dr. Maudsley reproved science
for forgetting that all external objects are really seen within us, he voiced
his celebrated witticism, "A thing is a think". Psychology will get
out on to terra firma again when it learns to say " A think is also
a thing."
In the meantime Goelemus the unskilful word-searcher is being justified. Psychologists
are devoting themselves less and less to the thinking soul which must ever elude
materialistic science, and are resigning its study to the metaphysicians. More
and more they are devoting their inquiries to the feeling soul - the true psyche
- which because it is external to man is capable of being studied in the objective
manner of science. Gradually they are isolating it, describing it and revealing
it as conformable to the animal world from which occult science says the Ego
has lifted it. At the same time the true Ego withdraws and day by day becomes
more definitely the anomaly he is - a visitor in a world that is not his own.
The question is, "What is his true world ?"
THE
MATHEMATICAL PROBLEM.
Something peculiarly
enlightening for the student of the occult sciences has occurred in these recent
years of the steady materialization of thought under the influence of positive
science. There has been a revolution against materialism and strangely enough
the rebel has been the most exact of all scientists - indeed the only scientist
who has never had a doubt cast upon his exactitude - the mathematician.
The mathematician has been the factotum of his fellow, and less scientific,
scientists. They brought him their sums to do. They enlisted him to work out
their formula. They engaged him to impart to their young men enough of his science
to enable them to carry on the simpler operations of their own. He was a sort
of slave-pedagogue, regarded as vague and unpractical in his preoccupations
but none the less useful.
The mathematician has always been more or less of a mystic. He is constantly
engaged in meditation on abstractions like those archetypal ideas of Plato's.
The nature of his work compels him to remember what less scientific inquirers
forget, that all the major assumptions of scientific research are intuitions
and are unprovable by mental process. He is used to remembering that the mind
of the seeker, while it is an instrument, is none the less in itself a severe
limitation. The mathematician knows that you can never have a science until
you have posited a number of things you are entirely incapable of proving. These
he calls axioms. If he is a bit shaky about whether his intuition is accurate,
he is honest and calls them postulates. Consciousness, for example, is an axiom.
Space is only a postulate. So is time. Matter is only a postulate, Motion is
a postulate. The mathematician is strict. If he is not it is bound to show in
his result.
I have said the exponents of positive science bring their formula to the mathematician
for solution, and like the good auditor he is, he reproves the evils of their
bookkeeping. He objects, for instance, to their trick of trying to explain one
unknown by another. When, to take a classical example, they say motion is change
in the relations of matter, and when they are then asked what matter is, they
say matter is the field in which motion makes changes, the mathematician is
reproachful. He reminds them that they cannot define one postulate by another
.
They can get nowhere, he has reminded them, until they make up their minds on
the whole subject of knowledge. What is knowable ? What is not knowable ? How
is anything knowable ? He does not demand with Berkeley that they believe only
in consciousness and deny that anything has actual existence outside of the
spectator's idea of it. Neither would he let them take their stand with Buchner
and Haeckel and go to the extreme of saying that matter and motion are the only
truth and that consciousness is merely a sensation arising out of their operation.
The mathematician votes with Kant. He says the only sound position is the critical
one~that each of us is a consciousness, that there exists outside of us a world
of causes. A tree is something that causes me to think of a tree, but a real
tree is vastly different from what I think it is and if I do not know all about
a tree, it is because I have not brought to bear on it an adequate perceptive
equipment. Or as the occultist would say, I am not seeing the tree on a high
enough plane to know its high plane truths. Or as Ouspensky has stated it in
his Tertium Organum, it is not because I have a confused perception of
a real world, but because I have a very acute perception of an entirely unreal
world. Or again, as Hinton would have said it, I am not seeing a real tree but
the thinnest possible three-dimensional section of a real tree. Or as Kant would
have said, the space-sense I bring to bear on the tree is inadequate: it is
a limitation of my mind. In the far older Voice
of the Silence the parallel saying is, "Mind is the great slayer
of the real."
The modern restoration of the idea that our sense of a three-dimensional world
is not ultimate, begins with Kant. His philosophical successors promptly lost
the idea or never knew he had it. His mystical successors, carried it on. The
academic philosopher's ideas only have to be accurate enough to get into a book
or a student's notes. The mathematician's and the mystic's ideas have to work.
R. F. Gauss and N. I. Lobachevsky were the first continuators of Kant's idea.
Then came C. H. Hinton, who in a remarkable series of works developed a mechanism
of cubes for the education of the space-sense. He declared that diagrams on
paper were quite useless because the solid itself being a symbol, the diagram
is a symbol of a symbol. His mechanism is an equipment of coloured cubes by
which to make the transition from three-space into four-space perceptions. After
Hinton the most notable figure in the same phase of the inquiry has been the
Russian P. D. Ouspensky who has worked out a remarkable relation of the ideas
of two-, three-, and four-space consciousness to mysticism and occultism. More
recently and in the field of physics, Einstein, Eddington and their group have
made the mathematical formula that demonstrate the concept of time as being
a limited understanding of a fourth way in space. They have also developed Kant's
relation of the observer to the object observed, into their theory of relativity.
For my present purpose I require only the straightest way through the subject.
The line represents one-dimensional space. It is generated by the motion of
a point. It has no "up or down" and no "across". It has
only "along". A line moved in a direction at right angles to its length
generates a surface. It has the dimensions, of length and breadth but no "up
and down", no thickness. This is two-space. A surface moved in a direction
and breadth generates a solid. This is three space. Can this solid - imagine
it a cube --- be moved in a fourth direction which is none of the three others
but perpendicular to all of them and thus generate a four-space shape - a tesseract?
Mind cannot grasp it. The positive scientist says emphatically, "No."
Mathematicians say "Yes, it is puzzling and paradoxical but we must say
it can." There is a dimension of space (perhaps several) that eludes our
mental space-sense 'but is none the less real on that account. It is probably
more real than our limited mental concept".
The mathematician has a constantly recurring problem. When a physicist, let
us say, brings the mathematician a sum to do, and it is one that involves linear
dimensions carried into surfaces, the mathematician writes alongside and above
the quantity a little 2- x ²- meaning the quantity is to be squared. If
it is a problem running into solids, the mathematician writes x ³. But
occasions arise when he must write x 4. You can imagine a colloquy between the
mathematician and his client. The physicist says:
"But there is no such thing as four ways in space."
"I am sorry," says the mathematician, "but there are the processes.
I'd like to make the result easier for you but I cannot tell a lie."
"But I cannot imagine such a thing."
"That is a defect certainly," says the mathematician, "but it
is your own defect. The calculation is all right."
Which is precisely what Kant said. Mind shackles us to an adequate concept of
the world and therefore precludes our knowing the truth about it.
Hinton said that by observation and reflection we can know three dimensions.
By intuition we can know four dimensions. This intuition he called direct apprehension.
It has been called by the occultist direct cognition, and is said to be an attribute
of Buddhi, the fourth level of the manifested world, and the plane next above
Manas or mind, which is the third. In his posthumous book, A New Era of Thought,
Hinton has, curiously enough, related this direct apprehension of four-space
to love and sympathy and brotherhood which are also attributes of Buddhi and
the indications are that his realization of the relation arose out of his own
experience as he developed by means of his cubes the power of seeing the tesseract.
After Hinton came Ouspensky who built on Hinton, but carried the experiments
into many other fields. The phase of his research that means most to us at the
present moment, is that which has to do with the higher animals. Ouspensky says
the dog and the horse, for instance, have no consciousness of three-space. All
their actions in and reactions to the world around them show that they are under
a two-space limitation. They see the same objects - or causes - as we do but
they cannot convert what they see into three dimensions. He advances a great
many demonstrations of this. For most of them I must refer the reader to his
Tertium Organum.
Ouspensky's work stirred resentment and unbelief among some lovers of animals.
They were chiefly the people who anthropomorphize their pets and attribute to
animals thought processes like their own. They believed it involved some degradation
of the animal to impute to it a limited space sense.
The better animal lovers welcomed a profound insight into age-old problems of
animal behaviour. It offered the explanation of why a dog, going round an unfamiliar
tree, for example, is startled when he sees a previously unseen branch and swerves
as if the tree had thrust an arm out at him suddenly in hostile demonstration.
His master knowing a third dimension of trees knows that the branch extends
another way in space and has been there all the time. Ouspensky offers the only
valid explanation of dogs barking at the turning wheels of vehicles in the notion
that they are alive. He explains also the animal's inability to use the principle
of the lever, a fundamental mechanism of all three dimensional concepts.
Occult science offers a continuation of Ouspensky's thesis. It says that the
Ego is living in the body of an animal and is compelled to see the world through
the sensory and sensational mechanism of an animal. It will be unnecessary,
therefore, to go to the dog and the horse for assurance of the two-dimensionality
of animal consciousness. If what Ouspensky says is true, the whole series of
phenomena will be observable in the complex of organisms which we call man.
If all knowledge of the physical world must pass to the Ego through the eye's
and consciousness of an animal nature, there must be a stage in every percept
when it will be two dimensional.
And is it not so ? The reader must test it for himself. Our first view of everything
is two dimensional. We see a surface. Depth, the third dimension, has to be
reasoned out by an effort of thought. Look at the moulding on the door or window
before you. It appears as a flat surface with light and shade. You examine it
more carefully and analyze the shadows into a third dimension, saying, "It
goes back there, it comes forward here, it curves towards, it curves away ."
Pick up a perspective drawing in, let us say, a text book of solid geometry,
or look at a mechanical drawing in line. It presents itself at first as an arrangement
of lines on a surface. Then you reason it out, setting back this plane and advancing
that one, recognizing this as receding, that as approaching, this plane as foreground,
that as middle ground, a third as distance. Or wake up in an unfamiliar or half
lighted room and watch the tricks your animal vision will play on you before
you resolve the flat impressions into their successive planes by effort of will.
Or, come around the corner and see unexpectedly a coat thrown over a chair and
observe how you start like the dog did as he ran around the tree, until your
mind asserts itself and assures you there is nothing hostile in what at first
seemed so. You say in such cases that you got a start. Of course you did not.
The animal got a start.
Evidently Hinton left out a step. His formula should have been : By observation
we know two-space ; by reflection we know three-space; by direct apprehension
we know four-space.
Let us return now to the direct apprehension of four-dimensionality. Is it a
function of a higher soul than the thinking soul we identify with ourselves,
or is it a higher function of the thinking soul ? Hinton's experiments prove
conclusively, and so do Ouspensky's, as also do those of Einstein, that the
apprehension of objects in their four-dimensionality is the removal of a limitation.
It is a function of the soul in a level just above mind. When Hinton sets about
his space-education discipline, he shows that the vision comes first in glimpses
that can be made increasingly permanent. Each time he wants to make the transition
into four-space, he starts by making the transition from two-space to three-space
as a means of knowing what the three-to four-transition would be. The two-space
to three-space transition is easy because we make it more or less unconsciously
every minute of the day. Since the transition from two-to three-is a resumption
each time of a power of thought we have long possessed, the transition from
three - to four - is similarly a resumption. It is not a new acquirement
but a renewal of an old power .
We are back again with the occultists! Occult science takes count of seven dimensions
in space, of which The Divine Ego, by virtue of evolution in past world periods
has made himself master of four. In his present anomalous state of limitation
and bewilderment he has "fallen" from his four-dimensional consciousness
into a three-dimensional one. Presently, the occult traditions say, unless he
consolidates his forces and re-asserts his divinity he can fall another stage
and come under the limitation of two-dimensionality.
Two dimensions mark the present apex of the evolution of the animal soul. The
dog cannot himself make the transition from two to three. Two are for him what
four seem to be for us. ( I offer here because it will come up later, the suggestion
that the Ego has really touched a fifth dimension in his past but has not fully
mastered it.) Our task, the occult tradition would indicate, is to help the
animal soul to make his necessary transition into the three-space consciousness
of mind. We must first recover our own apex and then lift him. We cannot stand
still. If we will not go up we must go down. The descent into Avernus
manifests itself in its incipient stages as psychism, which, unless it is resisted,
must degenerate into two-space consciousness. The psychic is one who cannot
resolve his perceptions into their necessary planes, either of time or of space.
With this process of degeneration, I shall deal more fully later in the series.
Here then is another contribution to the necessary picture of the Exile in his
relation to the worlds above and below him. Again his position is anomalous.
He sees surfaces, he thinks them into solids. He could go on and resolve them
into vastly more potent four-space forms but he faints and grows weary. He
is the user of a power of vision above that of the animal in which he dwells
and is the possessor of a dormant power of vision higher than that he uses.
Resumption of his high vision does not seem to wait on evolution or any cyclic
process. It seems to be available when the Ego wills it. The animal soul, on
the other hand, is a creature of cycles. It is evolving. Is this perhaps what
the Secret Doctrine means when it says the Ego is not evolving; it has
emanated?
THE
PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM
We have seen how, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, psychology,
attracted by the glittering beginnings of scientific research, deserted the
field of philosophy for that of positive science and came thereby under limitations
that have made it almost unworkable. The other branches of philosophy could
not so readily change to a materialistic basis and they have remained more or
less in their original field of subjective research, but they too have been
affected by the scientific fashion. They have assumed the name of "the
philosophical sciences". They define their province as the co-ordination
and synthesis of the results of scientific research. That is, they have been
persuaded that the interior or subjective method is no longer good enough, because
reality lies outside us. They become, therefore, the servants of external reality.
The modern philosopher proudly calls himself the "critic of the sciences,"
and, as inevitably happens when a man devotes himself
exclusively to the criticism of the product of others, he ceases to produce
in his own right.
The philosopher's position would be superb if he could sit in state and have
the scientist bring results to him for criticism. But a scientist does not quite
see the necessity for a philosopher at all. The scientist is quite confident
he can do his own criticizing. And so, within the rules of his enquiry, he can.
At last with no business coming in, the philosopher goes looking for business
and ends up in the orbit of a scientist who has his eye fixed to the end of
a microscope. When a few philosophers, all in quest of business, have gathered,
they find nothing to talk about but whether the microscope-man can believe his
eye. The idealistic monists contend that what he sees is all in his mind. The
materialistic monists ask "What is he himself but the sort of thing he
sees under the microscope ?" The reality is in the object. The seer is
an illusion arising out of the motion of the parts of the object. The critical
realists, who as we have seen before have a high position - Kant's - if they
wish to take it, content themselves with a compromise and try to steer a peaceable
middle course.
Am I flippant about it ? Here is a modern philosopher stating it in more dignified
terms. It is Professor A. S. Pringle-Pattison speaking :
"Subject-object, knowledge, or, more widely, self-consciousness and its
implicates - this unity in duality - is the ultimate aspect which duality presents.
It has generally been considered, therefore, as constituting in a special sense
the problem of philosophy. Philosophy may be said to be the explication of what
is involved in this relation."
This is the present state of the art of Pythagoras and Plato, of Kapila, of
Sankaracharya, of Nagarjuna, of Arya-sangha, of Plotinus, of Kant, and all the
line of the lovers of wisdom. It has been said, not once but many times, these
recent years, that formal philosophy has reached the most arid, unserviceable
and generally contemptible era in its history.
Professor Pringle-Pattison's definition of the crux of modern philosophy is
the sterile modern form of what once was the great fertile problem of epistemology
, the theory of knowledge. The ancient philosopher asked, "How does knowledge
come into the world ?" The immediate and inferior answer is, "Through
the senses." Such an answer will not stand the test of the commonest experience.
We are all conscious of knowledge not traceable to what we have seen or heard.
Apart from visions in dreams, which might be recollections of something we have
seen but have forgotten, we have tendencies, aptitudes, capacities which are
themselves a sublimated form of knowledge. If playing the piano after long training
is an earned aptitude, the capacity to play the piano without any training in
this life can only be an earned aptitude. Precocious genius is a kind of knowledge
not traceable to known experience. So the philosopher, articled to the scientist,
who is in his turn articled to the doctrine of the exclusive reality of an outside
world, falls back on the idea of heredity and says some ancestor earned the
aptitude. These knowledge-powers, he says, are transmitted from generation to
generation. This is the Plan of the Universe.
It may be true,
but at the best it is an inefficient Plan, and in nowise to be compared to the
other processes of nature. For one thing, too many of the wisest of mankind
do not transmit at all, and when they do so it is with the poorest results.
Almost all of mankind transmit at a time when they would seem to have the least
worth transmitting. The valuable experience of all of them is at its greatest
worth long after they have ceased transmitting. Too many make no use of what
has been transmitted, and too many destroy it with counteractive energies. Added
to which the scientist is now satisfied that acquired characteristics cannot
be transmitted anyway. What escaped these abysses of inadvertence is called
heredity. This seems to be the Plan. A more incompetent one could scarcely have
been conceived. A Greek or Hindu philosopher would be ashamed to entertain it
even for a moment. It neglects the one factor of which the philosopher - or
anybody else for that matter - can be sure, the factor of soul. But this man
of ours, having become a critic of the revelations of microscopes can only admit
what microscopes reveal, and they are not equipped to reveal souls.
For a statement of the problem in terms of souls, therefore, we must take the
whole inquiry to the older philosophers. Plato is nearest to hand and easiest
for my reader to examine for himself. It comes up in the Phaedo. There,
in the last talk between Socrates and the Thebans, Simmias and Cebes, Socrates
raises the whole question of knowledge. Whence comes it ?
Socrates wastes little time on the possibility of attaining pure knowledge through
the senses. Even seeing and hearing, the best of the senses, are not accurate
or exact. What then of the inferior senses of smell, taste and touch '? Certainly
the body is of little assistance. On the contrary it contaminates truth. It
keeps man busy finding sustenance for it. Its diseases hinder the pursuit of
truth; it begets passions, desires, fancies and foolishness, and so constantly
does it break in on study that the Ego finds it almost impossible during life
to think at all.
But man, Socrates argues, has interior standards of truth, and the perceptions
of this world fall short of them. Two objects, for example are almost equal.
They just fall short of a perfect, abstract equality which man can entertain
although he has never seen perfect equality on this earth. So it is, Socrates
argues, with every other external fact we contemplate. We measure it against
an abstract perfection which cannot have arisen out of earth experience. We
look at a triangle. It is not a perfect triangle. How do we know? We have never
on earth seen a perfect triangle. Neither have we ever seen perfectly parallel
lines but we persist in thinking of them. So also with a point which we cannot
ever have known on earth, and a line, and all the posited ideas of geometry.
We have abstract perfect criteria for goodness, truth, beauty, love, justice.
None the less these perfections we cannot quite bring to earth. They are vague
and fragmentary, now in our effort to realize them, stronger; and since obviously
they are not of this human state, in which such perfections are nowhere evident
outside of us, there is only one possible explanation of them. They
are recollections. They are the earned aptitudes of a half-remembered past.
Of what past?
The scientist recognizes interior recollections that have no counterparts in
this life. He says they are inherited and has erected about them a doctrine
of racial memory, but that will not explain their perfection. His race is evolving.
Its ancient memories cannot be of things more perfect than anything in its present
state. If so the race is degenerating.
There is also a school of pietists who deny the interior ideas as memories,
preferring to think of them as divine intimations of the future. Socrates has
a quick answer for these !
"If a man, when he has heard or seen or in any other way perceived a thing,
knows not only that thing, but also has perception of some other thing, the
knowledge of which is not the same but different, are we not right in saying
that he recollects the thing of which he has the perception ? ... As
when one sees Semmias, one often remembers Cebes."
What other solutions
are there ? That we got the perfections in this life? Obviously not. That we
got them at the instant of birth and lost them in the same instant ? This is
ridiculous. Did we get them in a previous life on this earth ? There could be
nothing more perfect in a previous human life than in this one. Whence then
?
From a state that preceded the human one, when, before we were human beings,
we were in a state higher than the one in which we now find ourselves. Our present
earth life and the earth lives preceding it are to be thought of, not as our
proper place in a scheme of soul evolution at all. If so we are degenerating.
The old philosophers called our present state a temporary obscuration and the
result of some offence of ours against divine law. It is an obscuration that
has brought about a condition of amnesia. Thus only can we explain the high
memory that is evoked by the imperfect perceptions of this earth life.
The problem Is the central one in Plato. In Socrates' discussion with Meno,
the whole dialogue turns on this theory of knowledge. If Meno knows the
whole of anything he need not ask about it. If, on the other hand, he knows
nothing about it, he can neither ask nor learn. The only possible condition
under which he can know enough to ask, and little enough to profit by being
told, is that he possess a fragmentary recollection of it. This fragment is
his fragment of crystal. The instruction enables him to restore it to its original
completeness. One man cannot teach another unless by virtue of the fact that
the other has a partial recollection of the truth to be taught.
Socrates, in Meno's presence, demonstrates the truth of his doctrine, when he
calls in a slave-boy and, first, by letting the boy discover his own ignorance,
then by asking him questions to elicit his memory, leads him through the geometrical
problems of the duplication of the square.
This is the central doctrine in the greatest of the lovers of wisdom. It is
Empedocles' doctrine of the fall into the dark meadow of Ate. It is Plotinus'
doctrine of the restoration of the Divine Intelligence and the return to the
One. It is the basis of the Taraka Raja Yoga system which proceeds by an exercise
of reminiscence identical with Plato's dialectic or "choosing through."
It is the basis of the many mnemonic systems occultists have used as an aid
to meditation, those curious arrangements of questions and the philosophical
categories placed on revolving discs such as the one Raymond Lully invented
and Giordano Bruno used. It is the basis of the lamasery wheels of which the
exoteric "praying wheels" are the distorted form, the discs of the
Tibetan mystics called chakravartins or wheel-turners. It is the explanation
also of the effort of the older philosophers to arrange knowledge in categories.
It is the only valid theory of meditation itself as the process of stilling
the body and steadying the mind in order to elicit from the archetypal memory
what the Ego has known but has forgotten.
.,
This is the only fertile mode in philosophy. The narrow treadmill of subject-object
must always be sterile, must always contradict itself, must always fail of what
it undertakes to do. We can only know the higher truth of a thing by rising
into a higher plane of being.
What then must we do? Await the slow crawl of the evolution of the soul until
we evolve those higher powers ? Maybe we can try to hasten evolution. We had
better save ourselves so vain an effort. We would be trying to hasten that which
cannot by its very nature be hastened.
It is not a problem of evolution that faces the soul, and still less a problem
of hastening evolution. It is a problem of resumption, of recovery of
atrophied powers long since evolved and now forgotten.
This is the testimony of the sages and seers. They do not offer it as a guess.
They offer it as a demonstrable fact which every man, by virtue of his dormant
divinity, may know for himself by examining his intuitional memory .
Clearly it is not a current problem in academic philosophy. Philosophers of
our time have forsaken intuitional memory and devoted themselves to the inferior
reports of the senses. And, as we have seen, fertile philosophy has tended these
recent years to pass over to the mathematicians for whom the senses matter less
and the intuitions more.
For the purposes of this series, the problem of the theory of knowledge offers
us another picture of the Ego, bewildered and stripped in a strange world which
he sees through senses which are not his own, in a body that limits the use
of the mind. He is the possessor of a high reality which he neglects for an
illusory appearance he has lost the power to interpret.
THE
MYSTICAL PROBLEM
We come now upon
another phase of the same problem of consciousness - that presented by the phenomena
of mystical experience. I use the word mystical in its modern sense as describing
an interior revelation that can be had independently of the senses and of the
reasoning processes.
Needless to say, this idea that there can be a transcendental knowledge superior
to ordinary processes is one of the most ancient in the history of mankind.
It is to be found at the origin of all religious systems, and indeed, as we
shall see, all religion is to a lesser or greater degree a distortion of it.
The possibility of this interior experience has been asserted by the greatest
philosophers, by the saints and sages, and is in a sense the one ever-present
and enduring thought in religion. It is also the idea around which the fiercest
struggles have raged and against which the bitterest persecution has been directed.
Although an enormous literature has arisen out of mysticism, only recently -
in this era at least - have we had a comparative examination of its phenomena.
The first notable one is by the Canadian psychologist Richard Maurice Bucke
who in his Cosmic Consciousness assembled and examined a large number
of cases of the direct illumination commonly described as mystical.
It is outside of my purpose in this article to make a complete examination of
Dr. Bucke's material and results, but to deal with certain special aspects of
it. Drawing largely from biography and autobiography, he cites many remarkable
cases of illumination in the lives of Jesus, Buddha, Walt Whitman, Jacob Boehme,
Francis Bacon, Plotinus and other historical figures. These he supplements with
modern cases of interior experience drawn from among his friends and patients.
The records thus gathered present certain common factors. One is a more or less
definite sense of "lighting up" and is frequently accompanied by an
objective luminosity, when the subject finds himself bathed in light. Another
is the descent upon the subject of an ineffable peace likened to the "peace
that passeth
all understanding" in the Christian Testament. A third is that of possessing
a direct apprehension of fact, a means of knowledge that is best described as
the mystics described it, as transcending reasoning processes altogether. A
less common, though no less marked, experience, in the cases where it is recorded
is the modification or complete elimination of the sense of time, as if time
were merged or lost in another way in space. The German Theosophist, Jacob Boehme,
says he saw the "signatures of things" and that he saw the grass growing.
More important than any of these is the realization by the subject of a communion
between the members of the human race and an actual sense of being in a realm
of consciousness where all separation and longing are at an end. It is an entry
into a one-consciousness, seemingly without loss of individuality, and a kind
of all inclusiveness in which the person experiencing the new state takes the
rest of the race into his being.
Walt Whitman in Song of Myself describes it thus:
"Swiftly arose
and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters
and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and pokeweed."
Dr. Bucke in his analysis of the cases came to several interesting conclusions
which, while they will not satisfy all the demands of occult philosophy, represent
nevertheless a great advance in the scientific study of mystical experience.
He divides consciousness into three great grades or successive divisions. The
lowest of these, representing subhuman levels, as of the animal, he calls "Simple
Consciousness". The reasoning consciousness of men and women, limited as
it is by a sense of separateness, he calls "self consciousness". The
illuminated state, in which separateness disappears, he calls cosmic consciousness,
a level transcending the mental state as much as mind transcends the instinctual
consciousness of the animal. Issue has been taken with him on the use of the
word "cosmic" as describing too high a level, but nobody has yet suggested
a more satisfactory term.
Since Dr. Bucke's time there have been numerous other inquiries and, although
it is not a popular subject with academic psychologists because it makes trouble
with theologians with whom they have to live, it has had a considerable share
of attention from the more independent writers. The general disposition has
been to regard the superior consciousness as one into which the human race will
eventually evolve, and to look on those who have had intimations of it as forerunners
of the rest of mankind.
When this theory goes hand in hand with the idea of physical evolution or race-evolution,
as it sometimes does, and there is no element of the immortality of the individual
soul implied in it, it means that succeeding generations of men and women begotten
of the present ones will have an increasing number of cosmically conscious persons
among them, cosmic consciousness becomes the general and finally the universal
condition.
This is a cold idea. It offers the present generation the comfortless theory
that all our striving and suffering is for the purpose of transmitting to other
entities in a distant future powers and blessings they have not earned. To complete
the anomaly, experimental science has now reached a position where it declares
that all our striving will not and cannot transmit its fruit anyway. So poorly
do the facts of interior illumination consort with the Darwinian theory of evolution
that it is little wonder the psychologists are not fond of the subject.
When the theory of cosmic consciousness goes hand in hand with the idea of the
survival of the soul of man after death and the passage of the soul into higher
realms of consciousness, a heaven-world or whatever, the disposition of writers
- mostly theologians - is to treat the experience as a passing intimation of
the after-death states, a sort of foretaste of heaven vouchsafed by God to saintly
persons during their earth life. The exponents of this theory are in grave difficulties.
The chief one arises out of the fact that the experience is not confined to
saintly persons but sometimes happens to persons whose lives are to say the
least heretical and sometimes markedly irreligious in any sense that would please
the orthodox God. Conversely many persons of saintly conduct do not achieve
any such foretaste of the hereafter. The ironical commentary on this theory
is that the cosmic vision has been frequent among those whom the Church found
necessary to burn at the stake. In fact the church has had a definite antipathy
to persons who had a foretaste of its own Heaven. It may have feared that some
visionary would blurt out the truth.
A much better theory of it is the Hindu one - that the soul is engaged in a
pilgrimage of experience which requires a long series of lives on this earth,
in the course of which it evolves successive powers. Having passed through an
arc of descent from spirit to matter and having turned at the mineral on its
way back to a vastly enriched spiritual existence, the soul, they teach, has
had successively the consciousness of the mineral, the plant and the animal,
and is now passing through the mental state of consciousness as man. Beyond
the mental state is a state of direct cognition or awakening into reality, which
they call Buddhi. This has been attained by the leaders of mankind and into
it all men will in due time enter. Those who have experienced it partially are
our vanguard on the long path of the evolution of the soul. This is the opinion
commonly offered today as Theosophy. In point of fact it is orthodox Brahminism
and is, in its own way, scarcely less a distortion of Theosophy than is orthodox
Christianity.
The fatal defect of the Brahmin explanation of the data of cosmic consciousness
is identical with the defect of the Christian explanation of the ecstasies of
the saints as an advance knowledge of the hereafter. Both religions assume that
those who have a touch of cosmic consciousness are of great mental and spiritual
stature.
The facts show that they are not. While many who experience the higher vision
are, like Jesus and Buddha, beings of transcendent spirituality, and some, like
Bacon, are giants of intellect, many of the recorded cases are of very simple,
often ignorant and frequently anything but blameless people. The experience
is nothing if not sporadic and obeys a law of its own nature. The Christian
finding no rule for it attributes the whole thing to the pleasure of God. The
Brahmin, whose theory of gradual advance would require that before going on
with a realm above mind, a man should have exhausted the development of mind,
has no adequate explanation to offer.
This curious illumination strikes like lightning. While it does favour the saint,
it does not neglect the sinner. It comes very often to the sick, to the drunkard
and the epileptic. Remarkable cases of conversion (literally, together-turning)
as in the cases of Raymond Lully, John Bunyan and others, show that it can come
even to men plunged in vice.
The learned, the ignorant, the devoted, the austere, the sodden, the well, the
sick, the vicious, the nearly mad - these are not categories of leadership.
Half of them give the lie to the other half. Nor did Jesus seem to expect that
leaders would be the readiest to receive his message of liberation. He tended
to pass over acknowledged leaders and to devote himself to those who by reason
of misery and suffering on earth were best able to understand a doctrine of
transcending earth and entering into a Kingdom of Heaven that he declared awaited
them. Gautama did not confine himself to leaders among men. He found great men
as did Jesus but his doctrine was as readily applicable to the vicious as to
the austere. The Dhammapada shows him going to young men mired in their
vices and bidding them turn. When they did they became Arhats.
That the manifestation in man of a power above the level of mind is the experience
of men and women whose intellectual powers are not equal to the task of explaining
it, is evidenced by the fact that mystics themselves differ widely in their
explanations.
Mystics with an inclination for orthodox Christianity, for example, say the
illumination flows into the soul by a supernatural channel. For the Roman Catholic
Church the Church itself is such a channel. So are the sacraments. For mystics
of Protestant sects, the Bible is a magical channel.
Quietistic cults like the Friends and the followers of the Abbe Fenelon and
Madame Guyon ascribe the results to direct Divine intervention. They say that,
in answer to aspiration, God himself acts immediately upon the mind of the devotee.
Jacob Boehme held this theory of his own remarkable experiences. He declared
that in his vision he saw God. H. P. Blavatsky remarks drily that what he saw
was his Divine Ego, as all aspirants eventually see it.
More valid than either of these is the Platonist theory maintained by the most
philosophical of the mystics. They say that the illumination comes by faith
or intuition resident in the higher consciousness of the soul itself, and that
there can be direct attainment of truth by virtue of the fact that man possesses
from a previous world-period an inheritance of wisdom which he now neglects,
but which he may at any time recover . A momentary return of it may be experienced
under special conditions.
Obviously the cosmic consciousness is not, then, a latent thing, in the
sense that it is still to be developed. It is a dormant thing in the
sense that it has been developed and lost temporarily. It is not a potentiality
to be realized in a distant future. It is an ever-present knowledge which the
vast majority of men cannot use because it is overlaid by mental and emotional
confusions. When such a power can be aroused by aspiration, the following of
intuitions, or by austerity, it is sufficiently explained as an intimation of
a new power. When, however, it comes direct out of intense suffering, out of
turning from vice, or out of disturbed physical conditions, we need a wider
formula than either the Brahmin or Christian one. We need a formula that will
reconcile the contradictions. The old occult formula, the only one that will
serve the unbiased inquirer, is that cosmic consciousness is an old, hard-earned
power, lost and in these cases for a brief time recovered. The Christian formula
for it, as the words were originally understood, is that in the parable of the
prodigal, "This my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is
found."
The implication in the highest mystical and occult schools - indeed the explicit
statement many times repeated - is that we thinking souls are all prodigals,
alienated from a divine unified consciousness which the New Testament
calls ho theos, the god. That consciousness we have as a dim, flickering,
inward light.
This aspect of it as a unified whole is important for purposes of the present
study. The universal characteristic of all true experiences of cosmic consciousness
is an immeasurably quickened sense of unity with the rest of mankind. This is
variously described. Sometimes it is a flooding of the nature of the subject
with a great love. Sometimes it presents itself as a sense of peace resultant
on the passing away of the
sense of separateness. It has also been described as an attainment of the centre
of a wheel where stillness prevails and the stress of earth life, even of mental
life, vanishes. It is the place of stillness that the Chinese called Tao,
and the Buddhists call Alaya. " Alas, alas, that all men should
possess Alaya," says The Voice of the
Silence, "and that possessing it Alaya should so little avail
them."
All these descriptions bear out the old idea that the world above mind is the
Oneness towards which At-one-ment tends, and that we only lose our way in a
too far removed and unserviceable notion when we talk of being merged in Ultimate
Deity. The Unity to which we are now returning is the rest of our race - the
divine exiles here on earth.
This seems to be the reason why persons who have had a touch of cosmic consciousness
show a prevailing impulse for the rest of their lives to make mankind the object
of their devotion, to see God as it were in their brothers' faces. All true
humanism has arisen primarily out of this mystical vision and has taken its
stand against the worship of a personal
God. The older humanists called the Divine Communion, in whose body we are all
atoms, Osiris, and symbolized the present partition of mankind into scattered
and confused souls as the dismemberment of Osiris, the fragments of whose body
must again be assembled. It is to the assembling of the fragments that the Masters
are pledged.
Damascius says of this resurrection of the dismembered Osiris, or return to
the higher consciousness, that it "should be a mingling with the God, an
all-perfect at-one-ment, a return upwards of our souls to the divine".
So we have again, in another problem of modern science which is compelling the
attention of students, a picture of the soul of man which can transcend mind
under conditions so contradictory as to preclude the idea that the soul is slowly
evolving into the transcendent state. We must decide whether we will take our
stand with the Church mystics and the Quietists and say it is the fantastic
gift of a personal God, or with H. P. Blavatsky and the occultists who say it
is the renewal, brief or
enduring, of an ancient power of entering a common consciousness we have forgotten.
THE
THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM
Within recent years theological problems presented in the theologian's manner
have ceased to be matters of great importance to thinking people. They are survivals
of a gloomy interval in the history of mankind and do not conform to a free
habit of thought. Emancipated thinking must be based on verifiable experience
that can be correlated and made to yield laws. While the proper correlation
may be greatly assisted by the records of previous enquiry and by intuitional
processes, it is none the less necessary that the whole inquiry have its roots
in physical, emotional and mental phenomena.
Instead of proceeding from fact on any of these three planes, theologians demand
that you proceed from imputed fact-dogma. This dogma, which we now know derives
from an ancient, symbolical guide to the intuitions, has been so badly mutilated
that it will no longer interpret fact. The theologian is in a quandary. Lacking
the ability to impose it by force, he must discard it altogether
or thump a desk and assert that it is fact.
The primary material of Christian theology - all other theologies embody the
same principle but manifest it variously - instead of being made up of data
of experience, is a body of tradition or fable, handed down from generation
to generation, and, as I have suggested, badly distorted in its many transfers.
In its starkest form the tradition is as follows :
That the universe and all its creatures are the product of an omnipotent, omniscient
and omnipresent, but none the less personal God, who is moved by anger, jealousy,
unwillingness to forgive and by preferences for one of His creatures over another.
That the first human beings He created in His own image proved a disappointment
and plunged themselves and all their physical descendants into a state of alienation
from the omniscient God who must have known perfectly well what they intended
to do, but was none the less angry with them for what He permitted them to do.
So unrelenting was He, or so incompetent at finding a way out of
His mistake that it was a trifle over four thousand years before He executed
a scheme of redemption by which He incarnated on earth as His own Son. Those
who would or could thereafter believe such a relief measure was actually the
work of the same One Cause, who kept the stars in their courses, ordered the
minerals and plants and animals with all their myriad intricacies and ramifications,
could at death go to eternal happiness. Those who for some defect could not,
were condemned for eternity to an inferior state, if not to a state of actual
torment.
Most theologians, for reasons of common sense, would repudiate so bare a statement.
They avoid bare statements of their dogma because without theological adornment
and a thick mist of words it is too terrible for acceptance. Rarely does any
of them dare to state it even in full. They devote their lives to special and
less contradictory aspects of it.
None the less, what I have given is a map of the theological theatre of war,
and all the great battles of theology have
been settled or are still raging within its boundaries.
The profound controversy between theists and deists is between those who think
that a personal God, having made the world, remains in touch with all His creatures
to hear their prayers and importunities, and those who think that having made
it, the personal God is now beyond reach and is no longer bothering about it.
The deists are called rational theologians.
The intricate trinitarian dispute turns on whether God incarnated Himself as
His Son, or whether He made for the occasion a Son of superior quality but separate
from Himself.
The struggles over original sin are also within the map. They have to do with
the mystery of that first offence which God must have anticipated but which
so gravely annoyed him when it occurred. They have to do with the precise nature
of the offence, the extent of the alienation, and the justice of the inheritance
of the penalty by souls who had nothing to do with the offence and do not even
know what it was.
The famous, but never
finished, war between the Traducians and the Creationists is a dispute about
the origin of the individual soul and started as a skirmish in the fight about
original sin. The Traducians declared that souls are generated at the same time
and in the same manner as bodies, by sexual union. Thus only, the Traducians
said, could there be any transmission of the original sin by inheritance. The
Creationists insisted that whenever two bodies came together and made a third,
God hurriedly created a soul to thrust into it. Although Traducianism is the
only theory (within the map) that will validate original sin, it is now rarely
held. The Creationist picture of a God of love making an innocent new soul to
accommodate the amours of a drunkard and a harlot, who will later instruct it
in their arts and send it bowling along to hell, has evidently proven more attractive
to the theologians. Perhaps it is another mystery into which you must not peer
- or you may laugh.
The unending controversy between the exponents of freewill and those of predestination
with all the rarefied subtleties that have gone into it, is a war to decide,
within the boundaries I have outlined, whether, because God knows everything
in advance - as would become an omniscient deity - all events are therefore
fixed, or whether one of God's creatures can decide of his own free will to
do something God knows in advance he will not do or something God had not foreseen.
Predestination destroys the whole point of the redemptive system, because whether
an individual will be saved or not is all fixed in advance. Free will, on the
other hand, makes God less than omniscient. If the Predestinarian is right,
God knows in advance every time he makes a soul for eternal torment, but seemingly
He continues to do so because He is bound by a law manifested in the sexual
proclivities of His creatures. In which case again He is not only less than
omnipotent but is a servant of sex.
The wars over the true apostolic succession are no more than commercial wars
about the authorized agency for the redemption brought to earth by Incarnate
God. The apostolic successors would argue that in addition to making an inefficient
scheme of salvation, God further vitiates its efficiency by permitting a monopoly
of it instead of using every agency to further it. They have this in their favour
of course, that the God who would work out such a system of salvation would
be just the one to limit its use. He is that kind of a God.
The controversy over the actuality of the eternal torment for those who rejected
or missed redemption are wars of method. They are between those who believe
in scaring men into the arms of a loving Father, and those who would lure men
into the arms of an angry one. Or the other way about. It does not make much
difference.
These are the great wars. There are numberless little ones. Does the power of
the Incarnated God to absolve from sin continue in his human self-elected successors
and exponents ? Does an infant who dies without doing wrong suffer eternally
for the sin of those first parents to whom he is in no way spiritually related
except through the Loving God who made all three ? Can a ritual of admission
to a Church save such an infant from the penalties for sins he never committed?
Has God made any provision or amnesty for those who missed redemption because
God made them before it came into effect? Has He made any provision or amnesty
for those who miss it or have missed it for geographical reasons - being born
in an unfavourable place ? Has He made any provision for those who refused the
whole doctrine because they sincerely believed they had a better one, or because
the men who tried to persuade them by argument or force were notoriously debauched
or dishonest or cruel? If God has made any or all of these provisions is it
not a much less advantageous thing for a man to hear of redemption than to live
in ignorance where the responsibility is not so great ? Was not the whole redemptive
scheme, therefore, a further cruelty in that it put on some a responsibility
it did not put on others ? Who is to be held responsible, the Congo native who
dies in ignorance of redemption for lack of a visit from the missionary, or
the missionary who went to a garden-party instead of carrying the message to
the native ? Or does God personally adjust these lesser inadvertences at the
last day ? Since all cases contain inadvertences, might He not merely adjust
each case as it comes up without any redemptive complications at all ? Is redemption
to be considered the reward of godlike acts, or is it the reward of simple belief
in the scheme ? If it is the reward of acts, what point would there be in redeeming
a dying man already bankrupted by his sins ? If this is the reward of faith
the sooner a man dies after his redemption the better. This, incidentally, was
the position of the Chicago clergyman who, having reconciled a murderer with
his God, opposed a commutation of the death penalty, for fear his convert, if
permitted to live, would fall again from grace. The clergyman was strictly logical
within the theologian's scheme. If other clergymen were as logical, and were
devoted enough, they would first save and then shoot their converts.
These are a few of the crucial issues of Christian theology .They fill the dusty
tomes of those great and good men whose books we see but so rarely read. Stripped
of their latinity and reduced to everyday language these are the subjects theologians
debate. They are at great pains, however, not to let the contradictions get
into one sentence where they will become too evident. As long as they are carefully
compartmented they are impressive. If perchance the contradictions become evident
the theologian says "That is a great mystery, and it does not do to pry
into the inscrutable will of God. It unsettles faith," he says. What he
means is that such enquiry unsettles theology. People will reject his system
as valid theory and his revelation as fact.
You will observe that for the theologian his dogma presents many problems. For
the person no longer persuaded that the Creator of the universe can be so incompetent
and ridiculous a personage as the theologian makes him, there can be only one
problem - a psychological one.
How has such a farrago of nonsense maintained the tenacious hold it has upon
the minds of men ?
There are several reasons, some lesser, and one, I believe, the great central
reason. One reason is to be found in human laziness, the willingness to let
men whose trade it is argue these problems. Another reason is human fear - the
fear of going in the face of bigotry. Another and more important reason is that
the flower of the teaching of Jesus, regeneration through love, has so commended
itself to good men and women that they have accepted for its sake the tangle
of degradations the theologians have permitted to grow up around it. Another
reason is that, aided by the forces of bigotry and frightened compliance, theologians
of a certain type have, wherever they could, destroyed the traces of efforts
men have made to purify and cleanse it.
Beyond all these, the great reason for its persistence is that, concealed within
its misshapen form, there is just enough of the element of truth to arouse in
men the vague memory of a truth they once held but have forgotten and cannot
quite recall. Deformed as the fable is, it has still the discernible shape of
an age-old wisdom about the origin of man and of his relation to earth. The
dogma has the power to stir the ancient memory without
reviving it, and men cling to the distorted formula in dread that if they lose
it they will have no clue at all. The more they dread the loss of the clue the
more frantic and bigoted they become.
There is no absolute untruth in the world. The grossest superstitions are divine
visions reflected in the waters of man's desires, and the more disturbed the
waters, the more hideous the reflections. The Kabbalist says, "Demon deus
inversus est - the evil principle is only the godlike principle upside down."
For the student of occultism every distorted image is a divine image he must
restore. Every myth, every fanaticism, every broken fragment of unclean magic,
has somewhere at the heart of it a clue to a divine function. Man does not make
new ideas of religion; he gets old ideas wrong.
Let us see if we can find what was in the minds of the first progenitors of
the fable, who possessed their memory of the ancient truth, and see then how
the theologian has reflected it in the waters of his own desire. In order to
do so we must now go outside the Christian field because although all theologies
are distorted the distortion varies with the religion.
By putting fragments together and comparing one with another we discover the
original formula to have been something like this :
That from an Absolute Divinity, an Unmanifest, have emerged wave upon wave of
beings, no less divine than their ineffable source but limited by their conceptions
of themselves. That in long process of ages they have proceeded through experience
to more and more extended consciousness, presenting in the aggregate the picture
of a great army of journeying souls stretched out along a road, none less divine
than any other, but differentiated by their consciousness of divinity. That
not only do they advance but they are bound by the law of their being to preserve
the unity of the whole by transmitting, each to the orders below it, in a kind
of cosmic link-motion, the spiritual forces received from the orders of beings
beyond. That, being each a first cause in his own right, they have the same
free will that inheres in the great First Cause, and can manifest it in the
measure that they have
realized divinity. That in the chain, however it came about, a race, identified
with this earth before the thinking Egos touched it, broke down, and whether
by the exercise of its own will or by the failure of the will of the regents
who guided it, became distorted. That another race beyond these- our own - whose
duty it was to transmit higher powers to the lower race, refused to accept responsibility
for the misshapen creatures, or to enter into them. That at last under cosmic
law the higher race was compelled to do so, was drawn down into the sphere of
earth, where its individuals dwell now, embodying themselves as rarely as cosmic
law will permit, in the misshapen bodies of the beings they have to redeem.
That by their rebellion they have lost a great measure of the powers they first
brought to earth, and instead of being the Unity they once were, are a scattered
and terrified host. That if they take thought and renew their lost powers they
can return to that comparatively high wisdom from which they fell. That if they
do not they must inevitably be drawn down into the creatures
they despise. That from time to time one of the unwilling becomes willing, performs
his task, returns to the Unity with his brothers - the God of which he is a
part - and knowing the truth pledges himself to work for the restoration of
it among his exiled brethren here upon earth. That such liberated ones work
without ceasing, relying upon each other for support, and creating a unified
body of doctrine which they renew from century to century as the activities
of theology vitiate it. That the liberated one stands in the relation of exemplar
and friend to the rest of mankind, and that it is the Ego who is, himself, the
redeemer and potential Son of the Unity or God he has forgotten. That the original
sin which taints us all refers therefore to the refusal and that it is carried
from incarnation to incarnation by each Ego and not from father to child by
generation.
At first glance it seems as fantastic a formula, perhaps, as the other. It has
this difference, however, that it is capable of proof by phenomena on all planes.
It is the key to comparative religion and it agrees with the findings of philosophy
and the sciences as far as they have gone. Often, as I have shown, it solves
what they cannot.
Let us see now how the theologians vitiated the age - old formula - in what
desires they let it reflect itself.
Their first destructive step was when they desired that their God should be
more important and all-inclusive than the gods of their rival religions. They
expanded the phrase "the God" in the books they had inherited. "The
God" was evidently what the Eastern religious teachers called Atma. It
is our Unity or Oversoul and functions in a realm immediately superior to mind.
Between it and the First Cause are vast ranges of consciousness which will be
beyond our ken for untold ages. As soon as the theologians of those early years
said "Our God is the All-God" they started at once a series of destructive
contradictions, and they had to give attributes to an Absolute Unmanifest who
cannot have attributes.
The next distortion arising out of their desires was when they made their teacher
Jesus the one and unique Son of their Absolute God. This required that they
wipe out all traces of previous teachers who were also Sons of "the God".
It required also that they destroy the symbolic and exemplary relation of Jesus
to all Egos and have it in the special and historical relation of the pseudo-deity
Jesus to all mankind. It was Sanchoniathon who said of the Egyptians that "they
corrupted their mysteries by cosmical and historical affections," which
is precisely what these early Christians did. They made "the God"
cosmic in his scope, and the Son who was the symbol of each Ego they reduced
to a historical incident.
When you have told one lie you must either acknowledge it or tell another. No
falsehood ever stood alone. In order to validate their cosmic Father and His
unique Son they had to wipe out also that which had been explicit in early Christianity,
as it is in all religions at the beginning, the doctrine of the rebirth of the
soul. If the Omnipotent Creator after a long interval begets His one and only
Son, it is essential for a belief in it that the souls who are to be saved shall
come only once to earth. If they have come many times before and are
to come again and again thereafter as a means of working out their own destiny,
the one and only appearance of the Saviour must be only a trifling incident
in their lives. Furthermore if you admit the principle of coming again and again,
the first thing you know you will have the necessary idea of a Saviour coming
again and again, which of course plays the mischief with the unique redeemer
idea. People will shop around and go where they like the theology best. It also
arouses the suspicion that the pagan redeemers whose cults surrounded early
Christianity might have been similarly Sons of God. Buddha might have been a
redeemer, and Krishna, and Dionysos, and Attis, and Hercules, and Horus, and
Baldur. So, abolishing reincarnation from their formula, the early Christian
theologians had to fall back upon the alternative of souls begetting souls by
sex or of God creating souls to order .
Another distortion of the ancient truth must necessarily follow. If the soul
has not lived before, it cannot have shared in an offence that alienated it
from the God. Therefore the very evident
state of alienation that exists must have been inherited in some obscure way
or must arise out of God's annoyance at the behaviour of Adam and Eve.
The old universal saying is that the soul alone is responsible. What it has
sown, that also must it reap. The degraded formula says, "By a special
act of clemency on God's part, the soul may sow a great evil and reap a great
good, or may sow a little good but for lack of having taken part in God's clemency,
may reap a great evil." Exact justice thus becomes a farce. When the Church
Fathers had extracted the last comic element out of it in this form, their Latin
successors developed new comic values by remitting evil themselves. Then they
spun out the doctrine to permit of the issue of coupons that would remit sins
even before they were committed.
It is easy, therefore, to see how men who take such a doctrine and by falsifying
the idea of "the God" so necessary to its usefulness, by removing
the idea that each soul is a redeemer of a fallen being, by vesting the redemptive
power in one personage, by throwing away the necessary idea of the pre-existence
of the soul, and by making justice the whim of deity, must come out with a monstrous
caricature of the old idea.
They have had hundreds of chances to amend. They had a choice between Plato
who knew it and Aristotle who did not. They wiped out the Platonists and clung
to Aristotle. Origen knew and taught it and they put him under anathema. In
1400 it was a punishable offence on the part of Pico della Mirandola even to
offer to debate whether Origen was in hell. Paul knew the old tradition and
for centuries the Latin theologians would willingly have left him out of the
New Testament. They laboured to supplant him with their favourite Peter through
whom they had exclusive sales rights on salvation. The Mithraists knew it and
the Holy fathers crushed them. The Manicheans knew it and a hundred thousand
were put to death with torture. Basilides knew it and his books were burned.
The Cathars and Albigenses knew it and were mercilessly destroyed even though
the south of France had to be devastated. The troubadours
knew it and paid with their lives. Lully knew it and was locked up as mad. Dante
knew it and was an exile all his life. Roger Bacon knew it and was kept under
lock and key. Bruno knew it and was burned to death.
Since the Renaissance the burnings have been less frequent. The bigots have
been forced to use persecutions of a lesser sort, obscurantism, tampering with
books, and fulminations from their pulpits.
There has never been but one heresy -the effort to restore the old doctrine
of the exile of the soul and to restate the means by which each man must find
his way back into the wisdom of the God.
THE MYTHOLOGICAL PROBLEM
In the preceding article I have offered a brief version of an ancient formula
as an approximation to the truth underlying Christian theological distortions
of the tradition of the fall and redemption. I have claimed for the formula
that it is a key, not only to the understanding of the Christian mythos, but
to the interpretation of all other mythological systems. I am now under obligation
to demonstrate that it is as I have said.
It should require no great space to prove that Christianity, however bitterly
theologians argue for its historicity is a mythos like all the others. It is
true that for many centuries, during which there was a poverty of comparative
data, the theologians had little difficulty in persuading men that the miraculous
birth, the escape from slaughter in infancy, the baptism by the fore runner,
the transfiguration on the mount, the temptation, the crucifixion, and ascension
of Jesus were unique in religion, and were celebrations on the part of God of
His special paternity of the Judean redeemer. Neither was it difficult in those
days to argue that the sayings of Jesus embody a truth and ethic previously
unattained by any sage or prophet among men.
A better informed generation knows now, from archaeological research and the
inflow of Eastern scriptural writings, that every religion has had its virgin
mothers, most religions several of them. Virgin birth is now recognized to be
much more a spiritual than a physical fact. Better philosophers than ours find
something ridiculous in our Christian insistence on a foolish and unnecessary
trick by which a God would distinguish this unique Son from the multitudes of
other ordinary sons. The slaughter of the innocents by Herod has never been
taken as fact except by the credulous. So wholesale a massacre would have been
corroborated by a dozen classical historians. Now we know that an identical
legend forms part of the symbolic story of every avatar in his infancy. Buddhist
Gautama, Hindu Krishna, Egyptian Horus, all had similar escapes from the powers
of evil, and in the Egyptian mythos, the jealous ruler was actually called Herrut,
the "slayer of the youngling in the egg". Even Herod seems to have
been used mythically. All religions have the illustration as a symbol of the
passing under the waters, or plunging in the waters of desire. Most religions
have a transfiguration on the mount, and of some of these other transfigurations,
notably the Buddhist and Egyptian, ours is only an attenuated shadow. Even our
cherished cross is a universal glyph of the process by which a superman sacrifices
himself for an erring race, and is the symbol of the means by which, having
done it, he rejoins the Oversoul. Gautama Buddha is marked with a cross on his
forehead; Krishna is transfixed to a tree by an arrow in a cruciform attitude;
Horus is crucified on an orb between two trees or "breathers" ; Bacab
in ancient Yucatan is crucified between two revilers in Tzonpantli, the place
of the skull. All redeemers ascend to heaven after their work is done and take
their place with the Father. The husband of the Virgin of
the world is always an artificer, Vulcan, mate of Venus Urania; Joseph of Mary;
Seb of Isis ; Brihaspati of Soma. The secret teaching is invariably given on
mounts of vision; the twelve apostles have their parallels in the twelve labours,
the twelve adversaries of Buddha, twelve initiations, twelve Zodiacal signs
and the twelve powers in the body along the girdle of the beast. The avatars
are always fishers of men, or shepherds of men, or both. There is always an
adversary who has been cast out in some fabulous war in heaven.
Even the Logia or sayings of Jesus, clung to so desperately by men whose
business it is to prove that they are selling an exclusive line of goods, are
not original with the Christian scriptures. They all have their earlier parrallels,
often richer and fuller than the fragments which survived our era of patristic
bigotry. The Sermon on the Mount is age-old and was never spoken, extemporaneously.
It was obviously written. The Lord's Prayer has earlier parallels for every
phrase, so also have the parables. The whole story of Jesus from Gethsemane
to the end is not a historical narrative. It is a scenario for the secret mystery
drama of the early Christians, that drama to which St. Paul refers when he says:
"0 foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the
truth, before whose eye's Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified
among you ?"
To the kind of man for whom there is more virtue in a story if it be given time
and place, and if all the events in it are actual, this passing of the treasured
marvels of the historical life of Jesus into spiritual myth is a desecration.
To the thinking man such a spiritualization opens a door into wisdom. History,
he knows, is shadow; myth is the effort of the creative mind to explain the
truth behind shadow. A historical event is over and done with; a myth is ongoing
and eternal. Sallustius, the Neo-Platonist said of Greek myths - and of all
myths: "These things never were; they always are."
As the Christian fable resumes its place among the cosmic stories of the world,
it takes on dignity. The tradition, once frankly allegorical, then reduced for
so many centuries to the imbecility
of unrelated fact, stands again abreast of the great spiritual dramas of the
race, and may be interpreted by means of its parallels.
There are three kinds of modern writers about mythology. The first are the few
who see in it a secret tradition passing from generation to generation, kept
always in the world for returning and returning souls as they become in time
pure and intuitive enough to receive it. They interpret the parallels of religion
and myth as meaning that all systems emanate from the one body of truth available
to all sages. These myth-interpreters have their reward in the wisdom that comes
of discerning similarities and in the power that comes of teaching.
The second are the mythologists who with a great parade of scholarship and scientific
method, but with a definite intention, none the less, to bring in a verdict
for the uniqueness of Christianity, plunge into the subject and emerge presently
with a book that proves, by disparaging all other faiths, that Christianity
is the sole and effulgent light of the world. These get their reward
in professorships, curatorships of museums, editorships of safe books and occasionally
a bishopric. They produce many books but are not extensively read. Their celebrity
arises chiefly from the fact that they quote each other approvingly. It is very
doubtful, for instance, if you have ever read a book by J. Estlin Carpenter,
or Professor Grant Showerman or Dr. Pfleiderer, but if you have ever read any
book in this class, you are sure they are great men.
Third are the mythologists who, having observed the success in our time of the
materialistic doctrine of evolution, have endeavoured to interpret mythology
along lines parallel to it. They decide that myths evolved with man. All religious
fables, they say, arose out of primitive misapprehension and, superstition,
and all religion is the philosophization of the errors of savage belief. These
mythologists try, according to various formula, to probe the benighted mind
for the influences - hunger, fear, cruelty, and lust - that were the first parents
of religious belief. If they are consistent in their theory,
of course, they have to find that Christianity is similarly a collection of
rationalized outcroppings of savagery, but their art and usually their fame
is in the measure of their skill in not saying so in a manner that will give
offence. Most of them make a slight, but still discernible, genuflexion as they
pass the altar. They have their reward in being acclaimed as very scientific
and uncompromising, and are said to be abreast of modern culture. They produce
many books and are most widely read of the three classes. None the less they
are a puzzled lot.
Their first difficulty arises out of the fact that none of them has ever succeeded
in proving that a religion evolves, or even improves as time goes by. Like the
Christian apologist whose business requires him to demonstrate the superiority
of Christianity, they have carried a partial conclusion into their impartial
enquiry.
Every datum of religion indicates that a religious system does not evolve. It
always degenerates. It is never born of human ignorance, but of human vision.
The normal habit of mankind is not to enrich the lucubrations of the village
idiot, but to cheapen and miss the point of the sentences of the village wise
man. The best Christian to date has been the inspirer, whoever he was, of the
Christian renewal of the wisdom tradition. No Christian would contend for a
moment that the founder of Christianity had been surpassed or improved on. The
best Buddhist so far, and the wisest, has been Gautama Buddha. The best exponent
of Bhagavad Gita has been the teacher who uttered it. There has been no Platonist
greater than Plato, no teacher of Yoga greater than Patanjali, no exponent of
Veda greater than Veda Vyasa, no Hermetist greater than Hermes, no Zoroastrian
greater than Zoroaster, nor any Vedantin greater than Sankara. A stream does
not rise higher than its source. What student would be so foolish as to read
the five thousand words of Lao-Tsze and then examining modern Taoism with its
devils and its shamanism, declare that the present form had evolved ? A garment
evolves ? It evolves tatters and filth.
We have no trouble
demonstrating the degeneration of living religions, where we can find something
of the personality of the prophetic founder and his apostles. Why then should
we suppose that a different law supervenes when the personalities of the founders
are missing? Or should we, having a system, refuse to believe there was a founder?
Whatever is true of religions whose whole duration falls within the historical
period is true also of those whose start was prehistoric. Why accept a Jesus
or a Lao-Tsze or a Buddha and reject an Orpheus or a Hermes? And finding the
degraded fragments of an older faith why should we suppose them to have had
an origin different from that of the degraded fragment of a younger one ?
If the older forms are more corrupt it is not because they have had a different
kind of origin, but, obviously, because they are older, and more thousands of
misunderstanders of the first ideal have had a chance to corrupt them. One selfish
or stupid man can defile a whole sect; he can disgust the more intelligent members
of it with his distortions of truth until, when they go elsewhere, he can have
only the people foolish enough to perpetuate his follies. How great then can
be the destructive effect on a religion of the entry into it of thousands of
self-seeking and inferior men who make filthy its first intent. With such a
destructive process in mind it is not hard to foresee the time, for instance,
when the selfishness and bigotry of the followers of Christianity encrusting
it with their dogmas of papal infallibility, of sacraments that are pure whether
the priest is or not, of plenary absolutions, of indulgences, of extreme unctions,
of assumptions of Mary; their fetichisms of sacred hearts, of charms and amulets
and scapulars, of magical waters, of reproduced stigmata, and bones and nails
and bits of wood, of Veronica's napkins, will make Christianity no longer fit
for the use of the higher kind of intelligent humans and will hasten it down
the long road to voodoo and tribal magic.
In the meantime thinking souls will have enlisted under other and newer teachers,
no more inspired than the Christian and no less Sons of the God, but with a
restored and cleaner magic. If in lives to come one of our present Christians
happen on broken shards of the Christian vessel and thinks of them as born of
the mistakes of savage minds, he will be making the same error about the Nazarene
that our mythologists make about the forgotten northern sage whose wisdom remains
to us in the Elder Edda, or about that Thoth-Herme's whose vision became the
hocus-pocus of a thousand Egyptian cemeteries.
This is the prime reason why the evolutionary mythologists are puzzled. If you
are quite sure that nine-tenths of the material of your study is nonsense, it
will be fatally easy - for reasons of mental laziness alone - to give up your
effort to understand a difficult problem, and assign the whole thing to the
nonsense division. The man who is satisfied that the earth is flat and that
the sun goes over and under it, can never become a distinguished interpreter
of Copernicus, nor will any man who thinks compassion a waste of time make much
of the sayings of Gautama Buddha. Neither will anyone who is sure the science
of philology was invented yesterday have the patience to unriddle the Cratylus
of Plato. Instead you will find him saying, "Plato, so intelligent about
other matters, was ignorant and credulous in his tracing of the origins of Greek
words, and his Cratylus has no scientific value." Which is to say that
the clear-eyed Plato, in spite of the strictest habit of examination of any
philosopher we have ever known, in spite of a lifetime in the use of Greek,
in spite of association with the greatest trained minds of the golden age of
Athens, in spite of an intimate knowledge of the several dialects and related
languages, the possession of dictionaries that have disappeared, for all he
pondered words and was the greatest classical user of them, for all he was the
avowed continuer of the then - extant lore of Orpheus, Onomacritus, Pherecydes,
Aglaophamus, Homer, Pythagoras and Pindar, word makers and users, knew less
of these things than a foggy-minded English or German curate.
Similarly you will find such a Gradgrind writing, "The Greek mind, of course,
was incapable of understanding such and such a thing or, " It never occurred
to the ancient Egyptian that-", or "The Hindu could not conceive of
", or when Homer does not specifically mention something, saying "
It is certain that Homer knew nothing of -". Sometimes you will find one
of these omniscient gentlemen writing this kind of nonsense; "The figure
of the infant Horus with his finger upon his lips was long considered a symbol
of secrecy, and was used as such by Egyptian, Greek, and Roman secret societies.
Modern research shows that it meant nothing of the sort ; that it was merely
a sign of childish innocence." That is to say, the societies that used
it and the sculptors who made it with such a use in mind, as a sign of
the inviolability of a mystery cult did not know why they used it or why they
made it. What is one to do with minds like these ? Yet such are the constant
processes of argument brought to bear on the modern interpretation of myth.
These are the absurdities inseparable from an evolutionary theory of religion.
With this habit to defeat their best endeavours it is easy to see why our interpreters
of religious fable do not penetrate far into the mystery. They have in recent
years worked out a definition of myth on which most of them agree. In the version
of W. Sherwood Fox it is as follows :
" A myth is a statement, or virtual statement as implied in a symbol, an
attribute, or an epithet, accepted as true by its original maker and his hearers,
and referring to the eternal nature and past acts of beings greater than man,
and frequently to circumstances which to us are improbable or impossible."
It is the requirement of this school of thinking that the phrase "accepted
as true by its original maker and his hearers," should mean that it was
accepted as literally true, or if some element of symbol did enter in it must
be such a symbol as could be easily grasped by childlike minds. If one suggests
that it may have been offered as philosophicalor mythical allegory, these mythologists
reply that being born of savagery it could have had only a trifling interpretation.
Under no circumstances must you attribute a high meaning to it although it is
permissible to attribute ever so far-fetched a low one. Their dogma is that
because it originated early in the history it must have a less profound value
than if it had appeared later. Which is the same as saying that all later poets
must be superior to all earlier ones, that all later philosophers must be wiser
than all earlier philosophers and all later teachers more profound than all
earlier ones. Which of' course is nonsense.
The outstanding fact about human thought is that wisdom is where you find it
and you are more likely to find it in a document of tradition that has had the
power to move many persons over a long period of time. The great myths may easily
have been - indeed the mass of evidence is in favour of their having been -
the symbolical expression of ideas from which we are excluded because of materialistic
prejudices. The same Sallustius I quoted before had another wise saying about
which is a key to the art of myth reading. It was that when the events of a
myth become improbable or impossible as literal fact it became the duty of the
student to look for a spiritual fact. Only an evolutionary mythologist can assume
that these early poets and seers must have been fools offering impossibilities
to credulous listeners. By the rules of his game he must think Keats a fool
for telling people that jocund day ever stood tiptoe upon a misty mountain-top.
The central clause is valid enough but it is insufficient to account for the
facts. He says that myth refers to "the eternal nature and past acts of
beings greater than man." What is needed to complete it is an idea, as
easily available to Dr. Fox as it is to any other reader. It is to be found
throughout the pages of the best and wisest teachers of the various systems
- that most of the beings greater than man, whose eternal nature and past acts
form the body of myth, are none other than man himself. The rest are
man's adversaries here upon earth.
Pythagoras is clear upon the point so far as Greek myth is concerned. So is
Empedocles and so is Plato. So also are Plotinus, Plutarch, Iamblichus and Proclus.
Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian, leaves no doubt of his belief that men are
fallen divinities. The Hindu sages, Krishna, Gautama, and Sankara, taught it.
So did the Chinese Lao Tsze, Lieh Tsze, Chuang Tsze, Confucius, Chu Hse, and
Wang Yang Ming. No one can read the Gathas without recognizing it as fundamental
in Zoroastrian belief; the Sufis taught it, and so did the Christian Gnostics.
It is in the Eddas, the Quran, and the Kabalah. It is in our Christian tradition.
Why then, if it is so evident that all the myths deal with a golden age before
the descent of the Divine Egoes, a bondage or enchantment here in the hands
of the adversaries, and a return again to our earlier home, do not modern mythologists
accept it?
Because they do not want it. And honest use of their scientific method would
dictate that they report the phenomena as they find them saying, these are the
beliefs and although we do not hold them, these foolish and credulous people
did. They are not so honest, they repudiate the philosophy that accompanies
the stories and assign meanings they themselves can believe. The only reason
for thinking an ancient Mayan could possibly believe the ocean swallowed the
sun at night and disgorged it in the morning is that Sir Bertram Windle had
the kind of mind that permitted him to believe the Mayan could.
Just as surely as the Christian apologists are pledged to the belief that Christianity
is the true light, so the evolutionary mythologists are pledged to the idea
that evolution is the only true theory of man on earth, and no matter what the
facts, they will bring in their predetermined verdict. That man was once higher
than he is and is now below his true place is a defiance of Darwin and Haeckel
and although you may say what you please about God, Darwin and Haeckel are sacred.
Too many men have invested their reputations in them.
Meanwhile, the contradictions involved in the life, let us say of Dionysos,
the heights from which he has come, the degradations to which he has fallen
and the heights to which he will again ascend, clear enough as Proclus explains
him, must be modernly interpreted
as the sap in the grapevine. Prometheus, the god who fell into the bondage of
the earth forces, so revealing a figure in Aeschylus, must remain a primitive
savage who discovered fire; the Kumaras or celibate youths who descended into
half animal bodies to redeem them, must have their interpretation in sex magic
and taboo; the Chinese men of old time who knew the Tao and lost it, must be
understood as skin-clad barbarians of a pastoral age. The key that would reconcile
the contradictions and thus lead to a useful conclusion these mythologists reject
because they do not want the conclusion.
The fables of redeemers, understood in all the older faiths as types and exemplars
of man himself, of the ego of each of us, are to these interpreters, "culture-heroes"
and no more. The fables of Orpheus who came down into this place of shades for
Eurydice, of Persephone drawn down into the realm of Pluto, of Herakles who
toiled for the liberation of men, of Perseus who freed Andromeda from the sea-monster,
of Theseus who defeated the Minotaur, of Apollo who slew Typhoeus, of dismembered
Osiris assembled and raised again, of the Greek Sons of the Sun besieging the
stronghold of the Sons of the Moon to free Helen, Rama the Son of the Sun freeing
Sita from the moon host, Arjuna and his four brothers all the Sons of the Sun
defeating the Kurus or Sons of the Moon. Vainamoinen defeating the evil magician
Lemminkainen, the Volsungs toiling to save a lower race, are nothing but childish
efforts of the dawn of human intellect to celebrate their tribal strong men
? It doesn't seem reasonable. There is too much power in the stories. They have
moved too many wise men of vision. If they do not move mythologists to vision
the implication is plain.
THE
ETHICAL PROBLEM
We get our word 'ethics' (through the Latin ethicus) from the Greek ethikos,
that which pertains to ethos, character. With the Greeks the word ethos
had other connotations. It meant custom, usage, native habit, and in its original
sense contained also the idea of an accustomed seat or place, a habitat, or
primal abode.
As a branch of philosophy ethics concerns itself with the meaning and scope
of the words "good" and "bad", "right and wrong",
as applied to character and to conduct. The first phase of its enquiry is descriptive.
It endeavours to classify thoughts, moods, and actions according to their goodness
or badness. In its second phase it determines, if possible, whether the common
ideas of goodness and badness and right and wrong reveal any absolute standards
of action, or point to any cosmic laws that govern the issues of conduct.
After many centuries during which ethics had been looked upon as purely philosophical
in its subject matter and method, enthusiastic scientists of the nineteenth
century made an effort to bring it into the fashionable field of positive science,
but without notable success.
It should have been evident to the biologists who made the effort that it must
end in failure. It inevitably ends in a ring-around-a-rosy. A science is necessarily
experimental. Since the results of right and wrong action could be understood
only by the experimenter and in his own person - to anyone else or in anyone
else they would be mere opinion - he must be, therefore, not only his own laboratory
but also his own judge of results, and he must judge by means of his ethical
judgment which is the subject of his experiment.
Worse than this for practical purposes, it is the great defect of all attempts
at ethical experiment that the observable consequences of actions are too far
removed from their causes in point of time. Indeed the cycle of most important
moral operations does not fall within a single lifetime. This makes a positive
science of ethics quite impossible for a materialist or a theologian. If the
experimenter is a materialist he can have no assurance that the results will
show at all before the soul that produced the causes is resolved again into
the life force from which it came. The results of most of his experiments must
therefore be lost entirely or must be seen in physical descendants, in which
case the whole problem is transferred to the field of heredity. An action that
will only have its effect in a man's remote descendant is not a matter of active
ethical interest, especially if he does not expect to have a descendant. If
the experimenter has a predisposition for Christian dogma he is in an equally
bad fix. The results of most experiments will only become evident in Heaven
or Hell and will not be natural effects on the doer but merely effects manifested
in the approval or annoyance of God. The only possible scientific experimenter
in ethics would be the theosophist who believes in reincarnation, and he would
expect the results to show in a subsequent life and would regard effects in
this life as arising out of experimental conduct in previous ones. He would
then have two courses of procedure, one would be to set up a cause and wait
patiently for its result with the certainty that by the time he reached his
result he would have mislaid his memoranda of the cause. The other would be
to develop his memory of the specific causes in previous lives that have given
rise to present results. As we shall see there is a simpler method.
It is now generally agreed that ethics had
better remain a branch of philosophy.
Philosophy has been defined as "a process of reflection upon the presuppositions
involved in unreflective thought". In other words the philosopher turns
his attention upon himself to discover how and why his mind does what it does
and what are the elements he has all along carried in his mind without thinking
of them. He does not deal with new things but with old and previously unobserved
things. He sets his own precepts, concepts and processes in new lights and examines
them. He seeks merely to become more fully aware of himself.
In logic he examines the processes of reasoning. In epistemology he seeks a
theory of knowledge, endeavouring to know how he knows and whence come his ideas.
In metaphysics he examines his apprehensions and his conceptions of space, cause,
time, and substance. This is the enquiry into what the Greeks called the True
- aletheia, the unforgettable. In aesthetics he examines his ideas of
the Beautiful - kalos, excellence of form and motion as embodying interior
spiritual function. In ethics he examines his ideas of the Good - agathon,
that which is firm and secure.
In its first stages ethics is not a philosophy at all. It deals with specific
problems such as any man might face in his daily life. "What would be just
in this case ?" "What, in that case, would excuse one from responsibility?"
The power to answer such questions is present with every Ego however little
it may have been exercised. The power grows with use. Presently the first philosophical
phases of the subject arise. "Why, given similar cases, should there be
so great difference in the answers given by different men ?" "Why
should the answers vary at all?" "Or, why, indeed, should men, having
found an answer to a question proceed to do something contrary to that which
they have decided ?" "Why should men, desirous of following a certain
wrong line of conduct justify their actions by casting doubt upon the authority
of the ethical judgment ?"
Thus, out of its own contradictions and difficulties, arise ethics as a philosophy.
After all it is natural that it should so arise. Ethical philosophy is born
of its own disabilities as certainly as a study of health is born of the fact
of illness.
All ethical systems belong broadly to two groups. There are those that maintain
that the intuitive power of judgment possessed by man is supreme, and a supreme
guide to conduct. The others maintain, on one ground or another, that man's
ethical judgment is not final but that there are other and external considerations
which must guide his actions. These external standards vary. Herbert Spencer
tried to erect standards on biological data and failed egregiously. Christian
theologians have tried to base standards on an imputed revelation of the dictates
of a personal God. Various writers have tried to found systems based on what
they claim to be the universal acceptance of certain judgements, social, legal,
or political. In view of the fact, however, that each of these systems is finally
tested by the author's own ethical judgment and is addressed to the ethical
judgment of those who read or study it, we are forced to conclude at last that
there is only one valid basis for ethics, that of supreme power of the soul
of man to decide between right and wrong. If a soul deciding for itself addresses
to souls deciding for themselves a system of ethics which declares that souls
do not decide for themselves, there is something wrong with the system.
One of the great controversies in ethics has revolved around hedonism. The hedonist
bases his contention that pleasure is the end of all human effort upon the universally
experienced feeling that for a "good" to be good it must in some sense
be "my good". The anti-hedonist offers the fulfilment of duty as the
true end of effort, arguing that the pleasure of the individual can never be
complete in himself.
A multitude of controversies have arisen also out of theology and the effort
to place the ideas of an omniscient God above man's interior judgment. The first
fallacy of such an external standard for conduct lies in the fact that the ethical
judgment is itself superior to the idea of God. Man has never been willing to
worship a God who does not fulfil his moral requirements. God is therefore inferior
to whatever it is in man that makes ethical judgements The folly of thinking
of a God greater than the maker of Him has led to innumerable contradictions.
The most noticeable in its effect on ethics has been that dispute to which I
have referred before in these articles, the one about free will and predestination.
It is a dispute that never could arise in the realm of pure ethics at all because
all the ideas of ethics have to do with free choice between right and wrong
and the inalienable right of man to will his own destiny. It is only when theologians
have managed to persuade men of the existence of a personal deity who knows
everything in advance that anyone will consider even for a moment, the soul
as bound to a routine laid down in the mind-made God's foreknowledge.
The central problem of ethics, and the one with which I am especially interested
in this series of articles, is a mystical one. It is the problem of the nature
of that mysterious quality in man that makes him the sole and final arbiter
of his relation to earth. The primary manifestation of the quality is the operation
of Will. The soul of man acts, it refrains from action. It approves, it disapproves.
It judges. It may judge rightly or wrongly in any given case but it reserves,
for some high reason it does not itself understand, the right to will and to
judge.
Emerson's schoolboy with his book of history is in no awe of Napoleon or of
Alexander. He arraigns them for every thought, word and deed, he praises, he
condemns serenely and without passion. He is their equal, not of this earth
but of a higher world than this from which they all three have come. He is one
soul appraising another and deciding what he would do - nay, will do - in like
case, trying them by a higher criterion than they or he can bring to actuality.
So he judges all kings and saints and heroes. His judgements of the event may
be faulty, desires may disturb his calm; anger may sweep over him or a chill
of fear; his understanding may limp but from his height he decides. He and they
are beings superior to earth, walking about fitfully and dimly remembering how
Gods should walk.
Plato, in common with all the great occult philosophers, found in this high
assumption a demonstration of the state of the soul prior to its original descent
into the bondage of earth. Lest I be accused of twisting Plato's doctrine to
my needs let me offer a summary in the words of the late Dr. Henry Sidgwick
: ". ..If the objects of abstract thought constitute the real world, of
which this world of individual things is but a shadow, it is plain that the
highest, most real life must lie in the former region and not in the latter.
It is in contemplating the abstract reality which concrete things obscurely
exhibit, the type or ideal which they imperfectly imitate, that the true life
of the mind in man must consist; and as man is most truly man in proportion
as he is mind, the desire of one's own good, which Plato, following Socrates,
held to be permanent and essential in every living thing, becomes in its highest
form the philosophical yearning for knowledge. This yearning, he held, springs-like
more sensual impulses - from a sense of want of something formerly possessed,
of which there remains a latent memory in the soul, strong in its proportion
to its philosophic capacity; hence it is that in learning any abstract truth
by scientific demonstration, we merely make explicit what we already know; we
bring into clear consciousness hidden memories of a state in which the soul
looked upon Reality and Good face to face, before the lapse that imprisoned
her in an alien body, and mingled her true nature with fleshly feelings
and impulses."
Sidgwick gives here the impression, frequent in modern philosophical writings,
that Plato's Reality and Good are the ultimate Reality and Good. It is evident
from Plato himself and from the Neo-Platonists that they were only comparative
and that they do not in any sense embrace the entire scale of knowledge, but
only an octave above and beyond the present octave of mind, namely, that subtle
but none the less material plane the Eastern writers call Buddhi. It was the
realm of the Christos in the Gnostic systems. This interior world which the
soul has lost, Plato and his followers regarded as one in which our now separated
soul's must be reintegrated into a unity we once enjoyed but have lost owing
to the delusions of earth. The reawakening of the soul of man is for Platonists,
a return to that Unity. This is the One of Plotinus, and as I have already suggested,
it is the One which Christian theologians disfigured into their ultimate and
all-knowing God.
Conceiving the race of men here upon earth as disintegrated and scattered fragments
of that Unity, but essentially bound, each to the others, we have a clue to
the truth about that other great crux of ethics - duty. This is the one which
Kant called the greatest of mysteries. It is the ethical factor we saw the hedonist
rejecting when he said, "That is not good which is not my good."
The exponent of duty is a believer, however dimly he may see it, in the lost
Unity, and he says, "Good can only be our good." There can
be no good which omits any of the exiled race. They must go through together.
The concept of duty - that which one owes - is, then, a blurred recollection
of the essential fact of existence in the One. This is the only valid explanation
of the constantly recurring intuition that can impel a man to an act of sacrifice
which he cannot justify by any process of mind. Hedonism is of the mind; duty
is a reminiscence of the lost world beyond mind, and mind has been called always
the great slayer of the real. The concept of justice is an archetypal idea from
that lost world, as are the concepts of love, philosophy, mathematics and the
yearning for beauty.
The differences between the souls of men in this world are not, therefore, to
be explained as differences of development or as varying accretions of powers.
They can only be explained as varying degrees of loss of divine self-consciousness.
This is the only adequate explanation of the differences in the clarity of ethical
judgment. Failure of judgment does not come of inadequate development but of
over clouding. The will to act, the arrogation of the right to decide are of
the divine soul and are common to all men. The failure to judge wisely comes
of the obscuring forces of an alien earth.
THE
HUMANIST PROBLEM
The magnificent old word "humanist" is one which has known many vicissitudes
and if the rising fashion is any index, it is likely soon to know a few more.
In its broadest and most general sense humanism denotes a greater preoccupation
with the welfare of man than with the glory of God. It implies a realization
that whatever God's glory may be will be most efficiently enhanced by the service
of God's creatures. Humanism is therefore an emphasis and an approach rather
than a theory, and is polar to theology and sacerdotalism, which tend to emphasize
man's duty to an extra-human and highly hypothetical Deity and to ascribe human
joys and sorrows to the operation of His inscrutable will.
Of course humanism is as old as the human love which motivates it, but, in periods
of priestly ascendancy it is forced to flow underground. In Europe it has several
times welled up into a visible stream, once with Plato, once with the Neoplatonists,
once with the Arabian philosophers who came into Europe with the Saracen invasion,
and once with the rebirth of Platonism at the Renaissance of the fifteenth century.
It is with this last that the word is specially identified, but like so many
other words it has been parcelled out among the seers of the parts of things
and has been used in limited senses. It is widely used to refer to the cultivation
of classical (profane or non-Christian) literature; sometimes to mean any kind
of secular learning. More recently Comte and his followers arrogated it as a
name for the Positive philosophy. R. B. Haldane and others have used it to describe
modern scientific advance. Professors Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More and Norman
Foerster have revived it as a name of their kind of addiction to "polite
letters" and abstention from anything that seems too modern, and have used
it to describe a cold, intellectual gentility which they pretend derives from
Plato. In the past year or so it has become a cult name and seems to be in for
a vogue that will defile it, just as the word "Theosophy" has been
defiled. It will then have to go back to the limbo of soiled words to be reissued
when men have forgotten the follies associated with it. To date, however, it
is a clean, noble word.
Each of the great humanistic movements in Europe in history has had a direct
theosophical origin. It has been the projection into philosophy, religion, the
arts, philanthropy and government of an idea which is fundamental in all theosophies
- the idea of the essential unity of mankind and the consequent necessity for
brotherhood as a means of awakening the intuitions of interior divinity which
are the central object of effort in every theosophical system. This is the idea
bound up in the word "Theosophy' itself. It is not, as so frequently interpreted,
merely Divine Wisdom. Any religious system purports to be that, and saying that
theosophy is especially so is no more than vociferation. It is "the wisdom
of the god", that wisdom which man may make manifest by virtue of the fact
that he has in the past attained to a far higher measure of divinity than he
now displays. Or in another symbol, it is the Sophia, lost since our entry into
this sublunary sphere.
It is easily demonstrable that no theology (Christian or other) can generate
a vigorous humanism. Although Jesus, for example, is a humanist of the first
order, engaged in his lifetime in the task of humanizing Jewish dogma, the theological
accretions that have gathered about his doctrine have inevitably destroyed the
spirit of his work. The dogma concerning Jesus is that a Father in Heaven, of
whom he is the extraordinary son and we the stepchildren, has sent us all into
the world and has known in advance the outcome of His action and ours. Nevertheless
this God requires of us that we make a series of choices that His own foreknowledge
renders impossible. Theology argues also that we can repair wrong choices by
an implicit belief in the disparity between us and Jesus. It says that the outcome
of this brief and futile period of choice - in which there is obviously no choice
- is a return to the Father, who will in Justice and Mercy, (not manifested
up to date) straighten out the whole intolerable tangle. With so muddled a theory
of life and so optimistic a theory of death it is not marvellous that the central
hope of theology will be a return to the Father. The more contradictory and
confusing this God becomes the more surely will He become theology's central
fact.
The injunction of the theologian's God to be compassionate and to love one's
neighbour as oneself is the addition of insult to injury. Man is expected to
do something God evidently overlooked - in effect to transcend his God. In any
case it is the history of theology that the people who have taken its dogmas
most seriously have been more concerned with propitiating the Deity than with
loving the neighbour. The most logical adherents of the Christian dogma have
felt with Torquemada that the best service one can render his erring neighbour
is to despatch him to his God before he can do any more damage to his soul's
chance of happy return. The fear of God has always been the destruction of the
love of humanity.
Science does better. Compelled by the strict terms of its enquiry to confine
itself to tangibles, visibles and audibles, it has to leave God - even an interior
one in man - out of its research. It has therefore no lofty ideal left but the
service of humanity. This service is, however, a trifle vague because, so far
as the scientist can see - as scientist - humanity has its origin in birth and
its end in death. Before the one and after the other there exists only the vaguest
sort of abstraction. So unless the scientist has unscientific interior intimations
to bear him up, he must pour all his energy and learning into a flux of forms
that have visibility but no meaning. Man is only demonstrably man while he is
in the body; therefore, he must argue, body makes man. The beneficiaries of
the scientists' devotion have done nothing to deserve it, neither is there any
certainty that they can requite it, or even benefit greatly by it. In only a
few cases can they transmit it. This is a cold kind of humanism, and I doubt
if any scientist with no wider vision than it implies would ever go on with
it. So while he is performing a humanistic service, the theory of his effort
is to be found elsewhere. He can, just as easily as anyone else, be a man who
does the right thing for that wrong reason.
There is a third theory of life, increasingly widespread among us today, immeasurably
wider in its sweep than the notions of theology and science, which might conceivably
give a motive for humanistic endeavour but which rarely does so. It is that
system of thought vaguely described as Hindu philosophy and promulgated in India
and the West by exponents of exponents of the Advaita Vedanta. Rarely has it
been offered in any completeness. What we have is a syncretism drawn from the
six Darshanas or philosophical systems of India, better or worse put together
.
It starts, as all great philosophies must, with an incognizable First Cause,
out of which arises the polarity we recognize as spirit and matter. The Absolute
Cause manifests and in the resultant ocean of being myriad centres of consciousness
arise, each seeing the other apart from itself and each under the illusion of
I and not-I. These lives begin a long pilgrimage from ignorance through successive
stages of self-realization to an ultimate full knowledge of their divinity.
So far there is no division of opinion. This idea of the manifested universe
and the flow of souls is common to all Eastern system and to many Western ones.
The modern Vedantin, however, assuming a simple and unbroken rhythm as capable
of explaining all phenomena, and as reconciling all contradictions, proceeds
to deal with man as having mounted the cosmic stair to the position we now occupy.
The Vendantin would say that our present mental consciousness represents our
full stature, and that continuing on the wheel of evolution of soul powers and
returning life after life to earth, we shall pass presently into a superhuman
condition and from that on to a higher, so step by step to the inner most. Many
of our own order, he would say, have gone on, becoming Mahatmas, Rishis, Arhats,
and we must all become so in due course.
This is a great concept, greater by far than any generally accepted theory we
have had in the West. It is greater than our theology and greater than our science
but as a complete hypothesis it has always been rejected because it does not
fit the facts.
The theosophical schools, of which the philosophies are dessicated fragments,
refuse it. They say, "No. Unfortunately it is not so simple as all that.
There is undoubtedly such an emergence from the Absolute, undoubtedly such a
cycle of outpouring and return. Undoubtedly also the evolution or unfolding
of the powers of souls is the great law of the Universe. Unfolding consciousness,
however, requires also an increasing unfolding of will and the freedom to choose.
Whatever permits an individual or an order of individuals to choose permits
a wrong choice as well as a right one. If a right choice can result in achievement,
a wrong one can result in failure. H. P. Blavatsky speaks of the "necessity
of failures even in the ethereal races of Dhyan Chohans".
The theosophist of any school would say, therefore, that man in his present
state is not proceeding serenely in his ascent. Somewhere in the past he has
made a choice which is now impeding his progress. And even if the theosophist
had no more to say about the nature of the choice and the resulting impediments,
there are enough indications around us everywhere to show that serious impediments
do exist. The theosophist does, however, say more. He says that man - the Ego
- is not at the full altitude to which his evolution entitles him, but is considerably
below that altitude, and is the partly-conscious possessor of powers more or
less in atrophy. There is an order of beings evolving on this earth, a lunar
race, but it is far below the stature of man. Man himself is making a bad job
of a redemptive act to which the law of the interrelation of orders of beings
has committed him and he is for the most part doing his best to go counter to
a law of sacrifice which requires that he raise to the level of mind a creature
who without his assistance cannot advance. Because of this failure to lift the
animal soul, thereby establishing a rate of progression that will permit him
to rise himself, he is in no present process of evolution at all but in one
of stagnation. Indeed, in the cases where man is most obstinate in refusing
his obligation, and uses the animal organism for selfish and separative magic,
he is in a state of active degeneration, with lower levels before him. His remedy
against further descent is his memory of the lost wisdom.
Because evolution tends ever to unity, whatever memory we recover will be in
terms of a level of unity higher than our present one, a community in which
the severances of man from man have formerly disappeared and can be made to
disappear again by the exercise of brotherly love.
This is the theosophy of Veda, of Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, of the Orphic
Mysteries, of Hermes and Plato, of the alchemists, the Rosicrucians, the Sufis,
the Kabbalists and of the occultists of the Renaissance in Europe. It is also
the theosophy of H. P. Blavatsky and her teachers, so difficult for those who
have become indoctrinated with the spurious Hinduism of recent years.
It is also the only "theosophia" which by any conceivable set of conditions
can be "remembered" out of our past, as Plato says it must be, or
attained by virtue of an earned divinity which all men possess.
These then are the two doctrines that can arise out of the idea of the evolution
of the soul. The one is that the soul is proceeding evenly on its way, that
it has known nothing higher than it now knows, and that every step is a new
one. The other is the same but with the modifying idea of the lapse, of which
Kant has said that it is fundamental in religion.
"That the world lieth in wickedness is a complaint as old as history, even
as what is still older, poetry. ..All alike nevertheless make the world begin
from good: with the Golden Age, with life in Paradise, or one still more happy
in communion with heavenly beings. But they represent the happy state as soon
vanishing like a dream, and then they fall into badness. ..Later, but much less
general, is the opposite, heroic opinion, which has perhaps obtained currency
only among philosophers, and in our time chiefly among the instructors of youth,
that the world is constantly advancing in precisely the reverse direction, namely
from worse to better. .. This opinion, however, is not founded upon experience,
if what is meant in moral good or evil, for the history of all times speaks
too powerfully against it."
Of the two doctrines, one is a doctrine of ultimate achievement, the other a
doctrine of immediate conditions. Each has its place in theosophy but whereas
the Vedantin bases his ethic on the ultimate, the theosophist bases his on the
immediate.
There is no humanism to be born out of the idea of orderly progression, because
none is needed. It is a doctrine of laisser faire. If all men are coming
out at the same goal - duly and in the course of the cycles - what virtue can
there be in fixing one's concern upon the pilgrims. If there is any matter for
concern at all it should be the goal.
Humanism can arise only out of the other, the realization that the Ego of man
is one of a broken legion, in sore straits in an alien world, and must find
his divinity in the restoration of the scattered host.
The line of demarcation between these two positions runs through all human thought
and practice. Here are some of the conflicts :
Our Vedantin is the Pollyanna of metaphysics. His scheme is one of glad progress
regardless of ethical choice. All suffering is a necessary part of the joyous
plan. No matter what a man does, he is doing it for the unfolding of his divine
consciousness. The theosophists, on the other hand, have always said that believing
this is a glad world is begotten of what one wants to believe. It is not a glad
world. On the contrary it is a world of misunderstanding and division, of death
and separation and loneliness, of isolation, of tears and sorrow, of cruelty
and distorted lusts, of the terror of little children at being born into earth.
Gladness is in spite of the conditions in which we find ourselves. Gautama
Buddha enunciated the doctrine of a sad world out of which we must arise and
the Vedantins call him a pessimist.
The Vedantin says there is no urgency. Everything is working out according to
immutable plan. All beings must go forward and all must achieve. What are a
few scores of years in the sweep of evolution ? What is the hurry? But turn
to the great theosophists- Gautama, Hermes, Krishna, Jesus. There is the will
of man at work in the world, they say, and the will of man is not bound only
to the good side of the immutable law. It can be separative as well as unitive;
it can do as much evil as It can good. The servitor of mankind who goes to early
death, to the faggots and to the rack, who is persecuted in life and slandered
in death, is matched by the vampire upon mankind who uses the bondage of the
rest to feed his lust. The lovers of mankind find something urgent in man's
state. Their world is a field of battle, and they are always too few. Every
disciple who comes to them must come as a recruit to an army that never rests.
Each enlistment must be an answer to the old question of The
Voice of the Silence;
"Can there be bliss when all that lives must suffer? Shalt thou be saved
and hear the whole world cry?"
The Vedantin argues that reincarnation into this earth is the unalterable law,
and then he undertakes to tell how to escape it. The theosophist says that reincarnation
is a necessity only until we complete what we came here to do, then we may leave
it, unless in compassion we return as teachers to liberate our brothers.
The Vedantin tells us of great time cycles and of a progress that goes step
by step with them. In an aeon we develop this power, in another aeon that ;
senses come into operation as the cycles unfold. Then if one asks him why anybody
should exert any effort at all, why any man should press forward, he will offer
some cloudy nonsense about hastening evolution, about speeding up the cycles,
as if any man could do that. If he could he would destroy all that is cyclic
about them. He would abolish cycles. Theosophists of all schools have, on the
contrary, taught "a path to liberation in this life". They say, in
effect, "These are not new powers you must steal from the cycles, but old
powers you must restore, and you can restore them whenever you will it.
The Vedantin speaks of powers gained anew. When he comes upon a word like "restore"
or "regain" he explains it as meaning that all powers are latent in
the Absolute and that to gain a power is to draw on a previously existent one.
He prefers however to say "attain". The theosophist has always said
"attain again". His words are "re-store", "re-new"
"re-deem" "re-member" "re-cognize", "re-surrect",
"re-ligion", (it-self the binding back of something broken) , "re-union
with the companions of their former toil". The theosophist's figures of
speech are of prison-houses of the soul, of bondage, of slavery, of deliverance
out of Egypt, of liberation from the wheel of rebirth, of being raised from
the dead, from the sepulchre, from the roofed-in cave, from the dark meadow
of Ate. They are figures of finding a way out of a labyrinth, of rousing a warrior
from sulking in his tent, of rising superior to despondency and going into battle,
of rising from lethargy or from drunkenness, of turning from the cities of the
plain and going up into the mountains, of forsaking the fleshpots. The theosophist
talks of exiles, of wanderers, of prodigal sons who have wasted their substance
in a far country, of sons that were dead and are alive again, were lost and
are found, of Sophia tempted into the vices of the world, of Narcissus falling
in love with his image in the waters of desire, of gods dismembered as Osiris
was, of heroes like Odysseus fighting their way home over the raging seas of
passions and having to do battle for their old heritage.
The Eastern metaphysician of unbroken rhythms and processes has also - as he
must have - a garden-hose theory of illumination. He says our ideals and high
aims come from high, kindly beings in the world beyond us. But Hermes and Plato
will not have it so. Hermes says, "This race, my son, is never taught,
but when it wills it, its memory is restored." Plato makes Socrates say,
in the Meno, "It is no wonder that she (the soul) should be able
to recollect all that she knew before about virtue and other things." And
in the Meno also he says that the greatest of the things we know, we
learned before we were human at all.
The Vedantin has curious ideas about the power of the Ego to go on alone. If
you perform austerities until you have shut out the world you can attain to
a state in advance of the rest. The great Compassionators agree that within
limits you can, but they say of one who tries it that he is a Pratyeka or Ekash-ringa,
which means that he is concerned only with one person - himself. Or they pity
him and call him a rhinoceros Buddha - a Buddha of a thick and insensitive skin.
There is, they say, by reason of his ancient effort, a previously attained stature
he can resume, but if he tries to do it thus without compassion, his nirvana
is a condition of negation, of rejection, as long as he can will it, of his
bond with the rest of mankind. The great restoration of the high ones cannot
be entered alone. It is a communal consciousness.
The Vedantin is amused if you talk of white and black magic. The greatest of
the teachers have not been amused. White magic is the return of union: black
magic is the inevitable pole of severance from the Oversoul and plays far too
great a part in the struggle for the redemption of the race to be amusing.
The Vedantin says the soul cannot be destroyed or lost. Such an idea is unthinkable.
Divine essence lost ? Spirit is indestructible, eternal. And so it is,replies
Plotinos, but it is not indivisible. If the Absolute has divided into many,
such as you and I also break up into many others. Spirit is indestructible but
soul is only an integration and its present integrity is not secure. So we find
the old teachers of Yoga suggesting that when a man thinks all he has to do
is unite himself with the Oversoul, he is flattering himself. His first task
is to unite himself - to correct his own tendency to disintegration.
He must draw himself out of the multitude of karmic forms into which he has
poured his life and by which he is dismembered. When he has re-gathered his
own fragments and become the Diamond Soul he may make the restoration of the
Unity of which he is himself a fragment.
These are a few of the conflicts, all parts of the greatest battle in human
thought. Every lesser conflict stems off from these. What am I to do about my
divinity? Shall I go on alone and let the devil take care of the hindmost? This
has been the practice of Calvinism and of our Puritan sects. Or shall I find
some metaphysical formula that will give me the sweet assurance that the hindmost
are softly pillowed in the Great Law and do not need my care? If I can find
such a formula I shall have the gratitude of all the lazy, the rich, the top
dogs, the feudal-minded, the people who profit by the distress of others. The
Brahmin and the Pharisee long ago found such a formula but they pay a heavy
price. Some vital current in them stops, their austerities and taboos increase
and complicate, their philosophy becomes arid, circular and unserviceable. Filth,
squalor and misery grow up around their doors, their world is peopled by pariahs,
untouchables, Mlechchas, through whom they must thread their way as they go
to prayers. They must spend their lives avoiding the evils they have made.
Or shall I measure my spiritual altitude only by the number of persons for whom
I have made myself responsible ?