The Meaning of Happiness

1. WAR IN THE SOUL

Almost everyone knows the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs. A man and his wife had a mysterious goose that from time to time favored them by laying a golden egg. When this had been going on for some weeks they began to think it rather tiresome of the goose to part with its gold so gradually, for they imagined that it carried a store of such eggs inside itself. Not having the sense to weigh the creature first and find out if it was much heavier than a goose should be, they decided to kill it and cut it open. As might be expected, they found only one ordinary, dead goose, void of gold eggs and unable to produce any more.

There were once scientists, too, who were similarly disappointed when they searched the human anatomy to find an organ that might be described as the soul; there are still scholars who analyze Beethoven down to the last semiquaver and Shakespeare to the last pronoun to find the secret of their genius, and there are also theologians who do much the same thing with the words of the Bible to discover the nature of God. And it is yet the hope of even the most advanced science that the universe will yield up its mysteries, its last mighty secret, to those who dissect its tiniest fragments, learning more and more about less and less. This is known as not being able to see the wood for the trees. It is by no means an error peculiar to scientists and scholars, for the fable of the golden eggs is an ancient tale of human nature.

We have a saying about the virtue of being able to “see life whole,” for all meaning is in wholeness. There could be no golden eggs without the goose, and however tiresome, slow, and stupid the goose might be, he resembled life in that he was an interplay of opposites: he was slow, but his eggs were gold, and if you cut him to pieces to gather the gold and discard the slowness you were left with nothing but a corpse. This will also happen if you carve up the human body to find the mysterious source of its vitality or if you separate the flower of a plant from its muddy roots. Something very similar happens in a much more important way when men love life and hate death or cling to youth and reject old age, which is like expecting a mountain to have only one slope—that which goes up, whereas to be a mountain it must go up and down. For the meaning is in the whole, and not only the meaning but the very existence of the thing. Indeed, we are only aware of life and life is only able to manifest itself because it is divided into innumerable pairs of opposites: we know motion by contrast with stillness, long by short, light by darkness, heat by cold, and joy by sorrow.

Therefore to see life whole is to understand these opposing qualities as essential to its existence, without trying to interfere, without dissecting the body of the universe so that its pleasant portions may be preserved and its unpleasant cast away. This is what the philosophic Hindu understands when, looking at the most terrible things, he can say, “Sarvam kalvidam Brahman”—“This, too, is Brahman,” that divine Being of whose Self¹ each single thing is a changing aspect. And to him this Brahman is not merely the whole universe any more than seeing life whole is seeing the whole of life; in this sense Brahman is rather the wholeness, even the holiness, of life which can be destroyed only in the fantasy world of our own minds. Therefore those who attempt to destroy it carry, as it were, corpses in their thoughts which corrupt and poison their souls. In the life to which they cling in horror of death, the pleasure in fear of pain, the wealth in fear of poverty, and the youth in fear of age, they hold only to the world’s dismembered limbs. Yet though they may not know it the dismembering and the consequent suffering exist only in themselves; they think they can take the whole apart, but it is a poor illusion. Its only result is that for all their clinging their life, pleasure, wealth, and youth have the taint of unhappiness because, having cut them off to possess them forever, they are no more alive. Thus it is not surprising that some few “wise ones” having come to grief in this way cry out that pleasure and wealth are sins wherein no happiness is to be found. But fire is not evil because it burns your fingers if you try to catch hold of it; it is only dangerous.

The Problem of Opposites

We call such things as life and death “opposites,” but this is not altogether a satisfactory name seeing that it implies a state of opposition and hence of conflict. But life and death are in conflict only in the mind which creates a war between them out of its own desires and fears. In fact life and death are not opposed but complementary, being the two essential factors of a greater life that is made up of living and dying just as melody is produced by the sounding and silencing of individual notes. Life feeds on death, its very movement is only possible and apparent because of the continuous birth and death of cells, the absorption of nourishment and the discarding of waste, which in its turn provides a fertile soil from which new life can spring. For vitality is a cycle whose completion requires both upward movement and downward movement just as light cannot manifest itself without the whole motion of the light wave from start to finish; if these waves could be divided into half or quarter waves the light would disappear. So also in the biological realm we have two opposite yet complementary sexes, male and female; beings are divided in this way in order to reproduce themselves, and the meaning of man and woman is the child without which there would be no point in having two sexes at all. Thus they are the two legs upon which our life stands, and when one is cut away the whole collapses.

These so-called opposites present man with a difficult problem, for there is a longing in his heart for eternity and victory over death, a longing which is misdirected because in life as he knows it he himself is one of those opposites and thus is apparently set against something over which he can never triumph. For the foundation of our life as we know it is the opposition between ourselves and the universe, between that which is “I” and that which is not “I.” Here again are two things which are complementary rather than opposed, for it is obvious that the self cannot exist without the universe and that the universe cannot exist without the multitude of selves and entities of which it is composed. But from the point of view of suffering, struggling man this fact, however obvious, is purely abstract. Moreover, the existence of the universe depends apparently only on the impersonal multitude of selves of which there is an inexhaustible supply; it does not depend on any particular self. Indeed, nature seems astonishingly callous and wasteful in its treatment of individual selves, and it is therefore not surprising that man should rebel when treated with the same callous disregard for individuality as is the insect. It even seems that here there is an actual conflict which does not exist solely in the mind, for with one hand nature lavishes the most amazing skill on the creation of individuals and even on their preservation, while with the other it treats them as if they were no more than the dust from which they rose. But if one or the other of nature’s hands were tied the world would either choke itself from overabundance of life or be altogether depopulated. Nevertheless, from the individual point of view the process is wasteful and callous. Man might assist nature to a greater economy by regulating the reproduction of his own kind and by adapting himself to nature instead of trying to fight it. But this requires a concerted social effort that might take thousands of years to accomplish, and hence is of little consequence to individuals living in the turmoil of the twentieth century.

However, scientific measures for the removal of suffering are here beside the point, for it is doubtful whether the resulting increase of comfort would be welcomed if it were sufficient to upset the balance of the opposites. Just as too much light blinds the eyes, too much pleasure numbs the senses; to be apparent it needs contrast. But the problem of man’s conflict with the universe remains. We can present any number of straightforward, rational solutions, justifying the existence of these uncomfortable opposites and the unfortunate but necessary operations of natural law. It is the easiest thing in the world to philosophize, telling man how glad he should be that he suffers, seeing that otherwise he would be unable to feel joy. But when it comes to the point such talk is found to be remote and abstract, leaving the heart unconvinced even if the head is satisfied.

For here we are touching the very root of man’s unhappiness, and to these regions the sweetly reasonable voice of pure philosophy does not penetrate. Whatever may be said about the need for basing one’s attitude to life on a universal as distinct from a personal point of view, the difficulty is that in the ordinary way man does not feel universal. His center is himself and his consciousness peeps out through windows in a wall of flesh; he does not feel his consciousness as existing in things outside of himself, seeing through others’ eyes or moving with others’ limbs. And the world outside that wall is threatening, so much so that he does everything possible to fortify himself against it, surrounding himself with a barricade of possessions and illusions to hide himself from the world and the world from him. Within this fortress he strives to guard and preserve the thing he calls his life, but he might as well try to imprison sunlight in a room by pulling down the blind or trap wind by shutting the door. To enjoy wind you must let it blow past you and feel it against bare flesh; the same is true of time, for the moment has always gone before it can be seized, and the same is true of life which not even this wall of flesh can hold forever. To feel and understand it you must let it blow past you like the wind as it moves across the earth from void to void. But this is intolerable. It means tearing down the barricade, giving up every security, opening windows both sides of the room so that the draft sweeps through, knocks down the vases, scatters our papers, and upsets the furniture. This is too great a price to pay for having the dust and cobwebs blown out of our souls. Besides, we shall catch cold and sit shivering and sneezing till we go crazy.

From thy nest every rafter

Will rot, and thine eagle-home

Leave thee naked to laughter

Till leaves fall and cold winds come.

So we keep the windows closed and shuttered until we die from suffocation, overwhelmed by stagnant air.

The Fear of Fear

This is a malady as old as life, born of what Keyserling² calls “Original Fear” whose outward aspect psychologists term the “pleasure-pain principle.” For as the snail and the tortoise withdraw into their shells, man retires into his castle of illusion. But it is curious that whereas the snail and the tortoise often come out of their shells, man hardly ever comes out of his castle, because he seems to have a much more acute sense of his personal identity, of his distinction from the rest of the universe. The greater the sense of distinction, the greater the tension between the two and the more the pairs of opposites war together in the soul. This tension we call unhappiness, but it is not suggested that it will be overcome by the abolition of “Original Fear,” which is in itself a most valuable instinct. If we liked pain as much as pleasure we might shortly become extinct, for it is only this original fear of pain which urges us to self-preservation. Here again we have a pair of opposites, love and fear or like and dislike, mutually essential components of the faculty of feeling, for who does not fear neither loves nor feels. But note the term original fear. Man’s difficulty is that his fear is seldom original; it is once or many times removed from originality, being not just simple fear but the fear of being afraid.

There are two kinds of tension, creative and destructive, the first as when a string is tensed to produce music and the second as when it is tensed to be broken. Between the opposites there must also be tension if they are to produce life. Of their nature they must move in opposite directions, and yet they must be held together by a relationship and a meaning. By centrifugal force the earth speeds away from the sun; by gravity it is drawn toward it, and hence it moves around it in a circle and is neither frozen nor burned. Thus the movement of the opposites away from each other is original fear, while the tie that binds them is original love. The result is creative tension. But man is not just afraid; he fears the tension caused by his original fear so that his fear is increased. The tension is also increased, growing all the more frightening until it becomes destructive instead of creative. The tie is stretched to breaking point, whereat the opposites tend to shoot apart into utter isolation. Thus when the tension of original fear is accepted man can swing happily upon his orbit; but should he try to escape from that fear he simply adds one fear to another and one tension to another, which is a process that may go on forever. Like a fly caught in a spider’s web, the more he struggles, the more he becomes involved.

In this way the tension of the opposites is turned by man into destructive conflict. Clinging to one and fleeing from the other he simply incites the one he flees to assert itself the more. To hate death and change is trying to make life deathless and changeless, and this is a rigid, moribund, living death. Hence the saying, “Cowards die a thousand deaths, but the valiant die but once.” For in holding to pleasure in fear of pain man starts the tension, but the real trouble begins when he tries to get rid not only of the pain but of the tension as well, giving himself two enemies instead of one. That pain should arouse fear is as natural as that fire should arouse warmth. But let it stay there, for if we run from our fear it becomes panic, and this is the entrance to a bottomless abyss of self-deception and misery. Man does not like to admit to himself that he is afraid, for this weakens his self-esteem and shakes his faith in the security of his ego. To accept fear would be like accepting death, so he runs from it, and this is the great unhappiness. Sometimes it is expressed in sheer unbridled terror, but more often it is a half-concealed, gnawing anxiety moving in vicious circles to an ever-greater intensity. It would have been better to say in the first place, “I am afraid, but not ashamed.”

Therefore in struggling with the opposites man perpetually deceives himself. The prizes he tries to pluck away from life and keep solely for his personal use turn moldy because he has severed them from their roots, and nothing that is isolated can live, since the two most important characteristics of life are circulation and change. On the other hand, the troubles which he tries to avoid are the only things which make him aware of his blessings, and if he would love the latter he must fear the former. But he is afraid of fear. These two things make him respectively frustrated and worried, driving him more and more into an attitude of isolation, of separateness from and hostility toward the rest of life, standing huddled and miserable between the devil of circumstances and the deep sea of his own unpredictable and unruly emotions. And in this isolation his spirit perishes.

Man and Nature

Man is as much attached to nature as a tree, and though he walks freely on two legs and is not rooted in the soil, he is by no means a self-sufficient, self-moving, and self-directing entity. For his life he depends absolutely on the same factors as the tree, the worm, and the fly, on the universal powers of nature, life, God, or whatever it may be. From some mysterious source life flows through him unceasingly; it does not just go in at birth and come out at death—he is the channel for an ever-moving stream, a stream that carries the blood through his veins, that moves his lungs and brings him air to breathe, that raises his food from the earth and bears the light of the sun to his face. If we look into a single cell of his body we find the universe, for sun, moon, and stars are ceaselessly maintaining it; we find it again if we plumb into the depths of his mind, for there are all the archaic urges of primeval life, both human and animal, and could we look deeper we might find kinship with the plants and rocks. For man is a meeting place for the interplay of forces from all quarters of the universe, swept through him in a stream which is the power behind all his thoughts and actions, which is indeed more truly man’s self than his body or mind, its instruments. This was known to almost all the ancient peoples of the world whose sages taught that all the actions of man were as much expressions of nature’s unceasing movement as the sun and the wind—a fact that would be obvious to anyone not born and bred in a place where there was little more to see than human handiwork.

The isolation of the human soul from nature is, generally speaking, a phenomenon of civilization. This isolation is more apparent than real, because the more nature is held back by brick, concrete, and machines, the more it reasserts itself in the human mind, usually as an unwanted, violent, and troublesome visitor. But actually the creations of man, his art, his literature, his buildings, differ only in quality, not in kind, from such creations of nature as birds’ nests and honeycombs. Man’s creations are infinitely more numerous and ingenious, but this very ingenuity, together with his fear, aggravates his feeling of isolation, persuading him that he is a creator in his own right, separate from nature. For once again it would go against his self-esteem to have to admit that his superb faculty of reason and all its works do not make him the master of nature rather than its servant. Bewitched by his power of reason and urged on through fright of his fear man seeks his freedom in isolation from and not union with nature—“whose service is perfect freedom.”

Man’s struggle for mastery is magnificent and tragic; but it does not work. And the difficulty is not so much in what he does as in what he thinks. If he were to seek union instead of isolation this would not involve what is generally called “getting back to nature”; he would not have to give up his machines and cities and retire to the forests and live in wigwams. He would only have to change his attitude, for the penalties he pays for his isolation are only indirectly on the physical plane. They originate from and are most severe in his mind.

What are these penalties? We give them the broad name of unhappiness, and though this is not something peculiar to civilization, civilization offers us an extreme case especially in the world of today. Of course, it is not possible for us to know whether we are any less happy than savages, nor whether we suffer less. All men suffer, now as well as in ancient times, but not all are unhappy, for unhappiness is a reaction to suffering, not suffering itself. Therefore, generally speaking, the primitive was unhappy from his conflict with the external forces of nature. But the unhappiness of civilized man is chiefly the result of conflict with natural forces inside himself and inside human society, forces that are all the more dangerous and violent because they come in unrecognized and unwanted at the back door.

The Importance of Conflict

The meaning of civilization is nowhere better explained than in the parable of the Prodigal Son.³

A certain man had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living.…The younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance in riotous living. And when he had spent all there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.…And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him. And when he came to himself he said,…I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose and came to his father.…And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat and be merry.…Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant.…And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him. And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee…and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends: but as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf. And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry…for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.

Civilized man is the prodigal, and the primitive is the elder son who always stayed at home—unconsciously in harmony with nature, living more by instinct than intellect and without the civilized man’s acute self-consciousness. The primitive differs from us in somewhat the same way as the child differs from the adult. The child has no psychological problems of its own, and even if it has they are only latent and do not manifest themselves until later life. Its inner affairs are managed partly by nature and partly by its parents; not until the sense of self-consciousness is fully developed does it feel that sense of responsibility which arises when we become aware of our power to direct and control our own affairs. But when man attains that state of self-consciousness he becomes a Prodigal; he feels isolated and lonely, and more particularly in his “low” moments is certain that the universe is against him. Superficially his whole culture is a violation of nature; he becomes utterly dependent on his machines and perishes when left to fend for himself against the elements. But soon comes the “famine.” In our own day war and economic disorganization are the “famine”; there is no actual scarcity of wealth; men starve only because of human stupidity. In time there are some who “come to themselves,” realizing that in some way or other we must return to nature and experience in full consciousness the harmony which the primitive has by unconscious instinct.

But it is not often realized that the apparent departure from nature which we have in civilization is an absolutely essential stage in man’s development. Without it we should remain like the elder son in the parable, jealous and unappreciative. For only those who have sinned can understand and appreciate the bliss of redemption. Perhaps, therefore, this wandering away from nature is not so unnatural after all, for it seems that our task is not to go back to nature but forward. The Hindus represent the evolution of man as a circle. Starting at the top he falls, instinctively and unconsciously, to the bottom, at which point they say he enters the extreme of materiality and self-consciousness, the age of Kali Yuga. From thereon he must climb up the second half of the circle and so return in full consciousness to the point from which he began. But truly to be united with nature again, he must first experience that absolute division between himself and the universe (or life).

At this point, however, two things must be remembered: first, that civilized man’s division from nature is only apparent, and it would seem that this very appearance is part of a natural scheme of evolution, something into which we have grown by instinct as the caterpillar grows into a chrysalis; second, that although the return journey is done in consciousness, it is not done by consciousness, by the efforts of the self-conscious ego. This part of the journey is again as natural as the development of chrysalis into butterfly, and any attempt to force this growth egotistically is like trying to open the chrysalis with tweezers. It only results in keeping us back in the state of acute opposition between ourselves and life.

Here again we meet with the familiar proverb that those who search for happiness do not find it, because they are trying to manufacture it by the very means which defeat it. Therefore the first step on the homeward journey is to understand that we have never actually been cut off from nature at all, that our present acute conflict with life is necessary, is part of a natural purpose and that self-consciousness is not a denial but a fulfillment of natural law. In other words, we have to accept that conflict, because the ego can no more extract itself from it than a tooth can pull itself out of your jaw. The second step arises naturally from the first: by accepting the conflict between itself and life as part of the nature of life, the ego begins to feel itself in harmony with the “dark” side of nature. For the conflict becomes unhappiness only through our desire to escape from it, which adds one tension to another. But when it is accepted we make a paradoxical discovery, namely that by accepting the ego and the conflict which it involves we also accept and become united with that which stands behind the ego and takes on self-conscious form, that is, with nature. (See diagram on the next page.)

The Historical Background

It is important to consider this problem in relation to its historical background and to discover some of the ways in which the modern divorcement from nature developed. What is said here is true, in the main, only for Western peoples rooted in the European and Christian tradition, which is to say, for the white races. The Oriental has a different problem, at least in its preliminary stages. Of course, it is impossible to say just exactly when the modern conflict began, but an obvious and convenient starting point may be found in Catholic philosophy of the Middle Ages, although its seeds may be noticed even earlier in late Roman times. Christianity differs from many other religions in according the existence of an immortal soul only to man. The rest of creation exists principally for man’s convenience, for no other living creature is of any special significance in the divine plan. This view was never shared by the Hindus or the Chinese, and a Buddhist scripture says that in time even trees and grass shall become Buddhas. But in early Christian thought and practice there was, with few exceptions, an utter lack of concern for anything beyond the salvation of man. It was not surprising, therefore, that Christianity took on an increasingly human or anthropomorphic conception of God. His nature was made to correspond more and more with human reason while the “merely animal,” the “irrational” in nature, was more and more identified with the Devil, so that Christianity saw in the beauties of nature little more than a snare for the unwary soul, an essentially sinful world, doomed in the end to perish and give way to a supernatural Paradise.

But the thinkers of the Renaissance did not seem to share this idea, for apparently they were concerned far more with the human and natural than with the spiritual and supernatural. They were the forerunners of the natural sciences. Among them were such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Francis Bacon, men who, as the latter boasted, “took all knowledge for their province.” But their preoccupation was still with man, and with the rational aspect of man as distinct from the divine on the one hand, and the bestial on the other. Certainly they found a new interest in the world of animals, trees, flowers, rocks, stars, and mountains, but only to discover therein analogies of the human being; they knew almost nothing of the Chinese and Japanese feeling for nature as nature. In their belief “the proper study of mankind was man.” And in this, for instance, we find the principal difference between Dante and Shakespeare, the former concerned with man in the supernatural world, the latter with man in his own human world, for “what a peece of worke is man, how noble in reason, how infinit in faculties, in form and moving, how expresse and admirable in action, how like an Angell in apprehension, how like a God!”

The faith of Humanism in the capacity of human reason to solve all problems and subdue all nature made possible the astounding advance of rational science in our epoch, for mathematics and machinery are constructed in the very image of human intellect, sharing its rigid and inevitable logic. But by making a god of this faculty man tends to become machinelike, for reason is essentially the mechanical aspect of the mind. Its laws of logic are as predetermined as the motions of a steam engine, for a given cause can have only one effect and in this principle the universe is reduced to a machine whose every event has been fated from all eternity. Having discovered the potentialities of his reason man became obsessed with it, and the mechanical Weltanschauung of nineteenth-century science, the Utopia of machines conceived by Wells, and the social anthill of Marx were logical results.

Similar changes came to pass in religion. It is particularly significant that the rediscovery of reason should have been accompanied by the birth of Puritan morality and Calvinistic Protestantism with its doctrine of determinism as reactions against “Popish superstition.” With the confessional gone and the dark side of life rigidly suppressed, man’s unmoral nature was denied and rejected by religion as forcibly as his irrational nature was thrown down by science. This is not to say, however, that Protestantism was essentially a rational system; it was not, and consequently came increasingly into conflict with science as the years went by. But the conflict was concerned rather with matters of theory than with those of practice, for though Protestantism was not doctrinally rational in the strictest sense of the word, it was rational in its psychology. Its beliefs were based to a great extent upon literal interpretation of the Bible, but its morality was founded mainly on the spirit of Jewish law as set forward in the Old Testament, and it is curious that though doctrinally both Lutheranism and Methodism are anything but legalistic, their standards of morality follow the rigid Puritan tradition. A similar inconsistency may be noted in Calvinism, for belief in predestination, in the doctrine that each man is irrevocably damned or saved from the beginning of the world, might easily encourage moral laxity, seeing that nothing that man can do can affect his ultimate fate. But the result was the very opposite, and nowhere were there more uncompromising moralists than the Calvinists.

Such morality is rational in that it is an attempt to force mankind to conform in thought and action to a rigid and idealistic law. This may be giving a rather wide meaning to the term “rational,” but in essentials there is little difference between attempts to force man to be moral and attempts to make him reasonable. There may be differences between the moral ideal and the rational ideal, but as they were conceived in the Puritan and Humanist traditions they were ideals contrary to nature in that they ignored that aspect of man’s being which corresponds to “nature red in tooth and claw.” Indeed, prior to the twentieth-century rationalist and Puritan ideals had numerous points in common, especially among the Anglo-Saxon peoples. For the ideals of progress, of the rational society of liberty, equality, and fraternity, of pure communism, were not originated in the eighteenth century by the rationalistic philosophers of France. As important forces they first came to light in Puritan England of the seventeenth century.⁴

Yet these ideals, especially the purely rationalistic, held within themselves the seeds of their own decay. It is interesting to note that, so far as science was concerned, in spite of its exaltation of human reason there arose, as in religion, an inconsistency between its doctrine and its psychology and practice. It removed man from nature and made him its master by giving him machines and by overestimating the potentialities of his reason; yet in theory it showed his essential connection with and subservience to nature. Man was evolved from animals and was not a special creation of the Deity; furthermore, he might think himself free, but the universal law of causality made it obvious that his every thought and deed was predetermined and that he was as helpless a tool in nature’s hands as a drifting cloud. But determinism is a doctrine which self-assertive man has never taken seriously (as witness the Calvinists); it convinces his head but not his heart, and in practice he has to temper it with what Vaihinger calls the philosophy of “as if,” for he behaves as if he were free. But in the glorification of human reason there was an appeal to his pride, and reason had something to show for itself in steam engines, factories, medicine, electric power, airplanes, and radio. But the god of reason had some serious reverses, one of the most important of which came out of science itself, as a result of the uncomfortable and searching inquiries of a certain Sigmund Freud into matters connected with the other aspect of scientific discovery—the inseparability of man and nature.

Freud, Original Sin, and the Unconscious

The rationalists of the nineteenth century were essentially optimists, and it was not surprising that they had no more taste for Freud than for the Church’s doctrine of original sin. Their faith in the ideal of progress and the certain triumph of reason was not at all in harmony with Freud’s contention that man’s highest aspirations had their origin in unconscious forces of a very different character, forces to which he gave such unpleasant names as “incest wishes,” “castration complexes,” “mother or father fixations,” and other phrases of bluntly sexual type. Nor did rationalism take kindly to so irrational an idea as that man’s unconscious goal might be to reenter the womb and revert to a condition of protected irresponsibility, floating blissfully in a warm, sleepy darkness. But Freud’s teaching was original sin in a new garb, for it showed the unregenerate Adam behind a thin shell of reason, and if man’s highest aspirations were just “rationalizations” of these dark, unconscious forces, did not this go to prove a fundamental doctrine of the Church? Did it not show that man’s efforts to save himself by exercise of his unaided will and reason are fruitless? For Humanism and rationalism had altogether neglected a mysterious factor called the Grace of God, believing that the human mind was sufficiently powerful to work out its own salvation. And by the mind they understood merely that aspect of the soul known as intellect.

Now we have seen that intellect is the thinking machine; a power drives that machine, but whatever the character of that power the machine can only interpret it in a mechanical way. Therefore when it has to accept an irrational impulse it rationalizes it in the course of putting it into effect. When the unregenerate Adam desires blood just for the sake of blood, the reasoning machine has to find a reasonable purpose for shedding blood, however specious. And it finds it because in many ways the intellect has the most intricately subtle power of adaptation and an almost infinite capacity for self-deception. For it is of immense importance to the self-esteem of the ego that rationalizations should be convincing; otherwise man must admit his failure to stand above nature.

Nevertheless, Freudian doctrine aroused little sympathy until after the Great War when it achieved sudden success, primarily through the ability of its method of psychological healing to cure cases of shell shock. But the outburst of the unregenerate Adam in the war itself made Freud’s ideas much more acceptable, though it is surprising how many intelligent people even today will refuse to admit that they have such a thing as an unconscious mind. They regard it as quite an impertinence for anyone to suggest that they do not always know why they want what they want and do what they do. Yet they are quite ready to admit that they do not know why their bodies produce such mysterious things as cancers and that they are quite unaware of what is going on in their kidneys, hearts, and bowels. Thus if there are unconscious realms and activities in the body, it seems reasonable to suggest, if only by analogy, that there is an unconscious aspect of the mind.⁵

The Contribution of Jung

Analogy might suggest even more than this. The physical body has intimate connections with the entire material universe, most of which are equally unconscious, and might it not be supposed that the unconscious mind extends its roots far beyond the individual, having begun long before he was conceived in the womb? With much more than analogy to support this idea, Freud’s pupil C. G. Jung propounded a theory of the unconscious which came close to the fringes of mysticism.⁶ For to him the unconscious mind is personal only on its surface; essentially it is collective, racial, and perhaps universal, for Jung found that in their dreams modern men and women spontaneously produced myths and symbols thousands of years old of which they had no conscious knowledge. Thus the infantile sex life of the individual was a comparatively unimportant factor in the unconscious, and Freud’s analysis was found to be just the first important step into this undiscovered realm.

The significance of the idea of the unconscious is twofold, for it reveals a natural universe on the inside of man as well as on the outside. It also raises important questions as to the character of man’s real self. I have already suggested that this self lies much deeper than conscious reason and intellect, deeper even than man’s individuality which appears more and more to be an instrument animated by natural and universal forces. Now that we find the roots of the soul descending far below the personal level, we can understand why Jung describes the ego (which we ordinarily regard as our central self) as a complex of the unconscious. That is to say, it is a device employed by the unconscious mind to achieve certain results; in the same way the apparently self-contained human body is a device employed by nature to achieve certain results. But it must not be thought that this employment of a device is necessarily purposive in the same way that the reasoned actions of human beings are, for human purpose may be only a rationalization of natural impulse, as reason can only operate in terms of purpose.

To us these ideas are very new. But I said that they bordered on mysticism because in fact they would have been well understood by many of the ancient peoples of the world. Thus to the Hindus man’s self was identified with his individual person only because of his limited vision; they knew that if this vision could be enlarged, he would discover that his true self was Brahman. In other words, man’s ego is a trick or device (maya)⁷ to assist the functions of life, for if life is to manifest itself it must do so in the form of separate things. Life as such is one and has no form; nobody has ever seen life without a form. Thus, according to the Vedic teaching of the Hindus, Brahman is one and has in itself no form, and hence Brahman as such cannot do anything, cannot express itself. Action and expression can only be achieved when Brahman manifests itself in these devices or forms, and therefore they say that actions are done by the forms and not by Brahman.

Parallel teachings may be found in other ancient civilizations, notably the Egyptian and Chinese. Thus in the Shabaka inscription of ancient Egypt we find:⁸

Ptah lived as the governor in every body, and as the tongue in every mouth of all the gods, all cattle, all reptiles and everything else.…Thus every kind of work and every handicraft, and everything done with the arms, and every motion of the legs, and every action of all the limbs take place through his command, which…giveth value to everything.

And the Chinese sage Chuang Tzu writing about 200 BC says:⁹

Your body is the delegated image of Tao. Your life is not your own. It is the delegated harmony of Tao. Your individuality is not your own. It is the delegated adaptability of Tao.…You move, but know not how. You are at rest, but know not why.…These are the operations of the laws of Tao.

Such illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely, and there is every reason to believe that this was not just speculative philosophy. These ancient sages wrote not what they thought but what they felt, and the intuitive and poetic quality of their wisdom is emphasized by the fact that they simply stated what they felt and seldom, if ever, argued the point.

But modern man demands that his reason be convinced and expects his philosophy to be argued like a proposition in geometry. Among thinking people this is a heritage some five hundred years old at least and neither Freud nor wars and crises will make him doubt the supremacy of reason in a mere thirty years. But this heritage has left him in an awkward position having slain his faith in the psychologically satisfying doctrines of the Church, for there is no doubt that those who can really believe in a loving God, in the redemptive power of His Christ, and in the efficacy of confession, penance, and absolution, are essentially happy people. They feel themselves to lie in the everlasting arms of a Father whose demands on them are not too exacting because, having taken on human flesh Himself, He knows its frailties and because, having understood all, He can forgive all. For this and other reasons the Catholic Church is a master in the art of relieving man of his responsibilities, and where its priests do not indulge in petty politics and mild terrorism its people are among the happiest on earth. For they are able to trust life, knowing that however much it may pain them its master will never let them down.

The New Religions

But what of those whose reason will not allow them to believe these things? What do they do when the pains of life become too much? The majority, I suppose, try to forget them, and civilization offers countless ways of escape—movies, sports, magazines, mystery novels, high-speed travel, and the more time-honored remedies of wine, women, and song, all of which while being instructive, entertaining, and relatively harmless do not really solve the problem. For underlying all and the unescapable, wearing threats of economic insecurity and war, the tense, nerve-wracking struggle of business, the social and economic barriers to normal sex life coupled with the saddest misunderstanding of the art of marriage, the frustration of trying to make oneself a place in a huge, unwieldy community that cares nothing for you—one might compile quite a long list. And to know that the escapes do not work one has just to look at faces, especially when people think they are not being watched.

Then there are those who, being fundamentally religious and yet skeptical of orthodox Christianity, resort to the various new religions with which modern society abounds—Christian Science, Theosophy, Spiritualism, Buchmanism, Rosicrucianism, not to mention those unnamed cults which revolve around such personalities as Krishnamurti, Ouspensky, Meher Baba, Alice Bailey, the Ballards, Gurdjieff, Crowley, and a thousand other lesser teachers whose followers are comparatively few but often influential.¹⁰ In the same category must be included those who have found a substitute for religion in one of the many schools of the new psychology, some of which are almost semireligious in a certain sense of the word. But this category is especially interesting because although the man in the street may have little or no knowledge of such things, they are becoming increasingly popular among the intelligentsia, and in small, unobtrusive ways their influence slowly extends to society as a whole. It has often been observed that members of this category and also of the churches are predominantly women approaching or past the middle of life—a class which seems to constitute a special problem in the modern world. Many were deprived of their husbands in the Great War, others have lost them somewhat early in life for American men in particular are apt to die young through business worries and nervous strain. Others still are those who have failed to marry at all or who have made unsuccessful marriages. Thus it is often concluded that their interest in these matters is simply the result of sexual frustration. But while this may well be a contributory cause in some cases, it should be remembered that people naturally acquire an interest in religion in the latter half of life, having accomplished their mundane duties, and that women are more inclined to religious feeling than men. Perceiving this as a natural phenomenon the Hindus divided life into two main stages. In the first man’s duties consisted of Artha and Kama, the fulfillment of the duties of citizenship and the fulfillment of the senses—making a position in the world and establishing a family on the one hand, and the life of love, sex, and aesthetics on the other. When these were completed came the stage of Dharma or devotion to religion.

Apart from the definite adherents of these new religious and “religio-psychological” groups there are innumerable “seekers” who find no one creed fully satisfying, and who drift from group to group, seeking they know not what unless it is that magical knowledge which will solve all problems and set their souls free from fear. Sometimes they think they have almost found it in this or that “ism,” but what a strange place to look for the secret of life! Surely it is more likely that this secret will be found in life itself and not in doctrines and ideas about life?

Some look for Truth in creeds and forms and rules;

Some search for doubts and dogmas in the schools,

But from behind the Veil a Voice proclaims,

“Your road lies neither here nor there, O fools!”

For the peculiar thing is that both what we are trying to escape and what we are trying to find are inside ourselves. This, as we have seen, is almost more true of modern man than of the primitive, for our difficulty is what to do with ourselves rather than the external world.

Thus, at the risk of repeating a truism, it is obvious that unless we can come face to face with the difficulty in ourselves, everything to which we look for salvation is nothing more than an extra curtain with which to hide that difficulty from our eyes. Whether salvation is sought in mere forgetting or in a definite attempt to find salvation either through religion, philosophy, or psychological healing the same principle applies. Psychological healing in particular has been devised for the very purpose of enabling man to face himself, to accept nature in himself with all its primeval desires and fears. Oddly enough, however, many of the most fervent devotees of psychology are outstanding examples of its failure to help them. It does not attempt to offer comforting doctrines about this world or the hereafter like many forms of religion and philosophy, nor does it hold out promises of power and success. It digs ruthlessly into the secret places of the heart and drags out man’s most carefully guarded mysteries, and yet one has met accredited and fully qualified practitioners of this science who appear to be anything but reconciled to themselves or to life. For it seems that even the acceptance of life can be used as a means to escape it.

The Instrument of Freedom

But this is not surprising. The seekers for forgetfulness, salvation, and health of the mind alike want happiness, and therefore among these classes one cannot expect to find happy people. Those who are happy are interested in religion mainly as a means of expressing their gratitude to life and God and of enabling others to see as they do; they are not looking for personal salvation, for they do not think about such things. But how can they enable others to see as they do if it is true that while those who have happiness do not search for it, those who have not cannot find it by seeking?

We have examined something of the meaning of unhappiness, of the war between the opposites in the human soul, of the fear of fear, of man’s consequent isolation from nature, and of the way in which this isolation has been intensified in the growth of civilization. We have also shown how man is intimately and inseparably connected with the material and mental universe, and that if he tries to cut himself off from it he must perish. In fact, however, he can only cut himself off in imagination, otherwise he would cease to exist, but we have yet to decide whether this elusive thing called happiness would result from acceptance of the fact of man’s union with the rest of life. But if this is true we have to discover how such an acceptance may be made, whether it is possible for man to turn in his flight into isolation and overcome the panic which makes him try to swim against the current instead of with it. In the psychological realm this swimming against the current is called repression, the reaction of proud, conscious reason to the fears and desires of nature in man. This raises the further question of whether acceptance of nature involves just a return to the amorality of the beast, being simply a matter of throwing up all responsibility, following one’s whims, and drifting about on the tide of life like a fallen leaf. To return to our analogy: life is the current into which man is thrown, and though he struggles against it, it carries him along despite all his efforts, with the result that his efforts achieve nothing but his own unhappiness. Should he then just turn about and drift? But nature gave him the faculties of reason and conscious individuality, and if he is to drift he might as well have been without them. It is more likely that he has them to give expression to immeasurably greater possibilities of nature than the animal can express by instinct, for while the animal is nature’s whistle, man is its organ.

Even so, man does not like to be put down to the place of an instrument, however grand that instrument may be, for an instrument is an instrument, and an organ does what it is made to do as subserviently and blindly as a whistle. But this is not the only consideration. It may be that man has a wrong idea of what his self is. In the words of the Hindu sage Patanjali, “Ignorance is the identification of the Seer with the instruments of seeing.”¹¹ Certainly man as instrument is an obedient tool whether he likes it or not, but it may be that there is something in man which is more than the instrument, more than his reason and individuality which are part of that instrument and which he mistakenly believes to be his true self. And while as an instrument he is bound, as this he is free, and his problem is to become aware of it. Finding it, he will understand that in fleeing from death, fear, and sorrow he is making himself a slave, for he will realize the mysterious truth that in fact he is free both to live and to die, to love and to fear, to rejoice and to be sad, and that in none of these things is there any shame. But man rejects his freedom to do them, imagining that death, fear, and sorrow are the causes of his unhappiness. The real cause is that he does not let himself be free to accept them, for he does not understand that he who is free to love is not really free unless he is also free to fear, and this is the freedom of happiness.