The Meaning of Happiness

2. THE ANSWER OF RELIGION

The oldest answers in the world to the problem of happiness are found in religion, for the kind of happiness we are considering belongs to the deepest realms of the human spirit. But this should not lead us to suppose that it is something remote from familiar experience, something to be sought out in supernatural spheres far beyond the world which we know through our five senses. The world of the spirit is so often understood in an almost materialistic way, as a locality infinite in space containing things that are eternal in terms of time.¹ It is thought to be a world corresponding in form and substance to our own, save that its forms and substances are constructed of spirit instead of matter, and its operations governed by different laws, for nothing changes—all things are everlasting. To understand the world of the spirit in this way is to make it wholly different from the world in which we live, and when religion is concerned with this kind of spiritualism a great gulf appears between the world of the spirit and the world of everyday experience, contact with the former being possible only in a disembodied condition, as after death, or in a state of consciousness where we acquire a new set of senses, spiritual senses that can perceive things to which material vision is not attuned.

This view of spirituality is so common in religion that many people believe salvation to lie utterly beyond our present life, being something for which earthly existence is only a preparation and which will be inherited either when we have passed beyond the grave or when, even though still living, our thoughts have ascended to a higher sphere so that we are in this world but not of it. It is probable, however, that this idea has arisen because so much religious teaching is presented in the form of allegory; spiritual truths are presented in terms of time and space for purposes of simplification. Heaven and hell are removed in time to the life after death and in place to a different world order; eternity is represented as unending time, which is not eternity but everlastingness. This kind of simplification may have its uses, but in many ways it is an unnecessary complication for the conception has greater value if we think of heaven and hell as here and now, and of eternity as the timeless, eternal Now.

Religion as a Denial of Life

However, this is one of the main trends of thought in religion as generally understood, besides which there is yet another believing that spiritual happiness is attainable on earth but in a somewhat utopian and materialistic way. Both of these trends exist in Christianity, some holding that “on this earth we have no continuing home, therefore we seek one to come,” and others working for the establishment of the “kingdom of heaven on earth.” The Christian holding the former opinion feels that he can never be at home in this world which he regards as a kind of anteroom to the life hereafter, a place of trial and temptation where God tests the fitness of His children to enter His kingdom. At the same time he will thank his Lord for all the blessings of this earth, for the pleasures which give him joy as well as for the pains which give opportunities to learn wisdom. Yet he is not content with those pleasures, and because they are so fleeting he regards them as mere hints of the glories of paradise which shall endure forever and ever.

But in modern Christianity especially there is another element which existed in olden times, though in a different form. An article of the Apostles’ Creed is the belief in the resurrection of the body,² the belief that the world to come is not only a spiritual state but also a condition of life where the physical world has been recreated by spiritual power. It is said that God will create a new heaven and a new earth, and that “the kingdom of this world shall become the Kingdom of Our Lord and of His Christ.” The modern Christian is apt to regard this teaching in rather a different way, for whereas his ancestors viewed it as something which would happen only at the last day when all the dead would rise from their graves, the modern view is rather that the kingdom of heaven on earth is something which man may create by the Grace of God here and now. Hence the increasing interest of the churches in idealistic politics. Morality becomes something to be practiced, not only to ensure salvation in the world to come, but to improve the lot of mankind in the world as it is. For Christianity has become linked to the idea of progress, and the churches are the foremost advocates of peace, of social service, and of political and economic justice.

But both among Christians and among followers of other religions there are those who feel that such ideals are rather naive, either because they seem impossible of achievement or else because they do not seem very desirable. Spiritual happiness, as they understand it, has little to do with either material well-being or everlasting glory in a paradise of heavenly music and streets of pure gold. But they share the same suspicion of the world as it is, believing the highest illumination of the spirit unattainable in the flesh or under the particular limitations of the senses which compel us to view life as a transient alternation of pleasure and pain.

For many centuries there has been a tendency of this kind in the religions of the East, of which the most notable example is Hinayana Buddhism—the type of Buddhism with which the West is most familiar. The Hinayana takes the most gloomy view of the world of any religion, and seeks escape from it by the quickest possible means to a state which is not exactly complete annihilation, but a kind of vague, infinite consciousness from which all personality, all sense of individual identity, and all diversity of form have been removed. In this state there is no pain because there is no pleasure, and no death because there is no longer anyone to die. The gist of its teaching is that when you realize that your personal self does not exist, then you are free of suffering, for suffering can arise only when there is a person to suffer. The same may be said of pleasure, with the result that the Hinayana ideal is a state of tastelessness which is held to be the highest attainable bliss.

A similar ideal might be found by a casual examination of the teachings of Hindu Vedanta as expressed in the Upanishads. For it seems as if the supreme aspiration of the Hindu yogi is to become merged into the infinite Brahman, the one reality of which all diverse forms are illusory expressions. In common with the Hinayana Buddhist, he finds the world unsatisfying because of the impermanence of its glories. Therefore he fights against all those things in himself which move him to seek happiness in the pleasures of the world, learning to see the changing forms of life as a web of delusion hiding the face of God. To him all things are God; mountains, trees, rivers, men, and beasts only seem to be what they are because of the limitations of his own senses. Once those limitations are overcome, the world of diverse form vanishes and there remains only the vast and void infinitude of Brahman in whom is eternal rest and bliss.

Such ideas are frequent in Eastern thought, although they do not represent its deepest meaning. To most of us they are abstract and incomprehensible. Nevertheless, countless religious people maintain that the end and aim of our life here on earth is an eternal condition whose characteristics may be described in one of the following ways. First, a state beyond death wherein the beauties of life are greatly magnified and all its pains and limitations overcome. Second, a state in this life wherein earthly pains and limitations have been overcome by the exercise of human reason and skill, inspired by the Grace of God. Third, a state attainable either in the body or out of it where human consciousness has been raised above the limits imposed upon it by the personal self and its five senses, wherein all diversity of form, all pairs of opposites, have been merged into the infinite and formless divine essence from which they originally came.

Abolishing the Universe

All these three have certain elements in common. There is a distaste for the world as it is, implying that the wrong is not so much in the external world as in one’s own imperfect self, which is either doomed to live in this world on account of those imperfections or else which sees that world falsely, being deluded by imperfect senses. There is also the hope for an eternal state in which good things are made permanent or abolished altogether along with the evil. And, most significant of all, there is the implication that one of these religious states is the ultimate purpose of our earthly existence, from which it must follow that appropriate religious activities are fundamentally the only worthwhile pursuits for mankind. All other pursuits must therefore be considered subordinate and ephemeral, and in this view art, literature, music, politics, science, drama, exploration, and sport become vain and empty unless they are regarded simply as means of keeping body and soul together in reasonable comfort, or unless they are used for specifically religious purposes. Apart from these two uses they become simply the trimmings of life, the mere gilt on the pill, mere “relaxations” to assuage in as harmless a manner as possible our carnal nature lest its sufferings become too great for us to bear.

The direction of this kind of religion is even more apparent when we consider the various ways and means prescribed for attaining such ideals. Among civilized peoples there are two principal ways of approach to the religious ideal, both of which have various common elements. Both are founded on the idea that the search for spiritual happiness in worldly pleasures is a snare because those pleasures are impermanent; they do, perhaps, impart a certain happiness, but because that happiness is entirely dependent on external circumstances it disappears as soon as those circumstances change. But there is something in man which makes it exceedingly hard for him to avoid the pursuit of earthly pleasures, and this tendency religion attempts to vanquish by a strongly hostile attitude to them. Hence the general antipathy in religion to all that pertains to the senses, and especially to the most elementary and important of earthly pleasures which are to be found in the sexual functions.

The first of the two ways of approach to the religious ideal is found mainly in Christianity. It is the way of mortification of the flesh in order that the eyes may be turned from the snares of the world to the eternal glories of the world beyond. By prayer, fasting, and acts of charity, by abstinence from fleshly delights, man may make himself fit to receive, feel, and rejoice in the Grace of God which senses deluded by earthly things cannot appreciate. If the senses are coarsened by carnal pleasures, man becomes incapable of entering either now or hereafter into that realm of supernatural glory to which the Grace of God belongs. By its light he is not illumined but burned because of his impurities, for only those things which have been refined of all evil can exist within it.

The second way is similar in most respects, save that it is a way of self-development, wherein the individual relies not on God, but on his own power of willing. It is found in Buddhism and Vedanta, and consists of exercises in mortification and meditation whose object is similarly to refine the senses, to turn them away from the snares of the world, and finally to root out from the soul the sense of personal identity and self-sufficiency and its desire to find happiness in the forms of life.

Obviously we are discussing some of the more extreme forms of religious theory and practice; generally speaking, their outward forms have been increasingly modified in the course of years. But there has been little change in the underlying philosophy, which amounts virtually to the complete denial of life as we understand it. For according to this kind of teaching the world of the senses has been made for the sole purpose of encompassing the human soul with a variety of snares. Even the “highest” delights of the senses such as are to be found in the arts are “trimmings,” and the less refined joys of eating and sex are just tolerated insofar as they are used only for the purpose of maintaining and reproducing life. Today the harsh attitude of religion to these things has been appreciably softened, but this softening is rather a concession to human nature than an attempt to alter the fundamental premises of religious doctrine. And a mere concession to human nature it will remain while so many types of religious philosophy regard the material and spiritual worlds as irreconcilably opposed.

The problem is important because it affects the usefulness of religion to the greater part of mankind. The belief is still generally prevalent that those who wish to “go furthest” in religion must practice extremes of fasting and chastity and other forms of cumbersome discipline to acquire the necessary spiritual sensitivity for making contact with states of consciousness and mystical insight which less refined senses can no more experience than a jaded palate can taste the subtleties of a fine wine. But this refining and exaltation of consciousness by means of asceticism is obviously a vocation for the very few, for even if it were practicable for the majority it would not be altogether desirable to have the world converted into a vast Tibet. It would be wiser to heed the warning of Lucretius, “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,” or “Too much religion is apt to encourage evil.”

But if the highest illumination of the spirit is only attainable by such means, of what use is religion to the ordinary run of mankind? It may encourage them to a greater morality; it may even teach them to love one another, though the course of history does not suggest that there has been much success in this. It may also give them a sense of the reality of a Father God to whom they can pray as “a very present help in time of trouble.” But this does not begin to exhaust the possibilities of religion because it comes nowhere near to the real essentials of religion; it scarcely touches what is called “religious experience,” without which doctrines, rites, and observances are the emptiest shells. It cannot be assumed that because most religious people are moral, moral people are therefore religious. As Wilde said, “When I am happy I am always good, but when I am good I am seldom happy,” and this becomes more true than ever if by happiness we mean the state that arises from religious experience.

The Religious Experience

Religious experience is something like artistic or musical inspiration, though “inspiration” is a word that through misuse has unfortunate associations; religious experience is not “uplift” or flighty emotionalism. Strictly speaking, a composer is inspired when melody emerges from the depths of his mind, how or why we do not know. To convey that melody to others he writes it down on paper, employing a technical knowledge which enables him to name the notes which he hears in his mind. This fact is important: his technical knowledge does not create the tune in his mind; it simply provides him with a complicated alphabet, and is no more the source of music than the literary alphabet and the rules of grammar are the sources of men’s ideas. If he is writing a symphony he will want to orchestrate his melody, but to do this he does not look up the books on harmony and orchestration to find out what combinations of notes he is advised by the rules to put together. He has heard the whole symphony in his mind with every instrument playing its independent part, and his knowledge of orchestration and harmony simply enables him to tell which is which. What music teachers call the “rules” of harmony are just observations on the harmonies most usually used by such people as Bach and Beethoven. Bach and Beethoven did not use them because they were in the rules but because they liked their sound, and if people’s tastes change so that they like other sounds then the old harmonic forms are replaced. It is necessary for a composer to study harmony in order that he may be able to identify chords which he hears in his mind, but he does not use his knowledge to construct chords unless he is a mere imitator of other people. In the same way, language is used not to create thoughts but to express them, and mastery of prose does not make a great thinker.

The spiritual genius works in the same way as the musical genius. He has a wider scope because his technique of expression, his alphabet, is every possible human activity. For some reason there arises in his soul a feeling of the most profound happiness, not because of some special event, but because of the whole of life. This is not necessarily contentment or joy; it is rather that he feels himself completely united to the power that moves the universe, whatever that may be. This feeling he expresses in two ways, firstly by living a certain kind of life, and secondly by translating his feeling into the form of thoughts and words.

People who have not had this feeling make observations on his actions and words, and from them formulate the “rules” of religious morality and theology. But this involves a strange distortion, for as a rule the observer goes about his work in the wrong way. When the mystic says, “I feel united with God,” the observer is interested primarily in the statement as a revelation of the existence of God, and goes on to consult the mystic’s other sayings to find out what kind of God this is and in what manner He behaves. He is interested only secondarily in the mystic’s feeling as a feeling, and it occurs to him only as an afterthought that it might be possible for himself to feel united with God. Whereat he proceeds to achieve this by trying to think in the same way as the mystic; that is to say, he takes the mystic’s ideas and substitutes them for his own. He also tries to behave in the same way, imitating the mystic’s actions. In other words, he tries to perform a kind of sympathetic magic, and in imitating the mystic’s external forms deceives himself and others into thinking that he is really like him. But the important thing about the mystic was his feeling, not his ideas and actions, for these were only reflections of the feeling, and a reflection existing without a light is a sham. Therefore just as great technical proficiency will not make a creative genius in music, morality, theology, and discipline will not make a genius in religion, for these things are results of religious experience, not causes, and by themselves can no more produce it than the tail can be made to wag the dog.

The Spiritual Irrelevance of Occultism

This is not the only example of confused thought in searching for religious experience. The other, which we have already mentioned, is the opposition made between the spiritual and the material. Much depends, of course, on the precise meaning given to the word “spirit,” but it should certainly not be confused with the word “psychic” and many things described as spiritual are clearly psychic. There is no definite rule as to how these words should be used, so to be explicit we have to make our own rules. And the spiritual, in the sense in which it is used here, is no more opposed to the material than white is opposed to long. The opposite of white is black, and of long, short; white things are no more necessarily short than material things are unspiritual. But we can say that the material and the psychic are opposed, if only in the sense that they are opposite ends of the same stick. Psychic things belong to the world explored by occultism and “psychic science”—telepathy, clairvoyance, mind reading, and all those phenomena which appear to require sixth or seventh senses whose development seems unquestionably to be assisted by ascetic practices. The so-called spiritual realms inhabited by departed souls, angels, elementals, and demons, and the source of beatific visions, would be most correctly described as psychic if we are to allow that such things have actual, objective existence. And this world is the logical opposite of the material world because it belongs in the same category; it contains forms and substances, even though its substance may be of a wholly different order from what we understand as matter. People who are in touch with this world, however, are not necessarily spiritual people; they may have unusual faculties of perception and be familiar with the beings and ways of a more glorious world than our own, but this is a matter of faculty and knowledge, not of spirituality. The technique of living employed by such people is more highly evolved than that of ordinary men, just as the technique of the opera is more complicated than that of pure drama. Opera involves not only acting but singing, playing music, and sometimes dancing, but this does not make it a greater art.

Spirituality belongs in the same category as happiness and freedom, and strictly speaking there is no such thing as the spiritual world. If psychic people are to be believed, there is a psychic world, and because it is a world entry into it is simply an enlargement of experience. But experience as such never made anyone either free or happy, and insofar as freedom and happiness are concerned with experience the important thing is not experience itself but what is learned from it. Some people learn from experience and others do not; some learn much from a little, others learn little from much. “Without going out of my house,” said the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, “I know the whole universe.” For the spiritual is in no way divided from the material, nor from the psychic, nor from any other aspect of life. To find it, it is not necessary to go from one state of consciousness to another, from one set of senses to another, or from one world to another. Such journeying about in the fields of experience takes you neither toward it nor away from it. In the words of the Psalmist:³

Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence?

If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall Thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.

Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to Thee.

In fact the spiritual world, if we must use the term, is this world and all possible worlds, and spiritual experience is what we are experiencing at this moment and at any moment—if we look at it in the right way.

Union with Life

This is the difference between religious or spiritual experience and artistic inspiration; both are analogous, but the latter is particularized. The artist or musician has a special type of creative genius; he creates pictures or music, for his genius is a specialized gift. But the spiritual genius is not a specialist, for he does not just paint or compose creatively: he lives creatively, and his tools are not confined to brush, pen, or instrument; they are all things touched by his hand. This is not to say that when he takes up a brush he can paint like Leonardo or that when he takes hammer and chisel he can work like a master mason. Spiritual experience involves neither technical proficiency nor factual knowledge; it is no shortcut to things that must ordinarily be mastered by pains and practice. Nor is spiritual experience necessarily expressed in any particular mode of life; its presence in any given individual cannot be judged by measurement in accordance with certain standards. It can only be felt intuitively, for creative living is not always outwardly distinguishable from any other kind of living; in fact, spiritual people are often at pains to appear as normal as possible. At the same time, although spiritual people may do exactly the same things as others, one feels that their actions are in some way different. There is a story of a Buddhist sage who was about to speak to his disciples when he found that he wanted more light. He pointed to a curtain covering one of the windows and instantly two of the disciples went and rolled it up, whereat the sage remarked, “One of them is right, but the other is wrong.”⁴

In itself, spirituality is purely an inner experience; it has no necessary effect whatsoever on one’s outward behavior judged from the standards of efficiency and worldly wisdom. This is not to say, however, that it is something absolutely private and personal, finding no expression that others can see. For spirituality is a deep sense of inner freedom based on the realization that one’s self is in complete union and harmony with life, with God, with the Self of the universe or whatever that principle may be called. It is the realization that that union has existed from all time, even though one did not know it, and that nothing in all the world nor anything that oneself can do is able to destroy it. It is thus the sense that the whole might of the universe is at work in one’s every thought and action, however trivial and small. In fact this is true of all men and all things, but only the spiritual man really knows it and his realization gives a subtly different quality to his life; all that he does becomes strangely alive, for though its outward appearance is perhaps the same as before it acquires a new meaning. It is this which other people notice, but if he has the gift for teaching they will see it in other ways as well. By his words as well as his deeds and his personal “atmosphere” they will understand that this realization has awakened in him a tremendous love for life in all its aspects.

Prose and the logic of philosophy cannot explain this love; one might as well try to describe a beautiful face by a mathematical account of its measurements and proportions. It is a mixture of the joy of freedom, a childlike sense of wonder, and the inner sensation of absolute harmony with life as in the rhythm of an eternal dance such as the Hindus portray in the interlocked figures of Shiva and his bride.⁵ In one sense you feel that your life is not lived by you at all; the power of the universe, fate and destiny, God Himself, are directing all your motions and all your responsibilities are blown to the winds. In another sense you feel free to move as you wish; you seem to be moving life with the same vast power with which life moves you, and your littlest acts become filled with gigantic possibilities. Indeed, physicists tell us that the stars are affected when we lift a single finger. The result of these two feelings is that you no longer distinguish between what you do to life and what life does to you; it is as if two dancers moved in such perfect accord that the distinction between lead and response vanished, as if the two became one and the same motion. By the whirling, ever-changing movement of this dance you are carried along without pause, but not like a drunken man in a torrent, for you as much as life are the source of the movement. And this is real freedom; it includes both freedom to move and to be moved; action and passivity are merged, and in spirituality as well as in marriage this is the fulfillment of love.

The Spirituality of Everyday Life

All this, however, does not take place in the ecstasy of trance, in some abstract state of consciousness where all shapes and substances have become merged into a single infinite essence. The spiritual man does not perform his ordinary activities as one in a dream, letting his surface thoughts and deeds run on mechanically. He can become just as much absorbed in the usual affairs of the world as anyone else, but in a certain way he sanctifies them for under his hands sharpening a pencil becomes as much a religious act as prayer or meditation. Indeed, he can afford to become absorbed in everyday affairs almost more than others, and he can do so with a certain zest and abandon for to him ordinary human thoughts and activities are as much included in the dance of the spirit as is anything else. This, indeed, is much of his secret, for he knows that spirituality does not consist in thinking always about the spiritual as such. His world is not divided into “watertight compartments” and his religion is not a special form of thought and activity, for the spiritual and the material are not separated.

But because a man does not occupy himself with the ordinary pursuits of mankind, this is no indication that he lacks spiritual understanding. He is free to follow whatever occupation he pleases—monk, philosopher, lawyer, clerk, or tradesman, but from the spiritual point of view a priest is not necessarily more holy than a truck driver. Furthermore, to obtain spiritual experience it is not essential to “vex your mournful minds with pious pains,” to spend years in the study of theology, to retire from the world, to become a vegetarian and teetotaler, to practice mental acrobatics and seek out “higher realms” of consciousness, to abstain from sexuality, or to develop such peculiar gifts as “fourth-dimensional vision.” Certainly these things are necessary for the professional philosopher or for that particular type of scientist whose field of research is the psychic world. If we are going to find out how our present senses may be developed, how we can tap sources of nervous energy as yet unused, how we can understand time in terms of space and see past and future at once, how we can transfer thought, or how we can acquire the faculty of immovable concentration, then indeed we have to go in training even more rigorously than the professional athlete. To acquire psychic faculties you must practice just as much as if you wanted to hold the world’s record for sprinting or to be able to walk on hot coals without being burned.

The Nonessentials of Religion

Religion as we understand it includes many things which do not strictly belong to it, because in olden times it had to fulfill functions which have now been taken over by scientists, doctors, and lawyers. At one time the major preoccupation of so-called religion was the study and manipulation of the unknown and the unseen; as these things became known and seen they passed out of the hands of priests. But when priests were considered the wisest of all men they were expected to have answers to all the problems which others did not understand. They were expected to know the causes of disease, the behavior and influence of the stars, the origin of such natural phenomena as thunder, storms, and famines, not to mention the more remote questions of what happens after death and whether there are gods and angels.

Many of these problems have now been taken over by science, though we are still ignorant of the life after death and still have no objective evidence of the existence of “supernatural” beings. Therefore the priests are still the authorities on such matters even though they remain legitimate objects of scientific inquiry and have no essential connection with religion. The day may come when science, physical or psychic, will be able to answer these questions, and some scientists imagine that there will then be no further need for religion, having no clear idea of what religion is. This is not exactly their fault, for religious people seldom understand the true function of religion and still waste thought and energy in a war with science based on wholly false premises.

If it could be proved objectively and scientifically that there was a life after death and that supernatural beings do exist this would have about as much religious significance as the discovery of a new continent, of the existence of life on Mars, or of the uses of electricity. It would be neither more nor less than an addition to human experience and knowledge. It would not necessarily be an addition to human wisdom, and this is the province of religion. For wisdom is not factual knowledge nor mere quantity and range of experience, nor even facility in the use of knowledge and experience. Wisdom is a quality of the psychological or spiritual relationship between man and his experience. When that relationship is wise and harmonious man’s experiences set him free, but when it is unwise and discordant his experiences bind him.

Religion alone can deal with that relationship, and this is its essential function. For what do we find left in religion when its quasi-scientific aspect is removed? There is the whole, vast problem of love or spiritual union which is contained in the question, “How can I learn to love life, whose source and essence we call God? How can I learn to be united with it in all its expressions, in living and dying, in love and fear, in the outer world of circumstances, and in the inner world of thought and feeling, so that in union with it I may find freedom?” Now science cannot teach any kind of love, not even the love between man and woman, for whoever learned to love his wife out of a psychological textbook on matrimony? Morality, which religion would teach as having supernatural sanctions, is just the expression of love; it follows it as a consequence and does not precede it as a cause. The will of God as expressed in morality is not a ukase which we should merely obey, for the purpose of His will is not that there should be morality, but that there should be love, and morality is just the “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”

Insofar as religion has diverged from its main purpose into psychism, morality for its own sake, speculative theology, concern for the life after death, and attempts to awaken spirituality by imitating its expressions, it has also put itself out of touch with people who have no desire to be religious specialists. Those who cannot feel that man’s principal concern should lie outside this world, who feel that salvation has nothing to do with removal to another realm of experience or with mere obedience to a moral law—such people can find little assistance from religion as usually taught, and today they constitute a very large proportion of intelligent men and women. For the nineteenth-century conflict between religion and science was, for those whose eyes were open, a stripping off of nonessentials from religion, but unfortunately official religion seldom saw it in this way. It clung to supernaturalism, which, rightly or wrongly, rationalist science had discredited, and continued to make it the keystone of spirituality.

But this kind of religion does not encourage the type of love upon which spirituality is founded. We have seen that its technique is imitative and thus unlikely to produce genuine, firsthand religious experience; we have also seen that its contempt of this world and its concentration on the life hereafter has little to do with the essentials of religion. This is not all, for not only has it little to do with such essentials; it is also a decided hindrance to spiritual growth because it encourages a “love” of God on a false basis. God is loved not because He has given us this world, but because He is said to have promised a much better world in the life after death. His gift to us of this world is therefore declined without thanks—an effrontery which is softened by describing this world as a place of trial for fitness to enter the world to come, on the principle that if you refuse God’s first gift, you will get His second.

The “Higher Sensuality”

But if God created this world only as a temporary place of trial, He seems to have taken a wholly unnecessary amount of trouble in its construction. He gave us senses which as yet we have hardly begun to develop to their full potentialities, and yet religion warns us against those senses as if they were given us simply as a sop to embellish life with such superficial trimmings as art, literature, music, and athletics so that in playing with them we may have a little relaxation from the more important task of fitting ourselves for the hereafter. But there is a way of looking at things whereby these “trimmings” become the main business of life, and religion the means to their fulfillment, on the principle that religion was made for life and not life for religion. For the contempt of the world of the senses is peculiarly like the fable of the sour grapes. Man burned his fingers at the game of pleasure, and instead of learning to play it aright was filled with fear and relegated pleasure to the realms of the Devil and his vanities, crying:

The earthly hope men set their hearts upon

Turns ashes, or it prospers, and anon,

Like snow upon the Desert’s dusky face,

Lighting a little hour or two, is gone.

But the whole point about the beauties of the earth is that they would be intolerable if they did not change and vanish. A woman is not less beautiful and desirable because she grows old and white; if she had eternal youth she would be a monster, as many women are who refuse to accept the different beauties of old age and death. For the beauty of life is not in any one of its stages but in the whole movement from birth to death, and if this movement is in any way resisted or interrupted there come unhappiness, maladjustment, and neurotic disease. Those who look pitiful and hideous in their old age are only so because years rankle them, because they have not accepted the rhythm of their life and go forward to old age with regretful glances behind at lost glories.

Certainly all pleasures are transient; otherwise we should cease to appreciate them, but if this be made the excuse for refusing to enjoy them, one must suspect that man’s ideas of happiness are horribly confused. The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man does not learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult task. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things because they are impermanent. We do this every time we listen to music. We do not seize hold of a particular chord or phrase and shout at the orchestra to go on playing it for the rest of the evening; on the contrary, however much we may like that particular moment of music, we know that its perpetuation would interrupt and kill the movement of melody. We understand that the beauty of a symphony is less in these musical moments than in the whole movement from beginning to end. If the symphony tries to go on too long, if at a certain point the composer exhausts his creative ability and tries to carry on just for the sake of filling in the required space of time, then we begin to fidget in our chairs, feeling that he has denied the natural rhythm, has broken the smooth curve from birth to death and that though a pretense at life is being made it is in fact a living death.

The Problem of Pain

But by itself this philosophy of “higher sensuality” is inadequate, for life is not like a musical masterpiece in certain respects. We may find all of a musical masterpiece beautiful; from the sensual point of view life is only beautiful in parts; it has also ugliness, pain, and horror, and hence the love for a God who will remove these things in the world to come. But this, too, is an avoidance of the problem. For the attitude of ordinary religion to both the pleasures and the pains of this world is negative. Pleasure is suspected, and in the everlasting life pain is not.

But we must now ask whether it is not possible that greater heights of spirituality may be attained by a positive attitude to pleasure and pain in this world. If this is possible, it is clear that religion has no special concern with the life after death and that spirituality has nothing whatever to do with retiring from this world. No one can deny the existence of a life after death, but that it should be a more spiritual life than this one is a wholly unreasonable assumption. If it is true that we are physically reincarnated on this earth or another, the whole picture is changed. But if orthodox Christianity is right in its belief that we have only one material life, then the next life will be psychic because according to our definition there can be no such thing as a spiritual world, spirituality being a quality of life and not a kind of existence in the same category as the material and the psychic.

Spirituality is therefore a way of living in whatever world one happens to be, and is in no way separable from the actual process of living in that world. In other words, there is no difference between religion and ordinary, everyday life; religious ideas and practices (which are no more religion itself than any other activities) exist solely to promote a positive and loving attitude toward ordinary life and what it stands for, namely, God. Unless one happens to be a religious specialist, which is not necessarily the same thing as a spiritual person, religious practices are not ends in themselves. They are means to a fuller and greater life in this world, involving a positive and constructive attitude to pleasure and pain alike, and thus an increasing ability to learn happiness and freedom from every possible kind of experience. In this sense, religion is union with life; whether that life is this present life of physical form, of thought and feeling with brain and soul, or whether it is a future life of purely psychic substance is beside the point. These are only different grades of existence; they are not different grades of spirituality, for the same spiritual laws apply in every grade of existence, and when one has learned union with one of them, one has discovered the secret of union with any of them.

We have suggested that the secret of this union lies in a positive attitude toward the world in which we live. To repeat the question which religion has to answer, we want to discover how we can learn to be united with life in all its expressions, in living and dying, in love and fear, in the outer world of circumstance, and in the inner world of thought and feeling, so that in union with it we may find freedom and happiness. To be united with life in all its expressions may seem a large demand to make on oneself, for those expressions include disease, pain, death, madness, and all the horrors which man can devise, wittingly or unwittingly, for his fellow creatures. In fact the “nub” of the whole problem is the acceptance of the dark side of life, for this is the very occasion of our unhappiness. “Acceptance” may seem a weak word for a positive attitude of love, but it is used because the type of love in question is relaxed. It is positive but not aggressive; it grows in its own way and is not forced. Therefore we may say that it is not enough to tolerate the dark side of life; acceptance in this sense is much more than a “let it be” with a resigned shrug of the shoulders. Let us call it “creative acceptance,” though because this phrase smacks overmuch of philosophical jargon we will write the noun and only remember its qualifying adjective. This is perhaps wise in another way, for a truth oddly comes out of a play on words: to be genuine, acceptance must be unqualified.