The Meaning of Happiness

3. THE WAY OF ACCEPTANCE

In recent years men seem to have discovered a new virtue and a new vice in the human soul. The virtue is called “accepting life,” and the vice “escaping from life”—two phrases whose meaning, from a strictly philosophical point of view, is most doubtful. The phrases themselves were apparently brought into popularity and given special significance, however vague, by the new movement in psychology which began with Freud, being continued by Adler, Jung, and a thousand others. Of course, neither the virtue nor the vice is new, and psychologists were not the first to become aware of them. Carlyle spoke of them as the “Everlasting Yea” and the “Everlasting Nay,” and though modern psychology has perhaps investigated them with a newer and bolder thoroughness, they have been known throughout history under a hundred different names.

But, save for some isolated instances, the idea of accepting life as understood in modern psychology has been noticeably absent from the philosophy and religion of the Western world. For centuries the symbol of Christian moral endeavor has been St. Michael and the Dragon—St. Michael standing triumphant on the dying body of a villainous clawed and winged serpent, his spear driven into its heart. That serpent was a symbol not only of greed, hatred, lust, and ignorance but of all that is involved in the trinity of “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” At the risk of quoting something that most people know by heart, it is interesting to turn in this connection to the fifth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel.

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.…Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies,…That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

Christian psychology makes an interesting distinction between the man himself and the evil in him. In accordance with the above precepts the man himself, the immortal soul, is to be loved. But for that very love and for the eternal salvation of that soul, the evil in him is to be fought, hated, and slain without quarter. Yet it is questionable whether Jesus had just that idea in mind. Certainly he was referring to what one’s reaction should be to evil treatment from other people, but it is possible, even probable, that the words “resist not evil” carry more meaning than that. It is likely that he told men to love their enemies not only because their enemies were human, but also because love is the only wise reaction to evil of any kind, whether human, natural, or demonic.

An earlier myth than that of St. Michael and the Dragon tells of an encounter with a monster who for every one head slashed off by the hero’s sword grew seven new heads. Indeed, the problem of evil is not quite so straightforward as the accepted technique of “morality by battle” would assume. Those desires, feelings, and impulses in the soul which are called evil seem to thrive on resistance because resistance belongs to their own nature, and, as the Buddha said, “Hatred ceases not by hatred alone; hatred ceases but by love.” This seems reasonable enough when applied to persons, but somehow we find it difficult to believe that the impulse of hate can only be overcome by loving it. But, as with fear, the hate of hatred is only adding one hate to another, and its results are as contrary as those of the war which was fought to end war. And yet, if you take a gun and shoot a murderer, the result seems to be clear and satisfactory: a dangerous person, who might have killed innocent and defenseless people, has ceased to exist. Should it not be equally satisfactory when by violence we remove evil from our minds? If it thereby ceases to exist why should we question the means used to remove it?

Today this is not quite so much of a problem as it was to some of our ancestors, for now there is a general inclination to regard as evil only the more extreme vices with which the hearts of normal men are little troubled. Many things that the Puritan would have called deadly sins are now either “natural” or positively “healthy.” But the problem still exists because Satan has assumed a new form. He cannot terrify and ensnare us so thoroughly as of old with our own “fleshly desires,” so he has shifted the emphasis of evil to pain, disease, war, and insecurity—adversaries which we now fight and hate as much as our ancestors fought and hated incontinence, gambling, drunkenness, and irreligion. In one way Satan has the better of us, because whereas our ancestors recognized the evil as something existing inside themselves, something for which each man was personally responsible, we tend to externalize it and make nature or other people responsible. No one (unless a Christian Scientist) need shame himself because of pain and disease; war is the fault, conveniently enough, of Nazis, Fascists, or Communists, and insecurity of an economic system.

The Uses of “Evil”

Nevertheless, there is now among us a section of opinion which not only recognizes the internal origin of all kinds of evil, but which also believes that they are best controlled by a pacifist technique. Needless to say, the leaders of this section of opinion are the psychologists, for in their view any attempt to root out a thought or desire from the mind only results in “repressing” it. Repression in this sense is the forceful damming up of a psychological urge, which continues to pile up against the barrier until either the barrier breaks or the urge finds another way out. Psychologists do not believe that such urges can ever be wholly eliminated because they arise from an aspect of man’s being over which his conscious mind and reason have no real control. This aspect—the unconscious—is irrational nature in man, which centuries of civilization and moral discipline have made him forget or ignore. We know from ordinary, everyday experience of nature that natural forces are exceedingly difficult to check; they can only be redirected. You cannot simply remove the River Amazon, and if you dam it the pressure of water against the dam will constantly increase until the dam breaks or the river overflows its banks—unless you provide an outlet. This is true of almost every little stream as well as of great waterways. In the same way, everyone who has a garden knows that if you want a hedge to grow more vigorously, you must cut it back. Of course, if you tear it up by the roots it will certainly stop growing, but the human soul is not quite like a flower bed in that respect.

We cannot exterminate our own evils any more than the earth can throw out its weeds. But weeds have not choked all those parts of the earth where nature has been left to her own devices; it is only when man interferes with nature that he begins to notice the inconvenient persistence of certain lowly plants to which he gives the name of “weeds.” Yet even the best-regulated gardens have to have their soil filled with manure and other “unpleasant” fertilizers, and what is true of the soil is also true of the human mind. Where the roses of virtue bloom in their glory there will certainly be a bed of manure; it will be kept in its place, to be sure, but it will certainly be there. This is not said in cynicism, because the “filthiness” of the soil in no way detracts from the beauty of the flower except in the imaginations of those who would like to see roses blooming in midair, whose oversensitive tastes are revolted by the realities of nature. However, the expert and enthusiastic gardener finds something almost pleasurable in manure; certainly he does not smear it all over the plants, but a soil well mixed with it he calls “good” and “rich”—not “foul” and “putrid.”

This gives us a clue to what is meant by the acceptance of evil, which was never intended to be an excuse for unbridled license. It means that what morality calls evil is a natural urge that no one need fear if it is kept in its proper place—in the ground. In other words, if you find yourself thinking that you want to murder someone, to commit adultery, to rob a bank, or to beat your wife, don’t try to force the thought away. Forcing the thought away increases its power until it demands expression in action. On the other hand, there are times when people become obsessed with such thoughts, even if they have never tried to resist them. The thought takes hold of their imaginations with an apparently autonomous and irresistible power and drives them to the deed; this is precisely what the moralist fears. Yet Berdyaev writes in his Freedom and the Spirit:¹

Our attitude towards evil must be free from hatred, and has itself need to be enlightened in character.…Satan rejoices when he succeeds in inspiring us with diabolical feelings to himself. It is he who wins when his own methods are turned against himself.…A continual denunciation of evil and its agents merely encourages its growth in the world—a truth sufficiently revealed in the Gospels, but to which we remain persistently blind.

These words are significant from a philosopher of the Catholic Church. For those Christians who have really studied the New Testament know as well as psychologists that evil is not overcome by violence; but apparently those who would inculcate morality by forceful, legalistic discipline have never troubled to read St. Paul. If there is any doubt about the words of Christ, there can be no two opinions about the following passage from the Epistle to the Romans:²

For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.…What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid, Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead. For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.

What was St. Paul’s alternative? This is given perhaps most clearly in the Epistle to the Galatians. In his own mystical terminology it is that Christ must be born in the human soul so that the will of Christ shall supplant human will. Laws and rules will then be irrelevant because whatever the individual desires to do will be the desire of Christ. We have to discover just exactly what this means, but it will immediately be clear that as Christ means love it will involve a new attitude to evil.³

St. Michael as the Dragon

But there is an important point which is often overlooked. We described a certain attitude to evil as pacifistic, and a pacifist is often one who hates the hating of hatred—three hates instead of one!—a fact which explains the frequently violent intolerance of peace propagandists. For St. Michael is as much an integral part of the human soul as evil itself, and unless the St. Michael urge of impatience with evil and pain is accepted along with evil and pain, the acceptance is only one-sided.⁴ This is indeed a point on which the new psychology has to be careful lest in becoming reconciled with one devil it create another in the form of St. Michael himself. The phrase “acceptance of life” means precisely the acceptance of the whole of life, and should certainly not be understood as mere spiritual laissez faire. Thus the spiritual ideal is more than “a wise passiveness”—a partial attitude that excludes force and effort, that accepts old evils but creates a new one that is almost worse than the old because it is more subtle and complex.

The difficulty of the whole psychology of acceptance is that unless it is understood in the right way it leads into a mental labyrinth whose fine nuances take us further and further from realities. There is no doubt that the technique of relaxation or acceptance “works” where an aggressive attitude would only create further trouble. Everyone who has practiced jujutsu has had a convincing, physical demonstration of the way in which force can be overcome by yielding, by arranging things so that his opponent defeats himself by his own effort. But there are two kinds of acceptance, one which is applied to particular things and the other which is applied to life in general. In exactly the same way there are the two kinds of happiness, one which is occasioned by particular things or events, and the other by the whole of life. The first type of acceptance is a question of technique and the second of spirituality; there are specific ways to achieve the former, but the latter is strangely elusive.

Acceptance, Partial and Total

Jujutsu is an example of the first kind of acceptance, being simply the exchange of one technique of fighting for another. It is therefore an exclusive technique just as the technique of psychology is exclusive in that it creates a new “evil” called escapism as the opposite of acceptance. Thus we have these two psychological states called “acceptance of life” and “escape from life,” but when they are opposed to one another in this way it is clear that “life” can have only a limited meaning. It means particular things in life—specific evils, desires, events, and situations, because when life is understood in its widest sense there is no possibility of escape from it. Everything is life, even escapism, and if the whole of life is to be accepted the desire to escape must not be made into a new devil. Therefore partial acceptance is what Oriental philosophers would describe as a dualistic as distinct from a nondualistic state of mind. For according to Hindu and Buddhist teachings the enlightened man attains a state of mind that is one with Brahman or Tathata,⁵ the Reality of life which includes all possible things and apart from which nothing exists. This state is nondualistic because it is union with something to which nothing can be opposed, and in this sense it is complete and absolute acceptance of life, philosophically described as union with the principle that is the meaning, essence, and raison d’être of the universe. In this state man is supremely happy because even though he may be involved in a conflict with pain and evil, even though he may feel the very human emotions of fear, anger, and love, he lives his life with a wholeheartedness and abandon born of the understanding that all things are fundamentally acceptable. For to him there is meaning and divinity in every aspect of the universe and in both the greatness and the littleness, the love and the fear, the joy and the sorrow, and the content and discontent of the human soul. For the Upanishads say:⁶

The Soul is Brahman, the Eternal. It is made of consciousness and mind: It is made of life and vision. It is made of the earth and the waters: It is made of air and space. It is made of light and darkness: It is made of desire and peace. It is made of anger and love: It is made of virtue and vice. It is made of all that is near: It is made of all that is afar. It is made of all.

But this total acceptance and love of life eludes us because in striving to attain it we are constantly at war with that which appears to go against it. The reason is that in trying to be united with life we are striving to achieve something that already exists; the result is that our very efforts to achieve it are hindrances in that they encourage the feeling that we are divorced from life and have to make ourselves one with it. But we cannot realize all at once that this union already exists because centuries of civilization have orphaned us from nature both in and around us, making us feel that we are self-contained, independent, and autonomous egos. The primitive does not feel this to the same extent, having what Levy-Brühl described as a participation mystique with nature, which is to say a union of which he is not fully aware because he has never been conscious of what it means to be separated from nature. That feeling of separation must come before union can have its full meaning for us. Thus in the parable of the Prodigal Son it is the returning prodigal for whom the fatted calf is slain—not the faithful son who had always stayed at home and had never been separated from his father.

Thus if man is to realize again his fundamental unity and harmony with life he must proceed by the roundabout way of trying to get that which he already has until he convinces himself of his own folly. For it is only by trying to accept life as a whole that we can make ourselves aware that there was never any real need to try, and that spirituality is in fact a matter of “becoming what we are.” In trying actively to accept life we find that this is successful only in regard to particular things; we reconcile ourselves to the dark side of life only to find that we are not reconciled to our desire to escape from it, and this desire in itself is an aspect of that dark side. By this method something is always left out of the whole, with the result that our acceptance and therefore our happiness is still dependent on particular things, and we are just as far from including the whole as ever. For this reason a large number of psychological patients are never really cured. Specific neuroses of the more obvious kind are certainly overcome, but except in some rare cases the great happiness remains undiscovered. This is not at all surprising, for not only is total acceptance the most elusive thing in the world; it is also something against which intellect and reason rebel.

The Three Stages of Morality

It is argued that if the highest spirituality is simply a matter of accepting life as it is, and if this is something which we already have but do not realize, then its attainment will make no difference whatever to our lives. It may possibly make us inwardly happy, but if this is not expressed outwardly in different and better thoughts and actions, it is of no real value. Moreover, the idea of a supreme Reality or God that is manifested alike by all forms of life is amoral and dangerous, and is at variance with the important Christian doctrine that the world order is basically a moral order. But this view of spirituality is only inconsistent with a moral world order insofar as the morality in question is the invention of human intellect and wishful thinking. If, however, the foundation of morality is “to love your neighbor as yourself,” it cannot be said that total acceptance is inconsistent with a moral world order. For it involves acceptance of the virtues and vices of other people as much as of one’s own. More than this, although the idea suggests amorality, it seldom works out this way in practice—a paradox that will subsequently be clear when we consider total acceptance in detail.⁷

But it should be noted that there is an important difference between those whose acceptance is partial and those whose acceptance is total. The ordinary moralist feels that he is not free to be anything but moral; in other words, he feels compelled to be moral—for a variety of reasons. It may be that he fears the wrath of God or the pangs of conscience; it may be that he has an egotistic sense of duty, thinking that his own and other people’s natures ought to conform with the dictates of his reason. But he is slavishly moral, and he fights his “lower nature” because he is either too afraid or too proud to do anything else. As to those whose acceptance is partial, they do not feel free to fight their lower nature; they think that they ought to accept it because anything else would be escaping from life. The result is that they make a compulsive discipline out of psychological relaxation and so “exchange King Stork for King Log.” But to accept totally is to be free to be moral, and he who follows a moral law in freedom does not suffer the consequences of repression in the same way as the slavish moralist. Part of the secret of this freedom is that he knows he is also free to be immoral, for St. Michael and the Dragon are given equal recognition. In practice, however, free people are seldom immoral because the Dragon no longer impresses them with his forbidden glamour; they find preoccupation with evil merely tedious for reasons which will later be apparent. To quote Berdyaev again:⁸

The exaggeration of the power of temptation can hardly be a positive means of overcoming it.…As long as in our struggle against evil we regard it as strong and enticing, and at the same time both awe-inspiring and forbidden, we are not going to achieve any radical or final victory over it…it will remain invincible as long as it is so regarded.…The attraction of evil is a lie and an illusion.…Only the knowledge of its absolute emptiness and tedium can give us the victory over it.

Christianity and Oriental Religion

In Christianity the idea of total acceptance is somewhat hidden; it is only spoken of directly in some of the writings of the mystics, but it is soon discovered when we begin to make a thorough search into the symbolism of Christian doctrine. In the religions of the East, however, it is given particular emphasis; in fact, it is the fundamental principle of Vedantist, Buddhist, and Taoist philosophy. The chief difference between these Eastern religions and Christianity is that, on the surface at least, Christianity is concerned with belief in doctrines whereas the Eastern religions are concerned with states of mind. That is to say, Christianity tends to be a theological and ethical religion, while Buddhism, Taoism, and Vedanta are psychological religions. In Christianity the supreme attainment is reserved for the life after death and it is seldom described in more definite terms than “the bliss of the soul absorbed in the eternal contemplation of God.” Some Christians believe that the contemplation of God can be achieved while on earth, but to most people such phrases convey nothing more than a form of deep introspection in which the soul is confronted with a vision of boundless light and permeated by a feeling of infinite love. But how is this condition attained? Most Christian mystics agree that its intense forms arise spontaneously, at rare intervals, and without any apparent cause.

Eastern religions have this condition of the soul as their very center and raison d’être, although they do not describe it in quite the same terms as do the Christian mystics. For them it is not just an unusual phenomenon which happens to occur among some strangely gifted people called mystics; it is the very lifeblood of religion, and comes before doctrines, ethics, or any other aspect of the religious life. The avowed object of Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism alike is that man, while living on this earth, may attain a state of mind which is indicated as the understanding of his eternal union and identity with the “Self of the universe.” This is the object of Christianity also, but it is not stressed, its psychology is inadequately studied and the many possible ways to its attainment are only vaguely described. In the ordinary way the aim of Christianity is to make the person of Jesus as described in the Gospels as vivid a reality as possible so that the believer may love, follow, and serve Him as if He were a real friend standing always at his side. The psychology of Christian faith is therefore one of the personal devotion of the disciple to his Lord and Master, and this expands into mysticism when the believer feels a relation of love to the cosmic as well as to the personal Christ. In the ordinary way it is impossible to separate the psychology of Christian religion from a specific personality and specific beliefs concerning him, and thus it is not always easy for the Christian to recognize that a similar, if not identical, state of soul can be attained by one who has never heard of Jesus of Nazareth.

This in no way invalidates the Christian experience. It only means that in Christianity there is no clear division between the psychology of spiritual experience and religious doctrine and history. The Christian belief that only one historical religious tradition is valid for man is a clear enough sign of this confusion; so much emphasis is placed on history and doctrine as the essentials of salvation that a psychology of religion independent of the person of Christ is not understood. In the three great Eastern religions this confusion does not exist, and from them we are able to form a much clearer idea of the essentials of religion, of the state of mind called spiritual experience as distinct from the “local color” of particular historical events. For if indeed this experience is attainable outside the Christian faith, apart from devotion to a particular personality, and even without reference to theology (as in certain forms of Buddhism), then Eastern religions have two important contributions to make to Western civilization. Firstly, they show the principles of an approach to spiritual experience on a purely psychological basis to those who have lost faith in the historical and theological tenets of Christianity; secondly, Christianity itself can be enriched and expanded in this sadly underdeveloped aspect of its experience, and perhaps led to a higher understanding of spirituality than even many of its own mystics have attained.⁹

Eastern Wisdom and Modern Man

The wisdom of the East is something from which we can learn but which we should be careful not to imitate. It is unwise for a Westerner to become “converted” to Buddhism or Hinduism as missionaries expect the “heathen” to become converted to Christianity, for there are aspects of the Eastern religions which would be decidedly harmful for us to adopt. We cannot escape our roots and traditions, which are different from those of Asiatic peoples, for we have a different function or Dharma to fulfill in the world. We have already said that acceptance is not necessarily a matter of mental or physical passivity, but we find a certain kind of passivity insisted upon in all the great religions of the East, for the Asiatic attitude to life has a decided element of quietism and laissez faire—an attitude which is encouraged by their religious technique. For them this attitude is right, but European and American psychology is active and assertive and it would not be right for us to deny this active urge. Therefore it is important for us in our study of Oriental religion to distinguish between principles and their application; the principles have universal value, but, generally speaking, their application has been worked out to accord only with Asiatic peoples and conditions. We have to discover our own way of applying those principles, and though in the end this may lead us to something like Oriental passivity it would be the greatest mistake to begin by imitating it.

The outward forms of this passivity are seen in yoga meditation, a pacifism (ahimsa) extended even to animals, a total disregard for material progress and social service, and a lofty detachment from material concerns in general. It is often that in the applied philosophy of the East the world of form and action is illusion (maya) and does not merit the wise man’s attention; but this is applied philosophy and not a fundamental principle, according to which the universe cannot be absolutely divided into illusion and reality, seeing that the ultimate is nondual and includes all opposites. It is impossible for anyone not inured to it by tradition to regard the world as illusion by a mere decision of the will, for imitation of other people’s ideas is as false as imitation of their behavior. But Oriental introversion and Occidental extraversion are alike essential and equally important human functions, the one without the other being as sterile as man without woman. To grasp the essentials of Oriental wisdom we do not have to imitate its externals; it is neither necessary nor wise, as some theosophists and would-be Buddhists and yogis imagine, for us to go and sit at the feet of masters in India or Tibet, to assume the life of the homeless sanyassin, and to adopt the technique of Eastern meditation in order to attain spiritual freedom. Having attained that freedom, however, there is no reason why one should not study Eastern meditation as much as one pleases if one happens to be interested in it. But to look for actual salvation, happiness, or enlightenment in it is asking for trouble because it is almost impossible to avoid both imitation in itself and imitation of something that belongs to an alien tradition.¹⁰

The Danger of the Inflated Ego

Anyone who has studied either Hinduism, Buddhism, or Taoism will know that the object of these religions is to attain a realization of the union between man and the Self of the universe. In their scriptures they describe various psychological techniques by which this may be achieved, and many Western people who approach them from a practical standpoint simply follow the directions as given. The result is not very happy. Such people do not appreciate the vast difference between the psychology of modern man and the psychology of the ancient Chinese or Hindus. Their scriptures state very plainly that the true Self of man is God. Tat tvam asi is the Hindu formula, meaning, “That [Brahman or God] art thou.” This is also the theme of several forms of Western mysticism; in the words of Eckhart, “While I am here, He is in me; after this life, I am in Him. All things are therefore possible to me, if I am united to Him Who can do all things.” And again, “I have a capacity in my soul for taking in God entirely. I am sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself; my existence depends on the nearness and presence of God. He is also near things of wood and stone, but they know it not. If a piece of wood became as aware of the nearness of God as an archangel is, the piece of wood would be as happy as an archangel.”¹¹ But for the modern Westerner there is a danger in this knowledge; reading and practicing such ideas he is apt to make a God of his ego rather than an ego of his God.

Until modern man has truly understood the meaning of his apparent divorce from nature, his acute sense of separateness and self-consciousness, he cannot possibly understand the teaching that his true Self is God. If he makes any attempt to impose this teaching upon himself, he is more than likely to suffer a spiritual inflation, a blowing up of his ego to the size of God, which is the very thing that Oriental philosophy does not desire. This happens because the unfortunate victim has not first accepted the division and the conflict. He has not allowed God to be an ego; he has denied the purpose of nature in evolving the sense of separateness, and until he has accepted it all his attempts to resolve the problem will be in terms of egoism. In other words, unless you accept all that the loneliness and isolation of self-consciousness involves every attempt to get away from it will be futile. The ego cannot abolish the pain of conflict between itself and the universe simply by trying to identify itself with the essence of that universe which is God. Paradoxically, it must realize its union with God by being an ego, for the very reason that that is what God Himself is doing in that particular human being. In fact modern man’s path to this wisdom is roundabout and not direct, and he must always bear in mind the saying, “Before you can unite, you must first divide.”

The Importance of Gods and Demons

There is still another reason why the wisdom of the East cannot be imitated. It has to be understood against the background of popular belief among Asiatic peoples. The wisdom of the East was taught among men who firmly believed in the existence of innumerable gods, demons, elemental spirits, and angels, who were familiar with all the potentialities of the human soul both for good and for evil, and whose personal and social lives were hardly regulated, even in theory, by what we should call reason. We, on the other hand, do not have anything to do with gods and demons; we do not believe that men’s souls can be possessed by autonomous devils except in certain cases of lunacy, to which we give the relatively harmless name of “obsession.” We think we are masters of our minds (or should be) and that such beliefs are outworn superstitions. In the universe of science everything happens for a reason and no room is left for the gods to interfere.

What is the result? Simply that the demons, having been driven out of the external universe, return with a vengeance in our own souls and behave quite as irrationally. For in proving to ourselves that the universe is wholly explainable in terms of reason and logic, we ourselves become anything but reasonable and logical. We starve in the midst of unparalleled abundance and wage diabolical wars when everybody knows that nothing can be gained from war, when for years everyone has (consciously) been trying to avoid war—yes, even those who thought they could “get away with murder” without starting a war. Of course, the old-fashioned psychologist could give a perfectly logical and reasoned explanation of human irrationality, but we are not speaking in those terms. We are looking at the situation from a purely empirical standpoint and noting that the more men try to dominate life by conscious reason, the more irrational they become. We are not saying for a moment that the logical explanation of the universe given by science is untrue; we are simply noting with interest that such an explanation and such an age exist together, that in a time when science is unusually logical, men are unusually stupid. We are therefore entitled to assume a connection between these two phenomena, for the psychologist is not interested in the truth or untruth of scientific theories; he wants to know why those theories are acceptable to modern man. He is also rude enough to suggest that people believe in them not because the theories or the people are logical, but because the people want to be logical.

In other words, the reasons for belief in a logical universe would have to be invented if they were not true. As Bernard Shaw says, belief is a matter of taste and is quite unaffected by the objective truth or falsity of that belief. Our belief in a logical universe is a matter of taste, even though it may be objectively true; we say we are reasonable men, but we accept the pronouncements of our scientists with a faith quite as groveling as the faith of peasants who believe unquestioningly those who say they have seen gods and demons. How many people could prove such common beliefs as that the earth revolves round the sun or that atoms are composed of electrons and protons?

But who are the gods and demons whom we have tried to cast out of our lives? They are the forces of that unknown, inner universe of the unconscious, though today we give them the unromantic names of impulses, depressions, phobias, manias, and other constant reminders of the fact that our inner lives are not so much under our control or even under our surveillance as we should like to think. These forces are projected by other races than our own into deific and demonic forms which play an important part in everyday life, and those who were instructed in many of the ancient religions had to recognize the existence of those beings within themselves. But we are slow in recognizing them at all, much less in ourselves, and from that point of view we are in a worse psychological position even than the “heathen Chinese” who really believes in their external existence. For whether or not the “heathen Chinese” is aware of their true nature, he is nevertheless aware of irrational forces at work in his life, and even that much awareness gives him a certain release from them. Naturally there is a considerable difference in Asiatic lands between religion for serious students and religion for the masses, but in the former the gods and demons are still preserved though there is a difference of understanding. Western students of Oriental religion should never neglect the study of its iconography, especially in Hinduism and Buddhism, for there it will be found that almost every god, Buddha, and Bodhisattva has his demonic counterpart. The student may be surprised to find, however, that these demonic counterparts are not regarded as evil in our sense of the word although the forms in which they are painted and carved are diabolic in the extreme.

I have before me a Japanese painting of the Buddhist divinity Nilambara-Vajrapani which might easily be a portrait of that monster the Dweller on the Threshold of Western mysticism.¹² His body is black and he wears a tigerskin adorned with skulls; he has some eighteen heads wreathed with serpents, and upon each are three glaring eyes above snarling lips and bared teeth; serpents coil around each of his twenty-eight arms and in his hands he grasps swords and thunderbolts while other monsters grovel beneath his feet. Behind the whole figure is an aureole of writhing vermilion flame. In all his outward aspects he might be taken for an Oriental version of Satan himself, until one discovers that he is one of the guardians of the Law of Buddhism. Going to even more ancient sources one discovers the same idea, for Iamblichos, writing on the Egyptian Mysteries, says:¹³

The race of demons…causes the otherwise invisible goodness of the gods to become visible in operation, becoming itself both assimilated to it, and accomplishing perfect works that are like it. For then what was before unutterable in it is made capable of being uttered.

We, too, have a popular but perhaps neglected saying that God created the Devil for those who could not learn by love, and it cannot be by mere chance that his name is Lucifer, the light-bearer. But somehow the demons became identified with evil, and this seems to have been part of the necessary but repressive mission of Christianity. Christianity made the demonic light-bearer evil, but our modern age does not even allow the demons to be evil; it does not allow them to exist at all, and it is noticeable that in most forms of modernistic Christianity the subject of the Devil is either tactfully avoided or explained away.

The Conscious Relationship

From this it seems that before we can approach Oriental wisdom in any way resembling the Asiatic approach we must first become conscious again of the various demonic powers which our civilization has relegated to the unconscious. Furthermore, we shall have to learn the actual beneficence of those powers. They represent the dark side of life, being the earthy aspects of divine activity—the deep urges of the physical body, the storms of emotion, the principle of death and destruction, and all those irrational passions that the cult of reason will not tolerate. This is not to be confused, however, with such modern phenomena as Nazi psychology with its cult of blood and soil. Such cults are rationalization and logic run wild and denote possession by those powers, not in any sense a conscious relationship with them, for Nazi philosophy also includes the complete rationalization and regimentation of social and personal life—a very suggestive combination, and a warning.

Thus at the present time modern man is unconsciously identified with his gods and demons, and while they remain unknown he cannot arrive at any conscious relationship to them; he cannot accept his “inner universe” until he knows what kind of things he has to accept, until he can see it objectively and break up the identification. In this present state the blind adoption of Oriental mysticism would simply perpetuate and aggravate his condition; in trying to identify himself with God he would become more and more possessed by the unconscious powers of his inner universe. This is not what Oriental mysticism means by “identification” with God, which is not unconscious possession but the result of fulfilling a conscious relationship between the ego and its inner and outer universes. In twentieth-century civilization such a relationship is rare indeed.

Union through conscious relationship is illustrated in the accompanying diagram. The first circle represents the primitive, unconsciously lived by Nature, and with only a limited self-consciousness. The second represents modern, Western man, still unconsciously driven yet at the same time aware of the difference between himself and the natural, external universe. If he flees from that opposition along the line marked “escape” he simply continues to be driven and so possessed by unconscious forces. The third represents the principle of conscious union, of approaching God or Nature through accepting the difference between that and one’s own ego—or more correctly by accepting the tension caused by an apparent difference. The full union described in Oriental philosophy would be represented by a continuation of the third circle to the point where man coincides with Nature; this would be the same symbol as the familiar Oriental motif of the serpent biting its tail. Note that the first two are not complete circles; the circle is only completed when the opposition is accepted, and this completion is a symbol of the feeling of harmony in the midst of opposition.

Psychology versus Metaphysics

If this problem has to be approached in the way described above, it will be asked whether Oriental philosophy has any value at all for us at the present time. We have already drawn attention to a certain “trickiness” in the problem of acceptance; it is precisely in dealing with this that the East is of value to us. We must learn, however, to concentrate on the psychology of Oriental religion as distinct from its metaphysics. In fact, it is very doubtful whether its metaphysics was ever intended to be taken as metaphysics. For Oriental philosophy is emphatically not philosophy in the Western sense of the word, having scarcely any relation to the intellectual search for objective, metaphysical truth which we find in Descartes, Berkeley, Hegel, and other Western metaphysicians.

Thus the Oriental doctrine of the union of man and Brahman is the symbol of a psychological experience rather than a statement of objective fact, and it is almost impossible to study Oriental religion with profit unless one is always careful to inquire into the experience behind the doctrine. But of all the psychological techniques in Oriental religion the most important is that of acceptance (in Chinese wu-wei)—a technique which may be applied in a number of different directions. It is not for us to apply it exactly in their way; our method, as we have seen, has to be somewhat indirect, for we have to apply this technique to the opposition between ego and universe. Yet in so doing we shall arrive at the same result, though by a different route, and discover that wu-wei is more than technique; it is an actual spiritual experience, absolutely independent of metaphysics. Thus for the Oriental and Westerner both the experience and the technique are the same, but the approach, the direction in which the technique is applied, differs in each instance. Generally speaking, I would say that whereas the former accepts the universe, the latter must accept the ego and the conflict involved. But, as has been shown, this amounts in the end to the same thing because it will eventually be realized that the ego and its conflict are necessary aspects of universal life, of the Tao, Brahman, God, or whatever the ultimate reality may be called.

One exception must be made to this statement. It is important to remember Jung’s warning that there are still among us people whose sense of self-consciousness is not yet fully developed, who still share the primitive’s participation mystique with nature. They are easily overwhelmed by unconscious forces, as in obsessions, and sometimes find it hard to distinguish between fantasy and real life. Such people must first experience the independence of the ego; otherwise they will find themselves hopelessly overwhelmed in any attempt to deal with their “gods and demons” by acceptance.¹⁴

In conclusion we may say that for Western man acceptance means this: “Live and let live.” We see the root of our unhappiness in the war between ourselves and the universe, a war in which we so often feel tiny, impotent, and alone. The forces of nature, death, change, and unreasoning passion, seem to be against our most cherished longings, and by no trick or deceit can we get rid of our helpless solitude or of the battle between desire and destiny. Acceptance for us is therefore to say, “Let it live” to the whole situation, to the ego and its desires, to life and destiny, and also to the war between them. This acceptance is made in the knowledge that the conflict and all its parties are aspects of a single living activity which employs a seeming discord to achieve the understanding of a harmony which in fact has never been and never can be broken. This is to fulfill the purpose of that conflict, a purpose which is denied when the ego strives to arrogate to itself identity with God—an identity achieved simply in being an ego and in being true to its self-conscious nature. This, however, cannot possibly be understood in any deep sense until the situation as it is now has been accepted, whereat it will develop in its own natural course into a new and different situation. But it is also necessary to understand the conflict, to become aware of its existence and character not only in external circumstances but also in the soul of man, and of the latter we are very ignorant. Therefore it seems wise to consult the wisdom of the East both in accepting and in understanding, in finding an appropriate way of life which, for reasons that will be apparent, psychology alone does not as yet supply.