The Meaning of Happiness

5. THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

A curious feature of the quest for freedom is the appearance of a snag just as you think you are getting somewhere. The snag appears for the very reason that you think you are getting somewhere, for the essential point of spirituality, the point so difficult to grasp, is that it is not a question of going at all. You cannot get the freedom of the spirit by climbing up to it; it is not reached by any kind of ladder, for otherwise it would be possible to describe a specific technique by which wisdom and enlightenment can be “obtained” and the whole matter would be as apparently simple as buying a ticket and taking a train. But the steps and stages are not laid out in black and white, and there are no fixed rules and regulations the mere observance of which will achieve the desired result. It is very much like learning to love someone. You cannot look up a book of rules and find out how to love, although many such books have been written.

Now the practice of any kind of technique is going somewhere, yes, even the technique of acceptance. If this is true, it will be asked why anyone should go to the trouble of talking about it at all; if even the technique of acceptance will not, of itself, achieve the desired object, why introduce it? Because, according to the proverb, the longest way round is the shortest way home. It seems to be necessary to try to discover the secret by going somewhere in order to learn that this can never be done. The path always takes you round in a circle, back to the place where you stand. It is the parable of the Prodigal Son over again, and the Buddhists describe it as the journey of a lunatic all over the world in search of his head, which he had never lost. There is no doubt at all that from one point of view the technique of acceptance actually works, but it is always partial. It is admirable for solving an immediate problem, in instances of pain, depression, and sorrow, but there is always something it leaves unsolved, for there remains a subtle, indefinable, and elusive inner discontent.

The Longing for God

This is truly a “divine discontent” for I believe it to be what the mystics describe as the yearning of the soul for God; as St. Augustine says, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, therefore we may not rest anywhere save in Thee.” By a hundred different techniques we can adjust the details of our lives and make ourselves happy in the superficial sense of having nothing specific to be unhappy about. But techniques can only deal with details, with separate parts; something different is required to transform one’s attitude to life as a whole, and to transform the whole of one’s life. Without this transformation the real unhappiness remains, expressing itself in all manner of disguises, finding innumerable substitutes for God which do not work because they are always partial things. They are, as it were, the parts of God, but not the whole of Him. Technique can find these parts; it can find acceptance, wealth, pleasure, experience, knowledge, and all the lesser gods and demons of the unknown realms of the soul. But even when all these many parts are brought together, there is still something which no technical trick or device can discover, and this is the whole which is greater than the sum of its parts.

Those who have followed partial techniques know that in a life where there is nothing special to be unhappy about there is a kind of barrenness; it is like a wheel without a center, or a perfect lamp without a light. There is nothing to supply any creative fire. Everything is going just as it should go; the daily routine may be a little dull, but it is by no means unbearable. Certainly there are troubles, but nothing overwhelming. As for one’s own character, well, that is quite normal. There are no serious neurotic troubles and no moral defects. For the most part life is quite agreeable and if death comes at the end of it, that is a matter of course for which nature will prepare us; when the time comes to die we shall be tired and ready to go. That is not a happy life, even though it may be contented; it is simple vegetation. There is not that joyous response of the individual to the universe which is the essence of spirituality, which expresses itself in religious worship and adoration. I suppose there must have been times in everyone’s life when there has been such a response, even for a short moment. In those moments most of us like to be alone, for we are afraid to let others see us become so childish. After all, we are dignified adults and it would not do at all for Mr. Cornelius Pomp, president of Grand International Railways, Inc., to be seen dancing wildly around on a hilltop in the middle of the night for sheer joy at seeing the stars. But I have no doubt there was an occasion when Mr. Pomp, in the dim recesses of his being, felt very much like doing this but could not unbend.

It is a symptom of our spiritual phlegmatism and torpidity that the dance is no longer a part of our ritual and that we worship in churches which, as often as not, resemble cattle pens where people sit in rows and pray by leaning forward in their seats and mumbling. Sometimes people try to get away from this stiffness by putting on short pants and running out to the woods for community dancing and the cultivation of response to nature, and there are other people who try to make their prayers sincere by groveling on their knees and whimpering. This is another case of trying to make the tail wag the dog. The first essential is to feel the joy; the response follows of its own accord, but you cannot get the joy by slavishly imitating the response. In fact we first have to feel as St. Francis felt in writing his Canticle to the Sun, which is perhaps the most superb expression of the joy of spiritual freedom that was ever written:

Praise to my Lord for all His creatures;

for our brother Sun who bringeth us day

and light, and showeth Thee unto us.

Praise to my Lord for our sister Moon

and for the Stars hung bright and lovely in Heaven.

Praise to my Lord for our brother Wind

and for Air and Clouds, Calm and all Weather

whereby Thou maintainest life in all beings.

Praise to my Lord for our sister Water,

useful and lowly, precious and clear.

Praise to my Lord for our brother Fire,

mighty and strong, by whom Thou makest

for us light in darkness.

Praise to my Lord for our mother Earth

who doth uphold and teach us, and bringeth

forth in many colors both fruit and flowers.

Praise to my Lord for sister Death,

from whom none can flee. Blessed are

those who find themselves in Thy most

Holy Will, for Death shall not harm them.

Oh all ye creatures, praise and bless my

Lord, and be thankful, and serve Him in

great humility.

The Ecstasy of Creation

This hymn of happiness is more than a hymn of acceptance, for it includes not only sun and moon, fire and water, life and death; it includes also God, and those who find God are happy because they share in the ecstasy of creation. They, too, know the answer to that eternal question of philosophy, “Why does the universe exist?” They know that it exists for an almost childlike reason—for play, or what the Hindus called lila (which is nearly our own word “lilt”).¹ Chesterton points out that when a child sees you do something wonderful, it asks you to do it again and again. So too he says that God made the earth and told it to move round the sun, and when it had moved round once He was pleased and said, “Do it again.” He has been saying it ever since. To some this may seem sentimental, to others irreverent, and to yet others absurd, for how can one say that all the cruelty, destruction, and anguish of life is play? And if it is play, is not God like a thoughtless child who picks a butterfly to pieces to watch it struggle? But for what other reason could it have been said that when the foundations of the earth were laid “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy”?²

But those who ask this question about the cruelty of God’s play are expecting him who answers to make excuses for God, to “justify the ways of God to man,” and as Lao Tzu has tersely and aptly said, “Those who justify themselves do not convince.” Should we ask and expect the universe to conform with our standards of good behavior and doubt the existence of God in all things because He does not observe the ordinary standards of middle-class humanitarian morality? We think of God as a meek, kindly old gentleman, or else as an infinitely powerful but essentially nebulous spirit of pure love, by which we mean pure dotingness. But, as Edwin Arnold has written, ——

It slayeth and it saveth, nowise moved

Except unto the working out of doom;

Its threads are Love and Life; and Death and Pain

The shuttles of its loom.

The dissertations on the so-called “Problem of Evil,” which has so much worried Christian theologians, are nothing more than an attempt to apologize for the Deity, and such attempts invariably indicate lack of faith. And faith in God, faith in life, faith in nature, is the important thing; that faith is the very key to freedom of the spirit.

The Faith of Abandonment

Faith is not blind belief, and it is certainly not mere intellectual assent to the proposition that God exists. Nor is it trusting that life will work out “all right” in spite of its tribulations. Faith is not hope. From one point of view faith is the most illogical thing in the world; it is trusting life because of its tribulations; it is the sense of love and wonder before the mystery of a God who is both Creator and Destroyer, love and terror, life and death, angel and demon, sage and fool, man and worm. There are those who ask why they should be expected to have faith of so unconditional a kind in a universe which takes with one hand what it gives with the other, and the answer suggests a story about Thomas Carlyle. There was a woman who wrote him a long dissertation which ended with the words, “In short, I accept the universe.” “My God!” said Carlyle. “She’d better!” For the truth is simply that without faith we are forever bashing our heads against an immovable wall. No self-deception, no trick of reason or science, no magic, no amount of self-reliance can make us independent of the universe and enable us to escape its destructive aspect. Pain is a fact and no amount of wishful theology can explain it away with promises and apologies for its existence in a universe whose God is supposed to be “love.” At the same time no amount of acceptance can make away with our fundamental horror of pain in its more extreme forms. But, even so, faith can never be real faith if it is halfhearted, if we think that it is merely a question of the “best policy,” of the best means to make an intolerable situation a little more bearable.

God, life, and the universe keep their two aspects whatever we may try to think about them, and continue their play in all its love and all its cruelty. Faith means that we give ourselves to it absolutely and utterly, without making conditions of any kind, that we abandon ourselves to God without asking anything in return, save that our abandonment to Him may make us feel more keenly the lilt of His playing. This abandonment is the freedom of the spirit.³ That is the only promise which can be given for faith, but what a promise! It means that we share in the ecstasy of His creation and His destruction, and experience the mystery and the freedom of His power in all the aspects of life, in both the heights of pleasure and the depths of pain. It may seem illogical, but those who have once shared in this mystery have a gratitude that knows no bounds and are able to say again that God is Love, though with an altogether new meaning.

The Man and the Means

But we cannot make a technique of abandonment, for at once a snag arises. It is the same snag that stands between partial and total acceptance and may be described in a number of different ways. Fundamentally it is the old problem of lifting oneself up by one’s own belt and is perhaps most aptly put in the Chinese saying that “when the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.” The “right means” are all forms of technique—acceptance, abandonment, and what you will; the “wrong man” is, generally speaking, oneself. We are “wrong” in the sense that we are unhappy, that we are without faith and have no freedom of spirit. The problem is therefore how the wrong man can become the right man when all the available means for so doing are bound to work in the wrong way. In other words, a man desires to change himself. Now a man is what he is, and his desires are according to his nature. If he is a “bad” man, his desires will be bad, even though one of them is that he shall become better. We discover this by asking why he wants to become better. The underlying motive for improvement is tainted because the man who entertains it is bad; he wants to become better out of self-interest, because in his pride he wishes to escape from the reproach of being bad. If this is pointed out to him, he will then ask whether he ought simply to accept his badness. And if we again ask him why he wants to accept his badness, we discover that he wants to accept it in order to escape from it. He is caught whichever way he turns because the means he adopts, his behavior, his ideas, his religion, are always his, and he will always use them according to his capacity and his nature. They are like so many different suits of clothes; he may wear rags, ermine, tweeds, or skins; he may walk, run, skip, or trot; he may whisper, shout, sing, or talk—but he himself remains the same since he is the cause and not the consequence of his actions.

Let us put it in another way. Supposing that we decide to accept the dark side of life, the unconscious and the conflict between the unconscious and the ego, there is still one thing that by this means we do not accept—our desire to escape from it. Until that desire is accepted our acceptance is always an indirect attempt to escape. Here we meet the problem of St. Michael and the Dragon again. Christian morality taught us to overcome the dark side of life by fighting it; psychology would have us overcome it by acceptance, but in fact these are both ways of overcoming it, which means getting rid of it and escaping it. Thus the way of acceptance as distinct from the way of fighting is apt to make a new Dragon out of St. Michael.

Infinite Regression

There is also the problem of the relation between nature and the ego. If we accept the universe and subordinate ourselves to it, if, instead of trying to live life, we let life live us, we are accepting one aspect of life only to deny another—the aggressive, self-asserting ego in which life has manifested itself. Acceptance is indeed the feminine way, but it cannot be practiced at the expense of the masculine. It seems, therefore, that what we need is, as it were, a higher type of acceptance that includes both acceptance and escape, faith and suspicion, self-abandonment and egotism, surrender and aggressiveness, the Dragon and St. Michael. But even this does not quite solve the problem—indeed, it is as far from a solution as ever—because we are starting out upon an infinite regression. We are becoming hopelessly involved in a vicious circle, for as soon as we set up the notion of an acceptance which takes in both accepting and escaping we have two pairs of opposites instead of one. We begin with the opposition of acceptance₁ vs. escape; but we then get acceptance₂ vs. acceptance₁-vs.-escape—a psychological monstrosity which can continue indefinitely.

At first sight the problem of the vicious circle may seem purely mathematical and remote from experience. But in fact it is only a rather complicated way of expressing the fundamental conundrum that those who search for happiness do not find it. It is again the problem of the donkey with the carrot suspended before his nose from a stick that is fastened to his own collar. If he chases it, using the aggressive technique, he does not catch it; if he stands still, using the passive technique, he still does not catch it. What can he do? The poor creature is apparently quite helpless. Of course, it will be said that any attempt to answer such riddles is an easy way to go crazy. This is very true, and for just the same reasons it will be discovered that any attempt to discover happiness is also an easy way to go crazy, and the world today is a crazy place just because people are trying to do it. We are a collection of people running wildly round in circles in frantic pursuit of our own selves, and the picture is not particularly edifying. Yes, if we could see ourselves from a psychological standpoint we should think we had walked into bedlam. We should see men running away from their shadows, men trying to jump off the ground by tugging at their shoelaces, men trying to see their own eyes and kiss their own lips. It is like trying to mend a hole in one part of a handkerchief by taking a patch from another. For the trouble is that all our schemes, systems, and devices are partial. It is as if we ourselves were the hole in the handkerchief; we see some other part of the handkerchief and think how pleasant it would be to fill our emptiness by acquiring it. So we cut it out and fill ourselves, only to find that we are now the new hole—the invisible blind spot in the universe.⁴

The Squirrel Cage of Duality

That which we call God can only be known intimately by total acceptance, because freedom by its very nature cannot be limited. Therefore we may say that when you consider yourself free to accept but not to escape, this is not freedom. But the human mind is so constructed that it cannot imagine total acceptance; our intellect is such that it must think in dualities—this and not that, that and not this. It is a seesaw; one end must be up and the other down; both ends cannot be up at the same time and down at the same time. Therefore freedom of the spirit demands the interference of some factor over and above the human intellect. For not only is the intellect unable to conceive of this totality, it is also unable to appreciate its value, arguing that in “abolishing” dualism you destroy all values, give sanction to the wildest libertinism, and in fact require nothing more of the spiritual man than that he should do as he likes. (Somehow we are reminded of St. Augustine’s precept, “Love, and do as you will.”) The same objection is raised to the Oriental idea of God as the Self of the universe, the One Reality and true self of all creatures, forms, activities, thoughts, and substances. It is argued that if everything is God, then God is nothing—on the principle of W. S. Gilbert’s line, “When everybody’s somebody, then no one’s anybody.”

The Oriental philosophies of Vedanta, Taoism, and Mahayana Buddhism do not, however, involve this reductio ad absurdum, because to say that all things are God is not quite the same as saying that everything is one thing; in fact it is not even remotely the same. In their view God is not a thing, and they do not abolish all differences by reducing individual shapes and forms to a single, infinite formlessness. For God is not the One as distinct from the Many, nor unity as distinct from diversity.⁵ We cannot begin to understand the Oriental view of God until we can conceive of a “One” that can include both unity and diversity, which can at the same time be God and a speck of dust or a human being with equal reality. In this sense it might be said that the oneness of things is revealed in their multiplicity and diversity. Such paradoxes are inevitable when we try to approach nonduality from the intellectual point of view. This is true not only of intellect, for the way of acceptance which we have already described involves much more than mere thinking; nevertheless it is just as liable to be involved in this squirrel cage of duality.

The problems of duality are clearly stated in the Christian faith, but they often pass unrecognized under the symbols in which they are contained. The story of the Fall, of the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, describes man’s involvement in the vicious circle—a condition in which, of his own power, he is able to do nothing good that is not vitiated by evil. In this condition it may be said that “all good deeds are done for the love of gain,” that is, with a purely self-interested motive, because “honesty is the best policy.” Every advance in morality is counterbalanced by the growth of repressed evil in the unconscious, for morality has to be imposed by law and wherever there is compulsion there is repression of instinctual urges. Indeed, the very formulation of the ideal of righteousness suggests and aggravates its opposite. Thus St. Paul says, “I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.” So, too, Lao Tzu remarks in the Tao Te Ching:

When the great Tao is lost, spring forth benevolence and righteousness.

When wisdom and sagacity arise, there are great hypocrites.

When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.

When a nation is in confusion and disorder, patriots are recognized.

Where Tao is, equilibrium is. When Tao is lost, out come all the differences of things.

[Trans. Ch’u Ta-kao]

It is not surprising, therefore, that Christian doctrine follows St. Paul in saying that salvation for fallen man is unattainable by law alone, which is to say by technique. For this is not only a question of morality. So long as man attempts to save himself by the mere observance of moral, spiritual, or psychological law he is involved in the vicious circle of duality.

The Acceptance of Grace

The motivating power of the vicious circle is pride. In Christian terms we should say that man is not willing to be saved as he is; he feels that it is necessary for him to do something about it, to earn salvation by his own self-made spirituality and righteousness. The Grace of God is offered freely to all, but through pride man will not accept it. He cannot bear the thought that he is absolutely powerless to lift himself up and that the only chance of salvation is simply to accept something which is offered as freely to the saint as to the sinner. If nothing can be done to earn this Grace it seems to set all man’s self-imposed ideals at naught; he has to confess himself impotent, and this is more than he can bear. So the gift of Grace is tacitly ignored, and man goes on trying to manufacture it for himself.⁶

When it is said that man will not let himself be saved as he is, this is another way of saying that he will not accept himself as he is; subtly he gets around this simple act by making a technique out of acceptance, setting it up as something which he should do in order to be a “good boy.” And as soon as acceptance is made a question of doing and technique we have the vicious circle. True acceptance is not something to be attained; it is not an ideal to be sought after—a state of soul which can be possessed and acquired, which we can add to ourselves in order to increase our spiritual stature. If another paradox may be forgiven, true acceptance is accepting yourself as you are NOW, at this moment, before you have even begun to make yourself different by accepting yourself.⁷ In other words, as soon as we try to make the ideal state of mind called “acceptance” something different from the state of mind which we have at this moment, this is the pride which makes it so difficult to accept what we are now, the barrier that stands between man and that which we call God or Tao.

But when it is suggested that we should find union with God here and now at this very moment, everyone is outraged and begins to make excuses. “After all, how can we attain such sublime understanding at this moment? We are unprepared. We are not good enough. We shall have to do all kinds of things first. We must meditate and train ourselves in religious discipline, and then perhaps after many years we shall be fit and worthy to attain that greatest of all attainments.” But this is surely a peculiar form of blindness and false pride, masquerading as humility. We see God every time we open our eyes; we inhale Him at every breath; we use His strength in every movement of a finger; we think Him in every thought, although we may not think of Him, and we taste Him in every bite of food. This is an old story to those who have studied the wisdom of the East, but still the search goes on, a search for something we have never lost, something which is staring us right in the face, a search which the Buddhists sometimes describe as “hiding loot in one’s pocket and declaring oneself innocent.” It is difficult just because it is too easy, for man finds it so hard to climb down from his high horse and accept that which is, freely and unreservedly. Small wonder, then, that we are advised to become again as little children, who have an inconvenient way of drawing attention to obvious things which the adult mind cannot or will not see. For spiritual understanding is not a reward given to you for being a great person; you cannot acquire it any more than you can acquire the wind and the stars. But you can open your eyes and see it.

The Dweller on the Threshold

Now in this true acceptance of oneself there is a mystery, for, as the Pythagoreans say, “Know thyself, and thou wilt know the universe and the gods.” The mystery is that something so apparently simple and lowly as oneself as it is at this moment can contain so great a treasure. But that is the peculiarity of divine Grace; it is always found where it would least be expected, for, in the words of Lao Tzu, Tao “seeks, like water, the lowly level which men abhor.” And so it happens that the very thing we are forever struggling to get away from, to outgrow, to change, and to escape, is the very thing which holds the much desired secret. That is why there is a vicious circle, why our search for happiness is this frantic running around, pursuing in ignorance that which we are trying to flee. We are running away from our front in order to catch up with our back, with the result that, for us, happiness is always somewhere in the future, just round the corner perhaps, but always beyond. Ourselves and our situation as they are at this moment contain the whole secret, but when we try to accept them in the technical way we are still going on with the circular chase; we are trying to add to them the virtue of acceptance so that we do not have to face them as they are, without their acceptance and with all their shortcomings, their conflicts, their desires to escape, their impotence, and their sins. We catch a glimpse of them from time to time in all their nakedness and run from them as fast as we can go, trying to improve them, spiritualize them, and in a thousand other ways hide such terrible nudity. Naturally we deceive ourselves and begin to have fanciful pictures of ourselves as we are. But when these pictures are torn away we meet again the unedifying and fearful sight of our real selves, and it seems impossible that the great treasure can have anything to do with such a degraded state of affairs.

From one point of view this sight of our true selves is the dreaded Dweller on the Threshold, the monster which all initiates into the divine mysteries have to face on the brink of their enlightenment. But the Dweller on the Threshold is the face of God seen from this side of the brink; you pass over the brink if you can call Him by His real name, though it needs a profound humility to utter it. For to accept the Grace of God as you are now, without any “improvements” and dressing up in more respectable clothes, is to realize that all the cherished ambitions of self-interest, all your efforts to make yourself great, are vain. You have to come down to the level of worms and dust which have not a particle of your cleverness and yet exist by the Grace of God. Most people know this from childhood, and yet never can be simple enough to recognize it, for “which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?…Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”⁸ It would be well for those who struggle so hard in the squirrel cage of duality to be spiritual, to accept, to find wisdom, and to be happy to remember occasionally those words, “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?”

The Religious Problem of Modern Man

But familiarity breeds contempt. Modern man is now seeking in all manner of new religions, in the psychology of the unconscious, and in the wisdom of Asia what has always been in the teaching of Christ and the symbolism of the Church. Yet we cannot blame him, so much has the Christian religion been dragged in the mud. Most of its teachers have long forgotten the meaning of its symbols, even if they ever knew them, and the events in the life of the spirit which they describe have been placed at the safe distance of bygone history. Moreover its Bible is such a vast collection of conflicting ideas that Christians, accepting all of it as the word of God, have often fallen into the absurdity of trying to incorporate the legalistic morality of the Jews⁹ into their own faith with the fantastic result that many forms of Protestantism are much more Jewish than Christian. They try to interpret the Sermon on the Mount in the same spirit as the Ten Commandments, whereas if they had ever read St. Paul they would realize their utter difference. (Curiously enough, there are times when even St. Paul seems unable to shake off his hereditary legalism and realize the full implications of his own faith.) But in Christianity this legalistic moralism has been carried to such extremes of sanctimonious gloom that for thousands the very word “religion” means little more than doing exactly what you don’t like. So often have the words “God” and “Christ” been said with a frown in the voice or with a type of intense seriousness in which there is no room for humor or beauty that they are apt to cause a deadness of heart instead of a thrill. There is hardly any other religion in the world with quite this depressive atmosphere, and even in Christianity it is confined mainly to Protestantism—to the spiritual descendants of Calvin, Luther, Knox, and Wesley. It is small wonder, therefore, that people of spirit turn to the more colorful faiths of Catholicism (if they wish to remain Christian), Buddhism, Hinduism, Theosophy, or, if they are of a more scientific mentality, to one of the many psychological systems of modern times. I even know those who acknowledge themselves pagans, sun worshippers, and polytheists.

But Christianity is our traditional faith; it is in our blood and bones. Therefore it is possible and very desirable that the wisdom of Asia and the psychology of the unconscious will bring its treasures to light again and interpret them in a way that will give us an altogether new zest for it. Until I had studied the religions of the East for some years the teaching of Christ and the symbols of Christianity had no real meaning for me. But I do not mean to suggest that a study of Oriental faiths is essential for an understanding of Christianity. For my own part, I believe that my understanding would have been much the same had I read Eckhart, Augustine, à Kempis, Berdyaev, and others of their caliber instead of the sages of India and China. But there is an increasing interest in the wisdom of the East among us which will take its own course and to which many will turn before they ever understand Christianity as anything more than a set of inhibitions and outworn dogmas. Of all the new religions and ways of life that have been evolved in the West, Christianity is almost alone in understanding a way out of the vicious circle of dualism, but it is difficult to see how that way can appeal to thousands of thinking men and women unless they can approach Christianity with somewhat changed conceptions of God and the soul. For, as Jung so often points out, the difficulty for modern man with his rationalistic background is to believe in Christianity as a system of theology. As he writes in Modern Man in Search of a Soul:

People no longer feel themselves to be redeemed by the death of Christ; they cannot believe—they cannot compel themselves to believe, however happy they may deem the man who has a belief. Sin has for them become something quite relative: what is evil for one is good for another. After all, why should not Buddha be in the right also? [p. 268]

Indeed, we may say of modern man’s attitude to religion as a whole that he has little patience with doctrines that are beyond objective proof and that seem to him, perhaps arbitrarily, to be stretching his credulity. But if he can be shown that there is a psychological approach to Christianity almost independent of doctrine as such, in which doctrines are taken as symbols of spiritual experiences, this may perhaps be the foundation for a wholly new attitude to religion in the Western world. This is the point of view from which we shall approach the doctrines of the Orient—a point of view which many Easterners have adopted and among whom we must number the Buddha himself. He valued only immediate personal experiences and when questioned upon the ultimate mysteries of the universe answered only with “silence—and a finger pointing the way.”