The Meaning of Happiness

7. THE GREAT LIBERATION

Those who search for happiness do not find it because they do not understand that the object of their search is the seeker. We say that they are happy who have “found themselves” for the secret of happiness lies in the ancient saying, “Become what you are.” We must speak in paradox because we think we are divided from life and, to be happy, must unite ourselves with it. But we are already united, and all our doings are its doings. Life lives us; we do not live life. Yet in fact there is no “us” apart from life that life can so “live.” It is not that we are passive tools of life, as fatalists believe, for we could only be passive tools if we were something other than life. When you imagine yourself to be divided from and at war with life, you imagine yourself to be its passive tool and so are unhappy, feeling with Omar Khayyám—

Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,

And who with Eden didst devize the Snake;

For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man

Is blacken’d, Man’s Forgiveness give—and take!

But in truth action and passivity are one and the same act, and life and yourself are one and the same being. This truth of ancient philosophy is beyond our logic, but he who understands it is a sage and he who does not is a fool. But, curiously enough, the fool becomes a sage by letting himself be free to be a fool; then his joy knows no bounds and he “walks freely throughout the universe.” One might call this the complexity of the very simple. And this, without the use of technical terms, is the answer of Oriental wisdom to the toughest problem of Western thought—the problem of fate and free will.

Fate and Free Will

Inevitably, the search for spiritual freedom brings us to this time-honored conundrum. For, it will be asked, is not the total acceptance of life as we have described it simply the most thoroughgoing fatalism? Does it not mean just the huge sense of irresponsibility which arises from the knowledge that not only your deeds and circumstances, but also your very thoughts and feelings, are the acts of life or fate—and you may as well cease to be worried by them? If this is true, does it not also imply that those who persist in the apparent bondage and very real misery of refusal to accept, believing in free will and taking pride in their egoistic powers, are in fact unable to experience that acceptance, fate having decreed their belief in free will? When Oriental philosophy says that all things are Brahman, Western intellectualism cannot resist applying the label of fatalism. The reason is that we have not been able to resolve the problem of the vicious circle, for determinism or fatalism is its philosophic description. The vicious circle is the impotence of man; it is not resolved until the realization of our impotence as men can be complemented by our omnipotence as God. This is the point where fatalism bursts into freedom. Curiously enough, few philosophers have ever dared to be consistent fatalists because the doctrine contains an odd paradox. Fatalism is the doctrine of man’s utter subservience to destiny, but one strange objection is always raised to it—“If everyone believed that all their thoughts and deeds were inevitably foreordained by fate, then people would behave just exactly as they pleased.” In other words, they would become dangerously free!

Total acceptance as we have described it is very nearly this carrying of fatalism to the point where it becomes absolute liberty. But it contains an additional factor which guards the process against its dangers and makes it something much more than a mere proposition in philosophy. But first we must consider the problem of fatalism in its purely philosophical sense. Logically, the position of the fatalists is unassailable; they reason that a given cause can have only one effect and that there can be no activity of the human mind which is not the effect of a cause. Thus whenever a choice of actions is presented to us, our decision is determined not by a free act of will but by the untold number of factors which make up our being at that moment—hereditary impulses, instinctive reflexes, moral upbringing, and a thousand other tendencies which incline us to a particular choice as inevitably as a magnet draws a needle lying within its field. An act of choice could not be free unless it were done without motive, for our motives are the result of past conditioning. But motive is only another name for cause, and an action without any kind of cause is impossible. Thus we have a chain of cause and effect, in which each cause is an effect and each effect a cause; each link in this chain can only have two particular links on either side of it, before as cause and after as effect. Therefore the last link in the chain is predetermined by the first.

With Earth’s first Clay They did the Last Man’s knead,

And then of the Last Harvest sow’d the Seed:

Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote

What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.

The Freedom of Fate

Yet, strictly speaking, this amounts in the end to a proof of free will, but a more tremendous free will than the advocates of that doctrine ever contemplated. For if each one of our acts is determined by the entire previous history of the universe, if sun, moon, planets, and stars are at work in the winking of an eyelid, this means that we in our turn are using their power in all our doings. For the doctrine of fatalism, from one point of view, amounts almost to God’s giving man carte blanche to use His power in whatever way He pleases. Objectively it may be true that in a determined universe fatalism gives you anything but the power to do as you please, but purely objective matters have little or no direct meaning for human beings when it comes to the really important things of life, and it is a truism that cold facts have no meaning apart from that which we give to them. As a rule, fatalists are those who try to understand life in terms of strictly rational and objective values. (“Objective values” have probably as much reality as cubic colors.) But if determinism is a cold fact its meaning depends entirely on the subjective attitude we take toward it, and it is seldom that the rationalist has either the courage to accept its power to liberate or sufficiently abject pessimism to take the other attitude and say with Andreyev

I curse the day on which I was born. I curse the day on which I shall die. I curse the whole of my life. I fling everything back at your cruel face, senseless Fate! Be accursed, be forever accursed! With my curses I conquer you. What else can you do to me?…With my last thought I will shout into your asinine ears: Be accursed, be accursed!

But even on the objective plane it does not follow that determinism deprives us of all freedom, because no Western metaphysician or scientist has yet decided what is the precise difference between the soul of man and fate itself.

Now Oriental philosophy is quite clear on this point, and for this reason has never found any stumbling block in the fate–free will problem. Vedanta says that the soul of man is Brahman, which means that our own deepest self is that First Cause which set the wheels of fate in motion. But then Vedanta does not share our commonsense view of time, for only from the standpoint of maya was the First Cause a thing of the past. In reality the First Cause is forever now. We speak of the beginning and the end of the universe in terms of eons, kalpas, and ages simply because human intellect cannot grasp the nature of eternity unless it is spread out upon the measuring rod of time. But to the Oriental philosopher the creation and destruction of the universe are taking place in this moment, and for him this is true from both the metaphysical and the psychological standpoints. It is not our purpose to enter into the former because it is quite outside everyday experience, and has no more to give to the solution of immediate human problems than the scientific or objective view.

In terms of practical psychology I would say that this metaphysical concept of the East is a state of mind in which the relation between oneself and life, fate, or destiny is no longer a question of moved and mover, passive agent and active power. Therefore it involves a change from the view of life in which man is an isolated being without any sense of union or positive relationship between himself and the rest of the universe as it exists both externally and within the soul. Spiritual freedom is not apparent in this state because man as an isolated unit has no meaning, just as the finger is meaningless without the hand, and the hand without the whole body. A life without meaning is unhappiness, and we have this lack of meaning whenever man’s view of life is not whole, whenever man sees himself as a creature whose desires and whose very human nature have no positive relation to the universe.

In this view we are the merest whims of fate who can only find salvation in letting ourselves drift on the sea of chaos or in fighting for everything that we can hold. Man can never understand his freedom while he regards himself as the mere instrument of fate or while he limits his freedom to whatever his ego can do to snatch from life the prizes which it desires. To be free man must see himself and life as a whole, not as active power and passive instrument but as two aspects of a single activity. Between those two aspects there may be harmony or conflict, but conflict itself may also proceed from that single activity. Thus man’s experience becomes whole when he sees the activity of life as a whole in himself as he is now, when he realizes that there is no difference between his own thoughts and actions as they are at this moment and the nature of the universe. It is not that life is making him think and move as you pull the strings of a marionette; it is rather that man’s thoughts and deeds are at once his own creations and the creations of impersonal nature. Man’s volition and nature’s activity are two names for one and the same thing, for the doings of life are the doings of man, and the doings of man are the doings of life.

Two as One

Here there is no question of which is the mover and which the moved, for man lives his life by the same power with which life lives man. This is why total acceptance, which seems to be a response to bondage, is actually a key to freedom, for when you accept what you are now you become free to be what you are now, and this is why the fool becomes a sage when he lets himself be free to be a fool. Indeed, we are always free to be what we are now and only false pride keeps us from seeing it. Therefore acceptance is activity and passivity in one; as passivity it is accepting ourselves, our desires, and fears as movements of life, nature, and the unconscious; as activity it is letting ourselves be free to be ourselves and to have our desires and fears. Whereupon the ego and the unconscious, man and nature, oneself and life are seen as the two dancers who move in such close accord that it is impossible to say which moves and which responds, which is the active partner and which the passive. It is possible to have this feeling of wholeness not only in rare moments of insight but also in everyday living, and this comes just as soon as we realize that all our activities are just as much activities of nature and the universe as are the circling of planets, the running of water, the roaring of thunder, and the blowing of the wind.

In this understanding we shall move forward as freely and uninterruptedly as the wind. But our freedom will not inflate us if we see that we share it with all things under the sun; for if you think you can possess and acquire freedom it will inflate you to the point of bursting with spiritual pride. Therefore it is not a question of putting yourself artificially into a certain state of mind, for freedom is no different from the state of mind you have now, and whether you realize it or remain ignorant it makes no difference to your freedom. But we are always trying to interfere with our states of mind as they appear from moment to moment, imagining that some are nearer to freedom than others—singing “Nearer my God to Thee” instead of “Just as I am, Thou wilt receive.” This very interference drives out the sense of freedom, for spiritual pride is to imagine that some creatures and some states of mind are nearer to God than others. Now acceptance becomes love when it enables us to see that God does not depart from us even when we are sinful men.

But does man have freedom only through God? In other words, can he realize his freedom only in the moment when he is predestined to do so and not before? This question has been much of a puzzle to the theologians, the Calvinists having taken the view of predestination and the Catholics, generally speaking, the view that although man is not free to be good without the Grace of God, he is nevertheless free at all times to choose the acceptance of Grace. Thus Berdyaev writes in his Freedom and the Spirit:

If human nature was definitively perverted and the freedom of the spirit definitively impaired, there would be no faculty in man capable of receiving the truth of revelation and he would be insensible to the operations of grace. But man though wounded and broken remains a spiritual being and has preserved his religious consciousness, for the Word of God could not be addressed to a being who was deprived of it. Liberty in man precedes the action of revelation and grace. [pp. 130–31]

The answer seems confused because the question is wrongly stated. Both the Calvinist and the Catholic answer seem to fall short of the mark through not recognizing that man’s acceptance of Grace is one and the same act as God’s giving of it. Man’s free choice does not precede the action of Grace, nor does it follow it, and it cannot be said that the initiative comes from either side. The two acts occur simultaneously because they are two aspects of the same process; man’s ascent to God is God’s descent to man. The theologians are confused because they make too hard and fast a distinction between God and man—a distinction which, in view of the Christ symbol, the God-man, they should have avoided. As St. Athanasius said, “He became man that we might be made God.”¹ Therefore, in Christian terms, the descent of God into man as Christ is a historical symbol of an eternal event—a union of God and man in which neither ceases to exist (for Christ was as much man as God) and a union which achieves realization from both sides at once. Eckhart puts it in this way:

It is as if one stood before a high mountain and cried, “Art thou there?” The echo comes back, “Art thou there?” If one cries, “Come out!” the echo answers, “Come out!”

The echo only follows the call because there is physical space between man and mountain, and because the mountain has no tongue and cannot call and be echoed by the man. But God and man have a closer union, and Eckhart says that “the eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me.”² Realization is not predestined to come at a certain time because predestination is an utterly limited half-truth. It may come at any moment, for that union exists eternally. Fate is only the other face of freedom, and we may say that you are fated to realize it at a certain time only because you choose to see it at that time.

This argument will not, of course, appeal to those who argue fatalism on the basis of causality in the objective universe. These will argue that although fatalism may perhaps give one a wholly imaginary sense of freedom, events will nevertheless occur only in their predestined time and thus the development of a sense of freedom will be as fated as anything else. This type of fatalism takes no account of the possible relationships between the self of man and the “cause of fate” and depends to a great extent on the commonsense view of time. Factual knowledge of these matters is rudimentary, to say the least, and hence we cannot regard the argument as in any way final. Moreover, the psychology of the unconscious argues against the lesser type of free will (i.e., the usual theological notion) on different grounds, explaining the apparently free decisions of the conscious ego as “rationalizations” of unconscious impulses. But here it parts company with the argument from causality, for many psychologists of this school do not admit that causality applies within the unconscious.³ From the spiritual standpoint, however, the purely philosophic and scientific arguments are irrelevant; such metaphysical premises as it employs may be regarded as “working hypotheses”; the important thing is that they should be “working.” Scientist and philosopher may argue to the end of time, but meanwhile the human soul thirsts, and psychologist, priest, and mystic have the temerity to suggest that there may be ways of approach to the ultimate mysteries other than laboratory observation and pure logic. For while scientist and logician dissect and analyze, the mystic looks for meaning in the whole.

At each moment the mystic accepts the whole of his experience, including himself as he is, his circumstances as they are, and the relationship between them as it is. Wholeness is his keyword; his acceptance is total, and he excludes no part of his experience, however unsavory it may be. And in this he discovers that wholeness is holiness, and that holiness is another name for acceptability. He is a holy man because he has accepted the whole of himself and thus made holy what he was, is, and shall be in every moment of his life. He knows that in each of those moments he is united with God, and that whether he is saint or sinner the intensity of that union never changes. For God is the wholeness of life, which includes every possible aspect of man and is known in accepting the whole of our experience at each moment. And for those who do not understand the word “God,” I quote from Goethe’s Fragment upon Nature:

Nature! We are encompassed by her, enfolded by her—impossible to escape from her and impossible to come nearer to her.…The most unnatural also is nature. Who sees her not on all sides sees her truly nowhere.…At each moment she starts upon a long, long journey and at each moment reaches her end.…She lets every child enlarge upon her, every fool judge her, thousands pass heedlessly over her, seeing nothing; yet she has friends among all and has her recompense from all. Even in resisting her laws one obeys them; and one works with her even in desiring to work against her.…Love is her crown. Only through love does one come near her.…She has isolated all things so that she may bring all together.…All is eternally present in her, for she knows neither past nor future. For her the present is eternity.

Freedom and Libertinism

Indeed, Goethe’s words seem to suggest a freedom of terrifying possibilities, possibilities which the sages of Asia have known and understood, and which the mystics of Christianity may also have known but of which they have spoken only with the greatest care. For all things are possible to the free man—but not probable. His freedom is founded in the knowledge that his union with God, life, or nature can never be destroyed; that while he lives (and perhaps when he is dead) he can never do anything but express God or nature in all that he thinks and does. He is free because he knows that even if he descends to the uttermost depths of depravity he can in no way deny or separate himself from a universe which includes all extremes and hence can suffer from none. For as God “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good” so also He provides them with that of which His sun is a symbol—Himself. As Whitman says in his poem “To a Common Prostitute,”

Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,

Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.

Thus in the freedom of the spirit we understand that whether we love life or loathe it, whether we are filled with compassion or hatred, wonder or lust, beauty or horror, wisdom or ignorance—each and all of these opposites are as acceptable as day and night, calm and storm, waking and sleeping. We do not feel bound through any preconceived pattern of good character to react to our experience in the “proper” way; at any moment we may react to that experience just exactly as we please and consciously be just as uninhibited as the wild animal is by instinct. In sorrow the free man feels himself free to weep, in pain to scream, in anger to kill, in tedium to get drunk, and in laziness to idle. It is precisely this feeling of freedom which absolves him from the necessity of doing these things, and there is another reason too of which we shall speak later. He is like a man with a fire hose; the nozzle is his physical body and brain, and the water is the power of life. He is free to turn that hose in any conceivable direction, for by no twist or turn can he cut off the supply of life-giving water which never ceases to flow out in all its power. In moods of depression or sluggishness we may think that it has run low, but this is only because we do not give the mood freedom to expand itself; we are pointing the nozzle at the ground and the force we employ to keep it down is our effort to repress the mood.⁴

The Dance and the Center

We have a popular phrase that describes this freedom—“Let yourself go!” In the language of religion and psychology it is called self-abandonment. Essentially self-abandonment to life is a knack. A deliberate attempt to abandon oneself cannot be done without faith, for it seems like taking a plunge into a roaring torrent. Confucius tells of a man who managed to come safely down a huge waterfall by abandoning himself to the nature of falling water. But faith will follow abandonment provided we do not hang about on the brink and prevent ourselves from jumping by an increasing rush of misgivings—provided we jump immediately. This is to abandon yourself to your experience, your state of mind as it is at this very moment, being prepared to let it take you wherever it wills. But, as we have seen, as soon as you let life live you, you discover that you are living life with an altogether new fullness and zest. To return to the analogy of the dance, it is as if you allowed your partner, life, to swing you along until you so get the “feel” of the dance that you are doing the “swinging” just as much as your partner. And then she will laugh at you and tell you that you were doing it all the time, only that you were so busy trying to figure out the steps by yourself that you forgot your partner and even forgot that it was a dance.

Thus the free man has the feeling of an unchanging center in himself—a center which is not exactly in his ego and not exactly in life, nature, or the unconscious as independent of the ego. It is the middle of the dance, the point around which the two partners revolve and in which they realize union. He is free because this center makes him feel absolutely secure and at home in the universe; he can take it anywhere, make it do anything, for, as Lao Tzu says of the Tao, “Using it, he finds it inexhaustible.” This center is the point on which his feeling of wholeness depends, and it develops out of faith—because he trusts and abandons himself to life on the one hand and to himself on the other, and also to the dance that is between them. God imparts His life and strength to all creatures, trusting them to use it as they will, because God is the principle of faith and love. When man can have that same faith and love for all the creatures of his mind, which are the states of his mind from moment to moment, then he becomes at one with God. Indeed, the kingdom of heaven is within us—microcosm of the macrocosm—and man finds his freedom through faith in his own universe, making the sun of his acceptance to rise on the evil and the good. Now in this there is profound humility, for as God knows Himself in the sinner as well as in the saint, in the slime as well as in the stars, so also man, in partaking of the freedom of God, must recognize himself in his depths as well as in his heights. For our true instructors in wisdom are not the sages and their writings but the creatures of our own minds, the gods and demons of thought and feeling and their reactions to the outer world of experience. And of these demons the blackest of all is called Lucifer, the bearer of light, for he is made to show us that there is light in the darkness as well as in the light. In the words of Monoimus the Gnostic:⁵

Cease to seek after God (as without thee), and the universe, and things similar to these; seek Him from out of thyself,…and learn whence is sorrow and joy, and love and hate, and waking though one would not, and sleeping though one would not, and getting angry though one would not, and falling in love though one would not. And if thou shouldst closely investigate these things, thou wilt find Him in thyself, one and many, just as the atom; thus finding from thyself a way out of thyself.