SEX AS SYMBOL
The Ancient Light in Modern Psychology
BY
ALVIN BOYD KUHN, PH.D.
Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research
purposes. I can be contacted at pc93@bellsouth.net.
I will be greatly indebted to the individual who can put me in touch with the
Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following works:
The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Tree of Knowledge, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes - But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Through Science to Religion, Creation in Six Days?, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy, A. B. Kuhn's graduation address at Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn's unpublished autobiography, Great Pan Returns.
"We have only just rediscovered the
precious stone;
we have still to polish it. We cannot yet
compete
with the intuitive clarity of Eastern
vision,"
-- C. G. JUNG: Integration of the
Personality, p. 41.
"All that can be said concerning the
gods must be
by exposition of old opinions and fables: it
being the
custom of the ancients to wrap up in enigma
and
allegory their thoughts and discourses
concerning
nature, which are, therefore, not easily
explained."
--HENRY O'BRIEN: The
p. 302--quoted from Strabo.
TO
ALL THOSE
WHO STRIVE TO SEE
THE MIND OF THE CREATOR
IN ALL THE WORK
OF HIS HAND
THIS
VOLUME IS
SINCERELY DEDICATED
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BRIGHT LEXICON OF DEITY 1
II. DRAMA BEARS MISSHAPEN OFFSPRING
12
III. AND GOD SPAKE UNTO MOSES 22
IV. THE GODS DISTRIBUTE DIVINITY 31
V. LOST DATA OF ANTHROPOLOGY 48
VI. "OLD CHILD" IS HIS
NAME 63
VII. THE TWO SUBTERRANEAN GROTTOES
83
VIII. IN PLUTO'S DARK REALM 98
IX. THE TWO MOTHERS OF THE CHRIST
111
X. IMMANUEL'S LAMP 124
XI. THE
XII. THE CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN
152
XIII. LIGHT FROM AN OLD LAMP 180
XIV. THE LANGUAGE OF LINGAM AND YONI
194
XV. PHALLICISM TRANSFIGURED 215
XVI. LOVE AND HATE 230
XVII. LOVE LOOKS BEYOND DEATH 245
XVIII. ROMANCE IN THE TRYSTING-TENT
260
XIX. THE
XX. WITH UNVEILED FACE 287
XXI. THE OIL OF GLADNESS 300
XXII. MY CUP RUNNETH OVER 322
v
CHAPTER I
THE BRIGHT LEXICON OF DEITY
In a very venerable document, Records
of the Past (XII, 68) we read that in remote days of antiquity geographical
mapping and local naming were instituted according to a plan which has almost
totally escaped recognition in our search for understanding of archaic culture.
It is said there that the names and localities were derived from the features
of an original uranograph, or chart of the heavens, and were transferred from
it to earth and applied to the geography of a country, with a distribution of
the names already localized in the empyrean amongst the places to be named,
according to a scheme of correspondence or analogy. It is declared that
"the mapping out of Egyptian localities according to the celestial Nomes
and scenery is described in the inscription of Khnum-hept, who is said to have
'established the landmark of the south, and sculptured the northern--like
the heaven. . . . He made the district in its two parts, setting up their
landmarks, like the heaven.'" In obvious corroboration of this method we
have the injunction given by deity to Moses in the Bible: "See that thou
make all things after the pattern shown thee in the Mount . . . the pattern of
the heavens."
Charts of the "Holy Land of
Canaan" have been uncovered in early
1
That this systematic procedure back
of primeval naming and topography had any remotest connection with two such
widely separated domains of human ideation as theology and modern
psychoanalysis has of course not been known. Yet it now looms on the horizon of
intelligence that the roots of these sciences are grounded in that ancient
practice. The connection appears superficially remote, but is in reality close
and direct.
It inheres in the basic cosmic
constitution of the creation, wherein the universe of total being, for the
purposes of manifestation or becoming, bifurcated into the duality of
subjective and objective, or spirit and matter. This is the procedure stated
precisely where it ought to have been, as the very first step in cosmic
creation--in the first verse of Genesis. Here it is proclaimed that the
first act in universal creation was the splitting apart of the unity of being
into its two facets or components, consciousness and objective reality. Most
aptly these two segments of whole being were allegorized under the terms
"heaven" for consciousness, or spirit, and "earth" for the
opposite node, matter. We have here the philosophical dichotomy of being, the
substrate of all life in the cosmos. Without the separation and opposition of
cosmic mind and cosmic body there could be no existence and no awareness of it.
Being would remain the Absolute, would remain asleep, if it did not rend apart
its totality into the twoness of polarity. Spirit and matter spring into
activity by concomitant stages of emergence from blank unconsciousness, and
each, so to say, generates itself and its opposite by mutual counteraction or
"hostility." For each is the counterfoil, the countervalence and by
reflection the counterpart of the other. Each is the fulcrum against which the
other can lift itself into reification. Hence intelligence is in the first step
of understanding instructed by the item of knowledge that spirit and matter, or
heaven and earth, mutually balance and mutually interpret each other.
Mind is the active agent, the
creator, and matter, the opposite energy, is the plastic substance of creation.
The two spring simultaneously into existence, the first impressing and shaping
the second
2
according to its original or
archetypal ideas. Hence all material creation is formed over the patterns of
heavenly or spiritual ideation. Divine thoughts may be said to be the molds
into which the energies of divine will pour the fluid essence of substance in
order to shape the universe projected in mind and purpose. Poured in while
liquid or plastic, the matter of substance crystallizes, solidifies, hardens and
thus brings into manifest existence the things of the visible worlds. Therefore
each created object bears the image of the thought that shaped it. Even man was
made in the image of his creator. The universe is the Logos of God, for it
reveals the form of the logical structure of the cosmos. It is the logical
structure concreted in matter.
If, then, the pervading oversoul of
the system wishes to communicate with the intelligences of gradated ranges of
lower being brought into function by its own initial activity, it is perforce
constrained, if not confined, to speaking in the language germane to and
commensurate with the lower ranges of consciousness addressed. For the
enlightenment of inferior by superior intelligence, such a language must be
constituted in the character and nature of symbols known or knowable to the
lower. Therefore higher intelligence must speak to lower in the language of
concretely known objects in the latter's world. Thus it is that the objective
world of any creature's life furnishes the characters and alphabet of the
language it is capable of comprehending. It is the office of the physical world
to provide the symbols which constitute language, for all language must be
concrete at base. There is not a word of remotest abstraction that does not
take its roots in some simply physical or mechanical process. As Carlyle says,
"Thy very attention, is it not merely a stretching toward?" To
express spirit itself, the terms used are all in the meaning of breath or air.
The human mind can conceive of abstractions, such as principles, laws, ideas,
realities of superphysical nature, only with the help of sensually known
objects or phenomena.
One of the most instructive truths
of all time was announced by
3
the great hierophant Hermes
Trismegistus of
"True, without falsehood,
certain and most true, that which is above is as that which is below, and that
which is below is as that which is above, for the performance of the miracles
of the One Thing."
Well had it been for the race of man
if the pertinence of this wisdom-laden pronouncement of the ancient sage had
not been obscured and lost when ignorance smothered sagacity in the third
century of the Christian era. For it embodies the basic principle of all human
culture. There goes with it as its corollary and necessary involvement the
great truth that an immediate analogy subsists between things seen and
realities unseen. It becomes in its primary cogency the key, as it is the
starting point, of all religion, philosophy, morality and psychology, not to
name such ancillary manifestations as mythology, anthropology, poetry, drama,
ritual, folk-lore and celebratory festivals.
The modern world has witnessed, if
somewhat stolidly, a remarkable phenomena. It has seen, perhaps not strictly
the renaissance, but at any rate the recrudescence, of three long buried and
discredited ancient sciences. These are alchemy, astrology and symbolism.
Neither of them has come back to vogue in the same aura of understanding in
which they were esteemed of old. They have reappeared in the modern day resting
on foundations that are for the most part pseudo or spurious. Their true nature
and rationale are by no means known as formerly they were. They rest now on
partial and imperfect theorization. Whatever they possessed of legitimate worth
before their repression has not been reintegrated in their recent resurgence.
Indeed it may be said with reference at any rate to astrology and symbolism
that whereas in olden times they stood grounded on scientific theses of
positive value, they now flourish largely through supposititious motivations.
Their original high science has not been resuscitated with them.
Our concern is definitely with
symbolism. While the rehabilita-
4
tion of this primary science is
still in its infancy, there are cheering signs that it is on the way to be
given more adequate recognition of its pivotal importance. It is one of the
indices of the waking of the modern mind out of the still-lingering obfuscations
of Medievalism that a new science of "semantics" is well started
toward a central place in mental procedure. Yet it is evident that current
understanding has far to go before it will have regained the ancient insight
that discerned in symbolism the prime methodology by which the mind can be
given any substantial degree of realistic grasp of the realities of higher
worlds. Nationalistic languages, with their fixed signs and coins of mental
imagery, are local and temporary. They come and go, and serve a partial segment
of humanity, locking each unit off in cultural isolation. Symbolism is the
one universal and omnipresent language, significant and meaningful everywhere. For
its alphabet is the world of ubiquitous nature. The tree, the seed, the leaf,
the serpent, the beetle, the cow, the fish, water, earth, fire, the flower, the
sun, the star and the dragon-fly deliver the same oration to penetrating
perception in any land. "Nature never did betray the heart that loved
her," sings Wordsworth. And again he adjures us: "Let nature by your
teacher." She can not misteach, for she can not tell two varying stories
of truth. She may indeed have a wide variety of ways of telling her story, but
they all converge eventually upon the one monogram of truth. Life, or God, has
but one law, as ancient sapiency affirms. But it deploys its manifestations out
to concretion in a practically limitless play of variation or differentiation
in the worlds of form. If there is unity, it is a unity behind or beneath an
endless variety. No single expression violates the canons of true meaning. All
things in their several ways illustrate and exemplify the universal, the
eternal. Truth in the absolute may be one. As such it has little
serviceableness for man, who is no dweller in the absolute, but is still a
citizen of the relative. Truth, in manifestation, is many-sided, has many
facets, comes to an epiphany or showing forth at many levels. Strictly, man's
concern is not directly with truth. His prerogative is to deal
5
with the many truths that confront
him, doing his best to rationalize them into an organic structure that
approximates a vision of truth from his level.
As man, made in the image of Creator
God, reflects the dual constitution of all being in his two aspects of mind and
body, consciousness and instrument, function and organism, there is immediately
at hand the ground of understanding the play of psychic forces in and through
his world. Psychology has stumbled along a dark path, blindly trying to find a
formula that would elucidate psychic phenomena in the life of man. Its failure
heretofore has been due to its ignorant insistence on taking man as a unit, or
as possessing a consciousness with but one single focus. It has not known that
it has to take man for what he is,--a generically dual creature, of soul and
body, each with a distinct life of its own and lived on its own plane.
Scripture has well indicated this broad differentiation of his two elements,
when it says that at death the body returns to dust, but the soul to God who
gave it.
6
race is of heaven alone." This
predicates for man a dual constitution, asserting that his body is a product of
earth and that his soul, or spirit, is from the empyrean, with the
unforgettable reminder that he is intrinsically, by virtue of the part of him
that subsists perennially whether in or out of fleshly body, of the race of the
dynasty of imperishable souls, fragments of God's own integral being.
The early Egyptians symbolized the
dual nature of mankind by a dramatization that is one of the sublimest and most
revealing of all ancient hieroglyphs, and whose relevance we should no longer
miss. They depicted man under the symbol of the sun standing, now at morn, now
at eve, on the line of the horizon. Masterly dramatic genius represented man by
the sun, because he has a portion of the sun's identic light, energy and
intelligence in his own being. "Every man has a little sun (of
intelligence) within him," was the averment of the Medieval "Fire
Philosophers," the Illuminati and Therapeutae of occult wisdom. Rather it
should be said that a part of man's constituent nature is a fragment of
the dynamic life of the sun. Precisely like the sun, too, he stands in
incarnation exactly on the horizon line in the evolutionary situation, at the
place where he is half in the heaven world of high consciousness and half in
the lower kingdom of matter, or on earth. "Head in heaven, feet on the
ground," was again the statement of the position occupied by man as
formulated by sage Egyptian knowledge. "Soul in heaven, body on the
earth," was a variant of the same description. Virtually man shares the
life of heavenly creatures whenever he lives in the uplands of his
consciousness, for heaven is a state of exalted consciousness and not a
locality spatially dimensionable. He need not be detached from his body to
enter that superior condition of reality. In the same way the bodily part of
his being partakes of the life of earth. He inhabits earth through the
connection established with it by his senses. Verily man stands on the horizon
line that divides heaven from earth, where also, conversely, the two segments
of his nature are linked together. He enjoys the lofty prerogative of standing
in two worlds at once, and he can pass over the borderline from one
7
to the other by the simple measure
of focusing his consciousness upon the body, or upon the world of noumenal
unseen realities. "The horizon is covered with the tracks of thy
passing," declares the Ritual of the great Book of the Dead. This
is a reference to the continued aeonial passing of the soul back and forth
between body and incorporeal existence for its incarnations. In variant Hebrew
figure, but with kindred meaning, we are the angels ascending and descending
the Jacob's ladder that links earth and heaven, as we emerge from the empyrean,
or fire-land of spirit, to enter earthly body, or reascend thither at the end
of each excursion into actual being. Also in minor relevance, there is implicit
here the meaning that we pass up and down over the boundary line every time we
shift the focus of consciousness from bodily, earthly, physical things to the
interests of ideality.
Standing on the frontier between the
two kingdoms of life, consciousness and objectivity, man is at the most
strategic point of vantage occupied by any creature in evolution. It is deeply
significant that Norse mythology locates man in Midgard, where from his
seat on middle ground he is able to be the two-faced Janus of Roman mythicism,
who stands thus at the opening door (janua) of his evolution and can
look backward over the yesterday of his past, stored in the basement of his
unforgetting subconscious mind, and forward prospectively to his oncoming
future. The Egyptians were not ignorant of this situation, for they make the
eternal pilgrim, the reincarnating soul, the bearer, collector and husbandman
of all the values gained in living experience, utter this terse statement
descriptive of its nature and its task: "I am Yesterday and I am Tomorrow.
The things that have been and the things that will be are in my womb."
Again the soul declares the fact of its everlasting peregrination through the
realms of matter and being when it exclaims, "I am the persistent traveler
on the highways of heaven." "Eternity and everlastingness is my
name," it says again. "The name of my boat is Millions of Years."
But from his midpoint of strategic
position he can, as intimated,
8
gaze out upon two worlds at once,
that of mind and soul in the higher reaches of his conscious life, and that of
sense and feeling in the bodily half of his constitution. Again
Here indeed is the substance of
spiritual ethics, and at the same time the genius and the rationale of modern
psychoanalysis. The unification of the two natures, allegorized as "the
two lands," in man is the entire sum, gist and essence of the effort of
religion in the world. It springs directly out of the basic situation that sets
the religious problem,--the duofold constitution of the human being, involving
a perennial warfare between the two elements, to end in an ultimate
reconciliation or atonement, symbolized by the "wedding" of Old and
New Testament representation, and the birth of the divine child of Christly
consciousness from the marriage. The age-long conflict waged between them till
the consummation of their alliance is the grossly misconceived Battle of
Armageddon, which, says the Book of the Dead, "is fought at
9
the carnal nature can cross the line
and affect the conscious life of the opposite compartment. Man is thus the only
creature in whose life there is the equal admixture of sense and soul. And, as
Browning has so well said--for the benefit of those who decry all things
material--
Nor soul helps flesh more now
Than flesh helps soul.
Soul and flesh must battle each
other through the aeon, for only by such mutual resistance are both able to
generate their potential energies into functional development. But the great
battle must end in mutual accord, since in the happy denouement of victory they
find themselves merged in each other's arms.
The great Armageddon battle, dragged
down from intelligible meaning as allegoric typism of human experience into the
nonsense of supposed objective history in the form of a titanic war of nations
on earthly fields of battle, has been contorted into a sorry caricature of its
true reference. It has held, and always must hold, a central place in any great
system of philosophy, being in Plato's system the mighty conflict between dianoia
and doxa, or true knowledge and "opinion," or between the
soul's unforgettable instinct for truth and the outer mind's mere notion of
things, governed by sense and external influences. Not only in the dominant
Greek philosophies was the struggle centrally related to the entire ethical and
spiritual life of man, but it was vividly depicted on the stage boards of the
Mystery Religions of the ancient world. There the Sun-God, or the
Christ-Messiah, was arrayed in battle with the Titanic or Satanic character,
temporarily overcome by him, to emerge as final victor in the end of the drama.
This outcome typified the eventual triumph of spirit over the thraldom of
matter. Nor is the great struggle less prominent in the Christian scriptures.
In great measure it pervades the whole context of Bible literature, in drama,
apothegm, parable and allegory, but is found in express statement in the
Epistles of St. Paul and elsewhere. The Apostle launches his spear of attack
against the "fleshly lusts which war against the
10
soul." And he appears to lament
his "wretched" human condition, subject to the sway of evil
propensity, when he fain would do good. He perceives "in his members a law
which wars against the law of" his mind, so that he cries out "Who
shall deliver me from the body of this death?" For, he has argued,
"to be carnally minded is death," and man is "dead" in his
trespasses and sins. "The interests of the flesh meant death; the
interests of the soul meant life and peace," he again admonishes. He lists
the weaknesses or vices of humankind as those predominantly which spring from
the promptings of the fleshly side of human nature, with sexual lust,
concupiscence, at the very head. And in his list of virtues that redeem the
soul to her heavenly estate he places continence and chastity at the summit.
11
CHAPTER II
DRAMA BEARS MISSHAPEN OFFSPRING
As said, the ground of moral
conflict in the dual nature of man has long been recognized in theology as the
war between Christ and Satan. Even in the form of the promised reciprocal
bruising of the head of the serpent and the heel of the Son of the woman, it
was understood as Christianity's historical moral battle in the inner nature of
man. But what has not been seen is the recognition that this same ancient
depiction of internal conflict in the bosom of mankind is at once the ground
condition of the comprehension of determinative phenomena in the realm of
psychology. Theology, had it stepped aside from mere intellectual approach and
formulations to investigate the phenomena of moral struggle on the side of
their symptomatic and clinical manifestations in individual reaction, would
have anticipated modern psychoanalytic purview and adopted its technique and
methods of treatment. Or, looking back from the present, modern psychoanalysis
would from the start have known itself to be but an extension of the legitimate
scope and range of theological influences. It amounts to saying, then, that
psychology, when adequately envisaged in relation to the basic content and
nature of its practice, is just a branch of theological religion.
Whereas moral stress, with its
concomitant emotional and intellectual strain, had been esteemed only a
province of religious influence and only loosely and unscientifically subsumed
under that head, being ascribed to motivations such as piety, faith, conscience
and authority, now it is being taken in hand by a secular interest, or science,
and brought under systematic investigation by a religiously neutral psychology.
What would have been--perhaps in
12
a measure really was--a true science
under ancient priestly control, was lost out of religious manipulation during
the fifteen hundred years of the Dark Ages and is only now, in the hands of
profane agency, regaining its pristine scientific character. Healing in general
has had much the same history, having been in antiquity a purely religious
function, but in later centuries emerging as a secular profession, retaining a
fringe of original religious flavor. Dreams, visions, trance, speaking in
tongues, "prophecy," were all formerly matters of religious afflatus,
esteemed generally as emanating directly from God, the gods or daemons. While
they are still accorded a semi-religious characterization, they have become an
integral part of profane science and are removed from the realm of phantasy
religionism, holding a place in the open field of scientific research.
Religion has done mankind little
service--rather a great disservice--in attempting to mark off his life in two
mutually hostile areas, one the holy ground of religion, and the other the
profane territory of worldly interest. The criterion of "holy" and
"sacred" thus employed to introduce a precarious standard of
worth-value in all of man's activities, has vilely misled and hallucinated the
mass mind of many generations. A true philosophy would confer on humanity the
inestimable boon of sanctifying the whole of its life.
This obliteration of a false
evaluation would by no means wipe away the keen intellectual differentiation
that subsists between man's two natures. The perception of difference in
nature, function and rank between the two components of human being need not
entail an unbalanced judgment of values. Unfortunately this is exactly what has
come to pass. The whole science of theology indeed is based on the relation of
the two natures in man to each other. The divine and the worldly elements are
commingled in his constitution, and no interpretation of scripture is possible
without a reference to the fact. Man is a soul and that soul is attached to a
body. But the ascription of "sacred" to the one and of
"sinful" to the other, however naturally it results from the
premises, came only by default of sage philosophical insight.
13
The mistake, which confused and
vitiated the whole view, came from holding the opposite characterizations as
absolute and not merely relative within the total picture. Here lay the germ of
an error which has erected its ugly head to warp and harry the thinking of
millions for sixteen centuries. The body was conceived as absolutely evil,
worldly, sensual, devilish, apart from any consideration of its obvious utility
and beneficence, indeed its indispensability, for all the purposes of normal
evolution. The body was condemned as the parent and ground of all evil in despite
of the knowledge that life could not exist without it. The soul received the
accolade of good character, while the body reaped the contumely of evil. Spirit
was claimed the all-good, matter its enemy. The entire enormity of the ascetic
fanaticism that swept early Christianity like a pestilence arose out of these
philosophical aberrancies.
Drastic correction of misguided
assumption in the case is pressingly needed. Neither matter nor body is to be
flouted as evil. They are not even relatively evil. They are essential parts of
the total good. They are equally as necessary to the ultimate aims of evolution
as is soul itself. Each side of the polarity is impotent without the
countervalence of the other. The evil ascription is only the shadow of
erroneous thought falling upon a thing the function and the ultimate
beneficence of which have been misconstrued through the sheer warping of vision
and the mis-reading of ancient drama. The secret of this gigantic folly comes
to light when it is known that ancient ritual dramatism and allegorism, in
order to portray matter and body in their role of evolutionary service, had to
represent them in their function of providing polar opposition to the force of
spirit-consciousness. For they are the opposite node of the spirit-mind. They
form the negative cathode to spirit, the divine anode. Hence they had to play
the dramatic role of the "opposers" of constructive and creative
mind. But--and here is the core of the miscalculation which led to their
aspersion and disparagement as evil forces--ignorance later construed their
polar opposition in the terms of absolute enmity. As intelligence flew out of
the win-
14
dow, calamitous misconstruction flew
in at the door, and there it has dwelt ever since, defiling the hall of man's
mind in religion with its vile contempt for matter. The stabilizing and
balancing power that holds spirit to the performance of its function was foully
besmirched with philosophical disdain. Shallow minds could not grasp matter's
function as the twin of spirit without falling into the error of imputing evil
to it. Because body had to stand at the opposite side and counterbalance spirit
to give it localization, focus and a point d'appui for the exercise of
its own positive qualities, narrow insight held it in depreciation as the
opponent or enemy of spirit. From being represented dramatically as the
necessary foil or balance of spirit, it became the hostile force, the enemy of
soul. And down on its innocent head tumbled the whole weight of obloquy of
millions of fanatic minds in many religions, notably Christian and Hindu,
piling on it the accumulation of their malignant derogation. Under the lash of
this mad persuasion the poor body of man had to endure the agony of centuries
of brutal crucifixion and mortification in the alleged interests of the divine
soul, which, it was fatuously believed, could not unfurl its wings of ecstasy
as long as the least tinge of bodily enjoyment glued them fast to earth.
When it is seen how the frightful
corruption of understanding, occasioning the hallucinated folly and torture of
millions over the centuries, could ensue as the result of a mere and seemingly
slight misconstruction of the elements of a dramatic depiction of a
philosophical principle, it behooves sincere scholarship to examine the point
with searching care. The blunder was superinduced by the subtle requirements of
dramatic portrayal. To represent the opposition of polarity, spirit and matter
had to be pictured at war with each other. To carry profounder esoteric meaning,
they had to be outwardly represented as battling each other. They had to be
shown as "enemies" seeking to overcome each other. The sad outcome,
for less capable mentality, was that the opposition was remembered, and the
less concrete truth of polarity was lost. The deeper signifi-
15
cance of the opposition of matter to
spirit, and its truly beneficent function in providing spirit with the
resistance it needed in order to cause its latent powers to manifest
themselves, were forgotten. The opposition of matter to the good purpose had
never adequately or decisively been translated over into the terms of a
salutary and beneficent service to the final goal of good. Spirit could not
operate and evolve within the vacuum of its own unopposed inanition. It is by
itself but one half of a polar duality, totally inactive until confronted by
the necessity for active energization against its opposite tension. It could
not deploy its own hidden powers until it was challenged to do so by the
opposite pull of negative matter. Only when linked to matter do its latent
energies come into action, and its own potentialities find overt expression. It
remains wholly helpless or "dead" until the opposition of matter
summons forth its divine qualities to their awakening.
But this intelligent conception of
matter's utility was swamped in that avalanche of ignorance which swept over
philosophy from the fatal third century onward, and was replaced by the sorry
misinterpretation of its function which cast the dark shadow of religious folly
over the whole Medieval mind for centuries. Drama had done its best to fortify
the mind with the just conception of the true place and function of matter and
body in the evolutionary scheme. But the educative purposes of drama miscarried
when the representation ran afoul of massed ignorance and was shattered into
gross misshapen forms. The religious mind lacked the acumen requisite to the
task of understanding that matter had to play its role in the cosmic drama
opposite to spirit without earning thereby the stigma of evil character. It was
unable to discern the true good of matter's service beneath the outward
disguise of spirit's opponent. The mistake made was exactly comparable to what
would be the case if an audience, after witnessing a theatrical play, would
continue to attribute to the actor playing the part of the villain the same
permanent character which he merely personalized for the performance. The
Christian world became so drugged with sin-
16
consciousness that it forgot to
redeem the ritual personifications of good's necessary opposition from the
stigma of evil outside the drama.
It is now clear that the balanced
relationship of the anima of the body and the ego of the man within its
confines in one flesh is not only the ground determinant of the whole of man's
religious interest, his philosophy and moral effort, but that it becomes
specifically the basis of the great human problem of psychology as well. Even
more particularly it becomes the central situation activating the play of the
phenomena manifesting in the realm of psychoanalysis. In brief it can be stated
that when there is mutual compensation, harmonious energization, involving
constant accommodation and readjustment, between the two claimants for
possession of man's body and faculties, there will be the highest degree of
peace and happiness pervading the whole organism. And when there is a failure
in the achievement of this harmonious relationship between the two, there will
be a discord manifested in inner and outer neurotic conditions, psychic
disturbances and eventual bodily disease. In fine, the practical outcome of all
study of psychology, if such study is to save itself from futility, must be the
discovery of the forces in both the physical and the spirito-intellectual sides
of man's life that establish, or, conversely, mar the mutually harmonious
accord in motive and purpose of the two natures composing the human. If Goethe
has sounded a true philosophical note in his affirmation that "two souls,
alas, contend within my breast apart," waging a warfare for dominance over
the sphere of his interests and activities, then the point of ultimate
knowledge and wisdom for mortal man is to discover the terms on which the two
contestants can find a platform of agreement and happy mutuality. For in the
end, as
17
at the same time it is the
psychoanalytic "integration" of the diverse warring elements within
the ego consciousness.
There comes forcefully to mind at
this point that enlightening declaration of the Demiurgus, Jupiter Cosmocrator,
or world architect in the Orphic Greek system, given in Plato's Timaeus, as
rendered by Proclus in his majestic work on The Theology of Plato, as
translated by Thomas Taylor. It is the recording of the speech made to the
legions of angels who were being charged with the message and import of their
prospective mission to earth to become the souls or egos in the highest animal
creatures and to lead them across the area of human evolution to its
culmination at the foothills of divinity in the end of the aeon. The World
Framer outlines their aeonial task and assures them, as requital and
consequence of their successful performance of it, that they will gain immortal
status: "You shall never be dissolved." He instructs them as to the
dual composition of their natures when in the body and says that in the mortal
part there will be buried the seed of an immortal nature, through the growth of
which they will achieve immortality. He tells them that he will himself furnish
the "seed and the beginning" of the immortal part within them, and
that it is then their business to do the rest, to cultivate, nourish and
fructify this seed germ of the imperishable divine. Then occurs the phrase
which elucidates with vivid succinctness what should have been the constant
beacon-light to guide man's evolution throughout history, the clear manifesto
of the mission of souls on earth: it is their task "to weave together
mortal and immortal natures." This pronouncement should have rung with
anvil clearness on the good hard intelligence of man on earth and should have
galvanized his whole worldly striving into the crisp lines of conscious
direction of effort to achieve this goal of a unification of the two contending
beings within his own life. If it had been his common knowledge that he must
ever strive toward this consummation of a reconciliation between his soul life
and his sense life, surely there could have been entertained some sound
expectation that he might have passed from
18
blind groping along his path to a
more skillful concentration of his endeavors upon the object of life. Could the
great objective have been fixed in general knowledge and purpose, it may be
assumed that the course of human history for the last two millennia would have
exhibited something nobler than the nearly untamed sway of animal propensities
in human affairs. Some actual gain might have been registered in the transition
that must eventually take place from subjection of human conduct to brutish
selfishness over to direction by reasoning mind, the Lord of Life. But the
knowledge and the capacity to be thrilled to apply it conscientiously in
history were alike swept away by the deluge of fanatical ignorance that
submerged esoteric wisdom after the third century.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead states
that the ego in the man will bring together "the two sisters of the two
lands," that he "does away with the enmity which is in their
hearts," and will unite them in the bonds of friendly union.
History is just the record of this
"battle of Armageddon," in which the issues of the internal moral and
spiritual conflict between the soul of the animal man and the infant
Christ-mind in evolving humanity will be pitched from the subjective inner
sphere of motivation out upon the plane of physical activity and event. The
doings of kings, armies, legislatures, assemblies, mobs, parliaments, courts,
tyrants and heroes are but the precipitation of the issues of the inner
subjective conflict from the sphere of mental, emotional, sensual or spiritual
origin out upon the stage of overt concrete act. History is the record and
study of these myriad events in their collectivity.
Psychoanalysis works primarily and
practically with the individual. But the problem and the situation are the same
as in man collectively. His outward conduct is the crystallization of the
elements of his inward conflict upon the surface of his life as manifest
19
in his body and in his acts.
Causation arises from the world within, but comes forth in response to
provocation from external occasion. It proceeds from conscious, or unconscious,
inner motivations outward to register its nature in a physical deed or
formation. Plotinus has well phrased it when he says that the inner life of the
soul "publishes itself by the beauty of its works." But likewise,
during the period of its ignorance in infancy, and until it has gained the
poise of wisdom and the love of beauty and goodness, it will also publish the
whimsicalities of childish waywardness and crudity, by the ugliness of its
works.
As man is a miniature replica of the
universe, or what the ancient sages called the Heavenly Man, he, like the
universe, is composed of soul and body in a conjunct relationship, the one, the
soul, functioning within and sustained and nourished by, the other, the body,
precisely as the fiery energy of the candle flame is fed and fueled by its
power to transform the gross elements of its physical substrate into the
likeness of its own glorious soul of fire. This is precisely what St. Paul says
the Christ-soul in us will do to our "vile" bodies, changing them "into
the likeness of his own glorious body." Pope in his terse couplet has well
reminded us of this our basic constitution--if we are made in God's image:
All things are parts of one
stupendous whole,
Of which the body Nature is, and God
the soul.
God, considered for the moment apart
from body and as spirit or mind, is the soul of the universal Being, and
nature, the visible manifest universe, is his body. So man is a soul,
and he, too, has his body. As man is thus a little or miniature cosmos
(microcosm), having his being as one cell within the milieu of the larger
cosmos (macrocosm), he is placed, as the Egyptians so well intimated, on the
border territory, or horizon line, facing the world of nature, the body of
the macrocosm, on the one side, and its invisible soul, the hidden mind
and spirit of the universe, on the other side. And as the outer form reflects
the nature of the hidden conscious creative
20
idea, so, as says Emerson, "man
stands midway betwixt the inner spirit and the outer matter. He sees that the
one reflects and reveals the other, and he becomes a priest and interpreter of
nature thereby." Nature is the mirror of the soul. Paul confirms this in
his remarkable statement that that which may be known of God is manifest.
For, he says, the "invisible things of Him from the creation of the world
are clearly seen, being understood from those things which are made." You
can read God's mind from the observation of his works. God's stupendous
physical body took form over the lines of his primordial creative
thought-forms. For body is formed from the final deposit of matter or substance
in the matrix or mold constructed by divine mind. Soul builds, or as we should
say, out-builds body. The soul, seated within the inner "ark" of
finely attenuated bodies of sublimated matter--"spiritual bodies," as
Paul assures us we possess--projects vibratory radiations outward, carrying the
form and nature of her thought, and these impact upon plastic matter and throw
it into the mold of the idea pattern, where it later hardens. In The Faerie
Queen Edmund Spenser puts this so clearly in his memorable distich:
For of the soul the body form doth
take;
For soul is form, and doth
the body make.
Both the macrocosm and man, the
microcosm, are composed of soul and body. And in every case the body reflects
the mood and mold of the soul that energizes it.
We now have the background to
understand the function of symbols, the enormous part they are now again seen,
as of old, to play in the developing culture of the creature man, as the amber
of meaning preservation and the agents of meaning transmission from mind to
mind.
21
CHAPTER III
AND GOD SPAKE UNTO MOSES
The study is led, then, directly
back to the primary formula of understanding which ordains that as cosmic
creative thoughts shaped the objects of the physical worlds over their patterns
or forms, each object is thus the concrete image of the archetypal idea
originally projected in God's mind, but now manifest to the conscious creature
man through his open senses. Every physical thing or phenomenon is then a
symbol, or the symbol, of the ideation that shaped it. And the primal language,
as well as all later language, is thus--symbolism. The concrete object must be
the only true and perfect symbol of an idea, since it is that idea
crystallized in visible substance before the eye. A picture presented to the
eye is ever the most vivid form of bringing an idea of a distant scene before
the mind.
Symbolism is the language of utmost
clarity and impressiveness, since through a symbol one mind gives another the physical
picture of the thought or idea to be conveyed. And the pronouncement of
culminative importance in the elucidative introduction to valid determinations
is the discernment that if mind on a higher plane, or the mind of a creature
higher in evolution than another (as man above the dog, or the gods above man),
desires to communicate intelligence to mind of lower rank, it must perforce use
as its medium of conveyance the objects known to the lower intelligence in its
world. Higher mind must employ the physical symbols drawn from the
objective world of the lower creature, if it would represent the forms of the
thought it wishes to transmit. Therefore the unconscious must employ in its
efforts to speak to the lower conscious mind of man, the language of nature
symbols. They would be in
22
man's known world the starting point
from which rudimentary meaning could proceed.
It is no overweening gush of
perfervid imagination to assert that the modern re-discovery of the unconscious
is a far greater event in world history than the invention of the airplane or
even the radio. It marks one of the long strides western humanity must take to
lift itself out of the dismal murks of the still lingering Dark Ages. All
merely physical conquests, all acquisitions of mechanical control of cosmic
forces, are both useless and dangerous unless accompanied by the equal
enhancement of inner intelligence, self-discipline and moral refinement.
Material forces become frightful menaces if their human manipulators are
neither wise nor disciplined enough to direct their use into beneficent
channels. Man's magnificent discoveries of nature's powers can all too readily
be made the instruments of his own destruction. If his philosophical
intelligence and discretion do not keep ahead of his discoveries, he may be
doomed.
The scientific recognition of the
unconscious is one of the steps necessary to be taken if human life is to be
redeemed from the throes of haphazard ignorant groping along the evolutionary
path to some larger measure of directed progress through knowledge and
understanding. Appalling in its revelation of the bondage to superstition under
which the human mind has labored through lack of this datum, the discovery is
also heartening in the prospect it announces of escape from superstition in the
future. A thousand obscure or darkly mysterious motivations of conduct of men
and nations, which had to be ascribed formerly to animism, fetishism,
possession, devil instigation, demoniac obsession, witchcraft, glamor and the
like, may now be assigned to the operation of forces uprushing from the
subterranean depths of the unconscious in the individual himself. And these forces
may, as technical interpretative skill develops, be traced to their deep lair,
brought out to observation and studied to the end of rectification and
intelligent control. The restoration of the unconscious to knowledge is the
harbinger of a brighter day for human culture, civilization and happiness.
23
But its discovery--good omen as it
is--has not yet brought with it a full knowledge of its nature and function,
its origin and place in the economy of human evolution, which would vastly
increase the practitioner's adeptness in handling psychopathic cases. The
professional knowledge of it in these respects is as yet hesitant, groping and
tentative or hypothetical, in the main. The modern world of academic
intelligence may be astonished to hear it said that the ancient sages and
philosophers had ample knowledge of the unconscious and dealt more or less
directly and scientifically with it in character stabilization. It was to them
an aspect of philosophy, even religion, and was an integral ingredient of an overall
philosophical attitude and practique, rather than a detached branch of
psychology. The study and treatment of the psyche stood then in far more
intimate relation to philosophy than it does now.
It has been intimated in a
preliminary way that symbolism must be the language used by the mind of a
higher being in the communication of ideas to a lower intelligence. It is this
vital deduction that stands as the basis of the next great scientific
announcement in the field of psychology: symbolism is now known to be the
language employed by the unconscious to impart its ideas to the conscious mind
of the individual. At once the inference from the premises inspires the
question: Is the unconscious then the mind of some being higher than the
personal human? Where is there such a being operating in relation to man? What
is the nature, how is it placed in superior status to man, and how is man
reduced to a position of subserviency and tutelage under it?
Psychoanalysis has deemed that the
unconscious is an epiphenomenon of man's total functionism, an expression of
his life conditioned to play a subterranean role in the area of motivation and
conduct, and uniquely and specifically generated in pre-conscious childhood to
be a life-long agent of underground influence upon the outer life. One theory,
and that of the founder of psychoanalysis himself, is that it is composed of
the native instincts of the animal-human psyche that have been driven
underground by repression.
24
It is the compound of all that one
would naturally like to do, but by conventional taboo, dare not. It is composed
of the repressed motivations that the individual has put out of his mind, but
which he can not put out of his deeper being, and which from time to time reach
up from out those deeper wells of natural incentive in dream or trance.
The entire apprehension of the
rationale of the unconscious has limped along in gross incompetence because the
ancient knowledge of the essential dualism in man's constitution has been lost
or ignored. It must now be realized that only in the light of that basic
dualism can the nature, place and function of the unconscious be understood.
The Bibles of antiquity, venerated
almost to the point of fetishism, have, strangely enough, received a meed of
worship which they have hardly merited, yet failed to receive credit for
containing truly supernal wisdom and the profoundest scientific knowledge.
Accepted largely as books of superhuman origin and contents, they have fallen
short of recognition of the sound principles of true philosophy which they
present. They, for instance, deal voluminously with the element in man's
psychic constitution which is now classified as the unconscious. Plato likewise
discourses upon it, but both Paul and Jesus, speaking from an appreciation of
Mystery dramatism, and even John, delineate its origin and status in the human
economy of consciousness. Each has a statement which, with numberless others of
similar import, outlines its basic character. Paul gave it in his statement of
man's dualism: "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second is the
Lord from heaven." This is paralleled in its companion passage: "The
first Adam was made a living soul; the second Adam was made a quickening
spirit." John's averment that the Christos is "that bread which came
down from heaven, that if a man eat of it he shall hunger no more" posits
the higher personage in the dualism, the divine dweller within the body. Even
the Christian creed speaks of the divine element in man, "who for us men
and for our salvation, came down from
25
heaven, and was made man." The Covenant--the
"broad oaths fast sealed" between the Deity and his sons sent to
earth--has been noticed in Plato's Timaeus, wherein the Demiurgus
promised to plant a heavenly seed of immortal consciousness in the mortal self
of man on earth. But Jesus himself comes forward with a decisive declaration
that he, the Christos, is that seed of immortal life, that Lord from above,
that spirit that descends upon man from the overworld, that heavenly bread of
life that, he says, must be "eaten" by man if he is to be lifted to
the race of the immortals and end by becoming gods. (All the mighty relevance
and truth of these affirmations have been lost for centuries on western
objective-mindedness by the application of them to the Christ as a man and not
to the Christos as the saving principle of divinity gestating for its birth in
human consciousness universally.) In an early chapter of John's Gospel in the
New Testament the dramatic character of Jesus, speaking to his disciples in
their character as natural human beings, and speaking of himself as that
consciousness sent down from above to be their Immanuel, makes a pronouncement
which should long ago have carried basic enlightenment to a Christendom groping
in darkness. He says: "Ye are from beneath; I am from above." This is
perhaps the most sententious and instructive verse in the scriptures, certainly
the most definitive and clarifying. It tells mortals that on their human and
bodily side they came up from beneath, from the animal orders through the long
development of something approximating "Darwinian" evolution of forms
and structure. And it adds to this the priceless datum that, while the body of
man comes to the human estate through this upward line of development from
simple to complex form, there is another part to him that did not reach its
superior status through the experience of a line of growth in the present life
of the race--surely not in unconscious childhood--but is an element that has
become conjoined with the mechanism of the animal brain and nervous system, by
a virtual "descent" from a loftier plane of being. This higher
element did not come "up" from rudimentary state to unfolded
26
powers in the short life of the
individual now in body. On the contrary it was already "up" above the
level of man's register of consciousness, and "came down from heaven"
to tenant for seventy or eighty years the conscious world of the individual's
experience. It did this for two reasons, as expressed by Plotinus: "to
develop her own powers, and to adorn what is below her." In these words
the philosopher means to say that she (the soul, treated as feminine) comes to
earth to continue her own evolution through further experience in the concrete
world, and conjoins with this effort for her own growth the undertaking to lift
up the animal species by a tutelage of its members whose bodies it overshadows
by an immanent attachment of its forces to the organism itself. Even modern
biological science, particularly as stated by Sir Alfred Russell Wallace,
co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of evolution, has positively asserted
that there has nowhere been discoverable in the life of any animal species on
earth a body of experience which could have developed in animals the faintest
germ of reasoning mind. Yet man, physical, tops the ladder of evolution on the
planet and crowns the animal's development with its most complex and
differentiated organs and functions. And in man there suddenly flashes out the
light of memory, imagination and "godlike reason," with the outburst
of human life. The circumstances confronting us in this situation force us to
recognize the truth, heard in Greek philosophy, reiterated in our own
scriptures, yet never solidly grasped, that the element that introduced
intellectuality and spiritual aspiration into the motivations of the highest
animal coming up "from beneath" was an imperishable nucleus of divine
selfhood, a veritable Son of God, a unit fragment of God's own mind, that by
vibrational and other capabilities of organization and nature could "come
down from above" and be linked by a kinship of registry with the higher
potential capacities of the human mind. Our revered, but latterly disdained and
never capably understood, scriptures have been shouting at us greater truth
than we have had the acumen to appreciate.
27
The Christos, coming first as
"a little child," the Krist Kind of the Germans, the Jesu
Bambino of the Italians, was born into the nature of man generically. He
came to share our life, as all sacred books testify, and so he was that seed of
immortal nature that the Demiurgus promised he would implant in us when the
animal side had risen from beneath to the point of refinement of structure and
sensitivity of feeling at which it could register the play of the vibrations of
a truly spiritual, divine or Christly mind. At this point, reached when animal
development had approximated the brain refinement of the first humanity, this
seed of God's own mentality was implanted, linked, coalesced within the
potential unfoldment of the animal's life. More and more of his inherent
capacity for superior genius and goodness was to be developed into manifest
expression as upward progress further refined and sensitized the mechanism of
consciousness. Incubated at first as a mere seed of later growth, coming
gradually to birth as the Christ-child, his powers and faculties slumbered
long, as do the powers of the human infant. The analogy is perfect and quite
illuminating; the infant divinity in us slumbers long in latency, in dormancy,
in unconsciousness, before awakening to recognition of his own innate
endowment. But experience in the outer world gradually evokes latent power into
conscious expression. His faculties are awakened to activity and their keenness
is sharpened. He becomes master of his powers and conscious of his high
destiny. But long he dwells within the unconscious area of the individual
personality, the unknown guest within the mortal house. And he is "the
unconscious" of the psychoanalysts.
He comes to link his life with the
human in order to continue his own quest of life more abundant, the eternal
prerogative of all living creatures, and, secondarily, "to adorn,"
that is, to beautify, spiritualize, divinize, "what is below him," as
Plotinus says. His Covenant oath, given at the time of his departure from
celestial kingdoms, bound him to lift up the animal race. This feature of
ancient teaching is clearly expressed in Jesus' statement, "if I be
28
lifted up, I will draw all men unto me."
Though he stands a full grade above the animal whose body he tenants, he, too,
is marching along in the line of ongoing, and must dip again and again into the
worlds of sense in order to grow further in stature. Indeed he expressly tells
the animal human in the Biblical allegory, the mortal who comes first as his
forerunner and way-opener, that he must come under the baptism of the lower
nature. That is to say, he must undergo the carnal experience in a body which
is seven-eighths water. And, be it affirmed with certitude at last, this is the
only water of baptism ever referred to in any doctrine or ritual of religion!
The animal human is that faithful servant-beast on whose back he is borne in
the end up to and within the gates of the Holy City of full-blown divine
consciousness, or "Jerusalem" above, while the multitudes acclaim his
triumph with exultant hosannas.
It is not too strong an assertion to
declare that the true renaissance of human culture has waited long, and still
waits, upon the general recognition of the presence and the nature of the
indwelling child of divinity within the core of conscious being. The thought
and philosophies of modern man in the west are afflicted with the age's
predilection for mechanistic theories of causation. It seems impossible that
the tendency to view soul activity and phenomena as products of bodily function
and therefore destined to vanish with the demise of the body can be overcome by
the rebirth of ancient knowledge, which took the soul to be an independent entity
that detaches itself from union with body at the latter's disintegration,
retires to mansions of spiritual being and returns in due time to build up a
body again. Recreant to this fundamentum of primeval wisdom, the modern age
persists in maintaining its philosophical position on the wholly untenable
ground of a veritable worship of ancient scriptures combined impossibly with a
rejection of the basic anthropological datum on which alone the true
interpretation of those scriptures can be made and their true meaning
understood. Modern mentality thus stands on the precarious platform of
attempting to use as its guiding light the ancient scriptures whose
29
fundamental theses it stubbornly
repudiates. Thus it has come about that for sixteen centuries the light that
shines in those scriptures has been darkened and nearly extinguished. The holy
writ of the sages of antiquity deals with the history of those fragments of the
God-mind, those Sons of God who undertook the commission of becoming human
souls on earth. And modern religious philosophy attempts to utilize this
munificent literary gift as the prime inspiration for culture--by denying the
very existence of those same souls. Meaningless is the reverence and hollow
worship paid the great scriptures, the true sense and message of which is
completely blocked off from comprehension by the obdurate blindness of
traditional view. While a veritable fetish worship is offered up to these
venerable documents, it is insidiously undermined by the treachery that refuses
acceptance of the fundamental theses and premises by means of which alone the
full gospel of their truth-telling can be brought to the light of
understanding. And this interior self-contradiction of attitude has stood, and
will continue to stand until rectified, at the causative center of the world's
delirium of philosophical confusion. When the world returns to sanity it will
be achieved through the recapture by intelligence of the substrate of archaic
wisdom which fortified the mind with the definite knowledge that there was in
man a conscious entity distinct from the body, yet consubsistent with it,
capable of accumulating and preserving to perpetuity the values won by living.
Until this knowledge is restored there can be little more than a continuance of
the world's groping and stumbling in the twilight.
30
CHAPTER IV
THE GODS DISTRIBUTE DIVINITY
It is an axiom of Greek philosophy
that in the vast hierarchy of beings and intelligences from supreme Deity down
to man each god is as it were a cell unit of the life of one superior divinity
and that the total company of such cells comprising the body of the higher lord
multiplies, magnifies and "distributes" the life of that more exalted
being, in seed form, out over a wider range of creative activity. In this
formulation Greek philosophy quite fully agrees with St. Paul, who says that we
are all members of one body, of which Christ is the head. It seems difficult
for world thought to grasp realistically the cogent force of this teaching. All
living creatures are the component atoms in the life or body of some
tremendously greater being, who lives and moves in and through the activities
of his constitutive elements. Precisely as the oak renews and expands its total
life by the generation and distribution of the seeds of its own being, so a
larger unit of life produces in potential form a multiple progeny of its own
kind in order thus to expand its own measure of total being.
But each fragmented son of parent
being must start from seed potentiality and through a long process of growth
eventually bring its separate life back to the level and completeness of the
progenitor. Thus it comes that life proceeds from the Father and returns unto
him again. Obviously the life of the son is a part of and "in" the
life of the parent, and equally the life of the parent is "in" that
of the son. As the life and being of the progenitor is latent in the seed,
until it is finally brought to awakened consciousness in the later stages of
growth, there is implicit here the entire explanatory formula for understanding
the presence and nature of the uncon-
31
scious in man. The unconscious is
just the unawakened being of the higher parental life and consciousness of
whose unitary selfhood the individual man is one organic cell.
There occurs in a sentence in an
enlightening late work of psychoanalysis by a practicing clinician of wide
experience and deep insight into the science a single word, which falls with
the aptest, though with perhaps altogether unsuspected, relevancy into the
context and support of the thesis of the unconscious here expounded. The work
is The Recreating of the Individual, by Beatrice M. Hinkle, M.D.
Asserting that the unconscious can not carry through any form of expression or
activity that counters the rational judgment of the outer conscious mind, she
writes that under the ban of such repression "the individual remains
unaware of the ancient processes functioning in and influencing his
present life and he cannot evolve beyond them except through greater
self-consciousness or according to the immeasurably slow process of nature
herself."1 This is to say that the present activities of the conscious
mind overlay and keep buried under their constant play a body of innate and
generic motivations which would exercise a control in the direction of the
individual life if they were given free course in the conscious. It may fairly
be presumed that the word "ancient" in the passage quoted carries far
more significance than the author dreamed. This word, used in description of
"processes functioning in and influencing . . . present life" is the
prime clue to the mystery of the unconscious. For ancient indeed is
the unconscious. It is, in reference to the human individual, that part of the
man which is the "Ancient of Days" of the Psalmist. Wordsworth caught
the vision of it when he wrote in his immortal Ode:
The soul that rises with us, our
life star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting, and
cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
_______
1 This and numerous other citations
from Dr. Hinkle's fine work made in this volume are reproduced with her
gracious permission.
32
But trailing clouds of glory do we
come
From heaven, which is our home.
"The sunshine comes and
goes," he says--and so does the soul of man. It comes into expression in
the life and body of a human, and at the end of its cycle goes back to
celestial repose, and it does this time and time again. It has had many births
and "deaths," but never death. It has garnered up the fruits of vivid
experience in the kingdoms of the world and in the bodies of men, and preserved
them in the indestructible treasure house of its inmost spiritual body, which
is safe from the rot of decay, the tooth of moth or the loot of thieves. And it
comes forth for each fresh sally into the daylight of world experience, bearing
the wealth of its deposits of wisdom, knowledge and genius, not to be hoarded,
but to be put out to "usury" in further investment in living, for the
endless enhancement of its own glory in the more abundant life promised it by
its Parent. The central phrase of old theology, "for the glory of
God," bears with more direct pertinence on pivotal meaning than has been
surmised. The onward march of progress does indeed bring an increment of glory
to the son of God within the body of the man. For as the sun-fragment of
divine soul in corporeal man grows in self-consciousness, it increases the
shining texture of that "body of the resurrection," that "robe
of glory" integrated of the essence of solar light, which the soul weaves
for itself in ever more effulgent splendor to be its spiritual temple not made
with hands and in which it may dwell when the earthly tabernacle of this flesh
has been discarded. There is fathomless meaning in Paul's statement that this
mortal shall put on immortality and this corruptible shall be clothed in
incorruption. The climactic guerdon promised by Deity to man is that the
creature shall have immortal life. And to be undying, man must have wrought for
himself a body which when he shall have put it on, will never decay. Hence the
great object of his coming to earth is, as Plato said, to "weave together
mortal and immortal natures," so that the mortal part can inherit
33
immortality through its partaking the
life and nature of the immortal. By charity and wisdom, all the scriptures
affirm, man shall transform, transubstantiate and transfigure his being until
it glows in equal radiance with the glory of the gods whose raiment shines like
the sun. Man will end his earthly career by casting off the "filthy
rags" of fleshly vestments of decay, and come forth arrayed in the glory
of the sun. "I shall clothe thee with light as with a garment," saith
the Lord in the Old Testament. We are to be made "children of the
light," he again says. We are adjured to let our light shine, since we
"are the light of the world." The Christos is the "Lord of
light," "the life and the light of men." This has all been
killed in its thrilling meaning by being shifted away from humanity at large
and allocated--and hence lost--upon the person of one man in history. It was to
be the possession of all the sons of earth who achieved it.
The vital truth about this glory
body, this house from above, with which Paul says he waits to be clothed upon,
is that it is imperishable. Once formed--and Paul says he groans and travails
in pain with us until Christ be "formed" within us--it does not die;
it does not disintegrate. "You shall never be dissolved," promised
the Demiurgus, once the garment of shining Christhood has been woven.
And now comes the denouement of
mighty truth from out these ancient scriptures that becomes the open sesame for
unlocking the hidden mystery of the rationale of the unconscious. The white
raiment of the redeemed is not only composed of solar essence that is
imperishable, but so close is it to the heart of eternal being, so changeless
in its protogonic essentiality, that an impression made upon it is forever
ineradicable. The unconscious never forgets!
Here is an item of cosmic truth that
even the uncertain tentatives of psychological searchings have already brought
out. An impression made upon the innermost part of man which stands nearest to
true being is never erased. The substance of that holy of holies of real being
is changeless first matter. It partakes of the ultimate
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nature of the real. It is the
primordial mind-stuff. And so the Greeks had a beautiful word for that which
this mind knows, truth. Truth in Greek is aletheia, from a, "not,"
and lethe, "forgetfulness." Truth is therefore that which is
not forgotten, can never be lost. Once gained, it is stored up in the alcoves
of indestructible mind-essence. What the soul has gained of truth, she brings
with her when she comes anew into body. "Truth is from heaven,"
declares Jesus in one of the apocryphal gospels in answer to Pilate's derisive
question, an answer omitted from the four canonical Gospels. Truth is indeed
from heaven, from the overworld of diviner ideality. It is inscribed upon the
imperishable tablets of cosmic mind. What the individual mind grasps of its
eternal principles is never lost. But at each dip of the soul into incarnation
it loses its paradise of knowledge and understanding as it plunges deep into
the heart of matter and is buried in the underworld of sense. Paradise must be
regained each time with the return of the consciousness to the levels of former
development, and new glories won. And so we have the great Plato giving us the
twin doctrines of "the loss of memory of divine things" and
"reminiscence," or recovery of divine memory.
The unconscious mind never forgets;
yet here is Plato saying it suffers the loss of its memory. Is it
contradiction? The Platonic amnesia is only a forgetfulness which is paralleled
and analogized in the life of the oak, which loses its eternal memory or
consciousness when it goes as a seed of future growth into the soil, but
regains its full awareness of life when it attains maturity in the new cycle.
For life must die to be born again, must lose its life to repossess it, must
suffer loss of memory to win eternal memory. Life ever passes from the highest
stage of conscious unfoldment in any cycle back into the embryo of itself to
begin a new cycle. As a seed it can carry, not the adult development of its
powers, but the sheer potentiality of renewing those powers. It enters earth
shorn of all that it had won in the last cycle's effort, save the capability of
renewing and increasing all previous winning. It must start each cycle over
again from beginning. It more quickly each time recapitulates the
35
range of previous development, now
become "instinctive," and then takes new strides forward into
infinite being. Thus all evolution moves forward through what the sage ancient
teachers everywhere called the "eternal renewal" of life. Life
"dies" to be born again. And the wreckage and then the loss of the
intelligible structure of the ancient wisdom came through the failure of philosophic
thought to retain the true reference of the words "die" and
"death." Life, poetized the wise men of old, "dies" when it
goes under the trammels of the flesh in incarnation. "Death" in
theology is then precisely that which goes by the name of "life" in
our world. Says Paul in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans: "The
command that meant life proved death to me." So the ancients regarded this
life as the "death" of the soul under the sluggish waters of the
river of the underworld, the river of forgetfulness--Lethe! But always it was a
"death" from which there was the resurrection. Always the planted
seed died and then germinated and lived again. And thus life went forward to
its ever-expanding conquest of new glories, "through death to life eternal,"
as the Easter hymn sings it. For what the soul loses temporarily at the start
of each cycle of growth, it regains and eventually holds in perpetuity. The
unconscious never forgets!
The pursuit of truth through this
channel leads to the open door of a revelation of one of the great Biblical
allegories so sweeping in its magnitude and relevance that its disclosure may
indeed promise a wholly new regeneration of scriptural interpretation. At first
glimpse no two things would appear to be farther apart and remote from each
other in significance than the unconscious in modern psychology and the ark and
deluge story in the Bible. It happens, however, that the flood allegory in the
Old Testament is the ancient esoteric glyph of the unconscious in the human
constitution! Again this has never been seen because the narrative in Genesis
has been taken as history, or at least quasi-history, and not for what it
really is--the allegory of evolutionary method, as the Genesis story is
the allegory of creational method.
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Light is gained on this cryptic
scriptural representation by tracing the pivotal words employed in it back to
their archaic or basic meanings. These are "ark," "Noah,"
and "Ararat," as well as the numbers that crept in, seven and forty.
Noah was given seven days in which to build the ark and collect numberless
thousands of animals of every species from all over the earth, manifestly
impossible as actual history, but immensely significant as allegory. It rained
forty days and nights, covering the whole earth to the highest mountain
tops,--again absurd as history. The ark floated on the waters till the flood
subsided, and then the occupants emerged and landed on Mt. Ararat.
Who was "Noah"? It is
evident that though Hebrew in origin, at least found in a Hebrew document of
antiquity, the name "Noah" is built on the stem of the word which in
Greek stood for the rock principle of the universe, Mind, the mental principle
in mankind. Anaxagoras' theory that the world is the production of a cosmic
Mind, or of Nous, is relevant to this determination. The root of the
word is that basic Greek stem, No, and the Greeks called the
intellectual principle in man Noé @horizontal line over e. It is
important to notice that this is feminine in form and grammatical gender. This
is so because, although mind and spirit are commonly typed under masculine
symbolism, yet when the spirit descended into matter and became the soul of a
living organism, it was regarded as feminized through its coming under the
power of matter and body, which are symbolically feminine always. The feminine
ending was placed upon it to indicate that it was mind involved in and
energizing matter. The ancients always affirmed that the soul entered its
"feminine phase" when it incarnated. The Greek feminine ending is the
long é, eta. When the Hebrews used the word they substituted on the No
stem their own feminine singular ending, which is -ah. This gives No-ah,
the principle of mind in body.
It is next to be noted that, in
perfect accord with all ancient philosophy, the mental principle, Noah, was
given three sons. In the arcane allegorism the intellectual ray from God's mind
suffered
37
differentiation from its primal
unity into a triplicity when it established its connection with physical
organisms on three linked planes of higher consciousness. It has been lost out
of studentship that terms corresponding pretty closely to our three words,
spirit, soul and mind, expressed this differentiation. In one Hindu system they
were named atma, buddhi and manas. In astrological pictography
they were represented by the three stars, most significantly known for ages as
"the three kings," in the belt of Orion. They were the lower trinity
of spirit, the reflection in the human microcosm of the cosmic trinity above.
Mind is ever triple in its manifestation. Modern theology posits little
difference between mind, soul and spirit, but the early philosophical and
anthropological systematism knew of the gamut of distinct gradation subsisting
among the three. Spirit held the topmost rank, more ethereal and sublimated in
its nature than the other two, being the pure energy of intuitive knowledge.
Soul was a further projection of that energy into matter, manifesting one step
lower, and standing midway between pure intuition and concrete thinking. Mind
was a still deeper injection of spirit into matter, coming to expression as the
glowing rational power of conscious thought directly conditioned by the
mechanistic function of the brain.
The mind-body problem has been a
perplexing conundrum for human understanding, entangled in the difficulty of
perceiving how an immaterial force can lay hold of and utilize a physical
mechanism. But no longer should this problem offer difficulty to the modern
mind that understands even remotely how the radio wave can blare through its
instrument. It has been said that the repeated note of a violin string,
properly attuned, could destroy a steel bridge. Really the secret of the
mind-body relation has been opened to our unthinking minds ever since a piano
note has been known to rattle a cup in its saucer on the old parlor mantel
across the room. Caruso, the tenor, demonstrated it when, having lightly struck
a delicate drinking glass with a tuning fork to get its pitch, he then
shattered it with the same tone sung from his powerful vocal cords. A thought
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is just the registry of a vibration
in ethereal matter of great tenuity, projected by that root energy known as
will, and carried by an electric play of force generated by the chemical
constitution of the blood. The human blood has in it the components requisite
for the production of battery current. A modern scientific pronouncement states
that the brain contains four quadrillions of minute dynamos, and these are
charged by electricity carried by the blood and drawn by it out of the vast sea
of static electricity in the air. Each cell of the brain is the seat of the
flash of electric current between the positive and negative poles within it.
These tiny currents can catch and carry the energies of primal will and
thought, as the voice carries the structure of an idea. Life energizing as will
or thought is at once the generator of electric force that can carry into
expression its creative forms of ideas. Immaterial energy such as that of the
mind can lay hold of and move matter and body, for the simple reason that its
every impulse can stir the vital currents that are themselves constitutive of
the very being of matter.
Understanding of the problem was
thwarted as long as the blind conception prevailed that matter was inert,
lifeless substance. Now that it is known that matter is itself a composition of
purely etheric energies, really no longer to be conceived as matter at all, but
spirit itself held in static bondage, the fundamental kinship between mind and
body is readily intelligible. If lines of immaterial force can move the iron
filings around the head of a magnet, it should no longer be a task to know how
life works to accomplish its purposes. There is needed only the mathematically
correct adaptation of structure to vibration rate and wave length to produce
motion. Life manifests through an infinite gradation of such adaptations, be it
in coarse substance or in finer ethereal or "spiritual" matter. And
we have spiritual bodies, more than one of them, archaic science asserted. Each
of these registers energy in its particular form and expression, each one
conditioned by the fineness or coarseness of the material composing its
organism. Sound, as the old philosophers argued, is one; yet it manifests in a
million different sounds, deter-
39
mined by the quality and structure
of the instrument sounded through. Man's very "personality" is based
on this hoary knowledge, since his "person" is the physical
instrument through (Latin, per) which the higher rates of
conscious vibration sound (Latin, son-) out their tones in the
manifest world. The personality is the physical instrument through which the
soul sounds its characteristic note of spiritual being in the world. The spirit
deep within, being a ray of changeless being which is eternally one--however it
manifests in variety--is not subject to division. Hence it is the
"individuality," the regnant king within the personality. It is
further instructive to recall that persona is the Latin word for
"mask." This item illuminates intelligence with the important
knowledge that the physical personality is the mask which the divine
individuality puts on and through which it can sound out its proper keynote in
the total symphony of being.
If the allegory was to be kept true
to profound wisdom it was necessary that "Noah" should have three
sons. The intellectual principle in cosmic operation must manifest in triple
form. This is the explanation of the many figures of triform gods, the Trimurti
of India and the gods with three heads or three faces so often found. It is
likewise the lost meaning behind the legend of the three "Magi" who
come with the Christos in the Christian Gospel narrative. For whenever divine
Mind deploys its forces into creative expression, it generates its three
distinct aspects which stand behind the great doctrine of the Trinity.
And their wives? Not even divine
Thought can create worlds of manifest existence without uniting its energies
with the physical power hidden in the atom of matter. Spirit must
"marry" matter if it is to create concrete universes. The subjective
side of life may know what it wishes to create, but it can not build structures
until it has the material with which to build them. It must therefore link its
directive energy with the latent power in the atom. This is its shakti, or
spouse, through whose motherhood spirit alone can procreate. It became his
wife, his sister, eventually his mother and
40
his daughter, and it is pictured
under all these characters in mythology.
But the great enlightenment comes
with the elucidation of the recondite significance hidden under the symbolism
of the "ark." Here again it is the language root that brings lost
intelligence to view. The "ark" was, last and least of all things, not
a boat or floating structure, save, of course, in a purely figurative
sense, as the "flood" was not a deluge of water. It is all
arcane allegorism, and this is established beyond any possible question. The
true meaning of the "ark" is to be found in its derivation from the
Greek noun, arché, "beginning," which is in turn from the
Greek verb archo, "to begin." It is past all understanding how
the scholars of many centuries have failed to discern either the etymological
background of the "ark" or its implications for the Biblical
interpretation. The fact that it is the first word in the Bible (preceded by
its preposition "in") should in itself have gone far to open blind
eyes to obvious meaning. The Bible thus starts from the point of proper
departure--"in the beginning." The Greek word arché means
beginning, primal state, aboriginal condition of being. It is seen in our words
archaic, archangel, archetypal. God's archetypal ideas were the original
ideas projected in and by his mind to give shape to the universe. So the
"ark" is the primal or beginning state of a thing. For anything of
objective existence to "go into the ark" is, then, its retirement
back into the stage from which it emanated in the beginning of its cycle.
Next, what is the "flood"
or "deluge"? Grievously has ignorance plunged into shameful asininity
over this aspect of the representation. It has nothing actually to do with
water, or rain and water having nothing to do with it. But it has much to do
with flooding, or washing, or washing away, in the sense of a trope. For the
scriptural "deluge" (found in some fifty national mythologies!) is
nothing more or less than the figurative washing away of all created things by
the flood-tide of dissolution which cyclically ensues at the end of each
age of creation. The flood figure of description is imag-
41
inative, a trope; but the washing away through dissolution is an actual event. It is the dissolution of the worlds and universes at the end of the age (Greek: teleuten aion, so tragically mistranslated "end of the world" in the Christian texts of the Bible), when infinite being absorbs back into its capacious bosom the disintegrated forms of its last cosmic manifestation, when concrete existence dissolves back into sheer be-ness. Matter disappears or is washed away from palpable existence, and spirit retires into the interior core of being. The cosmos and all its formations dissolve as the creative energy that threw them into shape runs its given course and subsides into motionlessness and silence. For life works cyclically, after the analogy of the heart beat and the life breath. It awakes, and energizes its creative effort in building. In the evening of its cycle it tires of its labor, and like us made in its image, it withdraws its energies and rests. When the animating and supporting energy of creation is withdrawn, the universe it shaped collapses and disintegrates. It dissolves. Where does it go?--since there is no "place" for it to go save where it is. It goes where a handful of salt goes when you put it into a basin