We can watch it for hours, taken clear out of time and our own urgent history, by a scene which has been going on just like this for perhaps two million years. At times, it catches us right below the heart with an ache of nostalgia and delight compounded, when it seems that this is, after all, the world of sane, enduring reality from which we are somehow in exile.
We know that the “love of nature” is a sentimental fascination with surfaces — that the gulls do not float in the sky for delight but in watchful hunger for fish, that the golden bees do not dream in the lilies but call as routinely for honey as collection agents for rent, and that the squirrels romping, as it seems, freely and joyously through the branches, are just frustrated little balls of appetite and fear.
From now on, it is claimed, the organization of life cannot happen; it must be controlled, however intricate the task. Whether he likes it or not, man — or rather the conscious intelligence of man — must henceforth rule the world.
In some ways, however, the temper of scientific thought is far less managing and imperious than it was at the beginning of this century, if only because greater knowledge brings with it an awareness of ignorance.
The very ideas of impulses, forces, motivations, and urges may be nothing more than abstract intellectual ghosts as impalpable as the mysterious “it” in the sentence, “It is raining.” The same grammatic convention which requires subjects for every verbs may be the sole reason for urges and drives behind actions. Yet such a line of thought may be even more disturbing, since it suggest a universe of life which has no motive at all — not even survival — and surely an absolutely purposeless world would be the most depressing of all possibilities.
But the idea of a purposeless world is horrifying because it is incomplete. Purpose is a pre-eminently human attribute. To say the world has no purpose is to say that it is not human.
There is much to suggest that when human beings acquired the powers of conscious attention and rational thought they became so fascinated with these new tools that they forgot all else, like chickens hypnotized with their beaks to a chalk line. Our total sensitivity became identified with these partial functions so that we lost the ability to feel nature from the inside, and, more, to feel the seamless unity of ourselves and the world. Our philosophy of action falls into the alternatives of voluntarism and determinism, freedom and fate, because we have no sense of the wholeness of the endless knot and of the identity of its actions and ours.
Our difficulty is not that we have developed conscious attention but that we have lost the wider style of feeling which should be its background, the feeling which would let us know what nature is from the inside. Perhaps some intimation of this lost feeling underlies our perennial nostalgia for the “natural life,” and the myth of a golden age from which we have fallen.
But is it of any use to point out that they have learned these political philosophies, by reaction, from us, and that, in their differing ways, Gandhi, Nehru, Nasser, Mao, and the other leaders of Asian nationalism are to a large degree Western in both personality and doctrine? Almost every one of them is a product of an educational system established by Western colonialism.
Examining the record of its past, the progressive society reconstructs it as history, that is, as a significant series of events which constitute a destiny, a motion toward specific temporal goals for the society as a whole. The fabricators of such histories easily forget that their selection of “significant” events from the record is subjectively determined — largely by the need to justify the immediate political steps which they have in mind. History exists as a force because it is created or invented here and now.
In the sexual sphere the goal is not so much the concrete personality of the woman as the orgasm which she provokes, and provokes not so much as an integral woman as an aggregation of stylized lips, busts, and buttocks — woman in the abstract rather than this or that particular woman. Such love is not the love of woman but the love of being in love, expressing a dualistic, dissociated, spirit-loving and matter-hating attitude to life.
For as the image of God was composed of goodness piled on goodness, power piled on power, it became insufferable and monstrous. But in conceiving the image of the Devil there were no laws to be kept, and the creative imagination could run riot, emptying all its repressed and sensuous contents. Hence the persistent allure of Satanism and the fascination of evil.
The partisans of historical culture seem to congratulate themselves on having escaped from cyclic into linear time, from a static into a dynamic and “on-going” world order — failing to see that nothing is so cyclic as a vicious cycle.
We are not longer saying “So what?” to everything, as if the only importance of our present experience were in what it is leading to, as if we should constantly interrupt a dancer, saying, “Now just where are you going, and what, exactly, is the meaning of all these movements?”
It is easy, this argument would continue, to love the aesthetic surfaces of nature, so long as we do not have to contend with the ruthless heartlessness, the cold struggle for life, which underlies it. It is true that we sometimes need to seek relief from the hideousness of crowds and cities in the solitude of nature, but this is only because the worst is the corruption of the best. The evil of man far exceeds the evil of the spider or the shark, but only because the goodness of man immeasurably exceeds the goodness of a spring landscape. One has only to consider how cold and desolate the fairest face of nature can seem to a man left utterly alone, willing to exchange the whole sum of natural beauty for a single human face.
Westerners generally feel that Asian indifference to the technical control of nature is either tropical laziness or the lack of a social conscience. It is easy to believe that religions which concern themselves with inward rather than outward solutions to suffering encourage callousness toward hunger, injustice, and disease. It is easy to say that they are aristocrats’ methods of exploiting the poor. But it is, perhaps, not so easy to see that the poor are also being exploited when they are persuaded to desire more and more possessions, and let to confuse happiness with progressive acquisition. The power to change nature or to perform miracles conceals the truth that suffering is relative, and that the fact that nature abhors a vacuum is above all true of troubles.
By and large, the naturalistic religions hold out for man no greater hope than a philosophic acceptance of the inevitable, a noble but sorrowful resignation to the truth that nature is beyond good and evil, and that death is the necessary counterpart of life, as pain of pleasure. But this sacrifices the most human thing about man — his eternal, childlike hope that somehow, someday, the deepest yearnings of his heart will come true. Who is so proud and unfeeling that he will not admit that he would not be deliriously happy if, by some strange magic, these deep and ingrained longings could be fulfilled? If there were everlasting life beyond death after all? If there were eternal reunion with the people we have loved? If, forever and ever, there were the vision and the union of hearts with a God whose beatitude exceeds immeasurably the most intense joy that we have known — somehow including all the variety of form and color, uniqueness and individuality, that we value so much upon earth? Christianity alone, it would be argued, has the audacity to affirm this basic hope which the wisdom of the world represses, and so is the only fundamentally joyous religion.
The more a person knows of himself, the more he will hesitate to define his nature and to assert what he must necessarily feel, and the more he will be astounded at this capacity to feel in unsuspected and unpredictable ways. Still more will this be so if he learns to explore, or feel deeply into, his negative states of feeling — his loneliness, sorrow, grief, depression, or fear — without trying to escape from them.
In many so-called primitive cultures it is a requirement for tribal initiation to spend a lengthy period alone in the forests or mountains, a period of coming to terms with the solitude and nonhumanity of nature so as to discover who, or what, one really is — a discovery hardly possible while the community is telling you what you are, or ought to be. He may discover, for instance, that loneliness is the masked fear of an unknown which is himself, and that the alien-looking aspect of nature is a projection upon the forests of his fear of stepping outside habitual and conditioned patterns of feeling. There is much evidence to show that for anyone who passes through the barrier of loneliness, the sense of individual isolation bursts, almost by dint of its own intensity, into the “all-feeling” of identity with the universe. One may pooh-pooh this as “nature mysticism” or “pantheism,” but it should be obvious that a feeling of this kind corresponds better with a universe of mutually interdependent processes and relations than with a universe of distinct, blocklike identities.
Things are separable in words which are inseparable in nature because words are counters and classifiers which can be arranged in any order. The word “being” is formally separate from the word “nothing,” as “pleasure” from “pain.” But in nature being and nothing, or solid and space, constitute a relationship as inseparable as back and front. In the same way, the formally static character of our words for feelings conceal the fact (or better, the event) that our feelings are directions rather than states, and that in the realm of direction there is no North without South.
For one type of culture, then, the “truth about nature” is the verbal explanation or reconstruction of the world, considered as a system of law which precedes and underlies it as the plan in the mind of the architect comes before the building of a house. But for another type it is nature itself, experienced directly in mental silence, which is Zen Buddhism is called wunien or “no-thought”. Thus in the cultures of the Far East we rarely find the discrepancy between religion and nature so characteristic of the West.
Likewise, in the ancient Hebrew religion, the Ark of the Covenant was essentially a throne, hidden in the inner sanctuary of the Holy of Holies, which was built in the form of a perfect cube — symbol of completeness and perfection.
Yet from the standpoint of Chinese philosophy and aesthetics, this symmetrical and architectonic perfection ins rigid and lifeless. Such forms are found but rarely in nature, and thus when the Chinese artist starts to paint the rigid Cross he finds himself in conflict, for what he really wants to pain is a living tree.
The architectonic and artificial style of Christianity is nowhere clearer than in the idea of God as the maker of the world, and thus of the world itself as an artifact which has been constructed in accordance with a plan, and which has, therefore, a purpose and an explanation. But the mode of action of the Tao is called wu-wei, translatable both as “nonstriving” and “nonmaking.” For from the standpoint of Taoist philosophy natural forms are not made but grown, and there is a radical difference between the organic and the mechanical.
By his omniscience he attends consciously to everything at once, and by his omnipotence makes it subject to his will. At first sight this is a fascinating and marvellous conception — an infinitely conscious mind, concentrated simultaneously on every galaxy and every atom with the entirety of its attention. Yet on second thought the conception is more monstrous than marvellous — a kind of intellectual elephantiasis, being simply a colossal magnification and multiplication of the conscious, analytical mode of knowledge. For God is conceived in the image of a severed consciousness, without inwardness, since he knows not only all things but himself as well through and through. He is completely transparent to his own conscious understanding; his subjectivity is totally objective, and for this very reason he lacks an inside. This is perhaps what Western man would himself like to be — a person in total control of himself, analyzed to the ultimate depths of his own unconscious, understood and explained to the last atom of his brain, and to this extent completely mechanized. When every last element of inwardness has become an object of knowledge, the person is, however, reduced to a rattling shell.
Equally monstrous is the notion of absolute omnipotence when considered as perfect self-control, which is actually tantamount to a state of total paralysis. For control is a degree of inhibition, and a system which is perfectly inhibited is completely frozen. Of course, when we say that a pianist or a dancer has perfect control we refer to a certain combination of control and spontaneity. The artist has established an area of control within which he can abandon himself to spontaneity without restraint. We should rather think of God as the one whose spontaneity is so perfect that it needs no control, whose inside is so harmonious that it requires no conscious scrutiny. But this is not the regal God of ecclesiastical imagery, presiding over a cosmos which is a beneficent despotism run by enlightened force.
It is easy, of course, to show that life is life-death rather than life as opposed to death, but rationalizations do not alter a revulsion so deeply embedded. Yet the problem of death is surely not to be solved by the abolition of death, which is almost analogous to chopping of the head to cure headache.
However much ideas of the laws of nature may have changed, there is no doubt that the idea of natural law first arose from the supposition that the world obey the commandments of a ruler conceived in the image of an earthly king.
It is commonly felt that the mind can think only of one thing at a time, and language, in so far as it is the main instrument of thought, confirms this impression by being a linear series of signs read or sounded one at a time. The sense of this common feeling is presumably that conscious thought is focused attention, and that such concentration of our awareness is difficult or impossible when the field of attention is too complex. Attention therefore requires selection. The field of awareness must be divided into relatively simple unities or wholes, so structured that their parts can be taken in at one glance.
Just because concentrated attention is exclusive, selective, and divisive it is much easier for it to notice differences than unities. Visual attention notices things as figures against a contrasting background, and our thought about such things emphasizes the difference between figure and ground. The outline of the figure or the “inline” of the ground divides the two from each other. Yet we do not so easily notice the union or inseparability of figure and ground, or solid and space. This is easily seen when we ask what would become of the figure or the solid without any surrounding ground or space. Conversely, we might as what would become of the surrounding space if unoccupied by any solids. The answer is surely that it would no longer be space, for space is a “surrounding function” and there would be nothing to surround. It is important to note that this mutuality or inseparability of figure and ground is not only logical and grammatical but also sensuous.
Figure-and-ground, then, constitute a relationship — an inseparable relationship of unity-in-diversity.
When it is not recognized that thought orders the world, it is supposed that thought discovers an order which is already there — a type of order which is, furthermore, expressible in terms of word-and-thought.
Here, then, is the genesis of two of the most important historical premises of Western science. The first is that there is a law of nature, an order of things and events awaiting our discovery, and that this order can be formulated in thought, that is, in words or in some type of notation. The second is that the law of nature is universal, a premise deriving from monotheism, from the idea of one God ruling the whole world.
Science is, moreover, an extreme instance of the entire method of attention which we have been discussing. It is an awareness of nature based upon the selective, analytic, and abstractive way of focusing attention. It understands the world by reducing it as minutely as possible to intelligible things. This it does by a “universal calculus,” that is, by translating the formlessness of nature into structures made up of simple and manageable units, as a surveyor measures a “shapeless” piece of land by approximating its areas as minutely as possible to such simple abstract figures as triangles, squares, and circles. By this method all oddities and irregularities are progressively screened out until at last it appears that God himself is the supreme geometer.
But this we have been able to do by analysis, by the ever minuter division of the world into parts which approximate the supreme simplicity of mathematical points.
Consequently the progress of technology begins to have the opposite of its intended effects. Instead of simplifying human tasks, it makes them more complicated. No one dares move without consulting an expert. The expert in turn cannot hope to have mastered more than a small section of the ceaselessly expanding volume of information. But whereas formal scientific knowledge is departmentalized, the world is not, so that the mastery of a single department of knowledge is often as frustrating as a closetful of left shoes. In a society whose means of production and communication are highly technological, the most ordinary matters of politics, economics, and law become so involved that the individual citizen feels paralyzed. The growth of bureaucracy and totalitarianism has, then, far less to do with sinister influences than with the mere mechanics of control in an impossibly complex system of interrelations.
Yet if this were the whole story scientific knowledge would already have reached the point of total self-strangulation. That it has done so only in some degree is because the scientist actually understands interrelations by other means than analysis and step-by-step thinking. In practice he relies heavily upon intuition — upon a process of intelligence whose steps are unconscious, which does not appear to work in the painfully linear, one-thing-at-a-time fashion of thought, and which can therefore grasp whole fields of related detail simultaneously.
Despite its rigor and despite its initial successes, this is an extremely clumsy mode of intelligence. Just as it is a highly complicated task to drink water with a fork instead of a glass, so the complexity of nature is not innate but a consequence of the instruments used to handle it. There is nothing complex about walking, breathing, and circulating one’s blood. Living organisms have developed these functions without thinking about them at all. The circulation of the blood becomes complex only when stated in physiological terms, that is, when understood by means of a conceptual model constructed of the kind of simple units which conscious attention requires. The natural world seems a marvel of complexity, requiring a vastly intricate intelligence to create and govern it, just because we have represented it to ourselves in the clumsy “notation” of thought.
Understanding nature by means of thought is like trying to make out the contours of an enormous cave with the aid of a small flashlight casting a bright but very thin beam. The path of the light and the series of “spots” over which it has passed must be retained in memory, and from this record the general appearance of the cave must laboriously be reconstructed.
In practice, then, the scientist must perforce use his intuition for grasping the wholes of nature, though he does not trust it. He must always stop to check intuitive insight with the thin bright beam of analytic thought.
Yet surely the ideal of survival is completely inane. Studying human and animal psychology, it does indeed seem that “self-preservation is the first law of nature,” though it is possible that this is an anthropomorphism, a projection into nature of a peculiarly human attitude. If survival is the test of wisdom, the significance of life is merely time: we go on in order to keep going on. Our attitude to experience seems to be one of perpetual hunger, for even when we are satisfied and delighted to be alive we keep calling for more. The cry “Encore!” is the highest mark of approval. Obviously, this is because no moment of life is a true fulfillment. Even in satisfaction there remains a gnawing emptiness which nothing save an infinity of time can fill, for “all joys want eternity.”
But the hunger for time is the direct result of our specialization in narrowed attention, of the mode of consciousness which takes the world in serially, one thought and one thing at a time. Each experience is for this reason partial, fractured, and incomplete, and no amount of these fragments ever add up to a whole experience, a true fulfillment. The impression that all nature, like ourselves, hungers endlessly for survival is, then, the necessary result of the way in which we study it. The answer is predetermined by the character of the question.
It is therefore becoming generally realized that for the most creative research, men of science must be trusted and encouraged to let their minds wander unsystematically without any pressure for results. The visitor to such an inspired foundation as the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton will see some of the world’s greatest mathematicians just sitting at their desks with their heads in their hands, or staring blankly out of the window, apparently financed munificently to do nothing but “good off.” This is precisely the Taoist principle of “using knowledge to attain knowledge,” the Western discovery of the creative power of wu-nien, or “no-thought,” and kuan, or contemplation without strained attention.
Furthermore, moral and spiritual idealisms with all their efforts and disciplines aimed at the future are forms of the very mode of awareness which is giving us the trouble. For they perceive good and bad, ideal and real, separatively and fail to see that “goodness” is necessary a “bad” man’s ideal, that courage is the goal of cowards, and that peace is sought only by the disturbed.
Narrowed, serial consciousness, the memory-stored stream of impressions, is the means by which we have the sense of ego. It enables us to feel that behind thought there is a thinker and behind knowledge a knower — an individual who stands aside from the changing panorama of experience to order and control it as best he may. If the ego were to disappear, or rather, to be seen as a useful fiction, there would no longer be the duality of subject and object, experiencer and experience. There would simply be a continuous, self-moving stream of experiencing, without the sense either of an active subject who controls it or of a passive subject who suffers it. The thinker would be seen to be no more than the series of thoughts, and the feeler no more than the feelings.
It would be as if our narrowed consciousness had to take charge of all the operations of the body so that, unless it took thought of them, the glands and nerves and arteries could not do their work. As language, both written and spoken, so eloquently shows, the order of thought must be strung out in a line. But nature is not strung out in a line. Nature is, at the very least, a volume, and at most an infinitely dimensioned field.
In some respects this is what we mean by feeling, as when one learns to dance by watching and “getting the feel of it” rather than following a diagram of the steps. Up to a point these arts have communicable rules, but there is always something indefinable which distinguishes true mastery.
The brain may be represented in terms of quantitative measurement, but it does not follow that it works in these terms. On the contrary, it does not work in terms at all, and for this reason can respond intelligently to relations which can be termed only approximately, slowly, and laboriously.
As Chinese and Japanese painters have so well understood, there are landscapes which are best viewed through half-closed eyes, mountains which are most alluring when partially veiled in mist, and waters which are most profound when the horizon is lost, and they are merged with the sky.
Respect for the unknown is the attitude of those who, instead of raping nature, woo her until she gives herself. But what she gives, even then, is not the cold clarity of the surface but the warm inwardness of the body — a mysteriousness which is not merely a negotiation, a blank absence of knowledge, but that positive substance which we call wonderfull.
When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. There is no substitute for the direct perception [kuan] of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality.
To know nature, the Tao, and the “substance” of things, we must know it as, in the archaic sense, a man “knows” a woman — in the warm vagueness of immediate contact. “By love he may be gotten and holden, but by thought never.” The image of vagueness implies that to know nature, outside ourselves and within, we must abandon every idea, every thought and opinion, of what it is — and look. If we must have some idea of it, it must be the most vague imaginable, which is why, even for Westerners, such formless conceptions as the Tao are to be preferred to the idea of God, with its all too definite associations.
According to Taoist philosophy, it is just this attempt to regulate the psyche from outside and to wrest the positive from the negative which is at the root of all social and moral confusion. What needs, then, to be controlled is not so much the spontaneous flow of human passions as the ego which exploits them — in other words, the controller itself. This has likewise been evident to such highly perceptive Christians as St. Augustine and Martin Luther, who realized so keenly that mere self-control was in no sense a remedy for the ills of man since it was precisely in the self that evil had taken its root. But they never abandoned the political idea of control, since their solution was to have the self empowered and regenerated by the grace of God — the ego of the universe. They did not see that the difficulty lay, not in the good or ill will of the controller, but in the whole rationale of control which they were attempting to use. They did not realize that the problem for God was the same as the problem for the human ego. For even God’s universe had spawned the Devil, who arises not so much from his own independent malice as from God’s “arrogance” in assuming omnipotent kingship and identifying himself with unalloyed goodness. The Devil is God’s unconsciously produced shadow. Naturally, God is not allowed to be responsible for the origin of evil, for the connection between the two lies in the unconscious. Man says, “I didn’t mean to hurt you, but my temper got the better of me. I shall try to control it in future.” And God say, “I didn’t mean there to be any evil, but my angel Lucifer brought it up of his own free will. In the future I will shut him up safely in hell.”
A problem of evil arises as soon as there is a problem of good, that is, as soon as there is any thought of what may be done to make the present situation “better,” under whatever nomenclature the idea may be concealed.
Clearly this state is, in retrospect, “better” than the seeking and staring strain of the mind which came before. But its goodness is of another order. Because it came unsought, it is not the kind of goodness which is in relation to evil, not the fantasy of peace which is conceived in the midst of turmoil.
In sum, then, the realization that nature is ordered organically rather than politically, that it is a field of relationships rather than a collection of things, requires an appropriate mode of human awareness. The habitual egocentric mode in which man identifies himself with a subject facing a world of alien objects does not fit the physical situation. So long as it remains, our inward feeling is at variance with reality. Based on this feeling, our efforts to control ourselves and the surrounding world become viciously circular entanglements of ever-growing complexity. More and more the individual feels himself frustrated and impotent in the midst of a mechanical world order which has become an irresistible “march of progress” toward ends of its own.
An organic natural order has its proper correspondence in a mode of consciousness which is a total feeling or experiencing. Where feeling is broken up into the feeler and the feeling, the knower and the known, what lies between the two is not relationship but mere juxtaposition. Identified with one of its terms alone, consciousness feels “out on a limb” facing an alien world in which it controls only to find out more and more uncomfortable, and which it exploits only to find it more and more ungratifying.
Modestly and graciously posed, the naked form of man and woman is revered as the height of beauty, yet this same form can turn in an instant lascivious or grotesque, disgusting or uncouth, by the slightest change of posture or activity — so easily, indeed, that for most of the time we conceal it from sight with clothing, beneath which it grows pallid and potatoish like the white slugs that live under rocks.
But to the extent that the measure of reality is felt to be the degree of resistance and pain which the environment offers to our nerves, the body becomes above all else the instrument of our suffering. It negates our will; it decays before we have lost the capacity to disgust it; its possession exposes us to all the 21 measurable degrees of agony by the cruelty of human torture, by accident, or by disease. Those who are fortunate enough to escape the worst that can happen are nevertheless tormented with imagination of what might be, and their skins tingle and their stomachs turn in sympathy and horror at the fate of others.
It is little wonder, then, that we week detachment from the body, wanting to convince ourselves that the real “I” is not this quaking mass of tissue with all its repulsive possibilities for pain and corruption. It is little wonder that we expect religions, philosophies, and other forms of wisdom to show us above all else a way of deliverance from suffering, from the plight of being a soft body in a world of hard reality. Sometimes therefore it seems that the answer is to match hardness with hardness, to identify ourselves with a spirit which has principles but no feelings, to despise and mortify the body, and to withdraw into the comfortable fleshless world of abstract thought or psychic fantasy.
This is, as it were, a shrinking of consciousness from its environment of pain, gathering itself back and back into a knot around its own center.
It is true that we want to have our cake and eat it: we want to be sensitive and alive, but not sensitive to suffering.
Hence the sadist and torturer takes his most unholy delight not just in watching the bodily convulsions of his victim, but in “breaking the spirit” which resists them. Yet if there were no resisting spirit his savagery would be rendered something like slashing at water with a sword, and he would find himself confronted with a total weakness that offered neither challenge nor interest. But it is exactly this weakness which is the mind’s real and unsuspected strength.
This is, in other words, the recognition that all our psychological defenses against suffering are useless. The more we defend, the more we suffer, and defending is itself suffering. Although we cannot help putting up the psychological defense, it dissolves when it is seen that the defense is all of a piece with what we are defending ourselves against.
What we feel is to an enormous and unsuspected degree dependent on what we think, and the basic contrast of thought ordinarily strike us as the basic contrast of the natural world. We therefore take it for granted that we feel an immense difference between pleasure and pain. But it is obvious in some of the milder forms of these sensations that the pleasure or the pain lies not so much in the feeling itself as in its context. There is no appreciable physiological difference between shudders of delight and shudders of fear, nor between the thrills of rapturous music and the thrills of terrifying melodrama. But the context of the feeling changes its interpretation, depending on whether the circumstances which arouse it are for us or against us.
Perverse and abnormal as they are usually regarded, we should also consider the phenomena of sadism and masochism — better designated by the single term algolagnia, or “lustful pain.” Merely to dismiss these phenomena as perverse and unnatural is to say no more than that they do not fit into a preconceived notion of order. The very fact that they are human possibilities shows that they are extensions of ordinary feelings, revealing depths of our nature which are usually left unexplored. Distasteful as they may be, this should not prevent us from trying to discover whether they throw any light on the problem of suffering.
Suffering and death — all that dark and destructive side of nature for which Shiva stands — are therefore problematic for the ego rather than the organism. The organism accepts them through ecstasy, but the ego is rigid and unyielding and finds them problematic because they affront its pride. The ego is the social image or role with which the mind is shamed into identifying itself, since we are taught to act the part which society wants us to play — the part of a reliable and predictable center of action which resists spontaneous change. Death and agony are therefore dreaded as loss of status, and their struggles are desperate attempts to maintain the assumed patterns of action and feeling.
There are no means of methods for understanding this, for every such device is artfulness, is ultimately an attempt to become something, to be more than this melting moment which the utmost tension of the will cannot hold. Belief in an unchanging God, an immortal soul, or even in a deathless nirvana as something to be gained is a part of this artfulness, as is equally the sterile certainty and aggressiveness cocksureness of atheism and scientific materialism. Yogas, prayers, therapies, and spiritual exercises are at root only elaborate postponements of the recognition that there is nothing to be grasped and no way to grasp it.
For in seeing fully into his own empty momentariness, the Bodhisattva knows a despair beyond suicide, the absolute despair which is the etymological meaning of nirvana. It is complete disillusion from every hope of safety, or rest, or gain, suicide itself being no escape since “I” awakens once more in every being that is born. It is the recognition of final defeat for all the artfulness of the ego, which, in this disillusion, expires — finding only emptiness in its most frantic resistance to emptiness, suffering in escape from suffering, and nothing but clinging in its effort to let go. But here he finds in his own dissolving the same emptiness from which there blazes the whole host of sun, moon, and stars.
But things are not usually felt to be marvellous unless they are full of consequence, unless they lead to definitive changes in practical life. When this sensation first dawns upon people, as it often does quite unexpectedly, they are apt to expect all kinds of results from it, which is why it vanishes as swiftly as it comes. They expect it to change their characters, to make them better, stronger, wiser, and happier. For they believe that they have grasped something immensely valuable, and go bouncing around as if they had inherited a fortune.
The whole notion of gain, whether it be the gain of wealth or the gain of knowledge and virtue, is like stopping the pangs of hunger by gobbling oneself up from the toes. Yet we do it anyhow, for it really makes no difference whether it is one’s own toes or roast duck: the satisfaction is always momentary.
You cannot take hold of it,
But you cannot lose it.
In not being able to get it, you get it.
When you are silent, it speaks;
When you speak, it is silent.
Such assertions will naturally be irritating to sensible and practical minds — this excitement about something which does not necessarily make any difference to anything, this perfectly meaningless idea of a harmony from which it is impossible to deviate. But the whole point of this “dead cat’s head” philosophy is just that it is inconsequential, that, like nature itself, it is a kind of sublime nonsense, an expression of ecstasy, an end in itself without purpose or goal.
Presumably it is regarded as one of those “escapes from reality” so much condemned by those restrict reality to what one reads about in the newspapers.
But perhaps the reason for this love of nonhuman nature is that communion with it restores us to a level of our own human nature at which we are still sane, free from humbug, and untouched by anxieties about the meaning and purpose of our lives. For what we call “nature” is free from a certain kind of scheming and self-importance. The birds and beasts indeed pursue their business of eating and breeding with the utmost devotion. But they do not justify it; they do not pretend that it serves higher ends, or that it makes a significant contribution to the progress of the world.
Thus when our love for others is based simply on a mutual need it becomes strangling — a kind of vampirism in which we say, all to expressively, “I love you so much I could eat you!”
Lacking divine grace, man can act only from the natural incentive of need, and this assumption persists as a matter of common sense even when it is no longer believed that there is a God creating the world out of his infinite fullness. We assume, furthermore, that the whole realm of nature acts from hunger alone, for in Christianity it was understood that nature fell together with Adam, its head. And the notion that nature acts only from necessity accords perfectly with the mechanism which displaces theism.
The most unnatural also is nature. Who sees her not on all sides sees her truly nowhere… Even in resisting her laws one obeys them; and one works with her even in desiring to work against her.
Even under tyranny “a people gets what government it deserve,” because it always retains the power, that is, the freedom to govern itself.
To act or grow creatively we must begin from where we are, but we cannot begin at all if we are not “all here” without reservation or regret. Lacking self-acceptance, we are always at odds with our point of departure, always doubting the ground on which we stand, always so divided against ourselves that we cannot act with sincerity. Apart from self-acceptance as the groundwork of thought and action, every attempt at spiritual or moral discipline is the fruitless struggle of a mind that is split asunder and insincere. It is the freedom which is the essential basis of self-restraint.
For in identifying God, the Absolute, with a goodness excluding evil we make it impossible for us to accept ourselves radically: what is not in accord with the will of God is at variance with Being itself and must no under any circumstances be accepted. Our freedom is therefore set about with such catastrophic rewards and punishments that it is not freedom at all, but resembles rather the totalitarian state in which one may vote against the government but always at the risk of being sent to a concentration camp. Instead of self-acceptance, the groundwork of our thought and action has therefore been metaphysical anxiety, the terror of being ultimately wrong and rotten to the core.
Growth in philosophical understanding, or just plain wisdom, is always a matter of being able to distinguish between levels of truth and frame of reference, at the same time being able to see one’s own life in its intimate relation to these differing and ever more universal levels. Above all, there is the level beyond levels, the boundless frame of universal nature, which, however impossible to describe, is the self-determining and spontaneous ground of our being and our freedom. The degree of freedom and self-determination varies with the level which we realize to be our self — the source from which we act. As our sense of self is narrow, the more we feel our existence as restraint. For when we stand with our nature, seeing that there is nowhere to stand against it, we are at last able to move unmoved.
Extreme modesty and prudishness in the home so heightened the fascination of sex that prostitution, even for the upper classes, flourished on a far greater scale than in our own relatively liberal times.
Even the chairs, tables, and household ornaments were suggestively bulged and curved — the chairs wide-shouldered and then waisted at the back, the seat broad, and the legs so obviously thighs or calves that squeamish housewives made the resemblance all the stronger by fitting them with skirts. For when sexuality is repressed in its direct manifestation, it irradiates other spheres of life to scatter on every side symbols and suggestions of its all the more urgent presence.
But the universalization of sex involves far more than Freud’s recognition that art, religion, and politics are expression of sublimated libido. We must also see that sexual relations are religious, social, metaphysical, and artistic.
All these are maya, and the love of these is the endlessly frustrating love of fantasy. What is not maya is mystery, what cannot be described or measured, and it is in this sense — symbolized by the veil of modesty — that woman is always a mystery to man, and man to woman. It is in this sense that we must understand van der Leeuw’s remarkable saying that “the mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
It’s always instructive to go back to the original meanings of words to discover not only what new senses they have gained, but also what old senses they have lost.
Yet it was not thus that Jesus was described as “speaking as one having authority and not as the Scribes.” The point was that he spoke with inner conviction, which must again be distinguished from the dogmatism of inner uncertainty.
One of the most extreme forms of this parody is the attitude of so many Freudians which reduces all creativity — art, philosophy, religion, and literature — to a manifestation of oral or anal eroticism, or infantile incestuousness, with the cynical implication that all men are thereby equally guilty.
War, for example, is less destructive when fought for greed than for the justification of ideological principles, since greed will not destroy what it wishes to possess, whereas the vindication of principle is an abstract goal which is perfectly ruthless in regard to the humane value of life, limb, and property.
Mathematic works because of its immense inner consistent and precision, serving thus as an admirable tool for measuring nature to suit the purposes which we have in mind.
But this mode of control is a peculiar example of the proverb that nothing fails like success. For the more consciousness is individualized by the success of the will, the more everything outside the individual seems to be a threat — including not only the external world but also the “external” and uncontrolled spontaneity of one’s own body, which, for example, continues to age, die, and corrupt against one’s desire. Every success in control therefore demands a further success, so that the process cannot stop short of omnipotence. But this, save perhaps in some inconceivably distance future, is impossible. Hence there arises the desire to protect the ego from alien spontaneity by withdrawal from the natural world into a realm of pure consciousness or spirit.
The world is a whole greater than the sum of its parts because the parts are not merely summed — thrown together — but related. The whole is a pattern which remains, while the parts come and go, just as the human body is a dynamic pattern which persists despite the rapid birth and death of all its individual cells.