and establishing a family on the one hand, and the life of love, sex, and aesthetics on the other. When these were completed came the stage of Dharma or devotion to religion.
Apart from the definite adherents of these new religious and “religio-psychological” groups there are innumerable “seekers” who find no one creed fully satisfying, and who drift from group to group, seeking they know not what unless it is that magical knowledge which will solve all problems and set their souls free from fear. Sometimes they think they have almost found it in this or that “ism,” but what a strange place to look for the secret of life! Surely it is more likely that this secret will be found in life itself and not in doctrines and ideas about life?
Some look for Truth in creeds and forms and rules;
Some search for doubts and dogmas in the schools,
But from behind the Veil a Voice proclaims,
“Your road lies neither here nor there, O fools!”
For the peculiar thing is that both what we are trying to escape and what we are trying to find are inside ourselves. This, as we have seen, is almost more true of modern man than of the primitive, for our difficulty is what to do with ourselves rather than the external world.
Thus, at the risk of repeating a truism, it is obvious that unless we can come face to face with the difficulty in ourselves, everything to which we look for salvation is nothing more than an extra curtain with which to hide that difficulty from our eyes. Whether salvation is sought in mere forgetting or in a definite attempt to find salvation either through religion, philosophy, or psychological healing the same principle applies. Psychological healing in particular has been devised for the very purpose of enabling man to face himself, to accept nature in himself with all its primeval desires and fears. Oddly enough, however, many of the most fervent devotees of psychology are outstanding examples of its failure to help them. It does not attempt to offer comforting doctrines about this world or the hereafter like many forms of religion and philosophy, nor does it hold out promises of power and success. It digs ruthlessly into the secret places of the heart and drags out man’s most carefully guarded mysteries, and yet one has met accredited and fully qualified practitioners of this science who appear to be anything but reconciled to themselves or to life. For it seems that even the acceptance of life can be used as a means to escape it.
The Instrument of Freedom
But this is not surprising. The seekers for forgetfulness, salvation, and health of the mind alike want happiness, and therefore among these classes one cannot expect to find happy people. Those who are happy are interested in religion mainly as a means of expressing their gratitude to life and God and of enabling others to see as they do; they are not looking for personal salvation, for they do not think about such things. But how can they enable others to see as they do if it is true that while those who have happiness do not search for it, those who have not cannot find it by seeking?
We have examined something of the meaning of unhappiness, of the war between the opposites in the human soul, of the fear of fear, of man’s consequent isolation from nature, and of the way in which this isolation has been intensified in the growth of civilization. We have also shown how man is intimately and inseparably connected with the material and mental universe, and that if he tries to cut himself off from it he must perish. In fact, however, he can only cut himself off in imagination, otherwise he would cease to exist, but we have yet to decide whether this elusive thing called happiness would result from acceptance of the fact of man’s union with the rest of life. But if this is true we have to discover how such an acceptance may be made, whether it is possible for man to turn in his flight into isolation and overcome the panic which makes him try to swim against the current instead of with it. In the psychological realm this swimming against the current is called repression, the reaction of proud, conscious reason to the fears and desires of nature in man. This raises the further question of whether acceptance of nature involves just a return to the amorality of the beast, being simply a matter of throwing up all responsibility, following one’s whims, and drifting about on the tide of life like a fallen leaf. To return to our analogy: life is the current into which man is thrown, and though he struggles against it, it carries him along despite all his efforts, with the result that his efforts achieve nothing but his own unhappiness. Should he then just turn about and drift? But nature gave him the faculties of reason and conscious individuality, and if he is to drift he might as well have been without them. It is more likely that he has them to give expression to immeasurably greater possibilities of nature than the animal can express by instinct, for while the animal is nature’s whistle, man is its organ.
Even so, man does not like to be put down to the place of an instrument, however grand that instrument may be, for an instrument is an instrument, and an organ does what it is made to do as subserviently and blindly as a whistle. But this is not the only consideration. It may be that man has a wrong idea of what his self is. In the words of the Hindu sage Patanjali, “Ignorance is the identification of the Seer with the instruments of seeing.”11 Certainly man as instrument is an obedient tool whether he likes it or not, but it may be that there is something in man which is more than the instrument, more than his reason and individuality which are part of that instrument and which he mistakenly believes to be his true self. And while as an instrument he is bound, as this he is free, and his problem is to become aware of it. Finding it, he will understand that in fleeing from death, fear, and sorrow he is making himself a slave, for he will realize the mysterious truth that in fact he is free both to live and to die, to love and to fear, to rejoice and to be sad, and that in none of these things is there any shame. But man rejects his freedom to do them, imagining that death, fear, and sorrow are the causes of his unhappiness. The real cause is that he does not let himself be free to accept them, for he does not understand that he who is free to love is not really free unless he is also free to fear, and this is the freedom of happiness.
The oldest answers in the world to the problem of happiness are found in religion, for the kind of happiness we are considering belongs to the deepest realms of the human spirit. But this should not lead us to suppose that it is something remote from familiar experience, something to be sought out in supernatural spheres far beyond the world which we know through our five senses. The world of the spirit is so often understood in an almost materialistic way, as a locality infinite in space containing things that are eternal in terms of time.1 It is thought to be a world corresponding in form and substance to our own, save that its forms and substances are constructed of spirit instead of matter, and its operations governed by different laws, for nothing changes—all things are everlasting. To understand the world of the spirit in this way is to make it wholly different from the world in which we live, and when religion is concerned with this kind of spiritualism a great gulf appears between the world of the spirit and the world of everyday experience, contact with the former being possible only in a disembodied condition, as after death, or in a state of consciousness where we acquire a new set of senses, spiritual senses that can perceive things to which material vision is not attuned.
This view of spirituality is so common in religion that many people believe salvation to lie utterly beyond our present life, being something for which earthly existence is only a preparation and which will be inherited either when we have passed beyond the grave or when, even though still living, our thoughts have ascended to a higher sphere so that we are in this world but not of it. It is probable, however, that this idea has arisen because so much religious teaching is presented in the form of allegory; spiritual truths are presented in terms of time and space for purposes of simplification. Heaven and hell are removed in time to the life after death and in place to a different world order; eternity is represented as unending time, which is not eternity but everlastingness. This kind of simplification may have its uses, but in many ways it is an unnecessary complication for
