CHAPTER VII

THE TWO SUBTERRANEAN GROTTOES

The intermediate soul, therefore, is the meeting ground, the arena, of the conflict between soul and body. It is rent and torn by the tug and pull of opposing motivations, the animal tending downward toward sensuality and grossness, the spirit striving with the soul to raise it up out of the mire. The animal self reached upward to intrigue the soul down into its coarseness and brutish delights; the spirit wrestled valiantly to entice its lower brother upward by the desirable rewards of virtue. The great battle was on. All religions have so fully depicted the grim stress and the crucial issues of the struggle that it needs no considerable elaboration here. What is needed, however, is the orientation of relevance and pertinence from the purely theological purview over to its even more pertinent reference in the field of everyday consequences, particularly as the nub and core of psychoanalytic technique. It has not been known that the immediate categories of the psychoanalytic situation were all the while those time-hallowed fundamenta of the old theology and the Bible texts.

Dr. Hopper, in another passage from his The Crisis of Faith may be permitted to sum up what has been presented in the foregoing pages as to the three-ply constituency of our consciousness, and adduce for our consideration in psychology the practical outcome of the living action in the three-storied human structure (p. 249):

"It is formally and structurally, that man may live his life on one of three levels: on the sub-human, the human, or the divine--below the level of the regulative control of reason, or within the regulative control of God's will. These levels of experience are conceived formally;

83

but they are lived dialectically. Each level when chosen is a commitment to a total end." (The italicizing of below is ours, for a purpose soon to be specified.)

Broadly this is precisely what the elaborate and recondite Greek Orphic, as well as its parent Egyptian Hermetic, wisdom promulgated in the ancient day in the arcana of the Mysteries. The sages of olden time knew of man's threefold composition, and it is obvious that they knew also the vast involvements of the triplicity for all phases of human conduct, thought and understanding. Their astute philosophy reveals their underlying recognition of the interrelated status of the three levels of conscious life, since indeed their systems and principles can not be apprehended dialectically without grounding the effort in these formulations. What they knew is that which has not yet dawned on modern mentation, namely, that as man lives on, or in, three levels of consciousness, he must have an organic equipment that will relate him, consciously, with the reality of each level, and that he must therefore have three separate "minds." He must possess a sub-human, a human and a super-human, or divine, mind!

Here is the mighty key to the modern psychoanalytic science without which it yet hobbles ahead in semi-groping. Circumscribing itself ignorantly within the limits of a twofold segmentation of consciousness, psychological science has hit and missed in its assumptions. Conjecture and confusion have come in because it prescribed but one realm of play for man's "unconscious," whereas there are two quite separate and different strata of unconscious content and influence. The one lies below (sub) the ordinary conscious, and the other above (super). The first is of the earth, physical; the second is "the Lord from heaven," spiritual. And the conscious human mind stands between its unconscious underling and its unconscious overlord. Here in Greek philosophy is the key to the scriptures. No less is it the key to psychoanalysis. For how can a thing which concerns the very constitution of mortal man be true in philosophy

84

or theology, and then not be the actuality in the same mortal nature when it is studied through the eyes of psychic interest?

Man, the strictly human, stands as the conscious being between two areas of unconsciousness, one "below," the other "above." His little life is indeed rounded with--unconsciousness, which presses close in upon him from both above and below. He is a little gamut of sound and action between two immense silences. And just as his physical sight extends over only the narrow segment of the scene upon which his vision can focus, but his cognition can take in in a secondary awareness further areas on each side of the middle focus without the gaze falling directly upon them, exactly so his consciousness can reach upward and downward from his central ground of focus and cover in a secondary type of recognition some sections of the rim of the great unconscious domains stretching far below and far above his allotted range of being. His consciousness is therefore extensible some distance into both the subconscious, beneath his ordinary status, and the hyperconscious, or world above his vibratory range. Man's conscious being, then, is a little light set aglow between two great darknesses, but through the evolving powers of the mental genius within him he is able to penetrate some distance into both of the two environing border regions of outer darkness.

The interrelationship of the three minds in man has never been systematically diagnosed. It is all important. It is the structural anthropological key to the problem of man. Its exposition must be attempted. The three minds must be described and classified.

The first step in the elucidation is taken from a hoary volume, Egypt's venerated Book of the Dead. The "Speaker" is the soul and he says: "I am Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow." "I am what hath been, what is and what shall be." Again he dramatizes his three consciousnesses in saying: "I am Atum in the morning; I am Ra at noon; I am Khepr at evening." What is meant here is that of the three elements or conditions of consciousness, one is the deposit of his actual experience in his past; the second is his conscious

85

present awareness; and the third is a higher consciousness supervening gradually for his future. We are thus instructed in the great truth that the subconscious mind is the hidden memory of our past; the conscious is our present awareness; and the superconscious is the mind that will function in our future. The last is only embryonic, potential, in seed state, as yet unopened to operative function. It can thus be seen that man's present consciousness is a point of transition from past to future, or equally from future to past, and that it is his effort to gain a state of stability at the neutral point between the two nodes of the movement of time. As his life and therefore his consciousness are a continuum, they must entail the union of all three experiences, or a union of the two end moments in the center. That is, the two end aspects that are not now in overt awareness must be integrally present, related and incorporated, essential components of the total deposit of experience in consciousness.

The past has teleological relation to the future and to the whole, since its meaning is determined by the nature of the ultimate goal at which the total experience is archetypally aimed. The future is conditioned by the past, as its ontological product, since it is built up on the past. The present moment is the resolution of the past into a mold that at the same time shapes the future.

All this brings out the important functionism of the three minds. As only one of the three grades of consciousness can fill the field of awareness, that is, occupy the mind's attention at one and the same time, owing to the finite limitations and the single dimensionality of the time concept as applicable to human mentality, it is both a logical and a practical necessity that the other two must lie in the unconscious sphere. The mind must retain the memory of its past experience, but that dare not occupy the field of consciousness at the cost of driving out the present,--or life would stop. Therefore the experience of the past, held in memory, must be stored out of the way, so to speak, in the halls of potential memory, to be available at any time if needed for present uses. This is just as under-

86

standable as that a person must have a room or attic in which to store things accumulated (in the past), so that while they may be available if needed, they are nevertheless out of the way to leave free space for present activities and uses. The subconscious, then, is the attic or storage room in which are packed away the gist of our past careers. The present is the new moment arising out of the past and receiving the influx from the future. The brain consciousness then is that poise in the flux, or that moment at which the content and essence of future development is registered in open awareness, to be dealt with by the initiative of the present, and passed back into the storehouse, an addition to what has been stored there previously.

But the purely temporal aspect of the movement must be oriented over into the concept of quality. The future can be, of course, just additional moments or events of the same kind of beads on the string of time. But it is proper to think of the future as bringing at least an evolutionary instinct to count on the future to bring higher values to life than those of the past or present. What the mind of the future will bring is expected to be something richer and fuller. The play of consciousness for the coming time will be cast at a higher frequency and shorter wave length than those in the past. Man is, as it were, but very actually, walking up a gamut of values, climbing up a golden stairway of realities, much like a cat walking from left to right over the piano keyboard. Each forward step he takes strikes a higher-pitched string of consciousness and realization. He awakens from silence to sound in his world a new and higher note each time he can reach one key higher in the scale. At each step of advance in his evolution in time, be it slow or rapid, he is progressing from a lower to a higher tempo or pitch. The past has resounded or responded to the lower tones; the future will strike the higher ones. For evolution is tuning up the strings and refining the mechanism of the physical instrument at each step of ongoing. Present man can produce sweeter tones and manage completer

87

harmonies than past man, and future man will be able to come ever closer to striking ineffable symphonies.

The past goes into latency--though it is always re-available--while the future awaits the slow development of the instrument in order to be brought forth out of latency and be registered on the surface of the actual. Until this moment it is only potential, awaiting the perfectibility of the sounding board of brain and nerves. The future thus emerges out of unconscious potentiality to pass through the gate of the present moment of actualization into the storehouse of accumulated and partly digested reality. It is the birth moment of ever advancing stages or registries of real being. All life progresses from the potential to the actual, and the area of immediacy in consciousness is the necessary ground whereon that which has been held in conscious thought in the mind of the great Oversoul of creation can be projected from the superior plane above the range of man's conscious grasp down into the open field of actual experience. The superconscious is that segment of the gamut of God's graded values which lies or extends immediately above the highest arc of man's responsive reach.

God is the sending generator of waves of reality; man, as he perfects his instrumentalities of body, mind and soul, is a poor, a good or a better receiving instrument. The total harmonies of God's being are thrilling about us all the while. But we are bound in silence to all of them except those that we have grown able to match in vibration through the evolving capacities of our organisms. Only these are the limited though ever expanding glories of reality that we are able to make actual to ourselves. The Egyptians again solidly portrayed this basic truth by one of their sagacious "myths." They said that man was imprisoned in twelve dungeons, one after the other, and that he could only be liberated from each in turn as he learned to pronounce the name of the god who stood guard at each dungeon door, and who held the key but would not use it until the prisoner pronounced his name properly. Name and nature are identical in this situation, so that man's ability to utter correctly

88

the name of a god is the same thing as being capable of manifesting that god's divine nature through the personality, the lower mind and self. This is brightly illuminating on the mental side. This is the meaning of "calling upon the name of the Lord" in the scriptures, a vastly different and far more demanding thing than a mere vociferation of the word-name of deity as understood in Christian rendering. We are, as the Egyptians poetized it, in prison to a faculty that is as yet unopened and undeveloped. We are freed from limitation only as potential faculty and power are opened to function through unfoldment. This is as clearly true as is the simple remark that we are blind until we evolve the faculty of sight through development of the organs of seeing. No wonder the ancients set forth man's life in the flesh as an imprisonment, a burial, sleep and death. We are the captives in a long exile here on earth. We are in bondage to matter, Hagar, the bondwoman, until brought up out of this land of Egypt, the abode of flesh and sense. That is what is entailed for the soul in its migration to earth, its coming "under the law" that prevails not in the world of spirit, but holds consciousness at low ebb in the realm of body and matter. This is what it means to be "crucified in the flesh." The Logos was made flesh--not only in one man, but in all men--and came and dwelt among us, hiding for the early time his grace and truth under a bushel of matter. This is our Immanuel, the god imman-ent in us. We are in prison under the limitations of our still undeveloped potentialities, and the Christos within us, who brings not only the stored-up capital of his former achievements, but the potentiality of vastly greater genius to be unfolded in the living process, is kept on the cross, in darkness and inanity, until we of the outer personality open the barred doors and let him out to freedom. He abides on the level immediately over our heads, a resident of a plane the life of which transcends ours, awaiting the chance to incorporate more and ever more of his unexploited capability in the world of the actual through the heightened mechanism of consciousness we slowly learn to provide. He dwells on the plane above

89

us, but is eager to break through into our world and find thereby a greater actualization of his own powers, as we prepare the way in the wilderness for him.

This being understood, a glimpse can now be had into the interlinked operation of the three levels of mentation in the human constitution, on its purely mechanical side. As Dr. Hopper has said, one can live in any of the three kingdoms, the sub-human, the human or the super-human or divine. We can step from one to the other of the two end realms across the connecting bridge of the human or conscious link. We can rise to divinity, or sink to animality, by a shift of the focus of interest, desire or will. The process by which true advance is constantly being made, however, is clearly to be seen and is the basis of a deeper understanding than has been given hitherto. The present or human state of the conscious mind is, as said, the point of meeting, and therefore the point of friction, clash and struggle between the two natures. It is to be set down categorically at once, however, that this clash and struggle is not evil, but only the exertion of the tension necessary to bring out to activity the latent energies of both soul and sense. (A whole prodigious segment of religious theory and practice has gone awry, with fatal consequences, as the result of regarding the contention of soul and body as evil.) It is here on the plane of ordinary daily struggle and effort, and not in ethereal palaces of mystical realization, that the battle is fought and the gains made. No bliss will ever be enjoyed in Nirvanic heavens that has not first been won on earth! For it is the function of the conscious mind, as the outcome of its insistent, perennial divine urge and aspiration, to reach upward toward the fuller and sweeter life of the supermind, to catch the purer tone of its more exalted radiation of divine character, and to bring it down into its lower station and hold it there. Ordinarily it is only at infrequent times that the human is able to vibrate consciously in rapport with that upper divine. These are the high moments, when we are wafted upward as by an afflatus, when inspiration flows and light flashes. We may thereafter sink

90

back into dullness, the glory departed. But having had one touch and taste of paradise, we will not rest until we have more; and with each new one there comes a greater skill to impound and hold the illuminated moment.

That there is a mind in us pointing to the future is indicated by what the eminent psychologist, Carl G. Jung, has to say in a footnote (p. 493) of his profound study, The Psychology of the Unconscious. He here succinctly lays the foundation for the erection of the two unconscious minds:

"Just as traces of memory long since fallen below the threshold of consciousness are accessible in the unconscious, so too there are certain very fine subliminal combinations of the future, which are of the greatest significance for future happenings in so far as the future is conditioned by our own psychology."

He says it is impossible for analysis to concern itself with these intimations pointing to future happenings. That would be the task of "an infinitely refined synthesis, which attempts to follow the natural current of the libido." This, he says, is beyond us, but it "might possibly happen in the unconscious, and it appears as if from time to time in certain cases significant fragments of this process come to light, at least in dreams. From this comes the prophetic significance of the dream long claimed by superstition."

He adds that "the aversion of the scientific man of today to this type of thinking . . . is merely an over-compensation to the very ancient and all too great inclination of mankind to believe in prophecies and superstitions." There will be hearty agreement with the revulsion of the scientific mind from age-long superstition and the gullible credulity of uncritical masses, but the literature containing the authentic record of prophetic dreams and premonitions is too great for denial of the possibility of projections of the future into consciousness. We are not too well fortified with a clear rationale of their occurrence, but it is certain that the future touches us closely and now and again pictures from its panoramic screen

91

pierce the curtain and drop down into the area of present awareness.

Dr. Hinkle, too, speaks of the necessity of man's transforming himself through the effort to follow the "transforming power within life," resident in the unconscious. She says that man "has now apparently for the first time arrived at the borderland of that supreme necessity, self-creation, and involved in his attitude towards this task lies his answer to the great urgent question of the present time and all time--the future of humanity itself."

The archetypal norms of divine thought implanted in the creation and suspended above man's head, as it were, are to be projected downward into conscious recognition in the minds of thinking beings. The first reception of them is a matter of impression, much like a photographic print. But the firmer fixing of them upon lower mind is effected through the operation of a very wonderful law, the law of repetition. It gains and holds its possessions by means of its power of retaining impingements made repeatedly upon it. It is possible that it retains all impressions made upon it, even in the slightest manner; but ordinarily, from the standpoint of known powers of memory, several repetitions are required to fix an imprint indelibly upon its sensitive slate. Repetition induces a sort of automatism in the memory. It is entirely akin to the mind operating in children and animals, and is therefore not aided by the processes of conscious intelligence, reason or will. It is just the power of sheer automatic memory. It is grounded on repetition. What it hears or sees often enough stays with it, having carved its form upon the "tablet of consciousness."

The rationale and the sum of all progressive growth for man the human, then, is the effort of his superconscious, the god within him, to project downward from above the ideal realities of the noumenal world, the same being the thoughts of God's own creative mind, stamp them upon the open consciousness of the individual, and then fix them finally through the force of repetition upon the

92

subconscious level of habitude. The conscious mind, Prometheus-like, catches and draws down a light from out the upper chamber of the superconscious, ingrains it in its mentation by repetition, and thus finally plants it firmly in the soil of the subconscious. Man is in this manner slowly but constantly transferring bits of "heaven" down to earth, and holding them as his permanent possession. Habit (from the Latin habere, "to have") is the method by which we have something. But it is a matter of the gravest import, whether in the end, owing to the hypnotic power of mental action, it is not to be said that a habit is something that has us! "A slave to habit" is one of the commonest phrases. The great majority of our actions in a day's time are the automatic impulsions of habit. The whole structure of tradition and custom is the product of habit, or the inertia that binds men to habits. The maxims of old-fashioned character building, and much in educational procedure, were based on the effort to form good habits or to cultivate the mind through memory work.

Evolution proceeds as the conscious mind exercises its mediatorial office of drawing down divine "fire" of wisdom and knowledge out of the heaven of the overworld, the ideal empyrean, and passing it on down to the custodianship of the subconscious, where it becomes automatized as part of the built structure of the human. Physiology falls in conclusively with this delineation, since it tells us that the autonomic nervous system, the organism of the subconscious, is the apparatus that holds the impressions fixed by habitual practice. It functions in the ganglia of the spinal cord, we are told. These take over what the brain consciousness builds up by repetition.

Man's advance in evolution, as far as the attainment of higher consciousness is concerned, consists, then, in the ability of the conscious self to capture more and more of the superconscious potential, to repeat it consciously, and so store it away as a permanent possession, an increment of living gain. Each time he becomes capable of registering a higher note in the scale of conscious values

93

he takes a step up the ladder of evolution from man to god. He is climbing up the Jacob's ladder toward the heavens, the locale of more vivid reality.

There is a grand enlightenment for intelligence in the consideration of the habit phenomenon in the human economy. Through habit, more particularly and clearly noted in animals, in whom there is no free initiative of new action by the deliberative reason, but seen even very generally in humanity, life is able to achieve a close approach to invariability and uniformity in its normal procedures. These traits may be assumed to be requisite and indispensable in so far as the welfare of creature life may be dependent upon absolute regularity. At any rate the genius that orders the universe has evidently found it necessary to install regularity and uniformity into the operative scheme, since they are most amazingly in evidence. The constancy of life's procedures, movements, activities in periodicity and rhythm is the one element in the creation that has so powerfully enchained the human mind. The immutable repetition of cycles, the endlessly renewed alternation of activity and rest, the diastole and systole of all pulsations of living energy in the cosmos, have struck the thought of man with an overwhelming sense of the play of divine mind in the phenomena of the universe. It is the feature that the human mind builds upon in its determination that the universe is a cosmos.

Two items of knowledge, then, combine to instruct us further, both as to the nature of God and as to his laws. The first is man's constitution in God's image; the second is an immediate derivative of that, the corollary assumption that if man is like God, then man's composition and functionism supply to thought an analogical suggestion as to the make-up of God's being. The astonishing inference then rises to conception that, as man has the three minds or levels of consciousness, God must be constituted likewise! And a startling formulation arises out of the parallel. It is the determination that what we observe in the way of invariable natural procedure and style "the laws of nature" are just the fixed habitudes of God's

94

subconscious mind! They are invariable in their regularity because sufficient of God's conscious energization has from the beginning been expended in establishing them to make them automatic. They have by habit of God become the actions of his autonomic "nervous system." Pope's astute discernment that God is the soul of the universe, while "nature" is its body, must be given the chance to register its full import here. Like us, God is spirit-soul-mind, and all three ranges of consciousness function in his great body, the universe. He, too, must be able to turn over the products of his present consciousness, if conscious mind is the creating and ever recreating power behind the worlds, to the automatic unvarying control of his "lower mind" resident in "ganglia"--the suns--so as to free his conscious self for ever new exercise of desire and will. The laws of nature, as to which we affirm poetically that the mind energies of God uphold and perpetuate them, and which we declare would crash in chaos the moment his mental concentration was relaxed, are evidently established habitudes of his former conscious regimen of activity. They are immutable because they have, through repetition, come under the control of a segment of divine consciousness that holds an aptitude fixed upon it by initial impact and endless recurrence. It lies below the realm of freedom. It can not exercise choice. It obeys the will of the conscious part. It is the anima, the animal part of mind, and its universal function is to repeat automatisms ingrained upon it. When God says, in the Old Testament, that he will write his laws in our minds and hearts, he is announcing the great principle here discussed. Little by little he is able to communicate the transcendent principia of his exalted being from the higher vibrational key in the gamut to the next lower stratum of his organic being, and from that to the one below, until all creature life reflects his nature and in miniature repeats his procedures. Thus his law pervades the total creation. Our fixed systematic operations, such as pulse, respiration, food intake and elimination, metabolism, cell decay and renewal, are all operations that were once for a limited period consciously ordered and directed

95

by intelligence, but were later turned to automatic actions, to free the conscious. These are the laws of nature operating in our bodies, as all larger procedures are the laws of nature operating in the spacious reaches of life beyond our little lives. In both cases they are under the control of the never-failing subconscious. We think of God so constantly as Mind or Spirit that we forget he has his body, which is the physical creation in the large. And that body provides him with the "nervous" apparatus for a subconscious activity.

This, in fine, elucidates to our puzzled minds why it is that God can give his attention to the inconceivably vast range and multitude of all his activities in all his worlds! They are under the control of his subconscious. They do not require his conscious attention. For whatever the word may conceivably connote when applied to the higher level of God's life and being, they are automatic. Our little, though still marvelous, automatisms are copies of his. We are made in his image. The profounder and more real implications of this datum in the scriptures have never been taken at obvious face value. It is the key to practically the whole science of human understanding of life and its processes and phenomena.

It is a subsidiary reflection that it is therefore a matter of inexpressibly serious consequence in the life of man, collectively and individually, what activities of body or mind he chooses to make habitual. He has the power of choice and initiative, and these are virtually the powers of a god. If, through ignorance, which is his handicap from the start and hobbles him in diminishing degree thereafter, he chooses the wrong kind of procedures, he fixes upon his subself an inharmonious, pain-engendering routine. The outcome must in all cases be suffering and misery. Human suffering has here its origin. The chains of a bad habit can be broken only by resolute correction of the addiction by conscious re-direction when the disease or corruption created in the organism has brought the intelligence and the will in line with a better run of conduct. Pain is the guardian angel that with inevitable certitude announces

96

whether the ingrained habitudes produce in the organism a life-sustaining harmony or jangle of death-bearing cacophony. In the end, knowledge, requisite to the making of choices aright, is the indispensable warden of human happiness. Pain is both our chief protector and our ultimate educator. Without its timely signals we would be totally at the mercy of our own follies.