CHAPTER XI

THE BATTLE ON THE HORIZON

There is a strange corollary that runs with the recognition of the dual segmentation or composition of man's nature. Psychoanalysis has brought out some aspects of it. The duality manifests in a rather remarkable series of correspondences between the phenomena on both sides.

It can start from Paul's declaration that the natural precedes the spiritual. "First that which is natural, then that which is spiritual," says the Apostle. As must obviously be the case, the body of God must be formed and in function before his spirit can manifest its life in any given area of creation. Spirit must be instrumentalized or implemented if it is to create and animate concrete worlds. It must first form its instrument with and through which to work.

The clear intimations from these reconstructions of ancient wisdom following its fatal mutilation at the hands of medieval benightedness constitute a new mandate for all true religion. The clarified knowledge provides the magna carta for a religion redeemed from psychic charlatinism and sanctified hypocrisy, from bigotry, nescience and insincere motivations, to become again, as of old, the moral and spiritual beacon of mankind. The new-found correlation or kinship between the modern discovery of the unconscious and ancient philosophical and psychological principia invests religion once again with dignity and with a sanctity that springs from recognition of the deeper intrinsic values now perceived to lie within the psychic area. The ultimate criterion of sanctity is always that of utility or beneficence for the whole advance of an evolving entity toward its destined goal. Things are not sanctified merely by being held in traditional and often artificial awesomeness.

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They become sacred by being found contributory to values rated high in the economy of most enduring good.

Foremost of all among the beneficial agencies which the combined new and old psychic sciences now place afresh at the service of mankind is the understanding of the vital technique by which religion must work pointedly and not diffusely toward its high ends. The nub of a religious striving that will be efficient to the highest degree is now indicated as centered in the relation between the conscious and the superconscious. This is the chief point and nodal focus at which the effort toward a spiritual uplift of the individual must be directed. For here is the locale of the great aeonial Battle of Armageddon, which the Egyptians so astutely allegorized as being fought at the meeting-point between the subconscious and the superconscious, the "horizon" line between them. Progress and well-being will henceforth be measurable by the amount of the potential quality of the superconscious or divine nature which can be brought down "out of heaven" by the conscious, incorporated in its daily program of self-directed activity and made a permanent possession by transference through habit to the custody of the subconscious. If man does not wish to remain bound in the automatic unconscious of his animal mentality, he must bestir himself to throw off old habitudes and elevate the tenor of his life by bringing down more luminous and more dynamic potential from the god-ego dwelling in the area of higher frequencies of vibrational consciousness awaiting the perfecting of his receptive capacity.

The Old Testament Psalms and Proverbs and the New Testament books alike strike hard at the human vices of sloth and lukewarmness. The exigencies of the soul's incarnational situation and the terms of the covenant entered into with the higher deity before descending alike demand the ego's close attention to the evolutionary mission he came here to discharge. The old books continue to insist that the thing is urgent, that opportunity passes with time and that there are tides in the affairs of evolution that can not be missed

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without having penalty. Disregard of opportunity will entail serious consequence. One is enjoined to be "diligent in business, fervent in spirit" in serving the Lord of higher consciousness. The business of the inner mind is paramount in the enterprise. The great human ordinance of the Sabbath was instituted to the end that one entire day in every seven should be devoted to the interests of the presiding genius of the organism, following six days given to the secular matters pertaining to the physical life. A new light indeed might creep over the face of humanity if this one day was truly consecrated, not to morbid sentimentalism and groveling pietism but to philosophical enlightenment and the combined ministration of intelligence and beauty. For "without vision the people perish," proclaimed the prophet, the true-speaker of old. The pathway to more radiant and more abundant life runs in one direction and along one fairly narrow track. It runs atop the ridge of open consciousness lying between the subconscious and the superconscious. Only on that path has man accessibility to the god. The only true and right felicity for the mortal lies in opening as widely as may be the highway between his mortal self and the deity who has, in a dramatic sense, condescended to come to take up residence in the upper reaches of his demesne. The only or at least final criterion of culture is the degree to which the conscious mind can lay itself open in ever more expanded receptivity to the vibrations of the superconscious. These are always pitched, so to say, in the octave immediately above its ordinary or habitual range. Whatever technique will be found to govern the development of this enhanced capacity or this high art will be the most "practical" skill and employ the greatest genius in all the area of life. It will embody the principles of the science of true culture. For it will empower its practitioner to place himself directly in touch with the flowing currents of both meaning and value, under the influence of the most dynamic release of vital quality that life can give to man. It is in truth man's communion with God.

It must never be forgotten, however, that the god himself is

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climbing the ladder of evolution, the same as is the human and the animal. The poverty of modern knowledge in the field of anthropology consists mainly in the total want of understanding that man is not a simple unit of organization, but is in reality a composite creature, compounded of flesh, feeling, thought and spiritual will, each necessarily subsisting within the organism by virtue of a body of material fineness or coarseness exactly constituted to express its vibration of life. The highest grade of this hierarchy of being is of course the leader and the king. And he is far ahead of his companion travelers. He stands in the higher grade in the school of evolution. Where he stands his younger associates will stand later on. What is important for intelligence is that the god requires the experience of incarnation in order to actualize his as yet undeveloped potential of reality in the concrete. This is almost a lost canon of understanding, yet it is strategically close to the nub of all practical wisdom. The god is subject to the law of being which makes polarization of the two nodes of reality, spirit and matter, the operative modus of evolving life. As Plotinus has told us more clearly than anyone else, the soul comes into earthly body in order to develop her latent capacities into actual faculties. He says: "It is not enough for the soul merely to exist; she must show what she is capable of begetting." She remains, he adds, "ignorant of what she possesses" until she is made aware of her potential riches through her deployment of them in answer to the exigencies and contingencies met in a life of actual awareness in a physical body on a planet. That which is real, but as yet unmanifest in the creatural consciousness, must be actualized, to follow Plotinus again, in a life of open consciousness. And for this possibility and this service she is dependent upon her union, for cycle after cycle, with the negative energies of a physical body.

We find Dr. Hopper (The Crisis of Faith, p. 257) saying that which is a crucial nub of understanding:

"Men of wisdom ever since [Socrates] have held that true self-knowledge is the clue to fulness of life."

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And he adds (p. 259):

"Everything depends on man's understanding of himself as he relates himself to the Absolute. He must know himself both inwardly and outwardly against the perspective of the ultimate meaning of things. He must know himself not merely as one object among other objects, but as an immediate subject of experience occupying inwardly the precarious point of infinite commitment."

Here is indeed great truth expressed, worth deep reflection. The statement that man only comes to know himself as he relates himself to the Absolute, the core of real being, and that he must know himself against the background of the ultimate meaning of things, is downright truth. But the immediate practical implication of this insight has never been seen or acted upon. If man can not guide his course intelligently unless he knows, broadly, his ultimate goal, which knowledge alone can invest his every step with its true meaning, then the deduction is sound, that philosophy is the most important study his mind can engage in. This was the insistence of the wise men of old who named philosophy as the kingly or divine science. It has never been decisively apprehended that the rightness of the present stride can not be determined if the long perspective of man's path and the distant vision of the ultimate goal, or, as Aristotle called it, the entelechy, is not known. To walk--and to have to walk--now, with no knowledge of whither the walking is to take one, or what is the proper direction of the walking, is the hazardous predicament of man when he is without philosophy. And the psychoanalysts tell us from clinical experience, that people who have no positive philosophy go mad. A world without positive philosophy has gone mad, again and again. It is not to the credit of Christianity that in the third century it killed philosophy and substituted faith. Renaissance came when the shift was made from faith back to (ancient) philosophy. The implications of this turn in history have never been canvassed. It is a costly dereliction.

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That the race might have in its childhood the requisite knowledge to guide its historic conduct aright toward a known distant goal, religion was fashioned to embrace philosophy, and that in turn embraced anthropology and cosmology. These were accounted necessary to enable man to orient himself aright in his evolutionary environment. It told him where he stood, whence he had so far come, whither he was progressing, what was his set task and what his own equipment to perform it. It told him he was the human, standing on the horizon line between the heaven of spiritual immortality and the earth of physical mortality. It told him his present consciousness was a blend of incipient divine mind with the mind of the subconscious animal. "An animal's mind shall be given unto him," says Daniel to the king, and the king always typified the divine in man. Lecky observes in his famous History of European Morals that in ancient days "philosophy had become to the educated most literally a religion." The later decay of religion was brought on and marked by the decadence of philosophy and the substitution of pietistic unction.

It is a point of great significance which is brought out in Dr. Hopper's sentence last quoted, that man must know himself as the subject of experience occupying "the precarious point of infinite commitment." Brilliant light would be released again for the human mind if it could recover the principle of truth known to the ancient Egyptians that the only point at which potential power or quality becomes actual--where the static electricity of life and mind is transformed into kinetic or power current--is at the meeting point between the positive node of conscious spirit and the negative anode of unconscious matter. In this life, described by the Egyptians as "the lake of equipoise," and in symbolism known as the zodiacal house of Libra the Balance, life is brought from latency or unconsciousness out upon the plane of open consciousness, or the actual.

Intelligence should long since have caught the esoteric hint from the prefix "con" in consciousness. It means "with" or "together."

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Consciousness comes only when the two segments or ends of being are linked together in tensional relation and opposite pull. Reality burgeons forth into actuality at the mid-point of neutralization. As the scriptures have so forcefully shouted at us, life must be weighed in the balance, in the scales of the judgment, that from the test its true being may come forth and be known to and by itself. Life can scarcely engender consciousness if it does not split asunder into the dual polarity. For to know itself it must objectify itself to itself, and for this purpose it must stand itself as matter aside from and over against itself as spirit. There can be no consciousness unless there is something for it to be conscious of. Consciousness can not exist in the vacuum of sheer Absoluteness.

The Egyptians denominated the god in evolution "Lord of the Balance." With conscious power developed he stands in control of the equilibration between the soul of life and the physical embodiment and strives to maintain the equipoise between the two entities. The conscious mind is therefore the ground arena of the battle, the focal point of the energization.

Psychoanalysis has gained so much of primal wisdom as goes with the knowledge of the unconscious. Its next great forward stride must be to establish the principle of the duality in the unconscious, the subconscious and the superconscious, and the great realization that the conscious, the prime seat of all value-actualization, is the point of neutralization between the two poles of man's being. Then the science will be in position to advance to new accomplishments in practique and more competent service to the race.

It is quite worth noting what Dr. Hopper says (p. 248) relative to the threefold constitution of man:

"This distinction will be clearer if we consider that man, according to this understanding, is not a static somewhat to be comprehended formally,--as intellect, feeling, will, etc.,--but that he must be understood as a creature in motion, as already in course of action. He is a viator, a creature who must go a way."

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It is amazing that this decidedly pivotal understanding has not been given insistent accentuation in philosophical systematism. It is equally amazing that almost nothing has been made of it even when, as here, it is mentioned. And never have the absolutely necessary corollaries of the datum been scrutinized and unfolded. A great deal of philosophical speculation has been a mere shameless dodging of the overt palpable issue presented by accurate observation of the prime data. Here it is affirmed, and with great truth, that man is a viator; he is going a way. Never has it seemed to occur to speculative philosophy that two or more questions immediately and necessarily stand knocking for answers when this is affirmed. If he is on his way, whence has he come, whither is he going, and indeed also, why is he out on the highway at all? Why is he a-journeying and what is his destination? Ancient cosmology and anthropological science rendered voluble answers to these questions. Modern philosophy shuns them. Ancient wisdom comprehended the answers; modern philosophy is poverty-stricken and lacks the resources for reply.

If man is a viator, as far as modern acumen goes, he is traveling onward, after some eighty brief summers, to individual death and extinction! By killing arcane philosophy in the early centuries, our endowments of millions of dollars for great universities have brought forth the squeaking mouse of a Bertrand Russell's "philosophy of despair." The only thing surely known to modern science is that we are traveling a hard path to--annihilation! Our solar system will cool and life--our life--become extinct. "We pass this way but once" is the perennial slogan of average worldly "philosophy" today. Its corollary, "let us eat, drink and be merry," has set the tune for common motivation to dance to. As for the post mortem future, religion vaguely asserts it will be eternal peace and rest. Oblivion, and no more toil, sweat, blood and tears.

Ancient sagacity knew differently. The soul was described as "the persistent traveler on the highways of eternity." The divine soul in man says in the Egyptian books that he is "stepping onward

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through eternity." Modern thought has no more extended vision than to depict the soul as saying, "I am Today." Egypt presents the same soul as saying, "I am Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow." "Eternity and everlastingness is my name."

The ancient world, instructed by "just men made perfect" in knowledge and wisdom, knew that man is indeed a viator through the cycles of time and the kingdoms of matter. Present vapid religion and jejune philosophy have scarcely the intellectual stamina to face the relevant questions, whence and whither. And the sorriest matter of all is the apparent belief that it makes no difference to man's mental stability whether he knows he is traveling a brief and stony path to death and oblivion, or whether he is on his way, through storm and sunshine, to an endless unfoldment of radiant life.

It is perhaps not surprising that the attitude of complacency in the face of total want of knowledge as to evolutionary paths, aims and goals should have become an expression of devout religionism in the modern day. For religion had dropped philosophy in the fatal third century and has had to fall back upon substitute formulae and mechanisms of escape and comfort. Prominent among pronouncements as to the non-philosophical character of modern religion are the two lines of Cardinal Newman's famous hymn:

"I do not ask to see the distant scene;

One step enough for me."

Ancient Egypt did not hold with this sentiment, but, fortified with definite knowledge of man's continuity of life, lived in the present and faced the future with a cheer and a fortitude based on something more vital than faith.

In the Mithraic system the soul of man was represented as saying at one point in the ritual: "I am the star wandering about with you and flaming up from the depths." In Egyptian the words "star" and "soul" came to an identity in the word Seb. In ancient depiction of truth and reality under nature symbols the soul that came to

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animate the animal man was presented to thought as veritably a star of divine life, light and energy descending from the heavens to inhabit a physical body. The symbol of a soul coming down to earth was the falling star, along with the imagery of the evening sun sinking into the earth or water.

The logic that supported the ancient mind in its assurance of the soul's immortality was simple and natural. The soul was a fragment of the divine life, energy and mind of God himself. As such it was as indestructible as the whole of which it was a germinal or seminal portion. As the whole visible world of manifestation was generated and sustained by the energies of cosmic mind, and mind generated it cyclically and periodically, surely mind was the eternal force behind the series of appearing and disappearing manifestations. The worlds might fade away again and again, but mind remained to create them anew. And the fragments of cosmic mind did not sally forth into cosmic adventure and undergo the stress and strain of incarnation merely to throw away all their hard and slowly won gains at the end of each sojourn in body. The ancients knew how life and mind husbanded and preserved the fruits and harvests of victories won in the battle with matter. With the closing up of the Platonic Academies in the fifth century and the utter suppression of the systems of esoteric philosophy for fifteen centuries the world of the west was left to drift along the historical road entirely without the pilotage of guiding wisdom. The horrendous record of those centuries bears testimony to the fatal consequences of despoiling human life of an enlightened philosophy.

Psychoanalysis now enters the arena of human striving after truth and knowledge and its discovery of the unconscious marks one of the great forward steps out of the murks of medieval errancy and obfuscation of mind. It supplies empirical data to corroborate what could be sensed only by enlightened philosophical vision, that the decay of philosophy precipitates minds into conditions of neurotic instability. This is the recovery of an item of knowledge that was well established in Plato's day and is one of the few real advances

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toward higher culture made in the modern age. Ancient Greek thought regarded the soul in incarnation as having lost her true bearings under the illusive dominance of fleshly concerns and as wandering in a fog of ignorance, from which state she was only to be redeemed to knowledge and true intelligence by philosophy. Philosophy was held to be the true knowledge of divine things. The soul, it was affirmed, could not relate itself properly to its task in incarnation if it totally lacked the assurance of its divine origin, the nature and value of its mission to earth and the general scheme and purport of its evolutionary enterprise. Philosophy was the essential foundation of moral rectitude, of equanimity and stability of mind and of the good life in general.

It is quite important to note what Chandler Bennitt has to say in his work The Real Use of the Unconscious. He is discussing healing, but sets it over, as a special technique, against "understanding," or what could be called philosophy:

"Healing is not understanding. At long last it is always something less. In the living sense in which I use understanding, the most final statement of the case is not that we must be healed if we would understand, nor even that we must understand in order to be healed; it is that understanding is its own way and its own god where healing is not, and that as we increasingly understand in our entire being, whatever must still be left to the specific technique of healing will be less and less a vital matter. Meanwhile I believe that even in what are accepted therapeutic issues, it will more and more be recognized that the individual cannot cooperate in the healing medical realities where their application contravenes his still more fundamental sense of things."

What Mr. Bennitt here denominates understanding and again refers to as a "still more fundamental sense of things" is equivalent to what the ancient sages termed philosophy. His evaluation of it as a more basic and essential element in the psyche than any temporary or specific influence employed in healing is a discernment matching the ancients' knowledge of its place deep in the core of human being. This observation of Bennitt's should stand as a re-

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buke and corrective for much modern spiritual-cult preachment and practique. Eccentric religionism has given a tremendous vogue to the notion that physical healing is the indisputable proof of the rightness of the cult philosophy in whose name the healing is performed. Not only is this not so, according to this psychoanalyst, but the vital truth is that the healing is always less important than the philosophy. The thing of intrinsic value is always the understanding in its deepmost issues. It is the eventual determinant of the individual's health or his need of healing. Understanding is ultimately the ruling factor in the individual's life, and healing is only an effort to rectify disturbance when understanding has not held a true grip on the life.

It is evident, on this analysis, that there lies buried deep in the organism a sense and apperception of values in incarnational life that transcends by far the welfare of the body and its illness or health. Again it must be granted that such values must be connected with a part of man that does not perish with the body. These values do not rise and fall in any immediate or direct parallelism with the rise and fall of the condition of the body. They are obviously not fully enhanced by the body's healthiest state nor deflated by its worst condition. Bennitt ventures to assert that they verily transcend the issue of life and death alike.

"Our life object is not merely not to die, nor even to live long and healthily. It is to attain the ultimate realness . . . our daily aim is further and more deeply to integrate our existence . . . as we go. It is with these finalities and these practicalities that I am concerned."

And he adds:

"Greatly as any individual in trouble may desire to be well, he will do this only for something further. I automatically assume that any patient has a sense of his business in life as something beyond health. This business includes his deepest total connection with reality."

No healing can come, he states further, through any specific medical or psychological technique, when the individual's evolution-

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ary status is such that frustrations and troubles can be handled "only by the realities of advance in a living understanding, and not merely by those of ill health and cure." And such guidance from the inner daimon, he says, "can be given only by an individual who is himself deeply in touch with meaning." Meaning is indeed the touchstone of the whole matter. The mind that can not discern the forms of meaning into which the events of life and the cosmos fall is little better than a piece of flotsam on the moving wave. It is heading for imminent wreckage. Indeed Bennitt expresses a climactic maxim when he says that "truth must make not only sense, but significance; it must be not only clear, but meaningful."

All this is cardinal truth, and well spoken. Bennitt is on the right track; modern psychology at last is on the right track. The new science of semantics is an important formulation. Meaning, even transcending significance, is the keynote of the modern mental movement. There are issues that lie deeper than even health and success in the worldly sense, that are not, necessarily, met and satisfied with a healthy body and a long life. These must be the concern of some other portion of man than his external self, for health and long life would pretty completely fulfill the main needs of bodily man. By inference they must appertain vitally to the history of the ego-soul. And this is the unconscious. The ego has his own interests. He is wrestling doubtless with the exigencies and crises, the halts, impasses, deadlocks, obstructions, frustrations that mark his progress on the upward road. As his life is subterranean to that of the body he tenants, the symptoms which these contingencies bring to manifestation in some form of disturbance in the life may not be obvious or clear to the outer mind. Hence the need of a special technique that probes beneath the surface phenomena to locate the more esoteric and occult origin of inharmony. This technique is the special discovery and implement of psychoanalysis.

If the new approach of modern psychology to spiritual esotericism through the discovery of the unconscious is not beaten down and obscured and again lost by the oppression of crude mechanistic

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philosophies so rampant in the age, this period of history will be catalogued by later analysts as marking the dawn of the recovery of ancient truth after sixteen centuries of benightedness. For now again, as in ancient times when wisdom reigned, the part of the divine soul in human life, in its health and in its ills, is recognized and healing practice embraces a technique which penetrates to the inner seat of the soul instead of treating merely the outward superficial symptoms. The body is in Greek soma and the soul is psyche. Perhaps it is yet a long way to the place where in the treatment of human maladies psychology based on the soul will be the most effective curative agency and philosophy the perennial preventative medicine.