The Pagan Bible
Contents:
Part I Orientation.
Definition of Religion
The Emotional Color of Paganism
The Barbarian Attitude
Our Interest in Religions
The Nature of Religions
The Existent Religious Cultural Forces
The analytical and introspective religions
Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism
Taoism
Shinto
Western Science
The Religions of Expedient Ethics
Confucianism
Ethical Christian-discipline.
Automation of the Subconscious Matter.
The Fourth Discipline.
Abdication of Control Organic Life.
The Fifth Discipline.
Assurance of Diversity Sex.
The Sixth Discipline.
Approbation of Diversity Man.
A Speculation Regarding Further Disciplines.
The Pagan Concept of Reality Viewed from the
perspectives of Christianity, Western Psychology,
and Western Science.
Part II Concept.
Concepts of Knowing and Sources of Knowledge.
THE SIX DISCIPLINES OF MAN'S BEING
Part III Being.
The Pagan Concept of the Good Life
The First Stratum of Being
The Second Stratum of Being
The Third Stratum of Being
The Fourth Stratum of Being
The Fifth Stratum of Being
The Sixth Stratum of Being
The Problem of Creating a Pagan Society.
Part I
Orientation
Definition of Religion.
A religion is a concept of the cause, reality, and purpose of the universe, and a conscious attempt to attain harmony with that reality and aid that purpose.
There are as many definitions of religion as there are commentaries on the subject, and we are exercising the usual prerogative of redefining the word. By this broad definition we place all concepts of the universe, including those offered by Western science and Western philosophy, as well as those based on beliefs in god-creatures, in one category. This enables us to look at all men's purposes from the same perspective. Locating a real point for that perspective is one of our major concerns.
The Emotional Color of Paganism.
This is a book of religion. It recognizes the major institutional religions of the world, but its purpose is not simply to give condensed information about them in such broad generalities as to be acceptable to all. Nor is its purpose to ride the tide of current religious thought by deftly mixing and turning about the beliefs of various religions, throwing on them facets of colored light, like a kaleidoscope, in the hope of bringing a feeling of "ecstatic radiance" to the devoutly confused. Its purpose is to examine the validity of concepts, the direction and efficacy of men's purpose, and, finally, to set forth a systematic concept of the universe, together with a morality derived from that concept, as the basis for a living religion.
This religion is called Pagan. It is not consciously evolved from the fragmentary remains of what was once called paganism, and what is now neatly entombed under headings of Greek, Roman, German, Scandinavian, Chinese, Japanese, and early Indian "mythology." It takes the name Pagan not because its concepts are obviously those of the pagan era, but in acknowledgement of its spiritual heritage.
The concepts contained in religions that were once dynamic enough to act as evolutionary catalysts in the development of Indo-European man, have been mutilated and distorted by writers with dogmatically fixed perspectives, until their remains are placed alongside Mother Goose Tales without offending the general sense of propriety. We could perhaps reconstruct something of great significance from these mutilated conceptual fragments, that children now keep in their toy boxes, as a paleontologist reconstructs pre-historic animals from two teeth and a splinter of jawbone found among the assortment of ornaments on the necklace of a savage. But we are content to let the portions of the past that are dead remain dead. This is a book about living religion, not dead mythology.
Pagan is often defined as a religion other than Judaism, Christianity, or Mohammedanism. By that definition the religion set forth here is unquestionably pagan. But its claim to the title is not because it simply contains ideas other than those contained in these three religions, but because it is based on something living that has survived in the being of man. Physical evolution is slower to be affected by the influence of new dogmas than is the religious literature of a people, and so, despite inquisitions and social pressure, the dogmas that have triumphed over paganism have not yet fully triumphed over the pagan. There is a heritage of spirit in certain living beings that can be recognized as pagan without an reference to, or claim heritage from, the well-known pagan mythologies.
In the popular concept, pagans are often associated with bloody deeds, but it is not the bloody deeds that identify the pagan spirit. The Mohammedans frankly spread their religion with a sword. The path of Judaism is a path of blood, spilt in lust and treachery. And Christianity, despite the teachings of its founder, came to flower through a blood path of such magnitude as to show that his followers placed little reliance on the few pints of blood spilt by Jesus to purify the world. Recent wars also have shown little reluctance on the part of Christians to break their sixth commandment. So, clearly, it is not a readiness to spill blood that distinguishes a pagan.
In the historical behavior of the pagan, there was a freedom from inhibitions, and a robust love of life, whether expressed in eating, drinking, fighting, loving, singing, dancing, or perceiving god, that was unique and characteristic. This spirit was born of a special concept of the cause and purpose of the universe with is unfathomable to those who create gods that are either vengeful, or sad-eyed and mournful. It is this spirit that we seek to recognize in calling our religion Pagan.
Those who wish to do so can trace the conceptual antecedents of the religion set forth here, through the desecrated fragments of mythology, to the Indo-European man of prehistory, but the point will not be emphasized. This work wishes to claim no authority from the antiquity of its concepts. The authority for its concepts rests solely on the ring of validity in the consciousness of he who perceives them.
A dark shadow, cast by a belief that men are born heirs to "the sins of Adam," has done much to destroy man's love of life, as well as the evolutionary dominance of men of good will. We would do what is possible to change this, but we do not believe that dredging up some ancient authority from the dead past to control men will free them from inhibitions. It is solely on the assumption that there are existent men of pagan spirit, whose innate consciousness will respond to the Pagan concept of the universe, presented in current language and symbolism, that this work, as a living religion, chooses to stand or fall.
The Barbarian Attitude.
The concept of "pagan" is often confused with the concept of "barbarian" in its sense of being uncivilized, or foreign to a particular civilization. We will let the confusion stand for the moment. It may aid our approach to the subject of religion.
If we are to examine basic ideas, we must not meet as old school friends, or as beings of a common civilization, mouthing the same shibboleths and cliches. We must not meet fully relaxed by our confidence that everything we do not understand is neatly entombed in the collective works of our civilization's scholars; and, if one small phase is to be reexamined, it will be done in so genteel a manner that the rest will be left as an anchor for our smugness.
We must meet as barbarians from opposite sides of a mountain who come together seeking adventure. We must be equally ready to fight or be friends, but we must be curious enough, and adventurous enough, and brave enough to seek knowledge of a strange being and his strange culture at close quarters. We must never fear nor disdain to come together and draw pictures in the sand, make a few grunts to convey the emotions aroused by the pictures, and search each other's eyes for meanings that the grunts and pictures cannot convey.
Perception of a significant pattern in seeming confusion, not an accumulation of catalogued "knowledge," is the Pagan's criterion of intelligence and the basis on which Pagan religion is built. We offer no more scholarly authority than can be offered by the most unkempt barbarian. We appeal solely to native perception.
Therefore, without arguing over the distinction between Pagan and barbarian, let us approach each other, draw some crude pictures in the sand, and see if we can each perceive the same significant pattern in the seeming confusion of the world around us.
Our Interest in Religions.
Thinking men of the Western world usually shun the word "religion" because, in the West, it has gathered a strong coloring of dogmatism and irrationality. In their researches into the cause and purpose of the universe, and the nature of reality, they indicate that they are avoiding the concepts of Yahweh, Jehovah, and Allah by calling their studies philosophy, psychology, or science. We have chosen to use the word religion, after modifying and clarifying it a little with a precise definition, because we feel that it conveys the scope of this work better than the others.
The language of philosophy is little better. Many of its expressions, such as "categorical imperative," are not only awkward but tend to impose upon those who are familiar with them the whole perspective of their originators rather than an isolated concept. But its major drawback is that it is spoken by very few.
The language of science is spoken more widely than that of philosophy; it is less confused than that of the religions but it is almost as dogmatic in its perspective. It presumes to deal with objective realities, but dogmatically ignores that what it calls objective realities are often concepts in consciousness rather then tangible objects. We can never fully know the accuracy of our sensory information but, even if we assume it to be accurate, our language, scientific or not, seldom points to objective realities. "That chair" designates an objective reality, but "a chair" does not. Similarly a language that talks of light waves, mass, velocity, gravitation, molecules, electrons, et cetera, is a language of concepts rather than one pointing to objective realities, and if we were to use it here we would need to recite and examine the dogmas it implies. That would be an extremely long process and it would not accomplish our purpose.
Our perspective is neither identical with that of Western science nor that of any known religion, and therefore our initial presentation of basic concepts is a major problem. We do not have time to create and make known a completely new language. So during our period of orientation, we have chosen to vary perspective and language in the manner that seems to give the most nearly accurate concept in each individual instance. Thus we will initially mix words, concepts, and perspectives freely from popular religions, the physical sciences, psychology, and philosophy, in any way we believe may further understanding until we feel that we have sufficiently oriented our own point of perspective. We trust that the love for a foolish consistency which Emerson called "the hobgoblin of little minds" will not add to our difficulties.
Recognizing the unreal nature of the tentative perspective, we begin our attempt to build a bridge of understanding, with what is known as the objective approach.
Viewed "objectively," man must be recognized and accepted as a unique animal, unless he is considered merely an animal gone mad. It is generally concluded that man's distinction from other animals is his intelligence. From a detached perspective this is not observable. He fills the landscape with his handiwork in an impressive way; but beavers build dams, birds build nests, and ants build bridges. The difference between them and man in that respect is only in the quality of the of the things that they produce; and, it could therefore be concluded only that man possesses a particular type of intelligence, which enables him to manipulate the world around him, to a greater degree than other animals. From the long perspective man is different from other animals in only one respect; his actions very frequently have different motivating forces.
In the unreal viewpoint that characterizes this detached "objective" perspective (unreal because it ascribes motives which cannot be known objectively) the simplest animal life apparently has one dominating motive; the search for food. Bisexual life apparently has two dominating motives: the search for food, and the search for a mate. Man apparently has three dominating motives; the search for food, the search for a mate, and the satisfaction of some, often obscure, code of conduct. This is often based upon a still more obscure concept of the universe.
It has been well established by observation and experiment that animals, other than man, will knowingly face death in an attempt to obtain food, or in the attempt to obtain a mate. Man will do the same. In addition he will knowingly face death in an attempt to establish, retain, or regain his self-respect as an adherent to an ethical concept that is of no utilitarian value in the circumstance. Other animals will not do this, although they can be made to present an appearance of so doing by carefully conditioning their reflexes. Unless we consider man an animal gone mad, whose actions in this respect are based upon ridiculously conditioned reflexes, unless we oversimplify by an unconvincing system of tracing all man's impulses back to food hunger and sex hunger, we must concern ourselves with his unique motivating force.
Indeed, even if we do consider man only an animal gone mad, we must, if we are to live in this world of men, concern ourselves with this force. Man is the most persistent and pursuing force man has to deal with, and it is not the boiling up of food hunger and sex hunger that makes the force of other men inescapable. It is this third force-motive that pursues us, tracks us down, and presses in on us, until we must turn to meet it in one fashion or another. We may call it madness, and think of ourselves as psychiatrists attempting to manipulate madmen. Or we my subjectively recognize that we, too, are men with this unique motive-force, consider it a healthy attribute and call it religion. A predisposition toward either a detached, supercilious objectivity, or a wallowing, subjective reverence would equally hinder our study. So we have chosen to call the force religion but we will withhold any reverence for its concepts and practices unless or until we find them worthy of reverence.
If as individuals we were dealing with individuals, we might not find the force of religion so persistent and formidable. But each individual has to deal with whole peoples motivated my religious impulses. The people, among whom he is born, insist on controlling his actions in conformity with their concepts. The idea that there can be an effective separation between the forceful government of a people and their religion has not been determined. The incompleteness of purported separations usually fails to become obvious because the effective religions within a state are seen as separate and divergent while, in fact, they are so compatible that they are in effect one. The voices of the few followers of truly different religions within such a state are shouted down by the larger masses. So freedom of religion remains simply an unrealized ideal.
It takes little perception to note that food hunger and sex hunger move individuals but it is religion that moves peoples. The need for food, or living room to mate and rear children, may sometimes move a people to war, to their expressive, death-defying manifestation of a major force-motive, but usually, whatever the motive of the leaders who manipulate them, the motivating force of the people is religion.
The obscure motive is even more obscure when we are looking at the motivating forces of modern peoples, who are made up of heterogeneous races and cultures. We do not find religions, but aggregations of the disintegrated remains of numerous religions. When we look at these heterogeneous peoples in mass and the inconsistent aggregation of concepts that motivate them, we admit that we face the temptation to call our study psychiatry. But to the extent that we can consider people to be made of individuals, we will continue to think of their unique motivating force as religion. So instead of saying that we must all become psychiatrists in order to survive, we say that a major concern of us who live, and move, and do things, in a world as thickly populated as the one in which we now find ourselves, is properly the study of religion.
This study is necessary so that we can fix, with some certainty, our own position, and know the efficacy of the religions that swirl around us. We must study all religions whether we are completely satisfied with our own position among the various concepts, and study other religions pragmatically; or whether we seek for concepts from which to construct or by which to corroborate our own religion.
But when we look at the size and complexity of the field of world religions, we all but despair of finding a perspective for a clear-eyed approach to our study.
It has become popular for scholars with an objective, and purportedly unprejudiced view to treat the religions of the world, past and present, as if religious thought followed a definite evolutionary pattern. Their implication has been that, as organic life evolves from lower to higher forms, so does religion also evolve from lower to higher forms. There is much evidence in support of this theory, and it may well be true as regards the growth and spread of some religions as it is regarding the growth and spread of some forms of organic life if we consider that a "higher" is one that is capable of appropriating to its uses a "lower." But this "evolutionary" swallowing of concepts never appears to produce in religion a stable perceivable entity, an entity of the sort that characterizes organic life. Therefore the implication that the swallowing religion is essentially more valid than the swallowed is highly undesirable. It is difficult enough to retain an unbiased approach without letting the unexamined implications of inaccurate analogies affect our conclusions. So we must reject the popular approach to the study of religions.
Instead of following evolutionary patterns, it appears that religions are born full-blown, and the prognosis of an institutional religion is from one individual's vital perception of a significant pattern of reality, to the dismembered and disintegrating corpse of his attempt to express that perception with is retained in the half-understood concepts that constitute the language of a people. These once vital concepts make an awesome pile which leaders use to strike terror, or create reverence, in the minds of all who have ever cherished and nurtured any fragments of the mutilated concepts that still quivered with life in their sleeping or waking consciousness.
Viewing religions from this perspective, our interest in them becomes divided into an interest in the vital perceptions of significant patterns of reality, and the awesome pile of mutilated concepts.
The first can be valuable to us as flank spotter's views of the patterns we perceive.
The second is of interest only in helping us to understand the motivating forces of peoples who press in upon us, and whom we must turn to meet in one fashion or another.
We will look first at our subject matter in total, turn it about a little, view it from different angles, and then proceed to segregate it in accordance with our interests.
The Nature of Religions.
A religion, by our definition, is a concept of the cause, reality, and purpose of the universe, and a conscious attempt to attain harmony with that reality and aid that purpose.*
*It should be noted that we do not class as religion such things as seeking the aid, or attempting to sway the will, of hypothesized gods by prayer, sacrifice, good behavior, prostrate worship, or other propitiation. These attempts to enlist the power of the universe for selfish interests, rather than attain harmony with and aid universal purpose, must not be included in religion as we define it, unless we are going to abandon all hope of developing reverence as we continue our study. We consider them entirely unworthy of any serious consideration.
Tentatively we might break this down a little and see what we should expect a proper religion to be and do:
First, it should give a fully satisfying explanation of the origin, reality, and purpose of the universe.
Second, its ethical concept, for man's relation to the universe as a whole, and for man's relation to each of its parts, including other men, should be explicitly derived from its concept of the universe and be in harmony with that concept.
Third, the practical results of its ethical concept should aim at aiding the purpose of the universe. Presumably such aid would consists of determining man's function in it, and creating a culture whose effect on man's evolutionary development would produce a man ever better fitted to that function.
Given the first of these, the second and third would probably present no difficulty. But very little poking in the awesome aggregation of religious concepts is necessary to show us that we are going to have difficulty in finding a fully satisfying explanation of the universe among them, or in fitting bits together into a coherent whole. We may want to throw them all out and start fresh.
With this possibility in mind, let us consider how this aggregate of concepts came into being. How do religions start?
Men perceive things about themselves and the universe. They assemble these perceptions into patterns which fit together with a seeming cohesion, or apparent significance, and these patterns we call concepts. The all-embracing pattern, which includes all knowledge of self, all knowledge of everything in the universe, and gives total significance to all other concepts, and conscious purpose to one's life, is properly one's religious concept.
Most religious concepts show a tendency towards instability as knowledge progresses. Their patterns are disturbed by and unable to accommodate new facts. A stable, well-thought-out concept of the universe is an essential factor of a sound religion, and all one's actions, and is sense of right and wrong, should properly derive from it. However as one must continue to act even while his concept of the universe is forming, or has begun to disintegrate, he often makes ethical decisions whose basis, the total concepts of the universe, is incompletely defined in his conscious understanding.
After the act, one often finds himself justifying the act to himself or others, and what is conceived as being credible is frequently given preference over what is conceived as being valid. This is true in the thoughts of men whose thoughts have been conditioned by conversation with others, and it is especially true in justifying acts to other adults, and in teaching children. This being the case, understanding the diverse religions of the world is greatly aided by understanding the conceptual climate in which they were formed, or came to be forces.
No people has ever been known without a religion. Man is presumed to have been on earth about a million years but earlier than 6,000 years ago his history is known only hazily. Religion is obviously much older than the recorded history of man so we can only make conjectures regarding the unpressured beginnings of religion. But we are reasonably certain that three streams met, blended, and distorted each other, so early that the distorting effect of the past must always be considered in all religions that are the heritage of peoples, as distinguished from the fresh perception of individuals. Let us conjecturally reconstruct the beginnings of these first three streams of religion.
In the remote past of prehistory, when there was the first beginning of words and gestures to express the thoughts that were forming behind increasingly expressive eyes, savage man bent over the lifeless form of his mate, looked for movement, listened for a sound, and there was none. He had seen death often, but now, as tears welled up in his eyes, he refused to accept his old objective observations, and called upon the depth of his being for the meaning of death. "Something has gone out," he thought, "the part that directs movement in the body and makes sounds in the mouth. It was real, and it is no longer here. Where did it go?"
He looked about him for that something, without knowing what form to expect, but there was nothing which his senses could find. "Where did it go?" he kept asking himself. And when he had looked everywhere, without finding it, he thought, "Maybe up into the blue where together we tried to go one day when we climbed the mountain. "Why and how?" he asked, and perhaps glimpsed some possible idea of a spirit land from his remembered world of dreams.
Then with much pointing, and many gestures in imitation of life and death, he conveyed the thought to those of his kind who squatted around the mouth of their common cave. At that time, or later, when they, too, made a similar intense search for explanation, they accepted the strange fantasy. And so came into being a concept of a world that was not earth, and spirits that lived where no man could see. It was the beginning of a religion born of emotional need.
Another man, who lived in mortal terror of his chief, continued to see images of his chief in his dreams. He explained the chief's mysterious and persistent being to his fellow cringers, who had also experienced visitations of the chief's spirit, and lived in constant terror of a chief who could appear and disappear in a dark closed cave in the night, to observe and impress with his omnipresence.
The chief heard of the stories and recognized their political value. And so the verbose cringer, who spread the stories, was elevated to the status of a tribal medicine man, or high priest. The strong father image of the impressive chief, who kept order, bestowed favors, and imposed punishment, continued in the thoughts and language of the tribe after his death. It was found useful to his less impressive successor and transformed by him into a tribal god. Thus a religion born of political expedience came into being.
Another type of religion was born in the calm observations of men whose need was understanding. Certainly, they reasoned, there was a spirit, a being, an entity, manifest in the invisible but very powerful wind, that pushed over mammoth trees and whipped the sea into a terrifying fury. Certainly there was a spirit, a god, or something to which they should give some name, manifest in the mysterious cold that turned the water of the lakes to ice and covered the world with snow.
If they called the perceived force god, then certainly the formless, twisting blazes of fire were a god incarnate, mysterious and ungraspable still, but a visible being that could be observed, studied, fed, and perhaps made into a friend or ally. Certainly the sun that rose each morning giving of its life and warmth and comfort was a kindly god to be loved, admired, and worshipped. And the moon was a lesser god, not so powerful, but gentle, kindly, at times altogether lovely, and deserving of some worship not so much as the sun, but some. So a religion that attempted to explain the universe by analyzing and giving names to the motives incarnate in its forces came into being.
Various men developed preferences for different gods, and the tribal chief, to keep harmony in the tribe, and to keep harmony among the gods, felt that it was his duty, as leader, to state the order of greatness among the gods, and to establish how much, and what kind of, worship should be granted unto each. Thus long before the oldest story transmitted in picture, or told in song, the religions born of (I) emotional need, (2) political expedience, and (3) attempts to explain the universe became intermingled in the language of each people, and to some extent, lost their identity as to type.
This intermingling has continued ever since. When the people from the mountain came into contact with the people from the sea they found it strange that the sea god, whom they, the mountain people, considered a very minor being, had a place second to, or even above, the sun god. And the people of the tropical jungle could only call the people of the north infidels and unbelievers, when they learned that their supreme deity was some ridiculous being called a frost god. Then came other unheard of gods, born of the father images evoked from long forgotten tribal chiefs.
To the objective observer the most incomprehensible gods were the pure fabrications of the dream world, born of emotional need; but these gods satisfied emotional needs in others, and so survived in ever changing forms. Conquest; intermarriage, with its com promise and amalgamation; and consolidation of power by chiefs, as ready to annex more gods as more subjects, soon created a religious complex that gave survival preference to ever more clever priests and medicine men.
As people became civilized, which generally seems to mean became craftsmen, they produced idols which represented their concepts of their gods. Good craftsmanship and sculptural imagination became a strong factor in selecting religious concepts for survival, and so, civilization began to overrule perception as language had already done. But idols can be desecrated, and, if they do not conspicuously punish those who publicly violate them, a great part of their claim to godhood is lost. So after idols had been tried and found wanting abstract, nebulous, invisible gods of words, who could not be ridiculed so dramatically, were again set up in the place of the tangible idols.
As always, they were not new gods but modified concepts of the old. There are certain obvious mixing and replacement pat terns of religions but the patterns make no apparent progress. The triumph of an abstract god of words over a stone idol, for instance, is no virtue unless the abstract god of words is a clearer concept. Some men express themselves better in words, some with a chisel. Thus, at the dawn of history we do not find religions at a particular stage of evolution.
We simply find, in different areas, different aggregations of religious concepts. Always these have been built up over countless years and they continue to be built upon. Not once throughout all our recorded history of religious thought has there been a complete house cleaning of the religious concepts carried forward in the language of peoples. Since we see that existing religions are nothing but aggregations of mutilated concepts, our original classification of religions by impulse of origin is no longer applicable, except in factoring each religion.
Trying to divide the whole field into smaller fields that can be more easily studied, we look about for some other classification that might be useful. We know that religions have been largely accepted at sword's point or by social pressure. But, as discussion of religious concepts must be based on innate faculties of judgment, we try reclassifying religions by the manner in which the aggregate of concepts that forms the basis for a religion is accepted by an individual when no coercion is involved. We again find ourselves with three classifications. These are not clean divisions, but if we remember the haziness of the lines we may make some tentative use of them.
One type of religion is based upon a belief that an individual. other than oneself. has. or had. access to special information not available to everyone. This special person then interprets, for all others, the cause and purpose of the universe, and lays down rules for man's action. His interpretations, and the authority of his commandments, are to be accepted on faith. The apparent demonstration of powers not natural to man, or the making of prophesies that turn out to be correct. are the only substantiating evidence.
These religions which are dependent on faith in an authority for their acceptance we call dogmatic religions. A second type of religion is evolved from a purely objective study of the religions of the world and acceptance of one for its practical value. Faith and mysticism are smiled upon by the sophisticated pragmatist, as he chooses the one that most nearly fits his purpose, and subtly insinuates changes in it to make it fit his own needs. To those who have been conditioned to the "objective" thought patterns of Western civilization this appears to be the rational approach to religion. and so in the West we find an increasing number of adherents to religions, who consider the basic concepts of their religions foolish.
They merely wish to take advantage of the popular momentum in the direction of their choice that the religions have built up through the force of accumulated dogmas. Religion for them is simply a code of ethics. The irrational part of their rational objectivity is that it accepts, without examination. the innate or acquired criterion that chooses the code of ethics. Expedience is the only apparent motive. We call this religion, of unexamined or unstated motives, expedient ethics. A third type of religion is rooted in an intense examination of what one knows, and how, and why. Self discoveries can be compared to the self discoveries others have recorded, but the final criterion is always self examination of how one came by knowledge, and why he thinks it valid.
Because of the widely divergent methods of examining knowledge and the popular concepts that have grown up regarding these methods, there is a sharp line between the records of the Eastern and Western civilizations. The East looks upon this self examination as a religious pursuit and calls it mysticism. In the popular language of the West, the word mysticism implies mystery and magic, and immediately forms a barrier, which precludes further Western study of the records of self examination which have been made in the East.
The Western world, because its most widespread religion, Christianity, is based on faith in dogma, has imposed a coloring of dogma and faith on the word religion. For this reason the self examiners in the Western world have not called their studies of what the self knows, and how, and why, religion; they have called them science, philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, et cetera. Without regard to this play of words, a religion, evolved by self discovery, can be as profitably compared to the records made by Newton, Kant, lung, or Wagner, as to those made by Buddha or Zarathustra.
The name for this class of religion should combine the thought expressed by the West in science and philosophy and that expressed by the East in mysticism. We will call this type of religion analytical and introspective. When we consider religions merely as cultural forces we must consider all religions known. But when we consider religions as records left by flank spotters, useful for checking the validity of the concepts we may evolve from our own perceptions, we have a strong inclination to ignore the first two categories of religions.
Our reason for this is different in each case. Our inclination to ignore dogmatic religions is based on a single compelling consideration. We recognize that various persons obviously have special capacities and abilities. We might believe that a person could die and rise from the dead, go into Nirvana without leaving a physical body on earth, make accurate prophecies, or perform all kinds of miracles.
But we cannot believe that any person has been chosen to bring messages from the Creator of the universe to all other men in the contrived, feeble, in exact, changeable, and usually misconstrued language of men; when the universe, made by the Creator, is, itself, a language that is immeasurably more precise and more eloquent.
The reason for our inclination to ignore religions of expedient ethics can also be easily stated. When we look for the reasons why the followers of expedient ethics, as a religion asserted in words, do not bring their basis of opinion into waking consciousness and display it, we find three possibilities. Either (1) the pressure of living does not allow them the opportunity, (2) they do not have the perceptive ability to discern it, or (3) they deliberately wish to hide their motives to gain a strategic advantage.
In none of these cases can their hidden concepts be of much value to us in helping us to determine the validity of our own. That leaves us only the analytical and introspective religions as of probable value. They should be highly useful. But when we look a little more closely at the reasons why an individual accepts their concepts as valid we be come greatly disappointed. We find strong factors that tend to pervert all analysis and introspection.
We remember that none of the existing religions have ever been cleansed entirely of the awesome pile of mutilated concepts, and we ask ourselves to what extent even those religions that appear to be accepted on analysis and introspection are actually so accepted. Are not most men's innate predilections overlaid so early in life, with concepts carried forward by a people as a perception coloring language and as a motive distorting social force, that their predilections cannot be trusted?
Of how many adherents of institutional religions, even those that we might call the analytical and introspective religions, might we say that they truly accepted the religions to which they adhere be cause they found them acceptable to their innate perceptions of validity? When we pause to consider this, we recognize that acceptance of a cultural environment, itself, constitutes acceptance of a dogma. We then begin to wonder to what extent acceptance of a religion on a basis of conscious analysis and introspection might be construed as more unbiased than acceptance of one that was dogmatic in utterance but could well have been embraced by the sub conscious as valid.
We face the temptation to take the easy way and conclude simply that statistics showing broad acceptance of a concept indicate its wide appeal to innate predilection. But that sort of lazy, indifferent rationalization does not fully satisfy for we recognize it as merely a dogma of an other aggregation of unexamined concepts, a present day cultural pressure. Then, as we consider pressures, subtly distorted bases of appeal, and other factors that would affect statistical evidence, we find a major factor that would invalidate the significance of any religious statistics.
Known religious history is not the religious history of man, but only of a particular type of man, an incomplete man, one who is dependent on others for his motivating forces, or essential purpose being, as well as his physical sustenance. Let us clarify that statement by what appears to be a valid analogy. Some plant life takes its nourishment directly from the sun, earth, and water; and although it may feed on other life or the remains of other life, it is not dependent on it. Most animal life must feed on other life or its remains. Some men appear to create motive force, or purpose, from an unknown source or by an unknown process within their beings as green plants appear to make food from sunlight.
But in the process we talk of as forming civilizations most men's purpose being appears to take on the sort of total dependence on other men's purpose for its nourishment that animal life shows in its dependence on green plants. This purpose dependence in men is manifest by the evolvement of metropolitan centers. We do not call the metropolitan center "metropolitan" because of its size, but because it supplies, or promises to supply, this "purpose nourishment" to those who must have it.
Thus regardless of size, it is distinguished from the "village" where individuals may live together but still derive their purpose nourishment, not exclusively from "a people" but to a great extent from the universe outside man, on which all men are basically dependent for survival, and on which all are ultimately dependent for basic concepts and motivating force. It is to this distinction between the sources of men's purpose nourishment that, to some extent, we owe the word "pagan" as originally used to designate a religion.
When metropolitan Rome accepted Christianity, it called those who had not done so "villagers" or "pagans." This original coloring of the word "pagan" is one that we wish to add to the coloring we have already given to the name of our religion. We need words to talk of the source of motivating force, or purpose nourishment, and we are ready to show our unequivocal preference in purpose nourishment by making the name of our religion carry the significance that was originally attached to it in this respect.
For lack of a better word we wish to use the word metropolitan to signify the opposite of pagan when talking of the source of purpose nourishment, even though there be no geographical fix for the metropolis, and even though the metropolitan people be nomad or scattered. Thus, by our definition: metropolitan religions have their roots strongly or exclusively in the body of religious concepts carried forward in the history and language of a people.
Pagan religions are built less on word concepts than they are upon the innate mental patterns that make concepts from the perceptions of individuals looking freshly at the natural universe. If (1) this distinction were complete rather than partial, and if (2) we had sufficient knowledge of pagan religions, we might well have a basis for evaluating the statistical preponderance of concepts formed by innate predilections. But such is not the case.
In the first place the old body of religious concepts carries on to some extent even in pagan religions, or else the pagan religions take on some of the coloring of metropolitan religious concepts when an attempt is made to articulate them in the language of "a people." In the second place our knowledge of pagan religions is very limited. Statistically the evidence is stacked heavily in favor of metropolitan religions.
Our whole religious history is the history of metropolitan religions. Only the purpose hungry people make religious histories, and jealously guard the "body of purpose" accumulated over the ages. The religious history of the pagans largely disappears. Thus all religious statistics that we could gather would be meaningless as regards the innate appeal of concepts. The statistically wide acceptance of metropolitan religions is no indication that they satisfy man's search for a purpose of the universe.
It merely means that they are pursued and grasped at by the purpose hungry, not because they appear to represent the purpose of the universe, but because they appear to represent the universal purpose of men. The greater the metropolis, the more it impresses the purpose hungry that its purpose is universal purpose. Therefore the greater the civilization, the less meaningful its religious statistics become as evidence that its concepts are acceptable to innate predilections. Thus the statistics regarding the spread and dominance of metropolitan religions can only be considered as evidence of efficacious methods for their spread and dominance.
Recognizing this, our major purpose in looking at metropolitan religions unmistakably becomes that of appraising the motivating forces of people who press in upon us. But we have previously decided that their efficacy alone is a sufficient reason for looking at these religions and studying the aggregations of concepts that motivate peoples as masses. If we can discover some significant patterns of reality, that men of perception have injected into the aggregation of religious concepts from time to time, it will be a reward above and beyond what was necessary to justify our study efforts.
THE EXISTENT RELIGIOUS CULTURAL FORCES
We have observed that among the religious concepts that are carried on by recorded history, and the language of peoples, the religious concepts of the pagans tend to disappear. This does not disturb us. We have already stated our conviction that any real god would disdain words when he had all the reality of the universe as his language. What does disturb us is that the pagan, himself, the real being with strong inclinations to trust only his own innate perception-coloring predilections, also tends to disappear.
And what disturbs us even more is that a man with new innate predilections may be bred by the pressure of metropolitan religions. The cultural forces of pagan and metropolitan religions tend to segregate and breed two distinct types of men. This may already have progressed so far that in some instances the innate predilections of men may be the products of man's manipulation, rather than the predilections bred into man by his creator.
Thus, if a purposeful creator could be presumed to exist, and to have developed man with an innate tendency to perceive his purpose, that perceptive ability might be bred out completely. and man becomes as void of universal purpose perception as he often appears to be. Religion, we have discovered, lies behind and must be identified with the political force of every state. In our study of religion we are not satisfied to look at its efficacy merely by looking at the government which evolves from it, and to consider that government only as to whether it interferes with, or facilitates, our obtaining the means of abundant livelihood. The government is a tool of religion.
It may be a clean tool, inspiring our admiration by its design, and by its ability to do its job without friction, but we are less interested in the government than in the force behind the government, in religion. Religion is a cultural force. In common usage "culture" is a vague word, signifying, collectively or partially, literature, art, refinement, or the skilled use of the products of civilization. Those who use the word often do not distinguish between culture and the aggregate of incidental cultural manifestations, that is, between culture and civilization.
But, when we speak of religion as a cultural force, we are speaking of culture in its more basic sense, the sense which is retained in the expressions "grain culture," "fruit culture," et cetera-a manmade environment that selects certain forms of organic life to survive-we are speaking of "man culture." Religion is man culture; its fruits are men, flesh and blood individuals-not behavior patterns, not societies, not ways of living, but tangible realities that breed their own kind. We are interested in the religious forces of the world because of their selective influence on the evolution of man. The cultural force of a religion is often very conspicuous. For example Moses came down from Mount Sinai bringing commandments (including "Thou shalt not kill") which he represented as coming from god.
After determining the extent of their acceptability, he ordered each person who believed in the god who gave the commandments to kill the members of his own family who did not. This is an evolutionary selective force of some sort-perhaps in favor of those who, by innate temperament, are ready to accept dogma without conscious examination, those who are susceptible enough to word-inspired fanaticism that they can be led to act against their own perceptions and instincts.
The spread of Christianity -with its appeal of civilization's products to those who were told they should not seek to lay up treasures on earth, and, with its inquisitions, witch burnings, and routine executions of all pagans who would not profess to believe what they had no background for comprehending-was a definite selective influence, removing much innate personal integrity from the evolutionary base determining future man.
Perhaps the major cultural forces of religions are less conspicuous. One religion may make for a way of life, a civilization, a man-made environment, favoring the quiet. contemplative, patient, scheming man over the active, free speaking, open motivated, forceful man; and so result in early marriage and many children for the one who has a feeling of security, and an unsettled semi-vagabondage and few or no children for the other.
Another religion may result in community help for the complacently indigent, and jail or other institutionalization, with consequent reduction in offspring, for the actively uncomplying, and so affect the mental and emotional characteristics in the evolutionary stream of a people. Culturally inspired suicide and monastic seclusion often reach proportions that significantly affect the evolutionary stream. And so on endlessly. It is not our purpose to trace these cultural influences, but simply to recognize them as a compelling reason for studying the major world religions.
Religion is not religion when it is only a concept; it must be a fruit bearing concept. If their concepts have for us no significance, by their fruits we must know them. We must not forget that religion is man culture, and its fruits are men. Recognizing that there is a great deal of overlapping and inaccuracies, we can say that the professed religions of the world, with over a million adherents, have roughly the following memberships.
Millions Buddhism 150 Christianity 740 Confucianism 300 Hinduism 255 Jainism 1 Judaism 11 Mohammedanism 315 Shinto 25 Taoism 50
The persons whose religious concepts do not coincide with any institutional religion but who adhere to one either because of expedience or "purpose hunger" doubtless make up significant parts of the quoted memberships. Comparing the religious statistics with the population of the world reveals that there are many persons who definitely do not adhere to any established religion. But we cannot consider that any person, who is capable of conscious reasoned behavior, is without a religion as we have defined it.
It may be uninstitutionalized, and it may be extremely nebulous, but by our definition it still must be considered as a religion. Some of these religions are sufficiently manifest to be recognizable, and have enough adherents to be considered as major religions, even though not institutionalized. So we will consider them under arbitrary headings of: Western Science Ethical Christian-Democracy Popular Materialism Membership in these arbitrarily named religions could probably be guessed closely enough to be as significant as that reported by the other religions, but we will not invite fruitless controversy on the point by making estimates.
It is enough to recognize that it is substantial. We have decided that classification of religions according to the basis on which they are accepted has little significance in the case of metropolitan religions, and all conspicuous religions are metropolitan, but we will place the ones we have named in the classes we tentatively considered just as a general commentary. This list will also serve as a picture of the religious field which we will consider in the order that we will look at it. So placed, the present religious cultural forces may be comprehensively viewed as follows:
Major World Religions
Analytical and introspective Approximate date of origin
Hinduism 3,000 B.C. Taoism 600 B.C. Jainism 550 B.C. Buddhism 550 B.C. Shinton 500 B.C. (very rough estimate) Western Science 1,800 A.D. (very rough estimate)
Expedient ethics
Confucianism 550 B.C. Ethical Christian-Democracy 1,500 A.D. (very rough estimate)
Dogmatic
Judaism 1,300 B.C. Christianity 0 A.D. Mohammedanism 600 A.D. Popular Materialism 1,900 A.D. (very rough estimate)
In discussing these religions it should be remembered that we are not attempting to be comprehensive but to orient our Pagan point of perspective.
We recognize that we could no more present a comprehensive knowledge of a complex religion in a few words than we could present a comprehensive knowledge of a three-dimensional house with a two-dimensional photograph taken from one point. But when several photographs of various houses, all taken from one point, are presented the point from which the pictures were taken becomes fixed in the mind of one who knows the area. In this way we are merely trying to orient our point of perspective in the minds of those who have a broad knowledge of the world's religions.
THE EXISTENT RELIGIOUS CULTURAL FORCES
A. The analytical and introspective religions
HINDUISM, JAINISM, AND BUDDHISM
Hinduism is the oldest metropolitan religion in the world. Jainism and Buddhism are conceptual offshoots of Hinduism. As cultural forces, also, they can be considered together with it. These religions of India were developed by a people who migrated to the Indus Valley before historical records.
Anthropologists identify the people as Indo-European; their prehistorical religious heritage is presumably the same as that of the other Indo-Europeans who gave us the Greek, German, and Scandinavian "mythologies." We can postulate a common pre-metropolitan pagan heritage and find no difficulty tying the Indo-European "mythological" concepts to the metropolitan religious concepts as they first appeared in the Indus Valley. Greek, German, and Scandinavian religions apparently underwent modification tending toward more ritualism and drama in trying to compete with the metropolitan religions of the Mediterranean peoples.
The religions of the Indo Europeans, who migrated to the Indus Valley, apparently underwent modification to give their adherents a cultural advantage among the dark-skinned peoples that already occupied India. These people were in such profusion that it was impossible to drive them out or destroy them, and survival of the Indo-Europeans required that they find a religious basis for coexistence. The Indo-Europeans are conspicuously a warrior people and, therefore are doubtless the product of a cultural force or religion which favored the evolution of warriors.
Coexistence with an incompatible people violated both their innate temperament and religion. To reconcile temperament and religion with peaceful coexistence was impossible, and yet an attempt was made. The product is the most complicated theology known to mankind. In addition to the complications inherent in the condition, the native religion of the original population had to be absorbed. This added problem appears merely to have intensified introspection, for all the concepts seem to be traceable to a pagan warrior thought pattern.
The religions of India have by far the greatest number of adherents of any group of religions that has its basis for acceptance in analysis and introspection, and so might be assumed to be a very rewarding field in which to look for concepts acceptable to perceptive men. It is, however, a very tedious job to separate, in these complicated religions, those concepts that come from the clean perceptions of men studying their beings from those that have been absorbed into the religion on a basis of expediency. Most conspicuous of the concepts that appear to have been created by expediency is that on which the caste system rests.
The leaders of the invading warriors had to sit down and consider what was strategic and honorable in a situation where there was no hope for victory.
From these leaders therefore came the priest caste, rather than the priest caste being the spontaneous voice of superstition turned to political expedience as is more usual. Five thousand or more years of cultural influence have bred out the original invading leaders, and left more physical evidence of native population in priest roles, but the basic concepts still bear the stamp given them by the original problem that faced the invading leaders who sat down to reconcile the irreconcilable.
The caste system was the expedient form of the stalemate which attempted to avoid racial integration. Varna, the earliest Indian word for caste, means color. There are now many castes but the original four are still strongly defined. These are the priestly (Brahmin), the warrior-ruler (Kahatriya), the merchant-farmer (Varsya) and the artisan-laborer (Sudra). These are intended as hereditary and immutable, and have retained that character to an amazing extent.
However, it is probable that the priest caste originally was composed of native priest-rulers as well as the invading leaders who thought integration on the top level was no danger; and, as priesthood was a compatible life for the native, but not for the invading warrior leaders, the culture of the religion soon left natives almost exclusively in the priest roles. Another evidence of expediency that is found in Hinduism is the doctrine of Dharma: the way things are and ought to be. It sets forth rules of duty, social custom, and laws that were designed to maintain the truce between incompatibles, the status quo, until the right decision could be made.
No decision that appeared honorable to the invaders was possible and the status quo continued. The invading strain of Brahmins became ascetics seeking a death they could not find. What was once a happy religion, of how and why the great unknowable created the universe of his being, and how men, who were sons of god, could live, love, fight, and die with honor, became an inquiry into how the created could regain identity with the uncreated first cause of the universe. The will to know the creative cause of the universe became the search for a method of satisfying a purpose that had become too strong to be questioned-the desire to be uncreated.
Reincarnation can well be a logical growth of man's observation and introspection, and it may have been so in India. However, whether it was or was not, the need for it demanded that it become an accepted concept. A compromise before death or victory appeared to be a dishonor too great to be cleansed simply by suicide. The aboriginal Indo-European concept of an afterlife offered no such emotionally satisfying punishment as the Christian concept of hell, nor was there any logical basis for conceiving a hell or conceiving that a dishonorable act could be cleansed by punishment.
Wiping out dishonor was conceived as involving an almost endless cycle of return to earth to face the suffering and degradation that compromise had caused, until the soul was finally stripped, layer after layer, of the concepts that gave it being. If this could be accomplished it could be dissolved into its uncreated oneness with the soul of the creator. First, the old joy of life, the prime mover of all being, had to go, and then the work of this joy, of desire and ambition, had to be torn down systematically from the top, piece by piece.
A primary conclusion from observation of the universe and from self-examination is that every force has its counterforce, and if these are brought together and accepted, each by the other, in a compatible existence they will reciprocally cancel out and reduce themselves to nothing.* (Western Science is now searching for anti-matter, the existence of which must follow the postulate that matter" exists. Destroying sound by playing a negative record of the sound has been effectively demonstrated)
Thus it was concluded that the reverse value of every thought, word, and deed that man experienced also had to be experienced by him if his existence was to be negated. This is the basis for the law of Karma which has undergone some conceptual change as the original problem was forgotten.
Asceticism was the first act aimed at negating the self. Then, after drawing the stature of future acts down to their minimum by a life of asceticism, Karma was the sought for, and welcomed, path to undoing the past. But death, which cannot be accomplished by a physical act of will, is hard to conceive.
So the basic problem of the existence of the universe had to be faced. It was faced narrowly. The individual soul's return to its uncreated state was the only problem and, therefore, the universe, as a totality, was ignored as being of no concern to the individual.
The individual's responsibility for his acts was part of the problem and therefore the supreme ideal was, not only to dissolve the soul, but also to uncreate the body and retain no responsibility to the world of others. Otherwise matter, as such, was not construed to be an individual responsibility. The objective of self-destruction is unacceptable to all who postulate joy of living as good. Also this limited objective obviously distorts the field of study by its failure to give adequate attention to the universe that is not self.
Nevertheless, Hinduism's study of the self, which is the only channel through which the universe can be perceived, has been so long, so intense, and so well coordinated that it forms by far the broadest body of thought from which to gain a perspective for viewing individual conclusions regarding the self. In addition to that, there is no known break between Hinduism's present basic concepts and the basic concepts of the aboriginal Indo-European from which the Western man was evolved. It might therefore be assumed that the basic concepts were strong enough to survive while a warrior people turned into a people where one fourth the population are dedicated to a life of asceticism and meditation.
This argues for the concepts an added probability of validness. Pantheism, or the concept that the universe in its entirety is inseparably identifiable with god, is as fundamental to the religions of India as it is to what we can discover of the religions of the prehistoric Western Indo-Europeans. Also, polytheism, the practice of trying to explain a pantheistic god by factoring the concept into many aspects in an artistic creation, is common to Hinduism and the apparent religions of the Western Indo-European people. Among the Greeks and Romans polytheism degenerated into dogma as the original religions underwent their death struggles for survival against the simpler, dogmatic religions of the Mediterranean.
The basic concepts of Hinduism that warrant our unpragmatic attention are those that deal with the nature of our fundamental perceptions and the faculty by which we build from them our concept that there is a universe. In our Western concept we visualize an unbroken chain that begins with a stimuli creator, which we call matter; passes through sense organs and nerves to the brain center and finally becomes consciousness. Western science gives its attention to an objective study of the stimuli creator, or matter. It has not conceptually bridged the final gap from brain center to consciousness and it has not considered consciousness, itself, at all.
Western science might therefore be seen as starting from the wrong end of the chain, for only by these final conscious sensory percepts, and the concepts in consciousness that make patterns of them, through an unknown faculty, can it be known that there is a universe. A few Western philosophers have given intense thought to this basic problem but Western science largely ignores it. Hinduism ignores the material world and starts with consciousness. For five thousand years the Hindus have been attempting to uncreate themselves by tracing their conscious awareness and concepts to their source, and then trying to discover the Karmic thought that would cancel them out and dissolve the soul.
The evidence of their gigantic efforts argues strongly against the unsupported dogmatic denial of a few Western scientists that there is such a thing as consciousness. But presumably those Hindus who have found the Karmic thought that totally cancels the soul have made use of it. At least we have no contact with consummate masters of uncreation if there be such. However it is worth noting that, after all their broad analytical and introspective experience, the Hindus teach and practice what is, purportedly, an absolute conscious control over the existence of awareness in consciousness. To do this they do not attempt to bridge the gap between consciousness and sense organs but to make the essential self entirely independent of external stimuli.
Since their study of the ability to consciously create and cancel out awareness at will is for the purpose of total cancellation, it may be presumed to be an unbiased research. We will consider concepts for validity later; we recite them now only to note their origin and influence. It is the evolutionary effect or efficacy of religious cultures that chiefly concerns us now. In addition to the study of how awareness come to exist in consciousness, the concepts of time and space take a fundamental place in the pattern of a universe-concept. Hinduism does not concede the reality of the Western concepts of time and space.
It sometimes appears that Hinduism is classifying these concepts as relative rather than absolute. However, if the influence of external pressures on free projection of innate concepts is to be considered, we must recognize that it is as natural for conditions that turn man inward upon himself in self-examination to minimize space as it is for the reaction against such condition, exemplified by Western science, to minimize time by conceiving it as a fourth dimension of space. But Hinduism also minimizes time. Aside from the apparent fact that time and space are prime elements of creation, and to achieve uncreation they must be destroyed, the Hindu had to deny time in order to deny a specific willful act of creation.
The win to be uncreated was too strong to admit a unique, purposeful act of creating the universe. By avowing that the universe was not the problem of the individual, the founders of Hinduism avoided the necessity for examining the purpose of creation. Their problem was to uncreate their individual souls. We must remember this bias whenever we look at present-day Hinduism, which no longer consciously remembers its origin. Most reform movements have been wholly absorbed in the changing Hinduism, but Jainism and Buddhism exist as separate religions.
They are not radically different in their concepts; they are mere outgrowths of and reactions to the trends that Hinduism has taken over the centuries, after forgetting the problem that originally gave it its direction. Jainism, rationalizing rather superficially on the Karmic principle, conceives the universe as simply an existing balance in a postulated opposition between spirit and matter. It looks at matter and conceives it as having permanent individual forms and so conceives the soul as having permanent individuality.
Jainism thus arrives at a belief in an individual indestructible soul, whereas original Hinduism's compulsion toward uncreating the individual required it to consider the individual soul as a part of the universal soul. Jainism reasons that if all is individual soul and individual form of matter, existing by reciprocal opposition, there is, logically, no place for a supreme being, and all is individual responsibility. This concept of individual responsibility which was evolved without going back to the creation of the universe and picking up the constructive motive, has become a doctrine of non-injury to others.
Thus the main doctrine of Jainism is to refrain from taking life (Ahimsa) Its adherents do not condone war, capital punishment, or the killing of any animal, or fish, for food or sport. They protect insects, carrying brooms to sweep away ants, lest they step on them. They advocate nudism to avoid crushing insects that may be caught in their clothes. Buddhism is a superficial adherence to the basic concepts of Hinduism. The Buddhists simplify the concepts by the belief that the soul is merely a bundle of elements held together by desire, and dispersed when the desire is overcome. There is no new basic perception in this concept or elsewhere in Buddhism.
The founder, Gautama Buddha, was not concerned with concepts, but with the alleviation of the suffering that he saw all around him. He abstracted, from his Hindu background, the concept that suffering results from desire and therefore the way to relieve suffering is to escape from desire. Buddhism simply evidences the tendency of metropolitan religions to either oversimplify or else muddy original concepts.
In Buddhism, Nirvana, the act of blowing out or dissolving the soul, has gradually come to be vaguely conceived as a state of being. This is merely the will to live, forgetting the original objective of the religion and seeking for one that is more universally acceptable, while still not free of its original bias. Jainism's unpractical doctrine prevents it from becoming popular; but Buddhism, by translating the complex thought patterns of Hinduism into something simpler and declaring them with a greater tone of authority, has become popular both in India and elsewhere.
Both Jainism and Buddhism have individual founders, whose teachings have virtually become dogma, and so these branches of Hinduism tend away from the classification of analysis and introspection. They are so classed here because their basic concepts stem from no authority other than self-study, nor did their founders claim other authority. Originally Hinduism sought no disciples, and its branches have not been aggressive in seeking disciples, so its evolutionary effect has been circumscribed.
Its obvious evolutionary effect has been toward weeding out all in whom high intelligence was combined with an aggressive self-reliant temperament. Because of the caste system, innate temperamental bent toward particular ways of life has been so inbred into the stratification of the people that interdependence has become almost a necessity for survival, as it has among the cells that compose a man's body. Indeed the interdependence perceived in the organic analogy is the argument on which the caste system was built.
Despite the obvious inequality and temperamental differences between men, who may have been products of such a culture many times in man's million or more years on earth, we cannot accept an expediency that destroys man as an entity by building an organism of men, unless it be shown to be a dictate of universal purpose. The basic concepts of Hinduism weaken man's joy of living, and tend to destroy the full man's innate tendency to grow unhampered, and to take aggressive action to facilitate and feed that growth.
Hinduism's concessions to expediency make possible the practical life of those of its adherents who do not involve themselves too deeply in its basic concepts. In art, architecture, poetry, music, dances, et cetera, India has shown the material productive efficacy of its culture, but we consider that the first concern of religion is man culture. Until otherwise shown, we will assume that man should be a full rounded, whole man. What characteristics he shall have must be dictated by a universal purpose that directs him by giving him joy of living whenever he is moving in the direction to which it points.
TAOISM
Taoism is often considered as a conceptual offshoot of Hinduism but it has its major following in China. It had an individual Chinese founder, Lao-tze, who lived at the same time as Buddha and Confucius in the sixth century B. C.
He was the Keeper of the Archives in the Imperial Library at Lo-yang, and the author of a short book, Tao Te Ching, on which Taoism was originally based. Tao is variously translated as The Way, God, Nature, the principle of cosmic order, et cetera. Lao-tze claimed that Tao is immanent in all things as that which gives to things their significance, that it is the fundamental value in all values, but that it cannot be taught to those who do not know it. He apparently believed that teaching tended to destroy perception of Tao. He said that "those who know Tao are not very learned; the very learned do not know Tao."
That we need a clean word to be used for the purpose for which Lao-tze coined "Tao" is obvious to all perceiving men, but all such words quickly take on color from the conceptual climate in which they are used. That the word "Tao" was born in and carried forward as a mixture the learned thought patterns then current in religious circles of both China and India is clearly apparent in the behavior patterns advocated in the Tao Te Ching. The following quotations will illustrate: "Therefore the sage, in the exercise of government, empties the peoples' minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, strengthens their bones. He constantly tries to keep them without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those that have knowledge, to keep them from presuming to act on it."
Where there is this abstinence from action, good order is universal." "There is no greater guilt than to sanction ambition, no calamity greater than to be discontented with one's lot, no fault greater than the wish to be getting." The ruler-subject, father-son relationships from the Chinese thought pattern is brought to bear upon the Hindu desire to be uncreated, and the aggregation becomes a collection of pithy statements advocating that the self seek contentment and that the individual try to still the turbulence of discontentment in others by example, or by the use made of whatever authority he possesses.
Much of Lao-tze's work is simple dogma, and is accepted as such, but Lao-tze's point of tangent brush with reality, evidenced by his seeking to create the concept of Tao, stimulated perception. Also Tao Te Ching, despite the fact that it is only 5,000 words long, contains enough obscure verbosity to incite those, who can get no nearer to probing self than probing for the meaning of words, to turn the search for the meaning of Tao and the search for the meaning behind obscure statements in the little book into a search for the unknown in self. In that way it becomes a crutch for those who would become introspective.
In some aspects it may, therefore, well come within the analytical and introspective classification we have hesitantly given it. There are some followers of Taoism who tend toward analysis and introspection but on the whole Taoism has become a search for the mysterious and magical, and the religion has become overlaid with meaningless magical rituals designed to control evil spirits that are of the most superficial conception. The monks practice seclusion and communion, after the fashion of the Buddhists and Hindus, but the priests are mere conductors of rituals.
In its general practice the appeal of the religion is largely that of adding colorful fancy to a religious landscape made rather barren by the expedient ethics of Confucianism. Its major effect appears to be that of filling minds that, if made empty as Lao-tze advocated, might be capable of significant perception of Tao. It has little missionary zeal and its effect is largely that of inert obstruction. As Taoism exists today, it does not interest us, either because of its concepts or because of its pressure as a cultural force. The cultural force of Confucianism overrides it. We take cognizance of it only because it has a relatively large following and such a body of inertia may later need our consideration.
SHINTO
Scholars who proudly claim to be objective and unprejudiced, and who orient their studies of religion by a concept of "evolutionary progress," often make such remarks as the following regarding Shinto: "It is little advanced from the most naive and primitive form of nature worship" and "The Japanese soul has never risen to the concept of monotheism."
If an agnostic, atomic scientist were relaxing on the seashore, watching the waves dashing against the land, cutting it away, with great chunks of land falling in and I filling the sea, he might think of the sea as devouring the land. If he saw a tree being undermined he might think of it as clinging precariously to its foothold. Knowing that the tree is organic life and that it exhibits every evidence of motive and purpose that man does, he might feel that "clinging" was an entirely correct word. Knowing the thin line between organic life and inorganic matter, that seems to get thinner with each new discovery of science, he might wonder if the sea "devouring" the shore might not be more than a poetic concept, might be a simple fact.
He might then feel anew respect for the not uncommon concept that religion is a form of poetry and that poetry is properly religion. But if he were a strange man, on a strange island, speaking his thoughts in a strange tongue to a scholar who adhered to a concept of religion's evolutionary progress and did not know the scientist's back-ground, the scholar would note that the man possessed the most naive and primitive form of religious concepts.
He might even add that it was a form of religion that was "lower" than that which endowed natural objects with god-personalities. Apparently a difficult thing to understand, in the emotionally charged field where men try to define subtle purposes that they will live and die for, is that, in a battle of words, subtle thought is lost to blatant bleating. Shinto is a subtle religious concept. It might be better understood in the West by thinking of it simply as a consistently reverent and poetic attitude in viewing the natural world.
Like Hinduism, Shinto conceives the entire universe as god, but the god-universe identity is closer than the Western concept of the relationship between man's soul and body. There is no conceivable conflict between matter and spirit. There is no will of god that is not the will of the universe. There is no being of god that is not the being of the universe. Shinto has no teachings of morality. Human beings are conceived as being naturally endowed with all knowledge of what they should and should not do. It is therefore unnecessary for them to have formulated systems of morality. Shinto has no belief in a personal soul that survives death. This might be conditioned by the Japanese custom of considering family and community above self.
It appears rather, to indicate a freedom from the pressures of prejudices and predilection, intense feeling of guilt, or unsatisfied hopes, that would lead to conjectures about life after death. Like morality, the matter is conceived as needing no discussion. Looking at the history of the world's religions it might be easy to conclude that men need religions only as defensive measures against the religions of peoples. In the essence of its concept and the essence of its practice, Shinto should apparently be acceptable to all men of all times.
It is nothing but the belief in a reverent approach to the wonders, mysteries, and beauties of the universe, and looking within oneself for sincere purpose and an acting upon that purpose. But the battle of words and concepts comes before, after, and concurrent with the battle of acts and, although the validity of reason can be followed more accurately in acts, we apparently must enter the battle of concepts in self-protection, whether we wish to do so or not. In conceptual essence Shinto was originally not an aggressive cultural force. In pure essence it is still unchanged, and its essential efficacy may be seen only in the art and grace of it adherents. But it early began acquiring appendages. The most conspicuous history of Shinto is not that of its effect on peoples but that of an honest, "primitive" religion's fate.
It particularly interests us because it lasted two thousand years, and still exists in fair semblance of its original form, whereas most "primitive" religions fall at one contact with the "higher" religions. The known history of Shinto shows how a religion that appeals to sincere individuals is modified to gain appeal for metropolitan peoples. To hold the people together an elaborate story of the migration of the Japanese from the Asiatic mainland was given a supernatural implication and made apart of Shinto. It was later recast into a dogma stating the divine right of the ruling family to rule.
This made Shinto politically expedient and this is the appendage that has made its survival possible among the more blatantly colorful and dramatically awesome religions. Buddhism came to Japan about 600 A. D. and was at first accepted because it brought from China material evidence of more accomplished craftsmen, which is usually spoken of as "higher civilization." The religion, on the strength of its own appeal to metropolitan people, gained a foothold because Buddha, who warned against deifying men, had now become a deified and dramatic personality. A further sect of Buddhism known as Zen Buddhism was brought in from China about 1200 AD and gained a competitive advantage over Shinto because of the ritual of meditation that it had detached and dramatized from the Hindu's intense search to be uncreated.
Attention to posture, breathing and ritualistic control of sense perception was novel and it could be dramatically imposed upon the Japanese tendency toward introspection and self-discipline. The idea that the deepest intuitive insight into the nature of things cannot be expressed intellectually, which Zen Buddhism taught, was thoroughly compatible with Shinto. Only the objective was different. Buddhism still carried in its essence the death desire that molded Hinduism. So the desire to be uncreated that was still apparent in Hinduism had to be rephrased for those who had not grown up with a tolerance for a cultural death compulsion, if it was to be acceptable to them.
It was rephrased as the attainment of "the white silence of truth," where one became identified with the ultimate reality. The Japanese concept of reality was affected by the institution of this new religion that differed from the old so subtly that it seemed merely to have a hauntingly mysterious and undefinable new flavor. Shinto with its contemplation of nature and its talk of a way of life, was unable to compete victoriously, in the minds of the metropolitan peoples who were losing their pagan perceptions, with the mysterious appeal of a religion that contemplated "white silence" and proclaimed, not simply a way of life, but a way of "truth."
But Shinto and Zen Buddhism each took on something of the character of the other and both survived. Christianity was introduced about 1550 AD with amazing success. Original Buddhism had set a pattern for worshipping a divine personality when it was accepted as intricately interwoven with the products of a higher civilization. Now the European traders, who came with the Christian missionaries, brought a new evidence of "higher civilization," firearms, which made Christianity readily acceptable. After thriving for about a hundred years, Christianity was suppressed and went underground. Buddhism was given the job of keeping it suppressed and impotent.
Political authority clearly opened and closed doors admitting religions into Japan and pushing them out. After the suppression of Christianity, Confucianism was officially encouraged because of the teachings of self-discipline, faithfulness to duty, and stern justice which constituted the core of its morality. About 1850 AD a movement toward strong nationalism restored a ruler of the original line to power. To support this movement Shinto was resurrected from its deteriorated position because it had of old been identified with the dogma of the emperor's divine right to rule. Its pagan concepts and its appeal to innate perception were tolerated by a people becoming metropolitan because its appendages were useful to them.
The present Shinto is split between State Shinto and Sectarian Shinto and has been much influenced by Buddhism, Christianity, and Confucianism. However, it still retains enough of its original character to make it unique among the influential religious of the world. This "nature worship," that for two thousand years has continued to be a cultural influence of a people who hold a high place among current civilizations for their art and gracious living, gives us much cause to re-examine religious classifications that talk of proceeding "upward" from "naive primitiveness."
WESTERN SCIENCE
If aboriginal religions had not become entwined, we could follow the development of Western Science back over a clearly discernible, and perhaps very admirable, trail. This would lead through something resembling Shinto back to the first man who inquired into the god spirits that motivated the sun, the wind, the sea, and the fire. Along that trail we would find the first use of fire, the smelting of iron, and much other "magic" that has flowered and often perished with civilizations. But what we would be looking for would be much more significant. We would be concerned primarily with what Western Science, as a cultural force, had done to the evolutionary stream of man. It is as a cultural force that we consider Western Science to be a religion.
If we were looking back from some future date at the present, we would probably have to look very closely to see the short life of Western Science as a religion, separate and distinct in itself. It is probable that the "magic" of Western Science will be appropriated as evidence supporting some dogma; this has always been the fate of all "magic." The manner and proportion in which Western Science will be absorbed into and mixed with other religions is not fully apparent at this time. We see two much more powerful religions, "Popular Materialism" and "Ethical Christian-Democracy," trying to appropriate it, and present trends indicate that one will probably be successful.
The complete absorption of scientists in their work is making them less than whole men. They are already becoming appendages to mobs who are as ready to adopt any religious concept that is expedient as to absorb any people who can add to the build-up of power. But as of this moment Western Science must be considered as a separate religion by our definition. As such it has no specific founder and its date of origin is indefinite, but for about two hundred years it has been a religion. Its concept of the universe is not new. A concept of the universe in terms of atoms, for instance, goes back to Greek thought before the Christian era.
The Greeks, however, did more thinking than experimenting and so science, as we know it, can hardly be said to have existed then. But about the sixteenth or seventeenth century the concept that experiment and empirical observation were the only valid bases for knowing the universe began to gain adherents. We have set the beginning of the nineteenth century as an arbitrary date when this concept had become fixed enough and had begun to affect men's lives enough to be called a religion.
At first glance, Western Science appears to go counter to our general observation that metropolitan religions do not clear up the aggregation of old thoughts and place their foundations on innate concepts. Certainly Western Science carries forward nothing from Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism, the religions which predominate among the peoples that gave it birth. But undeniably it is conditioned by reaction against the dogma and irrationality of these religions.
The prejudice against admitting into its holy of hollies any concepts that cannot be demonstrated by rigidly controlled observation and experiment is a reactionary prejudice which, at this stage of its development, appears to promise its undoing. If Western Science does not amalgamate with a religion that compensates this distorting tendency, it will eventually bring crashing down an admirably well integrated, but unbalanced, conceptual structure.
Science purportedly deals with realities but it is 56 reluctant to admit the only uncontestable reality, consciousness, into its concept of the universe. As is generally true of metropolitan religions, its line between the sacred and profane wavers irrationally. The major tool of science is mathematics, which has its origin and existence solely in the realm of consciousness, without a recognized connection to any external universe.
The correctness of all mathematical conclusions is dependent upon limiting the material in which mathematics deals to concepts in consciousness. If mathematics were a religion it would have a clear and positive line between the sacred and profane. Everything sacred to it exists in consciousness; the external universe is profane and inadmissible. But mathematics cannot be a religion by our definition because this concept of it limits it to a world apart from the actions of men.
If science began with "consciousness is" as its first axiom, mathematics as its primary exercise in being, and then attempted to branch out into concepts of innate awareness of mathematical verities, concepts of external stimuli, concepts of external appearance, concepts of external forces, and, finally, to concepts of organic life, it would be developing in a well-rounded manner.
But the dogmatically accepted concepts of god and soul, that cover the ground it plows, give it an aversion to including a concept of consciousness in its mathematics, and then recognizing that a relation has to be discovered between consciousness and the external world. The Greeks did something approaching that, but then began looking only at words, rather than perceivable realities, and ran amuck. Then the dogmatic religions, with their muddy concepts of souls, made consciousness a subject to be avoided by thinking men. So science created a gulf between its tool, mathematics, and its subject matter in the external world.
The gulf appears to be widening. Psychology, sociology, and political science have tried to step into the yawning emptiness. They spring from Christianity, with a predilection in favor of the way of life it advocates, and are not compatible with Western Science. Indeed, although they claim to follow "scientific methods," their existence is a major basis for an argument by Western Science that it is correct in leaping over the field against which it has prejudices. They have done little that commands its respect. So the field of consciousness, outside the existent scope of mathematics, continues to appear to "pure science" as a voodoo swampland.
Some scientists feel that if the secret of organic life, which seems just beyond the finger tips of "pure science," could be discovered, the voodoo swamp would lose its mysterious power over man and the decision to ignore it would be vindicated. The one-sided evidence that they admit leads them to a tentative opinion that the relative magnitude of the inorganic universe to organic life, both in time and space, argues the probability that organic life is a freak accident having no relation to the overall purpose of the universe; that the consciousness by which man perceives the universe is a peculiar attribute of this freakish organic life; and that the matter of which all the universe, including organic life is made, has no direction or purpose not decreed simply by its mechanical construction.
They feel that they will eventually find an explanation of consciousness in mechanical terms. That attitude is the one that concerns us in our looking at Western Science, with the consideration of its cultural efficacy foremost in our perspective. Whether the position be affirmed, implied, or denied, it is the position in practice. The presently unbalanced religion of Western Science is a cultural force in favor of beings who are less than whole men. It advocates the development of men who seek purpose; these men become effective only when combined with men who have purpose.
However at the present moment, we have to conjecture its possible future to evaluate its efficacy. We can easily conjecture what would be the course followed by its adherents if some circumstance should make it a dominant aspect of some religion rather than consign it to the usual fate of magic as an appendage to some religion. Like the warrior leaders in the Indus Valley, who could not hope for victory and sat down to consider what was strategic and honorable and never got up again, the leaders of Western Science would attempt to hold the status quo while they pored over their concepts, and made some more laboratory experiments.
A thousand, or five thousand years, might go by while the "holy men" of science devoted themselves to their religious rituals, became more ascetic in their devotion and drew into their ranks ever more of the population. Certainly the one out of four holy men in Indian would not seem excessive as compared to the number of "holy men" who would give their lives to science. The complexity of the religious concepts would increase many times and new leaders would arise and develop new sects. Meanwhile the status quo would continue with only the cursory and expedient development necessary to avert catastrophes.
In time, perhaps, a vigorous race of "barbarians" would invade, take command, and absorb those processes which were useful and understandable to them, and those religious concepts that appealed and could be added to the awesome pile of their own. Sooner or later the scientists' mania for empirical study must be directed by those who do not seek purpose but have purpose. But in a thousand or five thousand years of ascetic devotion, would not Western Science, that has made so much progress so quickly, find the "truth" of the universe, and be able to give "scientifically correct" direction to all mankind? So far, only the "magic" it has performed is impressive.
Its accomplishments are an argument for accepting its concepts as dogma, but Western Science would be the first to warn against such acceptance. It has learned many formulas for achieving predictable results. A great number of highly intelligent person's working together, with a precise language for coordinating effort, could not fail to do otherwise. Many of its concepts appear to be the most plausible interpretations of phenomena in the external world that are available.
But they do not add up to an interpretation of the universe in totality. It is a young religion filled with a forceful momentum of reaction to dogma, and courted by two religions more powerful than itself. But it is no more than that. Its efficacy is yet to be known and evaluated. It will probably never be known except as a mere part of some other religion. We Pagans who postulate joy of living as the prime mover of all life, can see little promise either in Western Science's ability to survive as "pure" science or the direction of its research.
When man's most searching analysis begins with the axiom that consciousness exists and reasons that matter, if it exists, is perceived by consciousness, the exclusively empirical perspective from which Western Science approaches the universe appears no less narrow and unable to comprehend reality than the perspectives of the religions against which it is reacting. Its concepts must be considered with this narrowness in mind. Yet, even so, we find them worthy of consideration. Some mystics of the East make patterns in colored sands with their fingers while they think. The Western Scientists make experiments in their laboratories while they think. They discover many useful recipes.
These we consider as a mere by-product of their introspection. It is their intense introspection and the concepts that bubble up from their subconscious during their experiments which merit our study, not because their "magic" has impressed us, but because we postulate that they have consciousness like ours, and what is innate validity for them is innate validity for us. We need only remember that our total perspectives are not congruent because of distorting influences.
THE EXISTENT RELIGIOUS CULTURAL FORCES B. The religions of expedient ethics
CONFUCIANISM
The cultural force that has been the selective factor in the evolution of the Chinese people appears to be a doctrine of respect for expedience in day-to-day living, rather than a concept of creative purpose. Adherence to agriculture as a way of life appears as a cultural influence that overrides all concepts of the origin and purpose of the universe in selecting individuals for survival and prolific procreation.
Into the stream of agriculturalists have been absorbed all mutants who became warlords or bandits, all attacking nomads and herdsmen, and no religious concept has ever become a sufficient force to upset the inbred viewpoint that, in the Western world, finds admirable expression of spirit in Longfellow's "Village Blacksmith," Gray's "Elegy," and in an almost unlimited number of other works. In different scenes and under different circumstances the Western world has viewed with full understanding and approval the concept of the "good life" that has been the Chinese ideal: "Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing onward through life he goes; Each morning sees some task begin, Each evening sees it close." -Longfellow.
"Let not ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile, The short and simple annals of the poor." -Gray. The Chinese have certainly not lived in simple pastoral peace without conflict and bloodshed, nor have they been without god concepts of creation and elaborate religious rituals, but, before the dawn of history, the concept of the "good life" had already affected the evolution of the people and no religion has ever replaced it in efficacy. Scholars find in the oldest language of the Chinese words for god and heaven.
Interpretations as to what the oldest beliefs were vary, probably in accordance with the prejudices and predilections of the scholars, from worship of one god to some sort of nature worship. However, the formalized religion that dominates today is frankly the ethics of expedience for perpetuating the "good life." At the time of Confucius, 550 BC, there was much war and unrest among the people, and by reacting against war and unrest Confucius was successful in starting a religious trend that, after his death, became the dominant religion. His teachings were based on more ancient Chinese teachings of expedient ethics.
The discipline in "right" and "wrong" which children receive from their parents is often more influenced by day-to-day pressures than by perception of long-range objectives, and it is very positive in its authority. To some extent the body of accepted thought in the group, and the power of the group, usually takes over where the parent leaves off, so that no one is permitted to become an adult who thinks for himself and acts on his own volition. In the West there is a strong fiction of freedom for adults that the people tell themselves, and believe with an incredible childlike naivete. In China, from prehistoric times, a frank submission to parental discipline has been a revered part of the "good life."
It continues, as either a form or efficacious fact, for the active life of the parents and after their death. Tablets with the ancestors' names inscribed upon them, or stone images of the ancestors, have, from ancient times, been revered in worshipful rituals. A ruler has been considered merely an illustrious descendant of the common ancestry who combined the many-branched family again under one head for the common good. Confucius considered the origin and purpose of the universe as a subject beyond human knowledge.
He restricted his teachings to organizing, and clearly restating, the rules of conduct, which had been taught by parents to children for so long that they were considered axiomatic. Thus Confucianism needed no exploration of universal purpose to become efficacious. It assumed that the purpose of adults was to continue the peaceful, unquestioning acceptance of custom that makes for happy children. Acquiescence to established customs and religions was taught as an objective in itself.
Learning and self-discipline were considered as a means to this end. The authority-responsibility and obedience-respect relationship between parent and child, husband and wife, elder brother and younger brother, and ruler and subject, are set out with practical rules of conduct. Moderation in all things, the "Doctrine of the Mean," is the general ideal of conduct, implemented by the practical criterion of "what you do not want done to yourself, do not do unto others."
Equilibrium is viewed as that state where no emotion is involved. Harmony is viewed as a state involving emotions but where actions are in accord with environment. Taoism and Buddhism have been absorbed in the stream of expedient ethics without any conspicuous effect on the efficacy of Confucianism. The concept of the "good life" is so strong in China that it outweighs all other considerations. Like the will to be uncreated in Hinduism, the will to the "good life" in China has overridden all considerations of a universal purpose. The Chinese do not ask of a religion "Is it right?" but "Is it moral?"
The thought pattern that poses this question is saying that customs which appear good from long experience may be embroidered but not challenged by introspection or critical analysis of concepts. If, as Confucius concluded, man cannot know the purpose of the universe, it would be an easy matter to fall into a morality built upon family relationships. The instinctive love of parents for their children would properly be carried over into the benevolent ruler who considered all his subjects as his children. By further extension a creator of all men would presumably have a parent's feeling for all men; that is, a god, if such existed, would be presumed to be a loving father.
And so the behavior patterns of a loving father, teaching his children, would be in harmony with the morality advocated by a single god, who was both creator and ruler of the universe. The expedient ethics of Confucius doubtless helped to create the Christian concept of Jehovah as a benevolent modification of the original Jewish god of vengeance, but Confucius did not presume to set forth a dogma that such a god really exists. To do so would have been incompatible with the background of the Chinese people, who presumably had long ago fought the battle of tribal gods, and had retained no such concept as Yahweh that had to be dealt with in some manner -built upon, modified, or destroyed.
Lacking this unifying dogma, the Chinese have preserved some semblance of their pagan perceptions, rather than become wholly a metropolitan, purpose-hungry people. But somewhere in their history. a high degree of tolerance was bred into them, with a result that population is controlled largely by famine, disease, and natural catastrophes rather than mortal combat. The resulting dense population, standing between the perceiver and the universe as it was before man, has precluded balanced perception of man in relation to the universe that is prior to him. Thus, in China, the expedience of a man dealing with men has been of paramount interest, and in its religions we find little exploration of basic concepts regarding the universe, or the relation of man to that portion of the universe which is not man.
ETHICAL CHRISTIAN-DEMOCRACY
This ethical religion, or one substantially the same, is widespread throughout the world. It is not confined to Christian lands nor to lands which claim to be democratic. It is uninstitutionalized and has no name. We have merely chosen the name that seems most descriptive in Western language. Buddhism, in its original concept, with emphasis on relief of mankind's suffering, might conceivably be a parent religion instead of Christianity. Confucianism has much the same spirit as Ethical Christian-Democracy, and might have been its parent, except that its concern with parent-child, husband-wife, elder-brother, younger-brother, and ruler-subject relationships creates a slight incompatibility with the intellectual concept of democracy. Socialism or communism could be substituted for democracy in the name with little disturbance of intellectual concept.
These differ only in that their several names relate to their environmental basis of conceptual origin and method of development. All are identical in taking their power from a majority, which finds it expedient to proclaim that the welfare of the majority, as distinguished from the danger to the majority resulting from individual tendencies toward mutation, is a sacred thing that no "good" man will challenge with violence. A "good" man in the language of the group is simply one who does not claim more rights for the individual than the group will concede. Those who ask for more "rights" are restrained as "evil" men who advocate anarchy.
Thus, despite any lip service that the group may pay to the dignity of the individual, the group has an efficacious superiority that tends to destroy the individual as an entity. Many streams of thought have gone into the making of this present-day ethical religion. It often appears to be the ultimate metropolitan religion, springing from so many diverse sources that it gives religious scholars, with more breadth than depth, the impression that all religions follow definite evolutionary trends. A metropolitan religion, whatever it may be, owes its existence to the fact that those who cannot, themselves, perceive universal purpose look to the purpose of the greatest number of men, and construe this majority purpose as being the purpose of the universe.
It therefore follows that a religion that makes "the greatest good of the greatest number its shibboleth, and supports it with some semblance of argument, has a strong bid for efficacy. Of course if its efficacy is great enough, and it is not consistent with the purpose of the universe-and the evidence of real evolution that is predicated on the possibility of a mutant individual triumphing over the type conclusively says that it is not-it will simply destroy man as a species.
We do not postulate that it may become that efficacious. Since we do not yet have Ethical Christian-Democracy segregated from the other religions with which it is momentarily compatible, coexistent, and confused, we cannot yet discuss its efficacy in any terms that would lead to other than fruitless argument. So we will leave efficacy to each person's individual appraisal, and limit our discussion to the intellectual argument on which it is based, and to its methods as a cultural force.
In this restricted space we must even limit discussion of the many streams that lead to this final product of what some scholars term "evolution of religion" to mere examples. We have chosen the two streams of democracy and Christianity that are now mixed together in the Western world. To the adherents of this religion, the rightness of democracy is considered proved by the religious background of ethical Christianity and the rightness of ethical Christianity is considered proved by the efficacy of democracy. The whole is a superficial, rationalized attempt to ride the stream of popular thought in its current directional trend. In other words, it is a rationalized approval of the flowing stream of unexamined cultural tendencies that has no roots in any basic concept of the universe.
We therefore are being over generous when we talk of its intellectual argument, but we need to sketch the course of its appeal to waking consciousness at least as far as its adherents trace it. The concept of democracy had its Western origin in the Greek city states. These were created when some of the northern European warrior peoples established themselves in a permanent site as rulers of a people with an agricultural economy. These they made into slaves and the pagan warriors with a background of individual freedom, experimented with the creation of a government in which all adult warriors had an equal voice. The son of a warrior, on becoming an adult, had the choice of voluntarily becoming apart of the city state, or taking his possessions and going elsewhere.
Those who remained did so on the assumption that joint rule could be a science, that orderly discussions among themselves could lead to agreement, and that combat between themselves would result only from a stubborn refusal to discuss issues. Their background as warriors of homogenous breeding, and a common culture of individual integrity, led them to this conclusion. They gave no consideration to the possibility that such a government could include men of slave temperament, or anyone who was not a potential warrior of the breed that had, from time immemorial, been accustomed to enter discussions only when fully armed and ready to fight at any infringement upon his integrity as a whole man.
Whole men, beings of integrity, honor, courage of conviction, and the habit of living that backed conviction with mortal combat, were assumed as the only possible citizens. The city states were extremely small, the citizens continued as warriors, and so it took several centuries for the breed to deteriorate and the metropolitan culture to lose its tolerance for individual integrity. Meanwhile the "science" of democratic government was profusely documented, and this "science" has been modified and adopted since in less favorable circumstances, without adequate inquiry into either its specific or universal validity. The "Golden Age of Greece" has simply become, in common usage, a sort of past utopia, made possible because government was not a monarchy, but a "science." Then, without examining it in the light of the purpose of the universe, the purveyors of this "science" have transformed the possible relative virtue of democracy into an absolute virtue.
Those who accept it as such can not see clearly the realities before them because they are blinded by the aura of shining virtue that surrounds them when they are given the name democracy. And the name is applied to an ever-changing variety of realities. For example, states are now so large and powerful that they effectively claim title to all the land in the world. Therefore no one, who might wish to be an individual, has a choice of being a free man, detached from a state, or a free man, who has voluntarily subscribed to citizenship in a state. A territory is annexed to a state or transferred from the title of one state to the title of another by conquest, purchase, or upon application by the majority of its residents.
Many of the citizens of the states, therefore, have the origin of slaves. They, together with their lands and possessions, are acquired by conquest, purchase, or brought in against their will through circumstances in which their dissenting voice is ignored. Sometimes, slaves who are conspicuously bound in chains are brought in and later made citizens of the democracy. To meet these circumstances, the concept of citizenship has gradually changed from voluntary union of free men to an obligatory union of all adults within certain boundaries.
There is now nowhere for a man who would be free of any state to go, and nothing for him to do but commit suicide, be hounded in all states as criminal, or accept the cloyingly benevolent rule of one state, or the more austerely tyrannical rule of another. It is no longer a privilege for free men to join a state and have a voice in the government, but a duty of captives with no place to go, to cast their votes and thereby tacitly approve their captivity as well as proclaim their worship of the state religion of democracy. With such an efficacious method of gaining converts to its ranks, democracy has inspired those motivated by expedience to try to rationalize it into a full-blown religion. Borrowing ideas from currently popular religions, they have blended them into a superficial argument so as to endow democracy with a Christian connotation.
The argument runs that family life among the Homo sapiens, by interdependence and the long helplessness of the children, taught men the virtue of considering the welfare of others ahead of the mere welfare of self. Then the religion of Judaism replaced the welfare of the family with that of the Jewish race as a "good" that opposed the "evil" of selfishness. Jesus brought self-abasement and self-sacrifice for others to its ultimate excellence, as an example for all. With this example Christianity broadened the "good" of the Jewish race to the "good" of all mankind as the noble objective to which all thought of self should be sublimated.
The old Jewish Ten Commandments, that were designed to keep peace within the tribe, contained a concept that human life, rather than human dignity, was sacred. When this dogma had been made a part of the stream of accepted concepts, the popular mind was led to the conclusion that the democratic rule of citizen-warriors, that made possible the "Golden Age of Greece," was outmoded, because there should be no war and warriors. Having convinced themselves that Christian-Democracy was "higher" in the evolutionary scale than the democracy of the "Golden Age of Greece" its adherents looked back at their prototype and told themselves how much more advanced, broad-minded, and just they were than the Greeks who did not make women and slaves into full fledged citizens.
Shamefacedly they set about "making it up" to women, to those who were known to have been former slaves (forgetting the ones who had never actually worn shackles), and finally set themselves to the task of "freeing" the children from the control of their parents. Those who tend to believe that a currently widespread idea is essentially a valid one can tie together, by superficial logic, wholly incompatible concepts, and accept the misfit of pieces with a complacency that is unbelievable to those with perception. Then they blatantly proclaim that their lack of perception is a virtue. Combining the "Golden Rule" and the "Golden Mean" from other religions, the Christian-Democrats have made, without any conspicuous inspiration, an ethical precept of tolerance. Instead of the "Golden Mean," this might be called, in current language, the "tolerant gray."
In the enforced coexistence between strong men who would be free, weak men who would have charity and guidance, women who would be women, women who would be men, helpless children, the indifferent, the aged, the religious fanatics, the adult "criminals," and the juvenile "delinquents," those who hold positive opinions naturally irritate the others. A cult has therefore arisen which says that those who have positive opinions on any subject see everything as black and white, while the tolerant see that all viewpoints are of mixed virtue, or some shade of gray. This proclamation of a beauty in grayness, because it surpasses in restfulness the meaningless pattern of the unselectively collected blacks and whites, is merely the current one of many fad phrases shouting "tolerance is good" that the adherents of this religion pronounce as each becomes a mob shibboleth.
The adherents of Ethical Christian-Democracy pronounce these shibboleths with the same meaningless fervor that other religious disciples intone "The Lord He is God, the Lord He is God." They are expressing their true faith, for this grayness, this lack of both color and pattern, is the distinguishing characteristic of this religion. It has accepted so many unexamined precepts that it can see only grayness. It has grayed down the dogmas of Christianity in an attempt to make Christianity, not attractive, but simply nonirritating to all. The ethical precept that seeing grayness is a virtue has precluded all but the strongest individuals from incisive examination of any basic concept.
Under democracy, the widespread acquaintance with the religions of the world, all claiming to be the only true one, and all superficially contradicting each other, has led to wide-spread semi-skepticism, or grayed skepticism. Many who have been reared in the tradition of Christianity have not been able to accept its dogmas nor yet reject them. They simply think moderately well of what they vaguely construe to be the Christian way of life, or of the material benefits which they vaguely assume that it brought, and build up an ethical religion to replace the dogmatic one. There is a point in the transformation of adherents from the colorful dogmas of Christianity to the gray emptiness of this ethical religion that arouses the observer's sympathy by all the elements of significant tragedy.
The Ethical Christian-Democrats do not believe in Jesus as a supernatural being, but simply as a great teacher. Some vacillate between a semi-belief in a benevolent father-creator of the universe and of man, and the mere wish to believe in such a being because it would be comfortable to do so. Some face the tentative conclusions of Western science with semi-acceptance, but some, who are incompletely conditioned to see only grayness, are horrified by the picture Western science paints of a universe of inconceivably great size in which there is a little world, something like a speck of dust, and on this speck of dust a green mold has set in at a particular stage of decay and evolved into man.
Their egos cannot accept the picture, and those of Christian heritage want to run back to the god which they no longer believe fall on their knees and cry, "Father Tell me, assure me, that you created it all; that as its creator you are greater than it, and that I am your child in your own image." These semi-skeptics crying, "Oh. God -if there be a God -assure me it is so -Give me some sign" touch the sympathetic understanding deeper and more piteously than any cries of a martyred saint upon a cross could ever do.
When first denying the god. whose shadowy. devitalized image they still retain from the forgiving and protective god-father concept of Christianity the semi-skeptics have an attitude of humble obedient children who want to get along well together and maintain harmony as cooperative struggling orphans. And when instead of the tyrannical but merciful father-image. sacrificing his own son for them. one sees the expediency-motivated rationalizers offer them the gray symbolic monotheism, upheld as the ultimate in "religious evolution" by the scholars, he has no sympathy for a religion that. seeing starving children begging for food has given them a stone.
When the same semi-skeptics come from their shamefacedly stolen devotion. and try to rationalize their ethics with a passion that betokens their lack of faith in their rationalization, they come without reverence for the universe. respect for man, or clear reason in their arguments. They then make themselves utterly unsympathetic when they try fostering on to others. as a god substitute, a nebulous concept that they call mankind. Those struggling desperately to synthesize an ethical religion, to transform the drab. dehydrated remains of old dogmas into some symbolism. without conspicuously insulting an agnostic intelligence, have created nothing that merits our attention.
They have merely mixed the streams of democratic and Christian thought with each other. and jerry-built new concepts by a superficial logic that has been accepted by those who do not examine basic concepts. The impulse that moves them is simply the unadorned purpose-hungry impulse on which all metropolitan religions are built. The objective is merely the vague one of uniting all mankind, considered as one people, under some world-wide government, with "liberty" and "justice" for all. The same objective exists whether this "ultimate" religion be called Christian-Democracy, Communism, Socialism, One Worldism, United-Nationism, or any other name. Since it has not yet been achieved, those who are satisfied with superficial thought have never been called upon to examine the objective further.
All differences between the adherents of this religion are the insignificant differences regarding the best route to the first limited objective of "one world." The way a religion such as this, that has no obvious emotional appeal whatsoever in its grayness, can be spread and perpetuated without the actual use of the sword, is an example of the pressures that make it impossible to find significance in statistics regarding the numbers who have "voluntarily" accepted various metropolitan religions. A method presently used for perpetuating and spreading the Christian-Democratic branch of this "ultimate" religion, is particularly worthy of note. This method involves enforcing a choice between conformity and social embarrassment.
The social embarrassment results from limiting the popular concept of alternatives so as to make the individual choose the one advocated by the religious fanatics because it is the least unsavory. Any reasons for nonconformity that are based on personal perception, and might be acceptable if declared, are shouted down by the mass that is "educated" to mouth the unsavory alternatives to conformity. First, one is required to choose between being called criminal and traitorous or upholding the mob in power, regardless of what it may be. As this social embarrassment has kept masses of unthinking people in line since the beginning of time, it is not peculiar to Ethical Christian Democracy, but is only the prototype on which further choices are patterned.
The second point, on which it is easier to choose the most socially acceptable than try to explain that the two choices do not exclude all other possibilities, is "Are you one of the responsible, intelligent persons who takes action in the democratic processes of government, or one of the illiterate masses who must be governed by others?" The third goes to the hidden emotional core of this ethical religion. It is an attempt to regain the god in whose actual existence they can no longer believe-the loving self-sacrificing father-image. The adherents of Ethical Christian-Democracy try to make the state, with its increasing number of welfare laws; or society, in the semi-official form of a state-approved charity organization, into the lost god.
In this attempt they are able to combine the confused emotional basis of the religion with a real, universal fellow-sympathy, and therefore extract the maximum efficacy from social embarrassment. Each person is allowed to choose one of three roles: (1) He can be an inhuman, unsympathetic monster. (2) He can be a pathetic object of charity himself, as evidenced by his inability to help others, or (3) he can be apart of the omnipotent, benevolent, radiant-faced god of Ethical Christian-Democracy, as evidenced by his donations to charity or his vote in favor of welfare legislation. This religion is obviously affecting the evolution of man very rapidly and in an unmistakable direction.
By preserving the congenitally unfit and making it possible for them to propagate themselves, it is breeding great physical weakness into the race. By institutionalizing "criminals" it is breeding aggressiveness and all tendency toward non-conformity out of the race. It is breeding out aggressiveness and non-conformity to a much greater extent by supporting, and thus making possible, the large families of the unthinking conformists who would not be competent to survive in a competitive society; and making conditions so emotionally incompatible for the intelligently perceptive, and strong principled, that they frequently have small families or none at all.
Ethical Christian-Democracy has not conceived a purpose of the universe, so it can have no ethics that is rooted in anything more enduring than momentary expedience, but its direction, as a culture favoring certain types of men for survival, is clearly apparent. It is to the meek, those with weak vision, and the poor in spirit that this religion of the tolerant gray appeals.
THE EXISTENT RELIGIOUS CULTURAL FORCES
The dogmatic religions
JUDAISM
Those who attempt to create an integrated religious concept by analysis and introspection are often thrown off balance by their confused religious heritage, and by the pressure of immediate circumstances. Those who attempt to create a religion of expedient ethics, without going to the root problem of the cause and purpose of the universe, cannot be expected to have more than a tentative and temporary code of conduct for men of weak vision, men who do not perceive that they take their beings historically and continuously form a natural universe with which they must harmonize.
But Judaism, the parent of the powerful dogmatic religions of the world, introduces a new note. It asserts dogmatically what is right and wrong on the basis of a purported special revelation direct from the creator of the universe in words.
Judaism, in itself, is of interest because of its apparent efficacy in keeping a people united in thought and direction when these people are thoroughly scattered. But we have a still greater interest in it because it is the parent of two much more powerful religions, Christianity and Mohammedanism, and these have inherited its characteristics.
Judaism originated at the crossroads of commerce between the craftsman-civilizations of the world. The Jews were a buffeted, overrun, and often enslaved people. They looked at civilization as slaves looking at their masters, and created their concept of their god, Yahweh, in this circumstance. In their thinking, he was the supreme master, a god of vengeance, who was obviously punishing them for some misdeed. If they repented and mended their ways, he would give them all the rewards of civilization.
Judaism is a metropolitan religion. Its emphasis is not on the relations of an individual to his god, but the relation of a "people" to their god. In this religion the creator of the universe is conceived as an omnipotent, man-type being. He is the typical master as seen through the eyes of a slave -vain, jealous of other gods, and vengeful. The relation between a "people" (or more specifically, the Jews) and their god becomes for them an all-absorbing drama which ignores the natural universe as a present reality, but retains a valid emotion regarding it -a deep feeling of guilt for man's inability to live in the "Garden of Eden."
Beginning with their original refusal or inability to accept nature, and the punishment therefor, the Jews read into their repeated buffeting by circumstances a pattern of defiance, punishment, repentance, and redemption, until the dogmatic origin of their god's characteristics is forgotten in the long imaginary god-people drama. Real events which they construe as illustrating this god-people relationship are recorded to the exclusion of others, until the history of the Jews appears, to them, to prove the existence of a god who has made a chosen people, with some obscure but noble destiny, out of those whose original act in the drama was refusal to accept and call good the universe as it was created.
Concentration on man-to-man relationships, to the exclusion of man-to-total-universe relationships, is the impetus of metropolitan development. A religion that sees the universe only as an insignificant stage setting for a people-god relationship is therefore a highly favored metropolitan religion. And when the God-creator of the universe is not a nature god, but a man-type being, who can create a world in six days, then settle down to the more serious business of trying to exact obedience on penalty of punishment, or wheedle praise out of a people, he is an eminently acceptable metropolitan god. It is therefore not surprising that the Jewish Yahweh has been translated, with little modification, into the Christian god, Jehovah, the Mohammedan god, Allah, and that he is becoming the super-civilized being whom the Popular Materialists hypothesize as existing in some planet of outer space.
The guilt feeling, which strongly permeates Judaism, is a highly important part of a broadly appealing metropolitan religion. Those who have denied the impulses that are inherent in their beings, closed their eyes to the evidence of the natural world, and then presumed to speak for god regarding what is good and evil, must find some act to which they can ascribe the feeling of guilt that tries to rise from the depths of their beings and claim the attention of consciousness. Otherwise they cannot live with it.
In seeking a universal purpose they have denied the purpose which the total evidence of the universe proclaims and substituted for it a worship of the desire for group-solidarity which develops in the purpose-hungry metropolitan mind. They feel that some atonement must be made for the wrong, for to the slave mind a wrong can be corrected by atonement. In choosing myths and historical events to record and fit into the religion taught by Moses, Judaism has left a trail of the evolving metropolitan man's thought pattern, albeit it is sufficiently obscured by other concepts to be acceptable to the metropolitan man, himself, a being who cannot face a record of his thoughts that is entirely clear.
For presuming to partake of the forbidden fruit, for seeking equality with his creator in decreeing good and evil, Adam was cast out from the Garden of Eden and required to earn his living by the sweat of his brow. But toil and sweat were not enough. The natural universe, from which the people were trying to escape, was one where the criterion of survival was mortal combat. In atonement for man's rejection of this universe the Jews thought blood had to flow from some source. Therefore when Adam's two sons, Cain and Abel, came to offer part of the fruits of their toil to pacify the angry god, both sacrifices were not believed to be equally acceptable.
Cain was a farmer; Abel a herdsman. Abel's sacrifice was considered acceptable because it involved letting blood. Cain's sacrifice, without spilt blood, was not considered acceptable. For a man's sacrifice to be acceptable to god the Jews thought he had to offer deliberately the thing he had tried to save in presuming to decree a good and evil opposed to that which is evident in nature. The entire religion is one of offering blood sacrifices to god in atonement for the original sin. Following the established custom of offering the first born and finest, Abraham took his son up the mountain to sacrifice him to god.
But as he cringed before this super compensation for his feeling of guilt, he saw a sheep caught in a bush and made a substitute sacrifice. There was no ill effect; on the contrary, Abraham's son, Isaac, became the father of a race. This was construed as showing not only that god had directed Abraham, but that god must have had some special use for Isaac and the race he would found. After a long trial and error effort to find an acceptable atonement for presuming to deny the natural world, the concept of sacrificing the desires of self to the good of the race became paramount. It seemed to satisfy the objective of atonement and also the objective of finding a substitute for universe-purpose which had been denied.
The major difference between Jewish ethics, and the ethics of its children religions, Christianity and Mohammedanism, is the substitution of all mankind for the Jewish race. But still the ethics of all three are rooted only in the man-to-man and man-to-god relationship of the purpose hungry being -the "part of a people" being -who has refused to accept the dictates manifest by the greater universe beyond the narrow circle of metropolitan man. Moses is considered the essential founder of the ethical aspect of Judaism. The Ten Commandments, which he purportedly received from god while alone on a mountain, are the ethical foundation of Judaism and, to a very great extent, of all subsequent dogmatic religions.
The first three commandments state that the Jewish god is a jealous, vengeful, merciful god, and a god of action, who will punish, to the third and fourth generation, those who disobey, and lavishly reward those who keep the commandments and hold his name sacred. The fourth commandment is an attempt to restore the habit of leisure and contemplation to a slave people by giving them a periodic day of rest. It appears that the Jews borrowed, without understanding, the story of creation from some other religion, for they made no use of it but to establish a day of rest to account for the difference between six days of creation and the seven days of a moon's quarter.
Setting aside a day for rest and contemplation, or a week, a month, or a year, has unquestioned merit for metropolitan peoples who tend to establish routines and rituals, but it becomes an ethical concept only if it is accepted as a dogma handed down by god. The fifth commandment, "honor thy father and mother," is one of proved efficacy for keeping peace in the family. It can be evolved into a habit of behavior that insures acceptance of dogma by keeping an adult individual from becoming fully adult in his thinking.
The last five commandments are designed to keep peace among all who adhere to the religion. These are: Thou shalt not (6) kill (7) commit adultery, (8) steal, (9) bear false witness against thy neighbor, or (10) covet thy neighbor's possessions. These commandments are designed to produce a people who gather and guard civilization's concept of wealth without internal squabbles, and who have no individual honor or morality other than obedience to "people-creating" dogmas supposed to have come from god. Initial acceptance was accomplished by the simple expedient of killing off opposition.
So it has been ever since. According to the sixth commandment no man can kill another, but those who conceive themselves as being not individuals -but part of a people feel completely justified to kill, and never question the inconsistency, if the official group leader, or an official group vote, directs killing that is construed to be for the good of the group. The individual has become nothing; the group everything. Thus in its ethics Judaism meets the requirements of an efficacious metropolitan religion.
The concern of its ethics is simply the protection of the metropolis from all who raise a hand against it, whether within or without. Originally the Jews had no belief in a life after death. Obtaining the fruits of civilization was their purpose, and evidence that their god was pleased with them was to be measured by the prosperity and growth of the race. In periods of hard times, a belief in an after life of reward for obedience to the laws became useful, and this has now been rather generally adopted. The religion has undergone numerous changes over the years. There are now several schisms in it, and it might well be construed that the common history of the Jews is a bigger factor than their religion in binding the scattered people together.
The efficacy of Judaism, as a metropolitan religion, has been largely passed on to Christianity and Mohammedanism. As we mentioned, the main point of difference between them and Judaism is merely their attempt to embrace all mankind, rather than a single race. Judaism however has always changed whenever expedient to do so, and, In the twelfth century A. D., Moses Maimonides, having observed the efficacy of Christianity and Mohammedanism, updated Judaism by a formal condensation of its current beliefs. This was never officially adopted but students of Judaism state that these are widely accepted and are fairly representative of Jewish theological opinion.
For possible reference we recite the thirteen articles set forth by Moses Maimonides here: (I) Belief in the existence of God, the Creator; (2) belief in the unity of God; (3) belief in the non-bodily nature of God; (4) belief in the priority and eternity of God; (5) belief that God alone must be worshipped; (6) belief in prophecy; (7) belief that Moses was the greatest of all prophets; (8) belief that the Law was revealed from heaven; (9) belief that the Law will never be annulled and that God will give man no other Law; (10) belief that God knows the works of men; (11) belief in reward and punishment; (12) belief in the coming of the Messiah; (13) belief in the resurrection of the dead. Analytical Jewish scholars summarize the basic objective of Judaism as victory over nature.
If we were only attempting to find religious concepts that might open fertile fields of analysis and introspection, we would dismiss a religion which said that the creator of nature had commissioned man to overcome nature with less attention than we would give to the spurious arguments of a psychopathic liar trying to excuse himself for some shameful act. But we not only seek to know the purpose of the universe and bring our purpose into harmony; we also seek to know the religious forces that swirl around us. The dogmatic religions are the most efficacious in the world at this time. So whether as psychiatry or religion, we must give them a due proportion of attention.
CHRISTIANITY
Judaism, like most metropolitan religions, was formed around a purpose of a people that was so strong that it blotted out all consideration of the purpose of the universe. The Biblical myths reveal the subconscious and ideological history of the Jewish people. The Ten Commandments, which apparently are attributed to god merely to give them authority, are the pragmatic laws of a buffeted worldly-wise people, with a burning passion to become a metropolitan race.
The Jews were, and are, a spiritually tough, stiff-necked. people eminently fitted to withstand and prosper under the friction and petty annoyances of metropolitan life. At the time of Jesus, their metropolitan culture had sufficient stature to be no longer a rosy dream of a nomadic tribe, but an existent reality. As such it had all the contrast, in the hard light of accomplished fact. To the fresh perception of a sensitive being-a mutation which sometimes occurs even among a stiff-necked* (They proudly attribute this description of themselves to the lips of their god) people-the machination of a brash metropolitan civilization, made up of a people deliberately bred for metropolitan life, was so offensive as to make his aversion to it an all-consuming passion.
Jesus looked at the glaring evidence of human kindliness and fellow feeling crowded out by aggressive acquisitiveness, of spirit replaced by form, and of honesty replaced by legality; and he found it all an offense to his innate predilections. He set about to develop a corrective train of thought and teach it to the people. He taught meekness and compassion, instead of brash aggressiveness. He looked at the Ten Commandments of Moses and, seeing form rather than spirit, implied, as clearly as it was safe for him to do so, that they should be replaced with only two: "Thou shalt love thy God with all thy heart, soul, and mind; and love thy neighbor as thy self." He appropriated the growing doctrine of life after death because he saw in it an emphasis on spirit as opposed to form. With it as a lever he tried to appeal to an acquisitive people by preaching that they should not seek earthly material possession but should lay up "treasures in heaven."
Jesus was highly imbued with the strong Jewish race feeling and made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with non-Jewish people. His reaction was against the Jewish way of life, and his teachings were aimed at correcting it. Stiff-necked people do not like to be told their faults, so they crucified him, and the reform movement that he had started among the Jews died out shortly after his death. But there were many other peoples about the Mediterranean who had been caught up in metropolitan culture, yet did not have the inbred temperament for the constant friction. Among them, the preaching of Jesus caught on. The strong pronouncements he made in his life against wasting time with non-Jewish people, taking the children's bread and casting it to dogs, had to be overcome to make him acceptable to others. This was done by emphasizing the fact that the Jews had crucified him.
The natural resentment that could be attributed to him because of this made him actually appear anti-Semitic to the anti-Semitic gentiles. His words restricting his mission to the Jews, that he had spoken in life, were counteracted by a pronouncement his spirit purportedly made to his disciples after his death: "Go ye into all the world and teach all nations." Thus the metropolitan culture force of Judaism was spread throughout the world by the life and teachings of a man who was strongly opposed to the manifest fruits of it. But he apparently considered that the fruits were not an essential product of the objective and ethics but only of too much formalization. He never challenged the basic proposition of "victory over nature."
The evolvement of Christianity, as it exists today, from the life and teachings of Jesus, is intricate, and its study would serve no purpose here. We are concerned with cultural efficacy and trends of existing religions, and with the distorting influences that account for their being. Initially, as we have indicated, the movement which Jesus started continued among the non-Jewish people of the Mediterranean because it filled a need for leadership in something they wanted to do; it gave direction to a nebulous desire to revolt against metropolitanism.
Also the promise of reward in heaven was both an opiate for the miseries of the downtrodden, and an intoxicant, giving a feeling of strength to the failures and to the have-nots of the metropolitan civilizations. But when Christianity was carried to the pagan peoples beyond the Mediterranean, Christianity and the products of civilization became identified as one in the concepts of these non-metropolitan peoples. The character of Christianity reverted to the character of its parent metropolitan religion because of this identification. This reversion was also given impetus because there was no need for the teachings of Jesus among the pagans.
Among the pagans, there was no formality to be condemned in favor of spirit, no legality to be condemned in favor of honesty, no acquisitiveness to be condemned in favor of love and fellow-feeling. In their councils the pagans chose their leaders on a criterion of innate spirit. There was no law above the sacred honor of a spoken oath. A contempt for material possession was considered an essential quality of a nobleman. And, as these pagans loved war and fought on the slightest pretext, those who remained alive had a love for each other and a comradely fellow-feeling to an extreme that, if it be judged at all, was, in itself, a fault. But these pagans, who were in complete agreement with the direction of the reform movement of Jesus, did not have a religion to which the reform could be applied; they did not have a religion that was a metropolitan culture force.
They were individuals who made their own decisions as soon as they were adults, and they were ready, at any time, to stake their lives to defend that prerogative. So the formality of the Ten Commandments of Moses was imposed on them, rather than the spiritual substitute that was offered by Jesus. The first three commandments merely said to them that the god of the Christians was intolerant of other gods and a clean decision for or against the new religion would have to be made. The fourth commandment, with regard to resting on the Sabbath, was meaningless to these non-slave people, but it fitted in easily as merely another holiday. Honoring father and mother, whether or not worthy of honor, was hard to swallow but it was largely academic.
To a very great extent the people continuously bred out all who were not worthy of honor with the ready use of the sword. "Thou shalt not steal," and "thou shalt not covet" were largely meaningless; the pagans did not have an acquisitive culture; they measured a man's stature by his heroism, not by his possessions. "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and "thou shalt not bear false witness" were axiomatic in their culture and did not need to be commanded. But "thou shall not kill" was an utterly ridiculous and unthinkable commandment. The pagans were a warrior race, not a race of slaves. Not to kill would upset the selective evolution of heroes, and the world would become cluttered with dastards and weaklings. It was against every evidence of nature's purpose. The ready answer, only a few hours younger than the commandment itself was "you shall confine your killing to that done for the glory of God."
The pagans, to whom the commandment "thou shalt not kill" was an unacceptable offense against the manifest laws of nature, were simply told that god, not their perception, would now dictate who should be killed. The spokesman for god was the church. And, as has always been done, the commandment "thou shalt not kill" was enforced and spread with a sword. The guilt-feeling regarding Adam's original sin in presuming to surpass nature in deciding good and evil was carried over from Judaism and embraced by Christianity. The atonement therefor, the sacrifice of self for race, was broadened into the purportedly nobler sacrifice of self for all men who were born in a metropolitan civilization and therefore were guilty of Adam's sin. Only the rituals of worship are different in present-day institutional Christianity and Judaism.
The cultural direction is the same. Around the life and death of Jesus, Christianity has built a story of a god's self-sacrifice for mankind which has been deftly tied to the sacrifices and prophecies of Judaism. Jesus has been deified as Jehovah incarnate, or as the son of Jehovah, who was crucified voluntarily to atone for man's sins. This vicarious sacrifice of god for the original sin of Adam, and the sins of all who follow his footsteps, effectively transforms the old god of vengeance into a god of love, while capitalizing on the long history of the Jewish sacrifices as archetypes. As self-sacrifice in the right time and place is eminently admirable in all eyes, the story has universal appeal when the underlying dogma is ignored.
Also a beautiful, poetical fantasy of the birth of Jesus has been created, and the festival of Christmas has been superimposed upon, and has usurped the place of, the original festival of the new year's birth. Two thousand years of art, music, and poetry, by a highly individualistic people, pressed into the service of a metropolitan religion, has created from Judaism, and the gentleness of Jesus's life in reaction to Judaism's harshness, a religion much more acceptable than the raw pragmatism of Moses to those who do not have the innate callousness essential to metropolitan existence.
But it contains still the dogma that man's purpose in life is to deny and overcome nature. It is a metropolitan religion, which satisfies those who would rather be carried in the stream of a people's purpose than be separate entities and accept individual responsibility for their own decisions and acts. It has a long way to go before it completes its work as a cultural force acting upon the evolution of warrior-bred, individualistic peoples, but its efficacy is being manifest at an accelerated rate.
The massive, impersonal forms of charity organizations have usurped the reformative desire for a spirit of love and human kindness expressed by Jesus, and have themselves become cultural forces reacting against the reformative teachings of Jesus. Spirit has been lost in the letter of the law, and honesty has been replaced by legality. Inquisitions to destroy the opposition of the strong; monasteries and nunneries to breed out the truly religious; jails and insane asylums to breed out the rash and questioning; mass warfare to destroy the physically fit; medical aid to preserve the congenitally weak; all are tending to create a metropolitan people who will feel comfortable with a metropolitan religion.
The callous indifference to the petty irritations of a metropolitan acquisitive civilization, that is a distinguishing characteristic of the Jews because their metropolitan religion was a cultural force long before Christianity came into being, is now clearly becoming a characteristic of Christians. Every religion is a cultural force, and by culture we mean pressure that shapes the evolutionary direction of man. Religions based solely on dogma are unworthy of attention on a basis of their beliefs, but by their fruits we shall know them.
The cultural force of Christianity is breeding meekness in significant matters of spirit and creative will, but it is also breeding the unperceiving callousness to one's fellows that must characterize the beings who survive in metropolitan cultures. The ultimate effect of this in decreeing the fate of the civilization it produces has ample: precedents. The fate of our present metropolitan civilization is obvious. but it does not concern us. What does concern us is the mass pressure this highly efficacious metropolitan culture exerts on individuals who by nature are incompatible with it and the direction it thereby gives to the evolutionary stream of man.
MOHAMMEDANISM
Six hundred years after its birth, Christianity had become a force greater than its parent, Judaism. It fought , with Judaism, and claimed to be entirely different from Judaism but, to the detached observer, similarities were much more in evidence than differences.
Christianity was going into all the world, whereas Judaism was confined to a single race. That was the only difference the detached observer could see. But with that little difference Christianity was having an amazing success. Apparently it was going to turn the entire world into a single metropolis, one that would respond to the whim of whoever controlled the source of dogmatic pronouncements and interpretations of "god's words," if someone did not rise up and stop it.
The Germanic tribes of Europe had comradely love developed to a fault, and love of heroism developed to a point where every man sought for worthy causes in which to sacrifice himself in battle. The story of Jesus' teachings of brotherly love and his heroic self-sacrifice appealed to them. The metropolitan aspect of the religion was merely identified with fine craftsmanship of the Greek and Roman civilizations.
The Germans were caught off guard by a culture that was foreign and incomprehensible to their natures. Therefore they made no effective stand against it. The Arabs, on the other hand, were traders, and they understood the thought patterns that had developed Judaism. In fact, Yahweh was a north Arabian deity, whose acquaintance Moses made through his Midianite wife.
When the tide of Christianity began spreading in the direction of the Arabs, it is not surprising that a man arose who could recognize its essential efficacious characteristics and quickly develop a religion of the same design and efficacy as a counter weapon. Mohammedanism, or Islam as it is more correctly called, is a religion created by one mature, worldly-wise man.
Mohammed lived among a people who were metropolitan by temperament, but who had no metropolitan religion; they were simply realists with a tradition of wise teachings. They lacked the fanatical unity that had been given to the Jews by dogmas purported to have come direct from god, and they lacked the fanatical missionary drive that had been given to the Christians by dogmas purported to have come directly from the son of god.
Mohammed set about to remedy the situation by the simple expedient of appropriating the dogmas of Judaism and Christianity and turning them back against their sources of origin. He conceded that Moses and Jesus had access to special information in words, direct from the creator of the universe, and that these words were therefore higher than any observable phenomena of nature. Any contradiction between commandments from god in words and the evidence of god's work in nature could therefore be either ignored or interpreted as meaning that man's purpose was to change and triumph over nature. He denied that Jesus was the supreme god incarnate, but stated that he was even a greater prophet than Moses.
And, as in order of time, so also in progression of greatness, Mohammed claimed to be a still greater prophet than Jesus. He wanted to be sure that no one else would appropriate that maneuver and successfully claim to be still greater than Mohammed, because of following in time, so he announced that the line of prophets was definitely ended with him. Then he set about to adopt the opposition's dogmas. The dogmas he set forth show how directly and precisely he went to the source of Judaism's and Christianity's fanatical strength. The teachings of Islam may be briefly summarized as follows:
1. There is one god, Allah. He is an undivided entity, existent before the universe, the creator of all things, omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal. "He begets not and is not begotten; nor is there like unto Him anyone."
2. Mohammed is a messenger of god. He is a prophet as was Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus but he is "the seal of the prophets," the last and greatest. He is the final channel of revelation for all time and all generations. He is not divine and he performed no miracles other than his participation in writing the Koran as the means through which it was revealed.
3. The Koran is an exact replica of god's uncreated word which exists as a divine book carefully guarded in heaven. God ordered its contents revealed to men and it was dictated to Mohammed by the angel Gabriel.
4. There is a hierarchy of angels in heaven who assist god in his functions of administering the affairs of men. They were created before the universe and are of finer material.
5. Man's soul is immortal. There is a heaven and a hell which are places of extreme pleasure and extreme pain. There is a judgment day for each man and after death he is rewarded or punished according to his acts in this life.
6. All that happens to man is fixed by god. "No soul can ever die except by Allah's leave." Mohammedanism is designed as a universal religion and makes a point of not being highly intolerant of the inability of peoples with various customs to adapt themselves to its teachings.
It does, however, set forth six essential duties formalized from the observedly efficacious practices of Judaism and Christianity. 1. The public profession of belief in the one god, Allah, and in the prophet, Mohammed. 2. The adherence to a prescribed ritual of worship which includes five prayers daily at dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and night. These are to be performed in a fixed position which makes each believer an advertiser and defender of the faith. There is also a weekly congregational prayer and sermon. 3. Almsgiving for the support of the religion. 4. Fasting at definite periods. (This was recognized as an impressive ritual but it is one point on which Mohammedanism does not seem to follow Judaism and Christianity in spirit. The Jews and Christians practice fasting to mortify the body. The Mohammedan viewpoint appears to have been slanted more toward Hinduism. Fasting for the Mohammedan is a period of communion with god.) 5. Pilgrimages to the holy places of Arabia. 6. Holy war.
In the Mohammedan concept the world is divided into two zones; the abode of Islam, where peace prevails, and the abode of war, which includes all the rest of the world. It is the duty of all Mohammedans to keep expanding the abode of Islam until it encompasses the earth. There is none of the inconsistency of Judaism and Christianity which teach "Thou shalt not kill" and then ask their adherents to go into holy wars "to save Judaism, democracy, or Christianity."
The Koran frankly declares to be good what the Christians practice and deny. "Fight in the path of God against those who fight against you," is a precept of Mohammedanism; "but be not the aggressor"; the worldly-wise Mohammed transcribes the words purportedly dictated by the angel Gabriel, "for verily God loveth not the aggressors. And slay them wherever you find them, and drive them out of the places where they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter. But if they desist, then verily God is forgiving, merciful."
POPULAR MATERIALISM
Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism as cultural forces still bind purpose-hungry men into mobs, and in these mobs the individual can forget his lack of purpose by losing himself in a tide that appears to have purpose because it has direction. Their dogmas are still those that metropolitan peoples must have to keep the tide running but the miracles and myths on which their authority depends have outlived their credibleness. The metropolitan people, who would deny the nature that gave them being, would like a new authority for their objective of "victory over nature."
They would not think of opposing the tide, but they would like a new and more credible god to proclaim that the direction of the tide is good. We live in a scientific age that claims adherence to cold, hard facts. The precision of its language, the scope of its disciplines, and before all the concrete evidence of its achievements, inspires in us a certain respect. Few would hesitate to admit that a healthy respect is deserved. But the perceptive man will pull up short and check his expression of admiration when he sees the millions who bow before SCIENCE with the same religious awe that has been lavished by their kind on gods and demi-gods, of flesh, or stone, or fable, since long before the dawn of recorded history.
We need to remember that, despite the long, tedious road that Western science has traveled with imagination, courage and discipline, there is no evidence, whatsoever, that it is any nearer to a real understanding of the universe than is a savage child looking through the interlaced branches of the jungle roof above him to the infinite depths of the blue nothingness beyond. Science may even be further away. It may have to retrace the long tedious path it has come, searching for a lost clue, to which the direction given it by its verbalization will make it blind.
The science that deserves our respect, the science that is made up of a body of dedicated men, would, if necessary, have the courage, strength, and intelligence to throw over the massive tower of consistent hypotheses it has built and start again with a fresh viewpoint. But the momentum developed by the great mass of compulsive "believers," who look to scientists and see them as the high priests of a new materialistic religion, could never be checked by reason. Their old gods have disintegrated and they have snatched at a new one. For them there is no god but matter, and for them the only problem is that of finding the scientist-prophet, who can interpret the message of the god. Somewhere between the dedicated scientists, and the purveyors of scientific information for public consumption, there is a shadowy line where the fruits of analysis and introspection become dogma.
Scientists are credited by a worshipful public with having a special knowledge, understandable only by those who are geniuses by birth and erudite beyond comprehension by training. Their super knowledge must be interpreted and handed down by lesser priests, who present adequate credentials in the way of scientific degrees or personal conversations with the "gods," to a public hungry for deities and commandments. The popular faith in science is the most unadulterated form of faith in dogma. Those who believe and act upon this faith, while uninstitutionalized, constitute an efficacious dogmatic religious body of major proportions. For identification we have given their religion the name of Popular Materialism.
This is a metropolitan religion with a new modern perversion behind its dogma of metropolitanism. The savage child, lying on his back and looking into the blue depths of infinity, is most susceptible to having his innate being, which is trying to break through into consciousness, perverted by a fantastic story. The child who has grown up on fantastic stories is most susceptible to having his perception perverted by denying a portion of the evidence before him as fantastic and then dogmatically ignoring it.
Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism hypothesized a monotheistic god with a special affection for man out of nothing more substantial than purpose-hungry men's need for such a god. Then endowing him with characteristics that men seeking direction would attribute to their ideal master, they said he created the universe for the pleasure of man. When man violated god's obvious decrees of good and evil that are evident in the natural world, they said that the universe was transformed by god into a testing ground containing obstacles for man to overcome.
In this hypothesized circumstance, winning a victory over nature by cooperation, or withdrawing from nature, and from the natural self into a "spiritual community," became the basis for metropolitanism. Any evidence in support of the purported monotheistic god on which the first three dogmatic religions build their belief is difficult to produce, but this lack of evidence has been largely passed over until recent times. Now children raised on fantastic and obviously spurious stories as "stimulants of the imagination" ask for evidence that the old gods exist, or else for some new religion. They find a face lifting for the old religion in Popular Materialism.
Popular Materialism has no conspicuous fiction to be attacked. It has merely refused to consider apart of the evidence. Popular Materialism believes in no god but matter; it seeks only for a prophet who can interpret matter's message. It does not concern itself with spirit, or commandments, but with the search for the meaning of its god, matter. It says that the evidence does not indicate that the universe was created either for man's benefit or as a testing ground for man but everything indicates that man could triumph over it. They therefore conclude that universal cooperation of all men in discovering the "secret of the universe," and then subduing it for the benefit of man, is a logical objective.
The rejection of a single, albeit all important, fact as a fantastic concept is the modern twist that appeals to the over entertained, over sophisticated, and therefore highly skeptical modern child. The unadmitted evidence is that organic life and man have consciousness which cannot be conceived as an attribute of matter. Even if the complex purposes that motivate organic life and man could be construed as resulting from a complex mechanism inherent in certain accidental combinations of intricate molecular structures, consciousness would still remain unexplained. This is dismissed, by the true believer, as a minor thing that will be cleared up when the coming Messiah finally arrives and reveals the "secret of matter."
The Popular Materialists insist on ignoring everything that does not fit into their dogmatic doctrine that the material universe is the only reality. They insist that if something that might be called god is to be found, it must be found by the study of matter. They ignore the possibility that matter, which is known by consciousness, may be purely a concept of consciousness. They can conceive fantastic worlds in the fourth or fifth dimension but believe that they can be found only through physical science. The Popular Materialists believe the scientists will find these marvelous worlds and exhibit them with fitting fanfare.
They would not, for a moment, consider that they may already live in a dimension other than the material to which their dogmatic faith in matter and physical science blinds their perception. Their new world of another dimension must be found in some place other than home. Novelty and bizarreness is their desire. This desire is a simple product of a childhood overstimulated by clever, intricately contrived, spoon-fed entertainment. The Popular Materialists vaguely believe that an awe inspiring something, not consciousness, but SCIENCE produces the fascinating products of Western civilization which they consider a preliminary proof of their contention that god will be found in the laboratory. Most of the faithful followers of this religion go about the streets shouting, "SCIENCE is on the verge of discovering the secret of matter, Give alms, or vote more taxes, for the cause. Consecrate your children to SCIENCE. SCIENCE must not be handicapped by insufficient funds and insufficient neophytes. We must have more and better schools. We must insure that no genius shall lack the erudition and discipline that would fit him for a dedicated life in the service of SCIENCE. Your child might be the promised Messiah."
Others look to the skies for the coming, in all his glory, of He who shall reveal the "secret of the universe." Flying saucers and interplanetary space ships are dreamed of, sought for, seen clearly with the waking eye, and recorded by instruments of "scientific fidelity." "If He does not come, we must go into outer space and find Him," they proclaim. "Surely," they rationalize, "in all the great universe the same conditions favorable to the development of analytical intelligence that we find on earth must have been duplicated, perhaps before the earth was born, and beings of inconceivable superiority must have been living for countless aeons, as far above man as man is above the first cell of green scum that wiggled in the Cambrian fen."
Ah, the religious ecstasy of the imagined meeting Moses came down from Mount Sinai bearing a commandment "Thou shall not kill" and asked those, who believed in the god who gave it, to kill those members of their families who did not. They killed; and the followers of the concept that man's purpose is to unite and triumph over nature have moved against the universe, against those they held dear, and against their own natures, with the same unreasonable fanaticism ever since. Now the momentum continues under a new banner, with new weapons, new efficacy of organization, and an unprecedented clarity of purpose. It is Metropolitan religion brought to a new level. It even has a new and unbelievably efficient form for trying and condemning unbelievers.
It is one that surpasses the efficacy of the Christian inquisition, as a cultural instrument for affecting the evolutionary stream of man in favor of mass faddishness and against individuals of perception, as far as the atomic bomb surpasses the bow and arrow. The use of social statistics has become an adaptable combination of punishment and commandment for all who would digress from the true faith of metropolitanism. Social statistics is called a science, and so holds a position equivalent to a god incarnate, or the son of a god. Those who worship this god are completely deaf to the voice of the individual. His existence is not recognized. He must become part of the statistical majority or die.
If man is, in fact, the purely mechanical creature the Popular Materialist conceives him to be, this religion cannot fail to triumph over all others. It is stripped of the confusing concepts of the past religions, yet it rides the cultural wave created by the other dogmatic religions with an increased pace rather than a pause for readjustment. But like Christianity, which gained its power by harnessing the force of a people diametrically opposed to its concepts, Popular Materialism must take its power from a people diametrically opposed to it. Its sinews are the fanatical child-like people who can accept dogma without criticism, because they stand in open-mouthed awe staring at miracles worked by their gods.
But its life blood is the sincere, reflective scientists, who make possible the products of Western civilization. The blood and sinew are incompatible. However, Christianity gained its power by harnessing the force of a people diametrically opposed to its concepts. And Popular Materialism may be able to do the same. It may synthesize the incompatible blood and sinew into a terrible monster, of bizarre and unpredictable purpose and direction. If it succeeds, the monster may well leave an indelible mark on what might remain of man, before its blood coagulates and its sinews are tied up in a death paroxysm. Again our major concern is the effect it will have on the remaining evolutionary stream of man.
WESTERN PHILOSOPHY
We have noted the distorting effects that the pressures of existing religions have on the formation of new religions. However, in pointing out these we do not want to imply that religious history serves no purpose and that we advocate its destruction. We have concluded that it is primarily the pressure of religion as a culture, rather than simply the conceptual heritage, that distorts and overrules individual perception, and tends to destroy individuals whose perception is too strong to be perverted.
If the history of all religious perception were preserved in graspable form and studied by each individual with the minimum of social pressure, it could be very useful. For the pressures of religion are not all that distort innate perception from functioning freely. Religious history, perceptively analyzed, might save some new religion from a distortion of perception caused by another pressure.
One very conspicuous pressure that has strongly bolstered the dogmatic religions of the West, and is a strong factor in those now being formed is a simple, innate compulsion born of the fact that man is a gregarious animal. This simple fact they blow up into amorality and code of ethics. And because gregariousness is innate in man, these religions are seldom bothered with a need for supporting dogmas which proclaim that the metropolis is holy, that majority rule is essentially right, that the state is more than its citizens, that the group should have priority over the individual, and that mankind is greater than man.
There is an emotional pressure towards this point of view, and a careful study of religious history might be able to show how big a factor this pressure has been in creating a tendency to believe certain dogmas. In a study that distinguished dogmas from the realities that were distorted into dogmas, religious history could help man to more clearly perceive himself and his place in the universe. Man is a gregarious animal. It is a fact, but is not a basis for a religion. It surrounds man with a mass of men to such an extent that he cannot see over their heads to the rest of the universe, but it has no discernible universal value. It is not something that raises man above other animals. It is by no means even unique and peculiar to man. Man is evolved from monkey-like ancestors. Monkeys are gregarious.
If man were evolved from the cat family, he would be considerably less gregarious. If he were evolved from the sheep family, he would be more gregarious. If he were evolved from the lemmings, he would have his gregariousness already developed to the point of periodic over-population and mass suicide, and would not have to accomplish this feat of questionable merit by a metropolitan religion. From looking at these examples we can see that, while gregariousness has a survival value, if pressed too far it becomes a survival hazard.
At best it is only one of a great number of survival methods, and it is so widespread throughout nature that only the grossest lack of perception makes it possible for one to think of it as a special virtue when found in man. Man is utterly ridiculous when he proclaims that his herd animal tendency to give herd interest priority over individual interests, when solemnly proclaimed and dramatized by religious trappings, should merit him a select place at the right hand of the universe's creator.
But the number of man-like creatures who are unconsciously proclaiming this causes one almost to despair of the species, and to think that man might be a better being if he had evolved from a less gregarious animal. Instead of trying to justify a hyper-gregariousness by rationalizing it into a religion, man should be able to see, from the study of religious history, his innate need for guarding against the pressure of gregariousness on his balanced perception of reality.
It should be obvious that a man, in the center of a mob, who cannot see over the heads of other men to the greater universe around him, cannot hope to evolve a proper religion by merely considering man's relation to man. The highest purpose of man, which might be extracted from studying men, is not necessarily the purpose of the universe. The earth is a very small part of the universe and man is a very small part of the earth, both in power, and in the length of time he has inhabited the little planet.
For thousands of times the total existence of man, the world existed with organic life that was not man. The long duration of this prior organic life indicates that it was apparently adequate to whatever purpose it served. For countless aeons before that the world existed without organic life. So far as has been shown by any religion, it had no all-consuming need for organic life. Therefore the religions have laid no foundation for assuming that the purpose of the universe is to be a mere stage setting, or virtue-testing contraption, created by an omnipotent and omniscient god, who was preparing to engage in some master and slave, or cat and mouse, drama with man.
That the universe is useful to man, and must of necessity be, is as obvious and unimpressive as the fact that , the race is useful to man; the universe evolved, cradled, and nourished man. By man's very nature this is a continuing and inescapable relationship. Religion must not be based on this, but on an answer to the question of whether man is useful to whatever god or force created the universe.
The question which we must ask of man is whether he is a mere momentary parasite, struggling to make the status permanent and improve the take-all-give-nothing relationship, which he seems to have in the universe when viewed from some perspectives, or whether he fits into a universal scheme and purpose. Western science asks this question of the Western dogmatic religions, and knows that their inability to answer it is their weakness.
It knows that the evidence of the evolution of man and other organic life-from the simplest one-celled organism, over millions of years-and the evidence of the earth's antiquity prior to organic life, effectively refute the dogmatic religions, all of which consider that the universe is a mere insignificant stage setting for a man-god drama.
However, this evidence produced by Western science does not affect the basic concepts of the ancient introspective and analytical religions of the East. The concepts of the universe held by Western science and those held by Hinduism and Shinto do not coincide, but the objective data regarding the material world which has been accumulated by the West does not invalidate the studies of the "self' in the East and vice versa.
Their fields of study are entirely separate. Western science deals with matter as a reality, and the Eastern religions deal with the "self," or more loosely "consciousness," as a reality. Thus we see that, while any single religion is distorted, some pattern of balance may appear when religious history is looked at in the whole. Religions are created by man, and if there is meaning in man, the source from which man's creations spring, it must somehow exist, regardless of whatever distorted and fragmentary form it may take, in the man-created religions themselves.
When we note that the analytical and introspective religions of the East and the West do not contradict each other, but simply deal in two separate subject matters, we become interested in finding a point of contact for these separate subjects. We look again at how the religions have each treated the relations between the self, or consciousness, and the material universe; and we find that each has assumed a dogmatic position on the subject, then proceeded to construct a code of conduct based upon its assumptions. After once developing into a metropolitan religion, each has tried to maintain a consistent emotional appeal and has tried to minimize, ignore, or distort for its unifying purpose, the stream of concepts being fed into the pool of general acceptance. As a result of this, no religion has ever really come to grips with the problem of reconciling concepts of consciousness and concepts of matter.
Then we turn to the Western philosophers, who, although occasionally martyred for their insistence on the right to a free expression of opinion, have not built active religions on their concepts. We find that the problem of reconciling consciousness and matter is one of their major concerns and, since they are not trying to justify past actions, we should find that they are not hostile to extraneous concepts, as are the religions. When we investigate we find that they are not hostile. Indeed the opposite proves true to an extreme that is distressing. Western philosophers have welcomed every new concept over zealously. Instead of trying to ignore or minimize new concepts they have blown them up until they became too bulky for integration into the lives of practical men, whose concepts of the universe and the purpose evolved therefrom must be expressible in everyday action.
Thus the verbosely expressed concepts of philosophy have not led to actions that would test them as often as they have led to more verbosity. Western philosophy has become a complex game, played by highly trained professional players, and watched by a grandstand audience, much as a baseball game is played and watched. The philosophers are, all too often, carried away by their own logic. They become, not only distorted beings by thinking too abstractly, but also distorted logicians by an over meticulous attention to superficial ratiocination at the expense of distorting a more subtle logic subtle, subconscious logic, that deals with realities rather than words, and is evidenced by what practical men call sound judgment and common sense.
After a distortion has been effected by one philosopher, another comes along, sees the distortion, sets about correcting it, and in the effort, he also becomes over meticulous in attention to superficial ratiocination and distorts in another direction. To the audience in the grandstand it looks like an amusing, highly complex game that attracts brilliant intellects, but a game of the unsolvable type called idiot's delight. It offers its players no more than any other such game-nothing but the exquisite torture of new vistas of ever greater complexity.
To a few, who have faith in the existence of an absolute intellectual truth, it looks less like a game being played than like the writhing of a hurt, groping thing, struggling in blindness behind a veil, a veil which it never seems able to penetrate. We do not here propose to rend the veil, to open the womb that gives birth only to stillborn religions; but, to continue our orientation, we will set forth the problems that must be faced in all attempts to find an integrated concept of the universe, the problems which Western philosophy has faced with a mountain of words that is available to all.
Foremost among these is the question of whether consciousness, matter, or both, are real. At first glance they both appear to exist and to be somehow related, but neither appears to have any need for the other. If consciousness appears to be actually hampered by matter to such an extent that most heavens which are created in imagination from the desires of men are places I where the consciousness, or self, is free of matter.
Many religions and philosophies posit matter only as an education, or punishment, of the consciousness, or soul. If it learns or does its penance then it will be freed and all problems will be solved. These various concepts of the universe which must posit a heaven to give matter meaning cannot satisfy us, for we have even less evidence that heaven exists than we do that matter exists. We cannot be satisfied to posit one unknown as an explanation for another. Matter, if it exists, does not appear to be hampered by consciousness, but consciousness appears to be of no use to it.
If we assume the existence of matter we can well imagine that a universe of matter could exist independent of consciousness. Indeed, if we dwell at length exclusively on material evidence, we develop an inclination to believe that the universe was once entirely without consciousness, that life then came along by some mechanical accident, and that certain forms of matter developed a strange, indefinable attribute which we call consciousness. If we follow along, we postulate that this unexplained consciousness developed and became more intense until it began to turn from a useless attribute of matter into its master.
But when we halt our intense interest long enough to recover our balanced perceptions, we find that the acceptance of this perspective without a clear concept of consciousness as an attribute of matter, without even a plausible theory of how and why it could have developed, is as great a demand on our credulity as accepting matter as a testing ground for gaining entrance into a matterless heaven. Both consciousness and matter appear to belong to incompatible patterns. Both appear to exist, yet no metropolitan religion or no widely accepted philosophy satisfactorily reconciles their coexistence. Also no such religion or philosophy presents convincing theories or points out persuading evidence that one is an attribute of the other.
We cannot believe matter exists without consciousness, because consciousness is what does the believing and knowing. We find it difficult to believe that consciousness exists without matter, because it does not appear to have the full control it would be expected to have if it were all. The concepts of time and space need to be fitted into any all-embracing pattern which we may develop. They seem in some way to be a connecting link between consciousness and matter. Or if matter does not exist perhaps they are the key to why consciousness insists on holding to its concept of matter. We must not lose sight of them.
If we admit the real existence of matter, with time and space either as attributes of it or the attempts of consciousness to know it, we must admit the evidence of evolution. We must believe that there was a time when man did not exist, and, prior to that, a time when organic life did not exist. If matter did not create consciousness, then consciousness may have existed before there was organic life upon the earth, and so was, and perhaps is, independent of organic life upon the earth. Presumably, then, it existed from the beginning, perhaps before there was matter, or else it was created by something that was not matter .
If we do not admit the real existence of matter, with time and space either as attributes of it or the attempts of consciousness to know it, if we insist that consciousness is all, we must explain why consciousness conceived the material world, and why it insists on believing that the material world existed before man was. If consciousness is all, it must give its reason for all of the concepts it clings to which seem to handicap it. It must explain why it holds on to the seemingly burdensome concept of the material, while considering happiness as a heaven without the burden of the material. And through it all we must watch for implications from which we can develop amorality that is soundly rooted in our concept of the universe.
The Christian morality is not so rooted. If we accept that man is evolved from animal, and is animal, we cannot say that any behavior pattern which contributed to the evolvement of man is immoral. Quite the contrary. If we accept man as an animal, because evolved from animal, we must condemn as immoral any attempt to thwart man's fullest expression of his animal nature. If man is animal, and more than animal, then the morality of man must add to, but not detract from those things that the animal finds good.
And if we accept that animal-or more broadly, all organic life-is inorganic matter with something added that is purposeful and meaningful, we must be able to see that organic life adds to, but does not detract from inorganic matter. We can never be satisfied with the position of the popular materialism that claims organic life to be a freak accident in an inorganic universe, which may become its master but is incompatible with it. Nor can we be satisfied with the concept that organic life is merely a peculiar form of rot that attracts matter in a certain stage of its decay.
Something in this consciousness, or self, the existence of which upsets the materialists' theories, demands a consistent purpose for everything in the universe. It does not demand harmony; on the contrary consciousness shows a decided inclination toward a desire for relieving excessive harmony by conflict; but it wants the conflict to be purposeful drama, not unguided chaos. In our concept of the universe there must be no thing and no effect that we feel cannot be traced to a first cause, and we must know the intention, the direction, and the purpose of the first cause.
The key to the first cause appears always to be lodged in the answer to the question of whether consciousness, or matter, or both, are real. This is the major problem that has interested Western philosophy for twenty-five hundred years. But it would be an over meticulous logic that would attempt to point out a trend in Western philosophy of the sort religious scholars try to point out in their studies of religion, by their theories of the evolution of religious concepts. The expressed opinions of one philosopher have stimulated another, but there is very little evidence of continuous building on the work of a predecessor. Two, three, or four thinkers build on the same foundation, then the foundation is taken up and relaid.
Often the same concepts are simply rearranged, but the whole never reaches a stable form. Therefore, to avoid becoming mired down, we will restrain a strong inclination to enter into at least a brief review of the history of philosophy and only recognize, in passing, the pattern of vacillation between a preference for consciousness and matter as the basis of reality that our Western philosophic history has left. About 400 B. C. Democritus declared that "in reality there is nothing but atoms and space."
A little later Plato presented the world of ideas as reality, and the world of perception, or phenomena, as a world of appearances only. He based his viewpoint on the consideration that ideas are a result of rational thought, or scientific knowledge, whereas sense perception is less dependable. He conceived the real world as static, composed of universal ideas, entities existing without time or space. He conceived the world of the senses as in the process of becoming, a world that was approaching the world of ideas.
Matter, to him, was a principle of variability and multiplicity in the world of becoming (a world part way between non-being and being) . His pupil, Aristotle, insisted that Plato's world of ideas did not explain the phenomenal world, that it was only a generic representation of the sense world, and that the relation between the two worlds as presented by Plato was only metaphorical. Aristotle presented universal ideas as real, in the sense of being the formative principle of things. He conceived all things as being composed of two principles, form and matter, except the Prime Mover of the Universe, which he considered as pure ideal form.
He considered that the Prime Mover was the uncaused first cause of the universe, motionless itself, but the cause of all motion because it was the ideal form toward which all matter strives. Matter was a very vague concept to both philosophers. Neither denied its existence in a world known by sensory perception, but neither gave much attention to the world known by sensory perception. They considered it unfit for scientific study. But both, in effect, believed in the reality of both consciousness and matter. This dual aspect of reality, as matter and consciousness, with consciousness the controlling force, predominated until about the sixteenth century. At that time Bruno attacked the Aristotelians. He spoke of god as a principle of nature.
Consciousness was still conceived as existing but it was no longer conceived as controlling matter; it was considered to be an attribute of matter. Motion, within the universe, was not conceived as being directed by consciousness toward a goal, but as being simply the nature of things. This line of thinking continued to grow in favor during the seventeenth century. Descartes and Hobbes presented mechanical concepts of the universe, with consciousness playing a very small part.
Spinoza presented all as being god and behaving according to god's nature, but denied will, or intention, as the directing force. In the eighteenth century, scholars reversed the tendency of the previous century; they again placed the accent on consciousness, not matter, as being reality. Berkeley attempted to dispose of the concept of matter by considering matter as the thoughts of god, and therefore more forceful than the thoughts of men. Hume's concept completed the expulsion of matter entirely from the world of reality. Kant again brought matter back within the concept of reality. He presented a world of things that have an existence in themselves, apart from the consciousness that perceives them.
However he injected anew idea that, inasmuch as the consciousness has certain conceptions and ways of knowing which condition its perception of things in themselves, perception of things can never be trusted to be accurate. In the words with which we started, Kant conceived reality as composed of both consciousness and matter, but reasoned that consciousness can be known and studied, but the reality of matter must be accepted on questionable evidence. This dual quality of reality continued in the concepts of the major philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, varying in conception but retaining its duality.
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel presented systems of idealism based on duality. Schopenhauer conceived the world as will and idea, but concluded that the will was blind and purposeless. What we wish to point out in this hasty glance is that, after twenty-five hundred years of circling, zigzagging, and oscillating back and forth between various concepts of consciousness and matter, philosophers end up, as of this moment, with the concepts of both consciousness and matter still in a nebulous state.
Twenty-five hundred years of the most intense study by thinking men, who accepted metropolitanism as good, have produced no irrefutable concept of reality. The major criticism that we can make of them is that they appear to have been looking at each others words and thoughts too much, instead of looking at reality itself. Of this much we are positive: words seldom clearly point to reality and so deflect perception in ways that are often too subtle for discerning.
The philosophers have tried to avoid this distortion and we have no quarrel with them. It is those who distort and turn distortion into dogma, that are cultural forces which we must meet. As we have previously indicated, materialism is now becoming a dogmatic religion. Because of the long dominance of Christianity in the Western world, consciousness has become associated with the Christian concept of soul. Persons who are dogmatic by nature, reacting against the Christian dogma of soul, are rapidly popularizing a dogma that there is no such thing as consciousness.
This is not a carefully expressed opinion, such as the materialistic philosophers have produced, but an unadulterated dogma, something to be accepted because it is pronounced by persons claiming authority to pass judgment. It is often taught in schools and colleges as an incontestable fact, handed down by the "highest authorities," and the dogma is supported only by the most superficial reasons. Great weight is given to the implication that any concept of consciousness, soul, or any such thing, as a reality is "old fashioned" and modern science has "progressed" far beyond such "nonsense. This dogma has a free field in a world where the Christian dogmas are disintegrating.
The preponderance of present-day research is concentrated on matter because such research can be turned to economic advantage. Consciousness, as a reality, receives no attention. The hazy concept of consciousness is left unexamined because it has become identified with the Christian "soul" which is conceived only as an entity in a fabled god-man drama that ignores the material universe. We admit that this concept of a self, or consciousness, is completely indefensible. But the time has now come for us to examine realities and their relation to each other as a basis for our religion, and we cannot dismiss consciousness as non-existent.
CONCEPTS, KNOWING, AND SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE
We cannot accept, merely on the basis of some religious dogma, the existence of something resembling the Christian concept of a soul. We refuse to accept such a concept merely on the basis of a re-reaction to the reaction against it.
We restrain ourselves from believing, merely because of an emotional need born of the emptiness we feel as we stand over the motionless body of one we love, that the something which once gave that body an extra quality it no longer possesses is a detachable entity, which has found the blue that together we tried to attain when we climbed the mountain.
We find it impossible to believe that there is no distinction between matter and dream, and that this matter, which appears to us as different, is nothing but a dream product of our consciousness; it does not respond to our will. But we also cannot accept the position of the materialists, that consciousness is only a functional complex of matter. That is completely untenable. We perceive consciousness directly. It is of our essential "selfs," the one reality that is known unequivocally.
The universe that is not self is known, if is known at all, only by consciousness. Not only must data regarding it pass through sense organs that may distort, and are unquestionably selective, but that data forms part of the pattern of the universe as we perceive it only if it can be fitted into the pattern of the universe already existent in our selfs at the time we make our first analysis of data. Thus all patterns of the universe which our selfs form, and can form, are highly suspect unless we know our selfs thoroughly.
The knowledge of our selfs on which all are in agreement is very limited. We consider the following assumptions of sufficiently wide acceptance to form the basis for a discussion that will be preliminary to placing them in a pattern, a pattern that is intended to give significance to the assumptions themselves.
1. The self has unequivocal knowledge that it is.
2. The self knows awarenesses that we can recognize under the terms light, darkness, red, blue, pressure, sour, sweet, fragrance, heat, cold, et cetera. Awarenesses is not the word we want. There is no undogmatic word for the perceived realities. These awarenesses are thought of as sensory perceptions in the Western world. Sensory perception definitely does not point to the idea for which we claim general acceptance. For lack of a better word we will call them awarenesses, but the Western coloring of sensory perception is not included in this statement of wide acceptance, simply the awarenesses as a conscious experience, without reference to the body that is often identified with the self, or the universe, or anything other than the awarenesses themselves.
3. Some of the awarenesses the self knows are patterns. As with other awarenesses, no implication that the patterns exist outside of self is contained in the statement of general acceptance.
4. The self has will and can choose among known awarenesses.
5. The self has memory of awarenesses; that is, the self has the ability to recall and reexperience those that have been previously experienced. This memory is, at least partially, an act of will.
6. The self has memory of patterns; that is, the self has the ability to recall and reexperience patterns that have been previously experienced. This memory is, at least partially, an act of will.
7. The self has ability to create either new awarenesses in new patterns or new patterns of remembered awarenesses. Geometrical figures, musical melodies, mathematical systems are examples of creations by self. At least some of the innumerable concepts of reality for which men claim exclusive validity are creations of selfs.
8. The self enjoys its being and the joy of being is the prime mover of the will.
On the basis of our own self-examinations, and the works of others who have made intense self-examinations, we conclude that certain patterns are essential awarenesses of our selfs at the time we first become conscious of our selfs as entities. We will assume that the concepts of time and space are sufficiently recognized as innate patterns of awarenesses so that we may talk of them as existent in self during our discussion that precedes presentation of the pattern in which they are contained.
We know that all of our awarenesses, including patterns, do not respond to our wills. Conceivably this could be because our selfs contain conflicting wills. Dual wills within one self are frequently posited, and the positing of such constitutes a major phase of disagreements among individuals and peoples. When dual wills within one self are posited, they are usually considered as being (1) the true, or broad will of comprehensive wisdom, or the will of god, and (2) the false, or narrow will, still in the process of learning, or the will of man.
This concept of dual wills in one self has its largest following in India, but spills over into the Western world. In its unadulterated form, it is an alternate for positing the existence of a material universe. For those who posit a material universe it is an unnecessary duplication of assumptions to account for the basic awarenesses, including patterns, of which the self is conscious but which do not respond to the will of the self. To continue laying the basis for a discussion, we must choose to speak the concept language of one side or the other.
We choose to carry on our initial discussion in the language of those who posit the existence of a material universe. In so doing we are recognizing that the self has hypothesized a material universe to account for what does not respond to its will. It can fit all awarenesses and patterns into its essential being and find them compatible with its Own essential patterns, including space and time, but it cannot make them respond wholly to its will. It must hypothesize either a dual will in self, or the existence of something outside of self.
In hypothesizing the material world, the self is deciding that an integrated will is essential to its being. Whatever pattern is necessary to preserve that concept of self as a being with an integrated will must be accepted. Thus, if the body does not respond to the will in a crucial test, then the body must be conceived as not being self. If the body dies when the self says "live," then it cannot be construed to be part of the essential self, and we may be left with a question of what the essential self is. Thus we see that the material is merely a concept of that which does not respond to the will of self, and self is merely a concept of that which is not beyond the control of the will.
While recognizing that all are mere concepts hypothesized by the self, we find the hypothesis of a material world preferable to the alternate choice of an unintegrated self. Later we will consider the total pattern into which this choice fits, but at present we will only say that the choice appears to be what the Western world calls an instinctive or innate preference. In our initial discussion we will assume the material world to be a reality, and assume that those awarenesses in an organic being which appear to be stimulated by it are, in fact, so stimulated.
Having accepted that hypothesis, we can accept all the data that Western science has amassed about the material universe by its amazingly ingenious methods. However we must be careful to distinguish between data and interpretative patterns for the data which are created by the self. Having recognized that our selfs divide the total field of real knowledge into: the non-material, or self, which we know exists; and the non-self, or material universe, the segregated existence of which we have merely assumed; we find ourselves in a strange position regarding our relative knowledge of each. About the self, it first appears that we know very little; while, about the material universe, we know a great deal.
This causes us to pause and ask, why, to inquire as to whether the self is a minor entity and the universe a major one. However, even if that be true, it is still strange that the self's knowledge of the universe, which is made part of self, should be more than the self's knowledge of the self, that contains all knowledge. A very brief look at the nature of this knowledge reveals that the unbalance exists simply because knowledge regarding the material world has been amassed, analyzed, and organized by Western science, while knowledge regarding the self is a chaotic junk pile of abortive concepts contained in religion, philosophy, psychology, mythology, poetry, novels, history, et cetera.
Whether by acquiring fresh knowledge or organizing what we have, it appears that, in our attempt to find a satisfactory working relationship between our selfs and the universe, our first efforts should be directed toward attempting to recover our balance of knowledge, by concentrating our attention on the self. At the present time, while Western science is still a pure introspective and analytical religion, while it has not yet been absorbed into the other religions that are attempting to make it part of themselves, we are in a highly favorable position regarding the non-self world.
We can accept the major portions of Western science's findings about the universe with the same confidence that we have when we accept, after assuming the existence of a material world, that the awarenesses that appear to be stimulated by the material world are, in fact, so stimulated. Western science gives us a great abundance of data and suggested assimilation patterns to consider, and carefully segregates its data, its currently accepted assimilation patterns, and its speculations.
We may find some slight difference where the concept of the material trails off into transcendental hypotheses regarding the ultimate essence of matter, but, on the whole, we find no need to review the major conclusions of Western science. We can concentrate our attention on that field where accumulated knowledge is but a junk pile -albeit a field where we have ever with us the full and vital subject of our study -our selfs.
The evidence amassed by Western science leads us to assume that life existed long before man evidenced a conscious will as an organism, that the universe existed long before any living thing, and, therefore, the universe has a pattern and purpose that is not a product of the will of any organic being. It is that pattern and purpose which Western science seeks to discover without reference to self. It seems to assume that the pattern of the universe will explain its purpose and possibly the consciousness and will of self.
In Western science's exclusive concentration on the material universe, the self seems nothing, a mere point of perspective-perhaps a real zero point. We have no wish to attempt to discredit the evidence amassed by Western science but the conclusion that it tentatively draws from the evidence, as indicated by the direction of its further inquiries, we cannot accept even tentatively. We remember that it was the self that hypothesized the material universe. The self cannot be a real zero point. If it were no more than an undefinable consciousness mirroring the material it would still not be a real zero point. It must be a reality.
Translated into the graphic language of Western Concepts, the non-material self and the material universe appear like two cones whose apexes meet in an absolute zero point which is our fixed perspective. If we look at the material we do not see the self. If we look at the self we do not see the material. But while looking at the material, our selfs are selecting what we see and how we compose the conceptual pattern of the universe. If the material world be real, then, when we look at self, something in the material -perhaps the design of our brains and the pattern of our atomic structure -is affecting the manner in which we compose the conceptual patterns of our selfs.
If we continue to concentrate unwaveringly on the material universe we are at a great disadvantage: we do not have any conscious knowledge of self and of its influencing will to selectivity, and thus our interpretation of the material universe comes upon us from out of the darkest dark. When we recognize that, in the concepts of the Western world, we cannot look at self and the material at the same time, albeit we look at them from the same point, and we then turn to look at our selfs, our position is greatly improved.
Our knowledge about the material universe is knowledge in our waking consciousness, and we can carefully observe to what extent it influences our selection of what we perceive to be innately existent in self. Our knowledge of our selfs is direct knowledge. It comes to us through no medium that is suspect. We cannot deceive ourselves that we have "proved" its validity when we have merely checked over, with painstaking care, the medium through which we received it. We must pass on it simply as knowledge, bare and unadorned. We want to interpret learned and/or self-created patterns by a master test-pattern which we postulate as being existent within our selfs.
Our concern is to discover any comprehensive master test-pattern that innately exists in self, and see how it relates to the perceived realities of the material universe. Our attempt to find this master test-pattern cannot be creative. It must be destructive. Our success in this venture depends on our ability to destroy with the same calm, considered selectivity that we employ when we create. We are faced with the task of stripping our selfs of patterns that can be clearly recognized as synthesized during our lifetime and then looking only at what is left in our selfs.
As the selective factor that seeks to bring forth from the unknown immensity of our selfs the comprehensive master test-pattern, we hold up before our selfs the pattern of the universe produced by our own observations and those of the currently available introspective and analytical religions: Shinto, Hinduism, and Western Science. These various patterns we seek to keep in composite form, with their lines of disagreement a mere blurred and hazy suggestion, and we deliberately blur any points of clear agreement with all alternatives which we can conceive.
We want this hazy indefiniteness in the hypothesis; its purpose is to give our selves full freedom to present any remotely comparable master pattern, without the danger of losing its original lines by our desire to enforce upon it a congruity with known patterns. What we want to guard against is the danger of encouraging our selfs to create patterns or to fill in partially known patterns. We do not want to create; we want to find what is innately existent in our selfs. We are interested, therefore, in clearing our selfs of what we have created by our own abilities.
For example, we have either created, or found in our selfs, a world of geometric figures. They are approximations of figures that we perceive in the material world but they are not the same. The figures that we perceive in the material world have a complexity that is beyond our ability to grasp as a single awareness, but the geometrical figures are easily graspable. Some of them may, conceivably, be innately existent in self. But as we play with them we observe that we can clearly create patterns similar to them in our own consciousness. We need to distinguish between our new creations and any similar innate patterns.
Presumably, the innate should have priority and be useful for evaluating the others. Let us press the example still further to where it touches what we believe to be an unquestionable reality. We believe that we have an innate concept of a three dimensional world. We can conceive a two-dimensional world that is like a flat sheet of paper. If we dwell on it, we become absorbed in our creation. In our absorption, we designate two points, A and B, which are M miles apart. We can conceive the possibility of taking the two dimensional world and bending it around so as to place point A on point B.
Then continuing the pattern, we can l hypothesize the possibility of a fourth dimension, and the I possibility of bending the three-dimensional world so that two points, thousands of miles apart, could be made to Coincide and reduce travel time. We have not found a pattern for this four-dimensional world innate in our selfs, but we can made a mathematical formula for it, and we can spend our lives building "space benders" instead of "means of transportation" and building intricate conceptual patterns that purport to show that each "reduction in time of travel" is, in reality, a partial success in "space bending." if we are to find the patterns that innately exist in our selfs, we must avoid this sort of pattern building.
There is no obvious reason to doubt that we could create a thoroughly logical concept of a four-dimensional world if we lived with the assumption long enough; it might even be satisfying to the innate self if we worked it into complete compatibility with what we now are. But before we expand our beings by new concepts, we want to know what our innate concepts are and what purpose and direction of growth they indicate. So we look at what we know innately or instinctively. We do not know a four dimensional universe. Therefore until we know our selfs, and why we have an innate concept that the world is three dimensional, we should not hypothesize time as a fourth dimension of space, and spend our lives trying to determine whether it is or is not.
We want to know the essential connection between: the three-dimension space that we know; time that we know; the self that we know, particularly the will of the self; and that portion of the awarenesses-pressure, red, sour, et cetera-that we hypothesize as evidencing the existence of a non-self because they do not respond to our will. We want to find the patterns that relate our knowns. We want to limit our efforts toward developing our potentials until we know our selfs as they are. We recognize that we can create and exist in a world of concepts regarding our ability to evaluate facts, and to measure the validity of impressions received from the material world and patterns created by others, through processes that we call logical and reasonable.
This activity gives considerable happiness to those who create and live in such a world. Some men, such as Aristotle, have valued it highly. They have projected the concepts of this world of reason, and their high opinion of it, into whole civilizations. Their concepts might have survived as a separate religion, but instead they have made up a substantial part of various other religions. We need make very little effort to discover that the processes we call reasonable or logical, like the examination of the medium through which a sensory perception passes, do not contribute to what we know.
They merely examine piece by piece a pattern that is too big for a single awareness, with an attempt to see that all the pieces dovetail in a manner similar to the way pieces of more simple and more graspable patterns dovetail. They cannot pass on the validity of each piece, nor the validity of the pattern as a pattern. Yet the Western world has dogmatically given these man-created patterns of reason and logic a supremacy over everything in and out of consciousness, which is wholly unwarranted.
We have discovered no way of knowing but simple awareness. We know the color red. The acquired concept that red is alight wave of a certain length and frequency, which acts upon the retina of the eye to create a measurable electrical impulse, which in turn passes along a nerve fibre, and finally stimulates a particular cell in the brain, at which time the self experiences an awareness of red all this adds nothing to our knowledge of red. We know red as simple awareness of red. We may associate it with a particular emotional awareness. We may associate it with other colors or things.
We may associate it with a lifetime of elaborate scientific experiments that gives us "more knowledge on the subject than any person alive." We may be able to stimulate the awareness of red by other external means than light waves, or we may be able to experience the awareness by an act of will. But we still know red only as simple awareness of red. We cannot say positively that our knowledge of red comes through the senses, that it is accurate knowledge by self of what is not self, but we can say that it is of the stuff of which our essential existence is made, that it is of the essence of reality.
The awareness of patterns about light waves, retinas, nerves, electrical impulses, et cetera, can give our selfs awareness of being, and, if we compare them to the pat-terns that we call reason and logic, we will probably find that they fit the patterns closely enough to be called reasonable and logical, but we must examine them carefully before we say the patterns are real. They do not appear to be part of self and they may be faulty self-created representations of the non-self to the self. Without changing perceived realities we could explain them to our selfs in other ways if we spent as much time on other explanations as we have spent on the ones that are currently accepted.
Something less contrived and more comprehensive than the patterns of reason and logic tells us what is real. When we examine our awarenesses of patterns that are comprehensive enough to include a relationship between self and matter, we observe that we perceive a mass of matter, a mountain, or a sea, as a challenge to the will of self. Certain other patterns of awarenesses-some of red and l heat, for example-we perceive as danger to self. Red, fragrance, and a certain shape is a pattern of awareness which we call a rose, that signifies pleasure to self. This perception of relationship appears to be evolved from certain basic innate relationships between self and awarenesses, including pattern awarenesses.
The effect of the relationship upon the emotions of self, or the will of self, is clearly recognized in many patterns that can be perceived as embracing both the self and the non-self world. But we also have an interest in patterns that embrace the self as a perceiver and the non-self as the perceived, which may indicate innate knowledge of an emotional relationship of the self, or a will relationship of the self, to the non-self, which is existent or potential in the patterns; but, if so, the memory of the relationship is dimmer than the simple, seemingly disinterested, preferences for some patterns over others.
We know this innate awareness of pattern preference as awareness of beauty, goodness, or truth. Thinkers of the Western world cannot talk of one portion of the triad beauty-truth-goodness without referring to the others, but the Western world, with an apparent inanity, the derivation of which would lead us to a mere psychiatric study, insists on trying to factor the triad. Beauty is the word it uses when talking of an object perceived by self as if the emotion produced in self were intrinsic in the object.
Truth is the word it uses when talking of abstract thought as if the abstractions had existence independent of the realities they feebly attempt to symbolize. Goodness is used chiefly when talking of actions as if the actions could have reality distinct from the self that is willing and distinct from the other selfs or non-self realities that form part of the pattern. This makes it very difficult for us to express ourselves in the language of Western civilization. We need one word and one concept for the triad as a whole. If we could call the triad beauty, we could say simply that following our sense of beauty to its basic innate essence is the only avenue by which we can hope to discover the comprehensive master test pattern which we want as the basis for our religion.
But we recognize that Western civilization circumscribes a field that it calls the field of beauty, which is separate from such fields as science and religion. The field that civilization calls beauty gives some of us an unwillingness to talk of beauty, because we associate the limited field with its drooling missionaries, just as we associate the limited field that civilization calls truth with its preoccupied scientists and philosophers, and the limited field it calls religion with its fanatical missionaries. Broadening our perspective beyond the concepts of the West for a moment may help to give us balance. Shinto emphasizes the exercise of an innate preference for patterns, as such patterns appear in the natural world before man came upon it, as a major religious devotion.
If we think of Shinto instead of the narrower Western word aesthetics and combine it with Hinduism, which emphasizes man's study of his self and his willed actions, and with Western science, which emphasizes study of what is real in the non-self world, we will have a better balanced concept of our field of study, when we turn to look for the significant test-pattern in our selfs, than if we simply try to amalgamate into one word the triad of beauty, goodness, and truth. Balance that will not distort our perception is our greatest need, for we have nothing by which to evaluate the master test pattern when we find it but an innate recognition by an unknown faculty that is part of our selfs.
Concepts of proof, reason, and logic we must strip from ourselves, because we recognize that they do not contribute to basic awareness or basic knowledge. Let us therefore take the most comprehensive concept of what we term our sense of beauty, free it from the associations placed on it by the droolers, and expand it into our criterion for valuing patterns that are innate in self. It makes no difference whether we call it sense of beauty, sense of validity, Shinto religious perception, or something else; but it is important that we expand the field to which we apply it to include all patterns for which we know affinity without a perceivable involvement of will or emotions.
Thus if we call it beauty, then we must recognize that this sense of beauty, this innate awareness of pattern preferences, is our only test of validity. We must stand or fall on our perception. We must say with Keats: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -that is all ye know on earth." If we find a comprehensive test pattern that satisfies us completely, we can carry our agreement further, and say that is all we need to know. To segregate our innate preference for patterns into a sense of validity, a religious or moral sense, and a sense of beauty, is merely to create unnecessary stumbling blocks to our perception.
There is one act of perceiving and valuing; the whole of the self and the whole of the material universe as it is known by the self is to be perceived and valued as one comprehensive pattern. If we cannot do this we fail completely. Since there can be no perception independent of a perceiver, we have the obvious problem of getting our selfs, with their emotions and willings into a perspective where they may take their unbiased place in our perception of the pattern. The Hindu method of attempting to avoid distortion is to reduce the desires of self and the will of self to almost zero.
We consider that this distorts, because self with a near zero will and desire is a self that has been conditioned to accept a perspective that is not innate. Our method for achieving the unbiased perspective of self is to perceive our selfs in the pattern, and then tentatively substitute some other self, then some other, each in its turn, until the most diverse assortment of selfs that we have assumed to exist has been substituted into the pattern-and see if that pattern still appeals to our sense of beauty. If So when we think we have found the master test pat! tern in our selfs we will turn around on the zero point, and project that pattern into the material world. We will then ask ourselves (I) if it is congruent, and (2) if another self can replace the self we can perceive, our self, without distorting the pattern.
Then, to the extent that we can communicate, we will try to discover how the other self feels in the pattern that we have projected. Words are of little value for imposing that pattern on others; we must do it by action. Words, also, are of little value for them to tell us how it feels. But they can tell us by their actions toward us if they have the capacity to act effectually. This is the only test to which we can put our master test-pattern or religious concept. The success of this test is dependent on other selfs having their freedom to act unrestricted; it is also dependent on other selfs not being "converted" to our opinion, but having their own perceptions uninfluenced by ours as much as possible.
We do not forget that we hypothesized the existence of the world outside our selfs in the beginning. If it be not real there are no other selfs. We know that "I am" is a reality. But can we know that any other self is a reality? We know that we can create a machine that can ratiocinate faster and more accurately than man, that can react to stimuli in the same manner that man does. Presumably, if we became sufficiently skilled craftsmen, we could make a machine that would duplicate man's appearance and behavior so accurately that it would be objectively indistinguishable from man.
But we cannot conceive that any mechanical ingenuity which we might express in it, would endow it with that something which we know as consciousness. We recognize that there are men who are color blind. A mechanical device could translate different colors, red and blue for instance, into identifiable patterns of gray, so that red could always be identified as red and blue as blue by the color blind, but the lack of incapacity to distinguish would not cure the color blindness-only the functional disability resulting from it.
The effect of light waves passing through the eye, into the retina, along the nerves to the brain, where they are compared with stored images, actions decided upon and directed, all this can be mechanical; but the awareness of red and blue as such is something other than function. Just as there are men who are color blind, it is not inconceivable that there are men who have no consciousness, whatsoever; but, if so, we would have to think of them as different from men like ourselves.
We would consider them as a strange breed of man-like robots, objectively indistinguishable, and indistinguishable by any functional test, but still different, and different in the most significant manner possible. We know that there are differences in intensity and quality of consciousness; but we know that only within our selfs, by comparing one conscious experience of self to another, in our own consciousness. Any relation, whatsoever, to any functional test that could be devised would have no significance. This is knowledge, gained by ourselves from the study of our own consciousness, and we can only assume that what is true for us is true for others that appear to be like us.
From the fact that the intensity and quality of consciousness within one self varies from time to time, it seems probable that the intensity and quality of consciousness varies from individual to individual. However, we persist in believing that those who disclaim the existence of consciousness, entirely, are speaking from an overwhelming will to be consistent in a pattern of logic, a pattern based on an assumption that matter is the only reality; that they are ignoring the empirical data regarding the self that is supplied to them by their own beings.
In other words, we cannot know, but we persist in believing that, although some seem to come very close, there are no man-like beings in the world as we perceive it that are complete robots. We also believe that no thing which appears to have life and will is a mechanical robot. Many religions of the Western world dogmatically assert that everything was created for man's benefit, and that man alone of the animals has a soul. In these religions, the concept of soul is merely a dogmatically distorted concept of consciousness as a spiritual entity in a man-god drama.
Many persons, who are trying to sluff off obviously invalid concepts, have exchanged the Christian concept of soul for perceivable consciousness. But because the Christian religion claims that man alone has a soul, they then are simply left with an unexamined belief that man alone, among living things, has consciousness. A very prevalent idea that man thinks with words also contributes to the belief that man alone has consciousness, for only man has words. It is obvious that some men do at times, and perhaps most of the time, think with words, as it can be clearly seen that their invalid conclusions result from invalid concepts which are contained in the words they use.
We can even observe, by studying our selfs, that it is possible to have conscious being, to a very great extent, exclusively in words, or in mathematical concepts, or hypothesized concepts of the universe, or in other self-created worlds. But we also know, from the same source, that it is possible to have conscious being in the world that appears to be material and does not respond directly to our will. Objectively it appears that men all have some conscious being in the material world. It appears that other animals do not have words or any other discipline for maintaining self-created worlds and therefore have conscious being in the material world to a greater extent than man does. Conscious being is very much alike in both the material and the self-created worlds.
Thus we assume that all living things have consciousness and that this consciousness is similar, in its essential characteristics, to our own. Our assumption that there are other selfs, similar to our self, then, should be able to include all living things. This assumption may help to save our tentative replacement of "I am" with other selfs, in the comprehensive master test-pattern, from a distortion it might have if we limited our concept of selfs to men-selfs. We do not want to forget that it is the total universe with which we are seeking to establish an understandable relationship.
The greater body of kinship our selfs can properly find, the greater will be the scope of our test for validity. We do not want to limit our kinship to man, for we recognize that we have a valid claim to brotherhood with every living cell in every form of life on earth. We have one more question before we look for the source of our innate knowledge: What are the possible channels of this innate knowledge? We sometimes feel we can perceive one consciousness, or perhaps subconsciousness, that permeates all men, and perhaps all living things.
However, the preponderance of our awarenesses indicates that our own consciousness, along with our subconscious self, is limited to a single perspective point so strongly that a point, having a definable position in time and space, may, for the purpose of discussion, be considered as identified with our living selfs, and this point in past generations has been carried forward from living organism to living organism with the fertilized ovum. The analytical religions of the East consider consciousness as identified with the breath, and consider it a detachable entity, coexistent with everything that breathes. It is assumed to take up residence in the living thing with its first breath, and depart with the last.
In the West this Eastern concept of consciousness is often distortedly pressured into conformity with the dogmatic Western religions' concept of a soul, as an entity in a hypothecated god-man drama, but in the East the soul is conceived as existing in all living things, and so approaches more nearly our assumption of consciousness in all living things. When a pattern that identifies consciousness with a living cell and one that identifies consciousness with breath are expanded to mesh with the total pattern of the universe, a significant difference appears, but in the present considerations they are substantially compatible.
Like the West, the East also posits the evolution of consciousness from its being in simpler forms of life to man. In the East the soul is conceived as inhabiting different bodies from simpler to more complex life without reference to physical consanguinity. In the West the consciousness is considered as coexistent, or identified, with an unbroken physical heredity. We are concerned with the patterns in consciousness with which the individual is born. We want to separate the innate patterns from all patterns that can be identified as learned. Whether the innate patterns came into our world of consciousness identified with the breath or the cell does not, at this point, concern us, so long as we can assume that the innate patterns exist.
In the West we base this assumption on continuity of cellular life. The conceptual language of the West is the one we have chosen for our use so we will talk of what is inherent in the cell. The evidence Western science has considered indicates that man's behavior depends on learning to a much greater extent than that of other animals, and this learning buries his innate patterns, or instincts. But Western science conceives that man is of the animal kingdom, and that the universal characteristics of the animal kingdom are essentially valid for him. We have no quarrel with this thinking. We, therefore, assume that man has instincts.
Instincts can be interpreted as nothing other than inherited memories. After recognizing that a faculty for inherited memories does exist we become concerned with the extent of these memories. Observations indicate that those things most vital to survival constitute the strongest inherited memories. But, in theory at least, anything and everything could be remembered. This memory could go back anywhere in the unbroken chain of existence. Man could remember the experience of his monkey-like ancestors, or his fish-like ancestors, or his one-celled ancestors floating in the primordial ooze. Perhaps he could even remember the beginning of organic life-and before.
A great wealth of knowledge had to be existent in, or identified with, the spermatozoa and the ovum to enable these single cells by growth and cell division, to design and become the intricate physical organism, including the brain with its inherited memories. Obviously if all memory and knowledge inherent in self should reach the level of consciousness, an objective appearance of madness would be the inescapable result. Even if that knowledge were fully organized and comprehensible to self, it would have to come at a speed that would be incompatible with normal existence if the self were to consciously assimilate it all in one lifetime.
But just as the need and opportunity for the human baby to suckle the breast, or the beaver to build a dam, or the salmon to go upstream for spawning, open up the stored memory related to the circumstance, so presumably, the scientists's, philosopher's, lover of beauty's, and self searcher's need and search for the origin and meaning of existence may -if the thought patterns afford a vehicle through which the innate self can express its being -call forth the specific memory that holds the answer. Theoretically it must be there. The only question is: can it be brought to the level of consciousness where we can grasp and recognize it?
Unless we believe that the self may be able to call forth from its own being a concept of the universe more comprehensive and valid than that of any of the major religions we have considered, we waste our time in dwelling on religious concepts. And unless, when a valid concept is found by one individual, its validity can be corroborated by others, we waste our time discussing religion on any basis other than the pragmatic. That we proceed is evidence that we believe both in the ability of self to find a fully satisfying total concept and the ability of other selfs to perceive its validity. In the language of the East, which identifies self with breath, we are turning now to what the self knew before this life.
In the language of the West, which identifies self with an unbroken chain of life that began with the first living cell, we are turning now to the knowledge inherent in the cell: that knowledge by which it designed and controls the human organism, and that knowledge which gave it purpose and will when it was the first cell floating in the primordial ooze. Because our physical. bodies are constructed by that cell, and because all our innate consciousness is its consciousness, we believe that all the knowledge which it has is also ours, and can be brought to waking consciousness by focusing our attention intently and undistortedly on what the self knows.
PART II Concept.
Concepts of Knowing and Sources of Knowledge.
THE SIX DISCIPLINES OF MAN'S BEING
In accordance with the concepts of the Western world, we have been assuming the reality of the material universe and the reality of self. Now that the time has come to present, for the corroboration or rejection of other selfs, the comprehensive master test pattern which we perceive, we must temporarily suspend these assumptions. In our pattern, the material universe has a place, and self has a place, but the pattern begins with neither.
The pattern is composed of six progressive disciplines, each resting on all that have gone before. The material universe is completed in the third discipline, and self as we know it begins in the fourth discipline. The pattern of the first disciplines must have priority and form a foundation for the latter disciplines. But a concept of any pattern, whatsoever, for the first two of these disciplines is, for the most part, wholly foreign to Western civilization. So we must try to point out one that can be perceived in reality if we are to continue our discussion.
We assemble all our concepts from knowledge, basic knowledge, like that of the awareness of red, the awareness of time, the awareness of space, and the awareness of pattern preferences. The significance of each bit of knowledge is based on its place in the arrangement of the total pattern. This basic knowledge, including the innate preference for certain patterns, is assumed in all beings like ourselves. The basic knowledge that makes up the discipline patterns prior to the material universe is in the self for example, the concepts of time and space -but the realities that form this knowledge must be conceived as having existence prior to the material universe and prior to self as the Western world knows it.
Also, the most uncontestable reality, the consciousness of "I am," must be conceived as existing prior to the material universe and prior to self as the Western world knows it. This is no more mysticism than conceiving that red, which we know only as an awareness in self, existed prior to self. The Western world posits red as a reality outside of self and, because that posited reality is seen as part of a pattern, our concept of the material universe, the postulate seems to be supported. We are now going to enlarge the pattern to include both consciousness and matter.
Like the one we now have, our new pattern has to begin with something which we, our selfs, know but which existed before there was a self as the West knows self. In our pat-tern we are positing that this something existed, not only prior to this self, but prior to the material universe. Our pattern begins with what we will tentatively call the consciousness "I am" as it is perceived in self, but which we will posit as existing prior to self as it is known in the West and prior to the material universe. The difference between this first self, or conscious "I am," and that of self as it is known in the West is not of quality and capacity but of discipline.
We do not posit the consciousness "I am" as the first part of the pattern on the basis of the simple logic that, since our awareness of it is our most unquestionable knowledge, it should therefore be first. We posit "I am" as first because we have become aware of it as first in the pattern, and are trying to describe that pattern of which we are aware. The pattern must be seen as a whole before the self can either reject it or have the affinity for it that is its only test of validity. It cannot be measured by any frame of reference because it is, of itself, the ultimate frame of reference or it is nothing. Therefore all judgment should be reserved until the whole is perceived.
Western science has attempted to determine that of which the self is aware, when there is no stimulation of the body's senses. This experiment is performed by isolating subjects in a room that is sound proof and light proof, and attempting, in every way, to completely eliminate sensory stimulation. Temperature is controlled to the point of least awareness and touch eliminated as much as possible by enveloping the subjects' bodies in fluffy padding. The subjects have described spontaneous awarenesses of colors and patterns that have no significance to their rational minds.
The Eastern religious men attempt the same experiment by long periods or disciplining the self to block off and reject awarenesses that come through physical senses. They describe spontaneous awarenesses that they claim have significance to their religious minds. Concepts of time, space, matter (as a posited non-self reality), and matter !as perceived through bodily senses when relation to self does not enter into the perception) are of the essence of the pattern that concerns us. But to return to being before the formation of the pattern, so as to see its original purpose, we must suspend these concepts. With them suspended, we must tentatively conceive and exist in a state of no physical sensation, no physical being, and no universe.
This state may be attained at will, and with little ill effect by intensive self training, but continued conscious perception of it is a nullification of the disciplines of being, and detracts from man's purpose of being man. We therefore advocate that it be consciously attained only for purposes of gaining sufficient understanding of why and how the self and the universe were created, for the purpose of orienting man's objectives, or for the purpose of tapping the source of new creative energy-never to escape from man's field of decision and action. With that word of caution, we leave each to his own method of examining his innate knowledge and concern ourselves with the pattern that we postulate he will find formed by that knowledge.
We see the self, which is distinguished from the material or non-self, as a disciplined and restricted entity of the consciousness "I am." The consideration of whether the whole is greater than the part, whether this self is part of the consciousness "I am," or the consciousness "I am" is part of this self, does not enter here. These patterns of thought about whole and part belong to the patterns of the material universe, and we are now entering a concept prior to the material universe.
That, from which both the material universe and this self are evolved, we conceive as being that in self which knows "I am" prior to any restriction, or discipline, of its being. The comprehensive master pattern is the orderly, self-imposition, of six disciplines upon "I am." We want to point out that the consciousness "I am" is a continuing entity in the sense that all organic life is a continuing entity. Western science assumes that all organic life began from one cell and all life that now exists is the result of that one cell's division. In the same way we assume that the consciousness "I am" was originally one and what we perceive as our self, and what we perceive as the material universe, is the result of discipline and division.
So far, we have seen the consciousness "I am" and self as substantially identical, because we have not developed concepts for, and words to talk of the consciousness "I am" when it is not self as simply distinguished from the material, or non-self. The relation between the consciousness "I am" and this self as conceived in the West is not the same as the relationship between protoplasm and man's body but there is a very rough similarity that can illustrate our need for a new word. We need a name for the original undisciplined and unrestricted "I am."
The word "god" in common language implies an omniscient and omnipotent spirit. He is conceived as having foreknowledge of the consequence of his acts, as if the universes were created from a perfect blueprint in the mind of god. This concept is not what we 144 wish. We have considered "primordial self" and found in it many advantages. However we feel that the word "god" should be used in the sense of "creator of the universe" and we will so use it to name the original undisciplined and unrestricted "I am." But we do not wish, by giving the original "I am" this title, to endow it with any qualities not known by our selfs in the here and now.
Billions of years of experience cannot be comprehended as one moment of waking consciousness but all the experience of god prior to man is fully comprehensible to man. That statement is not to be taken as dogma of what god as hazily conceived in the West really is, but as a promise that only perceivable realities will be pointed out and designated by the word, "god," as we use it.
Before the study of science convinced Western man that his self was, in some unexplained manner, a product of the preexisting physical universe, the dogma of Judaeo-Christianity had convinced him that he was a soul created by a great, magician-like god having incomprehensible powers. He, therefore, has been precluded from asking himself what he was before there was a universe. Western man knows that he was very recently a single cell, but because of the "brain block" created by the Judaeo-Christian culture he never even asks himself how it feels to be a single cell. Certainly then he does not ask what he was before the self was identified with a cell.
As a concession to this blocked avenue of introspection we will try to describe our concept of the original "I am" or god by talking about what, if anything, could remain of the self after death of the physical body. We do not wish by this to imply that death is not, or is, the end of self. This contemplation of death is for the purpose of understanding the first discipline of being. We are not now attempting to understand death, but to understand "I am" as it was before the creation of the universe. If at the time the body no longer responds to the will of self, the conscious self still exists, and remembers life in the universe as a man, either in fullness, or as an emotional melody, or as a direction of will, it may seek to perpetuate its being. But stripped of its material environment, that self would probably be a rather meager and malformed embryo. It might wish to recapture for itself a place in the universe.
But, if it had retained some of the widely accepted concepts of the universe, we could only think of it as a helpless and hopeless "lost soul." If at the time the body no longer responds to the will of self, the conscious self still exists, but cannot perceive the universe, and does not remember it in any fashion, then lit would seem even more helpless and hopeless. But then the self would experience or be, "I am," or god, as he was the beginning of the first discipline. This primordial I am is a dim awareness that wills its being, but knows no time, no space and no universe. If at this time there truly are not, and have never been, time, space, universe, and self, then "I am" is the concept which we want to present of god as he was before the first discipline.
But this approach is evolved from the Western concepts of self and the universe and is therefore colored by the Western concepts. We therefore simply say that "I am" is one in god and self but the perspective of self has restrictions, or will guiding and form-determining conditions, that do not exist in the perspective of god. These self-imposed and self-accepted restrictions, these selected memories retained as will-guiding conditions of being, are the six disciplines of our pattern.
THE FIRST DISCIPLINE
The first discipline is concerned with the willful and formalized departure of god from absolute reality into relative being. Absolute reality cannot be discussed or described in any words or conceived in terms of any other reality, for words and concepts are all relative and finite; but it can be known, of itself, absolutely. This absolute omniscience is alike in god, and man, and the worm.
The nearest approximation of this, which Western man comprehends when expressed in words, is the knowledge that nothingness I and infinity are one absolute reality, differing only by an assumption of being. All awareness is predicated on the assumption that absolute reality can be factored. This is not an absolute truth; it is an assumption of being. It begins as an uncontrolled pulse of assumption, vacillating between nothingness and infinity. The first discipline is god's formalization of his choice of finite being. This choice can be known, for it permeates all being. The willed "I am," injected into the reality that everything and nothing are different aspects of one absolute, creates an awareness of being.
The side of the pulse which says "I am" is pleasurable awareness, and the side which says "I am not" is painful awareness. "I feel and know, therefore I am." Pleasure. "What am I? Nothing:' Pain. "But I feel joy when I conceive being. If I feel, I am something. Even the pain I feel at the thought that I am nothing is an awareness which convinces me that I am." Pleasure. "All illusion. All this is sophistry without reality." Pain. "But to create what was not, even though only an illusion, is something." Pleasure. Such thoughts are familiar to all of us. Such are the thoughts of god before the beginning. Except as decreed by self-discipline there is no beginning, no end, and only one consciousness. God and self are separated into different perspectives only by discipline. The pulse of infinity and nothingness, the two perspectives of one reality, is the pattern concept upon which all creation rests.
In it are potential consciousness, potential thought, and all potential awareness. Joy of being is the prime mover of creation: the perspective of consciousness that perceives "I am" and finds joy in that perception. What is the awareness by which "I am" perceives "I am"? What is the color, or taste, or touch, or feel of this basic awareness? Is "I am" light or darkness? Is it sound or silence? Is it hot or cold? Is it sweet or bitter to the taste? Is it form to the touch, or formless to the touch like the faint fragrant breezes before the morning's awakening? The perception of "I am" is none of these, but all of these. The basic awareness of being bears roughly the same relation to man's sensations as the first one-celled ancestor in the primordial ooze bears to all organic life.
It is the undeveloped essence and the grandfather of all sensations. We can rationalize the existence of this basic awareness but perhaps the worm, and surely the one-celled glob of green scum floating in the ooze, can still remember. The memory is also in us if we dare awaken it. Many times man has brought this remembered knowledge to consciousness and written down the thought in words with great art of expression, but others have seen only what the words said in the language of a people, and not the reality indicated by the art of the perceiver.
A perceiver wrote of the first discipline of creation: "In the beginning God said 'Let there be light' and there was light and God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. And it was the morning and the evening of the first day:' But the unperceiving, reading the words said, "God is light and a power of evil dwells in the darkness." Or they thought that god was a mighty magician who could speak and have the universe appear full-blown from out of nothing. So the art of the perceiver became, not an aid, but a stumbling block to understanding.
Another perceiver translated the basic awareness into terms of heat and cold, and said, of the first discipline, "In the beginning was the unknowable, and of himself, he made two opposing forces, the frost and fire gods." But the unperceiving said "There is but one God." And the cry, "One God," became the shibboleth for a mob, and a war cry for destroying all who would not join the mob and proclaim the shibboleth. So the art of another perceiver perished. "In the beginning the infinite willed the end of infinity, and divided his being into two opposing finites," a perceiver might say.
But the unperceiving would cry: "Blasphemy! God is infinite. The man declares that there is no more god." When we attempt to understand the universe of god in the first discipline, we must unless we have given special discipline to our senses as is the practice of Hindu mystics, substitute for the basic awareness one with which we are more familiar. According to our special inclinations some of us find it easier to substitute for the prototype, light and darkness. Others prefer colors, taste, smell, touch, sound, et cetera.
He who can best imagine an awareness of being in a consciousness that knows no time, space, or universe, as a mathematical abstract, let him think mathematical abstracts until he discovers their meaning. He who can do better with conceived awarenesses of heat and cold, let him find for himself a universe of fire and frost gods which exists beyond time, space, and matter. He who would substitute light and darkness for the basic awareness of being, let him not try to look upon a magician conjuring up a universe, but search his own consciousness for what would have been the dawn of his awareness "I am," if the first reality were not the pulse of everything and nothing, but the more familiar pulse of light and darkness.
All are but examples aimed at guiding consciousness to a change of perspective. If the awareness indicated by the word, sight, be used in its simplest form as an example, then, in the consciousness of god before the beginning, there was the conceptual awareness of light and darkness. God willed, "I am light," and the concept of light was pleasure. But the knowledge that absolute reality contains both sides of the pulse beat, instead of only one, said, "I am not light," and the concept of not light was pain to the will to be light. Then god willed, "I am darkness," and the concept of darkness was pleasure.
But the knowledge that absolute reality contains both sides of the pulse beat instead of only one said, "I am not darkness," and the concept of not darkness was pain to the will to be darkness. God then discovered that he was not the will to be light nor the will to be darkness, not yet the will to be pleasure nor the will to be pain, but simply the will to be. The concepts or awarenesses of light, darkness pleasure, pain, are all alike part of the awareness "I am." All intensify the perception of being but they offer no criterion for "I am." But as light can be conceived and be, only if darkness be conceived and be, so "I am" can be conceived and be, only if "I am not" be conceived and be.
The perception of this principle led god into seeking to conceive a universe, or pattern of concepts, in which "I am" could be separated from, and contrasted to "I am not," as we who benefit by past disciplines perceive that light and darkness, pleasure and pain can be separated and contrasted. God sought a concept by which he could abdicate absolute being in favor of relative being. So god conceived, and willed, a universe in which his being was not absolute. The first universe, or pattern of concepts for finite being, was the conception of "I am" as having finite extension in time. In this universe, "I am" and "I am not" were a pulse of time-limited awarenesses, which as a pulse intensify the awareness "I am."
The free will of god arbitrarily assumed the perspective, or created the universe, in which time exists, and imposed upon his further being the conceptual discipline that "there shall be no more absolute and eternal; all existence shall be finite in a concept of time." The first discipline of creation is that consciousness shall call good and have its being only in a finite universe conceived as time. The thought that does not call it good is banished from the consciousness of god. The first discipline of being provides a fully satisfying universe. Within the concept of time, all awareness has its existence.
The awareness of light exists because its duration is limited by darkness. The awareness is dependent on its segregated existence. God does not call the light as distinguished from the darkness good, but all awareness produced by adherence to the concept of limited being, good. The concept of time constitutes the first universe, or comprehensive frame of reference, for all finite being, and all being within the universe must be conceived as finite. There can be no awareness except the awareness of finite being. We have seen that the story of creation, as written by some perceivers, favors light and darkness as illustrative of the first "day" of creation. The awareness of cold and heat seems more illustrative to others, and the first "state" of creation is portrayed as the era of frost and fire gods.
The choice depends on the way of life of the perceiver. The medium through which we find our path to perception of the first "discipline" of creation is not important, but it is important that we perceive it, and know that it is, of itself, good and very good. To the Western world, the sensation of sound has special virtue as a path to perceiving the first discipline of creation, because many men have cultivated the habit of listening to music with complete disregard of all concepts except that of the universe of time. Consciousness and music become one.
The musical composer "hearing" his composition for the first time, in its uninstrumented conception in his consciousness, is living in a simulated universe that, except for man's perspective, might be that occupied by god in the first stage of creation. In the music, which he is conceiving, there is the all-permeating awareness of being as "sound" in a universe of time. However, countless billions of years of "musical composition" lie between the god perspective of consciousness in the beginning of creation, and consciousness as it is in the man-perspective of the musical composer. God's first "musical compositions" were single "notes." He was concerned with creating the most joyful pulse of the awareness prototype. He joyed in the varying emotional effects produced by the interval of timing.
The scientist studying the number of vibrations in a note of music, or the number of vibrations in a colored light, and perceiving each vibration so completely that he conceptionally becomes it, lives its life and dies its death, in slow motion as it were, through the composite temperament of a scientists and of an artist, approaches god's perspective in the first stage of creation. But the scientist seldom holds this perspective save for a brief moment. His man-made discipline as a scientist tends to keep his artist's temperament from his "serious" work, by demanding that he detach his "emotion" from his "reason." Also he, usually, has not admitted the existence of consciousness into his equations.
But in addition to these walls of man-made disciplines, which he has called good, he has five other disciplines called good by god, which guard him from reverting wholly to first stratum existence. First stratum existence is good, and living in it could be wholly satisfying subjectively, but viewed as a man by men he would be hopelessly insane. From the perspective of god, we would also have to condemn him for not finding good the five other disciplines of creation. Man, the worm, and the single cell of green scum in the slime, each has abilities fitting to his needs. The single cell is closer to the original perspective of god; it has one undivided sensation, and an all-engrossing interest in the first four disciplines of being.
Man is protected from a complete, and excessively engrossing, perception of the first discipline of creation by having his perceptions channeled through limiting sense organs. By observation and analysis we have concluded that ears and eyes are organs for perceiving vibrations of different frequencies, but we do not perceive through our sensory organs that all sensations are different "frequencies" of the one basic awareness. Our sense organs break sensation into sharply differentiated categories by leaving wide intervals of "frequencies" that we do not perceive at all. Also the "frequency" of our own beings played against the "frequencies" god conceived in the first discipline of creation brings about a super-heterodyne effect that causes us to perceive "frequencies" peculiar to man.
But foremost among the devices god has incorporated into our perspectives, or beings, to bring about a peculiar joy by guarding us from full sensory perception of the oneness of creation, is an accelerated time perspective as compared to the time perspective of god. As a result of this great acceleration we do not hear the "melodies" god originally composed. We hear those "melodies" as single "notes." And we compose not "melodies" but "medleys" of the first discipline god's "melodies." Despite the separation resulting from the disciplines, consciousness is one, and purpose and joy are one. God and man are different only in perspective. In the first stage of creation god composed "notes," "melodies," and "medleys" that are to the compositions of man like the waters of the seas to a single drop.
But, in the accelerated perspective of man, the musician can still compose as freely and joyously as god in the first dawn of creation. In so doing he is living, to the extent that he forgets the universe of man, in the universe of the first discipline. When we hear melody after melody with joy, and perceive the limitless possibilities for intensifying emotions by the frequencies of notes and the frequency of those frequencies, our consciousness joins the consciousness of god in proclaiming the first discipline of creation to be good and very good.
THE SECOND DISCIPLINE
Western man has concentrated his attention on an objective analysis of the universe he knows, with all six stages intact. Because consciousness cannot be perceived objectively, he has tried to ignore it.
He has studied the objects that act upon the body to produce sensation in consciousness, and, because he has amassed such a mountain of detail with regard to such things as vibration, speed of light, the measurable electric current of nerve impulses, the construction of the sensory organs, et cetera, he ignores the fact that he has made no progress whatsoever in bridging the gap between the objective universe and the consciousness in which all awareness has its being. Even if he has not deliberately created a taboo against believing in the existence of consciousness, he has filled consciousness with details of objective analyses of vibrations, ear drums, anvils, cornea, rods, cones, nerve ends, ganglia, brain reception areas, storehouse areas, and other related data, until the perception of creative consciousness, such as that of the composer, in the first discipline of being, is continually sidetracked.
This is neither disconcerting nor surprising. Man associates all awarenesses, to some extent, with objects that later disciplines tell him produce them. It is therefore difficult to exchange man's perspective for that of god. It is only with the effort of self-analysis that we can perceive that all awarenesses exist in our consciousness by reason of their finite existence in time, that they exist first in a time-limited universe only, and all belong to the first discipline of creation. The difficulty we have in making this change of perspective is a triumph of the art of the creator. We should not seek to overcome it but to appreciate the art and make use of it.
However its purpose is merely to preserve man's perspective, not to close doors to man's perception when he can assimilate what he perceives. None of the six disciplines of man's being replaces a previous one. Each is built solidly on the foundation of all that have gone before. Each may be existed in, and enjoyed at will, by consciousness, provided the good of all upon which it rests is cherished. Since the first discipline rests only on absolute reality, all can return and live in the universe of the first discipline at will and, as god did in the beginning, find it fully satisfying.
The second discipline is equally available to all, but perceiving the second, as distinct rather than amalgamated with the first, requires a step-by-step simulated re-creation of the universe. The individual "melodies," or "medleys," man composes are cherished by man in the perspective that is his. As they are the being of the composer manifest only in his consciousness, or self, they exist in time, and pass in time, albeit they can be recalled, re-created, or re-lived, again and again. But the composer seeks for a way of selecting his favorites, and preserving them, lest he lose them to his consciousness. In this the composer understands the feelings that were god's when he found the first discipline fully satisfying, but continued on to establish further disciplines.
The first discipline was good, but he sought to select his favorite melodies of being from his memories of the first discipline. Also he sought a way to preserve his favorite melodies of being, while letting the garbled attempts be forgotten, when by their nature all were finite in the universe of time. He needed further self-discipline. To derive value from the comparison of the consciousness of god in the first stratum of creation to the consciousness of the composer conceiving a melody, and living it in his consciousness, we must be careful not to lose our perception of god's perspective.
Western man's thought patterns make it difficult for him to carry the god perspective of the musician into the second discipline. As a concession to these thought patterns we will choose another example for the second discipline. We chose sound and silence, rather than light and darkness, or heat and cold, as a recommended example for Western man's perception of the first discipline because he often loses himself in the world of music. Unlike his early ancestors, he does not crouch in universal darkness waiting for the coming of universal light, nor does he huddle in universal cold waiting for the coming of universal warmth.
Light and darkness, heat and cold, he has placed within space limitations in his habit of thinking, and neutralizes his perception of them by seeking to bring them to a "comfort" point, which is to remove them from conscious perception. He brings space into his concept of heat and cold by enclosing spaces which he heats or cools. He also thinks in terms of lighting enclosed spaces. He has made some small attempt to increase perception of colored light by raising its use to an art. But where he has done this he has not emphasized time duration and time succession of colors, as distinguished from a use of color that involves space concepts.
The Clavilux is a rarity, but even where found, this instrument for "color music" is seldom played with solid colors succeeding each other on the full screen. Instead, color is given space limitation by other colors. From these considerations we see that light and darkness, as well as heat and cold, are for Western man poor examples of the first stage of creation. But as sound and silence appears to be Western man's best channel to the perception of the prototype of all awareness as it was in the first discipline, so light and darkness, or perhaps colored light, appears to be the best channel through which he may perceive the essentials of the second discipline.
Let us therefore go into the second-discipline illustrations by switching our original example to say that in the first discipline was light and darkness. The first discipline could be considered accomplished when god's will-to-be became fully satisfied with finite existence, and became engrossed in comparing awareness to awareness, "what is" to "what was" and "what shall be." There were many possibilities in the field of light and many questions came to him. How long could an awareness of being as light exist without the interval of an awareness of darkness? By varying intervals, where could the greatest intensity of awareness come? Was it greatest by instantaneous change from intense darkness to intense light, or by a "melody" where changes came so rapidly that gray existed and proceeded from light to darkness, and from darkness to light by varying the relative duration of light and darkness?
Could it be conceived that different qualities of light could exist that were not simply varying intervals of darkness? In an accelerated perspective that perceived a "melody" of light as a single note, could light of one quality be limited by light of another quality so that an awareness of light could exist without an awareness of darkness? Since finite duration is the principle of awareness, could not one light be time limited by another light in an accelerated perspective? Seeing the possibility, god conceived color melodies or medleys that had their being in the being, or consciousness, of god. Each varying awareness was a joy. God recalled when time began, and recalled all the awarenesses he had known in the universe of time and recalled the joy of these awarenesses.
He yearned for a method of preserving the most cherished, and a method for fixing them in his consciousness, or being, in such away that the order in which they were recalled, or reviewed could be selected at will. He pondered this possibility, and saw that an additional advantage could result from it. Not only could awarenesses be selected for placement in the proposed special category of consciousness only after they had been worked up into specially appealing melodies, but, having placed an awareness in the category, harmony with it could be made a requisite for placing further awarenesses in the special category. To satisfy these desires, he called upon his experience, and perceived that, even as a finite universe of time had been conceived, so could a finite universe within a finite universe be conceived.
In the second discipline god worked on the creation of a concept whereby his chosen "melodies of being" would be construed as having relatively continuous existence outside his consciousness. "Melodies" to be preserved would be consigned to a portion of consciousness where they were conceived as having objective existence in a finite universe within a finite universe. This finite universe within a finite universe, when perceived in its finished state, is our concept of a universe of space in which awarenesses have objective existence. In the conception of time, "I am" had to will a limitation on the being of self. In the second discipline, "I am" had to will a further limitation on "I am." To be able to exist in the second discipline, god had to assume himself to be a non-omniscient point of perspective with regard to his creations.
The concept of space necessitated the concept of fixed points of remembered awarenesses which would become sources of new awarenesses. God also had to assume existence at a point, freely movable by god's will, but always a point. The distinction between the concepts of time and space is a distinction between priority and purpose. A concept of one-dimensional space would have little distinction from a concept of time except that the universe of space would have to be conceived as being contained in, or of lesser priority than, the universe of time, and would have to be conceived as having objective existence with relation to consciousness. The objective existence of the universe of space in the concept is essential to its purpose.
A concept of one-dimensional space satisfied the condition of retaining selected awarenesses, but fixed the order in which they might God could assume a position at either end or somewhere between. From one end, movement would have to be one direction only. In the center, god could move either way. If space were conceived as one dimensional, with the ends closed in a circle, there would be the advantage of always having a choice of direction, but the whole would become filled and so would limit awareness sources that could be placed in it. God attempted to overcome the limitations by conceptually filling in the enclosed area of one-dimensional space closed in a circle.
By this effort he conceived two-dimensional space. This he found more satisfactory. Once the concept was achieved it could be broadened until two dimensional space did not need to be conceived as limited by a circle or any one-dimensional boundary, but could be of indefinite size, and thus have indefinite capacity for holding awareness sources. Also it permitted the order of god's movement into the awareness sources to be varied endlessly. Appreciating the evolving concept of space, god perceived that the condition of holding more than one awareness in consciousness at a time could be attained by conceiving the position of "I am" in a third dimension.
God could then view all that had been conceived and placed in the preserved category from one perspective. We can easily conceive the creation of a two-dimensional universe perceived by god in a third dimension. Indeed we have raised the creation of pattern and color, in two dimensions, to a fine art.* (At this time we are not considering Western man's attempt to have painting give an illusion of three dimensions.)
In the practicing of this art we forget our three-dimensional materials almost as completely as a musical composer forgets the instruments by which he conveys the creations of his consciousness to the consciousness of another. A two-dimensional world with god in a third dimension has its virtues but, in the universe we know as men it was not called good by god and made into a discipline.
God perceived that this arrangement was too great a recapture of omniscience, that it was better to have selective placing more pronounced. He found the remedy by conceiving the spheres of awarenesses also as existing in three dimensional space.
We can conceive a one or two-dimensional space universe. The memory is innate in our beings and in our own conceptual creations we can make use of it as we do in mathematics. We can rationalize a space universe with four or more dimensions. But from man's perspective we are limited to perceptive knowledge of three-dimensional worlds like that in which our bodies exist. The second discipline requires that we choose this from among possibilities and call it good.
The tentative will that "test created" the space universe in god's consciousness exists in all and we may know or study the establishment of the second discipline by recourse to the consciousness of god. God is a perspective, freely interchangeable with self. We can, at will, exchange our perspectives for that of god in any previous discipline. God only requires that we call good what he has called good.
The second discipline requires man to have his being in a three-dimensional universe where awarenesses are construed as having objective existence. The order of the disciplines requires that this be recognized as resting upon, contained within, or of secondary priority to the first universe of time in which awareness and consciousness are one. Western man has some difficulty in limiting himself to the second stage of existence without unwillingly anticipating the third. Except for a few artists, Western man has difficulty forgetting his concept of perception through sensory organs, and valuing awarenesses as having simple objective existence in space.
In the second discipline awarenesses are conceived as proceeding from a source of awareness but there is no concept of conflict, friction, or destruction. The sources of awarenesses have fixed orbits in space and are experienced by consciousness willing its movement into a particular sphere of awareness. Each is placed in this special category of consciousness, or subconsciousness, by god, with a thought to attaining harmony but avoiding conflict with others. Also no awareness is conceived as strong enough to overpower "I am." God has abdicated omniscience but he still retains omnipotence with regard to his creations. There is no concept of force intrinsic in matter and no concept of death of self.
We may illustrate the second stratum of existence to ourselves by conceiving a dream world such as we often experience, a dream world in which "I am" perceives objects but "I am" has no objective existence. "I am" exists only as a point of perspective, albeit it has unlimited movement through all time and space. If we imagine that we retain our memory and our inclinations, this second stratum universe into which we enter might be very much like the one we know. The major differences to the one we know are that there could be no organic thing, and no object could conflict with another object. There could be movement, but movement would have to be in fixed orbits, albeit they might be extremely complicated.
Air for instance, might be conceived as flowing around a solid object, giving to consciousness the awareness of warmth, coolness, or fragrance, but there could be no erosion. Water could flow and be conceived as giving sparkle and sound, if an orbit for return to its source were conceived as existing, and the water conceived as flowing without forces inherent in matter other than the simple inertia of continuous being. If orbits of inertia were in conflict, an awareness source with objective existence, a substance, would simply pass through another substance.
In the second discipline we might move through all time and space, and know all the second-stratum universes that can be experienced, or interpreted in the familiar awarenesses that limit our perspective. Our desires would perhaps find for us a heaven that is strangely familiar. We might find the rocky crags of colorful desert rocks, at dawn, or at sunset. Or, if we are artists who love the world created by man's art, we might find something resembling a Greek city with smooth, cool, sculptured marble, columned buildings, and flowing fountains. Perhaps fragrance would feature heavily in our heaven. Perhaps music associated with moving form and color.
Perhaps painting done with pure light on a "ten-league canvas with brushes of comet's hair." Certainly the universe of the second discipline is that of the artist and sculptor. And in it are not only visual awarenesses, but music, fragrance, taste, and all awarenesses that consciousness wills to carry forward from the first discipline and associate with an objective source of origin. We need only to remove from our memory the world of matter and organic being to be able to remember or reexperience, the universe of the second discipline of creation and say that it is good and very good.
THE THIRD DISCIPLINE
By the deliberated will of god, awareness had objective being in the space concept of his consciousness, had their being in the universe of the second discipline, only if they were in harmony with all others in the universe of the second discipline.
As the perspective of god moved in space, or the spheres of awarenesses moved in their assigned orbits, the distant were conceived as occupying a less and less portion of consciousness, or growing smaller with relation to those nearer, or becoming completely obscured by those nearer and larger in the space perspective. Yet, the sources of awarenesses were conceived as existing even when obscured by those that hid them. Those obscured existed in the non-consciousness of god, or the subconscious, unconscious, super-conscious, or whatever we choose to call that which self knows when it is out of consciousness. Thus god had effectively divided his being into a conscious being and a subconscious being.
The subconscious was that which retained in their immutable orbits the conceived awareness sources in the concept of space. The subconscious was arbitrarily given unequivocal priority over the conscious so that if an awareness source was not perceived by the conscious at the time and place it should have been perceived, the conscious was held to be in error, or not properly alert. The reality was the disciplined consciousness of god, manifest as objects, and distinguished from still undisciplined new creations in consciousness which were merely thoughts.
The awareness sources thus became substance in space very much as we know substance in space, except that there was perfect harmony, with no friction or conflict. If orbits conflicted, substance passed through substance. Substance was nearer to the Western spiritualist's vague concept of ectoplasm, or the Hindu concept of the spiritual body, than to the Western concept of matter. Through time and space, of magnitudes that we are just beginning to conceive, god created and re-experienced the creations of the first and second disciplines. But in god as in our further disciplined selfs, a creative consciousness seeks a criterion of excellence and tile selection of the best from the good.
Space filled endlessly with the products of art wearied or confused god, as undisciplined imagination wearies or confuses us. He therefore sought a further limitation, a third discipline. The art of god had progressed to associative values in stimuli, or what we call motifs when we speak of opera. If god were dealing in sensations as we know them, we might say, as an example, that in certain instances color and fragrance were associatively connected, or color and temperature, light and heat, touch and taste, et cetera. This had come about as an artistic achievement, and presented a need for a disciplined concept.
A search for a criterion of dominant and subordinate themes was conceived. There was a need for measuring one awareness against another, for translating one into another, for establishing a common denominator. This was necessary not only for harmonic purposes but for purposes of selective comparison and subordination so as to keep the field reduced to the comprehensible. In considering this need, it appeared to god that intrinsic qualities of comparison and selectivity in awareness sources would be the thing, perhaps automatic comparisons.
Automatic comparison could result in changes, presumed to be carried on in the subconscious, that would give a fresh new aspect when the awareness sources were again brought to consciousness; that is, when the fixed point that god had identified with himself moved through space to rediscover them, or when the fixed orbit of the spheres of awareness brought them back into the cognizance of god. There could be something like conflicting orbits that compared and rearranged awareness sources. But conflict would have to be according to preconceived plan, otherwise the first two-disciplines would be negated.
If the dream substance which had been conceived-the objective sources of awareness which existed in time and space, either in consciousness or subconsciousness -were to be thought of as meeting, comparing, conflicting, harmonizing, coordinating, and joining to form new ones, the automatic order would have to be thought out in detail, and made an immutable discipline of subconscious knowledge. So in the third discipline of man's being, god conceived and willed the dream substances, the spheres of the awareness sources, to have relative force and mass, to take the position in god's consciousness that matter occupies in the consciousness of the Western scientist who disregards self when he contemplates matter. In the third stage of creation god worked out and assigned to matter all the attributes which the physicist and chemist find so intriguingly complex.
The Greeks, whose ideas blended with Judaism in the creation of Christianity and in the creation of Western thought patterns, believed the highest ideal of reality to be immutable and immovable. To them, the highest ideal of reality was crystallized perfect form. They did not perceive the god of the third discipline, the god who sought the adventure of eternally incomplete knowledge by assuming that something was always happening in a sphere beyond his perception of the here and now. What god had called good in the second discipline, they called perfection, and deemed it to be immutable. They did not perceive that a god who could create a universe without friction, or conflict, would want to introduce friction and conflict into his willed conception of creation. They considered that the material universe was an imperfect expression of god's will.
If they had used the words "conscious" and "subconscious" as we do now, because psychology has introduced these useful approaches to real concepts, they would have considered the material world, not "as a god-willed subconscious discipline of the conscious, but as a mental disease of god, which cried out for treatment. The man who wants to escape from reality into a simpler world of logical relationships between the concepts that are contained in the languages of a people, and therefore decrees that man's reason, within the narrow framework of these concepts, rather than man's full being, is his claim to kinship with god, is like one of the blind men who went to see the elephant.
He thinks god is only that aspect of reality which he has gropingly touched. Unlike the Greeks, Western man has grown to love dynamics, and can understand the will of a god who would place positively and negatively charged bits of matter in his subconscious rather than fill it entirely with inert atoms in immutable orbits. But Western man's concepts are still highly influenced by that aspect of his metropolitan religious heritage which contains a slavish respect for certain mummified patterns of reason and logic. He reasons from concepts extant in the language of his cultural heritage that overrule his direct perception of reality.
Force inherent in matter is a concept, no more and no less an arbitrary self-discipline, imposed on both consciousness and subconsciousness by conscious deliberation, than are the concepts of time and space. The sophisticated reasoning of the physicists of our present Western civilization has built nebulous concepts that appear, at times, to approach the force concepts of god. But they approach them through channels as indirect, devious, and full of pitfalls as the morality of god has been approached by religion. As of this moment science appears much better than religion, merely because the efforts of the scientists are better coordinated and therefore more efficacious.
The reverse was true a thousand years ago. Science is merely a new vigorous religion supplanting the old. But like all metropolitan religions it does not clear the field of old concepts. The theoretical and experimental physicists add the results of their reasoning and experiments, that is, their explorations of the consciousness or subconsciousness of god, to the old aggregation of religious concepts. As a result the cultural force is still the non-comprehending, purpose-hungry, metropolitan mob. We are able to see god in the first discipline as the god of the musical composer.
In the second discipline he is the god of the painter and sculptor. In the third discipline god seems to be the god of the chemist and physicist. But music, sculpture, and physics are merely highly simplified illustrations of three very extensive disciplines and there are six disciplines. All these narrow perspectives, including that of Western science, are as far off the track of god's purpose as are the religious fanatics who seek god too parasitically, who pray for aid in maintaining their distorted perspectives against their heathen enemies, rather than seeking understanding. Joy of being is the prime mover of the creator.
We can experience for ourselves an example of the joy of god in the first discipline most easily through our sense of hearing, through creating and enjoying the creations of music. We can experience for ourselves an example of the joy of god in the second discipline most easily through our sense of vision. We can perceive beauty of color and form as god conceived it. We do our kindergarten work of learning to know the god of the second discipline by painting, sculpture, architecture, and the practice that primitive peoples find so fascinating, making clay vases.
For discovering god's joy in the third discipline we will do well to look for our example in our senses also, rather than in scientific concepts synthesized from verbalizations, either words or mathematical formulas, that cherish men's ideas rather than god's realities. Touch appears to be the best example for appreciating god's third discipline art. We must recognize that conjectured touch has come to mean more to Western man than actual touch, because his culture-controlled sphere of awarenesses is dominated by vision. But there are still a few cracks in his culture where reality is allowed to seep through.
The seashore illustrates the joy of the third discipline: the waves pounding on the rocks and pulling at the beach sands, the wind blowing the spume, the heat of the sun on our physical bodies, the cold of the water, the force of the waves, and the flow of sand through our fingers. Then there is force as we feel it well up in our bodies, such as the mighty strokes in swimming through the water, or the knotting of shoulder muscles when we lift heavy rocks and toss them into the ocean with a splash. The old farmer who holds the plow behind a muscular team of horses knows force as a joy. So does the man with the bulldozer clearing land. The pagan warrior knew it intimately in battle.
The mother, feeling her baby's fingers press soft skin against her soft skin, knows the joy of force in the aspect of tenderness. The delicate touch of a greasy mechanic can bring experience of the same sort, as he fits precision-machined parts into place. Joy of being is the prime mover of creation and each discipline, to be good, must contribute to that joy. The mechanics of the discipline, the rationale by which it was decreed, is part of consciousness in its god perspective. We shall see later that god's perspective, except for moments of conscious orientation, properly belongs in the subconscious of man.
But as Greek civilization was fascinated with the second discipline, and sought for the god of the second stratum of being, so, now, our Western civilization is fascinated by the third discipline and seeks for the god of the third stratum of being. It seeks with ever-increasing fanaticism. A people in which each individual was whole and balanced, rather than dwarfed, deformed, staggering, and clutching desperately, might well have taken two thousand years or more to do what Western civilization has done in the last two hundred.
Then it could have assimilated the knowledge of the god of the third discipline, which it has stumbled upon in reacting against the excesses of Greek civilization and Christian religion. But Western man's search also became blindly frantic when he perceived the god of the third discipline of which the Greek culture was not cognizant. He turned from the distorted concepts other civilizations and other religions had developed and distorted his concept in anew direction. He studied force with the same fervor that the Greeks studied form, without perceiving it as a mere part of a whole. The worship of the third discipline of creation has now become a mass fanaticism.
The desire for complete conscious reversion to the third discipline which often seems to be the goal of Western civilization, is simply the rejection of the concepts that other metropolitan religions have created regarding the realities that make up the other disciplines. Man must give attention to all the disciplines if he is to remain man. He must have balanced being as an entity. He must be more than a parasite, gnawing at the consciousness of god in search of the secret of matter.
Joy of being is the prime mover of creation. In the third discipline god willed the existence of matter with force conceived as intrinsic in it, as distinguished from second discipline substance that was without force and therefore immutable. He assigned to each type of matter the measure of its being in terms of other types, and fixed in his subconsciousness the immutability of the conceptions.
In the concept of matter was contained the good of the first and second disciplines. Then god, who still held the concepts of the third discipline fresh in his consciousness, "looked" at the spheres of matter in their orbits, and "watched" them meet and mingle as they automatically compared themselves each to the other by the forces that he had conceived as intrinsic within them. God found a joy in the meetings, conflicts, transformations, and fusions of the conceived forms of matter. The more basic the conflict, the greater was the joy. He found glow and energy in gradual transmutation, and a terrible ecstatic joy in sudden explosive impact. God abdicated his omnipotence to will this concept an immutable discipline. God looked upon this third discipline and found it good. He who would be a whole man must also find it good, and very good.
THE FOURTH DISCIPLINE
With the completion of the third discipline, god became an observer of the concepts he had deemed good and immutable. The origin of these was buried ever deeper in his subconscious. The awarenesses of the first discipline which had been conceived as having objective being in the second-had now been conceived as coming together, mingling and changing by a force, and being subject to laws intrinsic in them, which functioned without conscious effort.
The cosmic dust of incompatible impacts eddied and swirled and re-formed new spheres. The richness of mingled concepts, lying dormant in this dust, appealed to god, the artist and creator . Having detached conscious perception from the creative energy of the universe, god conceived the possibility of identifying his fixed point of conscious perception with some of the cosmic dust, and reassembling bits into anew pattern from a new perspective. To hold and fondle each fragment, to turn it about and perceive, or recall, its origin, or to conjecture what once was created of it, or determine by experiment what could be created with it as a unit of construction, could be a joy unending.
The first three disciplines had been limitation upon limitation upon limitation of omniscience and omnipotence. This had resulted from dividing consciousness into assumed categories and limiting freedom to make further decisions by what had been called immutably good. Western man knows this as subconscious and conscious being. As man may probe and modify that portion of his subconscious which was born within the range of his volition, so god could probe and modify the whole of his subconscious. But the ability to conceive, or create, and the joy of being had been enriched with each of the three limitations he placed on himself, and he voluntarily called them good and immutable.
This fourth discipline would be the ultimate abdication of omnipotence in which god consciously identified himself with a near microscopic speck in the immense vastness of the universe. But god again limited consciousness and assumed the perspective and being of organic life. God identified his conscious being with a single cell, assembled of cosmic dust, so that he might know and find joy in the universe from a new perspective. The pulse of being became: I am god who created and decreed good the universe -I am a cell with an independent will to joy in being, floating in the ooze of cosmic dust, subject only to the decrees of god. If we limit our perspective to that of the cell, this is a pulse between the subconscious and the conscious being.
It is at this point that the self as we know it begins its being. It might have been clearer to call god, prior to this point, the primordial self, which, at this point, becomes divided into god and self. It might have been well to have left out the word "god" entirely, and talked only of the conscious and subconscious self, or perhaps the conscious and super-conscious self. God as we have used the word, bears a relation to man which is a closer approximation to the Western concept of the subconscious, than it is to the Western concept of god. But the Western concept of the subconscious is grossly inadequate to express the reality it tentatively touches.
The Western concept of the subconscious, like the concepts of the dogmatic Western religions that form the climate of its creation, does not go beyond the narrow concept of man as composed of a body and an unknown. Also a big stumbling block is the heritage of Greek logic turned into a dogma proclaiming that the way to know a whole is to divide it into the smallest parts and study the parts. The logic would be all right if the logician had previously faced and solved the problem of perceiving when the line of division is real and when the division is mutilation. This he has not done. All knowledge in the West is so divided as to completely mutilate perceivable realities.
Then each "branch" goes off at a tangent. and. not being a branch but a mutilated impulse. becomes such a deformed monster that the task of reconciling the whole, so as to perceive if the total concept be valid, is so hopeless that it is never attempted. The psychologist studies the subconscious, the autopsy surgeon the organic body. the chemist the composition of protoplasm. and the physicist the composition of the atom. All this studying is examining one whole, like the blind men examining the elephant, and the disagreeing concepts are just as ludicrous. Therefore we chose to call the whole "god," rather than subconscious, or matter, or some other name which might give weight to the opinion of one of the blind men over the other.
By so doing. we certainly do not intend to honor the blind man, who chose to perceive the elephant by staying home. and even declining to touch it. We are not honoring the secluded mystic, nor the man who himself perceives god but tries to represent god to others as one who grants exclusive interviews to him. We are honoring the pagan, who called god that which he perceived in his subconscious and that which he saw with clear eyes in the universe around him: one entity, having different forms and aspects. God is the being who exists within self and the being who exists in the universe outside of self as something distinct from self, by reason of self-discipline. God becomes self to the extent that the self becomes proficient in incorporating the discipline of god into its separate being. God is the source of all awarenesses that exist by giving himself time limitations.
He is the source of all substances that exist by consciously and willfully objectifying selected awarenesses and becoming a fixed point of perspective, with ability to experience what he had conceived, while scrupulously avoiding alteration of what he had previously selected for objective being. He is the source of all matter by fixing his will in a set pattern within substance and overcoming all temptation to alter that will. In the fourth discipline he becomes the source of all organic life by choosing to identify his further creative will and effort with a small fragment of the dust that comes from the collision of his creations.
In the fourth discipline god declared what he had found good in the three previous stratums of being to be immutably good and binding on himself, and then chose to identify his conscious being with a minute bit of cosmic dust, and to limit his further creation to that made possible by the energy that he had formerly decreed to be inherent in that bit of dust. Consciousness became the original consciousness of god, with memory consigned to subconsciousness and brought to consciousness through the poignancy of sensory perception. Sensory perception was awareness of all that had previously been decreed as intrinsically existent in matter.
Except for the wealth of memories in the subconscious that were to be known from the limited perspective of sensory perception, the cell was the same as god in the beginning. The conscious awareness of the cell was the creator's awareness, the will was the creator's will, the purpose was the creator's purpose. Only the perspective was changed. God had called force good and he loved the debris and cosmic dust of collision. It was a stimulation to further creation. The new creation would give debris anew form-and-force-pattern of more intricate beauty and emotional appeal. Energy was limited. It had to be gathered, hoarded, and controlled. But possibilities, will, dreams, and designs were unlimited, and so organic life forms are unlimited.
As awarenesses, substance, and matter were conceived and had their existence only in god, and became separate entities, having limited characteristics, only by god's self-discipline; so also, organic life has its being only in him. All is self-discipline, a play of self against self, to achieve greater effectiveness. Matter is god with self-imposed limitations. Organic life is god with self-imposed limitations. The consciousness of god is that consciousness which accepts and wills the limitations. The god that accepted and willed his limitations and became the subconscious and conscious being while still only a perspective of total being, now had something with which to identify that perspective point.
Identification of the perspective point with the cell placed emphasis on self and non-self. Self was identified with certain matter, and acted upon other matter, according to the third discipline concepts. This opened up a whole new field. This further abdication of omniscience and omnipotence increased the intensity of awarenesses. When god identified himself with the small substance, the big substances appeared bigger by comparison; when he identified himself with the weak force, the strong appeared stronger by comparison. Conceivably the non-self could overpower and destroy the self. This was following the discipline of giving the subconscious unequivocal priority over the conscious.
Thus, with emotions intensified, god set forth, as organic life, to take cognizance of the whole of his creation. God willed to start as a small part and encompass the whole. As such we see the living cell reaching out. It is god identifying himself with his creation, setting out to embrace it in its minutest detail. The objective of organic life is to experience the whole universe by growth, mastery, and absorption-to reunite, from anew perspective, what was formerly conceived and now has been decreed to have immutable existence. The green scum floating on the swamp, the worm crawling in the earth, the sea grass, and the sponge-these are forms of existence chosen by the creator because they are good.
To experience them, in their limitation and emotional simplicity, he has abdicated his omniscience and omnipotence. And when life fights life it is god against god, willed by the intellect and chosen by the emotions, as free of malice as ideas being weighed by a scholar, as emotionally satisfying as the point-counter-point of a musical work; yet each bit of life is, in itself, immutably egoistic. By self, all that exists outside the bit of organic life is considered only as experience in tangible form, to be sought after, encompassed, and made part of that which has been identified with self. The conscious god within the cell says it is good, and very good. And so the fourth is added to the overlayment of immutable disciplines.
THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE
Western man, who has lived with the concept of god as a personal entity, in some unconceived heaven, may, at this point, question what happens to our concept of god when we call the conscious god of the fourth discipline "organic life." Is god thereafter merely another word for the subconscious of organic life? Is there no conscious entity which we can call god, who controls, and enforces the disciplines that have been decreed? We have remarked that it is very difficult to clear ourselves of old religious concepts, but that we need to do so if we are to find an integrated pattern of the universe, which includes both observations of our selfs and observations of what is not our selfs. It would be confusing to posit an entity similar to our selfs, that is not perceivable as similar to our selfs.
We are concerned with knowns, and our conceptual pattern has no gap that must be filled in by a hypothesized unknown. In the first discipline we chose to call the limited, perceivable aspect of reality god, instead of calling absolute reality god. We were following the pagan tradition of giving the name god to a perceivable reality, rather than the metropolitan tradition of giving the name god to the merged reality and unreality where all perception ceases. By this trick metropolitan religions are free to create dogmas that cannot be tested. When we Pagans talk of god, we are talking of a perceivable reality, whose being is always triumphant over mere words and dogmas. It is to the perceivable and triumphant reality that we continue to give the name god.
From the perspective of god, as we originally used the word, all is god. From the perspective of the Western world, god, as we have presented him, has many aspects. One aspect is simple awarenesses and pattern awareness in the comprehensive universe of time. One is substance and substance patterns in the sub-universe of space; one is also the perspective that perceives these substances and substance patterns. One is force and force patterns in matter; one is also the perspective that perceives these forces and force patterns. One is the total pulse beat of which a phase of the beat is the narrowly egoistical self which is identified with organic life. If we did not have the benefit of religious history, we would be tempted to give each aspect of god a separate name.
But we have seen that what begins as illustration by a perceiver ends as a metropolitan polytheism of word gods for the unperceiving. We will therefore chance the danger of being a little vague in preference to the danger of creating a multitude of word gods. We have used the word "god" for the primordial self which is the creator. Beginning with the fourth discipline we will use it also in another sense, similar to that in which it is often used, as that which controls. When we use it in this sense we are talking of the innate discipline of being which is stronger than the mere caprice of the egoistic self implanted in organic life.
This aspect of god, as expressed by his control of organic life through the subconscious, often appears as a mysterious force behind a veil. As was intended by god in the fourth discipline, the egoism of organic life is its dominant good. In man this egoism is strong enough to continue after two further disciplines have overlaid it. Those disciplines have been aimed at counteracting its blindness, by disciplining short-sighted capriciousness without destroying egoism as an immutable good. But often the blindness is still strongly in evidence. Western man, with his rapidly developing religion of Popular Materialism, talks of intelligence as an accident of nature. He says that it seems to serve no purpose.
But, we observe that, because of his egoism, and his belief that intelligence is his peculiar possession, he reveres it above all things. Because of this same blind egoism, he seeks to explore every planet of the universe in search of an intelligent being like himself. He is half fearful of finding such a one, but thinks that if he did, the intelligent being might credit his doctor's degree from a good university as a credential for entering the kindergarten of a higher civilization. He seldom seriously considers that such a credential might evidence a need for psychiatric treatment; albeit he does, at times, concede that there might be some difficulty in arriving at common concepts. He often pictures this higher being as communicating by telepathy, of thinking directly into his consciousness.
He has visualized egg-heads without bodies, weird mechanical contrivances, or great globs of protoplasm, but he always assumes that, if they were intelligent, he would find some way to communicate. But on earth when he sees a glob of protoplasm, or even a highly developed "lower" organism, he refuses to look at the evidence before him. He blindly asserts that it is not intelligent, and ignores it as a living being that might have some concepts useful to him. The amoeba cannot, or does not, talk in words understandable to metropolitan man. If Western man had first met it as a sphere twenty feet in diameter on Mars, he would doubtless try to study its intelligence.
But as a near microscopic speck, that has been on earth longer than he has, a serious consideration of its intelligence never occurs to him. He approaches it with a hypothesis, born of his Judaeo-Christian cultural inclination to believe in a magician-like creative intelligence, that it is an intricate little mechanical robot. He concedes that it might have some dim consciousness, but no intelligence, and certainly no plans, ideals, or aspirations. He sees these one-celled living things combine into organisms, or civilizations, that have a million or more varieties on earth.
Each of these cell civilizations is highly efficient, and so satisfactory that individual cells rebuild them over and over again with little change. Even as he observes this, he sees man striving to do the same thing, without ever producing a single civilization which has been satisfactory enough to inspire others to reproduce it without change. He sees a seed cell, from a tree for example, fall in the debris around it and create a structure of such beauty and efficient design that it properly makes him ashamed of any apartment house, or city, or state he might conceive in his most idealistic dreams.
But he says the cells of the tree are blind robots, that they do not know the marvelous structure they build. He studies the embryo of his own body, sees the sperm and ovum meet, the fertilized cell divide, and each new cell redivide, sees the cells begin to alter with unbelievable precision, and to form a pattern. When the intricate organism is complete, and ready for function as an entity, he says that the organic entity has intelligence, dreams, plans, or aspirations. But he insists that the cells that produced, control, and think for him, have none, that they are mere blindly functioning robots.
This blind egoism, which many men exhibit, is the perspective which god imposed upon his being in identifying his consciousness with organic life. He decreed that egoism must dominate all organic life. It must be blind to purposes that are not its own in order to be egoism, but there are degrees of blindness. There are also different causes for blindness. Blindness born of a culture pressure is blindness with a man-decreed purpose that usurps the god-decreed purpose. We have seen that the blindness essential to the good of egoism results from something which god decrees must be kept in the subconscious of organic life. That something is the perspective of god which is cognizant of his own omnipotence.
The fourth discipline requires that organic life must not return to that perspective. It is given the god-will to create, but that will must be expressed by absorbing and reworking existing creations and using only the power inherent in them. As this gives the organism a will to power it is tempted to return to the god-perspective where it is all powerful. The fourth discipline therefore requires that some of the memory and knowledge of the first three disciplines, as seen from the god-perspective, be veiled over from full consciousness, or made a subconscious knowledge. However, it is desirable that all which god has previously found good be brought forward into the consciousness of the organism, if it can be done without disturbing the organic perspective.
The knowledge of truth-beauty-goodness is consciously existent in self. But the omnipotent aspect of god is largely known, not as memory within self, but as an objectively perceived, present reality. The organic being carries forward in full consciousness an objective awareness of the time-space-matter pattern of the material world. The subjective knowledge regarding the force in matter is buried in the subconscious. Nevertheless the adventure possible in force conflicts is consciously recognized as good, provided the organic life, which in the discipline is identified with self, can avoid becoming the subordinated force.
Egoism must dominate. In this ego-centric pattern, which was deliberately decreed by god in establishing his organic perspective, joy of living and the will to create had full expression from the first. However, there were four other previously decreed goods which did not need to be veiled by the fourth discipline, but which did not find ready expression in organic life. From the first discipline, there was the good of the dividedness of being. From the second, there was the good of the limited perspective. From the third, there was the good of limiting or balancing the power of self. And again from the second, there was the good of perceiving good objectively.
These were memories of good that were left as abstracts for which expression was desirable but for which no expression had been found. Dividedness of being was immediately made a pattern of existence in cell division. But when the cell began creating organisms to express its purpose, dividedness of being, as well as the other three goods, still needed a discipline to ensure their perpetuation. The good of the limited perspective received early attention by the cell which incorporated special perception disciplining sense organs into the organisms it was developing. The good of dividedness was often left for the non-self universe to enforce by trauma, but attempts at working this good into a discipline of the organism were in early evidence.
Budding is an assertion of the good of dividedness by individual cells in an organism that has made no other provision for carrying forward this good. Plant and animal interdependence is an early attempt to perpetuate the good of the dividedness and to ensure against the oneness of creation. However this merely creates a condition for survival; it does not make the recognition of the good of dividedness a condition for further existence. Sex is a full-fledged discipline that carries on the maximum number of the previous goods as a condition of racial survival. It ensures dividedness of being, a limited perspective, a limiting or balancing of power, and it brings these goods to the threshold of consciousness when it ensures perpetuation of the fourth good: the good of perceiving good objectively.
Sex saves the essential egoism of organic life from resulting in total blindness. It does this by requiring perception of good in an entity external to self as a condition of continued racial being. More than that, it confronts the organism with this limitation on egoism at the threshold of consciousness. What was before a blind drive to create, by considering all outside of self as mere material of creation, now requires recognition of something outside of self as an already created entity. Sex teaches that there is a creative will outside of self, and that this other creative will must be respected, or the ego itself will perish.
Thus sex lays the groundwork for objective recognition of a godwill in the universe that is higher than self-will. Objective recognition of this god-will is necessary because full perception of this god-will directly in self would be a return to the god perspective. Such a return would constitute the complete destruction of the discipline of organic being. Full recognition of god in self must be held to a rare experience, carried forward merely as a sort of melody memory that finds full orchestration in consciousness at the time when a vital decision is to be made, and when the individual has created a tentative pattern of decision through which the god perspective can find a vehicle of expression.
The melody memory of the decision which the cells that were designing the organism had to make to create sex is still, after all these countless generations from the first segregated male and female entities to man, one of the strongest memories in the innate being of man. It is one that calls forth the grandest emotion of the universe. The highest ecstasy known to an organic being had to be incorporated in the organism to ensure that the sex instinct would be only slightly less than egoism. For the most part, only the high ecstasy itself, rather than conscious knowledge of its purpose and conscious experience of the original grand emotion, has made sex a success. But the grand emotion of the cell that willed the discipline of sex, with full knowledge of what it involved, still rises in man to ennoble him. Indeed it is repeated in decreeing the discipline of man. And yet some beings that have the appearance of men can the cells mere mechanical robots.
As we have seen, all the potential and unexpressed goods, left over in establishing the fourth discipline, are assured perpetuation in sex. This was a strong incentive for the cell trying to design the most successful organism, to create sex. When it could be seen that objective perception of good in an organism different from self would stimulate the koan designers of future organisms to incorporate the best of the two designs, it was apparent that sex would have another advantage: mutations superior to the original organism. But with the perception of this advantage the ego of the creating organism was brought up short by the certain knowledge that if the ego wills something higher than itself in a competitive world, it is willing its own death!
The egocentric perspective of the conscious organic being had to lift the veil of the holy of hollies, the subconscious god-perspective within self, before it could make such a decision. Joy of living is the prime mover of all being and this was a will to death. But the deepest inquiry of the ego discovered that the beginning of god in the first discipline was the will to death of the absolute, the infinite. And the answer the ego received from god was: it can be good, it can create greater joy of being. But still the fifth discipline had to be made from an egocentric perspective, and this was a choice beyond full understanding from that perspective. The making of that choice is a never-to-be-forgotten memory.
This inherent memory, brought to the threshold of consciousness, is the subject of the emotion portrayed by Wagner in the Liebestod of Tristan and Isolde. This innate knowledge, this knowledge that the will to love must be twin born with the will to death, also accounts for the high emotional appeal of Christ's death on the cross. In the early centuries after the event, men of pagan heritage, who had no background for understanding Jesus as a reformer of Judaism, turned his crucifixion into a symbol for the thing their beings remembered. To do this they had to consider Jesus as a god incarnate, and had to consider that he was crucified by his own will rather than the will of others. The historical life of Jesus was accordingly modified to include these implications.
As we noted, the grand emotion is repeated when the discipline of man is born. Thus man has an innate memory of two valid realities in which this grandest of all emotions was experienced. It is unfortunate that a drama more expressive of one or the other than the crucifixion of Jesus has not occupied the thoughts and emotions of half the world for the last two thousand years. But each individual who finds, amid all the ecstatic joy inherent in the relations between the sexes, that the will to love is also the will to death, and chooses it gladly, meets with god to experience the grand emotion and to proclaim the good of the fifth discipline.
THE SIXTH DISCIPLINE
In the fourth discipline, organic life, the self will is the will to create by appropriating what is outside self, destructively disregarding all entities, and reworking all, as mere material, into a pattern identified with self. In the fifth discipline, sex, this will is partially held in check, by requiring the self to perceive good in entities outside itself, and to instinctively will its own death, in order to attempt creation of something better. But sex cannot be allowed to destroy the narrow self will of organic life, or it will negate the fourth discipline. Yet to accomplish its purpose this perception of good, this recognition, perhaps subconsciously, of the god-will outside of self, must be almost as strong as egoism.
The nearer it gets to a precarious balance the more effective it becomes. But it cannot be allowed to overbalance or even reach complete balance. The cells-striving for an advantage in the competition between organism-designed and launched, as mutations, an endless number of organic variations. The objective was to achieve the most delicate balance, without coming too near to the perilous overbalance. Pursuing this objective, the cells, by a long series of mutations, arrived at the monkey-like creatures. In the monkey-like creatures, perception of the universe outside self was brought to a point where simple curiosity in external things largely overruled further development. The monkey, safe in the tree top, became a grandstand spectator of the drama on the ground below him.
Perception had become extremely acute. It had, as intended, gone far beyond the mere sufficiency that recognized enough good external to self to ensure racial perpetuation. But perception had degenerated into mere interest in drama. Perception of the good decreed by god had been lost in perception of the universe as entertainment only. Joy of being is the purpose of existence, and joy in entertainment is joy of being, but it is a wholly passive joy and therefore a blind alley. No further reality can be built on it. An increased sensitivity to the deeper meaning of the drama is necessary before the discipline of sex can be overlaid with still another discipline.
The monkey-like creature lacked this deeper sensitivity. But a high degree of perception had been achieved and this was the superiority of the monkey-like creatures. The blind alley which the path of perception had taken needed to be retraced. The self needed to have a greater role, but not simply the egocentric self. The fully balanced self, the innate self, which was sensitive to all goods inherent in memory, needed accentuation, so as to counterbalance the dominance of empirical interest in the world merely as entertainment. From the evidence before us, it presently appears that the cells, which were decreeing the mutations, tried to accomplish this by backing up evolution a little.
As we see it now, Homo sapiens evolved from a monkey-like being that was born and developed into an adult, capable of reproduction, while still in the fetal state. The arrested development, the longer childhood, and the greater emotional sensitivity of the hairless mutation, became the vehicle for the development of man as a discipline. Whether through this or some other evolutionary process, the sensitivity of the organic being to the remembered goods in self, and the ability to perceive god in the universe, has become evident in a sufficient number of individuals of the Homo sapiens for us to recognize man as a sixth discipline. We may look upon the sixth discipline either as potential or accomplished.
The sixth discipline usually is not sufficiently strong to overcome training that inhibits it, and so it does not show up in the Homo sapiens as a full-fledged discipline. But neither are egoism and sex able to show their nature as an expression of the god purpose within when inhibiting cultural pressures are very strong. Inhibited egoism and sex are often manifest in some distorted flare-up of objectively incomprehensible behavior, or perversion. In the same manner, the discipline of man, if inhibited or distorted, is manifest in perverted religions.
The discipline of man begins with the recognition of god's methods and objectives. This is an innate knowledge, the melody of which can be fully recognized and brought into the waking consciousness if empirical observations are allowed to form themselves into a vehicle for the expression of the innate melody. The pattern formed by empirical observations is most often distorted by a perverted egoism that seeks to see other entities as extensions of self. When man perceives himself as a separate entity he can know that he is a god-entity.
This high sensitivity to innate memories, which gives man his perception of himself as a god-entity, and gives him his perception of god in the universe, approaches the knowledge which god decreed must be apart of the subconscious being, rather than conscious being, when he identified himself with the cell, as organic life.
For the cell to bring this knowledge to consciousness is dangerous. If it becomes more than a semi-consciousness, if it becomes a dominant part of being, it negates the discipline of organic life. If this happens the will of the organism dissolves into the will of the god of the first three disciplines and the perspective of man is lost. The dominance of innate egoism and innate sex urge in animals, prior to man, precludes their interest in the first three disciplines from becoming a ruling motive.
This good is achieved by lack of balance. The achievement of the supremely precarious balance, which makes the organic being conscious of its unbroken god heritage, involves replacing innate compulsions with conscious control. It is a calculated risk. This revelation of man to himself, and replacement of blind compulsion with free will, is not a test of men devised by a god who works from an unrevealed blueprint, but a risk taken by the god within the cell in seeking further development.
The history of man is the history of its failure. The Judaeo-Christian Bible is cognizant of these failures, and is much involved in god's repentance that he ever made man. However, only in pagan mythology do we find cause to believe that men, who were conscious gods, ever walked the earth in sufficient numbers to constitute a society of men. And then, their contracts with the giants, or states, the conceptual creations by which the perverted ego tries to see other entities as extensions of self, required that they destroy themselves. The self destruction of the conscious god-entities may be simple historical fact, or it may be a symbolic story of the grand emotion brought into the sixth discipline. That emotion is necessarily involved in establishing the sixth discipline.
In the fifth discipline, the self must will its death to create sex-love. In the sixth, the self that has become the conscious god must will its death to create the consciously disciplined god-entity: man. We have seen that the fourth discipline is aimed at separating the perspective of the organic being, which in one sense is simply god incarnate, from the perspective of the conscious god. From that point the movement is toward the full emergence of a force-limited, integrated being, who is consciously a god-entity. Sex encourages perception by requiring a constant choice between what the self perceives as good within and what it perceives as good without.
This trend, brought to a full comparison of the whole self with the whole universe, brings us to an understanding of the disciplines of man's being. Understanding these disciplines reveals to us the clear identity of man and god as one being, separated only by their respective points of perspective. The same understanding reveals to US that the six disciplines are aimed at keeping man's perspective clearly separated from the, theoretically possible, omnipotent and omniscient perspective that metropolitan religions call god. It would perhaps be better for man not to know that he is potentially this god, but if he does not know this he falls victim to the confusion of perverted concepts, and his will and purpose become deflected by the dogmas of perverted religions.
Therefore a fully conscious perception of the six disciplines of man's being is desirable because it removes fear and uncertainty from man, and gives him a criterion for avoiding perversion. Full understanding leads to joy in man's perspective, rather than a wish to exchange it for that of the metropolitan god. But in passing from the fifth discipline to the sixth discipline, every integrated being must pass through the perspective of the metropolitan god. He must face its temptations to acquire power and inspire worship, before he becomes true man (or true woman).* (A word for the sixth discipline being that leaves no doubt that it includes woman is highly desirable. It must include male and female-not be neuter or asexual. Perhaps "Pagan" can become such a word.)
The metropolitan god perspective is not a discipline or a real being. It is a taboo -the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden -something to be glimpsed in passing and rejected. It is a path from sex to something higher than the metropolitan god. That something higher is man. The being, who has acquired enough understanding to know that he is potentially the metropolitan god, must win the death of that being, to create the god-entity restricted by other god-entities like himself, the Pagan god-entity: man.
To achieve that restriction, he must not seek power; he must seek to create man in his own image: a consciously manifest god-entity. This act of god creating man in his own image is the act of the subconscious god wining the conscious man's existence. It is also the act of one man willing another man's existence. It is the sixth discipline, man, made conscious and articulate in three circumstances: in the first true man by his subconscious; in the will of such a man to propagate a race of men rather than seek eternal life; and in the will of such a man to reveal, by education, a potential man to himself. Man is a god, but he is a god-limited god. In man the power of each god-entity is limited by other god-entities.
The conscious god-entity, who has perceivable being, must will this multiplicity or return to the perspective of the early discipline gods and leave his organic entity to be perceived by others as an insane man. He recognizes that to try to become an incarnation of the metropolitan god is a perversion that closes the channel to continued perception. He recognizes that it would not only make impossible the sixth discipline but negate the good of the fifth. He would not be a perverted man but a perverted fourth discipline organism.
A god who is alone always wishes for a creator with all the attributes of himself, who can create a universe and will be appreciative of one created for him, when he finds it completed and good; who will cherish it, manipulate it, have dominion over it, and who will change it at will so that it will always be new and fresh to its original creator. He also wants the discipline of that other god's will opposing his own: the sixth discipline. A fully conscious god entity always seeks to create man in his own image: a god entity like himself.
When this creation has become a perceivable reality, the sixth discipline is added to the other five, and all can be brought to the level of consciousness and examined at will or modified (on penalty of death). When the conscious self, identified with the physical man-like being, recognizes that he is a god-entity, he lives or dies by his own volition. When he wills his being he is consciously willing what his subconscious has heretofore willed for him: conformance to the disciplines that are his creation. Man is finite and he must reject the infinite, the eternal, and the absolute. He must find joy of living in finite awarenesses, and love the creation of finite awarenesses and their patterns. He exists in time and space, and must accept and call good the conceptually concentric universes of time and space. He is identified with matter and he must accept and call good the existence of matter and its intrinsic forte.
He is organic life, and he must accept and call good the egoistic attempt of organic life, both in himself and in all other organic beings, to embrace and remake the universe. He is one sex in a two-sex discipline, and he must recognize desirable qualities in other beings which he does not possess, and will his death to create something superior to himself. This must be called good as a discipline of being, a compulsory condition; the inferior can aspire to but not fully evaluate what is superior to himself and therefore cannot have the prerogative of reserving the death will for the propitious moment. He is man, a being consciously embodying the purpose and will of god, and he must not only learn to enjoy the whole of creation; he must accept responsibility for it.
He must design, dare, and do, whatever he feels will add poignancy to creation. Following the good of organic life he must feel free to destroy whatever opposes him, and to take whatever he needs for the growth and for the development of his design for living. Following the good of sex, he must not be blind to other beings and other designs for living, but must see desirable qualities he does not possess, and will the death of his own to combine the two into one superior to each and both. He must accept and call good the limitation of his power by other god-entities. He must will to have them rise to equality with him and, if they can, surpass him.
The universe, as a Garden of Eden, is given to each man to do with as he wills. It is subject to but one restriction, or caution, to the newly created god-entity from the first and more certain god-entity: "You may do with it as you will, you may even destroy my body, but if you presume to modify any established discipline, that is, if you partake of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall surely die. As a man, conscious god-entity, you now live by your own volition." This is not simply a historical taboo given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
It is a taboo given to every man by his being, or articulated by a god-entity who would point out another's being to himself. It is all that limits man's omniscience and omnipotence. Death for violation is not a punishment; it is a simple fact. The violator is no longer a man, or a god-entity, but an evolutionary throwback, a being who has already been surpassed. He must rise to become man, accept the enforced retreat to a discipline that he is able to maintain, or suffer until he does the one or the other. By rejection of any discipline, a man immediately falls to the level of that discipline next below the one rejected.
There can be no unfilled gaps. For the conscious man, recovery of the higher level is a matter of his individual volition. When he has become a being of the sixth discipline, the conscious man and the subconscious god within him look together at the whole and say of it: it is good and very good.
A SPECULATION REGARDING FURTHER DISCIPLINES
We, who have perceived the assemblage of disciplines that make up the universe which we know, are as certain that the discipline of man must follow the discipline of sex as we are that five is the next number of the assemblage: one, two, three, four; that A is the next note in the scale assemblage: C, D, E, F, G; or that solid is the next real concept in the assemblage: point, line, plane. We have perceived man in ourselves and others; we know he is part of the assemblage.
Man must follow sex, he must be an established reality, a being of unquestionable integrity, before a further discipline can be overlaid upon man as a foundation. The assemblage that found sex good, millions of years before the Homo sapiens came on the scene, has in it the unequivocal requirement that man, as we Pagans use the word "man," must follow next in order. If Homo sapiens had not developed, or if Homo sapiens should now fail the role by achieving success in his continuing efforts to create a monstrous asexual organism, or fourth stratum civilization, another animal in which male and female temperaments and functions exist in separate entities would have to become man before the assemblage could continue.
However we who perceive the six-discipline assemblage which includes man, and expect that at least a portion of the species Homo sapiens will be able to sustain the sixth stratum of being, go on to ask ourselves: Is man necessarily the end product? Is there no destiny for man as an entity but death? After man has become a conscious individuated god-entity, is there nothing further but dissolution of the individual will back into that totality from which it was segregated as a disciplined part? Even if this should be so, we might visualize a society of sovereign men in which we would look at the man stratum and say that it is good and very good.
Joy of living, and joy of dying, in a world dominated by true man, could attain a climactic height inconceivable to the man-like beings who now dominate the world. But is death necessary for man? For the biological vehicle, through which the self manifests being as a conscious god-entity in the sixth stratum, the answer appears to be an unequivocal, yes. This appears to be an essential part of our concept of man. If god, in identifying his conscious self with a single-celled animal and burying the origin of the universe in the subconscious, had merely given the conscious self the ability to experience the world external to self, death would not have been implicit.
But we perceive that the will to grow, to create, to split, to vary, to become diverse, and to discover good by competitive selection in accordance with the discipline of matter in other words, the essential will of god as a totality was also made part of the will of self. This required that death be called good by the god who decreed and became the self. In sex the acceptance of a deferred, god-enforced destruction of the physical self vehicle for a divinely perceived good becomes a semiconscious act. In man it becomes an act of full consciousness. The third, fourth, and fifth disciplines, on which man is built, seem to require the death of any self vehicle identified with matter that can be surpassed.
The man-like being who willed himself to be perfection, who willed himself to be the metropolitan concept of an immortal god, presumably would die only by a gradual dimming of awareness if death were not imposed by a higher will. But that higher will appears to be in his subconscious, in the real god within him. If without understanding it well enough to concur in it, he understood it well enough to effectively negate it in his own self, presumably it would triumph over him through a more firmly based and stronger self.
As true men, our conscious will is in essential agreement with what the subconscious dictates and we thereby know a joy of living never before conceived. But still the conscious will belongs to selfs that are individual entities in which egoism has been made the dominant note. Each rises ever anew, born again, enriched, from its willed submission to dominance by the subconscious or god within us. This play between consciousness and subconsciousness, this buffeting of self by the total triumphant god, when the two wills are in essence one, yet have different perspectives, becomes, in the reverent man, not solely physical fight and physical buffeting, but a something that is like two themes of first discipline music.
He begins to create his own first and second stratum universes into which he invites the comprehensive god subconscious and finds that it responds to the extent that the melody he creates strikes a harmonic chord. His first and second stratum universes do not conflict with the physical sixth stratum universe that he shares with the total god and other selfs. His self returns to his first and second stratum universes enriched from the melody-patterns acquired in the later disciplines.
In the physical universe he shares with the comprehensive god and other selfs he recreates some of the things he has created in his individuated first and second stratum universes and gains stature by the experience of adapting them to later disciplines. They are his individuated self as distinguished from the comprehensive god self. He begins to recognize his embryonic being as a design, a pattern, a melody that retains its identity in all art mediums, in all strata of being.
Then, gradually or suddenly, he perceives that he might develop a sufficiently disciplined individual self to sustain being as an entity and create a universe subsequent to and built upon his knowledge of the six strata of being as a base. He, who has become a man, might develop a universe by his own creative will and effort if there were no control greater than that which he had already perceived. He cannot but believe that if there were no stratum of being built upon a full life and death in the sixth, it would be possible to create one.
But he knows that should he try he would be confronted by the will of those who had developed enough integrity as sixth discipline beings to survive death of their self-disciplining organisms and who had already established a seventh discipline. It is not good that we seek to know a discipline ahead of that in which we still strive to become proficient, but a seventh, and perhaps eighth, are not wholly inconceivable. We can only conceive these strata as an asexual animal conceives sex, and as many man-like creatures conceive man-incompletely, as a hazy potentiality.
But that hazy conception, bolstered by our six discipline assemblage, gives our waking consciousness a defense against the dogmas of other religions. Therefore, inasmuch as we must have a conscious defense against the other religions that insist on discussing life after death, we will speculate briefly on the subject. Partial perception of the seventh stratum of being could be construed as evidenced in the mutilated concepts of various religions. The concepts of Purgatory and Valhalla, for instance, could be construed as either perceptions of existing seventh stratum universes or tentative creations in the seventh discipline.
However, no mythological symbol, except possibly the world tree as it appears in German and Norse mythology, would permit us to construe that it could have been based on perception of an eighth. The Western concept of Heaven is apparently nothing but the metropolitan, sex-and-man-negating concept of civilization as a super fourth-stratum organism translated into the second stratum of being. The concept of Heaven appears to be a neurotic attempt to negate only certain aspects of the disciplines of reality; this leaves no real concept. The original concept of Nirvana, as the complete negation of all strata, appears entirely valid but of no concern to us while we know joy of living.
The present concept of Nirvana is sometimes that of a selected portion of man existing as part of a hypothesized entity in the first or second stratum of being. This is a theoretical possibility but to make such a state an objective of living, while one exists as a potential sixth stratum being, is to denounce the triumphant reality of god and seek retrogression. In seeking harmony with the triumphant god-reality We might consider that we might be forced back to such a state but we would not make it an objective of sixth stratum being.
The self that we perceive, the self as an entity whose form or melody is determined by the six disciplines, the self that has molded experience into integrity, the self that has the capability of translating the essence of experience from one stratum to another, might be something that could form the foundation for a further discipline. The self appears to have much more to build on than had god in the beginning. It has the multitude of melodies and dream designs stimulated by its long struggle with its disciplines. It has the conscious knowledge of the six discipline assemblage, which constitutes a faint glimmer of a plan for creating a real universe.
Thus it has a basis for believing in a seventh stratum of selfs who might seek to negate all prior disciplines and achieve Nirvana, but could as well seek to build on them instead, each as a separate entity, or in mutually chosen harmony with others. Continued harmonic relationship between the seventh stratum and the universe we know could be accomplished in many ways. Self identity with the physical via further miniaturization within an atom of the discarded body, or self identity with a cosmic ray within the body and movement to another planetary position in space are examples that are compatible with the Western concept of continuous material identity in a single three-dimension universe.
Simple admission of a real fourth dimension (as distinguished from the concept of time as a fourth dimension) into the seventh discipline would also be consistent with Western thought patterns. But speculation on these points is idle and fruitless. We mention them only for the benefit of those who ignore the fact that there are possibilities and therefore do not perceive the source of the power to pervert perception of reality that most religions exhibit.
All are potentialities but it is as useless for us to discuss them as it would have been for the first fourth stratum cells to have discussed whether a hypothetical crustacean, mollusk, or some other organism, would be the triumphant reality that achieved the next discipline that could provide a sound base for a further overlayment. They would never have developed Homo sapiens if they had been content with speculation. Creative development, not analysis of ideas, is the dialectic of being. It is apparent that the self which has the soundest overlayment of disciplines is the one in which can be found the greatest good-the one that leads the advance echelon of the triumphant god-reality.
Whether the seventh stratum of being as we can conceive it is real or potential we cannot know without testing our will to creative existence in it. But if we assumed it to be real we might go on to hypothesize an orderly sustained relationship between seventh stratum beings that as a unity constituted an eighth discipline strong enough to dominate, perpetuate or eradicate all, including of course the universe we know, if it should so wish. As there would be no limited realm of reality, of which one could be deprived, the seventh stratum individual would either accept the eighth stratum or reject.
For the most part it would probably be the other way: the individual would be accepted or rejected. Both positive and negative answers to the question of whether there are, or are not, influences upon the universe we know by possible beings of the seventh and eighth strata are equally conceivable. But this question is not our proper concern because the discipline of man requires that he live by his own efforts as an integrated being. He is less than man if he seeks to gain an unfair advantage by prostrate prayer and supplication rather than a stature increasing examination and embracement of perceivable realities.
The vaguely perceived or conceived realm beyond the sixth discipline is a fertile field for artists who are in sufficient harmony with the total universe to partially perceive or conceive it, but true men of balance will hold it to be a taboo field for dogmatic presentation, lest they induce others to try preparing for a latter discipline in some manner other than becoming proficient in those disciplines that constitute the present reality..
The age of Greece that has been glorified by the adjective "golden" followed the crystallization of partially formed concepts into a formalized representation of idealized gods, but thereby the seed for destroying perception of present realities was sown in the waking consciousness of the people. We have also seen what happened to pagans in India who sat down to contemplate death and formalized their perceptions into a theology. Let us learn from the errors of these two peoples.
Their attempts to crystallize half-formed concepts into dogmas may have done less violence to man's perception of reality than the dogmas of the Judaeo-Christian founders, but even so, they deflected attention from further perception of the clearly manifest realities of the first six strata of being. This we should avoid. We either accept and call good the present reality and grow from our beings as they exist in the here and now, or else we become selfs who are dwarfed, deformed, and destined to be surpassed.
THE PAGAN CONCEPT OF REALITY VIEWED FROM THE PERSPECTIVES OF CHRISTIANITY, WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY, AND WESTERN SCIENCE
Now we pause, we, who met as two barbarians from different sides of the mountain. We cease from our words, our grunts, our crude pictures drawn on the sand. We stand erect, and look into each other's eyes. I have been saying "we, we, we." When we Pagans live in our thoughts about ourselves and the universe as we perceive it, it is not wholly improper to say "we," for in our thoughts you, I, and god are one.
Now when you and I stand erect as separate entities and look into each other's eyes, perhaps we each see god in the depths of the other's being. If so, we may continue to talk of you and I and the god within us as "we." If this be fact, we can summarize our attitude in these simple words: We, who met as barbarians, recognize each other as conscious god-entities, and when the conscious god-entity is more than one we call each a true man, or a Pagan. We are Pagans. Further words of explanation are not necessary between us. But it may be possible that we stand erect, look into each other's eyes, and do not each see god in the other.
If so, it may be that our differences regarding our concepts of the world we know are great, and will only be aggravated by further verbosity; or it may be that we have only the slight misunderstanding that comes from using words containing an aura of undesired concepts associated with the concepts we were attempting to make the words convey, and we should talk a little more about the words themselves in the hope of clarifying. We have been using the words of metropolitan cultures and they are not made for Pagan use. There is no Pagan language. If there were it would be designed for songs, for joyful proclamations of perceivable being, not for discussions which assume that being which cannot be perceived as a reality can be perceived as a word.
We Pagans have little need for discussions; each is an entity and has his own volition, based upon his own dreams, designs, and aspirations. Our dialectic is being and action. But we, who have died in metropolitan civilizations, and been born again as Pagans have been trying to point out, in the words of a metropolitan civilization, something that we perceive as a reality but something which does not exist in the concepts of a metropolitan civilization; therefore, something for which it has no words.
This something is man as an entity: a living soul in the image of god. You notice the words to which we had to resort in order to name the thing we were trying to point out the words of Judaeo-Christianity, the metropolitan religion on which Western civilization is founded. But the concept of the living soul of man as an entity does not exist in this religion any more than it does in the civilization.
A "living soul" is not a concept of Judaeo-Christianity; it is merely a word or symbol for the unknown being, hypothesized as Adam, the mythical progenitor of metropolitan civilization, before something changed him from a living soul. Neither Western civilization nor its metropolitan religions know man as a living soul, as an entity, man as originally created by god. They cannot know; the concept is taboo in their thought processes. The metropolitan civilization conceives all men as being born pieces of a state. Its religions conceive all men as born in sin: born dead.
The Christian concept of a living soul is a "redeemed" soul. It is then in custody of its redeemer. It is never an autonomous entity. These concepts are in direct conflict with what we Pagans perceive in the world of reality. They are not the same thing at all. We have previously denied the validity of the Christian word "soul" because this difference between a living soul as an entity and a redeemed soul in the custody of its redeemer, which to some may appear to be minor is to us wholly unreconcilable.
But now that we have finished our labored effort to present our concept, while scrupulously avoiding the Judaeo-Christian concepts, it might be well to give a moment to a statement of difference in the language of Judaeo-Christianity. We previously mentioned that the Bible of Judaism and Christianity contained a story of creation that seemed to have been copied in garbled form from one composed by a being of perception. The garbled story of creation contains little more than the fact that creation was in six "days," and man was created on the sixth, as a living soul in the image of god.
It could not contain Pagan understanding because the Biblical copy is written in the metropolitan concept of "speaking" a thing into existence; that is, creating by word concepts. Therefore the concept is not that of a real god creating out of nothingness, but that of a metropolitan word god, creating out of the chaos in the minds of a metropolitan people. The Judaeo-Christian god is a metropolitan magician that commands being by words.
Later in the Christian Bible this is emphasized even more by saying, "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God." The pattern set forth is that of a force external to man creating according to preconceived plans, and making man subject to an eternal direction that attempts to fit him into a perfected blueprint. The reform movement instituted by Jesus, who proclaimed, "The kingdom of heaven is within you", "I am in the Father and the Father in me," et cetera, made no progress, and the old pattern prevailed. The Christian god is still conceived as external to man, whether as a separate anthropomorphic being or as a "humanity" consciousness.
To most Christians, as to most Jews, god is not a perceivable reality; god is the dogmatic, authoritative utterance; god is the law; god is the ten commandments; god is the word: god is the metropolitan entity which proclaims the authoritative word and is, itself, a concept created of words. Like the Judaeo-Christian story of creation, the story of the Garden of Eden, which was obviously originated by a perceiver, also loses its valid meaning in its Biblical form as generally interpreted by present-day Christians and Jews. The older Babylonian legend, which recites the casting out of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, clearly recognizes that the world is already populated with men.
A study of the Babylonian legend, in conjunction with the mythology of other peoples, and in conjunction with the total Biblical story which includes the story of Cain and Abel, indicates to us that the Bible may be recording the story of a people's rejection of the real perceivable god, as widely known by Indo-European pagans, in favor of the metropolitan god created in the language of men. If so, it would appear that they only colored the facts slightly to try to justify their stiffnecked position. The story could also be interpreted as instructions to the Jews from a conqueror who could have destroyed them but chose to let them live because of a potential good he saw in them.
But for the purpose of distinguishing between the Pagan and the metropolitan concepts of soul, we will refer only to the story as it appears in the Judaeo-Christian Bible and as it is now generally interpreted. If man were conceived as still existing in the Garden of Eden, subject only to commandments of the god within, the Christian concept of the soul would approach the concept of man as a god-entity close enough for discussion. However, the idea of perfection, or creation according to a preconceived blueprint, could not enter. Man, as a living soul in the image of god would have to be taken as merely the sixth stage of a continuing evolution such as we have outlined.
The direction and purpose are known by god in the beginning, but not the end result. The father-son relationship perceived by Jesus is much closer to the perceivable god-man relationship than is the all-wise-master and ignorant-slave relationship of the original Judaism. Each stratum of being is called good, or arbitrarily decreed immutable, when its creator has seen it as a solid foundation on which further development can be overlaid.
The commandment of the god within is that man may partake of any fruit (do anything or call anything good) but try to alter what god has called good: the six disciplines themselves, not the products of those disciplines. By choosing an opposing good to that decreed by the god within, by creating a metropolitan god, man destroys his own entity. He perishes as a living soul. He becomes part of a metropolitan soul, a culture soul, or the soul of mankind as a total world culture. This "soul" is a creation of words. There is no such soul as a real creation of a real god. It is a pure fabrication of undisciplined imagination, destined for death, even as an imaginative fabrication.
He who denies his living soul, his being as an entity, to become part of it, is already dead. No authoritative, dogmatic, external god gave man the commandment against violating what had been called good. No penance for the violation can help the violator. No vicarious sacrifice can aid. The soul that sinneth, it shall surely die. For the dead there is only one way to find the kingdom of heaven within him; he must be born again. "I am" is the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh into god except through "I am."* (Jesus: "I am the way, and the truth and the life: No man cometh unto the Father, but by me." St. John, Chapter 14, verse 6.)
This explanation is not an attempt to reconcile our differences with institutional Christianity. Despite the efforts of Jesus to the contrary, the generally accepted present day Christianity, like the generally accepted present-day Judaism and Mohammedanism, is a metropolitan religion.
The metropolitan god, the dogmatic commandments in the words of a "people," and the perceivable god within each individual are completely unreconcilable. Those who deny their own souls to become part of a metropolitan soul choose death. We will let the dead bury its dead. When we turn to look for possible ways of expressing our concepts in the language of that portion of Western civilization which is disclaiming its Christian origin, we find the task still more hopeless than that of expressing ourself in the Christian concept language. The Christian concepts are dying, but their replacements are still unformed. The study of the metropolitan soul, social science, we can pass over without any consideration.
Whether this fabrication of god as the word be called god or humanity, it lacks purposeful reality, and its language, statistics, is the language of what has been, and is no more: the dead past. Statistics motivate power-hungry ghouls but not real men. We will leave social science to the autopsy surgeons. In Western civilization there remain, then, only the unintegrated concepts of psychology and physical science. Neither is the whole idea, and so neither can properly be said to be congruent nor not congruent with the Pagan concept of reality.
Psychology attempts to study the self and ignores the non-self, except at the point of contact with the self as stimuli. Physical science attempts to study the non-self and ignores the self doing the studying. Neither sets forth any hypothesis whatsoever for integrating the realities of self and non-self that both have segregated. But before we leave concepts behind, and begin talking of Pagan culture, we will briefly compare the perspectives of Pagans with the perspective of Western psychologists and physical scientists so as to indicate the existence of a fragmentary "Rosetta Stone." Present Western psychology is an aggregation of abortive concepts that is kept from real prowess because its foundation is psychiatry. Psychiatry's purpose is relieving pressures of distorted thoughts and emotions, rather than developing undistorted beings. It has no concept of an undistorted being. It is a parasitic growth upon a civilization of distorted beings and must have the distortion for its survival. Psychology then grows out of this parasite, gets its financial support from it, and justifies its existence by its contributions to psychiatry. If psychology were a healthy growth, rooted in the fundamental realities of being, it would be a religion. The abortive concepts of psychology, that do give us a crude language, come to us from innately religious men.
They perceive that religion has degenerated into dogma in the Western world so they adhere to their pseudo-science in an attempt to avoid the stigma attached to the classification "religion." To claim the classification of "science" rather than "religion" they make a pretense of looking at self from the objective analytical viewpoint. As a consequence, they come up with an objective language. This language is not satisfactory for our purpose but it might give some clarification to the concepts we have tried to convey without any proper language whatsoever. In the language of psychologist, an organic being has two kinds of actions: (1) actions that come from impulses that are consciously considered before the action, and (2) reflex actions, that are responses to a circumstance without conscious consideration. We have described three strata that exist in each man as a disciplined organism: (4) organic being, (5) sex, and (6) conscious man.
Psychologists have no concept of conscious man as we perceive him. They are merely dealing with a man-like being who is semi-conscious. Therefore they do not recognize the sixth stratum of being as a reality. They do recognize the stratum of organic being and the stratum of sex, after a fashion. The perceptible realities that we call (4) organic being and (5) sex receive various interpretations and names by psychologists, such as (4) the death urge and (5) eros. In the popular mind the viewpoint presented by the psychologists evolves into the concept that man has a destructive and creative side.
To our Pagan perceptions this interpretation is a distortion of realities which has resulted from viewing them solely from the metropolitan perspective. However, we are not here concerned with it as theory, but with real actions resulting from the realities, and we can perceive the same realities and the same sources of real actions whether we look at them from our perspective or theirs.
We perceive the self's impulses to action as properly passing through the basic organic being (which considers everything merely as material for creation); then through the sex impulse (where the entity to be acted on is weighed by a sexually taught, instinctive evaluation); then the impulse is submitted to conscious evaluation by man; and finally it is passed as action. Stimuli coming to the self are evaluated first by conscious man; then subconsciously evaluated by the sex stratum; finally evaluated by organic being; then submitted to the self, where action is either directed, or the stimuli retained as a basis for future impulse to action, or simply retained as data for future evaluation.
We Pagans call both the channel of action and the channel of stimuli good, and we attempt to keep these channels open. We attempt to recognize the stratum of being that has the dominant role in each decision to act. We attempt to keep our lives good, and our beings healthy and well-balanced. To do this we try to work out a design for living whereby the total being is symmetrically represented in action, and where the total being receives balanced nourishment, that is, stimuli which promote the balanced development of each stratum. Our concern is that civilizations and metropolitan religions create a center for reflex action that is interposed between the stimuli and consciousness. This is the domain of the god of words, or dogmas. By psychologists this center is called the super ego, or various other things. In effect it is a reflex center where all impulses are evaluated by a word criterion. By "word" criterion we do not mean utterances exclusively.
The "word" may be a symbolic ritual, for instance. It may be created willfully, like the Christian sacrament, or be simply a behavior fad of civilization. We Pagans believe it should contain nothing but "words" willfully created by individual parents for their own children, and that it should be as temporary as possible. Obviously the reflex center that can be deliberately conditioned is part of man's being. It helps to make man what he is. We Pagans consider that the objective should be to place it under full conscious control of the individual by the time he is an adult. We recognize that it can properly be used by parents for teaching behavior patterns to their children.
But we can encourage these to be different in each family, and thereby encourage a condition wherein the child must consciously examine them when he comes in contact with others. Therefore by the time the child becomes an adult he should have examined them all, and assimilated the childhood conditioning into his waking consciousness. His survival as an adult should depend on his ability to examine and become a conscious master of this reflex center, which is the crutch of childhood. Civilization's man-like creatures, who are less than man, retain the unexamined childhood conditioning of their reflex centers into adulthood. In such man-like creatures all conscious perceptions must pass through this center where they are segregated by the conditioned reflexes into "good" and "evil."
The "good" pass on through the channels we have described. The "evil" are repressed: they are packed away in a closet in this reflex guard station of consciousness, so to speak, and are never evaluated by conscious man, sex, or organic being. This unmastered reflex center is a block to full perception. The conscious man, sex, and organic being receive only one-sided nourishment, and, instead of becoming full-statured and symmetrical, the man-like creature is dwarfed and deformed. Civilization and the dogmatic religions make a special attempt to see that these dwarfed beings are kept content, so that they will have no impulse to action that cannot pass through organic being, sex, and conscious man, in the deformed state these strata of being have acquired. But sometimes the lid blows off. The self can find no proper outlet through the deformed channel that has been set up.
The impulse to action is approved by organic being, approved by sex, approved by conscious man (to the extent that any conscious man remains) but it is rejected in the reflex center of the word god, the super ego, and returned to the self, marked "non grata; classification: evil." Then the self tries to cut a new channel. That channel is through the closet in the guard station. If the impulse is strong enough the self succeeds in cutting this channel and gets action. But the action can be almost anything. If the impulse is sexual in nature it passes organic being, sex, then by-passes consciousness, goes through the closet of the guard station, emerges through the reflex center, and results in action, without being evaluated by conscious man.
The result is a purely sensual sexual act perverted by any appendages that happen to become attached in the closet where all unevaluated "evil" is kept. If the impulse is organic being in nature, it is deprived of the benefit of evaluation by the sex center, as well as the conscious man, and comes out below the level of any sexual animal on earth, accompanied by any ideas that happen to become attached to it in the closet of "evil."
An individual, or a whole nation of individuals, that has blown the lid, can be "treated" by restoring an environment in which all impulses in the dwarfed selfs can be passed through dwarf channels. After a while the channels of the break-through partially close again. That is not satisfactory to the Pagan. We recognize no evil as conceived by the metropolis. As there is no word for the triad truth-goodness-beauty, which is what we are talking about when we use the word "good," so there is no word for the opposite of the triad.
In circumstances where metropolitan religions see evil, we see simply errors that are preserved until the self is disciplined by its own god content, or the individual is disciplined by the god content of others, or a people is disciplined by the god content of total reality. This deferred discipline sometimes backs up into a mountainous tide, then breaks through as a catastrophe. This catastrophe that the metropolitan mind sees as "evil" can be avoided only by welcoming and embracing the discipline as quickly as it can be perceived.
Thus from the Pagan viewpoint, psychology should frankly be dissolved into some religion so that it does not need distortion in order to have purpose. All psychiatry should be aimed at complete conscious knowledge of and mastery by the individual of the reflex center, the guard house and its closet of "evil." It should be aimed at aiding the patient to recover symmetrical being by encouraging balanced existence in each of the six disciplines.
We cannot carry forward our comparison between our concept of self and the objectively viewed "functional impulse" of psychology into other Western sciences, because psychology is not integrated with the "pure" sciences. After rejecting the Christian concept of soul, Western science has simply ignored consciousness. As a result of this, we can only compare it to the Pagan concept of the universe, in which we recognize a directing will, by considering the direction, or rather lack of direction, implied in its language. A large part of its language is a mathematic. A mathematic differs significantly with each civilization. The Greeks, for instance, were concerned only with tangible objects.
Their mathematic was confined to the measurement and relationship of hypothesized ideals, which were mere abstractions of objects. They had carefully considered objects because they had become interested in sculpture and architecture. In the Greek mathematic a number could be squared or cubed because the function had relation to reality, but the forth power of a number was rejected as ridiculous because an object had no fourth dimension. If Western science is based on the probings of the universe by those who have no concept of self, and have found all concepts of god ridiculous. Its mathematic is built on a search for a reality that it admittedly cannot conceive.
Therefore it rejects no number simply because the number has no perceivable relation to observed reality. While the Greeks limited their mathematic by a narrow concept of reality, the Western mathematic has no concept at all to give it discipline. As a result, the mathematic of the West concerns itself with the infinite possibilities of a hypothetical point in infinite space. This mathematic, as distinct from any attempt to make it symbolize perceivable reality, belongs to what we Pagans call first discipline being. It is not disturbing that a mathematic be undisciplined in this stage. The first discipline is only basic awareness and any thought pattern can give the joy of basic awareness. In the first stratum of being any awareness can have existence as reality.
However, when Western science begins to try to represent space and force by its mathematics, its language needs the discipline of concepts and science has not yet developed its concepts. In its searching it has developed a language for communicating fragments of concepts that has no known equal but it has not developed a comprehensive concept and it cannot communicate a concept until there is one to communicate. Its language is useful as a system for writing music is useful, and some of its products we find desirable as we find some of the products of musical composers desirable. But the difference between the language of science and that of music is simply one of essential complexity. Science is trying to indicate the whole of three strata of being in its language, the musical composer only a small part of one.
To do what it wants to do, science would have to create at least three languages; we see an attempt to develop a separate language for the second stratum of being in its pattern language for atomic structure. The fact that science has been able to record and communicate its highly complex "melodies" at all is a creditable achievement that we do not seek to minimize. But the thing that impresses us most is that, in reacting to the obvious Judaeo-Christian error of making the word into its god, science has developed its highly complex language and still remembers that its language is its own creation and it has not yet bowed down and worshipped its words instead of reality.
But we have little faith in the direction of its search for reality. We postulate that it can never find the corpse of a force point regardless of how long it pursues its game of chasing matter toward a real zero point. We see force as will become inertia. We see pattern as prior to force. And we see the essence of reality as existing in time that has independent existence prior to space. We recognize the possibility of roughly approximating an expression of time and space in one equation. But we deem it essential that time not be considered as the fourth dimension of space. We consider that any such concept will be a stumbling block to perceiving reality.
An aspect of the quantum theory of light is an axiom of our concept of first discipline knowledge. However, from our perspective, the concept of space-bunched points of energy is an attempt to distort observed data to make it fit the extant Judaeo-Christian dogma of a world whose existence is continuous from a past act of completed creation. We see force as actually having intermittent existence in time. In our thinking this intermittent existence underlies all concepts of reality. We therefore suggest that intermittent existence must be hypothesized before science can develop a satisfactory concept of the force within the atom, or, for that matter, the pattern of the atom.
We consider that Western science has not yet lost contact with reality, but we are not interested in it enough to give it the proportion of attention that learning its elaborate language demands. Science is the study of methods while ignoring purpose. We are ready to accept and use anything science produces that fits our purpose but we would not pursue scientific study unless or until we reached a point where a purpose we saw as good had no adequate vehicle of expression. We prefer to make use of the vehicles at hand rather than create new ones. The science of man's being deals with billions of years of discipline by the total intelligence.
The virtue of the existent products of those billions of years of discipline for man's purpose compares to the virtue of what all men could produce, by a thousand or ten thousand years of carefully coordinated effort, as the complete universe compares to the streak of a meteor. The meteor is merely momentarily impressive because of its closeness. We are more interested in living as men in the existent universe than in creating a meteor. Our difference with pure science is not great either in its methods or in its concepts, so far as they have developed, but it is great in purpose. From our perspective, what the Western world calls science is merely a study of the history of being.
An appreciative look is nourishment and stimuli to further creation, but in the look we should not become so absorbed in analysis as a form of entertainment that we forget the purpose of life. Unto that stage of discipline to which each form of life has evolved each may know, but to man, the magnitude of each discipline prior to him is like the waters of the ocean to one drop, or like the sands of the shore to one grain. He may perceive enough to know a joy of being that is a pulse between his potential omniscience and his chosen limitation. But his joy in life has been lost when he tries to go back and recheck the past in the hope of improving it. His purpose cannot be to count the grains of sands on the beach, nor measure the drops of water in the ocean. His purpose is to live to his highest potential. We Pagans accept the past and we accept our present beings in the present reality joyfully as good and very good.
Man is a sixth discipline being. He takes nourishment from the others but his highest purpose is in the sixth. We take nourishment from perception of the earlier disciplines, but we discuss them in words merely because we have found ourselves in a world that has forgotten how to express its being in song, a world that tries to segregate truth, goodness, and beauty. Our attitude toward the buried memory of the first three disciplines that fascinates scientists has long ago been given an expression in song, but its significance has been shouted down by a multitude babbling words. In words we can only state that the science of the first three disciplines of man's being is better left buried in the depths of his being, and its reality enjoyed simply as accepted reality.
But Richard Wagner, reworking the materials of pagan mythology, draws a truth-goodness-beauty picture of this viewpoint in his presentation of the Rhinemaidens guarding the Rhinegold -the existent reality. In it we see that joy in being, and the will to love, should be strong enough to insure the simple acceptance of what god has called good in the first three disciplines. We see that only a being who forswears love would try to tear the Rhinegold from its setting, and mold it into a thing for gaining power. The three bewitchingly lovable girls, assigned by god to the task of guarding the Rhinegold are, by their attractiveness to man, a symbol of the appeal of the later disciplines for appropriate attention.
But they are more than a symbol; they are real words; they are living examples of the reality. The guard is ineffectual only against a man-like being who is dwarfed, deformed, and less than man. This is a note of Pagan song-language in its highest form. That is the only language which we consider worthwhile. It presumes to say nothing to the unperceiving; it merely focuses attention on what can be perceived. But when Pagan language tries to stand in the market place and shout down words that are worshipped as words by those who do not perceive reality, it is no longer a language; it is no more than dust and ashes in which it flounders. So if we had such a language there would be no use in articulating it before the unperceiving.
We see those whose beings are created in the image of a real god so enslaved by blind faith in a god whose being is the word that they can perceive only words. We have therefore attempted to point out the unreality of the word god and the reality of the perceivable god in words. However, in fighting this faith in a god of words with word weapons, there is a limit beyond which we cannot go without doing harm. If we continue too long we will be creating, not weapons of words, but another god of words.
We therefore now leave each to his own self-examination of the god within him. In words we have tried to draw crude pictures of this perceivable god, of self, and of the universe as it appears to us, but if the reality has been glimpsed behind the word-created concepts, each will have to translate it into his own language. This should not be a symbol language but an example language of the realities he can perceive. We want it remembered that the words and word pictures we have used are intended as mere pointers to reality. They have no validity of themselves. Only reality is valid. It cannot be known through words. It can only be known by a real self as "I am," "I perceive," and "I will."
PART III -BEING
THE PAGAN CONCEPT OF THE GOOD LIFE
Now the communion implied by "we" is no longer simply that between barbarians. Nor are we who commune mere pieces of a civilization, having no integrity in ourselves, malformed dwarfs, who are less than man and less than animal. We are whole beings of individual perception and individual volition.
We are men and women in the full sense of the words. We know our selfs and perceive each other as individual god-entities. We are Pagans. These thousands of years of our somnambulism, of our walking death, of our zombie existence, are over. We are awakened, or we are born again. We look at the world and see the things that our beings remember and recognize: "tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stone, and good in everything."
The whole of the world, the whole of the creation that we perceive objectively, is good; and the good that is within our selfs fills our beings to overflowing. Our joy leaps and sings. This good is presently existing, not something to be achieved. It is a song perceived during the singing by the being that knows harmony with it. It is not "good" conceived as "fitness," a concept that can undermine joy of being by the claim that both we and the world are "imperfect." "Perfection" and a good that means "fitness" are concepts of men who created the unreal word gods.
These men claim that the universe was created from blueprints in the minds of their gods, and that it has imperfections to the extent that it deviates from their dogmas. We, Pagans, know that in the third discipline of creation, the god within us willed the things these men call "imperfection," the things that cannot be forced into a standard by those who would substitute a word-created authority for vital joy.
We have seen that the diversity in multiplicity which god has willed in preference to standardization stimulates beings to greater stature. Our innate beings, with their billions of years of living experience, say there is good and there is better, but only the will to death says there is perfection. Much of the joy of living is the joy of creating, and perfection is the limit of the will to create, as infinity is the limit of the will to be. God and man are finite; no achievement reaches perfection; and that contributes to making the universe good.
The perception of this teaches us that living is an art, not a science. Emotional response to patterns, not empirical cognizance of absolutes, constitutes the stuff of being. Melodies, not logic, are man's proper language for discussing knowledge. The innate emotional appeal of the composition, not the extent of its conformity to learned dogma, is the test of its validity. Integrity of ever increasing stature is the goal of being, not perfection.
The good life can be either complexly patterned or simple, turbulent or reposeful, selectively destructive or creative by aggregation, violent or gentle, full or austere, gregarious or solitary, hardened by war or expansive in peace, mundane or ethereal. But the good life is always the life made whole by one who says "I am," "I perceive," and "I will" as an integrated being in harmony with the universe of reality. Only the art of living as a sovereign among sovereigns can demonstrate a desirable composition of an integrated being in harmony with the universe.
We cannot point out an integrated being by holding up the few art fragments that exist in a world that knows no total Pagan art. And in word discussions we can only make a dull dissection of a hypothesized being. By its conflict with metropolitan dogmas, this may prod into wakefulness the innate understanding of Pagans who have sunk into a hypnotic sleep with their eyes fixed on words and word logic. But we would like to do more than simply arouse Pagans by words from a somnambulism that has been induced by words.
Man is a being who holds his balance consciously, and, in a world of mobs shouting, this is good and that is evil, he is forced to hold some simple formula in his consciousness as a defense against the shibboleths which the various mobs try to force upon him. A conscious striving for a six-way balance, one that will maintain the memory of the six disciplines amid the din of the shouted shibboleths, seems to be the best shield that we can devise for meeting this assault on integrity.
We need to remember that man knows six strata of goodness, and, if anyone fails, he will fall to the layer next below it. The lower layers are good if uncorrupted, but they are less than man, and the upper layers must be reconstructed before man can again be man. Man's being is of all six and he must continually maintain his being in all six, or be less than his potential self.
Our thought processes are disciplined to formulate and appreciate guiding principles for composing and perpetuating good designs for living. This good that we set forth in our designs for living is to be distinguished from the good of the six disciplines. It is not different in nature, but different because subordinate to the sixth discipline. We can create disciplines, as god has created disciplines in the past, but the good of the sixth discipline, man, essentially overrides and invalidates any good a man-like being decrees as immutable.
The act of decreeing a good as immutable marks him as less than man. The god in man embodies the will to surpass all that is decreed good by a man among men, and to have that which he decrees good similarly surpassed. The man who has conscious knowledge of the god within him, knows that he is free to strive for his own good only because the sixth discipline, man, is insurance against the immutable crystallization of any design any man-like creature might decree good.
If there were no sixth discipline, man, and no entities of a further discipline higher than man, a man-like creature who was confused enough to seek "perfection" might destroy the universe, and destroy the total god. But we perceive the sixth discipline; we call it good, a higher good than any we may decree; and we will its perpetuation. With this knowledge always in the back of our consciousness we can proceed to a discussion of the realities which we Pagans seek to make into an artful composition of the good life.
Under present circumstances, the good life must be composed as a sequence to the thousands of years of living death that have been imposed upon us by metropolitan religions. With this restriction on the good life, the pace and fullness of its development must be attuned, by each individual, to the completeness of his resurrection. We will therefore talk only of recognizable elements of design to be embodied rather than the total pattern of a design for living.
Nourishment is our first requirement -nourishment for our emaciated souls. The nightmare of ourselves as sheep, made to lie down beside the still waters, must be purged from our beings by roast meat and hard drink if we have strength enough to come to the table where god-entities join in feasts and joyous laughter; or by mead and milk held to our lips by a full-sexed Pagan, if we can only raise our heads.
But nourishment for men we must have, after that nightmare of munching grass in green pastures and ruminating over the mysteries of a creator, who made men with the dreams and passions of gods and then asked them to be grateful for the opportunity of becoming sheep. After the first nourishment has restored our beings and perspective, we can begin to consider the meaning of a full and balanced life. This consists of nourishment and creation, in proportion to one's emaciated weakness and dynamic stature.
Creation is an individual thing and must be left to the individual; that is, its design and joys of accomplishment are individual. Its results are nourishment for others; each receives nourishment for his own creative efforts from what has been created by himself or others. Only god of the first discipline had to create by will alone. Our difficulty of understanding the first discipline is the difficulty of understanding this great strength, which we have never since been called upon to use.
The six disciplines, which, in us, are now both willed and obligatory, are our guide and inspiration to further creation.
Their corresponding strata of being are our nourishment. Full nourishment requires balanced partaking of all six, and creation of a balanced design for living requires movement toward a balanced self-embodiment of an six. If we conceived life as a science, to be governed by inflexible rules for balancing, we might devise as our design for living some formula such as emphasizing one discipline each day of the week, and then using the seventh as a day of rest, for digestion or contemplation of this goodness.
There is nothing wrong with such a formula if it fits individual needs. But reverence for ourselves as god-entities, reverence for the comprehensive aspect of god as the creator and underlying disciplinary will of the universe, and appreciation of the universe as an ever changing work of highest art into which we must fit our design for living, teaches us to seek balance by sensitive "feel" rather than measurement and calculation. This balance is dynamic and individual.
The factors affecting it are ever changing. Many of these can only be known by the individual. There are differences in innate being, differences in nourishment that has been made a part of self, differences in the extent of the universe around that is perceived by self, differences in the momentary drive and purpose of creative impulse, and differences in the extent of dynamics necessary to produce joy.
All these are within self, none can be known by another; therefore there can be no control or guidance imposed on one individual by another than can be called good. All we can do toward giving proper nourishment is to portray examples of what we call good design for living and let others partake of or reject our offerings as they choose. We are god-entities who offer freely of things that will be as good a million years from now as today; we are not neurotic dwarfs whose twisted minds seek vengeance if their repulsive concoctions are not accepted instantly before they spoil.
In the absence of Pagan art, either as expressed designs for living, or as drama, or as some less complete art, we have attempted to trace with a blunt finger the immutable framework of the comprehensive god's art as expressed in the creation of the universe. We could keep our orientation by living in this comprehensive god's perspective, but that is not desirable.
As men, multiple god-entities as distinguished from the original undivided god, we are beings who should stand on the past, and gain stature by accepting the past as the present reality. The art of living as men is not to be found in holding the perspective of the creator of the universe, but in creating from the perspective of multiple god-entities.
In this art we have no examples to show, no clean nourishment to offer. But we can sift a few crumbs of debris, and talk of how to distinguish food for men who are god-entities from the swill produced and eaten by civilization's malformed dwarfs who have lost their reverence for clean food. As the present reality, the six disciplines of creation merge into one composition. By man the six disciplines of creation are perceived as six strata of being, seen in an order which is the reverse of their creation.
Therefore when we create we are likely to produce something like a statue of a man, a sixth stratum being, as a product of our activity in second stratum existence. When this is pointing out an aspect of the human body to be reverenced, this is good. When it is showing in marble how the physical beauty of any human being may be surpassed, it is good.
But when it is a development on a theme of positing a static heaven of physical beauty as a higher stratum than the animal in man, it is denying good -the good of fourth stratum of being. To avoid doing violence to our perception of good when we look at the universe from man's perspective, where all strata merge, it is important that we guard against partaking of man-made creations based on confused concepts that so mutilate reality as to no longer be clean food.
We must guard against letting our wills deviate from a direction that is in harmony with that of the universe. We must avoid incorporating perverted concepts into our design for living. As man's biological being comes from a recapitulation of his evolutionary ancestry, so his essential dynamic self, to be well formed, must be a continuous recapitulation of the disciplines of god.
The universe, as created by god, encourages this recapitulation through the variation and; kind of experiences the "natural" universe presses upon self via the biological being. Departure from this educational process, by development of a man-made environment and a cultural pressure, requires the conscious establishment of significant factors to replace those that man has canceled out by his action. It is very difficult to do this without distortion. No existent civilization has accomplished it, and to overcome existing distortions we might need to return to a more natural environment for a new start.
Our problem in the world in which we find ourselves is twofold: (1) that of recognizing and rejecting cultural pressures that are inadequate replacements or in actual opposition to the "culture" created by god in the natural universe, and (2) that of planning and effecting our own design for living and culture that is in harmony with the purpose of god as we perceive it in the real universe.
We therefore need to look at the universe created by the god of reality and the universe created by the word gods, learn to distinguish between them, and segregate the particulars of each that are now intermixed.
Doing this requires that we keep several tasks in mind at the same time without letting their objectives become confused. (1) We need to learn to recognize the six strata of being from man's perspective as distinguished from the creator's perspective. (2) We need to discover how much of each stratum we can incorporate into our designs for living and still retain the balance that is essential to dynamic beings that live by will. (3) We need to recognize innate impulses that are good in one stratum of being but become distorted if transplanted to another in such a manner as to negate the discipline of the one or the other. (4) We need to recognize man-made concepts that have no harmony with the real universe. (5) We need to recognize man-made cultures that pressure individual will to deviate from its delicately balanced direction, a deviation which creates tensions in self and manic compulsions to recover or compensate for unbalance.
THE FIRST STRATUM OF BEING
The first and basic stratum of being is that of pure awareness in the universe of time. From the perspective of man this is the stratum of sensual existence. This stratum holds the stuff of an consciousness and all being, the basis of an reality, and it is highly desirable that it be full, clear, and vivid.
We have noted that we have different degrees of consciousness, that our awarenesses have different degrees of poignancy or vividness. And we have assumed that these degrees of consciousness vary from individual to individual. As everything is built upon the first stratum of being our first concern is that of maintaining and intensifying the vividness of our basic awarenesses, or what, from the man-perspective, we think of as our Sensory perceptions.
We rely on fourth stratum evolution to supply us with an adequate mechanism for sensory perception. Stimuli are abundant. But civilization creates a world of words, symbols, and ritualistic significances that tends to supplant the world of basic sensory perceptions in consciousness, to lead us to focus our attention on man-made concepts rather than realities. Our concern in the first stratum of being is with the wined focusing of our attention on basic awarenesses as such.
As muscular strength is increased by the use of muscular strength, so awarenesses are made more vivid by the exercise of awareness. We want to increase the vitality of our beings by increasing the vividness of our awarenesses.
Also in the same process we want to tentatively segregate the world of significances, both real significances and man-created concepts, from the world of pure awareness so as to consciously perceive that the first stratum of being is good of itself alone. If the unalloyed good of the first stratum of being is to be fully known through assimilated experience, there should be extended times when conscious existence is focused on simple, unalloyed awarenesses, undisturbed by all thoughts, or pattern associations, which have their basis in other strata.
As we noted when considering the first discipline, sound and silence is probably the easiest example of first stratum being for man to know. Simply listening to sounds, focusing our attention on the sounds around us, should properly provide a simple exercise in awareness. But the sounds of the metropolis do not recall the innate memory of a willed creation of beauty. Their symbolic significance moves our consciousness into the later strata of existence. When we listen to them, we do not hear them as sounds but as harbingers of activity that do not attempt to speak to us or to any self. It was not designed by a self creating sound as art, but a self creating something the artful creation of which was merely muddied by sound. Our beings revolt against it and tend to call the sounds ugly or evil. As a result, we seek to dim our awareness of sound rather than intensify it.
However, the civilization that made the sounds against which our beings seek to build a wall of non-attention has also given us the opportunity to build sound-deadening cells in which we can encourage our awareness of sounds by listening to personally selected music-artful, willed, creation of sounds. We will do well to make the most of this.
"Living a portion of one's time in a world of music" is a meaningful expression to us; yet we need to recognize what aspect of "the world of music" is the field of basic being. The basic awareness of sounds in the mind of the composer or listener, and the patterns of these sounds in the universe of time, are all the world of music that can be known in the first stratum.
All knowledge of composers, of the history of music, of individual players of instruments, of the visual appearance of the instruments and the orchestra, even the mental recognition of instruments by sound is extraneous. Also recalled dreamings of things associated with the music, such as stories and words for songs, distract from pure music. By these statements we do not mean to imply that this blending of things from other strata is not sometimes desirable, but attention to any creation of a latter stratum takes being out of the first. Being may move from the first to others, and return again to the first with greater vitality from other nourishment. It may do this again and again.
But to know the good of the first stratum fully in music there must be extended periods of time when the self is the music and there is nothing else. This return to the first stratum before the self was disassociated from stimuli is essential to balanced nourishment. Civilization makes this possible in music. With a little effort at eliminating the extraneous, we can achieve the solitary purity of basic being in sound that was once known by the lonely shepherd playing on his flute through the long day, or known by the gypsy playing his violin alone in the desert under the stars, before the shepherd and the gypsy were made aware of themselves as picturesque.
We can know basic awareness as it was known by god in the beginning. Before we lost the opportunity to hear it, and before the purity of our perception was corrupted by bad poets writing sentimental drivel about nature, we found our music in the infinite moods of the rain beating on the leaves, the wind among the trees, the gurgling of small brooks, the roar of falls, and the regular, intermittent crashing of the ocean surf. It was sound embodied in the material action by a purposeful creator who joyed in sound. It was simple and graspable as a composition, but its endless complexity never let it disappear totally from us as a basic awareness.
It was always there and it was uncorrupted as an awareness by memories of critics' opinions, or attempts at intellectual music appreciation; so it gave us basic nourishment. It is still ours sometimes in our vacation cabins in the woods, or at the ocean. There we can listen to the rain on the roof, the wind in the eaves, the sleet against the window pane, and the sounds of the forest on a dark night. Basic awareness is the communion of the first discipline god, that is both perceiver and perceived, with the highly developed part of god that is the man entity. In some way each of us must achieve this communion if we are to be fully nourished.
Sound is the sensation in which modern man can most easily dissolve self and know first stratum being. Differentiated senses as channels of basic awareness are organic creations. They are extracts of basic awareness. It is not difficult to conceive that the organism may have been designing a separate sense through which each of the first five strata of being could be best expressed. This is roughly analogous to creating five separate instruments to play a single melody with varying shades of coloring. Each sense often appears to be peculiarly appropriate to a particular stratum of being.
Sound may, by intention of its creator, provide a better approach to the first stratum of being than any of the others, as appears to be the case to modem man; but all sensations are differentiated extracts of basic awareness and the first stratum of being can be known through all. In seeking to intensify the vividness of each, in seeking to intensify the vividness of consciousness that is cognizant of the god reality, we will do well to willfully seek to know the first stratum of being through each of our separate senses.
The Hindu neophyte spends a long period formally contemplating each sense in turn. We consider this formalization undesirable because formalization tends to distract from spirit. Our purpose is to weave what we perceive to be good into the dynamic patterns of our lives. But if we feel ourselves deficient in the first stratum nourishment, we can, in odd moments take each sense in turn and concentrate on each stimulus that comes to it, in order to make it more vital.
To taste, many of us give fairly full attention, but all too often we do our eating at ritualistic luncheons and dinners, where we ignore our food completely except for such perfunctory notice as is necessary to form a few polite appreciative remarks about it. Yet taste, if pursued diligently as a baby pursues it, can be built up to a vital perception of reality. The hillbilly with a straw in his mouth has become a hackneyed comic, but enjoyment of taste need not be limited to food that is being eaten.
The taste of metal, stone, paper, wood, leaves of trees, the earth, and the hillbilly's straw, can be good. It can be good, however, only if it does not have to be defended as a ridiculous cult. A position that is socially embarrassing brings the focus of consciousness away from the first stratum of being. We must find our existence in the first stratum in sensory perceptions that can be, for an extended time, the whole of our consciousness. Each of us will have to find our own first stratum worlds to and from which we can move freely without acquiring complexes rather than achieving real points of perspective.
The sense of smell appears to have a special fitness to the perception of the fifth, or sex stratum of being. We recognize that many animals have their conscious being to a great extent in the world of smell. Smells occupy the portion of their consciousness taken over by words in the consciousness of man. In this aspect, smells have the advantage over words of being, of themselves, an artful extract of basic awareness. To animals that know entities best in smell-language, the smell of the earth is not only a composite richness of all that has made up its being over millions of years, as it is to man; it is also a rich base overlaid by a palimpsest of smell tracks left by all animals that have passed over it in recent times.
Also the air is interwoven streams of smell, eddying in each hollow of earth, and flowing around the corner of each up-cropping rock, or each fallen log. The passing animal, with an acute sense of smell, moves through a world of knowledge and emotion expressed in smells. In it there is food; there is that to which the subject is food; there is mate; there is the competition for the mate; and there is the richness of the past grown dim, the awareness of the simple goodness of being. And from this dim past, that no longer brings a challenge to self it is easy to move into the perspective of first stratum being in the sense of smell.
If, as is strongly apparent, smell has a special tendency to focus consciousness on the sex stratum, metropolitan civilizations have strong selfish reasons for attempting to play down the world of reality as known by smell. But civilization's efforts in this direction are primarily the urgent need to camouflage the unsavory reality of its own smell. The disinfectants by which it tries to hide its profuse filth and the synthesized perfumes by which it attempts to express its purity are often far from the subtlety necessary to make the sense of smell vivid.
Also they seldom or never leave an open door to the first stratum being where self is dissolved in awareness of the goodness of being. But if we can increase our awareness of any smells, we can increase our perception of reality. Our organic beings have a need to keep the sense of smell vivid as an aid to knowing sex entities. Also, if we can make the world of smell part of our pattern of first stratum being, without destroying the pattern of good by having to fight an insipid little social battle to do so, we will symmetrically increase our stature by doing so.
The world of touch is ours to know, without creating social tensions in our present status that are sufficiently distracting to overrule the good achieved. There is a recognized, and currently acceptable, art of texture and touch appreciation, that has not generally become so overrun with words and "aesthetics" as to preclude its being enjoyed without distracting thoughts. In addition to this recognized art, there are many times when we can know touch merely by becoming aware. For example, there is the regular nightly caress of smooth sheets, soft pillows, firm mattresses, and an occasional touch of rough blanket, which, if enjoyed as goodness in itself, rather than a rite of civilization, can give basic strength and joy to being.
The texture or tongue touch of food can be an enjoyment of eating almost equal to taste. In our vacation cabins, or by an outdoor campfire, away from civilization's controlled temperatures, we can know the sensations of heat and cold as we turn about before the fireplace or outdoor fire, getting warm on first one side and then another. We can know it by sitting with our backs against the sunny side of a log on a frosty day. Heat and cold have been used by perceivers as examples of first stratum awarenesses. This argues that a willed effort to know them as such can be highly rewarding.
Sight is the awareness that is strongly identified with second stratum being by modern man, and quite possibly the creator so intended it. This first stratum awareness is closely associated with the second stratum patterns of awarenesses as having objective existence in space. Western civilization, with its hard lights that go off and on instantaneously, further accentuates the identification of visual awareness with second stratum being. The basic awareness of light and color comes from ignoring space and being aware of light and darkness and color, as changeable in time duration.
Watching the coming of dawn or the deepening shadows of twilight brings sight into first stratum awareness. By this we mean concentration on variation in colors and light intensity, without attention to objects, as daylight comes or dusk deepens into darkness. To sit by an open fireplace in a shadowy room in the semi-hypnotic state recalled from very early childhood, or achieved by an abundance of good alcoholic drinks and an over-abundance of good food, will recover sight as a first stratum awareness.
Also the flicker quality of candlelight brings awareness in full measure. Clouds passing over the moon or sun bring the time-controlled change in color and light necessary to enjoyment of it as a basic awareness. The use of color and light by some painters calls forth the basic awareness in the midst of patterns, and some abstract painters place such strong emphasis on color and light as such, that their works produce predominately pure, first discipline awareness.
Metropolitan civilization has given some replacement for the nourishment of which it has deprived us, and where we can find a clean fragment we should not disdain to use it. But no artist, whether painter, musician, cook, creator of perfumes, or creator of textures can give the solid first stratum nourishment that can be found in the universe as it exists in its apparent disorganization.
This apparent disorganization is so subtly organized that it is art beyond any aesthetics that a man may translate into words or demonstrate in his own art in one short lifetime. The highest art man produces is only spoon-fed nourishment that can give enough strength of being to make possible perception of another small bit of potential enjoyment. Civilizations, which at best are faddish concentrations on narrowly defined fields of goodness, dwarf and distort man's being. Formalized broadening tends to destroy the joy of living.
But while we are living in the midst of civilizations, consciously chosen perspectives are necessary to overcome civilization's distortions and to develop full being in the first or any given stratum. By recognizing each of six perspectives we continually reteach self to bring the maximum fullness and maximum purity of all strata into its design for living. This perspective orientation is accomplished by recognizing the unalloyed nature of each stratum and then making patterns that contain all without doing violence to any.
Partial destruction of a stratum often comes from simply ignoring it; but perhaps equally as often this destruction comes from making one stratum a mere symbol for another, or from considering one as simply the medium through which another is expressed. To do this is to deny the validity or goodness of the one as a stratum of reality. For instance, sight and second stratum being often dominate the perspectives of Western man to the point where pure first stratum awarenesses simply suggest pictures to his mind, and the endless processions of these block the door to the self's knowledge of non-objective being.
We have talked of the need our emaciated beings have for nourishment. But balanced nourishment is what we need. Not only must we obtain nourishment. we must also learn to impose restraint upon our selfs in fields where excess nourishment is distorting being by crowding out other perceptions. If restraint is not imposed consciously it will often be imposed by the subconscious. or god. in the being. If we do not have the foresight to discipline ourselves we may sometimes perceive the good of the discipline that our subconscious, or the god within, forces upon us.
The Song of the Blind Plowman is a very understandable expression of this to beings of Western civilization who have over-emphasized sight and turned the awarenesses of the first stratum of being into mere mediums for expressing the second stratum. The blind man, who asks to have his hands placed upon the plow. his feet upon the earth, and sings his thanks to god, who took away his eyes that his soul might see. is a being that we Pagans can call man, and god, and brother. Loss of stature. by loss of sight, is preferable to the deformity that results from undisciplined growth.
THE SECOND STRATUM OF BEING
In sight we can find our simplest nourishment for second stratum being. In sight our joy is in the pattern and substance without attention to force. Pattern is an essential attribute of substance. Substance is something manifest as having corporeal existence external to self without reference to self, that is, without any consciousness of self-growth or self-destruction being associated with the awareness.
If self maintains this detachment from the thing perceived; if self is only a perspective for sensory perception, awareness of second stratum being can be much fuller than that made possible by sight alone. Air, as a breeze, can be perceived as substance to the touch. As a wind of gale velocity it usually becomes matter containing force perceived as such by self; that is, it becomes a third stratum experience. Water as a touch sensation only, as it is known in the bath; or the temperature, the feel of it, as it is known in a quiet pool or among light waves, can be perceived as substance. On the other hand, the mere sight of high waves breaking against a rocky shoreline is usually perceived as forceful matter.
The earth pressed in a gardener's fingers, the mud pies made by a child, or the warm sand burrowed in by a vacationer at the seashore is more often enjoyed as substance rather than matter. Textiles, stone used in building, smooth polished wood, or rough-cut wood softened by weather, is, to both sight and touch, usually perceived as substance.
Thus the creations of man and the creations of god that come to us in the second stratum of being can be more than nourishment of self through sight. One sense, and one stratum of being, should lead the perspective of self into others rather than subordinate others, or reduce them to symbols of itself.
Thus sight, instead of destroying, should awaken the other senses to a full embrace of the perceived pattern. The Greeks had a corporeal enjoyment of beauty that has been largely lost to Western civilization. We can increase our stature in the second stratum by seeking to know substance and its patterns in space with all our senses. However, looking at the world as it presently exists we find that our task in the second stratum is not primarily one of increasing stature. Modern man appears to have a tendency to overemphasize second stratum existence by creating his own second stratum worlds rather than enjoying those that exist.
This narrows his capacity while overemphasizing his interest. This may be a simple innate by-product of the being who evolved from a fetal monkey-like creature and has not yet adjusted to making his way in the world outside the womb because he still retains certain fetal inclinations. If so, his extraordinary interest in design, springing from a yearning for clothing and shelter, may be understandably out of balance without purpose. Like a field mouse who has found that a labyrinth of tunnels offers him protection from those who would prey on him and spends all his spare time digging more tunnels, man has a tendency to create an excessive amount of protection from his environment.
However, this inanity leads him to great interest in second stratum art. And art that produces nourishment is good whether it be man's or god's, provided it does not overemphasize one stratum of being. Man's art is extremely simple and childlike as compared to god's but, if it points out good that can be perceived to men who lack sufficient stature to perceive god's good, this spoon-fed nourishment may be considered worthwhile. It does not fail at being good simply because it is less than the more accomplished art of god as expressed in the natural universe.
Children building houses with toy blocks find their own efforts, and those of their kind, beautiful, while they see nothing in the Taj Mahal. Since only the perceived beauty is second stratum nourishment, we can have the tolerant joy in man's art that we have in a child's simple activity, and hope that he may, through it, gain sufficient stature to appreciate the analogous equivalent of the Taj Mahal.
Man, though, does not have the freedom in the second stratum of being that god had. God made a special effort in his second stratum concept to achieve unlimited space. The limitation he placed on man's articulated creations in the second stratum of being-the limitation of a world where one man's art must be either destroyed or accepted by another who knows the same space-makes man-created designs an instrument of man culture. This brings in a factor other than basic enjoyment.
Basic enjoyment of the second stratum is existence in an intermediate universe between dreams and matter. The second stratum universe of substance is conceived matter not yet willed to have forceful being. In man's proper use the second stratum can be only an articulated plan for becoming. Man's second stratum universe should not be crystallized into a world become, unless it is recognized as man culture and the full responsibility is assumed for all that implies. God gives us an example of uncrystallized second stratum art in the clouds of changing form that float in the sky.
The desert, mountain, plains, rolling hills, rocky crags, and ocean, when perceived as substance that is ever changing, substance that changes with the ever changing lights that give it its existence to the eyes, an existence no more material than the pools of colored light that lie around the substance -these constitute the universe of the second discipline as revealed by the art of god.
This universe, in this perspective, is the second stratum nourishment created by god to which the perceiving man falls heir. In this universe god has demonstrated second stratum be more accomplished art of god as expressed in the natural universe. Children building houses with toy blocks find their own efforts, and those of their kind, beautiful, while they see nothing in the Taj Mahal. Since only the perceived beauty is second stratum nourishment, we can have the tolerant joy in man's art that we have in a child's simple activity, and hope that he may, through it, gain sufficient stature to appreciate the analogous equivalent of the Taj Mahal.
Man, though, does not have the freedom in the second stratum of being that god had. God made a special effort in his second stratum concept to achieve unlimited space. The limitation he placed on man's articulated creations in the second stratum of being-the limitation of a world where one man's art must be either destroyed or accepted by another who knows the same space-makes man-created designs an instrument of man culture. This brings in a factor other than basic enjoyment. Basic enjoyment of the second stratum is existence in an intermediate universe between dreams and matter.
The second stratum universe of substance is conceived matter not yet willed to have forceful being. In man's proper use the second stratum can be only an articulated plan for becoming.
Man's second stratum universe should not be crystallized into a world become, unless it is recognized as man culture and the full responsibility is assumed for all that implies. God gives us an example of uncrystallized second stratum art in the clouds of changing form that float in the sky. The desert, mountain, plains, rolling hills, rocky crags, and ocean, when perceived as substance that is ever changing, substance that changes with the ever changing lights that give it its existence to the eyes, an existence no more material than the pools of colored light that lie around the substance-these constitute the universe of the second discipline as revealed by the art of god.
This universe, in this perspective, is the second stratum nourishment created by god to which the perceiving man falls heir. In this universe god has demonstrated second stratum being as it should be known. If our stature cannot yet encompass it, perhaps we should be content to blow gray and blue tobacco smoke rings, and perceive the goodness in them, rather than clutter up matter with form that is not an expression of dreams designed to pass as dreams pass.
But metropolitan civilizations combine some of the functions of the later disciplines with second stratum art. They present us with man-made designs as substance albeit they are presented in circumstances where the inertia of matter is highly significant. However, before we consider it as a culture force, we should look at their art as second stratum nourishment. It is often crude and simple but because of this it is perceivable beauty whereas the art of god is not always so to metropolitan men.
We cannot ask Pagans who have grown up in metropolitan concepts to accept our assertions that the beauty of nature is greater than the products of metropolitan art if they do not perceive it to be so. We must not ask them to accept it as dogma. Perceived beauty, however small, is joy; but beauty, however great, which is accepted on authority, is dust and ashes. An idiot who spends his life with a child's building blocks is nearer to being and knowing the second stratum god than an "art scholar" who could lecture on all the great architecture in the world but could feel no art for himself. And in something of this relationship of idiot-with-blocks to lecturing-art-scholar, the builders of cities have often stood to most of those who have talked of the "glories of nature."
We know the city builders are nearer to god than most back-to-nature advocates because we perceive that the talkers do not feel the art of nature; they are merely mouthing empty phrases. But architecture and other second discipline arts often fill a disproportionate share of our perspective and become an idiot's delight. This we would not object to greatly if it were left to be accepted or rejected by its intrinsic appeal to the individual. We would consider it a good test for segregating the perceiving from the unperceiving. But when the spoon feeding becomes a forced feeding of roan's art creations, it becomes objectionable.
It is then like civilized man's culture of goose liver by force feeding the geese and then fastening straps around their necks to preclude regurgitation -thus making their systems absorb the food and enlarge their livers. It may destroy or breed out those who are innately perceptive. Man's innate tendency toward a strong, perhaps unbalanced, interest in pattern and in manipulating substance, is blown up into a self-consuming compulsive interest by the pressure of metropolitan civilizations. Art becomes, not a presentation of beauty to any individual who can perceive it, but a dogma that must be accepted under penalty of social ostracism. Each civilization has its peculiar authoritative art.
This art, forced upon the individual by the pressure of the group, is as likely to confuse and unbalance as does the metropolitan god of words. As god-entities and creators we do not want to suppress momentum in any direction without extracting every potential good from it, but we must avoid the deformity that would make us less than men. We must not exist disproportionately in the second stratum to the neglect of others. But before all we must not accept as second stratum nourishment the products of creative activity which are inspired by dogma. This is what we usually see occurring among metropolitan peoples. One architect in a thousand creates beauty; the others bow before dogmatic authority and imitate without feeling.
One abstract painter in a thousand tries to point out the essence of the second discipline universe before the other four disciplines came into being; the others bow before dogmatic authority and imitate without feeling. Cities as architecture, and all plastic arts, are good if produced with feeling and assimilated in such a manner as to produce beings of balanced stature. Men may learn from the simple arts to appreciate the art of the god-creator, and after full appreciation perhaps even to surpass it. But self-discipline must assure balance in men, or men will face catastrophic discipline at the hands of other men, or at the hands of the god within them.
To avoid the specter of crystallized dreams, drained of the original joy of creation, god established the third discipline to limit his dream creations. When we see in the material cultures of metropolitan civilizations, not crystallized dreams, but crystallized unfeeling imitations of dreams, we are ready to embrace the third stratum of being with a will. If we have not the stature to assimilate, in balanced form and full appreciation, the great art before us, as distinguished from the current metropolis's authoritative art, nor yet the strength for self-discipline, but instead must have discipline forced upon us, we should at least prepare ourselves to take it in the spirit of The Blind Plowman.
THE THIRD STRATUM OF BEING
The pent up emotional reaction against civilization's overemphasis on construction, as art becomes dogma, is known by the soldier who subconsciously identifies himself wholly with the god-joy of third stratum existence, as he drives a tank through the walls of buildings, or otherwise goes about forcefully laying in waste the cities, and other works of man.
Force, irresistible, destructive, and pitted against inertia (inertia as distinguished from conscious will); force and will as one united emotional joy, is the essence of third stratum existence. The joy of pounding at strong buildings and fortifications at close range with heavy artillery, or of dropping bombs on a city, or of dynamiting abridge, is a vicarious joy in the third stratum being.
It is sought by all in the depths of their beings, by the god within, when constructive effort has been pushed beyond the innate joy of creation. It is god, unrecognized by consciousness but finding expression as a triumphant reality. The teenage gangs that run jalopies over cliffs, just to enjoy the crash, may be expressing the god within better than frustrated monks at their devotion. Firing a rifle, or just holding a gun in the hand, or carrying a hand gun strapped at one's side with a consciously ecstatic joy in its dormant power, or driving a high-powered car at top speed, is the contemplation of the essence of third discipline -and this contemplation is basically good.
There is only the matter of fitting it into a balanced pattern of living. The joy of living as man is the conscious joy of increasing the stature of self by a balanced development of all good. Excessive joy in destruction is a mere counterbalance to the deformity of unbalanced creation. It takes a pressured, powerful form when it must balance an impulse to creation that has been in a pressured, powerful form. When the unbalance is created in one individual by his own impulse, he usually has the strength to recover his balance.
But when the pressured, powerful form of unbalanced development is imposed upon the individual by a civilization it is often so great that the individual cannot recover balance. Western civilization, as a mass pressure on the emotions of the individual, is now reaching a monstrous malformed development in the third stratum of existence. Its attention is focused on matter, the identification of force or will with substance. It ignores organic life, or actually claims organic life to be only a complex mechanism, and gives all attention to force in matter.
It is creating a spectacular display of third stratum existence that in the end will counterbalance and obliterate its excesses in the second. In this we will witness the good of the third discipline as god designed and decreed it. However, unless we now consciously prepare to rise from the debris with better balance, we probably will also witness an excess in another direction and another monstrous malformed civilization. The coordinated efforts of men motivated by metropolitan impulses have already unlocked a much greater portion of the power and will-which god left locked within matter when he chose the perspective of organic life-than any man can assimilate as a balanced being.
The village blacksmith, with his sledge, anvil, and bars of red hot iron, could still feel a harmony between the god of the third discipline within and the same aspect of god without. At times in the long hours of his day this often became reverence. But few man-like beings had become men of sufficient stature to carry a hand gun with reverence, when an impetuous civilization placed atomic bombs in their hands. Only deformity, and frantic attempts to balance one deformity with another, can result from such forced feeding.
A hand-operated block and tackle is about the measure of most man-like beings' stature, when translated into third stratum existence. A few could use a bulldozer without deformity of being, but most should confine themselves to a pick and shovel. A wheelbarrow loaded with rock or earth is about the measure of a comfortable man-size bite of god, in the aspect of third stratum being. More than that should be merely observed with reverence until one has stature to assimilate it in a balanced being.
The heavy ocean surf on a smooth beach provides a communion with the third stratum god which a Pagan may receive with the defiant joy intended while still retaining awareness of his own stature. A waterfall in the depths of the woods provides a quiet personal communion that inspires joyful reverence. Thunder, lightning, storms, avalanche, earthquake, and volcanic eruption are third stratum cathedral music inspiring him to greater stature. But that stature must be as a balanced man. We Pagans seek to know the whole of god and along with the whole of god to know the whole of man, We strive to keep our nourishment in its proper proportion.
A sailboat provides a good source of third stratum nourishment and contact with the god of the third discipline. It might be thought of as a man-made instrument for communion with the god of the third stratum; It brings to full awareness the play of forces in matter in the forms that man first becomes conscious of them -gas, liquid, and solid -all woven together in a purposeful opposition, In the study of the force of wind and wave, working against and with the solid design of the boat that embodies the purpose of man, the comprehensive will of god and the limited will of man can be felt as held in hairbreadth balance by the tug of the sails and the pull on the rudder under man's touch.
In this the perspective of man meets the comprehensive perspective of god in a sustained intimacy. In this intimacy not only force, but also time and space, come to a very full vividness as purposeful concepts. All the attendant joys of the universe through the first three disciplines are heaped upon man, who has become a full partner with god in creation. The simple, firm lines and form of the boat contrast sharply with the complex forms of wave, headlands, and clouds; but somehow all forms have a poignant harmony. The subtle coloring of sea and sky, and man's simple but joyful use of color, give an eloquent evidence of simple reverence through joy. In this joy, god can be perceived as a reality.
Man is a being Who can achieve consciousness of the god within and the god without as one entity. He properly articulates his reverence by balanced growth. He can make the third stratum of being part of himself only to the extent that its experiences are integrated within him as a balanced being. The Pagan caught in the web of Western civilization needs third stratum nourishment which is not readily available in the form he can assimilate.
He needs experience that touches his being, rather than the unfelt, vicarious experience as an instrument of mass fanaticism, which Western civilization forces upon him. He needs to feel the surf buffeting his body rather than see a mountain rise in the air when he presses a switch that touches off several tons of well-placed dynamite. He needs to feel the muscular opposition of the man he would fight, rather than see the city of an unknown enemy through the eyepiece of a bombsight. Somehow we must make ourselves free of the vicarious and know the real.
THE FOURTH STRATUM OF BEING
When man compares his physical prowess to that of the universe, god's decision to become organic life is seen in its full magnitude.
Then, when it is recognized that god did not create organic life as an object, but, as a conscious being, became organic life, the willed change in perspective puzzles power-hungry beings and they refuse to believe it. However it is thoroughly understandable to the balanced man. That it is inherently understandable is evidenced by the fact that Christians of Pagan heritage have woven the idea of a god leaving heaven to become man into their concept of Jesus.
Abdication of power is innately recognized as characteristic of god.* (this is often interpreted by those who perceive the social expedience of a humble attitude, as humility. The fawning humility of the slave temperament is a gross distortion of constructive abdication; it is entirely foreign to the things god has called good. If honesty, integrity, and clear perception be called good, then an admiration for humility in a man's attitude to other men can give one an admiration only for incompetents and fools.)
This knowledge has to find expression, even though the vehicle of expression distorts beyond recognition, and results in thorough confusion. To fully understand the appeal of Christianity when the institutional concept lacks integration, we must segregate the several significances that have been woven into one story of Jesus. To appreciate this particular significance of god abdicating power we must be cognizant of the fact that god called power good, and then deliberately changed perspective to obtain an adequate foil for his power.
In the fourth stratum of being the will to power exists, but command of universal power has been deliberately locked in the subconscious. The conscious being must gain stature by accepting the memory of the first three strata as a present reality.
Fourth stratum being recapitulates the creative melody of the other three in an entity disciplined as to power by miniaturization, and adds the awareness of growth and organization. To balance our lives and live them to the fullest, we need knowledge of, and joy in, the fourth stratum of our beings; that is, we need knowledge of, and joy in, organic life as such. We need fourth stratum nourishment. Fortunately, love of organic life, as a work produced by a great artist, is still existent in Western civilization. We note, with joy, that, in Western civilization, gardening is a well accepted form of higher art appreciation that approaches religious reverence.
We frequently find persons consciously seeking harmony between the god in self and the god without through contemplation of growing things. We even find that "the stature of a man's soul can be measured by the length of time he can spend happily contemplating a single tree" is an idea that has fairly wide acceptance in Western civilization even though it is not apart of a conscious religion as such ideas are in Shinto. We recognize that, if development stopped with fourth stratum being, a tree could probably be called the highest form of organic life. It perhaps achieves the greatest comprehensive and self-contained beauty of anything in the universe.
A tree is such an eloquent work of art that no one can contemplate the physical being without perceiving and coming to appreciate its significant being. Therefore reverence for trees, retained in the midst of metropolitan religions, is encouraging. It is something to give us hope when we are tempted to think that man has been almost completely destroyed by Western civilization. But merely considering organic life as an art object is not fully satisfactory. All strata of being are within us. Full knowledge comes from full identification of self with that which is known. An objective perspective lacks the intimate communion that creates understanding. A single cell of organic life is an individual.
It is comparable to the organism of cells which we call man when he is considered as an individual entity. Man and a single cell are different in appearance, in the same way that Western civilization conceives that intelligent life might be different in appearance on various planets. But, except for appearance and a difference of two disciplines, man and a single-celled animal are the same. We can even note that many man-like beings do not have the two higher disciplines actively functioning, and, therefore, except for appearance, are not different from single-celled animals.
Senses are awarenesses differentiated by organs in man, but the composite of these differentiated senses must exist in the single-celled animal. "Intelligence" of the same quality that exists in man must also exist in the single cell, as do joys and emotions. We say "must" because command of the complex organism, which we know as man, obviously exists in the single cells as did the .'know how" of creating man. There is, therefore, no reason why we should not simply put ourselves in the place of one-celled animals. And as understanding and joy do not come from supercilious condescension in making analogies, but from full, temporary identification of self with the entity to be known, it is well that we do this.
The joy of the conscious god, as a single cell re-experiencing the creations of past consciousness, is like the joy of a beachcomber who has renounced civilization. It is a good thing to try for a season. To the beachcomber, the debris washed up by the sea-the driftwood, the pieces of old ships, the fish net in good condition, the lifeboat that can be easily repaired, the sea chest full of curious things that are useless to a beachcomber, the few glass floats from fishing nets, the piece of timber with a big iron bolt through it-all these are things to be scrutinized, to stimulate the imagination, and sometimes to be used.
The beachcomber finds joy in them. Such is the joy, the restful peace, the unpressured creative life, and the goodness that is the being of the simplest single-celled animal. But the welling joy of being, expressed in the will to experience, the will to know and create, the will to gather and hoard, the will to enlist the aid of other cells in a coordinated effort for the good of all, the win to build an organization that will take from each according to his ability and give to each according to his needs, the win to combine efforts with an objective to know and master the universe-these wills brought individual cells into organisms, or civilizations of cell.
These civilizations of cells created submarines (or fish) to explore the deepest depth of the sea, amphibians to know both sea and land, "tanks" of formidable armor to protect the living cells from enemies, "aircraft" with great strategic advantages in combat. The civilizations of cells created optical instruments of unbelievable power. They created radar-like instruments for hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling. They created means of communication and of camouflage.
They created systems of dealing with other organisms by using deadly poisons and gas warfare. They developed innumerable systems for spread and colonization. They developed injections to paralyze and preserve other civilizations for nourishments of new colonies. They developed firmly-rooted and sedentary civilizations, strongly fortified civilizations, civilizations that made themselves useful to and gained the protection of the more powerful. More than a minion varieties of cell civilizations, or organisms, are known to man. These civilizations are functioning governments, efficient and successful.
Their colonies vary very little, and thus show substantial approval of the fatherland. This experience is in our beings and we can recapture it at win by self-identification with any cell in the universe we may choose. In this identification we should remember that, as individuals, we are comparable to single cells. We can perceive what it is to be any cell in any organism, or civilization, including that cell which we truly are: that cell which commands the civilization which is the non-entity, and leaves the problems of administering the man-entity's organic functions to subordinates.
In addition to self identification with the commanders of various civilizations, we would do well to identify ourselves in turn with other cells in these civilizations. Self-identification with individual cells in our own bodies is effective in knowing the joys and sacrifices of specialization. However, because of the possibility of total transference of conscious identification, this knowledge of cells in our own bodies can be pressed to a danger point of no return. This should be guarded against by those whose will to adventure and know is stronger than self-discipline. Being-as-man requires that being in all strata be kept in balance. We need to remember that we are organic life, but we need also to remember that we are man entities.
Man-like beings, whose innate memories of the processes and successes of creating civilizations of cells are stronger than their cognizance of the good of later disciplines, can be seen everywhere trying to relive their subconsciously remembered successes in creating a cell civilization. They try to relive this experience by creating a super-civilization of men. Only balanced fifth or sixth stratum entities can avoid the danger of inadvertently destroying the progress that has been made toward the creation of true man by slipping completely back to fourth stratum being, and reproducing as organic entities the experiences of the single cells.
This remembered knowledge accounts for the gregarious urge that makes wolf packs and sheep herds. It finds full, successful re-expression in a colony of ants, or a hive of bees. A society of god-entities is difficult for a potential man to visualize, when he has no example before him, and when he is prevented, by hectic activity, from probing the nature of his being. Contemplation of what it is to be anyone of the individual cells in the many civilizations of cells in fourth stratum being, from jelly fish to the most complex organization, gives us examples of what man is not.
He is not an entity of organic life whose purpose is to surpass itself by creating an organism, or civilization. He is a product of that surpassing. Still we must remember that, although it is not something to be repeated, the fourth stratum of being is good. As the commanders of the civilizations of cells that constitute our vehicles of being, there are times when we are aware that every cell in our beings shouts with joy. This is true sometimes even in Western civilization, where man deprives his body cells of joy more than most organisms deprive of joy the cells that compose them. The joy of being part of an organization is real. We can create variations on the theme in our own lives and revel in it, provided we recognize it for what it is. It is the subconscious, remembered good of fourth stratum being recalled by a comparable circumstance.
The joy of a child who feels himself part of the family, the joy of an adolescent who revolts against the family and tries to dissolve himself in an adolescent clique, the joy of a debutante at her first dance where she feels she has joined a big wonderful world, the joy of a football player in a strategy of tightly coordinated action, the joy of a man among marching men coming in long uniformed columns down reverberating streets, the joy of a member of a gun crew on a ship in action under fire-the joy in all these situations gives one a temporary feeling that he would rather be nothing than cease to be part of a people, conceived as being an entity through which a uniting blood flows. This recalled innate emotion, this yearning to be part of the whole, which was created in the fourth discipline, is deliberately heightened, and left unsatisfied, in the later disciplines.
If these later disciplines are not to be negated, this deliberately heightened desire for unity which gives us the continual joy of discovering god or good in everything must not be given a perverse satisfaction by channeling the impulse back into the task of creating a social organism. There can be little virtue in creating merely another, of more than a million articulations of fourth stratum -existence, when fourth stratum existence is something that the being who is man has already experienced and surpassed.
We should therefore limit social relations to a tentative approach to organization that stops before we begin to talk of a "body politic" or attempt to create any other type of pseudo-entity. Among the Homo sapiens the desire for society is strong enough to draw individuals into social and economic relationships without those relationships being upheld as "holy" or otherwise forced upon those who do not at the moment choose them. It is individuation that needs encouragement, and any coordinated effort of a group seeking to develop true man will favor individual sovereignty and thereby protect the individual from those who seek license from the group to override individuation in the name of a hypothecated group entity.
THE FIFTH STRATUM OF BEING
The foundation upon which the metropolis is built is the memory of the joyful success of the cells that created a successful organism. The concept of sacrificing the individual to the group, which is postulated as a noble purpose by metropolitan cultures, is widely acceptable because it calls forth the emotional memory of the past success of the cells and associates the remembered emotion with the projected goal. In order for the metropolitan culture to thus capitalize on this fourth stratum impulse, it has to deprecate the two higher strata of being that overlay and counterbalance it.
These are sex and man. Man is a stratum in the becoming; that is, not all man-like creatures are true men. Because of this the perception of true man as a reality, the perception of man as a conscious god-entity, is understandably blurred. It is blurred in all man-like creatures who are less than true men because they do not experience it. It is blurred in many true men because it is not universally observable in the species Homo sapiens. Therefore the metropolitan culture is easily able to crowd out any popular concept of man as a conscious god-entity by positing a god external to man. But sex can clearly be perceived as an uncontestable reality even by man-like creatures who are less than man.
Sex is an ever prominent discipline which a metropolitan culture cannot simply deny as a reality. But over thousands of years, metropolitan cultures have learned amazingly well how to pervert men's perception of sex. They do this by dividing it into aspects that are each treated differently-ignored, denounced, glorified, or "sublimated" to other purposes-until the individual's perception is so confused that he is at the mercy of organized dogma and ritual.
The effectiveness of the spoken and ritualistic sex-mutilating dogmas that have been built up is amazing when we consider that they are counter to an unquestionable reality obviously created by god. Defense against these dogmas is a major problem which we Pagans must face, along with the more joyful task of developing a culture that enhances the reality of sex as a stratum of being worthy of full perception. We must remember that man is a being who retains his balance consciously or ceases to be man. If his perceptions are not brought to the level of consciousness, they can be overruled by incessantly repeated dogmas that fill up the whole of his consciousness.
The nature of man's organic being, with its extended childhood, permits the concept of sex to be learned, the joy dreamed of, and willed, and yearned for, before that which gives it substance wells up in the being. In this the god within and the conscious man have an opportunity for coordination of efficacy that is perhaps never equalled in any other circumstances. Metropolitan religions have taken advantage of this condition to pervert sexual perception. This requires a special conscious effort toward clear perception on the part of Pagans who have spent their childhood in metropolitan civilizations. We must meet the spoken and unspoken dogmas regarding sex by consciously focusing our attention on reality.
Variations on the theme of sex appear in all strata of man's being, but in its fullest expression sex results in a hungry searching and embrace between male and female animals, willed and directed by a perception of being that is strong enough to lead, rather than be led by, consciousness. The role of consciousness, with relation to sex, is to learn from sex, to hold it in balance with other strata of being, and to give it merited enhancement in a consciously created design for living. Conscious development of concepts regarding the god-intended relationship between a man and a woman is the development of a framework for an art of enhancing sex.
The art itself is an individual matter, but the framework as a cultural force is a proper subject for discussion. In the million or more varieties of life now existent in the universe we can see the myriad sex possibilities.
We find, in single-celled animals and tentative organisms, apparent experiments in four, five, or more sexes, but there is no evidence that more than two have ever been successfully developed. Sex enforces a volitionary counter balance between the will-to-destroy-absorb-and-remold and the will-to-love-and-accept-as-is. Therefore two sexes are all that are necessary: one to give each of these counter impulses a dominant aspect.
The extent of dominance and the relation of the dominant and recessive impulses to other characteristics give more possibilities of variety than man who has strong factors determining sex direction fixed in his being-needs to consider, except as possibilities to be quickly rejected in forming his design for living, as he can perceive god has rejected them in forming his being.
Simple interdependence, controlled only by god or completely subconscious, such as that which exists between plants and animals, we cannot call sex. Possible cross-pollination in plants, where self-pollination is possible, can hardly be called sex, nor even pollination between male and female plants where two entities are essential to survival.
Yearning and joy of fulfillment in total passivity, as parched plants yearn for and joy in rainfall, is an art possibility in designs for living, but it is not the plateau of sex as a stratum of being. True sex is an inherent requirement for a volitionary effort to balance the drive of egoism and the love of things as they are by seeking to create a personal design for living that embraces two entities who are unquestionably different. The extent of difference between the two sexes which is desirable is a major consideration.
Certain Crustacea change sex; the reproductive glands are first male, then the same glands produce eggs. Mollusks usually have both male and female reproductive organs fully developed and functioning in one individual. In certain kinds of fish the sexes are so different that it is difficult to recognize that they are the same species; the male appears more like a parasite that attaches itself to, lives off of, and directs the female. Among certain spiders the female devours the male as food during the mating. And so on indefinitely.
Without destroying the good of sex, a great variety of sexual relationships can be worked out between sexes of the Homo sapiens within the range of biological limitations (or within the range of consistency with the first five strata of being) and concepts consistent with the sixth stratum. Among Pagans there can be no dogma regarding sex, as there can be no dogma regarding anything else, but there are certain salient aspects that should be given conscious consideration. Contrast gives poignancy to art. Therefore, insofar as participants have stature to grasp sexual differences as complementary enhancements of comparable beings, the greater the difference the greater the poignancy.
Thus equality between sexes, or lack of differences, makes a flat design for living that de-emphasizes sex. As deemphasizing sex is an objective of metropolitan religions, they strive for sexual equality. Since we Pagans want to enhance sex, we need to strive for sexual differences, or, at least make strong sexual differences possible within a cultural framework. The Pagan limitation in striving for poignant difference is in the Pagan's immutable concept of man. Man and woman must be gods together. Individual sovereignty cannot be sacrificed to anything.
Thus the striving for difference between man and woman must be subordinate to the preservation of individual sovereignty, and subordinate to the striving for the integrity of the individual. As is well known to Western civilization, each sex carries the biological aspects of the other sex within its being in dormant or recessive form. In the same way the opposing impulses that are a major part of the sex discipline are both in each sex.
These (1) the will to create by destructive reduction of everything external to self to mere usable material and creatively absorbing it, and (2) the will to create by accepting existent design as is and making a place for it-are in constant conflict; one must be subordinate to the other. Although the first is indistinguishable from fourth stratum asexual will, we will call it the male will because it appears to remain dominant most often in the male, and the second we will call the female will. We look at these as two different and opposing aspects of god that are given objectively perceivable reality in male and female temperaments and see a discipline.
The apparent purpose of tying sex to reproduction is to weed out from the evolutionary stream those individuals who do not adequately respond to the discipline-whose self cannot call good apart of god other than the self when that other part is perceived objectively as having different desires and different volition from the self. The apparent purpose is to weed out those who insist on repeating the fourth discipline and trying to form all others into an entity which is merely another extension of the ego.
Each individual has in him both the dominant aspect of the sex that he is and the recessive aspect of the sex that he is not, but if we are to have the joy of man and woman as stimulating complements, and respond fully to the discipline of sex, the function of the male should be conspicuously performed for a woman by a man, and the function of the female should be conspicuously performed for a man by a woman. This makes it possible for each to see the recessive traits in himself objectively. It has the additional virtue of leaving the dominant emotions of each with a joyful freedom of action at the same time it is teaching objective perception of a counterbalancing good.
To stimulate a poignant perception of the objective reality of god, attention should be focused on the individual as a perceivable god-entity. A woman should be able to see an individual man, not only as the prototype of the seedling she would cherish and care for, but as the god-entity who counterbalances her love of things as they are and her consequent reluctance to destroy. And a man should be able to see an individual woman, not only as the potential cherisher of the life-design in his being, but as the god-entity who teaches him to look at entities other than that which he is, as good in themselves, perhaps a greater good than that which he is.
Thus the relation between man and woman is seen as twofold on each side. One is the joyful but enigmatical relation between the biological male and female who need each other to survive as a race. The other is the conscious relation between two aspects of god that are given objectively perceivable vehicles of expression in the male and female temperament. The discipline of sex includes an attempt to teach perception of these two aspects of god.
Both of these aspects must be perceived and the perception brought to full consciousness in all true men. The metropolitan religions seek to control the female's will to love and cherish what exists by dogmatically asserting what is to be cherished, and seek to control the male's will to destroy, absorb, and remold by dogmatically asserting what is to be destroyed. Thus the followers of these religions seek to usurp and crystallize into one dogmatically controlled entity the system of checks and balances through which evolution would otherwise pick its way to individuals of an even greater good.
To do this they must cloud over the meaning of sex that would otherwise become apparent to a clear-eyed observer. That two sexes are required to perpetuate the species, they cannot contest. But they never face the significance of sex in its total implication. Sex as an experienced reality is usually not listed as a topic head in encyclopedias, or, if so, the experienced reality is summarily dismissed as a minor deviation of something which is discussed under a "real" topic: love. Under the "real" topic reference is made to "sexual love" as a subdivision of love.
Thus attention is diverted from any consideration of sexual experience as a major reality. Sex, either as the experienced reality or as the objective reality, is not listed in the one hundred and two major topics contained in a recently published fifty-two volume work purporting to discuss the whole body of thought in the Western world. The Judaeo-Christian Bible tries to dispose of sex by saying that god created two sexes because it was not good for man to live alone.
It ignores the fact that god could as easily have made man asexual and still given him company. Significantly the modern medical profession, as an instrument of Western culture, is now making considerable "progress" aimed at correcting this anti-metropolitan "mistake" of god. It is making some very "promising" experiments aimed at one-sex reproductions of Homo sapiens. This would make it possible for man to follow the same pattern that the bees and ants have followed in creating a super organism of organisms whose sexual characteristics have been biologically altered.
But until this is "accomplished" metropolitan cultures will have to continue to distract attention from the good of sex, as an "unsublimated" personal experience, so that its message from the subconscious god within to the conscious man can be shouted down with dogma. We noted that Western culture attempts to destroy the concept of man as a god-entity by positing an external god. If the concept of man as a god is destroyed, the concept of sex as a rite of a god is, of course, automatically destroyed. This has largely been accomplished.
The fact that man's love for woman among the pagans of northern Europe approached reverence for women as for gods, was one of the things that most strongly impressed the writers who observed these pagans before they were influenced by metropolitan cultures. They could not understand it, because a conscious reverence for sex -the recognition of sexual joy as a god ennobling ecstasy -had long ago been destroyed by their metropolitan cultures.
But even if man's concept of himself as a god is destroyed he still tends to retain an innate reverence for sex. t Metropolitan religions attempt the destruction of this innate subconscious reverence for the experience of sex in one of two ways: (1) by positing an unattainable "spiritual love" which is "higher" than the perceivable reality, and thus belittling the reality, or (2) by considering the reality an attribute which man has accidentally retained in his "rise" from "lower" animals to become a "rational creature."
The promoters of metropolitan religions and civilizations know that clear-eyed consideration of the sexual experience will destroy such dogmas. So they have developed two methods for degrading the sexual experience into a subject unfit for a serious discussion that might uncover the subtle implications they use to deprecate it. One is to consider sex as a sin and banish it from open discussion, to implicitly brand it as an evil lurking in dark corners and unsavory places. The other is to place it conspicuously in the open and imply that it is a purely sensual experience. Whispered gossip accomplishes the first. To accomplish the second, elaborate rituals are overlaid on the sex rite to distract from personalities.
These personality-distracting rituals include making the art by which an individual would express his reverence for sex and asexual partner which properly involves such things as dinner, dancing, wine, soft lights, silks, perfumes, et cetera-into metropolitan rites that are highly faddish and sophisticated. In the course of giving elaborate attention to these rituals in a faddish manner that turns art to dogma, the individual tends to perceive sex as a mere part of the sophisticated pattern, and the partners in the sex act are reduced to anonymous sensual delicacies. The two methods of degrading sex are obviously in opposition, but their very opposition makes them very effective when used together.
The "rational creature" of the Western world thinks all reality is contained in two opposites. To the Western mind everything must be either the one or the other. So the reality of the sexual experience becomes lost between two opposing ritualistic dogmas regarding it, neither of which leads to recognition of the reality, and the metropolitan culture is not confronted with the religious significance of sex.
The metropolitan religions have not only put distorting pressures on the individual's perception of the sex discipline by their dogmas, but their implements, the states, have usurped the god functions of the male, and insinuated themselves into the god roles of both the male and female as objectively perceived. As a result, woman is not allowed to see god in an individual man and man is not allowed to see god in an individual woman.
Both are pressured, by conditions which interpose the group into all individual relations, to try to see god in the group or not to see god at all -to be satisfied with blind faith. In most mammals that approach man's potential, sexual difference are functionally expressed simply by mortal combat between males, and by the acceptance of a mate and the rearing of his young by females. These functional expressions of male and female temperament inherently carry over into man, but in metropolitan civilizations the group takes them from the individual as rapidly as possible.
First the individual male is deprived of his prerogative of mortal combat as an individual. Mortal combat becomes a group action of men who voluntarily combine their efforts in a dogmatically asserted cause. When the group has developed a sheep-like following of sufficient size to destroy any individual who does not hide himself in the group, an individual is ostracized and marked as a target for destruction if he does not join with the group in mortal combat for any group cause. Finally all concept of a voluntary choice is abandoned and the concept of "my country right or wrong" is formalized into a civic duty. Since the individual has already been deprived of his right of individual choice in combat, he is faced with the choice of fighting for any cause the group espouses or being branded a coward.
When this has been accomplished, the objective observer, significantly the woman who should properly be attracted by masculinity, has her perception perverted into seeing masculine combativeness only in those who acquiesce to the group. The pressure of the group on woman's basic role has followed a parallel line in taking the rearing of children from the individual and giving it to public institutions.
This is usually accepted as an unquestioned good by all but the most keenly perceptive, because the group can produce "education" faster than the individual can appraise it, and so the individual never catches up with the sheer momentum. By putting emphasis on "progress," new fads or current shibboleths, as the criterion of education, the group makes the mother who seeks to appraise appear to be a weak voice crying in the wilderness, a non-conformist who can be branded "old fashioned."
Now that the group has won the battle of taking the education of children from the individual, it is beginning to play with the idea of determining which woman shall bear children, and who shall be the father of them. If mating becomes a "scientific" selection by an electronic computer, the group will have taken over the sexual role which individual woman inherited from her animal ancestors as completely as it has already taken over the individual man's.
The group will then have entirely negated the billions of years of real achievement that lie between the first sexual creature and man, and will have no further obstacle to creating a super civilization, or fourth stratum organism.
The imposition of the group between woman and the man she would perceive as a god entity conditions the woman to seek in the group the god-entity who provides her with combat-free living room and to see man as an essentially evil and rapacious being whose natural tendencies are held in check by the state.
The imposition of the group between man and the woman he would perceive as a god-entity conditions the man to seek in the group the god-entity who teaches him to look at entities that are not of his being as things of value in themselves. He faces the constantly repeated dogma that "civilized humanity" gave him his appreciation of the world and other beings external to self and he tries to give "civilized humanity" the respect he should have for the experience of sex and the love he should have for woman.
Because of the diversity and number of individuals that constitute "civilized humanity," he cannot perceive them as identical units, nor can he perceive them as a group. In weariness, his consciousness accepts the proffered concept of the state, not only as an entity, but as an entity of greater value than individuals who are conceptually reduced to mere component parts of indistinguishable value and given the asexual name of citizens. A major Pagan objective is the recapture of a real perspective that is not engrossed with such hazy abstracts as "states" and "citizens" but concerns itself with real entities that are living individual beings.
Recapture of our ability to see individuals as individuals requires that we resist the metropolitan religions' attempts to destroy a sex-taught sensitiveness to personalities by pressing on us the dogma that one should have an indiscriminate love for all humanity, or for all of a particular metropolitan group. This dogma is derived from the concept that the habit of living with another individual, as the result of pleasant sexual relations, was, and properly should be, spread to the family, race, and finally the whole of society through the simple expedient of "sublimating" sex to the "higher" good of the group. Acceptance of such a "good" as an ethical concept is not possible for a perceptive observer.
It is abundantly clear that the breeding of any race or group toward a higher good is not development of a perception-benumbing behavior pattern; it is development of an ability to perceive and reverence good in other personalities as definite individual knowledge of definite individuals. The deep interest in individuals as individuals which leads to this perceptive ability wells up from the sexual impulse.
One finds, springing up from the depth of innate being, an attraction to specific persons of the opposite sex and an indifference to others. After puberty, consciousness is continually being awakened to the essential being's appraisal of what it would be like to embrace, share a design for living and rear children with the person in whom the sexual instinct has aroused an interest-what it would be like to know the person fully.
This appraisal of another being by the essential being of the self should be faced by consciousness with reverence. Reverence is the conscious focusing of attention on the deepest significance of reality with the will to learn. Therefore, bringing the sex impulse to consciousness and looking upon an appealing individual of the opposite sex in such a manner must be regarded as the highest form of reverence.
Yet, significantly, the only word that points to this reality in the English language, "ogling," carries a coloring that attempts to discredit it. The difference between "reverent ogling" and "lustful ogling" is not a difference in basic sexual impulse but a difference between the Pagan concept of sex and the concept of sex that metropolitan civilization has imposed on consciousness. If anticipation of the joys of a sexual embrace is anticipation of a superficial sensuality and a superficial contact that disregards personalities, then it might be called lust, not reverence. The reverent is the search for the fullest joy of sensuality and fullest contact of personalities.
This cannot be achieved by seeking to banish sexual thoughts as sinful or by a contempt for the sexual impulse as an embarrassing reminder than man evolved from "lower" animals. Man can be higher than other animals but he cannot achieve a higher stratum by a contempt for what is animal. It should be remembered with joy that sex is the highest stratum in the heritage of the animal who seeks to become man. He stands on it or falls below it.
The interplay of sexual instinct and a reverent consciousness, particularly when a prolonged monogamous relationship can be achieved by the mutual will of both sex partners, finally brings full perception of a being with a temperament and volition different from that of the self, to whom, as an individual, one gladly gives love, respect, and dignity as great as that one would wish for oneself.
This growing sensitiveness to personalities eventually becomes high sensitiveness to persons other than the sexual foil-children, the aged, and individuals of the same sex. This sensitiveness to such other personalities is no longer sex but something taught by sex. It is the sex impulse growing upward to produce man. There is no hope of becoming man if the source from which the impulse grows is not nourished or if the direction of the growth is perverted. No man-like being can become true man who perverts or "sublimates" sex to some direction other than that to which the discipline tends.
If we are to be true men, sex must be given a place in our design for living that reveals it as it is, a discipline that leads to a discriminating perception of individuals by individuals. Our broad objective in developing an ethical framework for man and woman relationships is that of keeping the deep penetrating perception, taught by sex, free from distorting pressures in any design for living that we may consciously evolve.
The things that sex can teach must not be something which we perceive, interpret, and teach to others, with subtle, even though possibly unintentional, distortion; as purported instructions from the gods of words are given to followers of metropolitan religions; that is, by symbolism, rituals, and institutions contained in a design for living. The things that sex can teach must come direct from the real god within him to each individual. If we would aid, our task is to keep the individual free from pressures that would distort his perception.
Sex as it is known by the animals of the jungle, sex as an unseen high priest, sex as a sort of Delphian oracle dispensing enigmatical but profound wisdom to be pondered by consciousness, must remain a stratum of being, firmly fixed in his design for living, before a man-like being can become true man. An open channel from sexual instinct to consciousness, bred into being, is the beginning of biological man. Conditioning man's reflexes to a behavior pattern is not a substitute for perception.
Using the channel between sex and consciousness, not to learn from sex, but to impose dogmas on sex, or on the sensitiveness to personalities taught by sex, makes man-like beings less than any other animal which has male and female temperament and function divided between two individuals. Sex is the highest plateau on which man is built. It is established by the god within as a subconscious or instinctive impulse that has innumerable messages of supreme importance for the conscious being. The true man or woman must consciously recognize it as something meriting the highest reverence and create for it a place in his design for living that befits its merit.
THE SIXTH STRATUM OF BEING
Sensitiveness to personalities is the beginning of a sixth sense that belongs to the biologically true man; it makes possible the blending of god-purpose and self-purpose in the consciously willed being, or individual soul. The sixth sense is a composite of what we know as sense of beauty, ability to recognize a thoroughbred, ability to "spot a phoney," or ability to judge men.
It is the sense by which we perceive integrity in personalities, in inanimate things, and in ideas. It is what we sometimes refer to as "perception of virtue," "perception of validity," "a nose for facts," "a feel for truth," "a sense of reality" or simply "common sense." But it is the highest and most uncommon sense. It is the true "aristocratic" sense which when possessed by commoner or slave causes him, and provides him with the genius, to overthrow those who seek to hold mastery over him without having this all important sense, to which metropolitan cultures significantly give no name.
This sixth sense, when fully developed, is that which enables us to perceive god as an integrated directional reality in ourselves, in others, and in the universe as a totality. This learning to perceive god objectively and to perceive the god within as the disciplined reality of self, is development of a real sense in the same manner that seeing and hearing are real. The mere fact that it has no organ of initial impulse reception does not preclude its existence. As is clearly apparent from the study of single cells, awareness exists before tile sense organs. Sensations depend on potentials in consciousness.
We can know red, not merely respond to a light wave of a certain frequency, because the potentiality of knowing red is in the self. The potentiality was in the aboriginal self before there was a universe. The mechanics of recalling it is a function of disciplines, differing only in quality and magnitude from such man-made disciplines as organization of algebraic thought. A sense organ is only part of the mechanics of the disciplines. We note from studying the man-organism that there are more types of stimuli receivers than the five which consciousness recognizes as distinct senses. For instance consciousness makes a composite of various types of touch stimuli.
The sixth sense is a sense for perceiving totalities, or entities. It takes some of its data from the impulses received through all sense organs, some from innate predilections or innate melodies of being, and refers all to a center, or discipline, of entity perceptions. Since it must deal in total knowledge, it is quite inconceivable that this sense should have an individual organ for initial impulse reception.
This sense does not spring full-blown in man any more than man sprang full blown from the first organism that divided male and female temperament and function between two entities. It was longer in developing as a disciplined activity in an organic being than the hand of man was in developing from the swimmer of a fish. When god became organic life, and buried the past in the subconscious, the purpose was for consciousness to find a way back to total perception through disciplines that would add stature to those already declared good. The disciplines restrict conscious contact between the present self and the aboriginal self, or god.
The sixth sense comes perilously close to merging the segregated perspectives and is therefore a delicate sense to evolve. The sixth sense was potentially always in organic life as a guiding instinct. As such, it exists in the cell, but in man an attempt is made to bring it to consciousness without merging it with the perspective of total god. A sexual organic life is largely blind to any entity other than that conceived by self. To it, the external universe is only material.
An embryonic perception of material as potential or remembered entity can be found in the use suggested to self by the form of the material. Sex is the discipline that teaches perception of objective entities as entities; it teaches comparison of self as an entity to entities outside of self. In man this leads among other things, to a search for integrity in the universe.
This is not a sublimation of sex but a building upon the foundation of sex. The foundation should be continually maintained and strengthened. The man in whom sex is inherently strong, and who has willed that his consciousness listen to sex, is capable of making the most of his sixth sense. When he has developed his sixth sense to a point of reverence for the perceived reality within and without his being, he can come perilously close to perception of universal integrity, or the totality of god.
But contemplation of the almost glimpsed totality, as a totality, is good only for orientation. The totality cannot be perceived in its fullness as an entity from the man perspective. The whole of the disciplines precludes that. To attempt to group and hold the totality of god as an entity in the consciousness of man is to negate the good of the disciplines. It is to exchange the real god for a shallow abstraction. Man can perceive god deeply only in realities. God is perceived in self as awareness patterns in consciousness, and as self-conceived, dream-like form and substance.
In the non-organic universe, god is perceived as matter that stimulates consciousness to perceive, or remember, patterns and concepts of form as realities; in organic beings, god is perceived as entities expressing various aspects of god's art; in sex, god is perceived as a god-enforced balancing of the god within and the god without; and, in man, god is perceived as a god-entity, who consciously chooses to balance god within and god without, and to carry forward their two perspectives and wills as the warp and woof of further creation.
He who is satisfied to subordinate his being to an abstract of total god represented by words, or by an inanimate image, or by an organic entity greater or lesser than himself, is not man. Man is a being who knows that he is a god-entity and wills it so at the same time that he wills that there also be other god-entities so that creation will have a rich texture of knowns and unknowns.
To what extent is that will already accomplished? How many man-like beings are there in the herds and mobs of Homo sapiens that are true men by birth and breeding? How many are now ready to assert themselves as men? How many can be awakened to the knowledge that they are men? And what would it be like to live in a world of men who knew that they were god-entities?
Pointing out man, and pointing out examples of sixth stratum nourishment for man, or examples of creative art in the sixth disciplines, is a very difficult task. Pointing out sex is difficult enough, when it must be done in the language and concepts of a civilization that has tried to negate it. But sex is fully entrenched in the universe. Man is still in the process of becoming and the attempts of metropolitan cultures to destroy him are very effective.
If we look closely under their protective masks we can find many of whom we can say, "he is a man." But nowhere on earth can we find a group of Homo sapiens living together to which we can point and say, "There is what it means to live in a society of men." Nor do we have any historical example to which we can point.
The scant information we have of Indo-European man before he migrated into metropolitan areas, or was overrun by metropolitan civilizations, indicates that his way of life was closer than that of most peoples to a society of men. And we can hardly avoid the belief that somewhere, sometime, there must have been a culture that favored the evolution of man. There are too many true men in the species Homo sapiens to have been produced without cooperative effort as a species. And certainly no metropolitan culture could have produced them.
But the culture that did produce them disdained words and left its record and direction wholly in the innate memories, in the very flesh and blood and bone, of the beings it produced. That record is the real Pagan Bible; what you read here is intended only for calling it to your attention and inviting you to join in a strategy for its perpetuation. It is our task now, at once willed and obligatory, to recognize what it is to be men, to conceive what it would be to live as men, to factually demonstrate what it is to live as men, and finally to create a culture that will favor the production and development of men.
Our enemy, in this task, is the mass of man-made disciplines that oppose those of god. They have produced no real beings but they are perceivable disciplines. Our enemies are the word-created-gods, whatever form they take: the verbally perpetuated concepts -before which men bow -that make them less than sovereign entities. It must be recognized that no man can relieve himself of personal responsibility for his own acts by ascribing them to some otherwise unarticulated entity such as Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, some "church" or some "nation."
No man can find in this world a higher god-entity than himself, unless it be another man who can be perceived as a real flesh and blood entity. He may want to help that higher god-entity, just to be near him and learn from him, but, if he be true man, he will not worship him; he will love and seek to surpass the higher god-entity. The higher god entity will joy in being surpassed, for then he will have an example he can love, and from whom he can obtain nourishment and gain strength for another rise.
This relationship between two such entities-for example, a man and wife-may reverse itself many times in the course of a day. The sort of god-entity who can accept the worship of the man-like beings who will prostrate their perception and volition before something "higher" than themselves is an intermediate step between sex and man. He is not a discipline; he is a temporary metamorphosis that a man like being goes through to become man. So, in that sense, the first god-entity created man in his own image.
The fact that such a god-entity must will his own death in order that man may have being is another of the things that the subconscious knows and stammers to articulate when it clings to the symbolism that has been attached to the life and death of Jesus. It can cease from its stammering and become articulate only within a real self when that self consciously wills its death as a potential metropolitan god in order to become man.
True man is a god-entity that has real being. An abstract god, created by accretion of conceptual tidbits supplied by a multitude of lesser beings, each offering his finest as a sacrifice, is not only a sterile god, who cannot propagate himself; he lacks integrity of being. He becomes not an example for real men but a deformed monster.
Those who, with the help of the billions of years of discipline that is woven into their organic beings, cannot become god-entities, should at least refrain from the blasphemy of conceptually creating monstrous idols. To become men we must recognize that there can be no god-entity in this world higher than the highest man we can organically produce. And he is not worthy to be called man, or god, unless his will is to create men who are also god-entities.
These other god-entities will be like him in all god-aspects, in all essential disciplines of being, but be of as great a diversity as selfs as a god integrity will permit. All living is an art and the highest art is that of living as a man conceived as a god among gods. This does not consist of accumulating and passing down the "wisdom of the ages"; the wisdom of the ages is in the being.
This is not a making of laws for the control of the unperceiving, nor the teaching of dogma for guidance of those who cannot perceive the god within themselves. It is the creation of an individual pattern of living by a reverent balancing of the god impulse to creation -that springs from within with the god impulse as we perceive its expression in designs for living that others are creating. In our relation to others, aid to those we would aid and opposition to those we would oppose will be, at its best, an expression of our own beings.
It will be an expression of self that aids or opposes by adding force of being: gives joy by carrying one in the direction he would go, as the surf raises and carries a swimmer; or gives joy by its stature building opposition as a wave that knocks one down and washes him backwards, and by so doing either strengthens or destroys him. Or it may be the creation of attractions and lures to bring another in the direction we would have him go, while each vista along the way opens anew joyful perception that our perspective is different from his but also good.
Or it may be the creation of a dramatic awareness that shows him our selfs standing between him and the folly that he appeared to be pursuing when viewed from our perspective. But all aid or opposition to others, whether concurrence, disapproval or a lateral difference, should require them to recognize both our perspective and our beings as distinct from theirs. It should not be an attempt to override the individual's sensitive search for adventure along his way by imperceptibly deflecting his direction. It should not be an attempt to override his reverent searching by supplying him with dogma.
To say the same thing a third way, it should not be an attempt to destroy his joy in creative living as an individuated self by giving him a blueprint. "Learn to trust your own perception" -not "listen to what is 'right'" -should be a major criterion in the education of children. But that is not enough. When each child becomes an adult, each should have freedom to choose as an individual the design for living he has been taught, freedom to become acquainted with and choose other designs, or freedom to choose anarchy and create his own. Thus, in effect, the true man, who has become a god-entity, and created beings in his own image, should both conceptually and physically provide them with a Garden of Eden, where they may eat of any fruit, and only warn them that if they attempt to change what the perceivable god has decreed good they will destroy themselves as true men with living individuated souls. They should be educated, not in "knowledge" but in perception; then provided with the unpressured opportunity to perceive if the concepts pointed out to them be real and the direction of the training given them be that which they would choose.
The child growing to maturity should be provided with the opportunity to choose the society into which he was born, any other society, or none at all, without any appreciable sacrifice. Even if this choice is made possible without total sacrifice of all access to the means of sustenance and expression of being, the society should make it possible for the new adult to choose on as unpressured a basis as possible.
Material advantages dangled before the maturing child to influence his decision is a gross perversion of the intent of any society of true men. Material advantages, aid, or protection should be freely offered to those we would aid or protect, without strings attached. No contract should be required and no existence of a social contract implied. Integrity of an organic being is a dynamic thing. It does not lend itself to dogma, law, or contracts.
The being who strives for integrity strives for "truth" as an artful expression of his being. This is much more than is conceived by those who seek mere technical or legal veracity, or conformance to the ninth of the Judaeo-Christian Ten Commandments as a dogma. The being of integrity cannot trade real truth for verbal truth or legality. Therefore, contracts, spoken or implied, are the greatest of all dangers to a true man; they tend to set a blueprint for integrity, whereas an organic integrity, motivated by creative artistry, is incompatible with blueprints.
Industrial development would be possible under a Pagan society but the primary objective of living a full life and retaining individual sovereignty would require that production of useful articles by groups of men be pursued principally by those of proved and retained ability and opportunity to sustain themselves in detachment from the group effort at any time they feel inclined.
Industrial production would necessarily be regarded as music and poetry are regarded in Western Civilization-contributions to man's heritage superimposed upon basic reality. It would not be a currency by means of which one sought to bargain for survival. Full individual integrity presupposes the ability and opportunity to survive and have a good life independent of any group assistance.
Pagan group action is for the clearly recognized purpose of protecting the individual from all group force, including, of course, the force of the group doing the protecting. The total god is the only entity which the Pagan perceives as having moral priority over his own volition. All cooperative effort in a joint venture should be the voluntary acts of sovereign adults who have adequate alternatives. Metropolitan civilizations do not permit adequate alternatives to individuals whose beings revolt at cooperation in their objectives.
They claim all the areas of the world, all means of obtaining sustenance, and insist on carrying their dogmas and laws into the deepest wilderness. They claim that every child is born apart of a nation. When he is an adult, he can change citizenship in one nation for another, but there is no place where he can be a sovereign individual. If he has an integrated soul, rather than a mutilated fragment of a soul crying out for an impossible amalgamation, the metropolis gives him the choice (1) of becoming a hunted criminal, (2) of simulating conformance to the extent of passing unnoticed, or (3) of raising a rebel army big enough for an effective fight.
Token resistance such as the civil disobedience of Thoreau is ineffectual to the point of ludicrousness in an individual, and when it acquires effectiveness from mass action the method has destroyed the objective. Thus, many men who would be effective individuals feel that they are forced by metropolitan civilizations into becoming mob leaders of rebel movements. Yet, not until an individual has laid a civilization in ruins is he permitted to be sovereign, and then only for a short time while another nation, motivated by remembered metropolitan dogmas, is forming.
And he who would be an individual can make little use of the brief, hard-earned opportunity. His fight against an enemy as formidable as the metropolis usually induces him to devise an appealing dogma as a shibboleth and requires him to become part of an organization to such an extent that the act of achieving the freedom to be an individual destroys his own individual integrity and that of those who help him.
Most men give up the objective as hopeless and succumb to the metropolitan dogma that a society of free men is an impossible Utopian dream. A society of free men would differ from our concept of democracy by permitting individuals who disagreed with majority objectives to live and express their viewpoints effectively in their lives. It would in practice call group integrity less important than individual integrity. We saw an attempt to create a society of free men when the United States came into being.
But as soon as all raw land was claimed, and that claim enforced by the power of the group, the individual became a pure fiction: the legendary hero of western stories. Without a living example, a society of free men is difficult for man-like beings brought up on metropolitan concepts to imagine. But at long intervals in the history of the world, individuals have a brief opportunity to attempt to form a society of men, rather than a monstrous fourth stratum organism.
We can make ourselves ready to grasp the next opportunity which is as certain to come as tomorrow's dawn. Every metropolitan civilization has in its creation the inborn destiny of its destruction: It is made up of manlike creatures of two sexes and a man potential. Both these fifth and sixth strata qualities must be destroyed if civilization is to become a stable fourth stratum entity as it has in bee and ant colonies.
So long as this retrogression is avoided we will have the continual spectacle of one civilization after another flowering but to perish. This will not end until the product is not a nation, nor a civilization, nor a "one world" organism of humanity, but a society of men sovereign, conscious god-entities of the sixth discipline.
THE PROBLEM OF CREATING A PAGAN SOCIETY
We have perceived a single pattern running through our innate knowledge and our objective observations which gives us a fully satisfying explanation of the origin, existence, and purpose of the universe. Our ethical concept, and the culture that we would evolve to aid the purpose of the universe, are thereby given an unmistakable direction.
The direction might be briefly indicated by the following statements: True man is, and must be, a sovereign individual. As such, no formal rules, either as dogma or law, can ethically be pressed upon him. Our culture should therefore aim at providing individual freedom both to perceive and to act; it should favor propagation of true man by effectively countering any group effort to impose its will on that of the individual. This concept is basic, so let us restate it from another perspective in order to further narrow the possibility of misunderstanding.
When two or more man-like beings join together to enforce their will upon another, who has not, while having an adequate alternative, voluntarily contracted with them to prevent certain clearly specified acts of his, it can only be construed as an act of war against the individual. Then, if he be true man, his consideration is not one of ethics but one of strategy against an enemy who is trying to destroy him. True man cannot accept the dogma of an inherent ethical right that a group may exercise over an individual. That principal is paramount.
We recognize many benefits which individuals have received from groups, even from those swelled to the proportions of metropolitan civilizations. Whether for ultimate good or bad, life within such a group is part of every individual's environmental heritage. As it doubtless was once with the sea when we first ventured onto the land, it may seem to some of us that there can be no life and nourishment apart from the total embrace and dominance of such a group. But for an air-breathing land animal, a complete re-swallowing by the sea is death. He may remember the sea with affection, return to swim in it, sail on it, but if it floods the highest mountain peak he has climbed, and he has prepared no ark, he win drown.
Such also is the relationship between the Pagan and the metropolis and, as of this moment, the metropolis is approaching all-enveloping flood proportions. For the individual being, the benefits of the now-flooding metropolitan civilizations have little appeal when acceptance of them entails acceptance of the soul destroying concepts and pressures of a dogma-fanaticized mob closing in on one from all sides and proclaiming by words and actions: "We are an entity. We must feel and act as an entity. He who does not feel and act with us must be destroyed."
Such mobs, and our culturally conditioned inclination to accept their concepts and to join them, are the great problem which we face in creating a Pagan society. As they press in upon us, the individuals who compose the mob are clearly perceivable as individuals, but when we turn to face them they do not face us as true men of integrity face others of their kind. Zombie-like, they disclaim an responsibility for their own acts.
Because their perceptions of entities have been perverted by metropolitan religions, they do not draw back from the concept of an entity that has no reality. They say that they are mere parts of some metropolitan pseudo-entity. Having been converted, they do not act in their own interests as they perceive them; they act according to the dogmatically stated interest of the unreal creation.
They demand that we either join them or do battle with them over which unreal entity-god, party, church, nation, et cetera-shall be upheld. We see nothing unethical in a mature, fully conscious man giving battle to another mature, fully conscious man who considers him his mortal enemy, but we can accomplish nothing by joining or doing battle with mobs of downy-cheeked, dogma-drugged youths, who are simply fighting because they have been conditioned to visualize themselves as protecting or destroying purely hypothetical entities that are not realities.
Individual human beings, animals, land, houses, and factories are realities, but a line drawn around them, or a common "quality" perceived in them, or a common shibboleth proclaimed by individuals within the line, does not make them into an entity. To conceive an entity that does not exist and try to create it may be an art objective, but to assert its existence because it has been conceived and given a name is madness. If we want to biologically and psychologically alter man to make a group of men into a real entity (although individuals are still physically segregated) , as bees and ants have done, we can do it, but it is retrogression from the sixth to the fourth stratum of being.
The highest entities which we can perceive from looking within ourselves and looking at others, the beings we perceive as true men, are captives by the millions in all "nations." We can fight no "nation" without fighting our own kind of real entities who in order to survive have been required to talk and act as if they were part of some pseudo-entity for so many generations that they have lost all memory of their own unconverted beings. Therefore, the most essential thing for every Pagan to remember, amid the din of shouted dogmas, is this: in the universe of reality no group of individuals can be perceived as an entity. We cannot fight what is not real.
These unreal "people entities," the contemplation of which reduces men to beings without perception or volition, can only be destroyed by being ignored and forgotten. We need a culturally impassable desert separating us and our children from the dogma mouthing zombies, until we and our children relearn perception. Our children need to hear the words of the dogmas, but without the color of authority and the constant repetition which gives them their hypnotic effect. If they are heard simply as words, our children will be able to decide for themselves whether or not the words point to realities.
That they may have something for comparison, we need to create a new language that points only to perceivable realities, and anew art that portrays only the dream desires for possible future realities that we seek to create in the depths of our beings. But there is no place for individuals to go and be free from the constantly repeated dogmas. In the name of their word-created entities, the states, the zombies claim every square inch of land on earth.
And Pagans are beings who need daily contact with the natural environment that gave birth to man. We, therefore, need much more space per person than the herd animals who have been converted into zombies that draw their soul nourishment from the metropolitan world of words rather than from the more disciplined world of physically expressed selfs in direct interaction with the world of physical reality.
But, if there were adequate space now, we would not want to go until we had awakened those who can be restored to consciousness, and maybe given the very weak enough nourishment so that they could stand on their own feet. Then let us face the realities presently before us. We have concluded that the whole man who lives a full life of action is the highest. We have been estopped from this highest life by losing ourselves in the great mass of self-styled "peoples" who are motivated by metropolitan religions. Trying to appeal to masses thus motivated is hopeless.
The accumulation of religious and philosophical works which men worship is so great that half a lifetime is needed to know it well enough to judge it fairly. Because of this the average man-like being limits the scope of his action to his day-to-day needs, which do not force upon him the necessity for considering the great mass of religious and philosophical word-creations that he accepts on faith. The great number of man-like beings who accept, without examining, the extant word-perpetuated thought patterns constitutes a formidable mass of inertia.
A man of action, whose scope of purpose would take him to the core of reality, would not only be required to spend half a lifetime learning his way around in the religions of the world, but he would also be required to face the problem of acting upon the inert mass of man-like beings who have not considered the problem, and yet are near enough to being true men to be reluctant to act without knowing. This state of things precludes leaders of depth and knowledge and followers of stature and balance from organizing in a course of action that could be effective in moving the inert mass. Life is not long enough.
All mass action then, is taken by (1) a more impulsive than conscious radical, leading an unstable mob against the inert mass, Or (2) a shallow leader and his zombie followers, who do not consider direction carefully, but simply swim with, and add momentum to, the tide of affairs that is running. Thus a tide of major proportions in human affairs once set in motion, must run its unbalanced course to its ultimate distortion and disaster, or meet an opposing tide in mass warfare. So long as men believe in and recreate "peoples," in whom the individual is swallowed up, the individual has freedom of action only in the short periods of chaos that follow catastrophe.
While freedom is restricted to the use of words, our objective is to repeatedly call the attention of such men as are capable of perception to the fallacy of their worshipful submission to the tyranny of the group. and to prepare for action in the chaos that follows the next catastrophe. This momentary relief of physical pressure seems to be just a lull before a great world-wide catastrophe, an atomic war between two or more pseudo-entities of word-created "peoples," communists, socialists, democrats, humanitarians, or whatever the zombies, who mouth the declarations that they are pieces of some word creation, call themselves.
We have little doubt that their war will clear ample space for us if any of us chance to be left. But even if some day we should be faced with a necessity for clearing living room, we would need to take the same initial steps in preparing ourselves to make the most of it. So let us simply take those initial steps now, while waiting for possible future circumstances to narrow down to a present reality that we are prepared to meet.
Our first step is to determine how many of us are now conscious enough, and have strength enough, to stand up and be counted. Our next step is to awaken those of us who are semiconscious. This can be done by books, lectures, articles, drama, television, movies, and other works of art, scatter-fired to stir consciousness in any Pagan with a remaining glimmer of perception. But there are all stages of semi-consciousness, and we need to select by personal perception those who we believe can be nourished back to health. For discovering the extent to which each individual is controlled by dogma-conditioned reflexes, progressively selective discussion groups can be useful.
These might begin with public discussions of selected books, progress through more selective discussions of ideas, continue on to discussion of direction, and finally to discussion and coordination of strategy by Pagans. Creation of bases for nourishment and operation is our next step. These would be similar to the early monasteries of the Catholic Church in that they would be camps in areas of alien culture but they would be radically different in function. Institutional religions attempt to bury their concepts in a "people's" consciousness, and claim that they are inborn in the conscience of the individual.
The deeper they are buried, the better the purpose of the institution is served, for they become much harder for the individual to perceive as something acquired rather than innate. The Pagan objective, and indeed the object of all personal religions, is to free the self from the influence of all acquired knowledge, discover what actually is innate knowledge, and bring it forth into waking consciousness.
Thus our camps would not be centers for insinuating Pagan ideals into the surrounding "peoples" but centers where Pagans, and Pagan children, could find a perceptive life out of earshot of shouted dogmas and shibboleths. The selection of sites would be affected by this difference in function. The sites should be located away from metropolitan centers. This would serve several purposes. It would give the necessary desert between Pagans and dogma-mouthing zombies.
It would tend to increase the proportion of Pagans left in the world in event of a catastrophic atomic war. It would serve as a base of operation in the chaos following such a war. It would serve the purpose of helping to break the umbilical cord with the metropolis. And it would serve as a university for relearning the realities of being. To accomplish some of these purposes our bases of operation should aim at being largely self-contained and self-supporting without commerce.
To disdain any products or processes in initial camp establishments would be a stupid faddishness, but the camps should be able to survive alone in their long-range function. For long-range function they should produce all their own food and necessities of existence. This self-sufficiency would also aid the centers in serving as universities in the realities of existence even while still only camps of Pagans in the midst of .'peoples." Each camp should have as close an intimacy with woods, mountains, rivers, ocean, wild life, et cetera, as possible, so as to teach perception of the realities on which man's being rests..
Modern man's concern with conquering his environment is a fear complex. He has lost his knowledge of how to win his livelihood in a wild world as the world's most intelligent animal. He forgets that the problem was solved long ago. Because he, himself, is not thoroughly conversant with it, he wants the science of the metropolis to protect him from the vast terrifying unknown.
In true man there is no place for this fear complex and we must see that it is not formed in our children. Obviating this by teaching survival in the wilds should be a function of the center. Insofar as permitted by the laws of the captors in whose midst the center was established, each center should be a rehearsal for a Pagan society, so that we might relearn, not as theory but as reality, the pattern of living among individuals as sovereign entities.
A continuing council of strategic cooperation should also be established, because a council among sovereign individuals needs even more rehearsal to become a reality than the acts of individuals simply living as individuals. We have been in too many councils among men conditioned by metropolitan religions not to know the dogmas contained in remembered situation-words as well as the dogmas contained in word-utterances.
In every council among men who remember a metropolitan assembly there lurks the unspoken dogma: we who meet here together are "one people." Therefore, a great danger is that, in attempting to coordinate strategy, we may begin to fancy that we, who coordinate our individual efforts, comprise a group that is an entity. Let us set forth among ourselves some of the points on which to focus our perception if we are to avoid this. The greatest danger we face in our councils is that the frustrated impulses of the male, which the metropolis has dammed to give motivating power to its dogmatic purposes, will push us into precipitate action.
A society of fully conscious Pagans could restrain each other's frustrated male impulses, but, while we are captives, prohibited by the laws of our captors from disciplining each other, and while some of us are still drugged, we must be doubly careful to listen to no demagogue in our midst and see that no mob rises up among the still drugged whom we have taken among us in an attempt to restore them to consciousness.
While we are seeking only to awaken drugged Pagans we may not expect that to be difficult, but it may be. We may become over ambitious and try to save those who are drugged beyond hope of recovery. If we do this we may defeat our whole objective. Ten conscious Pagans are more effective than ten thousand who are only semiconscious. We are not interested in "making converts" to our religion or our way of life, but in living it. Yet when we voice our criterion of being -the freedom and dignity of the individual -we find ourselves in strange company; we find that we have uttered the cry of demagogues the world over. More men have been led into slavery by the war cry of liberty than any other.
And on all sides we see masses of zombies proclaiming that they are individuals because they conform completely to the latest fad of how an individual should think and act. They do not want to be individuals; they want to be the leaders of a new fad. Paganism could become such a fad and this must be avoided. We must find a way of keeping a distance between ourselves and demagogues crying "individuality" who would join us, or have us join them, because they claim that they too are individuals.
We want to form a society of individuals to protect ourselves and our children from the pressures of the dogma-shouting mobs, but is that not substantially what has been said by all who have ever joined together against the mob in power, and, to give weight to their words, have mutually pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor? We hear advocates of democracy say that the best government is the least government. We hear the Christian Bible say that religion, pure and undefiled, is to help the widows and orphans, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.
These sound like proper words, spoken by true individuals, but when we look at the spectacle of democracy and Christianity we frequently do not see individuals but mobs of dogma-mouthing zombies. What is the difference between a society of individuals and a dogma-shouting mob, if, as we have seen, individuality can become a war cry of a mob like any other shibboleth if it strikes a harmonic cord in the word-perpetuated accretion of religious concepts? What distinguishes an individual from a verbally controlled zombie that is effectively merely part of a mob?
We do not, by definition, want to make the word "individual" synonymous with the word "Pagan." Pagan implies an individual, but it also signifies a certain development of consciousness and perception. "Individual" signifies only integrity of being and faithfulness to the impulses of one's being as opposed to control by dogma acting on conditioned reflexes. All wild animals are individuals, even the herd animals.
In man-like creatures the designation "individual" does not necessarily imply that one perceives the universe as we Pagans perceive it. It signifies only a full recognition that an individual's criterion of behavior must be found within himself. That perception must be sufficiently integrated into his being so as to make it, not merely a theory, but the actual basis on which he would found all social behavior. Bizarreness does not make an individual, neither bizarreness of appearance nor bizarreness of beliefs and ideas and actions.
Ten thousand men marching in highly disciplined columns, uniformed to the point of indistinguishability -and even, if possible, uniform in every cell of their bodies and every thought and emotion of their beings-could be individuals. The thing that makes them individuals is that the controlling impulses come from the integrated depths of their beings, that their controlling impulses do not come from dogmas superficially imposed upon them. They cannot be individuals in theory only and deny individual sovereignty in action.
Those who perceive that the individual should be free and proclaim it in theory often deny individual sovereignty in action because, in their short-sighted perspective, it does not appear practical and efficacious. Jefferson inclined to the belief that full individual freedom is best but said that such a state would not support sufficient population to effectively combat the mobs made possible by a partial sacrifice of individual freedom. He chose compromise to gain greater effectiveness. We now see the results of that compromise. We recognize that what is not efficacious has no ultimate value, but history has shown that the spectacular appearance of effectiveness which a mob exhibits is like the streak of a meteor-soon burned out.
There is no long-range effectiveness in the group except as a cultural pressure affecting the evolutionary stream of man. While civilizations rise and fall, it is the individual, the being who is perceivable as a flesh and blood entity, that is finally effective. Out of the group that has existence only as a verbal entity, the individual entity repeatedly emerges as the triumphant reality. So let us not limit individual sovereignty with a hope of gaining greater effectiveness unless we can see that the desired effect will become part of the evolutionary stream of man.
The history that the metropolitan civilizations have tried so hard to destroy or pervert, that of the northern European pagans, reveals another, a very subtle, danger point that we need to avoid in considering strategy. The northern European pagans stood strong against every expedient and ignoble mob-producing practice but they finally were destroyed by the dogma that a true soldier is a higher being than a true man. This resulted from something more than simple expression of egoism by trying to excel in nobility and bravery through the voluntary sacrifice of what they held even dearer than life, individual sovereignty.
In creating their concept of a soldier, the leaders, who would not be outdone by their followers, and the followers, who considered it a disgrace to walk away from a battle where their leaders died, were voicing their noblest love song to the true pagan woman who loved well and was eternally faithful. The song still rises in man's being and causes us to pay homage, with tears in our eyes, unfortunately, not only to "the woman marching by the beaten man," but also to "the faithful fool that follows the torn flag." With incessant repetition, the deliberate act of the soldier voluntarily sacrificing his sovereignty as well as risking his life that first began as a pagan love song to true woman became at last a mere dogma of behavior.
That is a dogma that, as god entities who are sprung from these heroes, we feel a great emotional reluctance to denounce. Yet denounce it we must, not only as a dogma but as a love song. The true man who would fight the good fight must choose his enemy with a perception that his oath as a soldier makes impossible for him. If we must find away to voice our love song to woman's faithfulness with a gesture that seems fitting to us before woman who undergoes the pain of death in each childbirth, we should find away to do it without becoming less than men.
The fourth discipline has its place in our lives, but as true men it is our task to find a place for it that adds to, rather than undermines, the later disciplines. So long as herds of dogma-mouthing zombies continue to exist, we cannot denounce mass warfare completely, but we can recognize it for what it is: an expedient in which we become less than men. If we choose this expedient, and tentatively become soldiers by oath rather than simply warriors by temperament, we should make our oaths of limited duration, and for a limited, clearly conceived, and clearly stated objective.
It is axiomatic that we could have a disciplined army only of volunteers, but even so, we should be careful to avoid, by words or actions, committing our comrades or our children to a "holy war." Mass warfare waged by zombies and mass warfare waged by true men is objectively indistinguishable. In mass warfare, we abdicate our role as perceivable, conscious god-entities. The objective indistinguishability during mass warfare of a fourth discipline mob of zombies, a pack of fifth discipline animals, and a group of true men is one of the greatest dangers that mass warfare holds for us. This makes it impossible for us to distinguish our kind.
In emergency fights for survival, of the sort that we might expect to follow the impending catastrophic atomic war, we might find ourselves with strange comrades in arms with whom we have made no deliberated alliance. Fights for survival are common to man, to all man-like creatures, and to all organic life. A true man may properly risk his life and die for his horse or dog. Also he may do the same for any man-like creature. What the individual perceives and wills must be for him his criterion of action. The danger lies in failing to distinguish between fighting for a flesh and blood entity and becoming committed to the cause of a conceptual entity that has no reality.
Metropolitan man like creatures, unlike horses and dogs, insinuate the causes of their word gods and the concepts of their unreal entities into the semiconsciousness of their comrades merely because they have learned to mouth them in times of stress, in times of rest, at all times, including the times when their comrades are too weary or too engrossed for conscious perception of the danger. If they have the appearance of men and have fought bravely and well, under conditions where men, animals, and zombies are indistinguishable by their actions, we are likely to call them brothers.
Then, before we discover that they cannot eat and digest the food of men, we are likely to seal our brotherhood by partaking with them their proffered drug of dogma, and instead of making them our allies as men, join with them as "one people" in fighting some creation of words which they call enemy. Then, no matter whether we win or lose the battle, we will awaken one morning to find that we have become slaves. We face no danger of becoming slaves to men who have perceivable purpose and volition as men, It is not in dealing with men as men that the slavery danger lies.
The danger lies in dealing with "peoples" or "states" rather than real entities. In meeting this danger we should remember the lesson of history: Slavery for men of our stature begins, not as slavery, but as noblesse oblige. We must, therefore, assume no obligation to protect, cherish, or save harmless, any man-like creatures who are less than man and less than animal, creatures who evidence that they are mere zombie-like pieces of a "people" or "state."
If we assume such an obligation, we will discover too late -discover only after we have forged our own bonds that we have sacrificed individual sovereignty and have become slaves to an unreal entity that exists only as a creation of words. If we would avoid becoming slaves to a god of words, we must be on the alert against becoming kings by the grace of such a god.
The knowledge that becoming kings is only a road to becoming slaves may be a needed deterrent while we have regained only semi-consciousness. When we are fully awakened, we see the desire to travel the road itself as being ignoble, for becoming kings provides us with less than the fullest expression of our beings. To be emperor of all the peoples of the world is to be less than a Pagan.
-end-