Part 31

Then we come to the fact that man displays disharmonies of mental construction, together with an innate hankering after harmony. The most obvious disharmony is that between the instincts that are self-regarding and those that are other-regarding--between man’s egotistic and his social tendencies.

It appears that man became gregarious quite late in evolutionary history. Through natural selection, sufficient “herd-instinct” was developed to ensure that men would on the whole stand by the tribe in danger, that the tribe should become a real biological unit. But it was impossible wholly to harmonize these new social instincts, even in the simplest societies, with the old, deeper-rooted, individualist tendencies; and as life became more complex and choice wider, conflict grew more and more frequent.

Another obvious disharmony in modern civilized communities is the fact that sexual maturity occurs long before marriage is possible or desirable.

In all this, there is inevitably a field for all the various combinations of suppression, or repression, or sublimation.

Man’s gregariousness, together with his power of speech, learning, and generalization, have led to the development of a new thing in the world--persistent and cumulative tradition. I use tradition in the broadest sense, as denoting all that owes its being to the mind of man, and is handed down, by speech or imitation or in some permanent record, from generation to generation. Language, general ideas of right and wrong, convention, invention, national feeling--all this and much more, constituting the more important part of the human individual’s environment--is part of tradition; and tradition is pre-eminently and inevitably social. However individualistic we may wish to be we cannot escape modelling by this social environment.

The general effect of man’s gregarious instinct is that he desires to find himself in harmony with some traditions, with the ideas that modern jargon likes to call the herd to which he belongs. The herd ideas, the traditions, may be those of a nation or of a stratum within the nation; of a whole class or of a clique; of science or of art; of a retired monasticism, or of an all-embracing world-civilization. But they are always herd ideas, and through them man is always member of some community, even though that community be tiny, or consist mainly of writers dead and gone; and he always strives to put himself in harmony with the traditions of that community.

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A long-winded introduction enough; now for the bearing of it. One of the essentials of every religion is its treatment of the subconscious, is its view and its practice as regards the relation between the personally-organized part of the mind to the remaining non-personal reservoirs. At first the non-personal part is regarded as being wholly outside the organism, and its occasional flooding up into the narrower ego is regarded as an operation of an external personality, a spirit, a God. Comparatively late, it is recognized as part of the organism, but the process by which connection is made is still regarded as divine, and called inspiration. Such ideas belong to the adolescence of the race, in precisely the same way as the discovery and acquisition of great tracts of this subconscious territory will always necessarily constitute part of the adolescence of the individual. But any developed religion must always in some way help to make these great reserves of power accessible, always teach the enlargements of the personal ego which their conquest brings about. This is one of the ways in which, to use current religious phraseology, self may be lost, and found again on a different plane.

Religion must further always provide some internal harmony, in counterpart to the harmony demanded in the unitary comprehension of external reality. The various activities and experiences of life, as they are originally given by heredity to the child, are either independent, or else antagonistic and disharmonious. There must be some means provided for bringing all of them into a true organization--in other words into a whole which, though yet single, is composed of co-operating parts. Here again the actual responses of actual religions have been many and various; but they all operate by suppression, repression, and sublimation, or by a combination of these.

It can at once be said that sublimation is the right and highest way, and that two of the criteria of religious progress are to be found in the stress laid upon sublimation, and in the enlargement and the elevation of the dominant ideas at work in the sublimating process. It is the right and highest way because through it no spiritual energy is wasted, and the age-long path of progress towards ever higher levels of complexity in organization is still continued. Among religious teachers, both Jesus and Paul laid great stress on this--on the freedom, the emancipation from the shackles of an external law made possible by the apprehension of some highest harmonizing principle and the subordination of all other ideas and desires to it. Once one can see and learn to follow such a principle, whatever one does is in a sense right, because one’s desires are all subordinate to a desire for right, and to something which is right. Perhaps it would be better to say that they appear right to oneself, that the haunting, terrible sense of sin is laid to rest, and one’s life liberated into free activity, one’s energy made all available for achievement.

The sense of sin, if not universal at one or other period of life, is almost so, and comes from an apprehension of inner disharmony. As one would expect, selfishness and sex are its most common roots; and whenever it exists, then the necessary preliminary to any further progress of one’s being is that it should be made to disappear. It can disappear, as in St. Paul’s natural man, by a suppression of part of the mind or of the connection between parts, or by a failure to make certain connections, or it can be eradicated by a growth of callousness; or--and I take it that this is the proper religious solution--by discovering a clue which will harmonize the two apparently opposed sections of experience, the two antagonistic tendencies, and so resolve the problem with no loss of energy or of vital possibilities.

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Finally, there remains to be considered the mode in which the mind may best organize the ideas of external reality given to it by its pure cognitive and intellectual faculties.

Even from the purely scientific point of view, generalization is obviously of value. When we have found unity in the outer world’s apparent diversity, direction in its apparent disorderliness, we have obviously achieved a great gain. But religion appears to demand something more. If for a moment we look at the matter pragmatically, we shall find that a number of the great mystics (and a large majority of those of our own occidental type and tradition) speak of their experiences of “divine communion” as being communion with a person.

What does this mean? We have seen that a purely intellectual analysis gives us no handle for finding personality in God. Can we suppose that this direct intuition gives us that handle? To say so, to my mind, would be simple obscurantism. Intuition, if it shows us reality, can only show a reality capable in the long run of intellectual analysis; to deny this is to deny all our premisses. No: their intuition shows us that something akin to personality is perceived, but permits no pronouncement as to whether its resemblance to personality is given in its real nature, or introduced into it by their thought.

If we look into the history of religion, we find over and over again that man has taken something from his own mind and projected it into the external world. The magic power of fetishes, the tabus incurred by contact with certain objects, the endowment of the idea of external powers, of God, with human form, the ascription of miraculous influence to places or things--in every case there has been this projection. And there is no reason to doubt that here again there has been a similar occurrence, that man has organized his idea of external power after the pattern of a personality, and has then ascribed this type of organization to the external power itself. This projection Blake symbolized in a sentence: “Thus men forgot that All Deities reside in the Human breast.”

The rival schools of psychology may disagree: but all are agreed that some modes of thinking are more primitive than others, and even in the most educated amongst us tend to persist, often in the subconscious, side by side with more developed methods that have arisen later.

The use of concrete symbols or images is the most widespread of these primitive modes of thought. It is natural that the more complex should at the first be described in terms of the less complex, that those experiences for which no proper terminology has been hammered out should be given names out of man’s existing vocabulary. That is inevitable: but there is an even more fundamental process at work. It seems as if the human mind works, on its most primitive levels, by means of image-formation, and that emotions and concepts for which no simple image exist may call up symbolic images by association and indeed often dress themselves in these new clothes before they present themselves to consciousness. Some such process appears to take place in dreams (including day-dreams!) and possibly in the ordinary thought-processes of savages. More advanced modes of thought substitute the currency of an arbitrary token such as a word or a formula for the barter of images and concrete symbols; the freshness and vividness of the image is lost, but more efficient and speedier working is attained. However, in most of us the concrete image-using mode of thought is a relief from the apparently less natural and more artificial (though more efficient) operations of reason, and we relapse into it, wholly or partially, more often than we realize.

This unconscious irrational tendency to symbolism, together with the other tendency to project ideas properly attaching to the subjective world into external objects and processes--these between them account for much of the modes of expression so far found for religious belief; and, since the majority of human beings have a profound distaste for sustained or difficult thought, it is likely that they will continue to account for much in the future.

These are facts of extreme importance. The professional sceptic is at once tempted to exclaim that every such projection and illogical symbolism is illusion through and through, and must be wholly swept aside. He would be wrong. We each of us must know from our own experience the “influence” (to use a general term) which may inhere in certain things and places. True that the influence is of our own mind’s making; but it is none the less real, not only as a momentary existence, but, as the term implies, as exerting a definite and often a great effect upon our lives. The lover who cherishes a ring or a lock of hair; the man who is drawn back to the haunts of his childhood or his youth; the mind refreshing itself with some loved poem or picture;--what do we have in these and innumerable other instances but a peculiarity of mind whereby it may take external objects into itself and invest them with its own emotions and ideas, in such a way that those same objects may later reflect their stored-up emotion back again into the mind? It operates by a form of association; but the actual working resembles the charging of a battery, which may subsequently discharge back. We have in it, in fact, a special faculty which, if rightly used, is of the greatest practical value. Further, the symbol, if rightly used and rightly limited, is of service to most minds in giving a more or less concrete cage for the winged, elusive, and hardly-retained creatures of abstract thought.

So too, the organization of the idea of God into a form resembling a personality appears definitely to have, at least with the majority of people belonging to what we call “Western civilization,” a real value.

Biologically, the essence of real personality is first that it is organized, and secondly that on each of its many faces it can, if I may put it metaphorically, enter into action at a single point, but with its whole content of energy available behind the point. In other words, man as a personality can concentrate his mind on one particular problem of one special aspect of reality; but he is able, if need be, to summon up ever fresh reinforcements if he cannot carry the position--more facts, other ways of thinking and feeling, memories, reserves of will. In a properly organized personality, it is possible to bring the whole to bear upon any single object.

Now when the idea which man makes for himself of outer reality is organized after the same general pattern as a personality, it too will be able to act in this same sort of way.

When man in perplexity interrogates the idea he has of external reality, he is anxious to put his little individual self in harmonious relation with the whole of reality that he knows. Therefore he should organize that reality as a whole, and in such a way that it can all be brought to bear through any single point. The relation between the self and the idea of outer reality is, for any one problem, that of two pyramids touching by their points only; but the points of contact can shift as by miracle over their surfaces as the problem is changed.

But another power of personalities is their power of interpenetration. The purely material cannot do this. One portion of matter cannot occupy the same space as a second portion. It is another of the great differences between the psychozoic and all previous stages of evolution, between man and all else that we know in the universe, that the discrete units reached at this level of organization, the individual human beings, can achieve interpenetration by means of their minds. When you expound a new idea to me, and I grasp it, our minds have obviously interpenetrated. This is a simple case; but there may be an intimate union of mind with mind which is the basis of the highest spiritual achievement and the greatest happiness. If mind and matter are two properties of the same world-substance, then the rise of mind to dominance has enabled this basic substance to escape from some of the imprisoning limitations which confined it at lower levels of its development; do we not all know that despair at being boxed up, that craving for communion? Using our previous line of argument, we see that the interpenetration of personalities is right, implies a further step in progress, must be part of the basis on which future advance in evolution is to build.

But to apply this to our present point. By organizing our knowledge of outer reality after the pattern of a personality, we make it possible for it to interpenetrate our private personality. If, therefore, we have, in any true sense of the word, “found religion,” it means that we shall so have organized our minds that, for flashes at least, we attain to a sense of interpenetration with the reality around us--that reality which includes not only the celestial bodies, or the rocks and waters, not only evolving life, but also other human beings, also ideas, also ideals.

This, to my mind, is what actually happens when men speak of communion with God. It is a setting, an organizing of our experiences of the universe in relation with the driving forces of our soul or mental being, so that the two are united and harmonized. There is a resolution of conflicts, an attainment of a profound serenity, a conviction that the experience is of the utmost value and importance.

Up till now, we have been defining and analysing: here we see religion in operation. It is a relation of the personality as a unit to external reality as a unit--and a relation of harmony. First, the inner structure of the mind must be organized into a harmonious unit, then our knowledge of outer reality organized similarly, and finally, in religious experience, the two must be harmonized in interpenetrating union.