CHAPTER ONE

THIS EVIL WORLD

The Biblical statement that God so loved the world that he dispatched his only begotten Son into it, not to condemn it, but to save it, silhouettes in sharp contrast the attitude of religions, both Eastern and Western, which has been invariably a condemnation and calumniation of the world. In the ideology of religion the world has been constituted as the first member of the diabolical trinity of evil powers malignantly conspiring to capture and subvert the divine soul of man,--the world, the flesh and the devil. For centuries the priestly hierarchy has exhorted its piously conditioned following to keep themselves unspotted from the world. And for many centuries the religion bearing the name of Christianity has so insistently accentuated this dour note of evil influence emanating from the world that thousands upon thousands of its men abandoned life in the cities, towns and villages of Europe to seek nepenthe from the world's foul contact in isolated hermitage in the Arabian, Syrian, Egyptian or Numidian deserts, living without benefit of cleanliness, comfort or companionship in caves and hovels. Likewise the venerable religious systems of India, the "mother of spirituality," have habituated their votaries to seek retreat from the world and the life of the outer senses in remote Himalayan solitudes. Even in later Western civilizations the impulse to cultivate the latent powers of the inner spirit in detached colonies in secluded localities still operates to a degree. Wordsworth's fine sonnet, The World Is Too Much With Us, finds still a hearty response over an extensive field of modern cultural idealism. The extravert direction imparted to the mind and consequently to the soul by the unrelieved impingement upon the members of urban communities is considered, and not without abundant reason, to militate against the soul's unfoldment of its divine powers. The world's concerns and their insistent demands upon time and nerve energy leave little opportunity to cultivate true godliness amid the rasping distraction of earthly interests and duties. In short, the influence of the world is believed always to be so potent as to threaten destruction to the pure nature of the soul, to befog its pure light and to crush down its divine sensitivity. The celestial light is buried under a

bushel of mundane concerns and can not glow brightly from the hilltop for all to see.

Considering the great power of venerated Scriptures to set the norms for religious ideology, one is struck by the trenchant verses of the seventeenth chapter of John's Gospel in the New Testament, in which Jesus, so to say, sends in to his heavenly Father the report on his cosmic mission which he at this time felt he had successfully terminated. He precedes his report by asserting that he "came forth from the Father, and am come into the world; again I leave the world, and go to the Father." He had come into the world, only to have it receive him, not to have in fact received crucifixion at its hands. He had reminded his people that "in the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." He says that he has completed the work which his Father gave him to do among the men of the world; he has glorified God in the world in the sight of men, and is about to return to his true home in the empyrean. "And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world." Then he prays the Father that he should not take these children out of the world; "but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil," because in reality "they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world." He asserts that he has communicated to them a radiance of the Father's glory, which immunizes them from the deleterious impact of the world's sordid interests. It is notable in passing that, while he holds the world to be a possible evil influence upon the soul, yet he prays the Father not to take the people out of it; rather to shield them while in it. All spiritual cultism might well take a hint from this feature of Jesus' presentation.

On the basis of hundreds of Scriptural and philosophical allusions to the world's malignant influence, religious philosophy has taken its posture of hostility to "the world." Many denominational groups still hold it a canon of sanctified living to forbid participation in certain lighter activities of secular life, such as dancing, games, amusements, diversions or recreation, even condemning modern mechanical appliances easing physical labor as baneful to the soul. Not in the engrossments in the world outside, but in the inner sanctuary of the spirit, religion has contended that the true interests of the divine nature of man are to be exercised, developed and glorified. The Quaker pattern of sitting in silence, shutting out the world, until the inner voice of the spirit speaks out of the eternal

depths of being, well illustrates the general religious posture. Outside is the froth, the scum, the flotsam and jetsam, the hurly-burly of chaotic meaningless activity; only within is to be discovered the reality and the glory of transcendent being. Hence religion has almost universally set the outer world at odds with the inner, and has erected ideologically a great wall and a moat of separation between the two, seeking to withdraw the unit of soul consciousness across the gulf, to lift the communicating drawbridge and so to seclude the soul within the safe ramparts of the spiritual castle of life. Thus to fend the soul off from the contamination of the world in its spiritual ivory tower has been the ethical and spiritual objective of most religion.

Yet, with trillions of other worlds into which to send his beloved Son, God so loved this one that he commissioned him to descend upon this minute speck of atomic dust in the cosmic universe. And that tiny world which God so loved and refused to condemn, religion has never ceased to hate and vilify.

And never has religious philosophy disclosed the remotest intimation as to why God was moved to send his beloved offspring into this low place of defilement, nor has it made an attempt to account for the Creator's great love of it. This, the fundamental question that the human mind must, now or eventually, answer, has been left wholly untouched. To this question, when thrown in its face, religion has given an answer that is no answer--that it is a blasphemy to question the inscrutable workings and counsels of the divine mind. Yet, as psychology now demonstrates, a rational answer to that insistent query is an indispensable element in human happiness and the maintenance of the human mind in sanity. Said the great and ever-memorable Dr. Robert W. Norwood, of St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York: "No man can be happy in this life until he knows why he is on the earth." And the third chapter of Proverbs most categorically declares that understanding of the meaning of life is the one supreme and essential element for the salutary existence of a soul on this globe. Religion has never faced the question with which its own position has implicitly challenged it: if this world is such a noxious region, such a pestilential menace to the purity of the soul's life, why did the All-Father send his beloved children, these potential sons of his, down to suffer humiliation, hardship, virtual exile and imprisonment, defilement

and "death" in it? That is the prime question to which all instinctive human interest demands an answer. Both religion and philosophy stand bankrupt until they come forth with a rational answer to that irrepressible inquiry.

To be sure, religion has come forward with a form of answer: our two first parents, given the choice of enjoying eternal felicity in Paradise, the celestial garden of delight, succumbed to temptation, chose to disobey God's command not to partake of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil set apart in the garden, and in consequence God had to exact punishment from them and all their future progeny, by driving them out of the delectable garden and sending them down into this wretched planet, this "sorrowful star," where toil and pain should be the terms of their "Egyptian bondage" in the dark underworld. Then God, in pity, sent his only Son as a sacrificial victim, led as a lamb to the slaughter, to redeem his stupidly-blundering wayward children, to help them in durance vile regain Paradise.

That indeed is the answer of the churches, the accredited and established exponents of religion. But it leaves still unanswered the central query: why were God's innocent children, in the very first moment of their infancy, fledgelings and untried and undeveloped, in any legitimate procedure subjected to a temptation which they could only be expected to have gained the wisdom to resist intelligently at the far completion and perfection of their evolution, instead of at the innocent beginning, when no life is wise. Never has the ecclesiastical hierarchy explained rationally why such a temptation was necessary in the first place, with such an issue as the possibility of a mistake entailing eternal consequences of dire fate hanging upon the choice, in a universe presided over by omniscient Power and Love. Never has it elucidated why an all-beneficent Father should set a stumbling-block in the way of his infant children, sure to catch their feet and cause their fall. Why God should set a baited trap in the pathway to ensnare the very first steps of his progeny the churchly councils have never ventured to tell us.

No child at the start of life knows anything about either obeying or disobeying its parents. It is at that stage neutral as to morality. Completely unmoral, it has no power or choice to be moral or immoral. Children are at the animal stage and act from native instinct. They are incapable of making ethical decisions. And any

parent who severely punishes his child for failure to act on the principles which govern adult behavior stands under the severest form of even human condemnation. Yet all Christianity has based its high claims on the theological asseveration that God condemned his children to eternal damnation for having committed a cardinal sin in the first moment of their conscious existence.

Ringing down the centuries in all the temples, cathedrals and synagogues of the religions has reverberated the endless cry: "the world is very evil." Even St. Paul adjures us to keep ourselves unspotted from the world. Though holding the conception in intelligent balance, the great Greek philosophy represents the world as a place where the soul runs imminent risk of having its feet caught in the viscous mire of sensuality, and might have great difficulty in extricating itself without detriment. The conception can be validated when properly held as legitimate figurism. For in profound understanding the Greeks dramatized the soul's experience on earth as a plunge out of superphysical existence into a body of sluggish inert matter. But when taken realistically in the bald literalism of its wording, the concept becomes deadly ruinous to all sane apprehension of its reference.

India in particular has gone so far in its derogation and devaluation of the earthly life as to assert virtually that it is a mistake for the soul to be on the globe at all. In this world it is in the wrong place. India has been reluctant to concede any real value to earth-life in the scheme of things. It has hesitated to include it in the beneficent order of creation. Swinging far over to denial of good in the mundane experience, its philosophies and its religions have loudly extolled the necessity of the soul's effecting its escape from the order of existence suffered here. Not the enjoyment of life, but escape from it, has been the dominant burden of Oriental religion.

Testimony to this effect is found in one of the celebrated Max Mueller's works, Theosophy or Psychological Religion (page 68):

"So far as we can judge, a large class of people in India, not only the priestly class, but the nobility also, not only men but women also, never looked upon this life on earth as something real. What was real to them was the invisible, the life to come. What formed the theme of their conversations, the subject of their meditations, was the real that alone lent some kind of reality to this unreal phenomenal world . . . . This is the side of the life of ancient India which deserves our study, because there has been nothing like

it in the whole world, not even in Greece or in Palestine . . . . Why would the ancient inhabitants of India not have accepted their lot?"

This work will be in the large an intensive effort to subject that Hindu position to an exhaustive critique, since it must be assumed that the world-wide consequences of the philosophical indoctrination of a large portion of the globe, now both East and West, with the belief that life is wholly evil and must be escaped, have been, are and will continue to be colossally calamitous.

Along with the earth, the world, came under condemnation also the thing called matter, and the human body itself, as being composed of that vile substance that brought impurity and defilement on the soul. The world and the flesh became the stock enemies of the spirit. Never has religion ceased its thunder against the infernal trinity. Endlessly the soul is exhorted to rise in its divine might and crush underfoot these three agencies of the initial curse on man's life in the world. The allegory of the soul's fall into sin, wrongly conceived, poses the question as to how and why spirit units of God's own intelligence, sons of his own being, came to be entangled in the inertia of matter, to suffer the hardships of a material existence in a world denounced as wholly vile. Religion has failed to give the answer which the human hunger for understanding resolutely demands. That philosophy once held and can still render the answer it will be the effort of this essay to establish.

In its rebound from the stigmatization of earth and matter as the prime evils, all religion has swung far over to the exaltation of "spirit." As matter and the bodily flesh became the synonyms of evil, all good was identified with spirit. To be good religiously was to be spiritual. And in all ages of more advanced civilization there arose one cult after another, each promulgating some new program by which the soul of man might better overcome the besetting thraldom of matter and its world and rise out of bondage under what St. Paul calls "the elements of the world" to freer communion with the spirit of God.

In America the period from about 1850 to 1880 gave rise to a veritable flood of movements whose central inspiration was the "spiritual" motif, which heavy derogation of matter as concomitant undertone. This period gave birth first to Spiritualism in its modern status, then to "Christian Science," Theosophy in a new resurgence of Platonism and Hermeticism, Medieval Rosicrucianism in new

vestures, the exploitation of hypnotism under Quimby in New England, this developing into the very great sweep of "New Thought," and crowning all came on the intellectual horizon the gleaming cloud of Emersonian Transcendentalism, irradiated with the golden sunlight of Oriental mysticism. With these as openers of the way, soon thereafter came the incursion of Hindu Vedantism and Oriental spiritual philosophy, purveyed by migrant Swamis and Yogis who could boast of a name ending with Ananda, Bliss.

In practically every one of these impulses the keynote was one and the same: deny and suppress the interests of the world, the body, the flesh and matter, and exalt the spirit. Each asserted the valuelessness of the things of the world, the deceptive nature of the physical senses, the peril yielding to the appetencies of the animal body, the delusive character even of the mind. Wholeness, peace, salvation and eventual bliss were to be won only in the super-realm of the spirit. Redemption from the incubus of mortal consciousness was to be achieved by denying all thought of materiality and filling the area of consciousness with only the affirmation of the sole existence and reality of spirit. With this went also the conception of man as a being of pure spirit, his apparent materiality being the creation of a false ideation. On the thesis that thought is the sole creative power, man might readily become the creator of his own universe of being by merely entertaining positive thought and denying all discord and imperfection. One could lay the axe at the root of all evil by refusing to give it a birthright in creative thought, must as one denies existence to a mosquito by covering the stagnant marsh surface with a coating of oil. Spiritual thought was the "oil of gladness" that denied existence to the germs of evil. Wrong ideation has bred the evil entities; change wrong ideation to right, and the evils will wilt and vanish. Values that are ignorantly associated with material things and contingent upon them are fleeting and essentially false. They form a veil of deception over our eyes. They shut us off from the vision of truth and reality. As Browning says, the flesh is a wall that stands between us and divinity, so that its heavy imperviousness must be dissolved or made translucent to the passage of the divine light through to us below. We must withdraw, if not physically, then in sublimated consciousness, from the noxious atmosphere of the gross world and aspire to a pure and blessed life in spirit.

The streaming thousands of cenobites who during some ten horrendous centuries fled the evil worldliness of Europe to find peace of soul in desert solitudes in the Near-East were surprised to find the imps of Satanic worldliness and fleshly lust haunting and taunting them in spite of the resolute denial of their power. And still today novices and neophytes enter convents and take orders and veils under the continuing persuasion that retreat from secular activities and associations and interests in the busy world will bring purification and sanctification of their souls. And still a vast segment of modern Western life is now caught in the sweep of interest in the philosophies extolling the supremacy of the spirit and pouring vituperation upon the world and matter.

Since this vast movement from an exterior focus of religious value to an inner realm took place in lands dominated by Christianity, it is of great interest to locate the motivating cause of the phenomenon, whether in the religion of Christianity itself or from influences encroaching upon it. The hierarchy of that faith would rush forward with an indignant denial of any accusation that it does not offer an adequate spiritual philosophy and a spiritual culture. Yet despite this protestation it is hardly to be denied that in reifying, personalizing and finally historicizing the Christ principle in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christian theology has diverted the direction of man's quest for the blessedness of contact with deity away from the inner seat of that divinity in man himself and outward to a man in history. It may talk volubly enough about the immanent Christ along with the historical Jesus, but the latter, not the former, has been the cornerstone of the faith; and with the masses always an objectified and personalized incarnation of deity will dominate devotion and allegiance and hold them move convincingly than any subjectively realized mystical principle can ever do. Always the figure and the realistic conception of the Galilean drew the eyes and minds across the sea and the centuries to the living picture of the hypostatized Man of Sorrows, allegedly paying with his own mangled body on the Golgathan cross-tree for our sins and our depravity. It presents no difficult problem in psychology to discern that this centering of all spiritual sancrosanctity upon the person of Jesus left far too large a vacuum in the subjective life of the Christian masses. Christianity thus inevitably drove its following into the worship of a deity remote in time and place, when all

the while the deity accessible to man is "closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet." The theology that sets the derivation of spiritual grace from one man in history automatically makes the divinizing of the individual a matter of imitation of a paragon, whereas it must always, at any rate finally, be the conquest of man's own divinity. It is a simple statement of the conditions of the entire problem to say that the divine nature that is to glorify man is a seminal essence of Godhood potentially realizable within himself. Christianity directed its people to the worship of a Christ in Galilee two thousand years ago and has profited by the psychological repercussion of the contemplation of an ideal perfection. How much more efficacious would have been the outcome of such massive adoration if the objective had been clearly pictured as an actual divinization directly attainable by the individual himself, can only be conjectured, as history has not had the chance to record the trial.

This very situation in the life of religion outlined itself clearly to the mind of perhaps the most eminent of modern psychologists, Carl G. Jung and he gave expression to his perspicacious discernment in the most forthright terms, which it were well we should heed:

"The Imitatio Christi will forever have this disadvantage; we worship a man as a divine model, embodying the perfect meaning of life, and then out of sheer imitation we forget to make real the profound meaning present in ourselves.

If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experience, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know, on the other hand, that God is a mighty power within my own soul, at once I must concern myself with him."

It can be safely affirmed that this excerpt states with absolute conciseness the nub of the basic problem of religion. Is man to be redeemed from animality by any volume of adoration of a distant cosmic idealization, assumed in the case of Christianity to have been embodied historically once for all in a given personality; or is he to rise in the scale of being and expansion of consciousness by developing a seed of potential divine perfection already implanted within his own constitution? The future history of mankind hinges heavily on its sufficiently clear perception of the realities of the evolutionary situation to make the proper choice of the right one of these objectives.

The tremendous exodus out of orthodox denominationalism into the ranks of the spiritual cult movements enumerated some pages back is conspicuous evidence of a turn toward the second alternative mentioned in the preceding paragraph. In no other way can the emergence of so many sporadic movements toward the cultivation of the Christos within, as distinct from the Jesus of history, be adequately accounted for. And these movements, surging in nearly all cases out of the body of Christianity itself, welled forth on the tide of an impulse generated as if by a fresh discovery of the Christ principle in the human constitution, entirely separate from the life of the man-Christ in Judea. It must be accounted a most singular circumstance, repugnant to the Christian claim that the religion is the cultus of the divine nature in man, to note the sheer fact that hundreds of surges of sincere spiritual expression apparently had to abandon the church of Christ in order to give full play to the recognition and development of the Christ immediately within the self. It must be incontestable that the localization of the incarnation of deity in the one historical man-Christ twenty centuries ago has inevitably diminished the authenticity, and therefore the sincerity and zeal of the Christian quest and cultus of the Christ consciousness in all the run of history. It can not have been otherwise in the outcome: that while the mind centers all its devotion, as at Christmas, Passion Week and Easter, upon the Galilean figure, the infant Christ-child of our own divine potential lies unnoticed, asleep in his cradle in the chambers of our hearts.

Oft quoted is the verse of Angelus Silesius, a Christian mystic of late Medieval times:

Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,

But not within thyself, thy soul will be forlorn;

The cross on Golgotha thou lookest to in vain,

Unless within thyself it be set up again.

Yea, if the Christ-love be not born within the open consciousness of living mortals and become active as a leaven in the lump of human society, not a thousand Bethlehem births can avail to save humanity. One epic and heroic life in Judea is, as a tail, powerless to wag the dog of human carnal grossness and stolid spiritual inertia. But, as Jung says, the tiniest scintilla of the divine fire flashing out within the forge of human ideation can be fanned to a flame that will enlighten and reshape the life of the world.

It must be taken as a cynical commentary on Christianity that periodically in its history one group after another has come to the realization of the presence of the Christ nature immediately in the constitution of man himself, and has been so galvanized into newness of life by the recognition as to regard the discovery as something outside the pale of Christianity. The Renaissance in Italy in the fourteenth century was to a degree an impulse of this nature, and the Protestant Reformation was likewise a move toward the possibility of direct communion with the Christ in the heart.

It can with full truth be said that all human culture and refinement, all civilization in fact, springs from the potentiality inherent in man of binding closer this communion between the two natures in man's life, the developed animal and the, as yet, imperfectly developed Christhood. For these two are, and are to be, copartners in the evolution of humanity. Plato gives us this definition of man: "Through body it is an animal; through intellect it is a god." Man, declared the ancient sages, is a god inhabiting the body of an animal. All potential culture is grounded on the possibility of taming the wildness of the animal by the loving-kindness of the god. The deity must domesticate its beastly elemental. Nearly all religion has been activated by the presumption that its function is to help the animal rise up to the capabilities of an association with the god, whereby its brutishness may be transfigured into seraphic love. But religion has been almost completely guiltless of any recognition that on his side the god is on earth in animal body, not only to tutor the animal into a more angelic transformation of nature, but, in his own interest, to find through association with its lower companion an outlet for the exploitation of his own latent capacities in his upward progression to higher status. The nearly total failure of religious philosophy to take into account this duality in the elemental constitution of man, its failure to know man as a compound of god and animal, the two mediated by the human entity which comes to birth on the borderline between the two, has made of religion an ineffective, because unbalanced, cultural enterprise in the psychological domain.

It will be well to recall a few statements from the most eminent philosophers that the kernel of a divine nature is latent in the constitution of man. The wise Socrates, facing the imminent return of his soul to the invisible world, asks Cebes if it is not the certain

conclusion of all philosophical reasoning "that the soul is in the very likeness of the divine and intelligible and intellectual and uniform and indissoluble and unchangeable" nature of the gods, and will at death rejoice to rejoin the company of the immortal deities. Leading the splendid movement to revive the great Platonic philosophy six and a half centuries after the master's day, Plotinus speaks as follows:

"The wise man recognizes the idea of the god within him. This he develops by withdrawal into the holy place of his own soul. He who does not understand how the soul contains the beautiful within itself seeks to realize beauty by laborious production. His aim should rather be to concentrate and simplify and so to expand his being; instead of going to the manifold, to forsake it for the One, and so to float upwards toward the divine fount of being whose stream flows within him.

I am weary already of this prison-house, the body, and calmly await the day when the divine nature within me shall be set free from matter."

Epictetus, the Roman slave-philosopher, adjures "never to say that you are alone, for . . . God is within and your genius is within." Heraclitus, before Plato's time, declared that "man's genius is a deity." Jacob Boehme, shoemaker-mystic of the late sixteenth century, wrote:

"The holy and heavenly man, hidden in the monstrous (external man) is as much in heaven as God, and heaven is in him, and the heart or light of God is begotten and born in him. Thus is God in him and he in God. God is nearer to him than his bestial body."

The voice of God speaketh within man, he declares, "and if thou canst for a while cease from all thy thinking and willing, thou shalt hear unspeakable words of God."

Coming to our own sagely reflecting Emerson, we hear him reiterate the concept of the divine philosophy:

"Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. From within or from behind a light shines through upon things . . . . When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love . . . . Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible . . . . It is indefinable, immeasurable, but we know that it pervades and contains us. We know that all spiritual being is in man . . . . Let man then learn . . . . that the sources of nature are in his own mind."

But in the exuberance of his zest to bespeak the immanence of divine grandeur at the heart of our being, the philosopher did not pause here, as the utterances found in his essay on Nature indicate he might have done, to remind us that, as the sources of nature are in the woven fabric of our minds, so too is the pattern of our thought and understanding already woven into the context of nature. This reciprocal counterpart of the truth this essay will endeavor to elucidate.

Famous is Robert Browning's poetic passage:

Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise

From outward things; whate'er you may believe,

There is an inmost center in us all

Where truth abides in fulness; and around

Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in.

This perfect, clear perception,--which is truth--

A baffling and perverting carnal mesh

Binds it, and makes all error; and to know

Rather consists in opening out a way

Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape,

Than in effecting entry for a light

Supposed to be without.

Assenting fully to the fundamental fact here expressed, in a strict analysis one might challenge the statement in the first lines that truth takes no rise from outward things. If the truth in our minds and the truth reflected in outer nature are the natural counterparts of each other, are in effect two representations of the same thing, why should not truth spring up to us from outward things? One must ask how Browning could let this negative assertion escape him, when he must have known that the outer world of natural things has been the most dynamic and prolific source of inspiration for poetry itself. It is to nature herself--where else?--that poetry and philosophy and art instinctively resort to tap the springs of insight and afflation. Here Wordsworth:

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach us more of man,

Of moral evil and of good

Than all the sages can.

And hark! How blithe the throstle sings!

He, too, is no mean preacher;

Come forth into the light of things;

Let nature be your teacher.

Indeed the weight of all literary authority is so diametrically the contrary to Browning's statement as to constitute direct contradiction. For actually it is precisely from outward things that truth does take its rise for man. It could take no rise out of a vacuum. It takes its rise from man's immersion in nature and under the influence of nature. The realization of truth is potential in man; but it awaits the challenge of external objectivity to awaken and spur it on to its deployment. To accentuate this aspect of the religious philosophy is an integral part of the purpose of this work. For it is one of the essential elements of truth that the subjective systems here examined have signally failed to recognize.

Walt Whitman, lyric singer of the inner godhood in our common human nature, asserts that no man "has begun to think how divine he himself is." "Divine I am inside and out; and I make holy whatever I touch." ". . . . and that there is no God any more divine than yourself." This indeed strikes a common chord with the statements of the ancient sages that man blasphemes both God and himself when he worships any power outside himself.

Volumes could not contain the whole of the literature testifying to the universal recognition of the presence of potential divine transcendence of being in the dual constitution of man. Thus indubitably established, the universal recognition will serve as our point of departure for an exegesis that must go far to effect a quite drastic reorientation of all understanding of "spiritual truth," and institute a new and more balanced rationalization of the entire theme. Going further than that, nothing less than a complete volte face in all religious philosophy and attitude is implicit in the elucidations to be presented in this discussion. As to the factuality of the presence or immanence of a nuclear unit of divine being in the constitution of man there can be no question or dispute. But from that point on it is to be demonstrated that nearly all the theory and practique long prevalent and dominant in general spiritual religionism as to the methodology of man's utilization of the divine segment in his nature has been tragically misconceived and injuriously mishandled.

CHAPTER TWO

THE IMPRISONED SPLENDOR

Yes, as Browning put it, the great evolutionary task set for the creature man is to bring out a light of divine glory of consciousness that is being slowly enkindled within him. Our path is dark, the poet implies, until we are able to illuminate it with the rays of a great spiritual refulgence for which we effect an outlet from hidden recesses within ourselves. We do not seek to kindle that flame, all subjective spiritual philosophy declares, by importing a light found outside ourselves to illumine the inner darkness. On the contrary we discover a great light within our own conscious depths, and by careful tending and skillful refueling, we learn to increase its glow to ever-intensified brilliance.

It must be made clear that confusion has been bred and expressed itself in Browning's passage and multitudinously elsewhere through the phraseology used. The inner light is loosely spoken of as either being made to shine within the depths of the individual consciousness, or as being "brought out" to shine through and from the person who has enkindled it. From one angle this distinction is of great moment; from a broad point of view it is only a matter of the appropriateness of a figure. IT is in consonance with the view advanced here that it is more fitting to speak of our task of bringing out the light within, than to think merely of enkindling the light in the interior depths, and, as if that were the final achievement, letting it shine there. The terms employed in a debate or treatise can all too easily lead to confusion if their connotations are not clearly predetermined. What is to be understood basically in the situation is that an inner light of perception that illumines the mind is brought to shining in the area of consciousness and from that fount of generation shines out in the whole expression of the individual life. It is made to shine out in the real sense that the splendid character it brings to view in outward conduct does emerge out of hitherto dark nescience in to the open light of conscious motivation. The "out" direction can only refer to something describable in this fashion. The "in-ness" of it so constantly cherished by devotees must refer to the conscious effort to achieve it and the sense of having made it a real possession. It is advanced here as a matter of ultimately great psychological moment, whether one thinks of

the enlightenment process as working inward or outward. In the simplest of words it is to be said that so much unctuous "spiritual" literature speaks of "going within" to find the light, in the belief that one must go within to get away from distracting interests outside which will defeat the power to set the inner light aglow. There is indeed a pertinent view of the process which makes it akin to one's shutting oneself in the house in order to escape disturbing noises outside. But in the case in question this analogue outreaches its validity in that it fails to take into account that the noise outside is itself an integral element of the total situation; in the one consideration that it is in part at least to exercise the function of driving the consciousness within; in another, that it serves as a challenge from outside to the soul within to come forth and do something about the noise itself. It fails to recognize that the external noise has a legitimate cosmic reason for being there, that it can not therefore be simply condemned as evil and treated as a thing to be escaped. As intimated vast psychological consequences flow from the attitude thus taken as to the mere direction in which the process is channelled. It can obviously be contended that one can not bring out what has not first been generated within, and that is entirely valid on the side of the subjective direction so strongly preached by the spiritual cults. But where that contention falls short of validity is in its failure to recognize that the enkindling of the light within can not be done in total disseverance of relationship and interplay with the concerns located outside. The generation of the light can come only through the intercommunion of the conscious energies exerted within and without. On the basis of the wisest philosophies of the ages, that statement must stand as the summation of the truth of the matter. And obviously the issue of enormous good or evil hinges on the recognition of this truth. In the end it becomes a thing of vital moment both to the individual and to the world whether one kindles the inner light merely to bask deliciously in its glow, or uses it to enlighten one's chart of active participation in the community of world life. When so much of the spiritual philosophy is bent in the direction of introversion, it is highly needful at the start to lay definite stress upon the extrovert direction. Browning clearly intimates this right direction. If the supernal beams are imprisoned within, it is the obvious psychological task of man to open barred windows and let them stream out.

It is true that all life does build and grow from inner germinal source-spring outward to conscious manifestation. The Scriptural injunction is to "let your light shine," with correlative caution against keeping it hidden or buried.

The first item in the indictment of traditional or conventional philosophy of the "inner light" comes from the notation that such view naively overlooks the consideration that nowhere in the cosmos, physical or metaphysical, can it be supposed that light can be generated, made to shine and be kept shining, without being fed by fuel. And always the fuel for the fire which generates light, even as in the superethereal elements that feed the solar fire, is of the essence of cruder matter, as is seen in the wood-sticks on the hearth, the oil or coal in a furnace, and the tallow beneath the candle flame, or indeed the physical food that keeps alive the flame of life in our bodies. Never in hundreds of books on the soul-light philosophy does one find the slightest notice of the necessity of material fuel for the inner spiritual fire. It seems never to have occurred to any theorist in this field. And as the bulky mass of this literature has insistently urged that we pull our focus of interest ever more completely away from outward things in the effort to fire up the soul in the inmost depths of our subjective kingdom, the question and challenge as to how this great light is to be supplied with fuel, when cult practice severs the energies of spirit from contact with the coarser experiences of earth, which a balanced philosophy recognizes to be the proper fuel for the burning, must be fully met.

Matter, lower in rank though equal in importance with spirit, is always the base, the sustenance of spirit. But so clamorously has matter been derogated as hostile to spirit that the dependence of the higher principle upon it for sustenance and the instrumentalization of its powers has been almost entirely left out of account. As surely as the candle flame can not be kept alive without the fuel supplied by the coarser tallow, which by its more potent chemical energies it can trasfigure into the likeness of its own glorious body, as St. Paul says, so neither can this radiance of spiritual light within the depths of conscious being be kept aglow without being able to draw up and transmute into its own essence the physical experience undergone by virtue of soul's interconnection with body. Spiritual cult philosophy has seemingly taken if for granted that the inner God-light can be generated and brought to white heat, so to say, in

a vacuum. For it expressly preludes its prescription for the enkindling of that light with the instructions to destroy all physical-sensual and intellectual forms of experience, the very elements that must be the natural fuel for the spiritual flame. From the very start it is to be deprived of the fuels which alone could serve to nourish it into its brightness. It is true that the electric light-bulb does glow and last longer in a vacuum, but,--lest this be seized upon as a natural confutation of the thesis here expounded--it is not to be forgotten that the power that generates the light in the vacuum is inducted into the bulb from outside, and is itself the conversion of a "lower" or "coarser" energy into light. It is the universal law of the cosmos that always "higher" life feeds upon, consumes and converts, by sublimation process, energies ranked as lower and grosser in essence. The lamp of the spirit within must be fed with the sacrificial oil of the life of sense, emotion and thought lived daily in the flesh. And, by analogy, soul science is as unwise to rail against the iniquitous influences of the flesh as the lamplight would be to express its repugnance to the oil under its wick. So confused has been the interpretative effort in the Scriptural field that this conspicuous connotation of the "oil" symbolism has not been clearly brought through to understanding at all. The coming of the Christos into our human nature is represented under the figure of the anointing of our heads with oil, because the Christ-mind that is to apotheosize us is poetized as a divine flame (cf. The tongues of fire touching the head of Jesus at the Jordan baptism and those of the disciples at Pentecost) coming to its glorious burning in our heads. And oil is the fuel for fire.

As the unfoldment of the case against false assumptions and erroneous methodology in handling the conception of the inner divine light will enunciate the ineptitude of all derogation of the body, matter, the flesh, the senses and even the mind, as detrimental instead of beneficial to the life of the spirit itself, the first hint in support of our basic affirmations will be presented in the material composing an advertisement-notice of the Vedanta Society, taken at random from a current magazine. It aims to present a concise condensed statement of Vedanta religion. A clause in one of the sentences makes it worth citation.

"Vedanta is chiefly a search for the Spirit, the Real Being, and the purpose of the philosophy is to reveal to man what he really is.

The body and mind are adjuncts, the necessary means, to the achievement of the spiritual element; but beyond them is the ever-shining light of man's consciousness; his 'I Am' self-consciousness is God consciousness."

Here is advertised the all-dominant motive of cultivating the divine spirit within. But there is that statement which, in fairness to the truth of a more advanced conception, it was deemed desirable to insert in the notice, that the body and the mind, so fiercely assailed and calumniated as the arch enemies of the spirit, are necessary adjuncts and indispensable means to the achievement of spirituality. This single sentence at once hails into court before the bar of simple logic the principle of the eternal condemnation of the flesh, the senses and the mind in the philosophy of "spiritual" religion. For if it is conceded that they are necessary adjuncts and the very means of spiritual evolution, their derogation as alleged enemies of the spirit is immediately seen as insane folly. If spirit itself is a glorious development, then it is asinine to berate the means and accessories by which it is exalted to beauty and kingly power. The physical body of man is obviously the instrument in, by and through which the divine soul of the mortal is implemented to its rebirth, growth and final divinization. What must have been the strange hypnotizing power of a persuasion in religion that has disposed the minds of millions for centuries to revile the body that performs so marvelous a function for the divine principle of goodness in the mundane race! What warped mentality must have bent the counsels of religion to deprecate as foul and vile, and even denounce as the source of human depravity, the awesome marvel of our bodily organism and its noble function as the mother, the nurse, the guardian of the infant soul born and coming to its adulthood in the home of the flesh! So closely allied is this fatal delusion with the concomitant persuasion of the "spiritual" religions that the senses and the mind obstruct the path of the soul's advance to perfection, that this issue must share the brunt of the present critique.

Of course the power that man must utilize to lift himself in the scale of being is a power operative within his own constitution. Christianity cut itself off from direct connection with this dynamo of influence when it segregated the source of the power off in its embodiment in one historical person only. Where else could have been localized a power capable of divinizing lowly human nature than

in the corporate body of humanity itself? Surely it could not have been placed outside the individual or the collective organism in whose life it was to be a fermenting leaven. How could man either save himself or be saved other than by the use of a power susceptible of cultivation within his own life, or other than by the discovery, exploitation, exercise and development of a power amenable to his own control? Life never expands or evolves save by the unfoldment of powers germinally innate in the organic being of its own creatures. The legend for which Christianity notably is responsible, that the human race is to be saved by a power sent down from heaven on one historical occasion and localized in the sole body of one historical person, is of all fatuities of theological obscurantism the one closest to a devastating irrationality.

This observation is thrown into sharp accentuation when we recall a myth found in one of the Hindu Upanishads. The story runs that the Lord called a council of the spiritual hierarchy of the world and spoke of a new race that he was about to generate on the earth, stating that he designed to place in its hands the creative power of the gods. He called for opinions as to how the power might best be invested in the new race, so as to safeguard it from misuse through the ignorance and waywardness of the people untrained in wisdom. "Man is a curious creature and he will surely discover the power and in his childishness misuse it to his injury. Where can it be hidden so as to be secure from his prying?" One archangel advised that it be placed on the top of the highest mountain peak. Another suggested that it would be better hidden in the profoundest ocean depths. At last the Lord bethought himself of a happy expedient: "I'll conceal it in the inmost depths of man's own nature, the last place he will ever think of looking for it."

Yes, the God-power is within us, making us potentially co-creators of the universe with God himself. All too slow have we been in discovering the presence or immanence of the mighty potency in ourselves. Religion has too insistently directed our gaze to seek it afar. Socrates told us plainly that each man harbored within him his overshadowing daimon, his guardian angel, and we still wonder if perhaps the Athenian philosopher was not entertaining a wraith of his own hallucinated fancy and not a true angel. At any rate we take it as an item of curious Greek speculation and hold it at arm's length, when truly the statement covers the most important fact in our existence.

To be sure, our divinity is lodged within us, deep down in the heart's core of our conscious being, but from the start implanted there as the mere seed of a potential development. So far it is possible to stand with the New Thought and spirit-cult philosophies. They are right in placing paramount emphasis on the necessity--and the glorious privilege--of recognizing that presence within us and living up to the highest capabilities of a technique that will put us in more effective relation to it. But from this point on, it is practically impossible to go along with the operational theory and the active practique of the idealists. Their envisagement and consequently their modus of operation of the forces in the case are all sadly and disastrously askew. A rectification of their codes and modes in the matter must be attempted.

The basic error of their procedure is discerned to be their naïve belief that all one has to do is to penetrate a little deeper than the surface level of daily consciousness and there will be found the god, fully matured and ready to exercise the entire repertoire of his divine power and majesty, only needing to be recognized and hailed. The common cult idea is that to awaken the inner deity to the full exercise of his godliness in and through us it is only necessary to call loudly enough upon him and he will forthwith arise and come forth. It is widely circulated as an open sesame technique that the practice of yoga breathing, sitting in certain postures, deep concentration--but more often the complete emptying--of the mind, will greatly facilitate the process or conduce to its effective working. Prayer and deep meditation are urged as aids to success. The methodology is predicated on the idea that the god is immanent in all his power, strength and glory, awaiting only to be summoned forth. All that is needed is that one should recognize him, or, as Christian phraseology has it, believe on him, and all his wealth of bounteous being will be immediately released for man to use to his advantage.

It is important to note that along with this ground assumption there went always the concomitant persuasion that a practically indispensable adjunct to successful courting of the indwelling deity was the operation of completely emptying the mind, or the total area of consciousness, of all ordinary forms of feeling and of thought, to make the field a complete blank, so that the god could then have unobstructed access to the entity below, or the latter have clear approach to the god. The method was to clear

away all rubbish of daily thought from the mind, and hold it steady as a clean slate on which the deity might better inscribe his own higher apperceptions of being. Emptying the mind of all its contents, deadening the senses, stilling all emotion, one might with much hope of reward sit and wait for the higher genius of the inner self to deliver its edifying messages. In the silence and the mental void suddenly the forms, apparitions, the ghosts and wraiths of divine truth could be expected to appear. Glowing in supernal light will shape themselves the outlines and figures of eternal reality. And the sitter will have consummated his yoga and met his god. He will have linked himself with the divine and himself become divine. He will have completed his earthly evolution and won the glorious crown of immortal life with the gods.

It is granted that of course a first step toward true theurgy is the individual's arriving at the certain knowledge, beyond mere speculation, that potential divinity is resident within him and awaits cultivation. But while this recognition is basic primarily, it is a mistake to expect the operation of magic or a perfected accomplishment from this one step alone. It merely puts one in line to begin the process of cultivating one's divinity. Just as a child entering primary school needs more than one recognition of the awakening of his slumbering divine genius than mere recognition of its presence within. The task calls for the perfect development and full functioning of every normal capability and faculty of the entire complement of powers engendered by evolution on the lower human side.

The most hurtful mistake is the too-simple assumption that the divine entity is in man in any other form than, from the first, potentially; except in so far as it has in the case of any individual been brought along to an advanced stage of development. It is at any rate, at any stage always potential of greater unfoldment in the progression ahead of it. The great and central item of theology that seems to have dropped almost into complete desuetude in current religion is the fact that the divine nature was implanted in man's constitution in the beginning as a seed. How can any potency be implanted in any organic development except as a seed? The one universal law of manifest life is growth. There can not be growth unless it is started from seed or shoot. The task of man is

not to discover the all-perfect God in full stature, a finished entity, within himself. His labor is to recognize his gardener's husbandry in the tending, cultivation and maturing of a seedling seminally implanted in the physical garden-bed of his body and his life. It is there from the start only potentially. The Christ within is a child, first to be brought from gestation to birth at the Christmastide of man's own awakening to the recognition of his parenthood of the august infant, and then to be reared, trained, educated to the brilliance of its full divinity. The Christmas note of jubilation should be, not the barren celebration of the birth of a babe in far Bethlehem two thousand years ago, but the present birth in one's own life of the infant Christ nature. Christmas festivity should leave its celebrants with the sensational realization that mankind has brought to birth and henceforth has to raise an infant god within the body. Christmas should mean that every man has taken a divine child to raise and educate. We are each assigned the task of bringing a young god to his maturity. He is still the Christ-child in most of us, a little bigger grown in a few of us.