CHAPTER THREE

HEAVEN WOOS EARTH

But what is the technique of his education? How are we to awaken his latent divinity? This is both the immediate and the ultimate question.

First we must realize that he has been sent down here to go to school, to attend the seminary of earth, whose head master is experience. The particular seat he has to occupy in the schoolroom is his own body and its environment. In his body and the place it occupies in the world he will have his instruction. The body and its needs for sustenance and health will be his lesson assigners and his taskmasters. He will learn only as he meets and masters the daily run of events and extracts their lessons for the weaving of the patterns of wisdom in his consciousness. His education was arranged in the divine government of the worlds to be his tutelage on this planet, because here was a schoolroom in which every appurtenance, every ornament, every pedagogical provision was itself an eloquent, if mute oracle of the goodness, the beauty and the truth of being, a knowledge and experience of which were to be the sum and crown of the achievement of his education. For this world had been created aforetime by his omnipotent Father, and created to be an embodiment and expression of the attributes of its Author's own supernal nature and being, which are the perfections of goodness, beauty and truth. All its living objects and its continuing events reflect and dramatize the laws and principles of the Father's nature, for the earth is a unit cell of the universe and that universe is his body. The physical worlds are instinct and vibrant with the pulsating life and the idea-patterns of the Creator Mind. The world is full of gods, as Thales said in ancient Greece. The heavens declare his glory and the earth showeth his handiwork.

All this mighty revelation is to be absorbed, inwoven into the substance and texture of the young god's own being as he dwells life after life in the midst of this gigantic cinema of his Father's epiphany of glory. For a long period of his childhood he will drink in unconsciously, unreflectively, the potent influences impacting him in his earthly home. He will instinctively feel the ministering benignance of the nature in whose lap he has been laid. Nature is his cherishing mother, his sustainer and guardian. Later, as his self-

awareness and his powers of conscious perception and reflection begin to unfold, he will learn to watch, observe and moralize upon the form and then the meaning of all the moving scenario that passes in the yearly round of nature's cycles. He will gradually register in the depth of consciousness an ever keener realization of the order and integral unity of the world panorama. As he moves on from instinctive sense of nature's providential goodness to speculative philosophy at the mental level, he will come at last to a rational understanding that he and the nature that encompasses his life are one and the same expression of creative mind, the one at the physical level, the other in the rarefied air of consciousness. He will discern that the world has been framed over the design of his Father's thought, in the image and likeness of which design his own mind is to frame the pattern of its creative work at his lower station. This recognition carries in all its import the power of redeeming his life from aimless drifting with the natural stream of the all-embracing cosmic life and empowers him to assume the conscious intelligent direction of the onward flow of his own evolution. It evokes from latency into conscious activity his soul faculties as the impact of his experience with the world without challenges dormant powers to come awake. Mainly through his very body the birth of self-consciousness and the evolvement of untried capabilities take place. His body and the world do exactly for him what the sun, the soil, the heart and moisture do for the seed in the garden. They evoke slumbering power in the unplumbed depths of his being. If he was not immersed in the ground-bed of the world and his body, he would remain an unplanted seed. These give him his birth and nourish him to maturity. Every birth must emanate from its mother's womb, and for the soul unit, the physical body is that womb. Said Jesus in a beautiful analogy, "unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." Not for twenty centuries has it been known that the ancient sages who indited the Bibles of divine wisdom referred to the long dormant condition of the soul when it was lodged in earthly body as its "death." But without this "death," as Jesus declares, it could have no rebirth and therefore no further growth. It would remain forever in the dormancy of purely celestial life. To rise higher in the scale of conscious being it has to endure the recurrent pangs of birth forever renewed. The philosophy that urges

escape from the world and the body would simply deny the soul its natural chance to be reborn at a higher level.

Probably the most succinct and positive declaration of the dialectical necessity of the central doctrine of all religion, the incarnation, has come from the pen of Plotinus, who must be ranked high in the roll of the world philosophers. He was the inheritor of the great Platonic wisdom, which had flashed out in brilliance over half a millennium before, but had gone into eclipse under philosophical obscurantism in the second century and needed a renaissance. The paragraph quoted from his Enneads is regarded in our purview as one of the most notable passages in all philosophy:

"Thus, although the soul have a divine nature, or being, though she originate in the intelligible world, she enters into a body. Being the lower divine, she descends here below by a voluntary inclination, for the purpose of developing her powers and to adorn what is below her. If she flee promptly from here below, she does not need to regret having become acquainted with evil and knowing the nature of vice, nor having had the opportunity of manifesting her faculties and to manifest her activities and deeds. Indeed the faculties of the soul would be useless if they slumbered continuously in incorporeal being without ever becoming actualized. The soul herself would remain ignorant of what she possesses if her faculties did not manifest by procession; for everywhere it is the actualization that manifests the potentiality. Otherwise the latter would be completely hidden and obscured; or rather it would not really exist, and would not possess any reality. It is the variety of sense-effects which brings to light the greatness of the intelligible principle, whose nature publishes itself by the beauty of its works."

A little father on he pens a sentence which adds tremendous dialectical force to the truth of his pronunciamento given above:

"Likewise it was not sufficient for souls (merely) to exist; they also had to reveal what they were capable of begetting."

And, the logic implies, they could not beget if they remained aloft in worlds of ethereality. This repeats in the dress of Greek systematism what Jesus says, that the unplanted seed can bear no fruit. That this enunciation and the principle back of it have not been acknowledged throughout the history of Christendom as the basic fundamental of all doctrinism bespeaks the loss that was suffered when narrow bigotry closed the Platonic academies in the fifth century.

And if the passage stands as a sharp rebuke to much rigid dogmatism of orthodox Christianity, it even more sharply negatives most of the warped predications of the spiritual cult philosophy. So drastically does it reverse the "spiritual" preachments, that it locates the hub of life values right here in the flesh, the very place where those preachments proclaim that values should be shunned. It makes the life in the flesh the seat of destiny. While the cult philosophy denies reality to the things and the experience of this life, it avers that only here is reality to be found. And while cult philosophy stigmatizes the senses as the purveyors of falsehood, it asserts that only through the variety of sense-effects is the grandeur of the "intelligible principle" made manifest to consciousness. It indicts the spiritual religionism on many charges of gross violation of cardinal truth.

The luminous philosophy of ancient Egypt--luminous because it is made translucent with the light of nature-types of spiritual truth--tells us that the soul is a unit seed of God's mind, conceived in heaven, but given birth on earth. Certainly this must be the truth, since the conception is by the Father who is spirit, and the birth is from the Mother, who is matter. Says the dramatic character of the soul in the Orphic ritual: "I am a child of earth and the starry skies; but my race is of heaven alone." As the Emerald Tablet of Hermes phrases it,

"the Sun is the father, the Moon -- or earth -- is its mother, the Wind carries it in its belly, its nurse is the Earth. This is the father of all perfection, or consummation of the whole world. Its power is integrating; if it be turned into earth. It ascends from earth to heaven and descends again to earth, and receives the power of the superiors and the inferiors. So thou hast the glory of the whole world. This is the strong force of all forces, overcoming every subtle and penetrating every solid thing. So the world was created. Hence were all wonderful adaptations, of which this is the manner."

And three especially of the ten statements of "the truth about the self" laid down by Hermes are too magnificent to be omitted from quotation:

"Filled with understanding of its perfect law, I am guided moment by moment along the path of liberation.

"In all things great and small I see the beauty of the divine expression.

"The kingdom of spirit is embodied in my flesh."

"In my flesh shall I see God," cries Job. And no less positively another Scriptural passage runs: "The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." It is time that those who heap up denunciation on the world and the flesh know how ignorantly they revile the very temple of the spirit. The philosophies that proclaim the desirability of escape from the body stand sternly rebuked by the greatest wisdom ever given to humanity, that of Hermes, Thrice-Greatest.

In the books of this sage Hermetic philosophy the divine soul, making its entry upon the earth, utters the declaration of its purpose and mission in migrating from the dreamy blissfulness of the spirit world to this land of a more realistic grade of consciousness: "Lo, I come that I may feed upon the bread of Seb, of the food of earth." Seb, his name carrying the cryptic significance of the creative number seven, is the god of the earth. Therefore, the "bread of Seb" is, like the manna of the Old Testament, that nutriment which the soul abstracts from the very ground of earthly experience. Also he says that he comes in order that he may bathe in the pool beneath the two divine sycamore trees of heaven and earth. As in the case of the divine nucleus represented by Jesus in the Christian allegory, the unit of potential Christ consciousness had to come down out of heaven and be immersed in the waters of the earthly baptism, which waters, be it known at last, are just the blood of physical human bodies. The immersion is dramatically administered by a forerunner called "the Baptist." For this body blood is indeed that "Red Sea" which "Israelite" souls had to cross on their long journey from "Egyptian" darkness up the hill of evolution to the "Promised Land" of higher blessedness.

By now it should be evident how great an error is committed in promulgating a philosophy that advises the human entity to turn away from contact with the earth and its influences, designed of a certainty to be salutary, and to negate psychologically the validity of all mundane experience. Such an attitude gains no sanction from the tomes of the great Sages of the early time. It is the spurious product of shallow understanding and gullible pietism.

What has been overlooked entirely is that to turn the mind away from the actualities of the world experience, with the expectation of finding more stable and enduring satisfactions in the depths of consciousness, is only to meet with a disappointing futility. For

that is only to plunge the mind into the vacuity of an empty cavern. It is quite the same as pulling the babe away from feeding upon the natural food from its mother's breasts, and expecting it to draw its nourishment from the sterile air. If one turns the mind from concrete objectivity to bask atop the hills of an inner divine subjectivity, the rueful upshot will be the fruitless groping of a mind in a void.

It is right here that spiritual cult theory and practice have perpetrated their most harmful blunder and most positively committed themselves to error. The divine power is within, and is to be implemented from within. But all procedure that aims to exalt it by nullifying the outer mind and seeking the soul's gold in the vacuum of an alleged inner consciousness of greater reality is marked decidedly as vain and nugatory. So positively is it untrue to predicate the soul's divinization through withdrawal from contact with the outer world, that the exact reverse of this theory is the truth which mans needs to follow. Perhaps an enlightened philosophy is soon to proclaim, as the long-lost truth of a sound soul-science, that the true cultus of the divine intelligence is man consists not in severing the links of conscious relation to the actualities of the earthly experience and retreating within the secluded depths of detached consciousness. Precisely on the contrary, that true soul-science is cultivated and perfected by going outside and establishing a living psychic relation with the external world. That this flies directly in the face of the vast literature of New Thought and the admonitions of the self-realization preachments denouncing the external world, is only too apparent. That it is the demonstrable truth is nevertheless maintained.

The difference in direction--going without instead of going within--is the difference between focusing the soul's energies upon blankness in the one case and upon the precise and mutely articulate images of reality in the other. Contrary to all the claims of religious theory, the forms and paradigms of real being are not found residing ethereally in the higher rarefied areas of human consciousness. They are not lying there in a superior world, merely awaiting the time when the mind will stop shutting off the soul's access to them. That interior domain is a blank, a void, until such time as the outer mind, learning to build up the images of supernal truth from its sublimation, or subjectification of the phenomenal

objects seen in the concrete world, supplies the upper region with the figured elements of real conceptions. Only then does the void begin to have content. Not inside, but outside in the world, has the creator mind placed the crystallized forms of the divine ideation for man's behoof. To preach the cult of discovering them by withdrawing the consciousness from the outer world into the vacant abyss of inner subjectivity is to direct our search for them precisely to the region where they are not to be found. They lie constantly out in the world under our eyes; and what egregious folly it is then to direct the mind away from them to stare fruitlessly into vacancy! Philosophy must recover the balance and sanity to point the search for truth toward the ground where it is found to lie, renouncing the fatuous seeking of them in a vacuous fairyland hypothecated by the tortured processes of unsound philosophical lucubration.

For, as said, nature is the body of God and the laws of nature are the automatic workings of his subconscious mind. In gazing out upon nature, the eye and then the mind will be observing the first creative or archetypal thoughts of the divine ideation, rendered solid and stable for human reflection and study. The objects and phenomena of nature are the operations of the cosmic intelligence made concrete and objective. They reveal the cosmic rationale of the great Noumenon. It could be poetically said that nature caught God's thoughts on the wing as they were projected from his mind and froze them into substantial form in matter. It has indeed been written that the forms of nature are the congealed thoughts of God. How decisively we are learning now that matter is divine force, divine spirit, petrified!

Herein comes to view a needed correction in the position of general academic philosophy upon a point kindred to the one under discussion. One reads endlessly that what the senses and the mind perceive in nature is not the reality, but the "mere" appearance of a reality that lies "behind." It seems necessary to take direct issue with this idea and especially with the phrase used,--mere "appearance." The view makes of concrete objectivity a mere shadow world, a false pretense at real being. The material object-form of a thing is not the reality of the thing, but an unreal image of it, the real thing being all the while an idea-form in the creative mind.

Our quarrel is with the wrong connotation this view assigns to the word "appearance" and its unwarranted accentuation by the

adjective "mere." The contention is that the concrete material object is the real appearance and in no sense a false representation of a real thing hiding behind it. It is the positive, most substantial and actual appearance to human view of an ideal conception that was invisible to us until it made its appearance physically and stood out there concreted in form of substance that made it perceptible to our senses. The appearance is in no wise a phantom of a reality haunting us, but the actual coming to view of what was only noumenal and as such imperceptible as long as it remained a subjective mind-form in creative thought. The use of "appearance" in the sense of only a seeming-to-be of something not really present is here vigorously disputed. And there is no warrant in truth for accompanying it by the adjective "mere". If a thing positively appears out of invisibility into visibility, like an actor appearing on a stage from behind the curtain, by what warrant is it referred to as a "mere" appearance? Would one say that at his proper cue the actor merely appeared? Why is the hint of unreality injected into the statement of the fact that in the phenomenal world of objectivity the ideal forms of God's thoughts appear, or make their appearance to our view, when previously they had been imperceptible! What is "mere" about it, when it is the very solidification before our eyes of what was until then only a thought form of cosmic mind? The objective world is surely not a "mere appearance" of true being, but that true being itself, having appeared in our world out of the heavens of divine ideation. It was hardened into concrete objectivity and placed here to be seen.

What becomes clear on the postulates of the greatest wisdom attained by the human mind, or the wisdom vouchsafed to early humanity by high exponents of the divine mind, is that there must be a complete reversal of direction in the quest for spiritual illumination and the consummation of the mystical apotheosis of consciousness. Not in the vacuity of the inner mind, but out in the world of living forms are to be found the monographs of God's prescience. The world he has created is the world that reveals the thought-pattern over which he designed that which came to be. There visibly are displayed the noumena which turned into phenomena in our world of dense substance. We have in utter folly termed the phenomena unreal and the noumena alone real. This makes a house that is only pictured in an architect's mind, or drawn

in blueprint, the real house, and the same house later standing fully created in wood, stone, brick or concrete, the unreal house, the ghost or "mere" shadow of the real house. Do we not only have to ask which one would accommodate real living? Determined from the standpoint of life in this world, surely the material house is the real one. From the standpoint of God's view, he being the thinker and creator, both the purely noumenal and the congealed actual house are real, since one has no warrant for pronouncing either thoughts or things unreal. Gerald Massey, profound student of ancient Egyptology, points out the odd closeness of the words "think" and "thing." And it seems to be clear that both derive from the Egyptian hieroglyph which is the symbol and the word for life, the great ankh cross. (The nk spelling did become ng in Greek.) In the cosmic creative process God's "thinks" became "things."

This whole question of reality or unreality has been involved in endless and needless confusion for the rather simple reason that the discussion has never specified which world is being considered as the home of reality. Life and its productions exist in two worlds, or, as philosophers might insist, they subsist in the noumenal world and exist in the physical. Life, if it is to become manifest to itself and its creatures--which are modes of itself--breaks apart into the two phases or aspects of consciousness and matter. Its creations are generated in consciousness, or noumenally conceived. Then by a process analogous to a reduction of temperature, which "freezes" them into "solidity," they are concreted in matter, which, now we know, is simply pure energy made static. That which is to be a material thing when "staticized" is first a formation in the energy waves of thought. How can there be any question of its reality in either phase of its being? It is first real as a thought, or as a real thought; later it is real as an object, a real thought objectified, and therefore a real object. It was a real thought; now it is a real object. Reality is a categorical attribute of things that are. What folly to maintain that they are real when in one world or in one form, and unreal when in another world or form! The philosophical maneuver of denying reality to the objects of God's creation when they have become substantially objectified to his own and to our consciousness, must some day be seen to be a weird misconception born of a most singular quirk of the human thinking process.

All these considerations bear strongly upon the matter of the

culture of the divinity in human nature. But the bases of a still more rigorous criticism are yet to be outlined. Perhaps the most flagrant mistake or omission in spiritual cult philosophy is its total failure to include in its rationale the place and function of the great law of polarity, absolutely basic for all manifestation, and therefore basic as a predicate for reality either noumenal or phenomenal. If this universal principle is left out, no competent rationalization of living experience is possible at all. A philosophy formulated without it is no philosophy. And it must be said in respect to this item that the "spiritual" philosophies miss the mark of true conception by a long mile. Because, in preaching at us the withdrawal of our conscious effort from objective reality in order to gain contact with an allegedly truer reality in subjectivity, they actually ask us to tear ourselves apart, to rend our being in twain, to rip ourselves asunder. They ask us to dismantle our integrity, to destroy the unity of our selfhood. In the first place, this is something that can not be done. In the second place the effort based on the false presupposition that it can be done and is desirable will entail disaster.

For life here, or anywhere it becomes manifest, is and must be polarized. The cryptic meaning of that great old Egyptian symbol, the ankh, is that life is the result of polarization, for it conjoins the two symbols of spirit and matter. Neither consciousness nor material existence is possible without it. No consciousness is possible to a completely unitary being. Unity must be broken apart into duality, if consciousness is to arise. For consciousness must be segregated from objectivity and then be confronted with something to be conscious of. This necessitates the existence of matter, body and the world. Spirit can have no birth or growth if it is not kept in the relation of polar opposition to matter. All values are born out of the tensional relation between spirit and matter. If spirit is, or could be, torn away from its connection with matter, the tension is dissolved and the worlds and consciousness both disappear. The universe is sustained in being on a web of force that stretches from spirit at the "top" to matter at the "bottom" of the scale, and that tensional force is the warp and woof of all existence. It is that dynamism which Einstein and now Hlavaty (recently declared to have proved Einstein's theory) have found to be the essence and the ground of all world appearance. It is the preaching of ignorance, the counsel of folly, to base man's divinization on the presumption

that it can be achieved or furthered by the attempt to pull the spirit away from its close and essential association with matter and body. It is asking both spirit and matter to renounce and dissolve their kinship, which is a twinship. The wisdom of ancient Egypt has told us that spirit and matter, the soul and the world, are twins. They must grow up together, brother and sister, yet man and wife. (Isis was both the wife and sister of Osiris, as was Juno of Jupiter.)

We have here at last the meaning of the allegory of the wheat and the tares in the Christian Gospels. True enough it is that the two can not be separated until the harvest. If you pull up the tares when they are growing close beside the wheat, you uproot the wheat along with them. If evil were taken out of the world, there would be no fulcrum against which to anchor the leverage for good. In the harvest at the cycle's end both relapse back into their primordial unity, and disappear as separate entities.

On the solid rock of this principle of universal polarity the preachment of the philosophy of spiritual detachment breaks in wreckage. It is seen to be little better than mystical moonshine. It ammounts to semi-pious intellectual fol-de-rol and is misleading and far from innocuous psychologically. The effort to abstract the consciousness from world objectivity--doomed to certain failure factually--can lead a mind so far from contact with reality as to rob all experience of its designed salutary pedagogical value. One can reify a dreamy persuasion until it is turned from fantasy into a hallucination of verity. The possibility of self-hypnotization is always a potential menace to balance and sanity. If we can escape actuality by relapsing into dream, it is certified that we can miss reality by dwelling continually in the dream fantasy. The soul is on earth to receive the full impact of actuality, without which its divine capability could never be brought out to conscious mastery. To sink back while on earth into the dreaminess to escape which it fled from heaven, is to counter the motive and reverse the procedure which life is pursuing in its drive for its own aggrandizement.

If the god-power is within the constitution of man it must be evident that the human body is the laboratory in which all the seed latency of future power and divine genius is to be evolved to full expression. The body, says St. Paul, is the temple of the living God. The Egyptians called it "the crucible of the great house of flame."

How far askew is that posture of mind which teaches the evil character of the body! For some ten or more centuries Christianity held it in contempt and tried to mortify it, imitating Indian philosophy, which aimed to kill it. Christianity based much of its condemnation of Paganism on the latter's wholesome reverence for the body, and Paganism is still berated for its alleged revel in the grossness of bodily sensuality. It is not at all realized now that it takes a far profounder and more sanely balanced philosophy to allocate the flesh to its proper place and function in a universal economy of good than merely to decry it as the low enemy of spirit and revile it accordingly.

The shortsightedness of the negative view of the world and our life in it is accentuated again by the reflection, apparently little pondered in religious circles, that the mental posture of earthly detachment and effort at absorption in a heavenly consciousness runs counter to the simple logic of the incarnational situation, when it is known that these souls of humans had been long enough in the heaven state of consciousness to have grown weary of its inactivity and inanity, and voluntarily (as says Plotinus) came here to exchange it for the more real sense of existence and the chance to exercise untried powers which heaven could never cultivate. If the disembodied soul consciousness is so blessed and blissful, so rhapsodically preferable to the drab real-sense experiences here, it is a legitimate question to ask why they did not stay up there. What prevailed upon them to leave that delectable homeland that now they are said to yearn so longingly to regain?

That, be it declared with great pointedness, is the question that the escapist philosophies have apparently never seriously asked, much less have ever competently answered.

CHAPTER FOUR

WEDDING IN THE TEMPLE

Until an answer is given to the insistent query as to why the souls of men are on the earth no philosophy pertaining to the mundane life is possible. The codes of escapism are exhortations to man to jump out of reality and land in a vacuum.

It comes as the unconscionable upshot of such a creed that if there is a legitimate ground for the withdrawal tactic, then earth life for the hosts of celestial souls immersed in it is an inadvertence, a mistake, an unjustifiable hardship inflicted on all caught in its current, a blundering miscarriage of some creative design. Cult ideology shades its eyes against the strong searching light of the ineluctable fact of the divine economy, in whose strategic moves earth life is no mistake, is entirely necessary and beneficent from every angle, for the one and all-sufficient reason that gods can not be born, bred and reared in heaven. Conceived they can be there, in the depths of the cosmic mind; but not there born or raised to maturity. For heaven can provide for their birthing no matter to be their mother. Planted on earth they must be. So to presume to tear them loose from their rootage in the soil-bed of human nature is dialectically equivalent to the folly of pulling up a garden plant out of the ground to hasten its growth. To expect a soul to grow without letting its roots hold deeply in the ground of earthly body is the same as to expect a candle to glow without its tallow, or the fire to burn without its wood. Again sage Egypt admonishes us sharply: "Head in heaven, feet on the earth; soul in heaven, body in the deep deep grave" of inert matter.

Just as in winter we long for the summer warmth and in summer we equally yearn for the coolness of winter, so it is that when we are here on earth we long for the vividly imagined bliss of heaven and bend our philosophies to accord with the yearning. But the other phase of the situation is not thought of or given weight in religious philosophy. Yet it must be true that when the soul has had its sufficiency of rest in the dreamy unreality of subjective consciousness in worlds above, it must long to be again where the contact with veridical sense experience gives to existence an engaging charm and zest. It must long for escape then from the inane passivity and enforced inactivity that can become morbid. It must yearn

to arise from sleep, throw off dull sloth and give play to the powers that else would remain in unwholesome stagnation. This, the positive aspect of the philosophy of life, seen only in the light of the knowledge of the dual and polarized state of being in manifestation, finds scarcely a single note of emphasis in whole libraries of cult literature. It is reasonable to assert that a philosophy which wholly ignores this balance of forces that stabilizes the world of life must be a blind and dangerous guide.

The legendary "rebellion of the angels," for which they were cast out of heaven to suffer hardship on earth in the Miltonian tradition, has been frightfully mangled in popular conception. It is commonly represented as an evil movement of hostility to the powers of God himself, a revolt against the divine rulership of the cosmos. A more recondite scrutiny of the allegory discloses that it was in reality simply a revolt against the gossamer vacuousness of the celestial life, against the ennui, prolixity and dreary tedium of the heavenly existence, motivated by eager longing for the more vivid experience of sense and the novel adventure of the ego-consciousness, all of which was impossible apart from union with physical body on a planet. It is not perhaps a rash surmise to suggest that this is the significance of the statement in Revelation that one sweep of the dragon's tail brushed out one third of the angels of heaven. The dragon, who is identical with "Satan, that old serpent that deceiveth the whole world," is the ancient allegorical figure typifying the lower sense nature in man, and it is indeed the strong sweep of this element which springs up and assails the soul from the side of body, that draws down the hosts of angels for a more actualized sense of being than heaven can give. Against the background of this determination of earthly motive for the descent of the angels, the systems of cult teaching emphasizing the evil of earth and exhorting escape by tugging and pushing the soul back up to heaven before the efficacious influences of earth can have accomplished their beneficent offices, are most clearly seen in all the flagrancy of their ineptitude.

As it was this yearning for sensuous self-consciousness that lured the angels down to earth, and earth and body gave them the freedom to revel in the luxury of physical existence, where their own fledgeling powers could be put to the trial, the sense of physical enjoyment became the polar opposite of the life of the spirit. And

because it was the opposite node to spirit, popular ignorance in the end misconceived it and set it up as the opponent, the adversary of the spirit. Hence it was this impulse to revel in the delight of free action in their own right that came to be denominated the "sin," the "carnal sin" of our first angelic parents. St. Paul makes this overwhelmingly clear when (in Romans 7) he makes the remarkable statement that when "the command" (wrongly translated "commandment" in most versions, corrected in the Moffatt translation) came home to him, sin sprang to life and he "died," the command (meaning the heavenly mandate to incarnate) that gave him earthly life proving to be a veritable "death" to his soul--precisely as Greek theosophies had always represented it. Just ahead of this he had said that the law of sin and death has power over a man "only so long as he liveth." All this strongly certifies that we have here at last the right approach to the true comprehension of the original theological connotation of the redoubtable thing called "sin." At base and stripped of all weird misconception of morbid pietism, it is just the soul's delight in its freedom to revel here on earth in a fling of its creative power in a little universe of its own, its physical body and its circle of mundane activity. It must be a shock and rebuke to somber pietism that Paul himself in this same chapter asks if the soul's revel in sense life is evil, and thunders out the negative answer, "God forbid." And he ends by pronouncing the whole "fall of the angels" "holy, just and for our good." He urges us in fact to "make use of this good thing."

In Plato's Timaeus is reported verbatim the speech made by the Creator Logos, the Greek Demiurgus, or Jupiter, to the legions of angels assembled to hear their commission of creational duty on earth. They are expressly told that they are being despatched to the earth to supervise the creation of "three races" who are necessary to the completion of the divine work on the earth. They are told to "convert yourselves according to your nature to the fabrication of animals [animate beings], using in their creation the powers which I used in your generation." For this creation the mundane animal evolution would provide the physical bodies; the cosmic Lord says that of the part of these dual beings which will be indestructible and immortal, he himself "will furnish the seed and the beginning," meaning the divine nucleus of soul energy. Then he concludes by commanding these angels to go down to earth, enter

the prepared animal bodies and "weave together mortal and immortal natures." "The underworld awaits your coming" is a statement made to these angels in another Scripture. This is the celestial assignment of the soul to its great evolutionary task, which entails its descent to earth, the uniting of its spiritual potential with the bodily forces of the highest animal races ready to receive and house such a heavenly visitant, and then the consummating the great achievement of effecting a final harmonization and union of the two natures, the animals' and its own, in "one new man, so making peace," as St. Paul delineates it.

How then, let spiritual cultism answer, can the soul effectuate this mighty consummation if it abandons the body, flees from it as a loathsome thing, renounces or ignorantly shuns all natural association with it, and battles to return to heaven before the great aeonial labor has been accomplished? This is the philosophy of truancy from the school of life. In this phase indeed is perhaps best expressed the gist of all the philosophies which negate all positive value to life and recommend psychological escape from it: they rebel against the complete course of education in life's school and exhort all pupils to truancy. India in particular seems to have most unanimously lauded this recalcitrancy, this intransigence to life's obvious obligation, as Max Mueller has remarked.

This, and not the angelic rebellion in heaven, must be accounted the real revolt against the authority of God. If God sends us out to school--since we can not learn by staying at home--it is the simple sum of our duty that, all instruction and discipline being arduous, onerous and to a degree painful--albeit also zestful and rewarding--we should attend faithfully, heed our great instructor, experience, and stick to the assignment until the commission is fulfilled. Of course human nature, if left to its own predilection, would prefer dreamy idleness and mystic musing to the tedious task of self-development and learning. But even common human judgment decides that this is not the way of the valiant spirit, not the true path up the scale of being. The philosophies counseling short cuts back to heaven will have to bend to acceptance of the tutelage of earth. The road to the mountain top, shining in the distance, runs through the valleys of lowly earth.

India has been named as the land in which the cult of negative value to the life experience and escape from it has been most sig-

nally stressed. The Buddhistic and other religious philosophies of the Hindu people assert that the soul is on earth because of its ignorance. But instead of following the natural course of logic to the conclusion that, because it is in childish ignorance, the soul should diligently apply itself to the tutelage of earthy experience and learn to supplant ignorance with intelligence, Indian thought can only seem to discern that the remedy is for the soul to flee the assignment and escape. It seems never to have been able to achieve the logical goal of understanding that the soul is sent here precisely to overcome that aboriginal ignorance, and that the victory when attained amply compensates for all strain and suffering endured in the process. This inability of the Hindu mind to accept the mundane existence as salutary stems, as intimated before, from failure to include in its philosophical systemology any rational accounting for the condition of ignorance in the first place. The dearth of this specific knowledge, a grasp of which could illumine this dark lacuna in Indian ideology, is definitely testified to by Max Mueller, eminent scholar already cited. He writes:

"The question how nescience laid hold of the human soul and made it imagine that it could live or move or have its true being anywhere but in Brahman, remains as unanswerable in Hindu philosophy as, in Christianity, the question how sin first came into the world."

The crux of all dialectic of "spiritual" and escapist philosophy is centered at the point where the desire for liberation is seen in conflict with the necessity for the incarnation of soul in the first place. A philosophy which simply drives its devotees to seek release for their bondage--if truly it is such--is as unbalanced and hence likely to be as irrational as is the medical practice which hurries to treat the surface symptoms of disease without discovering and removing the cause. Also it is as egregiously marked by folly and ignorance as would be the school boy's unremitting effort to escape the "durance vile" of the school and its tasks, in total failure to recognize the good purposes which induce his parents and the state to subject him to his days and years of "imprisonment" at hard labor. Further it is unassailable logic to declare that if the pupil in life's academy centers his whole effort intensively on the business of effecting his

escape, he will miss the total instruction for which attendance at the school was instituted. To his sorrow he will later learn that all he escapes is honor, promotion and the joy of eventual graduation summa cum laude. He will but prolong, with a worse accentuation of its hardships, his tenure of tutelage. Again citing St. Paul, it is useless to kick against the pricks.

The bent to erect into a competent religious philosophy the soul's natural desire to escape the hard travail on earth and revert to the delicious ease of Devachan, or the unconsciousness of Nirvana, must be interpreted as simply the exaltation of desire, unrelated in any balanced way to the other arcs and phases of the cycle of incarnation and release. It is by analogy simply the natural desire of unenlightened and unheroic man to be freed from the arduous and spiritless dragging on of his life in an ill-conditioned body, without balancing it against the evolutionary gains which are both the justification and the vindication of the incarnation. Torn out of its niche in the ever-recurrent rounds and viewed out of relation to the total beneficence of the whole involvement, the failure of zest for the experience and the longing for surcease of its woes in the more ethereal realms are elevated into the dominant principles of a religious philosophy. It is thus condemned by its shortsightedness and unbalance.

But the final verdict on its utter incompetence is rendered to logic in the realization that in sheer dialectic it is evident that if the motive of escapism can be edified into a sound defensible philosophy of life, there can not be found anywhere just grounds on which to base either the necessity or the beneficence of the soul's migration to earth in the first place or at all. If life is an unrequited evil and hardship gratuitously imposed on the soul, then there can be no philosophy formulated that either explains or validates it. If it can not be explained as a scheme of demonstrable good, no philosophy is possible in connection with it. In the last blunt words that can express it, if the drive to escape it is the supreme recommendation of the best thought the human mind can entertain about it, then it can not be deemed good. The only justification of escapist philosophy is that the experience here is not good but wholly evil. And if evil, then the question confronts man as to how he is to rationalize his being tossed about from heaven to earth by the power of some demoniac force that puts him periodically in a direful im-

prisonment, from which his noblest aspiration is the yearning to make his escape.

The Buddhist system, in analysing the so-called chain of the causation of suffering, lays all to the desire of the soul for the enjoyment of the sense and feeling of life. The hunger for the objects of desire causes the soul to be born again and again, and each birth prolongs the sorrow and suffering. Therefore if the soul is to be rid of the cause of continual sorrow and suffering, it must root out of its heart the craving for the sense of life. The life instinct must be overcome and destroyed. This further deepens and darkens the negative, self-annihilating philosophy of the Hindu mentality. The doleful upshot of such a philosophy, which fastens the tag of evil on the life experience, is that in fact it leaves life without a philosophy. As intimated earlier, in strict truth a thing which is pronounced an unrelieved evil can not properly have a philosophy covering it. By basic derivation philosophy means a love of wisdom. But does not a philosophy which proclaims life an unmitigated evil renounce or forfeit all claim to wisdom? The human mind can not be expected to love a thing categorized as evil. The negative philosophy of India fails to lift earth life into the category of good. The mind can truly be said to love the pursuit of truth only when its searching yields and understanding of the positive and affirmative values of the thing studied. If reflection fails to bring comprehension of positive values in the life on earth, it renounces its claim to be called a philosophy. Escapist doctrine simply confesses its failure to measure up to the stature of a philosophy at all.

If the soul hungers for life, it also hungers for knowledge. And ultimately the basic knowledge that the human mind demands and must have is some rational answer to the question why man as a conscious entity is on this planet. The "sacred" Scriptures can be truly holy to earth citizens if they tell us why the creator-power, intelligence, sent these souls, its sons, out from what they also describe as the glory palace of blessed life to undergo a quite strenuous existence on this rolling globe. A philosophy should not claim the high name until it answers that question, straight, fair and true. One school of religion asserts that it is veritable blasphemy for the child-soul to demand an answer to the great question or to pry curiously into the affairs of the Father's ordering. Another evades the answer on the ground that we do not possess the faculties by which

to comprehend the answer if it was given us. Another affirms that we were summarily despatched to earth by an angered Father to penalize us for an initial infraction of an arbitrary restriction on our freedom.

When properly interpreted, the sacred Scriptures enlighten us with the profound knowledge that we were sent out here, in one of the beautiful gardens of delight (Eden) in our Father's kingdom, in order, under the fostering care of our kindly earth-mother, to grow up from soul infancy to adulthood in the image and likeness of our Parent. The Scriptures have stood for centuries holding out this answer for us, and the schools of wisdom in antiquity intelligently studied them, and gave deep instruction to elucidate the great mystery. But in the historical run of world life there swept in upon the peoples of the lands in which the vital heritage of wisdom had been treasured and carefully transmitted, a crushing blight of intelligence so heavy and chilling that it deprived minds of the virile strength to grasp the true sense of the answer. Since that dismal event some two thousand years ago the instinctive quest for this precious knowledge has been only a wild blind groping amid darkness and ignorance.

All the while we can read as clear and concise a statement of the great answer as could well be condensed in a few short sentences, and if we can muster the intelligence to comprehend the words, we indeed can register again that elevated satisfaction and joy that our minds experience when they can digest the substance of truth. Plotinus strove to rekindle the fires of understanding that were so fast sinking down to dead embers and cold ashes, and to him we stand indebted forever for this mastery formulation of the positive answer to the dark riddle of our existence, an answer that repudiates all the gruesome imputation that life here is an evil mischance, and makes clear the grounds of our faith in its beneficence. The reader has already noted his ringing asseveration that but for its contact with and mastery of the evil in the world, the soul would never come to know the power of its mighty wings.

Here stands the answer of Greece's high rationalism to India's dismal negativism and pessimism. Here is the positive assertion and dialectic of life's basic goodness and the justification of its stressful modality, thrown out to stem the tide of defeatism and hopelessness that was sweeping in over the more westerly areas of

the Hellenic world with the spread of the persuasion that life is only an unredeemed evil to be annulled and escaped. The famous phrase coined by Sir Gilbert Murray, eminent English scholar in the field of Greek philosophy, "the loss of nerve" in the Hellenic world, vividly expresses the incidence to the intellectual blight that was so far advanced in Plotinus' day of the second century. Under the benignant influence of a philosophy that rated and rationalized life as wholly good, and its hard experience salutary, the human spirit could face the mundane task with a resolute valor born of inner certitude. The soul in the human could front life's challenge with cheer, with courage, with fortitude.

But with the invasion of the popular thought by the dour gospel of the evil of life, the springs of zest and "nerve" for the adventure of soul in body were drained dry, and the battle for life was transformed early into a desperate abandon and a struggle to win back the rhapsodies of heaven. The "bread of Seb," or food of earth, to partake of which the soul, in Egypt's great Bible, had so eagerly set out from heaven, was turned "moldy," and the divine "beer" which it had come down to drink had turned "sour". And by what! By the injection in the living essence of human thought of a poisonous tincture of the philosophy of the evil of life. The impact of this untoward idea is naturally such that it chills and kills the mind's instinctive glow of eager adventure, of hope, of zest for the experience.

The aim under this persuasion being consciously to stifle and quench the fires of worldly interest which seek outward expression, there must result a smothering and dampening of all life's outgoing energies. The effort to subdue the vigor of extrovert tendency must bear fruit of a bitter taste. The law of the circulation of the blood testifies by unfailing analogy that corruption and disease follow upon any checking of the free flow of the streams that carry life's impulses outward. For the voluminous tragedy of human ill that has stricken the society of mortals in Western history since the decay of the robust healthy Greek philosophy of the Platonic era, let the religions crying the negation of all values in the earth life bear the heavy onus of responsibility. If there is now any sincere desire to lift modern life out of its deep-grained corruptions to a level of dynamic vigor and health, to restore to it a more valiant spirit that will quicken again the pulse-stroke of the heart of our

existence, the most direct move as means to that end is to establish again the Greek academies that were closed by Justinian in the fifth century.

Stupidly and blindly the orthodoxies of our day will cry out against the "return to Paganism." The rebuke to this folly is that the great light did shine in Pagan times, and under Christianity we have had the Medieval "Dark Ages," during which the light obscured in Christian lands was kept burning in Mohammedan and Jewish academies and cloisters. The Italian Renaissance was a glorious upflash of its light from the smoldering embers. The Protestant Reformation carried its spirit some way into religion. But for the full free upflow again of the heroic nerve-pulse generated by the knowledge of the good purposes of the soul's periodic visits to earth we still must wait. Likewise we wait for a civilization that manifested the beauty, grace, sanity and wholesomeness of life such as flourished when the Platonic wisdom was cultivated. Much of the moral of this essay would be lost also if there is failure to note that the great truth enunciated in Plotinus' gratifying citation gives the coup de grace to all the spiritual-cult philosophy that emphasizes the withdrawal of the soul as far as possible from the flesh. The Greek philosophy inspired a healthy life because it was animated by the foundation truth that the soul was on earth to make common cause with the body in the evolutionary interests of both, neither to flee, escape nor crush the body, but indeed to woo, win and wed it, for the mutual parentage of the god in man.

The dialectical dilemma facing the spirit-cultists is drawn in sharp lines with the reflection that if spiritual life disengaged from body is the ideal of consummate good for the soul, what then is soul doing on earth at all? If its best interests are subserved when it is free of the flesh, by what misdirection of cosmic policy, or by what dire necessity, is it drawn down out of celestial felicity at all? If the untrammeled life of the soul in spirit existence is the all-perfect environment for it, why does life not permit it to remain there in beatific tranquility forever?

To this key question spiritual and mayavic philosophy has no answer. For that we have to go to the old Egyptian and the later Greek Wisdom. If heaven life is completely adequate for the soul's blessedness, there can be no justification of the enforced migration of souls to earth. And if we dare not assume that earth life decreed

for the soul is entirely good and to be lived to the full without distrust of its beneficent ends, then we are forbidden to postulate that the universe is under the rule of an omniscient Power in every way benevolent. And if we are not permitted to lay down this postulate, religion itself is not possible.

Some form of spiritual exaltation to the ineffable heights of conscious felicity is indicated for the soul in the apotheosis of its nature at the end of the cycle. But the unconscionable error of spiritual philosophy has been in thinking that the flesh stood as a barrier in the way of that consummation, and that it was only necessary to crush down the flesh for the soul to step unobstructed into its heaven. This presumption aligned the flesh in the ranks of opposition to the soul as its enemy, when the truth is that the soul can attain its Paradise only through the humble offices of the body. If the physical organism was not in some way positively essential to the soul's evolution to godhood, there is no warrant in philosophy for its being sent here to tenant the house of the animal at all. This is the final and decisive challenge to the vogue and the adequacy of the mayavic and escapist codes of thought. A verse from Alfred Tennyson embodies this philosophy:

"God lent the house of a beast to the soul of the man;

And the man said 'Am I your debtor?'

And God said, 'Make it as clean as you can,

And then I will send you a better.'"

And beyond all estimation must be the total psychological consequences for the worlds of both East and West of the depressant influence of these systems that negate the value of our life, berate and crucify the body and urge escape as the prime blessedness. The natural atmosphere in which the conscious ego of man can flourish and develop in happy and healthy state is that of positive and affirmative attitudes toward the experience now being undergone. It is not mere poetic figurism to say that such a psychic posture of perennial affirmation is as vital to the soul's life as is sunshine to the plant. Deprived of it the spirit languishes and may wither. The gratuitous imposition on the mind of the inculcation that all that we behold of this fair earth and our existence in the midst of its garden of beauty is not real, is maya, illusion, a deception that we must evade by a constant negation of its registered influences, can spell nothing but a pernicious corruption of the soul's energetic effort to relate itself to reality. It must amount in the

end to a partial palsy and paralysis of its evolutionary impulse, or involve it in "shoals and quicksands" of frustration and confusion. If this does not come close to rating as a crime against the holy ghost, the divine spirit of life, it would be hard to find anything closer.

Life flows by turns outward and inward in its periodic cyclic impulses. For the soul of man its migration from heaven to earth is its outward movement. The outward expression of its energies in this fashion is an integral part of the processes of its evolutionary advance. Its highest good is to be attained by carrying the outward sweep to its farthest limits as the pendulum swings on that arc. Anything that checks or interferes with the movement must be accounted harmful, potentially dangerous. Surely a philosophy that aims to reverse the direction of the flow in the sweep of the outgoing manifestation must risk involving the entity in being crushed by the onrushing current. Also the attempt to throw the outward cycle back into the inward direction before the former has completed its work, will in the same way invite calamity. In fact there is in occult literature the tradition of those groups of angels who, being ordered to incarnate on earth in animal bodies suitable as vehicles for the expression of their faculties, refused and in consequence were "punished" by being forced down at a later time into less suitable bodies. Indian literature has called them the "unwilling Nirvanees." Those conceptions which naively assume that the high interests of spirit are without question to be furthered by lifting the soul as far out of relation to the body as possible--as in some Hindu systems to master the technique of entrancing it entirely-suffer from ignorance of what the soul is intended to effectuate in its conjunction with body. The philosophy of life must be solidly grounded on the rationale of the incarnation. Spirit-cultism seems to think it can ignore this central axis of the situation entirely. The plan of life in the progressive arc of its cycle is generated by throwing the mind into the spirit of the movement outward toward the periphery. Anything that thwarts that outgoing swing is productive of disorder in the movement. To affirm in the very midst of the outgoing sweep that only the opposite direction is good is again to tune the movement to discord. This would be equivalent to urging the rising sap of the tree in the spring to turn back and retreat unto the root and ground where it hibernated in the winter.