Autobiography of a Suicide (Book Two) -The Abyss Absolute

The Abyss Absolute: Autobiography of a Suicide (Book Two)

by Ron Puhek

 

PART I

THE ABYSS

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

INTRODUCTION

THE ABYSS AND ITS AVOIDANCE

Let me start with a confession. The attempt to write anything about the subject I wish to deal with here involves me in a dilemma. I find the writing itself implicated in the very contradiction I am seeking to resolve. It is not a theory for me but a living experience that every proposition I produce dissolves itself in its own contradiction.

In essence, the living expression of this problem is simple and wellknown. Language is inadequate to understand, explain, and express actual reality; indeed, language can communicate nothing. I will not waste time establishing this wellknow fact but will try to explain how it leads me into a special kind of experiential state as well as what that state is like. This has to do not only with my ability to write here in a way that expresses my thoughts or understanding, but also, and more important, with the limits of my thoughts and understanding. Like everyone else, I have a sensation of knowing or understanding something but feel incapable of expressing it. Then I discover I really do not understand it, and finally that I really understand nothing.

I begin writing or lecturing and everything flows easily. One topic falls spontaneously into another. Examples pop into my head. It is not that I cannot “communicate” when I want to, but the reverse. Exactly when the expression and the thought seems most clear the shadow falls: “Yes, what you have said sounds and is valid, but only within the structure of assumptions you make but do not understand; the house of your knowledge has no foundation; your ideas lack unity and the whole lacks roots in life; so why continue.”

In my last work in this series, Meaning and Creativity, I referred to this experience as “meaninglessness.” Here I will call it “the Abyss.” Both terms refer to a single kind of state, but for me today “the Abyss” has more powerful symbolic significance. The term “abyss” refers to a bottomless pit, gulf, or void. It comes from the Greek adjective as used in the phrase abussos limine or “unfathomable lake.” Used substantively, it indicates just “the unfathomable.” Both “the bottomless pit” and “the unfathomable lake” expand the symbolic meaning of “abyss.” “The bottomless pit” stimulates the sensation of falling in darkness.

When I face this abyss, I respond to it in two ways. Either I draw back from it and continue making the web of my ideas increasingly intricate only to find the netting still too coarse as I fall through it again into the abyss, or I drop the attempt and move on to something else. But when I move on, I always do so feeling incomplete, as if I were leaving what should not be left. The moment of discomfort eventually passes as I become involved in the new activity.

One of the reasons for my enjoyment of simple yet attentiondemanding tasks is that they absorb time without requiring a commitment to them as important and so they allow me to avoid the judgment of how meaningless they are. I will never choose to get involved in these kinds of tasks, but when others impose them on me, I enjoy them immensely. When I am trying to be serious and committed to any task such as writing down these words, the abyss yawns before me. I know neither why I continue nor why I leave off to do something else. But both are a way of avoiding the abyss.

When I realize what I am doing, I become what others would see as lazy. They call those who keep writing “industrious”; those who flit from one thing to another they call “alive and energetic”; but I am lazy I see emptiness in industriousness and see escapism in variety. Yet it is worse to be lazy at heart than at activities devoted action is only a way of hiding a lazy heart, a heart that refuses to face its own abyss. Passive paralysis in external activity arises out of a reluctantly active heart.

I use this personal reflection to make two points: first, the subject I am dealing with is not distant and in the realm of ideas but is life itself including my life and the conclusions I come to have no value unless they immediately also reflect the reader’s concrete life; second, the primary problem I am concentrating on is the contradictory character of life the way that everything pursued for a time ends in the abyss and turns into something other than as it began.

This second point needs clarification. The confrontation with the abyss transforms everything into its opposite. When I doggedly push on with my work and writing despite the abyss, I am no longer writing because I find positive value in it but only because it saves me from the abyss. My originally positive motive has been transformed in to a negative one and one that is substantively outside the significance of the activity itself. Similarly, when I turn from my task after seeing, even at very low levels of consciousness, how it is leading me to the abyss, then I pursue the alternative to my work not because I find it to be valuable activity but only to escape from the confrontation with the abyss. In the end, I fall victim to the temptation of power. I persist or desist because I will to. I fight obstacles to my goals not because they are wrong but because they are right because they are true reflections of my deep reluctance to act as I am acting, a reluctance that only my fear of the abyss overcomes. I fight them not because they are bad but because they are the abyss.

CHAPTER 1

THINKING AND DOING

The basis of action is thought; the basis of thought is action. Action leads inevitably to thought; thought leads eventually into action. You can act only so long before your mind is awakened. You can think only so long before action is demanded. On the one hand, if thinking leads you to the brink of the abyss, you can turn away to action, or, if action becomes an abysmal bore, you can turn to thought; or, on the other hand, in the face of the abyss arising from either thought or action, you can turn back from them into your old pattern, not because it is good but only so as to escape from the abyss.

Ordinary and analytical consciousness divides these two functions. One, thinking, is internal, immanent, invisible, and the other, doing, is external, open, selftranscending, and visible. Thought takes place only within myself; doing takes place beyond myself. The two interrelate but are mutually exclusive the more intensely you involve yourself in fighting a war, struggling for success, battling your colleagues for position, the less you can think and reflect. Conversely, the more you think, the less you do. Conventional cliches criticize one person for acting thoughtlessly and the other for “thinking too much.”

You readily understand about others what you do not face in yourself: (1) that thinking and doing are both authentic parts of human existence and if you go overboard into either, but especially, into thought, you are likely to be hiding from existence by denying half of it and (2) that the motive for hiding is that existence has revealed the brink of the abyss. That you think “too much” or act “without thinking” may be true, but all who make the charge need be careful lest they criticize in others the opposite activity but the same sin they deny in themselves.

Life is neither thinking or doing. Life is poised on the chasm between them; it is the movement of selfconscious doing. Life must pass to thought and then back from thought to action. This much is clear. What is less clear is the relation the two stand in just what does or can thought contribute to life?

Obviously, thought can change life. Of the two possible ways it influences life, the second is the less obvious. First, thought can lead to acting or doing it allows you to act more effectively than you could before. Second, thought also always constitutes an immediate transformation in being. The very fact that you are thinking, the content and conclusions of your thought, and your conviction that you should realize your ideas in life all are transformations in being.

A longstanding prejudice in many areas of Western Civilization holds that only doing changes existence, and that, therefore, thought that fails to lead to action is fruitless. Countless small examples from anyone’s life can show that this is not true. As a child, you assume that Santa Claus exists; you start thinking and come to understand that he does not exist; your behavior need not change, and yet the state of your being may be radically altered and the alteration will reveal itself in the changed joys of Christmas.

The assumption that thought is important only because it leads to successful action is dangerous because it ignores what thought itself achieves through its impact on being. It is not only that the process of thinking involves a change in being because it is inner, rather than outer, action, and it is not even the content or the conclusions of thought such as the conclusion that Santa Claus does not exist that involves the greatest impact on existence. No, rather what has the greatest effect is the kind of thought that is operating.

Thinking changes being; different kinds of thinking alter being differently. For example, objective or scientific thought, which treats the world as a thing to analyze and dissect, makes scientists themselves into things while they are thinking in this way, they become objects external to their objects. Similarly, of course, their objective knowledge treats other people as, and makes them into, objects. Suppose, on the other hand, that thought is subjective, emotional, and involved in fantasy; this kind of thought, in turn, makes the thinker into a subjective being, and the actions flowing from it makes others into subjects subjective thought generates poetry, drama, novels, movies, paintings, and, above all, music each of these creations and the mental attitude producing them stimulates subjectivity in others.

Suddenly, we have discovered that the dualism between thinking and doing has generated another dualism two kinds of thinking and two kinds of doing and all forms of them have an immediate and opposite impact on being. And here again we see operating the circulatory principle. One of the sides in the polarities leads inevitably into two further states subjective thought either withdraws and closes itself off from the objective world or the thinker reverses directions to objective thinking; objective thought either withdraws still more from subjective emotionalism or the thinker flips over into subjective thinking.

Countless books and articles have been written by or about objective scientists who had a deep and abiding love for the arts especially for music. Music and mathematics go together; music is supposed to be like mathematics. I suspect, however, that the real reason for the mathematician’s love of music is not that music is so similar to mathematics but is so different. Of course, it is an art form that the mathematician is most likely to understand with its measures, intervals, and progressions, but the pleasure taken in music is there because it is the opposite of mathematics it requires a subjective, emotional way of knowing rather than an objectiverational way.

In his popular book, Physics and Beyond, Werner Heisenberg describes how a point of despair in his scientific life was transformed into joy when he attended a concert and how, while publicly performing music himself during the period of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, a sense of joy came to him and in the midst of it, he met the woman he was to love and marry. Here is evidence of how one form of thought may lead mechanically to another form. Heisenberg was at the brink of an abyss and could turn from it by seeking refuge in a different kind of thought and performance. On the basis of many reports, we might judge the case of Einstein to be similar.

These circlings multiply on top of each other. Mathematics leads to music leads to mathematics leads to doing; doing leads to thinking leads to music. Each of us can construct a diagram of our existence based solely on an evermore complex series of circulating opposites. And then, if we investigated fully enough, we could find the generating source of these circulations some fundamental assumption about existence that, when it is pursued, leads to its abyss and produces the primary reaction of turning from the abyss. To scientists and scientific civilization, life is action or doing; action is the goal of everything including thought. But, while convinced of this, neither civilizations nor individuals can deeply accept it as they live and thus nations will find groups in rebellion against the life of “doing” or “action” and the individuals will seek secret or public rebellion in “leisure.”

Where does all this lead us? Nowhere. Human existence emerges as either (1) the fruitless attempt to select and cling to one basic reality and so actually to circulate between it and all the realities opposed to it or (2) the intolerable recognition that life is nothing but movement and cycles where there is no meaning only the movement itself. Surely, both are dismal propositions.

CHAPTER 2

MATTER AND SPIRIT

Looked at more closely, the interior of the physical sciences reveals any number contradictions where one side transforms itself into its opposite. Rumors regularly pass through the ranks of biologists and trickles down into the public press that researchers have made another advance toward, and are on the brink of, creating life by turning nonliving into living matter. Ordinary folk duly nod their heads impressed by this latest miracle of science, ignoring for the moment that the simplest living organisms perform that miracle constantly; it is the most common event on the face of the earth. Indeed, the humble lettuce leaf I crassly tear apart to compose my salad does it without calling a press conference complete with worldwide live television coverage.

Obviously, for the biologist the simple ability to create life in a test tube is not the important thing. More significant is that, if life can be created out of nonlife by means of the application of scientific theory, then the most basic secret of life has come into their possession: Whoever can perform this creative act cannot but understand the physical laws of life. Such a conclusion on the part of biologists, however, violates all experience. There are many things you can do without understanding the forces at work in the process; you sleep every night without understanding it; even sleepscientists who devote their lives to analyzing sleep are still in the dark. You can bake a cake following a recipe without any real understanding of the forces at work in the mixture; you can even create your own recipe for a new dessert without understanding how the ingredients interact. You can know that baking soda, flour, eggs, salt, sugar will generate a certain “effect”, but you need not understand why or how the effect occurs.

The biologists who “create” protein in a test tube out of “inorganic” amino acids and then proceed to generate a cell from them that can take nourishment and reproduce itself may indeed have duplicated the circumstances where nonliving matter is transformed into living, but they have not necessarily gained greater understanding. They are likely, moreover, to be inspired to create life for less “scientific,” less conscious, and more subjective reasons than they imagine: the creation of life from nonlife would confirm their power and reinforce their materialistreductionist orientation.

Existence again confronts scientists with a profound paradox. They spend their lives investigating the physical or material world. Looked at psychologically, they could be trying we might say to find their mother, their mater, their matter. Their lifelong quest indicates they existentially, if not consciously, believe matter to be the most important phenomenon. In fact, however, it is spirit rather than matter that they identify with. They think and they experience a passion for understanding the material world. Thought and feeling are nonmaterial even though they may be inseparable from a material expression. The living paradox involved in having a passionate faith in matter while identifying with a spiritual principle leads to a secret contradiction in the heart of the highestlevel scientist. To use some of the terms laid down earlier, for physical scientists the material world is Abyss to the spiritual world; the spiritual world is abyss to the material world. There is dualism, contradiction, and, finally, pain. Now, if one of these worlds could be reduced to the other, then no ultimate dualism or inner discomfort would exist. The discovery that life can be produced entirely from nonlife would “prove” that mother nature was not involved in a dual creation of spirit and matter or of life and nonlife but, instead, that there was but one initial act of creation and that was of matter perhaps in a big bang; then, given certain conditions, non living matter transformed itself into living. The paradox and contradiction could be resolved at least intellectually. The biologists would have found their mother.

We may confidently predict, however, that the paradox will not be solved. At best, the new transforming experiment and the subsequent theories on the origin of life and, therefore, of thinking and feeling organisms may put biologists minds to rest. They will not, however, have conquered the contradiction in existence by means of a new theory. A theory is mental, not living. We once more see the way that opposing sides in a living contradiction transform themselves into each other. The profound discomfort involved in the life/nonlife problem, which itself is only a surface expression of a deeper spirit/matter problem, leads to an attempt to prove that nonlife or matter is prior to life and spirit. Biologists enter into nonlife or matter to prove this, insist that they have discovered that matter is prior, but come to this conclusion only with their minds. Mental operations, which are part of their spiritual experience, are the basis of their conclusion that not mind but matter is preeminent. They have “escaped” the abyss of falling from mind into matter only by falling from matter into mind. The one side remains the abyss of the other perhaps no longer consciously but at least in their own hidden depths; “abyss” refers not to conscious mental judgment of contradiction but to an experiential condition. The anxiety that characterizes biologists’ defense of their materialist reductionist theory reveals the extent that the theory was accepted not because it was true but became true to them because they had to accept it to maintain themselves in being.

All scientists must be careful not to fall into this psychological trap. And all must realize that even honest science can be a way of masking the truth both from themselves and from the others they instruct. In the devoted scientist the flaws as well as the talents of the normal human being are exaggerated. Biologists who are honest with themselves will recognize that even if life can be produced from nonlife: (1) it does not mean that the material or nonliving is prior to the spiritual or living; in fact it may just as well be that life is an uncovering of nonlife, that nonlife is like a seed or a number of seeds planted so that the sprouting, budding, and blossoming of matter is spirit, of nonlife is life; life may well be seen as showing to consciousness the spirit that is locked in the depths of nonlife; (2) the distinction between life and nonlife is purely conventional and has very little to do with an actual distinction the distinction may reveal an epistemological problem (a problem in the way we know and define things) as opposed to an ontological problem (a problem in the way things are). The contradiction between life and nonlife or between spirit and matter may be only one of false definition stemming from our assumption that matter or things as we perceive them are real.

This discussion of biological science leads naturally to physics. In fact, conclusions being reached by several twentieth century physicists agree with our claim that the problem that biologists see may actually be selfgenerated by the way that they conceive of reality rather than by the way it is.

Heisenberg again is a prototype. He points out that from the time of Democritus physicists took as a primary assumption that everything is composed of elementary particles called atoms until the last century when they discovered that those “ultimate” atomic particles were composed of smaller and smaller “subatomic” particles. Almost simultaneously with the discovery of these particles, they concluded that some “physical” phenomena appeared to be both “matter” and “energy.” Light seemed to be both a wave and a particle or neither one. Heisenberg

concluded on the basis of his investigation of subatomic particles that they could not really be considered particles either, that the idea of particles depended on ordinary everyday perceptions of reality, such perception always was of masses of atoms, and the perception was created only to help orient ourselves to this gross world, not to understand it. (1972, Heisenberg) In other words, our impression that things exist does not prove that they do; instead, the impression exists only because it is useful to us in normal life. Impressions and perceptions serve the cause not of truth but of convenience. At the subatomic and subnuclear levels “matter” is inaccessible to our eyes; its existence is determined only by effects and described only by mathematics and mathematical probability at best.

Like most major scientists, however, Heisenberg seeks a “byss” or a net in the abyss that concepts of matter fall into. For most other scientists in a position similar to Heisenberg’s, the catching net in the abyss is energy. For them, it is the most fundamental reality; matter has become secondary merely organized energy. Matter, in other words, is fundamentally immaterial. Heisenberg appeared to go farther and to realize more deeply the implications of this conclusion for physics; the principle of immateriality constitutes the suicide of physics because it leads physics to pursue the study not of physical reality but of probability and other purely mental constructs. Most physicists, nevertheless, still call themselves “physicists” as if they continue to practice the science of their predecessors. Heisenberg suggests a partial way out for physicists; they should retain the study of matter “as if” it existed because the assumption that it does is, like Newtonian physics, useful up to a point, but that they surrender the belief that physics can describe what is really there.

Where does Heisenberg end up? He recognizes that physics both the form that continues “as if” matter existed and the form that involves itself with energy and probabilities is in an abyss. He, therefore, advocates a new fundamental assumption a net to catch physics from falling. It can only be found outside of physics. Neither matter nor energy is basic. What is basic for him, as far as I can tell, is spirit.

The dramatic reversal he and a few others have wrought in twentieth century physics has not yet hit home. He has clearly shown the way that physics faced one contradiction after another and resolved it by reducing the issues to their simpler and constituent parts. In a way, the great promise of the natural sciences, built up through the previous century, has been wiped away in a single blow the grand image was that psychology could be reduced to biology; biology to chemistry; and chemistry to physics. Psychological problems were said to be produced by frustrated biological urges; biological and especially sexual urges were said to be a matter of chemistry so that a great chemical industry could develop to produce drugs to alter consciousness of the state of the psyche; finally chemistry was said to be a matter of atomic weights, measures, and relationships. But at the pinnacle of physics’ greatest success, out of the depths a shadow fell: the ultimate contradiction between matter and energy, between waves and particles, can only be resolved by the abolition of the belief in the physical world as real and the affirmation of the reality of the spiritual world. The spirit that physics had battled for centuries becomes the royal religious standard borne aloft by the most eminent of physicists. At the same time a pretense is suggested that the intellectual life of physicists be split between pursuing much of physics “as if” while still knowing that the “as if” is a lie. The selfdeception is needed because the life energy will evaporate from a science that knows that its efforts are “just pretense” for the sake of “utility.”

But Heisenberg has revealed the issue to the physicists the real and underlying problem in physics has nothing to do with the contradictions found in the discipline but arises from what physics has tried to deny. He calls upon them to recognize the problem as residing on a higher, more directly human and personal level than the discipline. But then Heisenberg also finds a net to save him the net of spirit as the more fundamental reality: it is unlike “energy” because it is “outside” physics but it is like “energy” because it is another net in the abyss. Just as “energy” leads the physicist to matter and matter leads to energy so that he can choose one or the other as the most basic whenever it is “convenient,” so, too, spirit leads to physics, and physics leads to spirit so that the choice between them is ultimately arbitrary.

The net in the Abyss is an illusion, an intellectual construct but an existential lie. The Abyss still yawns before the physicist just as it does before the rest of us.

CHAPTER 3

IDEALISM AND REALISM

Among humans living today the experience of emotional vacillation is hardly exceptional. Life circulates from moments of passionate optimism into periods of deep pessimism. Life goes well in the morning but grows deadly by night. You watch a film or see a news report of an extraordinary act of kindness the plight of neighbors devastated by floods brings spontaneous help, hands reach out to support ethnic groups displaced by war, racial barriers are forgotten in the love of helpless little children these kinds of events can touch off a flow of unexpected optimism. Paradoxically, the very same events may touch off the deepest pessimism. The state of your feelings is independent of the nature of the conditions surrounding me.

Optimism can be enjoyable but so can pessimism. Ironically, you may actually delight in a pessimistic view of the world. Deep satisfaction can accompany your reading of darkly pessimistic novels of the future. You can find something vaguely comforting in Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, or Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor. Somehow they give your heart solace. These novels predicting worldwide catastrophe and something even slightly new emerging after the collapse can generate positive joy.

This personal experience finds its mirror image in the recent history of our civilization. The general optimism appearing in records of the past century was pervasive. Things might have been hard, but even those suffering severe hardship sounded optimistic: “If we work harder, things will get better; our lives are miserable, but our children will live better; better jobs, health, homes, lives are on the way.” But at the very moment in the twentieth century when the chance of attaining a better life for all became economically possible, the shadow engulfed the light. In the midst of dreams fulfilled came the nightmare of pessimism. Now the civilization darkens and broods.

The optimistic “Yes” to life becomes a pessimistic “No!” Things are getting better and better, and suddenly things are actually worse. Pessimism is the natural and invisible Abyss of optimism. Pessimism arises not because things are getting worse but because things are getting better as we hoped but as things get better, life gets worse. Optimism is the natural and inevitable Abyss of pessimism. Pessimism predicts the collapse of the world. When it paints the picture darker and darker while nothing dreadful actually happens, the optimism returns. It returns not while things are getting better but as they are still getting worse. When things are getting bad, the pessimist finds no alternative except suicide or optimism.

Clever political leaders know this instinctively. When national pessimism is growing, the cure they administer is not a dose of good cheer but one of deeper gloom. Hidden in the heart of the deepest pessimism is high optimism; hidden in the heart of high optimism is deep pessimism. This is why so much optimism appears desperate optimistic statements, activities, dancing, traveling become more compulsive. By optimistic activity, we seek to hide a heart burdened with pessimism. Similarly, pessimism becomes increasingly dark and insistent as we strive to quell the bubbly optimism within because we know it to be a lie.

Pessimism is an Abyss to optimism, but it is not the Absolute Abyss. In fact, pessimism is actually a Byss to optimism. It is the net that catches the person and preserves him from a fall into total darkness. This is why you can take so much pleasure in news and novels. Momentarily, they match your mood; it does not feel that things are going well though they appear to be; pessimism justifies your feelings and puts your mind to rest. Moreover, pessimism is your judgment against the world; things are going badly; you are doing well. And even if you become pessimistic about your chances for success in life, the pessimism is still a judgment passed by your depths against your surface. It means you still have something to cling to.

When things actually are going badly, your feelings rebel and refuse to accept it. To both feel and see badness would be intolerable; it would conquer and annihilate you. Consequently, you reverse yourself and begin to take an optimistic stance. The twin attitudes of optimism and pessimism allow you to walk a thinning tightrope over the Abyss. Pessimists claim to see things as they really are. That may be true, but pessimism does not see them the way they are because they are that way. Rather it sees them as it does out of an invisible motive, one not based on any objective evidence. In fact, it sees nothing wrong with what is going on. Everything is proceeding as it will. What rebels is the pessimist’s feeling. It tries to tear the mask off what is visible. The pessimist says the powerful few have always controlled, manipulated, and oppressed, and they always will. The talk is wholly negative and yet delivered with a gleam in the eye, because it is not objectively, but subjectively correct the negative observations themselves are pleasing.

Optimists claim to see things as they could be. Optimism does so, however, not because they could actually be that way, but because they are not that way now and are unlikely to be so in the future. Optimism expresses itself precisely because the reverse of optimism is the most likely future. Optimism uses emotional and subjective terms expressing positive feelings, but its objective negative assessment of the future prompts the optimism.

Optimists and pessimists prefer to call themselves and each other by more respectable titles. Pessimists often regard themselves and are regarded by others as “realists” exactly because they want and need to assure themselves that the facts, not their feelings justify their pessimism. “I am just being realistic.” “It’s about time you face the facts of life!” “Come one, live in the real world!” each of these illustrates how pessimism expresses itself to itself and to others. Others refuse to face the facts; pessimism faces them. Actually, pessimists deceive themselves whether or not the facts are as they suggest: in their insistence that the facts be accepted, they are acting not from them but for their feelings.

Optimists often prefer to be known as “idealists” and for the same reason. The term allows them to believe that they are taking an optimistic attitude not as an evasive reaction to the sad facts of life present and future but as an inner choice. They see themselves as rationally rejecting the present and emotionally affirming the future. They commit themselves to making the future better as they long for it to be. Actually, the exact reverse is true their rejection of the present is emotional and their attempt to figure out a future is rational and scientific. And this is why idealistoptimists can be so much more dangerous than realistpessimists: because of a massive selfdelusion where they think they have discovered positive values within themselves and are working toward them when in fact they have only emotionally rejected the past. When they merely reject the past but think they are positively affirming a better future, not only is an enormous energy released to work on the world but it is an energy that cannot admit error because to admit error is to realize not only that you have made a mistake but also that you were fighting not for the good but only against the present. The energy was not positive but negative, not joyful but fearful, not lifegiving but deathdealing. They fight in others and especially in realists not the enemy of their truth but their truth itself. They fight themselves. You are never more destructive than when you fight to save yourself from yourself.

Realists and idealists fight each other because they are each other. Each embodies the Abyss of the other. Each confronts the other and seeks by conquering the other to conquer the Abyss.

Most important, none need commit permanently to either side in the battle. Indeed, the very same people who are idealistic to their friends can be realistic to their families. Realistic powerdealers in the business community believe in utopian family life. Those who flip from side to side may be better off because of a longer and apparently more peaceful “life.” Whoever becomes either an idealist or a realist and seeks to preserve integrity in that attitude may be better off because they will come more quickly to the end of the rope in the midst of violent confrontation with their own Abyss in others.

Finally, the way that the one contradiction that preserves you from the Abyss leads into another, generated also for selfpreservation, should be visible in the utopianpessimistic division. As part of the struggle against falling into the Abyss, optimists invent idealism and pessimists invent realism. And each helps the other to the invention. Idealists use “realist” as an epithet against the realist; realists use “idealist” as an epithet against the idealist. Yet each can accept the title or, if not the title, at least the role the two have mutually designed out of their relationship. Your confrontation with life may make you momentarily pessimistic; in the midst of your pessimism you meet an optimist. The optimist asks you to explain your position and you offer objective facts of how bad everything is; the optimist argues with you and in the argument is forced to rely on emotional longing as a basis of contradicting your facts. You begin to think of yourself as a realist; you begin to act, at least in relation to this optimist and others who are similar, as realists and so protect yourself. They become more and more emotional in their arguments defending their optimism and gradually grows into their role of idealist they present the mask of idealism to themselves and others but particularly to those who show realism. Secretly, in family relations the true realism slips out from behind it.

We may now conclude that all the roles you take on, you adopt in this way. No one teaches you roles, but still you learn them. They do not come primarily from others but from the self. Others help in manufacturing them, but you choose to accept them to hide. The tangled web you weave when you practice this deception applies most to your deception when you try to deceive; the web of deception weaves ever more complex patterns from pessimism/optimism to idealism/realism and on upward and downward spinning, spinning.

CHAPTER 4

INNER AND OUTER

You find in the facts of life an abyss to yourself. You love others, care for them for, and then watch them die and disappear into the earth. Your love is ultimately tragic; it ends in the emptiness of death. Viktor Frankl, the wellknown psychologist of “logotherapy,” describes how he helped an elderly client achieve peace despite the death of his beloved wife and the terrible loneliness it entailed for him. (1963, Frankl, 178179) Frankl first asked the man whether he thought his wife would have been as lonely as he if he had died before her. The man admitted he thought she would. Then Frankl pointed out that if the husband really loved his wife, he would be glad that she had died before him since this spared her of the burden he had to carry. His suffering spared hers. The man left with a lighter heart. The pain of his loneliness remained but now it had meaning and so was bearable and even joyful.

The story’s charm fails to resolve the problem. Frankl merely makes loneliness a category of necessity a form of suffering that you must endure since you cannot overcome it. The best possible alternative even he can come up with for the bereaved is to help him find a means of bearing the suffering. Love may be the end of all death, but death is also the end of all love. You may mourn the loss of loved ones for the rest of you life or you may find happiness and the end of the pain of their deaths the moment you realize a new love. At that moment, love whispers once more “forever,” “immortality,” and “deathlessness” into your ear, and you listen.

Surely, the relationship between love and death is the most dramatic and poignant example of the common experience of gain and loss but other examples abound. On a more trivial level, you can find yourself excited over the prospect of a new car, cycle, home, stereo set, or whatever. The excitement lasts for two weeks after you have acquired the car. Then disillusion sets in. You could respond by buying seat covers, chrome accessories, and special lights and by planning trips and excursions with the car or you could get freshly excited about making another major purchase until the disillusion of its actual acquisition also sets in. After that, you face the same alternative as you did after the car had lost is magical sheen. Disappointment is the pit your excitement falls into; new excitement is the pit your disappointment falls into. The vicious selfconsuming cycle recurs.

Our two sets of senses are often at war with each other: those senses that are commonly considered the senses proper seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, and touching on the one hand, and those that are commonly called “feelings,” on the other. Both put your consciousness into contact with something in the world outside it. However, they operate as contradiction to each other. What you see contradicts what you feel. This contradiction is the basis of the idealist/realist poles in yourself and between yourself and others. Sensation dies in feeling; feelings die in sensation.

Your eyes tell you your beloved is dead. She lies there in her polished would, satinlined, jewel casket. You touch, you smell, you see. It is the touch, the scent, the vision of death. You incredulous. How is this possible your love was immortal how can by beloved be mortal? What ungodly power has taken her from me? Where is she? The source of your love is gone, but the love lingers on. She is not dead; she is “just away” says one of the sympathy cards you receive. Her soul is immortal and will rise on resurrection day says the minister. But, no. She is dead, dead, dead.

When the fact penetrates to your feelings, bitterness, resentment, and even anger stir. Yet, as the fact of her death sinks in so also does the fact of your life. You are drawn back into life, activity, occupation. You get busy. Friends make a point of not leaving you alone, at least not during the first two weeks after the funeral. Listlessness becomes busy to forget. And in its midst, a new love may arise so you finally begin to let yourself feel again. But maybe this does not happen for a long while. The facts of death have instructed you to be wary of love. Whether your beloved actually died, divorced you, or just left, ultimately makes no difference. The facts of life involve all of these possibilities and are the valley of despair your love has lead you into. You can try to live by your senses and no longer by my feelings you will love but never be “in” love again. But finally you deceive yourself, the facts of life fall away, and you enter back into your feelings.

Both kinds of senses visible, or “seeing,” and invisible, or feeling tell you something about life and yourself. But, again, you separate them so you may exist more comfortably. When your beloved dies, the abyss opens before you. The abyss is your own emptiness. But you see death as alien, as what is not you, as giving you nothing, as only taking what you have and what you are. It is the abyss that induces you to stop identifying yourself with the feeling of love. Giving up your feelings and trying to live a hollow life without them opens another abyss that leads you back to feelings. Again you circulate between the poles to keep from falling. You alternate living from feelings one moment and from senses the next.

If you are at all selfconscious, you will notice the circulation. You will know that you am living nothing but fragments of your life and never living fully from your whole being at any given time. To protect yourself from such a realization, you cooperate with you to construct a divided reality. We call it “inner” and “outer.” There is a world “outside” us and on “inside ” us. It is not that we are masses of confused contradiction; rather it is the world that stands opposed to us. Sometimes the outer reality makes demands upon us work, taxes, other people but at other times it releases us from necessity to freedom when we can indulge what we are without interference. It is through our visible senses that we see the outer world; it is through our feelings that we see the inner world ourselves. Death becomes a category of the outer world visible to the senses; love, a category of the inner world visible to our emotions. Love is us; death is other.

The famous French existentialist, Sartre, claims “Hell is other people.”(see his play, “No Exit”) That makes it sound as if, like death, hell creeps into our lives from the outside, from others. In truth, however, neither death nor hell are other. It is our own inner division separating self from the world, inner from outer, that constitutes people as “other.” We make other people other by the act of separating our senses from our feelings or, more specifically, the content of our feelings from the content of our senses and pretending that the senses give us knowledge only of the object, the outside, while feelings give us knowledge only of the subject, the inside. When we see people with our eyes, we then conclude that they are “other” than ourselves, but their presence will have an immediate impact on our emotions. We fear the impact or we enjoy it, but it comes to us from them, from the outside, from what we have constructed out of our senses. We reject them or love them. As long as they remain other, they are our death and our hell.

The important point to realize here in the overall sweep of the argument is that, again, a confrontation with the abyss produces a circulation between two sides, feeling and sensing; that this, in turn, leads to the creation of two polar worlds, inner and outer. Between them we also vacillate to avoid facing the abyss. Finally and most significantly, we arrive at another intricacy in the selfdeception. As a defense against facing the abyss involved in our two forms of knowledge, we set up a dualism on an entirely different level on the level of being. Inner and outer, obviously created by separating the senses and feelings (which are both ways of knowing), we take as if they are real, as if they are places in being rather than modes of perception. What is real to us we obviously establish by our capacities to know, but fear of the abyss perverts our capacities to know. Therefore, they reflect not “what is” and what we can know but “what is not” and yet what we would like to believe.

CHAPTER 5

PLEASURE AND PAIN

Whenever you recover from illness, you have access to a deep secret. You probably do not pay much attention to it, but, however mild the disease, recovery has an interesting impact on you. In even the most common illnesses slight respiratory infections, “colds,” flu, for example there comes a moment in the progress of the disease when you know you are getting well, or you realize that, despite lingering symptoms, you are well. This does not mean that the pain is gone, and often the knowledge appears to have little to do with your actual condition. No, instead what makes you feel you are moving toward recovery is that suddenly the world is fresh again, interesting, pleasurable. The disease attacked not only your body but also your very perceptions. It afflicted the spirit. It made you stop caring about the world and was an occasion for selfabsorption. Books, the best of television programs, flowers nothing felt important or even interesting. But then you begin to take pleasure in the world and, significantly, even more pleasure than before you got sick.

The cycle of pleasure to pain and back is apparent in many places besides disease. Every pleasure turns into its opposite. It first becomes empty and then leads to pain, although the pain often comes on a level different from the pleasure. Sexual pleasure indulged in repeatedly becomes less and less pleasurable. Sexual activities either cease temporarily at least because of your diminished interest in them or else they become more anxious and compulsive you seek different postures, new partners, novel sensations. Physical pleasure leads to “tristesse,” sadness or emotional pain. To avoid that depression, you may move still more deeply into physical sexuality. Pain is obviously the negation or abyss of pleasure, but pleasure is also the negation or abyss of pain. You pursue pleasures to keep pain away, but the more pleasure, the more pain expands before you. For long our civilization has been pleasureoriented. I do not mean pleasure in the crude hedonistic sense alone. Rather I mean pleasure as the subtle principle it has become particularly in its function as the foundation of modern thought. At least from the time of the philosopher Bentham, we have tended to see the human creature as falling under the principles of pleasure and pain: “Pleasure and Pain are the only springs of action in man and always will be.”(C. A. Halveston, De l’homme, X, 173) The entire effort of industrialized society is to make life more pleasant, and, to manipulate public motivation, industrial society appeals to pleasure under the accepted notion that it will persuade everyone: work and you can get radios, television sets, skis, travel; do not work and you will suffer deprivation.

The pleasure principle attracted “philosophers” partly because they thought that society and science could calculate and quantify it. The liberal “science” of market economics has long claimed that individuals know best what gives them more or less pleasure and will make market choices based on their knowledge and that, therefore, where people are free from controls over purchase and production exercised by church or state, there public pleasure will be maximized. Pleasure appears also as a bridge between intangible human values and the empirical sciences. Pleasure and pain are something humans share with all animal life. Therefore, students of the science of the human psyche such as Freud wanted to reduce all positive human motivation to the principle of pleasure. Once that could be achieved, then all nonscientific “metaphysical nonsense” about the nature of the human being and human motivation could be dropped and replaced by the controlled physical and empirical analysis of science.

Finally, the physical pleasure principle was adopted as an ideological weapon in the war against control over human society and for liberty and democracy. Both economic liberalism (Capitalism) and political liberalism (democracy) are justified as long as pleasure is the primary value of all human life since no one can know better what gives pleasure than the individual who experiences it. Kings, generals, tyrants of all sorts are most likely to make decisions reflecting what is most pleasurable to themselves and not to those they rule.

The pleasure principle has been backfiring painfully for several decades now. Ironically, Freud himself sounded the retreat from pleasure. The very psychologist who made the principle preeminent in psychoanalysis abandoned it first. It is a measure of Freud’s greatness that he did not fail to retreat from a major theory when experiential evidence contradicted it. He therefore describes two things in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: first, there is a kind of pain (in Freud’s terms “a tension”) that is enjoyable in and of itself such as the play and tension in sex that sometimes gets us to delay the pleasure of orgasm; but second, and more important, all organisms seek their end, their death, and the state of relaxation that comes after pleasure. Moreover, Freud illustrated that human beings seek pleasure in compulsive and nonpleasurable ways: society must forbid certain pleasures and, therefore, what it allows the person to imagine gives pleasure may actually not it constitutes an unauthentic substitute. If this is true, then the whole foundation of Capitalism and liberal democracy, of individual liberty based on the rational choice of the most pleasurable, must crumble.

Significantly, in both the economic and political realms, the pleasure principle has led to its own contradiction. The ideologies of Capitalism and liberal democracy have generated an imperialism where peoples fight and destroyed others to preserve and extend the “blessings” of liberal democracy and Capitalism to them so they would gain the liberty to choose from their own knowledge of pleasure. It has become possible to conceive of fighting and destroying others to make them “free” by basing notions of freedom on the right of the individual to determine what is pleasurable.

In philosophy, psychology, and economics the same cycle reasserts itself. From pleasure to pain: pursued to its experiential conclusion by Freud, pleasure led to a psychological theory of pain; pursued to its practical conclusion in politics and economics, the pleasure calculus led to war, revolution, and massacres, to hunger, deprivation, and starvation in the name of individual liberty to pursue the “happiness” defined as pleasure.

What makes sense to the philosopher, politician, economist, and psychologist makes nonsense to common sense. The sensibility of the poets, by contrast, constantly casts better light on the pleasure cycle. “Sweet is pleasure after pain” repeats John Dryden in his epic poem on Alexander the Great; (“Alexander’s Feast or the Power of Music”) the pleasures of the feast are so sweet because the pain of battle has ended. The sensibility of Benjamin Franklin’s famous “Poor Richard” has also been forgotten: “Pain wastes the body; pleasure the understanding.” We forgot the dialectical relationship between pleasure and pain in adopting form of thought that sought to oversimplify reality by reducing it to the crudest animal principle. That all animal life can be explained by pleasure is a patent absurdity.

Not only pleasure but also pain is a positive value. It is the automatic and spontaneous sign that something is wrong with life. “Suffering casts a light upon life.” Pain is not only unpleasant but a judgment upon the pleasures we identify with. When Franklin says pleasure wastes the understanding, we are not to believe that pain is a good thing but that pain is nothing, it is a negation, a naysaying to what we have been seeking. What motivates the constant pursuit of pleasure is not the pleasure and not the disappearance of pleasure but the pain. The “pleasure” arises and appears good only because we have succeeded in desensitizing ourselves to the pain.

Franklin also implies that the two principles we regularly create out of our attempts to avoid being conscious of our pain are really both ourselves. Flesh and understanding. The body rightfully rejects pain, but the mind requires it. Pain casts light upon life; it enlightens us and makes it possible for us to choose. The mind invades our complacent hedonism and judges pleasures to be bad. Thus, the mind becomes an abyss to our pleasure and so we want to deny the mind along with the pain. Therefore, we reject our minds and their judgment against our pleasures claiming that “society” has seduced or indoctrinated them against our true selves. The sophisticated among us even quote Freud’s catch phrase “where there is Id, there shall be Ego” to find a justification for rejecting the Ego’s “false condemnation of our pleasures” and getting back to “spontaneity.” The problem, of course, is that these desires are no longer spontaneous but created out of our alienation. We reject the mind, and the agency that performs the rejection is the mind; yet we fail to perceive the contradiction because, in hiding from our pain, we have undermined our understanding.

Again, the everspiralling cycle reasserts itself: from the contradiction between pleasure and pain, to the contradiction between mind and body. Always we do this to reduce the dualism to a monism to make one principle where there are two because the two are an abyss, an abyss to each other, and we reject the abysmal experience of negation.

Using the pleasure/pain terminology rather than escalating the dualism to mind and body and beyond, Plato in The Republic suggests the existence of three states with regard to pleasure: (1) pain, (2) pleasure, and (3) the ending of pain. (1968, Plato, 265266) The person who refuses to face the pain that is an abyss to pleasure gets caught in a cycle of moving from pain to the ending of pain while never experiencing positive pleasure. Once in a golden age, in Eden, at our mother’s breast we may have experienced pleasure but, rather than face the loss of paradise and turning our faces from that fact, we seek what we come to call pleasure. This “pleasure” is, however, nothing more than the contrary attempt to avoid pain. The only hope, is, of course, that the pain is always there threatening us since only if it is can it be a goad to escaping it. With his threefold division, Plato strikes a dramatic blow at all theories of the “Golden Mean” between the extremes. Plato shows that the best conduct is the extreme of pleasure, that the “mean” between pleasure and pain is deadly. But, again, if we choose the middle ground out of fear of pain, that pain must always be present. Unlike Plato, later authors tried to build models of utopia on the basis of this middle ground falsely called “pleasure.” Recent utopian models illustrate the horror created by the “liberal” notions of pleasure. Their pleasure principle undermined the very liberty they appealed to.

What is most dramatically illustrated in this utopia is the dialectic of existence, and how we may already be enclosed in a trap running from one side of the contradiction to the other in a circle, thinking we are getting somewhere using our minds to achieve “pleasure” and overcome pain but in reality only running from pain and never finding pleasure.

CHAPTER 6

FREEDOM AND SLAVERY

For more than three hundred years a rising tide of hope has brought the promise of liberty to the farthest reaches of the earth. The human being could be released from the degrading drudgery of surviving in an alien and hostile environment through the machine. Because servitude to the soil could end in this way, the need for one brutal and powerful group to use another to enable itself to live above the animal level also could end. Material liberation and social liberation are at hand Capitalists and Communists alike told us. The older Liberalism had preached noninterference by government in the economic life of individuals as a means of conquering the earth, but we found in practice that liberation from the state meant that our masters were only changed. It meant not only that smaller groups such as corporations became our new masters but also that greater and not smaller numbers of us fell into servitude. Marxistsliberals later argued that liberation had to be not only from the aristocratic/agrarian state but also from the market economy that held us in thrall to the powerful groups in the marketplace and ultimately from all classes

whether they be noble, commercial, or industrial. At the same time, however, liberal Marxism produced allegedly as only a temporary phenomenon and as a stepping stone to ultimate class liberation a massive subservience to the state and the rise of a new dominant class sometimes called “bureaucratic” and other times called “managerial,” whose interest was vested not in wealth but in power. The new class did not use social power to achieve individual wealth; it used its management of social wealth to achieve individual power.

Everyone already knows that politics, political movements, economic and political liberalism all now stand for nothing but control. It no longer even occurs to us that politics and economics could even potentially be a realm of freedom. At best, we consider them only a means to it. We see freedom now existing, if at all, only on an individual basis. Society and the state are not your liberation but only theaters where you might enact your freedom. We talk of political freedom less and less and sexual freedom more and more.

The movement to “liberate” the sexes may be a good example of how the illusion that by reducing social control in the name of more individual “freedom” we end up with less: it alltoooften smells of an imperialist attempt to dictate new roles to the sexes. Men and women have been enslaved runs the argument: “Society and the state have never been a means of sexual liberation but always of sexual repression and have usually been the way one sex oppresses the other; the sexual roles that established powers have foisted upon us must be overthrown since it is by these roles that they set up their mastery over us.” The movement for liberation is (1) against “society” and (2) against “roles.” Women are told to seek liberation from the “wife and mother” role only to find themselves in a new servitude on the job to the system of production and to its managers. Men are told to seek liberation from the strong, silent, macho role but find themselves increasingly confused and enslaved to the fashion industry’s sales of cosmetics and clothing, to a hairstylist, gels, fashion coordinates, perfume, and jewelry.

Freedom ends in slavery; slavery ends in freedom another vicious circle in the cycle of life. We move from freedom to slavery and back not because this is an inevitable and eternal pattern but because it is not really slavery we fought against even though we hate our enslavement as much as it is consciousness of the abyss. Your life as a wife and mother need not be enslaving; this much is clear and would be commonly accepted. Why, then, do you find no way of living free in it so you cannot but experience it as enslaving? Because others force you to live up to their expectations? But you may refuse to do so, and, besides, others expectations are often not less but greater outside the home than inside it. Is it because you have no alternative to motherhood? Of course, there have always been alternatives though many of them were decidedly unpleasant.

Surely, there is much undeniable evidence that all but the most determined women in the past have been discouraged from leaving the kitchen and all but the most determined men have been discouraged from entering it. Men have also been discouraged from entering nursing and secretarial positions. Discrimination against women, because its realm was public and in the external world, has clearly been much more open, blatant, and structural while that against men has been more invisible, emotional, and psychological. Whether one kind of pressure is worse than the other is not the important point here. More significantly, once we have admitted the existence of discrimination and “inequality,” then we must still ask ourselves whether it is the discrimination that afflicts us or something else. When I try to be as honest with myself as I can, I must admit that the deeper motive behind my acting against role control over me is not so much the fact of control as the abysmal emptiness of the way I have lived my role life.

Like other failures, the failure of selfconsciousness is easier to see in others. Men can see in women who rebel against a conventional role not so much an action against control as against the emptiness of their lives a failure or inability to participate in the role in a way that has any chance of being meaningful. Rolefrustrated women may even discredit the very idea of men “liberating” themselves from the tyranny of job believing that men “have it made,” are independent, can move from job to job if they wish, and have no cause for complaint. Rolefrustrated men respond that it is women living at home who “have it made” no timeclock, independence from the imposed schedule of a corporate job, and no reason for complaint. Students complain that universities control them by grades. Faculty see themselves not fulfilled in their roles and so feel empty. Faculty complain that they re controlled by administrators and students. Administrators complain that they are controlled by students, faculty, and the public. All want liberation, but their movement for is motivated less by servitude than by the empty abyss of the way they have been living their lives.

Once you achieve liberation, once children break from their parents, once the French overthrow their king, once the Russians squeeze out their Czar, then servitude returns in a new form. Children conform to their peers, the French bring back he old king though they call him “President,” the Russians get a new Czar. The lyrics change but the melody remains the same. All because the child, the French, and the Russians were fighting not to escape servitude but to avoid facing the void. The desire to hide from the dark face of the abyss transforms itself into the personal problem of dealing with the frustrations of role; the personal role problem becomes a large or small social revolutionary movement whose success only leads to a new abyss, to new control, to new suffering.

Societies originated as instruments of human liberation. It is only in cooperation with others that we can free ourselves to live a human existence in our natural environment. Societies liberated human beings by allowing them to specialize their functions so that each of us could more effectively produce for the benefit of ourselves and others; through roles, societies liberated us both from economic and from emotional need no longer did you constantly have to protect your beloved from the attacks and enticements of others; through marriage, the group helped and supported you in the endeavor of delving farther and more deeply into the meaning of a love relationship. Society was meant to liberate you not from facing the abyss but from the distractions you use to keep it away. Marriage and roles allowed you to go beyond crudely sensual relations exactly so that the abyss involved in them could become visible and confrontable.

Ultimately, it is individuals rather than “society” or “the state” who distort roles so they can use them to hide themselves from the abyss. They choose roles as safe hiding places. That is what makes roles so fundamentally oppressive and what guarantees that the flight from one imprisoning role will only be a flight to another. This is so even though where the majority in the society are hiding from the abyss they use its power to prevent anyone else from escaping from role and facing it lest by witnessing that genuine liberation in others they be exposed to it themselves. In short, society is not the ultimate cause but only the occasion for oppression. The “social liberation” that occurs by changing structures can do little to overcome the oppression. Moreover, if the movement is radical and extreme, it cannot but wipe away the precondition for genuine liberation along with the occasion for servitude since, again, the group called society is a necessary means to liberation. When it is undermined, human beings will do nothing faster than reconstruct another, and the next is nearly always worse since it is built even less out of a knowledge of true freedom and more out of the absolute panic of losing a hiding place from the abyss.

No matter what happens, social power, the influence others have over us by virtue of their judgments of us will never disappear. It exists by virtue of our humanity and by virtue of our recognizing each other as human like ourselves. However much you try to break the control your parents have over you and succeed, you are likely to be successful only with the support of a gang of peers who equally or even more, though less consciously, control you. Whatever others expect of you, the fact of your knowing they expect it will always exercise power on you. It is well that you recognize this power, of course, since only then can you selfconsciously choose to act either in cooperation with it or against it. The power itself will always be there to be consciously or unconsciously experienced.

The dialectic of freedom and slavery going back and forth from one to the other both in the individual and society and constantly, in the force that drives the rotation, revealing your fear of the abyss, transforms itself for our “protection” into a new polarization: self and others. It is society (others) that controls you, but, of course, you know also that society can never give or take away your freedom. Only you can give and take it from yourself, and you take it from yourself when you draw back from the abyss so that you hide from it in cowardly fear of the emptiness of your existence by losing yourself in a role that only society can grant you and from the loneliness that their abandonment threatens you with; you also draw back from the abyss by the opposite strategy when you act in reckless abandon of a role and reject those others who seek to enforce it upon you by blaming the emptiness you can no longer avoid on them and it.

CHAPTER 7

LOVE AND SADISM

Surely not one of the least important paradoxes in life is the close relationship between love and sadism. From every age come histories and rumors of grotesque brutality, much of it incredible to most of us and yet also compelling and fascinating. I do not refer only to the connection between sex and sadism in a personality such as the Marquis de Sade himself but also and more significantly to the complex tortures of inquisitorial religion, the brutality of soldiers in war, the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi concentration camp, the actions of secret police they scream to us from a past we are tempted to forget at our own peril since it could become our finest teacher. In fact, we are less in danger of forgetting these than of turning them into titillations; so many people are so fascinated by the sadistic that we are in little danger of losing the stories themselves. There is great danger, however, that we will lose sight of their significance.

We alltooeasily ascribe sadism to evil people without taking the time to look more carefully at sadistic behavior and see that most of even the most monstrous of sadists were often kind and even gentle creatures. Anyone with an open mind has to be struck by statements of surprise coming from acquaintances of sensualists, mass murderers, rapists, assassins: “He was the last person you’d suspect of such abominations.” We like to imagine that these acquaintances must be incredibly naive not to have seen the monster behind the mask. Similarly, we fail to consider our own motive in either anxiously avoiding or compulsively reading, seeing, and hearing as much as we can of the life and death of the monsters and their victims.

At its root, sadism is enjoyment in the pain and destruction of others. It is sadistic to enjoy watching someone’s home getting bombed as it is sadistic to enjoy their bodies being beaten. I recently saw bulldozer razing a small, sturdy, stillliveable home. The maws of the jaw opened and chewed a whole room at a time. Within ten minutes the house was nothing but a pile of rubble, but the machine chewed on, until the pieces of splintered wood were small enough to be shoveled into a waiting truck. In my mind I found the destruction sad, but at a very deep, low level watching it interested and at least slightly excited me. After all, I did not have to stand there until the job was finished nor was I required to move around to get a better view, but I did. At some level, I enjoyed the destruction. It was not even a matter of fantasizing about the bulldozer but an enjoyment of the brutal power immediately expressed. My enjoyment is symptomatic of a basic kind of sadism.

Our very gentleness and love are often signs of the way that we ourselves are brutalized. We learned that the medieval god was a god of power, might, and, of course, love. The love could not conceal the brutality. We had to love God and all the terrible things God allowed to happen we had to accept. The slightest resistance was sinful. On another level, the bureaucrat whether religious or secular today and throughout all history rarely tortures us in visible ways but always enjoys the exercise of power in the fact of control over us and frustration in us. Bureaucrats can be sadistic in their very mildness; they can go home to enjoy a sadistic police story on television but also to be kindly and loving to family and friends.

Sadism leads to love and love to sadism. Sadists end in love for the object of their destructive power. Soldiers enjoying the destruction of an enemy village of innocent people can rush in to the aid of the injured at great personal risk and then work to rebuild the homes; bureaucrats who have just victimized clients may reach to console or comfort; the inquisitorial church elders who burn the witch at the stake after having just disjointed her bones on the rack, can express genuine concern for the victim and, after the victim dies, hurry to canonize her. Similarly, the most mild, most loving people can become the most sadistic. German guards at the concentration camps went home to fireside and family, full of romantic gentleness, laughed and played with small children outside the prison gate, then proceeded inside to bash little babies’ heads against stone walls as an inexpensive and interesting way to kill them.

We make others the victims of our sadism because we experience being the victims of the sadism of others. But the sadism that victimizes us may be less visible so, unable to fight it directly, we become more and are visibly sadistic toward others who are innocent like ourselves. We cannot fight our victimizers because their sadism is masked as love and concern for us it even wears the mask of God. The mask they wear is what they see when they commit their crimes of violence against us and what we see as we are their victims. We could not rebel against a sadistic church in the medieval period because the churchman was good God’s representative in our eyes. Using Freud’s terms, we find ourselves helpless to rebel against a sadistic father or mother. This is so first, because the torture is not always visible and, second, because to us they are “good.” We find ourselves placed in an impossible position. Unable to stop ourselves from being victims, we turn on other innocents with more brutality than even we had received. The bureaucrat victimized by a superior in the organization cannot strike back at the victimizer and so turns instead upon inferiors.

We must, if sadism is to be overcome, recognize that we are the victims of the sadism of others by virtue of our own choice. Thus, bureaucrats who deeply, though unconsciously, feel victimized by the organization would not succeed in ending their own victimization even were they to retaliate against that organization by acts of sabotage because the ground of their being victims is their own adherence to organized life. As those victimized by a medieval priest fail to liberate themselves by eliminating him as long as they believe the church organization is good or is of God, so, too, bureaucrats cannot liberate themselves as long as they allow themselves to depend on the god of the organization. In short, bureaucrats remain victims as long as they refuse to face the abyss. What is the abyss for them? The loss of their jobs, functions, “importance.” The sadistic venom they take in, they then pour out into others; others transfer it until it rebounds back to victimize the organization’s leaders who in turn pass it down to the bureaucrat distilled and more potent with each victim it has passed through and so creating an every rising crescendo of pain.

Thus, from the same sadistic motive comes contradictory behavior that is sometimes “loving” and sometimes “torture” but whatever form the motive takes, it leads to sadistic results. What most call love is as sadistic as hate. Their love can be as destructive and venomous as their hate and even more so because it appears good. The sadistic god beats you until you repent and then loves you until you can do not other than sin so he can beat you again and you can repent again. Married couples fight so they can make up and make up so they can fight their fighting is not playful but sadistic. Sometimes films show this in an unforgettable fashion “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” “The Last Tango in Paris,” and “Scenes from a Marriage,” bear witness to the cycle of love coming only out of sadistic degradation by one person against the other and sadistic love producing the drive to sadistic degradation. Like all art forms, films can show the problem, but they cannot show the solution. They can show behavior and they can talk of change, but your simple viewing the work of art cannot be of much help in coming to understand the invisible abyss that sadistic love in marriage often leads to or the way that the torment continues because of unwillingness to face the abyss. Either you cling to the sadistic love as the best thing in your life and continue to do damage to yourself and others or you recognize the consequent pain that seems to be coming from your partner so you attack brutally and visibly. The fight begins. You can make up without realizing the damage you are doing.

The cycle goes round and round: invisible at first to victim and victimizer, brutality then transforms its invisible depths to the surface, shifting from one dimension of contradiction to another, and finally, going from the surface back to the depths. There is always the chance that you will learn from this, but only if you realize that at the core is your refusal to open yourself to the abyss to the emptiness of what you regard as the best thing in your life, the thing you identify with the most, your sadistic love.

CHAPTER 8

MALE AND FEMALE

Despair is never far from an age that dares to ask ultimate questions while unequipped to find ultimate answers. Such an age questions the why of things without have the conceptual tools to develop, let alone express, an answer. Why are there men and women? What is the place of men? of women? in the scheme of things? Neither of the sexes has been free from suffering from its sexual status. Women may long have been the socially oppressed, but may not understand that this is partly because of the sexual insecurity and often the sexual terror of men, an insecurity that is only worse because it can be neither admitted or expressed. Men experience women as the sexually more secure not more secure in themselves but in the natural need for them to live if the human race is to continue. Women can in principle do everything men can do and bear children as well. Moreover, at least for reproductive purposes the existence of so large a population of men whose primary sexual function is to fertilize the ova is superfluous.

Biological, physiological, and sociopsychological disputes have raged for centuries over the comparative advantage of masculinity or femininity. One side argues that women are biologically superior because of their need in birthgiving, but the other side rejoins that evidence points to the essential place of a multitude of men in giving variety to evolution and care to the offspring. One side claims that women are physiologically superior they live longer, stand up to pain and even their own bloodshed better than men, while the other side answers that their strength, bone structure, and agility shows the physiological superiority of men. One side insists that women are the psychic heart of any society, and the other side claims that men are the organizing head. Both sides of these arguments have been vehemently supported by appeals to the facts and as vehemently the other side has cited facts to disprove the first and denounce it as blatant prejudice. Such is a summary of some major “scientific” positions on the place of the sexes.

The argument even spills over into the nature of original society to dispute whether it was matriarchy or patriarchy. Much anthropological evidence as well as ontogenic evidence today evidence found in upon the early development of concrete individual beings today suggests that matriarchy did precede patriarchy. Even the “original” gods seem to have been female and were only later overthrown by the male society and replaced by the male gods. Drawn from ontogeny, some psychology has viewed human history as the history of three possible types of social organization that succeeded each other: from (1) matriarchy to (2) patriarchy and from patriarchy to (3) democracy. From the rule by the mother principle over all, to the rule of the father, to the rule of brothers and sisters over each other. The life of the person may be seen as a sum of the life the race controlled by mother, contradicted by father, then, finally, selfcontrol and mutual selfcontrol. Three possible psychological principles, our biological inheritance, are said to be the social alternatives we perennially face. The fathers rebelled against maternal authority and established paternal authority; the brothers and sisters rebel against the father and set up fraternal/sisterly authority. “Fraternity” has been the battle cry in revolution for centuries.

We have found there cannot be freedom where there is inequality, but the central paradox of our era is whether there can be equality where there is no freedom. The evidence points increasingly to a positive answer.

The problem with maternal and paternal authority is the same everywhere and is the same on every level it is that both forms of authority stem form a relationship of dependence and must disappear when dependence is no longer necessary. Mother and father must release their hold on children and to mature children must strive to achieve that release or else adult tyranny ensues. In a state or a nation, similarly, paternal authority exists not for the benefit of the leader for the benefit of those who are still weak and dependent and must cease when they can be independent. But like in the family, when children demand the continuation of care long after they are independent biologically and psychologically or, worse, when parents seek to perpetuate their authority because they exercised that authority not for the benefit of the child but for themselves, then tyranny emerges.

The ideal, only occasionally neared it is true, during the earlier history of civilization was that the king and nobility ruled for the benefit of their “children.” Adults in relation to the whole society were equivalent within to children within a family. The king must not rule for his own wealth or selfglorification but God gave him power for the benefit of those he ruled. Noblesse obliges. History testifies to how easily and often royalty was tempted to believe that the position it held was by right and because of some quality in the royal person. The king was to rule by divine commission, but the divine commission meant responsibility to God and not a grant of arbitrary power from God. The divine commission or, in Chinese terms, the “mandate of Heaven” could be withdrawn by the church, by the public, or by failure in service.

Like human parents, the divinely commissioned rulers often and increasingly acted as beneficiaries rather than servants of their roles. Moreover, when state religions crumbled, kings identified their personality no longer with God but with the state and power. The king who had ruled by divine commission became divine without in recent times of course taking on the form of godhead, only its function. As long as things went well, the people could even be pleased with their godly king and find it comforting that he was taking care of them they were children remaining children. When conditions deteriorated, revolutions arose and kings fell.

The story repeated itself. Gods fell, kings fell, but mostly only names fell. When the “public” and the “voter” were proclaimed the new god that appointed rulers, the new kings were called “prime ministers” or “presidents,” and they ruled by the divine right conferred on them by the voters. They were the servant of the voters and responsible to them. Then again more selfcentered presidents were commissioned and increasingly wanted the commission not to serve the public but so the public should serve them. When the role became one of power and right rather than responsibility, the powerhungry, not the responsible, fought for office. Everything was fine as long as conditions remained prosperous, but when problems arose, the new “kings” were figuratively beheaded as of old but through elections that immediately replaced the old ones with new ones who ruled as badly as their predecessors.

We must understand there is a fourth alternative to the paternal, maternal, and fraternal/sisterly authority forms. It is an alternative having less to do with form itself than with motive. Beneath any paternal, maternal, fraternal/sisterly form may rest a power motive. The mother not motivated by the wellbeing of her children but by the desire to fulfill her own emptiness becomes a tyrant; the father not motivated by the wellbeing of his children or his society is tyrannical; the brothers and sisters not motivated by fraternal or sisterly concern but by power construct the worst despot ism possible. The wheel goes round and round from maternal, to paternal, to fraternal/sisterly forms sometimes nations even try to contain two or three of these in the “mixed” form of democracy combined with aristocracy or monarchy but the reality remains the same because the basic nature of the rule remains the same. We see particularly in our generation the polar opposites of paternal and fraternal/sisterly authority struggling the revolutionary brothers and sisters against the firm father. But hidden beneath that contradiction is the deeper one between conscious form and unconscious motive. The father and the brothers/sisters think they struggle over form democracy or monarchy when in fact they fight only because they seek neither. Each actually seeks power.

We may cast further light upon the problem by returning to the more personal issue of the place of men and women. The paternal and maternal forms of authority were not particularly sexual-they had less to do with being male or female and more to do with representing parenthood so they forced the bearer of authority to reflect upon responsibility to those entrusted to their charge. Fraternity/sisterhood means equality, however, and before two can be equal, they must be separated. The principles stemming from the function of mother and father arise not from separation but from, connection. The mother rules because she has established a relationship to and identifies herself with the child. Like mother, like father; and like father, like true brothers and sisters. When each exercises influence over the others because of concern for the others, there is unity, and control by one over another ends when it is no longer needed or healthy. The mother identifies most strongly with her child; she loves her child as herself but her very love is a motive to allow the child ultimate independence her very connection is an occasion for her children to realize themselves as herself as they break away. The same goes for the father. But “mothers” who are not really mothers, “fathers” who are not really fathers, and “brothers” and “sisters” who are not really brothers and sisters take and use these forms of psychological authority in an alien way.

Without a principle beyond his personality love for the other as for self, let us say the parental father is tyrannical. Similarly, without a principle beyond personality a higher standard you might call “God” the leader centers authority in the self. Finally, brothers and sisters cannot be brothers and sisters without a higher principle defining them and binding them as a human “family.” They need not get a hold of such a principle as much as they have to experience it as getting hold of them.

Modern equality or fraternity/sisterhood fails because it wants to abolish all parent visible and invisible alike. It has often made equality into an absolute principle. Eventually, this absolute equality even invades the family so father and mother and children are all equal. They have “equal rights” attached to them. This may sound marvelous to most of us, but, without a principle of a higher order above the individual, the outcome is that the equality is grounded only in separation, and its individualism makes each of us an abyss to the other. The male is the abyss of the female, and the female is abyss to the male. Each male is an abyss to every other male, and every female is an abyss to any other female. No reconciliation is possible because the male refuses to fall into the female abyss and the female refuses to fall into the male abyss, and each male refuses to fall into other males as each female refuses to fall into other females. Each turns away from the abyss, and the outcome is antagonism and competition for the superior role. Thus, equality generates its own contradiction. As long as there are “mother” and “father,” there can be freedom and equality between and within the sexes. The opposition, the difference between them, can be reconciled in the creative forms of “maternity” and “paternity” can be reconciled in their becoming “parents” who help each other give birth to themselves. But where each is purely individual and equal as individual, there is no basis for reconciliation.

We must now recognize that when paternal authority degenerates, it becomes male power; when maternal authority degenerates, it becomes female power. When brother and sister authority degenerate they become individual power. We also must realize that maternal authority did become female power, that paternal authority did become male power, and that the rebellions in history have been less against paternal and maternal authority than against male and female power. Why? Because paternal and maternal bear the symbolic mark not only or even principally of sexuality but of origin and care you have power over your children only because and to the extent that you care for them, help them, give birth to and sustain their flesh and mind. Male and female involves love too, but it also involves hostility. It must involve antagonism because the kind of love involves opposites. The woman essentially opposite to the man and the man essentially opposite to the woman; as long as male and female remain, the one cannot absorb the other and cannot surrender to desire to do so. The desire to do so will be called “love,” and the antagonism will be either suppressed beneath the surface or expressed in bitterness toward the oppressiveness of the other.

Whenever the gang of males the team dominates as male over the group, it is tyrannical and antagonistic to women though it “loves” them and sleeps with them. Similarly, whenever society is dominated by the female, it becomes tyrannical although it may be in a less obvious fashion. It is not paternal authority but paternal power; it is not fraternal/sisterly authority that destroys most societies but fraternal/sisterly power. It is when the “sisters” and “brothers” for the sake of power rebel against the “father” and “mother” and find their primary control in a group of absolute equals that civilization deteriorates. It is the male machismo society that in demise leads to a feminist reaction. The machismo society refuses to face and enter the abyss that is woman; this prevents the woman from entering the abyss that is man. It is the turning from the abyss that is the origin of the suffering of the as well as the decline and fall of great civilizations.

PART II

THE ABYSS ABSOLUTE AND SUICIDE

“Those who approach philosophy correctly are simply and only practicing dying constantly, but no one sees them….”

Simmias laughed at this and said, “I wasn’t in the mood for laughter just now, Socrates, but you made me laugh; I think that many if they heard your words would say, ‘That’s a good one on the philosophers.’ And others in my city would heartily agree that philosophers are actually suffering from a death wish and, now they have found them out, that they richly deserve death.”

“That would be true, Simmias,” said Socrates, “except the words ‘found out’ because they have not found out in what sense the true philosopher desires to die and deserves to die and what kind of death it is.”

Plato, Phaedo

CHAPTER 9

THE ABYSS RELATIVE AND THE ABYSS ABSOLUTE

At this point I must make a fine distinction too often blurred because of the flawed approach to philosophy descending to us since the time of Aristotle. Life discovers many opposites or contraries. I have spoken of a few of the most striking thinking and doing, matter and spirit, idealism and realism, optimism and pessimism, pleasure and pain, mind and body, freedom and slavery, self and others, love and sadism, male and female. There are hundreds more. Yet, strictly speaking, these are not contradictions (they are not literally “sayings against”); they are not verbal but living opposites. Each of them arises from and leads to the deepest opposite, the Absolute opposite.

Every affirmation, every definition, every living step evokes its own negation, its own abyss. Male is an abyss or bottomlessness to female; female is to male. Maleness may seem to be your basis, your definition, yourself. But then you meet female and your ground is torn away, and you fall into her as into emptiness. Every reality is a thing; every thing seems to be. But each thing that exists depends on the other; it contains and requires its own negation, its own opposite, its own contrary. Therefore, the moment you say “this is,” “I am male,” “it is love,” you must recognize that you experience simultaneously “this is not,” “I am not male,” “I have not love.” Why? Because each of the first statements errs in its claim to be definitive. It asserts something exists without qualification while the existence of everything is qualified by everything else; you cannot know anything until you know everything, and you cannot be anything until you are everything.

What was for the predecessors of Aristotle an experiential distinction became for his followers a logical distinction. Two levels of opposites exist in logic, contraries and contradictions. An example of a contradictory is the opposite between good and nongood; good is “yes” while nongood is “no.” Contradictories are direct opposites. On the other hand, contraries are not direct opposites. The opposition between good and evil is an example of a “contrary.” Evil appears logically not only a nongood but also as a positive presence, a “privation.” Medieval logicians said that evil was the absence of good where it should be present. For example, when I do not have a good, let us say I do not have a piece of pie, it is different from when I do not have a piece of pie and I am hungry. The absence of the good called food in the second case would be an evil and not a nongood because it involves hunger that is my body’s judgment that something is missing that should be there.

The subtlest and highest explanation of how to resolve the conflict between contraries can be illustrated by the case of a piece of pie that appears to be both good and evil at the same time. Of course, it cannot be good and nongood at the same time (it cannot be a contradiction), but it can appear so if evil is involved. The pie, you say, is evil. The term “evil” refers, not to something very bad or absolutely bad, but to an illusion of the good. The problem with the pie is not that it is laden with fat and “empty” calories and so not very nourishing to the body but the person who is hankering after it is anticipating through it a good it cannot deliver. Evil is even more characteristic of the sexual appetite where the desire for sex arises from the impression that it will satisfy the longing for what only genuine love can deliver.

Even modern science has finally rediscovered relativism or, as we now call it, “relativity.” Each reality is relative to all others. Even the most basic “categories” of time and space we now understand to be relative. Yet, mostly, this rediscovery, too, is only logical, intellectual, mathematical. We have not yet bridged the gap from the scientific, impersonal, and mental to the subjective, personal, and experiential confrontation with relativity. Relativity in the sphere of the physical sciences is the exact equivalent of the relative abyss in the sphere of experience.

To our understanding, the relative abyss always appears before the Absolute Abyss, but, to our existence, the Absolute Abyss is always prior to the relative abyss. As I have said repeatedly in the first part of this work, we run to, and become conscious of, the contrary the thing opposite to what we have just focused on only because we first deeply experience the emptiness or bottomlessness of that thing. We run to female because male has become hollow. We run to doing when thinking becomes empty. Again, female simultaneously expresses both the bottomlessness of the male and a new bottom or ground; the malefemale relationship is a new thing, a new being, a new something about which we try to say “It is.”

So much for relativity and so much for what the Marxian and Hegelian dialectic have become in our age. Both of them rediscovered how opposites cancel each other out but preserve each other in a new synthesis, a new being. What these physical and metaphysical philosophies did not illustrate fully is the source of the power of the dialectic. Both Marx and Hegel did make an attempt to identify this power: Marx by claiming that the movement from one side of the opposites to the other was produced by natural, biological demands built into the human organism for material wellbeing in the struggle with the environment, and Hegel by claiming a supernatural invisible force behind conflicts in history that moves it forward. Unfortunately, later scholars made both these hints increasingly abstract and theoretical. You do discover and experience the motive for better material life inside yourself, but you do not experience it as most fundamental. For the mind centered in life, the claim that it is can only be hypothetical although Marx suggests that you are not qualified to judge because your mind follows the material conditions of your life and is unavoidably alienated from the truth about yourself. My point here is not to dispute either Hegel, Marx, or Einstein. I would not even attempt to challenge the subtle genius of their arguments. More dubious is what their dialectic philosophies have become in our own time and how they have been interpreted. Even these I ignore here. My concern is solely with the experiential plight we find ourselves in and with the possibility we have not been helped out of this plight. Instead, interpreters of the great philosophers from Aristotle on down have only reinforced it. I have neither the time, the talent, nor the energy to provide a general critique of philosophers and philosophical speculation through the centuries past. Instead, let me speak from the perspective of where we are today.

Philosophy and science together have ignored the Absolute Abyss. This is largely because the Absolute Abyss is unspeakable, unutterable, while the essence of modern philosophy and science is definition. Indeed, many intelligent people practice both precisely to avert a confrontation with the void. They fill the air with inventions or discoveries of hundreds of exceedingly complex terms and avoid the silence of the Abyss. If you speak and write formally today, especially if you are most successful at it, you must occasionally wonder why you continue. Is it not because of fear that without the speaking, writing, publishing, and success a great silence would descend upon you? It is comforting to fill the silence with words, particularly when they describe the whirling vortex of the universe and the atom or the whirling contraries in human existence, so that you can ignore the absolute stillness at the center of the torrent. A culture founded superficially upon the idea of social progress and individual action and more deeply upon the principle of perpetual movement, as reflected in a science of “discoveries and novelties” and in a philosophy of words and tortuous linguistic analysis, is likely to be unwilling to realize and less to accept the truth of the deep stillness, the deep void.

Stop the motion for a moment. Stop the words from flowing into theories. Stop the activity that pretends to make better things for better living. Stop and consider not what we think or do about life but the experience of life itself. Is it not true that you turn to others because you first experience an emptiness in yourself? Is it not true that they show you this emptiness in yourself first and then you turn to them? Is it not true that the insufficient, dependent male knows deeply of this inadequacy and turns to female? Is it not true that the emptiness of thinking leads into doing? Is it not, in short, true that the hollowness, the loneliness, the void, the Abyss are the primary motivation in our lives? You buy a new car not primarily because it is good but because it helps turn your consciousness from the Abyss. If you really buy the car because it is good, why do you not remain satisfied with it? Is it really because, as modern theory says, every good is a partial good that once attained leads to something else or, as the economists say, human beings are an endless and neversatisfied “demand?” Would you really be satisfied if you had everything? Are there not moments when you have been “satisfied” with nothing?

We have discovered there is no thing that is absolutely good. All the good things that we know are only relatively good things. Perhaps we cannot be certain there is an absolute good that is not a thing, but we can be certain, from experience, that there is an absolute absence. As every contrary is an abyss to the opposites involved, proving the relativity in the value of the opposites, so, too, there is an Abyss at the bottom of every other Abyss. It is the Absolute Abyss. It is not where one thing is canceled, annulled, and preserved by another thing but where I am canceled, annulled, annihilated I am crossed out and made into nothing. Everything is made into nothing in its contrary. This is the experience of the abyss relative. However, as everything is made nothing, so, too, I am made nothing. This is the experience of the Abyss Absolute. It is an experience no longer of forgetting about one thing in seeing something else. Rather it is an experience of seeing nothing at all and not being seen at all.

There are two places where you can come to the Abyss Absolute. The first we have already explored extensively. It is the safest place but also the slowest to find. In it, the experience of the Abyss Absolute is very slight as if cracks of darkness passed through the walls of light, tiny cracks, small black sparks. Your mind, however, can begin to work with this experience and guide you to the slow but full understanding of the Abyss. It occurs when you see that your running from one good to another is not because you know that the next good will fulfill you but because you are fleeing from the lack of good the Abyss that has revealed itself in your life. The glimpse does not prevent you from moving toward these new goods optimistically but does provide you with the beginning of a deep distrust of your movement.

The second way of realizing the existence of the Abyss Absolute is the quicker, but also the more painful and dangerous path. In your mad pursuit of things you fall under the complete illusion that if you get them, you will be happy. You may be convinced you know who you are and what you want. Your strong belief gives you enormous energy. The harder you run after one thing, the farther you get from its relative abyss and the more frustrated energy you have. The achievement of the one thing allows you to turn to its dialectical opposite in an even higher energy state. You think you are having fun and leading a fulfilled life. You are likely to be the object of the admiration and envy of many. You pursue you maleness, aggressive, hardhitting more and more, success, more admiration; then, you pursue you femaleness leaping into bed with woman after woman again successful and admired. The intensity of your life, however, is the intensity of your death, you fall into nothingness. Every thing you pursue leads to its abyss; every such abyss either leads to the opposite thing or acceptance of the Abyss. Even if you choose the opposite, it, also, leads you to the Abyss or else to still another opposite and different “thing.” With increasing intensity you pursue things. But inevitably you came to the end of your tether and drop from the highest height of endeavors into the Abyss the Abyss Absolute with no more nets no more things, nothingness to catch you.

We have reached a state in this discussion where we can at least consider and explore the paths into the Abyss Absolute: memory, revelation, and suicide.

CHAPTER 10

THE WAY OF THE PHILOSOPHER

“…(T)hose who tackle philosophy aright are simply and solely practicing dying, practicing death, all the time…”(1965, Plato, 466467)

These are the famous words ascribed to Socrates in Plato’s most moving dialogue, “The Phaedo.” Socrates, who is about to be executed, goes on to describe death as the separation of the soul from the body and to suggest that such a separation is the fondest wish of every true philosopher. True philosophers seek to break the bonds of the body that tie them down to the world and to soar off into the deep blue sky to the sun. No wonder both Socrates and Plato are considered idealists, otherworldly dreamers, and no wonder Christian theologians adopted Plato as one of their own and saw in Socrates’ death for truth a prefigure of Christ’s death for love. Though Socrates celebrates death, no one is less gloomy about life than he is. His life has been interpreted as comic and his death as tragic, but no one is less tragic in all the Greek world and yet not comic either. Socrates was the death of tragedy in the Greek world. He was not its relative Abyss, which would be comedy, but its absolute Abyss.

Socrates is not a philosopher of death and sorrow but a philosopher of joy and life. When he does speak of death, it is always allegorically. What can he mean when he says all true philosophy is a rehearsal for death? If his philosophy is true philosophy, where in it does he provide the rehearsal hall? The death in Socrates’ philosophy is not in content but in method. It rests in Socrates’ famous dialogic technique. The movement of the argument is by negation or death as the movement of life is by death or negation.

Every worldly affirmation entails a worldly denial. Every logical affirmation entails a logical denial. Every living affirmation entails a living denial. Every “yes” implies a “no.” Every life implies a death. There is a thinking dialectic and a living dialectic. Thought most reflects life when thought is dialectical. Dialectical thought follows life. Other forms of thought seek first to capture life and then to lead it in captivity.

The dialogical process brings all points to nothing as life brings all things to nothing. In the opening of The Republic, when Plato shows the old merchant Cephalus the emptiness, the nothingness, of his life, he turns and leaves and goes on to make obligatory prayers and sacrifices to the gods. His is a remarkable action in that it is so unremarkable. Nothing is more typically human than to retreat from an argument once, through it, you have seen the emptiness of your life. Your retreat, however, may be by leaving the scene of the contest or by remaining but leaping to some new and extraneous extreme position. Later in this dialogue the hardheaded teacher of rhetoric, Thrasymachus, takes the second path; he remains with Socrates and continues the argument, but he leaps from extreme “realism” to extreme “idealism” from demanding that Socrates look at the way that real life rulers operate rather than talk of justice abstractly, to insisting that the ruler he himself describes as happy is not the actual ruler but the “successful ruler.” Thrasymachus flips from the material to the abstract and back all to preserve himself from facing the nothingness that Socrates has exposed him to.

Socrates forces Cephalus and Thrasymachus to face the nothingness not only in their logic but also in their very lives. If the arguments of these two selfassured men are flawed, then their lives, the basis of the views they express logically, are flawed. It is not only logic but life that faces the Abyss of nothingness. Neither Cephalus nor Thrasymachus are willing to endure it. They are “philosophers” but not authentic philosophers. Why not authentic? Because they are willing to deny everything, to accept any negation of their arguments, except where it touches upon their lives. For the true philosopher, the content of the logic that flows like life is not language but life. Genuinely philosophical thought is open not just to logical negation but to living negation. Cephalus and Thrasymachus follow a method of thinking that is exactly opposite. They organize their “philosophy” not to bring them to the point of “death” but to defend their lives from the realization of negation and nothingness. Socrates, by contrast, accepts the responsibility of mirroring in logic the negation in life.

The true philosopher is Socrates. He does not prepare for death, as Cephalus does. He does not avoid it, as Thrasymachus does. He practices it. If anything were to sadden Socrates at the point of swallowing his hemlock, it would have to be, not the end of his life, but the sorrow and anger of his wife and students all gathering around hoping he will save himself and escape into exile. It is inevitable, therefore, that his final instruction to his students on the method of philosophy is that he has been practicing death. He needs to show them that his deathbed in prison is not so different from his everyday life. The person who practices music does not prepare to play music but actually plays it. Surely, practice improves our relationship to music, but the practice of true music means something different from improving it for the sake of a later performance. If music is to be practiced, it must be experienced in the here and now and not for the sake of some future engagement.

This is the way Socrates “practices” death in philosophy by constantly dissolving the illusions of reality and value he had identified his existence with. Philosophy is the experience of this loss and death over and over again. It is the same experience day by day, so that, as a result, death becomes easier and more friendly. Yet death is never wholly kind. It always is challenge, loss, and pain. So, too, is practicing music. It is not necessarily pleasant although sometimes it can reach beyond pleasure to the sublime.

Though he drank the poison when he need not have, though he could have escaped the prison, though he could have gone and lived in exile, to await recall to his native land and elevation to heroic stature in the Greek Pantheon, Socrates did not commit suicide. The charge that his death was by suicide could come only from someone who did not understand true philosophy, from someone with a worldly prejudice, from someone who could not realize that everything in the world ends in its own negation or death. The philosopher who practices death ultimately realizes not that the world is unreal but reality as such is a construct built of what is there plus artificial projections from the human mind and created for the sake of convenience rather than truth. The ultimate reality of your own self is annulled or annihilated in philosophy it is literally “brought to nothing.”

If suicide could be defined merely as an act, Socrates is clearly a suicide. However, a person who commits suicide is one who chooses death, not one who accepts it on his own terms. Socrates accepts death on his own terms. There is a logical and a living suicide, but Socrates commits neither. The logical suicide is the great naysayer, the abominable “noman.” The logically suicidal delight in tearing down arguments. Before they even finish articulating a position of their own or hearing one from the lips of others, they are already preparing for attack. Negation is a powerful instrument in argument particularly when it is your singleminded devotion to bring every word to nothing, but this, in turn, makes nothing out of thought, including the thought of the naysayer. There is logical, intellectual, and moral suicide.

Mental suicide has never been common in human history, but it is so much less uncommon now than in the past. The power to say nay makes and breaks reputations. Whose intellectual reputation is more securely achieved than one who has effectively said “nay” to Kant, Hegel, Newton, Ptolemy, Einstein, Marx, or Freud? In fact, all you have to do nowadays to command instant attention is to present a proof, however weak, that some “great man” was wrong. It is not that you would get much farther by saying “yea” to them and to others, but at least you would avoid the catastrophe that has befallen us today the suicide of the mind. Too much faith in the authority of great thinkers, leaders, friends has led to no faith in any authority, whether it be human persons, thinkers, or thought itself.

Instead of criticizing and negating those you reject, you should instead negate the position only of those you fundamentally agree with and continue to agree with even as you disagree. The only intellectual growth you can gain from an Isaac Newton is what occurs when you can continue your deep admiration for him simultaneously with your negative analysis. So is it in human relations. Disagreement leads nowhere least of all does it lead to the Abyss of nothingness unless you continue to love those you disagree with. A deep affirmation beneath a heavy negation.

Socrates does not begin with negation or denial; he begins with affirmation: “I agree with your position,” dear Cephalus, “and I admire your life;” “I have deep affection for you, Polemarchus;” “I respect the clarity of your vision of reality, dear Thrasymachus.” Socrates does not even choose to negate does not choose death. Instead, he allows the negation already present in the affirmation to come out. The true philosopher is indeed the midwife of thought and not the thinker. True philosophers take the concept articulated into a living situation and are willing to face the negation and death, not of the idea but of their faith in it. It is in this sense that philosophers do not practice death by intellectual games. Indeed, philosophers experience death and submit themselves to it through their willingness to surrender what they identify themselves with. The mind at one moment identifies with this or that theory. When it surrenders the theory, the experience is the death not only to the theory but also to the person who had identified with it.

Similarly, Socrates does not choose death when he drinks the hemlock nor does he allow circumstances to dictate to him. He clearly has choice. However, his alternatives are worldly alternatives: to escape in exile and live or to drink the hemlock and die. The dialectical fulfillment of his life as a philosopher is to drink the hemlock. You can turn Socrates on his head or upside down and say he should have accepted his death as a philosopher instead of his death as a body. This would be justified if philosophy were merely theory and something Socrates identified with. But if his life was true if it was based not upon a theory but upon wisdom then physical death was the only choice he could make. In fact, of course, nearly everyone who identifies merely with a theory, a “worldview,” or a concept, will choose not to drink the hemlock when given the choice because they then will deeply, if unconsciously, realize that what they had a hold of was only a theory rather than the truth that had a hold of them. Socrates’ death was the necessary test to the existence of his life as truth rather than theory. He would have failed this “test,” his life would have been an illusion and a lie had he gone into exile.

Socrates does not choose death, he chooses life and truth. His physical death is a necessary consequence of that choice. It is not a desirable one. Though Socrates appears to welcome the separation of the soul from the body and an ultimate release, in fact, he is simply accepting the final test where he chooses to prefer the higher of the two dimensions he has discovered as his life. If the “body” is a reality constituted both of what is and our imagination, then we can surrender it since it is an illusion to think that it is ultimately real or more real than truth. But true life is not so easily surrendered. For the sake of preserving his life, Socrates dies. It is not even that his ideas live on that is most important. Socrates’ ideas do not justify his life; his life justifies his ideas. That he died is unimportant. All flesh dies. What is important is that it is he who lived until he died. His “death” is both universally fascinating and commonly disturbing because, like Christ’s, it constitutes the essential challenge and test everybody faces.

Socrates is a suicide in neither sense he commits neither mental nor physical suicide. He allows death to come. He neither chooses it nor runs from it. Socrates choice illustrates the first basic element in the path to the absolute Abyss death and suicide. It is death by your own hand. It is the death blow your Self deals to your ego or to what you identify with. It is the death of what your Self judges as less than true. It is the death of illusion.

CHAPTER 11

THE WAY OF THE ARTIST

I have subtitled this whole study “The Autobiography of a Suicide” because suicide is exactly the visible path you must take in meeting the problem of the Abyss absolute. Every individual faces the absolute Abyss constantly; no one is immune to it. Our choices are restricted to how will react. We have only two possible responses: (1) to turn from the Abyss either by retreating more deeply into what we were pursuing or by rushing to its opposite the relative abyss or (2) to allow ourselves to fall into the absolute Abyss. These are the only alternatives. There are no others.

Experience shows that selfdelusion and suffering are inevitable should the choice be to turn away from the absolute Abyss. This is because it is most difficult if not impossible for you to pursue someone, something, or some activity without the belief that a good lies in its achievement. Because the pursuit is exhausting, you welcome the achievement of your goal, but no sooner have you stopped running and have relaxed than the disquiet, sadness, frustration, tension begin to build. The message is universal and quite clear: what you thought would, at least partly, satisfy you does not. You may begin gradually to believe that the fun was in the going after and not in the getting, but you cannot get up and go until you adopt the selfdelusion, however temporary, that the value is in the having.

Without being able to fall into the Abyss, the human being lapses into what Eastern and Middle Eastern philosophy has called the problem of “attachment” or “identification.” The human being should be attached to and identified with what is good. The problem, therefore, is not the fact of identification or attachment in themselves but rather that the attachment is to something whose value fails to justify the strength of the attachment. Why do you attach yourself to something you would know to be relatively empty if you really thought about it? Why do you attach yourself to worse than childish games such as golf? Why do you attach yourself to other people? Only because they are the way you avoid facing and falling into the Abyss. They are my means of staying alive and not dying. You can overcome demeaning attachments only when you are prepared to allow yourself to fall into the Abyss.

It is no use to tell others that they should not be attached unless you also show them the path out of attachment, and you cannot show them the way out of false attachments without showing them the source of these attachments. To urge nonattachment on others without allowing them to face the basic problem of their unwillingness to fall into the Abyss produces nothing but an attachment to the principle of not being attached accompanied, even more disastrously, with pride in accomplishing “detachment” and a sense of superiority to others. Just because you get them to attach themselves to a fine idea or ideal, they are in no way superior. And worse, not only may they think they are superior, because their attachment is to an intangible, they may be less able to recognize it as an attachment.

These spiritual attachments are largely responsible for the bad name and bad press religion has received in recent times. So bad is the name that those who are most religious avoid the term the way birds avoid cats. Fads, nothing other than a form of mass identification or attachment, have become so common that they are now selfconscious and whole businesses organize to predict, build, and market shortlived products to take advantage of this form of attachment. Similarly, intellectual fads come and go and have been coming and going more rapidly that ever during the past several years. Take the meditation mania as an example. To wish to communicate to others a form of mind training you have found valuable may not be bad, but it is dangerous to parade that theory or practice as the salvation of the human race by pretending that it brings “selffulfillment,” releases the “highest levels of creativity,” “cures mental and physical illnesses alike,” and then frantically to press others to agree.

The fad of external salvation through new social and economic policies fades into its opposite salvation through the reconstruction of the individual’s mind. “No one should criticize the government,” said the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a famous spiritual leader of the meditation movement; “the government only reflects the minds of the people; do not seek to order society but seek to order the mind!” New forms of attachment and identification have become so subtle that they present themselves as nonattachment; detach from material things only to attach to immaterial things. Fortunately, the meditative detachment is only temporary, we are told, and the real value in it resides in enabling you to pursue more efficiently and with greater energy and seriousness whatever you have already been attached to. The cycle of avoiding the Abyss is complete from one false value to its equally false opposite.

Again, every refusal to fall into the Abyss produces a great reversal in values. What you consider the most worthless of things and activities when you are clearheaded becomes, with the fog wafting before you when you turn your eyes from the Abyss, the most desirable. You begin to live for, to find your only value and excitement in, hitting a little ball with a stick (golf), kicking a ball over a line (football), sitting and watching shadows projected on the wall in front of you (the cinema and television). This is what is most frightening about the flight from the Abyss; it activates enormous energy and expresses it in ways that violate both Self and others. The most infamous example in the twentieth century is the willingness of the people of Germany and its leaders to turn from the Abyss of a lost war and economic collapse to the illusion that allows a “Master Race” to grind human bodies like so much meat in concentration camps and toast the remains in ovens activities that the very people who performed them found, when they were clearerheaded, to be not only meaningless but disgusting and incredible. The corrupt are the most aghast at their own monstrous behavior when they can see it for what it is; they can see only by, and in, entering the Abyss, or else the monstrosity they have become they will see only projected onto the faces of others and as the responsibility of others.

I can think of no better term for the willingness to face the Abyss than suicide. We live and choose. It is our choice that is empty and leads us to the precipice on the edge of the Abyss. Your choice stems from what you attach yourself to and what you identify with. What you identify with is based upon what you are, keeping in mind that what you are is a mixture of what is there plus the mental definition that transforms its appearance. What you are is what you have made of yourself. If that leads to false values ultimately betraying you and driving you into cycles of contradiction, the alternative is the death of what you are and by your own hand.

The major character in George Orwell’s 1984, a fellow by the name of Winston Smith, temporarily achieved the highest level of liberation of anyone in the novel. He commits a rebellious act in writing a dissident diary in a totalitarian society; it is an act of thought; by the act of clarifying his thoughts, he commits “thoughtcrime” and observes, “One is not punished for thoughtcrime; thoughtcrime does not lead to the punishment of death; thoughtcrime is death.”(1949, Orwell, 27) Winston dies by his own hand; he dies because the life he has lived was identified with the state; he was a functionary of the state; when he sees through the illusion that the state is good and instead perceives its monstrous horror, he dies.

Winston is only one dramatic example of the many ways that the suicide might occur but always it involves the experience of death and always it is accomplished by your own action. The paradox of suicide: how can you kill yourself because killing yourself implies an agent called yourself that can make judgments against and beyond yourself? How can the self judge the self it is identical to itself? The answer, of course, is that suicide always involves two selves a split personality, a case of schizophrenia. One of the selves slays the other. In physical suicide a fantastic feat of psychological gymnastics is performed: The judgment of dissatisfaction comes from the deep, hidden, true Self. It judges the superficial identification and identity and condemns it to death. Suddenly the superficial identity seizes control and acts against a sea of troubles, opposes, and ends them. You, however, believe that it is the continuation of the deep Self that causes the sea of troubles. You fall under the illusion that by exterminating the life of your whole organism, you will finally silence the deep Self and its negative judgments against the superficial self.

Indeed, literal, physical suicide is not suicide at all at least not in the fullest sense of the word. Certainly, it is “your hand” that wields the razor blade or carries the pills that cause your death, but a hand is yours only when it reflects you. Most physical suicides take place from a lie by the superficial you that is not you. Physical suicide is nearly always actually homicide where another kills you. The other kind of suicide is suicide in the fullest sense and is not homicide. In the second form, the Self judges the surface life of the person and condemns it. This produces pain. Rather than imagining that the pain is coming from the Self, the true suicide recognizes that the pain comes from the phony life it is leading. To surrender that life means death to identity so the Self kills the self. It is not a fake, created sense of self that kills the organism but the Organism that kills the self created in relationship with, and partly by, others. The suicide is the true victory of man over monster. The deepest Self, of course might choose physical death to avoid physical and terminal pain, to preserve the lives of others, out of realization that life is over. If it could be such a choice, however, the distinction is very hard to make to yourself, and others could never judge whether you were committing suicide or homicide upon yourself. Yet it is most dangerous for society to recognize suicide as a political right it must, like many other categories of activities, remain in the limbo of being neither right nor wrong but dangerous and awful.

One death in recent decades has shaken the literary world. An Oriental novelist killed himself, ritually performing on himself the oriental rite of “sepuku.” Most Western suicides, by contrast have been shameful and cloaked in shadows hidden and uncertain about the suicidal character of the death Hemingway’s, for example. The ritual suicide of Yukio Mishima could not be hidden it was a public event and is concealed only by the incredulity of the public. “He must have been insane”; “Who knows the subtlety of the Oriental mind,” and so on. Outwardly and this is never possible to judge in depth Mishima’s death appears to have been a homicide. A writer who had achieved the greatest international reputation of any Japanese author in history; a writer who developed a scrawny, weak physical body into muscular perfection; a writer who successfully led a quasimilitary band of followers; a writer who failed only when he tried to reform his whole society. It all has the mark of someone of genius and energy who pursued every path, followed every opposite but who found himself simultaneously horrified and fascinated by the prospect of his own death, and, to preserve himself from the indignity of decline in his literary reputation and in his beautiful body, ended his life. The surface conquers the depths. A life and a death in a fabulous blaze of glory. A human to be emulated? A disease to be avoided? A living and a dying symbol of the new modern individual active and liberated who fell into the contradiction of longing for the past, unable to face the Abyss creating and created by that contradiction and yet unable not to face it because of his great genius and honesty died. Right or wrong, his life and death has to be an important lesson.

CHAPTER 12

THE PATH OF REMEMBERING

In his great penultimate novel, The Journey to the East Hermann Hesse concluded by giving the major character the choice of three punishments in increasing order of difficulty. The first is to kill the “dog”; the second, to burn the “archives”; and the third, to examine the records of his own life preserved in the archives. From his standpoint, the character finds it harder to do the easy first one than the third mostly because he fails to realize what the three entail how the degree of pain increases as he moves from the first to the last. Much of the value in this novel, as in Hesse’s earlier works, resides in its apparent ambiguity. I would not be so presumptuous as to offer a “true” or “definitive” explanation of the final plight of the hero, but would suggest that the “dog” represents a concealed conflict between animal and spirit; in order to live, we must kill one of the opposites within ourselves, but if we are true to ourselves, we cannot do this. If we cannot kill the opposite, then we must forget the opposition burn it completely out of our conscious and unconscious memory so that it will no longer injure us, but, if we are deeply honest, we cannot do this either. The only alternative offered to all of us is to look into the memory, the “archives,” and there to face the agony of contradiction that constitutes our Selves.

Hesse is doing more than merely reflecting dramatically what has become the hallmark of nineteenth and twentieth century psychology the discoveryinvention of, and “fixation” upon, “the unconscious.” There can be no doubt that memory is the only content of our thought. The view that our special consciousness, which transcends mere immediate sensation, is the result of our being able to process as “thinking machines” what lies preserved in our minds, then we must believe that there is nothing new in thought save what has already been in experience and has been captured in memory. The material of thought, the food of thought, is the past; it may be a second, minute, or a year, but is the past nonetheless. Our external senses and our internal senses or feelings give us experience; mind can reflect upon experiences occurring in the past. The epistemology of empiricism, which relies on the outer senses alone, combines with rationalism, which relies on thought, and nineteenth century psychology adds to both of them experience derived from the inner senses or “feelings.”

Where Hesse and his Jungianstyle psychology go one step beyond the Freudianbased psychology to realize that, while thought deals with the past, it can use the past to go beyond time. Your memory of a conflict from the past is a sign of struggle, not primarily with the outer world as perceived by the outer and inner senses, but within your inner world. Remembering is not valuable because it enables you to confront the facts of the past and deal with them so that you can live better in the future, but rather because it is a means of discovering the diseases and distortions afflicting what you have always been and always will be so that you can live more true to yourself.

Freudian psychology recognized, even in its superficial “ID, ego, superego” divisions and the still more superficial form that appeared more recently in “Transactional Analysis” as “child, adult, parent,” that people could be in a state of inner conflict but assumed that the conflict we suffered from unconsciously was produced by traumatic experiences in the past when the outer world broke into the inner: The literal father or mother, for example, were said to be capable of implanting distortions into the psyche; psychoanalysis could be justified as a treatment for psychological disorders only on the basis of the premise that by discovering a new “father,” the psychoanalyst after transference, who could authorize a new inner attitude, the patient would be cured. But then came Freudian psychology’s great pessimism that it was not primarily the personal, literal parent that demanded repression of the original self (ID) but the collective “parent” or society. Neither society nor the individual could survive on the basis of ID impulses alone. Freudianism subsequent division into a Right and a Left wing demonstrated the two poles of the abyss phenomenon. The Right emphasized “adjustment” to “normal” society; patients must be brought to accept or resign themselves to the inevitable conditions where they find themselves socially (superego). The Left insisted even more vehemently that the society needed to be revolutionized so that it would not exact a terrible price on the psyche; the sick collective “parent” had to be overthrown so that the ID could reign supreme inside and outside; usually this was to take the form of sexual liberation although political liberation was implied. The Freudian Left and Right were abysses to each other.

Jung turns out to be the true son of Freud. He took the contradiction between “biological” ID impulses and social necessity that Freud discovered and that drove neoFreudians into Right and Left camps but used them to enter an abyss that Freud did not. The abyss preJungian psychology encountered out of the opposition between “biological” impulses and social “necessity,” Jung saw generated because of psychology’s scientific character. So strong was the grip of “science” on him and so important his status as a “physical scientist,” that Freud could not give up his claim to science; even Jung constantly apologized for his departure from the physical sciences by regularly insisting that he was being “scientific.” Freud had even tried to reduce psychology to biology to take the typical path of physical science that reduced the more complex to the simpler. Jung ultimately rejected this last prejudice of nineteenth century scientific science.

Hesse takes us beyond Freud and into Jung. The conflict of the past that remains imbedded in us consciously or unconsciously is not a residue left by others who created a split in us by putting us in opposition with ourselves and separating us into the true Self and what is divided against the true Self. Instead, every conflict of the past is the necessary building material for the creation of a new being. Here, once more, Jung entered an abyss that Freud had resisted. It was the abyss of not knowing and admitting you do not. Freud originally suggested that normal psychological development entailed an orderly process of psychological growth from childhood to maturity; he claimed to understand how that process worked, how it began, and how it ended: the earliest organization of the psyche and its energy was “oral” and the final was “genital.” The “oral” receives; the “genital,” as is indicated by the literal meaning of the term genital as well as by its association with genius and genesis, creates.

The final state is psychological independence. But just exactly what is independence? In crude terms that are only a rough caricature of Freud, in mature adults energy is focused on the biological organs of reproduction so that together male and female procreate and generate babies. The individual pleasure of sex and the biological and sociological necessity of reproduction are thus reconciled. Anything interfering with this reconciliation must be overcome. Now, if Freud is correct about the end state of psychological development, then he allows mature adults what science in its pursuit of “causes” and necessary relationships permits us: no freedom He claims he knows the soul’s goal. It is biological; it is biologically predetermined necessity. Scientist/psychologists set themselves up a new gods, or, at least as new priests.

In truth, however, the meaning of dreams and conflicts can be understood by no one except the dreamer and the person in conflict, but, beyond these, the final condition of the human being, the end towards which we move, is substantially, basically, essentially, and ultimately unknown. Scientists are dissatisfied with not knowing and with their inability to capture truth in thought; it is an abyss to him. Moreover, the final state of maturity as described by Freud is one of consciousness; where there are not inner obstacles to understanding who we are and what we want; the problem for us at that point is only how to achieve what we know we want and who we know we want to be. For Freud, immaturity, stunted development, is produced by early trauma and its subsequent repression, which ended neither where its effects and the energy it generates persists. When you become conscious and face the trauma that was an abyss in your life, you will be cured. The assumption is that your confrontation with the abyss occurred, is over, and already happened. The abyss appears as something bad or essentially negative that you have to deal with; it is not recognized as arising as the result of your pursuit of something positive that came to nothing, the abyss. The cause of our abysmal pain according to Freud is the denial of, or excessive and inappropriate indulgence in, oral and anal pleasures while being unable to derive satisfaction from them. The cure is achieved through a psychoanalyst who directs you to just the right level and kind of pleasure (genital) and thereby removes your unhealthy fixations.

Since the Abyss is not a problem present only at one stage in your life or even at several stages but is perpetually there as the essential character of human existence, psychology helps you only a little at best, and its theories biological causation, pleasure, sex, etc. are actually barriers to understanding and growth. By being willing to open the door to the possibility that a dimension of human reality exists apart from the biological, Jung promoted the advancement of psychology. For Freud, the psyche, the mental, and the spiritual were all superstructures to the material, physical, biological foundations of human existence. Jung allowed for the possibility that the psyche and especially its spiritual dimension, although emerging “later” in time, were actually the foundation and the biological, the superstructure. Freud implied that the human psyche was a specific means to biological survival; Jung claimed that the biological system was the means to the expression of spiritual life. Therefore, Jung was able to understand that even after you made the apparently “biological,” sexual, and emotional adjustments to genital existence, you could still suffer from deep conflicts, and the biologicallyoriented psychologist would not only fail to help you resolve them but also in the attempt actually do you psychological damage by reducing a “meaningful” conflict to the level of nothing but a distortion of sexuality or sociophysical biology. Moreover, Jung illustrated what Freud failed to grasp: sexual maladjustments could be a necessary means to genuine human health so that ending them prematurely could keep you in a diseased condition.

Freud, Jung, and Hesse all illustrate, however, one of the paths into the Abyss: that of remembering. Remembering not what you normally can recall but what you have forgotten and do not want to recall. You forgot or repressed it because it was and remains a threat, an abyss, to what you have become, to what you think you are, and what you want to do. When conflict arises in your life, it is never only the sign of disease but always also of health. It is a sign that you are opening your eyes to the existence of the abyss you had pretended was not there. Of course, the conflict can lead to disease, but only if you remain unwilling to fall into the Abyss. Too many in current psychology the patients as well as the psychotherapists are fundamentally motivated by a desire to avoid conflict and tension by merely to “venting” or “releasing” them so that suffering individuals gain a temporary alleviation of their symptoms rather than by the willingness to enter the Abyss. Great thinkers such as Freud, if they themselves have not entered the Abyss and realize that it perpetually exists to be entered daily, always does more damage because of his insight than smaller minds.

“Remembering” is a path into the Abyss if its content is conflict. Not just any kind of conflict is adequate. Conflict between you and other people or things is insufficient; these are merely the outer shadows of true inner conflict. The memory of conflict that can lead into the Abyss is only that conflict that is between yourself and yourself so that when faced, it forces you to an encounter with your own nothingness.

CHAPTER 13

THE PATH OF SYMBOL AND MYTH

It should be clear that the notion that there are a variety of ways of entering into the Abyss, applies only to the first step. In the end, all of the entrances converge. There are many paths up the mountain but they all get you to the same place as long as you keep ascending. But even more important than understanding that all paths ultimately converge is that each one of them reveals a different facet of how we experience the Abyss. You begin in a state of being divided into pieces. To the extent that you are in conflict with yourself, your experience of the Abyss will be not one but many. Each part you are divided into will show you a different side to the Abyss, or, more accurately, each part is a capacity for limited knowledge of the one Abyss. The reality of the Abyss is single indeed, it is the deepest unity possible but your knowledge of it is multiple depending on what human capacity for being and knowing you are actualizing at the moment. Suicide, death, remembering, and revelation all come down to the same thing finally. Suicide of the self is the only worthwhile form of death, through this death, trueSelf/memory awakens, and memory provides the ground for ultimate revelation.

However multiple your experience of the Abyss is, you can gain entrance into it only if you approach it from two sides. You cannot reach the Abyss unless until you have discovered both. Human duality generates much confusion and error about your confrontation with the Abyss; since you are divided, it is possible for you to feel you have leapt into the Abyss when in fact you have only dangled one foot into it. The dual character of the human experience of falling into the Abyss is best illustrated by the problem of revelation. Revelation has two faces that need to be kept distinct; we must separate revelation proper from the apocalypse.

The literal meaning of the term “revelation” is “unveil.” Revelation is a sudden revealing or unveiling. Revelation penetrates past the mask to see this truth about human existence: at the bottom of every thing is the nothing. Revelation can be sudden and shattering or it can be slow and methodical. The veil is in the temple and the veil hides there the awful face of God; in revelation, the veil in the temple is ripped apart and the awful is naked to your eyes. Revelation proper, therefore, has to do with consciousness and with mind. It is similar to recognition: in revelation cognition or knowledge returns. This is why the practice of remembering is so valuable a preparation for revelation: not because the past has been lost and needs to be recovered for its own sake but because truth has been hidden behind a veil by means of the loss; in the beginning, you know the nature of truth and then, because it is so awful, you veiled it. In the beginning you had knowledge or cognition, but then you lost the knowledge and needed to refind it. You cannot refind it by looking for it because in the deepest sense it is not just that you have lost something but that you have lost your Self. Therefore, the self that strives to remember must always fail since in the act of trying it is asserting the very thing the self that created the veil against Self. This is why deliberate and directed remembering can only prepare the way for a revelation; the revelation comes spontaneously and appears to come from beyond the self.

Where no preparation has taken place, revelation can occur only as the apocalypse. The literal meaning of the term is “uncovering.” This word could and has been used interchangeably with “revelation,” but since an important distinction in the reality of these processes must be made, I will use “apocalypse” to refer to an event in the ordinary world that comes from a powerful, unsuspected, and awful reality beneath it. You see a metal pot sitting on the stove. It seems ordinary, inactive, nothing but a cold aluminum, shiny oval. Then suddenly the cover explodes and out blows scalding steam burning your fingers. The uncovering forces you to believe there is an unsuspected power in the pot or beneath it, but this apocalypse does not reveal the hidden. No revelation has occurred. The hidden manifests itself but does not unveil itself.

The normal, ordinary individual can always produce an apocalypse. In fact, attempts to do so are at the root of experimental science. Physically and mentally you tease someone or something until a reaction occurs; the reaction, you hope, will reveal a hidden and truer nature. Bombard subatomic “particles” with others and you will witness certain explosive events. On the basis of these events you develop new conclusions about the nature of reality. This evoking of the apocalypse is one of the most important things that religious and scientific mysticism have in common and why science is fundamentally religious: at its root, it is a search for revelations of ultimate reality. In psychology and the other social sciences, the basic attempt is the same: to observe people in their normal environment or in test groups in order to discover behavior that betrays something about them they have failed to see. Freud’s breakthrough was apocalyptic in this sense; he suddenly saw that “meaningless” handtwitching and repetitive dreams were pregnant with messages that betrayed forgotten aspects of the person. Similarly, one of the best ways to discover yourself is to place yourself deliberately in conflict, unusual, or extreme situations and watch for the apocalypse, or just observe yourself in everyday life so that you can, in the midst of an argument, stand outside yourself and recognize where you are coming from. Minor apocalypses occur day by day, moment by moment; you only have to watch for them.

The failure of experimental science and ordinary observation is in what they do with the apocalypse or rather with the fact that they are trying to do something with it when they should do nothing. The active mind intervenes with a theory to explain the apocalypse so that rather than preparing the way for revelation, the apocalypse reinforces the veil between the Self and the past. This is one of the reasons for hope in a positive outcome of the renewed popular interest in meditation in the West; it can be a reawakening to a passive form of thought for a civilization that, at least since Aristotle, has identified thought active thinking, with “figuring out,” with discursive logic. This narrowness is especially constricting in the form of thought that came to dominate philosophy beginning in the nineteenth century, openly labeled itself “logical positivism,” and demanded that the visible results of experiment be subjected to logic or active mind. The meditative speculation it utterly rejected may at last experience a rebirth.

This is not to say, of course, that the way the churches dealt with the apocalypse was any better. They, too, stressed logical analysis built increasingly upon prejudiced historical and empirical perspectives. Theology supplanted religious experience; theology was the application of reason to “revelation” but the “revelation” suffocated under a mass of abstract words. Indeed, it was religion that first killed revelation; experimental science only embalmed it. Theology killed revelation because theology assumed that revelation could be articulated, analyzed, and subjected to rational scrutiny without losing its character as revelation. Once again, revelation, if it is anything at all, is superior to reason. What reason analyzes cannot be revelation the act of analysis destroys revelation even though it preserves the name “revelation.”

I can now say something about the dual errors of experimental science and religion. The error of religion is that it has sought revelation without the apocalypse; the error of science is that it has sought the apocalypse without revelation. The two are absolutely essential if you are to reach the Abyss. The apocalypse refers to the bodily, visible, almost physical, experience. It is an experience achieved through pain and conflict. Religion is basically synthetic it tries to bind together, to bind the subject the object and literally to relink (“religio”) what is now separate and divided. It claims to expose you to what lies concealed behind the veil. The most dangerous illusion that religion fosters is that you can have the revelation and the relinking without the apocalypse; as such it departs from the world into the realm of what it might falsely call the “soul” or “spirit” and becomes emotionally subjective. The most dangerous illusion that science fosters is that you can achieve understanding by giving yourself over to experiment with the apocalypse that you can remain as you are, divided from the object of your study and divided in yourself, and yet achieve knowledge or contact with what is.

The path of revelation, as I indicated earlier, is separate from the other paths only in the beginning. It is a path tread by those who start out believing they want something quite out of the ordinary, that rather than asserting themselves they are willing to subordinate them’selves’ to a discipline or a teacher. All paths involve submission but in the beginning the other paths do not involve submission of the Self. You might temporarily accept the leadership of teachers when you are on the intellectual path because they have some information you can use for your own purposes (you are willing to suspend disbelief that mathematics exists and study until you discover it does exist either because you desire to use your success at math to get a job and make money) and stay obedient to their guidance only as long as you feel you are getting something of value out of the learning. In both cases you preserve your self; you remain in control of the depth and duration of your apprenticeship. The path of revelation, by contrast, is where you surrender your self even your capacity to judge whether your teacher is teaching you anything of immediate or eventual usefulness. You want to travel blind. You suspend your ego and follow the one who is the image of your undeveloped Self.

But the most important characteristic of what I call the path of revelation is that it begins with symbol and myth. It begins with the experience of the sacred as distinct from the profane. It begins with the experience of a dimension set apart from the world that seems at first to be merely different from, but then gradually you see it as deeper, fuller, and more meaningful than, the world. It is an approach where you toy with the awful, the sacred, or the Abyss from the very start of the journey and in a way that isolates you from the world forever. You may enter the temple of the spirit through many doors traditional religions, music, drugs but it is always a special place, a place set distinctly apart. It is so unique that you must avoid any “profanity,” which would occur were you ever to take your temple experiences out, literally, “in front of (‘pro’) the pillars (‘fanes’)” of the temple into the ordinary world or take the world with you into it.

The way of revelation is, therefore, a path for you only after you have discovered that ordinary life is veiled since you have experienced in the temple glimpses first of the veil itself and gradually of what is behind the veil. You have perceived the need for removing the veil, and you are striving to do so. Your danger, of course, is that the impact of the experience in the temple may remain separated from ordinary life in a way where you merely use the temple as an escape from life and you use ordinary life as a hiding place from the temple so that you engage the neverending cycle of the lost soul. The temple can even be the state of meditation itself; just like any temple you enter into, the meditation temple provides a special time and place separate from life. But, once more, like any temple, this one can be worse than worthless if you misuse it; it can become the means to total and yet pleasant resignation of the Self.

Rightly followed, the path of revelation typically is slow and, therefore, true progress can be confused with stagnation. In most cases, whoever does achieve growth realizes it only when they are shocked to fine how alien former friends and family members as well as their activities have become. Those who are actually progressing can despair of progress while those who are using the temple as an escape by popping in and out with increasing speed can be deluded into the illusion of movement.

You need one key to the temple and another to the veil you find there. Symbol and myth provide you with that second key. Moreover, what you find beneath the veil in the temple will ultimately be a state where the contradiction between the sacred and the profane is itself transcended what lies behind the veil is, of course, the Abyss. But to face the Abyss you must have a key that not only opens the veil but also one that sufficiently strengthens you so that you can pass behind the veil into the Abyss without being destroyed. Unhappy the one who falls naked into the hands of the living God.

If you faithfully engage them over time, symbol and myth will gradually grant you both the “objective” and “subjective” means of entering the Abyss, drawing you outside and beyond and simultaneously deeper into yourself. Symbol and myth exercise a synthesizing influence on consciousness. They integrate you by transcending the fragmenting sensuous and rational definitions of yourself. Symbol and myth are simultaneously mental, physical, and emotional phenomena. Anything that is not all three is not truly a mythical form of consciousness. Myth is obviously a sacred story, it obviously attracts your interest by appealing to your emotions, but myth must also be physical ceremonies are not just the acting out of myth; they are one of the ways you enter the myth or the way that the myth enters your flesh. It is in ceremony or ritual that myth enkindles the apocalypse. For example, most initiation rites involve great pain, deprivation, and isolation as well as consequent fear and terror. Children, born into an established reality and identifying themselves by their role, are taken and led step by step into the apocalyptic experience of a depth in themselves they had not known of until undergoing the ritual; the cover over themselves is taken away or occasionally savagely ripped off and the illusory character of childhood is destroyed. The story aspect of the myth that accompanies the ritual “explains” what is happening but explains it in such a way that they cannot remain standing from the perspective of their old selves; the explanation does not appeal to their old thinking and reasoning; it rather wipes them out and, in the use of symbols, which do not define what is happening but evoke a meaning for them, the children face the Abyss. They go beyond themselves allowing the child self to die in the apocalypse of pain. These ceremonies may become subtle and less barbaric but, without them, myth does not exist, and they way of revelation cannot be fulfilled.

Less primitive methods, especially for adults, get you to use the pain of everyday life as the physical material the mythical tales of suffering, death, and resurrection explain. While all revelation is personal and private in the end, the paths to it appear in a climate of community supported by communal myth and ceremony. The progress of the human pilgrim exists on two planes. Spiritual progress parallels material progress. On the one hand, we achieve material progress only through the collective activity of a productive community; as Marx so strongly reminded us in the nineteenth century, wealth is not produced by those who have it and not even by those who work to build it but by the community in its division of labor and specialization. On the other hand, material progress goes forward, as more contemporary figures such as Ayn Rand remind us, not by the mass but by the individual. The light bulb was not invented by the community but by a creative individual but one who was able to give it to realize his creative potential and make its product available to us only because of the community who educated him and the community that arranged for the production and distribution of it. Collectivism is a lie and individualism is a lie; neither can account even for material progress. Only human persons, individuals, can create, but the ground they create from is not their individuality but the community; the property is really collective even though a single person may be responsible for the specific invention. He could not invent without the materials provided by the community; he could not have the time to do it except for the division of labor allowing wealthy leisure; and he could not even think as he does without a whole history of civilizing teachers before him and available to him.

It is the same for nonmaterial progress. Individuals alone achieve the revelation but do so standing on the heads of predecessors and owing much to contemporaries. Even though the transcendent domain of spiritual work resides less in the community and more in the divine than does that of material work and more, their attitude toward them can only be one of profound gratitude.

A different and opposite kind of evolution occurs in the material and spiritual realm. In the material realm, the results of scientific research pile atop each other an accumulate, then an Einstein suddenly makes a breakthrough and reforms theory in a fundamental and unique way. Myth involves a different kind of consciousness, but it is a form of consciousness nevertheless and follows the same rule. Each generation can accomplish a creative breakthrough that expands and perfects the mythical system and allows an easier break into the revelation of the Abyss. This is why Judaism was superior in absolute human terms to polytheism; Moses had to abandon Egypt where the monotheistic myth of his predecessor, Akhnaton, was blotted out; it represents a superior religious insight. It is also why Christianity involves a step beyond Judaism not in any sense that those who call themselves Christians are superior to the Jews, but that the mythical system can work more effectively to achieve human growth through experience of the Abyss. Judaism may, in fact, be more heroic and there is no doubt that before Christians must be “Jews” before they can be Christians.

When communities or individuals experiences the “death of God,” the have suffered the eclipse of the path of revelation. In our own era, God has died by being eclipsed by both enemies of myth: the enemy within and the enemy without. Myth died at the hands of believers who used it as a sacred domain isolated from the rest of life that allowed them an escape from the world, at the hands of priests and ministers who became professionals and sought professional job security above everything, at the hands of theologians who tried to extract and separate revelation from myth by means of reason. Myth died also at the outer hands of the scientific community when science developed a religion without God a belief that reason and experiment could take scientists to a confrontation with reality and at the hands of a public willing to listen to the new religiosity and believe in progress, if not salvation, on the basis of the magical miracles that the new nonmythical religion used to prove its superiority. And yet, if it is true that all upward paths meet at the mountain top looking down into the Abyss, it is not necessary to run to an oldtime religious format to find what is needed; honest, serious, and openminded scientists will, at the end of their scientific path, find the ground falling away and the Abyss opening. Only one question remains: Will they have the courage to face it without the help and support of a mythical system?

Reason has its own path into and out of the Abyss. Scientific reason by itself is inadequate both because of is form and to the extent that it turns thought away from existence and confines it to the objective and subjective shards of existence. The genius of the modern world had its origin in turning away from uniform cultures uniformly initiating their members. The modern world is rooted in the revolution in thought that occurred between 2,000 and 2,500 years ago around the world culminating in Buddha, Socrates, and Christ and taking the form of either dialectical or paradoxical logic. The success of this revolution has so far been only partial so that modern society destroys the method of the apocalypse and revelation of the ancient world but has not yet given birth to the new method of Logos.

PART III

THE NATURE OF THE ABYSS ABSOLUTE

“And I,” he (David) says, “was dissolved in nothing and annihilated, and I knew not”; for as we have said, without knowing the way whereby it goes, the soul finds itself annihilated with respect to all things above and below which were accustomed to please it; and finds itself enamoured without knowing how. And because at times the enkindling of love in the spirit grows greater, the yearnings for God become so great in the soul that the very loves seem to be dried up by thirst and the natural powers to be fading away, and their warmth and strength to be perishing through the intensity of the thirst for love, for the soul feels that this thirst of love is a living thirst….

But it must be noted that…this love is not as a rule felt at first, but only the dryness and emptiness are felt…

St. John of the Cross

The Dark Night of the Soul

CHAPTER 14

ABSOLUTE NEGATION

The impossibility of speaking of the Abyss absolute makes every observation about it a lie, yet human consciousness can grasp something of it as long as thought avoids the traps of dualism. Most, thought must avoid either (1) demanding a factual description of the Abyss since facts reflect only the empirical or sensuous side of the basic dualism or (2) allowing itself to slip into dreamland and indulge emotional life, the other side. To the crude empiricist, what I say here will be nonsense and even gibberish; to the sentimental emotionalist, it will be “too analytical,” “harsh,” and “intellectual.”

Consciousness can come to grasp the Abyss in two ways. First, through mythical thought, where you are willing not to think about myths but to think mythically that is, to think not about but by stories, knowing they are unfactual but understanding that unfactual stories can reveal truth you can develop a medium for expressing the Abyss. Mythical thought allows sensation and emotion to work simultaneously. Second, Reason alone, though usually aided by myth, can develop increasingly subtle categories once it again surrenders attachment to the experimental and factual and is willing to reflect upon the experiential.

Take the myths of JudaicChristianity. Christian theologians traditionally correlate two stories those of Jonah and Christ. (See a parallel discussion of these traditions in Chapter 16) Jonah was called to do God’s work by preaching to the corrupt gentiles in Ninevah, but Jonah was afraid for his life and turned from the call, fleeing from his home on a ship. On board, he falls deeply asleep. While asleep, an awful storm begins to rage. Awakened by the ship’s captain, Jonah explains that the only way to save the ship is for the crew to throw him overboard into the sea. They do so and an enormous whale swallows Jonah. In this story, we find a summary of the whole process of falling into the Abyss as well as the nature of the Abyss.

It is fear of facing his inner judgment against the meaninglessness of his earlier life that leads Jonah to want to sail away asleep. In rational terms, he sails above the waters of unconsciousness, repressing his deep inner longing, not even willing or able to chart his own way since he knows nothing about the waters. Instead, he places himself in the hands of an experienced captain and then goes to sleep. He is living a normal life and yet without deep roots in himself. He cannot long live that life detached from roots and soon it beings to wither; he would remain asleep while it died, but, inevitably, his shattering life threatens everyone he comes in contact with. They shake and awaken him, trying to force him out of the illusory reality he has constructed to hide behind. Once awakened, unlike the others, he knows clearly what is wrong and what must be done because it is what he had deliberately put himself asleep to avoid facing. Still, he cannot do it himself. The crew must throw him overboard. He sinks into a kind of abyss as he had expected, but what he could not have predicted was a confrontation with the Abyss absolute that is, with the belly of the whale that swallows him. Beneath the surface of the waters of unconsciousness, he finds himself judged, and it is painful. However, there is a pain beneath the pain; it is the whale and the absolute Abyss.

This story leaves ordinary reason dumbfounded. However, if you found the story interesting enough or it was part of a religious heritage you wished to preserve, you might discover two ways of dealing with it. First, it might have moved you emotionally and inspired you to see the power of God at work. It might have stimulated your emotions enough for you to suspend your critical faculties and try to prove the factual possibility of being swallowed by a whale and surviving after three days and nights. This mistake would lead you to lose the significance of the story. On the other hand, however, you could take the story seriously without interpreting it factually. You might connect it with your living experience. Like Jonah, you are facing the Abyss, but have turned away from, or you might have fallen into deep judgments and despair. The intent of the story is obviously to lead you from the sleep of everyday life to the Abyss with the promise that if you face it, you, along with the others who are on the ship with you, will come out of it alive and improved. Those who are called to awaken and refuse the call are dangers not only to themselves but also to everyone who has not been called. Those who awaken to the call save not only themselves but all others as well.

The mythical account of Christ’s death is almost identical to that of Jonah although, of course, the words used and the events described are different. Like Jonah, Christ is Godman. God is also more immanent in Christ than in Jonah; in Christ, God’s call is less outer than inner. To ego or roleidentity, God appears transcendent or “outside,” but in the deepest sense (and only in that sense) the true Self, the Christ, is divine the seed of God is within the soul. Christ, like Jonah, tries to exist in the world, normally conversing with, living among, and criticizing ordinary people. When Christ, like Jonah, is on a ship asleep as the seas become violent, Christ’s disciples, like Jonah’s shipmates, in fear and doubt awaken him. Awakened, he proves his superiority to Jonah by ordering, on his own authority, the seas to calm. Like Jonah, however, Christ cannot face the Abyss without the help of his friends and enemies. Christ’s friends betray him to his enemies, and his enemies throw him into the sea to be swallowed more painfully, however, than Jonah. Like the captain and crew for Jonah, the people of Israel and their priestly leaders participate in the necessary act of redemption by putting Christ to death. He wrestles with his destiny both in the garden where his friends desert him by falling asleep and in his final plea on the cross when God deserts him, “Why have You forsaken Me?” Then, like Jonah, he is swallowed up in the first death going beneath the surface of the water, and then, buried under a stone tomb, he goes still deeper beneath the bottom of the waters.

One of the most amazing comments concerning Christ’s death in the Christian creed or “credo” is that Christ not only physically was placed in a stone tomb but also spiritually descended into Hell: “He died, was buried, and descended into Hell.” This has to be a great shock and mystery to Christians, and yet, they pass over it in silence as they recite the creed. Perhaps it is an embarrassment in this enlightened age to talk of God’s going down into Hell. How can Hell exist with God present when Hell means the absence of God? Hell must be a different face of God or else Christ is not God.

At any rate, Christ’s death understood neither as a sentimental, emotional, weepy incident nor as a literal, factual, historical event, but rather as a pattern you are to pour your life experience into, may illustrate not only the path into, but also the nature of, the Abyss. It involves three deaths, and each defy complete rational description. For Jonah, the three deaths are: (1) intellectual, (2) emotional, and (3) spiritual. For Christ they are: (1) emotional, (2) physical, and (3) spiritual the death in the Garden, the death on the cross, and the death in the tomb. In living, you experience fear of losing

your conceptions or the life patterns you identify yourself with. You fear this loss of identity because, while at a spiritual level you know it is untrue, you do not want to surrender it. Like Jonah hearing the call and Christ in the Garden, you will want to turn from the judgment. Second, you will experience being killed nevertheless thrown into the sea or nailed to the cross. Others will do this to you after you have recognized a deep judgment against the surface life you lead and reject it, but you will resist on the cross and try to swim in the water. You may have surrendered ideas and patterns but you still cling to yourself. Finally, even the self will be annihilated and brought to nothing the spiritual conflict that is Hell.

The myths, therefore, try to offer a description of experience and a warning that, however bad life looks now, it is only likely to get much worse before it gets better. Each major contradiction you conquer leads to another, and each subsequent one is harder and deeper than the last. Christ is first suspended in the contradiction between himself and his friends in the Garden and is rejected by their falling asleep. Next he is suspended on the cross between the earth and the heavens and is rejected by the heavens and destroyed. Finally, he is torn between the visible earth and the invisible spirit and is rejected into Hell. The absolute Abyss is, like Jonah’s whale and Christ’s tomb, Hell.

NEGATION

Instead of following myth into Reason, let us this time follow Reason into myth. Rationally described, the absolute Abyss is the experience of Negation. With reason you can penetrate, but only so far, into the notion of negation: you are moving; you see a sign; you stop. You have said “No!” to motion. Conceived in this way, negation is not experiential; it is experimental. It is the result of tests. The most committed experimentalist could grasp this notion of negation. To understand the quality of the Abyss, however, you need not only to perceive negation as a fact but as an experience that you cannot pin down to the visible evidence. The rose bush grows, flowers, dies all this is visible. You can see it growing, flowering, dying, but you do not experience its growth, flowering, and death as it does. To understand the reality of the Abyss, you need to understand not merely the definition of negation and its empirical basis but the experience of being negated.

The experience of negation has two faces. The most common side of the experience is that of having one’s will opposed. As a child, you wanted a piece of candy, a new toy, a trip to the park, but your parents said “No.” There was conscious, specific choice, and it was consciously and specifically opposed. You are getting older and want to play tennis, but your arms and legs just will not cooperate. Thus, you experience negation. Even the simple common, everyday, experiences of negation have one element in common: not only do you experience opposition, but you also oppose it. You do not accept the opposition. If you do, it is not the experience of negation. If you immediately accept your parent’s or your body’s judgment, then you turn from affirming one thing immediately to affirm the opposite. It is only when you cling to your initial desire that you experience negation. The psychology of the unconscious has discovered, moreover, that the absence of conscious opposition to your parents and your body does not mean the absence of unconscious rejection. Thus, you can experience negation without understanding its source. You have no doubts that you are doing what you want but this impression is due the denial of your deep resistance to what you are doing.

The experience of negation is constantly dual by nature. It is an experience of contradiction. You can be aware of experiencing negation without being aware of its source within. The source is an inner division. You are many persons while you may think of yourself as united and one person. You do not want to see the inner dualism because it would be painful, but simultaneously you seek to escape the experience of negation because it, too, is painful. Because you follow the principle of avoiding pain, as negation increasingly threatens to become conscious, you will escalate your attempts to escape it.

You may, of course, do what Freudian psychology particularly encourages you to do: make yourself conscious of the opposition. Even consciousness, however, does not guarantee understanding. Usually, it only helps you to materialize the opposition, destroying its spiritual essence and dissolving it in material appearance, so that you can act and work your way out of it. Children opposed by their parents and who, therefore, are suffering from an inner conflict, may refuse to repress that opposition. However, the only way they can preserve consciousness of it is by transforming what is an inner opposition, a struggle between two inner elements, into an outer opposition, a struggle between themselves and “others.” The opposition, they conclude, is between themselves, a unitary whole, and their parents, who are other than them. They think the solution is to liberate themselves from their parents, to fight them first by secret deception and, when they are stronger, by open hostility. But if they experience negation in relation to their parents, it is not because of parental opposition to them but only because the parents have touched off or have been the occasion for awakening to but never the cause of evoking an inner split. They experience negation only because their parents are not other than themselves because and to the extent that they deeply and unconsciously resent them.

Modern psychology promises liberation from this kind of negation through the therapy of either mental or emotional techniques. The purer form of Freudian psychology was cerebral and analytical. It asked the afflicted to delve into memory and figure out the external source of the original opposition. It assumed that the essential conflict took place in relation to the outer, the “real” world. Later and more radical psychology reversed the treatment. In place of thinking about the self, they recommended you start therapy with an emotional catharsis. Still, both forms always and everywhere assumed that opposition originated from some force outside the person rather accept the possibility that outer opposition originates out of spontaneous and natural inner divisions of the human being that “normal” human beings have not overcome. Given their assumption, then the only treatments needed for reaching sound health would entail the mental and emotional, but not the spiritual.

Freud, himself, dug more deeply and did find an experience of negation more fundamental than past or present frustration of conscious desires would justify. He started with the primary confrontation between children and their mothers. Mothers give their children their milk to drink and it initially satisfies the children. However, then they withdraw the breast and hunger remains. Then children scream in fear and rage. Their experience of negation is different from how it will be when they are older though Freud could treat it in a similar way. The difference is that babies cannot recognize the external object of their cravings. Adults may say “children want their mother’s breast,” but babies themselves cannot be perceiving that kind of want. We derive our notion that they want the breast from our understanding (1) of the cause of the hunger a lack of “milk” and (2) our ability to specify because of language things called “milk” and “breast.” Children have neither capacity.

We must consider children and their “wants” from their perspective at least as far as we can still understand it. They must be experiencing an opposition to their desire and rejecting that opposition without knowing how, why, or even what is opposing them. Theirs is a form of negation purer than that of adults, and its character can give a hint of the depth hidden behind your resistance to the more superficial forms of negation. The want you feel and the opposition you experience in the negation is a displacement of the more basic opposition and want that children learn to forget when they cannot face the negation of hunger. Their mothers console them and gradually they learn that the hunger is nothing but a hunger for food or milk. This knowledge is partly an attempt to hide the symptoms of a hunger the breast and milk did not fill. Lack of food may have touched off this hunger, but it did not cause it. Traces of this idea rest today in recent views that babies want not merely a full stomach but also their mothers to cuddle them. So babies whose mothers bottlefeed them very early and whose mothers merely prop up the bottle with a pillow rather than hold and embrace the feeding child in their arms will experience “deprivation.” Furthermore, “modern” ideas release mothers from needing to understand logically, analytically what should be done for their babies and, instead, encourage them to react “spontaneously”: “You feel the baby should be held; well, hold him!” The only problem in encouraging mothers to follow feelings is that many of their feelings may not be maternal at all but selfish or generated out of their own confusion, frustration, and deprivation.

Freud’s deepest and greatest insight was a paradox to rationalists: “The aim of all life is death.”(1972, Freud, 70) The desire for death is not only not pathological, it is the normal, but repressed, condition of the human being. It is no wonder that this insight became one of the first elements Freud’s disciples rejected in their teacher. Still, it was inevitable that Freud, using historical reductionism, would come upon this conclusion in his analysis of the human being. According to this historical viewpoint, the child is parent to the adult. However, if the child is parent to the adult, the baby is parent to the child. We like to think that the most intimately parental the most fundamental social and material relationship that children experience is that of being fed by their mothers. However, prior to this relationship and, therefore, for Freud more causative is the relationship in the womb and at birth.

Birth is the first experience of negation. Before birth, babies live a kind of death. They are largely passive. Fetuses may move, but the movements are instinctual, almost spasmodic. Birth is their first “trauma.” In it, babies are called to life, but experience the call as a negation. It is against the earlier, more pleasant intrauterine universe, and babies resent it. Life outside is not only different, it is painful. Recent psychology has sought to make the introduction to the world less of a “trauma” by prescribing that babies should be born in darkened rooms rather than under glaring examination lights; mothers should be as quiet as possible if not sedated. Never should you slap newborn infants to force them to catch their breaths. The experience of negation is painful and you should strive to avoid and lessen pain.

The question of birth thus propelled Freud to consider the problem of death. Birth is the first negation, and it is decisive. What is negated in birth is a state of passivity or death. Once babies have accepted life and become reconciled to it, then suddenly a reversal occurs: death rather than life becomes the primary negation. Babies first refuse to release their passivity and become active. Forced into activity, they then become reluctant to release their activity and become passive or let themselves fall into death. However, it is only consciously that we wish to live; unconsciously, we will our death or a return to passivity.

Life and death in this sense are not only different states; they are different dimensions. Therefore, that the human being unconsciously wishes to die, does not mean they wish physical death. This misunderstanding, in fact, is exactly the confusion involved in an act of physical suicide. No, the nature of physical, bodily death is the death of thing created by human consciousness. Your learning that you are a body is not immediate and spontaneous. It is mediated through language and only so to provide a convenient, not a truthful, way of living. To talk about a death wish as if it were a wish for “factual” or physical death is to try to force one dimension of human life to enter and conquer the other. Outer and inner deaths the death of “the body” and the death of the “flesh” or “ego” are different from each other: you cannot reduce the one to the other or even perceive it by conceptual tools names and thoughts. These are proper to understanding only the other.

Nevertheless, there is a great paradox. We experience negation in two contradictory modes, and we cannot reconcile them. The first negation involves an inability to accept life the more completely you accept it consciously, the more completely you reject it unconsciously. The second basic experience of negation is our inability to accept death. You do not want to go from the womb and you do not want to go back to it into the tomb. At the end of his most fascinating novel, Hermann Hesse ascribes these words to his major character: I am dying, “But how will you die when your time comes, Narcissus, since you have no mother?” (1968, Hesse, 315) He is saying that death must stand as a total negation to you unless you are willing to recognize, remember, and return to the peace of the intrauterine paradise.

Is there any way out of the contradictions and this negation?

NOTHINGNESS

Negation has three degrees. The first entails finding yourself denied the object of your will; the second consists in discovering yourself opposed first by life and then by death. About the third, nothing can be said. It is a unique experience. There is nothing like it to compare it with. It is the Abyss absolute, absolute negation, nothingness. We say, “It,” as if the beginning of our speech promised a conclusion; we say, “It is,” and the voice rises in great promise and expectancy; finally, we pronounce the great letdown: “It is nothingness.”

In its conventional form, the word “nothing” does look empty, but in both its conventional use and its literal definition, it is pregnant with meaning. Consider everyday life and the kind of conversation likely to go on in thousands of homes, streets, and public buildings throughout the world. “What are you doing, Jean?” “Oh, nothing.” “What’s the matter, Gary?” “Nothing!” “Then why are you sitting in that chair staring into space?” “Because there’s nothing to do.” “I brought you a present a little nothing.” “Thanks for nothing.” “Nothing succeeds like success.” “Nothing is more important than winning.”

A word so empty and yet so used and useful must reflect much meaning. You could say that you use the term “nothing” when you want to hide what is going on from others. Jean does not want to reveal to her mother what she is doing sitting with a book open on her lap, occasionally appearing to read, occasionally to write. It’s a way of breaking communication with a person you no longer wish to talk with. You start speaking and it sounds as if you are going to communicate something because language is the medium of communication, but then you appear to defeat communication by negating all content “Oh, nothing.” Still, everyone, and especially every parent, knows that the expression describing your state as “doing nothing” bears a heavy meaning. Some parents would take offense; the child is cutting them off from her world. However, you often can realize that a state of the other person’s being is more fully communicated in the phrase “I am doing nothing,” than in any other way. Yes, it usually involves meaning, “I’m doing nothing I want to share with you; I want to be left alone,” but the deeper meaning of this exclusiveness is that you are in a state of being that cannot be spoken. Speech will not only fail to give others any understanding at least speech other than “It’s nothing” but also will destroy the state itself. The smart parent will respect the silence knowing that it is not rejection that prompted Jean to withdraw but the discovery of an unspeakable state of being that must be treasured if growth is to occur; the wise parents will even rejoice that the child felt so open with them that she was willing to express in their presence the existence of this other dimension rather than force herself out of it and become phony and superficial with them. Parents often regard children such as Jean to be “problems,” but mysteriously have the greatest love for them. The sad part for Jean, however, is that she has not found in her parents, and probably not in anyone else, another who knows and can share the state she is entering. She must separate herself from others to be in it, but she would find marvelous joy were she to discover another to share this state of being. So great may be her hunger that she may fall into one of the many illusions that afford her soul consolation.

Then what about Gary? He says there is nothing wrong, but then suggests what is wrong is that there is nothing to do. Many a frustrated parent would be inclined to explode at a fifteenyearold boy’s saying, “There’s nothing to do,” even though most of us at any age know the frustration of feeling there is nothing to do when we know full well that there are hundreds of things to do, many of them not only can be done but are demanding to be done mow the lawn, put in the storm windows for the winter, repair the stairway, trim the hedge, cook a good meal, and on and on.

The feeling there is nothing to do can only mean there is nothing you want to do. Youngsters whose daily lives have been absorbed for nine months in attending school with hours of classes and study and extracurricular activities virtually forced upon them are not so different from adults similarly scheduled by jobs. Both may reach the beginning of a vacation full of plans of things to do so many that they could never get them done in the tooshort period of release from the oppression, but after three days off the job, all the wonderful activities fueled by anticipation become “nothing to do.” Liberated from classes and schedules, your first discovery can be that you are responsible for, and must yourself will, the things you are going to do. This liberty itself may momentarily be a fresh and novel experience. The next discovery is worse. It leads to paralysis. It is the discovery that our will has no basis. Originally, you wanted to do all the things you planned to do during your vacation only because they were the opposite to, or escapes from, your school or job. Once these burdens are lifted, the plans have no basis but your will, and you find your will has no basis. So it becomes paralyzed, and you do nothing. You say you are “doing nothing” because you feel there is nothing to do when, in fact, you are doing nothing because you can find no motive to do anything.

When you bring someone a present and call it a “little nothing,” you can be certain it is a “big something.” It can, however, be “something” in two ways. First and most obviously, it can be an expensive ring your saying that it is a “little nothing” is a way of underscoring its enormous value. Still, even here the second meaning is likely to seep through it is a big something exactly because it is a little nothing. Thus, you are offering in the gift of the bauble, however cheap or expensive it might be, not what its visibly contains the something but what it invisibly contains the nothing. A single red rose as a gift is much more meaningful to the recipient than a dozen. The poverty and transitory quality of a single rose underline the greater invisible value being offered. If you are wise, you will know when you receive a single red rose that you also can have all the things the other person could give all the somethings or the visible riches by virtue of the invisible gift, the “little nothing.” Better still, coming emptyhanded with absolutely nothing is when you can make the most perfect gift. “Nothing is better than winning.” The phrase can be read in two opposite ways depending on the mind of the person reading it. This paradox illustrates the two methods for reaching an understanding of the notion of “nothingness” as the third level of negation. You can gain it symbolically and romantically or you can gain it literally. When you are weeping but say “nothing is wrong,” your actual behavior belies the conventional definition of the term “nothing.” If you allow the term to evoke symbolically from you what could be the matter the meaning of “nothing” not contained in the word but drawn out of yourself then you may come to understand the experience you are going through as one of nothingness. On the other hand, if you are a hardheaded literalist and a believer only in facts, you may refuse to allow yourself to go beyond the literal meaning of the words used. You are not being literal but fantasizing, however if you believe the phrase, “Nothing is wrong,” means literally there is no wrongness. Literally, what it means is that what is wrong is nothing. “Nothing” is the wrong.

To illustrate what this signifies, take the “nothing is better than winning” slogan. What it means literally is not that winning is the highest human experience but winning is inferior to the experience of nothing. It is “nothing” that is better than winning. To a culture built upon a world of things, is difficult to face, but the term “nothing” does not refer to an absolute absence but only to a relative absence or the negation of things. Of course, if you believe that the only possible existence is as a thing, then you will neither accept nor even understand this point.

You can live in the world of things material things ideas or mental things, and feelings or emotional things. Not only are these things not the only existent, “they” do not “exist” at all. Again, these “things” and all other “things” are creatures of consciousness that joins a mental image or concept, which represents my interests or values, with some aspect of existence outside my mind and received through the inner or the outer senses. The experience of nothingness is, therefore, an experience not only of the annihilation of things around you, but also of yourself as a thing. Your bicycle is taken away and you resist. You are threatened by being taken away from yourself. When that happens, you experience nothingness. It is not the reaction to deprivation or to death but the experience of the end of resistance. All other forms of the experience of negation depend upon opposites and dualism some thing is negated or denied. The experience of nothingness is the experience of absolute negation the absolute Abyss where there is no longer any opposition. When you see your friend, son, or daughter sitting, looking listless, staring vacantly, what disturbs you is that they are not disturbed they are not dissatisfied with their state. You are pleased only when you can get from them a whisper of dissatisfaction because without that you are reminded of a possibility that you do not want to face that nothing is better than anything and everything while now you have many things and are looking forward to achieving everything in the future. Of course, if you have faced, entered, and survived the Abyss yourself, then you may be disturbed when others are not facing the Abyss that confronts them but accept the hand that you stretch out to them from your position in the abyss only to use it to save themselves from their own encounter with it.

The experience of being deprived of things is necessary and desirable for children and adults alike not because deprivation is desirable in and of itself but because the experience of deprivation, the most common, easiest, first experience of negation, is the necessary door to the harder and deeper experience of negation in the second degree. For ten years you built a house, but the house was really building you. Then the house burned overnight. For fifteen years you raised a child, but then war took your child from you and killed him. These “lesser” experiences of negation enable you to face the second negation your life and death. These two contradictory pillars of your existence (your being born and living is death to your death; your dying is death to your life), can drive you to negation in the third and final degree: nothingness. Nothing will have value no house, no person, not even yourself. Then you may be ready to enter the Nothingness, the absolute Abyss. The least resistance to the experience of Nothingness when it is knocking at your forehead produces nihilism. You want to tear down everything not because you see it as valueless, but only to avoid seeing the vacuity within.

Alone you are born and alone you enter something and so you end your aloneness. Alone you die alone you leave all somethings. But “alone,” like “nothing,” has literal and symbolic meanings that are the same and yet too often forgotten. Alone, on the one hand, means “without others.” However, alone, on the other hand and literally, means “allone.” Before you are born, you are without others, but you are “without others” only by being whole, allone. At death upon entering nothingness, you are without others but only because the “otherness” of others along with your selfidentity is annihilated you become “allone.”

It is now time to turn from the painful side of the Absolute Abyss, the experience of the Absolute as being negated, and explore its positive side.

CHAPTER 15

ABSOLUTE AFFIRMATION

Heaven and Hell

“So you think you can tell Heaven from Hell,

blue skies from pain.

“Can you tell a gun from a cold steel rail?

a smile from a veil?

“Do you think you can tell?”

Pink Floyd,

“Wish You Were Here”

If it is hard to contemplate the negative side of the absolute Abyss, the Abyss as negation, it is even harder to describe its positive aspect. You can know the positive dimension only by experience, and, unfortunately, before you can experience the joys, you must undergo the pains of entering the absolute Abyss that are annihilated only as you reach its depths. Because of the extreme dangers involved in the process, it is a good idea to begin considering the positive side of the absolute Abyss using symbolic and mythical terms. This will protect you from a premature and destructive exposure to the Abyss, concealing its true face from you as long as you remain unready to face it and simultaneously encourage you to keep searching until you are ready. The only problem with using myth and symbol is that you can easily make the mistake of taking them literally. Literal understanding of myth destroys it. For instance, when children reach the age where they demand literal knowledge, they destroy the deeper along with the more superficial meanings of Santa Claus to themselves. Even the destruction of myths through literal interpretation is preferable to preserving in a childish fashion the myths and the truths they can communicate for the cost of doing this is the destruction of the human being.

A dual religious tradition descended to us from the ancient Hebrews. One side involved myth and the other, the destruction of myth. One side was the Law and the other was the Prophets. The two stand not just in historical and accidental opposition but in one that is universal: the word kills, the Spirit gives life. Begin with the most basic distinction of Heaven and Hell along with their later theological addendum of limbo and purgatory. Juridical and legalistic consciousness takes Heaven and Hell to be justice’s reward and punishment for a life lived well or poorly. If you have lived wrongly, you should be punished; if you have lived rightly, you should be rewarded. But juridical consciousness hits its head against a stone wall: If God is good and merciful as well as just and if God sustains all life and all actions in life, then why does God punish what God allows? This question evokes any number of responses. They usually fall into two camps: those who insist upon predetermination (the decision of who is destined for Heaven and who for Hell has been made by God from all eternity) and those who insist upon liberty (we are so Godlike that we share in God’s own divine freedom). The determinists abolish the human being and the liberals abolish God. The first has no use for human beings and human effort under predetermination and the second has no use for God and God’s support since humans freely choose and make their own Heavens and Hells.

The juridical view insists on the necessity for purgatory and limbo. Justice demands that no one doing small wrongs be punished with severity equal to those doing great wrongs. A relative wrong does not justly deserve an absolute punishment. Not everyone who has done evil should therefore end up eternally suffering in Hell. At the same time, neither do they deserve the rewards of Heaven. If God is just, there must necessarily be a place of punishment in between but where the punishment eventually purifies you so you can enter Heaven. Finally, there are those who avoid doing evil but also fail to do good, particularly very young children who could not possibly have greatly sinned nor be selfconscious enough to know the difference between good and evil. They deserve neither Heaven nor Hell nor purgatory. They must be in limbo.

This juridical interpretation of myth is precisely what destroys myth. It reduces Truth and Justice from a cosmic to a human scale. It takes the lowest human social standard of material justice and applies it to the highest spiritual dimension. It allows the kingdom of the world to enter the Holy Family by suggesting, for example, that the Good Father punishes his children and does not indulge them. It appeals to a family analogy to justify the threat of Hell. However, very, very few decent human fathers would employ pain and punishment as an end rather than as a means. The human father punishes his children to correct and protect them so their future will be better and safer. Hell is a final punishment leading nowhere but to itself. In the end, Hell fails to meet even the human standard of justice, let alone the criterion of mercy and love.

Unlike legalists, prophets see not literally but mythically. The prophetic eye penetrates the black wall of legalism to the light. Heaven and Hell, limbo and purgatory, fundamentally are attempts to communicate experiences. We should take them not as explanations for life but as concrete, experimental observations about the truth of life. Purgatory is your actual suffering in time the consequences of your wrongdoing. For example, when you physically or verbally slap someone down without good cause you will consciously or unconsciously experience guilt. Those pains are twosided, however. On the one hand, they are bad because they hurt, but, on the other, they are good because they can lead you to a more positive relationship with others. They are caused by your wrongdoing, but they lead you to rightdoing. You do not become conscious of suffering these pains immediately. They do not come until after a deep judgment from inside has arisen. In shouting angrily at an employee, you can think you are only pursuing good business practice and not only not feel bad about it but even congratulate yourself on your toughness and skill. It is only when you drop your mask to yourself you no longer hide behind “being” an employer that the purgatorial pains, the pains that might “purge” you of your error press down upon your soul.

“Hell,” by contrast, is another term for the negative side of the Abyss. What differentiates it from guilt, resentment, or sadness, for example, is that you experience it as a final judgment. In the purgatorial experience, you realize that you have done things that are bad. It is because of these things that you suffer, but you still have time to make amends. Inwardly, the amends have already been made. The suffering signifies the inner transformation. Hell is total negation, total nothingness; there is no visible specific cause for it and there is no particular cure. It is an experience outside time: it is eternal.

The same goes for “Heaven” except “Heaven” signifies the positive side of the Abyss. There is no reason, no thought, no thing. Neither your behavior nor a hypothetical, literal God justifies the beatific experience. Heaven just is an experience of endlessness and endless joy. The term “Heaven” refers to the experience itself and not to theories about rewards and punishments.

Finally, we face the problem of limbo. The etymological connection between the terms “limbo” and “limen” or “liminal” in modern psychology is not accidental. “Limbo” is a grammatical form of the Latin limbus meaning “fringe” or “hem.” “Limen” and “liminal” both refer to the being on the threshold of a perception of a stimulus. Limbo is the fringe of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, but it is none of them. Limen is the fringes of consciousness or awareness. Both are outside of conscious judgment. If purgatory, Heaven, and Hell are the experience of judgments in time and outside time and if limbo (which is the “unconscious” dimension between time and eternity or what is not “subliminal” or beneath the limen) is also an experience of judgment on your life, then the great distinction between the modern science of psychology and the mysticism of religion breaks down. In limbo, you are always on the fringe of deep and meaningful judgments concerning your life but you never quite reach them. To be “saved” you must depart from limbo, experience the judgment, and enter Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory. To be “mentally disturbed,” in terms of modern psychology, is to be in limbo on the border of the depth where your affliction lies hidden and the psychoanalytical prescription should be that you need to enter below the limen and drag up to consciousness above the limen a truer knowledge of your life.

Limbo may be the “religious” or “mythical” experience most characteristic of our age. It is an age that considers psychological pain a disease you should avoid. It instructs us that guilt is both unnecessary, destructive, and caused by other people. All modern cultures are geared to sustain people who are living in limbo and willing to pay any price to stay there people who need to keep moving to new places and things as ways of dodging the fetid breaths of Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory. We believe we can longing for Heaven the pursuit of happiness without the risk of Hell or the pains of Purgatory. We leap into the instant Heaven of “mindaltering” drugs, but retreat when we find we cannot have Heaven without bad trips to Hell.

Our most common complaint to psychologists at present or in soonapproaching days is or will be the dull aching feeling that something is wrong without knowledge of what it is. Sociopsychological theory only reinforces our state of limbo by suggesting that the Purgatorial experience of guilt comes not from ourselves but from others. It claims that when you choose to do something you see as good but then feel guilt for having done it, the guilt comes because others have implanted rules in you. Psychology cannot deal with the problem of the widespread experience of limbo without accepting that deep conflict is natural to us and not merely implanted in us by others.

Were psychology to transform itself in a way that enabled it to deal with this problem, however, it would achieved the status of a religion. It would then speak and think in symbolic and mythical terms and no longer in scientific, literal, and factual terms. Indeed, it is by this new psychology that myth may be resurrected in traditional religions that had killed it by juridical and literal theology. We once moved from symbol and myth to fact and theory. Now we are moving from science and fact back to myth and symbol. Psychology’s most pressing problem in this regard is that it is impossible for psychologists to offer clients the therapy that relies on Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory unless they have “been there” they can, like all priests of the past, only use the words. If they had ceremonies, they might get and give a glimpse of these “places” or “judgments,” but without the Prophetic experience, they are the same as the corrupted priesthood of the past unaware that they are no better off than their “clients.”

The Christian mythical system insists that Christ died and was buried he went out of limbo beneath the limen, descended into Hell for three days, and then ascended into Heaven. This at least sketches the path both Heaven and Hell are united as an undefined, awful, nothingness except that one is horrible and the other is glorious. The stories of the life of Christ and the content of his teachings are filled with explanations: Where is the Kingdom of Heaven? It is “within.” It is hidden like a “mustard seed.” However, after his death, except the most barren outline of what happened, the reality, they left the experience, of Hell and Heaven undescribed. God is judgment, and judgment is both Hell and Heaven. What are the experiences of Heaven and Hell and how can we reach them?

THE BYSS AND LOVE

In more philosophical and rational terms, God is both the Abyss and the Byss. As there is an absolute Abyss, so, too, there is a Byss in the absolute Abyss. Hell is the Abyss. Hell is falling, an absolute nothingness and an absolute, eternal pain. The Abyss and Hell are categories, not of being, but of experience. Hell is not a place and it is not merely a state of mind. Both the notion of an external place and that of a state of mind are analytical. They arise from the analysis of existence. In existence, the experience hits you and only then do you judge and divide it into what contributes to the experience from the outside and what contributes to it from the inside, but once you make this division, you find that everything you thought was from the outside your mind partly constructs and that everything in the inside, the outside might have caused. The moment, for example, that you assume reality to be ultimately outside and investigate it as such, you find increasingly that the factual evidence suggests that the reality perceived is an organization of the raw data of your senses brought about by conceptualizations in your mind, and the ground is swept from my assumption about the reality of things. But then if you assume your mind projects all reality and you still strive to live, you find more evidence that the concept you thought originated in your mind came from “others,” but then maybe these other people are only constructs of your mind. You can go around and around frozen on a theoretical merrygoround.

This observation may help clarify another paradox. The Abyss, by definition, is a bottomless ocean without a net to catch you if you fall into it, but the Byss is the net in the netless ocean. Were you to use literal, experimental, or factual terms and use “logic,” this would be incoherent nonsense. But when you think experientially and symbolically, it all can make surprising sense. You remain in the same “place,” in the vast ocean, but you change so what first looked like an Abyss you now discover, through a transformation in your being, is actually the Byss.

Take the memory of a moment of depression or great emptiness. The bad feeling persists, however, only as long as you resist the depression. The depression or guilt is the result of a negative judgment you make about yourself and against yourself. You experience the bad feeling, if it is deep and so allencompassing, as endless. This state of being is like falling into the Abyss. Nothing is worthwhile. The pain continues, however, only because you resist the judgment of worthlessness. Some part of you still says no to the judgment against your life. When you finally surrender, you find happiness returning. The cure for depression is “letting go.” As you release your grasp on one part of your life or your life itself, you immediately find yourself released from the grip of these things. You find the Net. You find your Self.

You should accept none of this talk just because it sounds persuasive or authoritative. All of it you can and should put to the most rigorous test, that of experience. If you allow yourself to sink into depression giving up the resisting mental state signified by thoughts such as “Why me?” or “What did I do to deserve this?” you may continue to sink, but you will reach the bottom of the net and immediately experience a great joy that will be as high as your depression was deep. You may even begin to laugh. The depth of the depression is the height of the subsequent flood of happiness. In mythical terms, great sinners are saved if they repent and return to God. If you give yourself up to the depression, there is nothing, no one, there but God. The greatest joy in Heaven is one sinner who repents.

“Go naked into the World!: “Naked I was born and naked I shall die.” “Poverty” and “lack of attachment” in the symbolic terms of religion mean the absence not of goods but of the love of these goods. Whoever uses large quantities of goods, however, is always in great danger of using them not for themselves but against themselves, not using them but being used by them. The rich have so hard a time entering heaven because their very riches allow them to divert their minds into limbo and away from the pain of Purgatory, Hell, and the Abyss. Without these pains, they cannot enter Heaven or the Byss. Whether the riches are of mind or of matter, they can all be methods of escaping from consciousness and conscience. Thus, whole civilizations at their height their greatest intellectual and material wealth are always in decline. There is great promise in the riches. Riches themselves are not bad, but because of them we succumb to the danger of being able to hide from our Selves and the God that rules over them.

Using love as an analogy might make this clearer. I have met hundreds who claim never to have been in love. It is possible that what they claim not to have experienced is only a definition, an illusion, of love they have heard from others and not genuine love anyway. After all, how can they possibly claim anything about something they never knew. I suspect, however, there is at least a seed of truth in their claim. What they may mean is that they have never experienced an overpowering attraction to another. They may like or dislike others, but never intensely. The joy of love generated by the promise of union with the object of intense attraction has never been theirs.

Love, like the Abyss, has two sides. The state of “falling” into love is like attachment to a distant star. The distance leaves you tormented and feeling diminished, hungry, small, empty, and alone. But it is also the promise of union with the beloved. Either actual physical contact or only imagination may generate this joy, but whatever source it has, it is glorious. If you live in a civilization that has convinced you of the desirability of immediate gratification of longings and desires and of the principle that every emotional and physical attraction between people is sexual so you consummate the attraction in an orgasmic embrace as quickly as possible, then you will experience neither the tremendous Abyss of longing nor the strong Byss of fulfillment. Your love will be a limbo.

It is not that you must undergo the torture of deprivation to enjoy the peak of pleasure. This epicurean position is not the point though it contains, in the realm of the senses, the shadow of the principle. To a thirsty person, plain, cool water tastes indescribably delicious, and the experience of drinking may produce a state of pleasure far beyond that available to someone who is constantly consuming soft drinks, beers, and delicately flavored “mineral waters.” It is equally obvious that if you starve yourself, the simplest food will taste like the richest delicacy and better.

The principle you can discover in the experience of thirst as well as in that of love is that restraint produces an intensity that transforms the being of the person involved. It is not so much that the ultimate thing you get is so wonderful but you develop a new kind of appreciation and valuing. You no longer eat supper, you “commune” with it. (See Solzhenitzen, 1963, 56, 175) Deprivation sharpens the ability to perceive what was there all along. The world appears dull and lifeless but when you fall into love, you perceive with an intensity that transforms it. The recognition of deprivation transforms “the world” only because it transforms you.

When you look at a beautiful woman, your attraction suddenly makes just looking interesting and meaningful. Your senses feel intensified, but they are not. The attraction prevents you from seeing her as an object or as a thing and instead you see her as a mirror she becomes symbol of your inner Self. It is this quality that makes the vision interesting and shakes you out of a prejudiced, normal, everyday form of consciousness. If you accept the psychological theories of today and the allpervasive social code against allowing yourself to remain in pain and frustration for very long, you will chase the woman until you can get her in bed with you. And today that may be easier than ever before given the prevailing easy attitude toward casual sex as long as it is “safe sex.” You regard the pleasure you gain from the sexual encounter as your personal proof that the meaning of the attraction is physical, sexual union. The speed of your entry into the sexual adventure and activity reduces the depth of longing you would otherwise sink into and the height of fulfillment you might have reached. If you do not commit yourself to the other for life before you participate in sexualgenital union or coitus, then the mirror she was to you will be shattered. You will never know how great an experience you might have found an experience fabulously richer, and of a kind different from, the sexual. As it is with love, so is it with the Byss. Your experience of joy in love is proportional to the totality of your fall into its suffering. This is why, at the highest level, falling in love is falling into the Abyss. If you mentally, emotionally, and physically fall if it is really you, all of you, that falls, then your experience is of the Abyss. The only problem is that as long your love has a real object, then you have not fully fallen and been wiped out. You still cling to your belief that you understand what it is you long for. If you lose yourself in love, you find yourself; if you lose yourself in the Abyss, you find yourself in the Byss.

TAMING GOD

Nothing has been a greater stumbling block to Western religions than the Abyss Absolute. Everywhere and increasingly, they portray God as a beneficent, kindly old uncle, a “daddy,” who would like nothing better than to see his children happy. Only a few stories such as the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus and a few more from the ancient Hebraic Bible, show the awful face of God in the Abyss. “Terrible it is to fall into the hands of the Living God.” Even the prophets had to have acquired enormous strength to endure merely a glimpse the reality of God. God was the unspeakable, the unknowable, the Nothing. Moses was uniquely privileged to be put in the cleft of a rock so he could tolerate seeing even the retreating back of God as God passed by. The “rock” refers to the symbolic language that reveals/conceals God and preserves you from an annihilating face to face encounter. Christianity gradually presented only a soft, kindly face of God the face of a young man, delicate and almost effeminate in the decadent art of recent times. Even the crucifixion of Christ, undeniably suffered cruelly at the hands of God, became softened in portrayal almost to the point of gentleness, and the responsibility of God for the deed turned into blame for the “Romans,” “the Jews,” the Sanhedrin, even for all of us but never for whom it belonged: God, “the Father.”

“If God is so good, why does he allow death and disease to afflict innocent children?” “Why do the innocent become the heaviest casualties in wars?” “Monstrously perverted adults roam free, while the pure of heart perish.” The claims against God go on and on, condemning his injustice and lack of mercy and destroying whatever vestige of faith that had been left even for a few living during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “I have seen the face of death on the battlefield, at the funerals of family members, and I tell you that that face is the end.” “God must die of the torment he has brought to the human race.”

The two positions evolving in Western religion are mutually exclusive but amount to the same thing in the end: “God is good/God does not exist.” The second rejects God because of the evidence of grotesque evil in his world, and the first turns back in fear from the temptation to reject God and reacts with blinded and blinding affirmations of God’s goodness. Both stumble before the true God because of the Abyss fear of, and blindness to, the Abyss of suffering makes the one affirms a goody God, and rejection of the Abyss of suffering seen makes the other reject that God. Both positions are mistaken and the mistake arises out of refusal to face the Abyss. An encounter with both mistakes simultaneously may, however, lead us closer to the truth.

In symbolic and mythical terms, Westerners have yielded to the temptation to tame god. God is “untamed” and is as much present in the thunderstorm, the hurricane, the tornado in the chapel. We seek to insulate ourselves from the dreadful experience of God. The experience of God is the experience of the Abyss as well as the Byss, but that contradictory experience, a veritable encounter of matter with antimatter, is too much for most of us to endure. Moreover, ordinary life draws a veil between you and the Abyss. Religions are founded with the purpose both of leading you through the veil to the experience of the Abyss/Byss and of doing it without shattering you. The mythical systems they construct are protectors over those called to face the Abyss but also involve ceremonies to force them into the Abyss. Religions, however, rapidly degenerate, lose contact with their roots, and became mutual protection rackets. Rather than using the Church as a means to find the Abyss, we use it as a mighty fortress against the Abyss, a Peter’s rock that Hell cannot break into.

You tame God when you confine God to a specific building. Such buildings may be necessary and are at least desirable ways of guiding you to the confrontation with the Abyss, but the manner that you actually use them instead insulates you from God. Moreover, the Priestly function of helping you to face the Abyss turns into an end in and of itself. It is the Priest who has the power the bureaucratic power of office, the pontifical power of ceremonies, or the emotional/mental power of personality and abuses it by giving you what you crave, a sense of safety and selfconfidence.

You tame God by first abolishing God to the Church and then abolishing God from the Church. You tame God by giving God human standards of goodliness: God is good because going to church makes me feel better; God is good because Christ said, “Let the little children come to me”; God is good because God gives us these goodshepherd Priests, these pleasant sacraments, these warm and humane ministers. God is good because of the gifts of Christmas, Easter, and Passover. If God is good in these terms, then why does the Bible proclaim that it is such a terror to fall into God’s hands?

Nietzsche argued that ancient Greek religions declined when the Greeks abandoned the goatgod, Dionysus, and in his place raised Apollo. They dethroned the god of wine, intensity, madness replaced him with the god of calm, orderliness, humaneness. The later Greeks, with the Hebrews, tried to explain away tragedy the “goat’s song” or prophecy by attributing misfortune to a flaw in the character of those afflicted by it or, in Hebraic terms, “sin,” rather than recognize that the flaw was only the door beyond an orderly life of seeking human good and avoiding human evil. The tragedy ends with a fall into an Abyss of despair. When Socrates, calm and triumphant, drinks his poison, however, he demonstrates a confrontation with, and a conquest over, the Abyss he reveals a Byss going beyond it. The promise of the Byss was so beautiful that his followers tried to enter it immediately rather than realize that they first had to endure the fall into the Abyss.

What happened to Socrates also happened to Christ. The myth of Socrates and the myth of Christ, established as instruction for how to face the Abyss of tragedy, became instead the new model of human good that would protect you and save you from having to suffer the fall. Their followers generated the grand illusion that all you had to do was “accept” the goodness of Christ and Socrates, follow them, and you would be saved from the Abyss. Christ and Socrates, however, ended on the Cross and in the cup of poison, and all who follow them should assume that they will end similarly. Nevertheless, the “faithful followers” of Christ placed their hope in this kind of godman; he was their Master, their Savior he underwent the Abyss so they did not have to. They believed in the illusion that they could get the reward of the Byss without enduring the Nothingness of the Abyss.

It is right and just that this simpering religion rejected. When God is no longer terrible to you is no longer both Abyss and Byss when God becomes only the protector from dread and not also the dread, then you will be able to find no explanation for the evils of disease, death, and the torment of the innocent. That is, of course, only because you have made God in your image your image of good and evil, a human image projected into the Divine. No wonder Nietzsche was to proclaim the death of God and to insist on the necessity of going “beyond good and evil.” It is not that you should do what you believe to be evil but to recognize that your knowledge of good and evil is limited, partial, and inaccurate and, above all, that our knowledge of God not only is imperfect but cannot be perfect and cannot even be accurate unless you first have knowledge of the Abyss.

Many Agnostics are much more religiously motivated than the believers not because they have greater understanding of life and reality but because they, at least, know that they do not know. The believers get nowhere in shouting to the atheists that their God helped them in hard times. They only show in this that they have avoided falling into the Abyss. All such claims of the faithful from the crudest (“I prayed and God made me rich, healthy, and whole”) to the most complex (“My child died, but prayer to God made me feel better”) only signify weakness and ignorance. Better to say, “God led me into Hell and out: God is Heaven and Hell,” or “God is the death of my child.” Wrapped in the lion’s mane rather than in the sheep skins, the faithful might be more persuasive. It is God who torments us; it is God who gives us rest.

Evil, embodied by the term “devil,” is both good and bad; it is bad that appears good. God is neither good nor bad but is beyond all human judgments of both. Seeing God through merely human standards of good and bad leads to two opposite but complementary errors where you either deny God’s complicity in the evils of the world so you can accept God or you reject God because you cannot avoid God’s complicity in them. These dual errors feed off each other. Hope resides in the possibility that the faithful will realize that only fear keeps them faithful and that fear is the fear of the Abyss of God; hope resides in the possibility that the rebels against God will come to understand that their rebellion is based on their experience of an Abysmal bottomlessness of pain and suffering in the world they may realize this by understanding that their way of keeping themselves from experiencing the Abyss they confront is by rejecting the God they cannot reject because their very rejection is inspired by an affirmation of a standard of “good” higher than their concept of “God.”

PART IV

EMERGING FROM THE ABYSS ABSOLUTE

The sanctuary is in front of you and the thief is behind you. If you go on, you will win; if you sleep, you die.

Saadi of Shiraz

The true lover finds the light only if, like the candle, he is his own fuel, consuming him self.

Attar of Mishapur

If your cast yourself into the sea, without any guidance, it is full of danger, because man mistakes things which arise within himself for those arising from elsewhere.

If, on the other hand, you travel on the seas in a ship, you are in peril because there is the danger of being unable to let go of the vehicle.

In the one case, the end is not known and there is not guidance. In the other case, the means becomes an end, and there is no arriving.

Niffari

CHAPTER 16

TWO WORLDS

The face of the Abyss/Byss is terrible and awful. Everyone who has seen it emerges from its presence profoundly shaken. Human life demands that we do pass through and emerge from it. We are not allowed to wallow long in the torment and bliss of nothingness, and, yet, we cannot long live fruitfully and humanly without again tapping our roots in the Abyss/Byss for it alone nourishes our lives with crystal waters.

Religion is the means for attaching ourselves to the dual worlds that are ours. Entrance into the Abyss always comes out of failure to resolve the ordinary contradictions of life. In Greek mythical terms, life periodically faces attack from two opposite sides, as the stories of Scylla and Charybdis illustrate. Both Scylla and Charybdis are feminine and represent multiplicity and confusion. Scylla is a monster hidden in an ocean cave while Charybdis is a whirlpool. Humans must traverse the ocean through a narrow passage between them and, in the process, run the danger of eluding one horror only to fall victim to the opposite. Only the heroically clever like Odysseus can navigate between them carefully into the beyond. Similarly, monsters and gargoyles guard the entrance to cathedrals and temples to frighten away all who are not strong enough to persist through the contradictions of everyday life. They are unable to enter the house of God. (Campbell, 1968, 8992)

The Biblical tale most closely defining the human condition as we face both this world and the world beyond is, again, of the nonHebrew Jonah. (See parallel discussion of this in Chapter 14) Remember that Jonah, in the midst of his normal, everyday life is given a divine command to preach to a foreign people. He is afraid, however, and seeks to escape his responsibilities. Concealing his identity, he flees on a ship. A huge storm threatens the safety of the crew. Jonah knows the storm is from his refusal to answer God’s call so he tells the captain to cast him overboard and the storm will subside. The captain and crew do so, the storm calms, but a giant whale swallows Jonah and eventually spits him up on shore.

The ship, like all other solids beneath your feet, looks firm and strong but is actually floating upon unstable waters that can quickly turn from calm to stormy and destroy it. There is no safety on your “grounds” your home, city, and nation. Your presence in them, if it is a means of escaping human responsibility, is a danger to all, and your friends and relatives must sooner or later cast you out into the sea but only if you reveal to them who you are. You can continue to pretend you are not who you are and bring down the ship, city, and civilization. Jonah is thrown, half voluntarily into the sea that is, he allows himself to meet the groundless Abyss. In human terms, the high seas might as well be bottomless the sea of unconscious depths. The ground he had been standing on the ship was good ground, but it could no longer be home for him. He falls into the groundless and is swallowed by the underground. He has found the Byss in the Abyss. When the whale casts him up, he knows now there are two grounds or two worlds: the ship and the whale. That watery storm, which terrorizes the first ground of life, the ship, does not terrify the second, the whale. Jonah becomes strong enough to undertake the divine commission now because whatever happens to him in the foreign city (the unstable ground) cannot shake his security of connection with the whale. The worst that nature and others could do to Jonah would mean casting him into the Abyss of nothingness. They regard that as the supreme punishment because they do not know of the whale.

There are other similar stories of the double death in the Hebrew Bible. One of the most striking is the famous tale of Joseph and his brothers that figures even more significantly in the Koran. Stung by envy, Joseph’s brothers threw him into a valley to die when they could not carry out their original plan to kill him themselves. They regret their action, but when they go to retrieve him, he has disappeared. Others seized him and took him Egypt as a slave. When he resists the amorous advances of the wife of his master, which are spiritual derailments since she is inspired by spiritual love but interprets it as physical love, she accuses him of trying to seduce her. Thrown into the relative abyss of prison, the Pharaoh has him drawn out again because of reports of his remarkable ability to interpret dreams. Having explained to Pharaoh that his mysterious dream predicts the approach of famine, Pharaoh commissions to save the realm. Eventually, he saves even his own family who join him in Egypt. In all cases, he was thrown unwillingly into the Abyss that perfects him.

Take one more example, this time from the Christian Bible. Jesus dies on the tree, the cross, suspended between the thisworldly opposites of sky and earth. It is by virtue of these two opposites the lightness of the air and the gravity of the earth that he dies. After his death, he is entombed within stone and, according to tradition, he descends into Hell. Two symbols reinforce the message: the death symbol of the bottomlessness of the tomb hewn out of solid rock and the more theological symbol of Hell indicating not only an Abyss but also a painful one. Only after this fall into Nothingness does Christ arise to walk again among mortals and ascend into the Byss of Heaven.

Let us make no mistake. Ordinary life always and everywhere gives us the experience of dual worlds. All human beings meet the Abyss and enter into it. Every human being knows what the Abyss is. You do not need religion to reveal it to you. Why then have religion? What does it do for you? It benefits you in two ways above all others. First, it can give you strength sufficient to allow you to face the Abyss fully because it holds out the promise that what appears as terrible now does so only because of your attachment to illusions. The Abyss destroys illusions and appears to destroy you when you are attached to them. One illusion is that you are not going to die or, more specifically, that death is not part of you; under this illusion, you fear death. Religion may help you face it by breaking the illusion if only it does not create further illusions of literal, physical heavens and hells after literal, physical death.

Second, and even more strikingly unique, religion can allow you to realize the genuine dualism of human life while promising an ultimate, invisible monism. There is one God. While we are offsprings of that God, we are not God. We are only part God and must labor in contradictions. There are many paths into the Abyss/Byss. Art, for example, may allow you to enter into pain, suffering, and then, ultimately, ecstasy. However, as artists you easily conclude that art is an end and not a means so you strive to live only for your art and its ecstasy.

On the contrary, religion reveals the Abyss as terrible and awful as well as ecstatic. Jonah, Joseph, and Jesus all want to avoid the sea, the valley, the prison, the cross. The Abyss comes to them as an unwanted result of the way they and others are trying to live. In the end, none of them condemns those who throw them into the Abyss. Jonah immediately encourages the captain and crew to throw him to the sea because he knows he is to blame for the danger. Joseph forgives his brothers for throwing him into the valley as Christ forgives those who crucified him. Are Joseph and Christ indulgently tolerating evil? How can Joseph love his brothers who have so grievously intended to harm him? How can he, even if he loves them, not seek to cure the evil by punishment? How can Christ similarly overlook his those who crucified him? Are we to assume that Joseph and Jesus indulge criminals and tell us to ignore heinous crime? Jonah, Joseph, and Jesus show three insights. First, that the crime of others either is its own punishment or is the result of punishment. It is because jealousy torments them that his brothers try to kill Joseph, thus repeating the fratricide of Cain. It is because fear consumes them that the citizens of Jerusalem kill Jesus. Second, what others do to Jonah, Joseph, and Jesus leads to their ultimate good. Jonah and Joseph find mortal life improved by their experience. Christ is raised to Heaven. What appears as a horrendous crime is instead boon to the victim. The perpetrators have suffered enough. The best way to correct them and help all was to teach them by example how to face what they most dread.

All life gives testimony to the existence of the two worlds. Religion has been one, and may be the preeminent attempt to deal with this unique contradiction. Any other contradiction can be overcome. But all humanity stands with one foot in either of two worlds the timeless and the time bound, the blissful and the pleasurable, the terrifyingly awful and the merely painful. Our ultimate task, the concern I wish now to take up in this final section, is how to achieve a right relationship between the two opposing worlds.

CHAPTER 17

THOUGHT, OUGHT, AND TIME

The first step in achieving a happy relationship between the two dimensions of your life is to recognize there are two worlds, they are opposite, and each has its own rules that conflict with those of the other. This is what the story of Jonah teaches. Jonah tried to reject one of the worlds and live only in the world he understood. He thus refused to let himself enter the Abyss. Recognition of the basic dualism in human existence is the single universal necessity. Once you achieve recognizing it, all else will follow. Descriptions of what life is like after you have passed through the painful recognition of dualism must, at best, be only encouragements so long as you have not yet faced the experience of dualism.

As the lesson of Jonah illustrates, the more you seek to withdraw from the depth dimension, the more it draws you to it. The more you make your life common and pedestrian, the more you demand thrills, excitements, and games. However, the more you can hide in dull conventionality one moment and ecstatic conventionality the next, the more the uncreated “other” world draws you toward it and the more its embrace feels like a curse. The harder Jonah struggles against his fateful confrontation with the second world, the worse it looks and the more incessantly it presses itself upon him. There is no chance that it will leave him alone, and shows itself as a growing, dark, foamy, drowning Abyss. He can avoid facing it only by forcing himself into deep sleep.

Political leaders form a fascinating example. Both President Lincoln and Prime Minister Churchill claimed to have suffered horrendous bouts of depression. Churchill spoke often though usually in private of the depression he called the “black bear” that seized and squeezed the life out of him. Lincoln had his own black bear of brooding, and it had little to do with the successes and failures of his presidency.

Artists, too, come in for more than their fair share of torment. Pressures from the conventional world contradict unconventionality in life styles, genius, and the ecstasy of beauty. If unsuccessful, artists are dragged down by creditors; if successful, by managers, bankers, and hangerson. All long to rest in a monistic peace, but the dualism plagues them.

Try for a few moments to imaging the whole range and variety of human beings: picture the great politicians, artists, as well as the mass of the rest of us. What applies to each, however different they appear? The existence of the two worlds reflects the absolute unity of all of them. Everyone experiences dualism but longs for monism: everyone experiences life as a contradiction many different contradictions and one universal contradiction but everyone seeks the peace of knowing the world as one. All of us want to believe, for example, we exist as one person. If you are one, the dualism is not fundamental. You try to produce this sense of unity in one of two ways: either by forgetting about one dimension or by trying to conquer and subjugate it to the other.

You can fight your war against the truth of dualism on the battleground of reason. It is by thought and its tools of logic and hypothesis that you can pretend to defeat dualism. Theory allows you the illusion that you understand, grasp, or hold onto the passing shadows. Time and motion are the principle antagonists to your maintaining peace of mind. You have to account for change daily change, change from youth to age, from life to death. The grandest illusion of our age is that thought has conquered time and motion. We “prove” this to ourselves by being able to predict future events and to annul time and space by inventions that let us travel with nearly incredible speed. Prediction and speed, created by a few scientists and engineers and used by the rest of us, allow you to hold in your hands the eternal secrets of nature.

We delude ourselves when we come to believe that thought and theoretical understanding allow us to conquer time and to enter into pure existence or pure life. We want eternal Being. The everyday contradiction of change and disease are symbols of dualism. If we could understand change and disease, we believe we could conquer dualism. We want to be God pure and changeless being.

When we get exhausted by our endeavors designed to conquer dualism, we seek out the enormous variety of devices designed and available to allow us to forget about it. Thought exhausted us so we suspend it and sink instead into feeling and sensing. As individuals and often as whole civilizations, we move from the cult of conquest to the cult of selfindulgence. We have realized that thought does not release us from time and that, in fact, thought is timebound. It always deals with information, “data,” from the past and projects into the future. In thought, we may distinguish past, present, and future, but these are segments of time and change. The very thought by whose power we sought to conquer one dimension in life constantly proves to us that two dimensions exist: It is only because there are two dimensions that we can stand outside one of them; the form of thought gives us a place to stand beyond the immediate and the changing so we recognize it rather than merely immersing ourselves in it, but the content of thought is always in time, of the past locked in memory and record.

So we reject thought and surrender to the twin gateways we use to recognize “reality” and collect data: our senses and our feelings. We become alternately hedonistic and sentimental. One moment we are eating, drinking, and dancing, and the next, we are indulging in mawkish sentimentality in the form of novels, plays, and films a good soap opera or an exciting game capped with selfindulgence in candy or beer. We escape time by ignoring it. Time lays heavy on our hands so we kill it. And if we are not killing life by killing time, at least we kill half of life for time is one of two worlds or dimensions of human life. We can kill time, escape time, but only for a while. The pleasure and sentimentality must end; our self indulgence in it will end. We can turn to new pleasure or sentiment at that point, but, in doing so, we are serving rather than conquering time much as conquerors always become servants to their captives in caring for their prisoners and making sure they are securely guarded.

Time is only one of the signs of fundamental dualism in human life. Another is conscience or our sense of “ought.” We use both conquestthroughthought and forgettingthrough”spontaneity” to kill conscience too. Thought has to recognize that human beings throughout the ages have experienced an “ought” and have constantly, in a great variety of ways, tried to deal with it in their lives. The thinker, too, discovers a sense of ought inside. But where does it come from? Unless thought can answer, a dualism between “is” and “ought” rather than monism exists. Therefore, you seek to find the theoretical answer to this persistent sense of obligation. Social psychology springs to your rescue. There is no “inner” separate and distinct from the “outer”; everything is “outer,” it proclaims. The ought that feels subjective actually comes from the “outside,” from other people family, friends, fellow citizens, whatever. It comes from community and society. Why, it inquires, do community and society impose ought upon us? So that they can function more smoothly. Why do some “oughts” cause disruption instead? Because there are different societies and communities each teaching different oughts and, besides, natural events cause changes that make certain specific “oughts” ineffectual. For example, the “ought” against abortion was “functional” only when populations were small and precarious. The ought will reverse itself when populations become large and burdensome. The longing to escape the torment of dualism also expresses itself in an opposite fashion, one that abandons thought with one rationalismshattering blow. They say “ought” can never be derived from “is,” that ought is a special category of human feeling not explicable by rational abstraction. The requirement of harmony in society may lead us to conclude rationally that we must behave in this way or that, but our sense of right is beyond rational analysis. Reason must admit that this sense is an essential aspect of human nature. So hedonism and sentimentality depart from reason and abandon the attempt to conquer “ought” by subordinating it to external nature and social necessity. Instead, they indulge in leading a life based on an inner sense and feeling of ought. The hedonist says, “There is an ‘ought’ ingrained in my stomach and I must indulge it. No matter if society claims it is a bad ought; it is my ought and as good and as justified as theirs.” The sentimentalists say, “The heart has its own law; who knows the mysteries of love; you must follow your ought.” “All other ‘oughts’ are equal to yours but none is superior.”

Rationalism leads to order for the sake of order: ought contributes to social cohesion. Hedonists and sentimentalists produce the ultimate disorder: each of your “oughts” should be followed and each subjective ought, however it contradicts the other oughts inside you, must be indulged in its turn. The first strategy leads to inhuman rigidity; the other, to inhuman chaos. Individuals and civilizations eventually find either side intolerable and live by swinging back and forth between authoritarianism and hyperindividualism.

Sensualism and sentimentalism are the hardest of the two forms of monism to answer here for an answer must be couched in logic and logic is something each of them may reject out of hand. Yet two comments illustrate their error. First, the weaker argument: Human beings have standard equipment; part of it consists of the senses and emotions, but another part is thought; no matter what we do, thought remains as long as we live; indeed, many of the sensualsentimentalist activities are merely attempts to ignore thought’s persistent reminder of both time and conscience by keeping the organism busy. Second, if you reflect on whether your sensual or sentimental activity actually represents you, you may find yourself in a dilemma. Of course, you should follow the command of your inner ought, whether hunger for food at this moment really reflects you is highly dubious. At best, it is only a part of you. If it reflects only a part, then there may be another part more important and it expresses oughts or inner wants that your stomach is ignoring and contradicting. Finally, imagine pursuing each pleasure and each sentiment and consider where and when it will end consider not what you get out of it because pleasure and sentiment are their own ends but whether the quality of subsequent experiences of each pleasure and sentiment does not deceive you so to sustain it you must become more and more brutal in pursuing it; do not the anticipated pleasures and sentiments fade in the tasting?

Now, let us simultaneously agree with and refute sensual sentimentality’s argument against rationalism. While no “ought” can be derived from an “is,” this is so only if you are talking about the term “is” as applied to things. If, on the other hand, you recall that nothing is that nothing alone exists then you may make your way out of the trap sprung by reason against Reason. Nothing, no single thing, is. Everything both is and is not. Everything is a contradiction that reflects the fundamental contradiction in existence. Of course, if your basic motive in using thought is to conquer dualism, you want to lessen it as much as possible. Thought aids in this selfdelusion when thought is tied to a “discursive” logic based upon Aristotle’s law of identity (a thing is what it is and is not what it is not). “If this is a pen, then it is not a nonpen.” This conclusion is true and valid as far as logic goes but not as far as existence goes. The pen, both is and is not. You cannot apply just the term “is” to the pen without qualifying it: “is” accorded absolute and eternal existence, and you know that this pen was not and once will not be again; moreover, this pen is not perfect as pen so about it you cannot say simply that this exists as pen it exists as movement and change and not as the eternal notion of “pen.”

Finally, we come to the existential solution to the problem. Every thing is a mixture of the contradiction being (“is”) and nonbeing (“is not”) as well as a mixture of the contrary qualities of existence. “Becoming” is the union between the Absolute Being (“is”) and the relative being (the thing). Everything is not a being but a becoming. And becoming points to the inherent dualism that pervades all of existence as “thing.” Therefore, you can derive an “ought” from an “is,” and, indeed, that is the only place where you can derive an ought. Both the rationalists, on the one hand, and the sensualsentimentalists, on the other, make the same error. They derive an ought from a phony “is” the rationalist looks outside to the “is” of nature and society and the sensualsentimentalist looks to the “is” of “me,” “my desire,” “my stomach,” “sex organs,” etc. Sensualsentimentalists turn out to be rationalists in disguise; they do not know their hunger immediately without mind. Mind defines the origin of the hunger as from the stomach and for “food.” Rationalists turn into sensualsentimentalists when they claim that order is natural and that a wellfunctioning social organism is beautiful. Both ultimately establish an ought that comes from some “is,” but the “is” is only of their imagination a compound creation of “is” and “notis.”

Let us now conclude by looking at a religious metaphor. The biggest lie theology has perpetrated upon us is that God “exists” the way “society” exists or “you” exist. This would not be a great deception if you understood that neither society nor your stomach exist and that God is the only existent. Everything else is a thing, a mixture. God could not “exist” in our dimension of existence because ours is dual. In our terms, if we wanted to express the reality of God’s existence, we would have to say that all three of the following statements are equally true: that God is not yet born, that God is continually being born, and that God always was.

Time continues to play its tricks on our minds. We come to believe that an eternal being (eternity) is some thing that always was, that because god precedes us logically we came out of God that God therefore must precede us in time. But God is not before us in time. God is beneath us, above us, is us. We are the eternal generation of God. We are God’s means of coming into being. God is the breathing out of us not our “mechanical” manufacturer but the center we proceed from.

Now, continuing with the religious metaphor, only Divine thought is eternal and existent. Our normal thought, made up of language and logic, cannot let us emerge from either time or an “ought” that reels from oppressive totalitarianism to equally oppressive individualism. Thought may lead us out of being timebound, culturebound, or selfbound, but only when it surrenders categories of language and logic only when it surrenders categories of language and logic only when it stops and the Abyss of nothingness opens. When we know the fundamental ground of society and ourselves as nothing, then we can know the absolute existent, we can know what is, we can know the timeless. Then the task of life set before all of us emerges: to reflect the eternal in time by remaining attached to both worlds and mirrors the “is” in the world of things by its messenger, “ought.” “Ought” is our link between absolute existence and the relative world of things.

CHAPTER 18

THE CHASM BETWEEN

Towards the climax of his most famous novel, 1984, George Orwell has his major character, Winston Smith, reflect on the nature of modern society and on the way it differs from earlier societies. Winston, who has “thought,” although only subconsciously, that he was guilty of the deaths of his mother and sister, breaks through to face the guilt that had kept him from his past and remembers his mother now superimposed upon the image of a woman under attack in a boat that he has seen in a recent film. His mother and the woman unite in a single gesture: when his starving baby sister had wanted more chocolate after he had gobbled up her share of it along with his own, his mother had tried to comfort her daughter by hugging her to her breast; when the mother in the film could not protect her infant son from machine gun bullets, then she hugged him in the same way.

He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her than an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child’s death or her own, but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm which was no more use against bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago, this would not have seemed allimportant, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in themselves.

(Orwell, 1949, 136)

Orwell’s portrait shows simultaneously his understanding that there are two dimensions in human life as well as his judgment that we have lost one of them today. The arm of the mother in the boat and the arm of his own mother made no difference the one did not produce food and the other did not protect from machine gun bullets. Yet this simple gesture of his mother had protected him all his life until the very end of the novel. It first produced the guilt (the conflict within his soul between his hunger and his love for his mother and sister) that led him to lose contact with himself because he was driven to hide from the pain of his quilt, but then it became the first basis of his break from social conformity into freedom.

As Orwell points out, there are dual and contradictory “oughts” in the world. There is the “ought” of performance and achievement, the “ought” of providing chocolate and protection, and the inner ought. The two are not unrelated, but the inner ought takes precedence, and it is only from the inner ought that the outer derives its human value. Winston’s society our society provides food and protection for us and rewards those who do it. However that society fails to proceed from an inner motive, standard, or “ought.” As a result, the heights of its successes become the depths of oppression. The candy is important; protection from bullets is important; but those who provide the protection and the food must do so from a deep understanding of human value, human need, and human attachment to those they serve.

What can possibly motivate a worker, businessperson, physician, bureaucrat, and even a mother in the modern world? I provide you food only for your money. I love you only because you belong to me. I admire you only because you are a success. Nearly everyone senses something missing even those who take pleasure in the material wonders and benefits of this world. Unless we soon discover what we have lost, Orwell’s prediction will come to pass; we will be transformed into walking zombies. With artistry, Orwell reveals one way of expressing the source of the loss: we all some of us more and some of us less have undergone brainshrinking. We have allowed ourselves to be convinced that only one side of the dualism ultimately matters. Winston is destroyed at the end of 1984; “the longawaited bullet” entered his brain; (Orwell, 1949,245) his mother’s arm no longer protected him. He was destroyed because while under “treatment” in the “Ministry of Love” he was “educated” to understand that only the outer world was important. He was convinced that the inner person could accept as true whatever the outer person wanted: the marvels of electricshock therapy, scrambled his brain sufficiently to allow him to “see” five fingers on a fourfingered hand O’Brien held up; he had only to choose to do so. He saw that “true” freedom is the freedom to believe that two plus two equals five. Moreover, psycho”therapy” also forced him to see that, in his joining the revolutionary movement against the Party, he had given himself over to the outer world where he was willing to do anything (including throwing acid in a baby’s face) to serve the cause except separate from his beloved Julia. Finally, the psycho”therapy” showed him that under the pressure of fear of rats, for him the “worst thing in the world,” he abandons what had become his last inner principle, his love for Julia.

Something vital has already been lost in modern life, but so far no recognizable leader has stepped forth to show what it is. In fact, the intellectual world has largely become the psychomanipulative “Ministry of Love” of 1984 forcing all of us to Winston’s deathly final fate. Sociology, in its analysis of the vague but painful unrest produced in modern society, distinguishes between society and community and argues that society, the more formal and distant relationships based on interests, have replaced community, the closer more intimate relationships. On the surface, this reflects Orwell’s distinction between Winston’s relationships with his mother as opposed to his relationship with the State and government. Obviously, what is lost has not been recaptured by the repeated attempts of people to glop together in communal or family togetherness “lifestyles.” In fact, whatever success achieved by a retreat to communes has been not because of the frequency and intimacy of contact with others in them as much as by the belief of their members in what they were doing; the difference was that they were following inner rather than outer standards.

Unfortunately, of course, few in the communal movement achieve anything substantial. Particularly a failure were some of those who most vociferously insisted that communal living was their own, personal, inner choice. Too many based their decisions to join a commune upon their desire to choose their own lifestyles. But the very idea that people could have such a choice obviously comes from the society that they thought they were rejecting. Moreover, their motive is not positive and inner but negative an outer since it is only rejection of an outer social system. Besides, the very same human tyranny can plague a close family as infects a massive business organization. The problem is not the anonymity of modern life but the anonymity of us to ourselves. We are nameless to ourselves and remain so in the crowd and the commune alike.

Winston achieved an intimate relationship with his beloved Julia. However, as Orwell points out, while they regarded their relationship as what was best in their lives, it in fact was not private, personal, inner but a cry of despair against the State. (Orwell, 1949, 105) They had an inner ground to stand on against the State, they believed. It felt truer than the State. Still, in the end each betrayed the other to the State thus proving to themselves that their inner commitment had been a lie so both their “love” and the entire integrity of their personalities was destroyed.

But where do we go? Should we delve still deeper into a social psychology that claims that the human being is not free, that we do not suffer from fundamental dualism, that all conflict and contradiction, from emotional distress to war, are caused not by human freedom but by social conditions? It is an intellectual scandal of the highest order that the most renowned and honored of our contemporary social psychologists is B. F. Skinner. I shudder to think that even by referring to him, I might spread his fame even slightly. Yet all claims listed above are paraphrases of Skinner’s own conclusions. Such social psychology is the intellectual fruition of the tree of onesidedness spreading branches ubiquitously today. It is what comes when professions such as social psychology in this case, slice themselves off from all other philosophical and social knowledge and wallow in their own assumptions, pursuing them to the point of logical absurdity. The professional assumption at the heart of this social psychology is that the human being is the product of society; if you want better human beings, you must change society; forget about the notion of freedom and forget that human beings once made the society that “persecutes” them; social psychologists shall remake it in their own image of what is good. Social science will eliminate conflict, contradiction, dualism.

Modern life and modern science are attempts to escape from the Abyss. None of us want to realize the inner emptiness of our normal lives whether they be ordinary or exceptional. Moreover, our leaders are among those most frightened of the Abyss. In modern society awards leadership only to those who run for office, but what makes a candidate for President run? The same thing that makes a social scientist run: Nothing but the Abyss. After spending thirty years developing a program to keep the Abyss from the door, no leaders, least of all “intellectual” leaders, are going to endure facing the abysmal absurdity they have arrived at. Leaders revel in their glory and honor their distance from the Abyss. Those closer to the Abyss do not lead. They who can claim no political or even academic importance may be closer to the Abyss, but they are hidden and politically impotent. This is the picture Orwell paints: a society of leaders so distant from themselves that they destroy everything human in their wake, of masses who are either so glutted with products and information that they are tyrannized voluntarily, of a whole that is superficially selfsatisfied and puts its doubts to sleep by virtue of its success in providing wealth and military victories. This civilization is rooted in no human ground but only in its own mechanical definition of good: the good is what is functional to society.

What was the difference between Orwell’s mothers and contemporary leaders? Both the mothers in the novel faced an Abyss. They could do nothing for their children. Out of that Abyss, they spontaneously hugged them. Winston, too, was forced to the brink of the Abyss. But Winston blinked. Winston turned back. He had promised and committed himself never to betray his beloved Julia. Everything outside could change but the one inner thing would remain the same. His absolute terror of rats, used against him in the “Ministry of Love,” made him not only speak against Julia but inwardly to want her destroyed by them rather than him. That was his Abyss. The Abyss opens not only when things you have believed in are wiped away but only when the last thing is. The Abyss is the nothing. But Winston had already given in, first, to belief in things such as the principle of nonbetrayal and, second, to the value of working for things such as the visible collapse of the tyranny of his society. He was willing to accept failure in the struggle against tyranny but not failure in his commitment to love. He was destroyed not by his society but by himself; he rejected the preeminence of his own soul’s inner contact with the good, a preeminence represented by his mother. Thus, her protecting arm drew away and he became naked to the bullet entering his brain.

Had Winston allowed himself to fall into the Abyss, he would have found the Byss a deeper Self, another world judging this one but not giving it ultimate importance. He could have betrayed every “thing” he thought he believed in, regretted his failure and betrayal of Julia, and not been destroyed by it. He could have survived his torture, forgiving his tormentors and accepting himself. He could have approached Julia upon his release, put his arm around her, confessed his betrayal and how horrible it was, and yet he and she could have lived by that arm. Instead, he had already given in to the reality of the world he thought he was fighting by the time he was arrested. Both his physical and objective commitment to the revolution and his emotional and subjective commitment to Julia belong only to one dimension of human life though they are different and even contradictory. The betrayal of Julia is a negative, but it is not the absolute contradiction. The second world or dimension is life Winston did not yet realize. Orwell omits something, though, and it something that we cannot yet know if the depth dimension is indeed more fundamental in human beings than the surface, then even if individuals refuse to enter the Abyss and instead remain onedimensional, the whole civilization cut off from all human roots will endure the dreadful consequence of its refusal to enter the Abyss: its material destruction.

So, too, the wringing emptiness in modern life and the vast unrest in modern civilization that grows from a massive, fearful detachment from the deeper dimension since this dimension is first experienced as a pit, a tunnel, an Abyss. The person who pushes on to pass through the Abyss despite the pressures to avoid its brink will appear like the two mothers in Orwell’s story almost laughable in their attempts to us an arm to ward of starvation or bullets. But they will not be following in their actions the standard of “ought” that is based on success and failure; they will have their own human standard. It is right and good that you embrace another even if it gets you nowhere. Indeed, the very fact that you achieve nothing supports the likelihood that the embrace is true and priceless, that it comes from you not from an inner or outer alien, from your standard not theirs and it comes from You as a representative of the whole human race from the You beneath you, the You that is the Nothing wrapped in the self.

CHAPTER 19

THE ETERNAL TRIAD

The first book in this series (Meaning and Creativity) dealt with the experience of meaninglessness and concluded that the only escape to meaning was through creativity. Meaningful living is creative living and creative living is the process of entering the deeper of the two worlds we exist in and then returning to present, bring forth, and struggle to give birth in the more superficial world to the newly discovered depths. Creative and meaningful life is lived as a bridge between two dimensions. In one dimension you discover the treasure. By your struggle and pain you spend your energy and bring forth the treasure to the created world spirit or energy is the bridge. If humans are anything, they are inspired bridges concentrations or “complexifications” of spiritual energy longing to spend itself in building in the created world discoveries from the depth.

The older, deeper, usually forgotten, creator world that we have to rediscover constantly is the Abyss/Byss. The experience of meaninglessness, therefore, is indeed one on the forms of awakening to the deeper world. Meaninglessness reveals, however, only one side of that world: its nature as and Abyss and a judgment against the rootlessness of the created world when it is detached from its originating depths. Meaninglessness, like a ship or a whole island set adrift, unable to guide itself either by ropes and anchors attached to the sea’s bottom nor by energetic intelligence captaining the enterprise, is the realization that you are without anchor and without wisdom. It testifies to the existence of another dimension since the only explanation for your dissatisfaction with the created world is the existence of another world. By itself alone, however, meaninglessness does not reveal the deeper world nor does it generate creativity. And yet it is a beginning. If your can act and work no longer on the basis of ordinary definitions of good and bad but instead your actions remain grounded in the meaninglessness of things, then you may begin to build the bridge between two worlds so that the plans and efforts that started in meaninglessness the emptiness of all things and your detachment from them suddenly become transformed into meaningfulness when treasures from the other world begin to flow across the bridge. The situation demands stoicism but not the stoicism of despair. On the contrary, despair paralyzes the will to act. Therefore, we need hope a hope based on no positive evidence but only upon the deep knowledge that your dissatisfaction or meaninglessness can only arise from the judgment against life coming from a hidden meaning.

The profound dilemma that you meet when you face a deep sense of meaninglessness, when you stand on the brink of the Abyss, is that, while you are afraid of death or an end to things, your more profound fear is that you will not die in the Abyss that you will continue to live through your fall into it. No one can really be afraid of death as long as death is merely an end. You may fear dying and the pains involved in surrendering life, yet even there you know that physicians are most likely to support your dying with modern painkilling devices and medications. Realizing this, however, you are likely to take another route of escape. You may claim the pain of death is psychologically an unwillingness to give up all the happiness of living; you may insist upon this even as you complain of the burdens of life. No, you must finally face the truth. You fear death itself and not just dying, and you fear death because you deeply feel that we will not really die but continue to live in a transformed state. Since we do not understand that state, you are repelled by it.

I am, of course, now talking of death in its true and not its literal meaning. The Abyss is death. Meaninglessness is the early sign of an inner call to allow yourself to be transformed. Resistance to the call amounts to nothing more than the fear of the unknown “the unknown world from whose borne no traveller returns,” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet weeps. Thus “knowledge” makes cowards of us all the kind of knowledge we cling to that is rooted in a superficial penetration of reality. You will not face what you do not “know.” You will not face what the ancient Greeks called the Unknown God. But in all this you will be afraid simultaneously of death and of life. It is what Nietzsche called the “night journey” and the “going under”: whoever would be a “higher man” must first go down and be an “under man.” It is also what the medieval mystic called the “dark night of the soul.” Not the sadness, pains, and torments of everyday life, but the experience of being absolutely alone with nothing and yet being.

Every confrontation with the Abyss/Byss reveals the truth of human life as creative and reveals creativity as arising from the eternal triad. Anyone entering into the Abyss, reaching the Byss, and then stretching back to more ordinary ground will find that every conflict and contradiction in ordinary life is simultaneously (1) preserved, (2) annulled, and (3) transcended. The ideal and the real of ordinary life or the love and hate combined for the same individual are still there as you pass through the Abyss/Byss. But then they are also annulled or brought to nothing. The Abyss is Nothing. The contradictions are brought to it. As you enter the Abyss, they become nothing because you become nothing. Finally, this contradiction of preservation and annulment is simultaneously possible because the love and hate are transcended you cross beyond them without annihilating them as you enter the Abyss and find the Byss; the Byss is the deeper ground rediscovered as higher than the created ground you stood on before you entered the Abyss, but finally in the actualization of your own human life, you realize you are both grounds: the new and created ground of conventional reality and the oldest, deepest creator ground of the Byss and that these two grounds are both linked and separated by a chasm called the Abyss.

This, then, is the eternal triad of human existence: the surface ground, the underground, and the chasm/bridge between them. Human life, creative life, consists in the process where, after you realize the threefold basis of existence, you take on the task of connecting the surface ground and the under ground. In this, the threefold nature of the human being is realized and made into one. You will conclude with surprise that what appeared as a void, an emptiness the Abyss Absolute is really a bridge that consists of spirit; it is the only bridge you can walk over on the way to your creative humanity.

What is hardest to grasp indeed, it could be beyond intellectual understanding and may require direct, experiential knowledge is that the two grounds are not contradictory or even contrary. They are not opposites. Their separation is not one of difference but of distance. They are dimensions of experience separated by a chasm not by inherent opposition. You can realized this only by practicing entering into the chasm, the Abyss, between them. Only then can you be transformed from dread to joy, from conflict to peace, from fear to love.

You need not go far into your background or the tradition of any culture to uncover the triad, your threefold nature, in symbolic form. From the ancient Eastern come the inevitable Yin, Yang, and the circle of life containing both of them. They represent an active principle of building and making (an ordinary ground), but beneath it is the passive principle receptive, waiting, quiet that the active flows into (a second ordinary ground), and, including them both, there flows the wheel or circling of life (the necessity of movement between them). In the ancient Indian tradition, you will find the terrible goddess Kali on the one hand, the lifegiving mother, and, on the other, the consuming mother eating her own children. Kali is life, death, and the passage between them contained in her own figure.

Finally, of course, stands the Western JudaicChristian symbolic tradition. Christianity characterizes the triad as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father and the Son stand for the sturdy principles of earth and sky. The Father above is Heaven, and the Son earth or earthly. The Spirit stands for the quickening principles giving movement to sky and earth and imagined, on the one hand, as the lifegiving and yet also drowning coolness of water and, on the other, as the warming and yet also burning flames of fire. The three symbols contain the four “elements.” The son is the offspring and equal of the Father, who while equal to the Son, is more fundamental; the Son is ourselves, as we are born “into the flesh” incarnated here on earth born into the flesh not as a “fact” but as a shrinkage of our being and our seeing; flesh is constructed partly by our imagination out of the Father and yet is the Father. The ordinary visible world does not live without the Father; when it tries to, it soon falls into the Abyss of judgment, pain, torment the burning fires “Hell” that are a quick message connecting the Son and Father, but whoever recognizes the Father becomes a true son and discovers the cooling waters in Baptism where the pleasant side of the Spirit linking Father and Son is found. Thus, the Triunity of Christianity is a figure of humanity where the Son is the ruler in the ordinary world; the Father is the Byss, and the Spirit is the Abyss, the connection between the two all are there whether we are conscious of them or not.

Christian scholars unfortunately too often ignore the roots of the threefold God in ancient Judaism. Jewish mystics through the Cabala and other traditional writings have, however, kept it alive. Like the Greeks, the early Jews imagined an unknown and unknowable God surely the image of the distant Father so far beyond as to be undecipherable to the human mind, but out of the unknown God proceeds the creator God. This God’s actions and personality can be described. Then the two gods blend back together again; since there is only one God, the second proceeds from the first. But the nondual God exhibits one more duality: God appears both fierce and angry, on the one hand, and gentle and loving, on the other God is found as fierce as fire and drowning water, on the one hand, but as warmthgiving and thirstslaking, on the other. The deterioration of Judaism and Christianity begins, as with all religions and mythical systems, when the symbol is taken literally so, first in Judaism (the Unknown God, the known God, and fire and water) and, second, in Christianity (the Christ, the Father, and the Spirit) God is understood as a Being essentially outside of us rather than a description of our forgotten but essential root.

If you leap momentarily from the mysticism of philosophy and religion to the mysticism of physics, you will see the same eternal triad uncovered and spoken of in material terms as the essence of matter electrons, protons, and neutrons. At some level this connection may enable us to at long last put the insights of the estranged brothers in knowledge inner investigation of soul and psyche and outer investigation of matter finally to together in principle. Can science finally humble religion and religion humble science by dragging each other kicking and screaming back into the human world? The colossal effort involved in doing this is clearly possible; I believe that effort to be equally necessary for the survival of humanity. Whether or not we will achieve it in the end depends on human creativity and that depends on our ability to overcome the strongest fear and enter into the Abyss Absolute.

You may find the Abyss in a flash, thrust before you, a blow to the arch of the ribs knocking your windiness out. Or you may have been condemned to nothingness from the beginning. The latter is the sturdier but deadlier life. Each day you must drag yourself up from the Abyss, and, by an act of steely will, create the beginning of living. The experience of despair need not, however, generate a life of despair because its pain is only an experience of the Abyss and the Byss of hope and love is its highest gift. No one can avoid the Abyss, you can only turn your head from it. In doing so, you do not conquer it; it always endures and will return. The Abyss is there; you may always enter into and pass through it or you may choose to turn from it but only to live driven like an enslaved dog by the whip of fear. In the end, however, you have no choice. One way or another, sooner or later, the Abyss will open to receive you. You do have the choice, however, of either marching into it voluntarily with legs strengthened by that march so you can walk out of it into the Byss or of being swallowed by it and lost forever.

The Abyss Absolute is darkness and death. Nietzsche warned against staring into the abyss lest you find the abyss staring back at you. Because the Abyss Absolute — the bottomless depths — is utter darkness, when you continue to look into it your see only your own reflection staring back at you. The surface of the unfathomable lake reflects your face. This means that the abyss is frightening both because of the dark unknown it threatens your soul with and because it reflects your own flaws back to you. The more sinful your soul, the more your reflection in the Abyss appears to threaten you with evil instead of good. It looks demonic, not divine.

Thus, the Abyss appears to threaten you both with evil (your own dark reflection) and with death. The soul caught up with the illusion of the senses must die. Indeed, the Abyss is calling it to die.

To gain the courage to face entering the Abyss Absolute the soul needs the faith and hope that replaces knowledge. Above all it needs love — it is God’s love that draws the soul to the Abyss, God’s love that exposes the flaws in the soul, and god who kills the false soul. The soul loves the good (God) without initially knowing it. Surrendering to this love guides the soul securely into the Abyss, preserves it as it enters, receives it as it dies.

Meaning is the key to human life. Creativity is the key to meaning. The Abyss is the gateway to creativity. Civilization needs a new beginning; a new beginning can arise only after we have taken ourselves back before the old beginning. What was there before the old beginning and every beginning is the Abyss. Every beginning is something. Only the Abyss is absolute Nothing. Only our creativity can renew civilization and life itself, and our creativity is based not only on our bridging the two worlds but also building castles on the shore. Like all castles, these are of sand, but the ultimate test of all dwellings is not how rigid their construction but how much life they allow.