The Duties of the Heart

 

 

(Transcript by Tob Hawk)

In the 23rd chapter of Proverbs, Solomon, King of Israel, says: "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." We have long held this to be essentially a religious statement, but as we study man and his composite nature, we come to realize that this is a very scientific approach to the human problem of consciousness. The individual has an inner life, which was anciently regarded as the life of the heart, as distinguished from career, which was the life of the mind. The individual's thoughts are rational, but also sometimes very selfish, and as a balance to this, he has been given a deep emotional trend - a power to affirm value within his own emotional experience. He expresses this value through friendship, love, un­selfishness, and dedication. These are essentially the powers of the heart.

It may well happen that due to the pressure of circumstances, the internal heart-life of man is compromised, or perhaps even corrupted, and of all the disasters that can occur, this is probably the most serious in terms of human activity. Man, moving from within him­self, must orient in the world in which he lives. If this inner motion fails, or if the inner incentives of life are not ade­quate, the person's external career can never be truly successful; so most of our difficulties, particularly in personal relationships, arise from some failure of the heart in its psychic-emotional func­tion. And today we want to discuss this a little in the hope that we can convey some inspiration, courage or insight, which will help the individual to work with his own heart. Well this is a very very vital part of his entire way of life. In our generation, especially, the duties of the heart have come to be more or less ignored. We use the heart very largely merely as an emotional instrument to be catered to, to be justified in various ways, and to become, so to say, the basis of pleasures, and all too often, without our consent, the basis of pain.

What does the heart really stand for in the mysticism of re­ligion? I think it represents essentially the instinctive adjustment which man strives to make with the creative principle of life. The individual has a two-fold nature and a two-fold social problem. This was recognized long ago when religion divided the mistakes of men into two groups, called sins and crimes. When we make mistakes against the code around us, when we break the laws of our own kind - the statutes that have been set up for the regula­tion of human affairs - we are said to have committed a crime, and we come under the punishment of the code with which we live. If, however, we break the laws of the heart, if we break the laws of conscience and character, if we make certain internal mis­takes which throw us out of harmony with the universal purpose for our existence, we may then be said to have committed a sin. A sin is an act against universal truth; whereas a crime is breaking a rule that men have established.

Actually, all crime begins with what we call sin, inasmuch as criminal codes are established to curb the excesses of human self­ishness and human passion. Therefore, the criminal code became merely an instrument to protect society against the action of the individual who had broken faith with himself. Such codes we recognize to be essential to the continuance of any social order, but we also realize that there are a great many mistakes we make that can never actually come within the boundaries of a crime. There are mistakes for which we will never be punished by so­ciety, by any direct action, or by any direct code, but they are mistakes for which we will be punished; and our punishment lies largely in the damage which mistakes cause to our own psychic integration. The individual who commits a sin is not merely breaking a theological rule or a rule set down by some church; he is breaking faith with life.

Buddhism presents this in a rather simple and direct way, pointing out that the universe in which we live is a great pattern of purposes. These purposes are not always obvious to us, in fact many of them we will not discover in the years of our lives. Yet these purposes are valid. The mere fact that they exist as part of a great archetypal plan of things, not only makes them valid, but makes them inevitable. The codes of law which men establish are constantly changed, modified and too often exaggerated. But the basic laws of the universe never change. No change in human society alters them, because they are not concerned with human society, but with human character. A man being a human being has certain opportunities and responsibilities, related to these opportunities. The individual therefore is responsible to the universe for his character, even as he is responsible to human society for his conduct. All conduct arises in character and the individual will seldom perform an action which his character declares to be wrong.

Thus compromise arises in character itself. Either it fails to assert its full authority or it is incapable of doing so. Deficiencies of character arise from a number of causes. One of the most common causes is ignorance. Another cause which is almost as dangerous is bad example. To live in a world in which all emphasis is upon conduct and no emphasis upon character, will ultimately result in the decline of conduct, because conduct is an arbitrary thing. Will follow certain laws whether we approve of them or not simply because they are statutes and we are afraid to disobey them. But in matters of character we follow the nature of character itself because we know that it is inevitable, we know that it is the one way in which we can hope for personal happiness and security. To break faith with character is to destroy the probabilities of a useful and a well-adjusted life.

Though we do not know all the rules governing character but, as Buddha pointed out, this is not necessary. We learn from daily experience, by observation from history and from the reports in all fields of learning that which essentially can be done and that which cannot be done within the framework of character. We learn from long bitter experience what is not good for character and as we discover the fact we become informed by a process of negation, we know that we do certain things and the result is bad. Where the cumulative testimony of man unites in the statement that these circumstances are bad, have always produced bad, have never brought any integration to anyone and can be directly traced as the source of most of the corruptions of conduct, then we do not need to understand any more than this. We realize that we live within a structure, which we must learn to appreciate and obey.

Buddhism has been called an ethical psychology for the simple reason that it points out, that the individual must be right in character or he will be wrong in conduct. This is a very simple statement yet it is a profoundly true one. In our way of life we have devoted much time and attention to the development of abilities, the development of talents and we have done all that we can do, up to the present time at least, to equip the individual for success or security in the physical world. By this we mean that we have given him the advantages of education, we have taught him a useful trade or profession, we have surrounded him with opportunities and inducements to improve himself, as far as abilities are concerned, and we feel in an abstract sort of way that we have indoctrinated him also in the principles of character. Actually however this last assumption is an exaggeration, we have not. We have simply taught the individual to succeed in this world. We have given him very little understanding of the principles, upon which a successful life must be built.

The majority of our people, in this generation at least, graduate from high school. If they graduate from high school more or less equipped for a trade, or a craft, or a way of life, but they are not equipped to cope with the immediate problems of character. The individual leaving high school can almost immediately make a bad marriage, he has no defenses against this as far as his education is concerned. Nor has society troubled to assist him in outside ways to meet the challenge of his problems. We have divided personal problems from career, we teach career but we do not give adequate insight into the solution of personal problems, therefore factually and actually our education is incomplete. And it is not incomplete because we do not know better, it is incomplete because we have overlooked the fact that character is a financial asset.

Today we may deny that this is true and we look around ourselves and others and glance and the pages of our permanent journals and come to the conclusion that character is a debit, that the individual with character is predestined and foreordained to remain poor. Factually this is not true. An individual with character does not have to fail in anything. An individual without character however is most likely to fail in everything, regardless of whatever other opportunities and privileges he may enjoy.

All those who graduate from school, a goodly number, now pass onto colleges and universities. Here they receive further education, here they are brought up to a professional level, here they are introduced to forms of knowledge, which will prepare them according to our custom for more executive or advanced positions. Yet the college graduate, leaving college, will also often immediately make a bad marriage. He has not been taught those principles upon which a good life can be built, nor assuming that he has other skills but has not received this instruction and he makes a bad marriage. Can we deny that this is going to be a costly mistake in terms of personal security, in terms of finance, in terms of happiness and in terms of incentives for further advancement in physical activity. We know in industry today that a bad marriage will ruin a career. We know also that a bad marriage will endanger the next generation, so those children who come in into that marriage. We know therefore that a bad marriage can be measured in terms of dollars and cents, not only in terms of the cost, but in terms of the consequences. We know also that it may result in heavy alimonies, may result in a heavy loss to the involved parties. Even if the individual receives alimony, as a result of trying to solve a bad marriage, the person who receives the alimony is apt to be as damaged as the person who pays it. So we do realize that lack of character hurts physically. It hurts in our daily experiences with other people. It hurts us socially. It hurts us personally in our estimation of ourselves and efficiency in character is one of the principal causes for psychological complications, which mean in their turn to further physical expense, as a result of years of counseling or even hospitalization for this lack of character.

It is therefore impossible in our complex civilization to say that the development of skills is profitable and the ignoring of character is profitable. Such emmett a conclusion is utterly false. In every department of life character is the foundation of enduring success.

To meet this problem of character therefore we must try to work with ourselves and we must have some courage, some determination to make those changes which are necessary. Always in ethics or in religion we must make certain efforts, or attempts, without any obvious certainty that they will succeed. We must say to ourselves “this I will do because I believe it is better”. Then we must watch and wait for the results of what we have done. In Buddhism experience becomes the final teacher. If as a result of a certain action, performed that thoughtfully and intelligently, a better result comes to us, we then know that we are moving in the right direction. If as the result of a thoughtless action or a selfish one difficulties increase and peace of mind and security are threatened, then we know that this is not good. So thoroughly each person must work out his philosophy of life in his own skin. He must work it out in relationship to what things happen to him as the result of what he does. This becomes the of fact, this becomes the basis of the most certain truths that we are able to understand, and character builds gradually upon the evidence of its own need, and also upon the demonstration of its own value.

Though many persons have looked through the ages to religion for character and largely speaking, if we take the whole picture in consideration, religion has contributed to character. Religion wherever we find it for example does require certain discipline. Most of this discipline in religion is under the general heading of obedience. The individual learns to obey the laws of God as these laws are reveals from the scriptures of his faith. He also learns to obey certain rules, statutes and codes established by his religion. Some of these may be good, some of them may not be very good, but the experience of the individual is that he learns to discipline his conduct in terms of a conviction. He learns to do things that he knows he ought to do, rather than drifting along through the years, doing only the things he wants to do. He also blames the danger of the evasion of fact. He learns how desperately he can get into trouble when he tries to run away from a difficult decision. He learns also how tragic his life can be, when he considers only himself the in a decision and gradually rejecting common responsibilities moves further and further into self-centeredness. The experience of humanity from the dawn of time proves conclusively that selfishness does not pay.

Now we have to estimate what constitutes payment. We know that many selfish people are successful in this role for a time. But if we look into their lives we will find that these people are unsuccessful in the terms of every value that is meaningful. They are desperate, unhappy, unadjusted people, because success without character, success without conviction brings no peace of mind, peace of soul, or serenity of spirit.

Thus we have to decide what we want by success. Do we mean by success that we want certain physical comforts and in order to pay for these we are going to be miserable for a lifetime. Now it doesn't seem as though this decision should be forced upon us. The average person today feels that he ought to be able to do what he pleases and have a good time all along. Nature however denies this. Not because it does want man to do those things which bring happiness, but because nature itself has a definition of happiness and in nature happiness arises from keeping the rule and not from breaking it or ignoring it. Most true happiness is nature's end, nature wants us to be well-adjusted, happy, secure creatures, but nature knows how these things, these ends must be accomplished, and knows that we cannot enjoy the good things of life just because we prefer to remain stupid. To meet these facts we have to get into some basic set of convictions.

As I often pointed out the only source we have for conviction that is adequate is the recognition of natural law. We do as surely as the scientists that this universe is an exact structure and we have begun to realize that our emotional lives are exact structures. If in the development of one of our space exploring projectiles we make a tiny error in some calculation, the projector is a dismal failure. This mistake was not necessarily intentional, certainly no one wanted the mistake, this mistake was not because of hard heartedness, it was probably the result of a certain degree of ignorance. We just do not know quite enough to take care of the problem before it arose. But science realises that this process of knowing enough, this constant research into the laws of the universe, is the only procedure by which we can ultimately get that projectile into space and keep it where we want it. In order to achieve our end we understand law, we must apply to our own problem without breaking law and we must use the lawfulness of the universe to keep that instrument in space. This we recognize. We also know that forever science exists regardless of its intellectual attitude, science is paying homage to immutable principles with which it works every day, and the whole structure of science would collapse if any of these immutable principles suddenly ceased to be immutable. So in the scientific world we accept that in spite of our audacitys, our egotisms and our ambitions we have to work within the structure of law or fail. This seems reasonable, we find it in every department of life, if we break the laws of music our compositions are not good, we break the laws of health our bodies suffer, if we break the laws of mind we are liable to suffer from mental sickness. We also have to recognize that the inner life of man has laws, it has rules.

The heart of man, representing his consciousness, representing his inner mo­tivations and convictions, is also ruled by laws. There are laws of man's affections, just as there are laws governing projectiles in space. Our thoughts must be lawful, or we are sick. Our emotions must also be lawful, or we are sick. And it is just as certain that any pattern built upon ignorance or violation of law will fail in our personal lives, as it is certain that it would fail on a scientific level. Thus, the wise ones from the dawn of time have tried to learn to understand the laws governing the parts of man's nature. They realized that to fail these laws in any respect, is to ask for tragedy.

Tragedies are of varying degrees. Those which arise from con­scientious intention that does not quite work out, are usually more or less minor tragedies; and when we are faced by a major tragedy, if we search inside of ourselves, and examine our motives honestly, we will realize that we are the cause of our own trouble. Some­where we have violated those rules which apply to the way a man must think in his own heart. Nature requires absolute honesty,­ it will settle for nothing less; and where the inner life of man, be­cause it is secret, is permitted to be dishonest, this can never be concealed from the outer conduct of that person. Ultimately, these mistakes will come through to burden and trouble his daily ex­istence.

Today we are obviously in a bad spot from these bearing causes. Every time we read a paper we are offended by the news. Everywhere we look we see evidences of increasing corruption of principles. We see more and more selfishness and less and less integrity. But we are not going to measure this just in terms of what we see, nor can we afford to sit back as some will do. Ignore all this and say so what, we never had it so good. Is this true? I would very much doubt that it is true.

In 1960 which is the last year, on which we have really clear statistics available, one out of every 27 children in the United States was a juvenile delinquent. This is not good. At this time in the United States there is a suicide every 20 minutes, this is not good. At this time in the United States we have better than a million and a half alcoholics, this is not good. We can say we never had it so good. But what we mean is that at this particular moment we as individuals have the idea that we're getting along pretty well. But the rest of the world, so what, no one really cares. And by the time our own mistakes catch up with us completely, we are in such a weakened condition that we cannot even rationalize our own state.

Actually in the world today we have really probably never had it quite so bad, but this badness is so completely obscured by a great financial inflation, that we are trying to get along with the situation as it is. But what are we going to do about the fact that at this moment we are better than 600,000 persons in mental hospitals and probably another 2 or 3 million who ought to be there and are being treated in some way in a hope of keeping them from this unpleasant circumstance. We have at least a half million, maybe a little more, for six hundred thousand, statistically recorded divorces a year. This does not represent our full population as we have a number of religious groups that will not commit divorce or make it so difficult as to be practically unobtainable. We knew more however that from a socialized research project, that 50% of the American homes are in trouble. Under this heading we say we have never had it quite so good. We are just fooling ourselves. We look around and we try to figure out why this situation is as it is, and we also become more and more convinced, that the entire ethical side of our national life has been ignored. Those few persons who retain powerful ethics do so as the result of early training or bitter experience. But practically no effort is made to turn out into our society educated persons with positive ethical convictions.

Thus we see around us a serious deterioration of our way of life. It is a little worse than it was 2,000 years ago. At that time so called ethical deterioration was restricted to a few decadent cultures in the Mediterranean area. Rome could fall apart but the world remained about the same. The so-called primitive people still had their own quiet positive ethical codes. Today the situation is worse. The great spread of communication, of transportation has brought our ways of doing things to practically every backward people on earth. They are all copying us and they are becoming unethical as rapidly as possible. They are also sacrificing the codes which they once held, because they are convinced by general appearances that if they want to be rich and powerful they must follow the ways of Western man. As a result in every nation crime is increasing and so is juvenile delinquency. In every nation it is becoming more difficult to find honest craftsmanship, with continual dissension argument and debate, and whether this way of life touches crime goes up, divorce increases and the sufferings that strike directly at the life of man, they come more numerous and more desperate. So we have to come back to the problem of the individual himself.

Each person has to decide for himself whether he wishes to be happy or not. If he wants to be happy, if he realizes that happiness is at the root of success, and that success without happiness is meaningless in the long run, then he must do those things that will help to make him happy. He must do those things which na­ture says lead to happiness, because nature will not change.

Some people seem to have the idea that nature's observant eye occasion­ally looks in the other direction; that there is no reason to assume that nature can catch up with the mistakes of every private citizen; that there must be some way we can outwit nature and quietly carry along our misdeeds with dignity. But it cannot be done. Na­ture is not an observant thing; it is not someone sitting somewhere watching us. Nature is an involved complex of laws operating in us and through us.

It is not any more possible to fool nature than it is to fool our own stomach, because actually, nature is working in the intricate complexity of our own character. What we do affects us, whether anyone else knows it or not, discovers it or not; nor is there anyway we can separate our action from the inevitable consequence which that action sets up in our own chemistry. Thus, it is not that we are being watched; it is that everything we do has a re­sult of some kind, has an effect inherent in it, and that effect will have its way and will come out regardless of any effort we make to conceal it.

Today we leave this problem of internal regard largely to re­ligion. If religion was a little more vital in its direct contact with things, it might help us to sustain an ethical character, but it is unable to achieve too much because it is hopelessly separated from the daily life of the person. Religion is a thing apart. In the United States, we have a hundred million nominally religious persons. This is a lot of people, but unfortunately it is from this same group that crime, delinquency, and domestic incompatibility arise. It is from this same group for the simple reason that religion, as a separate thing, is not strong enough. We do not give it sufficient attention. We do not devote to it the same thought and care that we devote to the pursuit of our trades and professions. We go to church to listen, but we do not act, and we have not recognized that religion is finally ethics, and ethics is finally science. We do not realize these parallels or their importance to us.

By degrees, then, by attitudes of other persons, by the very depreciation of religion in our physical way of life, we are weaned away from convictions that might have use or value; or we become offended at religion because of the conduct of persons who claim to practice it. This is also a great mistake, for religion is not a person misusing it; it is a principle which endures. The individual who misuses it, breaks faith with it; he does not represent it.

The only way we can really get at some of these problems is to go beneath the mind, which is always justifying, explaining, and trying to prove that we are right. To each individual, his mind is a sort of private defender. He has allowed it to justify his own desire in almost every instance. Instead of using the mind to find out what is true, the individual uses it to find out how he can get what he wants. The mind has come under such tremendous pressure in our economic way of life, that by itself and of itself, it cannot be depended upon. Twenty-five centuries ago, Buddha was pro­foundly suspicious of the mind as an instrument, and after all these centuries, we are becoming more profoundly suspicious of the fact that he was right. We begin to realize that what he said was essen­tially true.

Behind and beneath the mind however are certain primordial desires, which may be considered as almost atavistic. They arise out of the dome of human experience. One of these desires that is as old as human consciousness, is the desire to be happy. Actually the individual wants to feel good inside. He wants to have a laugh in his soul. He wants to rise each day into a good world. He wants to come to the ability to sit down quietly, think about his own conduct and being glad that he did what he did. Happiness also means usually happiness for other persons we care for and the individual achieves a reasonable degree of happiness is a valuable citizen in his community. He is a better parent, a better executive and a better worker. This desire for happiness we've always had.

Another desire that is very deep within ourselves is the desire to be of value. We do not want to live just as parasites upon the face of nature, nor do we wish to live merely to exploit each other. We do these things but we're never very proud of them. And anything that we would like to conceal from another person we should not do ourselves. There's the desire to be of some value or service to others, moves all of us. We do not necessarily feel we must make careers of service, but we like to be appreciated because we have done something worth appreciating.

We like to also have the feeling within ourselves that every day we are gaining on something. We would like to believe that every day we know a little more than we did the day before, that we can do things a little better, that we are gradually coming to excel in something. We like to have the feeling that we are able to do something very well. We like to have the feeling also that we are self sustaining creatures, that in the emergencies that arise we can take care of ourselves spiritually, ethically, morally and physically. When we live these kinds of feelings, we feel better, we face life better. If however we look into our own natures and find that we are inept in all of these things or most of them, we are not proud on ourselves, we may have certain desire to go out and do something better, but unless we have a realization of some degree of valuable accomplishment we are not really happy people.

Thus we discover by actually working with troubled persons that the average person's happiness actually depends upon certain achievements of his own and these achievements are not primarily economic, but they do contribute tremendously to physical living, making this living more valuable and worthwhile not only to ourselves but to any who are dependent upon us or are associated with us. The average person wishes to be a good expression of the problems with which he is working, he wants to feel that whatever he has done, he has done it commendably and to the best of his own ability and insight. The only answer to this type of thinking is to get back inside of ourselves and try to work with the primordial instincts which we have been given as part of our cultural heritage and to get back into that and work with it teaches us a number of things, which perhaps we do not want to know. One of the things that it teaches us is the danger of the kind of  ambition which forces us to compromise in order to succeed. The moment we have to do this something inside ourselves is not happy. We may be outwardly glad for a little while, but very soon the consequences of the false sense of value begins to creep in upon us and we set forth upon a career, which will have too many ups and downs to have any permanent significance for ourselves.

Human heart stands mysteriously within man as a symbol of the spiritual instrumentality of his life. In poetry, philosophy, and literature, the heart signifies the peculiar moral power that particularly dis­tinguishes man. We say, "a good-hearted person," and we mean by this simply that the person is good. When we say that an in­dividual has heart, we mean that he has courage. When we say that he follows the dictates of his heart, we are saying that he is a person of honor and integrity. Thus, the heart has come to be the symbol of the principal spiritual-ethical center in man's life.

How we unfold the principles of the heart will depend upon our ability to educate basic impulses. Knowing that the instinct in all human beings is basically to be kindly creatures, we must then equip this instinct to do these things that are valuable and necessary for its expression. We find that in emergencies, in tragedies and in disasters, the humanity in man moves forward into expression. We forget our prejudices and conflicts, and we work together for the period of trouble, because something in us moves out to help. We have this instinct, and yet we are constantly frus­trating it or failing to permit it to manifest, lest it interfere with our ambitions or our careers. Actually, this instinct to help will advance all career, because it is the basis of our proper relationship with life.

Because of the general lack of background, opportunities, ex­periences, and examples, the individual today does not naturally educate his own heart. We assume that as a person grows up, he matures; but when, in the process of growing up, he dedicates his energies entirely to one purpose, that purpose being to achieve physical success, he fails to educate the rest of himself and is de­prived of the skills by means of which he can accomplish his in­tentions.
If an individual says, "I wish I could build a house," he can keep on wishing for a long time, and still not be able to build a house. But if he has a sufficient desire to build a house, so that he studies the necessary arts, crafts, and trades, he will have the pro­ficiency to build a house and can do it successfully. If an indi­vidual says in his heart, "I would like to be good. I would like to do good," and does nothing to equip himself for a life of con­structive endeavor, he will continue to wish to his dying day that he could do something better.
 
Thus, it is perfectly obvious that the mind must be trained in order to use its faculties well, and it is equally true that the emo­tions must be trained and disciplined if they are to give the in­dividual support in positive directives. We cannot assume that it is necessary to go to school for years in order to be an accountant, but that we do not need any training in order to be well-integrated human beings; nor does the achievement of being an accountant, or a jurist, or a physician compensate for the lack of ethical ma­turity.

How, then, do we train the heart? According to Zen, and most other mystical disciplines, we cannot train the heart by an ob­jective procedure. The mind and emotions are different instruments, and they cannot be educated in exactly the same way. The mind is educated by taking on knowledge, but the heart is edu­cated by casting off error; and the two processes are completely opposed to each other. One of the things we have to do in order to educate the heart is to gradually relax away from those false pressures by which the heart is enslaved to the wrong goals. The mystic has always assumed that if he could attain a proper feel­ing of worship within himself, he would find that his heart is a kind of temple, a sanctuary, a place where the individual can come quietly and reverently into the presence of the indwelling divinity in his own nature. Those who have less religious instincts may have difficulty in conceiving that they are going to come into the presence of an internal divinity, but perhaps for these people, it is enough to feel that they are going to come into the presence of the deepest and most indwelling integrity that they will ever know.

Actually, the heart of man is very close to life. It is closer to life than the mind or the hand. The heart of the human being is the mainspring of the best part of himself, and for the most part, even under evil conditioning and unfortunate examples, the heart does retain a large degree of its basic integrity. Thus, we find that even hardened criminals can reveal some amazing emotional in­tegrity. No individual is completely bad, and the last part of man to give up hope is the heart. We must do all we can, therefore, to preserve this instrument, so that it will not cease to believe in the good.

One way in which educate the heart is to concentrate upon the justi­fication of those better instincts which are embodied in it. We know, for example, that we educate the heart by giving it beauty, music, great art. We know that we exercise and strengthen it by following pur­suits of positive aesthetic value. We know, also, that we give it further strength when we contemplate the essential values in things. We give it more courage if we are idealistic than if we are materialistic. We give it greater value if we have a religious instinct than if we do not have a religious instinct. Everything that causes us to love the beautiful and to serve the good will help us to strengthen the resolutions of the heart.

We also realize that as we go further into this world of the heart, we become more sensitive to the responsibilities of living. The heart naturally accepts responsibilities, while the mind makes the most of opportunities. The heart, if we permit it to, naturally opens and confers itself, naturally seeks the joy, peace and happi­ness of others. If it has been trained away from this point of view by adverse conditioning, then we must try to recondition it by every means within our power. This can often be done by a posi­tive statement of belief, and by becoming more concerned with spiritual value in a material world. We increase the power of the heart by association with constructive religious movements. We also strengthen the heart by becoming better informed about the lives of other people, because information, knowledge, and insight overcome our natural tendency to criticize and condemn. Wherever we permit a negative emotional factor to go uncorrected, we are endangering our own insight and our ability to know truth. There is nothing that blocks truth as much as prejudice, and there is nothing more common in our world today than emotional prejudice.

As we go further, we also find that the heart has duties, and we have duties to the heart. One of our great duties is to set aside some part of our time to a direct effort to understand the heart, to know its meaning, to experience its desires, its purposes, and to share in the natural insight that it possesses. Buddhism points out very wisely that to the degree that we reduce the intellectual con­spiracy of our lives, to that degree we permit both the natural processes of the mind and the natural instincts of the emotions to express themselves. Man actually has to develop hard-heartedness, because it is not natural to him and never will be. He has to develop suspicion and hate. These are not natural instincts. It is the natural instinct of man to be normal, and the idea that normalcy must be cultivated by some artificial procedure, is wrong. What has to happen is that abnormalcy must be reduced by effort. The individual must gradually get away from his mistakes, and when he is through with these, the facts remain clear. If he will stop in­terfering with his own integrity, he will have that integrity. He does not have to develop it; he simply has to stop misusing it.

One of the simple ways to get over a compound misinformation or lack of insight is of course to gradually reduce the tensions of the mind and of the objective emotions by means of which the basic inner life is prevented from functioning. We know definitely that we block that part of man which is the best of him. Mysticism has always taken the ground that we do not know how to be good, we really do not, but we know how to stop making the mistakes that are already hurt us and somewhere as we gradually overcome the mistakes that which is left becomes clearly good. So in Mysticism we have this tendency to retire into quietude. We discovered that one of the problems that we all face is our difficulty in getting alone with ourselves.

It is therefore our responsibility to begin to discipline our emo­tional center. The disciplining is simply a process of freeing it, by a definite effort, from all emotions that are not right, not justified, and not helpful. In this way, we gradually find our way back to the inner heart-consciousness, which is the only thing that can guide us and lead us to bring our conduct into harmony with good character. This psychic heart center in us is the most powerful instrument of value that we have. It is the only instrument that cuts through mentation. As the Rig Veda says, the mind is for­ever slaying the real, so that we are constantly perturbed by the mind; and the great remedy lies in the heart. The heart also gives us the courage of sacrifice, the courage to perform actions which are beyond the call of duty. It gives us the willingness to forget ourselves in the service of other things. The heart makes us un­selfish if we will permit it to; and it is only when the mind cor­rupts this unselfishness that we begin to pervert the heart.

In quietude and in the relaxation of mind, we can gradually become aware of the doctrine of the heart, and we know that as we retire into the heart, we come nearer and nearer to life itself. Man is going out into space to explore life, but he will never find the answer there. The infinite wisdom of the universe has put all the answers that man can ever need so close to him that he does not have to walk around the block to find them. For within the heart of man there are bridges extending to the infinite in all di­rections. The heart is the gateway to the eternal, and those who have never explored this path, who have never attempted to open this gate, are not qualified to say that this is not true.

Down through history, there have been individuals who have explored the regions of the heart. They have sought to know what was in this core, and wherever they have sought, they have come to identically the same discovery. They have discovered that the road into the heart is indeed the golden road that leads to every­thing that is right and proper for the human being; that the individual who finds his own heart, who learns to live with it, who learns to know it as a magic garden within himself - this individual comes into a world of values, and by this circumstance alone, be­ comes enlightened in character. He comes into experiences which are so important that he can no longer afford to sacrifice them, and has no desire to. He discovers that with all the chaos in the world, no man is further from peace than he is from his own heart.

This heart-peace in man is not a selfish peace. It is not a turning away into the self in order to escape the bruises of the world. It is this peace that gives man the courage of his convictions. It gave Socrates the courage to drink hemlock rather than to com­promise a principle; it gave Jesus the courage to die on the cross for man; it gave courage to the Christians in the arena of Rome. It gave courage to Washington as he knelt in the snow in Valley Forge and prayed to his eternal God. It gave courage to Mohandas Gandhi, and made him perhaps one of the greatest men in the modern world. This search for the heart in us is not, therefore, a vanity search, nor is it an effort to find some kind of security against the winds of trouble. It is the search for our real selves, for our normalcy, our happiness, and our peace of soul. It is the kind of search that makes it possible for us to be people, because actually, we are truly human only when we have found the mys­tery of the heart, and have discovered its tremendous contribution to the perfection of our lives.

If we go further into this realization, we come also to great strengths that we haven’t otherwise been able to know. As Zen points out, the discovery of the heart doctrine is not by authority, but by experience. Once we begin to move in on this, once we begin to do those things that are necessary, things happen which we can no longer deny. We discover that we can achieve to this tran­quillity spirit without sacrificing anything that is worthwhile in life. In fact, everything in life becomes more worthwhile. For every small thing we seem to lose in this process, we gain so much more.

We gain values that we will never be able to appreciate until we really experience them. Through the heart, we finally come to discover this lawful universe in which we live; and we discover that this lawful universe also has a heart, and that behind every manifestation of natural law, there is a principle which might be termed eternal love. Through our own heart, we find the heart of the world, the heart of God, and the heart of man. We also find the purpose that moves this great instrument which we call crea­tion. We finally know that the universe, as man himself, is moved not by thought, but by love.

The universe, in its greatest love, therefore, disciplines man. It wants and demands that he shall be the fulfillment of a universal purpose. It wants for every human being that peace which man wants in his own heart. And if the universe did not have peace in its consciousness, man could not, because man is merely a part of the universe. How could man love if the universe were loveless? How could man have any emotion that is not justified by the great energies of space that sustain all emotion? Our natural emo­tional energies must operate in harmony with universal law. Thus, man's love is the proof of divine love; and man's love of God is the proof of God's love of man. And out of the great mystery of love come the only bridges that are real, the only ways in which we can ever become one with life.

By entering into our own hearts, therefore, we truly discover the heart of God. We truly experience the infinite security of this uni­verse. We realize, in a strange mystical way, that it is true that every sparrow's fall is marked; that every atom dancing in the light or mingled into the structure of some creature, is known and is recorded, and has its own destiny governed by the same lave that rules the universe. Gradually, out of this experience of the in­timacy of a beautiful universe, comes the wonderful realization of true security.

Accepting the Challenge of Maturity: The Courage to Be a Person

 

 

(Transcript by Tob Hawk)

According to the textbooks, maturity is that condition in which a person reaches the full use of their own potential capacities. It means that we are grown up. And that the combination of internal resource and environmental experience have brought with them the sense of adulthood, the power of personal decision, and the incentives and inducements to live in harmony with principles and convictions appropriate to our kind or type of creature.

Maturity, to many persons, is a difficult word because it seems to imply the loss of certain irresponsible attitudes. Most people seem to prefer a state of perpetual adolescence. They hesitate to accept responsibility and would like to hope that they can continue throughout life under some form of parental leadership. As a result of the failure of the individual to accept personal maturity, he becomes more and more dependent upon the conditions under which he lives. His negative relationship to these conditions is one of the reasons why we can have bad government, intolerance, unfortunate social conditions, and be almost constantly exploited by those in authority.

Practical Mysticism in Modern Living. Part 5 of 5. Mystical Trends in Modern Psychology

 

(Transcript by Tob Hawk)

This evening we want to point out a few more or less recent findings, which indicate that western psychology is beginning to move from some of its most cherished footings and is coming rapidly into a kind of partnership with both Eastern and Western Mysticism. Perhaps the one of the simplest points is a new attitude arising, concerning the problem of pressure and the effect of pressure in producing psychotic tensions and trauma. Actually a complex, or any negative psychological fixation, is not of any particular importance in itself, unless in some way it receives nutrition. Like everything else in the world the fixation must feed, it must be nourished, it must be sustained in some way, and the individual who is developing a pressureful interior life is likely to begin by trying to break up fixations or attitudes, which seem to be causing him trouble. It might be likened roughly to a situation of a skillful prize fighter and his advantage over an unskilled opponent, the chances are the opponent will not last long, he won't have a chance. But if you take this skillful prize fighter block him away somewhere and give him no food for thirty days, a much less skillful man could defeat him, simply because his energy is reduced, his strength is partly at least destroyed, in time it could be completely destroyed. He must therefore be fed.

And nearly every problem, that we nurse and nurture, depends upon its nutrition for its authority as a problem. Remove the nutrition the problem becomes less and less real. So instead of attacking all of the various mental attitudes separately and attempting with rather obvious western violence to uproot them, there probably are simpler ways of overcoming most of the abnormalities that we suffer from mentally and emotionally.

One of these ways is simply to remove the source of energy by means of which the problem is maintained. Now, the source of energy in the average individual is also the same energy by which through unreasonable action he contributes to the problem. Problems arise from the misuse of energy, situations become more difficult to the degree that we continue to devote to them unwisely energy which might have more constructive and proper channels of expression. The individual for example, who has a quick temper or a bad disposition temperamentally, his temperamental disposition could not exist without energy. It takes a great deal of energy to have a good temper fit. It takes considerable energy to have a good crying spell. It takes quite a bit of energy to hate somebody. It takes energy to criticize people. It takes energy to be sorry for ourselves. It takes energy to reject life. It takes energy to break patterns and it also takes energy to create patterns. Thus nearly everything, that comes out of our complex characteristics, everything is what it is because of the energy that we bestow upon it.

If therefore we are confronted with a situation that is not what we want it to be, one of the simplest and most direct ways of annihilating that situation is to starve it out, so simply turn from it the kind of energy by which it can survive. To reduce the available energy to support a psychosis is difficult for the reason that the person is not always able either to control himself or to know what particular type of control is most indicated in his case. Yet again the problem remains comparatively true as we see around it in life. The dandelion and the palm tree grow out of the same earth, they derive energy according to their natures, Paracelsus pointed this out long ago. Therefore complexes of many kinds and temperaments of many levels derive their individual expressions from common life supply. The life supply, totally turned away from the individual, terminates his existence utterly, and as he goes into this state of non-objective existence, his problems as far as his personality concerned disappear at least in their relationship to other peoples.

But energy is our answer and energy is something that the average person does not adequately control, he wastes it, we wasted every day, he dissipates it, he builds tensions within it, which finally cause it to break through, because he has obstructed normal patterns of life and though he may not realize it in most cases his energies are greater than his abilities to use them and this becomes a very important issue. When we say abilities, I mean manifested immediately available abilities, certainly energy could be used to create greater abilities in the individual, but he is not always inclined to use energy in this way. Actually most persons are restless, they are frustrated in some way, simply because their natural energy expressions do not have adequate outlets.

Now, energy flowing desperately outward will do the same thing as a flooded stream, it will break through dams, it will destroy good land, it will break through dikes and embankments and flood important communal areas. Energy out of control floods the mental and emotional life, resulting in excesses of numerous kinds, which arise always from lack of control.

So in the eastern and the mystical way of thinking there's an important clue to control the directed behavior and this is energy sublimation. The supply of energy not called upon falsely. Energy is a kind of reservoir, we do not control it, it is available in nature, but as the waters of a reservoir are piped with numerous faucets and outlets into millions of homes, so universal energy is tubed or piped or channeled into the lives of living things. Here various faucets regulate its release into usage. These faucets can be controlled, at least in part, by the person and thus he can determine the amount of energy that he uses, but this does not mean that he exhausts any potential cause of energy.

The release of energy through his own nature has certain requirements, certain normal purposes. If these purposes are variously blocked, it is as we would find in a home where difficulty arises in the plumbing and the basement is flooded or something of that nature. It is observable in psychological problems that the control of the amount of energy can have a very important bearing upon the problem itself. Now, one thing of course that we always have to bear in mind is that if we turn off a house meter we turn off all of the available outlets. If we throw a switch or blow a main fuse and an electric circuit then all the lights on that circuit are killed. And our thinking in energy has been that the individual, who begins to control his energy, begins to reveal lack of energization in all of his activities. In other words he becomes lackadaisical, he loses ambition, he becomes too sedentary in his ways, too phlegmatic and is left behind in this great race of life. One of these days we may be learned that the fellow that is left behind is the one who first enjoyed a little peace and quiet, but we are not quite to that way of thinking as yet. But the accusation that is most often turned against Mysticism is that it leads to a life of non-action. It causes the person to cease to be a valiant champion of some cause or other, real or imaginary, with which most persons keep their lives occupied. This is where the control however is without direction. If you want to turn off a faucet in the kitchen, you do not need to turn off the water at the curb or ask to have the city turn it off at the dam. It is perfectly possible for the individual to direct or control specialized uses of energy as these usages arise within his own understanding and need.

Then coming into the life of western man, and it is moving rapidly in the life of western man today, is simply a an oriental adaptation of the thought of the basic theme, that what we think is important is only important because we think it is important, therefore more or less empirically the amount of energy used by us in any particular undertaking is determined by our own attitude as to the relative importance of that undertaking. Two individuals both suffer a grievance or perhaps have mutually antagonized each other. To one of these persons this antagonism becomes the basis of an enduring disregard, hatred sets in, the most violent negative, critical, condemnatory emotions are given expression. The other person who is a party to the same grievance and perhaps has contributed to it or suffers from it, simply does not have this attitude. To him a person taking a small matter so seriously is humorous rather than desperate. So he simply laughs off a situation that is going to cause another human being years of misery. The difference is the amount of libido that these two persons are willing to expend on something.

We cannot deny the fact that persons are born with two essentially diverse dispositions. One individual finds it completely simple to remain detached from the primary pressures of life. The other individual finds it almost impossible to extricate himself, his every instinct is so intense and so extremely personal, that he cannot resist any challenge which can possibly stir him up and cause him to become involved in the situation. Where the sense of humor is deficient, this difficulty intensifies, but if you look around you you will find individuals of comparatively equal intelligence, of approximately similar inherent talents and capacities, who react entirely differently to approximately the same stimuli. To one individual the instinct is to fight back, to the other individual instinct is not to fight back. Now, we look at the individual who does not fight back and we say “is he a coward, is he afraid to fight back?”, always say “is he so stupid that he doesn't know he's been insulted?”. That's quite possible, and we begin to analyze his potential deficiencies, because we assume that if he was a nice, normal, happy person he would get mad. If he does not follow this expectancy, we consider the serious possibilities that there's something wrong with him.

On the opposite side of the picture the individual who fights back. Why does he fight back? He fights back perhaps because he has been insulted, and a person insulted, as one of the old greek philosophers explains, is in a very precarious position. It only is an indication that he does not know his own weaknesses, because the moment a person is wise enough to be insulted, he knows so many of his own shortcomings that no one else's discovery of them would be much of a discovery. A man who is insulted can turn and say “I could tell you many things about me more worthy of insult than the thing you have selected”. Now, this would be rather devastating and would probably to ruin the day for some illiterate character. I've seen things like this happen and the belligerent one pauses for a moment and then suddenly stands back and laughs. The pressure is off of the entire situation, because the individual has not permitted it to be pressureful.

Pressure of this nature is nearly always illusionary. Pressure is pride, pressure is offended hypersensitivity, pressure is the determination of arrogance to force a situation whether it is right or wrong. Pressure in almost every instance arises from the direct abuse of our energy resources, instead of using our energies to build with, we're using our energies to fight with, to fight against shadows, to create within ourselves patterns of tension which continuously energized, ultimately become so habit-written, so completely possessive of us, that we surrender to them, utterly and abjectly.

Mysticism has always been a quiet way, it has always been the way of non-violence, yet Mysticism in its great exponents has never been weak. This idea that Mysticism must be weak and negative simply arises in a civilization that is determined to justify its own lack of self-control. The Mysticism of Jesus was not weak. Jesus recommended strongly that if a man is struck upon one cheek he turned the other also. If the average person of today performed such an action, he would be called a coward, yet it is often a greater test of interior integration to remain poised and calm than it is to express violent displeasure by means in which other people think you are defending yourself.

Now, we have this situation also to bear in mind. We certainly desire, wherever possible, to keep the good esteem of other people. We do not wish to be regarded as eccentric, we do not wish to be labeled as weaklings, we do not wish to lose a certain propriety of status. On the other hand, is it necessary for us. In order to maintain our social position, to commit actions that endanger our health and security and perhaps even our lives, it's like the the problem of the genial host. Years ago, New York, the days of the open saloons, as they used to be when they were really great social centers, and you had five cents worth of drink and four dollars worth of free lunch, that type of situation once actually went verily on its way, and I have definitely seen fine tops, loin steaks go for free along with a five cents dinner beer. Of course those days are gone but the problem we're in is the bartender. Now, the bartender certainly does not wish to make a bad impression. At the same time every one of his customers wants him to drink with them. If he succeeds in doing this he will not be a bartender very long, so the bartender notoriously is a man who does not drink. He seldom if ever drinks with anyone and that is a known fact, no one asks him.

Now, when this arises in the problem of living, we can say that the person who is a continuous trying to please those around him by reacting as they expect him to react, has only two choices, either to be the bartender who drinks when everyone wants him to and very shortly develops ulcers, or to make some kind of a clear statement of his own values in this matter, either by revealing it or by affirming it, to the degree that he will not be expected to make himself sick in order to make himself companionable.

So in Mysticism this situation of the person being different, which does irritate, aggravate and horrify certain individuals, the process of being different in order to be healthy, is a decision that thoughtful persons have to make. Mystics in general have been different without being obnoxious and that is where the line of social proprieties come in. But in life we must either settle down to being like others and with doing this take on all of the karmic consequences of the way they act, all we must be like our own principles recommend that we should be and have strength enough of character to stand up under a certain amount of misunderstanding and even abuse, if the occasion arises, or in the universe in which we live it is much better for us to be abused a hundred times than for us to abuse someone else once.

Mysticism, by reducing the intensities, with which we react to situations, begins to smooth out living. It smooths out living by not permitting everything that arises to become highly personalized. It withdraws energy from areas in which that energy is not important and is non-productive, and applies this energy to other areas, which are important and are productive. This brings of course fine point of difference.

The individual who generally speaking is heavily loaded with psychic pressures, generally does not have any area to which he can transfer his energy. He is sick, he is in trouble, he is in the spot he's in because his energy has only a circle of negative outlets and that these outlets are continually punishing him. To tell this person that he should direct his energy into other outlets might present a problem, he has no other. I know a person with a bad neurotic situation for many years, we're not very healthy physically, had to live a rather sedentary life, I tried for months to try to get this individual to take a little interest in reading. Here he was a warrior, he was miserable, critical, thinking of himself all the time, loaded with hypochondria and he finally admitted to me that never in his lifetime had he read a book and never in his lifetime did he intend to. He didn't enjoy reading books. I asked him why and the man was absolutely honest, he said “they take my mind off my misery and I want to be miserable”. At least he was franker about it the most, he enjoyed misery more than he enjoyed getting over it, because he liked to be sorry for himself. This sounds ridiculous but without the verbal statement of it, it is present in millions of human lives. Innumerable persons given the opportunity to quietly and symbolically choose between a good constructive interest and self-pity, will cling to self-pity with everything they've got, because it is such a warming feeling, it makes a certain sense of psychic importance, is a distinction in being the most miserable person on earth, or even in the neighborhood. These things cause the person to feel individuality. Actually there are many better more important ways of being an individual and these should also be carefully considered.

Zen coming in with other eastern philosophies and a certain amount of Buddhism and the general trend of the day toward a somewhat more contemplative reaction to the intense pressures of modern life then has given us what is now being developed under the term Psychology of Values and Psychology of Value is a very interesting field, that shows that we can't help growing in spite of ourselves sometimes. This begins to analyze normalcy in the term of the individual's ability to recognize value. That is no longer a case of him finding out what is wrong with him. This has been one of the big problems in psychology. The average analytical procedure causes the individual to become hyper aware of himself. The theory of course is that if he gets aware of himself long enough and intensely enough and consistently enough, he will in the end get very tired of himself and in that way break away from some of his troubles. But the Psychology of Value says that it is more important for the person to begin the contemplation of what he should be, than the consideration continuously of what he should not be. That the experience of a positive state is highly desirable.

The person who is miserable is to a certain degree a person who has never enjoyed being comfortable. If he really had ever enjoyed being happy and had a clear psychic archetypal image of integration, he would find misery an unhappy contrast. But during his entire period of life he has never sensed by experience a truly positive situation. He was a little miserable as a child, he went through children's ailments and problems, a little more miserable as he got a bit older, his family may have broken up, left him falling around among relatives, got into school, wasn't well adjusted, a little more miserable, him out of school, took a job which he didn't like very well, didn't get along with the people around him, married, made a comparatively inadequate marriage, maybe not bad enough to be divorced, not good enough to be worth anything, gradually developed two or three children, became a cause of nervous tension. Against these things no resources within himself, went to church occasionally, thought the minister was an awfully smart man, especially when he talked on current subjects, and just drifted. A little more problem, a little more tension crept in, very soon neurotic situation. The individual gradually sinking further and further into a series of negative experiences. Against these negative experiences, by way of interior contrast, there was no positive experience. The individual knew how it felt to be uncomfortable, he did not really know how it could feel to be comfortable. He heard people tell about it, he heard people say that they were blissfully happy, didn't mean very much perhaps, a little twinge of envy, that somebody else was so much more content than he was. But when a person said they were happy, the only way this half integrated and half demoralized person could react, was by his own definition and instead of recognizing the other person to be happy, he could only say that the other person was not unhappy, in other words he could create a contrast only to himself and to his own experience. He could only decide that this other person was different and that certain secret longings or subjective desires, that he had intellectualized and emotionally thirsted after, did exist, someone else had them but he could not even tell what they were actually. It is very much as though each of us tried to plumb the depths of our closest friend or relative psychic nature, we might have certain intellectual concept of it but we could not know what it is.

Western man as we know him today therefore theoretically has never experienced normalcy, he has never experienced any normalcy other than that of the traditional degree of unrest, peculiar to the time in which he lived. His idea of normalcy is simply an interlude between wars and depressions, socially speaking. His idea of happiness is the day in which things did not go as badly as they usually do. His idea of supreme joy was to be able to get out of a responsibility. He had no real concept of happiness, or integration, or purpose that was meaningful. Like the two irishmen working down in the sewer and one of them looking over the edge of the sewers saw a valuable expensive automobile go by, evidently carrying some well financed citiZen, returned to his friend and said “if you had money as much as that, what would you do?” Pat said “I buy a new pick handle”. And that is exactly the problem we're up against. The individual feels that money would help him not to do the things that he does not want to do, but the positive expression of doing something creative, something valuable, something essentially right in itself. The average person in the west has no experience of it, he does not know what it means, he does not know what it means to be quiet in himself, he does not know what it means to be truly at peace with life. There are exceptions ofcourse, but the majority of human beings, functioning from a continuous existence of tension, are able to measure only tension and the diminution of tension, tension becomes a normal condition, and if the tension begins to let go, the individual senses relaxation setting in upon himself, he thinks of it as sickness or exhaustion. He simply does not have any way to visualize or to release within himself the archetype of essential normalcy. Only we can intellectualize this and say, well what is normal? In a time when the whole world is confused, what is to be regarded as normalcy.

A very simple answer is given to us by nature in this, for man normalcy is a way of life that produces health. Normalcy is a way of life that makes men well or keeps man well. The way of life in which the person is not afflicted by the negative consequences of his own action. The only way that the western man can think of that is well perhaps if he stays asleep all the time and does nothing he will thereby not cause himself in any trouble. To stop doing everything because anything we do is wrong is very much like the pouting child, but again that might be the individual's attempt, he might say the only way is to run away from the world, to enter into a cloister or live a monastic life and escape from all of it. The true answer, the answer of a positive adjustment with life and energy, is just so strange to western man that he has never hardly investigated it, and this is true of psychology. Psychology is trying to put man back again into health by the same brute force and awkwardness that made the man sick in the first place. It is simply a power drive with one policy driving for dominion over another. The physician pushing in one direction and the patient pushing in the opposite direction, but the physician having certain particular instruments of persuasion, that perhaps stronger or more psychologically impressive has a certain degree of success. He can influence the other person against that person's native instincts to a degree at least.

Now, why does Mysticism play an important part in this, it is because through a consciousness, the interior consciousness within ourselves, man is capable of a larger area of experience than his immediate intellectual might cause him to believe he possesses. Imagination, the more subtle aspects of human energy directive, causes it to be possible for a person to experience certain states by the natural positive determination to do so. It is therefore conceivable to the mystic that a state of peace can be experienced by the individual as a direct state within his own nature and that it is only through Mysticism and Mysticism alone, that a positive state of what might be called a possible good can be directly experienced by the individual. It is by Mysticism that he becomes aware of levels of value in himself, which become compensatory to the levels of non-value, which afflict him on the outside. If this be true then psychotherapy has to include a certain going inward into the individual's own consciousness by the individual himself, searching in himself for positive roots of expression and usage, he has to search for the missing values and experience them first within himself and, by so experiencing them, gain a means of positive action.

If we take the case of Plotinus, the neoplatonist, we are told that according to his own record on only a few occasions, two or three occasions, during his his lifetime was he accorded the blessed privilege of a mystical experience. In those brief moments however Plotinus, being peculiarly blessed among men, actually experienced the state of human integration. He experienced man as himself fulfilling the human purpose, he became aware of his positive ability to tune into a dynamic reality, to become part of and aware of a dynamic good, whereas it had always previously been that he lived in a dynamic evil and a static good. Evil had a power over him, good did not, because evil was acting in his nature and in his environment, but good was merely a word, a dim fantasy of value, something that had never been truly vitalized. But through the mystical experience this vitalization took place and Plotinus experienced the absolute victory of good over the shadow or absence of itself. He became in those instances dynamically good, and by that means dynamically happy, dynamically in a state of fulfillment, dynamically adjusted and in complete possession of those ordinal virtues, with which man's traditional moral life is said to be associated. Such an experience lasted five seconds, perhaps less, but it was an experience not an indoctrination. Plotinus could never have been vitalized had someone explained this to him for 50 years, but because it happened to him, because it occurred within his own life, it became an absolute authority in his life and he told his disciples, that all through the years in which no such privileges were again granted to him, he still lived in the serene living recollection of that which had occurred. The door did not open again for many many years, but he knew what was on the other side of the door. He had been through the door. Nothing, no one could alter this conviction which he could also re-stimulate in memory, in conscious understanding, in recollection, he could relive it a million times, because it had happened to him.

Mysticism then has this peculiar and wonderful authority of an experience that happens to us and becomes the first important experience against the mediocre. Psychology, realizing the possibility of such a thought, begins to analyze how the mystical experience can be engendered, how it can be conjured out of this mysterious complex of living. There's no use writing it as a prescription, because no one can fill it. Yet it is the only remedy, the sovereign remedy for the innumerable psychological ills of the individual. Actually of course the psychotic, the pressure laden person, is in a very poor situation to have such an experience, yet this is not totally the fact of the matter. It seems to be rationally and even morally we would assume, that the person who is most dynamically wrong is the furthest from the state of being right.

The story of Mysticism however does not sustain that, as we realize from the Theophany of Paul on the road to Damascus. Here the mystical experience is given to the apostle at the very time he is on the way to persecute the christians. He has already stoned them, he already struck and seriously injured James the disciple, he had no interest and no faith whatever, yet to him was given this experience. This seems to point out that the mystical experience is no respecter of the ordinary conventions of life, it originates in something else. Now, several answers have been given to the Paul in illumination, the distances of time and the inadequacies of records make it very difficult to answer this. Some say that Paul at this time was afflicted with the stroke, that something definitely happened in his health, which reduced him, which broke him interiorly. Another occasion, another group say that he was stricken with blindness, some say that he was blinded by the vision, others affirmed that this was not the occasion of the blindness, but was associated with it. If Paul had passed through some immediately preceding disaster, this might very easily explain the matter as a break in the armament of his negative aggressiveness.

Other mystics however are evidence and and clear proof that the mystical experience is not necessarily simply the result of the perfection of the disposition. What it appears to arise from is the reduction of the energy in the negative pattern of the personality. As we suggested at the very beginning of the talk, instead of exhausting the complex, there are ways and circumstances by which it is devitalized, in which the energy being withdrawn from it reduces its activity. It remains what it has always been, merely a small weed in the garden. If we take energy away from it it will not grow. If it has already grown and we take energy away from it it will die. We have spent all our time fighting with the weed, we have never realized that it lived by an energy which we can turn on and off and that it is the turning off of the energy, and not the fighting with the result of the energy, that gives us our easiest and most lasting victory.

Mysticism cultivates within the person who believes it certain religious virtues. Mysticism is founded in the simple doctrines of both Eastern and Western saints, whose lives have been very largely dedicated to a quiet, patient, reflective acceptance of the challenge of living and the continuous and unceasing refusal to become violently involved in problems which are of themselves of no importance, of no meaning, of no essential value and which rise only to satisfy pride, or egotism, or a moment's emotional instability. So that your mystic actually is a person who gradually takes the energy away from the whole complex of his own psychic personality. He withdraws his support, mental and emotional and vital, from negative patterns and these patterns, without his support, without his willful direction, without his bestowing upon them, the power of the will, willing them into activity and sustaining them by will energy, if he does not do this these patterns cease or die back again to such controllable dimensions, that they are no longer serious problems in life.

The mystic, by his retirement from confusion, by his relaxation away from tension, thereby acquires two situations that are helpful. First his natural reduction of intensities automatically helps to clarify the psychic field and the same reduction intention helps to clarify his relationship with his own basic consciousness. By moderation in his conduct he thereby reduces any abnormal psychic situation that exists and at the same time makes available to him and to himself his interior hyper psychic resources, resources that go beyond even his mental, emotional or psychic propensities. His end always is the same, namely that he shall experience that which is right and from this gain the absolute criterion of what he should and must be, because until he experiences the substance of good within himself he does not know how he can be good. The question always arises what must a man to do in order to be saved and until man experiences this as solution in his own consciousness he can only listen to the advice of others and this listening to advice is not the same thing. We can listen to advice forever and reject it all, but once we have known something we have a new level of value, a new standard upon which to erect our own structure of life.

Zen and other eastern systems therefore boldly advance what almost might be regarded as a sharp knife, a powerful and directive influence. Instead of wandering around in this misery world of continuous compromises then takes the attitude that's this is so, this is not so. The decision is simple. The need for this decision is obvious, the excuses against the decision are numerous and none of them is valid. The person's own predicament is such, that the need for solution is desperately indicated. Therefore instead of locking ourselves in a vast involved dispute about this matter let us visualize the situation as the death bed scene in which the doctors are arguing as to the medication and during the argument the patient dies, and that is more or less the situation. While we are making these tremendous philosophical arguments about this and that, our own situation grows steadily worse, and in the midst of all of the defenses that we intellectually conjure to our support, the individual is the living picture of the fact that his position cannot be defended. He proves by his own existence that he is wrong and then claims by his intellection that he is right. If he continues to do this of course he will continue in the difficulties with which he has been plagued from the beginning.

Now, in the west, which is not a contemplative world, the the search for a western Mysticism, a Mysticism not different substantially, well there can be really no East or West in truth, but western in the sense of being presented in a manner as compatible to our experience as possible and at the same time not to compromise its basic integrity. This idea of a western Mysticism is growing in importance to western man today. He cannot be actually the kind of person that he reads about in the stories of ancient eastern saints and things of that nature, he just isn't that person. But he has the same need as that person, he has a certain basic respect and veneration, or the thing that he does need, but he has to find some way of acquiring what he needs of making it available to him as a personal experience.

So psychotherapy approaches this situation. What can we do other than what we are doing in order to help to cleanse this stable of the human psyche and act in the true part of our own Hercules. Obviously for western man this must be brought under some kind of control mechanism and in that it's not so different from eastern man. Certainly the processes of eastern meditation are no less scientific than the processes of western psychoanalysis, nor are their theories in either case superficial, and in both instances there is a thoroughly integrated formula, it is being done in an almost completely scientific way, although it transcends science as we are likely to think of the term scientific. Meditation is also a person starting from a situation and moving from that situation towards a goal or an end which justifies the consecration of life to that end.

In some eastern nations, where meditation has been universally practiced, it is seemingly a thoroughly natural, reasonable and proper course and brings no thought of ridicule, or criticism in the public mind, in fact the person may be regarded with a special esteem, because he takes such a life, even as here he is going to be regarded with the most profound suspicion. Yet the end to be attained is in both instances approximately the same. But man in the west is thinking of his end in different symbolism. Eastern man thinks of his end perhaps as complete emancipation from worldliness. He thinks of the end of his existence is his return to a state of total union with deity. The eastern mystic has a highly spiritual end which he seeks to attain. To him this end is the only reason for life and it's the existence is a searching for god and good, and the life of godliness and of goodness, these are the proper lives and the important lives and other lives are comparatively unimportant.

In the west the goal of man is not good in the sense of god, but good in the sense of adjustment with a situation in which he exists. Western man is not seeking to go to a heavenly place. What he probably is trying to do, if he ever was able to define it clearly, is to bring that heaven here. He wishes to bring heaven here. He wishes to perfect the world he is in, whereas certain mystics have always had the attitude that the sooner out of here the better. Western man wants to make this world a world of security and peace, and he envisions his daily contribution to the future of his race as a contribution towards some golden age ahead, some utopian world to come in which all the five-year plans and the ten-year plans and the longer-range thousand-year plans and the long-range from the primitive to now 10 000 year plan will sometime result in these plans coming true and that a generation will come into the world sometime, in which there will be no sin and death and that everything will be as beautiful and wonderful as we might want it to be. Thus in the western man his idea is to bring heaven into expression here in some way to make now and this place spiritually significant. To do this is not particularly easy, because the moment we attempt to bring heaven out of the subjective and into the objective, we are inclined to trust part of it to the keeping of times, and places and circumstances. For heaven to come into this world and to be feasible or practical here would mean a tremendous change in an infinite number of beings, because heaven could not be heaven if it was not heaven to all and a renegade in heaven could soon bring about its downfall. It would mean that this world would have to become totally psychically satisfactory to an infinite diversity of psychic natures, each with a different standard of satisfaction. It would be very difficult therefore to assume that this world can be rapidly transformed in its totality, picked up as a globe, so to say, and carried from one level of integrity to another. Western Mysticism meets this possible conflict of concepts with the other situation then that man's own life becomes to a measure a psychosomatic symbol of the whole world. The world as we know it here is made up of an infinite number of beings, capable of the statement of I. These beings exist as individuals, but each of these individuals is in a world and is the victim of a world arising within himself and flowing outward into his environment or moving from his environment in upon himself. Thus each person becomes symbolical of the transference of heaven to earth, the bringing of a spiritual state into objectivity within the consciousness of man, the possibility of creating within man the utopia. The individual who possesses the virtues which he desires to have the community virtues of his world, that it is conceivable, that the individual can attain this, has not been denied and the resulting thought of course, that brings some optimism but restraint, is that enough persons, gradually coming to this individual discovery, could go a long way towards ultimately moving the collective in that direction, because by degrees individuals becoming as they are the units of masses. If enough individuals move in a direction the mass moves in that direction.

So Mysticism for western man has to be solutional of something. It is not his departure from life into some mysterious Nirvana, it is rather the departure of his ailments, the departure of his difficulties, and the final integration and organization of himself as a directive leader of his own fate with both the wisdom and the strength to be a good leader, to be capable of preserving the peace in his own nature and living according to it. Mysticism for this man cannot be totally disassociated from his immediate needs and I think it will come into our western world through the recognition of a process of therapy, in which the individual, by the cultivation of certain laws, principles and practices of mystical procedure, will discover that these put his personal life in order and that by putting his personal life in order they accomplish most of the byproducts which he desires is confusion in all its manifestation represents byproduct. The fact that he is in his presence sorry state results from this lack of organization, it is itself a byproduct. So if we wish to say that man's physical sickness is to a measure psychosomatic, that many of the ailments which are increasing at the present time are directly traceable to tension, or to one or other of the excesses by which the individual hazards his life. If we also want to assume that domestic problems, juvenile problems, vocational maladjustments, all these things to a measure result in man energizing the wrong values, then it means that by the re-education of his basic value sense much can be accomplished.

To re-educate the value sentence in man we may need and will probably ultimately develop a series of disciplines, based upon eastern techniques, but probably a little like some of the adaptations of eastern art and architecture to our western way of life. Coming upon us almost unawares. Perhaps the architectural situation would be of some use to us at the moment in trying to make a point here. We have several great systems of foreign architecture, particularly oriental, that have been neglected for a long time, because for years, for centuries our public buildings were greek or roman, our cathedrals are mostly gothic, our monuments largely gothic of baroque, or if we were extremely luxurious and wanted to finally indicate beyond all doubt, that we had wealth and culture, we ran into that glorious spindly gold leaf situation that dignified the Louis of France from the 16th to the 18th, and immediately following the 18th the deluge. This situation caused us a lot of discontent. Now, we have many schools of eastern architecture and it is interesting that, in selecting by our own subconscious or by the subconscious of our art directors or interior decorators, however they don't get very far unless the client pays them so it all goes back again to what is acceptable or what the individual is willing to live with.

Out of all the systems that could have been drawn upon the simplest was selected, and that was the japanese and it is distinguished by under furnishing, under ornamentation and such problems as bringing outdoors indoors. Some magnificent garden composed of nothing but five rocks and comb sand, a delightful and glorious house in which, theoretically if not actually and ultimately perhaps actually, you do not even have to continue to live in rooms of the same sizes and shapes. You get tired of your living room, you pull three or four silk petitions one way or the other and your living room becomes anything you want it to be. You can take all the petitions of the house down if you want to and change a nine-room house into one room. Or you can, if you're a little tired of that, you can put up so many petitions that it will make a house that resembles a cell block at sing-sing. You can have what you want, you live in walls that are only where you want them to be and that's Zen. The ability to change the shape of your room to meet the shape of your life. You can also realize that your consciousness following into all of these shapes can be any and all of them. Your consciousness can be a one-room house consciousness or a nine-room house consciousness. You can have a consciousness that wishes to be alive with the sky or the air and wants no walls, and you have complete control over whether you want walls or not, it is not necessary for you to blast through 16 feet of solid concrete as in the time of Richard the lion hearted in order to get into a house. In those days they built walls to keep people out and what did they do, they kept the people on the inside in, and every barrier we build to protect ourselves imprisons ourselves. So suddenly we like to see rivers flowing into our living room, we like to see doors and windows where walls used to be. We like walls that we can argue with a little bit pushing them this way getting rid of them that way if we don't like them. We are tired of the brick-a-bracks and of the admins, and all this type of thing and our taste today moves toward this openness, this broad sweep, this lack of boundaries. It tells us something. It is all part of a kind of an astute formula, a Zen formula, and when we are thinking of art today we go into the Zen type of generally art. We go into one art that goes back to the basic value of simple lines and the tremendous importance of the full consciousness of line and color.

These things point out psychological changes and they also point out the desire of the person not to be cluttered. This against clutteredness is showing up all through our culture. It is showing up everywhere where man has been for ages cluttered. His house is nothing more or less than his escape from himself. He is doing with his house what he wants to do with himself and his relations of his house to himself is the relation of his psyche to his being, and today he is very anxious to get rid of a cluttered up psyche, and he has learned that one way that he can get rid of it is simply to make his walls of paper and silk, instead of iron and steel. That he also can get rid of it by getting rid of debris, of courage, and psychology may so slowly realize as it has, that a badly demoralized psyche is very much like a room over furnished. Back in the old days, when nothing was ever thrown away, in the days when the portiers were threaded eucalyptus buds alternating with leaves, when small window curtains were beautifully festooned out of father cigar bands, in those days nothing was ever lost. The drapes were hung with little pinned reproductions of children's drawings that had been there, the wedding wreaths were underneath glass bells, everything was velour and velvet and felt. Every table top resembled a present piece of kitchenware, it was heavily loaded with marble and mosaic, or something that was the 19th century equivalent of linoleum. Linoleum was liable to appear in the living room just as well as anywhere else. For portraits of those long dead, most of them apparently having died of various types of grievances from the expression, were everywhere. This was the stuffy old psyche, this was the individual living in an atmosphere, in which there was no freedom for his own soul. He lived overshadowed by the grimness of hereditary bestowals and the psychologist today trying to explain to the individual that he is suffering from a broken home and the individual going back and visualizing that early childhood difficulty, is in very similar condition to the same man going to the family homestead, going into this room and seeing these grim-faced relatives glowing down upon him from across the years, relatives that still live in him as part of his psychic content, situations that mean that he has inherited this whole stuffy mess and that he has carried it on through the years. Now, it's wonderful for someone to try to put these things in order, but you cannot put a good many of them in order. There's only one thing to do with them - throw them away. They are of no importance to anyone, these cherished things that 50 years ago would have been lovingly preserved at the cost of life, the house was on fire the individual would gladly have been burned to death rescuing them. These things are not worthless. We cannot say in psychoanalysis learn to get used to them, what's the use? We cannot say well don't forget that this hatchet-faced ant up on the wall was really the victim of a bad psychotic time herself, look how her parents treated her and how their parents treated them, so gradually learn to see the good in your miserable old man, learn to see that underneath she is only the symbol of your own frustration. What's the use, just take the picture and turn it to the wall or better still throw it away.

Now, you can go through this same room and you can try to reconcile yourself. You can say yes these gorgeous portiers of eucalyptus buds were wonderful at the time they were made, they were the production of loving spinster sisters, who had nothing much more important to do because they couldn't play the piano all the time. These things have sentiment to them, they are nostalgic, they have a sacredness about them, they made somebody very happy or at least help somebody to be unhappy in a pleasant manner. This situation causes them to be part of us, to be part of our background. Well we can we can do that, we can take them down and we can carefully roll them up and say sometimes somebody may want them, although we know they never will. Or we may try to live with them, we may try to clear our dream life so that we can wander through this house, in this room, whistling with sheer joy because we understand everything in it so well, it's all reconciled now, but what have we done. We've reconciled ourselves with something that wasn't anything in the first place, that had certain perhaps excuses for existence, but never any reasons. It belonged to a way of life that was dated like a geological strata, once it's gone with it went the dinosaur and the magatherium, there's no further relationship in these things.

Now, if our own haunted house, our own psychic nature, carries this tremendous burden is no real gain from trying to rationalize it, from trying to accept it, from trying to say “I'll live with it regardless”, well maybe we could live with it, but it means nothing, it is only punishing ourselves for no purpose. It would be very much better to take a perfectly simple Zen attitude in this because a Zen monk coming in, looking around very carefully would probably burn the place. In other words it would be the simplest answer. There's nothing to be gained from it. It has no answers for questions or problems that we need, all that we need. Consequently if the whole situation dies out in us, completely and totally, it is far better. There is also no reason why we should go around in the presence of this saying “I don't like it, but because I don't like it I must now accuse myself of being disloyal to it, it's not any good, I know it isn't any good but I have loyalties, I am in some way required by a cold to protect this thing and if possible transform it into a national monument, it must go on”. Now, many people kill themselves with that type of loyalty and nothing gained again.

So Mysticism cutting through all of this gives us the concept of the simple house, the house in which the walls are very simple, in which things that are no longer valuable are buried honorably, where their ghosts will no longer walk, where these situations can no longer arise and the individual lives in the free air, looking out through these cloistered and sorry walls back to the sky and the earth, which were his common patterns. Here lies man's return to value and escaping the stumbling block of trying to get there by passing through a mystic maze of everybody else's values, which he can never do anything about anyway. He does not need to say his ancestors were wrong any more than he hopes his descendants will say that he is wrong, but these things do not add anything, and while we are fighting with these, struggling with, trying to root them out one by one, the years go by, the sickness goes on and the person who's cured of one ailment simply turns his face to another corner the same room and is just as sick again. It is the same problem infinitely repeating itself. Today physically we would scarcely do this anymore, it's on rare occasions now that persons literally hold on to things this way. The outer symbolism is broken by the five senses it can't tolerate it but the interior symbolism is held together by subjective pressures and by a certain psychic loyalty and perhaps this peculiar tie back to the past, which is part of the psychological entity of all of us and which unfortunately is not always tied to the right part of the past, there is a value in that tie, but only when it is properly and adequately used.

The psychic mystic problem goes into this gradual fading away of false value, getting away from this miserable conglomerate into simplicity again, and the house of today is a little bit symbolic of that. Some of these modern houses are pretty bad, but the principle of getting away seems to be driving the individual, driving him to more or less stylized expressions of living in which he is less and less a slave to literal particulars, prefers rather to live in an atmosphere of broad almost metaphysical implications. He is depending less and less upon the completeness of design, he is expecting that completeness to be supplied rather than provided, he expects the individual beholds it to sense something more than he sees and he leaves the situation in this way, rather open and fluid, which is much better for his psyche. If we would take this architectural release that he has gained and try to apply it to his interior psychic life, we would begin to understand perhaps something of mystical content. The rebellion on the outside is almost a mandala, the rebellion on the outside gives him a tremendous symbolic instrument to work with, and here we come to, I think, a very powerful factor in this entire situation. Man finds it comparatively easy to follow lines that are familiar to it. As he becomes adjusted to one level of a value, he becomes adapted to other less obvious value levels, that are similar. Thus the person living in the open house, with its very simple austere human factors, depending more and more upon nature moving in upon it, this individual is constantly contemplating a value. Perhaps he didn't originally build a house that way, perhaps an architect built it or a decorator provided the furnishings, perhaps it was only a stylization when he moved in, but if it was well done this stylization begins to move in him. The mandala is always the thing on the outside that starts something working on the inside. It is something that by looking at, or by studying, or by contemplating we create a series of reminiscent revelations, something moves in upon us, something moves out to meet it, and the thing that moves out to meet it is usually our need, moving out to meet a supply of some kind, or it is a quality within ourselves moving out to a different quantity of that quality in the thing outside of us.

The mandala in oriental art is consequently usually a highly symmetrical and highly symbolical structure. It is a design that is lawful in its formation and is peculiarly and specially intended to portray a principle, and to portray it in a way that is acceptable to us in as much as the portrayal is accomplished by archetypal symbols. By archetypal symbols we mean symbols which in the subconscious of all persons must be essentially interpreted in the same way as against the common symbol which is capable of any kind of interpretation. Archetypal symbols usually therefore go back to the great motions of humanity, the great religions, the great structures by means of which a certain device or figure brings to the conscious attention of the individual certain factors, certain thoughts, certain restorations of memory, which he will share with millions of others who look upon the same device, because the symbols themselves are archetypal and are so intended to be. If therefore the individual creates an archetypal order in his life, he is constantly releasing this archetype and in the releasing of it he finds positive experience, as against negative experience.

Now, it probably is too soon to say, that the american house builder is actually fulfilling or obeying the essential principles of all these archetypes, he is not. The eastern master would not permit one column, window or door in that building to be placed without absolute consideration for law. The western master will not do that, he is merely concerned with a general effect. But the general effect is improving to a degree. Therefore it is telling us something of man's recognition of archetypal symbol factors in his own life. It is telling us for example that man wants to allow nature to move in upon him more, he wants to live in a larger world, he wants so also live in a world in which he draws from basic resources. He wants to live in an uncluttered world and he wants to live in a world that reminds him of universals rather than particulars. He wants to reduce therefore the furnishing of this house to its utilities and to search elements of essential decoration as have the greatest basic significance for him. Thus he appoints into his house no longer a mass of confused things, but a reduction, in which his emphasis is upon luxury as the right of beauty rather than the right of clutteredness. It used to be that if you were very very luxurious, you loaded everything. A luxurious individual had nine times as many chairs as he needed, the luxurious individual had much larger pom-pons on the end of his curtain courts, he also had magnificent diapered plush edging on the curtains, so that every time you move the curtain it was as though you were moving the entire structure of history, and of course it was just as dusty usually, but there was mass that counted, tremendous evidence of things. Today we find one good painting, one fine piece of sculpture, perhaps neither the painting or the sculpture too good in substance, but simplification, definite reduction. It may be the selection of the art is not real, does not represent personal taste, maybe only general convention but it is reduced to a recognition that a few things become important in themselves, many things lose all importance. We go into the life of the person with the same thing.

Our great psychological problem today is this clutteredness which is resulting in desperation, emergency feeling within ourselves. We feel like the young wife coming into one of these ancestral monsters and feeling that almost irresistible is a desire to throw it all out. She is overwhelmed by factors that were never her own, that meant nothing to her and close in upon her like ancient relatives. She wants to rebel against them, she wants to furnish the place over again, to furnish it according to the living desires of her own nature. The same thing has to happen in the person. Coming into our own subconscious which is a conglomerate of many things including pressures, traditions, our own bad habits and everything you can think of, the individual either has to put this thing in order, or else he has to live in a continual state of internal irritation.

Though perhaps the psychologist in this place becomes the interior decorator. He has to try to rearrange these elements of design but he assumes that they all have to stay there. He assumes also that if he rearranges these things that he can arrange them, until they are better for the patient because of formulas that he possesses, and that he is the one who must decide, what is normal and what is abnormal, that it is necessary for the patient to fulfill a series of rules to achieve certain particular victories over certain things, and that the final victory to be attained is the ability to live with the rubbish. That the individual must be able to live in the haunted house and laugh at the ghost, that seems to be the real end that we're working for. That he must be able to get along with the inconsistencies in himself. That he must live in this house unfurnished by taste but filled with accumulated furniture and fixtures. The east will not permit this attitude in its basic thinking. It is not that the psychological adjustment is so the person can live with himself, this is only a an excuse and actually doesn't work. The individual who has reached the point where he can live with himself doesn't want to. He still finds himself totally boring, uninteresting, and unpredictable, and inexplicable as far as its own nature is concerned. When you learn to live with the psyche you are only learning to live with a mystery, because of the fact that even psychology cannot tell you what it is. This is not the end is sought, rather the end is to clear away the entire structure through we'll say the development of a recognition of universal taste, when the person has good taste he is capable of cleaning his own house. As long as a decorator does the job, we are never sure that the person himself is going to be happy. After the decorator has finished the house, the decorator has to a measure pleased himself, but he is not going to live in the house. Perhaps the person for whom he has decorated the house has given him as far as possible the ideas, but you'd be surprised how many people get an expensive decorating firm and then have no ideas of their own at all. They just move in into the grandeur that the decorator has conceived and as one individual told me after living in it for six months, he put his desk and card table out in the garage, because he couldn't live in the grandeur. He had a decorated home that cost him a quarter of a million dollars, he couldn't live in it. It wasn't his home. He had been raised in a farmhouse. It happened to get rich but still this glory of it all simply pressed in upon him, giving him the most terrible mental inferiority complex. He felt himself incapable of living on so high standard of elegance and opulence.

So the attempt to reorganize these interiors according to a formula, the attempt to take the individual's life and straighten it out in terms of Freud, or in terms of Adler, or in terms of any of these psychologists, assumes that they have to be right and also that a broad formula, not too broad actually, is applicable to most people. These facts have never been demonstrated in psychoanalysis, that certain pressures can be reduced, the individual can be counseled into a better state of living, is undeniably true. But this same individual may go back for counseling six months later with a new problem, the whole thing start over again. The actual achievement of a proven norm has not taken place and of course the counselor is in trouble on this also because as soon as the patient feels well enough to get along without him he doesn't come back and most of the time even the treatment that is available is never completed, so you don't get too far with it.

Mysticism, by getting behind the whole situation, helps the individual to recognize clutteredness and order. It helps him to recognize simplicity and confusion, and if he can recognize those two groups of couplets, he is pretty well out of his troubles on almost everything. If he was cling to order and cling to simplicity, he will never be very far from integration and improvement of health and attitude. It is when he departs from these basic things, that he then requires every type of psychological help that he can possibly receive. So in the west I believe that we are going to begin not to probe the individual continuously, to find out what is lurking in the subconscious. We are rather going to realize that if man has been conditioned by environment and this conditioning, moving in upon him, has caused the situation that we generally recognize as psychotic, that we have learned a tremendous fact about man. We have learned that something from the outside can move in upon the inside and make a profound effect upon the inside of life. Now, we have allowed this to always be a more or less detrimental thing, although nature is constantly reminding us that through this experience pattern from the outside nature itself is perfecting our own accomplishment. But what comes in through these sensory perceptions and goes into the inner life of man as a modifying force can be either orderly or disorderly.

We get back to the simple problem of pythagorean philosophy, namely that Pythagoras believed that medicine could be taken into the body through the eyes and the ears. That that part which is taken in at the mouth, has the greatest effect upon the body, that which has is taken in upon with the eyes has the greatest amount of effect upon the psyche, and that which is taken in through the ears has the greatest effect upon the mind. That these represent therefore senses the eyes, instruction the ears, nutrition the mouth. The medicines can come through all three of these avenues and in your mystical lore the eyes have become tremendously important on the psychic or soul level, the ears play a subordinate but also often important role. But the eyes particularly give man the experience of beauty, they give man the power to contemplate the orderliness of life and they can be focused upon the meditation forms, medicine through the geometric arrangements of devices, the mandala, the flower arrangement, the tea ceremony. Everything by means of which the individual becomes capable of receiving into his nature the archetypal symbols of contentment, order, relaxation, peace, integration - these things can move in upon him just as surely as chaos can move in upon him and through meditation the individual, through increasing discrimination, makes more and more use of these available faculties and powers. It always with the purpose of receiving into himself certain impressions and then moving these impressions by his own interior energies. This respect, supposing the individual seated quietly in some convenient area in the process of his mystical thinking, looks out across the landscape sees hills and valleys in the little town and becomes very much aware of the type of scene that we have with the story of Gray's Elegy, a very pastoral scene, a scene in which the human interference to nature is very slight and a wonderful soft glow hangs over life, the simple glow of nature itself. Now, this contemplating person, being will say for this moment a mystic, now returns to the common concerns of the day all perhaps to the concerns of rest and in his inner life he restores this pattern, he begins to build his concept of interiors upon the placidity of nature, which he has seen around him. Thus the pastoral seed moving in upon himself with its attendant emotional tranquilities give him a kind of experience which he can internally estimate. As he therefore becomes more adroit at these things, more advanced in the usages of them, he finds the very definite possibility of reorienting his attitudes toward life. He finds that as he sits quietly, looking out upon the thing as it is, that he realizes the life apart from the desperate desire to change that thing. He knows perfectly well that if a real estate agent was sitting there the place would be mentally subdivided within five minutes, man would move in upon it, that a hundred different motives of profit or gain could be contemplated by looking out over that landscape. But if you do not have those motives within your own consciousness, if rather you are accepting this scene as therapy, as a kind of medicine, arising from restoring strong real relationships between yourself and life, you will have a different type of experience and a rich one and an enriching one.

Gradually will also gain a skill in this, you will gain the possibility to achieve this orientation in more confused situations. You will find that someday you can look out of an office window upon a busy street, with all its traffic and its noises and its confusion, and still with this interior apperception you will be able to put this thing in order, you will be able to completely transcend its ability to confuse you, yet you will not deny its existence, deny its effects or minimize it or ignore it, but it simply will not have the power to disorganize you or cause you to be lost in that confusion.

Mysticism can make you a kind of in the world but not totally of the world. It permits you to do everything that you normally would do or that others would find it proper for you to do and yet do it in an unworldly way. You can do these things without ever becoming so involved in them, that you bestow upon them the right to hurt you. The moment you do something and become involved in it, you're going to be hurt for the one who doesn't appreciate it. Zen would strike at this thing with everything that it has, with a sharp knife, because as long as the other person can hurt us we will be in pain, even to the end of time. We will blame the other person and to the end of time it will be ourselves at fault. It is this case of the wrong placing of the blame will lead to modern western psychotic situations. It is only Mysticism that can prevent the wrong placing of the blame. It is only a degree of consciousness, that is strong enough not to place blame. That is the only absolute remedy for the situation. The consciousness to whom blame or not blame becomes equally unimportant, in as much as all things are done for the sake of themselves.

All good is for the sake of good, all truth is spoken for the sake of truth. It is not to please nor to displease, to gain nor a cost, it is not to add or to diminish, it is not to satisfy or dissatisfy, as the oriental mystic points out “the thing is done because of the necessity within the thing itself to be done”. it must be fulfilled and being fulfilled in this way nothing is neglected and no one is hurt. It is not a case of of the individual doing certain things regretfully or other things with great gusto and glee, it is that the simple problem of the doing of the thing because the doing of that thing is next. In Mysticism there is this complete detachment from the consequences in terms of other people's reactions. The great problem is that the mystic must be moved by a standard of value, in which he is constantly mindful of his responsibility to truth, for the use of truth. He is not censored by others, he is censored by the deed he performs, he is censored by the word he speaks, he is censored by the thought he thinks and not by the judgment of other persons. If he can understand this, gradually these psychic pressures will diminish in his own nature, he will find that the desire to push by exercise of will against inevitable ceases. When a thing has to be pushed is not timely. Now, you will say but many things would never get done if we didn't push. That isn't true. If we understand what is meant by Mysticism.

Mysticism is not achieved by the weight of the push. Mysticism is achieved by the inevitable integrity of the purpose. It can and must be preserved with a certain simple dignity, and experience has shown that the absolute integrity of the purpose is stronger than a push, yet there must be one or the other. Where we're not too easily able to prove our point, we push, where value is itself moving the situation, it moves itself if we become its servant. Therefore the mystic clearly interiorly visualizes and states and if his integrity and his visualization is true, the thing is pushed, but not by effort. It is moved by its own inevitable need, it is moved by the fact that it is trusted to a law and, because it is lawful, it must win. It is where we have to defend that which is not lawful that we have to push so hard. With all this pushing comes exhaustion, with exhaustion irritation, with irritation more pushing, and finally we tie ourselves into a hopeless complex.

So psychology today is beginning to seriously investigate this Zen concept of effortless effort. This process by means of which we simply do not fight all of these conflicts that we have but substitute for this battle, that we have previously thought, a very simple and direct positive search for value, to search for the thing we have not had, the reason for being different from what we are. Value, if recognized, becomes worthy of service. The individual will remain as he is until value teaches him, or informs him, or reveals to him that he is not in harmony with that which is valuable. So in psychology we are developing this value penetration in which we believe firmly that if the person has a greater appreciation for beauty and understands it better, a greater recognition of nature and a simple acceptance of nature, a greater variety of natural, simple, constructive interests and a stronger internal meditative life, not meditating for what he wants but meditating to experience the state he needs, achieving through experience and meditation and diversification, the personal awareness of a state of existence better than he is. In other words, in moments, like Plotinus. In these moments he will suddenly experience himself as being better than he is, or better than he knows that he is. There will be moments in which he will be picked up into peace, there will be seconds occur to him in which the confusion will open and he will see the bright light of sky beyond, there will be moments in which he will experience a greater peace than he has ever known, then these currents will close again and he will be swirled along into another uncertainty. But as he cultivates interiors, he will have these moments, he will have these moments in meditation or in the very simple association with the necessary, and out of these moments he gradually will integrate his positive philosophy.

He will say to himself “whatever that mood is that I had, I don't know what it is, but that mood is valuable, that mood is the thing which if I could possess it I would need nothing else, that mood would end all interval of misunderstanding between myself and myself and also between myself and every other living creature, therefore this mood of value must be cultivated, it is not a matter of education, it is not a matter of the overcoming of every other fault that I posses”.

It is simply the effort to cultivate a few positive values, a positive realization of something, and even the troubled person can search for some value, value in religion, value in a good book, value in a work of art, value in a pleasant walk in the garden, value in the kindly offers of a friend, value in one of a thousand different things, the experience of value is the first and simplest form of illumination, and it is also the thing that becomes the guide of our lives, because the moment we experience a superior state, we are moved to make that state real, to build it into ourselves as a permanent part of our own natures.

As time goes on, I hope that we shall be able to do more with this subject, because it opens a new concept of many things, but tonight we are past our time so I guess we have done all that we can for this evening.