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.

Practical Mysticism in Modern Living. Part 4 of 5. Mystical Overtones in Culture and Society

 

 

(Transcript by Tob Hawk)

When we think of Mysticism, we usually associate it strictly with the development of religious teachings, but looking around us in our modern way of life, we shall find considerable evidence of the continuance of mystical ideas and ideals in the more common institutions and procedures and practices, with which we are familiar. Therefore it seems appropriate to realize that Mysticism is not a sect, nor must it develop within the structure of sects.

Mysticism is an overtone, which bears upon many forms of life, many activities. Actually Mysticism is almost as difficult to capture as an adequate definition of beauty. Beauty is a sort of product, arising from other products, it is a byproduct. It comes to us as the result of order, arrangement of the power of the individual to perceive from within himself the unities and values that exist beneath the surface of various types of phenomena. In our modern thinking therefore Mysticism is a quality to be found in the lives of innumerable persons, developed variously according to the nature and temperament of individuals and also permeating and penetrating many fields of life where you would not immediately expect it to be present. Looking around us today therefore we can begin to recognize our indebtedness to mystical concepts and ideas. A brief historical survey may help to orient us in this.

At the time of the crusades Mysticism moved from the Near East into Europe with a tremendous impact. Mysticism arose among the islamic peoples at a time when their culture was reaching its golden age of flowering. It was transferred from the soil of Asia to the soil of Southern and Central Europe at a time when European culture was at a very low end. During this period, which we often call The Dark Ages or The Early Medieval World, European man was so far removed from ethical experiences as we know them, that he lived within an extremely narrow boundary of religious and political literalisms. Everything had to be accepted on its face value, there was no inquiry into the more subtle factors in beliefs or ideas. During this period in Europe no important texts were written, very little if anything came to us to bear witness of originality in man's thinking. It was only after this time, with the breakthrough of the Renaissance, that medieval man enriched by near eastern mystical attitudes began to move forward into what we call Modern Culture.

Thus we know that the Renaissance, although generally and traditionally believed to have originated in the area of Constantinople, actually represented a broad mystical tradition. It brought imagination back into the life of the individual, it caused him to recapture the spirit of dreaming, that had been lost with the collapse of greco-latin culture. In the rise of Renaissance man we find the individual daring to derive inspiration from within himself. For many centuries he had leaned completely upon institutional inspiration. He believed that in the vested clergy there existed a body of men divinely anointed to think, to lead, to believe and to teach. Those not belonging to this group developed incredible inferiority complexes about their own merit and their own achievement, and we had a time mutilated with this tremendous sense of personal sin, the shortcoming of the average mortal, his inability to have any part or place in the framing of his own destiny.

With Mysticism returning to Europe we find the rise of individualism. The rise of the individual whose source of courage and of certainty lay within his own convictions, locked perhaps by inadequate instruments in his own intellectual limitation, but nevertheless present as a powerful urge toward self-expressiveness. The individual began to think of himself as having a direct relationship with god and with nature and with life. Although it might seem to be a complete contradiction, Mysticism in Europe led very strongly to the rise of natural sciences. Mysticism caused the individual to question the authorities of Avicenna, and Galen, and Aquinas, to question formula as the solution to problem. Mysticism was opposed to authoritarianism, it was opposed to the idea that some other person could be an infallible source of knowledge. It also helped the individual to liberate his mind from the authority of centuries, the authority of creeds or sects. It was a breaking through of a spontaneous inner life, long repressed, long held and finally creating a terrific interior revolt in man. It was impossible longer to prevent this breaking through of the torrent of submerged individuality.

At this time the breakthrough was comparatively peaceful in as much as the mystic is not a person of violence. This breakthrough was a kind of an aurora, or a dawn light, a rosy glow coming in the sky to promise the coming of a better day. This rise of the sun of man, this rise of the light of the soul moved throughout Europe and brought with it innumerable reforms and changes, many of which are directly behind institutions and attitudes that we now regard as normal and commonplace. I would say therefore that from science to modern religion, there is practically no organized group that has not been influenced strongly by a mystical equation, although this Mysticism may no longer appear as a spiritual instrument, it may appear merely as a cultural or aesthetic instrument.

In our thinking about these situations we must also pause for a moment to give some note to the rise of mystical fraternities and mystics as individuals during the early modern period. We know for example the tremendous psychological importance of the rise of the fraternity of the Rosy Cross in the early years of the 17th century. Here we had a group protestant mystics, probably rooted in lutheranism, but individuals with the vision of utopian hope of future conditions that might prevail in society and in turn giving inspiration to a whole tribe of utopians, who have never ceased to envision a better state for man. We have the Mysticism of Jakob Boehme, the german shoemaker, whose works have continued particularly through the instrumentality of his disciple Gikto. The works of Boehme are still read and still considered, and there are small groups representing his spiritual convictions.

At about this time also we see the rise of the lutheran reformer Andreae, whose Mysticism impelled him to create unions and trade groups to improve labor conditions in Europe. Early Mysticism in Europe seems to have turned almost immediately to utilities and behind nearly all of its pressures were the instincts for human betterment, fraternity, equality and liberty. Thus your mystics became your patriots and contributed much to the freedom of nations and to the rise of religious tolerance among the peoples of the western culture group.

Now Mysticism, rising from these roots, moved directly into a number of rather recognizable channels. We had a whole group of mystical religious sects, not as clearly defined as most other theologies, but representing themselves through such organizations as The Friends, and The Quakers, and the various groups of adventists that flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries. Through William Penn and the Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania, a powerful link was established between European Mysticism and the opening of our western hemisphere to colonization. William Penn, as a man of integrity, of enlightened leadership, fair play and powerful internal conscience, was able to accomplish a great deal in solving the difficulties between the colonials and the american indian groups. Penn and others of his general quality were to be found among many of the early settlers and resulted in a rise of Mysticism in this country at a comparatively early date. We can find dates as early as the late years of the 17th century that Mysticism was actually moved to the western hemisphere. Mystical sects and cults have continued, as in Western Pennsylvania, where The Order of the Woman of the Wilderness and The Fraternity of The Mustard Seed represented strange but basic mystical foundations.

In addition to these kinds of movements we see Mysticism emerging into our cultural life as the result of these overtones that have been captured on the level of creative artistry. Today probably the principal instruments of Mysticism in our daily way of living are the various branches of the fine arts. Here we have continuous emphasis upon a spiritual experience. I think the one of the most important of these groups of experiences are now associated with music. Music has always been a peculiarly intimate experience in the life of the individual. Music is a universal language. It requires very little of the ordinary restrictions of communication forms with which we are so burdened. The music speaks no verbal language, it rather goes directly into the appreception of man as in experience and it is gratifying and important to realize the great music is now returning strongly to our people. This return is undoubtedly motivated by the psychological need within man himself. It represents his instinctive recognition that music nourishes a part of his nature which is otherwise without adequate support.

The majority of your great musicians of the past have been if not mystics, strongly influenced by Mysticism, we may include in such a list Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Scriabin and many others. This recognition of mystical equation we also note in the rise of such groups of music as the wagnerian operas, where not only the music itself but the themes are very largely drawn from religious or symbolic sources. The great ring operas of Wagner certainly represent a restoration of nordic mythology and germanic myths. On the other hand the study of Wagner reveals to us clearly, that he did not merely accept the sagas and adas that had descended from tradition, he took these various symbolic forms and infused them with a metapolitical concept of his own. Wagner was therefore a creator of myths, he created a mythology around the mythology, and the more we analyze his music dramas, the more convinced we become, that he gave a tremendous mystical creativity to stories which had previously lacked these powerful overtones. He also applied these symbols and these Mysticisms to the prevailing problems of his time and as we know even during his own life he was in political difficulties on several occasions.

Music has become one of the most important forms of therapy with which we have sought to counteract the extreme materialistic expressions of our time. For many persons today music is their only experience of Mysticism. We say this fully aware that the music lover may not even be aware or conscious that such is the case, but music accomplishes much of the mood of mystical meditation. First of all, in order to enjoy great music, we must become receptive. We cannot attack music, we must allow music to have its perfect works in us, we must be prepared to be receptive, to allow the harmonic chords and patterns to create their own interpretation in our natures. Thus music can be wonderfully and subtly adapted to our own moves and we instinctively seek out music that is consoling, comforting, inspiring, encouraging, relaxing, according to the nature of our own immediate requirement. Thus while music may seem to be a very simple and obvious art, actually it has within it a tremendous power to change the psychic integration of the individual. It moves in upon him, creating a series of experiences.

The music lover must pass through a series of degrees of personal unfoldment. His taste in music must mature with his understanding of the principles of harmony and musical composition. Also music is an experience in law, we're under the beautiful coding and covering of grand harmony a melody, music moves with absolute precision, music is as relentless and inevitable as the motion of the heavens. Every part of it must be adequately mathematically defined and the great musician may compose apparently with great ease and rapidity, although some have not been so facile in this regard. Actually however, whether it is intuition, whether it is the labor genius of long experience, the great musical composition is a document that is essentially valid. It is valid in terms of eternal facts. The musician dealing with rates of vibration must handle them adequately and properly, or the result is discord. He cannot permit himself to break through the essential rules of his art, he is therefore creating within law and order, is expressing within the legal boundaries of the hops accord, the violin or the piano. He is moving according to true creativity. He is not merely producing as whim dictates, he is producing as law and order required. He is taking certain original themes, he is developing them, according to principles and rules that are competitively inflexible. So out of this experience we have sheer beauty, but this sheer beauty is sustained by immutable law. This lesson itself is of the greatest importance to us, in as much as it reminds us forever, that all beauty and all harmony arise from obedience, that the individual is great to the degree that he uses laws wisely, and he loses his greatness when he breaks the rules, governing the art or science with which he is concerned.

We note the rise of greater music criticism on the part of the general public. The distribution of good music, attendance to great music - these are increasing every day and they certainly tell us that man is discovering soul hunger, he is discovering the need for an aesthetic expression that combines the acceptance of beauty with a deep reflective devotional attitude. As most western peoples know nothing about meditation or the contemplative arts of the east, it is good that they should have music as a way to create a kind of meditation. They find in great music most of the experiences of Mysticism, in fact we even have numerous records of music leading toward direct and definite musical experience on a mystical level. We have reports of individuals absolved in listening to a great composition, suddenly see the orchestra and the entire involved area burst into light to see the entire musical composition unfolding is a great geometrical pattern in space, producing an artistry which would almost defy man's greatest ambition to depict such a scene with the humble colors, available on an artist palette. Mystics also have perceived or known music as a tremendous vibratory motion moving through themselves, they have found themselves to be picked up in harmony and to be lifted out of the commonplace and the everyday. There are many persons who find in music therefore a form of religious devotion, a devotion that is based upon a symbolic acceptance of cosmic music moving in upon them. They have to a sense at least become aware of the music of the spheres, of the music of space, of the music of universal law, they have recognized a universe of harmony and that is exactly what the mystic experiences in his meditation. He perceives the universe unfold into light, color and sound, he perceives these divine forces which he has adored with his closed and covered senses, suddenly revealed to him in the splendor of sound and the majesty of form. Thus symbols, arising from within the individual, give expression to the instincts and emotions that are locked within him.

It is good to observe the improvement in music and also it is good to observe from a standpoint of our general information how individuals, not possessing this type of consciousness, have permitted themselves to become involved in non-melodic or inharmonic music. We also observe the rise of syncopations in various forms and the innumerable modern music forms, which are not entirely satisfactory from the standpoint of great art, like I think that's a bit of an understatement, but very we feel very kind and benevolent this evening and therefore do not wish to hurt anyone. But the essential fact is that music of a discordant nature, music in which we find no aesthetic value or satisfaction, but which seemingly becomes a stimulant, we see the same type of situation as between nutrition and stimulation. The individual who is wise and who's a little run down, will certainly work with nutrition, but if he is quite wise he will refrain so far as he can from stimulants. He will realize that a stimulant gives him a pickup without contributing anything to his basic improvement. The continual use of the stimulant also results in habit forming situations and the gradual loss of its effect. Thus music forms that are dissonant and are essentially intended for stimulation purposes, must continually change, must intensify their rhythms, must become more and more clashing in their discords in order to produce the so-called stimulating effect.

We have observed this also in the gradual motion of jazz from a comparatively innocuous form to one which is almost pure stimulation to jagged and ragged nerves. The individual becoming more nervous thinks he feels better but he does not actually gain any improvement from this type of stimulation. Nutrition on the other hand is the feeding of value within the person, it is supplying the individual with the essential materials necessary for the sustaining of a true attitude under the pressure of circumstances. Music gives the individual available internal resources, making him more aware of internals, giving him a greater experience of what peace of soul can be. Also to discover the tremendous vitality of relaxing to harmony, to opening oneself, to true order to true harmony of sound.

As a result of this type of situation many persons who have very little musical ability of their own, become exceedingly exacting in their selection of music. A person who is listening to music merely because he needs the nutrition of it in his soul, can be music's most complete critic. The critic for the daily paper has a certain sophistication, he is not listening, he wishes he was elsewhere, but he has to be there to cover the concert. His criticism is based upon purely technical productions and can sometimes be brutally heartless, he has destroyed many a career simply because he was not where he wanted to be at that time. This type of criticism is not vali. But the individual, who has opened himself to the healing power of music, can feel a certain type of dissonance strike into him, can cause him to detect some major error or flaw in the performance, because it begins to hurt him, because he finds that this stream of blessedness has been interrupted, he may not know how or why, but he is quick to discern its effect upon his own nature and therefore quick to observe if the error is repeated, and I know individuals who have never studied a musical score, who accurately pointed out every floor in a concert. They knew nothing about it, they cared nothing about flaws, but they winced when they occurred, they were simply too sensitive in their receptivity to be able to accept a dissonance without reaction, without sensing that something had been outraged in their own contemplative attitude toward music.

With music we come upon other branches of arts, one of which I think also calls for some thought and now we come to the fine arts, such as painting and sculpturing. In the fine arts the world in the last several centuries has not been particularly fortunate in the production of mystical genius. Our whole western way of life in artistry has not been essentially mystical. Building our art concepts and canons from the greek old roman schools, we have always glorified form predominantly. To us art has been the representation of the outer surfaces of things. Our art has been a copying of certain aspects of nature with special emphasis of the west upon man and upon the studies of the human figure as it has attracted art of an artist for many hundreds of years. As a result of this particular emphasis we have become almost photographic in our art. The traditional and academic poems are perhaps more dominantly so, but our rebellion against traditional and academic schools of art. This rebellion has not been fortunate, it was not fortunate because we have now find the individual placed in a different situation. The music lover listens, he accepts, he receives into himself art as impact. The creative artist, whether the composer or the painter, has a different relationship to art, to him art expresses impulse, it is the release of himself into some art form or art medium.

In the western world we have not had sufficient emphasis upon the cultivation of Mysticism per se, Mysticism in itself. As a result of that most of our artists were themselves not mystics. Now, an artist can be great within the field of his own activity without being an essential mystic. We do not question the greatness of Michelangelo, we do not question the greatness of Rembrandt or Peter Paul Rubens, we know these men from an artistic standpoint were masters within their own fields. Yet generally speaking they were not mystics and even when they chose a religious subject, this religious subject gained a strange realism, a strange literalism, until the various sanctified persons seemed to be brought down to earth and made into very earthy beings. Art in the west was always dragging ideas and symbols down to earth and giving them forms or bodies of an earthy quality or kind. Having thus brought heaven to earth the only remedy that the artist had to restore heaven to its proper place was to place a halo around the head of some earthly representation. Therefore first he took a divine being and caused a model to pose for this divine being and then, having achieved as the result of his artistry only a human being and not the likeness of a divine being, he wanted to explain this, what he really meant to other people who had never discovered otherwise, therefore he put a halo around the head to indicate that it was a divine being. Everyone who saw it said “my this is a sanctified person”. But the sanctification had to be labeled and this has been true of most western art. It has never been able to escape into the sheer creative imagery by means of which it was able to give to the one who gazes upon it the complete impact of unworldliness. Western man has for a long time cultivated worldliness and it shows pretty well even in his most unworldly efforts.

Against the background of this general worldliness we do find a few artists, who have broken through into what might be termed a mystical artistry. Perhaps the greatest in more recent times to achieve this end were the english artists William Blake and Watts. Watts was one of the greatest painters of England ever produced. The Watts gallery in London is devoted almost exclusively to the mystical works of this man. Blake of course was a tremendous creative genius, a genius to break through the conventional roles and patterns of things, a skilled lecture, engraver and painter, he was a tremendous student of Michelangelo, but he went far more into art in the standpoint of pure Mysticism than his master. Of course Blake did not actually study with Michelangelo, who lived much earlier, but he was greatly addicted to the works of Michelangelo. Blake had a peculiar religious mystical philosophy of his own apart from art. He used his Mysticism as the impulse behind his art and many of his choicest artworks are illustrations to his own mystical writings. Today we know of Blake as an artist, but very few persons know of him as a writer or as a mystic, nor do they realize how he cooperated with Thomas Paine to contribute considerable assistance to the rise of american independence. It was the mystic type of mind that saw in the experiment of the 13 original colonies one of the most important movements toward the release of the internal life of man.

Now, there were other artists also, possibly the name that stands out among the classic painters for mystical overtones is El Greco. He was one artist that broke away tremendously from the literal, who began to to sense the importance of life moving through form. The form was merely a symbol and that to deify the symbol was to obscure the life. So El Greco began to sacrifice form for life and this has always been one of the great indications of the creative artist, particularly on the higher levels of Mysticism.

The difference between eastern and western art is very largely this matter of Mysticism. We know for example the names of many of the old beggars and poor relations that paused for Rembrandt van Rijn at various times in his career. We know that he had a wonderful skill to drape some old fishermen or ancient from the community in strange bizarre clothing and transform him into an oriental napa of some nature. Plus the tremendous impact of the Rembrandt lighting technique we have much of the genius of this master.

In the east however it is rare if ever that a great artist will ever use a model for any reason. He is not making pictures of bodies. This does not mean that he has not studied anatomy, or that he is unable to draw a body correctly, it means however that the forms which he intends or desires to use have first moved out of the world into himself. He has stored away in his own consciousness the essential knowledge of draftsmanship. He has put away where he can find it when he needs it. Certain impressions of forbes, he can draw almost anything that he wishes to draw from memory. This is the beginning of art from inside, for memory inevitably passes through certain conditions within the consciousness of the artist, an example of this will be found in the wonderful Prince of Hiroshige. This interior conditioning causes an ocean to become a different kind of an ocean, a wave to become a different kind of a wave. It causes a flower to be more than a flower and it causes the human body to be merely the shadow of a purpose or an idea. Thus the bodies of things are subordinated to their moods, to their motions, to the qualities which it is intended that they should betray or that they should reveal. In oriental ark consequently there is an other worldness almost always apparent. The connoisseur of art, the individual who has a great and growing and steadily unfolding appreciation for the nobility of art value slowly comes to appreciate this fact that art in the unworldliness of the eastern technicians becomes truly creative. It is not even dependent upon nature except very indefinitely and indirectly. It is the artist impelling the spectator to perceive value, to receive a kind of message, a message cunningly concealed in design, a message also that requires no word for its communication.

Thus in eastern art we frequently discover the peculiar lack of involvement, the simplicity of no time. We see the essential elements and the rest is left to the imagination. The eastern, contrary to the western, does not indoctrinate, he is constantly coaxing, the person who sees the work to release himself into it, to give himself greater opportunity, to feel and to complete a design or pattern.

It is not generally known that European artists, even the greatest of them, usually worked in groups which are sometimes referred to as workshops. In these workshops several men of sometimes a great talent collaborated on various paintings, for example one man would do nothing but faces, another man would do nothing but drapery and a third man would do nothing but scenic backgrounds. And we know consequently that in a work such as the Mona Lisa the man who painted the face did not paint the background, even a man of the skill of Leonardo was a specialist and in many instances the master merely added the final touches to the works of his disciples. But even where the master himself intended the work as a serious production of his own he cooperated with others and the portraitists and the scenic artists were two entirely different types of skill.

In the orient this is not true. The individual paints all of his picture. He must have therefore the sense of both foreground and background, and in the orient there is the curious trick of often subordinating the foreground to the background, so that the background really moves forward to become the dominant note and wherever this is accomplished, it is achieved without the sense of conflict, that often arises in western painting, where one is sacrificed to the other. The oriental artist, because of his technique and because of his own natural Mysticism, paints almost, as one of the old master said, “upon silk clouds”. Instead of painting on the piece of silk in front of him he paints first in a cloud in his own consciousness, he fashions an imaginary panel of silk, he visualizes it until he sees it clearly. He then proceeds to place upon this his design, arranging it and rearranging it perhaps a thousand times with his own interior visualization before he ever touches brush to physical material. Thus the painting is finished before it is drawn and it is only the transference of this finished product to its final visible medium that concerns the artist. It would be inevitable that some such a process should have to distinguish eastern and western arts because of the materials in which the two groups painted. To paint in tempera, or in oil, or even in watercolor according to western technique is far simpler than the eastern way and we observe in x-raying pictures and in cleaning them many layers of over painting in which an artist for example may move the position of a hand three times before he finally decides exactly where he wants it. This is impossible in the East, where you are painting upon fragile silk and where no correction of any kind can be made. This means the work must be exactly as intended, not even a single stroke can be widened or deepened, not a single correction can be made in a line. It must appear in its finished form immediately. Kobo Daishi, the great japanese buddhist artist, painted with 10 brushes simultaneously and was able to do this without making a single false stroke.

Now, many individuals would say that this requires consummate skill, that the way it is done is to keep on making strokes until you feel thousands of pieces of silk and throw them away and until you have become complete master of making the strokes. This is not the eastern way however. The eastern way is that all of this experimentation shall be done interiorly, it is done within the consciousness of the artist himself. He subjects his entire body to the discipline of the purposes of his mind and he brings the mind into such complete control of the body, that he produces a miracle that almost corresponds with the western miracle of the great artist on the piano. Here the fingers move so rapidly that it would not seem that the mind can possibly control them. In the oriental painter the hand moves with absolute skill, simply because it is fulfilling an archetypal concept that is fully and entirely complete. It is rare indeed that the eastern master has to discard a painting because he has made an error. It is the complete discipline of creativity, it is not mechanical, it is visualization, it is the power to so completely see a thing within ourselves that there can be no need for any change afterwards, it is already as perfect as our genius will permit.

This art becomes a tremendous instrument in Mysticism. We know that in theology it has been used for centuries for the dissemination of religious knowledge. In many countries the church depends heavily upon paintings for communicating religious ideas. It depends upon religious drama for the edification of a populous which is perhaps illiterate, but we must never assume that an individual, though he may be illiterate, is without the capacity to grasp through some inner faculties important truths if they are presented to his consideration. So we have in art another profound instrument of the perpetuation of Mysticism and the great struggle of art today is not so different from the struggle of music, but what we term today syncopation and music, or the various schools of jazz, have their art correspondences in painting in our various schools of modern impressionism and post-impressionism and cubism and these types of artistic endeavors. We find there also the struggle of the individual to break away from literal things, to break away from copying, from photography, from the actual representation of nature, yet in order to break successfully the individual must have outgrown the level from which he is seeking to separate his consciousness. A violent revolution against matter does not lead to emancipation, it leads only to deformity or distortion as a means of escape. There is no escape in art or in Mysticism through breaking the laws of color or formal harmony, the escape must always be by outgrowing the poor use of an instrument and the development of a greater interior power to use that instrument for the expression of creative genius. Therefore rebellion, unaccompanied by genius, produces the rather sad spectacle with which we are all too familiar. To be different is not to be better but it cannot be said that an individual can be better without being a little different. Thus the equation is extremely subtle.

In addition to our arts we and our music we have a certain amount of creative Mysticism in our dance interpretations. These interpretations based upon mystical themes, such as the works of Mahler and Bruckner, give us the opportunity of using choreography as a means of expressing our natural reaction to musical stimulation, or the musical moves, or molds, which accompany certain compositions. This is not only the refinement of the modal music of the greeks, but it is also an approach to the mudra, which is the posturing or religious hand positions of Asia. In the East the body becomes a tremendous instrument of dynamic symbolism, by posturing, by various positions of the hands, by various gestures sometimes referred to in the East as the art of gesture, the individual communicates, he conveys, he is able to release or reveal the rhythmic forms of his own body and to prove that this rhythm arises from a certain conscious control.

Thus as in the theater in Java and Bali in the old days it required anywhere from 5 to 15 years of continuous work, constant discipline to gain the bodily control necessary for the elaborate dance forms of these people. These dance forms were almost completely religious, but they were religious in terms of folk symbolism and myth, as well as in the theological meaning of the word. In these Dutch East Indian areas, which have since proclaimed their independence under the general name of Indonesia, in these areas the theater came directly into the home, there were very few formal theatrical companies, plays were put on by members of families and the theater was an essential part of life and here's where your Mysticism becomes a factor. The individual portraying various characters is expected to release through himself his own understanding of these characters, he is as far as possible to revitalize them and be what these characters represent. To do this he must become receptive to the great symbolisms involved in the mythologies and legendaries of the areas. He finds himself living again the dead heroes of long ago, he feels the heroic spirit stir within himself and having sensed or actually experienced a certain mood or emotion he must through the perfectly disciplined instrument of his body, trained precisely to express any and all moves with mathematical accuracy, he must use his body as the musician uses his instrument to become able to reveal in the most certain and definite manner the most abstract and almost incomprehensible reflexes of mind and emotion.

This type of discipline is so far beyond western stage that we hardly know how to compare them. It does not follow however that certain individual western artists have not discovered this. They have and they are the ones whom we regard with the greatest admiration because we say they can live their parts.

Thus in the dance and in drama, which we know to have been early related, so that drama as we know it arose out of religious pageantry and out of the great ritualistic dances of antiquity, here we again see Mysticism flowing into our way of life. It flows into us as a series of experiences for which we are learning to pay good hard money. We do not know what we are experiencing but we still find some experience of this kind necessary to us.

Let us imagine then for a moment that you go to a motion picture theater and you are fortunate enough, fortunate enough to see something worth seeing. This in itself is a most delightful surprise, but it is conceivable. Let us imagine that you are seeing a truly great dramatic production. If this is true your relationship to the theater, your relationship to the art media and your own relationship to yourself pass through a series of metaphysical changes. In the first place after the picture becomes important to you, you completely lose sight of the fact that it is a picture. You are not concerned constantly with the technical aspects of camera and angle, unless that happens to be your business. If the picture takes you to some far place you feel yourself to be there. You're also no longer particularly aware that you were in a theater. You no longer feel that you were sitting with a thousand other people. The world has ceased. Your own consciousness has become completely absorbed in receiving the impact of this sequence of pictures which you find completely satisfying, or enthralling, or arresting in some way. Thus there gradually comes around the state in which you are alone with a picture and then gradually your own identity becomes submerged in the picture. You instinctively identify yourself with the places for the moment at least wherever the camera goes you are there. Whatever time it goes into you are part of that time. Your own formal nature, as you understand it, becomes unimportant, you do not think of your name or your identity and while you are watching this picture you have no imagination as to whether you are old, or young, rich or poor. You have created a rapport with something that has moved so closely into your awareness, that it has obliterated practically every element outside of itself. If the film or the stage production failed to achieve this, then they have failed in their own peculiar artistry. If you can still remain yourself in your own time then your imagination has not been captured, you have not been picked out of an historical situation and placed in a mystical one.

This mystical relationship between yourself, in which subject and object appear to merge and mingle, is an experience that we have almost every day. Millions of our people attend theater and motion pictures and concerts and dance recitals for the purpose of enjoying these aesthetic forms, yet very few of these individuals realize that what they are going through is a miniature or a symbolical shadow of a mystical experience in themselves. They do not analyze the condition, perhaps it is just as well that they do not, but analyzed or not analyzed, the individual passes into a dimension of experience in which practically all of the common equations of living have been submerged or have been cast out of the immediate awareness. Later the person comes back to the realities of the times and problems, but for a while he finds his escape and what does he escape from? What does all Mysticism imply that we must escape from? The answer of course is that we must escape from ourselves as directive beings. We must escape from the peculiar tyranny of self-purpose over action. We must escape from the tyranny of the burden with which we afflict our own faculties. We must escape the weight of our own attitudes. We must escape the ponderous procedures, by which we complicate every situation in life and change what might be a natural and pleasant pattern into an unendurable complex of circumstances.

Thus Mysticism and its arts in our way of life reveals to us clearly that we only have to let go, that we only have to redirect our attitudes or our activities and immediately we are free from the burden of our own prejudices, and opinions, and attitudes, and pressures. We are free from our own historical selves, from our own oriented personalities in time and space. We become universal, we become all appreciation and no criticism, and this statement itself is one greatly to be admired. We become infused also with new things and new values. We escape the boundaries of previous imagination and we are constantly enriching an interior storehouse of recollections, which we can call upon at various times. Out of this filing system of remembrances new personality developments arise within our own consciousness. We grow and enrich through these experiences, by which we escape from self and become spectators of greater things. This is again of course how Mysticism has moved into our present mode of existence. The movement continues and now we find Mysticism moving more and more directly into our homes.

A few years ago, if you will remember, the city of Los Angeles went on the great spree of uprooting anything that looked green or alive. We found street after street completely denuded of every tree and every bush in order that we might have the fine, clean, inspiring line of solid concrete. Now the city is suddenly realizing that thousands and millions of tourists from all over the world can see concrete at home without coming here at comparatively high vacation rates. So now we've gone on the great tree planting experiment. Down the middle of Wilshire boulevard there are palms appearing that would do credit to the center of the sahara desert. Everywhere vegetation is crawling up the front of mortgage and loan companies, perhaps to give a certain festive luxuriance to the interest rates. In any event, holy edge is back. It is back because everyone got very tired of modern architecture and, as the great eccentric of architecture Frank Lloyd Wright observed a short time before his death, that it would be an excellent thing if people planted trees in front of every building, except the ones he built, because all the others ought to be concealed in some way.

Actually, there is a little apology in this tree planting epidemic. We're getting very tired of this fine clean line and we remember that the United Nations building in New York for example looks surprisingly like that 50 pound block of ice that the iceman used to deliver. These clean cold deadlines are not quite as happy as we thought they were going to be. They were greatly heralded, not because anybody really liked them, but that it was a cheaper way to build and the individual could pay just as much and get less. This type of thing led inevitably in our way of life in which art has become too heavy a luxury for most people to bear. To meet this we have tried to bring life back into the city. We do this because we want to bring life back into ourselves. We want to recognize nature as a symbol of life and we instinctively realize that from his conduct over the past man has become associated as a symbol of death.

Thus man to redeem his own works seeks to make them live and he ornaments them with symbols of life and of all symbols of life the tree is one of the most ancient and the tree of life is deep in the subconscious of human consciousness. In any event we observe Mysticism moving back as an instinct into the private life of the citizen through the development of beauty, wherever he can find ways of cultivating this quality, and to meet this need we have a tremendous increase in the development of decorative arts of all kinds. We find the person recognizing the importance of art in his home, the importance of art in his business. Today you will find great works of art in the lobbies of hotels. They are put there because people want them and, because if the hotel has them, more people will come and stay at the hotel, it is no philanthropy but it is a discovery, it is a discovery that if you want people you have to please them and if you please them you must do for them things which give them a sense of greater belonging, a sense of greater personal satisfaction, peace and security in themselves. Where such factors are ignored, in the private life of the individual, the difficulty is as real as it is in business, institutions and public buildings. We have come back to the need for proper artistry and in every home and even in the most humble apartment the individual of today is seeking mystical satisfaction or mystical security through surrounding himself with small but select groups of material that satisfy his soul. Food for the soul. And food for the soul comes from pure and true beauty and beauty in turn is something that can be known only by mystical appreception. There is no absolute and unchanging rule of beauty for the individual. Beauty is that to which his own soul responds and it is important if that part of his soul, which is essentially true, responds.

It is not enough to satisfy his selfishness or cater to his delinquencies, true beauty must have meaning, must have a wonderful subtle teachment, by which the person is assisted to restore his own internal integration. So we'll observe every time you go into shops and stores today that while there is a massive brick of brackery that does not mean very much. There is an increasing emphasis upon worthwhile artistic creativity. Better things along our lines are available now than for a long time.

Also we have had quite a development of what have called “museum replicas of works of art”. Today a great many persons, unable to own great examples of egyptian, greek, oriental or primitive american art, have found that there is a certain general satisfaction in an accurate and trustworthy replica, one which can be secured for a comparatively small sum, the original beyond price, and that this reasonable facsimile can become an ornamentation or decoration in a well-appointed home and add dignity and depth of meaning to that home. So this is another example of the arising of artistry as a mystical concept in the life of the person. He is demanding more and more soul satisfaction to keep him going under the pressure and tension of his time.

Nor is it false to affirm that in this present generation also there has been considerable restoration of mystical elements in religion. For a long time religion was the custodian of arts and your great cathedrals of ancient and medieval Europe are also museums and of the artistry which they preserved perhaps some of the finest is in the stained glass and in the great artistry of the gothic spans of the cathedrals themselves. These great temples were not only places of worship but shrines of beauty, so far as the skill of man was able to impart beauty and this beauty had a particular integrity because it arose from devotion and was, for the most part, a gift or offering of the master craftsman to the great architect of all things.

More lately we have seen a general deterioration of these values and we have observed the surprising and disappointing lack of religious creative artistry. We have seen our christian art deteriorate to a group of rather highly conventionalized representations, which differ but slightly in execution, though done by a hundred artists. We see the general lack of great religious art in these institutions and up to very recently there was a surprising lack of good music in most of them. It usually required a very large and prosperous church to have an adequate choir or proper soloists. Now music is returning strongly to the church. It is also coming back with better music, with greater emphasis upon important religious composition. For a long time we had very little religious music being composed. More is now coming and some of the new works are admirable, remarkable and valuable.

Also we are observing greater attention to what might be termed the various mystical prerogatives of religion. We see greater emphasis upon the development of mystical veneration in even the most severe protestant denominations. We see the advance of a ministry of faith healing. We see emphasis upon religious counseling. We also observe a tendency on the part of progressive ministers to change from the practice of 20 years ago, in which sermons verged resolutely into politics, and now we find them moving back again into a more liberal, but at the same time more essentially religious field.

Thus religion faced with the weight of its own membership and perceiving or sensing that this membership is heavily neurotic, that the pressure of circumstances are forcing the individual to seek spiritual consolation of a valid nature, these discoveries are influencing practically every religious denomination, causing the churches to work more and more to create centers of spiritual orientation, rather than merely meeting places. The progress is observed and there are a number of publications devoted to this, some of which I see and all of them are emphasizing the importance of religious Mysticism.

Through the sectarianism of religion also we see another mystical light beginning to break and this is the light of symbolic interpretation. The old literalisms of theology are disappearing rather rapidly. Religion is taking on a universal mystical complexion. This is important and as to a measure been forced upon the churches, but regardless of how it comes about, it is helpful. One of the reasons it has come undoubtedly is this global strategy which we are developing psychologically. For the first time the western world is receiving something of the impact of eastern culture, art and religion. The possibility of destroying these competitive institutions now appears too remote to be considered. We realize that we cannot dominate the religions of all other peoples, we cannot proclaim them to be heretical and sweep them away, nor can we ignore them. These various religions must play their part in the theater of our modern living, they must join with us in the solution of great problems, they must be given civil treatment, they must be respected for their merits and values and can no longer be ignored or discarded. This has brought with it a crisis in christian theology, a crisis that the past never faced even when challenged and that is the crisis of a world in which at least five major religions must live together and must live together with a temperament and an attitude, that is not likely to cause them to explode into mutual warfare.

Also we are beginning to realize the extreme danger of permitting sectarianism to undermine the friendships of peoples and thereby become a useful aid to belligerent or militaristic persons with dictatorial ambitions. To use man's religious prejudice as a way of controlling or enslaving him or turning him upon his fellow man, we hope that this has happened for the last time, and modern man begins to realize that it cannot continue without ultimately disgracing and discrediting all religion. To meet this challenge therefore, each religion has been forced to seek overtones. It has been forced to search out points of common agreement, the last thing which would have happened 200 years ago. Also the possibility that religions are interpretations of interior spiritual values, held in common by all men, such possibility is being rather carefully considered. It is becoming evident that religion as of itself is a value apart from all forms, that as a value it is a mystical truth.