// -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
.dt The Project Gutenberg eBook of Psychoanalysis and the unconscious, by D. H. Lawrence
.pn on
.pn link
.de div.tnotes { padding-left:1em;padding-right:1em;background-color:#E3E4FA;border:1px solid silver;margin:1em 5% 0 5%;text-align:justify;}
// verse
.dm verse-start
.in +4
.sp 1
.fs 95%
.nf b
.dm-
.dm verse-end
.nf-
.fs 100%
.in -4
.sp 1
.dm-
// letter
.dm letter-start
.sp 1
.in +4
.dm-
.dm letter-end
.in -4
.sp 1
.dm-

.if h
.il fn=cover.jpg w=80%
.pb
.if-
// File: 001.png
.pn 1
.h1
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
// File: 002.png
.pn +1
// File: 003.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.nf c
<xxl><B>Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious</B></xxl>


<B>BY</B>
<xxl><B>D. H. LAWRENCE</B></xxl>

NEW YORK
THOMAS SELTZER
1921
.nf-
// File: 004.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.pm verse-start
Copyright, 1921, by
<sc>Thomas Seltzer, Inc.</sc>

All rights reserved


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
.pm verse-end
// File: 005.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
CONTENTS
.sp 2
#I. <sc>Psychoanalysis</sc> <i>vs.</i> <sc>Morality</sc>:chap1#       #9#

#II. <sc>The Incest Motive and Idealism</sc>:chap2#       #26#

#III. <sc>The Birth of Consciousness</sc>:chap3#       #45#

#IV. <sc>The Child and His Mother</sc>:chap4#       #64#

#V. <sc>The Lover and the Beloved</sc>:chap5#       #83#

#VI. <sc>Human Relations and the Unconscious</sc>:chap6#        #102#
// File: 006.png
.pn +1
// File: 007.png
.pn +1
// File: 008.png
.pn +1
// File: 009.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=chap1
CHAPTER I | PSYCHOANALYSIS <i>vs.</i> MORALITY
.sp 2
Psychoanalysis has sprung many surprises
on us, performed more than one <i>volte face</i>
before our indignant eyes. No sooner had we
got used to the psychiatric quack who vehemently
demonstrated the serpent of sex coiled
round the root of all our actions, no sooner
had we begun to feel honestly uneasy about
our lurking complexes, than lo and behold
the psychoanalytic gentleman reappeared on
the stage with a theory of pure psychology.
The medical faculty, which was on hot bricks
over the therapeutic innovations, heaved a sigh
// File: 010.png
.pn +1
of relief as it watched the ground warming
under the feet of the professional psychologists.

This, however, was not the end. The ears
of the ethnologist began to tingle, the philosopher
felt his gorge rise, and at last the
moralist knew he must rush in. By this time
psychoanalysis had become a public danger.
The mob was on the alert. The Œdipus complex
was a household word, the incest motive
a commonplace of tea-table chat. Amateur
analyses became the vogue. “Wait till you’ve
been analyzed,” said one man to another, with
varying intonation. A sinister look came into
the eyes of the initiates—the famous, or infamous,
Freud look. You could recognize
it everywhere, wherever you went.

Psychoanalysts know what the end will be.
They have crept in among us as healers and
physicians; growing bolder, they have asserted
// File: 011.png
.pn +1
their authority as scientists; two more minutes
and they will appear as apostles. Have we
not seen and heard the <i>ex cathedra</i> Jung?
And does it need a prophet to discern that
Freud is on the brink of a Weltanschauung—or
at least a Menschanschauung, which is a
much more risky affair? What detains him?
Two things. First and foremost, the moral
issue. And next, but more vital, he can’t get
down to the rock on which he must build his
church.

Let us look to ourselves. This new doctrine—it
will be called no less—has been subtly
and insidiously suggested to us, gradually inoculated
into us. It is true that doctors are
the priests, nay worse, the medicine-men of
our decadent society. Psychoanalysis has
made the most of the opportunity.

First and foremost the issue is a moral issue.
It is not here a matter of reform, new
// File: 012.png
.pn +1
moral values. It is the life or death of all
morality. The leaders among the psychoanalysts
know what they have in hand. Probably
most of their followers are ignorant, and
therefore pseudo-innocent. But it all amounts
to the same thing. Psychoanalysis is out, under
a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely
with the moral faculty in man. Let us fling
the challenge, and then we can take sides in
all fairness.

The psychoanalytic leaders know what they
are about, and shrewdly keep quiet, going
gently. Yet, however gently they go, they set
the moral stones rolling. At every step the
most innocent and unsuspecting analyst starts
a little landslide. The old world is yielding
under us. Without any direct attack, it comes
loose under the march of the psychoanalyst,
and we hear the dull rumble of the incipient
avalanche. We are in for a debâcle.
// File: 013.png
.pn +1

But at least let us know what we are in for.
If we are to rear a serpent against ourselves,
let us at least refuse to nurse it in our temples
or to call it the cock of Esculapius. It is time
the white garb of the therapeutic cant was
stripped off the psychoanalyst. And now that
we feel the strange crackling and convulsion
in our moral foundations, let us at least look
at the house which we are bringing down over
our heads so blithely.

Long ago we watched in frightened anticipation
when Freud set out on his adventure
into the hinterland of human consciousness.
He was seeking for the unknown sources of
the mysterious stream of consciousness. Immortal
phrase of the immortal James! Oh
stream of hell which undermined my adolescence!
The stream of consciousness! I felt it
streaming through my brain, in at one ear and
out at the other. And again I was sure it
// File: 014.png
.pn +1
went round in my cranium, like Homer’s
Ocean, encircling my established mind. And
sometimes I felt it must bubble up in the cerebellum
and wind its way through all the convolutions
of the true brain. Horrid stream!
Whence did it come, and whither was it
bound? The stream of consciousness!

And so, who could remain unmoved when
Freud seemed suddenly to plunge towards the
origins? Suddenly he stepped out of the conscious
into the unconscious, out of the everywhere
into the nowhere, like some supreme
explorer. He walks straight through the wall
of sleep, and we hear him rumbling in the
cavern of dreams. The impenetrable is not
impenetrable, unconsciousness is not nothingness.
It is sleep, that wall of darkness which
limits our day. Walk bang into the wall, and
behold the wall isn’t there. It is the vast darkness
of a cavern’s mouth, the cavern of anterior
// File: 015.png
.pn +1
darkness whence issues the stream of
consciousness.

With dilated hearts we watched Freud disappearing
into the cavern of darkness, which
is sleep and unconsciousness to us, darkness
which issues in the foam of all our day’s consciousness.
He was making for the origins.
We watched his ideal candle flutter and go
small. Then we waited, as men do wait, always
expecting the wonder of wonders. He
came back with dreams to sell.

But sweet heaven, what merchandise!
What dreams, dear heart! What was there in
the cave? Alas that we ever looked! Nothing
but a huge slimy serpent of sex, and heaps
of excrement, and a myriad repulsive little
horrors spawned between sex and excrement.

Is it true? Does the great unknown of sleep
contain nothing else? No lovely spirits in the
anterior regions of our being? None! Imagine
// File: 016.png
.pn +1
the unspeakable horror of the <i>repressions</i>
Freud brought home to us. Gagged,
bound, maniacal repressions, sexual complexes,
fæcal inhibitions, dream-monsters.
We tried to repudiate them. But no, they
were there, demonstrable. These were the
horrid things that ate our souls and caused
our helpless neuroses.

We had felt that perhaps we were wrong
inside, but we had never imagined it so bad.
However, in the name of healing and medicine
we prepared to accept it all. If it was
all just a result of illness, we were prepared to
go through with it. The analyst promised us
that the tangle of complexes would be unravelled,
the obsessions would evaporate, the
monstrosities would dissolve, sublimate, when
brought into the light of day. Once all the
dream-horrors were translated into full consciousness,
they would sublimate into—well,
// File: 017.png
.pn +1
we don’t quite know what. But anyhow, they
would sublimate. Such is the charm of a new
phrase that we accepted this sublimation process
without further question. If our complexes
were going to sublimate once they were
surgically exposed to full mental consciousness,
why, best perform the operation.

Thus analysis set off gaily on its therapeutic
course. But like Hippolytus, we ran too near
the sea’s edge. After all, if complexes exist
only as abnormalities which can be removed,
psychoanalysis has not far to go. Our own
horses ran away with us. We began to realize
that complexes were not just abnormalities.
They were part of the stock-in-trade of the
normal unconscious. The only abnormality,
so far, lies in bringing them into consciousness.

This creates a new issue. Psychoanalysis,
the moment it begins to demonstrate the nature
of the unconscious, is assuming the rôle of psychology.
// File: 018.png
.pn +1
Thus the new science of psychology
proceeds to inform us that our complexes are
not just mere interlockings in the mechanism
of the psyche, as was taught by one of the
first and most brilliant of the analysts, a man
now forgotten. He fully realized that even
the psyche itself depends on a certain organic,
mechanistic activity, even as life depends on
the mechanistic organism of the body. The
mechanism of the psyche could have its
hitches, certain parts could stop working, even
as the parts of the body can stop their functioning.
This arrest in some part of the functioning
psyche gave rise to a complex, even
as the stopping of one little cog-wheel in a
machine will arrest a whole section of that
machine. This was the origin of the complex-theory,
purely mechanistic. Now the analyst
found that a complex did not necessarily vanish
when brought into consciousness. Why
// File: 019.png
.pn +1
should it? Hence he decided that it did not
arise from the stoppage of any little wheel.
For it refused to disappear, no matter how
many psychic wheels were started. Finally,
then, a complex could not be regarded as the
result of an inhibition.

Here is the new problem. If a complex is
not caused by the inhibition of some so-called
normal sex-impulse, what on earth is it caused
by? It obviously refuses to sublimate—or to
come undone when exposed and prodded. It
refuses to answer to the promptings of normal
sex-impulse. You can remove all possible inhibitions
of the normal sex desire, and still
you cannot remove the complex. All you have
done is to make conscious a desire which
previously was unconscious.

This is the moral dilemma of psychoanalysis.
The analyst set out to cure neurotic humanity
by removing the cause of the neurosis.
// File: 020.png
.pn +1
He finds that the cause of neurosis lies in some
unadmitted sex desire. After all he has said
about inhibition of normal sex, he is brought
at last to realize that at the root of almost
every neurosis lies some incest-craving, and
that this incest-craving is <i>not the result of inhibition
of normal sex-craving</i>. Now see the
dilemma—it is a fearful one. If the incest-craving
is not the outcome of any inhibition
of normal desire, if it actually exists and refuses
to give way before any criticism, what
then? What remains but to accept it as part
of the normal sex-manifestation?

Here is an issue which analysis is perfectly
willing to face. Among themselves the analysts
are bound to accept the incest-craving as
part of the normal sexuality of man, normal,
but suppressed, because of moral and perhaps
biological fear. Once, however, you accept the
incest-craving as part of the normal sexuality
// File: 021.png
.pn +1
of man, you must remove all repression of
incest itself. In fact, you must admit incest
as you now admit sexual marriage, as a duty
even. Since at last it works out that neurosis
is not the result of inhibition of so-called <i>normal</i>
sex, but of inhibition of incest-craving.
Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably
in the end it causes neurosis and insanity.
Therefore the inhibition of incest-craving is
wrong, and this wrong is the cause of practically
all modern neurosis and insanity.

Psychoanalysis will never openly state this
conclusion. But it is to this conclusion that
every analyst must, willy-nilly, consciously or
unconsciously, bring his patient.

Trigant Burrow says that Freud’s <i>unconscious</i>
does but represent our conception of
conscious sexual life as this latter exists in a
state of repression. Thus Freud’s unconscious
amounts practically to no more than our repressed
// File: 022.png
.pn +1
incest impulses. Again, Burrow says
that it is knowledge of sex that constitutes sin,
and not sex itself. It is when the mind turns
to consider and <i>know</i> the great affective-passional
functions and emotions that sin enters.
Adam and Eve fell, not because they had sex,
or even because they committed the sexual act,
but because they became aware of their sex
and of the possibility of the act. When sex
became to them a mental object—that is, when
they discovered that they could deliberately
enter upon and enjoy and even provoke sexual
activity in themselves, then they were cursed
and cast out of Eden. Then man became self-responsible;
he entered on his own career.

Both these assertions by Burrow seem to us
brilliantly true. But must we inevitably draw
the conclusion psychoanalysis draws? Because
we discover in the unconscious the repressed
body of our incest-craving, and because
// File: 023.png
.pn +1
the recognition of <i>desire</i>, the making a
mental objective of a certain desire causes the
introduction of the sin motive, the desire in
itself being beyond criticism or moral judgment,
must we therefore accept the incest-craving
as part of our natural desire and proceed
to put it into practice, as being at any rate a
lesser evil than neurosis and insanity?

It is a question. One thing, however, psychoanalysis
all along the line fails to determine,
and that is the nature of the pristine unconscious
in man. The incest-craving is or is
not inherent in the pristine psyche. When
Adam and Eve became aware of sex in themselves,
they became aware of that which was
pristine in them, and which preceded all
knowing. But when the analyst discovers the
incest motive in the unconscious, surely he is
only discovering a term of humanity’s repressed
<i>idea</i> of sex. It is not even <i>suppressed</i>
// File: 024.png
.pn +1
sex-consciousness, but <i>repressed</i>. That is, it
is nothing pristine and anterior to mentality.
It is in itself the mind’s ulterior motive. That
is, the incest-craving is propagated in the
pristine unconscious by the mind itself, even
though unconsciously. The mind acts as incubus
and procreator of its own horrors, <i>deliberately
unconsciously</i>. And the incest motive
is in its origin not a pristine impulse, but
a logical extension of the existent idea of sex
and love. The mind, that is, transfers the idea
of incest into the affective-passional psyche,
and keeps it there as a repressed motive.

This is as yet a mere assertion. It cannot be
made good until we determine the nature of
the true, pristine unconscious, in which all our
genuine impulse arises—a very different affair
from that sack of horrors which psychoanalysts
would have us believe is source of motivity.
The Freudian unconscious is the cellar
// File: 025.png
.pn +1
in which the mind keeps its own bastard
spawn. The true unconscious is the well-head,
the fountain of real motivity. The sex of
which Adam and Eve became conscious derived
from the very God who bade them be
not conscious of it—it was not spawn produced
by secondary propagation from the mental
consciousness itself.
// File: 026.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=chap2
CHAPTER II | THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM
.sp 2
It is obvious we cannot recover our moral
footing until we can in some way determine
the true nature of the unconscious. The word
unconscious itself is a mere definition by negation
and has no positive meaning. Freud no
doubt prefers it for this reason. He rejects
<i>subconscious</i> and <i>preconscious</i>, because both
these would imply a sort of nascent consciousness,
the shadowy half-consciousness which
precedes mental realization. And by his unconscious
he intends no such thing. He wishes
rather to convey, we imagine, that which <i>recoils
from</i> consciousness, that which reacts in
the psyche away from mental consciousness.
// File: 027.png
.pn +1
His unconscious is, we take it, that part of the
human consciousness which, though mental,
ideal in its nature, yet is unwilling to expose
itself to full recognition, and so recoils back
into the affective regions and acts there as a
secret agent, unconfessed, unadmitted, potent,
and usually destructive. The whole body of
our repressions makes up our unconscious.

The question lies here: whether a repression
is a primal impulse which has been deterred
from fulfilment, or whether it is an
<i>idea</i> which is refused enactment. Is a repression
a repressed passional impulse, or is it an
idea which we suppress and refuse to put into
practice—nay, which we even refuse to own at
all, a disowned, outlawed idea, which exists
rebelliously outside the pale?

Man can inhibit the true passional impulses
and so produce a derangement in the psyche.
This is a truism nowadays, and we are grateful
// File: 028.png
.pn +1
to psychoanalysis for helping to make it so.
But man can do more than this. Finding himself
in a sort of emotional <i>cul de sac</i>, he can
proceed to deduce from his given emotional
and passional premises conclusions which are
not emotional or passional at all, but just
logical, abstract, ideal. That is, a man finds
it impossible to realize himself in marriage.
He recognizes the fact that his emotional, even
passional, regard for his mother is deeper than
it ever could be for a wife. This makes him
unhappy, for he knows that passional communion
is not complete unless it be also sexual.
He has a body of sexual passion which he cannot
transfer to a wife. He has a profound
love for his mother. Shut in between walls of
tortured and increasing passion, he must find
some escape or fall down the pit of insanity
and death. What is the only possible escape?
To seek in the arms of the mother the refuge
// File: 029.png
.pn +1
which offers nowhere else. And so the incest-motive
is born. All the labored explanations
of the psychoanalysts are unnecessary. The
incest motive is a logical deduction of the human
reason, which has recourse to this last
extremity, to save itself. Why is the human
reason in peril? That is another story. At
the moment we are merely considering the
origin of the incest motive.

The logical conclusion of incest is, of course,
a profound decision in the human soul, a decision
affecting the deepest passional centers.
It rouses the deepest instinctive opposition.
And therefore it must be kept secret until this
opposition is either worn away or persuaded
away. Hence the repression and ultimate disclosure.

Now here we see the secret working of the
process of idealism. By idealism we understand
the motivizing of the great affective
// File: 030.png
.pn +1
sources by means of ideas mentally derived.
As for example the incest motive, which is
first and foremost a logical deduction made by
the human reason, even if unconsciously made,
and secondly is introduced into the affective,
passional sphere, where it now proceeds to
serve as a principle for action.

This motivizing of the passional sphere
from the ideal is the final peril of human consciousness.
It is the death of all spontaneous,
creative life, and the substituting of the
mechanical principle.

It is obvious that the ideal becomes a mechanical
principle, if it be applied to the affective
soul as a fixed motive. An ideal
established in control of the passional soul is
no more and no less than a supreme machine-principle.
And a machine, as we know, is the
active unit of the material world. Thus we
see how it is that in the end pure idealism is
// File: 031.png
.pn +1
identical with pure materialism, and the most
ideal peoples are the most completely
material. Ideal and material are identical. The
ideal is but the god in the machine—the little,
fixed, machine principle which works the human
psyche automatically.

We are now in the last stages of idealism.
And psychoanalysis alone has the courage
necessary to conduct us through these last
stages. The identity of love with sex, the
single necessity for fulfilment through love,
these are our fixed ideals. We must fulfil these
ideals in their extremity. And this brings us
finally to incest, even incest-worship. We
have no option, whilst our ideals stand.

Why? Because incest is the logical conclusion
of our ideals, when these ideals have
to be carried into passional effect. And idealism
has no escape from logic. And once he
has built himself in the shape of any ideal,
// File: 032.png
.pn +1
man will go to any logical length rather than
abandon his ideal corpus. Nay, some great
cataclysm has to throw him down and destroy
the whole fabric of his life before the motor-principle
of his dominant ideal is destroyed.
Hence psychoanalysis as the advance-guard of
science, the evangel of the last <i>ideal</i> liberty.
For of course there is a great fascination in a
completely effected idealism. Man is then
undisputed master of his own fate, and captain
of his own soul. But better say engine-driver,
for in truth he is no more than the little god
in the machine, this master of fate. He has
invented his own automatic principles, and he
works himself according to them, like any
little mechanic inside the works.

But ideal or not, we are all of us between
the pit and the pendulum, or the walls of red-hot
metal, as may be. If we refuse the
Freudian <i>pis-aller</i> as a means of escape, we
// File: 033.png
.pn +1
have still to find some way out. For there we
are, all of us, trapped in a corner where we
cannot, and simply do not know how to fulfil
our own natures, passionally. We don’t know
in which way fulfilment lies. If psychoanalysis
discovers incest, small blame to it.

Yet we do know this much: that the pushing
of the ideal to any further lengths will not
avail us anything. We have actually to go
back to our own unconscious. But not to the
unconscious which is the inverted reflection of
our ideal consciousness. We must discover,
if we can, the true unconscious, where our life
bubbles up in us, prior to any mentality. The
first bubbling life in us, which is innocent of
any mental alteration, this is the unconscious.
It is pristine, not in any way ideal. It is the
spontaneous origin from which it behooves us
to live.

What then is the true unconscious? It is
// File: 034.png
.pn +1
not a shadow cast from the mind. It is the
spontaneous life-motive in every organism.
Where does it begin? It begins where life
begins. But that is too vague. It is no use
talking about life and the unconscious in bulk.
You can talk about electricity, because electricity
is a homogeneous force, conceivable
apart from any incorporation. But life is inconceivable
as a general thing. It exists only
in living creatures. So that life begins, now
as always, in an individual living creature. In
the beginning of the individual living creature
is the beginning of life, every time and always,
and life has no beginning apart from this.
Any attempt at a further generalization takes
us merely beyond the consideration of life into
the region of mechanical homogeneous force.
This is shown in the cosmologies of eastern religions.

The beginning of life is in the beginning of
// File: 035.png
.pn +1
the first individual creature. You may call
the naked, unicellular bit of plasm the first
individual, if you like. Mentally, as far as
thinkable simplicity goes, it is the first. So
that we may say that life begins in the first
naked unicellular organism. And where life
begins the unconscious also begins. But mark,
the first naked unicellular organism is an <i>individual</i>.
It is a specific individual, not a mathematical
unit, like a unit of force.

Where the individual begins, life begins.
The two are inseparable, life and individuality.
And also, where the individual begins,
the unconscious, which is the specific life-motive,
also begins. We are trying to trace the
unconscious to its source. And we find that
this source, in all the higher organisms, is the
first ovule cell from which an individual organism
arises. At the moment of conception,
when a procreative male nucleus fuses with
// File: 036.png
.pn +1
the nucleus of the female germ, at that moment
does a new unit of life, of consciousness,
arise in the universe. Is it not obvious? The
unconscious has no other source than this, this
first fused nucleus of the ovule.

Useless to talk about the unconscious as if
it were a homogeneous force like electricity.
You can only deal with the unconscious when
you realize that in every individual organism
an individual nature, an individual consciousness,
is spontaneously created at the moment
of conception. We say <i>created</i>. And by
<i>created</i> we mean spontaneously appearing in
the universe, out of nothing. <i>Ex nihilo nihil
fit.</i> It is true that an individual is also generated.
By the fusion of two nuclei, male and
female, we understand the process of generation.
And from the process of generation we
may justly look for a new unit, according to
the law of cause and effect. As a natural or
// File: 037.png
.pn +1
automatic result of the process of generation
we may look for a new unit of existence. But
the nature of this new unit must derive from
the natures of the parents, also by law. And
this we deny. We deny that the nature of any
new creature derives from the natures of its
parents. The nature of the infant does <i>not</i>
follow from the natures of its parents. The
nature of the infant is <i>not</i> just a new permutation-and-combination
of elements contained
in the natures of the parents. There is in the
nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown
in the natures of the parents, something
which could never be derived from the natures
of all the existent individuals or previous individuals.
There is in the nature of the infant
something entirely new, underived, underivable,
something which is, and which will forever
remain, <i>causeless</i>. And this something
is the unanalyzable, indefinable reality of individuality.
// File: 038.png
.pn +1
Every time at the moment of
conception of every higher organism an individual
nature incomprehensibly arises in the
universe, out of nowhere. Granted the whole
cause-and-effect process of generation and
evolution, still the individual is not explained.
The individual unit of consciousness and being
which arises at the conception of every
higher organism arises by pure creation, by a
process not susceptible to understanding, a
process which takes place outside the field of
mental comprehension, where mentality,
which is definitely limited, cannot and does
not exist.

This causeless created nature of the individual
being is the same as the old mystery of
the divine nature of the soul. Religion was
right and science is wrong. Every individual
creature has a soul, a specific individual nature
the origin of which cannot be found
// File: 039.png
.pn +1
in any cause-and-effect process whatever.
Cause-and-effect will not explain even the
individuality of a single dandelion. There is
no assignable cause, and no logical reason, for
individuality. On the contrary, individuality
appears in defiance of all scientific law, in defiance
even of reason.

Having established so much, we can really
approach the unconscious. By the unconscious
we wish to indicate that essential unique
nature of every individual creature, which is,
by its very nature, unanalyzable, undefinable,
inconceivable. It cannot be conceived, it can
only be experienced, in every single instance.
And being inconceivable, we will call it the
unconscious. As a matter of fact, <i>soul</i> would
be a better word. By the unconscious we do
mean the soul. But the word <i>soul</i> has been
vitiated by the idealistic use, until nowadays
it means only that which a man conceives himself
// File: 040.png
.pn +1
to be. And that which a man conceives
himself to be is something far different from
his true unconscious. So we must relinquish
the ideal word soul.

If, however, the unconscious is inconceivable,
how do we know it at all? We know it
by direct experience. All the best part of
knowledge is inconceivable. We know the
sun. But we cannot conceive the sun, unless
we are willing to accept some theory of burning
gases, some cause-and-effect nonsense. And
even if we do have a mental conception of the
sun as a sphere of blazing gas—which it certainly
isn’t—we are just as far from knowing
what <i>blaze</i> is. Knowledge is always a matter
of whole experience, what St. Paul calls knowing
in full, and never a matter of mental conception
merely. This is indeed the point of
all full knowledge: that it is contained mainly
within the unconscious, its mental or conscious
// File: 041.png
.pn +1
reference being only a sort of extract or
shadow.

It is necessary for us to know the unconscious,
or we cannot live, just as it is necessary
for us to know the sun. But we need not explain
the unconscious, any more than we need
explain the sun. We can’t do either, anyway.
We know the sun by beholding him and watching
his motions and feeling his changing
power. The same with the unconscious. We
watch it in all its manifestations, its unfolding
incarnations. We watch it in all its processes
and its unaccountable evolutions, and these we
register.

For though the unconscious is the creative
element, and though, like the soul, it is beyond
all law of cause and effect in its totality, yet
in its processes of self-realization it follows
the laws of cause and effect. The processes of
cause and effect are indeed part of the working
// File: 042.png
.pn +1
out of this incomprehensible self-realization
of the individual unconscious. The great
laws of the universe are no more than the fixed
habits of the living unconscious.

What we must needs do is to try to trace
still further the habits of the true unconscious,
and by mental recognition of these habits
break the limits which we have imposed on
the movement of the unconscious. For the
whole point about the true unconscious is that
it is all the time moving forward, beyond the
range of its own fixed laws or habits. It is no
good trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon
the unconscious. We have to try to recognize
the true nature and then leave the unconscious
itself to prompt new movement and new
being—the creative progress.

What we are suffering from now is the restriction
of the unconscious within certain
ideal limits. The more we force the ideal the
// File: 043.png
.pn +1
more we rupture the true movement. Once
we can admit the <i>known</i>, but incomprehensible,
presence of the integral unconscious;
once we can trace it home in ourselves and
follow its first revealed movements; once we
know how it habitually unfolds itself; once we
can scientifically determine its laws and processes
in ourselves: then at last we can begin to
live from the spontaneous initial prompting,
instead of from the dead machine-principles
of ideas and ideals. There is a whole science
of the creative unconscious, the unconscious in
its law-abiding activities. And of this science
we do not even know the first term. Yes, when
we know that the unconscious appears by creation,
as a new individual reality in every
newly-fertilized germ-cell, then we know the
very first item of the new science. But it
needs a super-scientific grace before we can
admit this first new item of knowledge. It
// File: 044.png
.pn +1
means that science abandons its intellectualist
position and embraces the old religious faculty.
But it does not thereby become less scientific,
it only becomes at last complete in
knowledge.
// File: 045.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=chap3
CHAPTER III | THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS
.sp 2
It is useless to try to determine <i>what is
consciousness</i> or <i>what is knowledge</i>. Who
cares anyhow, since we know without definitions.
But what we fail to know, yet what we
must know, is the nature of the pristine consciousness
which lies integral and progressive
within every functioning organism. The brain
is the seat of the ideal consciousness. And
ideal consciousness is only the dead end of
consciousness, the spun silk. The vast bulk of
consciousness is non-cerebral. It is the sap
of our life, of all life.

We are forced to attribute to a star-fish, or
to a nettle, its own peculiar and integral consciousness.
// File: 046.png
.pn +1
This throws us at once out of the
ideal castle of the brain into the flux of sap-consciousness.
But let us not jump too far in
one bound. Let us refrain from taking a sheer
leap down the abyss of consciousness, down
to the invertebrates and the protococci. Let
us cautiously scramble down the human declivities.
Or rather let us try to start somewhere
near the foot of the calvary of human
consciousness. Let us consider the child in
the womb. Is the fœtus conscious? It must
be, since it carries on an independent and
progressive self-development. This consciousness
obviously cannot be ideal, cannot be cerebral,
since it precedes any vestige of cerebration.
And yet it is an integral, individual consciousness,
having its own single purpose and
progression. Where can it be centered, how
can it operate, before even nerves are formed?
For it does steadily and persistently operate,
// File: 047.png
.pn +1
even spinning the nerves and brain as a web
for its own motion, like some subtle spider.

What is the spinning spider of the first human
consciousness—or rather, where is the
center at which this consciousness lies and
spins? Since there must be a center of consciousness
in the tiny fœtus, it must have been
there from the very beginning. There it must
have been, in the first fused nucleus of the
ovule. And if we could but watch this prime
nucleus, we should no doubt realize that
throughout all the long and incalculable history
of the individual it still remains central
and prime, the source and clue of the living
unconscious, the origin. As in the first moment
of conception, so to the end of life in the
individual, the first nucleus remains the creative-productive
center, the quick, both of consciousness
and of organic development.

And where in the developed fœtus shall we
// File: 048.png
.pn +1
look for this creative-productive quick? Shall
we expect it in the brain or in the heart?
Surely our own subjective wisdom tells us,
what science can verify, that it lies beneath
the navel of the folded fœtus. Surely that
prime center, which is the very first nucleus
of the fertilized ovule, lies situated beneath
the navel of all womb-born creatures. There,
from the beginning, it lay in its mysterious relation
to the outer, active universe. There it
lay, perfectly associated with the parent body.
There it acted on its own peculiar independence,
drawing the whole stream of creative
blood upon itself, and, spinning within the
parental blood-stream, slowly creating or
bodying forth its own incarnate amplification.
All the time between the quick of life in the
fœtus and the great outer universe there exists
a perfect correspondence, upon which correspondence
the astrologers based their science
// File: 049.png
.pn +1
in the days before mental consciousness
had arrogated all knowledge unto itself.

The fœtus is not <i>personally</i> conscious. But
then what is personality if not ideal in its
origin? The fœtus is, however, radically, individually
conscious. From the active quick,
the nuclear center, it remains single and integral
in its activity. At this center it distinguishes
itself utterly from the surrounding
universe, whereby both are modified. From
this center the whole individual arises, and
upon this center the whole universe, by implication,
impinges. For the fixed and stable
universe of law and matter, even the whole
cosmos, would wear out and disintegrate if
it did not rest and find renewal in the
quick center of creative life in individual
creatures.

And since this center has absolute location
in the first fertilized nucleus, it must have
// File: 050.png
.pn +1
location still in the developed fœtus, and in
the mature man. And where is this location
in the unborn infant? Beneath the burning
influx of the navel. Where is it in the adult
man? Still beneath the navel. As primal
affective center it lies within the solar plexus
of the nervous system.

We do not pretend to use technical language.
But surely our meaning is plain even
to correct scientists, when we assert that in all
mammals the center of primal, constructive
consciousness and activity lies in the middle
front of the abdomen, beneath the navel, in
the great nerve center called the solar plexus.
How do we know? We feel it, as we feel
hunger or love or hate. Once we <i>know</i> what
we are, science can proceed to analyze our
knowledge, demonstrate its truth or its untruth.

We all of us know what it is to handle a newborn,
// File: 051.png
.pn +1
or at least a quite young infant. We
know what it is to lay the hand on the round
little abdomen, the round, pulpy little head.
We know where is life, where is pulp. We
have seen blind puppies, blind kittens crawling.
They give strange little cries. Whence
these cries? Are they mental exclamations?
As in a ventriloquist, they come from the
stomach. There lies the wakeful center.
There speaks the first consciousness, the audible
unconscious, in the squeak of these infantile
things, which is so curiously and indescribably
moving, reacting direct upon the
great abdominal center, the preconscious mind
in man.

There at the navel, the first rupture has
taken place, the first break in continuity.
There is the scar of dehiscence, scar at once
of our pain and splendor of individuality.
Here is the mark of our isolation in the universe,
// File: 052.png
.pn +1
stigma and seal of our free, perfect
singleness. Hence the lotus of the navel.
Hence the mystic contemplation of the navel.
It is the upper mind losing itself in the lower
first-mind, that which is last in consciousness
reverting to that which is first.

A mother will realize better than a philosopher.
She knows the rupture which has
finally separated her child into its own single,
free existence. She knows the strange, sensitive
rose of the navel: how it quivers conscious;
all its pain, its want for the old connection;
all its joy and chuckling exultation
in sheer organic singleness and individual liberty.

The powerful, active psychic center in a new
child is the great solar plexus of the sympathetic
system. From this center the child
is drawn to the mother again, crying, to heal
the new wound, to re-establish the old oneness.
// File: 053.png
.pn +1
This center directs the little mouth which,
blind and anticipatory, seeks the breast. How
could it find the breast, blind and mindless
little mouth? But it needs no eyes nor mind.
From the great first-mind of the abdomen it
moves direct, with an anterior knowledge almost
like magnetic propulsion, as if the little
mouth were drawn or propelled to the maternal
breast by vital magnetism, whose center of
directive control lies in the solar plexus.

In a measure, this taking of the breast re-instates
the old connection with the parent
body. It is a strange sinking back to the old
unison, the old organic continuum—a recovery
of the pre-natal state. But at the same
time it is a deep, avid gratification in drinking
in the sustenance of a new individuality. It
is a deep gratification in the exertion of a new,
voluntary power. The child acts now separately
from its own individual center and exerts
// File: 054.png
.pn +1
still a control over the adjacent universe,
the parent body.

So the warm life-stream passes again from
the parent into the aching abdomen of the
severed child. Life cannot progress without
these ruptures, severances, cataclysms; pain is
a living reality, not merely a deathly. Why
haven’t we the courage for life-pains? If we
could depart from our old tenets of the mind,
if we could fathom our own <i>unconscious</i> sapience,
we should find we have courage and to
spare. We are too mentally domesticated.

The great magnetic or dynamic center of
first-consciousness acts powerfully at the solar
plexus. Here the child knows beyond all
knowledge. It does not see with the eyes, it
cannot perceive, much less conceive. Nothing
can it apprehend; the eyes are a strange plasmic,
nascent darkness. Yet from the belly it
knows, with a directness of knowledge that
// File: 055.png
.pn +1
frightens us and may even seem abhorrent.
The mother, also, from the bowels knows her
child—as she can never, never know it from
the head. There is no thought nor speech,
only direct, ventral gurglings and cooings.
From the passional nerve-center of the solar
plexus in the mother passes direct, unspeakable
effluence and intercommunication, sheer
effluent contact with the palpitating nerve-center
in the belly of the child. Knowledge,
unspeakable knowledge interchanged, which
must be diluted by eternities of materialization
before they can come to expression.

It is like a lovely, suave, fluid, <i>creative</i> electricity
that flows in a circuit between the great
nerve-centers in mother and child. The electricity
of the universe is a sundering force.
But this lovely polarized vitalism is creative.
It passes in a circuit between the two poles of
the passional unconscious in the two now separated
// File: 056.png
.pn +1
beings. It establishes in each that first
primal consciousness which is the sacred, all-containing
head-stream of all our consciousness.

But this is not all. The flux between mother
and child is not all sweet unison. There is
as well the continually widening gap. A wonderful
rich communion, and at the same time
a continually increasing cleavage. If only we
could realize that all through life these are the
two synchronizing activities of love, of creativity.
For the end, the goal, is the perfecting
of each single individuality, unique in itself—which
cannot take place without a perfected
harmony between the beloved, a harmony
which depends on the at-last-clarified singleness
of each being, a singleness equilibrized,
polarized in one by the counter-posing singleness
of the other.

So the child. In its wonderful unison with
// File: 057.png
.pn +1
the mother it is at the same time extricating
itself into single, separate, independent existence.
The one process, of unison, cannot
go on without the other process, of purified
severance. At first the child cleaves back to
the old source. It clings and adheres. The
sympathetic center of unification, or at least
unison, alone seems awake. The child wails
with the strange desolation of severance, wails
for the old connection. With joy and peace
it returns to the breast, almost as to the womb.

But not quite. Even in sucking it discovers
its new identity and <i>power</i>. Its own new,
separate <i>power</i>. It draws itself back suddenly;
it waits. It has heard something? No.
But another center has flashed awake. The
child stiffens itself and holds back. What is
it, wind? Stomach-ache? Not at all. Listen
to some of the screams. The ears can hear
deeper than eyes can see. The first scream of
// File: 058.png
.pn +1
the ego. The scream of asserted isolation.
The scream of revolt from connection, the revolt
from union. There is a violent anti-maternal
motion, anti-everything. There is a
refractory, bad-tempered negation of everything,
a hurricane of temper. What then?
After such tremendous unison as the womb
implies, no wonder there are storms of rage
and separation. The child is screaming itself
rid of the old womb, kicking itself in a blind
paroxysm into freedom, into separate, negative
independence.

So be it, there must be paroxysms, since
there must be independence. Then the mother
gets angry too. It affects her, though perhaps
not as badly as it affects outsiders. Nothing
acts more direct on the great primal nerve-centers
than the screaming of an infant, this
blind screaming negation of connections. It
is the friction of irritation itself. Everybody is
// File: 059.png
.pn +1
implicated, just as they would be if the air
were surcharged with electricity. The mother
is perhaps less affected because she understands
primarily, or because she is polarized
directly with the child. Yet she, too, must be
angry, in her measure, inevitably.

It is a blind, almost mechanistic effort on
the part of the new organism to extricate itself
from cohesion with the circumambient universe.
It applies direct to the mother. But
it affects everybody. The great centers of response
vibrate with a maddening, sometimes
unbearable friction. What centers? Not the
great sympathetic plexus this time, but its corresponding
voluntary ganglion. The great
ganglion of the spinal system, the lumbar
ganglion, negatively polarizes the solar plexus
in the primal psychic activity of a human individual.
When a child screams with temper,
it sends out from the lumbar ganglion violent
// File: 060.png
.pn +1
waves of frictional repudiation, extraordinary.
The little back has an amazing power
once it stiffens itself. In the lumbar ganglion
the unconscious now vibrates tremendously in
the activity of sundering, separation. Mother
and child, polarized, are primarily affected.
Often the mother is so <i>sure</i> of her possession
of the child that she is almost unmoved. But
the child continues, till the frictional response
is roused in the mother, her anger rises, there
is a flash, an outburst like lightning. And
then the storm subsides. The pure act of sundering
is effected. Each being is clarified further
into its own single, individual self, further
perfected, separated.

Hence a duality, now, in primal consciousness
in the infant. The warm rosy abdomen,
tender with chuckling unison, and the little
back strengthening itself. The child kicks
away, into independence. It stiffens its spine
// File: 061.png
.pn +1
in the strength of its own private and separate,
inviolable existence. It will admit now of no
trespass. It is awake now in a new pride, a
new self-assertion. The sense of antagonistic
freedom is aroused. Clumsy old adhesions
must be ruthlessly fused. And so, from the
lumbar ganglion the fiery-tempered infant asserts
its new, blind will.

And as the child fights the mother fights.
Sometimes she fights to keep her refractory
child, and sometimes she fights to kick him off,
as a mare kicks off her too-babyish foal. It is
the great <i>voluntary</i> center of the unconscious
flashing into action. Flashing from the deep
lumbar ganglion in the mother to the newly-awakened,
corresponding center in the child
goes the swift negative current, setting each
of them asunder in clean individuality. So
long as the force meets its polarized response
all is well. When a force flashes and has no
// File: 062.png
.pn +1
response, there is devastation. How weary in
the back is the nursing mother whose great
center of repudiation is suppressed or weak;
how a child droops if only the sympathetic
unison is established.

So, the polarity of the dynamic consciousness,
from the very start of life! Direct flowing
and flashing of two consciousness-streams,
active in the bringing forth of an individual
being. The sweet commingling, the sharp
clash of opposition. And no possibility of
creative development without this polarity,
this dual circuit of direct, spontaneous, honest
interchange. No hope of life apart from this.
The primal unconscious pulsing in its circuits
between two beings: love and wrath, cleaving
and repulsion, inglutination and excrementation.
What is the good of inventing “ideal”
behavior? How order the path of the unconscious?
For let us now realize that we cannot,
// File: 063.png
.pn +1
even with the best intentions, proceed to order
the path of our own unconscious without
vitally deranging the life-flow of those connected
with us. If you disturb the current at
one pole, it must be disturbed at the other.
Here is a new moral aspect to life.
// File: 064.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=chap4
CHAPTER IV | THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER
.sp 2
In asserting that the seat of consciousness
in a young infant is in the abdomen, we do
not pretend to suggest that all the other conscious-centers
are utterly dormant. Once a
child is born, the whole nervous and cerebral
system comes awake, even the brain’s memories
begin to glimmer, recognition and cognition
soon begin to take place. But the spontaneous
control and all the prime developing
activity derive from the great affective centers
of the abdomen. In the solar plexus is the
first great fountain and issue of infantile consciousness.
There, beneath the navel, lies the
active human first-mind, the prime unconscious.
From the moment of conception, when
// File: 065.png
.pn +1
the first nucleus is formed, to the moment of
death, when this same nucleus breaks again,
the first great active center of human consciousness
lies in the solar plexus.

The movement of development in any creature
is, however, towards a florescent individuality.
The ample, mature, unfolded individual
stands perfect, perfect in himself, but
also perfect in his harmonious relation to those
nearest him and to all the universe. Whilst
only the one great center of consciousness is
awake, in the abdomen, the infant has no separate
existence, his whole nature is contained
in the conjunction with the parent. As soon
as the complementary negative pole arouses
the voluntary center of the lumbar ganglion,
there is at once a retraction into independence
and an assertion of singleness. The back
strengthens itself.

But still the circuit of polarity, dual as it
// File: 066.png
.pn +1
is, positive and negative from the positive-sympathetic
and the negative-voluntary poles,
still depends on the duality of two beings—it
is still extra-individual. Each individual is
vitally dependent on the other, for the life
circuit.

Let us consider for a moment the <i>kind</i> of
consciousness manifested at the two great primary
centers. At the solar plexus the new
psyche acts in a mode of attractive vitalism,
drawing its objective unto itself as by vital
magnetism. Here it drinks in, as it were, the
contiguous universe, as during the womb-period
it drank from the living continuum of
the mother. It is darkly self-centered, exultant
and positive in its own existence. It is
all-in-all to itself, its own great subject. It
knows no objective. It only knows its own
vital potency, which potency draws the external
object unto itself, subjectively, as the
// File: 067.png
.pn +1
blood-stream was drawn into the fœtus, by
subjective attraction. Here the psyche is to
itself the <i>All</i>. Blindly self-positive.

This is the first mode of consciousness for
every living thing—fascinating in all young
things. The second half of the same mode
commences as soon as direct activity sets up
in the lumbar ganglion. Then the psyche recoils
upon itself, in its first reaction against
continuity with the outer universe. It recoils
even against its own mode of assimilatory unison.
Even it must break off, interrupt the
great psychic-assimilation process which goes
on at the sympathic center. It must recoil
clean upon itself, break loose from any attachment
whatsoever. And then it must try its
<i>power</i>, often playfully.

This reaction is still subjective. When a
child stiffens and draws away, when it screams
with pure temper, it takes no note of that
// File: 068.png
.pn +1
from which it recoils. It has no objective
consciousness of that from which it reacts, the
mother principally. It is like a swimmer endlessly
kicking the water away behind him,
with strong legs vividly active from the spinal
ganglia. Like a man in a boat pushing off
from the shore, it merely thrusts away, in
order to ride free, ever more free. It is a
purely subjective motion, in the negative direction.

After our long training in objectivation,
and our epoch of worship of the objective
mode, it is perhaps difficult for us to realize
the strong, blind power of the unconscious on
its first plane of activity. It is something quite
different from what we call <i>egoism</i>—which is
really mentally derived—for the ego is merely
the sum-total of what we <i>conceive</i> ourselves
to be. The powerful pristine subjectivity of
the unconscious on its first plane is, on the
// File: 069.png
.pn +1
other hand, the root of all our consciousness
and being, darkly tenacious. Here we are
grounded, say what we may. And if we break
the spell of this first subjective mode, we break
our own main root and live rootless, shiftless,
groundless.

So that the powerful subjectivity of the unconscious,
where the self is all-in-all unto itself,
active in strong desirous <i>psychic</i> assimilation
or in direct repudiation of the contiguous
universe; this first plane of psychic activity,
polarized in the solar plexus and the lumbar
ganglion of each individual but established in
a circuit with the corresponding poles of another
individual: this is the first scope of life
and being for every human individual, and is
beyond question. But we must again remark
that the whole circuit is established between
<i>two</i> individuals—that neither is a free thing-unto-itself—and
that the very fact of established
// File: 070.png
.pn +1
polarity between the two maintains that
correspondence between the individual entity
and the external universe which is the clue to
all growth and development. The pure subjectivity
of the first plane of consciousness is
no more <i>selfish</i> than the pure objectivity of
any other plane. How can it be? How can
any form of pure, balanced polarity between
two vital individuals be in any sense selfish on
the part of one individual? We have got our
moral values all wrong.

Save for healthy instinct, the moralistic human
race would have exterminated itself long
ago. And yet man <i>must</i> be moral, at the very
root moral. The essence of morality is the
basic desire to preserve the perfect correspondence
between the self and the object, to have
no trespass and no breach of integrity, nor yet
any refaulture in the vitalistic interchange.

As yet we see the unconscious active on one
// File: 071.png
.pn +1
plane only and entirely dependent on <i>two</i> individuals.
But immediately following the
establishment of the circuit of the powerful,
subjective, abdominal plane comes the quivering
of the whole system into a new degree of
consciousness. And two great upper centers
are awake.

The diaphragm really divides the human
body, psychically as well as organically. The
two centers beneath the diaphragm are centers
of dark subjectivity, centripetal, assimilative.
Once these are established, in the thorax the
two first centers of objective consciousness become
active, with ever-increasing intensity.
The great thoracic sympathetic plexus rouses
like a sun in the breast, the thoracic ganglion
fills the shoulders with strength. There are
now two planes of primary consciousness—the
first, the lower, the subjective unconscious, active
beneath the diaphragm, and the second
// File: 072.png
.pn +1
upper, objective plane, active above the diaphragm,
in the breast.

Let us realize that the subjective and objective
of the unconscious are not the same as
the subjective and the objective of the <i>mind</i>.
Here we have no concepts to deal with, no
static objects in the shape of ideas. We have
none of that tiresome business of establishing
the relation between the mind and its own
ideal object, or the discriminating between
the ideal thing-in-itself and the mind of which
it is the content. We are spared that hateful
thing-in-itself, the idea, which is at once so
all-important and so <i>nothing</i>. We are on
straightforward solid ground; there is no abstraction.

The unconscious subjectivity is, in its positive
manifestation, a great imbibing, and in its
negative, a definite blind rejection. What we
call an <i>unconscious</i> rejection. This subjectivity
// File: 073.png
.pn +1
embraces alike creative emotion and
physical function. It includes alike the sweet
and untellable communion of love between the
mother and child, the irrational reaction into
separation between the two, and also the physical
functioning of sucking and urination.
Psychic and physical development run parallel,
though they are forever distinct. The
child sucking, the child urinating, this is the
child acting from the great <i>subjective</i> centers,
positive and negative. When the child sucks,
there is a sympathetic circuit between it and
the mother, in which the sympathetic plexus
in the mother acts as negative or submissive
pole to the corresponding plexus in the child.
In urination there is a corresponding circuit
in the voluntary centers, so that a mother seems
gratified, and <i>is</i> gratified, inevitably, by the
excremental functioning of her child. She
experiences a true polar reaction.
// File: 074.png
.pn +1

Child and mother have, in the first place, no
objective consciousness of each other, and certainly
no <i>idea</i> of each other. Each is a blind
desideratum to the other. The strong love
between them is effectual in the great abdominal
centers, where all love, real love, is
primarily based. Of that reflected or moon-love,
derived from the head, that spurious
form of love which predominates to-day, we
do not speak here. It has its root in the <i>idea</i>:
the beloved is a mental objective, endlessly appreciated,
criticized, scrutinized, exhausted.
This has nothing to do with the active unconscious.

Having realized that the unconscious
sparkles, vibrates, travels in a strong subjective
stream from the abdominal centers, connecting
the child directly with the mother at
corresponding poles of vitalism, we realize
that the unconscious contains nothing ideal,
// File: 075.png
.pn +1
nothing in the least conceptual, and hence
nothing in the least personal, since personality,
like the ego, belongs to the conscious or mental-subjective
self. So the first analyses are,
or should be, so impersonal that the so-called
<i>human</i> relations are not involved. The first
relationship is neither personal nor biological—a
fact which psychoanalysis has not succeeded
in grasping.

For example. A child screams with terror
at the touch of fur; another child loves the
touch of fur, and purrs with pleasure. How
now? Is it a complex? Did the father have
a beard?

It is possible. But all-too-human. The
physical result of rubbing fur is to set up a
certain amount of frictional electricity. Frictional
electricity is one of the sundering
forces. It corresponds to the voluntary forces
exerted at the lower spinal ganglia, the forces
// File: 076.png
.pn +1
of anger and retraction into independence and
power. An over-sympathetic child will
scream with fear at the touch of fur; a refractory
child will purr with pleasure. It is
a reaction which involves even deeper things
than sex—the primal constitution of the elementary
psyche. A sympathetically overbalanced
child has a horror of the electric-frictional
force such as is emitted from the fur of
a black cat, creature of rapacity. The same
delights a fierce-willed child.

But we must admit at the same time that
from earliest days a child is subject to the
definite <i>conscious</i> psychic influences of its surroundings
and will react almost automatically
to a conscious-passional suggestion from the
mother. In this way personal sex is prematurely
evoked, and real complexes are set up.
But these derive not from the spontaneous unconscious.
They are in a way dictated from
// File: 077.png
.pn +1
the deliberate, mental consciousness, even if
involuntarily. Again they are a result of
<i>mental</i> subjectivity, self-consciousness—so different
from the primal subjectivity of the unconscious.

To return, however, to the pure unconscious.
When the upper centers flash awake,
a whole new field of consciousness and spontaneous
activity is opened out. The great
sympathetic plexus of the breast is the heart’s
mind. This thoracic plexus corresponds directly
in the upper man to the solar plexus
in the lower. But it is a correspondence in
creative opposition. From the sympathetic
center of the breast as from a window the unconscious
goes forth seeking its object, to dwell
upon it. When a child leans its breast against
its mother it becomes filled with a primal
awareness of <i>her</i>—not of itself desiring her or
partaking of her—but of her as she is in herself.
// File: 078.png
.pn +1
This is the first great acquisition of
primal objective knowledge, the objective content
of the unconscious. Such knowledge we
call the treasure of the heart. When the ancients
located the first seat of consciousness
in the heart, they were neither misguided nor
playing with metaphor. For by consciousness
they meant, as usual, objective consciousness
only. And from the cardiac plexus goes forth
that strange effluence of the self which seeks
and dwells upon the beloved, lovingly roving
like the fingers of an infant or a blind man
over the face of the treasured object, gathering
her mould into itself and transferring her
mould forever into its own deep unconscious
psyche. This is the first acquiring of objective
knowledge, sightless, unspeakably direct. It
is a dwelling of the child’s unconscious within
the form of the mother, the gathering of a
pure, eternal impression. So the soul stores
// File: 079.png
.pn +1
itself with dynamic treasures; it verily builds
its own tissue of such treasure, the tissue of the
developing body, each cell stored with creative
dynamic content.

The breasts themselves are as two eyes. We
do not know how much the nipples of the
breast, both in man and woman, serve primarily
as poles of vital <i>conscious</i> effluence and
connection. We do not know how the nipples
of the breast are as fountains leaping into the
universe, or as little lamps irradiating the contiguous
world, to the soul in quest.

But certainly from the passional conscious-center
of the breast goes forth the first joyous
discovery of the beloved, the first objective
discovery of the contiguous universe, the first
ministration of the self to that which is beyond
the self. So, functionally, the mother ministers
with the milk of her breast. But this is
a yielding to the great <i>lower</i> plexus, the basic
// File: 080.png
.pn +1
solar plexus. It is the breast as part also of
the alimentary system—a special thing.

In sucking the hands also come awake. It
is strange to notice the pictures by the old
masters of the Madonna and Child. Sometimes
the strange round belly of the Infant
seems the predominant mystery-center, and
sometimes from the tiny breast it is as if a delicate
light glowed, the light of love. As if the
breast should illumine the outer world in its
seeking administering love. As if the breast
of the Infant glimmered its light of discovery
on the adoring Mother, and she bowed, submissive
to the revelation.

The little hands and arms wave, circulate,
trying to touch, to grasp, to know. To grasp
in caress, not to reive. To grasp in order to
identify themselves with the cherished discovery,
to realize the beloved. To cherish, to
realize the beloved. To administer the outward-seeking
// File: 081.png
.pn +1
self to the beloved. We give
this the exclusive name of love. But it is indeed
only the one direction of love, the outgoing
from the lovely center of the breast—the
nipples seeking, the hands delicately,
caressively exploring, the eyes at last waking
to perception. The eyes, the hands, these wake
and are alert from the center of the breast.
But the ears and feet move from the deep
lower centers—the recipient ears, imbibing vibrations,
the feet which press the resistant
earth, controlled from the powerful lower
ganglia of the spine. And thus great scope
of activity opens, in the hands that wave and
explore, the eyes that try to perceive, the legs,
the little knees that thrust, thrust away, the
small feet that curl and twinkle upon themselves,
ready for the obstinate earth.

And so, also a wholeness is established within
the individual. The two fields of consciousness,
// File: 082.png
.pn +1
the first upper and the first lower, are
based upon a correspondence of polarity. The
first great complex circuit is now set up <i>within
the individual</i>, between the upper and lower
centers. The individual consciousness has
now its own integral independent existence
and activity, apart from external connection.
It has its right to be alone.
// File: 083.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=chap5
CHAPTER V | THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED
.sp 2
Consciousness develops on successive
planes. On each plane there is the dual
polarity, positive and negative, of the sympathetic
and voluntary nerve centers. The
first plane is established between the poles of
the sympathetic solar plexus and the voluntary
lumbar ganglion. This is the active first
plane of the subjective unconscious, from
which the whole of consciousness arises.

Immediately succeeding the first plane of
subjective dynamic consciousness arises the
corresponding first plane of objective consciousness,
the objective unconscious, polarized
in the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion,
in the breast. There is a perfect correspondence
// File: 084.png
.pn +1
in difference between the first
abdominal and the first thoracic planes. These
two planes polarize each other in a fourfold
polarity, which makes the first great field of
individual, self-dependent consciousness.

Each pole of the active unconscious manifests
a specific activity and gives rise to a
specific kind of dynamic or creative consciousness.
On each plane, the negative voluntary
pole <i>complements</i> the positive sympathetic
pole, and yet the consciousness originating
from the complementary poles is not merely
negative versus positive, it is categorically different,
opposite. Each is pure and perfect in
itself.

But the moment we enter the two planes of
corresponding consciousness, lower and upper,
we find a whole new range of complements.
The upper, dynamic-objective plane is complementary
to the lower, dynamic-subjective.
// File: 085.png
.pn +1
The mystery of creative opposition exists all
the time between the two planes, and this unison
in opposition between the two planes
forms the first whole field of consciousness.
Within the individual the polarity is fourfold.
In a relation between two individuals the polarity
is already eightfold.

Now before we can have any sort of scientific,
comprehensive psychology we shall have
to establish the <i>nature</i> of the consciousness at
each of the dynamic poles—the nature of the
consciousness, the direction of the dynamic-vital
flow, the resultant physical-organic development
and activity. This we must do
before we can even begin to consider a genuine
system of education. Education now is widely
at sea. Having ceased to steer by the pole-star
of the mind, having ceased to aim at the cramming
of the intellect, it veers hither and thither
hopelessly and absurdly. Education can never
// File: 086.png
.pn +1
become a serious science until the human
psyche is properly understood. And the human
psyche cannot begin to be understood until
we enter the dark continent of the unconscious.
Having begun to explore the unconscious,
we find we must go from center to
center, chakra to chakra, to use an old esoteric
word. We must patiently determine the
psychic manifestation at each center, and
moreover, as we go, we must discover the
psychic results of the interaction, the polarized
interaction between the dynamic centers both
within and without the individual.

Here is a real job for the scientist, a job
which eternity will never see finished though
even to-morrow may see it well begun. It is a
job which will at last free us from the most
hateful of all shackles, the shackles of ideas
and ideals. It is a great task of the liberators,
those who work forever for the liberation of
// File: 087.png
.pn +1
the free <i>spontaneous</i> psyche, the effective soul.

In these few chapters we hope to hint at the
establishment of the first field of the unconscious—at
the nature of the consciousness
manifested at each pole—and at the already
complex range of dynamic polarity between
the various poles. So far we have given the
merest suggestion of the nature of the first
plane of the unconscious and have attempted
the opening of the second or upper plane. We
profess no scientific <i>exactitude</i>, particularly in
terminology. We merely wish intelligibly to
open a way.

To balance the solar plexus wakes the great
plexus of the breast. In our era this plexus
is the great planet of our psychic universe. In
the previous sympathetic era the flower of the
universal blossomed in the navel. But since
Egypt the sun of creative activity beams from
the breast, the heart of the supreme Man. This
// File: 088.png
.pn +1
is to us the source of light—the loving heart,
the Sacred Heart. Against this we contrast
the devouring darkness of the lower man, the
devouring whirlpool beneath the navel. Even
theosophists don’t realize that the universal
lotus really blossoms in the abdomen—that our
lower man, our dark, devouring whirlpool,
was once the creative source, in human estimation.

But in calling the heart the sun, the source
of light, we are biologically correct even.
For the roots of vision are in the cardiac
plexus. But if we were to consider the heart
itself, not its great nerve plexus, we should
have to go further than the nervous system.
If we had to consider the whole lambent
blood-stream, we should have to descend too
deep for our unpractised minds. Suffice it
here to hint that the solar plexus is the first
and main clue to the great alimentary-sexual
// File: 089.png
.pn +1
activity in man, an activity at once functional
and creatively emotional, whilst the cardiac
plexus is first and main clue to the respiratory
system and the active-productive manifestations.
The mouth and nostrils are gates to
each great center, upper and lower—even the
breasts have this duality. Yet the clue to respiration
and hand activity and vision is in the
breast, while the clue to alimentation and passion
and sex is in the lower centers. The
duality goes so far and is so profound. And
the polarity! The great organs, as well as the
lymphatic glands, depend each on its own
specific center of the unconscious; each is derived
from a specific <i>dynamic</i> conscious-clue,
what we might almost call a soul-cell. The
inherent unconscious, or soul, is the first nucleus
subdivided, and from its own subdivisions
produced, from its own still-creative
constellated nuclei, the organs, glands, nerve-centers
// File: 090.png
.pn +1
of the human organism. This is our
answer to materialism and idealism alike.
The <i>nuclear unconscious</i> brought forth organs
and consciousness alike. And the great nuclei
of the unconscious <i>still</i> lie active in the great
living nerve-centers, which nerve centers, from
the original solar-plexus to the conclusive
brain, form one great chain of dual polarity
and amplified consciousness.

All this is a mere incoherent stammering,
broken first-words. To return to the direct
path of our progress. It is not merely a metaphor,
to call the cardiac plexus the sun, the
Light. It is metaphor in the first place, because
the conscious effluence which proceeds
from this first upper center in the breast goes
forth and plays upon its external object, as
phosphorescent waves might break upon a
ship and reveal its form. The transferring of
the objective knowledge to the psyche is almost
// File: 091.png
.pn +1
the same as vision. It is root-vision. It
happens before the eyes open. It is the first
tremendous mode of <i>apprehension</i>, still dark,
but moving towards light. It is the eye in the
breast. Psychically, it is basic objective apprehension.
Dynamically, it is love, devotional,
administering love.

Now we make already a discrimination between
the two natures, even of this first upper
consciousness. First from the breast flows the
devotional, self-outpouring of love, love which
gives its all to the beloved. And back again
returns to the ingathered objective consciousness,
the first objective content of the psyche.

This argues the dual polarity. From the
positive pole of the cardiac plexus flows out
that effluence which we call selfless love. It
is really self-devoting love, not self-less. This
is the one form of love we recognize. But
from the strong ganglion of the shoulders proceeds
// File: 092.png
.pn +1
the negative circuit, which searches and
explores the beloved, bringing back pure objective
apprehension, not critical, in the mental
sense, and yet passionally discriminative.

Let us discriminate between the two upper
poles. From the sympathetic heart goes forth
pure administering, like sunbeams. But from
the strong thoracic center of the shoulders is
exerted a strong rejective force, a force which,
pressing upon the object of attention, in the
mode of separation, succeeds in transferring
to itself the impression of the object to which
it has attended. This is the other half of devotional
love—perfect <i>knowledge</i> of the beloved.

Now this knowledge in itself argues a contradistinction
between the lover and the beloved.
It is the very mould of the contradistinction.
It is the impress upon the lover
of that which was separate from him, resistant
// File: 093.png
.pn +1
to him, in the beloved. Objective knowledge
is always of this kind—a knowledge based on
unchangeable difference, a knowledge truly of
the gulf that lies between the two beings nearest
to each other.

In two kinds, then, consists the activity of
the unconscious on the first upper plane.
Primal is the blissful sense of ineffable transfusion
with the beloved, which we call love,
and of which our era has perhaps enjoyed the
full. It is a mode of creative consciousness
essentially objective, but yet it preserves no
object in the memory, even the dynamic memory.
It is a great objective flux, a streaming
forth of the self in blissful departure, like sun-beams
streaming.

If this activity alone worked, then the self
would utterly depart from its own integrity;
it would pass out and merge with the beloved—which
passing out and merging is the goal
// File: 094.png
.pn +1
of enthusiasts. But living beings are kept integral
by the activity of the great negative
pole. From the thoracic ganglion also the
unconscious goes forth in its quest of the beloved.
But what does it go to seek? Real objective
knowledge. It goes to find out the
wonders which itself does not contain and to
transfer these wonders, as by impress, into itself.
It goes out to determine the limits of
its own existence also.

This is the second half of the activity of
upper or self-less or spiritual love. There is
a tremendous great joy in exploring and discovering
the beloved. For what is the beloved?
She is that which I myself am not.
Knowing the breach between us, the uncloseable
gulf, I in the same breath realize her
<i>features</i>. In the first mode of the upper consciousness
there is perfect surpassing of all
sense of division between the self and the beloved.
// File: 095.png
.pn +1
In the second mode the very discovery
of the features of the beloved contains the full
realization of the irreparable, or unsurpassable,
gulf. This is objective knowledge, as
distinct from objective emotion. It contains
always the element of self-amplification, as if
the self were amplified by knowledge in the
beloved. It should also contain the knowledge
of the <i>limits</i> of the self.

So it is with the Infant. Curious indeed
is the look on the face of the Holy Child, in
Leonardo’s pictures, in Botticelli’s, even in the
beautiful Filippo Lippi. It is the Mother
who crosses her hands on her breast, in supreme
acquiescence, recipient; it is the Child
who gazes, with a kind of <i>objective</i>, strangely
discerning, deep apprehension of her, startling
to northern eyes. It is a gaze by no means of
innocence, but of profound, pre-visual discerning.
So plainly is the child looking across
// File: 096.png
.pn +1
the gulf and <i>fixing</i> the gulf by very intentness
of pre-visual apprehension, that instinctively
the ordinary northerner finds Him anti-pathetic.
It seems almost a cruel objectivity.

Perhaps between lovers, in the objective
way of love, either the voluntary separative
mode predominates, or the sympathetic mode
of communion—one or the other. In the
north we have worshipped the latter mode.
But in the south it is different; the objective
sapient manner of love seems more natural.
Moreover in the face of the Infant lingers
nearly always the dark look of the pristine
mode of consciousness, the powerful self-centering
subjective mode, established in the
lower body—the so-called sensual mode.

But take our own children. A small infant,
as soon as it really begins to direct its attention.
How often it seems to be gazing across a
strange distance at the mother; what a curious
// File: 097.png
.pn +1
look is on its face, as if the mother were an
object set across a far gulf, distinct however,
discernible, even obtrusive in her need to be
apprehended. A mother will chase away this
look with kisses. But she cannot chase away
the inevitable effluence of separatist, objective
apprehension. She herself sometimes will fall
into a half-trance, and the child on her lap
will resolve itself into a strange and separate
object. She does not criticize or analyze him.
She does not even <i>perceive</i> him. But as if
rapt, she apprehends him lying there, an unfathomable
and inscrutable objective, outside
herself, never to be grasped or included in herself.
She seizes as it were a sudden and final,
objective impression of him. And the conclusive
sensation is one of <i>finality</i>. Something
final has happened to her. She has the strange
sensation of unalterable certainty, a sensation
at once profoundly gratifying and rather appalling.
// File: 098.png
.pn +1
She <i>possesses</i> something, a certain
entity of primal, pre-conscious knowledge.
Let the child be what he may, her knowledge
of him is her own, forever and final. It gives
her a sense of wealth in possession, and of
power. It gives her a sense also of fatality.
From the very satisfaction of the objective
finality derives the sense of fatality. It is a
knowledge of the other being, but a knowledge
which contains at the same time a final
assurance of the eternal and insuperable gulf
which lies between beings—the isolation of the
self first.

Thus the first plane of the <i>upper</i> consciousness—the
outgoing, the sheer and unspeakable
bliss of the sense of union, communion, at-oneness
with the beloved—and then the complementary
objective <i>realization</i> of the beloved,
the realization of that which is apart, different.
This realization is like riches to the objective
// File: 099.png
.pn +1
consciousness. It is, as it were, the
adding of another self to the own self, through
the mode of apprehension. Through the mode
of dynamic objective apprehension, which in
our day we have gradually come to call <i>imagination</i>,
a man may in his time add on to
himself the whole of the universe, by increasing
pristine realization of the universal. This
in mysticism is called the progress to infinity—that
is, in the modern, truly male mysticism.
The older female mysticism means something
different by the infinite.

But anyhow there it is. The attaining to
the Infinite, about which the mystics have
rhapsodized, is a definite process in the developing
unconscious, but a process in the development
only of the objective-apprehensive
centers—an exclusive process, naturally.

A soul cannot come into its own through
that love alone which is unison. If it stress the
// File: 100.png
.pn +1
one mode, the sympathetic mode, beyond a
certain point, it breaks its own integrity, and
corruption sets in in the living organism. On
both planes of love, upper and lower, the two
modes must act complementary to one another,
the sympathetic and the separatist. It is the
absolute failure to see this, that has torn the
modern world into two halves, the one half
warring for the voluntary, objective, separatist
control, the other for the pure sympathetic.
The individual psyche divided
against itself divides the world against itself,
and an unthinkable progress of calamity ensues
unless there be a reconciliation.

The goal of life is the coming to perfection
of each single individual. This cannot take
place without the tremendous interchange of
love from all the four great poles of the first,
basic field of consciousness. There must be
the twofold passionate flux of sympathetic
// File: 101.png
.pn +1
love, subjective-abdominal and objective-devotional,
both. And there must be the twofold
passional circuit of separatist realization,
the lower, vital <i>self-realization</i>, and the upper,
intense realization of the other, a realization
which includes a recognition of abysmal
<i>otherness</i>. To stress any one mode, any one
interchange, is to hinder all, and to cause corruption
in the end. The human psyche must
have strength and pride to accept the whole
fourfold nature of its own creative activity.
// File: 102.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=chap6
CHAPTER VI | HUMAN RELATIONS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
.sp 2
The aim of this little book is merely to
establish the smallest foothold in the swamp
of vagueness which now goes by the name of
the unconscious. At last we form some sort
of notion what the unconscious actually is. It
is that active spontaneity which rouses in each
individual organism at the moment of fusion
of the parent nuclei, and which, in polarized
connection with the external universe, gradually
evolves or elaborates its own individual
psyche and corpus, bringing both mind and
body forth from itself. Thus it would seem
that the term <i>unconscious</i> is only another word
for life. But life is a general force, whereas
the unconscious is essentially single and unique
// File: 103.png
.pn +1
in each individual organism; it is the active,
self-evolving soul bringing forth its own incarnation
and self-manifestation. Which incarnation
and self-manifestation seems to be
the whole goal of the <i>unconscious</i> soul: the
whole goal of life. Thus it is that the unconscious
brings forth not only consciousness, but
tissue and organs also. And all the time the
working of each organ depends on the primary
spontaneous-conscious center of which
it is the issue—if you like, the soul-center.
And consciousness is like a web woven finally
in the mind from the various silken strands
spun forth from the primal center of the unconscious.

But the unconscious is never an abstraction,
<i>never to be abstracted</i>. It is never an ideal
entity. It is always concrete. In the very first
instance, it is the glinting nucleus of the ovule.
And proceeding from this, it is the chain or
// File: 104.png
.pn +1
constellation of nuclei which derive directly
from this first spark. And further still it is
the great nerve-centers of the human body, in
which the primal and pristine nuclei still act
direct. The nuclei are centers of spontaneous
consciousness. It seems as if their bright grain
were germ-consciousness, consciousness germinating
forever. If that is a mystery, it is
not my fault. Certainly it is not mysticism.
It is obvious, demonstrable scientific fact, to
be verified under the microscope and within
the human psyche, subjectively and objectively,
both. Of course, the subjective verification
is what men kick at. Thin-minded
idealists cannot bear any appeal to their bowels
of comprehension.

We can quite tangibly deal with the human
unconscious. We trace its source and centers
in the great ganglia and nodes of the nervous
system. We establish the nature of the spontaneous
// File: 105.png
.pn +1
consciousness at each of these centers;
we determine the polarity and the direction
of the polarized flow. And from this we know
the motion and individual manifestation of
the psyche itself; we also know the motion and
rhythm of the great organs of the body. For
at every point psyche and functions are so
nearly identified that only by holding our
breath can we realize their <i>duality</i> in identification—a
polarized duality once more. But
here is no place to enter the great investigation
of the duality and polarization of the vital-creative
activity and the mechanico-material
activity. The two are two in one, a polarized
quality. They are unthinkably different.

On the first field of human conscious—the
first plane of the unconscious—we locate four
great spontaneous centers, two below the diaphragm,
two above. These four centers control
the four greatest organs. And they give
// File: 106.png
.pn +1
rise to the whole basis of human consciousness.
Functional and psychic at once, this is
their first polar duality.

But the polarity is further. The horizontal
division of the diaphragm divides man forever
into his individual duality, the duality
of the upper and lower man, the two great
bodies of upper and lower consciousness and
function. This is the horizontal line.

The vertical division between the voluntary
and the sympathetic systems, the line of division
between the spinal system and the great
plexus-system of the front of the human body,
forms the second distinction into duality. It
is the great difference between the soft, recipient
front of the body and the wall of the back.
The front of the body is the live end of the
magnet. The back is the closed opposition.
And again there are two parallel streams of
function and consciousness, vertically separate
// File: 107.png
.pn +1
now. This is the vertical line of division.
And the horizontal line and the vertical line
form the cross of all existence and being. And
even this is not mysticism—no more than the
ancient symbols used in botany or biology.

On the first field of human consciousness,
which is the basis of life and consciousness,
are the four first poles of spontaneity. These
have their fourfold polarity within the individual,
again figured by the cross. But the
individual is never purely a thing-by-himself.
He cannot exist save in polarized relation to
the external universe, a relation both functional
and psychic-dynamic. Development
takes place only from the polarized circuits
of the dynamic unconscious, and these circuits
must be both individual and extra-individual.
There must be the circuit of which the complementary
pole is external to the individual.

That is, in the first place there must be the
// File: 108.png
.pn +1
<i>other individual</i>. There must be a polarized
connection with the other individual—or even
other individuals. On the first field there are
four poles in each individual. So that the
first, the basic field of extra-individual consciousness
contains eight poles—an eightfold
polarity, a fourfold circuit. It may be that
between two individuals, even mother and
child, the polarity may be established only
fourfold, a dual circuit. It may be that one
circuit of spontaneous consciousness may never
be fully established. This means, for a child,
a certain deficiency in development, a psychic
inadequacy.

So we are again face to face with the basic
problem of human conduct. No human being
can develop save through the polarized
connection with other beings. This circuit of
polarized unison precedes all mind and all
knowing. It is anterior to and ascendant over
// File: 109.png
.pn +1
the human will. And yet the mind and the
will can both interfere with the dynamic circuit,
an idea, like a stone wedged in a
delicate machine, can arrest one whole process
of psychic interaction and spontaneous
growth.

How then? Man doth not live by bread
alone. It is time we made haste to settle the
bread question, which after all is only the
A B C of social economies, and proceeded to
devote our attention to this much more profound
and vital question: how to establish and
maintain the circuit of vital polarity from
which the psyche actually develops, as the
body develops from the circuit of alimentation
and respiration. We have reached the stage
where we can settle the alimentation and respiration
problems almost off-hand. But woe
betide us, the unspeakable agony we suffer
from the failure to establish and maintain the
// File: 110.png
.pn +1
vital circuits between ourselves and the effectual
correspondent, the other human being,
other human beings, and all the extraneous
universe. The tortures of psychic starvation
which civilized people proceed to suffer,
once they have solved for themselves the
bread-and-butter problem of alimentation,
will not bear thought. Delicate, creative desire,
sending forth its fine vibrations in search
of the true pole of magnetic rest in another
human being or beings, how it is thwarted, insulated
by a whole set of India-rubber ideas
and ideals and conventions, till every form of
perversion and death-desire sets in! How can
we <i>escape</i> neuroses? Psychoanalysis won’t
tell us. But a mere shadow of understanding
of the true unconscious will give us the
hint.

The amazingly difficult and vital business
of human relationship has been almost laughably
// File: 111.png
.pn +1
underestimated in our epoch. All this
nonsense about love and unselfishness, more
crude and repugnant than savage fetish-worship.
Love is a thing to be <i>learned</i>, through
centuries of patient effort. It is a difficult,
complex maintenance of individual integrity
throughout the incalculable processes of interhuman-polarity.
Even on the first great plane
of consciousness, four prime poles in each individual,
four powerful circuits possible between
two individuals, and each of the four
circuits to be established to perfection and yet
maintained in pure equilibrium with all the
others. Who can do it? Nobody. Yet we
have all got to do it, or else suffer ascetic tortures
of starvation and privation or of distortion
and overstrain and slow collapse into corruption.
The whole of life is one long, blind
effort at an established polarity with the outer
universe, human and non-human; and the
// File: 112.png
.pn +1
whole of modern life is a shrieking failure.
It is our own fault.

The actual evolution of the individual
psyche is a result of the interaction between
the individual and the outer universe. Which
means that just as a child in the womb grows
as a result of the parental blood-stream which
nourishes the vital quick of the fœtus, so does
every man and woman grow and develop as a
result of the polarized flux between the spontaneous
self and some other self or selves. It
is the circuit of vital flux between itself and
another being or beings which brings about
the development and evolution of every individual
psyche and physique. This is a law of
life and creation, from which we cannot escape.
Ascetics and voluptuaries both try to
dodge this main condition, and both succeed
perhaps for a generation. But after two generations
all collapses. Man doth not live by
// File: 113.png
.pn +1
bread alone. He lives even more essentially
from the nourishing creative flow between
himself and another or others.

This is the reality of the extra-individual
circuits of polarity, those established between
two or more individuals. But a corresponding
reality is that of the internal, purely individual
polarity—the polarity within a man
himself of his upper and lower consciousness,
and his own voluntary and sympathetic modes.
Here is a fourfold interaction within the self.
And from this fourfold reaction within the
self results that final manifestation which we
know as <i>mind</i>, mental consciousness.

The brain is, if we may use the word, the
terminal instrument of the dynamic consciousness.
It transmutes what is a creative flux
into a certain fixed cypher. It prints off, like
a telegraph instrument, the glyphs and grafic
representations which we call percepts, concepts,
// File: 114.png
.pn +1
ideas. It produces a new reality—the
ideal. The idea is another static entity, another
unit of the mechanical-active and materio-static
universe. It is thrown off from
life, as leaves are shed from a tree, or as
feathers fall from a bird. Ideas are the dry,
unliving, inscutient plumage which intervenes
between us and the circumambient universe,
forming at once an insulator and an instrument
for the subduing of the universe.
The mind is the instrument of instruments; it
is not a creative reality.

Once the mind is awake, being in itself a
finality, it feels very assured. “The word became
flesh, and began to put on airs,” says
Norman Douglas wittily. It is exactly what
happens. Mentality, being automatic in its
principle like the machine, begins to assume
life. It begins to affect life, to pretend to
make and unmake life. “In the beginning was
// File: 115.png
.pn +1
the Word.” This is the presumptuous masquerading
of the mind. The Word cannot be
the beginning of life. It is the <i>end</i> of life,
that which falls shed. The mind is the dead
end of life. But it has all the mechanical force
of the non-vital universe. It is a great dynamo
of super-mechanical force. Given the <i>will</i>
as accomplice, it can even arrogate its machine-motions
and automatizations over the
whole of life, till every tree becomes a clipped
tea-pot and every man a useful mechanism.
So we see the brain, like a great dynamo and
accumulator, accumulating <i>mechanical</i> force
and presuming to apply this mechanical force-control
to the living unconscious, subjecting
everything spontaneous to certain machine-principles
called ideals or ideas.

And the human will assists in this humiliating
and sterilizing process. We don’t know
what the human will is. But we do know that
// File: 116.png
.pn +1
it is a certain faculty belonging to every living
organism, the faculty for self-determination.
It is a strange faculty of the soul itself, for its
own direction. The will is indeed the faculty
which every individual possesses from the very
moment of conception, for exerting a certain
control over the vital and automatic processes
of his own evolution. It does not depend originally
on mind. Originally it is a purely spontaneous
control-factor of the living unconscious.
It seems as if, primarily, the will and
the conscience were identical, in the pre-mental
state. It seems as if the will were
given as a great balancing faculty, the faculty
whereby automatization is <i>prevented</i> in the
evolving psyche. The <i>spontaneous</i> will reacts
at once against the exaggeration of any one
particular circuit of polarity. Any vital circuit—a
fact known to psychoanalysis. And
against this automatism, this degradation from
// File: 117.png
.pn +1
the spontaneous-vital reality into the mechanic-material
reality, the human soul must
always struggle. And the will is the power
which the unique self possesses to right itself
from automatism.

Sometimes, however, the free psyche really
collapses, and the will <i>identifies</i> itself with an
automatic circuit. Then a complex is set up,
a paranoia. Then incipient madness sets in.
If the identification continues, the derangement
becomes serious. There may come sudden
jolts of dislocation of the whole psychic
flow, like epilepsy. Or there may come any
of the known forms of primary madness.
The second danger is that the will shall
identify itself with the mind and become an
instrument of the mind. The same process of
automatism sets up, only now it is slower. The
mind proceeds to assume control over every
organic-psychic circuit. The spontaneous
// File: 118.png
.pn +1
flux is destroyed, and a certain automatic circuit
substituted. Now an automatic establishment
of the psyche must, like the building of
a machine, proceed according to some definite
fixed scheme, based upon certain fixed principles.
And it is here that ideals and ideas
enter. They are the machine-plan and the
machine-principles of an automatized psyche.

So, humanity proceeds to derange itself, to
automatize itself from the mental consciousness.
It is a process of derangement, just as
the fixing of the will upon any other primary
process is a derangement. It is a long, slow
development in madness. Quite justly do the
advanced Russian and French writers acclaim
madness as a great goal. It is the genuine
goal of self-automatism, mental-conscious supremacy.

True, we must all develop into mental consciousness.
But mental-consciousness is not a
// File: 119.png
.pn +1
goal; it is a cul-de-sac. It provides us only
with endless <i>appliances</i> which we can use for
the all-too-difficult business of coming to our
spontaneous-creative fullness of being. It
provides us with means to adjust ourselves to
the external universe. It gives us further
means for subduing the external, materio-mechanical
universe to our great end of creative
life. And it gives us plain indications of
how to avoid falling into automatism, hints
for the <i>applying</i> of the will, the loosening of
false, automatic fixations, the brave adherence
to a profound soul-impulse. This is the use
of the mind—a great indicator and instrument.
The mind as author and director of life is
anathema.

So, the few things we have to say about the
unconscious end for the moment. There is
almost nothing said. Yet it is a beginning.
Still remain to be revealed the other great
// File: 120.png
.pn +1
centers of the unconscious. We know four:
two pairs. In all there are seven planes. That
is, there are six dual centers of spontaneous
polarity, and then the final one. That is, the
great upper and lower consciousness is only
just broached—the further heights and depths
are not even hinted at. Nay, in public it would
hardly be allowed us to hint at them. There
is so much to know, and every step of the
progress in knowledge is a death to the human
idealism which governs us now so ruthlessly
and vilely. It must die, and we <i>will</i> break
free. But what tyranny is so hideous as that
of an automatically ideal humanity?
.sp 4
.if t
.dv class='tnotes’
.ul
.it Transcriber’s Notes:
.ul indent=1
.it Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (<i>italics</i>).
.ul-
.ul-
.dv-
.if-