The Man and the Means
But we cannot make a technique of abandonment, for at once a snag arises. It is the same snag that stands between partial and total acceptance and may be described in a number of different ways. Fundamentally it is the old problem of lifting oneself up by one’s own belt and is perhaps most aptly put in the Chinese saying that “when the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.” The “right means” are all forms of technique—acceptance, abandonment, and what you will; the “wrong man” is, generally speaking, oneself. We are “wrong” in the sense that we are unhappy, that we are without faith and have no freedom of spirit. The problem is therefore how the wrong man can become the right man when all the available means for so doing are bound to work in the wrong way. In other words, a man desires to change himself. Now a man is what he is, and his desires are according to his nature. If he is a “bad” man, his desires will be bad, even though one of them is that he shall become better. We discover this by asking why he wants to become better. The underlying motive for improvement is tainted because the man who entertains it is bad; he wants to become better out of self-interest, because in his pride he wishes to escape from the reproach of being bad. If this is pointed out to him, he will then ask whether he ought simply to accept his badness. And if we again ask him why he wants to accept his badness, we discover that he wants to accept it in order to escape from it. He is caught whichever way he turns because the means he adopts, his behavior, his ideas, his religion, are always his, and he will always use them according to his capacity and his nature. They are like so many different suits of clothes; he may wear rags, ermine, tweeds, or skins; he may walk, run, skip, or trot; he may whisper, shout, sing, or talk—but he himself remains the same since he is the cause and not the consequence of his actions.
Let us put it in another way. Supposing that we decide to accept the dark side of life, the unconscious and the conflict between the unconscious and the ego, there is still one thing that by this means we do not accept—our desire to escape from it. Until that desire is accepted our acceptance is always an indirect attempt to escape. Here we meet the problem of St. Michael and the Dragon again. Christian morality taught us to overcome the dark side of life by fighting it; psychology would have us overcome it by acceptance, but in fact these are both ways of overcoming it, which means getting rid of it and escaping it. Thus the way of acceptance as distinct from the way of fighting is apt to make a new Dragon out of St. Michael.
Infinite Regression
There is also the problem of the relation between nature and the ego. If we accept the universe and subordinate ourselves to it, if, instead of trying to live life, we let life live us, we are accepting one aspect of life only to deny another—the aggressive, self-asserting ego in which life has manifested itself. Acceptance is indeed the feminine way, but it cannot be practiced at the expense of the masculine. It seems, therefore, that what we need is, as it were, a higher type of acceptance that includes both acceptance and escape, faith and suspicion, self-abandonment and egotism, surrender and aggressiveness, the Dragon and St. Michael. But even this does not quite solve the problem—indeed, it is as far from a solution as ever—because we are starting out upon an infinite regression. We are becoming hopelessly involved in a vicious circle, for as soon as we set up the notion of an acceptance which takes in both accepting and escaping we have two pairs of opposites instead of one. We begin with the opposition of acceptance1 vs. escape; but we then get acceptance2 vs. acceptance1-vs.-escape—a psychological monstrosity which can continue indefinitely.
At first sight the problem of the vicious circle may seem purely mathematical and remote from experience. But in fact it is only a rather complicated way of expressing the fundamental conundrum that those who search for happiness do not find it. It is again the problem of the donkey with the carrot suspended before his nose from a stick that is fastened to his own collar. If he chases it, using the aggressive technique, he does not catch it; if he stands still, using the passive technique, he still does not catch it. What can he do? The poor creature is apparently quite helpless. Of course, it will be said that any attempt to answer such riddles is an easy way to go crazy. This is very true, and for just the same reasons it will be discovered that any attempt to discover happiness is also an easy way to go crazy, and the world today is a crazy place just because people are trying to do it. We are a collection of people running wildly round in circles in frantic pursuit of our own selves, and the picture is not particularly edifying. Yes, if we could see ourselves from a psychological standpoint we should think we had walked into bedlam. We should see men running away from their shadows, men trying to jump off the ground by tugging at their shoelaces, men trying to see their own eyes and kiss their own lips. It is like trying to mend a hole in one part of a handkerchief by taking a patch from another. For the trouble is that all our schemes, systems, and devices are partial. It is as if we ourselves were the hole in the handkerchief; we see some other part of the handkerchief and think how pleasant it would be to fill our emptiness by acquiring it. So we cut it out and fill ourselves, only to find that we are now the new hole—the invisible blind spot in the universe.4
The Squirrel Cage of Duality
That which we call God can only be known intimately by total acceptance, because freedom by its very nature cannot be limited. Therefore we may say that when you consider yourself free to accept but not to escape, this is not freedom. But the human mind is so constructed that it cannot imagine total acceptance; our intellect is such that it must think in dualities—this and not that, that and not this. It is a seesaw; one end must be up and the other down; both ends cannot be up at the same time and down at the same time. Therefore freedom of the spirit demands the interference of some factor over and above the human intellect. For not only is the intellect unable to conceive of this totality, it is also unable to appreciate its value, arguing that in “abolishing” dualism you destroy all values, give sanction to the wildest libertinism, and in fact require nothing more of the spiritual man than that he should do as he likes. (Somehow we are reminded of St. Augustine’s precept, “Love, and do as you will.”) The same objection is raised to the Oriental idea of God as the Self of the universe, the One Reality and true self of all creatures, forms, activities, thoughts, and substances. It is argued that if everything is God, then God is nothing—on the principle of W. S. Gilbert’s line, “When everybody’s somebody, then no one’s anybody.”
The Oriental philosophies of Vedanta, Taoism, and Mahayana Buddhism do not, however, involve this reductio ad absurdum, because to say that all things are God is not quite the same as saying that everything is one thing; in fact it is not even remotely the same. In their view God is not a thing, and they do not abolish all differences by reducing individual shapes and forms to a single, infinite formlessness. For God is not the One as distinct from the Many, nor unity as distinct from diversity.5 We cannot begin to understand the Oriental view of God until we can conceive of a “One” that can include both unity and diversity, which can at the same time be God and a speck of dust or a human being with equal reality. In this sense it might be said that the oneness of things is revealed in their multiplicity and diversity. Such paradoxes are inevitable when we try to approach nonduality from the intellectual point of view. This is true not only of intellect, for the way of acceptance which we have already described involves much more than mere thinking; nevertheless it is just as liable to be involved in this squirrel cage of duality.