Acceptance, Partial and Total
Jujutsu is an example of the first kind of acceptance, being simply the exchange of one technique of fighting for another. It is therefore an exclusive technique just as the technique of psychology is exclusive in that it creates a new “evil” called escapism as the opposite of acceptance. Thus we have these two psychological states called “acceptance of life” and “escape from life,” but when they are opposed to one another in this way it is clear that “life” can have only a limited meaning. It means particular things in life—specific evils, desires, events, and situations, because when life is understood in its widest sense there is no possibility of escape from it. Everything is life, even escapism, and if the whole of life is to be accepted the desire to escape must not be made into a new devil. Therefore partial acceptance is what Oriental philosophers would describe as a dualistic as distinct from a nondualistic state of mind. For according to Hindu and Buddhist teachings the enlightened man attains a state of mind that is one with Brahman or Tathata,5 the Reality of life which includes all possible things and apart from which nothing exists. This state is nondualistic because it is union with something to which nothing can be opposed, and in this sense it is complete and absolute acceptance of life, philosophically described as union with the principle that is the meaning, essence, and raison d’être of the universe. In this state man is supremely happy because even though he may be involved in a conflict with pain and evil, even though he may feel the very human emotions of fear, anger, and love, he lives his life with a wholeheartedness and abandon born of the understanding that all things are fundamentally acceptable. For to him there is meaning and divinity in every aspect of the universe and in both the greatness and the littleness, the love and the fear, the joy and the sorrow, and the content and discontent of the human soul. For the Upanishads say:6
The Soul is Brahman, the Eternal. It is made of consciousness and mind: It is made of life and vision. It is made of the earth and the waters: It is made of air and space. It is made of light and darkness: It is made of desire and peace. It is made of anger and love: It is made of virtue and vice. It is made of all that is near: It is made of all that is afar. It is made of all.
But this total acceptance and love of life eludes us because in striving to attain it we are constantly at war with that which appears to go against it. The reason is that in trying to be united with life we are striving to achieve something that already exists; the result is that our very efforts to achieve it are hindrances in that they encourage the feeling that we are divorced from life and have to make ourselves one with it. But we cannot realize all at once that this union already exists because centuries of civilization have orphaned us from nature both in and around us, making us feel that we are self-contained, independent, and autonomous egos. The primitive does not feel this to the same extent, having what Levy-Brühl described as a participation mystique with nature, which is to say a union of which he is not fully aware because he has never been conscious of what it means to be separated from nature. That feeling of separation must come before union can have its full meaning for us. Thus in the parable of the Prodigal Son it is the returning prodigal for whom the fatted calf is slain—not the faithful son who had always stayed at home and had never been separated from his father.
Thus if man is to realize again his fundamental unity and harmony with life he must proceed by the roundabout way of trying to get that which he already has until he convinces himself of his own folly. For it is only by trying to accept life as a whole that we can make ourselves aware that there was never any real need to try, and that spirituality is in fact a matter of “becoming what we are.” In trying actively to accept life we find that this is successful only in regard to particular things; we reconcile ourselves to the dark side of life only to find that we are not reconciled to our desire to escape from it, and this desire in itself is an aspect of that dark side. By this method something is always left out of the whole, with the result that our acceptance and therefore our happiness is still dependent on particular things, and we are just as far from including the whole as ever. For this reason a large number of psychological patients are never really cured. Specific neuroses of the more obvious kind are certainly overcome, but except in some rare cases the great happiness remains undiscovered. This is not at all surprising, for not only is total acceptance the most elusive thing in the world; it is also something against which intellect and reason rebel.
The Three Stages of Morality
It is argued that if the highest spirituality is simply a matter of accepting life as it is, and if this is something which we already have but do not realize, then its attainment will make no difference whatever to our lives. It may possibly make us inwardly happy, but if this is not expressed outwardly in different and better thoughts and actions, it is of no real value. Moreover, the idea of a supreme Reality or God that is manifested alike by all forms of life is amoral and dangerous, and is at variance with the important Christian doctrine that the world order is basically a moral order. But this view of spirituality is only inconsistent with a moral world order insofar as the morality in question is the invention of human intellect and wishful thinking. If, however, the foundation of morality is “to love your neighbor as yourself,” it cannot be said that total acceptance is inconsistent with a moral world order. For it involves acceptance of the virtues and vices of other people as much as of one’s own. More than this, although the idea suggests amorality, it seldom works out this way in practice—a paradox that will subsequently be clear when we consider total acceptance in detail.7
But it should be noted that there is an important difference between those whose acceptance is partial and those whose acceptance is total. The ordinary moralist feels that he is not free to be anything but moral; in other words, he feels compelled to be moral—for a variety of reasons. It may be that he fears the wrath of God or the pangs of conscience; it may be that he has an egotistic sense of duty, thinking that his own and other people’s natures ought to conform with the dictates of his reason. But he is slavishly moral, and he fights his “lower nature” because he is either too afraid or too proud to do anything else. As to those whose acceptance is partial, they do not feel free to fight their lower nature; they think that they ought to accept it because anything else would be escaping from life. The result is that they make a compulsive discipline out of psychological relaxation and so “exchange King Stork for King Log.” But to accept totally is to be free to be moral, and he who follows a moral law in freedom does not suffer the consequences of repression in the same way as the slavish moralist. Part of the secret of this freedom is that he knows he is also free to be immoral, for St. Michael and the Dragon are given equal recognition. In practice, however, free people are seldom immoral because the Dragon no longer impresses them with his forbidden glamour; they find preoccupation with evil merely tedious for reasons which will later be apparent. To quote Berdyaev again:8