The Danger of the Inflated Ego
Anyone who has studied either Hinduism, Buddhism, or Taoism will know that the object of these religions is to attain a realization of the union between man and the Self of the universe. In their scriptures they describe various psychological techniques by which this may be achieved, and many Western people who approach them from a practical standpoint simply follow the directions as given. The result is not very happy. Such people do not appreciate the vast difference between the psychology of modern man and the psychology of the ancient Chinese or Hindus. Their scriptures state very plainly that the true Self of man is God. Tat tvam asi is the Hindu formula, meaning, “That [Brahman or God] art thou.” This is also the theme of several forms of Western mysticism; in the words of Eckhart, “While I am here, He is in me; after this life, I am in Him. All things are therefore possible to me, if I am united to Him Who can do all things.” And again, “I have a capacity in my soul for taking in God entirely. I am sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself; my existence depends on the nearness and presence of God. He is also near things of wood and stone, but they know it not. If a piece of wood became as aware of the nearness of God as an archangel is, the piece of wood would be as happy as an archangel.”11 But for the modern Westerner there is a danger in this knowledge; reading and practicing such ideas he is apt to make a God of his ego rather than an ego of his God.
Until modern man has truly understood the meaning of his apparent divorce from nature, his acute sense of separateness and self-consciousness, he cannot possibly understand the teaching that his true Self is God. If he makes any attempt to impose this teaching upon himself, he is more than likely to suffer a spiritual inflation, a blowing up of his ego to the size of God, which is the very thing that Oriental philosophy does not desire. This happens because the unfortunate victim has not first accepted the division and the conflict. He has not allowed God to be an ego; he has denied the purpose of nature in evolving the sense of separateness, and until he has accepted it all his attempts to resolve the problem will be in terms of egoism. In other words, unless you accept all that the loneliness and isolation of self-consciousness involves every attempt to get away from it will be futile. The ego cannot abolish the pain of conflict between itself and the universe simply by trying to identify itself with the essence of that universe which is God. Paradoxically, it must realize its union with God by being an ego, for the very reason that that is what God Himself is doing in that particular human being. In fact modern man’s path to this wisdom is roundabout and not direct, and he must always bear in mind the saying, “Before you can unite, you must first divide.”
The Importance of Gods and Demons
There is still another reason why the wisdom of the East cannot be imitated. It has to be understood against the background of popular belief among Asiatic peoples. The wisdom of the East was taught among men who firmly believed in the existence of innumerable gods, demons, elemental spirits, and angels, who were familiar with all the potentialities of the human soul both for good and for evil, and whose personal and social lives were hardly regulated, even in theory, by what we should call reason. We, on the other hand, do not have anything to do with gods and demons; we do not believe that men’s souls can be possessed by autonomous devils except in certain cases of lunacy, to which we give the relatively harmless name of “obsession.” We think we are masters of our minds (or should be) and that such beliefs are outworn superstitions. In the universe of science everything happens for a reason and no room is left for the gods to interfere.
What is the result? Simply that the demons, having been driven out of the external universe, return with a vengeance in our own souls and behave quite as irrationally. For in proving to ourselves that the universe is wholly explainable in terms of reason and logic, we ourselves become anything but reasonable and logical. We starve in the midst of unparalleled abundance and wage diabolical wars when everybody knows that nothing can be gained from war, when for years everyone has (consciously) been trying to avoid war—yes, even those who thought they could “get away with murder” without starting a war. Of course, the old-fashioned psychologist could give a perfectly logical and reasoned explanation of human irrationality, but we are not speaking in those terms. We are looking at the situation from a purely empirical standpoint and noting that the more men try to dominate life by conscious reason, the more irrational they become. We are not saying for a moment that the logical explanation of the universe given by science is untrue; we are simply noting with interest that such an explanation and such an age exist together, that in a time when science is unusually logical, men are unusually stupid. We are therefore entitled to assume a connection between these two phenomena, for the psychologist is not interested in the truth or untruth of scientific theories; he wants to know why those theories are acceptable to modern man. He is also rude enough to suggest that people believe in them not because the theories or the people are logical, but because the people want to be logical.
In other words, the reasons for belief in a logical universe would have to be invented if they were not true. As Bernard Shaw says, belief is a matter of taste and is quite unaffected by the objective truth or falsity of that belief. Our belief in a logical universe is a matter of taste, even though it may be objectively true; we say we are reasonable men, but we accept the pronouncements of our scientists with a faith quite as groveling as the faith of peasants who believe unquestioningly those who say they have seen gods and demons. How many people could prove such common beliefs as that the earth revolves round the sun or that atoms are composed of electrons and protons?
But who are the gods and demons whom we have tried to cast out of our lives? They are the forces of that unknown, inner universe of the unconscious, though today we give them the unromantic names of impulses, depressions, phobias, manias, and other constant reminders of the fact that our inner lives are not so much under our control or even under our surveillance as we should like to think. These forces are projected by other races than our own into deific and demonic forms which play an important part in everyday life, and those who were instructed in many of the ancient religions had to recognize the existence of those beings within themselves. But we are slow in recognizing them at all, much less in ourselves, and from that point of view we are in a worse psychological position even than the “heathen Chinese” who really believes in their external existence. For whether or not the “heathen Chinese” is aware of their true nature, he is nevertheless aware of irrational forces at work in his life, and even that much awareness gives him a certain release from them. Naturally there is a considerable difference in Asiatic lands between religion for serious students and religion for the masses, but in the former the gods and demons are still preserved though there is a difference of understanding. Western students of Oriental religion should never neglect the study of its iconography, especially in Hinduism and Buddhism, for there it will be found that almost every god, Buddha, and Bodhisattva has his demonic counterpart. The student may be surprised to find, however, that these demonic counterparts are not regarded as evil in our sense of the word although the forms in which they are painted and carved are diabolic in the extreme.