I have before me a Japanese painting of the Buddhist divinity Nilambara-Vajrapani which might easily be a portrait of that monster the Dweller on the Threshold of Western mysticism.12 His body is black and he wears a tigerskin adorned with skulls; he has some eighteen heads wreathed with serpents, and upon each are three glaring eyes above snarling lips and bared teeth; serpents coil around each of his twenty-eight arms and in his hands he grasps swords and thunderbolts while other monsters grovel beneath his feet. Behind the whole figure is an aureole of writhing vermilion flame. In all his outward aspects he might be taken for an Oriental version of Satan himself, until one discovers that he is one of the guardians of the Law of Buddhism. Going to even more ancient sources one discovers the same idea, for Iamblichos, writing on the Egyptian Mysteries, says:13
The race of demons…causes the otherwise invisible goodness of the gods to become visible in operation, becoming itself both assimilated to it, and accomplishing perfect works that are like it. For then what was before unutterable in it is made capable of being uttered.
We, too, have a popular but perhaps neglected saying that God created the Devil for those who could not learn by love, and it cannot be by mere chance that his name is Lucifer, the light-bearer. But somehow the demons became identified with evil, and this seems to have been part of the necessary but repressive mission of Christianity. Christianity made the demonic light-bearer evil, but our modern age does not even allow the demons to be evil; it does not allow them to exist at all, and it is noticeable that in most forms of modernistic Christianity the subject of the Devil is either tactfully avoided or explained away.
The Conscious Relationship
From this it seems that before we can approach Oriental wisdom in any way resembling the Asiatic approach we must first become conscious again of the various demonic powers which our civilization has relegated to the unconscious. Furthermore, we shall have to learn the actual beneficence of those powers. They represent the dark side of life, being the earthy aspects of divine activity—the deep urges of the physical body, the storms of emotion, the principle of death and destruction, and all those irrational passions that the cult of reason will not tolerate. This is not to be confused, however, with such modern phenomena as Nazi psychology with its cult of blood and soil. Such cults are rationalization and logic run wild and denote possession by those powers, not in any sense a conscious relationship with them, for Nazi philosophy also includes the complete rationalization and regimentation of social and personal life—a very suggestive combination, and a warning.
Thus at the present time modern man is unconsciously identified with his gods and demons, and while they remain unknown he cannot arrive at any conscious relationship to them; he cannot accept his “inner universe” until he knows what kind of things he has to accept, until he can see it objectively and break up the identification. In this present state the blind adoption of Oriental mysticism would simply perpetuate and aggravate his condition; in trying to identify himself with God he would become more and more possessed by the unconscious powers of his inner universe. This is not what Oriental mysticism means by “identification” with God, which is not unconscious possession but the result of fulfilling a conscious relationship between the ego and its inner and outer universes. In twentieth-century civilization such a relationship is rare indeed.
Union through conscious relationship is illustrated in the accompanying diagram. The first circle represents the primitive, unconsciously lived by Nature, and with only a limited self-consciousness. The second represents modern, Western man, still unconsciously driven yet at the same time aware of the difference between himself and the natural, external universe. If he flees from that opposition along the line marked “escape” he simply continues to be driven and so possessed by unconscious forces. The third represents the principle of conscious union, of approaching God or Nature through accepting the difference between that and one’s own ego—or more correctly by accepting the tension caused by an apparent difference. The full union described in Oriental philosophy would be represented by a continuation of the third circle to the point where man coincides with Nature; this would be the same symbol as the familiar Oriental motif of the serpent biting its tail. Note that the first two are not complete circles; the circle is only completed when the opposition is accepted, and this completion is a symbol of the feeling of harmony in the midst of opposition.
Psychology versus Metaphysics
If this problem has to be approached in the way described above, it will be asked whether Oriental philosophy has any value at all for us at the present time. We have already drawn attention to a certain “trickiness” in the problem of acceptance; it is precisely in dealing with this that the East is of value to us. We must learn, however, to concentrate on the psychology of Oriental religion as distinct from its metaphysics. In fact, it is very doubtful whether its metaphysics was ever intended to be taken as metaphysics. For Oriental philosophy is emphatically not philosophy in the Western sense of the word, having scarcely any relation to the intellectual search for objective, metaphysical truth which we find in Descartes, Berkeley, Hegel, and other Western metaphysicians.
Thus the Oriental doctrine of the union of man and Brahman is the symbol of a psychological experience rather than a statement of objective fact, and it is almost impossible to study Oriental religion with profit unless one is always careful to inquire into the experience behind the doctrine. But of all the psychological techniques in Oriental religion the most important is that of acceptance (in Chinese wu-wei)—a technique which may be applied in a number of different directions. It is not for us to apply it exactly in their way; our method, as we have seen, has to be somewhat indirect, for we have to apply this technique to the opposition between ego and universe. Yet in so doing we shall arrive at the same result, though by a different route, and discover that wu-wei is more than technique; it is an actual spiritual experience, absolutely independent of metaphysics. Thus for the Oriental and Westerner both the experience and the technique are the same, but the approach, the direction in which the technique is applied, differs in each instance. Generally speaking, I would say that whereas the former accepts the universe, the latter must accept the ego and the conflict involved. But, as has been shown, this amounts in the end to the same thing because it will eventually be realized that the ego and its conflict are necessary aspects of universal life, of the Tao, Brahman, God, or whatever the ultimate reality may be called.
One exception must be made to this statement. It is important to remember Jung’s warning that there are still among us people whose sense of self-consciousness is not yet fully developed, who still share the primitive’s participation mystique with nature. They are easily overwhelmed by unconscious forces, as in obsessions, and sometimes find it hard to distinguish between fantasy and real life. Such people must first experience the independence of the ego; otherwise they will find themselves hopelessly overwhelmed in any attempt to deal with their “gods and demons” by acceptance.14
In conclusion we may say that for Western man acceptance means this: “Live and let live.” We see the root of our unhappiness in the war between ourselves and the universe, a war in which we so often feel tiny, impotent, and alone. The forces of nature, death, change, and unreasoning passion, seem to be against our most cherished longings, and by no trick or deceit can we get rid of our helpless solitude or of the battle between desire and destiny. Acceptance for us is therefore to say, “Let it live” to the whole situation, to the ego and its desires, to life and destiny, and also to the war between them. This acceptance is made in the knowledge that the conflict and all its parties are aspects of a single living activity which employs a seeming discord to achieve the understanding of a harmony which in fact has never been and never can be broken. This is to fulfill the purpose of that conflict, a purpose which is denied when the ego strives to arrogate to itself identity with God—an identity achieved simply in being an ego and in being true to its self-conscious nature. This, however, cannot possibly be understood in any deep sense until the situation as it is now has been accepted, whereat it will develop in its own natural course into a new and different situation. But it is also necessary to understand the conflict, to become aware of its existence and character not only in external circumstances but also in the soul of man, and of the latter we are very ignorant. Therefore it seems wise to consult the wisdom of the East both in accepting and in understanding, in finding an appropriate way of life which, for reasons that will be apparent, psychology alone does not as yet supply.