It is as if one stood before a high mountain and cried, “Art thou there?” The echo comes back, “Art thou there?” If one cries, “Come out!” the echo answers, “Come out!”
The echo only follows the call because there is physical space between man and mountain, and because the mountain has no tongue and cannot call and be echoed by the man. But God and man have a closer union, and Eckhart says that “the eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me.”2 Realization is not predestined to come at a certain time because predestination is an utterly limited half-truth. It may come at any moment, for that union exists eternally. Fate is only the other face of freedom, and we may say that you are fated to realize it at a certain time only because you choose to see it at that time.
This argument will not, of course, appeal to those who argue fatalism on the basis of causality in the objective universe. These will argue that although fatalism may perhaps give one a wholly imaginary sense of freedom, events will nevertheless occur only in their predestined time and thus the development of a sense of freedom will be as fated as anything else. This type of fatalism takes no account of the possible relationships between the self of man and the “cause of fate” and depends to a great extent on the commonsense view of time. Factual knowledge of these matters is rudimentary, to say the least, and hence we cannot regard the argument as in any way final. Moreover, the psychology of the unconscious argues against the lesser type of free will (i.e., the usual theological notion) on different grounds, explaining the apparently free decisions of the conscious ego as “rationalizations” of unconscious impulses. But here it parts company with the argument from causality, for many psychologists of this school do not admit that causality applies within the unconscious.3 From the spiritual standpoint, however, the purely philosophic and scientific arguments are irrelevant; such metaphysical premises as it employs may be regarded as “working hypotheses”; the important thing is that they should be “working.” Scientist and philosopher may argue to the end of time, but meanwhile the human soul thirsts, and psychologist, priest, and mystic have the temerity to suggest that there may be ways of approach to the ultimate mysteries other than laboratory observation and pure logic. For while scientist and logician dissect and analyze, the mystic looks for meaning in the whole.
At each moment the mystic accepts the whole of his experience, including himself as he is, his circumstances as they are, and the relationship between them as it is. Wholeness is his keyword; his acceptance is total, and he excludes no part of his experience, however unsavory it may be. And in this he discovers that wholeness is holiness, and that holiness is another name for acceptability. He is a holy man because he has accepted the whole of himself and thus made holy what he was, is, and shall be in every moment of his life. He knows that in each of those moments he is united with God, and that whether he is saint or sinner the intensity of that union never changes. For God is the wholeness of life, which includes every possible aspect of man and is known in accepting the whole of our experience at each moment. And for those who do not understand the word “God,” I quote from Goethe’s Fragment upon Nature:
Nature! We are encompassed by her, enfolded by her—impossible to escape from her and impossible to come nearer to her.…The most unnatural also is nature. Who sees her not on all sides sees her truly nowhere.…At each moment she starts upon a long, long journey and at each moment reaches her end.…She lets every child enlarge upon her, every fool judge her, thousands pass heedlessly over her, seeing nothing; yet she has friends among all and has her recompense from all. Even in resisting her laws one obeys them; and one works with her even in desiring to work against her.…Love is her crown. Only through love does one come near her.…She has isolated all things so that she may bring all together.…All is eternally present in her, for she knows neither past nor future. For her the present is eternity.
Freedom and Libertinism
Indeed, Goethe’s words seem to suggest a freedom of terrifying possibilities, possibilities which the sages of Asia have known and understood, and which the mystics of Christianity may also have known but of which they have spoken only with the greatest care. For all things are possible to the free man—but not probable. His freedom is founded in the knowledge that his union with God, life, or nature can never be destroyed; that while he lives (and perhaps when he is dead) he can never do anything but express God or nature in all that he thinks and does. He is free because he knows that even if he descends to the uttermost depths of depravity he can in no way deny or separate himself from a universe which includes all extremes and hence can suffer from none. For as God “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good” so also He provides them with that of which His sun is a symbol—Himself. As Whitman says in his poem “To a Common Prostitute,”
Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.
Thus in the freedom of the spirit we understand that whether we love life or loathe it, whether we are filled with compassion or hatred, wonder or lust, beauty or horror, wisdom or ignorance—each and all of these opposites are as acceptable as day and night, calm and storm, waking and sleeping. We do not feel bound through any preconceived pattern of good character to react to our experience in the “proper” way; at any moment we may react to that experience just exactly as we please and consciously be just as uninhibited as the wild animal is by instinct. In sorrow the free man feels himself free to weep, in pain to scream, in anger to kill, in tedium to get drunk, and in laziness to idle. It is precisely this feeling of freedom which absolves him from the necessity of doing these things, and there is another reason too of which we shall speak later. He is like a man with a fire hose; the nozzle is his physical body and brain, and the water is the power of life. He is free to turn that hose in any conceivable direction, for by no twist or turn can he cut off the supply of life-giving water which never ceases to flow out in all its power. In moods of depression or sluggishness we may think that it has run low, but this is only because we do not give the mood freedom to expand itself; we are pointing the nozzle at the ground and the force we employ to keep it down is our effort to repress the mood.4
The Dance and the Center
We have a popular phrase that describes this freedom—“Let yourself go!” In the language of religion and psychology it is called self-abandonment. Essentially self-abandonment to life is a knack. A deliberate attempt to abandon oneself cannot be done without faith, for it seems like taking a plunge into a roaring torrent. Confucius tells of a man who managed to come safely down a huge waterfall by abandoning himself to the nature of falling water. But faith will follow abandonment provided we do not hang about on the brink and prevent ourselves from jumping by an increasing rush of misgivings—provided we jump immediately. This is to abandon yourself to your experience, your state of mind as it is at this very moment, being prepared to let it take you wherever it wills. But, as we have seen, as soon as you let life live you, you discover that you are living life with an altogether new fullness and zest. To return to the analogy of the dance, it is as if you allowed your partner, life, to swing you along until you so get the “feel” of the dance that you are doing the “swinging” just as much as your partner. And then she will laugh at you and tell you that you were doing it all the time, only that you were so busy trying to figure out the steps by yourself that you forgot your partner and even forgot that it was a dance.