The Middle Pillar Read online

  To illustrate in another way the import of this concept, let us describe it from a practical and physical point of view. One of the major inconveniences which afflicts a large portion of mankind is constipation. In many instances of this disorder, no organic disturbance exists at all; the trouble being principally a functional one. (Though it must be here interpolated that even if it were organic, there is sufficient psychological evidence to indicate that this likewise may ensue from an identical series of causes.) Very often, this malady does not respond to any kind of medical treatment. It is not uncommon for patients to testify that they have been recommended massage, surgical operations, drugs, nature cure, and all the other types of cures. In spite of these the illness persists unchanged. Enquiry elicits that there is, frequently, a conscious conflict between two courses of conduct. More often than not, however, the real seat of the conflict is not in consciousness at all, but exists in a far deeper level of mind, in the unconscious. It was probably around puberty that an already existent conflict developed such acuteness and severity as to require for the psychic safety of the ego to be repressed completely out of sight.

  From this, we might conclude—and there is some psychological evidence to this end—that the conflict is one between the instincts and social dictates. That is, because of parental training there is a blind refusal to recognize the necessity for the proper and legitimate expression of the instincts. It is a denial of one side of the personality, a denial without justification or reason. It is as though, while admiring the beauty and form of the lotus, we wished not to be reminded of the slimy source where grow the roots of the plant, and therefore cut the stalk right through, severing the flower from its necessary root. This cutting of the lotus stalk has its counterpart in human minds, many of us having been cut off from our roots. For this denial of the instinctual life, in which the conscious existence after all has its roots, and this persistent repression, cause some degree of dissociation. That is, a severance of the integrity and unity of the psyche. The psychosis,17 if sufficiently intense and prolonged, produces symptoms of various sorts ranging from lack of vitality, irritability, constipation, and a host of other physical and nervous disorders.

  With such a problem, there is but one logical method of attack. It is to recognize quite clearly that the physical symptoms are the results of an internal conflict, a conflict between the needs of the body and the self-sufficiency or cowardice of the mind. It is a conflict between the necessity to the expression of emotion and feeling, and the imperious urge of the ego to escape from a vulnerable constituent of its nature, that principle which at one time had been susceptible to hurt and injury. With the frank recognition of the conflict, one should endeavor to recollect the events of his early childhood, bringing up as many memories as possible of that period, experiencing neither shame nor remorse at his discoveries.18 Confronting these memories with the knowledge that as an adult in whom is the light of reason, he understands that his mature mind can dissipate the infantile emotion connected with early experiences, in which shame or inferiority or insecurity was felt. In this way, he links and applies mind to emotion, thus avoiding within him the uncontrolled play of the opposites. Their existence is neither denied nor frustrated. This is a vital point to be understood. No denial or rejection should be countenanced of what manifestly is an actual fact, no stubborn refusal to admit and accept a part of his own nature. As we have seen, the denial of any function of the self leads to dissociation, and the latter results in nervous and physical disorders.

  Face the fact that at one time there was a denial of one phase of life, and thus accept the conflict. Accept it, knowing that so long as we remain human, these conflicts are bound to be our lot. In our present stage of evolution, they are part and parcel of human nature, and so cannot be avoided. But what can be eliminated is the ignorant attitude so often adopted towards them. For these opposites, the two pillars of the temple, their magical images or prototypes, represent “those eternal forces betwixt which the equilibrium of the universe dependeth. Those forces whose reconciliation is the Key of Life, whose separation is evil and death.”19 This, then, is the solution to conflict. They must be reconciled.

  Let me recapitulate. There must be the clear recognition of the conflict. Its exact nature must be analyzed and faced, and its presence accepted in all its implications.

  One must endeavor to bring up into consciousness, so far as the capabilities of the mind permit, all the memories of childhood. In a word, he should attempt to perform a species of what is called in the Buddhist system the Sammasati meditation. This consists in a cultivation and rigid examination of memory. The idea involved here is not that these recollections in themselves are worth anything, but that raising them up to the surface releases a great deal of tension associated with early experiences. There is often a tying up of nervous energy in childhood experiences, in trivial events which are allowed to be forgotten and to sink into unconsciousness. But this forgetfulness does not overcome the shock of nervous exhaustion connected with them. On the contrary, they set up what are called resistances—resistances to the flow of life and vitality from the primitive and vital layers of the unconscious level.

  “What matters,” remarks Georg Groddeck20 the brilliant German physician-psychologist, “is not to make conscious anything at all of the unconscious, but to relieve what is imprisoned, and in so doing it is by no means rare for the repressed material to sink into the depths instead of coming into consciousness.... What is decisive in the success of treatment is the removal of resistance.”

  Beginning with the actual events of the day upon which the reader determines to commence this exercise, the meditation should gradually extend its field of vision until ultimately the events and occurrences of the earliest years are brought into the light of day. The technique is principally one of the training of the mind to think backwards. Difficult though at first it may seem, practice leads the student slowly and gradually to facility in the art of remembering. The facts of memory confronted fearlessly, without shame and discomforture, the resistance to the flow of vitality between the various levels of consciousness is broken down, restoring physical, nervous, and spiritual health.

  As the childhood memories are exposed, the student will see for himself in what way the conflict now bothering him came into manifestation. Since by definition a neurosis21 is a maladaptation of the psyche to life itself, by this process of remembering he will see in what way he failed to respond properly to the phenomena of his existence.

  Realizing this, and recognizing thoroughly the nature of his conflict, he must now endeavor to ignore it. More accurately a more positive attitude should be adopted. He must develop in an entirely new direction. It must be remembered, however, and this is important, that to ignore any symptom of conflict as manifested in mind or body, is dangerous until the conflict in question has been recognized and accepted. The unconditional acceptance almost invariably acts as its resolution. Any other attitude constitutes an escape.

  The escape mechanism is that so frequently adopted by the neurotic and must be avoided. It is the way of the coward. To face the conflict is to rob it and its consequences of crippling fear. Honesty with oneself acts as a catharsis. One finds himself endued with a new courage and greater ability to face one’s problem in an entirely new and more practicable way. Given the recognition of the conflict causing constipation, the symptom itself may be severely ignored, relying upon the bowel after the lapse of some days to recommence functioning of its own accord. The conflict and the warring between the two sides of the psyche, tied a knot as it were in consciousness preventing the perfect functioning of the whole. The immediate result of this is an impediment in the free movement of nervous energy in the body-mind system, causing stasis in that part of the system having a relationship or correspondence with the factors concerned in the conflict.

  Occult theory as we have it from tradition may be extremely useful here. With some degree of practical experience, we could easily d
iscover the precise nature of the original conflict by a consideration of that part of the organism to the symptoms of which our attention is attracted. For example, consider one troubled by nephritis.22 One of the most significant aspects of the magical tradition is astrology. In this latter science the kidneys are referred to the operation of the planet Venus. As we know from mythology, Venus is the deity concerned with love, feeling, and emotion. We would surmise therefore that in the event that the love or emotional life of an individual has been frustrated or repressed to such a point where the psyche finally refused to continue living whilst hampered by such a neurosis, some expression of that frustration could be transferred to the neighborhood of the kidneys. Were the frustration complete and devastating to the psyche, it is not impossible that we should find a cancer—the symptom par excellence of the death-wish, the so-called suicide complex indicative of a division in the psyche’s integrity.

  Moreover, we could proceed a step further. We might enquire as to whether the affliction were on the right or left, remembering the Qabalistic definition of the Left Pillar as the side of Mercy, and that on the Right as the Pillar of Severity.23 “Unbalanced mercy is weakness and the fading out of the will. Unbalanced severity is cruelty and the barrenness of mind.”24

  Enquiry might elicit the fact that an afflicted left kidney was symptomatic of one who had been afraid to taste life to the full. Or on the other hand, out of sheer compensation, had lived, so completely as to have over-indulged. The right kidney would indicate symptoms of severe and violent repression on principle—where the entire emotional life had been so subjected to continuous frustration because of an ethical standard that the outraged eros reacted upon the body either with acute nephritis or it may be with cancer.

  Where there is trouble with the legs, the patient being unable to stand and confined to the bed, some psychological thinkers proffer some such explanation as this. The legs are the things we stand on, that which gives support to the body. In the symbolic pageantry utilized by the unconscious—and it must be understood that the activity of the unconscious proceeds almost exclusively through what are to us symbols—the instinctual life is our mental support. It is that which we tend to rely upon, our stability and foundation, during life. Should therefore our understanding of life fall short of what it should be for us—and obviously that standard varies with different people—so that we unduly repress our instincts to the point when the resulting sense of insecurity and anxiety become intolerable, the psyche achieves a revenge through an affliction of the supports of the personality. Thus it is that we learn, so it is said, by illness. When our supports, no matter of what nature, have been annihilated, we sometimes seek to enquire into causes and origins. When the enquiry is honestly furthered, with a sincere view to self-knowledge, and internal resistance broken down by meditation or analysis, no doubt recovery would ensue. That is to say, the disappearance of the alarming symptoms, and a return of normal function.

  The solvent to these difficulties, the practical solution of the problem, consists primarily in the elimination so far as possible of fear. Of course, from the larger point of view, fear is an essential part of our make-up. Man is so puny a creature on the face of the earth, and nature is vast and terrible in her operations. How else could it be that fear eats at the heart of each of us? But this is a wholesome fear—a fear which is the beginning of wisdom. The emotion under consideration is a pathological thing—fear of the future, fear of position, a needless worrying about affairs which cannot be helped or changed, at least not by hugging a constant fear that they will change in a manner that is painful and sad. From the spiritual point of view, fears such as we have named act as a great freezer, as an inhibitor of action and of the free flow of vital energy from within. The man who is afraid to embark upon a given course of action because it may lead to failure, or whose apprehension of success and of the future generally, is hardly likely to accomplish very much. “Fear is failure” says one magical aphorism, “and the forerunner of failure. Be thou therefore without fear, for in the heart of the coward, virtue abideth not.”25

  One of the most interesting instances of the psycho-therapeutic attitude to fear and anxiety and the escape-problem as a whole was Groddeck’s treatment, when he was a physician before applying psychology to his problems, of certain cases of indigestion and nervous dyspepsia. One of the psychological theorems regarding this form of discomfort is that it is due to anxiety. We all know how bad news or worry affects the digestion, from turning the food sour to taking away the appetite. But the root cause of this particular anxiety is not the problem in hand, but the anxiety which has its roots in an early conflict and is made the worse by the occurrence of an immediate problem evoking conflict and anxiety. Groddeck’s treatment—almost the homeopathic principle—emphasized or comprised a diet of precisely those foods which formerly disagreed with his patient. If eggs were the cause of indigestion the diet would comprise eggs until eventually the psychic would give up attempting to evade the associations which had been linked to eggs, and the digestive trouble would in time disappear. To force the psyche to face its problems and accept them was his idea rather than that the psyche should continually baulk from and attempt to flee the symptoms it threw up in the body. The unconditional acceptance of the conflict, and the associations connected with it, was the first step towards cure. The technique is, in a word or two, an attack on the escape mechanism. Integrity cannot be won by an escapist attitude towards life. The reward of the attitude which escapes from problems and the reality of life is more likely than not to be nothing but the gnawing pain of guilt and sin.

  The same method is often made use of in other forms of therapy. Amongst these, for example, is the treatment of nightmares by analysis. The terror experienced in nightmare, causing the dreamer to awaken bathed in perspiration, angered by a palpitation of the heart, and experiencing an inexplicable sense of impending catastrophe, is likewise due to some conflict or other. Its nature, being unconscious, can only be determined by the context of the dream, and by the lengthy process of confession, free association, and reductive analysis.

  But if the dreamer can be trained in his waking state to realize that the nightmare is only the expression of an internal conflict, then he has proceeded halfway to the point where it will cease to bother him. He must accept the presence of such a disorder rather than attempt to escape it, because escape is not an adequate solution of a psychic problem.

  This discovery was brought home to us during the war. Amongst the soldiers at the front were those who would not recognize the very obvious fact, that war was a dangerous matter and that they were afraid. This they would not accept, though underneath a veritable torrent of fear was raging, and the whole of the instinctive impulse was to bolt from the scene of battle. Those who recognized this impulse but at the same time saw that flight was impossible and that the war had to be seen through, came to no mental or spiritual harm.

  It was the former type, suffering from a terrible fear but boasting that they were not in the least afraid, who became affected by shell-shock. Shell-shock—the shock experienced by the nervous system through the devastating noise of explosion, had nothing to do with their actual trouble at all. The cause was simply a cowardly refusal to face the conflict raging in the psyche. And when this became so intolerable, an actual split occurred in consciousness, so that there was a gap in memory, awareness, and in efficiency.

  With the acceptance of the theory of conflict as a cause of nightmare, a subtle change gradually creeps into the nightmare-dream. The following is one rather fine example, together with the method of dealing with it.

  A woman patient frequently dreamed that she was hanging from a rope in a room which had an enormously high ceiling, about fifty or sixty feet high. The rope was affixed by a hook to the ceiling, and the weight imposed upon the hook was gradually loosening the plaster around. Any moment, the hook would tear loose from the ceiling, and the body would be dashed to the ground. At this juncture of t
he dream, unable to face the terror of being hurled to death on the ground, the woman awoke in a frenzy of fear, screaming. The advice given in this particular case—and since the dream is a typical nightmare, the same technique may be widely recommended—was to suggest to the woman the advisability of meditating on the dream before falling to sleep at night. The suggestion was to lengthen the term of the dream so as to invite the nightmare and observe what happened when the plaster did finally break, tearing the hook from the ceiling.

  Constant and deep reflection on the dream’s theme before sleep was the method by which the unconscious could so be influenced as to induce a vigilant attitude even during the progress of the fantasy. The topic of meditation would also be the conscious application of the idea of non-resistance. Let the catastrophe occur, and see what happens. If the fantasy is being perched on a high cliff and at any moment there is the danger of being hurled to the ground, awaking at mid-point in a sweat of fear, then gradually train the mind to thrust out all resistance to the fall. By methods such as these resistance and repression is broken down and fear eliminated from the sphere of consciousness.

  Here, some word should be said about repression26 and the means of its elimination. A great many people have come to believe, through a very casual reading of some of the early psychoanalytic literature, that psychology countenances the removal of repression by means which are unethical and antisocial. Nothing could be further from the truth. Repression is always defined as an unconscious and automatic process. It is a process by which the personality protects itself against distasteful concepts, by thrusting them without the horizon of consciousness into the dark and forbidding region of the unconscious. Since this process begins very early in life, the unconscious is by middle age stuffed with a mass of repressed material ideas about parents and relatives, associations connected with environment, infantile beliefs and actions. Suppression, on the other hand, is a deliberate and conscious thing. It presupposses a process of conscious selection and elimination, in which one alternative is suppressed in favor of another.