An urge to self-transcendence is almost as widespread and, at times, quite as powerful as the urge to self-assertion. Men desire to intensify their consciousness of being what they have come to regard as “themselves”; but they also desire—and desire very often with irresistible violence—the consciousness of being someone else. In a word, they long to get out of themselves, to pass beyond the limits of that island universe, within which every individual finds himself confined. This wish for self-transcendence is not identical with the wish to escape from physical or mental pain. In many cases, it is true, the wish to escape from pain reinforces the desire for self-transcendence. But the latter can exist without the former. If this were not so, healthy and successful persons, who have (in the jargon of psychiatry) “made an excellent adjustment to life,” would never feel the urge to go beyond themselves. But in fact they do. Even among those whom nature and fortune have most richly endowed, we find, and find not infrequently, a deep-rooted horror of their own selfhood, a passionate yearning to get free of the repulsive little identity to which the very perfection of their “adjustment to life” has condemned them, unless they appeal to the Higher Court, without reprieve. “I am gall,” writes Gerard Manley Hopkins,
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Self-yeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
Complete damnation is being one’s sweating self, but worse. Being one’s sweating self, but not worse, merely no better, is partial damnation, and this partial damnation is everyday life.
If we experience an urge to self-transcendence, it is because, in some obscure way and in spite of our conscious ignorance, we know what we really are. We know (or to be more accurate, something within us knows) that the ground of our individual knowing is identical with the ground of all knowing and all being; that the Atman (Mind in the act of choosing to take the temporal point of view) is the same as Brahman (Mind in its eternal essence). We know all this, even though we may never have heard the doctrines in which the primordial fact has been described; even though, if we happen to be familiar with them, we may regard these doctrines as being so much moonshine. And we also know their practical corollary, which is that the final end, purpose, and point of our existence is to make room in the “thou” for the “That,” is to step aside so that the Ground may come to the surface of our consciousness, is to “die” so completely that we can say, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” When the phenomenal ego transcends itself, the essential Self is free to realize, in terms of a finite consciousness, the fact of its own eternity, together with the correlative fact, that every particular in the world of experience partakes of the timeless and the infinite. This is liberation, this is enlightenment, this is the beatific vision, in which all things are perceived as they are “in themselves” and not as they are in relation to a craving and abhorring ego.
The obscure knowledge of what we really are accounts for our grief at having to seem to be what we are not, and for our often passionate desire to overstep the limits of the imprisoning ego. The only truly liberating self-transcendence is into the knowledge of the primordial fact. But this liberating self-transcendence is easier to describe than to achieve. For those who are deterred by the difficulties of the ascending road, there are other, less arduous alternatives. Self-transcendence is by no means invariably upward. Indeed, in most cases, it is an escape either downward into a state lower than that of personality, or else horizontally into something wider than the ego, but not higher, not essentially other. We are forever trying to mitigate the results of the Collective Fall into insulated selfhood by another, strictly private fall into animality or mental derangement, or by some more or less creditable self-dispersion into art or science, into politics, a hobby, or a job. Needless to say, these substitutes for self-transcendence, these escapes into subhuman or merely human surrogates for grace, are unsatisfactory at the best and, at the worst, disastrous.
Without an understanding of man’s deep-seated urge to self-transcendence, of his very natural reluctance to take the hard, ascending way, and of his search for some bogus liberation either below or to one side of his personality, we cannot hope to make sense of the observed and recorded facts of history, of individual and social psychology. For this reason, I propose to describe a few of the more common grace-substitutes, into which and by means of which men and women have tried to escape from the tormenting consciousness of being themselves.
In France there is now one retailer of alcohol for every hundred inhabitants, more or less. In the United States there are probably at least a million desperate alcoholics, besides a much larger number of very heavy drinkers, whose disease has not yet become mortal. Regarding the consumption of intoxicants in the past we have no precise knowledge. In western Europe, among the Celts and Teutons, and throughout medieval and early modern times, the individual intake of alcohol was probably greater than it is today. On the many occasions when we drink tea or coffee or soda pop, our ancestors refreshed themselves with wine, beer, mead, and in later centuries, with gin, brandy, and other forms of “hard liquor.” The regular drinking of water was a penance imposed on wrong-doers, or accepted by the religious, along with occasional vegetarianism, as a very severe mortification.
Alcohol is but one of the many drugs employed by human beings as avenues of escape from the insulated self. Of the natural narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinators there is, I believe, not a single one whose properties have not been known from time immemorial. Modern research has given us a host of brand-new synthetics; but in regard to the natural poisons it has merely developed better methods of extracting, concentrating, and recombining those already known. From poppy to curare, from Andean coca to Indian hemp and Siberian agaric, every plant or bush or fungus capable, when ingested, of stupefying, or exciting, or producing visions, has long since been discovered and systematically employed. The fact is profoundly significant; for it seems to prove that, always and everywhere, human beings have felt the radical inadequacy of their personal existence, the misery of being their insulated selves. Exploring the world around him, primitive man evidently “tried all things and held fast to that which was good.” For the purposes of self-preservation, the good is every edible fruit and leaf, every wholesome root, seed, or nut. But in another context—the context of self-dissatisfaction and the desire for self-transcendence—the good is everything in nature by means of which the quality of individual consciousness can be changed. Such drug-induced changes may be manifestly for the worse, may be at the price of present discomfort and future addiction, degeneration, and premature death. All this is of no account. What matters is the awareness, if only for an hour or two, if only for a few minutes, of being someone, or more often something, other than the insulated self.
Ecstasy through intoxication is still an essential part of the religion of many primitive peoples. It was once, as the surviving documents clearly show, a no less essential part of the religion of the Celts, the Teutons, the Greeks, the peoples of the Middle East, and the Aryan conquerors of India. It is not merely that “beer does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.” Beer is the god. Among the Celts, Sabazios was the divine name given to the felt alienation of being dead drunk on ale. Further to the south, Dionysus was, among other things, the divine objectification of the psychophysical effects of too much wine. In Vedic mythology, Indra was the god of that now unidentifiable drug called soma. Hero, slayer of dragons, he was the magnified projection upon heaven of the strange and glorious otherness experienced by the intoxicated.
In modern times beer and the other toxic shortcuts to self-transcendence are no longer officially worshiped as gods. Theory has undergone a change, but not practice; for in practice millions upon millions of civilized men and women continue to pay their devotions, not to the liberating spirit, but to alcohol, to hashish, to opium and its derivatives, to barbiturates and the other synthetic additions to the age-old catalog of poisons capable of causing self-transcendence. In every case, of course, what seems a god is actually a devil, what seems a liberation is in fact enslavement.
Like intoxication, elementary sexuality, indulged in for its own sake and divorced from love, was once a god, worshiped not only as the principle of fertility, but also as a manifestation of the radical otherness immanent in every human person. In theory, elementary sexuality has long since ceased to be a god. But in practice it can still boast of a countless host of votaries.
There is an elementary sexuality which is innocent, and an elementary sexuality which is morally and aesthetically squalid. The sexuality of Eden and the sexuality of the sewer—both of them have power to carry the individual beyond the limits of his or her insulated ego. But the second and (one would sadly guess) the commoner variety takes those who indulge in it to a lower level of sub-humanity, evokes the consciousness, and leaves the memory, of a completer alienation than does the first. Hence the perennial attraction of debauchery.
In most civilized communities public opinion condemns debauchery and drug addiction as being ethically wrong. And to moral disapproval is added fiscal discouragement and legal repression. Alcohol is heavily taxed, the sale of narcotics is everywhere prohibited, and certain sexual practices are treated as crimes. But when we pass from drug-taking and elementary sexuality to the third main avenue of downward self transcendence, we find, on the part of moralists and legislators, a very different and much more indulgent attitude. This seems all the more surprising since crowd-delirium, as we may call it, is more immediately dangerous to social order, more dramatically a menace to that thin crust of decency, reasonableness, and mutual tolerance, which constitutes a civilization, than either drink or debauchery. True, a generalized and longstanding habit of over-indulgence in sexuality may result, as J. D. Unwin has argued, in lowering the energy level of an entire society, thereby rendering it incapable of reaching or sustaining a high level of civilization. Similarly, drug-addiction, if sufficiently widespread, may lower the military, economic, and political efficiency of the society in which it prevails. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries alcohol was the secret weapon of the European slave traders; heroin, in the twentieth, of the Japanese militarists. Dead drunk, the negro was an easy prey. As for the Chinese heroin-addict, he could be relied upon to make no trouble for his conquerors. But these cases are exceptional. When left to itself, a society generally manages to come to terms with its favorite poison. The drug is a parasite on the body politic, but a parasite which its host has strength enough to keep under control. And the same applies to elementary sexuality. Against its excesses, societies contrive, in one way or another, to protect themselves.
Their defense against crowd-delirium is, in all too many cases, far less adequate. The professional moralists who inveigh against drunkenness are strangely silent about the equally disgusting vice of crowd intoxication, of downward self-transcendence into subhumanity by the process of getting together in a mob.
“Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there is God in the midst of them.” In the midst of two or three hundred the divine presence becomes more problematical. And when the numbers run into the two or three thousands, or tens of thousands, the likelihood of God being there, in the consciousness of each individual, declines almost to the vanishing point. For such is the nature of excited crowds (and every crowd is automatically self-exciting) and that where two or three thority—priests and the leaders of peoples —have never unequivocally proclaimed the immorality of this form of downward self-transcendence. True, crowd-delirium evoked by members of the opposition and in the name of heretical principles has everywhere been condemned by those in power. But crowd-delirium aroused by government agents, crowd-delirium in the name of orthodoxy, is an entirely different matter. In all cases where it can be made to serve the interests of the men controlling church and state, downward self-transcendence by means of herd-intoxication is treated as something legitimate and even highly desirable. Pilgrimages and political rallies, corybantic revivals and patriotic parades—these things are ethically right so long as they are our pilgrimages, our rallies, our revivals, and our parades. The fact that most of those taking part in these affairs are temporarily dehumanized by herd-poison is of no account in comparison with the fact that their dehumanization can be used to consolidate the religious and political powers that be. Being in a crowd is the best-known antidote to independent thought. Hence the dictator’s rooted objection to "mere psychology" and a private life. "Intellectuals of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your brains.”
Drugs, elementary sexuality, and herd-intoxication—these are the three most popular avenues of downward self-transcendence. There are many others, not so well-trodden as these great descending highways, but leading no less surely to the same infra-personal goal. There is the way, for example, of rhythmic movement, so widely employed in all primitive religions. And closely associated with the ecstasy-producing rite of rhythmic movement is the ecstasy-producing rite of rhythmic sound. Music is as vast as human nature and has something to say to men and women on every level of their being, from the self-regardingly sentimental to the abstractly intellectual, from the spiritual to the merely visceral. In one of its forms, music is a powerful drug, partly stimulant, partly narcotic, but wholly alterative.
Another road to downward self-transcendence is the way of what Christ called “vain repetition.” Yet another is self-inflicted pain, which is used in all religions to modify normal consciousness and as a means for the acquisition of psychic powers.
To what extent, and in what circumstances is it possible for a man to make use of the descending road as a way to genuine spiritual self-transcendence? z\t first sight it would seem obvious that the way down is not and can never be the way up. But in the realm of existence, things are not quite so simple as they are in our beautifully tidy world of words. In actual life a downward movement may be made the beginning of an ascent. When the shell of the ego has been cracked and there begins to be a consciousness of the subliminal and physiological otherness underlying personality, it sometimes happens that we catch a glimpse, fleeting but apocalyptic, of that other Otherness, which is the Ground of all being. So long as we are confined within our insulated selfhood, we remain unaware of the various not-selves with which we are associated—the organic not-self, the not-self of the personal subconscious, the collective not-self of the psychic medium, out of which our individualities have crystallized, and the not-self of the immanent and transcendent Spirit. Any escape, even by a descending road, out of insulated selfhood, makes possible at least a momentary awareness of the not-self at every level. There are recorded cases in which a single “anesthetic revelation” has served as the starting point of a new attitude toward life. In certain Tantric practices elementary sexuality is used as a road to spiritual awareness. At revival meetings it sometimes happens that persons intoxicated by herd poisoning acquire a new knowledge which transforms them permanently. In a word, the downward road does not lead invariably to disaster. However, it leads there often enough to make the taking of it extremely inadvisable.
On the subject of horizontal self-transcendence very little need be said —not because the phenomenon is unimportant (far from it), but because it is too obvious to require analysis, and of occurrence too frequent to be readily classifiable.
In order to escape from the horrors of insulated selfhood most men and women choose, most of the time, to go neither up nor down, but sideways. They identify themselves with some cause wider than their own immediate interests, but not degradingly lower and, if higher, higher only within the range of current social values. This horizontal, or nearly horizontal, self-transcendence may be into something as trivial as a hobby, or as precious as married love. It can be brought about through self-identification with any human activity, from running a business to research in nuclear physics, from composing music to collecting stamps, from campaigning for political office to educating children or studying the mating habits of birds.
Horizontal self-transcendence is of the utmost importance. Without it, there would be no art, no science, no law, no philosophy, indeed, no civilization. And there would also be no war, no odium theologicum or ideologicum, no systematic intolerance, no persecution. These great goods and these enormous evils are the fruits of man’s capacity for total and continuous self-identification with an idea, a feeling, a cause. How can we have the good without the evil, a high civilization without saturation bombing and the extermination of religious or political heretics? The answer is that we cannot have it, so long as our self-transcendence remains exclusively horizontal.
When we identify ourselves with an idea or a cause, we are in fact worshiping something homemade, something partial and parochial, something which, however noble, is all too human. “Patriotism,” as a great patriot concluded, on the eve of her execution by her country’s enemies, “patriotism is not enough.’’ Neither is Socialism, nor Communism, nor Capitalism; neither is art, nor science, nor public order, or any particular religious organization or church. All these are indispensable, but none of them is enough. Civilization demands from the individual self-identification with the highest of human causes. But if this self-identification with what is human is not accompanied by a conscious and consistent effort to achieve upward self-transcendence into the universal life of the Spirit, the goods achieved will always be mingled with counterbalancing evils. “We make,’* wrote Pascal, “an idol of truth itself; for truth without charity is not God, but his image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.” And it is not merely wrong to worship an idol; it is also exceedingly inexpedient. For example, the worship of truth apart from charity—self-identification with the cause of science unaccompanied by self-identification with the Ground of all being—results in the kind of situation which confronts us today. Every idol, however exalted, turns out in the long run to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifices.