Parallel teachings may be found in other ancient civilizations, notably the Egyptian and Chinese. Thus in the Shabaka inscription of ancient Egypt we find:8
Ptah lived as the governor in every body, and as the tongue in every mouth of all the gods, all cattle, all reptiles and everything else.…Thus every kind of work and every handicraft, and everything done with the arms, and every motion of the legs, and every action of all the limbs take place through his command, which…giveth value to everything.
And the Chinese sage Chuang Tzu writing about 200 BC says:9
Your body is the delegated image of Tao. Your life is not your own. It is the delegated harmony of Tao. Your individuality is not your own. It is the delegated adaptability of Tao.…You move, but know not how. You are at rest, but know not why.…These are the operations of the laws of Tao.
Such illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely, and there is every reason to believe that this was not just speculative philosophy. These ancient sages wrote not what they thought but what they felt, and the intuitive and poetic quality of their wisdom is emphasized by the fact that they simply stated what they felt and seldom, if ever, argued the point.
But modern man demands that his reason be convinced and expects his philosophy to be argued like a proposition in geometry. Among thinking people this is a heritage some five hundred years old at least and neither Freud nor wars and crises will make him doubt the supremacy of reason in a mere thirty years. But this heritage has left him in an awkward position having slain his faith in the psychologically satisfying doctrines of the Church, for there is no doubt that those who can really believe in a loving God, in the redemptive power of His Christ, and in the efficacy of confession, penance, and absolution, are essentially happy people. They feel themselves to lie in the everlasting arms of a Father whose demands on them are not too exacting because, having taken on human flesh Himself, He knows its frailties and because, having understood all, He can forgive all. For this and other reasons the Catholic Church is a master in the art of relieving man of his responsibilities, and where its priests do not indulge in petty politics and mild terrorism its people are among the happiest on earth. For they are able to trust life, knowing that however much it may pain them its master will never let them down.
The New Religions
But what of those whose reason will not allow them to believe these things? What do they do when the pains of life become too much? The majority, I suppose, try to forget them, and civilization offers countless ways of escape—movies, sports, magazines, mystery novels, high-speed travel, and the more time-honored remedies of wine, women, and song, all of which while being instructive, entertaining, and relatively harmless do not really solve the problem. For underlying all and the unescapable, wearing threats of economic insecurity and war, the tense, nerve-wracking struggle of business, the social and economic barriers to normal sex life coupled with the saddest misunderstanding of the art of marriage, the frustration of trying to make oneself a place in a huge, unwieldy community that cares nothing for you—one might compile quite a long list. And to know that the escapes do not work one has just to look at faces, especially when people think they are not being watched.
Then there are those who, being fundamentally religious and yet skeptical of orthodox Christianity, resort to the various new religions with which modern society abounds—Christian Science, Theosophy, Spiritualism, Buchmanism, Rosicrucianism, not to mention those unnamed cults which revolve around such personalities as Krishnamurti, Ouspensky, Meher Baba, Alice Bailey, the Ballards, Gurdjieff, Crowley, and a thousand other lesser teachers whose followers are comparatively few but often influential.10 In the same category must be included those who have found a substitute for religion in one of the many schools of the new psychology, some of which are almost semireligious in a certain sense of the word. But this category is especially interesting because although the man in the street may have little or no knowledge of such things, they are becoming increasingly popular among the intelligentsia, and in small, unobtrusive ways their influence slowly extends to society as a whole. It has often been observed that members of this category and also of the churches are predominantly women approaching or past the middle of life—a class which seems to constitute a special problem in the modern world. Many were deprived of their husbands in the Great War, others have lost them somewhat early in life for American men in particular are apt to die young through business worries and nervous strain. Others still are those who have failed to marry at all or who have made unsuccessful marriages. Thus it is often concluded that their interest in these matters is simply the result of sexual frustration. But while this may well be a contributory cause in some cases, it should be remembered that people naturally acquire an interest in religion in the latter half of life, having accomplished their mundane duties, and that women are more inclined to religious feeling than men. Perceiving this as a natural phenomenon the Hindus divided life into two main stages. In the first man’s duties consisted of Artha and Kama, the fulfillment of the duties of citizenship and the fulfillment of the senses—making a position in the world and establishing a family on the one hand, and the life of love, sex, and aesthetics on the other. When these were completed came the stage of Dharma or devotion to religion.
Apart from the definite adherents of these new religious and “religio-psychological” groups there are innumerable “seekers” who find no one creed fully satisfying, and who drift from group to group, seeking they know not what unless it is that magical knowledge which will solve all problems and set their souls free from fear. Sometimes they think they have almost found it in this or that “ism,” but what a strange place to look for the secret of life! Surely it is more likely that this secret will be found in life itself and not in doctrines and ideas about life?
Some look for Truth in creeds and forms and rules;
Some search for doubts and dogmas in the schools,
But from behind the Veil a Voice proclaims,
“Your road lies neither here nor there, O fools!”
For the peculiar thing is that both what we are trying to escape and what we are trying to find are inside ourselves. This, as we have seen, is almost more true of modern man than of the primitive, for our difficulty is what to do with ourselves rather than the external world.
Thus, at the risk of repeating a truism, it is obvious that unless we can come face to face with the difficulty in ourselves, everything to which we look for salvation is nothing more than an extra curtain with which to hide that difficulty from our eyes. Whether salvation is sought in mere forgetting or in a definite attempt to find salvation either through religion, philosophy, or psychological healing the same principle applies. Psychological healing in particular has been devised for the very purpose of enabling man to face himself, to accept nature in himself with all its primeval desires and fears. Oddly enough, however, many of the most fervent devotees of psychology are outstanding examples of its failure to help them. It does not attempt to offer comforting doctrines about this world or the hereafter like many forms of religion and philosophy, nor does it hold out promises of power and success. It digs ruthlessly into the secret places of the heart and drags out man’s most carefully guarded mysteries, and yet one has met accredited and fully qualified practitioners of this science who appear to be anything but reconciled to themselves or to life. For it seems that even the acceptance of life can be used as a means to escape it.
The Instrument of Freedom
But this is not surprising. The seekers for forgetfulness, salvation, and health of the mind alike want happiness, and therefore among these classes one cannot expect to find happy people. Those who are happy are interested in religion mainly as a means of expressing their gratitude to life and God and of enabling others to see as they do; they are not looking for personal salvation, for they do not think about such things. But how can they enable others to see as they do if it is true that while those who have happiness do not search for it, those who have not cannot find it by seeking?
We have examined something of the meaning of unhappiness, of the war between the opposites in the human soul, of the fear of fear, of