Nous Rose

The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious. For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated, and the whole future is condemned to hopeless staleness, to a drab grey lit only by will-o’-the-wisps.

Campaigns to destigmatize so-called "mental illness" often take a wrong turning here. They try to demonstrate how suffers of some condition have made amazing contributions to the science or the arts. Trying to destigmatize the diagnosis of autism, for example, we read how Einstein and Newton would have received that diagnosis today, and yet made fabulous discoveries in the field of physics. Even if they are acknowledged to have been "different", their worth is still reckoned in terms of how their work has impacted on the world of others. However well-intentioned, such perspectives are hardly judicious, as they make an implicit equation between value and social utility. Taking this step is dangerous, as the moment that human life is defined in terms of utility, the door to stigmatization and segregation is opened. If someone was found to be not useful, what value, then, would their life have? This was in fact exactly the argument of the early-twentieth-century eugenicists who complained for the extermination of the mentally ill. Although no one would admit such aspirations today, we cannot ignore the resurfacing in recent years of a remarkably similar discourse, with its emphasis on social utility, hereditary and genetic vulnerability.

The alienated person has transformed his own functions of feeling and thought to an object outside. He is not himself, he has no sense of “I,” of identity. This lack of a sense of identity has many consequences. The most fundamental and general one is that it prevents integration of the total personality, hence it leaves the person disunited within himself, lacking either capacity “to will one thing” or if he seems to will one thing his will lacks authenticity. In the widest sense, every neurosis can be considered an outcome of alienation; this is so because neurosis is characterized by the fact that one passion (for instance, for money, power, women, etc.) becomes dominant and separated from the total personality, thus becoming the ruler of the person. This passion is his idol to which he submits even though he may rationalize the nature of his idol and give it many different and often well-sounding names. He is ruled by a partial desire, he transfers all he has left to this desire, he is weaker the stronger “it” becomes. He has become alienated from himself precisely because “he” has become the slave of a part of himself.

Everywhere we look something induces us to escape our alienation. We hear that we should search for a soul mate, do yoga, practice meditation, find the perfect job, relax with friends, or spend more time with our family. This omnipresent encouragement to discover a way out of alienation speaks to the danger that we assume it represents. According to our usual way of thinking, the alienated subject poses a threat to itself, to other people, and to society. Those suffering from alienation might kill themselves, hurt others, or violate the norms of human interaction. But alienation is not unbearable in itself. It is unbearable when one believes in the possibility of an unalienated state, in a past or a future free from the burden of it. The lure of overcoming alienation entraps subjects in the pursuit of a false possibility that deforms their perspective on existence. Existence becomes the struggle to transcend the obstacles standing in the way of achieving happiness. Unhappiness becomes a state to flee rather than the normal state of existence. Burdened by the image of an unalienated future, one finds oneself fleeing from existence itself. In such a position, there is no possibility for finding satisfaction in the everyday variegations of one’s life. People don’t become dangerous because of their alienation but because of their belief that they should be self-identical and are failing to achieve this aim. The danger consists in trying to overcome alienation, not in alienation itself.

The words “image,” “appearance,” and “outwardly” are crucial to understanding the morality of the evil. While they seem to lack any motivation to be good, they intensely desire to appear good. Their “goodness” is on a level of pretense. It is, in effect, a lie. This is why they are the “people of the lie.” Actually, the lie is designed not so much to deceive others as to deceive themselves. They cannot or will not tolerate the pain of self-reproach. The decorum with which they lead their lives is maintained as a mirror in which they can see themselves reflected righteously. Yet the self-deceit would be unnecessary if the evil had no sense of right and wrong. We lie only when we are attempting to cover up something we know to be illicit. Some rudimentary form of conscience must precede the act of lying. There is no need to hide unless we first feel that something needs to be hidden. We come now to a sort of paradox. I have said that evil people feel themselves to be perfect. At the same time, however, I think they have an unacknowledged sense of their own evil nature. Indeed, it is this very sense from which they are frantically trying to flee. The essential component of evil is not the absence of a sense of sin or imperfection but the unwillingness to tolerate that sense. At one and the same time, the evil are aware of their evil and desperately trying to avoid the awareness. Rather than blissfully lacking a sense of morality, like the psychopath, they are continually engaged in sweeping the evidence of their evil under the rug of their own consciousness. The problem is not a defect of conscience but the effort to deny the conscience its due. We become evil by attempting to hide from ourselves. The wickedness of the evil is not committed directly, but indirectly as a part of this cover-up process. Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it.

The alienation of the spectator, which reinforces the contemplated objects that result from his own unconscious activity, works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle's estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual's gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.

Every human being has both sets of forces within him. One set clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging on to the past, afraid to grow away from the primitive communion with the mother's uterus and breast, afraid to take chances, afraid to jeopardize what he already has, afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels him forward toward wholeness of Self and uniqueness of Self, toward full functioning of all his capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that he can accept his deepest, real, unconscious Self…This basic dilemma or conflict between the defensive forces and the growth trends I conceive to be existential, imbedded in the deepest nature of the human being, now and forever into the future…Therefore we can consider the process of healthy growth to be a never ending series of free choice situations, confronting each individual at every point throughout his life, in which he must choose between the delights of safety and growth, dependence and independence, regression and progression, immaturity and maturity. Safety has both anxieties and delights; growth has both anxieties and delights. We grow forward when the delights of growth and anxieties of safety are greater than the anxieties of growth and the delights of safety.

The Zen approach is to enter right into the object itself and see it, as it were, from the inside. To know the flower is to become the flower, to be the flower, to bloom as the flower, and to enjoy the sunlight as well as the rainfall. When this is done, the flower speaks to me and I know all its secrets, all its joys, all its sufferings; that is, all its life vibrating within itself. Not only that: along with my "knowledge" of the flower I know all the secrets of the universe, which includes all the secrets of my own Self, which has been eluding my pursuit all my life so far, because I divided myself into a duality, the pursuer and the pursued, the object and the shadow. No wonder that I never succeeded in catching my Self, and how exhausting this game was! Now, however, by knowing the flower I know my Self. That is, by losing myself in the flower I know my Self as well as the flower. I call this kind of approach to reality the Zen way, the antescientific or metascientific or even antiscientific way. This way of knowing or seeing reality may also be called conative of creative. While the scientific way kills, murders the object and by dissecting the corpse and putting the parts together again tries to reproduce the original living body, which is really a deed of impossibility, the Zen way takes life as it is lived instead of chopping it to pieces and tying to restore its life by intellection, or in abstraction gluing the broken pieces together. The Zen way preserves life as life; no surgical knife touches it.

Oneness implies the existence of twoness or threeness, but this experience says otherwise. It points instead to the presence of that which underlies the world of duality, to a union that is already present, not one that has to be achieved. It gives us a sense of completion, not by making a new whole but by exposing a mirage. It undercuts our notions of self and other, subject and object, and observer and observed. While it does not contradict the conventional experience, it puts it in perspective as only relatively real. At its best, desire has the capacity to reveal the underlying nature of reality, to help us discover our natural state…The natural state is not something that can be turned into an object, nor can it be found when we are searching for it as an object; it can only be experienced through the medium of personal experience. The words and symbols that are used to evoke or describe it might be helpful as far as they go, but they come after the fact and they do not go very far. At their peak, they give a sense of the flavor of some hidden capacity of the self: the capacity to know without resorting to objectification. In its wisdom aspect, the natural state is said to be luminous and knowing; indefinable and indescribable; clear, unwavering, fertile and empty; ungraspable by language or conceptual thought.

The answer to the problem of suffering is not away from the problem but in it. The inevitability of pain will not be met by deadening sensitivity but by increasing it, by exploring and feeling out the manner in which the natural organism itself wants to react and which its innate wisdom has provided.

The neurotic exhausts himself not only in self-preoccupations like hypochondrial fears and all sorts of fantasies, but also in others: those around him on whom he is dependent become his therapeutic work project; he takes out his subjective problems on them. But people are not clay to be molded; they have needs and counter-wills of their own. The neurotic's frustration as a failed artist can't be remedied by anything but an objective creative work of his own. Another way of looking at it is to say that the more totally one takes in the world as a problem, the more inferior or "bad" one is going to feel inside oneself. He can try to work out this "badness" by striving for perfection, and then the neurotic symptom becomes his "creative" work; or he can try to make himself perfect by means his partner. But it is obvious to us that the only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life. In this way he satisfies nature, which asks that he live and act objectively as a vital animal plunging into the world; but he also satisfies his own distinctive human nature because he plunges in on his own symbolic terms and not as a reflex of the world as given to mere physical sense experience. He takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, and then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem. This, as Goethe saw in Faust, is the highest that man can achieve.

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalisations, prejudices in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking process attempts to organise this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of logic and plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organising our life. This false map is not repressed. What is repressed is the knowledge of reality, the knowledge of what is true. If we ask, then: What is unconscious? The answer must be: Aside from irrational passions, almost the whole of knowledge of reality. The unconscious is basically determined by society, which produces irrational passions and provides its members with various kinds of fiction and thus forces the truth to become the prisoner of the alleged rationality.

Healthy, normal people cannot experience either agony or death. They live as if life had a definitive character. It is an integral part of normal people's superficial equilibrium to take life as absolutely independent from death and to objectify death as a reality transcending life. That's why they perceive death as coming from the outside, not as an inner fatality of life itself. One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner. Metaphysical revelations begin only when one's superficial equilibrium starts to totter and a painful struggle is substituted for naive spontaneity. The premonition of death is so rare in average people that one can can practically say that it does not exist. The fact that the presentiment of death appears only when life is shaken to its foundations proves beyond doubt the immanence of death in life. An insight into these depths shows us how illusory is the belief in life's integrity and how well founded the belief in a metaphysical substratum of demonism.

The anxiety of fate and death produces nonpathological strivings for security. Large sections of man’s civilization serve the purpose of giving him safety against the attacks of fate and death. He realizes that no absolute and no final security is possible; he also realizes that life demands again and again the courage to surrender some or even all security for the sake of full self-affirmation. Nevertheless he tries to reduce the power of fate and the threat of death as much as possible. Pathological anxiety about fate and death impels toward a security which is comparable to the security of a prison. He who lives in this prison is unable to leave the security given to him by his self-imposed limitations. But these limitations are not based on a full awareness of reality. Therefore the security of the neurotic is unrealistic. He fears what is not to be feared and he feels to be safe what is not safe. The anxiety which he is not able to take upon himself produces images having no basis in reality, but it recedes in the face of things which should be feared. That is, one avoids particular dangers, although they are hardly real, and suppresses the awareness of having to die although this is an ever-present reality. Misplaced fear is a consequence of the pathological form of the anxiety of fate and death.

In the healthy personality we see the struggle toward a balanced relationship between the energies of the ego and the Self such that the energies of the Self infuse the ego but do not overwhelm it or provide it with substitutes for human gratifications. Libido can be transferred across the ego/Self threshold and invested in love-relations, interests, commitments etc. In trauma, however, it is another story, as we have seen already. All investment of libido in "this life" is resisted by the self-care system in order to avoid further devastation. Energies of the numinous world then became substitutes for the self-esteem that should come from embodied gratifications in the human world. The transpersonal is placed in the service of defense.

The conflict of modern man stems from the opposing values represented by his ego and his body. The ego thinks of achievement, the body of pleasure. The ego functions with images, the body functions with feelings. When image and feeling coincide, the result is a healthy emotional life. When, however, the feeling is subordinated or suppressed in favor of the ego image, the result is a life of illusion and desperation. The illusion contradicts the reality of the body's condition, the desperation evades its needs. Behind every illusion is the desire for freedom and for love. The desperate individual strives for freedom and love through the illusion of power. In his mind, power is the key to freedom and love. Although this illusion serves to sustain his spirit in its despair and helplessness, we have seen that it also maintains the despair and helplessness when the critical period of childhood has passed. To overcome the illusion of power, the reality of freedom and love must be experienced as bodily feelings. This is accomplished by concentrating upon the physical tensions of the body. When a person feels the rigidity of his body, he will know that he is not free, regardless of his rebellion and defiance. If he feels that his body is frozen, he will know that he is shackled, whatever his external situation may be. If he becomes aware that his respiration is inhibited and his motility reduced, he will realize that he is not able to love.

When we refuse to face the shadow or try to fight it with willpower alone, saying, “Get thee beind me, Satan,” we merely relegate this energy to the unconscious, and from there it exerts its power in a negative, compulsive, projected form. Then our projections will transform our surrounding world into a setting which shows us our own faces, though we do not recognize them as our own. We become increasingly isolated; instead of a real relation to the surrounding world there is only an illusory one, for we relate not to the world as it is but to the “evil, wicked world” which our shadow projection shows us. The result is an inflated, autoerotic state of being, cut off from reality, which usually takes the well-known form of “If only so and so were such and such,” or “When this will have happened,” or “If I were properly understood” or “appreciated.” Such an impasse is seen by us, because of our projections, as the ill will of the environment, and thus a vicious circle is established, continuing ad infinitum, ad nauseam. These projections eventually so shape our own attitudes toward others that at last we literally bring about that which we project. We imagine ourselves so long pursued by ill will that ill will is eventually produced by others in response to our vitriolic defensiveness. Our fellow men see this as unprovoked hostility; this arouses their defensiveness and their shadow projections upon us, to which we in turn react with our defensiveness, thereby causing more ill will.