PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS




                   Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious


                                   BY
                             D. H. LAWRENCE

                                NEW YORK
                             THOMAS SELTZER
                                  1921




                  Copyright, 1921, by
                  THOMAS SELTZER, INC.

                  All rights reserved


                  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




                                CONTENTS


   I. PSYCHOANALYSIS _vs._ MORALITY 9

  II. THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM 26

 III. THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS 45

  IV. THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER 64

   V. THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED 83

  VI. HUMAN RELATIONS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 102




                               CHAPTER I
                     PSYCHOANALYSIS _vs._ MORALITY


Psychoanalysis has sprung many surprises on us, performed more than one
_volte face_ before our indignant eyes. No sooner had we got used to the
psychiatric quack who vehemently demonstrated the serpent of sex coiled
round the root of all our actions, no sooner had we begun to feel
honestly uneasy about our lurking complexes, than lo and behold the
psychoanalytic gentleman reappeared on the stage with a theory of pure
psychology. The medical faculty, which was on hot bricks over the
therapeutic innovations, heaved a sigh of relief as it watched the
ground warming under the feet of the professional psychologists.

This, however, was not the end. The ears of the ethnologist began to
tingle, the philosopher felt his gorge rise, and at last the moralist
knew he must rush in. By this time psychoanalysis had become a public
danger. The mob was on the alert. The Œdipus complex was a household
word, the incest motive a commonplace of tea-table chat. Amateur
analyses became the vogue. “Wait till you’ve been analyzed,” said one
man to another, with varying intonation. A sinister look came into the
eyes of the initiates—the famous, or infamous, Freud look. You could
recognize it everywhere, wherever you went.

Psychoanalysts know what the end will be. They have crept in among us as
healers and physicians; growing bolder, they have asserted their
authority as scientists; two more minutes and they will appear as
apostles. Have we not seen and heard the _ex cathedra_ Jung? And does it
need a prophet to discern that Freud is on the brink of a
Weltanschauung—or at least a Menschanschauung, which is a much more
risky affair? What detains him? Two things. First and foremost, the
moral issue. And next, but more vital, he can’t get down to the rock on
which he must build his church.

Let us look to ourselves. This new doctrine—it will be called no
less—has been subtly and insidiously suggested to us, gradually
inoculated into us. It is true that doctors are the priests, nay worse,
the medicine-men of our decadent society. Psychoanalysis has made the
most of the opportunity.

First and foremost the issue is a moral issue. It is not here a matter
of reform, new moral values. It is the life or death of all morality.
The leaders among the psychoanalysts know what they have in hand.
Probably most of their followers are ignorant, and therefore
pseudo-innocent. But it all amounts to the same thing. Psychoanalysis is
out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral
faculty in man. Let us fling the challenge, and then we can take sides
in all fairness.

The psychoanalytic leaders know what they are about, and shrewdly keep
quiet, going gently. Yet, however gently they go, they set the moral
stones rolling. At every step the most innocent and unsuspecting analyst
starts a little landslide. The old world is yielding under us. Without
any direct attack, it comes loose under the march of the psychoanalyst,
and we hear the dull rumble of the incipient avalanche. We are in for a
debâcle.

But at least let us know what we are in for. If we are to rear a serpent
against ourselves, let us at least refuse to nurse it in our temples or
to call it the cock of Esculapius. It is time the white garb of the
therapeutic cant was stripped off the psychoanalyst. And now that we
feel the strange crackling and convulsion in our moral foundations, let
us at least look at the house which we are bringing down over our heads
so blithely.

Long ago we watched in frightened anticipation when Freud set out on his
adventure into the hinterland of human consciousness. He was seeking for
the unknown sources of the mysterious stream of consciousness. Immortal
phrase of the immortal James! Oh stream of hell which undermined my
adolescence! The stream of consciousness! I felt it streaming through my
brain, in at one ear and out at the other. And again I was sure it went
round in my cranium, like Homer’s Ocean, encircling my established mind.
And sometimes I felt it must bubble up in the cerebellum and wind its
way through all the convolutions of the true brain. Horrid stream!
Whence did it come, and whither was it bound? The stream of
consciousness!

And so, who could remain unmoved when Freud seemed suddenly to plunge
towards the origins? Suddenly he stepped out of the conscious into the
unconscious, out of the everywhere into the nowhere, like some supreme
explorer. He walks straight through the wall of sleep, and we hear him
rumbling in the cavern of dreams. The impenetrable is not impenetrable,
unconsciousness is not nothingness. It is sleep, that wall of darkness
which limits our day. Walk bang into the wall, and behold the wall isn’t
there. It is the vast darkness of a cavern’s mouth, the cavern of
anterior darkness whence issues the stream of consciousness.

With dilated hearts we watched Freud disappearing into the cavern of
darkness, which is sleep and unconsciousness to us, darkness which
issues in the foam of all our day’s consciousness. He was making for the
origins. We watched his ideal candle flutter and go small. Then we
waited, as men do wait, always expecting the wonder of wonders. He came
back with dreams to sell.

But sweet heaven, what merchandise! What dreams, dear heart! What was
there in the cave? Alas that we ever looked! Nothing but a huge slimy
serpent of sex, and heaps of excrement, and a myriad repulsive little
horrors spawned between sex and excrement.

Is it true? Does the great unknown of sleep contain nothing else? No
lovely spirits in the anterior regions of our being? None! Imagine the
unspeakable horror of the _repressions_ Freud brought home to us.
Gagged, bound, maniacal repressions, sexual complexes, fæcal
inhibitions, dream-monsters. We tried to repudiate them. But no, they
were there, demonstrable. These were the horrid things that ate our
souls and caused our helpless neuroses.

We had felt that perhaps we were wrong inside, but we had never imagined
it so bad. However, in the name of healing and medicine we prepared to
accept it all. If it was all just a result of illness, we were prepared
to go through with it. The analyst promised us that the tangle of
complexes would be unravelled, the obsessions would evaporate, the
monstrosities would dissolve, sublimate, when brought into the light of
day. Once all the dream-horrors were translated into full consciousness,
they would sublimate into—well, we don’t quite know what. But anyhow,
they would sublimate. Such is the charm of a new phrase that we accepted
this sublimation process without further question. If our complexes were
going to sublimate once they were surgically exposed to full mental
consciousness, why, best perform the operation.

Thus analysis set off gaily on its therapeutic course. But like
Hippolytus, we ran too near the sea’s edge. After all, if complexes
exist only as abnormalities which can be removed, psychoanalysis has not
far to go. Our own horses ran away with us. We began to realize that
complexes were not just abnormalities. They were part of the
stock-in-trade of the normal unconscious. The only abnormality, so far,
lies in bringing them into consciousness.

This creates a new issue. Psychoanalysis, the moment it begins to
demonstrate the nature of the unconscious, is assuming the rôle of
psychology. Thus the new science of psychology proceeds to inform us
that our complexes are not just mere interlockings in the mechanism of
the psyche, as was taught by one of the first and most brilliant of the
analysts, a man now forgotten. He fully realized that even the psyche
itself depends on a certain organic, mechanistic activity, even as life
depends on the mechanistic organism of the body. The mechanism of the
psyche could have its hitches, certain parts could stop working, even as
the parts of the body can stop their functioning. This arrest in some
part of the functioning psyche gave rise to a complex, even as the
stopping of one little cog-wheel in a machine will arrest a whole
section of that machine. This was the origin of the complex-theory,
purely mechanistic. Now the analyst found that a complex did not
necessarily vanish when brought into consciousness. Why should it? Hence
he decided that it did not arise from the stoppage of any little wheel.
For it refused to disappear, no matter how many psychic wheels were
started. Finally, then, a complex could not be regarded as the result of
an inhibition.

Here is the new problem. If a complex is not caused by the inhibition of
some so-called normal sex-impulse, what on earth is it caused by? It
obviously refuses to sublimate—or to come undone when exposed and
prodded. It refuses to answer to the promptings of normal sex-impulse.
You can remove all possible inhibitions of the normal sex desire, and
still you cannot remove the complex. All you have done is to make
conscious a desire which previously was unconscious.

This is the moral dilemma of psychoanalysis. The analyst set out to cure
neurotic humanity by removing the cause of the neurosis. He finds that
the cause of neurosis lies in some unadmitted sex desire. After all he
has said about inhibition of normal sex, he is brought at last to
realize that at the root of almost every neurosis lies some
incest-craving, and that this incest-craving is _not the result of
inhibition of normal sex-craving_. Now see the dilemma—it is a fearful
one. If the incest-craving is not the outcome of any inhibition of
normal desire, if it actually exists and refuses to give way before any
criticism, what then? What remains but to accept it as part of the
normal sex-manifestation?

Here is an issue which analysis is perfectly willing to face. Among
themselves the analysts are bound to accept the incest-craving as part
of the normal sexuality of man, normal, but suppressed, because of moral
and perhaps biological fear. Once, however, you accept the
incest-craving as part of the normal sexuality of man, you must remove
all repression of incest itself. In fact, you must admit incest as you
now admit sexual marriage, as a duty even. Since at last it works out
that neurosis is not the result of inhibition of so-called _normal_ sex,
but of inhibition of incest-craving. Any inhibition must be wrong, since
inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity. Therefore the
inhibition of incest-craving is wrong, and this wrong is the cause of
practically all modern neurosis and insanity.

Psychoanalysis will never openly state this conclusion. But it is to
this conclusion that every analyst must, willy-nilly, consciously or
unconsciously, bring his patient.

Trigant Burrow says that Freud’s _unconscious_ does but represent our
conception of conscious sexual life as this latter exists in a state of
repression. Thus Freud’s unconscious amounts practically to no more than
our repressed incest impulses. Again, Burrow says that it is knowledge
of sex that constitutes sin, and not sex itself. It is when the mind
turns to consider and _know_ the great affective-passional functions and
emotions that sin enters. Adam and Eve fell, not because they had sex,
or even because they committed the sexual act, but because they became
aware of their sex and of the possibility of the act. When sex became to
them a mental object—that is, when they discovered that they could
deliberately enter upon and enjoy and even provoke sexual activity in
themselves, then they were cursed and cast out of Eden. Then man became
self-responsible; he entered on his own career.

Both these assertions by Burrow seem to us brilliantly true. But must we
inevitably draw the conclusion psychoanalysis draws? Because we discover
in the unconscious the repressed body of our incest-craving, and because
the recognition of _desire_, the making a mental objective of a certain
desire causes the introduction of the sin motive, the desire in itself
being beyond criticism or moral judgment, must we therefore accept the
incest-craving as part of our natural desire and proceed to put it into
practice, as being at any rate a lesser evil than neurosis and insanity?

It is a question. One thing, however, psychoanalysis all along the line
fails to determine, and that is the nature of the pristine unconscious
in man. The incest-craving is or is not inherent in the pristine psyche.
When Adam and Eve became aware of sex in themselves, they became aware
of that which was pristine in them, and which preceded all knowing. But
when the analyst discovers the incest motive in the unconscious, surely
he is only discovering a term of humanity’s repressed _idea_ of sex. It
is not even _suppressed_ sex-consciousness, but _repressed_. That is, it
is nothing pristine and anterior to mentality. It is in itself the
mind’s ulterior motive. That is, the incest-craving is propagated in the
pristine unconscious by the mind itself, even though unconsciously. The
mind acts as incubus and procreator of its own horrors, _deliberately
unconsciously_. And the incest motive is in its origin not a pristine
impulse, but a logical extension of the existent idea of sex and love.
The mind, that is, transfers the idea of incest into the
affective-passional psyche, and keeps it there as a repressed motive.

This is as yet a mere assertion. It cannot be made good until we
determine the nature of the true, pristine unconscious, in which all our
genuine impulse arises—a very different affair from that sack of horrors
which psychoanalysts would have us believe is source of motivity. The
Freudian unconscious is the cellar in which the mind keeps its own
bastard spawn. The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of
real motivity. The sex of which Adam and Eve became conscious derived
from the very God who bade them be not conscious of it—it was not spawn
produced by secondary propagation from the mental consciousness itself.




                               CHAPTER II
                     THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM


It is obvious we cannot recover our moral footing until we can in some
way determine the true nature of the unconscious. The word unconscious
itself is a mere definition by negation and has no positive meaning.
Freud no doubt prefers it for this reason. He rejects _subconscious_ and
_preconscious_, because both these would imply a sort of nascent
consciousness, the shadowy half-consciousness which precedes mental
realization. And by his unconscious he intends no such thing. He wishes
rather to convey, we imagine, that which _recoils from_ consciousness,
that which reacts in the psyche away from mental consciousness. His
unconscious is, we take it, that part of the human consciousness which,
though mental, ideal in its nature, yet is unwilling to expose itself to
full recognition, and so recoils back into the affective regions and
acts there as a secret agent, unconfessed, unadmitted, potent, and
usually destructive. The whole body of our repressions makes up our
unconscious.

The question lies here: whether a repression is a primal impulse which
has been deterred from fulfilment, or whether it is an _idea_ which is
refused enactment. Is a repression a repressed passional impulse, or is
it an idea which we suppress and refuse to put into practice—nay, which
we even refuse to own at all, a disowned, outlawed idea, which exists
rebelliously outside the pale?

Man can inhibit the true passional impulses and so produce a derangement
in the psyche. This is a truism nowadays, and we are grateful to
psychoanalysis for helping to make it so. But man can do more than this.
Finding himself in a sort of emotional _cul de sac_, he can proceed to
deduce from his given emotional and passional premises conclusions which
are not emotional or passional at all, but just logical, abstract,
ideal. That is, a man finds it impossible to realize himself in
marriage. He recognizes the fact that his emotional, even passional,
regard for his mother is deeper than it ever could be for a wife. This
makes him unhappy, for he knows that passional communion is not complete
unless it be also sexual. He has a body of sexual passion which he
cannot transfer to a wife. He has a profound love for his mother. Shut
in between walls of tortured and increasing passion, he must find some
escape or fall down the pit of insanity and death. What is the only
possible escape? To seek in the arms of the mother the refuge which
offers nowhere else. And so the incest-motive is born. All the labored
explanations of the psychoanalysts are unnecessary. The incest motive is
a logical deduction of the human reason, which has recourse to this last
extremity, to save itself. Why is the human reason in peril? That is
another story. At the moment we are merely considering the origin of the
incest motive.

The logical conclusion of incest is, of course, a profound decision in
the human soul, a decision affecting the deepest passional centers. It
rouses the deepest instinctive opposition. And therefore it must be kept
secret until this opposition is either worn away or persuaded away.
Hence the repression and ultimate disclosure.

Now here we see the secret working of the process of idealism. By
idealism we understand the motivizing of the great affective sources by
means of ideas mentally derived. As for example the incest motive, which
is first and foremost a logical deduction made by the human reason, even
if unconsciously made, and secondly is introduced into the affective,
passional sphere, where it now proceeds to serve as a principle for
action.

This motivizing of the passional sphere from the ideal is the final
peril of human consciousness. It is the death of all spontaneous,
creative life, and the substituting of the mechanical principle.

It is obvious that the ideal becomes a mechanical principle, if it be
applied to the affective soul as a fixed motive. An ideal established in
control of the passional soul is no more and no less than a supreme
machine-principle. And a machine, as we know, is the active unit of the
material world. Thus we see how it is that in the end pure idealism is
identical with pure materialism, and the most ideal peoples are the most
completely material. Ideal and material are identical. The ideal is but
the god in the machine—the little, fixed, machine principle which works
the human psyche automatically.

We are now in the last stages of idealism. And psychoanalysis alone has
the courage necessary to conduct us through these last stages. The
identity of love with sex, the single necessity for fulfilment through
love, these are our fixed ideals. We must fulfil these ideals in their
extremity. And this brings us finally to incest, even incest-worship. We
have no option, whilst our ideals stand.

Why? Because incest is the logical conclusion of our ideals, when these
ideals have to be carried into passional effect. And idealism has no
escape from logic. And once he has built himself in the shape of any
ideal, man will go to any logical length rather than abandon his ideal
corpus. Nay, some great cataclysm has to throw him down and destroy the
whole fabric of his life before the motor-principle of his dominant
ideal is destroyed. Hence psychoanalysis as the advance-guard of
science, the evangel of the last _ideal_ liberty. For of course there is
a great fascination in a completely effected idealism. Man is then
undisputed master of his own fate, and captain of his own soul. But
better say engine-driver, for in truth he is no more than the little god
in the machine, this master of fate. He has invented his own automatic
principles, and he works himself according to them, like any little
mechanic inside the works.

But ideal or not, we are all of us between the pit and the pendulum, or
the walls of red-hot metal, as may be. If we refuse the Freudian
_pis-aller_ as a means of escape, we have still to find some way out.
For there we are, all of us, trapped in a corner where we cannot, and
simply do not know how to fulfil our own natures, passionally. We don’t
know in which way fulfilment lies. If psychoanalysis discovers incest,
small blame to it.

Yet we do know this much: that the pushing of the ideal to any further
lengths will not avail us anything. We have actually to go back to our
own unconscious. But not to the unconscious which is the inverted
reflection of our ideal consciousness. We must discover, if we can, the
true unconscious, where our life bubbles up in us, prior to any
mentality. The first bubbling life in us, which is innocent of any
mental alteration, this is the unconscious. It is pristine, not in any
way ideal. It is the spontaneous origin from which it behooves us to
live.

What then is the true unconscious? It is not a shadow cast from the
mind. It is the spontaneous life-motive in every organism. Where does it
begin? It begins where life begins. But that is too vague. It is no use
talking about life and the unconscious in bulk. You can talk about
electricity, because electricity is a homogeneous force, conceivable
apart from any incorporation. But life is inconceivable as a general
thing. It exists only in living creatures. So that life begins, now as
always, in an individual living creature. In the beginning of the
individual living creature is the beginning of life, every time and
always, and life has no beginning apart from this. Any attempt at a
further generalization takes us merely beyond the consideration of life
into the region of mechanical homogeneous force. This is shown in the
cosmologies of eastern religions.

The beginning of life is in the beginning of the first individual
creature. You may call the naked, unicellular bit of plasm the first
individual, if you like. Mentally, as far as thinkable simplicity goes,
it is the first. So that we may say that life begins in the first naked
unicellular organism. And where life begins the unconscious also begins.
But mark, the first naked unicellular organism is an _individual_. It is
a specific individual, not a mathematical unit, like a unit of force.

Where the individual begins, life begins. The two are inseparable, life
and individuality. And also, where the individual begins, the
unconscious, which is the specific life-motive, also begins. We are
trying to trace the unconscious to its source. And we find that this
source, in all the higher organisms, is the first ovule cell from which
an individual organism arises. At the moment of conception, when a
procreative male nucleus fuses with the nucleus of the female germ, at
that moment does a new unit of life, of consciousness, arise in the
universe. Is it not obvious? The unconscious has no other source than
this, this first fused nucleus of the ovule.

Useless to talk about the unconscious as if it were a homogeneous force
like electricity. You can only deal with the unconscious when you
realize that in every individual organism an individual nature, an
individual consciousness, is spontaneously created at the moment of
conception. We say _created_. And by _created_ we mean spontaneously
appearing in the universe, out of nothing. _Ex nihilo nihil fit._ It is
true that an individual is also generated. By the fusion of two nuclei,
male and female, we understand the process of generation. And from the
process of generation we may justly look for a new unit, according to
the law of cause and effect. As a natural or automatic result of the
process of generation we may look for a new unit of existence. But the
nature of this new unit must derive from the natures of the parents,
also by law. And this we deny. We deny that the nature of any new
creature derives from the natures of its parents. The nature of the
infant does _not_ follow from the natures of its parents. The nature of
the infant is _not_ just a new permutation-and-combination of elements
contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the
infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents,
something which could never be derived from the natures of all the
existent individuals or previous individuals. There is in the nature of
the infant something entirely new, underived, underivable, something
which is, and which will forever remain, _causeless_. And this something
is the unanalyzable, indefinable reality of individuality. Every time at
the moment of conception of every higher organism an individual nature
incomprehensibly arises in the universe, out of nowhere. Granted the
whole cause-and-effect process of generation and evolution, still the
individual is not explained. The individual unit of consciousness and
being which arises at the conception of every higher organism arises by
pure creation, by a process not susceptible to understanding, a process
which takes place outside the field of mental comprehension, where
mentality, which is definitely limited, cannot and does not exist.

This causeless created nature of the individual being is the same as the
old mystery of the divine nature of the soul. Religion was right and
science is wrong. Every individual creature has a soul, a specific
individual nature the origin of which cannot be found in any
cause-and-effect process whatever. Cause-and-effect will not explain
even the individuality of a single dandelion. There is no assignable
cause, and no logical reason, for individuality. On the contrary,
individuality appears in defiance of all scientific law, in defiance
even of reason.

Having established so much, we can really approach the unconscious. By
the unconscious we wish to indicate that essential unique nature of
every individual creature, which is, by its very nature, unanalyzable,
undefinable, inconceivable. It cannot be conceived, it can only be
experienced, in every single instance. And being inconceivable, we will
call it the unconscious. As a matter of fact, _soul_ would be a better
word. By the unconscious we do mean the soul. But the word _soul_ has
been vitiated by the idealistic use, until nowadays it means only that
which a man conceives himself to be. And that which a man conceives
himself to be is something far different from his true unconscious. So
we must relinquish the ideal word soul.

If, however, the unconscious is inconceivable, how do we know it at all?
We know it by direct experience. All the best part of knowledge is
inconceivable. We know the sun. But we cannot conceive the sun, unless
we are willing to accept some theory of burning gases, some
cause-and-effect nonsense. And even if we do have a mental conception of
the sun as a sphere of blazing gas—which it certainly isn’t—we are just
as far from knowing what _blaze_ is. Knowledge is always a matter of
whole experience, what St. Paul calls knowing in full, and never a
matter of mental conception merely. This is indeed the point of all full
knowledge: that it is contained mainly within the unconscious, its
mental or conscious reference being only a sort of extract or shadow.

It is necessary for us to know the unconscious, or we cannot live, just
as it is necessary for us to know the sun. But we need not explain the
unconscious, any more than we need explain the sun. We can’t do either,
anyway. We know the sun by beholding him and watching his motions and
feeling his changing power. The same with the unconscious. We watch it
in all its manifestations, its unfolding incarnations. We watch it in
all its processes and its unaccountable evolutions, and these we
register.

For though the unconscious is the creative element, and though, like the
soul, it is beyond all law of cause and effect in its totality, yet in
its processes of self-realization it follows the laws of cause and
effect. The processes of cause and effect are indeed part of the working
out of this incomprehensible self-realization of the individual
unconscious. The great laws of the universe are no more than the fixed
habits of the living unconscious.

What we must needs do is to try to trace still further the habits of the
true unconscious, and by mental recognition of these habits break the
limits which we have imposed on the movement of the unconscious. For the
whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving
forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws or habits. It is no good
trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon the unconscious. We have to
try to recognize the true nature and then leave the unconscious itself
to prompt new movement and new being—the creative progress.

What we are suffering from now is the restriction of the unconscious
within certain ideal limits. The more we force the ideal the more we
rupture the true movement. Once we can admit the _known_, but
incomprehensible, presence of the integral unconscious; once we can
trace it home in ourselves and follow its first revealed movements; once
we know how it habitually unfolds itself; once we can scientifically
determine its laws and processes in ourselves: then at last we can begin
to live from the spontaneous initial prompting, instead of from the dead
machine-principles of ideas and ideals. There is a whole science of the
creative unconscious, the unconscious in its law-abiding activities. And
of this science we do not even know the first term. Yes, when we know
that the unconscious appears by creation, as a new individual reality in
every newly-fertilized germ-cell, then we know the very first item of
the new science. But it needs a super-scientific grace before we can
admit this first new item of knowledge. It means that science abandons
its intellectualist position and embraces the old religious faculty. But
it does not thereby become less scientific, it only becomes at last
complete in knowledge.




                              CHAPTER III
                       THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS


It is useless to try to determine _what is consciousness_ or _what is
knowledge_. Who cares anyhow, since we know without definitions. But
what we fail to know, yet what we must know, is the nature of the
pristine consciousness which lies integral and progressive within every
functioning organism. The brain is the seat of the ideal consciousness.
And ideal consciousness is only the dead end of consciousness, the spun
silk. The vast bulk of consciousness is non-cerebral. It is the sap of
our life, of all life.

We are forced to attribute to a star-fish, or to a nettle, its own
peculiar and integral consciousness. This throws us at once out of the
ideal castle of the brain into the flux of sap-consciousness. But let us
not jump too far in one bound. Let us refrain from taking a sheer leap
down the abyss of consciousness, down to the invertebrates and the
protococci. Let us cautiously scramble down the human declivities. Or
rather let us try to start somewhere near the foot of the calvary of
human consciousness. Let us consider the child in the womb. Is the fœtus
conscious? It must be, since it carries on an independent and
progressive self-development. This consciousness obviously cannot be
ideal, cannot be cerebral, since it precedes any vestige of cerebration.
And yet it is an integral, individual consciousness, having its own
single purpose and progression. Where can it be centered, how can it
operate, before even nerves are formed? For it does steadily and
persistently operate, even spinning the nerves and brain as a web for
its own motion, like some subtle spider.

What is the spinning spider of the first human consciousness—or rather,
where is the center at which this consciousness lies and spins? Since
there must be a center of consciousness in the tiny fœtus, it must have
been there from the very beginning. There it must have been, in the
first fused nucleus of the ovule. And if we could but watch this prime
nucleus, we should no doubt realize that throughout all the long and
incalculable history of the individual it still remains central and
prime, the source and clue of the living unconscious, the origin. As in
the first moment of conception, so to the end of life in the individual,
the first nucleus remains the creative-productive center, the quick,
both of consciousness and of organic development.

And where in the developed fœtus shall we look for this
creative-productive quick? Shall we expect it in the brain or in the
heart? Surely our own subjective wisdom tells us, what science can
verify, that it lies beneath the navel of the folded fœtus. Surely that
prime center, which is the very first nucleus of the fertilized ovule,
lies situated beneath the navel of all womb-born creatures. There, from
the beginning, it lay in its mysterious relation to the outer, active
universe. There it lay, perfectly associated with the parent body. There
it acted on its own peculiar independence, drawing the whole stream of
creative blood upon itself, and, spinning within the parental
blood-stream, slowly creating or bodying forth its own incarnate
amplification. All the time between the quick of life in the fœtus and
the great outer universe there exists a perfect correspondence, upon
which correspondence the astrologers based their science in the days
before mental consciousness had arrogated all knowledge unto itself.

The fœtus is not _personally_ conscious. But then what is personality if
not ideal in its origin? The fœtus is, however, radically, individually
conscious. From the active quick, the nuclear center, it remains single
and integral in its activity. At this center it distinguishes itself
utterly from the surrounding universe, whereby both are modified. From
this center the whole individual arises, and upon this center the whole
universe, by implication, impinges. For the fixed and stable universe of
law and matter, even the whole cosmos, would wear out and disintegrate
if it did not rest and find renewal in the quick center of creative life
in individual creatures.

And since this center has absolute location in the first fertilized
nucleus, it must have location still in the developed fœtus, and in the
mature man. And where is this location in the unborn infant? Beneath the
burning influx of the navel. Where is it in the adult man? Still beneath
the navel. As primal affective center it lies within the solar plexus of
the nervous system.

We do not pretend to use technical language. But surely our meaning is
plain even to correct scientists, when we assert that in all mammals the
center of primal, constructive consciousness and activity lies in the
middle front of the abdomen, beneath the navel, in the great nerve
center called the solar plexus. How do we know? We feel it, as we feel
hunger or love or hate. Once we _know_ what we are, science can proceed
to analyze our knowledge, demonstrate its truth or its untruth.

We all of us know what it is to handle a newborn, or at least a quite
young infant. We know what it is to lay the hand on the round little
abdomen, the round, pulpy little head. We know where is life, where is
pulp. We have seen blind puppies, blind kittens crawling. They give
strange little cries. Whence these cries? Are they mental exclamations?
As in a ventriloquist, they come from the stomach. There lies the
wakeful center. There speaks the first consciousness, the audible
unconscious, in the squeak of these infantile things, which is so
curiously and indescribably moving, reacting direct upon the great
abdominal center, the preconscious mind in man.

There at the navel, the first rupture has taken place, the first break
in continuity. There is the scar of dehiscence, scar at once of our pain
and splendor of individuality. Here is the mark of our isolation in the
universe, stigma and seal of our free, perfect singleness. Hence the
lotus of the navel. Hence the mystic contemplation of the navel. It is
the upper mind losing itself in the lower first-mind, that which is last
in consciousness reverting to that which is first.

A mother will realize better than a philosopher. She knows the rupture
which has finally separated her child into its own single, free
existence. She knows the strange, sensitive rose of the navel: how it
quivers conscious; all its pain, its want for the old connection; all
its joy and chuckling exultation in sheer organic singleness and
individual liberty.

The powerful, active psychic center in a new child is the great solar
plexus of the sympathetic system. From this center the child is drawn to
the mother again, crying, to heal the new wound, to re-establish the old
oneness. This center directs the little mouth which, blind and
anticipatory, seeks the breast. How could it find the breast, blind and
mindless little mouth? But it needs no eyes nor mind. From the great
first-mind of the abdomen it moves direct, with an anterior knowledge
almost like magnetic propulsion, as if the little mouth were drawn or
propelled to the maternal breast by vital magnetism, whose center of
directive control lies in the solar plexus.

In a measure, this taking of the breast re-instates the old connection
with the parent body. It is a strange sinking back to the old unison,
the old organic continuum—a recovery of the pre-natal state. But at the
same time it is a deep, avid gratification in drinking in the sustenance
of a new individuality. It is a deep gratification in the exertion of a
new, voluntary power. The child acts now separately from its own
individual center and exerts still a control over the adjacent universe,
the parent body.

So the warm life-stream passes again from the parent into the aching
abdomen of the severed child. Life cannot progress without these
ruptures, severances, cataclysms; pain is a living reality, not merely a
deathly. Why haven’t we the courage for life-pains? If we could depart
from our old tenets of the mind, if we could fathom our own
_unconscious_ sapience, we should find we have courage and to spare. We
are too mentally domesticated.

The great magnetic or dynamic center of first-consciousness acts
powerfully at the solar plexus. Here the child knows beyond all
knowledge. It does not see with the eyes, it cannot perceive, much less
conceive. Nothing can it apprehend; the eyes are a strange plasmic,
nascent darkness. Yet from the belly it knows, with a directness of
knowledge that frightens us and may even seem abhorrent. The mother,
also, from the bowels knows her child—as she can never, never know it
from the head. There is no thought nor speech, only direct, ventral
gurglings and cooings. From the passional nerve-center of the solar
plexus in the mother passes direct, unspeakable effluence and
intercommunication, sheer effluent contact with the palpitating
nerve-center in the belly of the child. Knowledge, unspeakable knowledge
interchanged, which must be diluted by eternities of materialization
before they can come to expression.

It is like a lovely, suave, fluid, _creative_ electricity that flows in
a circuit between the great nerve-centers in mother and child. The
electricity of the universe is a sundering force. But this lovely
polarized vitalism is creative. It passes in a circuit between the two
poles of the passional unconscious in the two now separated beings. It
establishes in each that first primal consciousness which is the sacred,
all-containing head-stream of all our consciousness.

But this is not all. The flux between mother and child is not all sweet
unison. There is as well the continually widening gap. A wonderful rich
communion, and at the same time a continually increasing cleavage. If
only we could realize that all through life these are the two
synchronizing activities of love, of creativity. For the end, the goal,
is the perfecting of each single individuality, unique in itself—which
cannot take place without a perfected harmony between the beloved, a
harmony which depends on the at-last-clarified singleness of each being,
a singleness equilibrized, polarized in one by the counter-posing
singleness of the other.

So the child. In its wonderful unison with the mother it is at the same
time extricating itself into single, separate, independent existence.
The one process, of unison, cannot go on without the other process, of
purified severance. At first the child cleaves back to the old source.
It clings and adheres. The sympathetic center of unification, or at
least unison, alone seems awake. The child wails with the strange
desolation of severance, wails for the old connection. With joy and
peace it returns to the breast, almost as to the womb.

But not quite. Even in sucking it discovers its new identity and
_power_. Its own new, separate _power_. It draws itself back suddenly;
it waits. It has heard something? No. But another center has flashed
awake. The child stiffens itself and holds back. What is it, wind?
Stomach-ache? Not at all. Listen to some of the screams. The ears can
hear deeper than eyes can see. The first scream of the ego. The scream
of asserted isolation. The scream of revolt from connection, the revolt
from union. There is a violent anti-maternal motion, anti-everything.
There is a refractory, bad-tempered negation of everything, a hurricane
of temper. What then? After such tremendous unison as the womb implies,
no wonder there are storms of rage and separation. The child is
screaming itself rid of the old womb, kicking itself in a blind paroxysm
into freedom, into separate, negative independence.

So be it, there must be paroxysms, since there must be independence.
Then the mother gets angry too. It affects her, though perhaps not as
badly as it affects outsiders. Nothing acts more direct on the great
primal nerve-centers than the screaming of an infant, this blind
screaming negation of connections. It is the friction of irritation
itself. Everybody is implicated, just as they would be if the air were
surcharged with electricity. The mother is perhaps less affected because
she understands primarily, or because she is polarized directly with the
child. Yet she, too, must be angry, in her measure, inevitably.

It is a blind, almost mechanistic effort on the part of the new organism
to extricate itself from cohesion with the circumambient universe. It
applies direct to the mother. But it affects everybody. The great
centers of response vibrate with a maddening, sometimes unbearable
friction. What centers? Not the great sympathetic plexus this time, but
its corresponding voluntary ganglion. The great ganglion of the spinal
system, the lumbar ganglion, negatively polarizes the solar plexus in
the primal psychic activity of a human individual. When a child screams
with temper, it sends out from the lumbar ganglion violent waves of
frictional repudiation, extraordinary. The little back has an amazing
power once it stiffens itself. In the lumbar ganglion the unconscious
now vibrates tremendously in the activity of sundering, separation.
Mother and child, polarized, are primarily affected. Often the mother is
so _sure_ of her possession of the child that she is almost unmoved. But
the child continues, till the frictional response is roused in the
mother, her anger rises, there is a flash, an outburst like lightning.
And then the storm subsides. The pure act of sundering is effected. Each
being is clarified further into its own single, individual self, further
perfected, separated.

Hence a duality, now, in primal consciousness in the infant. The warm
rosy abdomen, tender with chuckling unison, and the little back
strengthening itself. The child kicks away, into independence. It
stiffens its spine in the strength of its own private and separate,
inviolable existence. It will admit now of no trespass. It is awake now
in a new pride, a new self-assertion. The sense of antagonistic freedom
is aroused. Clumsy old adhesions must be ruthlessly fused. And so, from
the lumbar ganglion the fiery-tempered infant asserts its new, blind
will.

And as the child fights the mother fights. Sometimes she fights to keep
her refractory child, and sometimes she fights to kick him off, as a
mare kicks off her too-babyish foal. It is the great _voluntary_ center
of the unconscious flashing into action. Flashing from the deep lumbar
ganglion in the mother to the newly-awakened, corresponding center in
the child goes the swift negative current, setting each of them asunder
in clean individuality. So long as the force meets its polarized
response all is well. When a force flashes and has no response, there is
devastation. How weary in the back is the nursing mother whose great
center of repudiation is suppressed or weak; how a child droops if only
the sympathetic unison is established.

So, the polarity of the dynamic consciousness, from the very start of
life! Direct flowing and flashing of two consciousness-streams, active
in the bringing forth of an individual being. The sweet commingling, the
sharp clash of opposition. And no possibility of creative development
without this polarity, this dual circuit of direct, spontaneous, honest
interchange. No hope of life apart from this. The primal unconscious
pulsing in its circuits between two beings: love and wrath, cleaving and
repulsion, inglutination and excrementation. What is the good of
inventing “ideal” behavior? How order the path of the unconscious? For
let us now realize that we cannot, even with the best intentions,
proceed to order the path of our own unconscious without vitally
deranging the life-flow of those connected with us. If you disturb the
current at one pole, it must be disturbed at the other. Here is a new
moral aspect to life.




                               CHAPTER IV
                        THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER


In asserting that the seat of consciousness in a young infant is in the
abdomen, we do not pretend to suggest that all the other
conscious-centers are utterly dormant. Once a child is born, the whole
nervous and cerebral system comes awake, even the brain’s memories begin
to glimmer, recognition and cognition soon begin to take place. But the
spontaneous control and all the prime developing activity derive from
the great affective centers of the abdomen. In the solar plexus is the
first great fountain and issue of infantile consciousness. There,
beneath the navel, lies the active human first-mind, the prime
unconscious. From the moment of conception, when the first nucleus is
formed, to the moment of death, when this same nucleus breaks again, the
first great active center of human consciousness lies in the solar
plexus.

The movement of development in any creature is, however, towards a
florescent individuality. The ample, mature, unfolded individual stands
perfect, perfect in himself, but also perfect in his harmonious relation
to those nearest him and to all the universe. Whilst only the one great
center of consciousness is awake, in the abdomen, the infant has no
separate existence, his whole nature is contained in the conjunction
with the parent. As soon as the complementary negative pole arouses the
voluntary center of the lumbar ganglion, there is at once a retraction
into independence and an assertion of singleness. The back strengthens
itself.

But still the circuit of polarity, dual as it is, positive and negative
from the positive-sympathetic and the negative-voluntary poles, still
depends on the duality of two beings—it is still extra-individual. Each
individual is vitally dependent on the other, for the life circuit.

Let us consider for a moment the _kind_ of consciousness manifested at
the two great primary centers. At the solar plexus the new psyche acts
in a mode of attractive vitalism, drawing its objective unto itself as
by vital magnetism. Here it drinks in, as it were, the contiguous
universe, as during the womb-period it drank from the living continuum
of the mother. It is darkly self-centered, exultant and positive in its
own existence. It is all-in-all to itself, its own great subject. It
knows no objective. It only knows its own vital potency, which potency
draws the external object unto itself, subjectively, as the blood-stream
was drawn into the fœtus, by subjective attraction. Here the psyche is
to itself the _All_. Blindly self-positive.

This is the first mode of consciousness for every living
thing—fascinating in all young things. The second half of the same mode
commences as soon as direct activity sets up in the lumbar ganglion.
Then the psyche recoils upon itself, in its first reaction against
continuity with the outer universe. It recoils even against its own mode
of assimilatory unison. Even it must break off, interrupt the great
psychic-assimilation process which goes on at the sympathic center. It
must recoil clean upon itself, break loose from any attachment
whatsoever. And then it must try its _power_, often playfully.

This reaction is still subjective. When a child stiffens and draws away,
when it screams with pure temper, it takes no note of that from which it
recoils. It has no objective consciousness of that from which it reacts,
the mother principally. It is like a swimmer endlessly kicking the water
away behind him, with strong legs vividly active from the spinal
ganglia. Like a man in a boat pushing off from the shore, it merely
thrusts away, in order to ride free, ever more free. It is a purely
subjective motion, in the negative direction.

After our long training in objectivation, and our epoch of worship of
the objective mode, it is perhaps difficult for us to realize the
strong, blind power of the unconscious on its first plane of activity.
It is something quite different from what we call _egoism_—which is
really mentally derived—for the ego is merely the sum-total of what we
_conceive_ ourselves to be. The powerful pristine subjectivity of the
unconscious on its first plane is, on the other hand, the root of all
our consciousness and being, darkly tenacious. Here we are grounded, say
what we may. And if we break the spell of this first subjective mode, we
break our own main root and live rootless, shiftless, groundless.

So that the powerful subjectivity of the unconscious, where the self is
all-in-all unto itself, active in strong desirous _psychic_ assimilation
or in direct repudiation of the contiguous universe; this first plane of
psychic activity, polarized in the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion
of each individual but established in a circuit with the corresponding
poles of another individual: this is the first scope of life and being
for every human individual, and is beyond question. But we must again
remark that the whole circuit is established between _two_
individuals—that neither is a free thing-unto-itself—and that the very
fact of established polarity between the two maintains that
correspondence between the individual entity and the external universe
which is the clue to all growth and development. The pure subjectivity
of the first plane of consciousness is no more _selfish_ than the pure
objectivity of any other plane. How can it be? How can any form of pure,
balanced polarity between two vital individuals be in any sense selfish
on the part of one individual? We have got our moral values all wrong.

Save for healthy instinct, the moralistic human race would have
exterminated itself long ago. And yet man _must_ be moral, at the very
root moral. The essence of morality is the basic desire to preserve the
perfect correspondence between the self and the object, to have no
trespass and no breach of integrity, nor yet any refaulture in the
vitalistic interchange.

As yet we see the unconscious active on one plane only and entirely
dependent on _two_ individuals. But immediately following the
establishment of the circuit of the powerful, subjective, abdominal
plane comes the quivering of the whole system into a new degree of
consciousness. And two great upper centers are awake.

The diaphragm really divides the human body, psychically as well as
organically. The two centers beneath the diaphragm are centers of dark
subjectivity, centripetal, assimilative. Once these are established, in
the thorax the two first centers of objective consciousness become
active, with ever-increasing intensity. The great thoracic sympathetic
plexus rouses like a sun in the breast, the thoracic ganglion fills the
shoulders with strength. There are now two planes of primary
consciousness—the first, the lower, the subjective unconscious, active
beneath the diaphragm, and the second upper, objective plane, active
above the diaphragm, in the breast.

Let us realize that the subjective and objective of the unconscious are
not the same as the subjective and the objective of the _mind_. Here we
have no concepts to deal with, no static objects in the shape of ideas.
We have none of that tiresome business of establishing the relation
between the mind and its own ideal object, or the discriminating between
the ideal thing-in-itself and the mind of which it is the content. We
are spared that hateful thing-in-itself, the idea, which is at once so
all-important and so _nothing_. We are on straightforward solid ground;
there is no abstraction.

The unconscious subjectivity is, in its positive manifestation, a great
imbibing, and in its negative, a definite blind rejection. What we call
an _unconscious_ rejection. This subjectivity embraces alike creative
emotion and physical function. It includes alike the sweet and
untellable communion of love between the mother and child, the
irrational reaction into separation between the two, and also the
physical functioning of sucking and urination. Psychic and physical
development run parallel, though they are forever distinct. The child
sucking, the child urinating, this is the child acting from the great
_subjective_ centers, positive and negative. When the child sucks, there
is a sympathetic circuit between it and the mother, in which the
sympathetic plexus in the mother acts as negative or submissive pole to
the corresponding plexus in the child. In urination there is a
corresponding circuit in the voluntary centers, so that a mother seems
gratified, and _is_ gratified, inevitably, by the excremental
functioning of her child. She experiences a true polar reaction.

Child and mother have, in the first place, no objective consciousness of
each other, and certainly no _idea_ of each other. Each is a blind
desideratum to the other. The strong love between them is effectual in
the great abdominal centers, where all love, real love, is primarily
based. Of that reflected or moon-love, derived from the head, that
spurious form of love which predominates to-day, we do not speak here.
It has its root in the _idea_: the beloved is a mental objective,
endlessly appreciated, criticized, scrutinized, exhausted. This has
nothing to do with the active unconscious.

Having realized that the unconscious sparkles, vibrates, travels in a
strong subjective stream from the abdominal centers, connecting the
child directly with the mother at corresponding poles of vitalism, we
realize that the unconscious contains nothing ideal, nothing in the
least conceptual, and hence nothing in the least personal, since
personality, like the ego, belongs to the conscious or mental-subjective
self. So the first analyses are, or should be, so impersonal that the
so-called _human_ relations are not involved. The first relationship is
neither personal nor biological—a fact which psychoanalysis has not
succeeded in grasping.

For example. A child screams with terror at the touch of fur; another
child loves the touch of fur, and purrs with pleasure. How now? Is it a
complex? Did the father have a beard?

It is possible. But all-too-human. The physical result of rubbing
fur is to set up a certain amount of frictional electricity.
Frictional electricity is one of the sundering forces. It
corresponds to the voluntary forces exerted at the lower spinal
ganglia, the forces of anger and retraction into independence and
power. An over-sympathetic child will scream with fear at the touch
of fur; a refractory child will purr with pleasure. It is a reaction
which involves even deeper things than sex—the primal constitution
of the elementary psyche. A sympathetically overbalanced child has a
horror of the electric-frictional force such as is emitted from the
fur of a black cat, creature of rapacity. The same delights a
fierce-willed child.

But we must admit at the same time that from earliest days a child is
subject to the definite _conscious_ psychic influences of
its surroundings and will react almost automatically to a
conscious-passional suggestion from the mother. In this way personal sex
is prematurely evoked, and real complexes are set up. But these derive
not from the spontaneous unconscious. They are in a way dictated from
the deliberate, mental consciousness, even if involuntarily. Again they
are a result of _mental_ subjectivity, self-consciousness—so different
from the primal subjectivity of the unconscious.

To return, however, to the pure unconscious. When the upper centers
flash awake, a whole new field of consciousness and spontaneous activity
is opened out. The great sympathetic plexus of the breast is the heart’s
mind. This thoracic plexus corresponds directly in the upper man to the
solar plexus in the lower. But it is a correspondence in creative
opposition. From the sympathetic center of the breast as from a window
the unconscious goes forth seeking its object, to dwell upon it. When a
child leans its breast against its mother it becomes filled with a
primal awareness of _her_—not of itself desiring her or partaking of
her—but of her as she is in herself. This is the first great acquisition
of primal objective knowledge, the objective content of the unconscious.
Such knowledge we call the treasure of the heart. When the ancients
located the first seat of consciousness in the heart, they were neither
misguided nor playing with metaphor. For by consciousness they meant, as
usual, objective consciousness only. And from the cardiac plexus goes
forth that strange effluence of the self which seeks and dwells upon the
beloved, lovingly roving like the fingers of an infant or a blind man
over the face of the treasured object, gathering her mould into itself
and transferring her mould forever into its own deep unconscious psyche.
This is the first acquiring of objective knowledge, sightless,
unspeakably direct. It is a dwelling of the child’s unconscious within
the form of the mother, the gathering of a pure, eternal impression. So
the soul stores itself with dynamic treasures; it verily builds its own
tissue of such treasure, the tissue of the developing body, each cell
stored with creative dynamic content.

The breasts themselves are as two eyes. We do not know how much the
nipples of the breast, both in man and woman, serve primarily as poles
of vital _conscious_ effluence and connection. We do not know how the
nipples of the breast are as fountains leaping into the universe, or as
little lamps irradiating the contiguous world, to the soul in quest.

But certainly from the passional conscious-center of the breast goes
forth the first joyous discovery of the beloved, the first objective
discovery of the contiguous universe, the first ministration of the self
to that which is beyond the self. So, functionally, the mother ministers
with the milk of her breast. But this is a yielding to the great _lower_
plexus, the basic solar plexus. It is the breast as part also of the
alimentary system—a special thing.

In sucking the hands also come awake. It is strange to notice the
pictures by the old masters of the Madonna and Child. Sometimes the
strange round belly of the Infant seems the predominant mystery-center,
and sometimes from the tiny breast it is as if a delicate light glowed,
the light of love. As if the breast should illumine the outer world in
its seeking administering love. As if the breast of the Infant glimmered
its light of discovery on the adoring Mother, and she bowed, submissive
to the revelation.

The little hands and arms wave, circulate, trying to touch, to grasp, to
know. To grasp in caress, not to reive. To grasp in order to identify
themselves with the cherished discovery, to realize the beloved. To
cherish, to realize the beloved. To administer the outward-seeking self
to the beloved. We give this the exclusive name of love. But it is
indeed only the one direction of love, the outgoing from the lovely
center of the breast—the nipples seeking, the hands delicately,
caressively exploring, the eyes at last waking to perception. The eyes,
the hands, these wake and are alert from the center of the breast. But
the ears and feet move from the deep lower centers—the recipient ears,
imbibing vibrations, the feet which press the resistant earth,
controlled from the powerful lower ganglia of the spine. And thus great
scope of activity opens, in the hands that wave and explore, the eyes
that try to perceive, the legs, the little knees that thrust, thrust
away, the small feet that curl and twinkle upon themselves, ready for
the obstinate earth.

And so, also a wholeness is established within the individual. The two
fields of consciousness, the first upper and the first lower, are based
upon a correspondence of polarity. The first great complex circuit is
now set up _within the individual_, between the upper and lower centers.
The individual consciousness has now its own integral independent
existence and activity, apart from external connection. It has its right
to be alone.




                               CHAPTER V
                       THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED


Consciousness develops on successive planes. On each plane there is the
dual polarity, positive and negative, of the sympathetic and voluntary
nerve centers. The first plane is established between the poles of the
sympathetic solar plexus and the voluntary lumbar ganglion. This is the
active first plane of the subjective unconscious, from which the whole
of consciousness arises.

Immediately succeeding the first plane of subjective dynamic
consciousness arises the corresponding first plane of objective
consciousness, the objective unconscious, polarized in the cardiac
plexus and the thoracic ganglion, in the breast. There is a perfect
correspondence in difference between the first abdominal and the first
thoracic planes. These two planes polarize each other in a fourfold
polarity, which makes the first great field of individual,
self-dependent consciousness.

Each pole of the active unconscious manifests a specific activity and
gives rise to a specific kind of dynamic or creative consciousness. On
each plane, the negative voluntary pole _complements_ the positive
sympathetic pole, and yet the consciousness originating from the
complementary poles is not merely negative versus positive, it is
categorically different, opposite. Each is pure and perfect in itself.

But the moment we enter the two planes of corresponding
consciousness, lower and upper, we find a whole new range of
complements. The upper, dynamic-objective plane is complementary to
the lower, dynamic-subjective. The mystery of creative opposition
exists all the time between the two planes, and this unison in
opposition between the two planes forms the first whole field of
consciousness. Within the individual the polarity is fourfold. In a
relation between two individuals the polarity is already eightfold.

Now before we can have any sort of scientific, comprehensive psychology
we shall have to establish the _nature_ of the consciousness at each of
the dynamic poles—the nature of the consciousness, the direction of the
dynamic-vital flow, the resultant physical-organic development and
activity. This we must do before we can even begin to consider a genuine
system of education. Education now is widely at sea. Having ceased to
steer by the pole-star of the mind, having ceased to aim at the cramming
of the intellect, it veers hither and thither hopelessly and absurdly.
Education can never become a serious science until the human psyche is
properly understood. And the human psyche cannot begin to be understood
until we enter the dark continent of the unconscious. Having begun to
explore the unconscious, we find we must go from center to center,
chakra to chakra, to use an old esoteric word. We must patiently
determine the psychic manifestation at each center, and moreover, as we
go, we must discover the psychic results of the interaction, the
polarized interaction between the dynamic centers both within and
without the individual.

Here is a real job for the scientist, a job which eternity will never
see finished though even to-morrow may see it well begun. It is a job
which will at last free us from the most hateful of all shackles, the
shackles of ideas and ideals. It is a great task of the liberators,
those who work forever for the liberation of the free _spontaneous_
psyche, the effective soul.

In these few chapters we hope to hint at the establishment of the first
field of the unconscious—at the nature of the consciousness manifested
at each pole—and at the already complex range of dynamic polarity
between the various poles. So far we have given the merest suggestion of
the nature of the first plane of the unconscious and have attempted the
opening of the second or upper plane. We profess no scientific
_exactitude_, particularly in terminology. We merely wish intelligibly
to open a way.

To balance the solar plexus wakes the great plexus of the breast. In our
era this plexus is the great planet of our psychic universe. In the
previous sympathetic era the flower of the universal blossomed in the
navel. But since Egypt the sun of creative activity beams from the
breast, the heart of the supreme Man. This is to us the source of
light—the loving heart, the Sacred Heart. Against this we contrast the
devouring darkness of the lower man, the devouring whirlpool beneath the
navel. Even theosophists don’t realize that the universal lotus really
blossoms in the abdomen—that our lower man, our dark, devouring
whirlpool, was once the creative source, in human estimation.

But in calling the heart the sun, the source of light, we are
biologically correct even. For the roots of vision are in the cardiac
plexus. But if we were to consider the heart itself, not its great nerve
plexus, we should have to go further than the nervous system. If we had
to consider the whole lambent blood-stream, we should have to descend
too deep for our unpractised minds. Suffice it here to hint that the
solar plexus is the first and main clue to the great alimentary-sexual
activity in man, an activity at once functional and creatively
emotional, whilst the cardiac plexus is first and main clue to the
respiratory system and the active-productive manifestations. The mouth
and nostrils are gates to each great center, upper and lower—even the
breasts have this duality. Yet the clue to respiration and hand activity
and vision is in the breast, while the clue to alimentation and passion
and sex is in the lower centers. The duality goes so far and is so
profound. And the polarity! The great organs, as well as the lymphatic
glands, depend each on its own specific center of the unconscious; each
is derived from a specific _dynamic_ conscious-clue, what we might
almost call a soul-cell. The inherent unconscious, or soul, is the first
nucleus subdivided, and from its own subdivisions produced, from its own
still-creative constellated nuclei, the organs, glands, nerve-centers of
the human organism. This is our answer to materialism and idealism
alike. The _nuclear unconscious_ brought forth organs and consciousness
alike. And the great nuclei of the unconscious _still_ lie active in the
great living nerve-centers, which nerve centers, from the original
solar-plexus to the conclusive brain, form one great chain of dual
polarity and amplified consciousness.

All this is a mere incoherent stammering, broken first-words. To return
to the direct path of our progress. It is not merely a metaphor, to call
the cardiac plexus the sun, the Light. It is metaphor in the first
place, because the conscious effluence which proceeds from this first
upper center in the breast goes forth and plays upon its external
object, as phosphorescent waves might break upon a ship and reveal its
form. The transferring of the objective knowledge to the psyche is
almost the same as vision. It is root-vision. It happens before the eyes
open. It is the first tremendous mode of _apprehension_, still dark, but
moving towards light. It is the eye in the breast. Psychically, it is
basic objective apprehension. Dynamically, it is love, devotional,
administering love.

Now we make already a discrimination between the two natures, even of
this first upper consciousness. First from the breast flows the
devotional, self-outpouring of love, love which gives its all to the
beloved. And back again returns to the ingathered objective
consciousness, the first objective content of the psyche.

This argues the dual polarity. From the positive pole of the cardiac
plexus flows out that effluence which we call selfless love. It is
really self-devoting love, not self-less. This is the one form of love
we recognize. But from the strong ganglion of the shoulders proceeds the
negative circuit, which searches and explores the beloved, bringing back
pure objective apprehension, not critical, in the mental sense, and yet
passionally discriminative.

Let us discriminate between the two upper poles. From the sympathetic
heart goes forth pure administering, like sunbeams. But from the strong
thoracic center of the shoulders is exerted a strong rejective force, a
force which, pressing upon the object of attention, in the mode of
separation, succeeds in transferring to itself the impression of the
object to which it has attended. This is the other half of devotional
love—perfect _knowledge_ of the beloved.

Now this knowledge in itself argues a contradistinction between the
lover and the beloved. It is the very mould of the contradistinction. It
is the impress upon the lover of that which was separate from him,
resistant to him, in the beloved. Objective knowledge is always of this
kind—a knowledge based on unchangeable difference, a knowledge truly of
the gulf that lies between the two beings nearest to each other.

In two kinds, then, consists the activity of the unconscious on the
first upper plane. Primal is the blissful sense of ineffable transfusion
with the beloved, which we call love, and of which our era has perhaps
enjoyed the full. It is a mode of creative consciousness essentially
objective, but yet it preserves no object in the memory, even the
dynamic memory. It is a great objective flux, a streaming forth of the
self in blissful departure, like sunbeams streaming.

If this activity alone worked, then the self would utterly depart from
its own integrity; it would pass out and merge with the beloved—which
passing out and merging is the goal of enthusiasts. But living beings
are kept integral by the activity of the great negative pole. From the
thoracic ganglion also the unconscious goes forth in its quest of the
beloved. But what does it go to seek? Real objective knowledge. It goes
to find out the wonders which itself does not contain and to transfer
these wonders, as by impress, into itself. It goes out to determine the
limits of its own existence also.

This is the second half of the activity of upper or self-less or
spiritual love. There is a tremendous great joy in exploring and
discovering the beloved. For what is the beloved? She is that which I
myself am not. Knowing the breach between us, the uncloseable gulf, I in
the same breath realize her _features_. In the first mode of the upper
consciousness there is perfect surpassing of all sense of division
between the self and the beloved. In the second mode the very discovery
of the features of the beloved contains the full realization of the
irreparable, or unsurpassable, gulf. This is objective knowledge, as
distinct from objective emotion. It contains always the element of
self-amplification, as if the self were amplified by knowledge in the
beloved. It should also contain the knowledge of the _limits_ of the
self.

So it is with the Infant. Curious indeed is the look on the face of the
Holy Child, in Leonardo’s pictures, in Botticelli’s, even in the
beautiful Filippo Lippi. It is the Mother who crosses her hands on her
breast, in supreme acquiescence, recipient; it is the Child who gazes,
with a kind of _objective_, strangely discerning, deep apprehension of
her, startling to northern eyes. It is a gaze by no means of innocence,
but of profound, pre-visual discerning. So plainly is the child looking
across the gulf and _fixing_ the gulf by very intentness of pre-visual
apprehension, that instinctively the ordinary northerner finds Him
anti-pathetic. It seems almost a cruel objectivity.

Perhaps between lovers, in the objective way of love, either the
voluntary separative mode predominates, or the sympathetic mode of
communion—one or the other. In the north we have worshipped the latter
mode. But in the south it is different; the objective sapient manner of
love seems more natural. Moreover in the face of the Infant lingers
nearly always the dark look of the pristine mode of consciousness, the
powerful self-centering subjective mode, established in the lower
body—the so-called sensual mode.

But take our own children. A small infant, as soon as it really begins
to direct its attention. How often it seems to be gazing across a
strange distance at the mother; what a curious look is on its face, as
if the mother were an object set across a far gulf, distinct however,
discernible, even obtrusive in her need to be apprehended. A mother will
chase away this look with kisses. But she cannot chase away the
inevitable effluence of separatist, objective apprehension. She herself
sometimes will fall into a half-trance, and the child on her lap will
resolve itself into a strange and separate object. She does not
criticize or analyze him. She does not even _perceive_ him. But as if
rapt, she apprehends him lying there, an unfathomable and inscrutable
objective, outside herself, never to be grasped or included in herself.
She seizes as it were a sudden and final, objective impression of him.
And the conclusive sensation is one of _finality_. Something final has
happened to her. She has the strange sensation of unalterable certainty,
a sensation at once profoundly gratifying and rather appalling. She
_possesses_ something, a certain entity of primal, pre-conscious
knowledge. Let the child be what he may, her knowledge of him is her
own, forever and final. It gives her a sense of wealth in possession,
and of power. It gives her a sense also of fatality. From the very
satisfaction of the objective finality derives the sense of fatality. It
is a knowledge of the other being, but a knowledge which contains at the
same time a final assurance of the eternal and insuperable gulf which
lies between beings—the isolation of the self first.

Thus the first plane of the _upper_ consciousness—the outgoing, the
sheer and unspeakable bliss of the sense of union, communion, at-oneness
with the beloved—and then the complementary objective _realization_ of
the beloved, the realization of that which is apart, different. This
realization is like riches to the objective consciousness. It is, as it
were, the adding of another self to the own self, through the mode of
apprehension. Through the mode of dynamic objective apprehension, which
in our day we have gradually come to call _imagination_, a man may in
his time add on to himself the whole of the universe, by increasing
pristine realization of the universal. This in mysticism is called the
progress to infinity—that is, in the modern, truly male mysticism. The
older female mysticism means something different by the infinite.

But anyhow there it is. The attaining to the Infinite, about which the
mystics have rhapsodized, is a definite process in the developing
unconscious, but a process in the development only of the
objective-apprehensive centers—an exclusive process, naturally.

A soul cannot come into its own through that love alone which is unison.
If it stress the one mode, the sympathetic mode, beyond a certain point,
it breaks its own integrity, and corruption sets in in the living
organism. On both planes of love, upper and lower, the two modes must
act complementary to one another, the sympathetic and the separatist. It
is the absolute failure to see this, that has torn the modern world into
two halves, the one half warring for the voluntary, objective,
separatist control, the other for the pure sympathetic. The individual
psyche divided against itself divides the world against itself, and an
unthinkable progress of calamity ensues unless there be a
reconciliation.

The goal of life is the coming to perfection of each single individual.
This cannot take place without the tremendous interchange of love from
all the four great poles of the first, basic field of consciousness.
There must be the twofold passionate flux of sympathetic love,
subjective-abdominal and objective-devotional, both. And there must be
the twofold passional circuit of separatist realization, the lower,
vital _self-realization_, and the upper, intense realization of the
other, a realization which includes a recognition of abysmal
_otherness_. To stress any one mode, any one interchange, is to hinder
all, and to cause corruption in the end. The human psyche must have
strength and pride to accept the whole fourfold nature of its own
creative activity.




                               CHAPTER VI
                  HUMAN RELATIONS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS


The aim of this little book is merely to establish the smallest foothold
in the swamp of vagueness which now goes by the name of the unconscious.
At last we form some sort of notion what the unconscious actually is. It
is that active spontaneity which rouses in each individual organism at
the moment of fusion of the parent nuclei, and which, in polarized
connection with the external universe, gradually evolves or elaborates
its own individual psyche and corpus, bringing both mind and body forth
from itself. Thus it would seem that the term _unconscious_ is only
another word for life. But life is a general force, whereas the
unconscious is essentially single and unique in each individual
organism; it is the active, self-evolving soul bringing forth its own
incarnation and self-manifestation. Which incarnation and
self-manifestation seems to be the whole goal of the _unconscious_ soul:
the whole goal of life. Thus it is that the unconscious brings forth not
only consciousness, but tissue and organs also. And all the time the
working of each organ depends on the primary spontaneous-conscious
center of which it is the issue—if you like, the soul-center. And
consciousness is like a web woven finally in the mind from the various
silken strands spun forth from the primal center of the unconscious.

But the unconscious is never an abstraction, _never to be abstracted_.
It is never an ideal entity. It is always concrete. In the very first
instance, it is the glinting nucleus of the ovule. And proceeding from
this, it is the chain or constellation of nuclei which derive directly
from this first spark. And further still it is the great nerve-centers
of the human body, in which the primal and pristine nuclei still act
direct. The nuclei are centers of spontaneous consciousness. It seems as
if their bright grain were germ-consciousness, consciousness germinating
forever. If that is a mystery, it is not my fault. Certainly it is not
mysticism. It is obvious, demonstrable scientific fact, to be verified
under the microscope and within the human psyche, subjectively and
objectively, both. Of course, the subjective verification is what men
kick at. Thin-minded idealists cannot bear any appeal to their bowels of
comprehension.

We can quite tangibly deal with the human unconscious. We trace its
source and centers in the great ganglia and nodes of the nervous system.
We establish the nature of the spontaneous consciousness at each of
these centers; we determine the polarity and the direction of the
polarized flow. And from this we know the motion and individual
manifestation of the psyche itself; we also know the motion and rhythm
of the great organs of the body. For at every point psyche and functions
are so nearly identified that only by holding our breath can we realize
their _duality_ in identification—a polarized duality once more. But
here is no place to enter the great investigation of the duality and
polarization of the vital-creative activity and the mechanico-material
activity. The two are two in one, a polarized quality. They are
unthinkably different.

On the first field of human conscious—the first plane of the
unconscious—we locate four great spontaneous centers, two below the
diaphragm, two above. These four centers control the four greatest
organs. And they give rise to the whole basis of human consciousness.
Functional and psychic at once, this is their first polar duality.

But the polarity is further. The horizontal division of the diaphragm
divides man forever into his individual duality, the duality of the
upper and lower man, the two great bodies of upper and lower
consciousness and function. This is the horizontal line.

The vertical division between the voluntary and the sympathetic systems,
the line of division between the spinal system and the great
plexus-system of the front of the human body, forms the second
distinction into duality. It is the great difference between the soft,
recipient front of the body and the wall of the back. The front of the
body is the live end of the magnet. The back is the closed opposition.
And again there are two parallel streams of function and consciousness,
vertically separate now. This is the vertical line of division. And the
horizontal line and the vertical line form the cross of all existence
and being. And even this is not mysticism—no more than the ancient
symbols used in botany or biology.

On the first field of human consciousness, which is the basis of life
and consciousness, are the four first poles of spontaneity. These have
their fourfold polarity within the individual, again figured by the
cross. But the individual is never purely a thing-by-himself. He cannot
exist save in polarized relation to the external universe, a relation
both functional and psychic-dynamic. Development takes place only from
the polarized circuits of the dynamic unconscious, and these circuits
must be both individual and extra-individual. There must be the circuit
of which the complementary pole is external to the individual.

That is, in the first place there must be the _other individual_. There
must be a polarized connection with the other individual—or even other
individuals. On the first field there are four poles in each individual.
So that the first, the basic field of extra-individual consciousness
contains eight poles—an eightfold polarity, a fourfold circuit. It may
be that between two individuals, even mother and child, the polarity may
be established only fourfold, a dual circuit. It may be that one circuit
of spontaneous consciousness may never be fully established. This means,
for a child, a certain deficiency in development, a psychic inadequacy.

So we are again face to face with the basic problem of human conduct. No
human being can develop save through the polarized connection with other
beings. This circuit of polarized unison precedes all mind and all
knowing. It is anterior to and ascendant over the human will. And yet
the mind and the will can both interfere with the dynamic circuit, an
idea, like a stone wedged in a delicate machine, can arrest one whole
process of psychic interaction and spontaneous growth.

How then? Man doth not live by bread alone. It is time we made haste to
settle the bread question, which after all is only the A B C of social
economies, and proceeded to devote our attention to this much more
profound and vital question: how to establish and maintain the circuit
of vital polarity from which the psyche actually develops, as the body
develops from the circuit of alimentation and respiration. We have
reached the stage where we can settle the alimentation and respiration
problems almost off-hand. But woe betide us, the unspeakable agony we
suffer from the failure to establish and maintain the vital circuits
between ourselves and the effectual correspondent, the other human
being, other human beings, and all the extraneous universe. The tortures
of psychic starvation which civilized people proceed to suffer, once
they have solved for themselves the bread-and-butter problem of
alimentation, will not bear thought. Delicate, creative desire, sending
forth its fine vibrations in search of the true pole of magnetic rest in
another human being or beings, how it is thwarted, insulated by a whole
set of India-rubber ideas and ideals and conventions, till every form of
perversion and death-desire sets in! How can we _escape_ neuroses?
Psychoanalysis won’t tell us. But a mere shadow of understanding of the
true unconscious will give us the hint.

The amazingly difficult and vital business of human relationship has
been almost laughably underestimated in our epoch. All this nonsense
about love and unselfishness, more crude and repugnant than savage
fetish-worship. Love is a thing to be _learned_, through centuries of
patient effort. It is a difficult, complex maintenance of individual
integrity throughout the incalculable processes of interhuman-polarity.
Even on the first great plane of consciousness, four prime poles in each
individual, four powerful circuits possible between two individuals, and
each of the four circuits to be established to perfection and yet
maintained in pure equilibrium with all the others. Who can do it?
Nobody. Yet we have all got to do it, or else suffer ascetic tortures of
starvation and privation or of distortion and overstrain and slow
collapse into corruption. The whole of life is one long, blind effort at
an established polarity with the outer universe, human and non-human;
and the whole of modern life is a shrieking failure. It is our own
fault.

The actual evolution of the individual psyche is a result of the
interaction between the individual and the outer universe. Which means
that just as a child in the womb grows as a result of the parental
blood-stream which nourishes the vital quick of the fœtus, so does every
man and woman grow and develop as a result of the polarized flux between
the spontaneous self and some other self or selves. It is the circuit of
vital flux between itself and another being or beings which brings about
the development and evolution of every individual psyche and physique.
This is a law of life and creation, from which we cannot escape.
Ascetics and voluptuaries both try to dodge this main condition, and
both succeed perhaps for a generation. But after two generations all
collapses. Man doth not live by bread alone. He lives even more
essentially from the nourishing creative flow between himself and
another or others.

This is the reality of the extra-individual circuits of polarity, those
established between two or more individuals. But a corresponding reality
is that of the internal, purely individual polarity—the polarity within
a man himself of his upper and lower consciousness, and his own
voluntary and sympathetic modes. Here is a fourfold interaction within
the self. And from this fourfold reaction within the self results that
final manifestation which we know as _mind_, mental consciousness.

The brain is, if we may use the word, the terminal instrument of the
dynamic consciousness. It transmutes what is a creative flux into a
certain fixed cypher. It prints off, like a telegraph instrument, the
glyphs and grafic representations which we call percepts, concepts,
ideas. It produces a new reality—the ideal. The idea is another static
entity, another unit of the mechanical-active and materio-static
universe. It is thrown off from life, as leaves are shed from a tree, or
as feathers fall from a bird. Ideas are the dry, unliving, inscutient
plumage which intervenes between us and the circumambient universe,
forming at once an insulator and an instrument for the subduing of the
universe. The mind is the instrument of instruments; it is not a
creative reality.

Once the mind is awake, being in itself a finality, it feels very
assured. “The word became flesh, and began to put on airs,” says Norman
Douglas wittily. It is exactly what happens. Mentality, being automatic
in its principle like the machine, begins to assume life. It begins to
affect life, to pretend to make and unmake life. “In the beginning was
the Word.” This is the presumptuous masquerading of the mind. The Word
cannot be the beginning of life. It is the _end_ of life, that which
falls shed. The mind is the dead end of life. But it has all the
mechanical force of the non-vital universe. It is a great dynamo of
super-mechanical force. Given the _will_ as accomplice, it can even
arrogate its machine-motions and automatizations over the whole of life,
till every tree becomes a clipped tea-pot and every man a useful
mechanism. So we see the brain, like a great dynamo and accumulator,
accumulating _mechanical_ force and presuming to apply this mechanical
force-control to the living unconscious, subjecting everything
spontaneous to certain machine-principles called ideals or ideas.

And the human will assists in this humiliating and sterilizing process.
We don’t know what the human will is. But we do know that it is a
certain faculty belonging to every living organism, the faculty for
self-determination. It is a strange faculty of the soul itself, for its
own direction. The will is indeed the faculty which every individual
possesses from the very moment of conception, for exerting a certain
control over the vital and automatic processes of his own evolution. It
does not depend originally on mind. Originally it is a purely
spontaneous control-factor of the living unconscious. It seems as if,
primarily, the will and the conscience were identical, in the pre-mental
state. It seems as if the will were given as a great balancing faculty,
the faculty whereby automatization is _prevented_ in the evolving
psyche. The _spontaneous_ will reacts at once against the exaggeration
of any one particular circuit of polarity. Any vital circuit—a fact
known to psychoanalysis. And against this automatism, this degradation
from the spontaneous-vital reality into the mechanic-material reality,
the human soul must always struggle. And the will is the power which the
unique self possesses to right itself from automatism.

Sometimes, however, the free psyche really collapses, and the will
_identifies_ itself with an automatic circuit. Then a complex is set up,
a paranoia. Then incipient madness sets in. If the identification
continues, the derangement becomes serious. There may come sudden jolts
of dislocation of the whole psychic flow, like epilepsy. Or there may
come any of the known forms of primary madness. The second danger is
that the will shall identify itself with the mind and become an
instrument of the mind. The same process of automatism sets up, only now
it is slower. The mind proceeds to assume control over every
organic-psychic circuit. The spontaneous flux is destroyed, and a
certain automatic circuit substituted. Now an automatic establishment of
the psyche must, like the building of a machine, proceed according to
some definite fixed scheme, based upon certain fixed principles. And it
is here that ideals and ideas enter. They are the machine-plan and the
machine-principles of an automatized psyche.

So, humanity proceeds to derange itself, to automatize itself from the
mental consciousness. It is a process of derangement, just as the fixing
of the will upon any other primary process is a derangement. It is a
long, slow development in madness. Quite justly do the advanced Russian
and French writers acclaim madness as a great goal. It is the genuine
goal of self-automatism, mental-conscious supremacy.

True, we must all develop into mental consciousness. But
mental-consciousness is not a goal; it is a cul-de-sac. It provides us
only with endless _appliances_ which we can use for the
all-too-difficult business of coming to our spontaneous-creative
fullness of being. It provides us with means to adjust ourselves to the
external universe. It gives us further means for subduing the external,
materio-mechanical universe to our great end of creative life. And it
gives us plain indications of how to avoid falling into automatism,
hints for the _applying_ of the will, the loosening of false, automatic
fixations, the brave adherence to a profound soul-impulse. This is the
use of the mind—a great indicator and instrument. The mind as author and
director of life is anathema.

So, the few things we have to say about the unconscious end for the
moment. There is almost nothing said. Yet it is a beginning. Still
remain to be revealed the other great centers of the unconscious. We
know four: two pairs. In all there are seven planes. That is, there are
six dual centers of spontaneous polarity, and then the final one. That
is, the great upper and lower consciousness is only just broached—the
further heights and depths are not even hinted at. Nay, in public it
would hardly be allowed us to hint at them. There is so much to know,
and every step of the progress in knowledge is a death to the human
idealism which governs us now so ruthlessly and vilely. It must die, and
we _will_ break free. But what tyranny is so hideous as that of an
automatically ideal humanity?




 ● Transcriber’s Notes:
    ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).