Man is anything from a forked radish to an immortal spirit. He is pretty well everything that ever was or will be, absolutely human and absolutely inhuman. If we did but know it, we have every imaginable and unimaginable feeling streaking somewhere through us. Even the most pot-headed American judge, who feels that his daughter will be lost for ever if she hears the word cunt, has all the feelings of a satyr careering somewhere inside him, very much suppressed and distorted. And the reason that Puritans are so frightened of life is that they happen, unfortunately, to be alive in spite of themselves.
The trouble with poor, pig-headed man is that he makes a selection out of the vast welter of his feelings, and says: I only feel these excellent selected feelings, and you, moreover, are allowed only to feel these excellent select feelings too. Which is all very well, till the pot boils over, or blows up.
When man fixes on a few select feelings and says that these feelings must be felt exclusively, the said feelings rapidly become repellent. Because we’ve got to love our wives, we make a point of loving somebody else. The moment the mind fixes a feeling, that feeling is repulsive. Take a greedy person, who falls right into his food. Why is he so distasteful? Is it because his stomach is asserting itself? Not at all! It is because his mind, having decided that food is good, or good for him, drives on his body to eat and eat and eat. The poor stomach is overloaded in spite of itself. The appetites are violated. The natural appetite says: I’ve had enough! But the fixed mind, fixed on feeding, forces the jaws, the gullet to go on working, the stomach to go on receiving. And this is greed. And no wonder it is repulsive.
The same is precisely true of drinking, smoking, drug-taking, or any of the vices. When did the body of a man ever like getting drunk? Never! Think how it reacts, how it vomits, how it tries to repudiate the excess of drink, how utterly wretched it feels when its sane balance is overthrown. But the mind or spirit of a man finds in intoxication some relief, some escape, some sense of licence, so the drunkenness is forced upon the unhappy stomach and bowels, which gradually get used to it. But which are slowly destroyed.
If only we would realize that, until perverted by the mind, the human body preserves itself continually in a delicate balance of sanityl That is what it is always striving to do, and always it is shoved over by the pernicious mental consciousness called the spirit. As soon as even a baby finds something good, it howls for more, till it is sick. That is the nauseating side of the human consciousness. But it is not the body. It is the mind, the self-aware-of-itself, which says: This is good. I will go on and on and on eating it! The human spirit is the self-aware-of-itself. This self-awareness may make us noble. More often it makes us worse than pigs. We need above all things a curb upon this spirit of ours, this self-aware-of-itself, which is our spirituality and our vice.
As a matter of fact, we need to be a little more radically aware of ourselves. When a man starts drinking, and his stomach simply doesn’t want any more, it is time he put a check on his impudent spirit and obeyed his stomach. When a man’s body has reached one of its periods of loneliness, and with a sure voice cries that it wants to be alone and intact, it is then, inevitably, that the accursed perversity of the spirit, the self-aware-of-itself, is bound to whip the unhappy senses into excitement and to force them into fornication. It is then, when a man’s body cries to be left alone and intact, that man forces himself to be a Don Juan. The same with women. It is the price we have to pay for our precious spirit, our self-aware- of-itself, which we don’t yet know how to handle.
And when a man has forced himself to be a Don Juan, you may bet his children will force themselves to be Puritans, with a nasty, greedy abstinence, as greedy as the previous gluttony. Oh bitter inheritance, the human spirit, the self-aware-of-itself! The self-aware- of-itself, that says: I like it, so I will have it all the time! — and then, in revulsion, says: I don’t like it, I will have none of it, and no man shall have any of it. Either way, it is sordid, and makes one sick. Oh lofty human spirit, how sordid you have made us! What a viper Plato was, with his distinction between body and spirit, and the exaltation of the spirit, the self-aware-of-itself. The human spirit, the self-aware-of-itself, is only tolerable when controlled by the divine, or demonish sanity which is greater than itself.
It is difficult to know what name to give to that most central and vital clue to the human being, which clinches him into integrity. The best is to call it his vital sanity. We thus escape the rather nauseating emotional suggestions of words like soul and spirit and holy ghost.
We can escape from the trap of the human spirit, the self-aware- of-itself, in which we are entrapped, by going quite, quite still and letting our whole sanity assert itself inside us, and set us into rhythm.
But first of all we must know we are entrapped. We most certainly are. You may call it intellectualism, self-consciousness, the self aware of itself, or what you will: you can even call it just human consciousness, if you like: but there it is. Perhaps it is simpler to stick to a common word like self-consciousness. In modern civilization we are all self-conscious. All our emotions are mental, self-conscious. Our passions are self-conscious. We are an intensely elaborate and intricate clockwork of nerves and brain. Nerves and brain, but still a clockwork. A mechanism, and hence incapable of experience.
The nerves and brain are the apparatus by which we signal and register consciousness. Consciousness, however, does not take rise in the nerves and brain. It takes rise elsewhere: in the blood, in the corpuscles, somewhere very primitive and pre-nerve and pre-brain. Just as energy generates in the electron. Every speck of protoplasm, every living cell is conscious. All the cells of our body are conscious. And all the time, they give off a stream of consciousness which flows along the nerves and keeps us spontaneously alive. While the flow streams through us, from the blood to the heart, the bowls, the viscera, then along the sympathetic system of nerves into our spontaneous minds, making us breathe, and see, and move, and be aware, and do things spontaneously, while this flow streams as a flame streams ceaselessly, we are lit up, we glow, we live.
But there is another process. There is that strange switchboard of consciousness, the brain, with its power of transferring spontaneous energy into voluntary energy: or consciousness, as you please: the two are very closely connected. The brain can transfer spontaneous consciousness, which we are unaware of, into voluntary consciousness, which we are aware of, and which we call consciousness exclusively.
Now it is nonsense to say there cannot be a consciousness in us of which we are always unaware. We are never aware of sleep except when we awake. If we didn’t sleep, we should never know we were awake. But we are very much aware of our “consciousness.” We are aware that it is a state only. And we are aware that it displaces another state. The other state we may negatively call the unconscious. But it is a poor way of putting it. To say that a skylark sings unconsciously is feeble. The skylark of course sings consciously. But with the other, spontaneous or sympathetic consciousness, which flows up like a flame from the corpuscles of all the body to the gates of the body, through the muscles and nerves of the sympathetic system to the hands and eyes and all the organs of utterance. The skylark does not sing like the lady in the concert- hall, consciously, mentally, deliberately, with the voluntary consciousness.
Some very strange process takes place in the brain, the process of cognition. This process of cognition consists in the forming of ideas, which are units of transmuted consciousness. These ideas can then be stored in the memory, or wherever it is that the brain stores its ideas. And these ideas are alive: they are little batteries in which so much energy of consciousness is stored.
It is here that our secondary consciousness comes in, our mind, our mental consciousness, our cerebral consciousness. Our mind is made up of a vast number of live ideas, and a good number of dead ones. Ideas are like the little electric batteries of a flashlight, in which a certain amount of energy is stored, which expends itself and it not renewed. Then you throw the dead battery away.
But when the mind has a sufficient number of these little batteries of ideas in store, a new process of life starts in. The moment an idea forms in the mind, at that moment does the old integrity of the consciousness break. In the old myths, at that moment we lose our “innocence,” we partake of the tree of knowledge, and we become “aware of our nakedness”: in short, self-conscious. The self becomes aware of itself, and then the fun begins, and then the trouble starts.
The first thing the self-aware-of-itself realizes is that it is a derivative, not a primary entity. The second thing it realizes is that the spontaneous self with its sympathetic consciousness and non- ideal reaction is the original reality, the old Adam, over which the self-aware-of-itself has no originative power. That is, the self-aware- of-itself knows it can frustrate the consciousness of the old Adam, divert it, but it cannot stop it: it knows, moreover, that as the moon is a luminary because the sun shines, so it, the self-aware-of-itself, the mental consciousness, the spirit, is only a sort of reflection of the great primary consciousness of the old Adam.
Now the self-aware-of-itself has always the quality of egoism. The spirit is always egoistic. The greatest spiritual commands are all forms of egoism, usually inverted egoism, for deliberate humility, we are all well aware, is a rabid form of egoism. The Sermon on the Mount is a long string of utterances from the self-aware-of-itself, the spirit, and all of them are rabid aphorisms of egoism, backhanded egoism.
The moment the self-aware-of-itself comes into being, it begins egoistically to assert itself. It cuts immediately at the wholeness of the pristine consciousness, the old Adam, and wounds it. And it goes on with the battle. The greatest enemy man has or ever can have is his own spirit, his own self-aware-of-itself.
This self-aware ego knows it is a derivative, a satellite. So it must assert itself. It knows it has no power over the original body, the old Adam, save the secondary power of the idea. So it begins to store up ideas, those little batteries which always have a moral, or good-and-bad implication.
For four thousand years man has been accumulating these little batteries of ideas, and using them on himself against his pristine consciousness, his old Adam. The queen bee of all human ideas since 2000 B.C. has been the idea that the body, the pristine consciousness, the great sympathetic life-flow, the steady flame of the old Adam is bad, and must be conquered. Every religion taught the conquest: science took up the battle, tooth and nail: culture fights in the same cause: and only art sometimes — or always — exhibits an internecine conflict and betrays its own battle-cry.
I believe that there was a great age, a great epoch when man did not make war: previous to 2000 B.C. Then the self had not really become aware of itself, it had not separated itself off, the spirit was not yet born, so there was no internal conflict, and hence no permanent external conflict. The external conflict of war, or of industrial competition, is only a reflection of the war that goes on inside each human being, the war of the self-conscious ego against the spontaneous old Adam.
If the self-conscious ego once wins, you get immediate insanity, because our primary self is the old Adam, in which rests our sanity. And when man starts living from his self-conscious energy, women at once begin to go to pieces, all the “freedom” business sets in. Because women are only kept in equilibrium by the old Adam. Nothing else can avail.
But the means which the spirit, the self-conscious ego, the personality, the self-aware-of-itself takes to conquer the vital self or old Adam are curious. First it has an idea, a semi-truth in which some of the energy of the vital consciousness is transmuted and stored. This idea it projects down again onto the spontaneous affective body. The verv first idea is the idea of shame. The spirit, the self-conscious ego looks at the body and says: You are shameful. The body, for some mysterious reason (really, because it is so vulnerable), immediately feels ashamed. A-ha! Now the spirit has got a hold. It discovers a second idea. The second idea is work. The spirit says: Base body! you need all the time to eat food. Who is going to give you food? You must sweat for it, sweat for it, or you will starve.
Now before the spirit emerged white and tyrannous in the human consciousness, man had not concerned himself deeply about starving. Occasionally, no doubt, he starved; but no oftener than the birds do, and they don’t often starve. Anyhow, he cared no more about it than the birds do. But now he feared it, and fell to work.
And here we see the mysterious power of ideas, the power of rousing emotion, primitive emotions of shame, fear, anger, and sometimes joy; but usually the specious joy over another defeat of the pristine self.
So the spirit, the self-aware-of-itself organized a grand battery of dynamic ideas, the pivotal idea being almost always the idea of self-sacrifice and the triumph of the self-aware-of-itself, that pale Galilean simulacrum of a man.
But wait! Wait! There is a nemesis. It is great fun overcoming the Old Adam while the Old Adam is still lusty and kicking: like breaking in a bronco. But nemesis, strange nemesis. The old Adam isn’t an animal that you can permanently domesticate. Domesticated, he goes deranged.
We are the sad results of a four-thousand-year effort to break the Old Adam, to domesticate him utterly. He is to a large extent broken and domesticated.
But then what? Then, as the flow of pristine or spontaneous consciousness gets weaker and weaker, the grand dynamic ideas go deader and deader. We have got a vast magazine of ideas, all of us. But they are practically all dead batteries, played out. They can’t provoke any emotion or feeling or reaction in the spontaneous body, the old Adam. Love is a dead shell of an idea — we don’t react — for love is only one of the great dynamic ideas, now played out. Self- sacrifice is another dead shell. Conquest is another. Success is another. Making good is another.
In fact, I don’t know of one great idea or ideal — they are the same — which is still alive today. They are all dead. You can turn them on, but you get no kick. You turn on love, you fornicate till you are black in the face — you get no real thing out of it. The old Adam plays his last revenge on you, and refuses to respond at all to any of your ideal pokings. You have gone dead. You can’t feel anything, and you may as well know it.
The mob, of course, will always deceive themselves that they are feeling things, even when they are not. To them, when they say 1 love you! there will be a huge imaginary feeling, and they will act up according to schedule. All the love on the film, the close-up kisses and the rest, and all the responses in buzzing emotion in the audience, is all acting up, all according to schedule. It is all just cerebral, and the body is just forced to go through the antics.
And this deranges the natural body-mind harmony on which our sanity rests. Our masses are rapidly going insane.
And in the horror of nullity — for the human being comes to have his own nullity in horror, he is terrified by his own incapacity to feel anything at all, he has a mad fear, at last, of his own self- consciousness — the modern man sets up the reverse process of katab- olism, destructive sensation. He can no longer have any living productive feelings. Very well, he will have destructive sensations, produced by katabolism on his most intimate tissues.
Drink, drugs, jazz, speed, “petting,” all modern forms of thrill, are just the production of sensation by the katabolism of the finest conscious cells of our living body. We explode our own cells and release a certain energy and accompanying sensation. It is, naturally, a process of suicide. And it is just the same process as ever: the self-conscious ego, the spirit, attacking the pristine body, the old Adam. But now the attack is direct. All the wildest Bohemians and profligates are only doing directly what their puritanical grandfathers did indirectly: killing the body of the old Adam. But now the lust is direct self-murder. It only needs a few more strides, and it is promiscuous murder, like the war.
But we see this activity rampant today: the process of the sensational katabolism of the conscious body. It is perhaps even more pernicious than the old conservative attack on the old Adam, certainly it is swifter. But it is the same thing. There is no volte-face. There is no new spirit. It may be a Life of Christ or it may be a book on Relativity or a slim volume of lyrics or a novel like the telephone directory: it is still the same old attack on the living body. The body is still made disgusting. Only the moderns drag in all the excrements and the horrors and put them under your nose and say: Enjoy that horror! Or they write about love as if it were a process of endless pissing — except that they write kissing instead of pissing — and they say: Isn’t it lovely!