How To Kidnap A Child

Congratulations! You have embarked on a great adventure. Kidnapping a child is probably unlike anything you have done before. If you are a first-time kidnapper you may be hesitant; perhaps you have lingering scruples. It is true you will probably do irreparable harm to your own child. Children of divorce more often become involved in drugs, alcohol, and crime, become pregnant as teenagers, perform poorly in school, join gangs, and commit suicide.

But look at the advantages! You can be rid of that swine you live with, with all his tedious opinions about child-rearing. YOU call the shots! What could be more rewarding? And a little extra cash each month never hurts, eh?

Few people realize how easy abduction is. It happens 1,000 times a day, mostly by parents! So if you’re thinking, “I could never get away with it,” wake up! Millions do. In fact many only realize the possibility when they become victims. Then they invariably say, “If only I had known how easy it is I would have done it myself!” So don’t be caught off guard. Read on, and discover the exciting world of child kidnapping and extortion.

If you are mother the best time to snatch is soon after you have a new child or pregnancy. Once you have what you want, you will realize that the father is no longer necessary (except for child support).

A father should consider snatching as soon as he suspects the mother might. Once she has the child, you have pretty much lost the game. You will always be at a disadvantage, but it is in your interest (as it is in hers) to snatch first. Preventive snatching may not look good (and unlike her, it can be used against you). But hey, you have the kid. If you hit the road, it could take years to track you down.

Surprise is crucial for an elegant abduction. Wait until the other parent is away, and clean the place out thoroughly. Take all the child’s effects, because if you don’t grab it now you will never get it, and you will never be forced to return any of it. The more you have, the better “home” you can claim to provide. You also want to achieve the maximum emotional devastation to your spouse. Like the terrorist, you want to impress with how swift, sudden, and unpredictable your strike can be.

Concealing the child is illegal, but it will also buy you time. The police will make the case a low priority, and if you are a mother you will never be prosecuted. In the meantime claim to have established a “stable routine” and that returning the child (or even visits) would be “disruptive.” Anything that keeps the child in your possession and away from their father works to your advantage.

Find superficial ways to appear cooperative. Inform the father of your decisions (after you have made them). At the same time avoid real cooperation. The judge will conclude that the parents “can’t agree” and leave you in charge. Since it is standard piety that joint custody requires “cooperation,” the easiest way to sabotage joint custody is to be as uncooperative as possible.

Go to court right away. The more aggressive you are with litigation the more it will appear you have some valid grievance. The judge and lawyers (including your spouse's) will be grateful for the business you create. Despite professions of heavy caseloads, courts are under pressure to channel money to lawyers, whose bar associations appoint and promote judges. File a motion for sole custody, and get a restraining order to keep the father from seeing his children. (A nice touch is to say he is planning to “kidnap” them.) Or have him restricted to supervised visitation.

Going to court is also a great opportunity to curtail anything you dislike about your spouse's child-rearing. If you don’t like his religion, get an injunction against him discussing it. Is he fussy about table manners or proper behavior? Getting a court order is easier than you think. You may even get the child’s entire upbringing micro-managed by judicial directives.

Charges of physical and sexual abuse are also helpful. Accusing a father of sexually abusing his own children is very easy and can be satisfying for its own sake.

Don’t worry about proving the charges. An experienced judge will recognize trumped-up allegations. This is not important, since no one will ever blame the judge for being “better safe than sorry,” and accusations create business for his cronies. You yourself will never have to answer for false charges. The investigation also buys time during which you can further claim to be establishing a routine while keeping Dad at a distance and programming the children against him.

Abuse accusations are also marvelously self-fulfilling. What more logical way to provoke a parent to lash out than to take away his children? Men naturally become violent when someone interferes with their children. This is what fathers are for. The more you can torment him with the ruin of his family, home, livelihood, savings, and sanity, the more likely that he will self-destruct, thus demonstrating his unfitness.

Get the children themselves involved. Children are easily convinced they have been molested. Once the suggestion is planted, any affection from their father will elicit a negative reaction, making your suggestion self-fulfilling in the child’s mind. And if one of your new lovers actually has molested the child, you can divert the accusation to Dad.

Dripping poison into the hearts of your children can be gratifying, and it is a joy to watch the darlings absorb your hostility. Young children can be filled with venom fairly easily just by telling them what a rat their father is as frequently as possible.

Older children present more of a challenge. They may have fond memories of the love and fun they once experienced with him. These need to be expunged or at least tainted. Try little tricks like saying, “Today you will be seeing your father, but don’t worry, it won’t last long.” Worry aloud about the other parent’s competence to care for the child or what unpleasant or dangerous experience may be in store during the child’s visit. Sign the child up for organized activities that conflict with Dad's visits. Or promise fun things, like a trip to Disneyland, which then must be “cancelled” to visit Dad.

You will soon discover how neatly your techniques reinforce one another. For example, marginalizing the father and alienating the child become perfect complements merely by suggesting that Daddy is absent because he does not love you. What could be more logical in their sweet little minds!

And what works with children is also effective with judges. The more you can make the children hate their father the easier you make it to leave custody with you.

Remember too, this guide is no substitute for a good lawyer, since nothing is more satisfying than watching a hired goon beat up on your child’s father in a courtroom.

And now you can do what you like! You can warehouse the kids in daycare while you work (or whatever). You don't have to worry about brushing hair or teeth. You can slap them when they're being brats. You can feed them fast food every night (or just give them Cheez Whiz). If they become a real annoyance you can turn them over to the state social services agency. You are free!

November 19, 2001

https://www.lewrockwell.com/author/stephen-baskerville/

Sex is Nature's Greatest Deception

 

Would one trade in his or her vitality for a temporary thrill? Would one lose one's spirit over some frivolous romance that did not even last the night? Hopefully not, but most likely nearly everyone is doing something quite similar to the above on a regular basis. If one is really serious about finding wholeness, then one needs to beware of the conspiracy of nature!

What is nature's greatest deception? How serious is it? Everyone is subject to this grand deception or conspiracy of nature that diminishes the quality of life starting in one's teens in order to perpetuate the species. This effect seems to also keep the soul bound within the prison of the physical by diminishing access to the spiritual and sensitivity to the sublime. Nature's conspiracy is an insidious all-consuming universal influence that in ways mysterious to most people, keep souls bound to the flesh, and drive everyone, everywhere down a never-ending path of materialistic strife and struggle toward all manner of nonsensical desires and depressing fates. In other words, we are imprisoned by our senses, sensuality, and strong attachment to the physical body!

(...)

Would one in his or her right mind sell one's soul for a farthing? Of course not... if that person knew about it! Unbeknown to all, the vast majority of humanity is selling his or her soul for the "farthing" of sensory pleasure. Yet the soul is priceless, therefore of what avail is it if one gains the world but loses one's soul? Most do not even know exactly what I am talking about because of the average materialistic limited perspective so common to all people who are stuck on this Earth. And what is even more mysterious is I am not referring to the divine soul in the literal religious sense but in the yogic sense of the enlightened "soul" as a complete whole being of infinite bliss, freedom and love.

(...)

I have seen the negative effects of sex attributed to all kinds of causes except the one true cause, and sex is so normal, so common place, very few suspect or even concern themselves with nature's conspiracy of sex let alone even have the vaguest inclination that such a conspiracy exists! 

Very few even want to come to such a conclusion, after all who wants to give it up? Even worse is the widespread popularity and availability of technology to enhance sensual stimulation and masturbation. Then there is pornography which can provoke an indifference to one's mate or spouse who in most cases is unable to look as exciting or enticing as what can be found on the internet. Overstimulation only leads one further into spiritual debt and even more lack of sensitivity to the non-addicting and more wholesome pleasures of transmutation into continuous bliss, divine love, and a much more enlightened and fulfilling life.

Who wants to hear that conventional sex is also as addictive as a powerful drug and can have serious side-effects such as depression, anger, adultery, codependency, and sadness? Who wants to hear that this "normal, healthy behavior" that popular psychologists assume is bad to repress also has a dark side, and is a great drain on one's full human potential? No one wants to hear of or accept such things however true they are and however profound are the implications.

(...)

Successfully preserving and expanding one's sexual energy upward, rather than losing it through conventional sex, can lead to a permanent, incomparable, ever-increasing, ever-changing satisfaction for the entire future of one's existence. Not only that, after years of meditating in samadhi, many amazing mental and psychic powers, and other surprising benefits can also occur.

Even though reproductive relationships must continue if the generations are to go on, and even though conventional sex is a 100% natural and normal part of ordinary “healthy” living, that fact does not mean that it is always great for the mind, spirit and body to indulge in whenever one pleases! The wisest of couples (especially in Hinduism) are the ones who never have sex for recreation and only for the purpose to create a child. Drastic? Not at all when one fully realizes just how much blissful awakening in yoga is missed, and how much of the profoundest joys and most fulfilling romantic relationships in life are disrupted through the loss of vital fluids. 

The profound benefits of celibacy are rarely experienced and understood. It can take a month or more of strict celibacy to really start noticing the difference and before the months go by one often has to undergo the careful redirection of very strong urges, desires and overwhelming impulses into a continuous flow of blissful, expanded creative energy and prana up the spine in the form of a kundalini awakening.

One has to first fully overcome this most powerful addiction before one can start to experience this great inner strength, bliss, joy, rejuvenation and love within and eventually the realization of Self and then of God. Being free of the addiction to conventional sex also makes it possible to experience and enjoy the most incredibly satisfying relationships ever because the joy of love along with a wonderful new form of (transmuted) sensuality becomes magnified many times over.

Once one has been fully involved with the pure lifestyle of self-control for many months, one usually never wants to go back to the old way of life; the benefits are too great. This transformation may not be for everyone, especially the "young and restless," however, those most suited for the spiritual path should at least try it and find out for themselves. No longer being subject to the conspiracy of nature means one will soon find the keys to that elysian paradise of absolute, all-fulfilling joy called wholeness.

The benefits of celibacy are obviously not widely understood nor fully appreciated. With all the erotic opportunities, sensual photos, sex oriented e-mails, and other media of the sort flashing over the internet, there seems to be a universal obsession with trying to use up as much reproductive (creative) energy as soon as possible and as often as possible.

It seems that everyone thinks we should all have an endless potpourri of intercourse encounters and if not, plenty of pharmaceutical, natural remedies and pheromones to fix any lacks! Forget about unconditional love, wholesome affection, and sincere commitment, these ads seem to encourage a prodigious expenditure of only the most physical, basic urges while making one think that the size of that one part of the male anatomy is all that matters! What a hoax!

Even though sex may be a natural, essential part of life, so is being stuck in a physical body along with all its severe restrictions, miseries and complications lifetime after lifetime. Christians should especially be aware of this fact. For what reason was Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden of Eden in the first place? And humankind has ever since paid the terrible price of their “sin” by continuing with the sex act in the same old manner.

(...)

Even the majority of spiritual books I have read most recently don’t seem to touch on the virtues, values and benefits of celibacy, completely ignoring it almost as if everyone is somehow miraculously capable of achieving great heights of spiritual awareness, perfect love, perfect relationships, bliss, inner joy and concentration, etc. without any sort of reduction in the loss of creative fluids nor any help from advanced nutrition. How can anyone expect to make real and lasting spiritual progress under these conditions? In a similar sense, how in the world can one expect to get more and more power from a constantly drained battery?

In spite of the massive lack of popularity and understanding regarding celibacy, there is an obvious benefit to abstaining from sex for long periods of time that very few seem to understand or appreciate. Stored creative energy properly transmuted gives one a definite psychological boost such as a greater sense of purpose, better memory, concentration, and more interest in doing what is needed or required while giving one a feeling of reward in accomplishment. One tends to look forward to getting things done in a creative way while enjoying much greater motivation, bliss, joy, resilience, determination, and love for one’s duty.

As long as one prevents one’s creative energy from getting diffused or drained into the endless quagmire of lust, it remains easier for the accomplishment of one’s goals, and the expression of higher values such as unconditional love and affection, morality, purity, and spiritual marriage, to remain the main focus of one’s life. Obviously, if it weren’t so easy (unfortunate) to keep falling into this quagmire, there would be far wider acceptance and knowledge of the obvious ecological, economic, social, physical and mental health benefits of celibacy.

Celibacy and Transmutation of 

Sexual Energy for Deeper Meditation

Written by Russell Symonds 

(Yogi Shaktivirya)

 

Absurdistan in America

In Iowa, the government has confiscated the savings of 11-year-old Rylan Nitzschke. Rylan saved $220 from chores and shoveling snow, but that now belongs to Iowa. Why? Rylan's father allegedly owes child support (to Rylan), and his father's name was on the boy's bank account.

OK, so this is a mistake, and Iowa will return the boy's savings, right? Wrong. State officials have no intention of returning the money. After all, they receive federal funds for each dollar they collect (and for each father they incarcerate). Rylan's piggy bank helps balance the budget.

As Congress prepares to pass the Welfare Reform bill, the Washington Times reports that child support enforcement officials are ecstatic over provisions that will allow them to plunder and criminalize more citizens, using children as the justification. Yet no evidence indicates that there is, or ever has been, a problem of unpaid child support other than that created by the government. The child support “crisis” consists of little more than the government seizing people's children, imposing patently impossible debts on parents (and others) who have done nothing to incur those debts, and then arresting those who, quite predictably, cannot pay.

Now this dishonest and discredited hoax is creating a Western version of "Absurdistan" – the name given by East European dissidents to the Soviet dictatorships that were not only repressive but, at times, simply buffoonish.

West Virginia officials cleaned out the bank account of an 85-year-old grandmother whose son allegedly owed child support. The son paid in none of the $6,450 taken from the account, which comprised her life savings. She was also charged a $75 processing fee.

Canada has a name for such grandmothers: "deadbeat accomplices." These are grandparents, second wives, or other relatives, who can be forced to disclose and part with their savings to government officials.

In California, minor boys raped by adult women must pay child support to the criminals who raped them. "State law entitles the child to support from both parents, even though the boy is considered the victim of statutory rape," the district attorney’s office says. One boy was drugged before the sex. Kansas courts have likewise held that "the issue of consent to sexual activity under the criminal statutes is irrelevant in a civil action to determine paternity and for support of a minor child born of such activity." So much for not letting criminals profit from their crimes.

The elderly can also become targets of rape-for-profit. A disabled 85-year-old man, sexually assaulted by his housekeeper and awarded damages for the assault, was ordered to pay her child support, and his pension was garnished. The court denied him access to the child.

According to the Keystone Cops who enforce child support, a "child" is not a dependent minor but any recipient of their chivalry. “We’ve got some 40- to 45-year-old u2018kids' running around who are owed child support,” says Nick Young, enforcement director in Virginia. In Ohio, a 77-year-old great grandfather who had always paid on time was told he owed $45,000 in back child support and had his wages garnished, even though his youngest child was 46 years old.

In Canada, runaway children sue their parents for child support. In California, a 50-year-old divorce lawyer successfully sued his own parents for child support because, he said, depression rendered him unable to work. Startlingly, such suits were probably intended by a legislature dominated by trial lawyers. Judge Melinda Johnson observed that the statute is "unambiguous," and an attorney notes, “The statute didn’t come about by accident.”

In Canada and Australia, stepfathers are now ordered to pay the custodians of their stepchildren. Stuart Miller of the American Fathers Coalition comments wryly that such rulings open the door to multiple marriages to obtain multiple child support proceeds from multiple men without the inconvenience of multiple children. In fact, this is already happening, as judges allow "double-dipping," whereby both the biological father and stepfather are ordered to pay full child support to the same custodian for the same children.

Child support has little to do with providing for children. Its purpose is to redistribute money – and power – among grown-ups. Iowa officials say the only way Rylan's father can prevent the looting of Rylan's savings in the future is to give the boy’s money to the adult with custody.

But the miracle is that Rylan bothers with chores at all. Rylan's father "owes" his son money, according to the government, not because Rylan earns it through hard work but because his mother divorced the old man. Rylan can simply demand the money of his father, and the state will make him cough it up. Why teach youngsters to work when you can teach them to sue.

Indeed, some states now force fathers to pay college tuition. So kids, don't work to save for college or study hard for a scholarship. If you can convince your mother to divorce your father, the government will force Dad to pay at the barrel of a gun. Once fathers can be forced to pay law school tuition the machine will be completely self-financing.

States create instant deadbeats simply by increasing burdens. In Virginia, the author of sharply increased guidelines, William Rodgers of William and Mary College, tells officials that if they do not like his formula, he would “create a schedule to suit.” Presumably Dr. Rodgers proposes the guidelines he considers fair and reasonable. But if Virginia officials prefer guidelines that are not fair and reasonable, he can provide those too. This is Groucho Marx government: “Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others.”

Thus does child support simultaneously corrupt both public ethics and private morals, turning children into cash prizes and even "cash crops." One girl tells a Toronto newspaper of her savvy career plans: “I’m going to marry a really rich guy, then divorce him," she says. "But first I’m going to have his kids, so I get child support.”

September 24, 2003

Stephen Baskerville

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2003/09/stephen-baskerville/absurdistan-in-america/

"Historia Calamitatum" of Peter Abélard - introduction

 The "Historia Calamitatum" of Peter Abélard is one of those human documents, out of the very heart of the Middle Ages, that illuminates by the glow of its ardour a shadowy period that has been made even more dusky and incomprehensible by unsympathetic commentators and the ill-digested matter of "source-books." Like the "Confessions" of St. Augustine it is an authentic revelation of personality and, like the latter, it seems to show how unchangeable is man, how consistent unto himself whether he is of the sixth century or the twelfth—or indeed of the twentieth century. "Evolution" may change the flora and fauna of the world, or modify its physical forms, but man is always the same and the unrolling of the centuries affects him not at all. If we can assume the vivid personality, the enormous intellectual power and the clear, keen mentality of Abélard and his contemporaries and immediate successors, there is no reason why "The Story of My Misfortunes" should not have been written within the last decade.

They are large assumptions, for this is not a period in world history when the informing energy of life expresses itself through such qualities, whereas the twelfth century was of precisely this nature. The antecedent hundred years had seen the recovery from the barbarism that engulfed Western Europe after the fall of Rome, and the generation of those vital forces that for two centuries were to infuse society with a vigour almost unexampled in its potency and in the things it brought to pass. The parabolic curve that describes the trajectory of Mediaevalism was then emergent out of "chaos and old night" and Abélard and his opponent, St. Bernard, rode high on the mounting force in its swift and almost violent ascent.

Pierre du Pallet, yclept Abélard, was born in 1079 and died in 1142, and his life precisely covers the period of the birth, development and perfecting of that Gothic style of architecture which is one of the great exemplars of the period. Actually, the Norman development occupied the years from 1050 to 1125 while the initiating and determining of Gothic consumed only fifteen years, from Bury, begun in 1125, to Saint-Denis, the work of Abbot Suger, the friend and partisan of Abélard, in 1140. It was the time of the Crusades, of the founding and development of schools and universities, of the invention or recovery of great arts, of the growth of music, poetry and romance. It was the age of great kings and knights and leaders of all kinds, but above all it was the epoch of a new philosophy, refounded on the newly revealed corner stones of Plato and Aristotle, but with a new content, a new impulse and a new method inspired by Christianity.

All these things, philosophy, art, personality, character, were the product of the time, which, in its definiteness and consistency, stands apart from all other epochs in history. The social system was that of feudalism, a scheme of reciprocal duties, privileges and obligations as between man and man that has never been excelled by any other system that society has developed as its own method of operation. As Dr. De Wulf has said in his illuminating book "Philosophy and Civilization in the Middle Ages" (a volume that should be read by any one who wishes rightly to understand the spirit and quality of Mediaevalism), "the feudal sentiment par excellence … is the sentiment of the value and dignity of the individual man. The feudal man lived as a free man; he was master in his own house; he sought his end in himself; he was—and this is a scholastic expression,—propter seipsum existens: all feudal obligations were founded upon respect for personality and the given word."

Of course this admirable scheme of society with its guild system of industry, its absence of usury in any form and its just sense of comparative values, was shot through and through with religion both in faith and practice. Catholicism was universally and implicitly accepted. Monasticism had redeemed Europe from barbarism and Cluny had freed the Church from the yoke of German imperialism. This unity and immanence of religion gave a consistency to society otherwise unobtainable, and poured its vitality into every form of human thought and action.

It was Catholicism and the spirit of feudalism that preserved men from the dangers inherent in the immense individualism of the time. With this powerful and penetrating coördinating force men were safe to go about as far as they liked in the line of individuality, whereas today, for example, the unifying force of a common and vital religion being absent and nothing having been offered to take its place, the result of a similar tendency is egotism and anarchy. These things happened in the end in the case of Mediaevalism when the power and the influence of religion once began to weaken, and the Renaissance and Reformation dissolved the fabric of a unified society. Thereafter it became necessary to bring some order out of the spiritual, intellectual and physical chaos through the application of arbitrary force, and so came absolutism in government, the tyranny of the new intellectualism, the Catholic Inquisition and the Puritan Theocracy.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, the balance is justly preserved, though it was but an unstable equilibrium, and therefore during the time of Abélard we find the widest diversity of speculation and freedom of thought which continue unhampered for more than a hundred years. The mystical school of the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris follows one line (perhaps the most nearly right of all though it was submerged by the intellectual force and vivacity of the Scholastics) with Hugh of St. Victor as its greatest exponent. The Franciscans and Dominicans each possessed great schools of philosophy and dogmatic theology, and in addition there were a dozen individual line of speculation, each vitalized by some one personality, daring, original, enthusiastic. This prodigious mental and spiritual activity was largely fostered by the schools, colleges and universities that had suddenly appeared all over Europe. Never was such activity along educational lines. Almost every cathedral had its school, and many of the abbeys as well, as for example, in France alone, Cluny, Citeaux and Bec, St. Martin of Tours, Laon, Chartres, Rheims and Paris. To these schools students poured in from all over the world in numbers mounting to many thousands for such as Paris for example, and the mutual rivalries were intense and sometimes disorderly. Groups of students would choose their own masters and follow them from place to place, even subjecting them to discipline if in their opinion they did not live up to the intellectual mark they had set as their standard. As there was not only one religion and one social system, but one universal language as well, this gathering from all the four quarters of Europe was perfectly possible, and had much to do with the maintenance of that unity which marked society for three centuries.

At the time of Abélard the schools of Chartres and Paris were at the height of their fame and power. Fulbert, Bernard and Thierry, all of Chartres, had fixed its fame for a long period, and at Paris Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and William of Champeaux were names to conjure with, while Anselm of Laon, Adelard of Bath, Alan of Lille, John of Salisbury, Peter Lombard, were all from time to time students or teachers in one of the schools of the Cathedral, the Abbey of St. Victor or Ste. Geneviève.

Earlier in the Middle Ages the identity of theology and philosophy had been proclaimed, following the Neo-Platonic and Augustinian theory, and the latter (cf. Peter Damien and Duns Scotus Eriugena) was even reduced to a position that made it no more than the obedient handmaid of theology. In the eleventh century however, St. Anselm had drawn a clear distinction between faith and reason, and thereafter theology and philosophy were generally accepted as individual but allied sciences, both serving as lines of approach to truth but differing in their method. Truth was one and therefore there could be no conflict between the conclusions reached after different fashions. In the twelfth century Peter of Blois led a certain group called "rigourists" who still looked askance at philosophy, or rather at the intellectual methods by which it proceeded, and they were inclined to condemn it as "the devil's art," but they were on the losing side and John of Salisbury, Alan of Lille, Gilbert de la Porrée and Hugh of St. Victor prevailed in their contention that philosophers were "humanae videlicet sapientiae amatores," while theologians were "_divinae scripturae doctores."

Cardinal Mercier, himself the greatest contemporary exponent of Scholastic philosophy, defines philosophy as "the science of the totality of things." The twelfth century was a time when men were striving to see phenomena in this sense and established a great rational synthesis that should yet be in full conformity with the dogmatic theology of revealed religion. Abélard was one of the most enthusiastic and daring of these Mediaeval thinkers, and it is not surprising that he should have found himself at issue not only with the duller type of theologians but with his philosophical peers themselves. He was an intellectual force of the first magnitude and a master of dialectic; he was also an egotist through and through, and a man of strong passions. He would and did use his logical faculty and his mastery of dialectic to justify his own desires, whether these were for carnal satisfaction or the maintenance of an original intellectual concept. It was precisely this danger that aroused the fears of the "rigourists" and in the light of succeeding events in the domain of intellectualism it is impossible to deny that there was some justification for their gloomy apprehensions. In St. Thomas Aquinas this intellectualizing process marked its highest point and beyond there was no margin of safety. He himself did not overstep the verge of danger, but after him this limit was overpassed. The perfect balance between mind and spirit was achieved by Hugh of St. Victor, but afterwards the severance began and on the one side was the unwholesome hyper-spiritualization of the Rhenish mystics, on the other the false intellectualism of Descartes, Kant and the entire modern school of materialistic philosophy. It was the clear prevision of this inevitable issue that made of St. Bernard not only an implacable opponent of Abélard but of the whole system of Scholasticism as well. For a time he was victorious. Abélard was silenced and the mysticism of the Victorines triumphed, only to be superseded fifty years later when the two great orders, Dominican and Franciscan, produced their triumphant protagonists of intellectualism, Alelander Halesand Albertus Magnus, and finally the greatest pure intellect of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Bernard, St. Francis of Assisi, the Victorines, maintained that after all, as Henri Bergson was to say, seven hundred years later, "the mind of man by its very nature is incapable of apprehending reality," and that therefore faith is better than reason. Lord Bacon came to the same conclusion when he wrote "Let men please themselves as they will in admiring and almost adoring the human kind, this is certain; that, as an uneven mirrour distorts the rays of objects according to its own figure and section, so the mind … cannot be trusted." And Hugh of St. Victor himself, had written, even in the days of Abélard: "There was a certain wisdom that seemed such to them that knew not the true wisdom. The world found it and began to be puffed up, thinking itself great in this. Confiding in its wisdom it became presumptuous and boasted it would attain the highest wisdom. And it made itself a ladder of the face of creation. … Then those things which were seen were known and there were other things which were not known; and through those which were manifest they expected to reach those that were hidden. And they stumbled and fell into the falsehoods of their own imagining … So God made foolish the wisdom of this world, and He pointed out another wisdom, which seemed foolishness and was not. For it preached Christ crucified, in order that truth might be sought in humility. But the world despised it, wishing to contemplate the works of God, which He had made a source of wonder, and it did not wish to venerate what He had set for imitation, neither did it look to its own disease, seeking medicine in piety; but presuming on a false health, it gave itself over with vain curiosity to the study of alien things."

These considerations troubled Abélard not at all. He was conscious of a mind of singular acuteness and a tongue of parts, both of which would do whatever he willed. Beneath all the tumultuous talk of Paris, when he first arrived there, lay the great and unsolved problem of Universals and this he promptly made his own, rushing in where others feared to tread. William of Champeaux had rested on a Platonic basis, Abélard assumed that of Aristotle, and the clash began. It is not a lucid subject, but the best abstract may be found in Chapter XIV of Henry Adams' "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres" while this and the two succeeding chapters give the most luminous and vivacious account of the principles at issue in this most vital of intellectual feuds.

"According to the latest authorities, the doctrine of universals which convulsed the schools of the twelfth century has never received an adequate answer. What is a species: what is a genus or a family or an order? More or less convenient terms of classification, about which the twelfth century cared very little, while it cared deeply about the essence of classes! Science has become too complex to affirm the existence of universal truths, but it strives for nothing else, and disputes the problem, within its own limits, almost as earnestly as in the twelfth century, when the whole field of human and superhuman activity was shut between these barriers of substance, universals, and particulars. Little has changed except the vocabulary and the method. The schools knew that their society hung for life on the demonstration that God, the ultimate universal, was a reality, out of which all other universal truths or realities sprang. Truth was a real thing, outside of human experience. The schools of Paris talked and thought of nothing else. John of Salisbury, who attended Abélard's lectures about 1136, and became Bishop of Chartres in 1176, seems to have been more surprised than we need be at the intensity of the emotion. 'One never gets away from this question,' he said. 'From whatever point a discussion starts, it is always led back and attached to that. It is the madness of Rufus about Naevia; "He thinks of nothing else; talks of nothing else, and if Naevia did not exist, Rufus would be dumb."'

… "In these scholastic tournaments the two champions started from opposite points:—one from the ultimate substance, God,—the universal, the ideal, the type;—the other from the individual, Socrates, the concrete, the observed fact of experience, the object of sensual perception. The first champion—William in this instance— assumed that the universal was a real thing; and for that reason he was called a realist. His opponent—Abélard—held that the universal was only nominally real; and on that account he was called a nominalist. Truth, virtue, humanity, exist as units and realities, said William. Truth, replied Abélard, is only the sum of all possible facts that are true, as humanity is the sum of all actual human beings. The ideal bed is a form, made by God, said Plato. The ideal bed is a name, imagined by ourselves, said Aristotle. 'I start from the universe,' said William. 'I start from the atom,' said Abélard; and, once having started, they necessarily came into collision at some point between the two."

In this "Story of My Misfortunes" Abélard gives his own account of the triumphant manner in which he confounded his master, William, but as Henry Adams says, "We should be more credulous than twelfth-century monks, if we believed, on Abélard's word in 1135, that in 1110 he had driven out of the schools the most accomplished dialectician of the age by an objection so familiar that no other dialectician was ever silenced by it—whatever may have been the case with theologians-and so obvious that it could not have troubled a scholar of fifteen. William stated a selected doctrine as old as Plato; Abélard interposed an objection as old as Aristotle. Probably Plato and Aristotle had received the question and answer from philosophers ten thousand years older than themselves. Certainly the whole of philosophy has always been involved in this dispute."

So began the battle of the schools with all its more than military strategy and tactics, and in the end it was a drawn battle, in spite of its marvels of intellectual heroism and dialectical sublety. Says Henry Adams again:—

"In every age man has been apt to dream uneasily, rolling from side to side, beating against imaginary bars, unless, tired out, he has sunk into indifference or scepticism. Religious minds prefer scepticism. The true saint is a profound sceptic; a total disbeliever in human reason, who has more than once joined hands on this ground with some who were at best sinners. Bernard was a total disbeliever in Scholasticism; so was Voltaire. Bernard brought the society of his time to share his scepticism, but could give the society no other intellectual amusement to relieve its restlessness. His crusade failed; his ascetic enthusiasm faded; God came no nearer. If there was in all France, between 1140 and 1200, a more typical Englishman of the future Church of England type than John of Salisbury, he has left no trace; and John wrote a description of his time which makes a picturesque contrast with the picture painted by Abélard, his old master, of the century at its beginning. John weighed Abélard and the schools against Bernard and the cloister, and coolly concluded that the way to truth led rather through Citeaux, which brought him to Chartres as Bishop in 1176, and to a mild scepticism in faith. 'I prefer to doubt' he said, 'rather than rashly define what is hidden.' The battle with the schools had then resulted only in creating three kinds of sceptics:— the disbelievers in human reason; the passive agnostics; and the sceptics proper, who would have been atheists had they dared. The first class was represented by the School of St. Victor; the second by John of Salisbury himself; the third, by a class of schoolmen whom he called Cornificii, as though they made a practice of inventing horns of dilemma on which to fix their opponents; as, for example, they asked whether a pig which was led to market was led by the man or the cord. One asks instantly: What cord?—Whether Grace, for instance, or Free Will?

"Bishop John used the science he had learned in the school only to reach the conclusion that, if philosophy were a science at all, its best practical use was to teach charity—love. Even the early, superficial debates of the schools, in 1100-50, had so exhausted the subject that the most intelligent men saw how little was to be gained by pursuing further those lines of thought. The twelfth century had already reached the point where the seventeenth century stood when Descartes renewed the attempt to give a solid, philosophical basis for deism by his celebrated 'Cogito, ergo sum.' Although that ultimate fact seemed new to Europe when Descartes revived it as the starting-point of his demonstration, it was as old and familiar as St. Augustine to the twelfth century, and as little conclusive as any other assumption of the Ego or the Non-Ego. The schools argued, according to their tastes, from unity to multiplicity, or from multiplicity to unity; but what they wanted was to connect the two. They tried realism and found that it led to pantheism. They tried nominalism and found that it ended in materialism. They attempted a compromise in conceptualism which begged the whole question. Then they lay down, exhausted. In the seventeenth century—the same violent struggle broke out again, and wrung from Pascal the famous outcry of despair in which the French language rose, perhaps for the last time, to the grand style of the twelfth century. To the twelfth century it belongs; to the century of faith and simplicity; not to the mathematical certainties of Descartes and Leibnitz and Newton, or to the mathematical abstractions of Spinoza. Descartes had proclaimed his famous conceptual proof of God: 'I am conscious of myself, and must exist; I am conscious of God and He must exist.' Pascal wearily replied that it was not God he doubted, but logic. He was tortured by the impossibility of rejecting man's reason by reason; unconsciously sceptical, he forced himself to disbelieve in himself rather than admit a doubt of God. Man had tried to prove God, and had failed: 'The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote (éloignées) from the reasoning of men, and so contradictory (impliquées, far fetched) that they made little impression; and even if they served to convince some people, it would only be during the instant that they see the demonstration; an hour afterwards they fear to have deceived themselves.'"

Abélard was always, as he has been called, a scholastic adventurer, a philosophical and theological freelance, and it was after the Calamity that he followed those courses that resulted finally in his silencing and his obscure death. It is almost impossible for us of modern times to understand the violence of partisanship aroused by his actions and published words that centre apparently around the placing of the hermitage he had made for himself under the patronage of the third Person of the Trinity, the Paraclete, the Spirit of love and compassion and consolation, and the consequent arguments by which he justified himself. To us it seems that he was only trying to exalt the power of the Holy Spirit, a pious action at the least but to the episcopal and monastic conservators of the faith he seems to have been guilty of trying to rationalize an unsolvable mystery, to find an intellectual solution forbidden to man. In some obscure way the question seems to be involved in that other of the function of the Blessed Virgin as the fount of mercy and compassion, and at this time when the cult of the Mother of God had reached its highest point of potency and poignancy anything of the sort seemed intolerable.

For a time the affairs of Abélard prospered: Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis was his defender, and he enjoyed the favor of the Pope and the King. He was made an abbot and his influence spread in every direction. In 1137 the King died and conditions at Rome changed so that St. Bernard became almost Pope and King in his own person. Within a year he proceeded against Abélard; his "Theology" was condemned at a council of Sens, this judgment was confirmed by the Pope, and the penalty of silence was imposed on the author— probably the most severe punishment he could be called upon to endure. As a matter of fact it was fatal to him. He started forthwith for Rome but stopped at the Abbey of Cluny in the company of its Abbot, Peter the Venerable, "the most amiable figure of the twelfth century," and no very devoted admirer of St. Bernard, to whom, as a matter of fact, he had once written, "You perform all the difficult religious duties; you fast, you watch, you suffer; but you will not endure the easy ones-you do not love." Here he found two years of peace after his troubled life, dying in the full communion of the Church on 21 April, 1142.

The problems of philosophy and theology that were so vital in the Middle Ages interest us no more, even when they are less obscure than those so rife in the twelfth century, but the problem of human love is always near and so it is not perhaps surprising that the abiding interest concerns itself with Abélard's relationship with Héloïse. So far as he is concerned it is not a very savoury matter. He deliberately seduced a pupil, a beautiful girl entrusted to him by her uncle, a simpleminded old canon of the Cathedral of Paris, under whose roof he ensconced himself by false pretences and with the full intention of gaining the niece for himself. Abélard seems to have exercised an irresistible fascination for men and women alike, and his plot succeeded to admiration. Stricken by a belated remorse, he finally married Héloïse against her unselfish protests and partly to legitimatize his unborn child, and shortly after he was surprised and overpowered by emissaries of Canon Fulbert and subjected to irreparable mutilation. He tells the story with perfect frankness and with hardly more than formal expressions of compunction, and thereafter follows the narrative of their separation, he to a monastery, she to a convent, and of his care for her during her conventual life, or at least for that part of it that had passed before the "History" was written. Through the whole story it is Héloise who shines brightly as a curiously beautiful personality, unselfish, self sacrificing, and almost virginal in her purity in spite of her fault. One has for her only sympathy and affection whereas it is difficult to feel either for Abélard in spite of his belated efforts at rectifying his own sin and his life-long devotion to his solitary wife in her hidden cloister.

The whole story was instantly known, Abélard's assailants were punished in kind, .and he himself shortly resumed his work of lecturing on philosophy and, a little later, on theology. Apparently his reputation did not suffer in the least, nor did hers; in fact her piety became almost a by-word and his name as a great teacher increased by leaps and bounds: neither his offence nor its punishment seemed to bring lasting discredit. This fact, which seems strange to us, does not imply a lack of moral sense in the community but rather the prevalence of standards alien to our own. It is only since the advent of Puritanism that sexual sins have been placed at the head of the whole category. During the Middle Ages, as always under Christianity, the most deadly sins were pride, covetousness, slander and anger. These implied inherent moral depravity, but "illicit" love was love outside the law of man, and did not of necessity and always involve moral guilt. Christ was Himself very gentle and compassionate with the sins of the flesh but relentless in the case of the greater sins of the spirit. Puritanism overturned the balance of things, and by concentrating its condemnation on sexual derelictions became blind to the greater sins of pride, avarice and anger. We have inherited the prejudice without acquiring the abstention, but the Middle Ages had a clearer sense of comparative values and they could forgive, or even ignore, the sin of Abélard and Héloïse when they could less easily excuse the sin of spiritual pride or deliberate cruelty. Moreover, these same Middle Ages believed very earnestly in the Divine forgiveness of sins for which there had been real repentance and honest effort at amendment. Abélard and Héloise had been grievously punished, he himself had made every reparation that was possible, his penitence was charitably assumed, and therefore it was not for society to condemn what God would mercifully forgive.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were not an age of moral laxity; ideals and standards and conduct were immeasurably higher than they had been for five hundred years, higher than they were to be in the centuries that followed the crest of Mediaevalism. It was however a time of enormous vitality, of throbbing energy that was constantly bursting its bounds, and as well a time of personal liberty and freedom of action that would seem strange indeed to us in these days of endless legal restraint and inhibitions mitigated by revolt. There were few formal laws but there was Custom which was a sovereign law in itself, and above all there was the moral law of the Church, establishing its great fundamental principles but leaving details to the working out of life itself. Behind the sin of Abélard lay his intolerable spiritual pride, his selfishness and his egotism, qualities that society at large did not recognize because of their devotion to his engaging personality and their admiration for his dazzling intellectual gifts. Their idol had sinned, he had been savagely punished, he had repented; that was all there was about it and the question was at an end.

In reading the Historia Calamitatum there is one consideration that suggests itself that is subject for serious thought. Written as it was some years after the great tragedy of his life, it was a portrait that somehow seems out of focus. We know that during his early years in Paris Abélard was a bold and daring champion in the lists of dialectic; brilliant, persuasive, masculine to a degree; yet this self-portrait is of a man timid, suspicious, frightened of realities, shadows, possibilities. He is in abject terror of councils, hidden enemies, even of his life. The tone is querulous, even peevish at times, and always the egotism and the pride persist, while he seems driven by the whip of desire for intellectual adventure into places where he shrinks from defending himself, or is unable to do so. The antithesis is complete and one is driven to believe that the terrible mutilation to which he had been subjected had broken down his personality and left him in all things less than man. His narrative is full of accusations against all manner of people, but it is not necessary to take all these literally, for it is evident that his natural egotism, overlaid by the circumstances of his calamity, produced an almost pathological condition wherein suspicions became to him realities and terrors established facts.

It is doubtful if Abélard should be ranked very high in the list of Mediaeval philosophers. He was more a dialectician than a creative force, and until the development of the episode with Héloïse he seems to have cared primarily for the excitement of debate, with small regard for the value or the subjects under discussion. As an intellectualist he had much to do with the subsequent abandonment of Plato in favour of Aristotle that was a mark of pure scholasticism, while the brilliancy of his dialectical method became a model for future generations. Afer the Calamity he turned from philosophy to theology and ethics and here he reveals qualities of nobility not evident before. Particularly does he insist upon the fact that it is the subjective intention that determines the moral value of human actions even if it does not change their essential character.

The story of this philosophical soldier of fortune is a romance from beginning to end, a poignant human drama shot through with passion, adventure, pathos and tragedy. In a sense it is an epitome of the earlier Middle Ages and through it shines the bright light of an era of fervid living, of exciting adventure, of phenomenal intellectual force and of large and comprehensive liberty. As a single episode of passion it is not particularly distinguished except for the appealing personality of Héloïse; as a phase in the development of Christian philosophy it is of only secondary value. United in one, the two factors achieve a brilliant dramatic unity that has made the story of Abélard and Héloïse immortal.

Introduction by Ralph Adams Cram

Moral philosophy and the "realist" philosophers

Moral philosophy, from the days of Socrates down to our own lifetime, had been regarded as an attempt to think out more clearly the issues involved in conduct, for the sake of acting better. In 1912 Prichard announced that moral philosophy as so understood was based on a mistake, and advocated a new kind of moral philosophy, purely theoretical, in which the workings of the moral consciousness should be scientifically studied as if they were the movements of the planets, and no attempt made to interfere with them. And Bertrand Russell at Cambridge proposed in the same spirit, and on grounds whose difference was only superficial, the extrusion of ethics from the body of philosophy.

The 'realist' philosophers who adopted this hew programme were all, or nearly all, teachers of young men and young women. Their pupils, with habits and characters yet unformed, stood on the threshold of life; many of them on the threshold of public life. Half a century earlier, young people in that position had been told that by thinking about what they were doing, or were about to do, they would become likely on the whole to do it better; and that some understanding of the nature of moral or political action, some attempt to formulate ideals and principles, was an indispensable condition of engaging creditably in these activities themselves. And their teachers, when introducing them to the study of moral and political theory, would say to them, whether in words or not— the most important things that one says are often not said in words—'Take this subject seriously, because whether you understand it or not will make a difference to your whole lives'. The 'realist', on the contrary, said to his pupils, 'If it interests you to study this, do so; but don't think it will be of any use to you. Remember the great principle of realism, that nothing is affected by being known. That is as true of human action as of anything else. Moral philosophy is only the theory of moral action: it can't therefore make any difference to the practice of moral action. People can act just as morally without it as with it. I stand here as a moral philosopher; I will try to tell you what acting morally is, but don't expect me to tell you how to do it.'

At the moment, I am not concerned with the sophisms underlying this programme, but with its consequences. The pupils, whether or not they expected a philosophy that should give them, as that of Green's school had given their fathers, ideals to live for and principles to live by, did not get it; and were told that no philosopher (except of course a bogus philosopher) would even try to give it. The inference which any pupil could draw for himself was that for guidance in the problems of life, since one must not seek it from thinkers or from thinking, from ideals or from principles, one must look to people who were not thinkers (but fools), to processes that were not thinking (but passion), to aims that were not ideals (but caprices), and to rules that were not principles (but rules of expediency). If the realists had wanted to train up a generation of Englishmen and Englishwomen expressly as the potential dupes of every adventurer in morals or politics, commerce or religion, who should appeal to their emotions and promise them private gains which he neither could procure them nor even meant to procure them, no better way of doing it could have been discovered.

The result of all this might have been even worse than it has been, but for the fact that the 'realists' discredited themselves with their pupils before their lessons could take effect. This self-stultification was a gradual and piecemeal business. Not only did they jettison the entire body of traditional ethics; as soon as they began work on their new brand of moral theory, whatever doctrine concerning moral action was tested, to show whether it was fit to form part of that theory, was found wanting. Another traditional philosophical science which was thrown bodily overboard was the theory of knowledge; for although 'realism' began by defining itself as a theory of knowledge pure and simple, its votaries before long discovered that a theory of knowledge was a contradiction in terms. Another was political theory; this they destroyed by denying the conception of a 'common good', the fundamental idea of all social life, and insisting that all 'goods' were private. In this process, by which anything that could be recognized as a philosophical doctrine was stuck up and shot to pieces by the 'realistic' criticism, the 'realists' little by little destroyed everything in the way of positive doctrine that they had ever possessed. Once more, I am concerned only with the effect on their pupils. It was (how could it not have been?) to convince them that philosophy was a silly and trifling game, and to give them a lifelong contempt for the subject and a lifelong grudge against the men who had wasted their time by forcing it upon their attention.

That this did actually happen any one could see. The school of Green had taught that philosophy was not a preserve for professional philosophers, but every one's business; and the pupils of this school had gradually formed a block of opinion in the country whose members, though not professional philosophers, were interested in thesubject, regarded it as important, and did not feel themselves debarred by their amateur status from expressing their own opinions about it. As these men died, no one took their place; and by about 1920 I found myself asking, 'Why is it that nowadays no Oxford man, unless he is either about 70 years old or else a teacher of philosophy at Oxford or elsewhere, regards philosophy as anything but a futile parlour game?' The answer was not difficult to find, and was confirmed by the fact that the 'realists', unlike the school of Green, did think philosophy a preserve for professional philosophers, and were loud in their contempt of philosophical utterances by historians, natural scientists, theologians, and other amateurs.

The fox was tailless, and knew it. But this mental kind of decaudation, when people part with their morals, their religion, the learning they acquired at school, and so forth, is commonly regarded by the tailless as an improvement in their condition; and so it was with the 'realists'. They were glad to have eradicated from the philosophical schools that confusion of philosophy with pulpit oratory which was involved in the bad old theory that moral philosophy is taught with a view to making the pupils better men. They were proud to have excogitated a philosophy so pure from the sordid taint of utility that they could lay their hands on their hearts and say it was no use at all; a philosophy so scientific that no one whose life was not a life of pure research could appreciate it, and so abstruse that only a whole-time student, and a very clever man at that, could understand it. They were quite resigned to the contempt of fools and amateurs. If anybody differed from them on these points, it could only be because his intellect was weak or his motives bad.

The latter end of the 'realist' movement is one of those things whose history will never be written. It is a story of how the men who best understood the ideas of the original 'realists', and tried hardest to remain loyal to them, found one piece of ground after another slipping from under their feet, and stumbled from one temporary and patchwork philosophy to another in a kind of intellectual nightmare. One of them, Bertrand Russell, a gifted and accomplished writer, has left records of his successive attempts at a philosophy; but most of them are, or were, less articulate, or else struck dumb by their sufferings; and when they and their friends are dead no one will ever know how their lives were spent. What I myself know about it I shall certainly not repeat.

From the book An Autobiography - R. G. Collingwood

Going beyond aversion

See also on Upekkhā → ; Eight wordly conditions→

Who makes heaven from his bread, makes hell from his hunger.
Antonio Porchia

To the just man nothing gives more pain or distress than when, counter to justice, he loses his equanimity in all things. How so? If one thing can cheer you and another depress, you are not just:.if you are happy at one time you should be happy at all times. If you are happier at one moment than another, that is not just. The true lover of justice is so established in what he loves that it is his very being: nothing can drag him from it, and he cares for nothing else.

*
I say then: when outward ills befall the good and just man, if he remains in equanimity with the peace of his heart unmoved, then it is true, as I have said, that nothing that happens to him can disturb the just. But if he is perturbed by outward mishaps, then truly it is right and proper that God has permitted him to suffer this harm, for he wanted and thought to be just and yet was upset by so small a thing. If it is right for God, then indeed he should not be grieved thereby but should rejoice for it far more than for his own life, which a man rejoices in and values more than all this world; for what would this world profit a man if he were not?

Meister Eckhart

**

Q: The universe does not seem a happy place to live in. Why is there so much suffering?

M: Pain is physical; suffering is mental. Beyond the mind there is no suffering. Pain is merely a signal that the body is in danger and requires attention. Similarly, suffering warns us that the structure of memories and habits, which we call the person (vyakti), is threatened by loss or change. Pain is essential for the survival of the body, but none compels you to suffer. Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting; it is a sign of our unwillingness to move on, to flow with life.
As a sane life is free of pain, so is a saintly life free from suffering.

Q: Nobody has suffered more than saints.

M: Did they tell you, or do you say so on your own? The essence of saintliness is total acceptance of the present moment, harmony with things as they happen. A saint does not want things to be different from what they are; he knows that, considering all factors, they are unavoidable. He is friendly with the inevitable and,. therefore, does not suffer. Pain he may know, but it does not shatter him. If he can, he does the needful to restore the lost balance — or he lets things take their course.

Q: He may die.

M: So what? What does he gain by living on and what does he lose by dying? What was born, must die; what was never born cannot die. It all depends on what he takes himself to be.

Q: Imagine you fall mortally ill. Would you not regret and resent?

M: But I am dead already, or, rather, neither alive nor dead. You see my body behaving the habitual way and draw your own conclusions. You will not admit that your conclusions bind nobody but you. Do see that the image you have of me may be altogether wrong. Your image of yourself is wrong too, but that is your problem. But you need not create problems for me and then ask me to solve them. I am neither creating problems nor solving them.
*
So let us examine pleasure at its own level.
If you look at yourself in your moments of pleasure or pain, you will invariably find that it is not the thing in itself that is pleasant or painful, but the situation of which it is a part. Pleasure lies in the relationship between the enjoyer and the enjoyed. And the essence of it is acceptance. Whatever may be the situation, if it is acceptable, it is pleasant. If it is not acceptable, it is painful. What makes it acceptable is not important; the cause may be physical, or psychological, or untraceable; acceptance is the decisive factor. Obversely, suffering is due to non-acceptance.

Q: Pain is not acceptable.

M: Why not? Did you ever try? Do try and you will find in pain a joy which pleasure cannot yield, for the simple reason that acceptance of pain takes you much deeper than pleasure does. The personal self by its very nature is constantly pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. The ending of this pattern is the ending of the self. The ending of the self with its desires and fears enables you to return to your real nature, the source of all happiness and peace. The perennial desire for pleasure is the reflection of the timeless harmony within. It is an observable fact that one becomes selfconscious only when caught in the conflict between pleasure and pain, which demands choice and decision. It is this clash between desire and fear that causes anger, which is the great destroyer of sanity in life. When pain is accepted for what it is, a lesson and a warning, and deeply looked into and heeded, the separation between pain and pleasure breaks down, both become experience — painful when resisted, joyful when accepted.

Q: Do you advise shunning pleasure and pursuing pain?

M: No, nor pursuing pleasure and shunning pain. Accept both as they come, enjoy both while they last, let them go, as they must.

Q: How can I possibly enjoy pain? Physical pain calls for action.

M: Of course. And so does mental. The bliss is in the awareness of it, in not shrinking, or in any way turning away from it. All happiness comes from awareness. The more we are conscious, the deeper the joy. Acceptance of pain, non-resistance, courage and endurance — these open deep and perennial sources of real happiness, true bliss.

Q: Why should pain be more effective than pleasure?

M: Pleasure is readily accepted, while all the powers of the self reject pain. As the acceptance of pain is the denial of the self, and the self stands in the way of true happiness, the wholehearted acceptance of pain releases the springs of happiness.

Q: Does the acceptance of suffering act the same way?

M: The fact of pain is easily brought within the focus of awareness. With suffering it is not that simple. To focus suffering is not enough, for mental life, as we know it, is one continuous stream of suffering. To reach the deeper layers of suffering you must go to its roots and uncover their vast underground network, where fear and desire are closely interwoven and the currents of life's energy oppose, obstruct and destroy each other.

Q: How can I set right a tangle which is entirely below the level of my consciousness?

M: By being with yourself, the 'I am'; by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than to judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies. This is the great work of awareness; it removes obstacles and releases energies by understanding the nature of life and mind. Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.

Q: One more question. Why does pleasure end in pain?

M: Everything has a beginning and an end and so does pleasure. Don't anticipate and don't regret, and there will be no pain. it is memory and imagination that cause suffering.
Of course pain after pleasure may be due to the misuse of the body or the mind. The body knows its measure, but the mind does not. Its appetites are numberless and limitless. Watch your mind with great diligence, for there lies your bondage and also the key to freedom.

*
Maharaj: What do you consider to be wrong with your mind?

Q: It is restless, greedy of the pleasant and afraid of the unpleasant.

M: What is wrong with its seeking the pleasant and shirking the unpleasant? Between the banks of pain and pleasure the river of life flows. It is only when the mind refuses to flow with life, and gets stuck at the banks, that it becomes a problem. By flowing with life I mean acceptance — letting come what comes and go what goes. Desire not, fear not, observe the actual, as and when it happens, for you are not what happens, you are to whom it happens. Ultimately even the observer you are not. You are the ultimate potentiality of which the all-embracing consciousness is the manifestation and expression.

Q: Yet, between the body and the self there lies a cloud of thoughts and feelings, which neither server the body nor the self. These thoughts and feelings are flimsy, transient and meaningless, mere mental dust that blinds and chokes, yet they are there, obscuring and destroying.

M: Surely, the memory of an event cannot pass for the event itself. Nor can the anticipation. There is something exceptional, unique, about the present event, which the previous, or the coming do not have. There is a livingness about it, an actuality; it stands out as if illuminated. There is the ‘stamp of reality’ on the actual, which the past and the future do not have.

Q: What gives the present that 'stamp of reality’?

M: There is nothing peculiar in the present event to make it different from the past and future. For a moment the past was actual and the future will become so. What makes the present so different? Obviously, my presence. I am real for I am always now, in the present, and what is with me now shares in my reality. The past is in memory, the future — in imagination.

There is nothing in the present event itself that makes it stand out as real. It may be some simple, periodical occurrence, like the striking of the clock. In spite of our knowing that the successive strokes are identical, the present stroke is quite different from the previous one and the next — as remembered, or expected. A thing focussed in the now is with me, for I am ever present; it is my own reality that I impart to the present event.

Q: But we deal with things remembered as if they were real.

M: We consider memories, only when they come into the present The forgotten is not counted until one is reminded — which implies, bringing into the now.

Q: Yes, I can see there is in the now some unknown factor that gives momentary reality to the transient actuality.

M: You need not say it is unknown, for you see it in constant operation. Since you were born, has it ever changed? Things and thoughts have been changing all the time. But the feeling that what is now is real has never changed, even in dream.

Q: In deep sleep there is no experience of the present reality.

M: The blankness of deep sleep is due entirely to the lack of specific memories. But a general memory of well-being is there. There is a difference in feeling when we say ‘I was deeply asleep’ from ‘I was absent’.

Q: We shall repeat the question we began with: between life’s source and life’s expression (which is the body), there is the mind and its ever-changeful states. The stream of mental states is endless, meaningless and painful. Pain is the constant factor. What we call pleasure is but a gap, an interval between two painful states. Desire and fear are the weft and warp of living, and both are made of pain. Our question is: can there be a happy mind?

M: Desire is the memory of pleasure and fear is the memory of pain. Both make the mind restless. Moments of pleasure are merely gaps in the stream of pain. How can the mind be happy?
Q: That is true when we desire pleasure or expect pain. But there are moments of unexpected, unanticipated joy. Pure joy, uncontaminated by desire — unsought, undeserved, God-given.

M: Still, joy is joy only against a background of pain.

Q: Is pain a cosmic fact, or purely mental?

M: The universe is complete and where there is completeness, where nothing lacks, what can give pain?

Q: The Universe may be complete as a whole, but incomplete in details.

M: A part of the whole seen in relation to the whole is also complete. Only when seen in isolation it becomes deficient and thus a seat of pain. What makes for isolation?

Q: Limitations of the mind, of course. The mind cannot see the whole for the part.

M: Good enough. The mind, by its very nature, divides and opposes. Can there be some other mind, which unites and harmonises, which sees the whole in the part and the part as totally related to the whole?

Q: The other mind — where to look for it?

M: In the going beyond the limiting, dividing and opposing mind. In ending the mental process as we know it. When this comes to an end, that mind is born.

Q: In that mind, the problem of joy and sorrow exist no longer?

M: Not as we know them, as desirable or repugnant. It becomes rather a question of love seeking expression and meeting with obstacles. The inclusive mind is love in action, battling against circumstances, initially frustrated, ultimately victorious.

M - Nisargadatta Maharaj 

Acceptance and Surrender

Any disturbing noise can be as helpful as silence. How? By dropping your inner resistance to the noise, by allowing it to be as it is, this acceptance also takes you into that realm of inner peace that is stillness.

Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is — no matter what form it takes — you are still, you are at peace.

(...)

Whenever you are able, have a “look” inside yourself to see whether you are unconsciously creating conflict between the inner and the outer, between your external circumstances at that moment–where you are, who you are with, or what you are doing–and your thoughts and feelings. Can you feel how painful it is to internally stand in opposition to what is?

When you recognize this, you also realize that you are now free to give up this futile conflict, this inner state of war.
*
How often each day, if you were to verbalize your inner reality at that moment, would you have to say, “I don't want to be where I am?” What does it feel like when you don't want to be where you are–the traffic jam, your place of work, the airport lounge, the people you are with?

It is true, of course, that some places are good places to walk out of–and sometimes that may well be the most appropriate thing for you to do. In many cases, however, walking out is not an option. In all those cases, the “I don't want to be here” is not only useless but also dysfunctional. It makes you and others unhappy.

It has been said: wherever you go, there you are. In other words: you are here.
Always. Is it so hard to accept that?
*
Do you really need to mentally label every sense perception and experience? Do you really need to have a reactive like/dislike relationship with life where you are in almost continuous conflict with situations and people? Or is that just a deep-seated mental habit that can be broken? Not by doing anything, but by allowing this moment to be as it is.
*
The habitual and reactive “no” strengthens the ego. “Yes” weakens it. Your form identity, the ego, cannot survive surrender.
*
“I have so much to do.” Yes, but what is the quality of your doing? Driving to work, speaking to clients, working on the computer, running errands, dealing with the countless things that make up your daily life–how total are you in what you do?
Is your doing surrendered or non-surrendered? This is what determines your success in life, not how much effort you make. Effort implies stress and strain, needing to reach a certain point in the future or accomplish a certain result.

Can you detect even the slightest element within yourself of not wanting to be  doing what you are doing? That is a denial of life, and so a truly successful outcome is not possible.

If you can detect this within yourself, can you also drop it and be total in what you do?
*
“Doing one thing at a time.” This is how one Zen Master defined the essence of Zen.

Doing one thing at a time means to be total in what you do, to give it your complete attention. This is surrendered action–empowered action.
*
Your acceptance of what is takes you to a deeper level where your inner state as well as your sense of self no longer depend on the mind's judgment of “good” or “bad.”

When you say “yes” to the “isness” of life, when you accept this moment as it is, you can feel a sense of spaciousness within you that is deeply peaceful.

On the surface, you may still be happy when it's sunny and not so happy when it's rainy; you may be happy at winning a million dollars and unhappy at losing all your possessions. Neither happiness nor unhappiness, however, go all that deep anymore. They are ripples on the surface of your Being. The background peace within you remains undisturbed regardless of the nature of the outside condition.
The “yes” to what is reveals a dimension of depth within you that is dependent neither on external conditions nor on the internal conditions of constantly fluctuating thoughts and emotions.
*
Surrender becomes so much easier when you realize the fleeting nature of all experiences and that the world cannot give you anything of lasting value. You then continue to meet people, to be involved in experiences and activities, but without the wants and fears of the egoic self. That is to say, you no longer demand that a situation, person, place, or event should satisfy you or make you happy. Its passing and imperfect nature is allowed to be.

And the miracle is that when you are no longer placing an impossible demand on it, every situation, person, place, or event becomes not only satisfying but also more harmonious, more peaceful.
*
When you completely accept this moment, when you no longer argue with what is, the compulsion to think lessens and is replaced by an alert stillness. You are fully conscious, yet the mind is not labeling this moment in any way. This state of inner nonresistance opens you to the unconditioned consciousness that is infinitely greater than the human mind. This vast intelligence can then express itself through you and assist you, both from within and from without. That is why, by letting go of inner resistance, you often find circumstances change for the better.
*
Am I saying, “Enjoy this moment. Be happy?” No.

Allow the “suchness” of this moment. That's enough.
*
Surrender is surrender to this moment, not to a story through which you interpret this moment and then try to resign yourself to it.

For instance, you may have a disability and can't walk anymore. The condition is as it is.

Perhaps your mind is now creating a story that says, “This is what my life has come to. I have ended up in a wheelchair. Life has treated me harshly and unfairly. I don't deserve this.”

Can you accept the isness of this moment and not confuse it with a story the mind has created around it?
*
Surrender comes when you no longer ask, “Why is this happening to me?”
*
Even within the seemingly most unacceptable and painful situation is concealed a deeper good, and within every disaster is contained the seed of grace.

Throughout history, there have been women and men who, in the face of great loss, illness, imprisonment, or impending death, accepted the seemingly unacceptable and thus found “the peace that passeth all understanding.”

Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in this world.
*
There are situations where all answers and explanations fail. Life does not make sense anymore. Or someone in distress comes to you for help, and you don't know what to do or say.

When you fully accept that you don't know, you give up struggling to find answers with the limited thinking mind, and that is when a greater intelligence can operate through you. And even thought can then benefit from that, since the greater intelligence can flow into it and inspire it.

Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.
*
(...)

Surrender, one could say, is the inner transition from resistance to acceptance, from “no” to “yes.” When you surrender, your sense of self shifts from being identified with a reaction or mental judgment to being the space around the reaction or judgment. It is a shift from identification with form–the thought or the emotion–to being and recognizing yourself as that which has no form–spacious awareness.
*
Whatever you accept completely will take you to peace, including the acceptance that you cannot accept, that you are in resistance.
*
Leave Life alone. Let it be.

Go beyond good and bad by refraining from mentally naming anything as good or bad. When you go beyond the habitual naming, the power of the universe moves through you. When you are in a nonreactive relationship to experiences, what you would have called bad before, often turns around quickly, if not immediately through the power of life itself. Watch what happens when you don't name an experience as bad and instead bring an inner acceptance, an inner “yes” to it, and so let it be as it is, right now?

Any disturbing noise can be as helpful as silence. How? By dropping your inner resistance to the noise, by allowing it to be as it is, this acceptance also takes you into that realm of inner peace that is stillness.

Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is — no matter what form it takes — you are still, you are at peace.

***
See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is.

It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
Ordinary unconsciousness is always linked in some way with denial of the Now. The Now, of course, also implies the here. Are you resisting your here and now? Some people would always rather be somewhere else. Their “here” is never good enough. Through self-observation, find out if that is the case in your life. Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.

If you take any action leaving or changing your situation drop the negativity first, if at all possible. Action arising out of insight into what is required is more effective than action arising out of negativity.

Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case ifs no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing. Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into pour mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.

If there is truly nothing that you can do to change your here and now, and you can't remove yourself from the situation, then accept your here and now totally by dropping all inner resistance. The false, unhappy self that loves feeling miserable, resentful, or sorry for itself can then no longer survive. This is called surrender. Surrender is not weakness. There is great strength in it. Only a surrendered person has spiritual power. Through surrender, you will be free internally of the situation. You may then find that the situation changes without any effort on your part. In any case, you are free.

(...)

To disidentify from thinking is to be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior, especially the repetitive patterns of your mind and the roles played by the ego.

If you stop investing it with “selfness,” the mind loses its compulsive quality, which basically is the compulsion to judge, and so to resist what is, which creates conflict, drama, and new pain. In fact, the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.

Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield. Some people become bitter or deeply resentful; others become compassionate, wise, and loving. Yielding means inner acceptance of what is. You are open to life. Resistance is an inner contraction, a hardening of the shell of the ego. You are closed. Whatever action you take in a state of inner resistance (which we could also call negativity) will create more outer resistance, and the universe will not be on your side; life will not be helpful. If the shutters are closed, the sunlight cannot come in. When you yield internally, when you surrender, a new dimension of consciousness opens up. If action is possible or necessary, your action will be in alignment with the whole and supported by creative intelligence, the unconditioned consciousness which in a state of inner openness you become one with. Circumstances and people then become helpful, cooperative. Coincidences happen. If no action is possible, you rest in the peace and inner stillness that come with surrender. You rest in God.
*

Through complete acceptance of the form of Now, you become internally aligned with space, which is the essence of Now. Through acceptance, you become spacious inside. Aligned with space instead of form: That brings true perspective and balance into your life.
*
Whatever you cannot enjoy doing, you can at least accept that this is what you have to do. Acceptance means: For now, this is what this situation, this moment, requires me to do, and so I do it willingly. We already spoke at length about the importance of inner acceptance of what happens, and acceptance of what you have to do is just another aspect of it. For example, you probably won't be able to enjoy changing the flat tire on your car at night in the middle of nowhere and in pouring rain, let alone be enthusiastic about it, but you can bring acceptance to it. Performing an action in the state of acceptance means you are at peace while you do it. That peace is a subtle energy vibration which then flows into what you do. On the surface, acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it is active and creative because it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, that subtle energy vibration, is consciousness, and one of the ways in which ti enters this world is through surrendered action, one aspect of which is acceptance.

If you can neither enjoy or bring acceptance to what you do stop. Otherwise, you are not taking responsibility for the only thing you can really take responsibility for, which also happens to be one thing that really matters: your state of consciousness. And if you are not taking responsibility for your state of consciousness, you are not taking responsibility for life.

Eckhart Tolle from Stillness Speaks; The Power of Now; A New Earth

The mind’s defenses—like the body’s immune mechanisms—protect us by providing a variety of illusions to filter pain and to allow self-soothing

 Introduction

The mind is its own place, and in itself

 Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Our lives are at times intolerable. At times we cannot bear reality. At such times our minds play tricks on us. Our minds distort inner and outer reality so that an observer might accuse us of denial, self-deception, even dishonesty. But such mental defenses creatively rearrange the sources of our conflict so that they become manageable and we may survive. The mind’s defenses—like the body’s immune mechanisms—protect us by providing a variety of illusions to filter pain and to allow self-soothing.

Often such emotional and intellectual dishonesty is not only healthy but also mature and creative. Such defensive self-deception reflects the ego’s—the integrated brain’s—best synthetic effort at coping with life events that otherwise would be overwhelming. Equally important, such self-deception evolves throughout our lives. Our development does not end with childhood but continues through adulthood. The maladaptive defenses of adolescence can evolve into the virtues of maturity. This psychic alchemy helps to explain the resilience of individuals who are abused and disadvantaged during the first decades of life and yet become valued and useful adults. In short, our ego’s defenses can be creative, healthy, comforting, and coping. Yet when we are observers—rather than users—of defenses, they often strike us as downright peculiar.

Sixty years ago the physiologist Walter B. Cannon wrote a landmark book, The Wisdom of the Body, in which he described the invisible response of the human digestive tract to distress.1 He clearly identified the checks and balances employed by our bodies’ parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems to maintain homeostasis—the term he used to describe a body at peace with itself. In his research Cannon capitalized on what was then a recent invention, X-ray photography, to monitor hitherto invisible physiological processes. Echoing Cannon, I have called this book The Wisdom of the Ego, because I believe the invisible responses of the human mind to distress—the defenses deployed by the ego—are as healing, and as necessary to health, as the autonomic nervous system that he did so much to elucidate.

Like Cannon, I capitalize on a recent scientific advance—in my case the availability of records of prospectively gathered human lives. I draw my evidence from the Study of Adult Development, in which large numbers of people have been followed from adolescence through their adult fives. Such prolonged study helps to render visible the healing power of the ego’s defenses. In addition, the rich database of hundreds of lives provides statistical support for generalizations made from individual fives. Because one question of interest is the relationship of the ego’s adaptive self-deceptions to human creativity, I also examine the life histories of several creative artists.

In this book, then, I weave together three threads. One thread is the mind’s—the ego’s—modes of self-deception and denial, sometimes referred to as mechanisms of defense. To use a Piagetian term, the deployment of such defenses reflects our adult efforts to accommodate to life. The use of ego mechanisms of defense alters the perception of both internal and external reality; and often, like hypnosis, use of defenses compromises other facets of cognition. Awareness of instinctual wishes may be greatly diminished; antithetical wishes may be passionately adhered to; our consciences or our awareness of other people may be obliterated. I shall offer evidence that a person’s choice of defenses is critical to mental health.

The second thread is an examination of creativity—the peculiarly human capacity for putting in the world what was not there before. Such a capacity for creativity seems closely interwoven with the alchemy of the ego to bring order and meaning out of chaos and distress. Such creative capacity can allow grief to be mitigated by an esoteric hobby, and it can allow self-deception to be viewed as a virtue rather than a sin. In Piagetian terminology, creativity reflects how we assimilate life, take life in, make it our own, and share it with others. Creativity is how we experience life and pour it forth.

The book’s third thread is the unfolding of adult development. The study of lifetimes allows reexamination of cross-sectional views of adult development. Such study permits us to see how people bud and flower, and how human caterpillars evolve into butterflies. It allows us to trace how the capacity for intimacy makes possible the commitment essential for a gratifying career identity, and how such fulfillment from a career makes possible a capacity for generative care. It also allows us to see that this developmental sequence of love-to-work-to-care appears to hold for both men and women.

More important, prospective study of lifetimes demonstrates the resilience and the continuing maturation of adults. Freud diminished human hope by suggesting that the first five years of life were destiny. The evidence I adduce in this book restores hope. The data from the Study of Adult Development demonstrate that mental health and choice of defense are not static. Rather, choice of defense may evolve throughout adult life and may transmute irritating grains of sand into pearls. Nor is choice of defense determined by social class, education, or gender.

The modem psychoanalytic use of the term ego encompasses the adaptive and executive aspects of the human brain: the ability of the mind to integrate, master, and make sense of inner and outer reality. Or, in Freud’s words, “We have formed the idea that in each individual there is a coherent organization of mental processes; and we call this his ego.”2 The term ego addresses the capacity of the integrated mind to accommodate and assimilate the world.

On the one hand, personality development and maturity occur through the interaction between the person and his or her social environment. On the other hand, as John Milton reminds us, experience is not what happens to the mind (and heart) but what the mind (and heart) does with experience. How the mind manipulates experience is at the core of ego development.

We are accustomed to thinking of ego development as something that occurs in childhood. The developmental psychologist Robert Kegan has described watching the ego development of a young child as follows: “Being in another’s presence while she so honestly labors at an astonishingly intimate activity—the activity of making sense—is somehow very touching.” Such development, as Kegan notes, is social: “Our survival and development depend on our capacity to recruit the invested attention of others to us.”3 To develop, a child needs a loving caretaker, one who creates for the child what D. W. Winnicott has called a “holding environment”—that is, an environment that provides the child with the secure foundation it needs to mature and to develop a sense of self. Eventually, the caretaker’s love comes to dwell inside the child, where it supports the capacity of the ego’s self-deceptions to turn life’s leaden moments into gold, as it were, instead of into self-detrimental distortions and illusions.

But this book is not about children. Although Kegan expresses a fear that adolescents and adults less frequently “display themselves in these touching and elemental ways,” he realizes it may only be that in adults “we are less able to see these ways for what they are.”4 This book is about adults who have exposed their entire lives to scrutiny and have been seen in similarly vulnerable and intimate activities. This book is about middle-aged men and women wrestling with learning how to love, with making meaning, with reordering chaos, and with discovering, often inadvertently, how to put in the world what was not there before. Their life stories offer example after example in which maturation and the internalization of a holding environment occur in adulthood, not in childhood.

Finally, quite unashamedly, I wish to argue for preserving the baby of psychoanalysis even as we discard its bath water. I wish to remind the reader that we have limbic systems as well as cerebral cortices, and that the brain cannot be separated from the heart. This book is an effort to undo some of the excesses of the so-called cognitive revolution, of the medicalization of psychiatry, and of what has been called the “decade of the brain.” Howard Gardner, in his lucid history of the cognitive revolution, notes the deliberate decision of cognitive scientists to exclude certain factors that “would unnecessarily complicate the cognitive-scientific enterprise. These factors include the influence of affective factors or emotions, the contribution of historical and cultural factors, and the role of the background context in which particular actions or thoughts occur.”5The Wisdom of the Ego reflects my studied effort to recomplicate such an enterprise.

The prospective study of human lives makes it possible to look closely at psychological experiences and to trace their similarities and differences in large groups of men and women. In the words of the psychiatrist John Nemiah, “The difficulty many people have in accepting the validity of psychodynamic concepts lies not in their lack of a cognitive ability to understand the theory, but in their incapacity or unwillingness to observe the clinical facts on which the theory is based.

Those who reject psychodynamic theory refuse to take subjective human psychological experiences as phenomena worthy of serious attention and study, and consequently they cannot or will not allow themselves to observe them.”6 This book, using data from the prospective, long-term study of many lives, renders those subjective, human psychological experiences visible to even the most intransigent empiricist.

Throughout the book, I will point out the distortions that occur between the actual and the remembered past, between the artist’s life and her creative product, and between current reality and our perceptions of it. My intent will be to make the hidden visible, and to retrieve the dynamic “unconscious” first popularized by Freud and Janet from the parochial grip of the “Freudian” humanists so that it can be reinserted into the grasp of natural scientists. It is time for the ego and its defenses to be seen as facets of psychobiological reality, not as articles of psychoanalytic faith.

Notes

1  W. B. Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: Norton, 1932).

2  S. Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereinafter abbreviated SE), ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-1964), 24 vols., 19:17.

3  R. Kegan, The Evolving Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 16, 17.

4 Ibid., p. 17. 

5 H. Gardner, The Mind’s New Science (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 6. 

6 J. Nemiah, “Reflections of an Aging Educator: A Tale of Two Residents” (Teacher of the Year Award Address presented to the Association of Academic Psychiatry, Seattle, 1990).

**

Academic psychology, however, retains a mistrust of the unconscious in general and of defense mechanisms in particular. The “cognitive revolution” has ignored defenses, and only recently has modern experimental psychology been groping to reinvent a language for regulatory self-deceptions. The reasons for such mistrust stem both from the rigorous, if sometimes limiting, empiricism of academic psychology and from the often self-serving excuses given by psychoanalysis for ignoring empiricism.

In many respects the mistrust of defense mechanisms is unwarranted. Modern experimental psychologists often forget that Freud, too, began life as a scientific empiricist. Many modern psychologists try to study personality as if trying to understand operas by just reading the libretto. Freud insisted that we attend to the music as well. The metaphors of John Keats, Guiseppe Verdi, or William Shakespeare are simply better equipped than the literal-minded prose of Immanuel Kant or B. F. Skinner to describe the scientific realities of a colorful sunset or the pain of a broken heart. Freud reaffirmed that humans are the guardians of forces they cannot see or perfectly control. Modern investigation of the hypothalamus and the limbic system has left the central importance of these forces unquestioned. The good news is that psychologists have recently begun to rediscover defense mechanisms. But their terminology differs from mine: they try to operationalize defenses as “self-deceptions,” “comforting denial,” and “cognitive regulatory mechanisms.”

At the same time, in many respects the mistrust of defense mechanisms is entirely warranted. In conceptualizing defenses, Freud made many errors. At first he saw defenses as only pathological. To be fully analyzed supposedly meant to give up defenses. Thus, Freud did not always appreciate that defenses were homeostatic and could help even the most psychologically healthy adult keep from being immobilized by anxiety and depression. Second, he erroneously believed that all pathogenic defenses had their roots in childhood. In addition, because of events in his own life and historical epoch, Freud saw defenses as too exclusively related to sexual conflict; he ignored their equally important role in regulating aggression, grief, dependency, tenderness, and joy. Finally, having studied people in the solitude of the consulting room, Freud ignored the role of ego defenses in modulating relationships. He placed too much emphasis on a psychology of drives and too little on a psychology of relationships.

The Wisdom of the Ego

George E. Vaillant