[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

this world.
I have offended every liberal who would bring about a better world by discarding
God and organizing man to share and share alike--for I have said that the God which the
Christian or Mohammedan talks about is not real, but his underlying principle is far more
real than the idea man lives but to manufacture, distribute and consume. I have said that
we will always contain our wonder and our terribleness and that these can be assimilated,
understood, and put to use only by one individual at a time and neither by congregations
nor by political parties.
I have probably offended the scientist by bringing together haphazardly so many
of his sciences as analogues--and using one as language to discuss another. He would
prefer a demonstration or an equation; and to tell him that in the subjective world he
alone can understand the formulae, and only within himself, does not satisfy those past
premises of his which have been so successful in the material sphere.
I have disappointed the mystic--that curious person who acts courageously, and
with the motive of seeking truth, on all the data and impressions he receives from those
vestigial and rudimentary organs that abound in the collective unconscious. I have
materialized no ectoplasm for him, given him no new access to dead souls, devised no
fresh explanation of Survival. But the mystic is motivated by his ego, like the godly man.
His impression that immortality and eternity ought to exist for him as he sees and senses
himself in the moment--his sensation of the instinctual forces--is so intense that he sets
himself to rearranging archetypes and inventing legends, led on, as I say, by inklings of
resources in the electric brain that we have hardly guessed at or ever used properly--or
resources we once had which are almost deafened by eons of disuse. To the extent that
such enterprise is the ego's vain pursuit of its own excellence, it is a waste of time and
produces delusions; to the extent it is a scientific experiment--in telepathy or the
possibility of distant seeing--let scientists examine it and announce the proof or refutation
when they have it.
There are more senses to a man than he can check the true accountings of,
already. He would do better to narrow his perceptions for a while--to meditate more, do
simpler things with a larger part of his time, and reacquaint himself with the actual face
of Nature--than to invent exotic dogmas to prove the lie that his ego is immortal or try to
resurrect old senses or to strain new ones. Life is now--the whole of it--expressed in an
animal so infinitely capable, that it is infinite function to live consciously and foolish to
fiddle and fancy forever.
I have offended many and not offered in compensation that fashionable article, a
Plan. I say, the Plan is. I do not even have a Political Idea that lies to the Left or the
Right. For I believe the politics of man is democracy--whatever his immediate system.
Instinct, acting in him, will sooner or later expunge his blunders and compensate for his
exaggerations. If white men murder the world, they'll be slain for it by themselves in the
long run. A democratic government is not a system, in the sense that communism is--or
the totalitarian state, but merely a channel wherein the aspect of government can be
constantly changed, according to changes among the people. The post office is at the
moment communal, the agricultural benefits are socialist and the steel mills are owned by
capitalists. All of this is democracy and expresses the validity of the principle.
When man used the repressive brain to hold back the conflict of his instinct, he
discovered the precious dimension of time and his own image--his ego--existing there; he
has, so far, extended the dimension largely to flatter the image, putting his whole energy
in the work. Our democracy is only a little more aware--through individuals--of this
phenomenon, than the compulsory states. They have their revolutions, their wars, their
suicides, and we, our internal struggles, with the threat of suicide hanging over us, too, so
long as we persist in merely exploiting Nature--the outer, and our inner natures as well.
Our democracy is more successful because of the room for function it permits to instinct [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]