A. R. ORAGE PSYCHOLOGICAL ESSAYS

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We take it as a matter of course that man is a thinking animal. But there is a world of difference between what may be called natural thinking and deliberately developed and trained thinking. Man is also by nature a tool-using animal. But we know the difference between the tool-using capacities of the Fuegian and the trained civil engineer; and we know also the difference between the capacity of the engineer and, let us say, an untrained clerk. To begin with, it is certainly a question of innate possibilities. No system of technical education applied to a Fuegian would make a Smeaton or an Edison of him. Race-heredity fixes limits which, though they may never be reached, can by no means be crossed. On the other hand, given the same race-heredity, the development of its innate possibilities depends upon the proper employment of the means. A clerk may become a first-rate engineer; his hereditary endowment, that is to say, may perfectly well allow of it. But in the absence of special development and training, his potential capacity will never be actualized. So it is with thinking. Mankind varies racially over very wide degrees. But, even the same race, individuals with much the same hereditary possibilities actualize their capacities in very different degrees. And the difference in their case depends upon training.

 

There are two kinds of training which have the effect of developing and actualizing a given hereditary capacity to think: the training due to accident and the training due to deliberate design. Let us suppose, for example, that two boys of the same potential thinking capacity are placed, by the accident of circumstances, the one as a lift-attendant, and the other as an engineer’s apprentice. It is obvious that the latter will require to develop more of his thinking capacity than the former, as a mere condition of holding his job. Potentially they are equal; they start level. But owing to the fact that circumstances compel one of them, but not the other, to develop his potentiality and make it actual, he appears to be and is a better thinker, that is, more of a man.

 

We can carry this idea still further. The vast majority of people have enormous potentialities of thinking, far beyond anything ordinarily suspected; but so seldom do the right circumstances by chance surround them to require their actualization that the vast majority die without realizing more than a fraction of their innate powers. Born million­aires, they live and die in poverty for the lack of the favourable circumstances which would have compelled them to convert their credit into cash.

 

But it is to only a minor degree that we can really control circumstances. For one thing, most of our most influential circumstances were determined before we were old enough to have had a hand in the game. For another, they depend to a great degree upon what we call luck or chance. And even when we appear to have the decision in our own hands, our choice is largely limited and pre-determined by our chance circumstances of yesterday. Theoretically, of course, we can place ourselves in any of many different circumstances tomorrow; we can theoretically place ourselves in cir­cumstances which will require us to think. But it is a thousand to one that we shall ‘ choose’ tomorrow’s circumstances, not by their value to us as opportunities for developing thought, but merely in accordance with our already formed habits. Practically, in fact, we shall choose the circumstances that choose us. It follows that if the development of our power of thought is left at the mercy of circumstances, the chances are remote of our ever reaching beyond the ‘ natural,’ that is, the easy. We shall think no more than it is necessary to think; and the degree of our development will depend, therefore, on chance pure and simple.

 

The training that is not ‘natural,’ and that does not depend upon circumstances, may be regarded as deliberately willed; and, in contra-distinction to the first sort of training, it requires the employment of definite means and exercises. A blacksmith does not need gymnastic exercises to develop his arm muscles; they are naturally developed in the course of his work. But a book-clerk who wishes to be an athlete must deliberately practise physical exercises to attain his end. Similarly, for a man whose work does not require mental exertion, or for one whose chance occupation does not call forth enough exertion or sufficiently varied exertion to satisfy his sense of innate capacity, special exercises and training in thinking are indispensable. He cannot possibly get anywhere without them. Unless, in short, he deliberately employs special exercises, he is doomed to remain only as developed as his circumstances demand. His thought-power is the creature of chance circumstances.

 

There are many schools which profess to teach exercises designed to develop thought-power. Some are good; some are bad; and it is difficult to distinguish between them without prolonged trial involving the loss of much valuable time. Is there any simple yet certain means that anybody can employ without a teacher, without classes, and with only the resolution to accomplish something? Given the will to develop one’s thought-power and to think like a man and not like a machine, is there a means within easy reach which any of us can begin to practice. Without going to a gymnasium a clerk can develop himself physically, at least sufficiently to give himself much satisfaction. Can one develop oneself mentally by similar means and under similar conditions? The answer is Yes.

 

Take out your watch and observe the revolution of the second hand. It performs its circle in sixty seconds, or one minute. Watch the hand as it begins a fresh circle and let not your eye wander from it to the little dial; but keep your eye focussed on the moving hand. When you are honestly certain that you can keep the focus of your attention on the moving hand for one revolution, you will have made an important step in the deliberate development of your thought-power.

 

Now take another step. Keeping the focus as before, count mentally the numbers one to ten and backwards, slowly, during the course of one revolution of the hand. This requires a double attention, as it were. You are observing the movement and counting deliberately at the same time. At first it may be easy, but do it again and again until it becomes difficult; and then do it. This is a very important piece of advice.

 

The next step is to add to these two simultaneous activities a third. While continuing to observe the moving hand with the eyes, and counting with the mind, repeat to yourself some familiar piece of verse.

 

The exercise can be made progressively difficult by adding fresh subjects for the attention. Two or three minutes at a time is enough.

 

Practise this often, whenever you have a spare minute, and the effect on thought-power or concentration will speedily be marked.

 

 from “Psychological essays”

 

 

 

 

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The fact is that bad temper is insusceptible, except in rare cases, to reason as we can exercise reason. Had we a really muscular development of our thought-power, such as only special training can bring about, it might perhaps be possible to match thought against feeling and expect a victory for thought. But, as it is, not only is the development of our thought-power less than that of our animal feeling, but energy for our ordinary thinking is of a lower voltage than our ordinary feeling. In order of intensity our instinctive, feeling and thinking energies rank as electricity, gas and steam; and thus a very great amount of the lower energies is needed to counteract a relatively small amount of the greater. Reasoning against ill temper, reasoning taken by itself is like matching equal quantities of different energies; and the result is a foregone conclusion.

 

When reasoning appears to have produced an effect upon ill temper, the explanation is to be sought in the admixture of some other feeling or in the addition to reason of one of the powerful instincts. For instance, things provoke us less when we are in a state of physical well-being. Our body is full of vitality, and supports our weak reason against a threatened outburst of temper. Similarly, when we have a feeling of love, or fear, or any other emotion, its aid often enables reason to appear to suppress or overcome an attack of temper. Most of the current prescriptions against bad temper, consist of one or other of these two ingredients. They fall, in fact, into two classes; prescriptions of physical diversion or treatment, and prescriptions designed to call up other feelings than that of the temper itself. When Kipling says that the cure for the camel’s ‘hump’ is to dig till you gently perspire, or Gilbert recommends calomel against melancholy, they are making our prescriptions of the first kind. And when our parents, guardians and friends appeal, as they say, to our ‘better nature’ or invoke the image of fear, they are unconsciously concocting prescriptions of the second kind.  

 

Both kinds of prescriptions, it is evident, can be applied to ourselves, if we have the resolution to do so. There is a childish luxury in being prescribed for and in receiving attention, and ill temper is particularly infantile in its demands to be petted back to smiles. More grown-up natures, however, can prescribe for themselves, and take their own medicine. It is, in fact, a sign of being grown up that we can deal with our own emotional illnesses—at least when they are only comparatively slight. More serious emotional illnesses, such as severe attacks of despondency or jealousy are beyond the power of even most grown-ups to deal with by themselves. The two kinds of prescriptions prove usually in such cases to be beyond self-application; and it is almost as difficult to induce the patient to accept them from somebody else. Ordinarily there is then nothing to be done but to wait until the mood or temper has expended itself, often with wretched consequences to all concerned.

 

Let us suppose that a man or woman is truthfully desirous of dealing with his or her own ‘dark moods’ of anger, despair, fear, jealousy, hatred or what not—the negative emotions, in short. Is there any means?

 

To begin with, it is necessary to admit to oneself that this state of emotion is a nervous illness. The patient must learn to say: ‘I am ill’. The tendency, of course, is to blame the supposed cause, the situation, the person, the incident, the remark that seems to have provoked the disease. But there is no relief by that door. Nobody has ever recovered from a fit of bad temper by blaming the imagined cause. It is a thousand times better, as well as truer, to say: ‘I am sick’, than to say or feel: ‘So and so, or such and such have made me sick’. This attitude towards a bad temper already begins to modify its rage. It has some of the magic of oil upon the waves.

 

But it is not enough to adopt an attitude, however correct. Something must be done since Satan certainly finds some mischief for idle energy to do, and all bad temper is only energy running to waste. The Devil lives on our waste energy. But what?

 

Try not to think about the supposed cause of the emotion or about the things and circumstances in the dark light of it. Thinking in a state of negative emotion is necessarily distorted by the agitated medium through which it passes. It is like looking at an object through stirred and muddy waters. Thinking in this state never arrives at truth.

 

Try also not to feel. This sounds, at first, impossible, being apparently only the advice to cease feeling unhappy. But everybody knows that it is possible to dwell or not to dwell on a feeling. Everybody knows with an aching tooth the temptation to press the tongue against it to make it ache more. The advice not to feel is therefore not quite irrelevant. Do not feel more than you can possibly help.

 

But the secret is not contained in any of the foregoing alleviative. It is something quite different, and it can be described as follows: “When in, or in the process of develop­ing a black mood, observe and notice only your physical states. Your body at such times is very eloquent; it exhibits a special set of symptoms for every mood. Observe and notice, as a matter of personal and scientific curiosity, how your body manifests this, that or the other black mood. For instance, your mouth may go dry or there may be an unpleasant taste in it. Your skin may wrinkle; some of your muscles may contract; you may have indigestion, nausea or a heavy weight near the heart. Scores of symptoms reveal themselves. If you simply observe, notice and enumerate them, as if you were reporting them for a novel or a text-book of psychology, by the time you have finished, your black mood will have disappeared. You will have saved its energy to make observations with.

 

 from Psychological Essays

 

 

 

 

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Nothing is more common than the complaint that one’s neighbours are uninteresting, boring. Such complaints, however, are unconscious confessions rather than accusations, since the truth is that we are bored or uninterested exactly at the limit of our active intelligence. Boredom begins where our mind leaves off; and to be easily or quickly bored merely means that our intelligence is either small or very idle. All people, without exception are interesting and worth­while. Not only is there nothing else for us to know than people, the educational purpose of life being just to acquaint us with the mystery of mankind; but every individual is, as it were, an epitome of the whole human book. Who can read and understand everything about one person has the key to the knowledge of the race. Thus one person is as good as another as a subject of interest; and to be bored by anybody is to fail to look for interest in him.

 

This is not to say that there are not people who, in relation to ourselves, create interest, and others who do not. We can, in fact, divide all the people we know into two classes: those who, without effort on our part, interest and stimulate us, really interesting people, as we say, with whom it is always a pleasure to associate; and those who, in and of themselves, arouse and stimulate no interest and no pleasure at all—the uninteresting and dull people. But since, as we know very well, the same people are neither interesting to everybody nor uninteresting to everybody, it cannot be the case that they are the one or the other absolutely; they are only interesting or the reverse for us.

 

Why is this so? … Is it possible for us to make people interesting who are not naturally so?

 

Let us realize that in essence we are each of us composed of a collection of chemicals (using chemicals as a word for any particular kind of matter). As between one individual and another, not only is there a difference in the number of component chemicals, but the chemicals are not all the same, nor in the same proportions, nor in the same state of activity. This fact illustrates and explains the extraordinary variety in people; no two are chemically compounded exactly alike. And since we are or can manifest only what our component chemicals allow us to be or to appear, each of us may be said to be defined by the chemicals of which we are composed.

 

Now we know that certain chemicals are related to others by what we call affinity. They take notice of some but they are indifferent to others. With some they will enter into active relations, exchanging qualities or actually combining; with others they remain inert. It is all the same whether such chemicals are in a laboratory or in a human body; their qualities and action are the same. And thus it follows that what we call our interest in people, or their interest in us, arises from or is conditioned by, the presence in us and in them of actively related chemicals. All our relations with people, friendly, indifferent or hostile, are, at bottom, determined by the relations of the chemicals of which we and they are composed. Nevertheless there is a difference, and a very important one between a laboratory containing chemicals and a human being containing the same chemicals. In the latter laboratory, there is a chemist. The chemicals in two neighbouring laboratories will mix and combine according to their qualities; they will act and react on each other naturally. But if there be a chemist in one of them, or, better still, a chemist in each of them, and if the chemists in both are thoroughly conversant with the laws of chemistry—then, in place of the combinations due simply to nature and circumstances, we should have a series of combinations, due to science and art—combinations improbable or impossible in ordinary circumstances.

 

Returning to human relations, the analogy should be clear. So long as a man simply follows his interests, that is to say, finds people interesting or boring and acts ac­cordingly, seeking the company of the first and avoiding the company of the second, so long is he just a laboratory without a chemist. He does nothing. He simply allows his chemicals to manifest their native qualities of affinity, indifference or hostility, without attempting by science or art, to rearrange them to enable them to enter into more and more varied relation with the chemicals in his neighbour’s laboratories. He is, as we say, a creature of circumstance; and it is all a matter of chance whether he finds people dull or stimulating or is himself, to other people, one or the other.

 

To put a chemist into our laboratory and to train him to work scientifically, is the chief object of psychology. We wish to be masters of ourselves, and to have control over all the elements of which we are made. We wish to be able to enjoy all our resources, and to combine them with elements outside ourselves and in other people exactly as we please. Each of us really desires this power over himself; it is the essential aim and function of Man. But what is this but precisely to put a chemist into our natural laboratory and to set him to work?

 

As it is, and simply following the line of least resistance, we are not chemists with laboratories, but laboratories without chemists, or, let us say, laboratories in which the chemists are asleep. We must wake up the chemist in ourselves.

 

The means are comparatively simple. First, we must give our idle chemist a motive or reason for bestirring himself. And, second, we must tell him how to begin to work.

 

There are abundant reasons, and among them these: We are always at the mercy of people and circumstances so long as we depend on people and circumstances to interest us of themselves; we shall never know ourselves and others more than accidentally and imperfectly so long as we remain simply laboratories; we shall live and die passive and mechanical agents of processes we do not understand so long as we do not try to make combinations which are just not easy and natural. If we continue to act simply according to our natural affinities, our likes and dislikes, we shall be no more than mineral or vegetable or animal men; we shall never be human men.

 

How to begin. Make every encounter with people a laboratory experiment in psychology. Say to yourself in the presence of another person or persons: ‘Here is a wonderful collection of chemicals of which I know only a tiny number. I wish to know and understand them all. That is my work as a human being.’ In this attitude of active curiosity, it is impossible to be ‘bored’ by anybody in any circumstances. Your interest in people, circumstances and the like, is in yourself as a constant and increasing energy. You live ever more abundantly. Something of this kind of alchemistry must have been implied in the promise made to the Christian disciples: ‘I have come that ye might have life, and have it more abundantly.’

 

from Psychological Essays

 

 

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People are the most interesting books in the world. Books themselves interest us only because they are about people, their actions, their words, their feelings and their thoughts. If we could read people as easily as we can read books about people, who would take the trouble to read books with the subjects of all books before him; . . . Our only excuse for reading books about people, is that we cannot read people themselves.

 

Over a long life, and after having seen many people in many circumstances, a man may attain a degree of efficiency in reading a human book. Such men, indeed, seldom read printed books unless they are just amusing. They have acquired the taste for reading books bound in flesh and blood. 

 

Their skill, nevertheless, is exceedingly limited if we judge by the text to be read. Every man is not only a book but a scripture. Some parts of the text are comparatively easy to read. All of us have naturally some notion of what people are. Other parts are a little more difficult; and long experience and practice in reading people are necessary to enable us to read these passages correctly. But for the very reason that every man is made in the image of God, and is a pocket-world in himself, it is certain that the reading of Man by even the most experienced social leaders is limited to only a small fraction of the complete text. It is as if a child knowing only English were to read in a book printed in all the languages of the world.

 

Partly with a view to supplementing our ordinary means of reading men, including ourselves, attempts of a more or less honest character have been made to discover and read new alphabets. Ordinarily, we depend upon the evidence of our senses and actual experiences; but since this is not satisfactory, we turn to strange scripts and other devices. Palmistry and phrenology, for instance, may be scientifically experimented in, with the object of enabling us to read people more fully and exactly. Similarly astrology may be employed for this purpose. It is usually the case that none of these attempts yields more or better results than plain common sense; and often they are wilder than the wildest guesses of the least experienced ordinary observer. Too often, further, they try to read the future and to anticipate, as it were, the chapters of a human book which are not yet actually written. The grain of sense in it all, however, is the attempt to employ new methods of reading people; and from this point of view these so-called sciences which are not yet sciences have a shadow of excuse for living. 

 

From these pseudo-sciences with their aim of reading men more exactly, we can pass on to even more doubtful and deceiving means, such as clairvoyance, thought-reading and the like. In common with the pseudo-sciences and ordinary experience these so-called ‘occult’ sciences aim at enabling us to read people more completely and more exactly. But even more than the pseudo-sciences they are filled with imagination and nonsense, so that the little real science they contain is diluted beyond recognition.

 

Is there any direction of research that promises better results and is not open to objections that lie against the pseudo and the ‘occult’ methods? A method, moreover, which, unlike psycho-analysis, for instance, demands no special previous training but can be employed by anybody with common-sense? There decidedly is: But the strange thing is that it is as well known as it is little practised. Though it contains, as it were, the key to all languages, and would eventually enable us to read people’s hearts as well as their moods and thoughts, it is still regarded as something of an amusing toy, interesting, at best, in a detective story. The Greeks knew of electricity, but they failed to develop it. We have the key to human nature, but we fail to use and develop it seriously.

 

In a word, it is Sherlock Holmes. But Sherlock Holmes and his creator are infants spelling out words in contrast with the adepts we might become by taking their method seriously and pursuing it as diligently as we should the study of Sanscrit or Chinese if these languages were necessary to us. Even as the method is practised, in kindergarten, it yields results. There is no doubt whatever that a man accustomed to read people as studiously as a Sherlock Holmes, knows them sooner and better than the rest of his fellows. Many words and phrases of the human text which ordinarily are never read or only after years of experience can be spelled out very quickly by an observer self-trained in the infant-school of Sherlock Holmes.

 

To produce more and better results, not only must the method be developed and much more energy put into it, but the language to be deciphered must, at least, be cata­logued. After all, man is not infinite in his modes of self- expression. Our languages are limited in number; and they can be easily catalogued and classified. What are they? Imagine yourself in the presence of a complete stranger. He or she, we assume, is an open book, capable of being read at sight. We do not profess to be clairvoyants or thought-readers, we cannot employ psycho-analysis, and we have neither the inclination nor the smattering of knowledge necessary for palmistry or phrenology. What can we see with our unaided sight and mind? What can we gather by simple observation without experiment and without rudeness? To enumerate: we can observe the following categories of manifestation—physical appearance, posture, gesture, facial expression, tone of voice, character of speech, manner and conduct (the movement and variety of all the foregoing). And from each of these classes of observation we can arrive at conclusions, tentatively at first, but amounting to practical certainty with continued trial and error. The method demands, of course, that the observer shall be ‘all there’, and ready with his categories to pass rapidly from one to the other. But not only is it a safe method, open to everybody, but its employment yields double results: it is effective in its immediate aim of enabling us to read people more and more fully and certainly, and, at the same time, it compels the observer to develop more and more his powers of observation, deduction and reasoning. In the end he attains to the highest human faculty: intuition with certainty.

 

from Psychological Essays

 

 

 

 

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On many occasions we have involuntarily revealed what we wished to conceal. There are many situations in which the control of expression is essential to success; many in which it is essential to the happiness of others and oneself. Who cannot control his or her expressions—including not merely facial expression, but gestures, movements, postures, carriage, tone of voice and so on—is really a child. We do not expect a child to control itself; its virtue is in being uncontrolled. But when we become adult we put away childish things.

 

The first thing to realize is that we are all and upon all occasions transparent to any trained observer. We live in a glass house comparable to the observation hive which enables bee-keepers to watch bees at work. The hive in which we live is our physical body; and since we exercise in general no real control over it, all its movements, postures and gestures are the natural manifestations of our inward psychic states. For instance, I wake up in the morning and hear a depressing piece of news. My body at once manifests my depression. Lines appear in my face, my mouth droops at the corners, my gestures lose animation, and my carriage its spring. Anybody familiar with me recognizes at once that something is wrong; and a trained observer who had never seen me before would be equally perceptive. But this is only an exemplary case of our self-manifestation; all our states show themselves, from the most general to the most minute, in physical changes visible or perceptible to an outside observer. But for the fact that there is usually no such trained observer present, we should be giving ourselves away continuously—never doing anything else, indeed.

 

Assuming that we wish to be able to conceal ourselves, and not to continue to live transparently to the world, the first thing to do is to become the observer ourselves. Very few people are aware how they look when in this, that, or the other mood, or exactly how they betray their subjective states by their postures, gestures, tones and carriage. As a condition of controlling these expressions, it is plainly necessary to know what they are. And thus the first step towards not giving ourselves away is the discovery and realization of the particular ways in which we now do. Let us learn first to see (and hear) ourselves as others see us, and afterwards it may be possible to learn how not to be seen. But we cannot even begin to learn how not to betray ourselves until we know what our present habitual tell-tale modes of expression are.

 

How is this to be done; by setting ourselves systematically to the job in a spirit of experimental curiosity. You have been told that you give yourself away and you wish to find out how you do so. Make a point of observing yourself and especially at such moments when you are disposed to be off guard. For instance, you feel annoyed. Then look in a mirror and see how your face expresses annoyance. Speak, and listen to the tone of your voice. Walk and observe your carriage and deportment. Or you feel very elated about something. Just observe how, quite involuntarily all your expressions and movements join in the applause. Each of us has a limited repertoire of expressions for all the states we experience; and it is our first task to become familiar with our repertoire. Only when we have observed ourselves in all states shall we be aware of our habitual modes of expression.

 

The next step is to practise expressions in the absence of any feelings to be expressed. This, of course, is a normal process in the training of an actor; but we design it for a superior aim. In front of a mirror, preferably a pierglass, practise, in perfectly cold blood as it were, the expressions you imagine suited to this, that or the other emotion or mood. Think, for instance, that you have just received news of a fortune, then try to express your state of mind in appropriate movements. Or try to compose your features so that they express wonder, indignation, suspicion, affection, or even nothing at all. This running over the scales of our instrument of expression is very useful in many ways. But above all we realize from it the practical separability of our expressions and our inner feelings. For obviously, if we can learn to express without feeling, we can learn to feel without expressing—which is the most important element in the art of not giving ourselves away.

 

There are two further steps in the complete course. And the first is not to express the emotion or mood you are feeling. You feel sad, or worried, indignant, or jealous or suspicious. Exactly at the moment when you are experi­encing one of these emotions, and are involuntarily about to betray it, resist the impulse. Don’t let your muscles suit their action to your mood. Make them at least keep still. If this effort of non-expressionis made at the moment when our body is most eager to shout our secrets on the house-tops the results will be found to justify themselves. We shall not need to be assured that we are attaining a degree of mastery over our tell-tale body; we shall feel and know it. A man who can deny his muscles their habitual luxury of automatically acting his moods and emotions is on the road to the greatest powers.

 

The last step should be easy if the previous steps have been really taken, that is, not taken in imagination only.

 

It consists in expressing the opposite or at least, the different from what you are feeling at the moment. The penultimate step, as we have seen, was the non-expression of a current emotion. The present and final step is the positive expression but of a different or opposite emotion from that immediately experienced. This too can be practised in the mirror prepara­tory to being tried in life. You feel out of sorts, wretched and on edge. Everybody and everything are rather hateful. You wonder why you were born. You feel fed up with life. Stand in front of your mirror and deliberately make your body express the opposite of these melancholy trains of mixed thoughts and feelings and sensations. Make yourself appear radiant, affectionate and full of joie de fi’vre ;simulate the physical expression of emotions you do not feel; pretend by your postures, gestures, facial expressions and deportment that you feel anything but as you do; and simulate so cleverly that your manner would, as we say, deceive the Devil himself—in short, your own dark mood. It is naturally more difficult to do this in life.

 

Before people, in the midst of distracting circumstances, it is like employing ju-jitsu tricks outside the gymnasium and in real circumstances. Nevertheless, life must be our aim, and real circumstances our proof of proficiency.

 

from “Psychological Exercises”

 

 

 

 

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Sсience is organized knowledge and scientific observation. We assume all too readily that observation comes by nature, that we are born ‘naturally observant’. But the truth is that most of us are born lazy, and observation beyond the necessities of life has been too great a voluntary exertion. The result is that we live in a world of which we know a little more than a dog or a cat; we are familiar with a few things from long association; we have a nodding acquaint­ance with a number of things; but as far as our scientific observation of them goes, we can scarcely be said to be even curious. Exactly as in a dream, we take the most astonishing things in life for granted. Surrounded by hosts of mysterious objects we hardly observe their outer shells. Few of us could clearly recall, indeed, more than one in a hundred of the common marvels we daily see.

 

What increases our vital inertia is the habit, remaining over from childhood and seldom outgrown even by the oldest adults, of immediately classifying all objects (and people) as things we like and things we do not like. It is clear that there is no science in this, at least in the objective sense. Such a classification may serve as a symptom of our own state of being, but it does not even begin to classify and organize our knowledge of the world. Real observation only begins when likes and dislikes cease to be regarded as criteria of values; and all real science is beyond the childish attitude of ‘I like’ and ‘I don’t like’.

 

Even scientific observation, however, is very defective in its methods. Distrusting for good reason the inter-mixture of fancy with observation, science has made the profound error of dispensing with imagination; with the result that trained scientific observers are, as a rule, the last people in the world to see things as they are and to see them whole. Aspects of things, the continuity

 

and development of single qualities, they see with considerable precision. They can weigh and measure and analyse and reckon time and space movements. But the things they thus observe not only die in their hands, as it were, but they are seen piecemeal and seldom as wholes, and still more rarely as phases of a process without beginning and without end.

 

Take, for instance, an object such as one of the paving-stones of our street walks. A moment’s reflection will show us that it is full of curious interest. It is of stone quarried from some particular geological formation and brought to the city from near or far. It is shaped in a certain manner, implying the use of certain tools. It is of a certain size and it is laid alongside of others in a certain pattern. In short, given a single paving-stone in its actual situation, a com­petent thinker should be able to deduce almost its native civilization from it. But the process, rare as it is, is still reason and not observation as it might be. Observations are truly made of it, and reason subsequently classifies and organizes them for the purpose of drawing conclusions from them. But what we mean by imaginative observation is not such a series of painfully coordinated facts after the various lines of observation have been pursued, but a simultaneous perception, in the flash of an eye, of all there is to know of the object in question.

 

It is a paving-stone we are observing? We should have in mind immediately and simultaneously its nature, its origin, its history, its use, its place in nature, its future.

 

Naturally all these perceptions could not be simultaneously articulated; but the understanding should simultaneously grasp them all. A book and a month might be necessary for the writing down of all our immediate perceptions; but the important fact is not the successive articulation but the simultaneous realization.

 

It should be the same with all the objects we encounter. We are not animals to be uncurious about the world we live in, but it is our function, and hence the sure source of our real delight as humans, to be more and more fully conscious of the nature, attributes, history and use of everything around us. Conceive what life would mean for us if every object from the smallest to the greatest presented itself immediately to our minds in all its attributes and relations. That would, indeed, be living a waking life in this world.

 

Such a mode of instantaneous perception does not come, however, by nature; nor even, as we have seen, by the ordinary training of sciences. It requires to be specially cultivated by deliberate effort continued over a long period. Certainly the reward is very great; and the effort must be corresponding.

 

It is desirable, to begin with, to have a few categories or questions into which to pour one’s observations. Let us choose the following: origin, history, relations, use and future. Deliberately apply these categories or questions to any object at hand; and report to yourself the answers you can give. Having done this, then try to realize them as a whole. Look at the object again, and try to hold in the mind and to be aware simultaneously of all you know of it. This is an effort of real imagination, neither reason nor fancy.

 

At first, not only will you discover, to your surprise, both how much you know and how much you do not know, but the difference in feeling between observing, thinking, remembering, reasoning, imagination and fancy. These processes are, as a rule, merely names to us. We distinguish them theoretically and in our heads only. They mean as little to us as signs in algebra. But after a very few exercises of such observations as has just been described, these mental functions become certainly and specifically known as different.

 

There is no need to look about for strange objects. In fact, the more familiar they are, the better. We use a legion of things, for instance, in our daily domestic life. From waking to sleeping we tax the resources of the earth to provide us with necessities, utilities, and luxuries. Every one of these objects has a natural history, being ultimately composed of natural substance; a sociological history, having become what it is after many centuries of human development; and a particular history, its manufacture and delivery to our­selves. Try to assemble all you know of these histories of every object into a flash of realization. The resultant ex­perience, when you have succeeded, will amply repay you.

 

 

 

 

Как жить полнее

 

 

 

 

Time seems long or short to us according as it is filled or empty. We may compare time to a string on which beads are threaded. When the beads are very close together we are not aware of the string. The farther they are apart the more the string shows.

 

At the same time, however, that we complain of being bored or of things being dull, we also complain that we have too little time at our disposal. When we are aware of the passage of time, we are dull; and when we are not aware of it, then time goes all too quickly. 

 

In general we accept the beads as they are threaded on our strings by accident. We do not choose or create or control the incidents and events that happen to us; they just thread themselves, some few being bright and coloured and perhaps of gold and precious stones, but the majority being common glass. Nor, again, do we usually put ourselves to the trouble of going and placing ourselves in circumstances where beads are made, that is, where things happen. And, what is more, it is strange but true that even in circumstances rich with incident for some people, others find nothing. A man or woman may live a dull and uneventful life in the most romantic circumstances, simply because nothing happens to just them.

 

The complaint of the idle that they have not time is, of course, unjustified. Their remedy is simple: they should get and keep busy. But from the very active people whose lives are full and who still do not find life full enough, the complaint against time is reasonable. You live at full speed; every moment is occupied; you have no complaint that life is empty, but only that it is too short. Twenty-four hours to the day with the enforced idleness of sleep is altogether too small an allowance of time for the things one wishes and has the opportunity, but for time, to do. What is the remedy for this happily unhappy state of things? We cannot lengthen time. We already have all of it that there is.

 

Have you ever considered the possibilities of doubling or trebling or even multiplying the string without reducing its length? On the analogy of the string and the beads, it is obvious that you cannot thread more beads than the string will hold; you cannot fill life in time fuller than time will allow. But it is possible—in the illustration, at least—to put a new string side by side with the first string and to thread that; and afterwards, perhaps, to add still another and another, making in the end an area where at first was only a single line.

 

What is Time, as we ordinarily understand it? A single track succession of events. At every given moment we are called upon to make a choice among a number of possibilities and at every such choice the unchosen possibilities are, as it were, sacrificed. Time as succession is simply the actualization of one possibility out оf many in each successive moment. Could we actualize two possibilities, or three or four at once, we should be living in two or three or four different streams of time. Our life, though no longer than before, would nevertheless contain more time. We should be living several ordinary lives at once.

 

But how to do it? It is no use trying to crowd more in to the single track. By feverish haste and hurry it is possible, at best, only to fill one string, and usually with events of a very brittle and common composition. On the other hand, it seems at first sight equally impossible to multiply one’s strings and to choose to actualize several possibilities at once, especially when they appear to exclude each other. 

 

The chief difficulty, however, is our present-day training, which has prejudiced us in favour of time as a mere single sequence; and naturally we think that only a single sequence is possible. The first thing to do is to think simultaneously, and to be aware simultaneously of happenings which at present we perceive singly and successively and not all at once.

 

For instance, nothing is more certain than the fact that at every moment of our waking life we receive hundreds of sense-impressions, perform hundreds of more or less obvious movements, and are subject to hundreds of inner sensations, such as muscular contractions, breathing, changes of temperature, and of blood-pressure. Given any particular motive for observing and becoming conscious of any of these, we can isolate it from the rest and give our attention to it. But ordinarily we do not even do this. For all the consciousness we have of the marvellous sensational life of our body, we might as well have no body at all, or be asleep. Except upon special occasions, when our body insists upon attracting our attention to itself, we treat it as a mere machine of no real conscious value. 

 

It might be supposed that the case is different with our other strings—our life of feeling and our life of thought. But on analysis it turns out that we are just as asleep to the rich current of our emotional and intellectual life as we are to our physical life. It is true that some people are more aware, and others less, of one than of the other two. In­tellectual people are more aware of their thinking than of their feeling and physical life. Emotional people are more aware of their emotions. Common sensual people are more aware of their physical life. But in the first place, none of these specialists, as it were, is aware of more than a fraction of the life in which he specializes. The intellectual is conscious of only a few processes of his thoughts; the artist is conscious of only a few of his emotional streams; the sensualist is conscious of only a few of his physical sensations. And, in the second place, very, very few people can be conscious simultaneously of two of these streams, even intermittently and partially; and still fewer ever arrive at simultaneous consciousness of all three.

 

Now if we assume that each of these three modes or kinds of experience is a thread of time, and that each thread is always being filled with beads, it is evident that we can, at least, treble our time and consequently our life by becoming simultaneously conscious of all three successions of events. In other words, by becoming simultaneously conscious of our physical movements and sensations, our feelings, and our thoughts we should be leading in reality three lives at once, actualizing three possibilities at every moment. 

 

Naturally it is not easy; begin by trying to be aware of your movements and physical sensations while they are actually occurring. Try to realize more and more what your body is doing. Later try to notice your changing currents of feelings without, however, ceasing to be aware of your physical manifestations. Finally, try to become conscious of your streams of thinking; and include these observations with the previous observations or awareness of your physical and emotional life.

 

By this means, if you persist in it, you will treble your time and enrich your life. The method is not introspective nor is it analysis. You are not required to think about it but only to be aware; and to be fully aware is to be fully conscious.

 

 

 

 

Бодрствуем ли мы?

 

 

 

 

Orage examines sleep and waking as facts and as metaphors of our psychological and spiritual condition. 

 

HOW can we prove to ourselves at any given moment that we are not asleep and dreaming?  Life circumstances are sometimes as fantastic as dream circumstances; and change with the same rapidity.  What if we should wake up and find waking life a dream, and our present sleep and dream merely dreams within a dream?

 

There is a traditional doctrine, usually associated with religion, but now and then invading great literature, that our present waking state is not really being awake at all. It is not night-sleep certainly, nor is it the ordinary somnambulism or sleep-walking; but it is, the tradition says, a special form of sleep comparable to a hypnotic trance in which, however, there is no hypnotist but only suggestion or auto-suggestion.  In the first instance, from the moment of birth and before, we are under the suggestion that we are not fully awake; and it is universally suggested to our consciousness that we must dream the dream of this world—as our parents and friends dream it.  Young children, it is notorious, find it hard at first to distinguish between this fancy, that is to say, their other day-dreams, and the dream their parents live in.  Later in childhood, when the original suggestion has taken, auto-suggestion keeps us in the state more or less continuously.  Our friends and neighbours, and all the objects we perceive, act as soporifics and dream-suggestions.  We no longer, as in early childhood, rub our eyes in doubt of the reality of this world.  We are fully convinced not only that it is real, but that there is no other.  We dream but we do not doubt that we are awake. 

 

Religion, it is obvious, presupposes that mortal life is a mode of sleep from which it is possible to wake up to eternal life.  The New Testament, for example, constantly makes use of the imagery of sleep and waking.  According to the Gospels and the Epistles we sleep with Adam and wake with Christ; and the refrain of the Doctrine is that we should strive to wake up from our present waking state and to be ‘born again’.  In recent literature the idea has been exploited by Ibsen and H.  G.  Wells among other writers. Ibsen’s play, When We Dead Awaken, and Wells’ novel, The Sleeper Wakes, assume in their very titles that we humans are asleep but can wake. 

 

It is naturally difficult, of course, to convince ourselves that we are asleep.  A sleeping person, in the midst of a dream, cannot usually wake himself up.  The dream may be so unpleasant that it wakes him; or he awakes naturally; or he may be shaken into waking.  Very seldom can one voluntarily wake oneself.  It is even more difficult to wake voluntarily from hypnotic sleep.  And if from these relatively light states of sleep it is hard for us to wake of our own accord, we can imagine the difficulty of waking voluntarily from the profounder sleep and dream of our waking state. 

 

But how can we convince ourselves that we are really in a form of sleep when, as it appears to us, we are really awake? By comparing the two chief states of consciousness known to us and observing their strikingly common features.  What, for instance, are the outstanding features of our ordinary sleep as known to us through our recollected dreams? The dream happens, that is to say, we neither deliberately initiate it nor do we create its figures and events.  And in this respect it resembles waking life, in that we do not predetermine our experiences, nor do we create or invent the figures and events we meet from day to day. 

 

Another common element of our sleeping and waking modes of life is the variability of our conduct.  We are sometimes horrified, sometimes gratified, to recall how we have behaved in a dream situation.  It is true that whatever our conduct may have been, humiliating or flattering to our pride, we couldn’t have made it otherwise.  Our disquiet or satisfaction is solely an account of the presumed revelation of our unconscious selves.  But how, at bottom, do these facts differ from the facts of our waking life-dreams? In life-dreams also we cut a sorry or a good figure, not by pre-determined design but as it happens; and our regret or satisfaction is equally contingent on the effect the episode has upon our self-pride.  But can we truthfully say, beforehand, that, whatever happens, we shall behave ourselves thus and thus and not otherwise? Are we not subject to the suggestion of the moment and liable to be carried away from our resolution by anger, greed, enthusiasm? Exactly as in sleep-dream, our waking life is always taking us by surprise; and we are constantly behaving as we should not have imagined we could behave.  Nor, in retrospect, can we truthfully say that we could have done better or worse in yesterday’s situation.  If it were repeated exactly, no doubt we could.  But, taking it as and when it was, with ourselves as we then were, it could no more have been different than any night-dreams we have experienced. 

 

Serious examination of the parallelism between the two states of sleeping and waking reveals many other similarities.  One more only need be mentioned here—the close resemblance of our memory as regards the experience of the two states.  It is true that of our waking life we preserve a more or less continuous recollection, whereas our dream-life is a series of discontinuous memories.  But apart from this specific difference our actual memory-faculty appears to behave much the same in relation to both forms of experience.  We know how difficult it is to recall at will a dream of the night before; the dream was vivid, and all its details were in our mind on awaking; but in an instant the whole of it has vanished, leaving not a wrack behind.  Memory of yesterday’s life-dream is not so treacherous, or capricious as regards its main features; but where today is the vivid detail of yesterday? We saw clearly a thousand and one objects, we even attended to them.  We listened to conversation, we spoke, we watched men and things in the street, we read books or newspapers, we read and wrote letters, we ate and drank and did or perceived a host, that no man can number, of objects and actions.  That was only yesterday, yesterday’s vivid waking dream.  How many of those details remain in our memory today; or how many could we by any effort recall? As completely as the dreams of the night, the mass of our life-dreams of yesterday fade into the oblivion of our unconsciousness. 

 

It may be feared that there is something morbid in the foregoing speculations; and that an effort to see our waking life as merely a special form of sleep must diminish its importance for us and ours for it.  But this attitude towards a possible and probable fact is itself morbidly timid.  The truth is that just as in night-dreams the first symptom of waking is to suspect that one is dreaming, the first symptom of waking from the waking state—the second awaking of religion—is the suspicion that our present waking state is dreaming likewise.  To be aware that we are asleep is to be on the point of waking; and to be aware that we are only partially awake is the first condition of becoming and making ourselves more fully awake.  

 

 

 

 

Как стать человеком мира

 

 

 

 

Home-keeping youths, as Shakespeare says, have ever homely wits; and though the adage needs to be amended to include home-keeping thoughts and not merely bodies, it is true enough in general. A villager who has always been a villager cannot be said to know much more than his dog about the world in which he lives. True, he often attains a considerable sagacity; but sagacity is not the same thing as knowledge. The fact remains that the untravelled recluse is, as a rule, a man of cramped intelligence.

 

Men of the world, so-called, have wider acquaintance with people and things. They have travelled and seen other civilizations than their own. They have rubbed shoulders with many different types of men. They have seen in practice many different forms of religion and morality. They know that the world is very varied and are tolerant of difference in their immediate neighbourhood in consequence. 

 

But our men of this world, especially when so self-styled, are still only comparatively men of the world. Compared with rustics they may be men, but compared with a real man of the world they are at most only hobbledehoys of the world. For it takes much more than travel and seeing many people to form the mind of a man of the world. Our grown­up man needs to have used all his faculties, including, first and foremost, his scientific imagination. It is only by the training of the scientific imagination that we can arrive at a liberal conception of the world in which we live. It is only by dwelling on true and large ideas of the world that we broaden and deepen our minds. And, finally, it is only by daily contemplation of the great facts of our world that we arrive at elevation of mind, or the characteristic quality, of the real adult man of the world.

 

The great ideas of the world are not very numerous nor are they speculative. They are few and they are facts. Whoever will try to grasp them imaginatively as facts, and constantly keep them in mind, is already on the way to elevation; for elevation is attained by ascending ideas, that is by contemplating more and more inclusive facts about the world.

 

Let us begin with the simplest of the large facts about our world. The Earth is a planet on which, at any given moment 2,000 million human beings live in the midst of a natural kingdom made up of minerals, vegetables and animals. These 2,000 million people are distributed over the globe from the coldest extreme to the most tropical, and from the sea-level to the altitude of the Himalayas. They are of different racial and national breeds, and they vary in social culture from the Neolithic period to the Aeroplane period. Of these 2,000 million people, a million are born every month, let us say, and a million die every month. Thus they vary in age over every possible duration of human life, from a second to 150 years. Between them, at any given moment every experience possible to mankind is being suffered or enjoyed; every pain is being felt, every joy is being ex­perienced, every activity is being exercised, every state of consciousness or unconsciousness is being undergone. If we could conceive a Being whose cells were 2,000 million humans, he would be simultaneously conscious of all that man by his very nature can possibly be.

 

This procession that passes across the stage of our planet has been passing for as long as the mind can count. Literally scores, perhaps hundreds of civilizations have preceded ours. Beneath Carthage six civilizations, almost without a name, lie buried one below the other. Under yards of sand in the Gobi desert, chance has revealed civilization below civiliza­tion, stratified like geological deposits, and every one without a name. As far back, therefore, as we can think, and farther, this globe has been the scene of this vast procession of human life; and nobody can foresee the future of it.

 

Whence does this procession across the stage of our planet come? And where does it go? It arrives by the mysterious process of birth; each succeeding generation is unfolded out of its predecessors. It departs by what we call death, a process even more mysterious than birth. Human life on this planetary scale is like human life on the individual scale, as described by the Anglo-Saxon poet: it flies from the dark into the dark across the lighted interval we call life. But even our planet, stupendous as it is in relation to ourselves, is not all the world we live in. Our planet is only a provincial town of which the metropolis is the Sun; and the Sun is, again, only one metropolitan city amongst the myriads of capital cities we call the Milky Way. Finally, the Milky Way is only one of the unnumbered stellar continents that compose the celestial world.

 

Let us try to think of ourselves as we are truly situated. We belong to a biological process of which the earlier stages are mineral, vegetable and animal. We number at any moment about 2,000 million. Our species has existed on this planet, and in much the same form and variety, for as long as we can think; it will apparently continue in the same form and variety for as long as we can foresee. The planet is a dependent of the Sun which, in turn, is a dependent of the Milky Way which in turn, is a fraction, or perhaps an organ of the stellar universe—the great and all-inclusive world. Truly, we are inhabitants of no mean city; but which of the so-called men of the world today even begins to realize more than the fringe of the world he lives in?

 

It is sometimes supposed that the contemplation of such facts, with the inevitable confession they extract from us, that we are ignorant, utterly and profoundly ignorant, is bad for the mind. Bad for certain minds, it may be, such facts are not milk for babes to imbibe! But they are meat to the strong and, indeed, there is no exercise of scientific imagination better calculated to strengthen and raise the quality of men’s minds than to see our world steadily and to see it whole. It is obvious that seeing a thing whole is a first condition of seeing its parts in proportion. We may be said, without boasting, to know the whole; it is this picture of the world we have just constructed and which everybody can re­construct for himself. With this whole always in conscious view, we may be certain that the parts will one day fall into their proper places. On the other hand, without this view of the whole, the parts must always be changing places with each other. A capital mind is one that is aware of the whole world in which it lives. A provincial mind is one that has never travelled in time and space.

 

from Psychological Essays

 

 

 

 

Экономия нашей энергии

 

 

 

 

Orage examines how we lose a large portion of our physical, mental and emotional energy each day.  He makes suggestions about how it can be economised for thepurpose of serving conscious development. 

 

 

 

The human organism is a machine capable of doing work; and the energy to run it is derived from food, air and impressions. We eat food, we breathe air, and through our sense organs we receive impressions; and the give and take between these three forms of nourishment creates the various energies we manifest. These energies are of three kinds: physical, emotional and mental; and for each of these expenditures of energy it is necessary to create the means in ourselves. We cannot possibly spend more than our income. Not only can we not do physically more than our food permits, but we cannot feel and we cannot think more than our corresponding incomes allow. We get ‘tired’ of thinking, so that we think no more; and we get ‘tired’ with feeling, so that we can feel no more—exactly as we get tired with physical exertion. Fatigue in any of these respects means the same thing, namely, that we have temporarily used up our store of energy. After sleep or food or change of air or situation, we can act and feel and think again; but for the moment we are empty.

 

There are, however, two degrees of fatigue—imaginary and real. It is common enough for people to think they are tired when really they are not. Given some new motive, they surprise themselves by the energy they find they possess. This phenomenon in physical terms is sometimes called ‘second wind’; and it is as if there were a second reservoir of energy which comes into use only when the first is exhausted. The same phenomenon can occur in the cases of feeling and thinking—only usually we give up after the ‘first wind’ is finished. But we can, so to say, work on past our first fatigue to a second wind or reservoir.

 

Real fatigue, as distinct from a merely first fatigue, occurs when the second or perhaps the third reservoir is used up. Then rest and recuperation are necessary or the machine will break down. Our machine is so constructed that practically every day we create within ourselves a superabundance of the three kinds of energy. We do not spend more than a small part of our income. Nevertheless, it is spent; and we go to bed tired, used up. Why is this?

 

The human machine may be compared to a three-storied house, each floor of which is devoted to a particular form of work. On the ground floor we carry on our physical life; on the second floor we carry on our emotional life; and on the top floor we carry on our intellectual life.

 

Now when we are working on one of these three floors, it is not necessary that the others should be working too. We do not turn on the lights over the whole house when we are only using one floor. That would be a waste of light. Similarly we ought not to be using energy on all three stories of our organism when we are only actually using one of them. For instance, if we are thinking, it is not necessary for the body to be expending energy as well; or if we are working physically it is not necessary for the mind to wander and waste energy doing nothing. We ought to learn to shut off our energies on each floor at will, so that the machine is not running when we are not in the room to direct it.

 

All ‘unconscious’ actions waste energy; only conscious action saves it. The first principle of economy is thus to employ ourselves consciously and voluntarily and not to allow any activity to escape our attention or to run away with energy itself. The three chief sources of loss correspond to the three stories of our organism; and they may be defined as loss by unconscious muscular exertion; loss by mind-wandering; and loss by worry.

 

Just examine the state of your muscles at this instant. Observe that in all probability you are sitting with a quite unnecessary exertion. Your legs are braced, your neck muscles are taut, your arms are not loose. All this means that you have the lights on in your ground-floor rooms, though, in fact, you do not need them; and the meter is ticking away your energy uselessly. The cure is to relax the body when it is not in use. Always when you are not using the body, leave it loose. By long habit the body does not relax of its own accord; but it can be trained to do so; and the consequent saving of energy is enormous.

 

Thinking aimlessly is to leave the lights on in the upper story when they are not really needed. But everybody does it. Observe your fellow-passengers in a bus or train. They are not engaged in working out some definite problem. Their minds are just running over the incidents of the day or of yesterday or of last year. They are not trying to arrive at any conclusion; they are not, in fact, thinking. But their mechanism is being worked by association of ideas; and as it grinds out chance memories and images, it consumes energy. And when, later, we wish really to think, and to use our brains to some purpose, we find that our day’s supply of energy is exhausted. The remedy is never to think aimlessly. When you catch your mind just thinking by itself—day- dreaming, musing, plunged in reverie, lost in memory—make it think definitely. Say the multiplication table backwards, or repeat some verse to yourself. Compose a letter or a speech. Think out clearly tomorrow’s work. Recall exactly the day’s events. Do anything so that you intend to do it, but don’t allow your mind to be done. This effort to make the mind work may seem to be exhausting; but actually it is refreshing. It uses blood; whereas unconscious and uncontrolled thought is simply bleeding to exhaustion.

 

Worry, or involuntary feeling, is the third cause of our fatigue; and it is even more common than thought-waste and body-waste. As Shelley said: ‘We look before and after and sigh for what is not’. About the events of yesterday or tomorrow it is not only absurd to allow ourselves to feel, since they are not present, but exist only in memory or imagination; but the habit robs us of the energy with which to feel today. We call sentimentalists those who dwell in feeling or events of the past or future. The lights on their second floor are always on. At the same time it is notorious that sentimentalists do not feel intensely the situations immediately present; it is jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today with them.

 

The remedy consists in concentrating attention on the person or situation immediately present. Here, just in front of us, and not in memory or imagination, is the thing to be felt about, sympathized with or helped. Let tomorrow and yesterday take care of themselves. Those who practise these three methods will very soon find themselves with more energy that they now know what to do with. They will be hard to tire.

 

 

 

 

Может ли интуиция быть приобретенной

 

 

 

 

Intuition can be more easily described than defined. It is not thought, and it is not feeling. Perhaps it is a kind of chemical compound of both. Its results take the form, as we know, of swift judgments, usually upon evidence insufficient for logical deduction. Where reason is pedestrian and has to walk the whole distance fact by fact, intuition leaps, jumps or flies to conclusions. It is a gift of nature and bloweth whither it listeth. Some people have it, some not; some less, others more. And, in general, it is commoner among women than among men. The conclusions arrived at intuitively are often astonishingly right, though they are not absolutely certain. Even intuitives themselves have learned enough from experience to doubt their own clearest intuitions. Intuitions, in fact, are of the nature of guesses; and though they may reach a high degree of possibility and, in the end, prove to be right, only the very adventurous would pin their faith upon them in advance of the evidence.

 

The affinity of intuition and guessing suggests one means of developing and training the gift. We have all been familiar as children with guessing games; and it is interesting to note that guessing is one of the natural proclivities of the youthful mind. Ordinarily our parents and teachers dis­courage this tendency as much as possible; and try to substitute reasoning for guessing. They may be wise to cultivate the reason; but are they wise to cultivate it at the expense of the possible training of intuition? Suppose that the tendency to guessing, manifested in all imaginative children, should be the germ of the faculty of intuition, and that, by the deliberate cultivation of this mode of arriving at conclusions, intuition with increasing certainty might be developed, should we not have two powers where now, as a rule, we have only one? If intuition compares with reasoning as flying does with walking, cannot we develop both methods of locomotion without sacrificing one to the other? We suggest, in fact, the deliberate cultivation of the guessing habit in children, side by side with the cultivation of reasoning. Games at guessing should be encouraged at children’s parties; and exercises in guessing should be deliberately devised and practised in schools for the young. 

 

For adults the possible means of developing intuition must of necessity be different. They cannot revive the early tendencies of childhood; they cannot become little children again, and grow up where they left off. At least, the means are not the same. By what means, if any, can adults try to repair the defect of their youthful education, and train a gift which has been neglected if not entirely killed out?

 

It cannot, as we have seen, be thinking in the ordinary sense of the word; nor can it be feeling. Is there then any possible process which is neither one nor the other, and, at the same time, is not childish guessing, but which is, at least, akin to intuition and capable of yielding increasingly satisfactory results? We believe there is; and we shall give to this process the name of ‘psychological work’ to dis­tinguish it from ordinary thinking, feeling and guessing.

 

You have a friend with whom you have fallen out recently on some more or less trifling matter. There is a misunder­standing between you which neither party appears able to dissipate. You try and he tries; but your efforts only make matters worse. What can be done? Try the following: Compose a letter, written as from your friend to yourself, which would completely satisfy you if you received it. Put into exact words what you would like your friend to write or say to you. This effort of mind, it will be found, is not just thinking; nor is it feeling or guessing; since you have the means of checking its correctness. It is, in short, deliberate intuition or, as we have called it, psychological work. 

 

Or you are in doubt what certain people really think of you. To know their opinion of you would be of great value. Perhaps your future depends upon their judgement; yet you are not sure what it is. Here again, is an opportunity for deliberate psychological work. Imagine yourself in their situation and called upon to express their candid opinion of you. Write down in actual words what you imagine they would say if so called upon. You will be astonished to discover, in the first place, how different is the result from what you now expect; and, in the second place, how closely it will prove to approximate to the truth. Something in us is never self-deceived, and such an effort as we have just described is a means of arriving at our own conscious self-realization of the truth that is in us.

 

One of the commonest experiences in life is to receive and give offence where none is intended. People, otherwise worthy, fail to do something the effect of which is to disincline you to future relations. Without exactly knowing why, you drift apart. On the other hand, people who once cultivated you cease to take any interest in you. You do not know the cause of their coolness or indifference; and you attribute it to their caprice. In both cases a little psychological effort would possibly yield illuminating results.

 

In respect to the first, try deliberately to discover what it was that ‘put you off’ your acquaintance, and then just as deliberately, imagine what he or she should have done, or should now do, to win your regard back again. It is not enough to know that you wish to be treated differently.

 

You must try to think just how you wished or now wish to be treated. Nor is it of any importance that your friend should act on your discovery; you need not tell him what he should have done or should now do. Your own under­standing thus arrived at, will be of sufficient value in itself.

 

In your own case, when misunderstood, deliberately go over the incidents of the last meeting with these two questions in mind: What did my friend expect of me at that moment, and what did I give him? The effort to answer these questions candidly is not only an exercise in intuition, but incidentally it would do much to clear up old misunderstandings and to prevent new ones. Many such exercises will occur to the sincere student; all having an immediate practical value, which takes them out of the category of games, and, at the same time, a development value that transcends even their immediate value. In sum, they are of the nature of the Christian doctrine as commonly taught but seldom practised: ‘Do unto others as you would be done by.’ By reason and feeling alone we can never be practical Christians. Only by trained intuition can we certainly arrive at the truth concerning both how we ourselves would be done by, and, consequently, what we should do for our neighbour.

 

from “Psychological essays”

 

 

 

 

Ежедневно умирая

 

 

 

 

It is said by those who have survived death that before the final plunge into unconsciousness the whole of a man’s life is unrolled before him in pictures. Not a detail of the panorama is omitted, and every colour, form, and movement is reproduced in all its original lustre. Whether this is true of all causes or only in the case of death by drowning–which most such reports refer to–the significance is the same. In the first place, the fact clearly demonstrates the enduring quality of the impressions we receive, whether we consciously remember them or not. Somewhere in us, their record remains as clear as on the day they were first made. And, in the second place, the fact that such phenomena occur at a moment when, presumably, something we call our consciousness is leaving our physical body, suggests the possibility of utilizing this power of recalling the past by doing something at those moments when we are rehearsing death in the form of going to sleep.

 

Sleep and death are alike in this, that they are states of unconsciousness into which we normally pass by a gradual process; sleeping or dying. And if it be true that at the final passage we remember our whole previous life, what is more plausible than that in passing from waking to sleeping we recall the events of the day; or, at least, that such a recollection would be more easy than at any other time? If the moment for a pictorial review of life is death, the moment for a pictorial review of the day is sleep.

 

It is important to realize that the review before death, as reported by the survivors, is never censorious or didactic, nor is it a subject for either thought or feelings. Strangely enough, the review appears to be made quite impersonally and impartially, with no attachments and with no comments. Further, it is in pictures, exclusively; there is no talk and there is no text.

 

Following this hint, our nightly review of the day may be assumed to be of the same order. It is the day seen pictorially; it is the day’s events, with oneself as the central figure, reviewed without satisfaction or regret, without fear and without hope; it is impartial and impersonal.

 

Whether we do, in fact, make such a review or not, is scarcely relevant to our purpose, which is to make it consciously. Should we find that it happens, so to speak, of its own accord, our task of becoming aware of and observing it is so much easier. But even if it should not be natural, the values arising from attempting it are too considerable to be neglected.

 

To begin with, nothing is better calculated to keep us attentive to ourselves during the day than the prospect of seeing our day pictorially reproduced at night. Suppose we were accompanied everywhere by a cinematographic camera, and the films of each day were projected upon a screen, in our bedroom every evening. Would not the prospective show-up compel us to watch our steps? The gain to the day, in point of increased attention, would be incalculable.

 

Then too, without even any didactic object, the repetition of the day, in terms of pictures, would be of the utmost value as a lesson in self-knowledge. We should begin to be able to see ourselves as we appear to others, and, in consequence, to exercise all that tolerance of other people’s defects and awkwardnesses which now we usually give to ourselves alone.

 

Still again, the advantage from trying to recall the day exactly is inestimable. Memory, will, concentration and the power of sustained attention are all brought into play. It is impossible to practise such a review regularly without experiencing improvements in all these respects. The exercise in other ways valuable, is invaluable in respect to mental development simply. It is almost a specific against mediocrity. There are other advantages, but they can be left to be discovered. We must now consider the method itself.

 

Before going to sleep, begin to count slowly to yourself a series of simple numbers, backwards and forwards, such as 2, 4, 6, 8 10–10, 8, 6, 4, 2. Continue this repetition rhythmically. Having got this rhythm moving, almost but never quite automatically, deliberately try to picture yourself as you appeared on getting up that morning.

 

You woke, you got out of bed, you proceeded to dress, to breakfast, to read the paper, catch a bus and so on. Try to follow this sequence of yourself pictorially observed, from moment to moment, exactly as if you were unwinding a film. At first you will find the exercise difficult for three reasons. The necessity to count continuously will appear to trouble you at this stage. Nevertheless, continue; for the fact is that counting occupies the thinking brain and thus naturally allows the pictorial memory to work more easily. Remember that one of our objects is precisely not to think about what we represent. Thinking not only impedes the pictorial representation but it subtly but surely falsifies the pictures. For numerous reasons, the thinking brain must be preoccupied while the show is on; and there is no simpler means than counting.

 

The second difficulty is the constant interruption due to failure of memory. You begin very well but scarcely five minutes of the day have been pictured before you are at a loss to remember what you did next. In trying to remember you almost certainly cease counting; and no sooner have you mended the film and started it again than it breaks once more. Do not be discouraged. Everybody without exception finds the same thing. It is no proof of mental weakness to fail scores of times at a new mental exercise; and the fact is that the exercise is of so novel a character that even the greatest intellectual geniuses would bungle it when they first began it. It can be said that the exercise is possible to everybody equally; it is no respecter of persons. Moreover, it is possible to practise it until the film of the day appears to unroll itself without conscious effort. Exactly as the drowned report that the film of their lives passed before them, those who have mastered this exercise report that the events of the day, as recorded in conscious or unconscious memory, represent themselves in their original form and color. The interruptions, frequent at first, become fewer. From being an inexpert operator constantly breaking the film, the persistent student becomes expert. And his reward is not only the review of the day, but the control of mind that has made such a review possible. None of the numerous schools of mind-culture would have anything to teach a pupil grounded in this method.

 

The third difficulty, which perhaps should have been placed first, is simply–sleep. Brain-thinking, as we know, tends to keep us awake. Worrying–that is, emotional thinking–is an even more common cause of insomnia. Pictorially reviewing the day, on the other hand, being neither form of thinking, induces sleep when nothing else can. At the worst, therefore, you will sleep; and at the best you will know what it is to die daily.

 

                                                 (from Orage’s “Psychological Exercises and Essays”)

 

 

 

 

Поступать как мы хотим

 

 

 

 

There is no higher aim than to do as we like, provided that we first know what we like and, secondly, can actually do it. But these are the difficulties: we do not know what we like, and, when we find out, we too often discover we cannot, in fact, do it—and not because people or circum­stances forcibly restrain us, but for the lack of sufficient will or power or knowledge.

 

This is not to be wondered at, considering what we are and how we have come to be it. There are two people, so to say, in each of us—one derived by heredity from our parents and the other composed of all the influences we have received from the society in which we happen to have been born. By heredity we may be one sort of person; by training and education we may be quite another. 

 

Consider any particular example, one’s own or another’s. Your parents belong to a stock that for hundreds of years has been rural; but owing to accidental circumstances over which certainly you have had no control, you yourself have been brought up all your life in a city and trained for a city occupation. All your heredity calls for a robust physical life with all its correspondent needs and wishes; but all your training disposes you to sedentary pursuits and the needs and wishes that accompany them. The problem is to find yourself between these two conflicting sides. Which is the real you, the you of heredity or the you of environ­ment ? Which are your own likes and dislikes? And which of the two halves in you will do what you like.

 

We cannot say offhand which is the strongest, since individual cases vary. In some instances, environment has a less effect than heredity, or, as we say, blood tells. Some­times it happens that a man or woman will suddenly throw up the career thrust upon them by education and revert to their hereditary inclinations. In other cases the forces of environment are too strong for the heredity; and the mould of society remains unbroken. Thousands of people, born men and women, die business men or society ladies, only because their education has been too much for their heredity. Sociology may be said in such instances to have got the better of biology. What nature intended society has frustrated. 

 

Is it always, however, a matter for regret? Suppose that by heredity a man is of criminal propensities, the victory of society may be said to be for the best. It is only, in fact, when the hereditary tendencies are of a higher value than the tendencies due to training that there is any real loss.

 

But how shall we discover what our hereditary tendencies are? Since they certainly precede our superimposed social training, they may certainly be said to be more natural to us, that is to say, more nearly ourselves. But by the time we begin consciously to think about ourselves at all, the voice of heredity is already confused in the babble of voices due to environment. Our hereditary tendencies may be bad or they may be good; but if we have never had the chance of distinguishing them, we do not know which they are. And if we do not know which they are, we have no freedom of choice in indulging or restraining them. The struggle between our biology and our sociology goes on un­consciously. We are not masters in our own house, but servants, and victims 

 

As a first step towards discriminating between our native and our acquired likes and tendencies, it is best to begin with small things. Usually when people first become aware of the double strain in themselves, they are inclined to kick over the traces. Suddenly realizing the bondage of their nature to their environment, they burst out into a riotous rebellion. Nearly all ‘modern’ literature, beginning with Ibsen’s Doll’s House,is only a manifestation of the reactions following the discovery that each of us is two, one by nature and heredity, and another by nurture and sociology. And all the consequent ‘revolts’ are no more than attempts to undo or mitigate or control the effects of society upon the given heredity. The attempts usually fail for the reason that they are too ambitious. It is not possible all at once to be sure what your hereditary as distinct from your acquired wishes really are; and even given the knowledge, the will­power to discard the latter in favour of the former is not always present on demand.

 

Everything suggests, in fact, that we begin modestly and in small things. If we learn to distinguish between the two voices in ourselves in regard to small things and where, in any event, nothing serious is involved, we shall afterwards be able to discriminate in more important matters. More­over, by developing power in small things we may acquire the power to deal effectively with greater things. Our big ‘revolt’, if ever we should have to make it, will not be riotous and destructive, but a constitutional revolution.

 

 

 

Every day and almost every moment of the day provides ample material for exercise. To begin with, we wish to discover what it is we really like; not what habit or education has persuaded us we like; not what our own idleness prompts us to pretend we like; not what calculation, even, makes us say we like—but the things, the actions, the persons, the occupations, the circumstances we not merely fancy we like or might like, but actually do like. 

 

Whether we shall act on the likes and dislikes we discover in ourselves is another matter altogether. It may be if our reason agrees, we shall—if we can. But it may equally prove to be reasonable that we should not, or should not at once or with our present power. First things first; and the first thing is to discover what are our real, i.e., our native hereditary likes and tendencies.

 

You wake in the morning and propose to get up. Ask yourself whether you really wish to get up. And be candid about it. You take a bath — is it really because you like it or would dodge it if you could? You eat your breakfast—is it exactly the breakfast you like — in kind and quantity? Is it just your breakfast you eat, or simply breakfast as defined by society? Do you, in fact, wish to eat at all? You go to your office, or being a woman, you set about domestic and social duties of the day — are they your native tastes? Would you of your own free choice be where you are and do what you do? Assuming that, for the present, you accept the general situation, are you in detail doing what you like? Do you speak as it pleases you to this, that or the other persons? Do you really like or only pretend to like them? (Remember that it is not a question yet of acting on your likes and dislikes but only of discovering what they are really). You pass the day, every phase offering a new opportunity for self- questioning — do I really like this or not? The evening arrives with leisure — what would you really like to do? What truly amuses you, theatre or movies, conversation, reading, music, games, and exactly which? It cannot be repeated too often that the doing of what you like comes later. In fact, it can be left to take care of itself. The important thing is to know what you like.

 

The method here suggested may seem trivial to those accustomed to the extravagances of the ‘literature of revolt’ but we undertake to say that a week of it would convince everybody of its magical efficiency.

 

from Psychological Essays

 

 

 

 

Кто из нас лучший?

 

 

 

 

We needs must love the highest when we see it, sang Tennyson; but how shall we ever see it if we do not know what to look for? Tennyson assumed that we could not fail to recognize the highest at sight; but that assumption is too naive; and it has been falsified times out of number. It takes two to see the highest, the highest and a mind capable of recognizing it. And at present, we generally are not even aware of the values to be measured. Highest in respect of what? Is it in respect of brain or feeling or action or all or none of these? What makes a man more or less of a man?

 

At first sight, the problem is not easy. We take it for granted that we know all about it, and, indeed, every one of us cheerfully arranges people according to our estimate of them, without troubling to enquire whether our classifi­cation has any other basis than our accidental likes or dislikes. Those people are the highest whom we happen to like best; and though we all have different likes and thus arrive at different results—some thinking Napoleon the greatest man that ever lived, others thinking the same of Plato or Shake­speare or Buddha — the confusion of results gives us no concern; we continue to think our judgement is correct.

 

When we abandon this childish standard and try to find a scientific test to apply to human values, the immediate difficulties appear formidable. There are two thousand million people on the earth at this moment, and it is probable that the number remains fairly constant over thousands of years. This introduces the first difficulty. Is Man today better than Man ten thousand years ago, and, if so, in respect of what? What is progress—assuming that there is such a thing in Man as a species?

 

The next difficulty is presented by the difference of race and nation. Where are the ‘highest’ races and nations—and not according to our accidental preferences but in fact? Let us say ‘from God’s point of view’. Is the White the highest race; and, if so, by virtue of the superiority of what quality? Or assuming that the races are equal in value and only different in form, what creates differences in value between nations of the same race? We do not admit that all white nations are of the same value. Then what makes one more valuable, that is to say, higher than another?

 

But the greatest difficulty of all remains: to estimate the comparative values of the different types of man in any race. It is true that there are only a limited number of types; in fact, they can be reduced to three—the thinking, the emotional and the practical types, exemplified in the thinker, the artist and the man of action. But which of these three is the ‘highest’, and in respect of what quality? There’s the rub!

 

Everybody has his preferences and hence his bias in regard to these three main types. There’s nothing like leather, as we say; and a man who fancies himself to be a thinker or an artist or a man of action will naturally exalt his own type. Mr. Bernard Shaw, a man of brains, naturally asserts that the ‘darling object’ of the life-force is brains. The ‘highest’ in nature is Mr. Shaw up to date. The artist for his part maintains the highest values are aesthetics. To see the world as an artist, that is, himself, is to rise to the highest values attainable by man. The school of action exalts action. God, or the highest human value, is not in thinking or in feeling but in doing; and man is most like God when he successfully organizes industry, war or big business.

 

If there were no standard common to us all by virtue of our common humanity, no agreement could ever be reached. The differences in these types are so absolute that no type, if it be only typical, can possibly adjudicate upon values. If men were only thinkers, or only artists, or only men of action, it would be impossible ever to establish a standard by means of which to recognize the ‘highest’. Each type would have its own standard and there would be no one to judge their standards.

 

Fortunately the Tower of Babel has been long enough down to dissipate some of the confusion of tongues that brought about its fall. The three types of Man are not so distinct that they have nothing left in common. And though, as we have said, the problem of establishing a common standard of value and of thus arriving at an agreement concerning what is the ‘highest’, seems at first sight difficult to the degree of the impossible, actually it is not only not difficult but it is as easy as common sense.

 

In judging our three types of man—the thinker, the artist, and the man of action—it is obvious that already we introduce another standard than their own. Among thinkers, for instance, we all agree that the highest example includes the capacity for feeling and action as well as for pure thought. Thought may be his greatest function, but he must, to be the highest, exercise his other functions, and the more equally with thought, the better. And the same is true in our common agreement, irrespective of our personal preference for a single type, regarding the other two. Artists acclaim Da Vinci, for instance, as the greatest of artists, because he was also a thinker and a man of action. And men of action similarly regard, let us say, Caesar, as the greatest of their type because he combined art and thought with his practical ability.

 

It cannot, however, be said that we have arrived at anything very novel; and though that is not an argument against the conclusion, the fact that our common agreement, thus expressed, can be taken for granted, robs it of stimulus. And again, if we belong by nature to one type or the other, and have painfully to cultivate in ourselves the qualities of the other types, the prospect of attaining any degree of the ‘highest’ is very remote. Is there a simple criterion of human value, equally commonly accepted, but not so commonly formulated? And can it be adopted and applied by the ordinary person? We believe there is and that it can be.

 

At bottom we are not thinkers or artists or people of action, but human beings: creatures occupying a definite place in the world-scheme. We stand between Nature and God, between the created world and the Creator, between the world that is and the world that may be. Our specific function is to act like a bridge between the two; and ourhighest attainment is to be conscious of our function. With consciousness of our function and mission, we can think or feel or act to a purpose; without such consciousness we think or feel or act unconsciously. The true measure of human value is, in short, quantity and quality, not of thought or feeling or action, but of consciousness of why and how and what it is right that man should think, feel and act.

 

The standard is applicable to everybody, for the simple reason that it is possible for each of us, with no great skill in thought or art or affairs, to try to become more conscious of ourselves and of the world in which we live. The highest is he who knows himself best.

 

from Psychological Essays

 

 

 

 

Жизнь как гимнастика

 

 

 

 

In a thousand and one phrases we indicate the importance of ‘right attitude’. ‘I approached it in the wrong attitude’— ‘his attitude was all wrong’—’you’ll have to change your attitude if you want to get on’—’a proper attitude’ and so on. What do we mean by attitude? We mean the general state of mind of the person relatively to the object; or, rather, his emotional state in regard to it. If he feels suspicious of it, his attitude is one of suspicion. If he feels fear, affection, trust, hope, his attitude corresponds. Whatever the emotion evoked by the object, the attitude is determined by it.

 

Can we change our attitude towards things? Obviously our attitude can be changed for us by circumstances. In regard to most objects and persons our attitudes, in fact, change almost from day to day. One day we like so-and-so very much and are disposed, in consequence, to act thus and thus; but next day, owing to some change in him or in circumstances affecting ourselves, our attitude has changed, and we are cool where we were warm. Observation of ourselves will easily show how infinitely changeable we are in our attitudes, that is to say, in our emotional responses to things. But the question is: Can we change our attitude voluntarily at our own discretion, without the stimulus of a change in the object? For clearly, if we could do that, we should be on the way to becoming masters of our fate, since circumstances can affect us only as we are affectable. If I can adopt any attitude I choose—that is, have any emotion I like—then anything whatever that happens is all the same to me. I can feel about it as I please.

 

Such self-mastery is, of course, far beyond most of us; but there is no doubt that we do and can begin to attain it. For instance, when we find an attitude vis-a-vis some situation or person too painful to continue, we try to change the object, and, failing that, we change our state in regard to it. The fable of the fox and the grapes is applicable here. Having tried in vain to obtain the grapes, the fox persuaded itself that the grapes were sour. By imagining the grapes to be sour, the fox induced a different emotion, or attitude in itself. It no longer felt about the grapes as it had felt before. The practical conclusion to be drawn is that imagination is the means by which our attitude can be controlled. Our emotions are evoked by our imagination; and to the extent that our imagination is under our control, our emotions and attitudes are also. 

 

It is clear that the dominant attitude of our lives is our attitude or emotional response towards life itself. This colours everything. As we commonly say, some see everything ‘through rose-coloured glasses’; others have a ‘gloomy outlook’ on life; others again have a serious or happy-go-lucky or a religious or a sporting attitude. As many people, so many attitudes; though all can be reduced to a definite number of groups. And in every case their dominant attitude is decisive of every subordinate attitude. For instance, if your characteristic attitude towards life is gloomy, even your occasional moods of cheerfulness will be affected; they will in all probability be both intense and brief. Or if your dominant attitude is gay and reckless, your moments of depression may be profound but not lasting. Practically all preaching, whether religious or secular, and all teaching, whether institutional or personal, has for its real object the inducement of a changed attitude towards life. Equally, most of the modern systems of therapy, including Christian Science and Psychoanalysis, aim consciously or unconsciously at bringing about a change of heart (or attitude) in their pupils and patients. So all-important has it been found in its effects upon the organism as a whole, that practically every method aiming at betterment must begin with correcting the attitude towards life.

 

Attitude, we have seen, is conditioned by imagination. What you imagine a thing to be, you needs must feel it to be. If you imagine a coiled rope lying in the path to be a snake, you will feel and act accordingly. When you discover your mistake, and have a different view of the rope, your emotional attitude will change.

 

What is our imagination of life? What do we take it to be? Is it for us a coiled rope or a snake?

 

It may prove in the end impossible to know for certain what life is; but in that case, we are free to imagine it to be what we please; and it is only commonsense to imagine it to be something useful to us. All religious and similar systems aim, in short, at inducing in us a useful attitude towards life; an attitude, that is, in which we can act freely and usefully as regards our own ends or somebody else’s. Some religions and systems, for instance, try to induce an attitude of submission towards life, with the design of making use of us for their own advantage. Others —but very few—aim at evoking an active or creative attitude towards life in us with the object of enlisting our voluntary co-operation. And all alike proceed by a common method, namely, by changing our imagination of life.

 

We can name a few typical life-pictures, each, be it remembered, drawn to evoke its proper emotions, attitude and consequent conduct. There is the ‘Puritan’ picture which represents life as a hard and narrow school. This evokes the attitude of the nervous schoolboy in the constant presence of the stern dominie. There is the ‘Pagan’ picture of life as an orgy of Greek gods inviting men to drink and feast with them. There is the ‘Serious’ view of life which imagines ‘God’ to be struggling against almost helpless odds for the redemption of matter. The emotion or attitude evoked is one of ‘helping poor father’. There is the ‘Scientific’ view that sees life as an orderly insignificance, all dressed up with nowhere to go. There is the ‘Aesthetic’ view in which life is an artist making and exhibiting works of art, with man as the appreciative witness. And so on; each being designed, as has been said, to evoke an attitude or emotional response useful to somebody or other, either to the preachers or to their congregations.

 

It may be that each view in turn is useful; but there can be little doubt that for most of us, in the present epoch, the image of life as a gymnasium is a greatly needed tonic. Compare the difference in your attitude (emotional response) on entering a gymnasium and on entering, let us say, a cabaret, or a Y.M.C.A. lecture-hall or a house of mourning. Try to realize what and how you actually feel. You are braced up, you have the intention of strengthening yourself, you delight in the difficulties—provided you choose them yourself. In short, you feel at your strongest and getting stronger.

 

The classic Greek conception of life was just that; and everybody knows that the gymnasium, with its lectures and discussions as well as physical exercises, was the most popular institution of Pythagorean Greece. What is not so well known is that the gymnasium was for the Greeks a symbol of life itself. Their God ran this planet as a gymnasium for the exercise of men, and all experiences were to be taken as movements, turns, stretches, exercises in wrestling, running, lifting, and so on. Moderns will find what the ancient Greeks found in this image of life—the evocation of a creative emotion.

 

It is difficult to see in what other direction we moderns can look for a new image and therefore attitude towards life. We have no longer the possibility of religion in the traditional sense. Ordinary goodness—in the sense of doing what others call good—has no intelligent appeal. And, after the still recent Great War, the belief in world progress is superstition. But the clean, strong idea of life as a field of exercise for the development of all our muscles—physical, emotional and intellectual—has still the unspoiled quality of manly and womanly idealism. And life lived in that attitude would certainly be interesting as well as profitable.

 

from “Psychological essays”

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