The living soul has its great fear. The living soul _fears_ the automatically logical conclusion of incest. Hence the sleep-process invariably draws this conclusion. The dream-process, fiendishly, plays a triumph of automatism over us. But the dream-conclusion is almost invariably just the _reverse_ of the soul"s desire, in any distress-dream. Popular dream-telling understood this, and p.r.o.nounced that you must read dreams backwards. Dream of a wedding, and it means a funeral. Wish your friend well, and fear his death, and you will dream of his funeral. Every desire has its corresponding fear that the desire shall not be fulfilled. It is _fear_ which forms an arrest-point in the psyche, hence an image. So the dream automatically produces the fear-image as the desire-image. If you secretly wished your enemy dead, and feared he might flourish, the dream would present you with his wedding.
Of course this rule of inversion is too simple to hold good in all cases. Yet it is one of the most general rules for dreams, and applies most often to desire-and-fear dreams of a psychic nature.
So that an incest-dream would not prove an incest-desire in the living psyche. Rather the contrary, a living fear of the automatic conclusion: the soul"s just dread of automatism. And though this may sound like casuistry, I believe it does explain a good deal of the dream-trick.--That which is lovely to the automatic process is hateful to the spontaneous soul. The wakeful living soul fears automatism as it fears death: death being automatic.
It seems to me these are the first two dream-principles, and the two most important: the principle of automatism and the principle of inversion. They will not resolve everything for us, but they will help a great deal. We have to be _very_ wary of giving way to dreams. It is really a sin against ourselves to prost.i.tute the living spontaneous soul to the tyranny of dreams, or of chance, or fortune or luck, or any of the processes of the automatic sphere.
Then consider other dynamic dreams. First, the dream-image generally.
Any _significant_ dream-image is usually an image or a symbol of some arrest or scotch in the living spontaneous psyche. There is another principle. But if the image is a symbol, then the only safe way to explain the symbol is to proceed from the quality of emotion connected with the symbol.
For example, a man has a persistent pa.s.sionate fear-dream about horses. He suddenly finds himself among great, physical horses, which may suddenly go wild. Their great bodies surge madly round him, they rear above him, threatening to destroy him. At any minute he may be trampled down.
Now a psychoa.n.a.lyst will probably tell you off-hand that this is a father-complex dream. Certain symbols seem to be put into complex catalogues. But it is all too arbitrary.
Examining the emotional reference we find that the feeling is sensual, there is a great impression of the powerful, almost beautiful physical bodies of the horses, the nearness, the rounded haunches, the rearing.
Is the dynamic pa.s.sion in a horse the danger-pa.s.sion? It is a great sensual reaction at the sacral ganglion, a reaction of intense, sensual, dominant volition. The horse which rears and kicks and neighs madly acts from the intensely powerful sacral ganglion. But this intense activity from the sacral ganglion is male: the sacral ganglion is at its highest intensity in the male. So that the horse-dream refers to some arrest in the deepest sensual activity in the male.
The horse is presented as an object of terror, which means that to the man"s automatic dream-soul, which loves automatism, the great sensual male activity is the greatest menace. The automatic pseudo-soul, which has got the sensual nature repressed, would like to keep it repressed.
Whereas the greatest desire of the living spontaneous soul is that this very male sensual nature, represented as a menace, shall be actually accomplished in life. The spontaneous self is secretly yearning for the liberation and fulfillment of the deepest and most powerful sensual nature. There may be an element of father-complex.
The horse may also refer to the powerful sensual being in the father.
The dream may mean a love of the dreamer for the sensual male who is his father. But it has nothing to do with _incest_. The love is probably a just love.
The bull-dream is a curious reversal. In the bull the centers of power are in the breast and shoulders. The horns of the head are symbols of this vast power in the upper self. The woman"s fear of the bull is a great terror of the dynamic _upper_ centers in man. The bull"s horns, instead of being phallic, represent the enormous potency of the upper centers. A woman whose most positive dynamism is in the breast and shoulders is fascinated by the bull. Her dream-fear of the bull and his horns which may run into her may be reversed to a significance of desire for connection, not from the centers of the lower, sensual self, but from the intense physical centers of the upper body: the phallus polarized from the upper centers, and directed towards the great breast center of the woman. Her wakeful fear is terror of the great breast-and-shoulder, _upper_ rage and power of man, which may pierce her defenseless lower self. The terror and the desire are near together--and go with an admiration of the slender, abstracted bull loins.
Other dream-fears, or strong dream-impressions, may be almost imageless. They may be a great terror, for example, of a purely geometric figure--a figure from pure geometry, or an example of pure mathematics. Or they may have no image, but only a sensation of smell, or of color, or of sound.
These are the dream-fears of the soul which is falling out of human integrity into the purely mechanical mode. If we idealize ourselves sufficiently, the spontaneous centers do at last work only, or almost only, in the mechanical mode. They have no dynamic relation with another being. They cannot have. Their whole power of dynamic relationship is quenched. They act now in reference purely to the mechanical world, of force and matter, sensation and law. So that in dream-activity sensation or abstraction, abstract law or calculation occurs as the predominant or exclusive image. In the dream there may be a sensation of admiration or delight. The waking sensation is fear.
Because the soul fears above all things its fall from individual integrity into the mechanic activity of the outer world, which is the automatic death-world.
And this is our danger to-day. We tend, through deliberate idealism or deliberate material purpose, to destroy the soul in its first nature of spontaneous, integral being, and to subst.i.tute the second nature, the automatic nature of the mechanical universe. For this purpose we stay up late at night, and we rise late in the morning.
To stay up late into the night is always bad. Let us be as ideal as we may, when the sun goes down the natural mode of life changes in us.
The mind changes its activity. As the soul gradually goes pa.s.sive, before yielding up its sway, the mind falls into its second phase of activity. It collects the results of the spent day into consciousness, lays down the honey of quiet thought, or the bitter-sweet honey of the gathered flower. It is the consciousness of that which is past.
Evening is our time to read history and tragedy and romance--all of which are the utterance of that which is past, that which is over, that which is finished, is concluded: either sweetly concluded, or bitterly. Evening is the time for this.
But evening is the time also for revelry, for drink, for pa.s.sion.
Alcohol enters the blood and acts as the sun"s rays act. It inflames into life, it liberates into energy and consciousness. But by a process of combustion. That life of the day which we have not lived, by means of sun-born alcohol we can now flare into sensation, consciousness, energy and pa.s.sion, and live it out. It is a liberation from the laws of idealism, a release from the restriction of control and fear. It is the blood bursting into consciousness. But naturally the course of the liberated consciousness may be in either direction: sharper mental action, greater fervor of spiritual emotion, or deeper sensuality. Nowadays the last is becoming much more unusual.
The active mind-consciousness of the night is a form of retrospection, or else it is a form of impulsive exclamation, direct from the blood, and unbalanced. Because the active physical consciousness of the night is the blood-consciousness, the most elemental form of consciousness. Vision is perhaps our highest form of _dynamic_ upper consciousness. But our deepest lower consciousness is blood-consciousness.
And the dynamic lower centers are swayed from the blood. When the blood rouses into its night intensity, it naturally kindles first the lowest dynamic centers. It transfers its voice and its fire to the great hypogastric plexus, which governs, with the help of the sacral ganglion, the flow of urine through us, but which also voices the deep swaying of the blood in s.e.x pa.s.sion. s.e.x is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness. It is the basic consciousness of the blood, the nearest thing in us to pure material consciousness. It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is _almost_ asleep.
The blood-consciousness is the first and last knowledge of the living soul: the depths. It is the soul acting in part only, speaking with its first hoa.r.s.e half-voice. And blood-consciousness cannot operate purely until the soul has put off all its manifold degrees and forms of upper consciousness. As the self falls back into quiescence, it draws itself from the brain, from the great nerve-centers, into the blood, where at last it will sleep. But as it draws and folds itself livingly in the blood, at the dark and powerful hour, it sends out its great call. For even the blood is alone and in part, and needs an answer. Like the waters of the Red Sea, the blood is divided in a dual polarity between the s.e.xes. As the night falls and the consciousness sinks deeper, suddenly the blood is heard hoa.r.s.ely calling. Suddenly the deep centers of the s.e.xual consciousness rouse to their spontaneous activity. Suddenly there is a deep circuit established between me and the woman. Suddenly the sea of blood which is me heaves and rushes towards the sea of blood which is her. There is a moment of pure frictional crisis and contact of blood. And then all the blood in me ebbs back into its ways, trans.m.u.ted, changed. And this is the profound basis of my renewal, my deep blood renewal.
And this has nothing to do with pretty faces or white skin or rosy b.r.e.a.s.t.s or any of the rest of the trappings of s.e.xual love. These trappings belong to the day. Neither eyes nor hands nor mouth have anything to do with the final ma.s.sive and dark collision of the blood in the s.e.x crisis, when the strange flash of electric trans.m.u.tation pa.s.ses through the blood of the man and the blood of the woman. They fall apart and sleep in their trans.m.u.tation.
But even in its profoundest, and most elemental movements, the soul is still individual. Even in its most material consciousness, it is still integral and individual. You would think the great blood-stream of mankind was one and h.o.m.ogeneous. And it is indeed more nearly one, more near to h.o.m.ogeneity than anything else within us. The blood-stream of mankind is almost h.o.m.ogeneous.
But it isn"t h.o.m.ogeneous. In the first place, it is dual in a perfect dark dynamic polarity, the s.e.xual polarity. No getting away from the fact that the blood of woman is dynamically polarized in opposition, or in difference to the blood of man. The crisis of their contact in s.e.x connection is the moment of establishment of a new flashing circuit throughout the whole sea: the dark, burning red waters of our under-world rocking in a new dynamic rhythm in each of us. And then in the second place, the blood of an individual is his _own_ blood. That is, it is individual. And though we have a potential dynamic s.e.xual connection, we men, with almost every woman, yet the great outstanding fact of the individuality even of the blood makes us need a corresponding individuality in the woman we are to embrace. The more individual the man or woman, the more unsatisfactory is a non-individual connection: promiscuity. The more individual, the more does our blood cry out for its own specific answer, an individual woman, blood-polarized with us.
We have made the mistake of idealism again. We have thought that the woman who thinks and talks as we do will be the blood-answer. And we force it to be so. To our disaster. The woman who thinks and talks as we do is almost sure to have no dynamic blood-polarity with us. The dynamic blood-polarity would make her different from me, and not like me in her thought mode. Blood-sympathy is so much deeper than thought-mode, that it may result in very different expression, verbally.
We have made the mistake of turning life inside out: of dragging the day-self into the night, and spreading the night-self over into the day. We have made love and s.e.x a matter of seeing and hearing and of day-conscious manipulation. We have made men and women come together on the grounds of this superficial likeness and commonalty--their mental, and upper sympathetic consciousness. And so we have forced the blood to submission. Which means we force it into disintegration.
We have too much light in the night, and too much sleep in the day. It is an evil thing for us to prolong as we do the mental, visual, ideal consciousness far into the night when the hour has come for this upper consciousness to fade, for the blood alone to know and to act. By provoking the reaction of the great blood-stress, the s.e.x-reaction, from the upper, outer mental consciousness and mental lasciviousness of conscious purpose, we thereby destroy the very blood in our bodies.
We prevent it from having its own dynamic sway. We prevent it from coming to its own dynamic crisis and connection, from finding its own fundamental being. No matter how we work our s.e.x, from the upper or outer consciousness, we don"t achieve anything but the falsification and impoverishment of our own blood-life. We have no choice. Either we must withdraw from interference, or slowly deteriorate.
We have made a corresponding mistake in sleeping on into the day.
Once the sun rises our const.i.tution changes. Once the sun is well up our sleep--supposing our life fairly normal--is no longer truly sleep.
When the sun comes up the centers of active dynamic upper consciousness begin to wake. The blood changes its vibration and even its chemical const.i.tution. And then we too ought to wake. We do ourselves great damage by sleeping too long into the day. The half-hour"s sleep after midday meal is a readjustment. But the long hours of morning sleep are just a damage. We submit our now active centers of upper consciousness to the dominion of the blood-automatic flow. We chain ourselves down in our morning sleep. We trans.m.u.te the morning"s blood-strength into false dreams and into an ever-increasing force of inertia. And naturally, in the same line of inertia we persist from bad to worse.
With the result that our chained-down, active nerve-centers are half-shattered before we arise. We never become newly day-conscious, because we have subjected our powerful centers of day-consciousness to be trampled and wasted into dreams and inertia by the heavy flow of the blood-automatism in the morning sleeps. Then we arise with a feeling of the monotony and automatism of life. There is no good, glad refreshing. We feel tired to start with. And so we protract our day-consciousness on into the night, when we _do_ at last begin to come awake, and we tell ourselves we must sleep, sleep, sleep in the morning and the daytime. It is better to sleep only six hours than to prolong sleep on and on when the sun has risen. Every man and woman should be forced out of bed soon after the sun has risen: particularly the nervous ones. And forced into physical activity. Soon after dawn the vast majority of people should be hard at work. If not, they will soon be nervously diseased.
CHAPTER XV
THE LOWER SELF
So it comes about that the moon is the planet of our nights, as the sun of our days. And this is not just accidental, or even mechanical.
The influence of the moon upon the tides and upon us is not just an accident in phenomena. It is the result of the creation of the universe by life itself. It was life itself which threw the moon apart on the one hand, the sun on the other. And it is life itself which keeps the dynamic-vital relation constant between the moon and the living individuals of the globe. The moon is as dependent upon the life of individuals, for her continued existence, as each single individual is dependent upon the moon.
The same with the sun. The sun sets and has his perfect polarity in the life-circuit established between him and all living individuals.
Break that circuit, and the sun breaks. Without man, beasts, b.u.t.terflies, trees, toads, the sun would gutter out like a spent lamp.
It is the life-emission from individuals which feeds his burning and establishes his sun-heart in its powerful equilibrium.
The same with the moon. She lives from us, primarily, and we from her.
Everything is a question of relativity. Not only is every force relative to other force or forces, but every existence is relative to other existences. Not only does the life of man depend on man, beast, and herb, but on the sun and moon, and the stars. And in another manner, the existence of the moon depends absolutely on the life of herb, beast, and man. The existence of the moon depends upon the life of individuals, that which alone is original. Without the life of individuals the moon would fall asunder. And the moon particularly, because she is polarized dynamically to this, our own earth. We do not know what far-off life breathes between the stars and the sun. But our life alone supports the moon. Just as the moon is the pole of our single terrestrial individuality.
Therefore we must know that between the moon and each individual being exists a vital dynamic flow. The life of individuals depends directly upon the moon, just as the moon depends directly upon the life of individuals.
But in what way does the life of individuals depend directly upon the moon?
The moon is the mother of darkness. She is the clue to the active darkness. And we, below the waist, we have our being in darkness.
Below the waist we are sightless. When, in the daytime, our life is polarized upwards, towards the open, sun-wakened eyes and the mind which sees in vision, then the powerful dynamic centers of the lower body act in subservience, in their negative polarity. And then we flow upwards, we go forth seeking the universe, in vision, speech, and thought--we go forth to see all things, to hear all things, to know all things by acquaintance and by knowledge. One flood of dynamic flow are we, upwards polarized, in our tallness and our wide-eyed spirit seeking to bring all the universe into the range of our conscious individuality, and eager always to make new worlds, out of this old world, to bud new green tips on the tree of life. Just as a tree would die if it were not making new green tips upon all its vast old world of a body, so the whole universe would perish if man and beast and herb were not always putting forth a newness: the toad taking a vivider color, spreading his hands a little more gently, developing a more ruse intelligence, the birds adding a new note to their speech and song, a new sharp swerve to their flight, a new nicety to their nests; and man, making new worlds, new civilizations. If it were not for this striving into new creation on the part of living individuals, the universe would go dead, gradually, gradually and fall asunder.
Like a tree that ceases to put forth new green tips, and to advance out a little further.
But each new tip arises out of the apparent death of the old, the preceding one. Old leaves have got to fall, old forms must die. And if men must at certain periods fall into death in millions, why, so must the leaves fall every single autumn. And dead leaves make good mold.
And so dead men. Even dead men"s souls.
So if death has to be the goal for a great number, then let it be so.
If America must invent this poison-gas, let her. When death is our goal of goals we shall invent the means of death, let our professions of benevolence be what they will.
But this time, it seems to me, we have consciously and responsibly to carry ourselves through the winter-period, the period of death and denudation: that is, some of us have, some _nation_ even must. For there are not now, as in the Roman times, any great reservoirs of energetic barbaric life. Goths, Gauls, Germans, Slavs, Tartars. The world is very full of people, but all fixed in civilizations of their own, and they all have all our vices, all our mechanisms, and all our means of destruction. This time, the leading civilization cannot die out as Greece, Rome, Persia died. It must suffer a great collapse, maybe. But it must carry through all the collapse the living clue to the next civilization. It"s no good thinking we can leave it to China or j.a.pan or India or Africa--any of the great swarms.
And here we are, we don"t look much like carrying through to a new era. What have we got that will carry through? The latest craze is Mr.
Einstein"s Relativity Theory. Curious that everybody catches fire at the word Relativity. There must be something in the mere suggestion, which we have been waiting for. But what? As far as I can see, Relativity means, for the common amateur mind, that there is no one absolute force in the physical universe, to which all other forces may be referred. There is no one single absolute central principle governing the world. The great cosmic forces or mechanical principles can only be known in their relation to one another, and can only exist in their relation to one another. But, says Einstein, this relation between the mechanical forces is constant, and may be expressed by a mathematical formula: which mathematical formula may be used to equate all mechanical forces of the universe.