PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
(II) CONTEMPLATION AND SUGGESTION
In the last chapter we considered what the modern analysis of mind had
to tell us about the nature of the spiritual life, the meaning of sin
and of salvation. We now go on to another aspect of this subject:
namely, the current conception of the unconscious mind as a dominant
factor of our psychic life, and of the extent and the conditions in
which its resources can be tapped, and its powers made amenable to the
direction of the conscious mind. Two principal points must here be
studied. The first is the mechanism of that which is called autistic
thinking and its relation to religious experience: the second, the laws
of suggestion and their bearing upon the spiritual life. Especially must
we consider from this point of view the problems which are resumed under
the headings of prayer, contemplation, and grace. We shall find
ourselves compelled to examine the nature of meditation and
recollection, as spiritual persons have always practised them; and, to
give, if we can, a psychological account of many of their classic
conceptions and activities. We shall therefore be much concerned with
those experiences which are often called mystical, but which I prefer to
call in general contemplative and intuitive; because they extend, as we
shall find, without a break from the simplest type of mental prayer, the
most general apprehensions of the Spirit, to the most fully developed
examples of religious mono-ideism. To place all those intuitions and
perceptions of which God or His Kingdom are the objects in a class apart
from all other intuitions and perceptions, and call them "mystical," is
really to beg the question from the start. The psychic mechanisms
involved in them are seen in action in many other types of mental
activity; and will not, in my opinion, be understood until they are
removed from the category of the supernatural, and studied as the
movements of the one spirit of life--here directed towards a
transcendent objective. And further we must ever keep in mind, since we
are now dealing with specific spiritual experiences, deeply exploring
the contemplative soul, that though psychology can criticize these
experiences, and help us to separate the wheat from the chaff--can tell
us, too, a good deal about the machinery by which we lay hold of them,
and the best way to use it--it cannot explain the experiences, pronounce
upon their Object, or reduce that Object to its own terms.
We may some day have a valid psychology of religion, though we are far
from it yet: but when we do, it will only be true within its own system
of reference. It will deal with the fact of the spiritual life from one
side only. And as a discussion of the senses and their experience
explains nothing about the universe by which these senses are impressed,
so all discussion of spiritual faculty and experience remains within the
human radius and neither invalidates nor accounts for the spiritual
world. When the psychologist has finished telling us all that he knows
about the rules which govern our mental life, and how to run it best, he
is still left face to face with the mystery of that life, and of that
human power of surrender to Spiritual Reality which is the very essence
of religion. Humility remains, therefore, not only the most becoming but
also the most scientific attitude for investigators in this field. We
must, then, remember the inevitably symbolic nature of the language
which we are compelled to use in our attempt to describe these
experiences; and resist all temptation to confuse the handy series of
labels with which psychology has furnished us, with the psychic unity to
which they will be attached.
Perhaps the most fruitful of all our recent discoveries in the mental
region will turn out to be that which is gradually revealing to us the
extent and character of the unconscious mind; and the possibility of
tapping its resources, bending its plastic shape to our own mould. It
seems as though the laws of its being are at last beginning to be
understood; giving a new content to the ancient command "Know thyself."
We are learning that psycho-therapy, which made such immense strides
during the war, is merely one of the directions in which this knowledge
may be used, and this control exercised by us. That regnancy of spirit
over matter towards which all idealists must look, is by way of coming
at least to a partial fulfilment in this control of the conscious over
the unconscious, and thus over the bodily life. Such control is indeed
an aspect of our human freedom, of the creative power which has been put
into our hands. In all this religion must be interested: because, once
more, it is the business of religion to regenerate the whole man and win
him for Reality.
If we could get rid of the idea that the unconscious is a separate, and
in some sort hostile or animal entity set over against the conscious
mind; and realize that it is, simply, our whole personality, with the
exception of the scrap that happens at any moment to be in
consciousness--then, perhaps, we should more easily grasp the importance
of exploring and mobilizing its powers. As it is, most of us behave like
the owners of a well-furnished room, who ignore every aspect of it
except the window looking out upon the street. This we keep polished,
and drape with the best curtains that we can afford. But the room upon
which we sedulously turn our backs contains all that we have inherited,
all that we have accumulated, many tools which are rusting for want of
use; machinery too which, left to itself, may function satisfactorily,
or may get out of order and work to results that we neither desire nor
dream. The room is twilit. Only by the window is a little patch of
light. Beyond this there is a fringe of vague, fluctuating, sometimes
prismatic radiance: an intermediate region, where the images and things
which most interest us have their place, just within range, or the
fringe of the field of consciousness. In the darkest corners the
machinery that we do not understand, those possessions of which we are
least proud, and those pictures we hate to look at, are hidden away.
This little parable represents, more or less, that which psychology
means by the conscious, foreconscious, and unconscious regions of the
psyche. It must not be pressed, or too literally interpreted; but it
helps us to remember the graded character of our consciousness, its
fluctuating level, and the fact that, as well as the outward-looking
mind which alone we usually recognize, there is also the psychic matrix
from which it has been developed, the inward-looking mind, caring for a
variety of interests of which we hardly, as we say, think at all. We
know as yet little about this mysterious psychic whole: the inner nature
of which is only very incompletely given to us in the fluctuating
experiences of consciousness. But we do know that it, too, receives at
least a measure of the light and the messages coming in by the window of
our wits: that it is the home of memory instinct and habit, the source
of conduct, and that its control and modification form the major part of
the training of character. Further, it is sensitive, plastic, accessible
to impressions, and unforgetting.
Consider now that half-lit region which is called the foreconscious
mind; for this is of special interest to the spiritual life. It is, in
psychological language, the region of autistic as contrasted with
realistic thought.[85] That is to say, it is the agent of reverie and
meditation; it is at work in all our brooding states, from day-dream to
artistic creation. Such autistic thought is dominated not by logic or
will, but by feeling. It achieves its results by intuition, and has its
reasons which the surface mind knows not of. Here, in this
fringe-region--which alone seems fully able to experience adoration and
wonder, or apprehend the values we call holiness, beauty or love--is the
source of that intuition of the heart to which the mystic owes the love
which is knowledge, and the knowledge which is love. Here is the true
home of inspiration and invention. Here, by a process which is seldom
fully conscious save in its final stages, the poet's creations are
prepared, and thence presented in the form of inspiration to the reason;
which--if he be a great artist--criticizes them, before they are given
as poems to the world. Indeed, in all man's apprehensions of the
transcendental these two states of the psyche must co-operate if he is
to realize his full powers: and it is significant that to this
foreconscious region religion, in its own special language, has always
invited him to retreat, if he would know his own soul and thus commune
with his God. Over and over again it assures him under various
metaphors, that he must turn within, withdraw from the window, meet the
inner guest; and such a withdrawal is the condition of all
contemplation.
Consider the opening of Jacob Boehme's great dialogue on the
Supersensual Life.
"The Scholar said to his Master: How may I come to the supersensual
life, that I may see God and hear Him speak?
"His Master said: When thou canst throw thyself for a moment into that
where no creature dwelleth, then thou hearest what God speaketh.
"The Scholar said: Is that near at hand or far off?
"The Master said: It is in thee, if thou canst for a while cease from
all thinking and willing, thou shalt hear the unspeakable words of God.
"The Scholar said: How can I hear when I stand still from thinking and
willing?
"The Master said: When thou standest still from the thinking and willing
of self, then the eternal hearing, seeing and speaking will be revealed
in thee."[86]
In this passage we have a definite invitation to retreat from
volitional to affective thought: from the window to the quiet place
where "no creature dwelleth," and in Patmore's phrase "the night of
thought becomes the light of perception."[87] This fringe-region or
foreconscious is in fact the organ of contemplation, as the realistic
outward looking mind is the organ of action. Most men go through life
without conceiving, far less employing, the rich possibilities which are
implicit in it. Yet here, among the many untapped resources of the self,
lie our powers of response to our spiritual environment: powers which
are kept by the tyrannical interests of everyday life below the
threshold of full consciousness, and never given a chance to emerge.
Here take place those searching experiences of the "inner life" which
seem moonshine or morbidity to those who have not known them.
The many people who complain that they have no such personal religious
experience, that the spiritual world is shut to them, are usually found
to have expected this experience to be given to them without any
deliberate and sustained effort on their own part. They have lived from
childhood to maturity at the little window of consciousness and have
never given themselves the opportunity of setting up correspondences
with any other world than that of sense. Yet all normal men and women
possess, at least in a rudimentary form, some intuition of the
transcendental; shown in their power of experiencing beauty or love. In
some it is dominant, emerging easily and without help; in others it is
latent and must be developed in the right way. In others again it may
exist in virtual conflict with a strongly realistic outlook; gathering
way until it claims its rights at last in a psychic storm. Its
emergence, however achieved, is a part--and for our true life, by far
the most important part--of that outcropping and overflowing into
consciousness of the marginal faculties which is now being recognized as
essential to all artistic and creative activities; and as playing, too,
a large part in the regulation of mental and bodily health.
All the great religions have implicitly understood--though without
analysis--the vast importance of these spiritual intuitions and
faculties lying below the surface of the everyday mind; and have
perfected machinery tending to secure their release and their training.
This is of two kinds: first, religious ceremonial, addressing itself to
corporate feeling; next the discipline of meditation and prayer, which
educates the individual to the same ends, gradually developing the
powers of the foreconscious region, steadying them, and bringing them
under the control of the purified will. Without some such education,
widely as its details may vary, there can be no real living of the
spiritual life.
"A going out into the life of sense
Prevented the exercise of earnest realization."[88]
Psychologists sometimes divide men into the two extreme classes of
extroverts and introverts. The extrovert is the typical active; always
leaning out of the window and setting up contacts with the outside
world. His thinking is mainly realistic. That is to say, it deals with
the data of sense. The introvert is the typical contemplative,
predominantly interested in the inner world. His thinking is mainly
autistic, dealing with the results of intuition and feeling, working
these up into new structures and extorting from them new experiences. He
is at home in the foreconscious, has its peculiar powers under control;
and instinctively obedient to the mystic command to sink into the ground
of the soul, he leans towards those deep wells of his own being which
plunge into the unconscious foundations of life. By this avoidance of
total concentration on the sense world--though material obtained from it
must as a matter of fact enter into all, even his most "spiritual"
creations--he seems able to attend to the messages which intuition picks
up from other levels of being. It is significant that nearly all
spiritual writers use this very term of introversion, which psychology
has now adopted as the most accurate that it can find, in a favourable,
indeed laudatory, sense. By it they intend to describe the healthy
expansion of the inner life, the development of the soul's power of
attention to the spiritual, which is characteristic of those real men
and women of prayer whom Ruysbroeck describes as:--
"Gazing inward with an eye uplifted and open to the Eternal Truth
Inwardly abiding in simplicity and stillness and in utter peace."[89]
It is certain that no one who wholly lacks this power of retreat from
the surface, and has failed thus to mobilize his foreconscious energies,
can live a spiritual life. This is why silence and meditation play so
large a part in all sane religious discipline. But the ideal state, a
state answering to that rhythm of work and prayer which should be the
norm of a mature spirituality, is one in which we have achieved that
mental flexibility and control which puts us in full possession of our
autistic _and_ our realistic powers; balancing and unifying the inner
and the outer world.
This being so, it is worth while to consider in more detail the
character of foreconscious thought.
Foreconscious thinking, as it commonly occurs in us, with its unchecked
illogical stream of images and ideas, moving towards no assigned end,
combined in no ordered chain, is merely what we usually call day-dream.
But where a definite wish or purpose, an _end_, dominates this reverie
and links up its images and ideas into a cycle, we get in combination
all the valuable properties both of affective and of directed thinking;
although the reverie or contemplation place in the fringe-region of our
mental life, and in apparent freedom from the control of the conscious
reason. The object of recollection and meditation, which are the first
stages of mental prayer, is to set going such a series and to direct it
towards an assigned end: and this first inward-turning act and
self-orientation are voluntary, though the activities which they set up
are not. "You must know, my daughters," says St. Teresa, "that this is
no supernatural act but depends on our will; and that therefore we can
do it, with that ordinary assistance of God which we need for all our
acts and even for our good thoughts."[90]
Consider for a moment what happens in prayer. I pass over the simple
recitation of verbal prayers, which will better be dealt with when we
come to consider the institutional framework of the spiritual life. We
are now concerned with mental prayer or orison; the simplest of those
degrees of contemplation which may pass gradually into mystical
experience, and are at least in some form a necessity of any real and
actualized spiritual life. Such prayer is well defined by the mystics,
as "a devout intent directed to God."[91] What happens in it? All
writers on the science of prayer observe, that the first necessity is
Recollection; which, in a rough and ready way, we may render as
concentration, or perhaps in the special language of psychology as
"contention." The mind is called in from external interests and
distractions, one by one the avenues of sense are closed, till the hunt
of the world is hardly perceived by it. I need not labour this
description, for it is a state of which we must all have experience: but
those who wish to see it described with the precision of genius, need
only turn to St. Teresa's "Way of Perfection." Having achieved this, we
pass gradually into the condition of deep withdrawal variously called
Simplicity or Quiet; a state in which the attention is quietly and
without effort directed to God, and the whole self as it were held in
His presence. This presence is given, dimly or clearly, in intuition.
The actual prayer used will probably consist--again to use technical
language--of "affective acts and aspirations"; short phrases repeated
and held, perhaps expressing penitence, humility, adoration or love, and
for the praying self charged with profound significance.
"If we would intentively pray for getting of good," says "The Cloud of
Unknowing," "let us cry either with word or with thought or with desire,
nought else nor on more words but this word God.... Study thou not for
no words, for so shouldst thou never come to thy purpose nor to this
work, for it is never got by study, but all only by grace."[92]
Now the question naturally arises, how does this recollected state, this
alogical brooding on a spiritual theme, exceed in religions value the
orderly saying of one's prayers? And the answer psychology suggests is,
that more of us, not less, is engaged in such a spiritual act: that not
only the conscious attention, but the foreconscious region too is then
thrown open to the highest sources of life. We are at last learning to
recognize the existence of delicate mental processes which entirely
escape the crude methods of speech. Reverie as a genuine thought process
is beginning to be studied with the attention it deserves, and new
understanding of prayer must result. By its means powers of perception
and response ordinarily latent are roused to action; and thus the whole
life is enriched. That faculty in us which corresponds, not with the
busy life of succession but with the eternal sources of power, gets its
chance. "Though the soul," says Von Hügel, "cannot abidingly abstract
itself from its fellows, it can and ought frequently to recollect itself
in a simple sense of God's presence. Such moments of direct
preoccupation with God alone bring a deep refreshment and simplification
to the soul."[93]
True silence, says William Penn, of this quiet surrender to reality, "is
rest to the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body;
nourishment and refreshment."[94] Psychology endorses the constant
statements of all religions of the Spirit, that no one need hope to live
a spiritual life who cannot find a little time each day for this retreat
from the window, this quiet and loving waiting upon the unseen "with
the forces of the soul," as Ruysbroeck puts it, "gathered into unity of
the Spirit."[95] Under these conditions, and these only, the intuitive,
creative, artistic powers are captured and dedicated to the highest
ends: and in these powers rather than the rational our best chance of
apprehending eternal values abides, "Taste and _see_ that the Lord is
sweet." "Be still! be still! and _know_ that I am God!"
Since, then, the foreconscious mind and its activities are of such
paramount interest to the spiritual life, we may before we go on glance
at one or two of its characteristics. And first we notice that the fact
that the foreconscious is, so to speak, in charge in the mental and
contemplative type of prayer explains why it is that even the most
devout persons are so constantly tormented by distractions whilst
engaged in it. Very often, they are utterly unable to keep their
attention fixed; and the reason of this is, that conscious attention and
thought are not the faculties primarily involved. What is involved, is
reverie coloured by feeling; and this tends to depart from its assigned
end and drift into mere day-dream, if the emotional tension slackens or
some intruding image starts a new train of associations. The religious
mind is distressed by this constant failure to look steadily at that
which alone it wants to see; but the failure abides in the fact that
the machinery used is affective, and obedient to the rise and fall of
feeling rather than the control of the will. "By love shall He be gotten
and holden, by thought never."
Next, consider for a moment the way in which the foreconscious does and
must present its apprehensions to consciousness. Its cognitions of the
spiritual are in the nature of pure immediacy, of uncriticized contacts:
and the best and greatest of them seem to elude altogether that
machinery of speech and image which has been developed through the life
of sense. The well-known language of spiritual writers about the divine
darkness or ignorance is an acknowledgment of this. God is "known
darkly." Our experience of Eternity is "that of which nothing can be
said." It is "beyond feeling" and "beyond knowledge," a certitude known
in the ground of the soul, and so forth. It is indeed true that the
spiritual world is for the human mind a transcendent world, does differ
utterly in kind from the best that the world of succession is able to
give us; as we know once for all when we establish a contact with it,
however fleeting. But constantly the foreconscious--which, as we shall
do well to remember, is the artistic region of the mind, the home of the
poem, and the creative phantasy--works up its transcendent intuitions in
symbolic form. For this purpose it sometimes uses the machinery of
speech, sometimes that of image. As our ordinary reveries constantly
proceed by way of an interior conversation or narrative, so the content
of spiritual contemplation is often expressed in dialogue, in which
memory and belief are fused with the fruit of perception. The "Dialogue
of St. Catherine of Siena," the "Life of Suso," and the "Imitation of
Christ," all provide beautiful examples of this; but indeed
illustrations of it might be found in every school and period of
religious literature.
Such inward dialogue, one of the commonest spontaneous forms of autistic
thought, is perpetually resorted to by devout minds to actualize their
consciousness of direct communion with God. I need not point out how
easily and naturally it expresses for them that sense of a Friend and
Companion, an indwelling power and support, which is perhaps their
characteristic experience. "Blessed is that soul," says à Kempis, "that
heareth the Lord speaking in him and taketh from His mouth the word of
consolation. Blessed be those ears that receive of God's whisper and
take no heed of the whisper of this world."[96] Though St. John of the
Cross has reminded us with blunt candour that such persons are for the
most part only talking to themselves, we need not deny the value of such
a talking as a means of expressing the deeply known and intimate
presence of Spirit. Moreover, the thoughts and words in which the
contemplative expresses his sense of love and dedication reverberate as
it were in the depths of the instinctive mind, now in this quietude
thrown open to these influences: and the instinctive mind, as we have
already seen, is the home of character and of habit formation.
Where there is a tendency to think in images rather than in words, the
experiences of the Spirit may be actualized in the form of vision rather
than of dialogue: and here again, memory and feeling will provide the
material. Here we stand at the sources of religious art: which, when it
is genuine, is a symbolic picture of the experiences of faith, and in
those minds attuned to it may evoke again the memory or very presence of
those experiences. But many minds are, as it were, their own religious
artists; and build up for themselves psychic structures answering to
their intuitive apprehensions. So vivid may these structures sometimes
be for them that--to revert again to our original simile--the self turns
from the window and the realistic world without, and becomes for the
time wholly concentrated on the symbolic drama or picture within the
room; which abolishes all awareness of the everyday world. When this
happens in a small way, we have what might be called a religious
day-dream of more or less beauty and intensity; such as most devout
people who tend to visualization have probably known. When the break
with the external world is complete, we get those ecstatic visions in
which mystics of a certain type actualize their spiritual intuitions.
The Bible is full of examples of this. Good historic instances are the
visions of Mechthild of Magdeburg or Angela of Foligno. The first
contain all the elements of drama, the last cover a wide symbolic and
emotional field. Those who have read Canon Streeter's account of the
visions of the Sadhu Sundar Singh will recognize them as being of this
type.[97]
I do not wish to go further than this into the abnormal and extreme
types of religious autism; trance, ecstasy and so forth. Our concern is
with the norm of the spiritual life, as it exists to-day and as all may
live it. But it is necessary to realize that image and vision do within
limits represent a perfectly genuine way of doing things, which is
inevitable for deeply spiritual selves of a certain type; and that it is
neither good psychology nor good Christianity, lightly to dismiss as
superstition or hysteria the pictured world of symbol in which our
neighbour may live and save his soul. The symbolic world of traditional
piety, with its angels and demons, its friendly saints, its spatial
heaven, may conserve and communicate spiritual values far better than
the more sophisticated universe of religious philosophy. We may be sure
that both are more characteristic of the image-making and
structure-building tendencies of the mind, than they are of the ultimate
and for us unknowable reality of things. Their value--or the value of
any work of art which the foreconscious has contrived--abides wholly in
the content: the quality of the material thus worked up. The rich
nature, the purified love, capable of the highest correspondences, will
express even in the most primitive duologue or vision the results of a
veritable touching and tasting of Eternal Life. Its psychic
structures--however logic may seek to discredit them--will convey
spiritual fact, have the quality which the mystics mean when they speak
of illumination. The emotional pietist will merely ramble among the
religious symbols and phrases with which the devout memory is stored. It
is true that the voice or the picture, surging up as it does into the
field of consciousness, seems to both classes to have the character of a
revelation. The pictures unroll themselves automatically and with
amazing authority and clearness, the conversation is with Another than
ourselves; or in more generalized experiences, such as the sense of the
Divine Presence, the contact is with another order of life. But the
crucial question which religion asks must be, does fresh life flow in
from those visions and contacts, that intercourse? Is transcendental
feeling involved in them? "What fruits dost thou bring back from this
thy vision?" says Jacopone da Todi;[98] and this remains the only real
test by which to separate day-dreams from the vitalizing act of
contemplation. In the first we are abandoned to a delightful, and
perhaps as it seems holy or edifying vagrancy of thought. In the
second, by a deliberate choice and act of will, foreconscious thinking
is set going and directed towards an assigned end: the apprehending and
actualizing of our deepest intuition of God. In it, a great region of
the mind usually ignored by us and left to chance, yet source of many
choices and deeds, and capable of much purifying pain, is put to its
true work: and it is work which must be humbly, regularly and faithfully
performed. It is to this region that poetry, art and music--and even, if
I dare say so, philosophy--make their fundamental appeal. No life is
whole and harmonized in which it has not taken its right place.
We must now go on--and indeed, any psychological study of prayerful
experience must lead us on--to the subject of suggestion, and its
relation to the inner life. By suggestion of course is here meant, in
conformity with current psychological doctrine, the process by which an
idea enters the deeper and unconscious psychic levels and there becomes
fruitful. Its real nature, and in consequence something of its
far-reaching importance, is now beginning to be understood by us: a fact
of great moment for both the study and the practice of the spiritual
life. Since the transforming work of the Spirit must be done through
man's ordinary psychic machinery and in conformity with the laws which
govern it, every such increase in our knowledge of that machinery must
serve the interests of religion, and show its teachers the way to
success. Suggestion is usually said to be of two kinds. The first is
hetero-suggestion, in which the self-realizing idea is received either
wittingly or unwittingly from the outer world. During the whole of our
conscious lives for good or evil we are at the mercy of such
hetero-suggestions, which are being made to us at every moment by our
environment; and they form, as we shall afterwards see, a dominant
factor in corporate religious exercises. The second type is
auto-suggestion. In this, by means of the conscious mind, an idea is
implanted in the unconscious and there left to mature. Thus do willingly
accepted beliefs, religious, social, or scientific, gradually and
silently permeate the whole being and show their results in character.
A little reflection shows, however, that these two forms of suggestion
shade into one another; and that no hetero-suggestion, however
impressively given, becomes active in us until we have in some sort
accepted it and transformed it into an auto-suggestion. Theology
expresses this fact in its own special language, when it says that the
will must co-operate with grace if it is to be efficacious. Thus the
primacy of the will is safe-guarded. It stands, or should stand, at the
door; selecting from among the countless dynamic suggestions, good and
bad, which life pours in on us, those which serve the best interests of
the self.
As a rule, men take little trouble to sort out the incoming suggestions.
They allow uncriticized beliefs and prejudices, the ideas of hatred,
anxiety or ill-health, free entrance. They fail to seize and affirm the
ideas of power, renovation, joy. They would be more careful, did they
grasp more fully the immense and often enduring effect of these accepted
suggestions; the extent in which the fundamental, unreasoning psychic
deeps are plastic to ideas. Yet this plasticity is exhibited in daily
life first under the emotional form of sympathy, response to the
suggestion of other peoples' feeling-states; and next under the conative
form of imitation, active acceptance of the suggestion made by their
appearance, habits, deeds. All political creeds, panics, fashion and
good form witness to the overwhelming power of suggestion. We are so
accustomed to this psychic contagion that we fail to realize the
strangeness of the process: but it is now known to reach a degree
previously unsuspected, and of which we have not yet found the limits.
In the religious sphere, the more sensational demonstrations of this
psychic suggestibility have long been notorious. Obvious instances are
those ecstatics--some of them true saints, some only religious
invalids--whose continuous and ardent meditation on the Cross produced
in them the actual bodily marks of the Passion of Christ. In less
extreme types, perpetual dwelling on this subject, together with that
eager emotional desire to be united with the sufferings of the Redeemer
which mediæval religion encouraged, frequently modified the whole life
of the contemplative; shaping the plastic mind, and often the body too,
to its own mould. A good historic example of this law of religious
suggestibility is the case of Julian of Norwich. As a young girl, Julian
prayed that she might have an illness at thirty years of age, and also a
closer knowledge of Christ's pains. She forgot the prayer: but it worked
below the threshold as forgotten suggestions often do, and when she was
thirty the illness came. Its psychic origin can still be recognized in
her own candid account of it; and with the illness the other half of
that dynamic prayer received fulfilment, in those well-known visions of
the Passion to which we owe the "Revelations of Divine Love."[99]
This is simply a striking instance of a process which is always taking
place in every one of us, for good or evil. The deeper mind opens to all
who knock; provided only that the new-comers be not the enemies of some
stronger habit or impression already within. To suggestions which
coincide with the self's desires or established beliefs it gives an easy
welcome; and these, once within, always tend to self-realization. Thus
the French Carmelite Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus, once convinced that she
was destined to be a "victim of love," began that career of suffering
which ended in her death at the age of twenty-four.[100] The lives of
the Saints are full of incidents explicable on the same lines:
exhibiting again and again the dramatic realization of traditional ideas
or passionate desires. We see therefore that St. Paul's admonition
"Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
things be of good report, think on these things" is a piece of practical
advice of which the importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it deals
with the conditions under which man makes his own mentality.
Suggestion, in fact, is one of the most powerful agents either of
self-destruction or of self-advancement which are within our grasp: and
those who speak of the results of psycho-therapy, or the certitudes of
religious experience, as "mere suggestion" are unfortunate in their
choice of an adjective. If then we wish to explore all those mental
resources which can be turned to the purposes of the spiritual life,
this is one which we must not neglect. The religious idea, rightly
received into the mind and reinforced by the suggestion of regular
devotional exercises, always tends to realize itself. "Receive His
leaven," says William Penn, "and it will change thee, His medicine and
it will cure thee. He is as infallible as free; without money and with
certainty. Yield up the body, soul and spirit to Him that maketh all
things new: new heaven and new earth, new love, new joy, new peace, new
works, a new life and conversation."[101] This is fine literature, but
it is more important to us to realize that it is also good psychology:
and that here we are given the key to those amazing regenerations of
character which are the romance and glory of the religious life.
Pascal's too celebrated saying, that if you will take holy water
regularly you will presently believe, witnesses on another level to the
same truth.
Fears have been expressed that, by such an application of the laws of
suggestion to religious experience, we shall reduce religion itself to a
mere favourable subjectivism, and identify faith with suggestibility.
But here the bearing of this series of facts on bodily health provides
us with a useful analogy. Bodily health is no illusion. It does not
consist in merely thinking that we are well, but is a real condition of
well-being and of power; depending on the state of our tissues and
correct balance and working of our physical and psychical life. And this
correct and wholesome working will be furthered and steadied--or if
broken may often be restored--by good suggestions; it may be disturbed
by bad suggestions; because the controlling factor of life is mind, not
chemistry, and mind is plastic to ideas. So too the life of the Spirit
is a concrete fact; a real response to a real universe. But this
concrete life of faith, with its growth and its experiences, its richly
various working of one principle in every aspect of existence, its
correspondences with the Eternal World, its definitely ontological
references, is lived here and now; in and through the self's psychic
life, and indeed his bodily life too--a truth which is embodied in
sacramentalism. Therefore, sharing as it does life's plastic character,
it too is amenable to suggestion and can be helped or hindered by it. It
is indeed characteristic of those in whom this life is dominant, that
they are capable of receiving and responding to the highest and most
vivifying suggestions which the universe in its totality pours in on us.
This movement of response, often quietly overlooked, is that which makes
them not spiritual hedonists but men and women of prayer. Grace--to give
these suggestions of Spirit their conventional name--is perpetually
beating in on us. But if it is to be inwardly realized, the Divine
suggestion must be transformed by man's will and love into an
auto-suggestion; and this is what seems to happen in meditation and
prayer.
Everything indeed points to a very close connection between what might
be called the mechanism of prayer and of suggestion. To say this, is in
no way to minimize the transcendental character of prayer. In both
states there is a spontaneous or deliberate throwing open of the deeper
mind to influences which, fully accepted, tend to realize themselves.
Look at the directions given by all great teachers of prayer and
contemplation; and these two acts, rightly performed, fuse one with the
other, they are two aspects of the single act of communion with God.
Look at their insistence on a stilling and recollecting of the mind, on
surrender, a held passivity not merely limp but purposeful: on the need
of meek yielding to a greater inflowing power, and its regenerating
suggestions. Then compare this with the method by which health-giving
suggestions are made to the bodily life. "In the deeps of the soul His
word is spoken." Is not this an exact description of the inward work of
the self-realizing idea of holiness, received in the prayer of quiet
into the unconscious mind, and there experienced as a transforming
power? I think that we may go even further than this, and say that
grace, is, in effect, the direct suggestion of the spiritual affecting
our soul's life. As we are commonly docile to the countless
hetero-suggestions, some of them helpful, some weakening, some actually
perverting, which our environment is always making to us; so we can and
should be so spiritually suggestible that we can receive those given to
us by all-penetrating Divine life. What is generally called sin,
especially in the forms of self-sufficiency, lack of charity and the
indulgence of the senses, renders us recalcitrant to these living
suggestions of the Spirit. The opposing qualities, humility, love and
purity, make us as we say accessible to grace.
"Son," says the inward voice to Thomas à Kempis, "My grace is precious,
and suffereth not itself to be mingled with strange things nor earthly
consolations. Wherefore it behoveth thee to cast away impediments to
grace, if thou willest to receive the inpouring thereof. Ask for thyself
a secret place, love to dwell alone with thyself, seek confabulation of
none other ... put the readiness for God before all other things, for
thou canst not both take heed to Me and delight in things transitory....
This grace is a light supernatural and a special gift of God, and a
proper sign of the chosen children of God, and the earnest of
everlasting health; for God lifteth up man from earthly things to love
heavenly things, and of him that is fleshly maketh a spiritual
man."[102] Could we have a more vivid picture than this of the
conditions of withdrawal and attention under which the psyche is most
amenable to suggestion, or of the inward transfiguration worked by a
great self-realizing idea? Such transfiguration has literally on the
physical plane caused the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the dumb to
speak: and it seems to me that it is to be observed operating on highest
levels in the work of salvation. When further à Kempis prays "Increase
in me more grace, that I may fulfil Thy word and make perfect mine own
health" is he not describing the right balance to be sought between our
surrender to the vivifying suggestions of grace and our appropriation
and manly use of them? This is no limp acquiescence and merely infantile
dependence, but another aspect of the vital balance between the
indrawing and outgiving of power; and one of the main functions of
prayer is to promote in us that spiritually suggestible state in which,
as Dionysius the Areopagite says, we are "receptive of God."
It is, then, worth our while from the point of view of the spiritual
life to inquire into the conditions in which a suggestion is most likely
to be received and realized by us. These conditions, as psychologists
have so far defined them, can be resumed under the three heads of
quiescence, attention and feeling: outstanding characteristics, as I
need not point out, of the state of prayer, all of which can be
illustrated from the teaching and experience of the mystics.
First, let us take _Quiescence_. In order fully to lay open the
unconscious to the influence of suggested ideas, the surface mind must
be called in from its responses to the outer world, or in religious
language recollected, till the hum of that world is hardly perceived by
it. The body must be relaxed, making no demands on the machinery
controlling the motor system; and the conditions in general must be
those of complete mental and bodily rest. Here is the psychological
equivalent of that which spiritual writers call the Quiet: a state
defined by one of them as "a rest most busy." "Those who are in this
prayer," says St. Teresa, "wish their bodies to remain motionless, for
it seems to them that at the least movement they will lose their sweet
peace."[103] Others say that in this state we "stop the wheel of
imagination," leave all that we can think, sink into our nothingness or
our ground. In Ruysbroeck's phrase, we are "inwardly abiding in
simplicity and stillness and utter peace";[104] and this is man's state
of maximum receptivity. "The best and noblest way in which thou mayst
come into this work and life," says Meister Eckhart, "is by keeping
silence and letting God work and speak ... when we simply keep ourselves
receptive we are more perfect than when at work."[105]
But this preparatory state of surrendered quiet must at once be
qualified by the second point: _Attention_. It is based upon the right
use of the will, and is not a limp yielding to anything or nothing. It
has an ordained deliberate aim, is a behaviour-cycle directed to an end;
and this it is that marks out the real and fruitful quiet of the
contemplative from the non-directed surrender of mere quietism.
"Nothing," says St. Teresa, "is learnt without a little pains. For the
love of God, sisters, account that care well employed that ye shall
bestow on this thing."[106]
The quieted mind must receive and hold, yet without discursive thought,
the idea which it desires to realize; and this idea must interest and be
real for it, so that attention is concentrated on it spontaneously. The
more completely the idea absorbs us, the greater its transforming power:
when interest wavers, the suggestion begins to lose ground. In spite of
her subsequent relapse into quietism Madame Guyon accurately described
true quiet when she said, "Our activity should consist in endeavouring
to acquire and maintain such a state as may be most susceptible of
divine impressions, most flexible to all the operations of the Eternal
Word."[107] Such concentration can be improved by practice; hence the
value of regular meditation and contemplation to those who are in
earnest about the spiritual life, the quiet and steady holding in the
mind of the thought which it is desired to realize.
Psycho-therapists tell us that, having achieved quiescence, we should
rapidly and rythmically, but with intention, repeat the suggestion that
we wish to realize; and that the shorter, simpler and more general this
verbal formula, the more effective it will be.[108] The spiritual aspect
of this law was well understood by the mediæval mystics. Thus the author
of "The Cloud of Unknowing" says to his disciple, "Fill thy spirit with
ghostly meaning of this word Sin, and without any special beholding unto
any kind of sin, whether it be venial or deadly. And cry thus ghostly
ever upon one: Sin! Sin! Sin! out! out! out! This ghostly cry is better
learned of God by the proof than of any man by word. For it is best when
it is in pure spirit, without special thought or any pronouncing of
word. On the same manner shalt thou do with this little word God: and
mean God all, and all God, so that nought work in thy wit and in thy
will but only God."[109] Here the directions are exact, and such as any
psychologist of the present day might give. So too, religious teachers
informed by experience have always ascribed a special efficacy to "short
acts" of prayer and aspiration: phrases repeated or held in the mind,
which sum up and express the self's penitence, love, faith or adoration,
and are really brief, articulate suggestions parallel in type to those
which Baudouin recommends to us as conducive to bodily well-being.[110]
The repeated affirmation of Julian of Norwich "All shall be well! all
shall be well! all shall be well!"[111] fills all her revelations with
its suggestion of joyous faith; and countless generations of Christians
have thus applied to their soul's health those very methods by which we
are now enthusiastically curing indigestion and cold in the head. The
articulate repetition of such phrases increases their suggestive power;
for the unconscious is most easily reached by way of the ear. This fact
throws light on the immemorial insistence of all great religions on the
peculiar value of vocal prayer, whether this be the _mantra_ of the
Hindu or the _dikr_ of the Moslem; and explains the instinct which
causes the Catholic Church to require from her priests the verbal
repetition, not merely the silent reading of their daily office. Hence,
too, there is real educative value, in such devotions as the rosary; and
the Protestant Churches showed little psychological insight when they
abandoned it. Such "vain" repetitions, however much the rational mind
may dislike, discredit or denounce them, have power to penetrate and
modify the deeper psychic levels; always provided that they conflict
with no accepted belief, are weighted with meaning and desire, with the
intent stretched towards God, and are not allowed to become merely
mechanical--the standing danger alike of all verbal suggestion and all
vocal prayer.
Here we touch the third character of effective suggestion: _Feeling_.
When the idea is charged with emotion, it is far more likely to be
realized. War neuroses have taught us the dreadful potency of the
emotional stimulus of fear; but this power of feeling over the
unconscious has its good side too. Here we find psychology justifying
the often criticized emotional element of religion. Its function is to
increase the energy of the idea. The cool, judicious type of belief will
never possess the life-changing power of a more fervid, though perhaps
less rational faith. Thus the state of corporate suggestibility
generated in a revival and on which the success of that revival depends,
is closely related to the emotional character of the appeal which is
made. And, on higher levels, we see that the transfigured lives and
heroic energies of the great figures of Christian history all represent
the realization of an idea of which the heart was an impassioned love of
God, subduing to its purposes all the impulses and powers of the inner
man, "If you would truly know how these things come to pass," said St.
Bonaventura, "ask it of desire not of intellect; of the ardours of
prayer, not of the teaching of the schools."[112] More and more
psychology tends to endorse the truth of these words.
Quiescence, attention, and emotional interest are then the conditions of
successful suggestion. We have further to notice two characteristics
which have been described by the Nancy school of psychologists; and
which are of some importance for those who wish to understand the
mechanism of religious experience. These have been called the law of
Unconscious Teleology, and the law of Reversed Effort.
The law of unconscious teleology means that when an end has been
effectively suggested to it, the unconscious mind will always tend to
work towards its realization. Thus in psycho-therapeutics it is found
that a general suggestion of good health made to the sick person is
often enough. The doctor may not himself know enough about the malady to
suggest stage by stage the process of cure. But he suggests that cure;
and the necessary changes and adjustments required for its realization
are made unconsciously, under the influence of the dynamic idea. Here
the direction of "The Cloud of Unknowing," "Look that nothing live in
thy working mind but a naked intent directed to God"[113]--suggesting
as it does to the psyche the ontological Object of faith--strikingly
anticipates the last conclusions of science. Further, a fervent belief
in the end proposed, a conviction of success, is by no means essential.
Far more important is a humble willingness to try the method, give it a
chance. That which reason may not grasp, the deeper mind may seize upon
and realize; always provided that the intellect does not set up
resistances. This is found to be true in medical practice, and religious
teachers have always declared it to be true in the spiritual sphere;
holding obedience, humility, and a measure of resignation, not spiritual
vision, to be the true requisites for the reception of grace, the
healing and renovation of the soul. Thus acquiescence in belief, and
loyal and steady co-operation in the corporate religious life are often
seen to work for good in those who submit to them; though these may
lack, as they frequently say, the "spiritual sense." And this happens,
not by magic, but in conformity with psychological law.
This tendency of the unconscious self to realize without criticism a
suggested end lays on religious teachers the obligation of forming a
clear and vital conception of the spiritual ideals which they wish to
suggest, whether to themselves in their meditations or to others by
their teaching: to be sure that they are wholesome, and really tend to
fullness of life. It should also compel each of us to scrutinize those
religious thoughts and images which we receive and on which we allow
our minds to dwell: excluding those that are merely sentimental, weak or
otherwise unworthy, and holding fast the noblest and most beautiful that
we can find. For these ideas, however generalized, will set up profound
changes in the mind that receives them. Thus the wrong conception of
self-immolation will be faithfully worked out by the unconscious--and
has been too often in the past--in terms of misery, weakness, or
disease. We remember how the idea of herself as a victim of love worked
physical destruction in Thérèse de L'Enfant Jésus: and we shall never
perhaps know all the havoc wrought by the once fashionable doctrines of
predestination and of the total depravity of human nature. All this
shows how necessary it is to put hopeful, manly, constructive
conceptions before those whom we try to help or instruct; constantly
suggesting to them not the weak and sinful things that they are, but the
living and radiant things which they can become.
Further, this tendency of the received suggestion to work out its whole
content for good or evil within the unconscious mind, shows the
importance which we ought to attach to the tone of a religions service,
and how close too many of our popular hymns are to what one might call
psychological sin; stressing as they do a childish weakness love of
shelter and petting, a neurotic shrinking from full human life, a morbid
preoccupation with failure and guilt. Such hymns make devitalizing
suggestions, adverse to the health and energy of the spiritual life;
and are all the more powerful because they are sung collectively and in
rhythm, and are cast in an emotional mould.[114] There was some truth in
the accusation of the Indian teacher Ramakrishna, that the books of the
Christians insisted too exclusively on sin. He said, "He who repeats
again and again 'I am bound! I am bound!' remains in bondage. He who
repeats day and night 'I am a sinner! I am a sinner!' becomes a sinner
indeed."[115]
I go on to the law of Reversed Effort; a psychological discovery which
seems to be of extreme importance for the spiritual life. Briefly this
means, that when any suggestion has entered the unconscious mind and
there become active, all our conscious and anxious resistances to it are
not merely useless but actually tend to intensify it. If it is to be
dislodged, this will not be accomplished by mere struggle but by the
persuasive power of another and superior auto-suggestion. Further, in
respect of any habit that we seek to establish, the more desperate our
struggle and sense of effort, the smaller will be our success. In small
matters we have all experienced the working of this law: in frustrated
struggles to attend to that which does not interest us, to check a
tiresome cough, to keep our balance when learning to ride a bicycle. But
it has also more important applications. Thus it indicates that a
deliberate struggle to believe, to overcome some moral weakness, to keep
attention fixed in prayer, will tend to frustration: for this anxious
effort gives body to our imaginative difficulties and sense of
helplessness, fixing attention on the conflict, not on the desired end.
True, if this end is to be achieved the will must be directed to it, but
only in the sense of giving steadfast direction to the desires and acts
of the self, keeping attention orientated towards the goal. The pull of
imaginative desire, not the push of desperate effort, serves us best.
St. Teresa well appreciated this law and applied it to her doctrine of
prayer. "If your thought," she says to her daughters, "runs after all
the fooleries of the world, laugh at it and leave it for a fool and
continue in your quiet ... if you seek by force of arms to bring it to
you, you lose the strength which you have against it."[116]
This same principle is implicitly recognized by those theologians who
declare that man can "do nothing of himself," that mere voluntary
struggle is useless, and regeneration comes by surrender to grace: by
yielding, that is, to the inner urge, to those sources of power which
flow in, but are not dragged in. Indications of its truth meet us
everywhere in spiritual literature. Thus Jacob Boehme says, "Because
thou strivest against that out of which thou art come, thou breakest
thyself off with thy own willing from God's willing."[117] So too the
constant invitations to let God work and speak, to surrender, are all
invitations to cease anxious strife and effort and give the Divine
suggestions their chance. The law of reversed effort, in fact, is valid
on every level of life; and warns us against the error of making
religion too grim and strenuous an affair. Certainly in all life of the
Spirit the will is active, and must retain its conscious and steadfast
orientation to God. Heroic activity and moral effort must form an
integral part of full human experience. Yet it is clearly possible to
make too much of the process of wrestling evil. An attention chiefly and
anxiously concentrated on the struggle with sins and weaknesses, instead
of on the eternal sources of happiness and power, will offer the
unconscious harmful suggestions of impotence and hence tend to
frustration. The early ascetics, who made elaborate preparations for
dealing with temptations, got as an inevitable result plenty of
temptations with which to deal. A sounder method is taught by the
mystics. "When thoughts of sin press on thee," says "The Cloud of
Unknowing," "look over their shoulders seeking another thing, the which
thing is God."[118]
These laws of suggestion, taken together, all seem to point, one way.
They exhibit the human self as living, plastic, changeful; perpetually
modified by the suggestions pouring in on it, the experiences and
intuitions to which it reacts. Every thought, prayer, enthusiasm, fear,
is of importance to it. Nothing leaves it as it was before. The soul,
said Boehme, stands both in heaven and in hell. Keep it perpetually busy
at the window of the senses, feed it with unlovely and materialistic
ideas, and those ideas will realize themselves. Give the contemplative
faculty its chance, let it breathe at least for a few moments of each
day the spiritual atmosphere of faith, hope and love, and the spiritual
life will at least in some measure be realized by it.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 85: On all this, cf. J. Varendonck, "The Psychology of
Day-dreams."]
[Footnote 86: Jacob Boehme: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
[Footnote 87: Patmore: "The Rod, the Root and the Flower: Aurea Dicta,"
13.]
[Footnote 88: Ruysbroeck: "The Book of the XII Béguines," Cap. 6.]
[Footnote 89: "The Book of the XII Béguines," Cap. 7.]
[Footnote 90: "The Way of Perfection," Cap. 29.]
[Footnote 91: "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 39.]
[Footnote 92: _Ibid_.]
[Footnote 93: "Eternal Life," p. 396.]
[Footnote 94: Penn: "No Cross, No Crown."]
[Footnote 95: "The Book of the XII Béguines," Cap, 7.]
[Footnote 96: De Imit. Christi, Bk. III, Cap. I]
[Footnote 97: Streeter and Appasamy: "The Sadhu, a Study in Mysticism
and Practical Religion," Pt. V.]
[Footnote 98:
Que frutti reducene de esta tua visione?
Vita ordinata en onne nazione.
--Jacopone da Todi: Lauda 79.]
[Footnote 99: Julian of Norwich: "Revelations of Divine Love," Caps. 2,
3, 4.]
[Footnote 100: "Soeur Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus," Cap. 8.]
[Footnote 101: William Penn: "No Cross, No Crown."]
[Footnote 102: De Imit. Christi, Bk. III, Cap. 58.]
[Footnote 103: "Way of Perfection," Cap. 33.]
[Footnote 104: "The Book of the XII Béguines," Cap. 7.]
[Footnote 105: Meister Eckhart, Pred. I.]
[Footnote 106: "The Way of Perfection," Cap. 29.]
[Footnote 107: "A Short and Easy Method of Prayer," Cap. 21.]
[Footnote 108: Baudouin: "Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion," Pt. II, Cap
6.]
[Footnote 109: Op. cit. Cap. 40.]
[Footnote 110: Baudouin: "Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion," loc. cit.]
[Footnote 111: "Revelations of Divine Love," Cap. 27.]
[Footnote 112: "De Itinerario Mentis in Deo," Cap. 7.]
[Footnote 113: Op. cit., Cap. 43.]
[Footnote 114: Hymns of the Weary Willie type: e.g.
"O Paradise, O Paradise
Who does not sigh for rest?"
should never be sung in congregations where the average age is less than
sixty. Equally unsuited to general use are those expressing
disillusionment, anxiety, or impotence. Any popular hymnal will provide
an abundance of examples.]
[Footnote 115: Quoted by Pratt: "The Religious Consciousness," Cap. 7.]
[Footnote 116: "The Way of Perfection," Cap. 31.]
[Footnote 117: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
[Footnote 118: Op. cit., Cap. 32.]