All this is a mere incoherent stammering, broken first-words. To return to the direct path of our progress. It is not merely a metaphor to call the cardiac plexus the sun, the Light. It is metaphor in the first place because the conscious effluence which proceeds from this first upper centre in the breast goes forth and plays upon its external object, as phosphorescent waves might break upon a ship and reveal its form. The transferring of the objective knowledge to the psyche is almost the same as vision. It is root-vision. It happens before the eyes open. It is the first tremendous mode of apprehension, still dark, but moving towards light. It is the eye in the breast. Psychically, it is basic objective apprehension. Dynamically, it is love, devotional, administering love.
Now we make already a discrimination between the two natures, even of this first upper consciousness. First from the breast flows the devotional, self-outpouring of love, love which gives its all to the beloved. And back again returns to the ingathered objective consciousness, the first objective content of the psyche.
This argues the dual polarity. From the positive pole of the cardiac plexus flows out that effluence which we call selfless love. It is really self-devoting love, not self-less. This is the one form of love we recognize. But from the strong ganglion of the shoulders proceeds the negative circuit, which searches and explores the beloved, bringing back pure objective apprehension, not critical, in the mental sense, and yet passionally discriminative.
Let us discriminate between the two upper poles. From the sympathetic heart goes forth pure administering, like sunbeams. But from the strong thoracic centre of the shoulders is exerted a strong rejective force, a force which, pressing upon the object of attention, in the mode of separation, succeeds in transferring to itself the impression of the object to which it has attended. This is the other half of devotional love—perfect knowledge of the beloved.
Now this knowledge in itself argues a contradistinction between the lover and the beloved. It is the very mould of the contradistinction. It is the impress upon the lover of that which was separate from him, resistant to him, in the beloved. Objective knowledge is always of this kind—a knowledge based on unchangeable difference, a knowledge truly of the gulf that lies between the two beings nearest to each other.
In two kinds, then, consists the activity of the unconscious on the first upper plane. Primal is the blissful sense of ineffable transfusion with the beloved, which we call love, and of which our era has perhaps enjoyed the full. It is a mode of creative consciousness essentially objective, but yet it preserves no object in the memory, even the dynamic memory. It is a great objective flux, a streaming forth of the self in blissful departure, like sunbeams streaming.
If this activity alone worked, then the self would utterly depart from its own integrity; it would pass out and merge with the beloved—which passing out and merging is the goal of enthusiasts. But living beings are kept integral by the activity of the great negative pole. From the thoracic ganglion also the unconscious goes forth in its quest of the beloved. But what does it go to seek? Real objective knowledge. It goes to find out the wonders which itself does not contain and to transfer these wonders, as by impress, into itself. It goes out to determine the limits of its own existence also.
This is the second half of the activity of upper or self-less or spiritual love. There is a tremendous great joy in exploring and discovering the beloved. For what is the beloved? She is that which I myself am not. Knowing the breach between us, the uncloseable gulf, I in the same breath realize her features. In the first mode of the upper consciousness there is perfect surpassing of all sense of division between the self and the beloved. In the second mode the very discovery of the features of the beloved contains the full realization of the irreparable, or unsurpassable, gulf. This is objective knowledge, as distinct from objective emotion. It contains always the element of self-amplification, as if the self were amplified by knowledge in the beloved. It should also contain the knowledge of the limits of the self.
So it is with the Infant. Curious indeed is the look on the face of the Holy Child, in Leonardo’s pictures, in Botticelli’s, even in the beautiful Filippo Lippi. It is the Mother who crosses her hands on her breast, in supreme acquiescence, recipient; it is the Child who gazes, with a kind of objective, strangely discerning, deep apprehension of her, startling to northern eyes. It is a gaze by no means of innocence, but of profound, pre-visual discerning. So plainly is the child looking across the gulf and fixing the gulf by very intentness of pre-visual apprehension, that instinctively the ordinary northerner finds Him antipathetic. It seems almost a cruel objectivity.
Perhaps between lovers, in the objective way of love, either the voluntary separative mode predominates, or the sympathetic mode of communion—one or the other. In the north we have worshipped the latter mode. But in the south it is different; the objective sapient manner of love seems more natural. Moreover in the face of the Infant lingers nearly always the dark look of the pristine mode of consciousness, the powerful self-centring subjective mode, established in the lower body—the so-called sensual mode.
But take our own children. A small infant, as soon as it really begins to direct its attention. How often it seems to be gazing across a strange distance at the mother; what a curious look is on its face, as if the mother were an object set across a far gulf, distinct however, discernible, even obtrusive in her need to be apprehended. A mother will chase away this look with kisses. But she cannot chase away the inevitable effluence of separatist, objective apprehension. She herself sometimes will fall into a half-trance, and the child on her lap will resolve itself into a strange and separate object. She does not criticize or analyse him. She does not even perceive him. But as if rapt, she apprehends him lying there, an unfathomable and inscrutable objective, outside herself, never to be grasped or included in herself. She seizes as it were a sudden and final, objective impression of him. And the conclusive sensation is one of finality. Something final has happened to her. She has the strange sensation of unalterable certainty a sensation at once profoundly gratifying and rather appalling. She possesses something, a certain entity of primal, preconscious knowledge. Let the child be what he may, her knowledge of him is her own, forever and final. It gives her a sense of wealth in possession, and of power. It gives her a sense also of fatality. From the very satisfaction of the objective finality derives the sense of fatality. It is a knowledge of the other being, but a knowledge which contains at the same time a final assurance of the eternal and insuperable gulf which lies between beings—the isolation of the self first.
Thus the first plane of the upper consciousness—the outgoing, the sheer and unspeakable bliss of the sense of union, communion, at-oneness with the beloved—and then the complementary objective realization of the beloved, the realization of that which is apart, different. This realization is like riches to the objective consciousness. It is, as it were, the adding of another self to the own self, through the mode of apprehension. Through the mode of dynamic objective apprehension, which in our day we have gradually come to call imagination, a man may in his time add on to himself the whole of the universe, by increasing pristine realization of the universal. This in mysticism is called the progress to infinity—that is, in the modern, truly male mysticism. The older female mysticism means something different by the infinite.
But anyhow there it is. The attaining to the Infinite, about which the mystics have rhapsodized, is a definite process in the developing unconscious, but a process in the development only of the objective-apprehensive centres—an exclusive process, naturally.
A soul cannot come into its own through that love alone which is unison. If it stress the one mode, the sympathetic mode, beyond a certain point, it breaks its own integrity, and corruption sets in in the living organism. On both planes of love, upper and lower, the two modes must act complementary to one another, the sympathetic and the separatist. It is the absolute failure to see this that has torn the modern world into two halves, the
one half warring for the voluntary, objective, separatist control, the other for the pure sympathetic. The individual psyche divided against itself divides the world against itself, and an unthinkable progress of calamity ensues unless there be a reconciliation.
The goal of life is the coming to perfection of each single individual. This cannot take place without the tremendous interchange of love from all the four great poles of the first, basic field of consciousness. There must be the twofold passionate flux of sympathetic love, subjective-abdominal and objective-devotional, both. And there must be the twofold passional circuit of separatist realization, the lower, vital self-realization, and the upper, intense realization of the other, a realization which includes a recognition of abysmal otherness. To stress any one mode, any one interchange, is to hinder all, and to cause corruption in the end. The human psyche must have strength and pride to accept the whole fourfold nature of its own creative activity.
VI
HUMAN RELATIONS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
THE AIM OF this little book is merely to establish the smallest foothold in the swamp of vagueness which now goes by the name of the unconscious. At last we form some sort of notion of what the unconscious actually is. It is that active spontaneity which rouses in each individual organism at the moment of fusion of the parent nuclei, and which, in polarized connection with the external universe, gradually evolves or elaborates its own individual psyche and corpus, bringing both mind and body forth from itself. Thus it would seem that the term unconscious is only another word for life. But life is a general force, whereas the unconscious is essentially single and unique in each individual organism; it is the active, self-evolving soul bringing forth its own incarnation and self-manifestation. Which incarnation and self-manifestation seems to be the whole goal of the unconscious soul: the whole goal of life. Thus it is that the unconscious brings forth not only consciousness, but tissue and organs also. And all the time the working of each organ depends on the primary spontaneous-conscious centre of which it is the issue—if you like, the soul-centre. And consciousness is like a web woven finally in the mind from the various silken strands spun forth from the primal centre of the unconscious.
But the unconscious is never an abstraction, never to be abstracted. It is never an ideal entity. It is always concrete. In the very first instance, it is the glinting nucleus of the ovule. And proceeding from this, it is the chain or constellation of nuclei which derive directly from this first spark. And further still it is the great nerve-centres of the human body, in which the primal and pristine nuclei still act direct. The nuclei are centres of spontaneous consciousness. It seems as if their bright grain were germ-consciousness, consciousness germinating forever. If that is a mystery, it is not my fault. Certainly it is not mysticism. It is obvious, demonstrable scientific fact, to be verified under the microscope and within the human psyche, subjectively and objectively, both. Of course, the subjective verification is what men kick at. Thin-minded idealists cannot bear any appeal to their bowels of comprehension.
We can quite tangibly deal with the human unconscious. We trace its source and centres in the great ganglia and nodes of the nervous system. We establish the nature of the spontaneous consciousness at each of these centres; we determine the polarity and the direction of the polarized flow. And from this we know the motion and individual manifestation of the psyche itself; we also know the motion and rhythm of the great organs of the body. For at every point psyche and functions are so nearly identified that only by holding our breath can we realize their duality in identification—a polarized duality once more. But here is no place to enter the great investigation of the duality and polarization of the vital-creative activity and the mechanico-material activity. The two are two in one, a polarized quality. They are unthinkably different.
On the first field of human consciousness—the first plane of the unconscious—we locate four great spontaneous centres, two below the diaphragm, two above. These four centres control the four greatest organs. And they give rise to the whole basis of human consciousness. Functional and psychic at once, this is their first polar duality.
But the polarity is further. The horizontal division of the diaphragm divides man forever into his individual duality, the duality of the upper and lower man, the two great bodies of upper and lower consciousness and function. This is the horizontal line.
The vertical division between the voluntary and the sympathetic systems, the line of division between the spinal system and the great plexus-system of the front of the human body, forms the second distinction into duality. It is the great difference between the soft, recipient front of the body and the wall of the back. The front of the body is the live end of the magnet. The back is the closed opposition. And again there are two parallel streams of function and consciousness, vertically separate now. This is the vertical line of division. And the horizontal line and the vertical line form the cross of all existence and being. And even this is not mysticism—no more than the ancient symbols used in botany or biology.
On the first field of human consciousness, which is the basis of life and consciousness, are the four first poles of spontaneity. These have their fourfold polarity within the individual, again figured by the cross. But the individual is never purely a thing-by-himself. He cannot exist save in polarized relation to the external universe, a relation both functional and psychic-dynamic. Development takes place only from the polarized circuits of the dynamic unconscious, and these circuits must be both individual and extra-individual. There must be the circuit of which the complementary pole is external to the individual.
That is, in the first place there must be the other individual. There must be a polarized connection with the other individual—or even other individuals. On the first field there are four poles in each individual. So that the first, the basic field of extra-individual consciousness contains eight poles—an eightfold polarity, a fourfold circuit. It may be that between two individuals, even mother and child, the polarity may be established only fourfold, a dual circuit. It may be that one circuit of spontaneous consciousness may never be fully established. This means, for a child, a certain deficiency in development, a psychic inadequacy.
So we are again face to face with the basic problem of human conduct. No human being can develop save through the polarized connection with other beings. This circuit of polarized unison precedes all mind and all knowing. It is anterior to and ascendant over the human will. And yet the mind and the will can both interfere with the dynamic circuit, an idea, like a stone wedged in a delicate machine, can arrest one whole process of psychic interaction and spontaneous growth.
How then? Man doth not live by bread alone. It is time we made haste to settle the bread question, which after all is only the A B C of social economies, and proceeded to devote our attention to this much more profound and vital question: how to establish and maintain the circuit of vital polarity from which the psyche actually develops, as the body develops from the circuit of alimentation and respiration. We have reached the stage where we can settle the alimentation and respiration problems almost offhand. But woe betide us, the unspeakable agony we suffer from the failure to establish and maintain the vital circuits between ourselves and the effectual correspondent, the other human being, other human beings, and all the extraneous universe. The tortures of psychic starvation which civilized people proceed to suffer, once they have solved for themselves the bread-and-butter problem of alimentation, will not bear thought. Delicate, creative desire, sending forth its fine vibrations in search of the true pole of magnetic rest in another human being or beings, how it is thwarted, insulated by a whole set of india-rubber ideas and ideals and conventions, till every form of perversion and death-desire sets in! How can we escape neuroses? Psychoanalysis won’t tell us. But a mere shadow of understanding of the true unconscious will give us the hint.
The amazingly difficult and vital business of human relationship has been almost laughably underestimated in our epoch. A
ll this nonsense about love and unselfishness, more crude and repugnant than savage fetish-worship. Love is a thing to be learned, through centuries of patient effort. It is a difficult, complex maintenance of individual integrity throughout the incalculable processes of inter-human-polarity. Even on the first great plane of consciousness, four prime poles in each individual, four powerful circuits possible between two individuals, and each of the four circuits to be established to perfection and yet maintained in pure equilibrium with all the others. Who can do it? Nobody. Yet we have all got to do it, or else suffer ascetic tortures of starvation and privation or of distortion and overstrain and slow collapse into corruption. The whole of life is one long, blind effort at an established polarity with the outer universe, human and non-human; and the whole of modern life is a shrieking failure. It is our own fault.
D H Lawrence- The Dover Reader Page 62