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THE WAY THROUGH
Everything is known through its opposite. The Full is known through the emptiness which it fills. God is known through the condensation of spirit he emanates into the expectant human person — a vase shaped by the whirling pressure of the hand of experience.
What man experiences is always nature. There are levels upon levels of nature; but always, at any level, the law of nature is the law of descent toward an eventual state of even diffusion and scatteredness. Whatever is born (natus) must decay, must fall from a condition of high potential to one of low energy. This is entropy — the running down of energy. Nature — as we use the word here — is all that in the experience of man flows down the stream, however high the source of the stream.
Nature is not life; it is not consciousness. To nature belongs the organism through which life acts itself out. Nature is the collectivity of infinitely varied systems of organization, from nebulae to atoms, from conceptual theories to political states. It is everything that, having been brought to the condition of integrated existence, will become in time — days or eons — disintegrated. Nature is that which constantly reveals a trend toward the less; the present, ceaselessly becoming the past; the created, on its way to obsolescence.
Nature is humanity's field and object of experience. Man experiences himself man only through nature. In this experience of that which is becoming ever less, ever past, man realizes and enacts his manhood by liberating the plus factor which ever creates a more, a future. Man always yearns to be more than he is, if he is truly man. His increase in consciousness polarizes nature's entropy. Man answers the down-flow of nature's energy with the rise of his illumined consciousness which has received and assimilated the spirit, emanated by God. The spirit: God's answer to man's need, to man's essential emptiness.
God is the Full. Man is the Empty. Man's destiny is to become filled — through his experience of nature, through contrast with an earth forever dying. Man is man through the challenge of the earth, meeting which, he calls upon himself the release of spirit from the heart of divine plenitude. Man thus rises into the ever-unattainable fullness of God, Who, being the absolute Whole, is forever identical, through the fall of nature and the rise of man.Through — small, yet mighty word! Everything is what it is through its opposite. Man experiences through nature. He rises through nature. Not against, but through. A piercing through. An act which cuts from side to side the resistance of the opposite, thus which acknowledges it, which feels it, with which it becomes interwoven in space, yet opposite in direction. As man moves in a direction which opposes nature's, while occupying for a while the same space, man, the experiencer, emerges from nature.
The hand passes through the water. It experiences the water, the fluidity of it; yet it emerges from it, still a hand — the integrity of a hand, plus consciousness from the experience. Consciousness is through-ness. It is born of thoroughness of experiencing; and to be thorough is to pierce through and through the substance, the weight, the glamour, the whirlpools of nature. Having experienced to the full, man is "through" with this particular field of experience; because he has gained consciousness of himself, the experiencer.
Nature, for us, human beings, is represented primarily by the earth — the mass of the earth, the challenges of the earth. Nature is gravitation, the pull toward the dead level of uniformity and undifferentiated substance. Nature is the depths, the unconscious, the Mother-image, the universal collective, love that binds, glamour that bends radius into tangent and waylays into the mesh of green trees arrows shot straight to the heart of the sun. Nature is everything through which man must gain consciousness, and through consciousness an immortal form of emptiness, chalice for the downpour of the Holy Spirit — the light of the Whole. Nature is everything that man must overcome in order to be more than only man.
Overcoming is a passing through, not a dismissal. Nature is not to be dismissed before the experience; it is not to be shunned and fearfully avoided. It is to be met in contest within the limited field of the life-experiencer. Nature and man occupy the field. Each, by inherent destiny, is bound to a goal. The two goals are opposite. Nature cannot be forced back outside of the field. Man should not be forced back by nature. Yet each of the contestants occupies the entire field. The only solution of the contest is for man to enter the whole of nature within the field of experience, to pierce through nature, and, emerging from nature and the field, to continue his path toward an ever more total fullness of being — toward the absolute Full that is God.
Man's personality is the contest; his body — the gross and the subtle — the field of experience; his soul, that which already has pierced through; spirit, the gift after the victory; and God, the eternal bestower. There can be no victory if man clings to any substantial trophy from nature. True victory is victory that inflicts no defeat. The elements of nature are left to follow their gravitational course; they must obey the natural entropy which is their fate. Man's defeat would only give them an illusory, temporary solidity, which the downward sweep of the universal cycle would ultimately shatter. But man's victory does not merely mean that the normal cycle of material transformations will not be retarded; it means that nature, as a whole, will find in this victory its eternal and ultimate significance.
As man knows himself through his contest with nature, so does nature realize itself whole by the light of man's victory. It is this light which alone illumines nature. This indeed is the destiny of all nature; that it can realize itself whole, and thus reach its own fulfillment, only if it is successfully overcome by the man whom it must oppose so that he might know himself by piercing it through, and knowing himself, illumine it by the light of that knowing.
Indeed, everything is realized through its opposite. Man realizes himself in consciousness through nature. Nature realizes itself through the light shed by the man who overcame its gravitation. This light is the spirit gift of God, the Full, Who realizes His fullness timelessly through all the contests between the opposites, man and nature, in which man is the victor. As man, the positive, demonstrates his positiveness in successfully piercing through nature within the field of experience — and thus allows nature, the negative, to reveal its negativeness in contrast to man's positiveness — God's Wholeness is forever demonstrated to Himself through man.
In this process nature acts as challenger. It challenges man; yet with the unconscious desire to be overcome by man. These challenges operate within the field of the earth — the field of experience for humanity as a whole. They are circumscribed by the boundaries of the earth. To the individual human being, they are framed by the two great axes of consciousness, horizon and meridian — the symbolical cross of experience.
The Son of Man is nailed upon this cross. His organs of action — hands, feet, and the adrenal glands controlling muscular action — are pierced by the soldiers of Rome, the symbol of an organized and dictatorial nature. His head, abode of consciousness, is crowned with thorns which are nature's weapons. Will the Son of Man gravitate to the earth with his dripping blood? Or will he gather to himself all his powers, and passing through the disintegration of nature, emerge in radiant glory?
"Consummatum Est, " he said. He had gathered all of himself to his self; he had consummated the experience. His being now reached from hell to heaven. He had become indeed the Son of God — the Victorious, the Perfect. The earth that challenged him was blessed by his victory. It realized itself whole, through the light of his overcoming.
Challenges of the earth; tests of men who meet nature within the field of human experience — their bodies, their everyday living. Every man born of woman must meet these tests; must become crucified on the cross of horizon and meridian, which establishes the framework of his world of experience; must emerge whole and illumined, or cling to natural elements, whose normal disintegration is thus stopped — for a while; this while, a hell or purgatory.
A multitude of tests. Every experience is a test, a note in the great symphony of man's victory. Yet this symphony has well-defined movements. One after the other, man's pattern of experience unfolds, revealing perhaps his ability to include the whole space that surrounds his birth, his ever-renewed emergence into the world of light, of spirit and of divine pleroma — or else, ending in his being scattered into the empty space of defeat and frustration.
The fullness of space is God's signature; empty space, the illusion produced by defeat and materiality. Victorious man conquers the fullness of space. His path unfolds in counterpoint to that of the physical sun, from which streams forth the energies of nature, because man can only realize his selfhood in contrast to nature. Starting from the dawn-point of his selfhood, man must first reach depth; then he ascends counterclockwise to zeniths ever more radiant with the realization of ever deeper depths experienced as shrines of the immanent God.A cyclic symphony: a symphony in twelve great movements, twelve great tests, twelve avenues of victory — or disintegration. Each type of test presents a negative as well as a positive solution; a fall and an emergence. To every individual belongs the power to choose. It is his divine birth-right.
Not to choose victory is to decide for defeat; for both nature and man are moving on, in opposite directions. The field is limited. Each contestant fills it entirely. There is no way out for man save through and through — or back. To pierce through nature and move God-ward — or to fall back, entangled in the fateful advance of natural energies toward chaos.
