Page 47 - Microsoft Word - SPIRIT AND THE MIND.doc

30 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
terror, and the perception of that terror is not sickness but truth. In fact, the failure to apprehend that inherent angst, is achieved only by denying or repressing the actual and precarious nature of existence itself. Not anxiety but complacency is neurotic. The happy self is the diseased self, the self that “tranquilizes itself with the trivial,” as Kierkegaard put it; or the inauthentic person, who, said Heidegger, is precisely one who has not the awareness of lonely and unexpected death.
Even Freud would soon come round to this understanding, for, as he finally put it, “It is anxiety that causes repression and not, as I had thought, repression that causes anxiety.” In other words, angst is the primary mood of the separate self, and the separate self then instigates repression in response to angst in order to shield itself from the terror of death, of non-being, of nullity. “Consciousness of death is the primary repression, not sexuality,” as Becker (1973) put it. Primary neurosis is thus not caused by a reliance on mental crutches, but by an inability to fashion enough crutches in the first place. As Rank put it, neurosis “is at bottom always only incapacity for illusion”—incapacity to pretend there is no death, incapacity to hide the skull that, as James said, will soon grin in at the banquet.
The existentialists, then, as the epitome of personalistic theory, had seen precisely the nature of separate self-existence. They had diagnosed humankind perfectly, and the diagnosis was angst. But seeing that anxiety came first and then repression, they could no longer pawn off angst as merely neurotic or abnormal. Rather, it was primary; it was first and foremost something inherent in the separate- self sense and not something caused by bad toilet training or something the separate self could escape if only mommy and daddy were nice to it. It was existential and not merely circumstantial. Likewise, neurosis (or primal neurosis) was not caused by repression but by a failure to repress; not “the more repression, the more neurotic and unhappy,” but rather “the less repression, the more unhappy,” simply because less repression meant a person was coming closer to the actual nature of reality and existence, and that nature is angst, the sour-life, the unhappy self, the self that is inherently anicca, anatta, dukkha (impermanent, insubstantial, painful).
Now the mystical or transpersonal traditions agreed with this diagnosis—the separate self, the subject set apart from objects, is indeed necessarily faced with dukkha, or sour-angst. “Wherever there is other, there is fear,” say the Upanishads (see Hume, 1974). “Hell is others,” said Sartre. But the transpersonal traditions maintained that there was a way out of suffering, sin, and the disease