Part Three:
The Creative Release of Spirit - 1

To and fro, the heart of reality beats. To and fro, the Day-force and the Night-force weave their patterns of organic relationship in rhythmic interplay. But Man is neither systole nor diastole, neither the work of the day nor the dream-activity of the night. Man is the field in which the battle of the two streams of energies proceeds unceasingly in alternation of defeat and victory — or else, man is the integrated and creative whole within which the two polarities of human experience, balancing one another in dynamic harmony, contribute constantly to the activity of the creative wholeness of that whole which uses them.
      In the first of these two conditions, man operates as a nature-conditioned being, and his life and experience constantly oscillate between consciousness and unconsciousness, individual and collective, life and death, rebirth and once more death. In the second state, man is a Spirit-conditioned being, an utterance of destiny, yet deeply rooted in silence. He is poised in a harmony of opposites which both transcends these opposites and includes all their manifestations.
      The term "nature-conditioned" being may refer to a personality operating at the level of instincts and in a state of preponderant unconscious activity; or it may describe a person with great intellectual powers priding himself in that his behavior is ruled by rational and ethical standards deliberately accepted and applied. In both cases, nevertheless, the human being will have to be considered as a "nature-conditioned" being, because he is in fact conditioned by the alternation of negative and positive, of plus and minus — his moods and feelings, his thoughts and his interests waxing and waning, pulled hither and thither by the rhythmic interplay of the two great forces of nature.
      If the man lives according to his instincts, then his rhythm of change will closely follow the rhythm of life-phenomena on this earth; he will act as a seasonal creature. If he functions predominantly as a civilized and intellectually conscious person, the basic rhythms of earth-nature will be over-laden with counter-rhythms produced by social rules of behavior, by the demands of city-life, and by his own conscious and unconscious reactions to the impulsions which sway his physical and psychological organism. However, to oppose the rhythm of nature is still to live under its sway, for one is as much bound by that against which one rebels as by that to which one is subservient.
      Even the attempt willfully to control the great cosmic forces of life and to set deliberate patterns for their manifestations within the human personality is still a mark of subordination to the powers which the will tries to canalize and to tame. The energies which may be controlled in one direction and at one time will always tend to rebound with increased strength in some other direction, at some other time. And he who becomes by sheer conscious determination a poem of pure light, releases the very forces which, in the opposite direction, will congregate around a manifestation of equally "pure" darkness. Dualism will thus be intensified; it will not be solved. Intensification may be a necessary phase in the global attainment of spiritual living; for it is said that the "lukewarm" represent the lowest state of being — yet the quality of Spirit-conditioned being is not really reached by stressing to the limit one pole of life. It is not produced by the triumph of the characteristics of one of the two forces after bestowing upon these characteristics the qualification of "good."