"GOD" AND "SELF" 
203 
complex," giving rise later on, in certain cases to whole 
legions of neuroses. 
Now then make it a little clearer, please, just what you 
mean by 'higher'. 
Skeat seems to connect it with hills, swellings, boils, the 
maternal breast; is that reason enough for us to connect it 
with the idea of advantage, or-'superiority' 
merely translates 
it into Latin!-worth, 
or-no, it's really too difficult. Of 
course, sometimes it has a "bad" meaning, as of temperature 
in fever; but nearly always it implies a condition preferable to 
"low. " 
Applied to the 'self, it becomes a sort of trade name; 
nobody tells me if he means Khu, or Ba, or Khabs, or Ut of 
the Upanishads, or Augoeides of the Neo-Platonists, or 
Adonai of Bulwer-Lytton, or-here we are with all those 
thrice-accurs't alternatives. There is not, cannot be, any 
specific meaning unless we start with a sound skeleton of 
ontogenic theory, a well-mapped hierarchy of the Cosmos, 
and define the term anew. 
Then why use it? To do so can only cause confusion, 
unless the context helps us to clarify the image. And that is 
surely rather a defeatist attitude, isn't it? 
When 
I first 
set myself to put a name to my 
"mission" - the contemplation carried me half-way across 
South-West China-I considered these alternatives. I thought 
to cut the Gordian Knot, and call it by Abramelin's title the 
"Holy Guardian Angel" because (I mused) that will be as 
intelligible to the villagers of Pu Peng as to the most learned 
Pundits; moreover, the implied theory was so crude that no 
one need be bound by it. 
2. 'Within'. If you don't mind, we'll tackle this now, while 
'higher' is fresh in our minds; for it is also a preposition. First 
you want to go up; then you want to go in. Why? 
As 'higher' gave the idea of aggression, of conquest, 
'within' usually implies safety . Always we get back to that 
stage of history when the social unit, based on the family, 
was little less than condition No. I of survival. The house, the