Part One:
The Zodiac as a Dynamic Process - 4

A human being, considered as a physiological organism, is an ordered whole. What we have called "internal order" is order within the closed sphere of the body — or of the generic nature; man, as a member of the genus, homo sapiens. This is the "lesser whole" the lesser sphere of being — and as long as it is not fundamentally disturbed by the pull toward identification with a "greater whole" or greater sphere of being, there is order and organic integration.
      However, this state of lesser integration and narrow inclusiveness is never completely undisturbed. The "lesser whole" operates constantly within a "greater whole," and there is therefore a ceaseless interaction between the lesser and the greater. This interaction appears to the "lesser whole" as disorder and is felt as pain. It is seen by the "greater whole" as creative cyclic activity and is felt as sacrifice. What we call "life" is this constant interaction and interpenetration of "lesser wholes" and "greater whole." It is the substance of human experience; and human experience must necessarily be twofold or dualistic because human experience is always partly the experience of an individual and partly the experience of a collectivity.
      The individual feels pain; but also as be tries to explain it, to himself or to some friend, be uses words. His feeling is individual; but his words (and the thinking which has conditioned their formation and their standardized use) are collective. Pain is individual as an immediate experience; but tragedy is social, because it involves a reference to collective values. In every phase of experience the individual and the collective factors interpenetrate each other. This "con-penetration" is life itself. It is reality.
      Instead of two fundamentally separate realms of nature — one celestial, ordered and good; the other earthly, chaotic and dark with sin— we are now dealing with human experience as a whole and analyzing it into two phases. Man experiences what seems to him as jungle chaos and what seems to him as celestial order. In the first case we have human experiences conditioned by the pain felt by the "lesser whole" when relating itself in nearness and immediacy to other "lesser wholes," in the slow process of identifying its consciousness with that of the total being of the "greater whole" — the universe. In the second case, we have human experience when man is relating himself distantly, and through collective observations formulated into laws, with the "greater whole" — or with as much of it as he can encompass.
      In both cases experience is one and fundamentally indivisible. We divide it by establishing two frames of reference; that is, by lumping together all painful, individual-centered, near experiences into one category — and all inspiring, remote, collectively integrated experiences into another category. We have thus two categories or classes. Each class refers to one direction of experience; yet both classes deal with human experience as a whole.