In the mysterious way in which life is given to us in evolution on

this planet, it pushes in the direction of its own expansion. We don’t

understand it simply because we don’t know the purpose of creation;

we only feel life straining in ourselves and see it thrashing others

about as they devour each other. Life seeks to expand in an

unknown direction for unknown reasons. Not even psychology

should meddle with this sacrosanct vitality, concluded Rank. This is

the meaning of his option for the “irrational” as the basis for life; it is

an option based on empirical experience. There is a driving force

behind a mystery that we cannot understand, and it includes more

than reason alone. The urge to cosmic heroism, then, is sacred and

mysterious and not to be neatly ordered and rationalized by science

and secularism. Science, after all, is a credo that has attempted to

absorb into itself and to deny the fear of life and death; and it is only

one more competitor in the spectrum of roles for cosmic heroics.

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness,

or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As

awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no

longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget. Or,

alternatively, he buries himself in psychology in the belief that

awareness all by itself will be some kind of magical cure for his

problems. But psychology was born with the breakdown of shared

social heroisms; it can only be gone beyond with the creation of new

heroisms that are basically matters of belief and will, dedication to a

vision. Lifton has recently concluded the same thing, from a

conceptual point of view almost identical to Rank’s.43 When a thinker

of Norman Brown’s stature wrote his later book Love’s Body, he was

led to take his thought to this same point. He realized that the only

way to get beyond the natural contradictions of existence was in the

time-worn religious way: to project one’s problems onto a god-figure,

to be healed by an all-embracing and all-justifying beyond. To talk in

these terms is not at all the same thing as to talk the language of the

psychotherapeutic religionists. Rank was not so naïve nor so

messianic: he saw that the orientation of men has to be always

beyond their bodies, has to be grounded in healthy repressions, and

toward explicit immortality-ideologies, myths of heroic

transcendence.‡

We can conclude that a project as grand as the scientific-mythical

construction of victory over human limitation is not something that

can be programmed by science. Even more, it comes from the vital

energies of masses of men sweating within the nightmare of creation

—and it is not even in man’s hands to program. Who knows what

form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead or

what use it will make of our anguished searching. The most that any

one of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object or

ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so

to speak, to the life force.

Becker