The first impact of genuine mystical experience on the mind of
the experiencer is something like this that the world he was perceiving and his
own individuality, as he was conscious of it so far, were not true realities
but only the figures of, say, a relatively speaking, dream state from which he
has just awakened to the full bloom of another sun shining on a splendrous
world, entirely unlike the one which his senses were revealing to him before.
It should be remembered that for this state of cognition, it is not necessary
that the percipient should be insensible to the sensory world. Not at all. What
makes mystical ecstasy an increasing wonder is the incredible fact that both
the sensory and supersensory worlds can be perceived simultaneously. But how?
Like the radiant sky showing a mirage on it, both visible side by side.
The real status of the 'mystic' has not been correctly adjudged.
He is not a dreamy idealist prone to visions, conjured up by his subconscious
or to epileptic seizures or to hysterical swoons or to ecstatic trances,
brought about by a suppressed libido, or his own obsessive occupation with the
supernatural or by a pathological condition of the brain. In those cases, where
these symptoms have been exhibited by true mystics, the abnormalities were the
concomitant features of the extrasensory mental state, as in the case of
genius, and not the causative factors responsible for it. These are mere
conjectures of the learned made in absence of an accurate knowledge of the
phenomenon. Nor is he a special protege of the Almighty, sent to the earth to
preach His glory among mortals and to exhort them to surrender their all for
His sake and, himself intoxicated with His love, to infuse this intoxication in
others also. The human intellect has since outgrown the anthropomorphic picture
of the Creator and it is time she outgrows the current picture of the mystic
too.
Every mystic born has been a specimen of the man to come. His
self-imposed penances and his religious beliefs were the creation of his
culture, faith and the environment around him. But his vivid descriptions of
the new visions gained, the new worlds unfolded and the basic teachings about
the way to be followed to reach the same state of perception were the outcome
of knowledge gained in the new dimension of consciousness to which he had attained.
The descriptions are diversely colored and at times contradictory and
conflicting because they are, as it were, the first reports of a few space
travelers, separated by long stretches of time and distance, viewing the
gigantic planet, Jupiter, at a distance of hundreds of thousands of miles from
different angles through glasses of varied magnifying power.
Nature repeatedly produced the prototype of the future man to
awaken humanity to her destiny. But the multitudes, including the scholars and
the divines, misinterpreting the hint, erected for themselves the four walls of
ritualistic religions to confine themselves within, with a fanatical zeal which
led to some of the greatest horrors in history, still repeated at times in some
parts of the earth. That the followers of every faith arrogate to their own
creed the highest station among all the religions, to their founder or founders
the highest stature among all the prophets and to themselves the most favored
position with the Almighty, makes it obvious that the human ego has been as
strongly at work in this holy territory, where humility is the law, as in the
other spheres of life. This shows that self-worshiping man does not even spare
his Maker in the fulfillment of his selfish ends and makes of Him, too, a tool
to bolster his own vanity.
I have purposely introduced the prosaic figure of the human
brain in this discourse to serve as an anchor to the otherwise highly mobile
vessel of thought, prone to be carried away here and there by the wind of prejudice,
dogma, idiosyncrasy, stubbornness and the rest, especially when sailing on the
waters of religion, philosophy or metaphysics. It is only experiments on the
brain that can call a dead halt to these arbitrary flights of human thought
when dealing with the phenomena of mind. In order to explain why this need has
arisen, I can do no better than refer the reader to the views expressed by some
of the writers on mysticism in recent times. For instance, Evelyn Underhill, in
answering for her self-formulated question, "What then is the nature of
this special sense--this transcendental consciousness--and how does
contemplation liberate it," proceeds to explain:
"Any attempt to answer this question brings upon the scene
another aspect of man's psychic life: an aspect of paramount importance to the
student of the mystic type. We have reviewed the ways in which our surface
consciousness reacts upon experience: a surface consciousness which has been
trained through long ages to deal with the universe of sense. We know, however,
that the personality of man is a far deeper and more mysterious thing than the
sum of his conscious feeling, thought and will: that this superficial
self--this Ego of which each of us is aware--hardly counts in comparison with
the deeps of being which it hides. 'There is a root or depth in Thee,' says
Law, from whence all these faculties come forth as lines from a center, or
branches from the body of a tree. This depth is called the center, the fund, or
bottom of the soul. This depth is the unity, the Eternity, I had almost said
the infinity of the soul, for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or
give it any rest, but the infinity of God."
"Since normal man is utterly unable to set up relations
with spiritual reality by means of his feeling, thought and will, continues
Underhill, "it is clearly in this depth of being--in these unplumbed
levels of personality--that we must search if we would find the organ, the
power, by which he is to achieve the mystic quest. The alteration of consciousness
which takes place in contemplation can only mean the emergence from this 'fund
or bottom of the soul' of some faculty which diurnal life keeps hidden 'in the
deeps.'"
To draw a parallel for her own conclusion, Underhill turns to
the widely used concept of the 'unconscious mind,' a handy device of modern
psychology to explain whatever is unexplainable or unintelligible in the area
of mind. "Modern psychology," she continues, "in its doctrine of
the unconscious or subliminal personality, has acknowledged this fact of a
range of psychic life, lying below and beyond the conscious field. Indeed, it
has so dwelt upon and defined this shadowy region--which is really less a
'region' than a useful name--that it sometimes seems to know more about the
unconscious than about the conscious life of man. There it finds, side by side,
the sources of his most animal instincts, his least explicable powers, his most
spiritual intuitions: the 'ape and tiger.' and the 'soul.' Genius and prophecy,
insomnia and infatuation, clairvoyance, hypnotism, hysteria and 'Christian'
science--all are explained by the 'unconscious mind.' In his destructive moods,
the psychologist has little apparent difficulty in reducing the chief phenomena
of religious and mystical experience to activities of the 'unconscious,'
seeking an oblique satisfaction of repressed desires. Where he undertakes the
more dangerous duties of apologetic, he explains the same phenomena by saying
that 'God speaks to man in the subconscious,' by which he can only mean that
our apprehension of the eternal has the character of intuition rather than of
thought. Yet the 'unconscious' after all is merely a convenient name for the
aggregate of those powers, parts or qualities of the whole self which at any
given moment are not conscious or that the Ego is not conscious of."
I have reproduced these passages at some length for two reasons.
Firstly, to show the similarity between my ideas and the view expressed that
mystical vision is the herald of a 'new birth,' the symbol of a profound
transformation in the personality of an individual which reaches down to the
roots of his being, making him perceptive of spiritual realities denied to the
average human folk. Secondly, to bring into focus the usual tendency among
modern writers on religion, metaphysics or psychology to keep out the brain in
their discussion as if it does not come into the picture at all. This habit
allows too loose a rein to fancy. We know very well that even a slight
alteration in the chemistry of the brain, brought about by a drug, a shock, or
loss of sleep can cause an explosive change in consciousness or the personality
of the subject for the time being. Hence to suppose that such a signal event as
the experience of God or the entry into supersensory planes of creation can be
possible without involving the cranial matter in any way is but to confess the
fault, now common among scholars, of dissociating thought from the brain, both
inseparable chums from birth to death.
The answer to Underhill comes very near to the commonly accepted
explanations for the extraordinary experience of mystics and saints. The notion
is that there are submerged capacities and potentialities in the human soul
which can make these enrapturing flights to the holy precincts of divine consciousness
possible for those who apply themselves heart and soul to the task. Linked
inextricably to the idea that mystical ecstasy represents a union with or, at
least, a vision of God, and that the human soul is a particle of the divine
essence, an explanation of this kind has every semblance of plausibility and
usually puts the doubts of the inquirer to rest.
Every human being is aware of himself as a self-contained
independent unit of consciousness. The brain does not protrude into the
personality at all. For this reason, we do not think of it any more than of
other parts of the body and at times, even less. On account of the fact that a
serious injury to the head can easily prove fatal, all that the people exposed
to accident risk do is to take greater precautions to protect it. But even so,
it does not figure more in their thought, and the idea is usually absent that
the brain is our workshop and all that we observe, think or imagine happens
inside its bony frame.
There are glaring discrepancies in the conventional argument
adduced by Underhill. The lyrical mystical ecstasy which attracts and inspires
us is comparatively of recent origin, dating at the earliest from a period of
not more than three thousand years before the birth of Christ. Before that the
picture of religion and the ecstatic trance is more ugly than beautiful. We
should not forget the trance of the Shaman, the medicine-man, the witch-doctor
and the magi which, too, among their contemporaries betokened ascent to the
spirit-world or intercourse with supernatural beings. But often there was
hardly any element of the divine or the sublime as we understand it today, in
those states of entrancement. The rapture, the clearly marked expansion of self
and the sense of identity with all creation, which marked the later expressions
of the ecstatic state, are not noticeable in the earlier types, or at least in
the remnants of them which survived during historical times. It is a moot issue
whether the subjects of those ecstasies were mentally advanced enough even to
entertain those feelings as the later mystics did.
There were many gods and goddesses, human, divine or demonic
even in the form of animals, birds, reptiles and fish, that demanded bizarre
types of worship and ritual, including human sacrifice, cannibalism,
self-mutilation, infanticide, obnoxious ceremonies, revolting sexual orgies and
the like. It is not wise to overlook, in our zeal to find a supernatural
explanation for mystical ecstasy, the dark side of religion or religious
experience in the primitive phases of human culture nor the barbarous features
that attended the birth and growth of current faiths--forced conversion,
ruthless persecution, bloody wars and massacres, pillage and rape, the curse of
untouchability, the revolting custom of sati, self emasculation, the horrors of
the Inquisition and the rest.
The mystics, whose writings or recorded histories are before us,
do not even form one billionth of the population that lived on earth and passed
away during this period. Why they alone were gifted that way we do not know.
Why even now hardly one out of myriads reports success in the same endeavor is
still an enigma. Millions of aspirants to Samadhi in India abandon their homes,
dwell in solitude, practise every form of austerity, penance and
self-discipline, meditate and pray day and night without coming anywhere near
this state of indescribable beatitude. Were the 'sense' of Timeless Being an
integral part of man's spiritual consciousness, as argued by Underhill, then
the Vision of Reality would be equally accessible to all, of course, with
variations in the degree of success gained, as happens when a class of students
attends a university course to widen their knowledge or a group of athletes
works in a gymnasium to streamline their bodies. If this view were correct, the
'Vision' would have been the same for the cave dwellers of the neolithic age as
it is for the cultured products of this day. But we know this is not the case
and the two are poles apart. Why in our religious beliefs do we overlook the
past?
The extreme rarity of success in this enterprise has been
clearly recognized in India. "Among thousands of men," says the
Bhagavad-Gita, "scarce one striveth for perfection, and of the successful
strivers, scarce one knoweth me in essence." But even this rare one who
achieves the blessed union has, according to the Indian tradition, behind him
an accumulated store of meritorious actions done in previous lives, which form
the seeds of success in his present one. Explaining this, the Gita says:
"But a Yogi, laboring with assiduity, purified from sin, fully perfected
through manifold births, he reacheth the supreme goal." This is emphasized
again at another place: "At the close of many births, the man full of
wisdom cometh unto Me; 'Vasudeva is all; saith he, the Mahatma very difficult
to find."
It is obvious that the glorious consummation of human life, of
which the Gita sings, and of which a glowing picture is presented in the
writings of all great mystics of the past, cannot be the work of a day or even
of a lifetime, unless there are constitutional factors favorable to the climax,
of which we have no knowledge yet. In this respect, the great mystics can be
classed with the great secular geniuses of the earth. The mystical consciousness
of an Eckhart, or Al-Ghazali or a Chaitanya, is not possible for even one out
of hundreds of thousands of earnest practicers of yoga or other spiritual
disciplines, in the same way as the intellectual achievement of a Shankara, or
Einstein is not possible for every scholar or university professor. What these
constitutional factors are, it will be my endeavor to explain.
I have briefly touched on the views expressed by Evelyn
Underhill, as representative of a religious bent of mind, which believes in God
and the divine nature of the Soul. For the views representative of modern
psychology, I shall turn to William James and quote him at some length to show
the wide divergence in the two points of view. The trouble starts when the
Freudian psychologists on the one side, behaviorists on the other,
transpersonal on the third, anthropologists on the fourth, physicists on the
fifth, philosophers on the sixth, theologians on the seventh, the laity on the
eighth, the Vedantists on the ninth, the occultists on the tenth and, to crown
it all, the mystics themselves on the eleventh, express highly divergent views
on the same phenomenon, using all the embellishments of language and the
resources of intellect to make their point, without even one calling in for
evidence the one single witness of all the happenings in this historically
ageless scene. Not one of them even mentions the brain.
"The last aspect of religious life which remains for me to
touch upon," writes James, "is the fact that its manifestations so
frequently connect themselves with the subconscious part of our existence. You
may remember what I said in my opening lecture about the presence of the
psychopathic temperament in religious biography. You will in point of fact
hardly find a religious leader of any kind in whose life there is no record of
automatisms. I speak not merely of savage priests and prophets, whose followers
regard automatic utterance and action as by itself tantamount to inspiration, I
speak of leaders of thought and subjects of intellectualized experience. Saint
Paul had his visions, his ecstasies, his gift of tongues, small as was the
importance he attached to the latter. The whole array of Christian saints and
heresiarchs, including the greatest, the Bernards, the Loyolas, the Luthers, the
Foxes, the Wesleys, had their visions, voices, rapt conditions, guiding
impressions and 'openings.' They had these things because they had exalted
sensibility, and to such things persons of exalted sensibility are liable. In
such liability there lie, however, consequences for theology. Beliefs are
strengthened wherever automatisms corroborate them. Incursions from beyond the
transmarginal region have a peculiar power to increase conviction. The inchoate
sense of presence is infinitely stronger than conception, but strong as it may
be, it is seldom equal to the evidence of hallucination. Saints who actually
see or hear their Savior reach the acme of assurance. Motor automatism though
rarer is, if possible, even more convincing than sensations. The subjects here
actually feel themselves played upon by powers beyond their will. The evidence
is dynamic; the God or spirit moves the very organs of their body."
"When, in addition to these phenomena of inspiration,"
adds William James, we take religious mysticism into account, when we recall
the striking and sudden unification of a discordant self which we saw in
conversion, and when we review the extravagant obsessions of tenderness, purity
and self-severity met with in saintliness, we cannot, I think, avoid the
conclusion that in religion we have a department of human nature with unusually
close relations to the transmarginal or subliminal region. If the word
'subliminal' is offensive to any of you, as smelling too much of psychical
research or other aberrations, call it by any other name, to distinguish it
from the level of full sunlit consciousness. Call this latter the A-region of
personality, if you care to, and call the other the B-region. The B-region,
then, is obviously the larger part of each of us, for it is the abode of
everything that is latent and the reservoir of everything that passes
unrecorded or unobserved. It contains, for example, such things as all our
momentarily inactive memories, and it harbors the springs of all our obscurely
motive passions, impulses, likes, dislikes and prejudices. Our intuitions,
hypotheses, fancies, superstitions, persuasions, convictions, and in general,
all our non-rational operations, come from it. It is the source of our dreams,
and apparently they may return to it. In it arise whatever mystical experiences
we may have, and our automatisms, sensory or motor; our life in hypnotic and
'hypnoid' conditions, if we are subjects of such conditions; our delusions,
fixed ideas, and hysterical accidents, if we are hysteric subjects; our
supra-normal cognitions, if such there be, and if we are telepathic subjects.
It is also the fountainhead of such that feeds our religion. In persons deep in
the religious life, as we have now abundantly seen--and this is my
conclusion--the door into this region seems unusually wide open; at any rate,
experiences making their entrance through that door have had emphatic influence
in shaping religious history."
This is where we land at the end--the bottomless hollow of the
unconscious, the sub-conscious, below-the-surface, transmarginal and subliminal
mind. This is the hidden region of our personality which, they say, stalks on
the stage in dreams, hypnotic and somnambulistic conditions, in hysteria and
insanity, in genius and inspiration, in mediumistic displays and extrasensory
perception, in possession, obsession and fixations, in cracks, twists and kinks
in the brain; in fact, in all the abnormal, paranormal, extraordinary or
inexplicable conditions of the mind.
But has anyone explained why in some it leads to nightmares, in
some to happy dreams, in some to a mixture of the two and in some to dreamless
sleep? Why some are somnambulists, others not; why some are suggestible and
more intractable; why, in some, it leads to the highest purity and nobility of
character, as in mystics and, in some, to revolting compulsions or horrible
perversions; which make them act more like brutes than human beings; why in
some it leads to the horrors of insanity and in some to the joy of creation?
What rational solution is this that leaves everything unexplained? To say
religion and religious experience come from the unconscious is to shift the
venue to another compartment of the same mind. But, whether from this
compartment or that, mind is the bastion from which these incursions and
invasions, insidious or sudden, come. This we know, but how?
Were we to believe implicitly the saga of the 'unconscious,' the
suggestion would be irresistible that we harbor in our interior the arch-fiend
himself, and fall victim to his machinations every moment of our lives. He
turns into psychopaths the rare few who have the Vision of God, into lunatics
the handful who create or discover new treasures for the race, shocks the pure
and innocent in dreams or maddens the good and gentle with appalling fear in
wakefulness! Where is the man who can truthfully declare that he has subdued
this invincible giant? Who has taken a census yet or alleviated the anguish of
myriads who watch daily with horror, grief or shock the unpredictable obliquities
of their own mind? Does all this cart-load of fears, sorrows and sins rumble
out of the cavernous 'unconscious' or does it symbolize a slice of the torment
reserved for rebellious man for partaking of the forbidden fruit?
Written by: Gopi Krishna
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