|
These
two characters will entitle any state to be called mystical, in the sense in
which I use the word. Two other
qualities are less sharply marked, but are usually found. These are:--
3.
Transiency.--Mystical states cannot be sustained for long.
Except in rare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two,
seems to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day. Often, when faded, their quality can but imperfectly be
reproduced in memory; but when they recur it is recognized; and from one
recurrence to another it is susceptible of continuous development in what is
felt as inner richness and importance.
4.
Passivity.--Although the oncoming of mystical states may be
facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the attention,
or going through certain bodily performances, or in other ways which manuals
of mysticism prescribe; yet when the characteristic sort of consciousness
once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and
indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.
This latter peculiarity connects mystical states with certain
definite phenomena of secondary or alternative personality, such as
prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance.
When these latter conditions are well pronounced, however, there may
be no recollection whatever of the phenomenon, and it may have no
significance for the subject's usual inner life, to which, as it were, it
makes a mere interruption. Mystical states, strictly so-called, are never merely
interruptive. Some memory of
their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance.
They modify the inner life of the subject between the times of their
recurrence. Sharp divisions in
this region are, however, difficult to make, and we find all sorts of
gradations and mixtures.
These
four characteristics are sufficient to mark out a group of states of
consciousness peculiar enough to deserve a special name and to call for
careful study. Let it then be
called the mystical group. Our
next step should be to gain acquaintance with some typical examples.
Professional mystics at the height of their development have often
elaborately organized experiences and a philosophy based thereupon.
But you remember what I said in my first lecture:
phenomena are best understood when placed within their series,
studied in their germ and in their over-ripe decay, and compared with their
exaggerated and degenerated kindred. The
range of mystical experience is very wide, much too wide for us to cover in
the time at our disposal. Yet
the method of serial study is so essential for interpretation that if we
really wish to reach conclusions we must use it.
I will begin, therefore, with phenomena which claim no special
religious significance, and end with those of which the religious
pretensions are extreme.
The
simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened
sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps
over one. "I've heard that said all my life," we exclaim,
"but I never realized its full meaning until now."
"When a fellow-monk," said Luther, "one day repeated
the words of the Creed: 'I
believe in the forgiveness of sins,' I saw the Scripture in an entirely new
light; and straightway I felt as if I were born anew.
It was as if I had found the door of paradise thrown wide
open."[226] This sense of deeper significance is not confined to
rational propositions. Single
words,[227] and conjunctions of words, effects of light on land and sea,
odors and musical sounds, all bring it when the mind is tuned aright. Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of
passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as
they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of
life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them.
The words have now perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us; but
lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they
fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and
inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit.
We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts
according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.
[226]
Newman's Securus judicat orbis terrarum is another instance.
[227]
"Mesopotamia" is the stock comic instance.--An excellent Old
German lady, who had done some traveling in her day, used to describe to me
her Sehnsucht that she might yet visit "Philadelphia," whose
wondrous name had always haunted her imagination.
Of John Foster it is said that "single words (as chalcedony), or
the names of ancient heroes, had a mighty fascination over him.
'At any time the word hermit was enough to transport him.' The words
woods and forests would produce the most powerful emotion."
Foster's Life, by Ryland, New York, 1846, p. 3.
A
more pronounced step forward on the mystical ladder is found in an extremely
frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling, namely, which sometimes sweeps
over us, of having "been here before," as if at some indefinite
past time, in just this place, with just these people, we were already
saying just these things. As
Tennyson writes:
"Moreover, something is or seems
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams--
"Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where;
Such as no language may declare."[228]
[228]
The Two Voices. In a letter to
Mr. B. P. Blood, Tennyson reports of himself as follows:--
"I
have never had any revelations through anaesthetics, but a kind of waking
trance--this for lack of a better word--I have frequently had, quite up from
boyhood, when I have been all alone. This
has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all
at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of
individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into
boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest
of the surest, utterly beyond words--where death was an almost laughable
impossibility--the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no
extinction, but the only true life. I
am ashamed of my feeble description. Have
I not said the state is utterly beyond words?"
Professor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this
condition: "By God Almighty! there is no delusion in the matter! It
is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with
absolute clearness of mind." Memoirs
of Alfred Tennyson, ii. 473.
Sir
James Crichton-Browne has given the technical name of "dreamy
states" to these sudden invasions of vaguely reminiscent
consciousness.[229] They bring a sense of mystery and of the metaphysical
duality of things, and the feeling of an enlargement of perception which
seems imminent but which never completes itself.
In Dr. Crichton-Browne's opinion they connect themselves with the
perplexed and scared disturbances of self-consciousness which occasionally
precede epileptic attacks. I
think that this learned alienist takes a rather absurdly alarmist view of an
intrinsically insignificant phenomenon.
He follows it along the downward ladder, to insanity; our path
pursues the upward ladder chiefly. The
divergence shows how important it is to neglect no part of a phenomenon's
connections, for we make it appear admirable or dreadful according to the
context by which we set it off.
[229]
The Lancet, July 6 and 13, 1895, reprinted as the Cavendish Lecture, on
Dreamy Mental States, London, Bailliere, 1895.
They have been a good deal discussed of late by psychologists.
See, for example, Bernard-Leroy:
L'Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, Paris, 1898.
Somewhat
deeper plunges into mystical consciousness are met with in yet other dreamy
states. Such feelings as these
which Charles Kingsley describes are surely far from being uncommon,
especially in youth:--
"When
I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that
everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it.
And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp
amounts to indescribable awe sometimes. . . .
Have you not felt that your real soul was imperceptible to your
mental vision, except in a few hallowed moments?"[230]
[230]
Charles Kingsley's Life, i. 55, quoted by Inge: Christian Mysticism, London, 1899, p. 341.
A
much more extreme state of mystical consciousness is described by J. A.
Symonds; and probably more persons than we suspect could give parallels to
it from their own experience.
"Suddenly,"
writes Symonds, "at church, or in company, or when I was reading, and
always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, I felt the approach of the
mood. Irresistibly it took
possession of my mind and will, lasted what seemed an eternity, and
disappeared in a series of rapid sensations which resembled the awakening
from anaesthetic influence. One
reason why I disliked this kind of trance was that I could not describe it
to myself. I cannot even now find words to render it intelligible.
It consisted in a gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of
space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience which
seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self. In proportion as these
conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the sense of an
underlying or essential consciousness acquired intensity.
At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute, abstract Self.
The universe became without form and void of content.
But Self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness, feeling the
most poignant doubt about reality, ready, as it seemed, to find existence
break as breaks a bubble round about it.
And what then? The apprehension of a coming dissolution, the grim conviction
that this state was the last state of the conscious Self, the sense that I
had followed the last thread of being to the verge of the abyss, and had
arrived at demonstration of eternal Maya or illusion, stirred or seemed to
stir me up again. The return to
ordinary conditions of sentient existence began by my first recovering the
power of touch, and then by the gradual though rapid influx of familiar
impressions and diurnal interests. At
last I felt myself once more a human being; and though the riddle of what is
meant by life remained unsolved I was thankful for this return from the
abyss--this deliverance from so awful an initiation into the mysteries of
skepticism.
"This
trance recurred with diminishing frequency until I reached the age of
twenty-eight. It served to
impress upon my growing nature the phantasmal unreality of all the
circumstances which contribute to a merely phenomenal consciousness. Often
have I asked myself with anguish, on waking from that formless state of
denuded, keenly sentient being, Which is the unreality--the trance of fiery,
vacant, apprehensive, skeptical Self from which I issue, or these
surrounding phenomena and habits which veil that inner Self and build a self
of flesh-and- blood conventionality? Again,
are men the factors of some dream, the dream-like unsubstantiality of which
they comprehend at such eventful moments?
What would happen if the final stage of the trance were
reached?"[231]
[231]
H. F. Brown: J. A. Symonds. a
Biography, London, 1895, pp. 29-31, abridged.
In
a recital like this there is certainly something suggestive of
pathology.[232] The next step
into mystical states carries us into a realm that public opinion and ethical
philosophy have long since branded as pathological, though private practice
and certain lyric strains of poetry seem still to bear witness to its
ideality. I refer to the
consciousness produced by intoxicants and anaesthetics, especially by
alcohol. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its
power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed
to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands,
unites, and says yes. It is in
fact the great exciter of the YES function in man.
It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the
radiant core. It makes him for
the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.
To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony
concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy
of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as
excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier
phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning.
The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and
our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger
whole.
[232]
Crichton-Browne expressly says that Symonds's "highest nerve centres
were in some degree enfeebled or damaged by these dreamy mental states which
afflicted him so grievously."
Symonds was, however, a perfect monster of many-sided cerebral
efficiency, and his critic gives no objective grounds whatever for his
strange opinion, save that Symonds complained occasionally, as all
susceptible and ambitious men complain, of lassitude and uncertainty as to
his life's mission.
Nitrous
oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with
air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree.
Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler.
This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming
to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they
prove to be the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless,
the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more
than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a
genuine metaphysical revelation.
Some
years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide
intoxication, and reported them in print.
One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my
impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken.
It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as
we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it,
parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of
consciousness entirely different. We
may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the
requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness,
definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of
application and adaptation. No
account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these
other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
How to regard them is the question--for they are so discontinuous
with ordinary consciousness. Yet
they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a
region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature
closing of our accounts with reality. Looking
back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to
which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance.
The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation.
It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and
conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity.
Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same
genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the
genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself.
This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of common
logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority. I feel as if it must
mean something, something like what the hegelian philosophy means, if one
could only lay hold of it more clearly.
Those who have ears to hear, let them hear; to me the living sense of
its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind.[233]
[233]
What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected Being with all
its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his whole philosophy,
must have come from the prominence in his consciousness of mystical moods
like this, in most persons kept subliminal?
The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the mystical level and the
Aufgabe of making it articulate was surely set to Hegel's intellect by
mystical feeling.
I
just now spoke of friends who believe in the anaesthetic revelation.
For them too it is a monistic insight, in which the OTHER in its
various forms appears absorbed into the One.
"Into
this pervading genius," writes one of them, "we pass, forgetting
and forgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God. There is no higher, no
deeper, no other, than the life in which we are founded. 'The One remains, the many change and pass;' and each and
every one of us IS the One that remains. . . . This is the ultimatum. . . .
As sure as being--whence is all our care--so sure is content, beyond
duplexity, antithesis, or trouble, where I have triumphed in a solitude that
God is not above."[234]
[234]
Benjamin Paul Blood: The
Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874,
pp. 35, 36. Mr. Blood has made
several attempts to adumbrate the anaesthetic revelation, in pamphlets of
rare literary distinction, privately printed and distributed by himself at
Amsterdam. Xenos Clark, a
philosopher, who died young at Amherst in the '80's, much lamented by those
who knew him, was also impressed by the revelation.
"In the first place," he once wrote to me, "Mr. Blood
and I agree that the revelation is, if anything non-emotional.
It is utterly flat. It
is, as Mr. Blood says, 'the one sole and sufficient insight why, or not why,
but how, the present is pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by the
vacuity of the future. Its
inevitableness defeats all attempts at stopping or accounting for it.
It is all precedence and presupposition, and questioning is in regard
to it forever too late. It is
an initiation of the past.' The real secret would be the formula by which
the 'now' keeps exfoliating out of itself, yet never escapes.
What is it, indeed, that keeps existence exfoliating?
The formal being of anything, the logical definition of it, is
static. For mere logic every question contains its own answer--we
simply fill the hole with the dirt we dug out.
Why are twice two four? Because,
in fact, four is twice two. Thus
logic finds in life no propulsion, only a momentum.
It goes because it is a-going. But the revelation adds:
it goes because it is and WAS a-going.
You walk, as it were, round yourself in the revelation.
Ordinary philosophy is like a hound hunting his own tail.
The more he hunts the farther he has to go, and his nose never
catches up with his heels, because it is forever ahead of them.
So the present is already a foregone conclusion, and I am ever too
late to understand it. But at
the moment of recovery from anaesthesis, just then, BEFORE STARTING ON LIFE,
I catch, so to speak, a glimpse of my heels, a glimpse of the eternal
process just in the act of starting. The
truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished before we set
out; and the real end of philosophy is accomplished, not when we arrive at,
but when we remain in, our destination (being already there)--which may
occur vicariously in this life when we cease our intellectual questioning.
That is why there is a smile upon the face of the revelation, as we view it.
It tells us that we are forever half a second too late-- that's all.
'You could kiss your own lips, and have all the fun to yourself,' it
says, if you only knew the trick. It
would be perfectly easy if they would just stay there till you got round to
them. Why don't you manage it somehow?"
Dialectically
minded readers of this farrago will at least recognize the region of thought
of which Mr. Clark writes, as familiar.
In his latest pamphlet, "Tennyson's Trances and the Anaesthetic
Revelation," Mr. Blood describes its value for life as follows:--
"The
Anaesthetic Revelation is the Initiation of Man into the Immemorial Mystery
of the Open Secret of Being, revealed as the Inevitable Vortex of
Continuity. Inevitable is the
word. Its motive is
inherent--it is what has to be. It
is not for any love or hate, nor for joy nor sorrow, nor good nor ill.
End, beginning, or purpose, it knows not of.
"It
affords no particular of the multiplicity and variety of things but it fills
appreciation of the historical and the sacred with a secular and intimately
personal illumination of the nature and motive of existence, which then
seems reminiscent--as if it should have appeared, or shall yet appear, to
every participant thereof.
"Although
it is at first startling in its solemnity, it becomes directly such a matter
of course--so old-fashioned, and so akin to proverbs that it inspires
exultation rather than fear, and a sense of safety, as identified with the
aboriginal and the universal. But
no words may express the imposing certainty of the patient that he is
realizing the primordial, Adamic surprise of Life.
"Repetition
of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it could not possibly be
otherwise. The subject resumes
his normal consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its
occurrence, and to try to formulate its baffling import--with only this
consolatory afterthought: that
he has known the oldest truth, and that he has done with human theories as
to the origin, meaning, or destiny of the race.
He is beyond instruction in 'spiritual things.'
"The
lesson is one of central safety: the
Kingdom is within. All days are
judgment days: but there can be
no climacteric purpose of eternity, nor any scheme of the whole.
The astronomer abridges the row of bewildering figures by increasing
his unit of measurement: so may we reduce the distracting multiplicity of
things to the unity for which each of us stands.
"This
has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it.
In my first printed mention of it I declared:
'The world is no more the alien terror that was taught me.
Spurning the cloud-grimed and still sultry battlements whence so
lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray gull lifts her wing against the
nightfall, and takes the dim leagues with a fearless eye.' And now, after
twenty-seven years of this experience, the wing is grayer, but the eye is
fearless still, while I renew and doubly emphasize that declaration.
I know--as having known--the meaning of Existence:
the sane centre of the universe-- at once the wonder and the
assurance of the soul--for which the speech of reason has as yet no name but
the Anaesthetic Revelation." --I have considerably abridged the
quotation.
This
has the genuine religious mystic ring! I just now quoted J. A. Symonds.
He also records a mystical experience with chloroform, as follows:--
'After
the choking and stifling had passed away, I seemed at first in a state of
utter blankness; then came flashes of intense light, alternating with
blackness, and with a keen vision of what was going on in the room around
me, but no sensation of touch. I thought that I was near death; when,
suddenly, my soul became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me,
handling me, so to speak, in an intense personal present reality.
I felt him streaming in like light upon me. . . . I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt. Then, as I gradually awoke from the influence of the
anaesthetics, the old sense of my relation to the world began to return, the
new sense of my relation to God began to fade.
I suddenly leapt to my feet on the chair where I was sitting, and
shrieked out, 'It is too horrible, it is too horrible, it is too horrible,'
meaning that I could not bear this disillusionment. Then I flung myself on
the ground, and at last awoke covered with blood, calling to the two
surgeons (who were frightened), 'Why did you not kill me?
Why would you not let me die?' Only think of it.
To have felt for that long dateless ecstasy of vision the very God,
in all purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and then to find
that I had after all had no revelation, but that I had been tricked by the
abnormal excitement of my brain.
"Yet,
this question remains, Is it possible that the inner sense of reality which
succeeded, when my flesh was dead to impressions from without, to the
ordinary sense of physical relations, was not a delusion but an actual
experience? Is it possible that
I, in that moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always felt,
the undemonstrable but irrefragable certainty of God?"[235]
[235]
Op. cit., pp. 78-80, abridged. I
subjoin, also abridging it, another interesting anaesthetic revelation
communicated to me in manuscript by a friend in England.
The subject, a gifted woman, was taking ether for a surgical
operation.
"I
wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I remembered having
heard it said that people 'learn through suffering,' and in view of what I
was seeing, the inadequacy of this saying struck me so much that I said,
aloud, 'to suffer IS to learn.'
"With
that I became unconscious again, and my last dream immediately preceded my
real coming to. It only lasted
a few seconds, and was most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear
in words.
"A
great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind
of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway.
The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people
close to one another, and I was one of them.
He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash
came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel.
I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was
grinding his own life up out of my pain.
Then I saw that what he had been trying with all his might to do was
to CHANGE HIS COURSE, to BEND the line of lightning to which he was tied, in
the direction in which he wanted to go.
I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that he would
succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me
more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this,
as he passed, I SAW. I
understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one
could remember while retaining sanity.
The angle was an obtuse angle, and I remember thinking as I woke that
had he made it a right or acute angle, I should have both suffered and
'seen' still more, and should probably have died.
"He
went on and I came to. In that
moment the whole of my life passed before me, including each little
meaningless piece of distress, and I UNDERSTOOD them.
THIS was what it had all meant, THIS was the piece of work it had all
been contributing to do. I did
not see God's purpose, I only saw his intentness and his entire
relentlessness towards his means. He
thought no more of me than a man thinks of hurting a cork when he is opening
wine, or hurting a cartridge when he is firing.
And yet, on waking, my first feeling was, and it came with tears, 'Domine
non sum digna,' for I had been lifted into a position for which I was too
small. I realized that in that
half hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and purely than I had
ever done in my life before, or than I am capable of desiring to do. I was the means of his achieving and revealing something, I
know not what or to whom, and that, to the exact extent of my capacity for
suffering.
"While
regaining consciousness, I wondered why, since I had gone so deep, I had
seen nothing of what the saints call the LOVE of God, nothing but his
relentlessness. And then I
heard an answer, which I could only just catch, saying, 'Knowledge and Love
are One, and the MEASURE is suffering'--I give the words as they came to me.
With that I came finally to (into what seemed a dream world compared with
the reality of what I was leaving), and I saw that what would be called the
'cause' of my experience was a slight operation under insufficient ether, in
a bed pushed up against a window, a common city window in a common city
street. If I had to formulate a
few of the things I then caught a glimpse of, they would run somewhat as
follows:--
"The
eternal necessity of suffering and its eternal vicariousness. The veiled and
incommunicable nature of the worst sufferings;--the passivity of genius, how
it is essentially instrumental and defenseless, moved, not moving, it must
do what it does;--the impossibility of discovery without its
price;--finally, the excess of what the suffering 'seer' or genius pays over
what his generation gains. (He
seems like one who sweats his life out to earn enough to save a district
from famine, and just as he staggers back, dying and satisfied, bringing a
lac of rupees to buy grain with, God lifts the lac away, dropping ONE rupee,
and says, 'That you may give them. That
you have earned for them. The
rest is for ME.') I perceived also in a way never to be forgotten, the
excess of what we see over what we can demonstrate.
"And
so on!--these things may seem to you delusions, or truisms; but for me they
are dark truths, and the power to put them into even such words as these has
been given me by an ether dream."
With
this we make connection with religious mysticism pure and simple.
Symonds's question takes us back to those examples which you will
remember my quoting in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen, of sudden
realization of the immediate presence of God.
The phenomenon in one shape or another is not uncommon.
"I
know," writes Mr. Trine, "an officer on our police force who has
told me that many times when off duty, and on his way home in the evening,
there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization of his oneness with
this Infinite Power, and this Spirit of Infinite Peace so takes hold of and
so fills him, that it seems as if his feet could hardly keep to the
pavement, so buoyant and so exhilarated does he become by reason of this
inflowing tide."[236]
[236]
In Tune with the Infinite, p. 137.
Certain
aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar power of awakening such mystical
moods.[237] Most of the striking cases which I have collected have occurred
out of doors. Literature has
commemorated this fact in many passages of great beauty--this extract, for
example, from Amiel's Journal Intime:--
[237]
The larger God may then swallow up the smaller one. I take this from Starbuck's manuscript collection:--
"I
never lost the consciousness of the presence of God until I stood at the
foot of the Horseshoe Falls, Niagara. Then
I lost him in the immensity of what I saw.
I also lost myself, feeling that I was an atom too small for the
notice of Almighty God."
I
subjoin another similar case from Starbuck's collection:--
"In
that time the consciousness of God's nearness came to me sometimes.
I say God, to describe what is indescribable.
A presence, I might say, yet that is too suggestive of personality,
and the moments of which I speak did not hold the consciousness of a
personality, but something in myself made me feel myself a part of something
bigger than I, that was controlling. I
felt myself one with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in
Nature. I exulted in the mere
fact of existence, of being a part of it all--the drizzling rain, the
shadows of the clouds, the tree-trunks, and so on.
In the years following, such moments continued to come, but I wanted
them constantly. I knew so well the satisfaction of losing self in a
perception of supreme power and love, that I was unhappy because that
perception was not constant." The cases quoted in my third lecture, pp.
65, 66, 69, are still better ones of this type.
In her essay, The Loss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol.
lxxxv. p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer explains that the vanishing of the
sense of self, and the feeling of immediate unity with the object, is due to
the disappearance, in these rapturous experiences, of the motor adjustments
which habitually intermediate between the constant background of
consciousness (which is the Self) and the object in the foreground, whatever
it may be. I must refer the
reader to the highly instructive article, which seems to me to throw light
upon the psychological conditions, though it fails to account for the
rapture or the revelation-value of the experience in the Subject's eyes.
"Shall
I ever again have any of those prodigious reveries which sometimes came to
me in former days? One day, in
youth, at sunrise, sitting in the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; and again
in the mountains, under the noonday sun, above Lavey, lying at the foot of a
tree and visited by three butterflies; once more at night upon the shingly
shore of the Northern Ocean, my back upon the sand and my vision ranging
through the Milky Way;--such grand and spacious, immortal, cosmogonic
reveries, when one reaches to the stars, when one owns the infinite!
Moments divine, ecstatic hours; in which our thought flies from world
to world, pierces the great enigma, breathes with a respiration broad,
tranquil, and deep as the respiration of the ocean, serene and limitless as
the blue firmament; . . . instants of irresistible intuition in which one
feels one's self great as the universe, and calm as a god. . . . What hours, what memories! The vestiges they leave behind are
enough to fill us with belief and enthusiasm, as if they were visits of the
Holy Ghost."[238]
[238]
Op cit., i. 43-44
Here
is a similar record from the memoirs of that interesting German idealist,
Malwida von Meysenbug:--
"I
was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating
and reconciling; and now again, as once before in distant days in the Alps
of Dauphine, I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable
ocean, symbol of the Infinite. I
felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer
really is: to return from the
solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is,
to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one
imperishable. Earth,
heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world-encircling harmony.
It was as if the chorus of all the great who had ever lived were
about me. I felt myself one
with them, and it appeared as if I heard their greeting:
'Thou too belongest to the company of those who overcome.'"[239]
[239]
Memoiren einer Idealistin, Ste Auflage, 1900, iii. 166.
For years she had been unable to pray, owing to materialistic belief.
The
well known passage from Walt Whitman is a classical expression of this
sporadic type of mystical experience.
"I
believe in you, my Soul . . . Loaf
with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat;. . .
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge
that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my
own, And that all the men
ever born are also my brothers and the
women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love."[240]
[240]
Whitman in another place expresses in a quieter way what was probably with
him a chronic mystical perception: "There
is," he writes, "apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of
every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without
argument, frequently without what is called education (though I think it the
goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the
absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness
this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettiedness,
we call THE WORLD; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which
holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events,
however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the
hunter. [Of] such soul-sight
and root-centre for the mind mere optimism explains only the surface." Whitman charges it against Carlyle that he lacked this
perception. Specimen Days and
Collect, Philadelphia, 1882, p. 174.
I
could easily give more instances, but one will suffice. I take it from the Autobiography of J. Trevor.[241]
[241]
My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 268, 269, abridged.
"One
brilliant Sunday morning, my wife and boys went to the Unitarian Chapel in
Macclesfield. I felt it
impossible to accompany them--as though to leave the sunshine on the hills,
and go down there to the chapel, would be for the time an act of spiritual
suicide. And I felt such need
for new inspiration and expansion in my life.
So, very reluctantly and sadly, I left my wife and boys to go down
into the town, while I went further up into the hills with my stick and my
dog. In the loveliness of the
morning, and the beauty of the hills and valleys, I soon lost my sense of
sadness and regret. For nearly
an hour I walked along the road to the 'Cat and Fiddle,' and then returned.
On the way back, suddenly, without warning, I felt that I was in
Heaven--an inward state of peace and joy and assurance indescribably
intense, accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow of light,
as though the external condition had brought about the internal effect--a
feeling of having passed beyond the body, though the scene around me stood
out more clearly and as if nearer to me than before, by reason of the
illumination in the midst of which I seemed to be placed.
This deep emotion lasted, though with decreasing strength, until I
reached home, and for some time after, only gradually passing away."
The
writer adds that having had further experiences of a similar sort, he now
knows them well.
"The
spiritual life," he writes, "justifies itself to those who live
it; but what can we say to those who do not understand? This, at least, we can say, that it is a life whose
experiences are proved real to their possessor, because they remain with him
when brought closest into contact with the objective realities of life.
Dreams cannot stand this test. We
wake from them to find that they are but dreams.
Wanderings of an overwrought brain do not stand this test.
These highest experiences that I have had of God's presence have been
rare and brief--flashes of consciousness which have compelled me to exclaim
with surprise--God is HERE!--or conditions of exaltation and insight, less
intense, and only gradually passing away.
I have severely questioned the worth of these moments.
To no soul have I named them, lest I should be building my life and
work on mere phantasies of the brain. But
I find that, after every questioning and test, they stand out to-day as the
most real experiences of my life, and experiences which have explained and
justified and unified all past experiences and all past growth.
Indeed, their reality and their far-reaching significance are ever
becoming more clear and evident. When
they came, I was living the fullest, strongest, sanest, deepest life.
I was not seeking them. What
I was seeking, with resolute determination, was to live more intensely my
own life, as against what I knew would be the adverse judgment of the world.
It was in the most real seasons that the Real Presence came, and I
was aware that I was immersed in the infinite ocean of God."[242]
[242]
Op. cit., pp. 256, 257, abridged.
Even
the least mystical of you must by this time be convinced of the existence of
mystical moments as states of consciousness of an entirely specific quality,
and of the deep impression which they make on those who have them.
A Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. R. M. Bucke, gives to the more
distinctly characterized of these phenomena the name of cosmic
consciousness. "Cosmic
consciousness in its more striking instances is not," Dr. Bucke says,
"simply an expansion or extension of the self-conscious mind with which
we are all familiar, but the superaddition of a function as distinct from
any possessed by the average man as SELF-consciousness is distinct from any
function possessed by one of the higher animals."
"The
prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a consciousness of the
cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe. Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an
intellectual enlightenment which alone would place the individual on a new
plane of existence--would make him almost a member of a new species.
To this is added a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable
feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral
sense, which is fully as striking, and more important than is the enhanced
intellectual power. With these
come what may be called a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal
life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that
he has it already."[243]
[243]
Cosmic Consciousness: a study
in the evolution of the human Mind, Philadelphia, 1901, p. 2.
It
was Dr. Bucke's own experience of a typical onset of cosmic consciousness in
his own person which led him to investigate it in others. He has printed his conclusions In a highly interesting
volume, from which I take the following account of what occurred to him:--
"I
had spent the evening in a great city, with two friends, reading and
discussing poetry and philosophy. We
parted at midnight. I had a
long drive in a hansom to my lodging. My
mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions called
up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful.
I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually
thinking, but letting ideas, images, and emotions flow of themselves, as it
were, through my mind. All at
once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored
cloud. For an instant I thought
of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the
next, I knew that the fire was within myself.
Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of
immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual
illumination impossible to describe. Among
other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe
is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence;
I became conscious in myself of eternal life.
It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a
consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are
immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all
things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation
principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that
the happiness of each and all is in the long run <391> absolutely
certain. The vision lasted a
few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality
of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has
since elapsed. I knew that what
the vision showed was true. I
had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say that consciousness, has
never, even during periods of the deepest depression, been lost."[244]
[244]
Loc. cit., pp. 7, 8. My
quotation follows the privately printed pamphlet which preceded Dr. Bucke's
larger work, and differs verbally a little from the text of the latter.
We
have now seen enough of this cosmic or mystic consciousness, as it comes
sporadically. We must next pass
to its methodical cultivation as an element of the religious life.
Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans, and Christians all have cultivated it
methodically.
In
India, training in mystical insight has been known from time immemorial
under the name of yoga. Yoga
means the experimental union of the individual with the divine. It is based on persevering exercise; and the diet, posture,
breathing, intellectual concentration, and moral discipline vary slightly in
the different systems which teach it. The
yogi, or disciple, who has by these means overcome the obscurations of his
lower nature sufficiently, enters into the condition termed samadhi,
"and comes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever
know." He learns--
"That
the mind itself has a higher state of existence, beyond reason, a
superconscious state, and that when the mind gets to that higher state, then
this knowledge beyond reasoning comes. . . . All the different steps in yoga
are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state or
Samadhi. . . . Just as
unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so there is another work which is
above consciousness, and which, also, is not accompanied with the feeling of
egoism . . . . There is no feeling of I, and yet the mind works, desireless,
free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless.
Then the Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know
ourselves--for Samadhi lies potential in us all--for what we truly are,
free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from the finite, and its contrasts of
good and evil altogether, and identical with the Atman or Universal
Soul."[245]
[245]
My quotations are from Vivekananda, Raja Yoga, London, 1896.
The completest source of information on Yoga is the work translated
by Vihari Lala Mtra: Yoga
Vasishta Maha Ramayana. 4 vols. Calcutta,
1891-99.
The
Vedantists say that one may stumble into superconsciousness sporadically,
without the previous discipline, but it is then impure.
Their test of its purity, like our test of religion's value, is
empirical: its fruits must be
good for life. When a man comes out of Samadhi, they assure us that he
remains "enlightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint, his whole character
changed, his life changed, illumined."[246]
[246]
A European witness, after carefully comparing the results of Yoga with those
of the hypnotic or dreamy states artificially producible by us, says:
"It makes of its true disciples good, healthy, and happy men. .
. . Through the mastery which the yogi attains over his thoughts and his
body, he grows into a 'character.' By the subjection of his impulses and
propensities to his will, and the fixing of the latter upon the ideal of
goodness, he becomes a 'personality' hard to influence by others, and thus
almost the opposite of what we usually imagine a medium so-called, or
psychic subject to be. Karl
Kellner: Yoga:
Eine Skizze, Munchen, 1896, p. 21.
The
Buddhists used the word "samadhi" as well as the Hindus; but
"dhyana" is their special word for higher states of contemplation.
There seem to be four stages recognized in dhyana.
The first stage comes through concentration of the mind upon one
point. It excludes desire, but
not discernment or judgment: it
is still intellectual. In the
second stage the intellectual functions drop off, and the satisfied sense of
unity remains. In the third
stage the satisfaction departs, and indifference begins, along with memory a
self-consciousness. In the
fourth stage the indifference, memory, and self-consciousness are perfected.
[Just what "memory" and "self-consciousness" mean
in this connection is doubtful. They
cannot be the faculties familiar to us in the lower life.] Higher stages
still of contemplation are mentioned--a region where there exists nothing,
and where the mediator says: "There
exists absolutely nothing," and stops. Then he reaches another region
where he says: "There are
neither ideas nor absence of ideas," and stops again.
Then another region where, "having reached the end of both idea
and perception, he stops finally."
This would seem to be, not yet Nirvana, but as close an approach to
it as this life affords.[247]
[247]
I follow the account in C. F. Koeppen:
Die Religion de |
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