Chapter 1 Section 2: The Quest of a Thoroughfare
[p.14] "The essence of a tendency," says Bergson, in one of his sudden and suggestive images, "is to develop like a sheaf, creating by the very fact of its growth divergent directions amongst which its impulse is shared."[1]
The spiritual tendency in man — or perhaps it were better to say the spiritual tendency which appears to be inherent in the very being of all life — has been no exception to this rule. Spreading sheaf-like it has emerged in what seems at first sight to be a myriad diverse forms. In its origin a vague sense of direction, a dim unformulated desire for something other than the "given" world of sense, and in its later growths a conscious anxious seeking, its history forms of course the greater part of the history of religion, philosophy and magic. Confused though it be with elements of fear, and of self-interest, degraded into servitude to the physical will-to-live, yet all veritable expressions of this tendency, this passion for the Absolute and the Eternal, have as their foundation something which we may rightly call mystical. We find them or their traces wherever man has emerged from that state of exclusive attention to the struggle for life which limits his consciousness to the physical sphere. Then at once the attention which had been screwed down to the concrete business of existence dilates, and sets off in one of a million directions upon some adventure of the soul.
[p.15] There are certain characteristics which seem common to all such adventures. Their point of departure is the same: the desire of spirit for the spiritual, the soul's hunger for its home. Their object is the same: the attainment of that home, the achievement of Reality, union with God. Their very definitions of that God have much in common; and behind superficial differences disclose the effort of an exalted intuition to describe one indescribable Fact. He is, says the ancient Hindu, "One Eternal Thinker thinking non-eternal thoughts; who, though One, fulfils the desires of many. The wise, who perceive Him within their self, to them belongs eternal peace." And again, "They who see but One in all the changing manifoldness of this universe, unto them belongs eternal truth: unto none else, unto none else." [2] "Having harkened not unto me but unto the Logos" says the Greek, "it is wise to confess that all things are One."[3] "One God and Father of all who is above all and through all and in you all," says the Christian. [4] "For, as it is said, God is not external to anyone," says the Alexandrian Neoplatonist, in words which seem an echo of St Paul, "but He is present with all things, though they are ignorant that He is so." [5] So the Sufi poet -
"I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one;
One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.
He is the first, He is the last, He is the outward, He is the inward." [6]
So, too, the great Indian mystic of our own day, who seems to have caught and synthesised the vision and ardour of Eastern and Western faiths —
"Life of my life, I shall ever try to keep my body pure, knowing that thy living touch is upon all my limbs...
[p.16]Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well...
Hidden in the heart of things thou art nourishing seeds into sprouts, buds into blossoms, and ripening flowers into fruitfulness." [7]
Yet when we pass from the definition of Divine Reality to discussion of the road on which man's spirit shall travel thereto, we find that in spite of identity of aim — in spite, too, of certain remarkable similarities in method — divergence of direction soon begins to show itself.
As physical life, notwithstanding its countless varieties, the countless paths along which it has cut its way, yet shows one great line of cleavage, so that each of those infinite varieties has has the character of one or the other of two divergent forms — is as we say, "animal" or "vegetable" — so in the last resort we find that the many paths along which Spirit has tried to force an entrance into Reality, can be classed, according to their tendencies, in two great families. We must, however, say of them, as Bergson has said of animal and vegetable life, that "Every effort to provide a rigorous definition of these two kingdoms has always failed. There is not one single property of vegetable life which has not been found, to a certain degree, in certain animals; not one single characteristic trait of the animal which has not been observed in certain species, or at certain epochs of the vegetable world." None the less, in each case these tendencies do represent "divergent directions of an activity that split up as it grew. The difference between them is not a difference of intensity, nor more generally of degree, but of nature"..."Here the world of plants with its fixity and insensibility; there the animals with their mobility and consciousness." [8]
As the plant world has sacrificed one great power inherent in living things — mobility — in order that it may attain to a more intense development in other directions, [p17] so one great branch of the spreading sheaf of spirit tends to forego one aspect of life's heritage, in order that it may participate more completely in that other aspect which alone it accepts as real. We have said that the paradox of Deity, in so far as it is apprehended by human intuition and love, appears to us as a vast, all-encompassing, all-penetrating Reality which is both transcendant and immanent, static and dynamic, changeless yet changeful, ineffable yet personal, "Eternal Rest" and "Eternal Work" in respect of the soul and of the perceived universe; in essence the still and unconditioned One, in action the unresting and conditioned flux. "Supreme Being and Supreme Life," said Augustine. From this dual manifestation of God, which demands for its full apprehension a dual movement on the part of man, one line of spiritual life selects the utterly transcendant aspect — pure Being — as the only Reality, the objective towards which it is destined to return. From the rich possibilities of human nature it again selects one aspect — its Being — as real. For it the true Self is as unconditioned as the absolute; it does not struggle for expression, it has no qualities, it merely Is. Hence the soul only attains to reality when all will and all character have been eliminated.[9] As the normal man's consciousness is held down, by his attention to life, to the narrow contemplation of the concrete, this mystic's spiritual consciousness is held down to the contemplation of an unconditioned reality. Refusing all else, it pours itself out in a single state, of which the intensity is progressively enhanced by concentration, by the cutting off of all contacts with the "unreal" world of things.
This proceeding constitutes that Via Negativa which is too well known in the annals of mysticism: the attempt to attain Being by the total rejection of Becoming, to perfect Contemplation by the refusal of Action. Those [p.18] who choose this road to transcendance go up alone to meet God on the mountain; but they do not bring back any tidings of joy for the race. The tendency which they represent is, of course, found in its most characteristic form in Hindu mysticism of the philosophic type; though pure — i.e. non-Christian — Neoplatonism, and the exaggerated forms of quietism which have troubled the mystical history of Europe, belong in essence to the same great division of spiritual life.
As the fungi were called by Bergson the "abortive children of the vegetable world,"[10], so the extreme types produced along this line of development might be called the abortive children of the spiritual world. [With similar accuracy. If Bergson is uncomfortable with what does not fit his model of a dual form world, so is Miss Underhill uncomfortable with what does not precisely fit her model. She deals with her discomfort by mischaracterising these forms as abortive without effectively demonstrating that there is a true mysticism which answers "yes" to a whole series of questions, nor does she in fact establish that the questions reflect suitable or essential criteria. DCW] Their different varieties are "so many blind alleys" down which Life has run on her instinctive quest of transcendance, only to find an impasse where she looked for a thoroughfare. If we wish to demonstrate this, we need but look once more at Life in its wholeness — not merely natural, human, or intellectual life, but the whole mighty and invisible stream of which these things are manifestations, the totality of the Flux — and then ask: What kind of relation does that kind of life which is the ultimate objective of pure Indian, or even of Neoplatonic mysticism, bear to this totality? Does it exhibit the character of life; does it carry up its highest powers to new conquests? Does it grow, create? Can it be called "movement itself"? Does it tend towards the production of free acts, towards ever deepening correspondence with rich and varied levels of reality?
Consider first the way in which our mental life proceeds.
We live upon the physical plane, are kept in touch with the outer world, by means of that faculty in us — not always consciously exercised — which we call our "attention to life". Attention makes the bridge betwen ourselves and that "somewhat" not ourselves, which we [p.19] know as the world of things. A rich, thick, Universe, charged like a Bank Holiday crowd with infinite and unguessed possibilities of sight, sound and smell, waits at our door; and waits for the most part in vain. Attention keeps the turnstile, rejects the many and admits the few. The direction to which the turnstile is set conditions the aspect of the world which we are to know; the pace at which it works ensures that a certain number of sense-impressions shall be received by us, deliver their message and set up responsive movements on our part. The give-and-take of incoming feeling or sense impression, and outgoing action or response — though feeling, pure perception, has passed through the cerebral sorting house, and offers us only a selection of all that there is to feel — this broadly speaking, seems to be the process of our normal mental life, insofar as it consists in the maintenance of a correspondence with the physical world.[11]
[Underhill maintains that spiritual life is not just analogical with physical life: we pay its phenomena attention, perceive and respond to them with the same faculties and organs that enable us to attend, experience and respond to physical existence and filter them out in the same way we filter out the majority of sense impressions. Other schools of thought believe that for every one of the multiple levels of superphysical phenomena there exists a set of organs in a corresponding "subtle body", for the most part inactive, yet solely capable of attending to, experiencing and responding to material at that level. DCW]
So, too, with the life of the spirit. Though lived upon higher levels, it is not further removed from action: only the form of its action, the nature of its correspondences, is changed with that change of rhythm which makes us free of a wider universe. still it is Life that is at work in us; and Life, though here she seems to break forth into something strangely new, exercising to the full her inherent freedom and spontaneity, remains at bottom true to her own methods. Her object here is the transcending of the merely physical, the attaining of a foothold in Eternity; and Attention, Perception, Response must still be the means by which she moves towards that end.
The spiritual life of man, then, if it be a real life lived, must involve not only a deliberate attentiveness to this aspect of Reality — not only the reception of messages from the supernal sphere — but also the exercises of movements in response. It shall be the soul at home in the spiritual world, swimming in the "Sea Pacific" [p20] of the Godhead [12] moving in unison with its tides; not the trained and clarified consciousness contemplating a vision of "That which Is" [13] by means of some "interior organ" able to "receive the absolute truth of the transcendental world, a spiritual faculty which cognises spiritual objects."[14] Plainly such a transcendance involves a total growth and change of direction, which shall make possible of accomplishment the new responsive movements of the soul. The spirit is touched of God, spurred to a new quality of attention. It receives a message from the Transcendant, and moves, is changed, in response.
This receiving of something given on the part of the Spiritual, and the giving of ourselves back — this divine osmosis of spirit without and spirit within — is made possible by the soul's impassioned attentiveness, or Love; the primary condition of our spiritual life. The vision of Reality, says Plotinus, is the work of one who is anxious to perceive it; who is possessed by an "amatory passion" which "causes the lover to rest in the object of his love." [15] Such love, says St Augustine, is the "weight of the soul", [16] the spiritual gravitation which draws all things to their place in God. It "is God", says the author of The Mirror of Simple Souls: demonstrates, that is to say — since we can only "behold that which we are"[17] — the interior presence of a Divine Reality; and man's spirit only attains reality and freedom "by condition of love". [18] Pure love, then, which is tendency raised to its highest power and reinforced by passionate will, an ardent, deliberate attentiveness to a Reality [p.21] without — "hidden Bread of spirit, mighty Husband of mind" [19] — on the part of the scrap of self-creative Reality within; this is the only driving power of the soul on its path towards the Spiritual Life. It is the mainspring of all its responsive acts, its growth and its fecundity. This is the fact which lies at the root of all activistic mysticism.
"'Twere better that the spirit which wears not true love as a garment
Had not been: its being is but shame.
Be thou drunken in love, for love is all that exists." [20]
Thus the Sufi mystic; and his Christian brother answers, in a saying of which few can hope to plumb the deeps, "He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love." [21]
We shall expect, then, that life going forward to new levels will go forward in a spirit of love; nor can a consummation in which such a love is transcended have any other meaning than annihilation for human consciousness. "In love," says Aquinas, "the whole spiritual life of man consists."[22]
In the East, however, the contemplative and world-renouncing quest of the Absolute, the Movement from Becoming to Being, which developed under the influence of Hindu philosophy, has been from the first divorced from the warmly vital and more truly mystic, outgoing and fruitful, world-renewing attitude of Love. The two movements of the complete spiritual life have been dissociated from one another; with a resulting loss of wholeness and balance in each.
The search for transcendance, as we see it in orthodox Hinduism and Buddhism, represents in its general tendency. not a movement of expansion, not the generous industry of insatiable love; but a movement of withdrawal, [p22] the cultivation of an exquisite and aristocratic despair.
Inspired by the intellect rather than by the heart, the whole mystical phiolosphy of the Hindus "has as its presupposition a strong feeling of the transitoriness and unreality of existence".[23] It demands of its adepts, as a condition of their attainment of God, an acknowledgement of the illusory nature of the Here-and-Now, the web of appearance; which, though sometimes combined with a belief in Divine Immanence, robs that doctrine of all practical bearing on diurnal life.
In theory orthodox Hindu religion offers three paths to its disciples: the path of works, that is to say, not the pursuit of virtue, but the accurate fulfilment of ceremonial obligations; the path of knowledge, of philosophic speculation — which includes in its higher stages the transcending of illusion, the "mystical" art of contemplating the Being of God; and the path of devotional love, or Bhakti. [24] The history of Bhakti religion is a curious and significant one. It arose about the fourth century B.C., and then possessed a strongly mystical and ethical character; its central character being the impassioned and personal love of the One God, who was called by His worshippers, "the Adorable", and with whom they believed communion to be possible, even for those still immersed in the temporal world. This phase, which seems to represent a true outburst of natural mysticism, the effortof life to find a new path to transcendance, the instinct of the heart for its home and origin, is recorded in the most ancient parts of the Bhagavad-gita . "Bhakti", however, was but one of Life's false starts; a reaction against the arid performances of the religious intellect, a premature movement towards levels on which the human mind was still too weak to dwell. Thwarted and finally captured by the [p.23] philosophising tendency of Brahminism, against which it was in origin directed, it sank to a static and intellectualising system of vaguely pantheistic piety.
But in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries the deep-seated instinct — the profound human need — which it represents again broke out with vigour. As if in revolt against the abstract transcendentalism of the philosophical schools, a wave of passionate devotion, demanding as its object a personal and attainable God, swept over the land, under the influence of three great spiritual teachers and their disciples. Regarded by the orthodox Brahmins as heretics, these reformers split off from the main body, and formed independent sects of a mystical type; which brough back into prominence the original and long-lost idea of Bhakti, as a communion of love and will between the human spirit and an attainable and personal God. [25] From them descends that intensely personal, incarnational type of mystical feeling which is now known as "Vishnuite religion" and is seen in its purest form in the poetry of Rabindra Nath Tagore.
The really mystical element in the teaching of these reformers had, however, little connection with native Hindu Mysticism: represented, rather, a deliberate opposition to it. They were adventurers, departing from the main road of Brahmin theology in search of more abundant life; of closer communion with the substance of reality. The first of them, Ramanuja (c.1150), had been brought up in immediate contact with Indian Christianity: that ancient Christian church of Malabar which dates from the first or second century and claims to have been founded by the Apostle Thomas himself. It is probable that some [p.24] of the new inspiration which he brought to the antique and moribund science of the Love of God may be traced to this source. An uncompromising monotheist, he taught, in contradistinction to all previous theologians, the thoroughly foreign doctrine that the human soul is distinct from God, and that the union which is its proper end is not an annihilation, but a satisfaction; since it retains its identity and separate consciousness even when re-absorbed in Him — a position which is indistinguishable from the Christian idea of the Beatific Vision.[26]
[This form of mystical experience, in which the identity is retained, is characterised by W.T. Stace as "extrovertive" mysticism, a primarily western phenomenon, as opposed to what he regards as a more advanced eastern mystical experience, which he characterises as "introvertive".]
By the end of the thirteenth century the influence of Ramanuja had faded. Then arose the great Ramananda, and his greater pupil, the weaver-poet, Kabir: still living forces in Indian religion. Under the influence of Ramananda, Bhakti — now identified with the "incarnational" cult of Rama — was transformed into a system which has many striking correspondences with mystical Christianity. Ramananda was familiar with the Gospels; and his life and doctrine are full of deliberate Christian parallels. He trained and sent out twelve apostles, and taught a Christian system of ethics. Like Ramanuja, he insisted on the continued separate existence of the soul after the consummation of its union with the Absolute God. Many of the doctrines of Sufism werealso adopted by him, and his teaching is charged with the ardent personal emotion which we find in the Sufi and Christian saints.[27] The result was a sort of cross-bred mystical religion of Christian feeling on a basis of Hindu theology, which owed its driving power to the purity and enthusiasm of the soul which first conceived it. To this type of Bhakti, which expresses itself in its popular form in a personal [p.25] devotion to the God Vishnu under one or other of his incarnations, the bulk of North Indian Hindus still adhere; but it can hardly be claimed as evidence of the strength and splendour of true Indian mysticism.
In Ramananda's disciple Kabir, poet and mystic, a great religious genius whose name is hardly known in the West, the Christian incarnational element — dynamic perfection found within the Here-and-Now — appears under another form. Far from encouraging a rejection of the World of Becoming in order that pure Being might be found, Kabir taught that man was the supreme manifestation of God; and his mysticism was, as we should say now, the mysticism of Divine Humanity. He held that ultimate reality, the Absolute Godhead, was unknowable; but that the divine disclosed itself in the human race as a whole — for he allowed the worship of no individual incarnation — and might there be found and adored. This fragmentary truth, probably because of its obvious "value for life" has survived; and forms the central tenet of the sect which has descended from Kabir.
Thus Brahminism showes a perpetual tendency, on the part of its most (?) spiritual members, to break away from the negative transcendentalism which is its inmost principle, in the direction of a more human and fruitful reading of the secret of life. Even of those who have been true to that transcendentalism, with its deliberate cultivation of the ecstatic consciousness, its solitary and ineffable experiences of the Absolute, some of the greatest have felt, and obeyed, an inconsistent impulse towards active work amongst their fellow men; so true is it that "there is no single property of one form of life which is not found to a certain degree in the other". Unable to solve the paradox of imago e cercio, the tendency toward the real and eternal which is inherent in Hinduism splits into two streams, representing severally the search for a personal and an impersonal object of devotion — a "way [p.26] out" in the direction of knowledge and in the direction of love.
When we turn to Buddhism — particularly that esoteric Buddhism of which the mystical quality and vast superiority to all Western religion has been so loudly advertised of recent years — we find somewhat similar phenomena. In essence, this mysticism, if mysticism it can be called, is definitely self-regarding and definitely negative. It is a Way, not of attainment but of escape. The "Noble Eightfold Path" of high moral virtue and extreme detachment on which its disciples are set, the art of contemplation practised by its higher initiates, are both directed towards the xtinction od all that bears the character of life; that which its Scriptures call the "delusion of being a self". The strength of Budhism lies in the fact that personal holiness is its immediate aim; but this is not sought out of any generous motive of self-donation, any longing to enter more deeply into the unspeakable riches of the universe, any passion for God. For Buddhists the ultimate fact is not God but Law. They seek the elimination of selfhood and desire purely as a means of transcending "Dukka"; that is to say, suffering, pain, misfortune, unhappiness, all the illusions and distresses of conscious existence: "all things are impermanent... pain-engendering... without soul."[28] Therefore the path must lead to the cessation of such existence, to the realm of simple Being, Nirvana: a word which means literally "the blowing out of the flame".[29] "Just this have I taught [p.27] and do I teach," says the Buddha, "ill, and the ending of ill";[30] and the last grade of sanctity or wisdom is that in which the disciple is able to say, "This is Ill; this is then cause of Ill; this is the cessation of Ill; this is the way leading to the cessation of Ill".[31]
Yet, as though some intuition of the soul rebelled against this reading of life, later Buddhism, in defiance of consistency, began to exhibit some of the characters that were to find their full expression in Christianity. The growth towards sanctity, the selection and training of selves capable of transcendance, dynamic movement and change, became an integral part of it; and the three grades of training throughwhich the self was led on this "Pathway to Reality" — Higher Conduct, Higher Consciousness, Higher Insight — present the closest of parallels with the Mystic Way described by the Christian saints. Moreover, Buddhist ethics took a warmer tone. A "sympathising love" for all created things, not far removed from Pauline charity, took a high place in the scale of virtues, and this love soon demanded an objective in the spiritual sphere. Hence, as the Christian focussed his religious emotions on Christ, so Gautama himself, at first revered only as a teacher of this sublime but despairing system of morality, came to be adored as an incarnation of the Everlasting but Unknowable God; and the immediate aim of the believer was directed to being a "partaker of his nature" — a sharer in his illumination and freedom — though still with the cardinal idea of escaping from rebirth in the dreaded world of illusion, the flux of life.[32]
[p.28] Such facts as these, matched by the presence within the Christian fold of the phenomena of "metaphysical" contemplation, quietism, and holy indifference, and the exaggerated language of some mystics concerning a "self-loss in the desert of God" which seems indistinguishable from complete annihilation, only accentuate those difficulties of definition which trouble all orderly observers of that wayward, lawless thing, the Spirit of Life. [It might be suggested that EU has far less difficulty with the equally extreme language at times employed by the Christian mystics. DCW] They warn us of the danger which threaten all who yield to the human passion for classification; suggesting that here, too, as with animal and vegetable creation, the characteristic traits of one class are to be found "to a certain degree" in the other. The angles at which consciousness is set towards Reality are infinite; and every teacher gives us the system which he represents, not as a demonstration of scientific "truth", but as an artist, "through a temperament".
Nevertheless, reviewing the material here presented to us, we can truthfully say that the governing emotional characteristic of unchristianised Hindu and Buddhic mysticism is a subtraction from, rather than an addition to, the rich multiplicity of life — a distrust and dislike of illusion, the craving for a way of escape. In the place of that humble yet romantic note of adoration, that ecstatic and energetic passion for the One Reality everywhere discerned by the eyes of love, that "combined aptitude for intuition and action" [33] which inspires the other great kingdom of spiritual life, the Hindu, and after him the Neoplatonist, puts a self-regarding concentration on contemplation alone, a pathetic trust in the saving power of intellectual knowledge: the Buddhist, a severe morality which, though inculcating an utter selflessness, is yet pursued for personal ends. The philosophy on which both systems rest is a negative monism of inconceivable harshness, for which the whole World of Becoming, the [p.29] realm of the Here-and-Now is, for the Hindu, a dream: for the Buddhist a cruel wheel of misfortunes from which he must escape if he can. Pure Being, the unconditional and absolute God, is all that exists; and He, though supreme Knower, must be in truth unconscious.[34]
True union with such an Absolute really involves the shedding of every human — more, every vital — characteristic. That transcendance which is the aim of all spirit it accomplishes, therefore, not by a true regeneration, an enriching and an uplifting of the elements of life, that they may grow, branch out, create upon higher, more complex levels of reality; but by a subtraction, a rejection rather than a transmutation of the World of becoming, which has as its ideal the extinction of all emotion and the attainment of untroubled calm, complete indifference. Its last flower is a concentration upon Pure Being, an other-worldly specialism, so complete as to inhibit all action, feeling, thought: a condition which escapes from love no less than from hate, from joy no less than pain; an absorbtion into the Absolute which involves the obliteration of all that we know as personality. [35]
"It follows," says Royce justly, after an able discussion of Oriental mystical philosophy, "that if mysticism is to escape from its own finitude and really is to mean by its Absolute Being anything but a mere nothing, its account of Being must be so amended as to involve the assertion that our finite life is not mere illusion, that our ideas are not merely false, and that we are already, even as finite, in touch with Reality." [36] As in the vegetable [p.30] kingdom, so here, life has made the fatal mistake of sacrificing mobility; [A good example — among many in this book — of the personification of a postulated force or energy, giving it human traits, etc, with which, even if it exists, it is by no means obviously endowed. I suspect, not having read Bergson, that this an aspect of Vitalism, the theory of the structure and function of life which was widely accepted at the time. DCW] and with it that capacity for new creative acts which is essential if the whole man is ever to be lifted to the spiritual sphere and develop all his latent possibilities. It has left untapped the riches layers of human nature; its power of self donation, its passion for romance, that immense spiritual fertility which has made so many of the great mystics of the West the creative centres of widening circles of life.
Since the life of the spirit is to express for us the inmost and energising reality, the total possibilities of our rich and many levelled universe, we shall surely ask of such a true spiritual life that it prove itself capable of striking not one but all the notes possible to humanity; and this with a greater evocative power than any other way of life can attain. We shall demand of it the passion, the colour, the variety of music; since these are the earnests of abundant life.[37] [This is rhetoric. It may indeed be an accurate fantasy of what the ultimate spiritual life might be or even has been, but as an assertion, it remains just a fantasy. She adheres to the notion that illumination takes what we already have and makes it better, and will not allow the possiblity that the experience might be something quite new and other than ordinary experience, and is thus an alternative mode of experience rather than an enhanced one. St Paul speaks of dying to one's present experience, just as much as any Brahmin philosopher. "It is not I but Christ that liveth in me." Not I but Christ. Perhaps St Paul meant to say, "This is a new and improved I that lives inside of me", but what he has been recorded as saying is "Not I but Christ". Illumination is the discovery of the Christ as one's real deep self, and with it that particular relationship to God and creation that belongs to the Christ. Secondly, I am uncomfortable with any attitude that makes demands of the quality of one's spiritual life. (Even EU acknowledges that spiritual life is not about becoming comfortable pussycats basking in the spiritual sun.) DCW] We shall expect it to encompass the full span of human nature, and extort from that nature the full measure alike of perception and of act. Its consciousness must go from the still and rapturous heights of adoration to the deeps of utter self knowledge; from the candid simplicity of joy to the complex entanglements of grief. It must not dissociate action from contemplation, Becoming from Being, knowledge from love. He who lived this veritable life of spirit would be alive in the deepest possible sense; for his functions of reception and response would be raised to their highest pitch of development. Far from seeking a condition of static calm, he would accept emotion for that which it is: psychic movement, evidence of life, one of the noblest powers of the conscious soul. Those superb cravings and satisfactions which are produced in us by the sacraments of natural [p.31] beauty or of human love — true outgoing movements as they are in the direction of reality — such an one would not transcend, but would lift to a new level of immediacy. Where we received hints, he would have communion with certainties. The freshness of eternal springs would speak to him in the primrose and the budding tree. Not blankness but beauty would characterise his ecstasy: a beauty including in some inconceivable union all the harmonies and contrasts which express the Thought of God. To these he would respond, with these be in tune: so that his life itself would be musical. [She has made a repeated point of emphasising the blankness, the bleakness, the barrenness, the despair of the eastern spiritual state. It does not take a lot of reading in the field to discover that eastern mystics typically use the term "bliss" to describe this state. I believe that she is postulating her conception of the eastern experience, not the recorded descriptions, as the reality. DCW]
"Is it beyond thee to be glad with the gladness of this rhythm; to be tossed and lost and broken in the whirl of this fearful joy?
All things rush on, they stop not, they look not behind, no power can hold them back, they rush on.
Keeping steps with that restless rapid music, seasons come dancing and pass away — colours, tunes, and perfumes pour in endless cascades in the abounding joy that scatters and gives up and dies every moment." [38]
To "be glad with the gladness of this rhythm" — to keep step with the music of Reality — this is the aim, these are the possibilities, which have been seized and employed by that current of life which has chosen the second path towards the transcendant sphere: the positive and activistic mysticism of the West. [It can't be much clearer. Life is a force that is working out a purpose through the efforts of those beings and creatures in which it is present. They are the agents in some form or another of a purpose that works experimentally through them. If we hold "life" and "God" to be synonymous, then I feel we need some rationale to explain why the embodiment of the one is being impelled towards a state of consciousness in which it is fully aware of the other. If they are not synonymous, then they need to be differentiated and their relationship stated. DCW] Here we find inclusion rather than subtraction: a growing intuitive conviction that the One shall justify rather than exclude the many, that the life of spirit shall involve the whole man in all of his activities and correspondences. The mounting soul carries the whole world with it; the cosmic cross-bearer is its true type. [The problem with prose such as this is that even were we to argue that any given mounting soul could not possibly carry with it the whole world, as for it to do so would prevent any other soul from so acting, it would not thereby falsify what EU has written. The statements are highly poetic and metaphorical, and their information content is very small and only in the slightest degree suggests the nature of the activities involved, while colouring them immensely favourably alongside those of the Hindu and Buddhist. DCW] It does not abandon, it remakes: declaring that the "glory of the lighted mind" once he has attained to it will flood the totality of man's nature, lighting up the World of Becoming, and exhibiting not merely the unknowable character of "the Origin of all [p.32] that is", but the knowable and immediate presence of that Immanent Spirit in Whom "we live and move and have our being". As the heigtening of mental life reveals to the intellect deeper and deeper levels of reality, so with that movement to wards enhancement of the life of the spirit which takes place along this path, the world assumes not the character of illusion, but the character of sacrament; and spirit finds Spirit in the lilies of the field, no less than in the Unknowable Abyss. True, there is here, too, a certain world-renouncing element; for the spiritual life is of necessity a growth, and all growth represents a renunciation as well as an achievement. Something, if only permabulator and feeding bottle, we are compelled to leave behind. But that which is here renounced is merely a low level of correspondences that enslaves and limits the mind, confining its attention to its own needs and desires. The sometimes sterile principle of "world denial" is here found united with the ever fruitful principle of "word renewal": [Getting a bit unctuous here, we are. DCW] and thus the essential quality of Life, its fecundity and spontaneity, is safeguarded, a "perennial inner movement" is assured. [39]
This kind of life, this distinct variety of human consciousness, is found fully developed in those mystics whom we call Christian; less perfectly expressed — since here mingled with certain Oriental elements — in their cousins the Sufis, and partially present, as we have seen, in those Hindu sects which have affinities with Christianity. It is attained by them as the result of a life process, a kind of growth, which makes of those who experience it a genuine psychic species apart; which tends to the winning of freedom, the establishment of that state of equilibrium, "that eternal outgoing and eternal life which we have and are eternally in God." [40] These mystics grow through a constant and well-marked series [p.33] of states to a definite consummation: that so-called "unitive life" of enormously enhanced vitality, of harmonious correspondence with the transcendental order, in which each becomes a self-creative centre of spiritual no less than of physical life.
"Eternal life in the midst of Time," says Harnack, is the secret of Christianity. [41] "for all ontological minnesingers of the love of God," says Stanley Hall, "It is eternal life to know him."[42] But the power of living such a life depends on organic adjustments, psychic changes, a heightening of our spiritual tension; not on the mere acceptance of specific beliefs. Hence the true object of Christianity — hidden though it be beneath a mass of credal and ritual decorations — is the effecting of the changes which lead to the production f such mystics, such "free souls"; those profound psychic and spiritual adjustments which are called in their totality, "Regeneration". By the ancient natural means of birth and growth it seeks the induction of Man in his wholeness into the life of Reality; that "Kingdom of God" which once his attention is given to it, he not only finds without but has within. It is less a "faith" than a life-process. It differs from all otheer religions in that it implies and controls actual and organic psychological growth. That rare thing, the real Christian, is a genuinely new creation; not an ordinary man with a new and iinspiring creed. "If any man be in Christ he is a new creature," said St Paul; and described in those words a most actual phenomenon, the perennial puzzle of the religious psychologist. [43] The re-birth which is typified by the Church's sacrament of initiation, and the participation in the Divine Life which is dramatised in its sacrament of [p.34] communion — "the food of the full-grown" [44] — these are facts, these are things, which really happen to Christian mystics; to all those wo follow this path of development, whatsoever their theological creed. The authentic documents of Christianity — those produced by minds which have submitted to the discipline and experienced the growth — speak with no uncertain voice as to the actual and unique character of this life. It's result, they say, is no splitting up of personality, no isolation of the "spiritual sense"; but the lifting of the whole man to new levels of existence "where the soul; has fulhead of perception by divine fruition"; [45] where he not only knows but is, not only is but acts. "My life," said St Augustine, looking forward to that existence in God which he recognised as his destiny, "shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee." [46] "The naked will," says Ruysbroeck of that same consummation, "is transformed by the Eternal Love as fire by fire. The naked spirit stands erect, it feels itself to be wrapped around, affirmed and affixed by the formless immensity of God," since "our being, without losing any of its personality, is united with the Divine Truth which respects all diversity." [47] Here is the authentic voice of Western mysticism; and here we indeed recognise spirit pressing forward in a new direction towards new conquests, bringing into expression deeper and deeper levels of life.
Notes
1. L'Evolution creatrice, p.108
2. Katha Upanishad
3. Heracleitus: Fragments
4. Ephesians iv. 6.
5. Plotinus, Ennead, VI. 9.
6. Jelalu' d'Din, Divan (Nicolson's trans) p. 127
7. Rabindra Nath Tagore, Gitanjali, 4, 67, 81
8. L'Evolution creatrice, pp 115, 146, 123
9. Royce, The World and the Individual, Vol. I. p. 167
10. L'Evolution creatrice. p. 117
11. Compare Bergson, Matiere et memoire (Eng trans) p 178
12. St Catherine of Siena, Dialogo, cap 89
13. Aug., Conf., Bk. VII. cap 17
14. Eckhartshausen, The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary, Letter 1
15. Plotinus, Ennead, VI 9.
16. Aug., Conf., Bk XIII. cap.9
17. Ruysbroeck, De Contemplatione (Hello, p.145)
18. "I am God, says Love; for Love is God and God is Love. And this soul is God by condition of love" (The Mirror of Simple Souls)
19. Aug., Conf., Bk I. cap. 13.
20. Jelalu' d'Din, Divan (Nicolson's trans) p. 51.
21. I John iv. 8.
22. On Perfection, Opusculum XVIII. cap. 1.
23. Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p.7.
24. Cf. Hastings Dictionary of Religion and Ethics, Vol. II, Article "Bhakti Marga"
25. The fact that this movement, on its lower and popular side, gave support to the most erotic and least desirable aspects of the Krishna cult, ought not to prejudice our judgement of its higher and purer aspect. The wholesale condemnation of a faith on account of its worst by-products is a dangerous principle for Christian critics.
26. Cf Oman, The Mystics, Ascetics, and Saints of India, p.116
27. The influence of Sufism and Hinduism was to some extent mutual. there seems little doubt that cetain aspects of the Krishna cult provided the model for many of the favourite Sufi expressions of "spiritual love".
28. Cf Mrs Rhys Davids' Buddhism (Home University Library), pp 157 et seq., 218, 234, etc. This admirable and eminently fairminded little book is the best of all introductions to Buddhism. For a more attractive and less judicial view of the Buddhist spirit at its best see The Creed of Buddha.
29. Cf Mrs Rhys Davids, op cit., p 175; also Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, Vol. II. p. 231, and Hastings' Dictionary of Religion and Ethics, Vol II, Article, "Asceticism".
30. Majjhima-Nikaya, I. 140. Quoted by Mrs Rhys Davids, op cit, p. 159
31. Mrs Rhys Davids, op cit., p. 200
32. Baldwin, op cit.
33. Delacroix, Etudes sur le psychologie du mysticisme, p xii
34. Royce, The World and the Individual, Vol I. p. 168
35. The reference here is, of course, to the last stage of Hindu contemplation. The Neoplatonic ecstacy, at any rate as seen in that true mystic, Plotinus, appears to have been a state of consciously exultant communion with the One (vide Bigg, Neoplatonism, p. 286) and may be regarded as an intermediate between Eastern and Western spiritual life.
36. Royce, The World and the Individual, Vol I. p. 182.
37. "A beautiful breathing instrument of music, the Lord made man" says Clement of Alexandria, where on the spirit of Life "makes melody to God". (Cohortatio ad Gentes, I.
38. Rabindra Nath Tagore, op cit. 70
39. Cf Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p.14.
40. Ruysbroeck, L'ornement des Notes Spirituelles, Lib.III cap.5.
41. Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 5 (Eng trans., p. 8).
42. Adolescence, Vol II p. 128.
43. 2 Cor. v 17. Cf the sections dealing with conversion in Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion, and James, Varieties of Religious Experience.
44. Clement of Alexandria, Strom, V. 10
45. The Mirror of Simple Souls.
46. Aug., Conf., Bk X. cap 28.
47. Samuel (Hello, p. 201) and De Contemplatione (Hello, p 145)
Be aware of shifting meanings of any given word, and whether it is being used literally or figuratively, with or without an initial capital, and to what extent any figurative use is extended by analogy to infer or imply qualities not otherwise established.
