| |
We have looked at Krishna, Whitman, Nietzsche,
and Sartre from the perspective of Pure Consciousness Mysticism. We have
put the mysticism first and seen what emerges when we apply its world-view
to texts from religion, philosophy and literature in each case there has
been a mutual illumination, though a little different than if we had applied
religious, philosophical and literary world-views to the texts.
In the case of Krishna we have started by treating him as being as much
a man as Ramakrishna or Ramana Maharshi; what have we gained by this and
what have we lost? We lose, it is true, Krishna as an avatar, or god or
God; but we gain a secular Gita whose message is as profoundly useful
in the modern world as it was in the ancient. By recognising that the imagery
of revelation has its colour from the imagination, and that the language
of the dialogue has its roots in a feudal society, we can compensate for
these distortions and are left with a poetic and profound exhortation to
enter into the infinite and immortal. In the same breath the Gita
also shows us how to re-orient oneself to the manifest world: through the
surrender of the fruits of one's action. Most of us are faced at one time
or another with a moral crisis like Arjuna's, and, even if not temperamentally
inclined to the devotional, can use the Gita to find a sense of love and
proportion that not only helps us through the crisis, but changes our continuum.
Krishna as a man also offers us a unique kind of mystic: one who accepted
the material wealth and obligations of the life of a prince but who lived
in the infinite and eternal; at the same time he chose only once in his
life to engage in the teaching of it.
By applying the ideas of Pure Consciousness Mysticism to Whitman we reveal
a mystic of the first order; one who was a visionary of a post-feudal religiousness,
and at ease with the democratic and technological impetus of the modern
world. He shared with Krishna an engagement with life, only in Whitman's
case it was a gift for the commonplace and everyday which he only had to
touch to bring light to. Whitman rejected the limitations and hierarchies
of the old religions and ushered in a democratic spirituality (much as George
Fox attempted to do at a time when the people's voice in Britain Parliament
was being born). More than any of this is Whitman's unique embraciveness,
an embraciveness that Krishna only partially announces in the Gita.
We also examined with Whitman what a Nature mysticism could be and recognise
that the devotional impulse, so problematic in the West, can be directed
towards Nature, both as an inspiration for an inward peace and silence,
and as an outward action-shaping inspiration of gratitude and protection
for the natural world.
When we applied PCM to Nietzsche's Zarathustra, we have a promising
start but soon see that the impulse to the infinite and eternal is distorted
by the disproportionate emphasis on the aesthetic and his contempt for the
ordinary: Nietzsche is aesthetically intoxicated, not divinely intoxicated
as we find in Rumi and Kabir. Great art alone is no guaranteed route to
the infinite and eternal; far from it, for it may lead to insanity.
Echoing Nietzsche's ethos we find that Sartre's solution to his Nausea
is also in art, but he gives us on the way an excellent analysis of why
the modern intellectual may wish to reject the infinite and eternal, providing
us with a whole armoury of methods for keeping it at bay. His experience
of the Absolute may have been drug-induced, or by chance, but he had neither
the training nor the inclination to seize the opportunity. His Nausea
has none of the pretensions to mysticism that Thus Spoke Zarathustra
had but is possibly more valuable to us because of it.
Let us now briefly summarise Pure Consciousness Mysticism as a method of
enquiry. It is a simple one, relying on indications of an unusual expansivity
(or alternatively its complementary nothingness) which may be presented
in a variety of terms including devotional ones. It also looks for indications
that an individual loses the sense of mortality or loses the fear of death,
or indicates an unusual emphasis on the now, also possibly expressed as
suchness. Once we have established that an individual has a permanent orientation
towards the infinite and eternal (and these are not separate orientations
of course) we then examine how their re-orientation towards the manifest
human world expresses itself, through the concept of the embracive.
At the very least we expect to see a love that shows itself towards seekers,
who in turn are drawn to the mystic because of the 'cool wind' that comes
from them of the infinite, eternal and embracive.
Because the infinite and eternal have no attributes, nothing can be taught
about them; because human beings are built with the infinite and eternal
at the core of their being there can be no path towards it. Hence Pure Consciousness
Mysticism cannot favour any one pedagogy over another; all paths are equally
good and equally flawed in their first step. Consider this conversation
between a master and a student (master first, student reporting):
"Why are you wasting your life?"
he asks. There is complete silence. He looks at me and says, "If you
do not answer that question the moment it is asked, then you are wasting
your life."
"And if I do answer immediately?"
"Oh, then you are an aristocrat." [ 1]
This exchange could be between any of the great teachers described in this
book and a disciple; in fact it is between Krishnamurti and his friend Asit
Chandmal. It illustrates a multitude of points about the teacher and the
disciple, but the main one is the certainty that to possess what the mystic
possesses justifies life, not to possess it is to waste one's life, and
that the mystic must teach it. In this mini-drama Krishnamurti has it and
Chandmal doesn't: Krishnamurti had arrived at a point that he never left,
and his integrity prevented him inventing a path, or claiming any special
position (though of course his acolytes worked continuously to subvert his
democratic impulse).
Even if we agree that no particular practice, meditation, prayer, technique
or belief is necessarily of use, or for that matter useless, we can
say that exposure and immersion to the being and writings of certain individuals
may form a pedagogy. If it is Jesus that reaches one, or Ramakrishna, then
this is no better or worse than Krishnamurti or Ramana Maharshi. However,
for the modern world, I am going to suggest that the most appropriate figures
are Whitman and Harding. Although both may have a deeply religious instinct,
it is private, leaving their teachings clear and simple; there is no requirement
to carry the baggage of either the old religions of the West, tainted irrevocably
by abuses of authority like the Inquisition, or of the East, tainted irrevocably
with the renunciative desire to escape from the cycles of birth and death.
Whitman is poet of via positiva; Harding is the mechanic of via
negativa both are democratic, modern, secular; appropriate for
our age. Perhaps we can also build on this background a nature mysticism
from the writings of Jefferies, Krishnamurti and others (and we see a basis
for this already in many religious ecological movements).
To conclude: Pure Consciousness Mysticism represents a world-view that can
usefully be used to examine the phenomenon of those who orient themselves
towards the infinite and eternal, individuals usually termed mystics. It
is only one world-view amongst countless others however in the post-modern
period we are beginning to accept the plurality of world-views, and this
is going to be an increasingly vital factor in maintaining peace in a shrinking
world. The religions that evolved in feudal times have rarely had this fluidity
of attitude and the resulting intolerance has tarnished the modern conception
of spirituality; I am suggesting PCM as a world-view that has no incompatibilities
with any other world-view. One might argue that a system that proposes no
God, or gods as incompatible with a theistic system, but this is to miss
the point. We can examine Krishna as a mortal man and draw certain conclusions;
there is nothing to stop us also worshipping him if that is our impulse.
My own impulses are often not only devotional but theistic, and for this
reason I have included some of my poetry in the Appendix: however it neither
supports nor invalidates the PCM world-view.
In parting I would mention that I sometimes ask friends if they know a way
of thinking about the sun, the moon and the stars so that they are inside
one, and usually the answer is 'no'. I then ask if the question in itself
attracts them. Pure Consciousness Mysticism is for those who answer 'yes'
to this second question.
References for Conclusions
[1]
Chandmal, Asit, One Thousand Moons - Krishnamurti
at Eighty-Five, New York: Abrams 1985 p. 21
|
