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5.4 A Happy Ending in Art?
Nausea
continues after the park scene to strip Roquentin of his only remaining
link with the past - his girlfriend Anny; even the Autodidact is taken from
him. Sartre is luckier with the construction of Nausea than Nietzsche
with Zarathustra however: there is no momentum in the narrative that
requires him to deliver some kind of 'wisdom' at the end of it. But the
ending does contain a resolution, and it turns out to be a restatement of
Nietzsche's whole thinking and ethos: that the aesthetic justifies existence.
For Roquentin realises that the song he listens to in the cafe has 'saved'
two people at least: the Jew (who wrote it) and the Negress (who sings it).
Perhaps it is significant that he latches on to these racial stereotypes
because they give a well-defined sense of identity that he imagines that
he lacks as a white European middle-class intellectual. This is how Sartre
states his resolution:
She sings. That makes two people who are saved:
the Jew and the Negress. Saved. Perhaps they thought they were lost right
until the very end, drowned in existence. Yet nobody could think about
me as I think about them, with this gentle feeling. Nobody, not even Anny.
For me they are a little like dead people, a little like heroes of novels;
they have cleansed themselves of the sin of existing. Not completely, of
course but as much as any man can do. This idea suddenly bowls me over,
because I didn't even hope for that any more. I feel something timidly
brushing against me and I dare not move because I am afraid it might go
away. Something I didn't know any more: a kind of joy.
The Negress sings. So you can justify your
existence? Just a little? I feel extraordinarily intimidated. It isn't
that I have much hope. But I am like a man who is completely frozen after
a journey through snow and who suddenly comes into a warm room. I imagine
he would remain motionless near the door, still feeling cold, and that
slow shivers would run over the whole of his body.
Some of these days
You'll miss me honey
Couldn't I try Naturally, it wouldn't be a
question of a tune But couldn't I in another medium? It would have to be
a book.
Sartre does in his own terms justify his existence
with his books, and is certainly remembered in the way that he wanted to
be in this last section of Nausea. But do we really believe that
he later felt that he had 'cleansed himself of the sin of existing'? For
Rumi, if we remember, one is guilty of the sin of existing only if one does
not strive to come to God; what would he say if God came to a person and
that person says 'no thank you'? Because, using theistic terminology (and
only as terminology), that is what Sartre does. He says 'no thank you' to
the divine suchness in the park and turns to art as his salvation.
Through art the artist attempts to achieve the goal of Pure Consciousness
Mysticism: an expansivity and immortality, but through fame; unfortunately
looking for the right thing in the wrong place. Others of course seek the
same through wealth Harding gives an excellent analysis and remedy for this
in Head Off Stress [1] and through countless other avenues: through offspring
for example. Harding (and others) also claim that the orientation toward
the infinite and eternal allow one to pursue art or any other achievement
with greater success than otherwise. But before we return in detail to the
implications of the park scene we can usefully look at an issue raised by
the likely inspiration for it in Sartre's mescalin experience. Many commentators
have looked at the superficial similarities between accounts of the mystics
and accounts of some drug-users, noting also that the ritual use of drugs
has its place in many shamanic and religious traditions. Sartre took drugs
no further, but Aldous Huxley used drugs for a large part of his adult life.
5.5 Drugs and Mysticism
In The Doors of Perception Huxley gives
the impression that his main motivation for taking mescalin in 1953 was
the hope that he would be able to enter the state of consciousness of the
mystic, visionary, or artistic genius. He felt that in some way he had not
been blessed by Nature with a talent for these states, which he assumed
were similar. He was a little disappointed not to see the kinds of visions
that he thought these gifted individuals were endowed with as a matter of
course, but reports to us an experience of suchness or da-sein
similar to those from the Indian mystics or Eckhart. Here is an extract:
This participation in the manifest glory of
things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, the necessary concerns
of human existence, above all for concerns involving persons. For persons
are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously
perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born
Not-self, the behaviour, the appearance, the very thought of the self it
had momentarily ceased to be, and of other selves, its one-time fellows,
seemed not indeed distasteful (for distastefulness was not one of the categories
in terms of which I was thinking), but enormously irrelevant. Compelled
by the investigator [into the effects of mescalin] to analyse and report
on what I was doing (and how I longed to be left alone with Eternity in
a flower, Infinity in four chair legs and the Absolute in the folds of
a pair of flannel trousers!) I realized that I was deliberately avoiding
the eyes of those who were with me in the the room, deliberately refraining
from being too much aware of them. [2]
We need to be a little cautious of this passage,
because of the prior publication in 1946 of The Perennial Philosophy,
for which he had read extensively from similar accounts by the mystics.
Huxley invented a useful term for us however, the notion of the cerebral
reducing valve. His observation was that the drug, rather than creating
new experiences, inhibited the operation of a kind of narrowing function
within the brain, so that the floodgates opened to what was already there.
He also assumed that the medium or clairvoyant lived more permanently with
the reducing valve opened (at least to some degree). We will discuss this
further when we consider in more detail the role of the world-ordering function
of the mind, but we can note that for Sartre his imagination was stimulated
(seeing crabs and polyps everywhere), though more importantly the drug seemed
to have shut down normal thought.
Despite Huxley's association of drugs with mysticism, Mary Lutyens tell
us this about his attitude to Krishnamurti:
At first Krishnamurti was rather overawed by
Huxley's intellectual brilliance but, once he discovered that Huxley would
have given all this knowledge for one mystical experience not induced by
drugs, he found that he could talk to him about what he called 'the points'
he was making. [3]
Huxley shows a modesty in his assumption that
mystical 'states' were somehow beyond him (unaided by drugs at least); this
modesty also shows in his remark that the value of his book The Perennial
Philosophy lay in a large part of its contents consisting of quotations
from the mystics. Where the arrogance of Nietzsche or Sartre may have been
a reason for the failure of the mystic impulse in them, for Huxley it was
his modesty. Part of the problem lies in the assumption that mystics have
special capabilities, enabling them to have special experiences, and part
of it (though not necessarily with Huxley) is that by making the assumption
that the mystics are special one can avoid the reality staring out of one's
own face (to use Harding's language); elevating the mystics can be used
to postpone one's own realisation.
R.C.Zaehner disliked Huxley's linking of drug-induced experiences with mysticism,
quoting his last words (a week before his death):
'We must not attempt to live outside the world,
which is given us, but we must somehow learn how to transform it and transfigure
it. Too much "wisdom" is as bad as too little wisdom, and there
must be no magic tricks. We must learn to come to reality without the enchanter's
wand and his book of the words. One must find a way of being in the world
while not being of it. A way of living in time without being completely
swallowed up by time.' [4]
Zaehner reads a complete recantation of Huxley's
position on drugs into these words, saying they were "a warning indeed
to all who would foolishly maintain that psychedelic experience is not merely
similar to mystical experience but is identical with it." However,
Zaehner's objections to drug use derive at heart from his insistence on
a theistic mysticism; but we have seen that Pure Consciousness Mysticism
has no problem with any kind of devotional expression of the infinite and
eternal; neither does it require devotion, or any kind of God. The
objections to drug use that can legitimately derive from PCM are more to
do with the general problem of peak experiences in mysticism, rather than
from the lack of divine intervention (grace) that Zaehner found missing.
Another advocate of drug use is the scholar Agehananda Bharati (born Leopold
Fischer); but he is not evanglical about it like Huxley, and at the same
time has first-hand experience of the mystical and generally a deeper understanding
due to being both an initiate and practitioner of a mystical tradition and
a professional scholar on the subject. Bharati suffers from the opposite
problem to Zaehner: he has no concept of the devotional; however he seems
to share the widespread emphasis on mystical experience, whether drug-induced
or not. His assumption, a little like that of Forman, is that the mystical
state has to be so transcendent as to be devoid of content (as with the
Pure Consciousness Event discussed earlier), or that it has to be 'ectstatic',
'cosmic', or even psychedelic (as with Huxley). From this perspective he
rightly points out that no-one can live in this state permanently, and from
that draws the unfortunate conclusion that an individual needs only to have
experienced these states (called by him the zero-state, or state of 'numerical
oneness with the cosmic absolute' [5]) a few times in their life
to be called a mystic. He somewhat mitigates this stance with the observation
that the mystic should also be continuously obsessed with the unitive state,
possibly to the extent have having no other small-talk (this is certainly
true of the well-known mystics that I have met).
Frits Staal, a scholar of mysticism who emphasises, like Bharati, that scholarly
work must be accompanied by practice (though it is less clear in his work
what his own practice is), also discusses the relationship of drugs to mysticism.
[6]
Staal's definition of mysticism is broader than Bharati's, and much broader
than in PCM, so his debate widens the issues to include powers that may
or may not be associated with drug-taking. Leaving this aside, however,
there is still an emphasis on experiences.
The views of Zaehner, Bharati and Staal bring us to an important issue in
Pure Consciousness Mysticism: what is the role of 'special' experiences,
or experiences in general? Clearly Bharati is content to define a mystic
as one who has mystical experiences as defined above, and on this basis
Huxley and himself, for example, would count as mystics. Zaehner on the
other hand found it unacceptable to equate drug-induced experiences with
mystical ones. It is also clear that while many of the mystics that we have
looked at in this book have had 'mystical experiences', but they have been
chosen for discussion because of evidence that their orientation was permanently
towards the infinite and eternal. It may be that for the large part they
seem to live in an ecstatic way, like Rumi, Kabir, or Ramakrishna; or that
for the large part they live in a very sober way like Whitman, Harding or
Krishnamurti (which can make the identification of common factors difficult).
It may also be that during a transitional phase in their lives, as they
first encountered the infinite and the eternal (or the unitive), that they
report 'special' experiences as in the cases of Ramana Maharshi, Krishnamurti
and Douglas Harding. However, we have seen in all of them the underlying
orientation towards the infinite and eternal, and from this perspective
we can also see that the use of drugs has no definite link with this orientation.
An individual like Huxley may experience the infinite and eternal for a
brief period while the drug takes effect, but their continuum is unchanged.
More probably the use of 'safer' drugs can give the individual some greater
'spirituality' in their lives, and this is being argued for the current
widespread use of the drug Ecstacy in rave culture. It may also be possible
that a drug-induced experience of the infinite and eternal becomes the starting-point
for a process that leads to a permanent state of the unitive, but the author
knows of no well-documented cases. The dangers of drug use are much clearer
however: firstly there is the danger of illness or even death through overdose
or accident or addiction. These are the conventional fears about drug use,
and apply as much to tobacco and alcohol, but the specific fear from the
perspective of Pure Consciousness Mysticism is that the drug user settles
for the occasional mystical experience on drugs, and gains the notion that
this is what Krishna, Whitman, Ramana, Krishnamurti, and all the others
are talking about. Alternatively, in order to make the experience a continuum,
they may seek continual use of drugs which by any account is undesirable.
In Sartre's case, the evidence is that his use of mescalin led to a bad
experience of the mystical. Not only was he not better off afterwards,
in the same way that Huxley knew he had gained nothing of permanent value
from drug use, he was permanently set against the (limited) revelation it
afforded him. Sartre's case also shows up the limitations of Zaehner's reasoning
and the widespread emphasis on experience. Firstly, unless one believes
in the the absurdity of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, no two experiences
can be identical; secondly, as Maharshi would put it, who is that has
the experience? The manifest world offers countless types of
experience (and we probably can at least make distinctions between types
of experience), including, for those inclined, contact with disembodied
spirits, angels, gods, God, ancestors, powers (why not?). But, entertaining
as they all are (or frightening or destructive creative or transformative
or whatever), there can be no fundamental differentiation between experiences
compared to the category shift of knowing their source, the Unmanifest.
Zaehner, Bharati, Staal, and all the others are free to define a mysticism
where different types of experience have different value, but in Pure Consciousness
Mysticism such a distinction in not that useful. At best an experience can
re-orient one towards the infinite and eternal: Sartre's experience in the
park was potentially such an experience, and if it was drug-induced then
it had no essential difference to the experiences that Zaehner preferred.
However the question still remains, why were similar experiences in Maharshi,
Krishnamurti and Harding accompanied by a permanent orientation to the infinite
and eternal, and not with Sartre? To consider this question we have to return
to the heart of Sartre's experience in the park: nothingness (or rather
its absence).
5.6 Nothingness in the Park
We come now to the difficult discussion of nothingness
(and again we caution against taking too seriously distinctions between
nothingness, nirvana, and the unmanifest). Anyone who knows the object-less
love that is at the core of the devotional orientation can enter into the
infinite and eternal. If it needs to grow then the Gita, or the writings
of Whitman, Rumi or Kabir, or the accounts of Ramakrishna, or the presence
of Mother Meera can be sought out. It may be felt as a love of Nature; as
a love of God, or a love for a mystic dead or alive, or a supposed deity:
the point is that it does not need explaining, cannot be explained.
But this door is so rarely open in the West, and the better educated and
more intelligent the person the less likely it is to develop spontaneously
there simply isn't the environment for it.
The other door is nothingness.
It was stated in chapter one that nothingness was the inevitable counterpart
of infinity; the other side to the coin of expansion: if expansion cannot
take place through love and embraciveness, then it can take place through
nothingness. However, this relationship between the nothing and the infinite,
and the ways in which nothingness can be directly encountered have only
been glossed over so far. It is Sartre's park scene that gives us now enough
material with which to attempt this exposition in the context of luminaries
like Ramana Maharshi, Krishnamurti and Douglas Harding.
Let us imagine that every educated Westerner at some point finds him or
her self in Sartre's park, and that we are going to help them use the experience
to orientate themselves to the infinite and eternal, to make it their continuum,
and not to escape from it through art or whatever (though there is nothing
wrong in art per se, far from it). Clearly we do not wish upon them either
a bad drug trip or a crushing depression that they should land up in Sartre's
frame of mind in the park, but we can use these as metaphors for the more
generally pervasive but unnoticed alienation of the modern condition. In
other words there has to be some discontinuity in a person's life to take
them to this park, a sense of something lost. So, we arrive in the park
with our basic requisite: time to spend, nowhere to go. The first thing
that we note is that the park smiles at us this is essential: existence,
however confusing it will get for a bit, is benign. The second thing we
note is that words disappear they disappeared for me in Koregoan Park, as
for Sartre in Bouville Park. We have all known moments when words disappear,
generally when confronted with the sublime or ecstatic, perhaps the sunset,
music, or sex, though it is easy to labour this point however, especially
if one has had any exposure to Eastern philosophy. Sartre's description
of this state is so exquisite that perhaps we can use his imagery to recapture
for ourselves the unusual moments of being wordless, thoughtless. Sartre
brings our attention to the black knotty root of a chestnut tree that plunged
into the ground by the bench he was sitting on clearly it occupied his whole
frame of vision, and it was simply and irrevocably there. We now
are presented with lesson number three in the pursuit of nothingness: the
experience of suchness, or da-sein. We have become temporarily
lost, aimless, we have time; we note that the park smiles at us, we can
lose our sense of fear and be ready to encounter anything (or nothing),
we lose words for the time being, and we are faced with the suchness
of some simple object. Lesson four: we watch the struggle of the mind to
defeat this suchness. The Buddha once compared this struggle to that
of a fish thrashing about on the shore: we are out of our customary milieu,
and we thrash around hopelessly. Sartre dissects with great insight all
the possible avenues for denial of the suchness of existence.
He first of all tries the oldest strategy known to man: he names
the existents. This is so fundamental an activity to our thinking that one
can call man the animal that names things but unfortunately
Sartre is having difficulty with words. He tries to remember that by using
things you tame them; his previous engagement with the prolific existents
was only through their use to him; as stage scenery to be discarded after
the tiresome necessity of picking them up. He then considers describing
them: green rust, black and blistered boiled leather he is trained in the
use of artistic and poetic adjectives, but the root of the chestnut tree
escapes this old trick as well. He then attempts to retreat to the safety
of concepts drawn from the purer world of mathematics and science:
lines, circles, black: all of these used to have a reality for him that
had kept existence at bay, but no longer. Sartre then draws on another uniquely
human ability: to use comedy, vaudeville, a sense of superfluity, absurdity
he can reduce the dignity of the existents but to no avail.
What about analogy?: existence is like the "weary women who
abandon themselves to laughter and say: 'It does you good to laugh' in tearful
voices." But this does not describe the way that existence is pressing
in on him in the park. So he tries to regiment the phenomena: count,
order, by height, coordinates, bearings, measurements; but he soon sees
through the arbitrary nature of all these relationships. He tries to reduce
things to their function: the root as a suction pump. Even politics
gets a mention: he imagines somebody complaining that there are rights involved
in all of this (the right to be safe, the right to be in control, the right
to exclude anything that doesn't fit).
What Sartre is doing for us is showing how we normally construct the world,
how existence is normally mediated through the activities of the mind. This
faculty, made up of all the mental processes just described, is of course
vital to our survival; they take the place and also subsume the instincts
of the animals. The philosopher Mary Warnock [7], basing her work on Hume and
Kant, calls these processes collectively the imagination, giving
the word a specialised meaning in addition to the more common one relating
to fiction-making. For her, imagination enables us to maintain the feeling
that objects have a coherent independent existence, despite the fragmentary
nature of the sense impressions we receive of them. This function is universal
in its basics, but becomes more differentiated in its intellectual layering:
for example if Karl Marx, Rudolf Steiner, and Richard Dawkins [8] were
sitting on the park bench with their world-ordering functions intact they
would give very different accounts of the park. For Marx the park would
represent bourgeois ideals, realised at the expense of working people: the
wrought iron-work of the bench and railings would conjure up capitalist
factories and a chain of exploitation and dependency; the trees and grass
as the raw material for an irrelevant aesthetic phenomenon bought and sold
in the capitalist market-place as art. For Rudolf Steiner, the man-made
elements of the park would, in their rectilinear and curved designs, represent
a spiritual impoverishment in the artisan; the trees and birds, even the
stones, would exist for him as spiritual entities dormant in various degrees,
and capable of evolution into man and angel. For Dawkins the profusion of
life-forms would represent the unending struggle for the establishment and
preservation of genes; each living organism a vessel adapted exclusively
as a carrier for those genes, and showing in a non-linear kind of way a
richness deriving from the simplest of concepts; man and his creations perhaps
more subtle in the parallel between genes and memes: the park-bench and
its design belonging to the latter. We can multiply these world-views endlessly,
for example the lover and his mistress see the park differently again, through
an emotional colouring.
What is happening to Sartre in the park is that this normal faculty (including
both the basic world-ordering imagination and the acquired world-views of
the middle-class intellectual) that we take for granted is breaking down,
and he has not he context of Eastern meditation techniques to realise that
this process is an opportunity, not a pathology. The whole training in meditation,
particularly in Zen Buddhism, is to suspend the world-ordering faculty (in
a controlled manner) in order for existence to present itself naked. But
Sartre in the park is frightened, just as I was in India. He complains that
he was the root of the chestnut tree; that things crowded in on him,
that they were exuberent and obscene: 'existence is a repletion which man
can never abandon', even with closed eyes.
Then he finds another possible solution: transitions. Things came into being,
and if he could capture that moment of nascency when they manifested themselves
from their necessary preconditions he could defeat the awful raw suchness
of things: he could take refuge in a process. But Sartre could not
jump to that point just before things came into existence, he could not
find the preconditions, he could not find the vantage point where he could
be safe from existence: 'It didn't make sense, the world was present everywhere
in front and behind'. It was not like the theatre where the raw unpredictable
events of the play took place in front, and back in the stalls everything
was in control: one could just get up and leave. Behind him there was more
of the same horrible superfluity that he saw endless examples of in front
of him, he only had to turn and look. Sartre then locates the key to his
problem: he hits on nothingness.
His instinct brings him to the point where he identifies the missing element
in all the profusion: nothingness; but immediately his life, his
culture, and his training tell him that nothingness cannot be grasped. Gandhi
was certain the the Unmanifest could not be aprehended, Nietzsche said that
talk of the intransitory was misanthropic and a lie, Jung saw nirvana as
an amputation, and Sartre knew that nothingness could not be grasped. Great
intellects, serious men; they represent the Western intellectual (even though
Gandhi was an Indian).
5.7 The Arrows of Awareness
Sartre complains that existence was everywhere,
in front and behind. For whatever reason, he was in a state of heightened
awareness, choiceless awareness (as Krishnamurti would put it), and the
manifest and manifold overwhelmed him: his world-ordering capacity (imagination)
had broken down, his 'cerebral reducing valve' had opened. He had an underlying
emotional position of depression, so the manifest world was coloured with
that, but this is not the real problem. His problem was that he had no training
in awareness. An old metaphor for awareness is the arrow: Sartre's arrow
of awareness is going out to the manifest and manifold, it is the 'single-headed'
arrow of Krishnamurti's teaching (though not of his reality). The awareness
was bigger than his customary one, but it only went out. Gurdjieff, and
much more explicitly, Harding, teach the 'double-headed' arrow of awareness:
to bring attention to what is one looking out of. If the brilliant,
profuse, exuberant suchness of the park does not point back at the observer
in such a way that the person also senses their awareness as much as the
content, then existence does indeed become overwhelming, with no place to
call home. If we imagine the double-headed arrow pointing out at the park,
and at the same time pointing back towards oneself, then what is it actually
pointing at? The answer is nothingness (or nirvana or the unmanifest, or
Harding's Space): one's true identity. Sartre is existentially mistaken
when he said that in front was existence, and also behind. If he had followed
the arrow back from what was in front he would have found that it pointed
to the very nothingness that he desperately needed, but was convinced (without
enquiry) that it was not possible to reach (if this statement seems hard
to grasp then look back to Harding's experiments described in the Chapter
Two). Sartre's notion of what was 'behind' was consistent with the 'behind'
created by the Humian world-ordering function that is a constructed reality,
fictional but useful: but if we can drop memory and imagination (without
the risk of damage to these functions) then there is no 'behind',
or at least not in the ordinary sense. This absence of a 'behind' is illustrated
by Douglas Harding in his observation (and it is ours if only we look) that
rooms never have a sixth side. Conceptually a box-shaped room has
six sides, but existentially it has five at the most; the sixth wall
is replaced by nothingness, the space for the universe to exist in. Harding
sometimes uses the word 'backing' to indicate the opposite of what is in
front; it is another word for the unmanifest source of the manifest; this
'backing' is existentially present as opposed to the 'behind' constructed
throught the Humian imagination. We may also remember a remark by Whitman
commented upon earlier that he has 'distanced what is behind me for good
reasons,' in connection with the manifold exuberance of existence. Whatever
his intention with this aside, it is a useful point: the abundance has to
be distanced when we need to or we are overwhelmed by it.
The third possibility in connection with the arrow metaphor is of course
that of the arrow-head pointing only inwards. This is the nature some forms
of meditation practice, the concentration of one-pointed awareness, directed
inwardly, and resulting in total withdrawal from the senses. It leads to
Forman's Pure Consciousness Event, and perhaps it is what Ramakrishna and
Socrates experienced, but as pointed out earlier it is not possible as a
continuum within a normal life, as it represents a rejection of the manifest,
and would have killed Maharshi if he had not begun to direct his attention
outwards again. Neither should we dismiss its possible importance in training:
withdrawal from the senses for periods of time can help in the establishing
of awareness or the immoveable "I" of Maharshi.
Sartre created a milestone in honesty in his observations in the park. He
gives us a picture of reality that almost no writer has had the intellectual
honesty to do up to that point: he stripped away all literary pretensions
of narrative and human drama, and put his energy into the observation of
a totally mundane scene. But his powers of observation take him precisely
half-way: he cannot see the nothingness that underpins the profusion, he
cannot sense the "I" that Ramana suddenly discovered, or the 'space'
that Harding found in the place of his fictional head. Sartre could not
follow the arrow back to where it came from: the true interface between
the unmanifest and the manifest. If we do not notice the nothingness where
it is, then other sorts of oblivion are sought out: in drink, drugs, or
suicide. Sartre's tentative optimism that art would be a solution was still
a recognition that the real thing was missing.
We can look at the problem of nothingness in terms of the threat that it
poses to identity; we may remember that D.H.Lawrence complained that Whitman
had lost his 'self' through his expansiveness, in other words lost his identity.
In the previous section it was suggested that nothingness was one's true
identity it sounds like a philosophical proposition: logically, if
all bases for identity are subject to change, then the only true (permanent)
identity would have to be devoid of substance, i.e. nothingness. If one
heard this from philosophers then one might be justified in ignoring it
(after all they make countless logical propositions), but the mystics do
not speak in logical propositions, they speak to one through their being,
and their being is full of light, it is full of love, it is embracive;
it is everything that the miserable Sartre in the park is not.
But nothingness cannot be the whole picture either if it were, then Jung
would have been right in his assessment of nirvana as an 'amputation'.
We also note that the majority of the non-devotional mystics talk about
expansion rather than annihilation, for example Whitman. However, if Whitman's
expansivity were of the nature of Sartre's in the park, where there was
no relief from the existents, he would have been in the same kind of trouble,
his identity would have 'leaked out into the universe'. We have no indication
from Whitman of a conscious engagement with the unmanifest substrate to
his manifest, populous world, but his eminent sanity and sense of the eternal
points to its presence.
Sartre, possibly under the shock of mescalin, or depression, or both, experienced
a suspension of the normal world-ordering function of the mind and notices
suchness and brings to it a Western mind that engages with it to
give us a quite unique account. Harding also experienced a suspension of
the world-ordering function, but he was better prepared (as I was) because
of an acquaintance with Indian thought (Harding says he was actively engaged
in the enquiry: who am I?); where he takes us however is unique to both
East and West: he gives us the first comprehensible account of nothingness,
and scientific method for its verification.
What does this mean in terms of identity however? Clearly the suspension
of the world-ordering function is required to apprehend nothingness, or
we could say more generally that mind needs to be silent. This represents
a shift in the energy of an individual from mind to no-mind, which is the
same as a shift in identity. When we imagined Marx, Steiner, or Dawkins
taking Sartre's place on the park-bench we conjured up very specific world-views,
and individuals obviously gain much of their sense of identity from them.
If they were to abandon their world-view, and also the more basic world-ordering
functions learned in childhood, then the park would stand naked before them.
It is the investment in personal identity that makes this a seemingly pathological
experience when by training or by temperament one is fluid enough about
one's identity, then it becomes a divine experience.
The contextualists believe, quite rightly, that identity is largely constructed
through language, but do not consider the possibility that one can suspend
both language and this narrow sense of identity created through its normal
functioning. This is partly because they define mysticism in a certain way,
rather differently to Pure Consciousness Mysticism, placing the emphasis
on experiences. Further, some believe that mystic experiences are experiences
of a certain category of object: this category being vaguely defined
as the numinous, the mystical (tautologically), the wholly-other, and so
on, allowing for a range of possible experiences; these in turn mediated
by the world-ordering systems that the subject identifies with. Stephen
Katz and the contributors to his Mysticism and Language make many
valuable contributions to our understanding of the role of language in connection
with a broader form of mysticism, but Katz's fundamental position is stated
thus:
It is my view, argued in detail elsewhere,
that mystical reports do not merely indicate the postexperiential description
of an unreportable experience in the language closest at hand. Rather,
the experiences themselves are inescapably shaped by prior linguistic influences
such that the lived experience conforms to a preexistent pattern that has
been learned, then intended, and then actualized in the experiential reality
of the mystic. [9]
Sartre's experience in the park offers us a
good counter-example to Katz's argument! (Sartre is quite explicit that
his account is a postexperiential description of an unintended and certainly
unlearned experience.) But Katz is describing a different range of phenomona:
for example my temptation when visiting Mother Meera was to bring about
the kind of cosmic visions that Arjuna had of Krishan (or Harvey of Meera),
and if I had succumbed it would have provided a good illustration of Katz's
view. Pure Consciousness Mysticism on the other hand is about a direct apprehension
of the infinite and eternal which is only possible when 'prior linguistic
influences' are suspended Krishnamurti points out over and over again that
as soon as language has entered the fundamental thing has escaped one again
(perhaps Krishnamurti is not a mystic for the contextualists).
But Warnock gives us a hint that Hume was not satisfied that mere 'imagination'
(his term for the world-ordering function) could perform such a difficult
task as bringing sense to the world in the first place. We have the impression
that, as he brought his powers of concentration to bear on anything, it
seemed to fall apart rather than become clearer, concluding that 'carelessness
and inattention alone afford us any remedy'. [10] I could be misreading this,
but I recognise the effect and goal of some types of concentration meditations,
where reality seems to fall apart, for example when staring fixedly at an
object for long periods of time. Sartre's image of the 'startled hares'
is a good one: by bringing the language-based world-ordering faculty too
heavily to bear on an object their apparent solidity begins to waver. For
the purely intellectually-oriented person the despairing conclusion must
be that carelessness and inattention are the remedy (i.e. not to push this
rather delicate functioning), but for us the remedy is different: to allow
awareness and attention to grow and rely on a different faculty to bring
order to the world: the faculty of the heart. (This is something that all
the mystics will whisper to you: the world is ordered through love.)
Clearly, even the mystic is not without a 'mundane' world-view, and clearly
a mystic could not function if the normal world-ordering capacity were permanently
damaged, as in some forms of mental illness. However, to voluntarily suspend
it is to cease to identify with it, and to start to identify with something
else. That something else cannot be pure nothingness: it has to be at the
boundary of nothingness and profusion, it has to be the interface between
the unmanifest and the manifest. This interface is the source of all creation,
and also the source of all destruction, called God in theistic systems of
thinking. In non-theistic language it is hard to find a suitable word for
it, though consciousness is not a bad start or even Pure Consciousness.
Perhaps then we could say that mystics identify with consciousness, which
in turn brings positive sensations (the word bliss is used in Hindu thought
in association with awareness, the Buddha on the other hand was wary of
it). In turn these positive sensations may be interpreted or amplified as
the devotional or theistic, if the temperament of the individual is so inclined,
though in a democratic world we should not privilege such intepretations.
References for Sartre, part Three
[1]
Harding, D.E. Head Off Stress - Beyond the Bottom Line, London: Arkana,
1990, chapter 9
[2] Huxley, A.
The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, Chatto and Windus, London
1972, p. 26
[3]
Lutyens, M. The Life and Death of Krishnamurti, Rider, London, 1991,
p. 92.
[4]
Zaehner, R.C. Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe, Collins, London
1972, p. 109.
[5]
Bharati, Agehananda, The Light at the Centre - Context and Pretext of
Modern Mysticism, Ross-Erikson / Santa Barbara 1976, p.25
[6]
Staal, Frits, Exploring Mysticism, Berkely, Los Angeles, London:
University of California Press, 1975
[7]
Warnock, Mary, Imagination, London: Faber, 1980
[8]
See for example Dawkins, R. The Selfish Gene, Oxford University
Press, Oxford, New York, 1992
[9]
Katz, Steven Mysticism and Language, Oxford University Press 1992,
p. 5
[10]
Warnock, Mary, Imagination, London: Faber, 1980, p. 25.
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