[world-vedic] EYE OF SHIVA PT.2

[Guest guest]

continued from Part

1

FROM THE KNOWLEDGE OF REALITY

MAGAZINE

The paradoxical meeting between eastern mystical insight and modern

physics springs from the fact that both disciplines are thoroughly

empirical. One investigates the inner world, the other the outer

physical universe. Both are experimental, both observe with clinical

detachment. Where they are could to meet is when physics comes

close to the fundamental nature of reality, to consciousness.

This meeting would not have been possible a hundred years ago

when physical science held dogmatically a far more mechanistic

and substantial view of the material world, a view that is still

quiet useful as far as our everyday life is concerned by which

is no longer appropriate at the microcosmic level where problems

of consciousness intrude unceasingly. The phenomena analysed by

quantum physics are elements in a string of processes, and what

binds them together lies in the observer's mind. The fundamental

unity of all things and events at that level is therefore bound

to include consciousness.

It becomes increasingly clear that both approaches

to ultimate

Reality are complementary rather than opposite and antagonistic.

What, then, is the major characteristic of the

mystical approach?

The East seems to have understood long ago what Henri Bergson

brilliantly demonstrated. That is, that man's mind, as it evolved

over hundreds of years, is cast in an essentially utilitarian

mould. His mental functions are atavistically geared to practical

action, rather than abstract thought about ultimates. The brain

analyses perceptions and selects the actions to be accomplished.

It is not, by nature, intended to deal with pure, non-utilitarian

knowledge. The illusion that the rational intellect could reach

some kind of ultimate metaphysical truth was never completely

discarded in the West. It was never seriously considered in the

East where the problem has always been to still and over - come

the mind through appropriate techniques of meditation and

contemplation,

to shed an intuitive trans-rational light on the depths of the

soul and let the Self disclose itself. Briefly, the various eastern

techniques aim at controlling and eventually stopping the flow

of thoughts with the assistance of physiological processes, bodily

postures and breath control, according to the hallowed Tibetan

saying: "Breath is the courser and thought the rider."

The fundamental dichotomy between East and West is

the result

of a sharp cleavage between two forms of consciousness which took

place some four thousand years ago. In the Sumerian and Babylonian

civilisations, the respective spheres of man and higher divinity

began to split away from one another. The king no longer partakes

of the divine; he is nothing but the humble priest of a totally

transcendental deity, and the religious problem therefore becomes

one of relationship rather than identification between man and

an external God. This sharp separation triggered a longing for

the restoration of the broken connection between the human and

divine spheres. The end result, many centuries later, was the

birth of the notion of history as a spiritually meaningful progression

in which the will of God reveals itself - history as a linear

development with a temporal direction, and without any possibility

of recurrence. This is a complete break with the previous cyclical

concepts of time which were geared to the natural cycles of the

seasons. The cosmic process appears now as a directional unfolding

with a once-and-for-all Creation, followed by a Fall and a struggle

to overcome the Fall and reach Redemption. The world becomes the

dramatic battlefield of a mighty struggle between the powers of

good and evil, light and darkness - a vision that found its fullest

expression in Zoroastrian) Persia and Israel. Thus, the West looked

for what theologian Paul Tillich calls the "new being" in

the

historical process itself rather than beyond it.

All this is foreign to the concepts of the East

where the ever-recurring

cyclical view, either historical as in China, or transhistorical

as in India, prevails. The process of history has no spiritual

significance whatsoever. There is no temporal tension here, no

historical struggle between good and evil, just a natural and

inevitable alternance between two complementary poles, as between

day and night. Man's spiritual problem is not relationship with

the divine but identification with it. Man is assumed to be divine

in essence; his main problem is therefore to realise this

identification

by peeling off the veils of illusion, which separate him from

his true divine being. Phrased another way, the problem is to

eliminate mere appearance, to which the individual ego belongs,

and which is due to the illusion bred by ignorance, in order to

retrieve one's fundamental identity, one's divine Self.

This, of course, has great bearing on the problem

of ultimate

Reality. From the first, Greece's Ionian philosophers took the

major step of sharply dissociating the subjective from the objective

- the subjective being viewed as illusory. Objective thinking

made its first decisive appearance in Greek pre-Socratic philosophy;

and the process of objectification can best be understood by looking

at the rare surviving fragments of Heraclitus of Ephesus. Until

then, as a legacy of the magic mind, dream-pictures were considered

to be at least as real as mental activity in the waking-state.

In other words, the unconscious was granted at least as high a

degree of reality. This was turned upside down by Heraclitus:

"It is therefore necessary to follow the

common. But while reason

is common, the majority live as though they had a private insight

of their own ... those who speak with a sound mind must hold fast

to what is common to all ... The waking have one common world,

but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own."

In Indian thought, the process was reversed; the

objective, that

is, the world of appearances, maya, is ultimately a phantasm (as

modern physics tells us), whereas the subjective, that is,

consciousness,

is the real world.

The Greeks began to see the external world as full

of detached,

autonomous objects, and linked these objects with one another

intellectually, binding them together into logically coherent

systems of objective relationships according to strict physical

laws. They conceived the ultimate object of the material world

to be the atom, the Greek atomos signifying "indivisible",

that

is, the irreducible building block of the physical universe. In

the process, they came to rely increasingly on the rational intellect

and on discursive thought, deemed fit to understand and explain

everything in the phenomenal world and beyond. With Plato, for

instance, the process of objectification reaches beyond the mere

material world to postulate a supra-physical order of objectified

ideas and geometrical concepts, of which physical things are imperfect

replicas.

Hence, for thousands of years, all the vain efforts

of the western

mind to adduce rational proofs of the existence of an objectified

God as First Cause, as Deus ex Machina. The East never had any

need for this; in fact it largely turned its back on the subject,

without cutting it off sharply from its emotional links with the

non-subject surrounding or underlying it.

As a result, whereas western philosophies are

philosophies of

strict intellectual information, eastern philosophies are philosophies

of total transformation, leading to a form of human wholeness

that is unreachable in the western context. To the easterner,

religion is an awareness of ultimate Reality, not an intellectual

theory. It is psychology and method rather than theology and dogma.

So that while the westerner advances from thought to thought,

from abstract concept to abstract concept, deducing, inducing,

differentiation, integrating, analysing, the easterner advances

from one subjective condition to another. The westerner focuses

on the objects of consciousness, the easterner on consciousness

itself. Eastern philosophies are basically empirical descriptions

of the possible evolution of man from one level of consciousness

to higher ones. To sum up, the westerner aims at clear thought,

the easterner at pure consciousness.

The Bhagavad Gita, one of the monuments of Indian

literature,

gives us a perfect example of this predominance of the subjective

outlook. This "Song of the Blessed" depicts the battlefield

of

Kurukshetra where two armies stand face to face. One of the

commanders,

Arjuna, drives his war chariot between the lines and, horrified

at the thought of the forthcoming slaughter, wants to call off

the battle. Lord Krishna, who assumes temporarily the role of

charioteer and incarnates divine wisdom, urges him to fight regardless

of the objective consequences, and his speech is the essence of

the Gita's message. Arjuna must fight with serenity and total

detachment because it is his duty as a professional warrior, because

he is bound by the Karma of his past and has to go inexorably

through the mysterious labyrinth of his appointed duties, however

evil the consequences may seem to others. The immediate message:

there is no such thing as objective reality. And the ultimate

message:

"Give thought to nothing but the act, never to

its fruits ...

For him who achieves inward detachment, neither good nor evil

exists any longer here below."

The western outlook has always included a full

acceptance of an

objective reality, implying the absolute dissociation of every

individual human being from every other, and the equally absolute

dissociation of all human beings from the higher divinity.

Furthermore,

there was in the West, until the advent of psychoanalysis, no

conscious problem of self-identification, of rediscovering one's

deeper layers of consciousness. The western problem was how to

relate to divine powers outside oneself, and how to develop in

the process one's original personality (a concept ignored in the

East), that is, one's ego. In the East, the problem is how to

overcome and extinguish the ego as an essential step on the way

to the discovery of one's fundamental identity with the

unindividualised

divinity within the deep self according to the sacred formula,

"Tat Tvam Asi", (Thou Art That). The Almighty Brahman, lord

of

the universe, and atman, the human soul, are one and the same.

Quite obviously, philosophies of transformation are entirely geared

to the development of the mystical potential in man; whereas

philosophies

of objective information are not. This explains the unending tension

between mystical tendencies in the West and the rational intellect

of its dogmatic theologians and philosophers.

In spite of the East-West dichotomy, there seems to

be, however,

a broad area of agreement between all mystics the world over;

that, while the majority of human beings lead a more or less worthy

life framed by the moral standards of whatever society they happen

to be born into, there is another special "way" for those

who

feel instinctively in touch with higher spiritual powers. This

way is as mysterious as its destination, which is literally beyond

verbal description, inexpressible in any language, although it

can be hinted at in pictures and metaphors, music and poetry.

It is here, in the direct records of the personal experiences

of the great mystics, that the heart of the religious impulse

is to be found, rather than in the official dogmas and intellectual

interpretations of theologians.

Perhaps the most dramatic instance of the

opposition between the

two forms of knowledge occurred to Thomas Aquinas, the supreme

theologian whose monumental Summa Theologiae remained the cornerstone

of Roman Catholic doctrine for centuries. On the feast of St.

Nicholas in 1273, he was unexpectedly overpowered by a mystical

rapture of such intensity that all his theological writings appeared

to him as totally worthless. In his own words:

"Everything that I have written seems like

straw to me, in comparison

with the things that I have seen and that have been revealed to

me."

And therefore, he never wrote another word. This,

from a theological

standpoint, rather embarrassing episode, also illustrates the

staggering nature of mystical rapture, not only as physical sensation

and spiritual emotion, but also as translogical knowledge of a

far higher order than can be acquired by the most brilliant intellect.

Quite clearly, all religions have sprung from this

indefinable

awareness in human nature that obviously transcends its physical

and mental limitations, a potential awareness made actual in some

peculiarly gifted human beings. It is in the sum-total of the

records of their own direct personal experiences in this realm

beyond life and death, and beyond time and space, that kernel

of religious truth is to be found - although in most men, this

mystical disposition lies beneath the threshold of waking

consciousness,

not strong enough to break into the open and revolutionise their

lives.

If we peruse these records carefully, we are struck

by a universal

insistence on the fact that all distinction between things, men,

object and subject, self and non-self is overcome, and abolished.

The world becomes "One", which is the essence of the

monistic

philosophy of India's Vedanta. This, the western intellect resists

with all its might, since it abolishes the whole monotheistic

concept of a sharp distinction between man and God; it makes a

mockery of the concept that history has any spiritual meaning;

and it destroys all the analytical claims of western thought as

to the sharp opposition between subject and object.

No wonder that western mystics have always had to

contend with

the underlying hostility of the cultural environment into which

they were born. Unless they are honest enough to claim, like Aquinas,

that their intellectual word is "straw" as compared with

the true

mystical vision, they had to go through extraordinary contortions

to dissociate the vision from the almost irresistible claim of

their souls to outright participation in the Divine. As St. John

of the Cross put it in his Dark Night of the Soul:

"I trust neither to experience nor to

knowledge ... but solely

to the Holy Scriptures ... it is not my intention to depart from

the sound doctrine of our holy mother the Catholic Church. I resign

myself absolutely to her light, and submit to her decisions ..."

In the East there can be no such surrender since it

is acknowledged

that ultimate Reality is precisely what the mystic experiences;

and that this experience is the actual recovery of his inner,

divine Self. He becomes, in fact, what he has actually alway been.

Time and again, the western mystic is warned not to let himself

be carried away by the subjective "illusion" of his own

potential

divinity, warned that there can be no divine incarnation in man

- save in the one and only case of Jesus, for the Christians -

and that his experience is actually a "vision" of an

objectified,

transcendental and forever separate Almighty God, rather than

a "fusion" with it.

In spite of all those strictures, western mystics

managed often

enough to convey the essence of their raptures, which agree with

the eastern testimony. The essence of their raptures, which agree

with the eastern testimony. The essence is the monistic feeling

that the seer and the seen are identical, that there is no division

or distinction between one thing and another: the corollary is

that the vision completely transcends the rational mind, and that

it is therefore beyond verbal description: and finally that the

experience is an overwhelmingly emotional one, involving a supreme

peace "that passes all understanding", total calm and total

blessedness.

As the pagan mystic Plontinus put it:

"The man is changed, no longer himself nor

self-belonging: he

is merged with the Supreme, sunken into it, one with it ... This

is why the vision baffles telling: for how could a man bring back

tidings of the Supreme as detached, when he has seen it as one

with himself?"

The true mystical experience is in complete

contradiction with

the main trend of the western philosophic outlook. No wonder that,

time and again, the objectifying, analytical mind of the West

has viewed mysticism either with distrust, or as sheer delusion

or superstition whereas the East views precisely this objectifying,

analytical mind as the source of all delusions.

In early Buddhism, we reach the height of total

subjectivity untainted

by any attempt at objectification. Buddha denied the objective

reality of Brahman, merely stressing Nirvana, the subjective state

of enlightenment. This has brought upon him the accusation of

atheism; but this accusation is irrelevant to the extent that

early Buddhism was simply not interested in any kind of

objectification

whatsoever. It merely posits the total unreality of any stable

substance, thing or concept, claiming that everything is in a

perpetual flux, that only events take place - reminding us of

Whiteheads's famous saying that "The event is the unit of things

real." The same, of course, applies to the other so-called

"atheistic"

schools of Indian philosophy such as Samkhya and Yoga. The real

is what you experience, not what you think. All attempts at

identifying

and defining the Supreme Deity, God, Allah, Brahman, are pointless

and meaningless since they all hint at some Reality that is beyond

time and space, beyond the objective and the subjective, and therefore

beyond verbal description - and yet, can be experienced by man.

Even to state that God exists objectifies Him, and implies that

He is one thing among other things, and is therefore finite and

in contradiction with His infinity - hence the impossibility of

proving His existence by intellectual means alone.

We can now sum up the broad areas of agreement

between the eastern

mystical insight as expressed in eastern literature and philosophy,

and the revolutionary vision of the universe postulated in

contemporary

physics. The first place must be given to the monistic view of

the world, the fundamental oneness of it, which becomes increasingly

evident at the subatomic level where all the phenomena are

interrelated

and cannot be viewed as autonomous and isolated things or processes:

particles' properties can only be observed and defined through

their interactions with other systems. The second place must be

given to the non-existence of a sharp separation between object

and subject, observer and thing observed, since the observer,

like the mystic, is an active "participant" in the

experiment,

and forms one whole with whatever is being observed.

This entails, in turn, the overcoming of the world

of opposites

and transforming them into alternation and interdependent poles,

like those of a magnetic field. In China the interplay of Yin

and Yang has traditionally symbolised this alternance. In the

far more intellectualised culture of India, the constant theme

is the need to transcend all pairs-of-opposites, dvandva. This

overcoming of pairs-of-opposites occurs constantly in nuclear

physics where continuity and discontinuity co-exist; where particles

are all at once destructible and indestructible; where energy

changes into matter and vice-versa; where the statistical character

of the quantum theory makes it impossible to state flatly that

a particle exists or does not exist in a given place since it

is, in fact, a probability pattern in a state that is halfway

between existence and non-existence.

To conclude, we may eventually look forward to a

global, planetary

culture in which both the "eastern" mystical and

"western" scientific

searches for ultimate Reality will merge, and which will transcend

them both. A physical science will go on developing indefinitely

within the limits it is setting for itself; and a science and

technique of mysticism will strip away all dogmas, theologies

and ideologies prevailing today in order to concern itself exclusively

with this most mysterious and profound transhuman experience.

Journal of Dharma