The Still Point

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Dear All,

 

" The Still Point " is a lecture given at Shanti Sadan on 13th June 1973.

 

Enjoy!

 

violet

 

 

GREAT POETRY is much more than a literary achievement, giving delight and

refreshment to its readers, it can also be the means of communicating truth.

 

One of the acknowledged major poets of our own century is T.S. Eliot. His Four

Quartets, recently read by Sir Alec Guinness on the radio, is regarded by many

people as among the greatest English poems of the twentieth century. In this

lecture the speaker wants to examine some of the themes running through T.S.

Eliot's poem, from the point of view of the yogic teaching.

 

Let us begin by reading a passage from the first of the four poems, 'Burnt

Norton':

 

At the still point of the turning world. Neither

flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point,

there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not

call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered.

Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for

the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there

is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been:

but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is

to place it in time.

 

 

Here Eliot describes a still point in the midst of the continual movement of the

turning world, a point where past and future are gathered, and yet which cannot

be placed in time, so that the idea of 'how long' - of duration - is

inapplicable to it. It is neither flesh, nor fleshless - neither in the body nor

out of the body. It is still, containing neither movement from nor towards,

neither ascent nor decline. And yet he says, paradoxically, 'at the still point,

there the dance is'. 'Except for the point, the still point, there would be no

dance, and there is only the dance.'

 

The poem was first published in 1944, but in this passage he is returning to a

theme which he had already expressed nine years earlier in Murder in the

Cathedral: there is stillness hidden behind the dance of events. One is at once

reminded of the verse in the Bhagavad Gita: 'He who can see inaction in action,

who can also see action in inaction, he is wise among men, he is a yogin.'

(4.18)

 

In the Yoga classics the world is spoken of as 'jagat', 'the moving thing', and

also at other times as 'the wheel of sansara'; it is the turning world,

constantly revolving and never still. It is the realm of action and of suffering

the consequences of action. Plunged in it, the soul is driven forward by the

motive force of desire for the fruits of action. The same image of the revolving

wheel, which is yet paradoxically unmoving, is used by Eliot in the earlier

play, Murder in the Cathedral.

 

It is in the passage where Thomas Becket speaks after the chorus of the women of

Canterbury have expressed the hopes and fears, the day-to-day suffering and

anxieties of the ordinary people in their everyday lives, now faced with a new

and greater fear of a cataclysmic event. They are rebuked by the priest for

their anxiety, but Thomas defends them:

 

Peace. And let them be, in their exaltation.

They speak better than they know, and beyond

your understanding.

They know and do not know, what it is to act

or suffer.

They know and do not know, that action is

suffering

And suffering is action. Neither does the

agent suffer

Nor the patient act. But both are fixed

In an eternal action, an eternal patience

To which all must consent that it may be willed

And which all must suffer that they may will it,

That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern

is the action

And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still

Be forever still.

 

The still point of the turning world, the world which is action and suffering

for those who are bound on its wheeling spokes, is also a means of escape from

this bondage and suffering. In Wisdom from the East, Dr. Shastri describes the

village oil mills in India, in which the oil is extracted from the seeds by two

revolving millstones driven by a buffalo. The buffalo is blindfolded and has a

bell round its neck. So long as he moves round and round the bell rings, but if

he rests even for a minute, the driver knows that he has stopped moving and

comes with a lash to beat him. In this way he spends the whole day in action and

in suffering, but at the end of the day he is where he was at the beginning. And

this in a sense is a picture of man's life when he is confined within the

treadmill of action and suffering.

 

In a poem by Kabir translated by Dr. Shastri, and written in the fifteenth

century, there is a strikingly similar image:

 

Alas! No grain remains between the grinding

stones,

Yet, those that cling to the pivot are not destroyed.

 

It is the same point. There is a still point at the centre of this turning

world, where the means of escape exist. Eliot speaks of it in the poem as

 

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release

from the inner

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,

Ehrebung [eternally-bonded] without motion, concentration

Without elimination, both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror.

 

The world, says Eliot, is a world of half-light, neither daylight nor darkness.

But to escape from this world of bondage, of action and suffering, we need to

seek the inner darkness which comes from the exclusion of the sense impressions,

by turning within. To live in the flickering half-light of the world is only

partly living:

 

Only a flicker

Over the strained time-ridden faces

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Tumid apathy with no concentration

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

That blows before and after time,

Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs

Time before and time after.

Eructation of unhealthy souls

Into the faded air, the torpid

Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of

London,

Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and

Putney,

Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here

Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only

Into the world of perpetual solitude,

World not world, but that which is not world,

Internal darkness, deprivation

And destitution of all property,

Desiccation of the world of sense,

Evacuation of the world of fancy,

Inoperancy of the world of spirit;

This is the one way, and the other

Is the same, not in movement

But abstention from movement; while the world

moves

In appetency, on its metalled ways

Of time past and time future.

 

The way of escape is by descent 'into the world of perpetual solitude'. It is

called the world, yet it is wholly other than the world; it is not a world at

all. Through this world of internal darkness, leaving behind all property,

drying up the world of sense impressions, says Eliot, and evacuating the world

of fancy, we reach the inner freedom from practical desire and release from

action and suffering, and are 'surrounded by a grace of sense, a white light

still and moving'.

 

One is reminded continually in this poem of passages in the Bhagavad Gita. And

here I think anyone who has read the Gita will be thinking of the verse in

Chapter Two:

 

What is night to all beings, therein the self-controlled one is awake. Where

all beings are awake, that is the night of the sage who sees. It is this descent

into what Eliot calls the 'inner darkness'. And in this passage he seems to be

giving a poetic description of the inner way, of the silencing of the mind in

meditation; withdrawing the senses and also eliminating the stream of irrelevant

ideas, which he calls the 'world of fancy'.

 

When a man completely withdraws the senses from sense-objects, as the tortoise

withdraws its limbs from all sides, then his knowledge is steady. (Gita 2.58)

 

But again we are told in that chapter that mere withdrawal is not enough.

'Objects withdraw from the abstinent man but not the taste...When a man thinks

of objects, attachment for them arises; from attachment arises desire.' So

escape from action and suffering, the inner freedom from the practical desire,

of which Eliot speaks, which gives release from the inner and outer compulsion,

demands not only withdrawal of the senses (not only desiccation of the world of

sense, as he calls it) but also restraint and emptying of the mind, the

evacuation of the world of fancy; the emptying of the mind. This world of fancy

is also the world of ambition and castle-building, in which the soul plunges

deeper and deeper into the insubstantial and ultimately unsatisfying realm of

appearances, a point which Eliot has already expressed very beautifully in the

earlier play in the passage where the tempters come to Thomas Becket:

 

Man's life is a cheat and a disappointment;

All things are unreal,

Unreal or disappointing;

The Catherine wheel, the pantomime cat,

The prizes given at the children's party,

The prize awarded for the English Essay,

The scholar's degree, the statesman's decoration.

All things become less real, man passes

From unreality to unreality.

 

Eliot tells us that people try to escape from the limitations of time

superstitiously by having recourse to magic or divination. They seek to overcome

the limitations of the unknown future by trying to achieve precognition of

events yet to come, either by astrology or palmistry or clairvoyance or

whatever. But the real route of escape from time is not in such superstition,

magic or occultism; it is to be found neither in the future nor the past, but

here and now at the point of intersection of the timeless with time:

 

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,

To report the behaviour of the sea monster,

Describe the horoscope...

Observe disease in signatures, evoke

Biography from the wrinkles of the palm

And tragedy from fingers; release omens

By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable

With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams

Or barbituric acids, or dissect

The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors -

To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams;

all these are usual

Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press;

And always will be, some of them especially

When there is distress of nations and perplexity

Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the

Edgware Road.

Men's curiosity searches past and future

And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint -

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

 

In this passage Eliot identifies the central problem for the saint and mystic as

the same as that of the yogi. It is to discover within his own being what he

calls the point of intersection of the timeless with time; the still point of

the timeless moment, where past and future are gathered, which cannot be called

fixed, and yet which is characterised by no movement, and except for which there

would be no dance. It is, as the Upanishad tells us, neti, neti, not this, not

that. It is beyond description in words. Yet this element is accessible to each

and every individual within the depths of his own personality. It is already

there but undiscovered.

 

Although we are ignorant of its nature in the ordinary way, we all have glimpses

of it, glimpses which are spoken of by Eliot, which occur when the mind is

one-pointedly concentrated on some experience, or lost in self-forgetfulness in

total absorption, either because of some aesthetic experience of great beauty or

for some other reason:

 

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. There are only hints and

guesses.

 

The hints and guesses that we all have in ordinary experience give promise of

escape to the soul, but in order to gain access to the still point, not only

concentration, but also purification and purgation, are necessary. The yogis lay

great stress on the need to refine and purify the mind as a preliminary to the

awakening of the spiritual consciousness. In the Bhagavad Gita the symbol of

fire is used twice in what appear to be quite contradictory senses. In Chapter

Three when Arjuna asks the Lord what it is that drives a man to commit sin, even

against his will, as if he were constrained by force, the Lord answers:

 

It is desire born of passion, all-devouring and most

sinful. Know this to be the enemy here. As fire is

covered by smoke, as a mirror by rust, as the

embryo is enclosed in the womb, so is this covered

by that passion; enveloped is wisdom by this

insatiable fire of desire, which is the constant foe

of the wise. The senses, the mind and the intelligence

are said to be its seat; veiling wisdom by these it

deludes the embodied soul. (3.36-40)

 

In the next chapter of the Gita, however, the same image of fire is used to

symbolise wisdom, which purifies and cleanses the mind from all the dross of

prejudice and spiritual ignorance which afflicts it:

 

As the fire which is kindled turns its fuel into

ashes, O Arjuna, even so does the fire of wisdom

turn to ashes all work; there is nothing on earth

equal in purity to wisdom. He who becomes

perfected by Yoga finds this of himself, in his self,

in course of time. (4.37-8)

 

This fire of wisdom, which is that which finally releases man from the bondage

to action and suffering the fruits of action, is actually enveloped by that

other fire of ignorance - of desire. Eliot uses a Christian image of the descent

of the Holy Spirit as a dove, bringing wisdom and divine grace, to express the

same truth in almost the same terms:

 

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

 

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre -

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

 

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

 

Man has to choose between the insatiable fire of desire, which plunges him into

action and suffering, and which consumes his life, as the buffalo's life is

consumed on the treadmill, or the fire of wisdom, which consumes the dross of

spiritual ignorance in the mind, and leads to enlightenment. To achieve wisdom,

he has to turn within and seek the still point.

 

Here and there does not matter.

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion...

 

One of the recurrent themes in Eliot's poem is that words cannot adequately

penetrate beyond time to the timeless moment. They are within time and yet even

though they are within time they can reach out to the timeless region. Although

they are part of the moving thing, yet they can, as he says, through their

pattern or form try to convey the stillness, that which is unmoving:

 

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now. Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still.

 

Elsewhere in the poem he regrets in the same way his own inability to adequately

express in words what he wants to say:

 

So here I am, in the middle way, having had

twenty years -

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of

l'entre deux guerres

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of

failure

Because one has only learnt to get the

better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the

way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it.

 

The attempted expression of something in words is a new beginning. Each attempt

is a new beginning. It is, if you like, a new life beginning; a coming to birth

of an idea in the form of a sentence. And yet that attempt is mortal and is

doomed, ultimately, to failure - to die. And yet even in that life and death,

promise is held out:

 

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from. And every phrase

And sentence that is right (where every word

is at home

Taking its place to support the others,

The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,

An easy commerce of the old and the new,

The common word exact without vulgarity,

The formal word precise but not pedantic,

The complete consort dancing together)

Every phrase and every sentence is an end

and a beginning,

Every poem an epitaph. And any action

Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the

sea's throat

Or to an illegible stone: and that is where

we start.

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

 

The end is where we start from. What an ancient theme this is! The story was

told by the Sufi poet, Rumi, in the twelfth century, in his Mathnavi, of the man

who has to go to Cairo in order to find that the treasure that he seeks is at

home in Baghdad; it is in his own house, there where he had never realised it

was, and where he was living in misery and poverty.

 

The still point, by which we can escape from action and suffering, is here and

now. It is not in some future heaven, to be attained after death, nor in the

re-attainment of some long lost paradise, which we have enjoyed but lost and

which is to be regained. To look for the solution within time, in the future or

in the past, is an error. We have to cross the intersection between time and the

timeless, to go beyond the realm of time, space and causation:

 

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

 

This is the paradox. We do not have to go anywhere, and yet we have to embark on

a voyage of discovery. This voyage is a far journey to that which is nearest to

us, our own personality. God - the still point - is nearer to us than the

jugular vein, as the Koran says. We are travellers, but not only in time and

space, but also travellers from the realm of time to eternity. And this paradox

continually recurs in Eliot's thought:

 

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more

complicated

Of dead and living.

 

We are travellers, he says, strangers in the world, passing like nomads on our

long pilgrimage. Yet paradoxically the end of that pilgrimage is not far off. As

Shri Shankara says in one of his works, the true place of pilgrimage is the mind

itself.

 

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning...

Quick now, here, now, always -

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

 

This is the last part of the poem and the final lines contain a clear reference

to one of the images which the yogis use to describe the higher meditation or

samadhi. The tongues of flame are the vrittis of the mind, the flickering

thoughts which become focussed and stilled in the higher meditation, infolded

into the crowned knot of fire. Then the fire and the rose are one. The mind

becomes absorbed in beauty absolute. This is the goal of Yoga, the achievement

of the fully awakened spiritual consciousness.

 

Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only

the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot

say where.

 

Freedom through Self-Realisation

A.M. Halliday

A Shanti Sadan Publication - London

ISBN 0-85424-040-3

Pgs. 112-125