The One Light - (Introduction, Part 3)

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The One Light

 

PHASES OF THE VISION

 

(p.10) Bede reflected upon his own intellectual development again and again. We

find this self- conscious process already taking place in 'The Golden String',

and continuing explicitly in 'The Marriage of East and West'. The process will

reach its synthetic culmination in 'A New Vision of Reality'. Often Bede takes a

fresh look not only at the 'objective' world of the spirit and its evolution,

but also at the successive stages of his own journey. (p.11) The evolution of

Bede Griffiths' vision, in the light of this continual reflection, appears with

great clarity. We can distinguish five phases.

 

I./ Awakening: the Divine manifest in nature, in poetry; the wisdom of myth and

imagination

 

We have mentioned the experience which was Bede's spiritual awakening and which

would remain a central point of reference throughout his long life. This was a

revelation of the divine presence in nature. Already, he had embraced the

English Romantic poets as kindred spirits. Bede (then Alan) was awakening to

wisdom, and thus to his lifelong vocation and search. Wisdom was a knowledge

which was more and other than rational: a knowing through intuition,

imagination, symbol and myth. He was to find it not only in his beloved poets

but in the literature of primitive religions.[9]

 

Bede rejected a modern West which had abandoned the timeless wisdom of antiquity

for an empirical and purely cerebral knowledge. While still at Oxford, Bede

proclaimed a 'religion of imagination' which he found emerging in the writings

of the English Romantic poets, particularly Wordsworth. Associated with this

orientation toward the intuitive or 'feminine' side of consciousness, and with

his rejection of the rationalist and industrialized West, were a constellation

of other attitudes. From those early years he was concerned with social justice

and the rights of working people, espoused socialism, and then attempted an

alternative to the western economic system in his quasi-monastic experiment with

two friends at Eastington. The orientation which emerges in these early

experiences and choices will re-emerge later, characterizing Bede's life and

thought until the end.

 

II./ Christian conversion: revelation, Christ, the Church

 

A first major transformation of Bede's perspective came with his dramatic

conversion to Christ and the church. Now his consciousness and vision could be

centered emphatically in the biblical, historical revelation. His further

awakenings would occur along the way of an explicitly religious journey. (p.12)

Bede's perennial criticism of western civilization, following his conversion,

became a theological judgment on history. He came to see the violence and

confusion of the twentieth century West as the direct result of a general

abandonment of Christ and the church in the era of Renaissance, Reformation and

Enlightenment.[10]

 

This conversion was costly for Bede: he found the surrender of his personal

autonomy - his 'reason' - extremely painful and difficult. The Christian

experience, further, planted deep in Bede's psyche and consciousness an enduring

foundation of faith which would assert itself in strong - if usually unspoken -

tension with the more characteristic movement of Bede's personality and thought.

Jesus Christ and the church - and the historical particularity which is

intrinsic to both Christ and church - would stand as a permanent counterpole to

the universal and unitive wisdom toward which Bede was so powerfully drawn as he

found it expressed in nature, in poetry and in the eastern traditions.

Associated with his Christian experience was an awakening to the primacy of love

and a discovery of the principle of self-sacrifice. Bede's Christianity, in his

writings, often remains implicit. This is true especially when he is looking

East, presenting the 'Vedic Revelation.' Bede's attention is most frequently

focussed on the new and unexplored country rather than on that which is already

known. Sooner or later, however - and almost certainly at the end of the

reflection - the invisible matrix of Christian faith will become explicit

together with the eastern wisdom, and a theological integration will be

attempted.

 

III./ Eastern wisdom: Vedanta, nonduality, the Self

 

When Bede discovered the sacred writings of India, he rediscovered the

intuitive, imaginative consciousness which he had found in the English Romantic

poets. But now it was as if were drinking this wisdom in full purity and

strength at its source. It is clear that in the discovery of the Vedanta and its

unitive wisdom Bede has found a language for the deepest movements of his

thought.

 

During his early years in India, Bede was much concerned with the uniqueness of

Christianity, insisting repeatedly on the essential differences between the

great religions. (p.13) He saw the relationship between the traditions of East

and West emphatically in terms of the 'fulfillment' of Indian religious

traditions by Christ. In a dialectical relationship [i.e., theologically

argumentable] with this position was his conviction that a 'common core' exists

within all the great religions; in Bede's writings one experiences a frequent

shifting between these two views. This mobility is characteristic of the

'alternating current' of Bede's thought, capable of following the logic of each

principle through to its implications, without immediate confrontation with

other viewpoints. While Bede's position will gradually evolve from fulfillment

toward complementarity, both perspectives are there from the start and continue

together until the end.

 

By the 1950's, the 'Perennial Philosophy' was emerging at the center of Bede's

thought as the common core of all religions. In the following decades this

'universal tradition' would be more and more clearly identified with nonduality,

the 'advaitan' reality. Alongside this first principle of nonduality, there

emerged a second within the 'Vedic Revelation' in which Bede immersed himself:

the search for the 'Self,' the 'atman'. This personal journey becomes, for Bede,

the heart of the eastern wisdom and he will often speak of it as the central

axis of spiritual life. Bede's early quest of intuitive wisdom has, at this

point, become the journey toward realization of the unitive Self. Bede will make

a series of correlations between elements of the Vedanta and elements of

Christian faith. 'Sat (being) - 'cit' (knowledge) - 'ananda' (bliss) becomes an

expression of the Trinity of Father, Word and Holy Spirit[11]. 'Purusha' is

correlated with Christ, particularly as 'Cosmic Person.'[12] 'Atman' is equated

with the Holy Spirit. Vedanta has become the interpretive lens through which

Bede understands the Christian experience.

 

Within this 'Hindu' phase, a change in direction takes place. As Bede comments

the 'Bhagavad Gita' in the conferences which would be published as 'River of

Compassion', we can sense an inflection of his own spiritual orientation away

from the strict interiority of the 'Upanishads' and toward a balance of spirit

and world which is closer to that of the Gospel. The exclusive grip of the

'center' and of 'atman' upon Bede's psyche, so evident in 'Return to the Center'

and in 'The Marriage of East and West', loosens. (p.14) As that period of

intense interiority and renunciation of the world comes to an end, a phase of

integration begins.

 

IV/. Wisdom and science: cosmology, consciousness and evolution

 

(p.14) It was around 1980 that Bede's rediscovery of the West took a pivotal

further step: an encounter with the " new science " articulated by such innovators

as Fritjof Capra, David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake. Moving from his earlier

categorical rejection of western science and technology, Bede began to

incorporate the insights of contemporary physics, biology and transpersonal

psychology with the ancient wisdoms, into a new and comprehensive vision of

reality. This fresh horizon would call forth Bede's 'New Vision of Reality'

(1989). Here he brings the ancient religious traditions of Christianity and the

East together with conceptions of the contemporary sciences in a new

evolutionary perspective. Bede now develops a coherent cosmology, bringing

elements of the 'perennial philosophy' together with classical hylomorphism[13]

and principles of the holistic new physics. Here matter and consciousness are

not distinct entities but two manifestations of a third primary reality which is

unitive spirit.

 

In turning towards the modern West and its culture, Bede begins to assimilate

not only the scientific perspective but a dynamic principle of development:

'evolution'. He sees the principle of evolution operative first in the physical

and biological world and then in the progressive development of human

consciousness. This vision of a continuing positive movement beneath the surface

of human history is a radical turnabout from his position in 'Return to the

Center', where the only meaningful journey was a return to the Source. Bede

largely adopts the vision of the evolution of consciousness conceived by Ken

Wilber - who, like himself, understands consciousness as essentially unitive,

'nondual'.

 

V./ The feminine, descent into darkness and body; unitive experience

 

Bede Griffiths' consciousness underwent a dramatic change in 1990, after his

first stroke.[14] He did not, as after earlier transitions, bring forth a book

in which his vision was recast in the light of this new experience, but he often

spoke about what had happened to him. (p.15) Bede declared repeatedly that at

the time of this physical trauma, 'the feminine' or 'the mother' broke into his

consciousness and life in a decisive way. At the same time he was initiated into

the nondual experience which he had sought for so long. Woven with these two

threads was a third: a new experience of darkness and chaos, of disorientation

and a shadow of death which accompanied his illness.[15] In this stage we

witness a second 'descent from the mind' parallel to that which Bede experienced

in his conversion to Christianity. Once again we have the sense that thought -

the continual activity of this vigorous mind - has given way to another, more

powerful reality which is invading Bede's person as if from outside. Here there

is also a strong recollection of the first phase, with its preferential

orientation toward the 'feminine' side of consciousness. The unitive core of the

third phase is also realized after the stroke in what Bede called his 'advaitan'

experience. While the ambitious intellectual construction of the fourth phase is

not reflected here at the end, Bede's existential return to the world of the

body recalls his late acceptance of natural science. Our final phase, however,

is a realization on a level distinctly other than that of conceptual reason.

 

From beginning to end, Bede Griffiths' life was a quest of 'wisdom', of

spiritual 'knowledge', of the knowledge that is experience, love, union. At an

early point he realized that this knowledge is essentially 'unitive': that it is

a participation in the one, absolute reality which is the source of all things.

He followed the track of this unitive knowledge to India, settling in that

'Orient' as the homeland of wisdom, the place of the primal Source. The clarity

itself of Bede's reflection upon his spiritual journey and of his distillations

of the spiritual literature of India is significant, however. We become aware

that, throughout these many years of his dedicated monastic life 'on the

ground,' what Bede has been able to share with us of his journey has remained

largely on the plane of the mind. It is here at the end, while he is living on

the edge of bodily collapse, that the level of Bede's own enlightenment deepens.

At this point, the unitive realization accompanies and reflects his personal

integration of body, psyche and spirit. Now it is more apparent than ever that

what he is able to understand and to put into words for us is the merest trace

of what is happening.

 

These phases of Bede's overall theological development can be resumed briefly as

a progressive integration of different 'ways of knowing'. Rejecting the

rational-empirical mentality which had been dominant in the West since the

Enlightenment, Bede begins to develop his personal theory of knowledge. The way

of knowing proper to the human person is not abstract and analytical reason, the

'masculine' and 'left-brain' activity of the mind, but rather an intuitive

knowing through participation in that which is known. The key terms are

'intuition' and imagination, symbolism and myth. In a second phase, explicit

'faith' dramatically appears and takes up its central place in Bede's life. In a

third phase, as Bede is more and more immersing himself in the tradition of the

Vedanta, contemplative knowing ('jnana', Bede will call it[16]) becomes central

in his thinking. This is 'unitive' consciousness and insight on the level of

spirit or atman, an immediate participation in the divine Absolute. It is

experienced especially in meditation, and becomes the light in which a spiritual

philosophy is conceived and developed.[17] In a fourth phase, scientific

'reason' returns, but now within the intuitive and organic vision of the 'new

paradigm.' This level of science is not directly empirical but intuitive and

synthetic; it integrates without too much strain into Bede's own intuitive

philosophy. In Bede's final theoretical synthesis, the perennial philosophy has

been fused with an evolutionary scheme which proceeds from elemental matter -

the stuff of positive science - to the heights of unitive consciousness. In his

final phase of life, body and unitive spirit are both present to Bede's

consciousness in a very simple way, while knowledge and love, too, have become

inseparably fused.

 

The One Light - Bede Griffiths' Principal Writings

Introduction, p. 10-16

Edited and with Commentary by Bruno Barnhart

Templegate Publishers, Springfield, Illinois

ISBN 0-87243-254-8

 

Notes:

 

[9] See Bede Griffiths, 'Pathways to the Supreme', 1-19.

 

[10] See, for example, 'The Golden String', 170.

 

[11] See, for example, text n. 86, p384-385.

 

[12] See, e.g., texts 43,44.

 

[13] 'hylomorphism': the Aristotolian and Thomistic view of the universe as

composed of the two principles of 'form' and 'matter.'

 

[14] See 'Beyond the Darkness', ch. 18, 227-235.

 

[15] See 'A Human Search', 100-101.

 

[16] 'River of Compassion', 111.

 

[17] See texts 64 and 65, and Wayne Teasdale, 'Toward a Christian Vedanta',

63-64.