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