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.
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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.
