Whitman - Part Three

Introduction: Pure Consciousness Mysticism
mike king| postsecular | jnani
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Krishna, Whitman, Nietzsche, Sartre

We may note that Jesus likewise dismissed the ties of family relationship in comparison to that which draws the Master and his disciple near; he also 'fished' continuously for those that would not be baffled by him. There are many other references in Leaves that support a view of Whitman as teacher, and possible comparisons to Christ. In this complete poem, To Him That Was Crucified we are left in no doubt.

My spirit to yours dear brother,

Do not mind because many sounding your name do not understand you,

I do not sound your name, but I understand you,

I specify you with joy O my comrade to salute you, and to salute those who are with you, before and since, and those to come also,

That we labor together transmitting the same charge and succession,

We few equals indifferent of lands, indifferent of times,

We, enclosers of all continents, all castes, allowers of all theologies,

Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men,

We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but reject not the disputers nor any thing that is asserted,

We hear the bawling and din, we are reach'd at by divisions, jealousies, recriminations on every side,

They close peremptorily upon us to surround us, my comrade,

Yet we walk unheld, free, the whole earth over, journeying up and down till we make our ineffaceable mark upon time and the diverse eras,

Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women of races, ages to come, may prove brethren and lovers as we are.

The only reference to Jesus is in the title of the poem. From the perspective of Pure Consciousness Mysticism there is no difficulty with a comparison between Jesus and Whitman, and many made it in Whitman's own life-time, but, because we more often encounter such a claim from the mentally ill, we need to consider what it means in terms of Whitman's own world-view. His three claims in the poem are: that he understands Jesus; that he labours to transmit the same charge (teaching) as Jesus; and that he is amongst the few equals of Jesus. And what is his teaching? That all 'may prove brethren and lovers as we are.' Is any of this inconsistent with the rest of Leaves of Grass? Does this one poem finally invalidate all the rest and mark Whitman as insane? If we look again at his life there is no evidence whatsoever that Whitman was insane, so we have to reconcile the world-view of a man whose simplicity, compassion, and generosity was outstanding with the apparent enormity of the claim to be like Jesus. But there is nothing in Pure Consciousness Mysticism to either contradict his claim, or to make anything special out of it. I have personally met at least six individuals like Whitman in this respect, and with one of them finding myself quite involuntarily saying 'I have spent a week with Christ' (odd, really, how one can say this without having met Christ, but people are often moved to the same remark in similar circumstances). Just because something is rare does not make it impossible, and it is the job of PCM as a critique to make comparisons by recognising the common ground amongst the 'few equals indifferent of lands, indifferent of times'.

A further Christ-reference is made in the following passage, where he almost makes the mistake of forgetting his Christ-likeness:

Enough ! enough ! enough !

Somehow I have been stunn'd. Stand Back !

Give me a little time beyond my cuff'd head, slumbers, dreams, gaping,

I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.


That I could forget the mockers and insults !

That I could forget the trickling tears and blows of the bludgeons and hammers !

That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning.


I remember now,

I resume the overstaid fraction,

The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves,

Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.


I troop forth replenish'd with supreme power, one of an average unending procession,

Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines,

Our swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth,

The blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years.


Eleves, I salute you ! Come forward !

Continue your annotations, continue your questionings.

(Song Of Myself, v. 38)

Even if the bulk of this verse is obscure, he addresses us in the last two lines as students (and we shall continue our annotations and questionings! in fact this volume only scratches the surface of Leaves and I can only hope that others continue to look deeper into it). Let us look at other hints that Whitman drops in Leaves about his mission as a teacher:

I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?

I follow you whoever you are from the present hour,

My words itch at your ears till you understand them.

(Song Of Myself, v. 38)

If we think back to the sentiment expressed in these lines:

No dainty dolce affettuoso I,

Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived,

To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,

For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.

We see that Whitman puts himself forward as a teacher of the solid prizes of the universe, but more than this, he affords them to the pupil; but the pupil must be worthy. This is the message of the following complete poem, Whoever You Are Holding Me Now In Hand:

Whoever you are holding me now in hand,

Without one thing all will be useless,

I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,

I am not what you supposed, but far different.


Who is he that would become my follower?

Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?


The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,

You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard,

Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,

The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon'd,

Therefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let go your hand from my shoulders,

Put me down and depart on your way.


Or else by stealth in some wood for trial,

Or back of a rock in the open air,

(For in any roof'd room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,

And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)

But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any person for miles around approach unawares,

Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island, Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,

With the comrade's long-dwelling kiss or the new husband's kiss,

For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.


Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,

Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,

Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;

For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,

And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.


But these leaves conning you con at peril,

For these leaves and me you will not understand,

They will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will certainly elude you,

Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!

Already you see I have escaped from you.



It is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,

Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it,

Nor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me,

Nor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few) prove victorious,

Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more,

For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at;

Therefore release me and depart on your way.

The erotic imagery in this poem could distract one from its meaning, but, as mentioned before, in mysticism throughout the world we find erotic imagery in the description of the unitive state or approaches to the unitive state. The sentiment here is one we find from many teachers in franker moments: few will understand me. Jesus knew it when he talked of the seed scattered far and wide, and only a few taking root; Gurdjieff knew it when he made insurmountable obstacles for the merely curious who flocked to him, and Krishnamurti's life-long irritability sprang from the same source: the earnest but dumb incomprehension of his questioners. Whitman also points out that it is a dangerous path all one's past theories of one's own life and those around one have to be abandoned (as Krishnamurti pointed out to Bohm), because of the shock of one's real identity. Ramakrishna was as irrepressible and eager to convey his wisdom to those 'touched' individuals that he could find as Whitman must have been, though their style and culture could not be more different. While Whitman was walking around Brooklyn where he 'fished' for one 'who would not be baffled by me', Ramakrishna sat in his temple delighting in any new aspirant of purity, urging them to contemplate the Divine Mother, and forget 'women and gold'. Although the pedagogy is poles apart, we can discern in Ramakrishna the same eagerness and curiosity for each potential aspirant that Whitman shows; Krishnamurti's interest was much cooler in contrast.

2.4 Other Perspectives

Apart from Bucke, Burroughs, Carpenter, and a number of other contemporaries who saw the spiritual and prophetic nature of Leaves, most Western scholars to this date have considered only the literary and aesthetic aspects of it. The varying fortunes of Leaves have been determined by such scholars and critics, with modern biographers either ignoring the mystic dimension of Whitman and his work, or downright hostile to it, in the typical modern fashion of many critics in the arts. In a recent volume called The Neglected Walt Whitman: Vital Texts, the author Sam Abrams claims to supply texts either left out in later editions of Leaves, or unpublished work altogether. He says of the neglected texts:

Some of these are absolutely crucial (and are so recognised by the overwhelming consensus of contemporary critics) for comprehending the radicality, the complexity and the sheer artistry of Whitman's poetic achievement. Other are equally crucial for illuminating the great sexual mystery of Whitman's biography, and, even more importantly for throwing light on the tangled relationship between the "real" Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and the immortal persona he created in Leaves of Grass "Walt Whitman, a kosmos." (page 2)

This passage shows clearly the main concerns of contemporary criticism for Whitman: his artistry, his sexuality, and to demonstrate that Leaves represents Whitman's persona and not his reality. The evidence from Bucke, Burroughs, Carpenter, and many others that his persona in Leaves and his reality were one and the same thing is incomprehensible to modern literary criticism, and this shortcoming is one of the reasons for examining Whitman so closely from the perspective of Pure Consciousness Mysticism. This is not to deny however that Whitman's artistry is superb and deserves praise and study in itself, and also that it adds immeasurably to his message. Many of the greatest mystics, both living and dead, have little literary gift, but where it does coincide with knowledge we are left with something priceless.

Dorothy Mercer was unusual amongst more recent Western scholars in taking an interest in the comparisons between Whitman and Oriental thought, submitting in 1933 a PhD thesis "Leaves of Grass and the Bhagavad Gita". This remains unpublished, but there exists a series of articles by her in the journal Vedanta and the West, published by the Vedanta Society of Los Angeles in the middle to late forties. In one of them she observed that a number of passages in Leaves suggested that Whitman believed in reincarnation, [40] and commented that though this bears resemblance to Vedic thought, he does not share some of its attitude to suffering. Mercer's work is illuminative, though, as V.K.Chari (introduced below) has commented, she probably over-emphasises the evolutionary aspect of Leaves, perhaps influenced in this by Bucke.
Romain Rolland's work, published in the late 1920's, was also sympathetic to Whitman. Rolland charted Vivekananda's role in the establishment of Vedanta in the West, in the USA in particular, and recognised the American Transcendentalists (Emerson and Thoreau) as important figures in the introduction of Hindu thought into the US. For Whitman however he reserves an unconditional salute as the equal of anything Hindu, at the same time lamenting that Vivekananda did not praise him enough (beyond calling him the 'American Sannyasin') [41]. Rolland calls Whitman the 'dead giant', 'whose shade was a thousand times warmer than such pale reflections of the Sun of Being seen through their cold methodist window panes. He stood before Vivekananda and held out his great hand to him. How was it that he did not take it?' This was meant metaphorically, as Whitman had died in the year previous to Vivekananda's arrival in the States. In my own experience great teachers are anyway disinclined to recognise each other or meet each other (with notable exceptions of course); Rajneesh, while recognising Krishnamurti, explained to those of his followers who urged a meeting between them that it would accomplish nothing they would either sit in silence in mutual recognition of the infinite and eternal in each other, or they would disagree on every single point of pedagogy. (I would add that as such great teachers are so rare it is a waste to put them in the same room, even for a day.)

Rolland said of Whitman's religious thought that it 'has come least into the limelight and at the same time is the kernel [of his poetry].' He regretted also that beyond his immediate disciples Whitman was not recognised in the States:

But this is true of all real Precursors. And it does not make them any the less the true representatives of their people that their people ignore them: in them is liberated out of due time the profound energies hidden and compressed within the human masses: they announce them; sooner or later they come to light. The genius of Whitman was the index of the hidden soul sleeping (she is not yet wide awake) in the depth of his people of the United States. [42]

Let us look now at some scholars with an Indian background and see how they have assessed Leaves of Grass. In his preface to Maha Yogi: Walt Whitman - New Light on Yoga, published in 1978, O.K.Nambiar comments on Hindu reactions to Whitman:

It is a curious fact that the Hindu mind has shown an instant capacity for responsive incandescence when brought into contact with Whitman's works. I remember an occasion when I read out passages from Leaves Of Grass and translated them for the benefit of a Brahmin pundit. The pundit's eyes lighted up with a flash of recognition, and he exclaimed from time to time 'He is a realised soul,' 'that is the cream of the Vedanta,' 'those are the signs of Bhava Samadhi' a joyous recognition of the familiar Upanishadic landmarks all along the route. I know also a few Hindu professors of American Literature who have cheap jibes ready when they talk of Whitman "homosexual," "egotist," "cataloguer," etc., all of which reveal how little they have tried to know him. [43]

(It is also unlikely that Gandhi would have responded with incandescence to Leaves, despite his extensive reading of the Hindu scriptures.) As another example of the Indian response to Whitman, it is interesting to note that Asit Chandmal ends his introduction to his photo-essay on Krishnamurti with passages from 'Song of Myself' [44] As a contemporary academic Nambiar is unusually receptive to Whitman (or perhaps only so to Western thinking), and makes many interesting connections and comparisons with other mystics of various tradition, though mainly Indian. He is able to describe various contemporaries of Whitman, such as Bucke and Horace Traubel, as Whitman's disciples, and him their guru, without any of the embarrassment or distaste that a Western academic would show. Here is a passage concerning Traubel:

An interesting fact about Horace Traubel may be mentioned here. Whitman was Traubel's Guru. Traubel had served him devotedly during the last fifteen years of Whitman's life during his illness. Traubel had his first samadhi experience at the age of thirty one, followed by two successive experiences at two year intervals. The last one, a particularly overwhelming experience, happened when he was crossing the ferry, leaning over the railing of the boat. He then "lost this world for another" and saw revealed for a few minutes "things hitherto withheld from him". "The physical body went through the experience of a disappearance in spiritual light.""I was one with God, Love, the Universe, at face to face with myself." He was sensible of particular mental and moral disturbances and readjustments, "an indissoluble unity of the several energies of my being in one force". He stood so profoundly lost in this blissful state that a deckhand who knew him had to tap him on the shoulder to bring him back to normal consciousness. There was such a heavenly look in his face that the deckhand exclaimed: "You look wonderfully well and happy tonight, Mr. Traubel." He continued in a state of ecstacy for full twentyfour hour before he met Walt Whitman. The first words that Walt addressed to him when he sallied into his room reassured him: "Horace," he said, "you have the look of great happiness in your face tonight. Have you had a run of good luck?" Traubel explained in a few words that he had indeed a run of good luck though not perhaps the good luck he had in mind for him at the moment. Walt put his hand on Traubel's shoulder and looked deep into his eyes and said one of the strangest things he ever said, "I knew it would come to you." Traubel said, "I have been wondering all day if I am not crazy." Walt laughed gravely. "No, sane. Now at last you are sane." The Guru knew instinctively that the disciple had made the grade. [45]

Where Nambiar's analysis parts company with PCM however, is in the ingrained Hindu attitude to the material world as 'illusion' or in some way lesser than the spiritual. This is shown clearly in the following passage:

Whitman speaks to us from two levels. He has got himself misunderstood, sometimes, because he commutes between the two levels without warning us. He shifts his standpoint.

There are two Whitmans. One is the 'son of Manhattan'. The other is 'a Kosmos'. The former, somewhat unreasonably calls himself 'one of the roughs', just for the sake of being all inclusive. The latter during his cosmic moments believes himself, to be an "incredible God". The two have to be carefully separated lest their voices should mix.

The Manhattan voice speaks of the earthly show: it talks about politics, wars, presidents, the Broadway pageant and the human scene. The 'incredible God' swiftly leaps over them and speaks of the soul, the cosmic plan, divine purpose and of the 'light untellable'. Since the son of Manhattan is intermittently aware that he is a Kosmos, there are two voices heard in Leaves, and we are apt to treat them alike. However, sensitive readers can note a difference. When he speaks from the 'Manhattan level' he appears to be speaking out to us in a 'yawp heard over the roofs of the earth.'

The reader is obliged to shift his view-point back and forth between the immanent and the transcendent levels of consciousness to follow the transition of thought. This movement on the part of the reader is necessary. [46]

Despite the embraciveness of the Gita (remember that Krishna urges us to love also the man who eats a dog), and the tradition of non-dualism, and the Tantric traditions, there is a very Hindu fastidiousness shown here that wants to separate the Manhattan voice from the cosmic voice; that wishes to make a distinction between the immanent and the transcendent, and thinks Whitman 'unreasonable' for calling himself one of the roughs. It is true that Whitman, in using language, does distinguish between his soul and the rest, but he always does so in the context of explaining their equality and inter-manifestatory nature (i.e. that one begets the other). Perhaps Whitman sensed this aspect of Hinduism when he told Carpenter that he did not expect more from that source. We have other reasons for finding Nambiar's directive to separate the two voices or levels unsatisfactory, detailed further in the section below on Douglas Harding.

Nambiar also makes explicit references to the occult in Whitman, mainly in terms of the theory of Kundalini, the snake-energy supposedly resident in the spine. PCM does not reject any of this, remember, but finds it mainly irrelevant; Whitman says explicitly 'The supernatural of no account'. However Nambiar's book is a very interesting and informative study of Whitman with sections on Ramakrishna, R.M.Bucke, and Rumi, amongst others.

V.K.Chari, another Indian scholar, first wrote Whitman in the Light of Vedantic Mysticism as his PhD thesis, and subsequently published it in 1964. The 1976 edition [47] has an introduction by Gay Wilson Allen who praised Chari's work as a thorough study of Whitman in the context of Indian thought. Allen recounts how Thoreau had asked Whitman if "he had read any of the great works of India", to which Whitman is supposed to have replied "No, tell me about them". Whitman claims however to have read "the ancient Hindu poems" before writing Leaves of Grass, and Nambiar's Maha Yogi: Walt Whitman, shows in the frontispiece a photograph of a page from Whitman's version of the Gita with a handwritten commentary.

Chari gives a good introduction to the literary controversies surrounding Leaves, and also compares it to Thus Spoke Zarathustra which we shall look at in the next chapter. Chari prefers the Upanishads to the Gita for comparisons with Leaves of Grass, and also gives a detailed exposition with reference to the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. This is generally a useful book about Whitman, but tends to use Western philosophy as the link between Whitman and Vedantic mysticism, partly on the grounds the Whitman was enthusiastic about Hegel. PCM as a critique avoids the speculative nature of the philosopher's discourse, at least as a starting point, so from this point of view Chari's work is not as relevant as Nambiar's.

In Whitman and Bharati: A Comparative Study V.Sachitanandan shows how the Tamil poet Bharati was influenced by Whitman in the introduction of free verse into his tradition [48]. Sachitanandan also investigates the affinity of the two poets in terms of Vedantic mysticism, in particular the Advaita (non-dual) school of Vedanta, but on the whole the study is more oriented towards a literary analysis than a mystical one.

2.5 Nature Mysticism

Postponing for a good while yet a closer look at Whitman's unique embraciveness, we turn now to the general consideration of what nature mysticism might entail. Any label on mysticism is misleading because PCM postulates that mystic union must at root be the same state for each mystic, but as a label on a particular form of embraciveness it might be useful. An Englishman, Richard Jefferies, is often referred to as a 'Nature Mystic', sometimes together with Whitman; Krishnamurti's notebooks, written through most of his life include frequent descriptions of nature, and opened my eyes in my twenties to nature in a way that no writer I had encountered up to then had been able to do since then I have sought connections with mysticism and nature.

What in Whitman could be called a nature mystic? If you lose your identity to the universe, or somehow expand to be the universe, then you embrace nature, and I would suggest that nature can be of a special significance to the mystic, though obviously this depends on temperament. It will not usually be part of the mystic's life who follows via negativa, or generally of those with a renunciative emphasis, though we must be wary of these distinctions. In Leaves, Whitman's celebration is so comprehensive, and so inclusive of man's arts and industries, that nature, in the modern sense of being in opposition to industrial and urban life, does not stand out. It is a comment of his to Bucke that gives us an interesting insight into his attitude to writing on nature (Bucke had suggested writing about a magnificent waterfall):

"All such things need to be at least the third or fourth remove; in itself it would be too much for nine out of ten readers. Very few care for natural objects themselves, rocks, rain, hail, wild animals, tangled forests, weeds, mud, common Nature. They want her in a shape fit for reading about in a rocking-chair, or as ornaments in china, marble or bronze. The real things are, far more than they would own, disgusting, revolting to them." Whitman adds: "This may be a reason of the dislike of Leaves of Grass by the majority." [49]

In Leaves the descriptions of nature are often in the form of lists, but effective in spite of that. There is a prose description in Specimen Days that perhaps comes closest to telling us how Whitman really sees nature:

1 September: I should not take either the biggest or the most picturesque tree to illustrate it. Here is one of my favorite now before me, a fine yellow poplar, quite straight, perhaps ninety feet high, and four feet thick at the butt. How strong, vital, enduring! how dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It is, yet says nothing. How it rebukes by its tough and equable serenity in all weathers, this gusty-tempered little whiffet, man, that runs indoors at a mite of rain or snow. Science (or rather half-way science) scoffs at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad, and of trees speaking. But, if they don't, they do as well as most speaking, writing, poetry, sermons or rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that those old dryad-reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get. ('Cut this out,' as the quack mediciners say, and keep by you.) Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of these voiceless companions and read the foregoing, and think.

One lesson from affiliating a tree perhaps the greatest moral lesson anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that same lesson of inherencey, of what is, without the least regard to what the looker on (the critic) supposes or says, or whether he likes or dislikes. What worse what more general malady pervades each and all of us, our literature, education, attitude towards each other, (even towards ourselves,) than morbid trouble about seems, (generally temporarily seems too,) and no trouble at all, or hardly any, about the sane slow-growing, perennial, real parts of character, books, friendship, marriage humanity's invisible foundations and hold-together? (As the all-basis, the nerve, the great sympathetic, the plenum within humanity, giving stamp to everything, is necessarily invisible.) [50]

It was an endless pleasure for Whitman to simply be in nature, spending time in the countryside, enjoying the ordinary as much as any spectacular scenes like canyons or great waterfalls or brilliant sunsets. Bucke saw that natural things gave Whitman a pleasure that ordinary people never experience, and credited him with above-average hearing and sense of smell (though this is probably unlikely: Whitman may have just been more alert to his sensations). Whitman's opinion of Thoreau was interesting: he suspected that the romantic view of nature expressed in Thoreau's Walden and in his life was not so much from 'a love of woods, streams, and hills, ... as from a morbid dislike of humanity. I remember Thoreau saying once, when walking with him in my favorite Brooklyn "What is there in the people? What do you (a man who sees as well as anybody) see in all this cheating political corruption?"' This is echoed in a passage from Thoreau himself:

"I walk towards one of our ponds, but what signifies the beauty of Nature when men are base? We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them; when we are not serene, we go not to them."[51]

Whitman then is perhaps unusual in his love of nature as an encompassing love, not a turning away from the human and man-made. 'The Lesson of a Tree' is telling us how to let nature instruct us in our human sphere, and in the foundations of our being; it is teaching us a sobriety, a willingness to allow the important things to mature at their own mysterious pace, and not to apply the modern haste to our foundations. Beyond this lesson, and it is fundamental to Whitman's teachings I think, there is also the sheer exuberant delight in nature, and also an almost painful wonder at it:

As I have walk'd in Alabama my morning walk,

I have seen where the she-bird the mocking-bird sat on her nest in the briers hatching her brood.


I have seen the he-bird also,

I have paus'd to hear him at hand inflating his throat and joyfully singing.


And while I paus'd it came to me that what he really sang for was not there only,

Not for his mate nor himself only, nor all sent back by the echoes,

But subtle, clandestine, away beyond,

A charge transmitted and gift occult for those being born.

('Starting from Paumanok' v. 11)

I am usually wary of the term 'occult', as mentioned before, but in this instance I like it, and sympathise with it. I also find in the song of birds, when I am in a receptive mood, something that I cannot find a word for, it is so delightful and evoking, but would accept the word 'occult' to describe it, or any part of nature when I am receptive. Have you ever been in the middle of a field of maize (corn) in summer? The march of rows of these eight-foot plants in all directions with their short aerial roots at the base of their thickened stems is extraordinary, perhaps 'occult', as are many plants and animals if you look at them as if for the first time, without the deadening of familiarity.

Richard Jefferies takes the 'alien' nature of Nature a step further, as we shall see. He was a contemporary of Whitman, though born in 1848 when Whitman was already thirty-one; he died young, five years before Whitman, in 1887. He was born in England, the son of a farmer struggling against the industrial age (Bucke too was born in England to a farming family, in 1837), and was a journalist and writer by profession, much as Whitman. That he is considered as a mystic is due to his book The Story of My Heart [52], which was published in 1883 (about the same time as Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Bucke's biography of Whitman). The Story of My Heart is as unique and different from the rest of the world's mystical literature as the Tao Teh Ching, or Leaves of Grass. At times there is an extraordinary parallel with Whitman, and at other times he seems to say the opposite. Jefferies' love of nature runs along the same stream as Whitman's thoughts in 'The Lesson of a Tree', only he describes his raptures at greater length, and in terms of the empowering of his 'soul life'. Again and again he describes how he seeks solitary moments away from his family and work, and climbs a local hill, or seeks the sea, and strides across the human-remote countryside or beach in order to wrest the nourishment for his soul-life from nature; or he lies under a tree or by a brook and stares up at the sky and lets it fill him. His book is a careful prose, and in great contrast to Whitman's free verse, but he sings of nature, and, oddly for a Victorian Englishman, the body too:

There came to me a delicate, but at the same time a deep, strong and sensuous enjoyment of the beautiful green earth, the beautiful sky and sun; I felt them, they gave me inexpressible delight, as if they embraced and poured out their love upon me. It was I who loved them, for my heart was broader than the earth; it is broader now than even then, more thirsty and desirous. After the sensuous enjoyment always come the thought, the desire: That I might be like this; that I might have the inner meaning of the sun, the light, the earth, the trees and grass, translated into some growth of excellence in myself, both of the body and of mind; greater perfection of physique, greater perfection of mind and soul; that I might be higher in myself. [53]

For Jefferies his mysticism is one of longing, a desire that he calls his 'single thought' or prayer, and the beauty of nature raises it to the highest degree. Unlike those that run away from the human to nature, Jefferies finds the human body to be the sum of all beauty in nature:

Not only in grass fields with green leaf and running brook did this constant desire find renewal. More deeply still with living human beauty; the perfection of form, the simple fact of forms, ravished and always will ravish me away. In this lies the outcome and end of all the loveliness of sunshine and green leaf, of flowers, pure water and sweet air. This is embodiment and highest expression; the scattered, uncertain, and designless loveliness of tree and sunshine brought to shape. Through this beauty I prayed deepest and longest, and down to this hour. The shape the divine idea of that shape the swelling muscle or the dreamy limb, strong sinew or curve of bust, Aphrodite or Hercules, it is the same. That I may have the soul-life, the soul-nature, let the divine beauty bring to me divine soul. Swart Nubian, white Greek, delicate Italian, massive Scandinavian, in all the exquisite pleasure the form gave, and gives, to me immediately becomes intense prayer. [54]

If Whitman can bring one to walk down the street looking at people that pass one in a new way a kind of curious touch to each person then Jefferies can cause one to see in them the distillation of sun, rain, and air on trees; a new gift to us.

Where Whitman is at pains to praise the body and the soul equally, letting neither 'abase' itself before the other, Jefferies is quite sure that the soul is higher, more important, and that the soul or the spirit is entirely lacking in nature, in the rocks, trees and sky, where Whitman sees 'God's handkerchief 'dropped at every corner. Jefferies goes further: he comments on the immense inhospitability of nature, the very sun that sends him into raptures burns and kills, the very sea is an undrinkable poison. It is a baffling contrast to Whitman at first, and is not easily resolvable; however we can leave it for now as a mark of the genuine expression of a mystic: that it is unique, and will not agree with another's tale of the ultimate. We can also find references in his book to having lived a hard life; one has the impression that he was as poor as Whitman, and as unpractised in economics, but his situation was worse, for he had a wife and children to support. The sheer hardness of extracting a living in Victorian England for a man so averse to the material spirit of that age may have found expression in his views on the in-humanness of nature: he even mentions all the hideous sea creatures, and finds dogs and horses alien to him. Yet his soul is never so uplifted as under a tree! Or by the sky or sea; rarely can you find such an extensive and sensitive relaying of a rapture with nature.

I don't agree with Jefferies about the alien and hostile nature of our environment it is not even a question of agreeing or not, but of emphasis. He had his reasons for his emphasis; my emphasis is different, for different reasons. Firstly, I have dim recollections of previous existences as animals, and secondly, if you take a dog or a cat, it is the similarities with us that strike me all the time: if you leave out the intellectual, their emotional life has so much in common with us. As to the overall indifference of nature and human commerce to the individual: Jefferies overlooks our interdependence in primitive times an instinctive cooperation with each other and the rhythms of nature ensured survival; in present times this translates into our technologically-based distribution of skills and activities that make it possible, for example, to buy a sandwich and cup of tea in a café. I don't know how to grow wheat, how to grind it and make it into bread, I cannot build lorries for its transport, bend huge pieces of steel for the chassis or cast metals for engine parts, weld and rivet the bodywork; I don't know how to grow tea, make ships for its transport, or extract gas from the earth to boil my water; I don't know how to milk a cow, or to grow sugar cane, or even what sugar cane looks like. I happen to know a little bit about computers; but even then it is probably humanly impossible to understand one totally, from the quantum theory of n- and p-type semiconductors in the chips, to logic gates, to chip manufacture, to software, to hardware to the making of plastic for the cases. So when the cashier uses a computer to bill me for my lunch in the café he or she may be in awe of someone who 'understands' this technology, but I am in awe of my sandwich and drink, or rather, how it got there. This interdependence that makes the simple acts of our lives possible, is to me a miracle that lifts my soul, as much as the beauty of a tree, or the so expressive curve of a limb. Jefferies is too much of a loner to see this, and perhaps for this reason sees Nature as inhospitable. But, I am not attacking Jefferies in the slightest: he has given us something quite unique in his Story, and if he were with me now perhaps he would like my views on interdependence, and perhaps he wouldn't. He was certainly at a loss to the human bustle and apparent purposelessness of the great throng of people viewed from the steps of the Royal Exchange in Victorian London, and rails against the work-ethic that prevented people from having time to reflect and be with nature (he shared this with both Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau).

Jefferies presents us with contradictions so much the better! But in his attitude to the eternal, he is quite classical in his discoveries, and unusually honest in admitting that he doesn't know what happens after death. He knows that this moment is eternal however; he is not worried that death may dissolve him completely, body and soul, for all of that is not now. In the following passage he is lying on the grass by a tumulus, the burial-place of a warrior of some two thousand years previous:

Realising that spirit, recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life. Here this moment, by this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it. The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years more it will still be only a moment. To the soul there is no past and no future; all is and will be ever, in now. For artificial purposes time is mutually agreed on, but there is really no such thing. The shadow goes on upon the dial, the index moves round upon the clock, and what is the difference? None whatever. If the clock had never been set going, what would have been the difference? There may be time for the clock, the clock may make time for itself; there is none for me.


I dip my hand in the brook and feel the stream; in an instant the particles of water which first touched me have floated yards down the current, my hand remains there. I take my hand away, and the flow the time of the brook does not exist for me. The great clock of the firmament, the sun and the stars, the crescent moon, the earth circling two thousand times, is no more to me than the flow of the brook when my hand is withdrawn; my soul has never been, and never can be, dipped in time. [55]

(This last sentence alone puts him on an equal footing with the Buddha or any other of our luminaries!) Jefferies shares Whitman's easy dismissal of all past religion; he does not make a big thing about it, but perhaps goes even further than Whitman in finding no consonance whatsoever between any previous writings and his experience. As a journalist, and one who spent time in the British Library, he would had access to Eckhart or The Cloud of Unknowing, or other mystical works; but perhaps the Christian language of these hid the similarities with his experience. We are probably better off that he had to struggle to find his own words; perhaps the only one he uses that we might recognise is the word 'prayer', and he only uses it for lack of something better. Jefferies' book is as explicit as Whitman's is implicit, yet there is not the slightest hint that Jefferies saw himself as a teacher, perhaps making the book an added delight.
Krishnamurti on the other hand, universally known as a teacher, is rarely considered a nature mystic despite the fact that this dimension of him is often noticeable. His obstinate refusal to adopt poetic terms or traditional Hindu terms (thought he knew them) gave his message an unusual strength, but the beauty in Krishnamurti's writings comes from his serenity of mind, and never more so than when he wrote about nature. Perhaps the best of his many 'notebooks' is The Only Revolution, which introduces each section with keenly observed natural scenes, though not observed in the way that a naturalist would. Here are some examples:

The sun wasn't up yet; you could see the morning star through the trees. There was a silence that was really extraordinary. Not the silence between two noises or between two notes, but the silence that has no reason whatsoever the silence that must have been at the beginning of the world. It filled the whole valley and the hills.

The two big owls, calling to each other, never disturbed that silence, and a distant dog barking at the late moon was part of this immensity. The dew was especially heavy, and as the sun came up over the hill it was sparkling with many colours and with the glow that comes with the sun's first rays.

The delicate leaves of the jacaranda were heavy with dew, and birds came to have their morning baths, fluttering their wings so the dew on those delicate leaves filled their feathers. The crows were particularly persistent; they would hop from one branch to another, pushing their heads through the leaves, fluttering their wings, and preening themselves. There were about half-a-dozen of them on that one heavy branch, and there were many other birds, scattered all over the tree, taking their morning bath.

And this silence spread, and seemed to go beyond the hills. There were the usual noises of children shouting, and laughter; and the farm began to wake up.

It was going to be a cool day, and now the hills were taking on the light of the sun. They were very old hills probably the oldest in the world with oddly shaped rocks that seemed to be carved out with great care, balanced one on top of the other; but no wind or touch could loosen them from this balance.

It was a valley far removed from towns, and the road through it led to another village. The road was rough and there were no cars or buses to disturb the ancient quietness of this valley. There were bullock carts, but their movement was a part of the hills. There was a dry river bed that only flowed with water after heavy rains, and the colour was a mixture of red, yellow and brown; and it, too, seemed to move with the hills. And the villagers who walked silently by were like the rocks.

The day wore on and towards the end of the evening, as the sun was setting over the western hills, the silence came in from afar, over the hills, through the trees, covering the little bushes and the ancient banyan. And as the stars became brilliant, so the silence grew into great intensity; you could hardly bear it.

The little lamps of the village were put out, and with sleep the intensity of that silence grew deeper, wider and incredibly over-powering. Even the hills became more quiet, for they, too, had stopped their whisperings, their movement, and seemed to lose their immense weight. [56]

For Krishnamurti, nature's appeal is in the silence that resonates between him and it. He, like Jefferies, was glad for the minimum of modern intrusion on nature, so that the human blended with it and did not jar. In the next extract it is clear how people and their obliviousness to nature pained Krishnamurti.

On every table there were daffodils, young, fresh, just out of the garden, with the bloom of spring on them still. On a side table there were lilies, creamy-white with sharp yellow centres. To see this creamy-white and the brilliant yellow of those many daffodils was to see the blue sky, ever expanding, limitless, silent.

Almost all the tables were taken by people talking very loudly and laughing. At a table nearby a woman was surreptitiously feeding her dog with the meat she could not eat. They all seemed to have huge helpings, and it was not a pleasant sight to see people eating; perhaps it may be barbarous to eat publicly. A man across the room had filled himself with wine and meat and was just lighting a big cigar, and a look of beatitude came over his fat face. His equally fat wife lit a cigarette. Both of them appeared to be lost to the world.

And there they were, the yellow daffodils, and nobody seemed to care. They were there for decorative purposes that had no meaning at all; and as you watched them their yellow brilliance filled the noisy room. Colour has this strange effect upon the eye. It wasn't so much that the eye absorbed the colour, as that the colour seemed to fill your being. You were that colour; you didn't become that colour you were of it, without identification or name: the anonymity which is innocence. Where there is no anonymity there is violence, in all its different forms.

But you forgot the world, the smoke-filled room, the cruelty of man, and the red, ugly meat; those shapely daffodils seemed to take you beyond all time.

Love is like that. In it there in no time, space or identity. It is the identity that breeds pleasure and pain; it is the identity that brings hate and war and builds a wall around people, around each one, each family and community. Man reaches over the wall to the other man but he too is enclosed; morality is a word that bridges the two, and so it becomes ugly and vain.

Love isn't like that; it is like the wood across the way, always renewing itself because it is always dying. There is no permanency in it, which thought seeks; it is a movement which thought can never understand, touch or feel. The feeling of thought and the feeling of love are two different things; the one leads to bondage and the other to the flowering of goodness. The flowering is not within the area of any society, of any culture or of any religion, whereas the bondage belongs to all societies, religious beliefs and faiths in otherness. Love is anonymous, therefore not violent. Pleasure is violent, for desire and will are moving factors in it. Love cannot be begotten by thought, or by good works. The denial of the total process of thought becomes the beauty of action which is love. Without this there is no bliss of truth.

And over there, on that table, were the daffodils. (page 145)

This is vintage Krishnamurti, and not primarily a description of nature, but is included because it shows many of his concerns and how he related them to nature. In the daffodils he 'forgot the world'; for Krishnamurti, more like Jefferies than like Whitman, was not the 'rough' type that allows for the common, coarse and good-natured. The following passage shows again Krishnamurti's sensitivity to nature (he is speaking to Asit Chandmal):

"Have you noticed, sir, " he said, "that when you enter a forest, for the first time there is a strange atmosphere, as if nature, the trees, do not want you to enter. You hesitate, and say 'It's alright,' and walk in quietly. The second day the resistance is less. And the third day it is gone."

I do not communicate with nature, and so this was something I had never discussed with Krishnamurti. [57]

If we disregard the mystics, then we find that the love of nature tends to follow fashion in the West, and that where it is in fashion it arises from an instinct for the aesthetic and sublime, closely related to the transcendental, but often in practice in its opposition. A hatred of nature on the other hand may derive from the Gnostic and Manichean elements mentioned earlier that set the material in opposition the spiritual, and as a corruption of it. But a religious context is not required for the Western intellectual to reject nature; the primacy of mind and the domination of the intellect often breed suspicion of intractable nature. We find that Huysmans can be seen as the supreme 19th century hater of nature, and in his immortal creation, Des Essientes, he takes to the extreme the man of culture, who systematises all human knowledge and arts, who can quote from all the great writers and poets, who accumulates all the science of the day, and cannot even bear fresh air. The character is so wicked and spiteful, so completely estranged from the natural in nature and the natural in human relations, that in the end he lives alone with despised servants who are only there to help him in his greatest, last, hope when faced with the despair of a terminally jaded palette: that he can feed himself via his bottom, and not have to even eat! In the face of such a sophistication all mystics look like fools, all their contradictions and subtle hints are out of the window, for what can you say to a man of immense learning who finds the meaning of life in an enema?

The charm of Huysman's creation is that it is so absurd that you have to laugh, and of course in the end, Des Essientes has to face his human bankruptcy, and retreat from his anal precipice. Literature will always abound with such creations; American Psycho is a similar caricature of the man who has everything and knows everything on the subject of food, etiquette, music, and dress-code, and who seeks an impossible and outrageous final solution. This modern inheritor of Des Essientes' mantle doesn't even have to escape nature: there isn't any in his world to escape from.

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References for Whitman, part Three
[40] Mercer Dorothy, 'Walt Whitman on Reincarnation' in Vedanta and The West, IX Nov/Dec 1946
[41] Rolland, Romain, Prophets of the New India, London, Toronto, Melbource, Sidney: Cassell and Co., 1930, p.273
[42] ibid, p. 285
[43] Nambiar, O.K. Maha Yogi: Walt Whitman - New Light on Yoga, Bangalore: Jeevan Publications, 1978, p. iii
[44] Chandmal, Asit, One Thousand Moons - Krishnamurti at Eighty-Five, New York: Abrams 1985, p. 21
[45] Nambiar, O.K. Maha Yogi: Walt Whitman - New Light on Yoga, Bangalore: Jeevan Publications, 1978, p. 30
[46] ibid, p. 236
[47] Chari, V.K. Whitman in the Light of Vedantic Mysticism, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976
[48] Sachitanandan, V. Whitman and Bharati: A Comparative Study, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Madras: The MacMillan Company of India Ltd., 1978
[49] Bucke, R.M. Walt Whitman, Philadelphia, 1883, p. 61
[50] Whitman, Walt, Specimen Days, London: The Folio Society, 1979, p. 118
[51] Thoreau, Henry, Walden and Other Writings, Bantam, 1962, p. 16
[52] Jefferies, R. The Story of My Heart, MacMillan St Martin's Press, London 1968
[53] ibid, p. 56
[54] ibid, p. 17
[55] ibid, p. 30
[56] Krishanmurti, J. The Only Revolution, New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1970, p.24
[57] Chandmal, Asit, One Thousand Moons - Krishnamurti at Eighty-Five, New York: Abrams 1985, p. 19

Introduction: Pure Consciousness Mysticism
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Krishna, Whitman, Nietzsche, Sartre