This has been the usual attitude of mystics at all times, but above all in the Orient, where philosophy has been in one respect profoundly different from Western Philosophy. Oriental philosophy has always been what I may call a kind of transcendental operationalism; it starts with somebody doing something about the self and then, from the experience attained, going on to speculate and theorize about the significance of the experience. In contrast, all too frequently Western philosophy, above all modern Western philosophy, is pure speculation based on theoretical knowledge that ends only in theoretical conclusions. However, there have been many exceptions to this rule in the West, above all among the mystics, who have insisted just as strongly as their Oriental counterparts on the necessity for direct experience and on the inefficacy of symbols and of ordinary discursive thought. St John of the Cross says categorically, ‘Nothing that the imagination may conceive or the understanding comprehend, in this life, is or can be a proximate means of union with God.’
The same idea is expressed by the great Anglican mystic of the eighteenth century, William Law:
To find or know God in reality by any outward proofs, or by anything but by God Himself made manifest and self-evident to you, will never be your case either here or hereafter. For neither God, nor heaven, nor hell, nor the devil, nor the flesh, can be any otherwise knowable in you or by you but their own existence and manifestation in you. And all pretended knowledge of any of these things, beyond and without this self-evident sensibility of their birth within you, is only such knowledge of them as the blind man hath of the light that hath never entered into him.
What is the mystical experience? I take it that the mystical experience is essentially the being aware of and, while the experience lasts, being identified with a form of pure consciousness, of unstructured transpersonal consciousness which lies, so to speak, upstream from the ordinary discursive consciousness of everyday. It is a non-egotistic consciousness, a kind of formless and timeless consciousness, which seems to underlie the consciousness of the separate ego in time.
Why should this sort of consciousness be regarded as valuable? I think for two reasons. First, it is regarded as valuable because of the self-evident sensibility of values. As William Law would say, it is intrinsically valuable, just as the experience of beauty is intrinsically valuable, but much more so. Second, it is valuable because as a matter of empirical experience it does bring about changes in thought and character and feeling which the experiencer and those about him regard as manifestly desirable. It makes possible a sense of unity and solidarity with the world. It brings about the possibility of that kind of unjudging love and compassion which is stressed so much in the Gospel, where Christ says, ‘Judge not that ye be not judged’ (Matthew 7:1). St Catherine of Siena, on her death-bed, stressed this point with great force: ‘For no reason whatsoever ought we to judge the action of creatures or their motives. Even when we see that it is actual sin we ought not to pass judgment on it, but have holy and sincere compassion and offer it up to God with humble and devout prayer.’
The mystic is made capable of this kind of life. He is able to understand organically such portentous phrases, which for the ordinary person are extremely difficult to understand—phrases such as ‘God is Love’ (1 John 4:8) and ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust him’ (Job 13:15).
There are other fruits of the mystical experience. There is certainly an overcoming of the fear of death, a conviction that the soul has become identical with the Absolute Principle which expresses itself in every moment in its totality. There is an acceptance of suffering and a passionate desire to alleviate suffering in others. There is a combination of what Buddhists call Prajnaparamita, which is the wisdom of the other shore, with Mahakaruna, which is universal compassion. As Eckhart says, what is taken in by contemplation is given out in love. This is the value of the experience. As for the theology of it, this is profoundly simple and is summed up in the three words which are at the base of virtually all Indian religion and philosophy: ‘Tat Twam asi’ (Thou art that), the sense being that the deepest part of the soul is identical with the Divine nature, that the Atman, the deep soul, is the same as Brahman, the Universal Principle, or, in Eckhart’s words, that the ground of the soul is the same as the ground of the Godhead. It is the idea of the inner light, the scintilla animae (spark of the soul); the scholastics had a technical phrase for it, the ‘synderesis’.
Now, very briefly, I must touch on the means for reaching this state. It has been constantly stressed that the means do not consist in mental activity and discursive reasoning; they consist in what Roger Fry, speaking about art, used to call ‘alert passivity’, or what the modern American mystic, the great teacher of reading to the world, Frank Laubach, has called ‘determined sensitiveness’. You don’t do anything, but you are determinedly sensitive to letting something be done within you. This has been expressed by some of the great masters of the spiritual life in the West. St François de Sales, writing to his pupil St Jeanne Chantal, says, ‘You tell me you do nothing in prayer. But what do you want to do in prayer, except presenting your nothingness to God?’ And St Jeanne Chantal writes in one of her letters:
His [God’s] goodness bestowed upon me this method of devotion consisting in a simple beholding and realizing of His divine presence, in which I felt utterly lost, absorbed, and at rest in Him. And this grace has been continued to me, although by my unfaithfulness I have opposed it much; permitting entrance into my mind of fears of being useless in this condition, so that desiring to do somewhat on my part, I spoiled all.
This attitude of the masters of prayer is in its final analysis exactly the same as that recommended by the teacher of any psychophysical skill. The man who teaches you how to play golf or tennis, your singing teacher or piano teacher, will tell you the same thing: you must somehow combine activity with relaxation, you must let go of the clutching personal self, in order to let this deeper self within you, which you interfere with, come through and perform its miracles.
In a certain sense one can say that what we are doing all the time is trying to get into our own light. Our superficial selves eclipse our deeper selves and so don’t permit this light force, which is an impartial fact within us, to come through. In effect the whole of the technique of proficiency in every field, including this highest form of spiritual proficiency, is a dis-eclipsing process, a process of getting out of our own light. Of course, one doesn’t have to formulate this process in theological terms. I myself happen to believe that the deeper self within us is in some way continuous with the mind of the universe or whatever you like to call it. But as I say, you don’t necessarily have to accept this.
We see that there is no conflict between the mystical approach to religion and the scientific approach, because one is not committed by mysticism to any cut-and-dried statement about the structure of the universe. You can practise mysticism entirely in psychological terms, and on the basis of a complete agnosticism in regard to the conceptual ideas of orthodox religion, and yet come to knowledge—gnosis—and the fruits of knowledge will be the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, and the capacity to help other people. And as Christ said in the Gospel, ‘The tree is known by his fruit’ (Matthew 12:33).
Natural History of Visions
I shall begin this lecture with a question. It is one of those seemingly innocent but extremely searching and profound questions which inquisitive children pose to their parents and their parents simply don’t know how to answer and so just say, Well, now, don’t be silly, run along and play. It is a question like, Why is grass green? To answer that question you have to go into botany, biochemistry, physics, astronomy, and even metaphysics or theology. Similarly, this question which I am going to start with, though perhaps not so searching as Why
