I suspected that few students of comparative religion would agree with the Sankaracharya’s theory. But time was running short, and I turned to a subject on which he was an unquestioned authority.
Question: ‘I had several talks with Hindu psychiatrists in Bombay. They all agreed that spiritual exercises greatly help to effect medical cures. What bothered them was the absence of criteria to distinguish between insights gained in mystic trance on the one hand, and hallucinations on the other.’
His answer was short and precise: ‘The state of hallucination is a temporary one. A person should learn to control his mind. What comes after such mental discipline is mystic experience. What appears in the uncontrolled state of mind are hallucinations. These are caused by the wishes and fears of the ego. The mystic’s mind is a blank, his experience is shapeless and without object.’
Question: ‘Can a mystic experience be artificially induced by means of drugs?’
H.H.: ‘You ask this because you think of the experiments of Aldous Huxley.’
AK: ‘no, I was thinking of bhang.’
H.H.: ‘Bhang is used among the people in some parts of India to induce certain states of mind. It is not a habit in the South. Such an artificially induced state does not last long. The real mystic condition is more permanent.’
Question: ‘How is an outside observer to distinguish between the genuine and the not-so-genuine?’
H.H.: ‘Of course, sometimes people mistake a pseudo-yogi for a real one. But the behaviour of the man who has disciplined his mind, who is a true yogi, will be different. When you look at him, you will see that this face is serene and at peace. That will discover and differentiate him.’
He spoke without a trace of self-consciousness; it evidently did not occur to him that the description applied to himself.
I felt that my time was up, though the Sankaracharya denied with great gentleness that he was tired; in India, it is the visitor who is supposed to bring the audience to an end, which sometimes leads to embarrassing situations. I waited for h.h. To get up, but he made no move. There was a silence; only the nose-picking disciple kept up his activities. So I embarked on an anecdote—about the Jesuit priest who was asked how he would reconcile God’s all-embracing love with the idea of eternal hell, and who answered: ‘Yes, hell does exist, but it is always empty.’
I suppose my motive in telling the story was to make him smile again. He did, then said, still smiling: ‘We have no eternal Hell in Hinduism; even a little practice of dharma will go a long way in accumulating merit.’ he quoted a line from the Gita in Sanskrit.
That was the end of the conversation. I found at last the courage to get up first, and the Sankaracharya, after a very gentle and unceremonious salute, quickly took the few steps to the palanquin and disappeared into its interior. The room was suddenly dingy and empty, and I had the feeling of a personal loss.
Such were the views of an orthodox religious leader in contemporary India; the remarkable thing about them is that they bore no relation to contemporaneity. Equally striking was the contrast between his gentle, saintly personality, lovable and loving, peaceful and peace-giving, immersed in contemplation ‘without shape or object’—and the rigidity of his views on Hindu doctrine and religious observances. If one tried to project him onto the European scene, one would have to go back several centuries to find a Christian mystic of equal depth and stature; yet in his views on religious practice he compared with the rigid ecclesiastics of the nineteenth century.
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This extract is from The Lotus and the Robot.
44.
Hidden Journey
Andrew Harvey
Andrew Harvey’s account describes his return to his native India in 1977 after his disenchantment with academic culture at Oxford (which he terms ‘a concentration camp of reason’). A series of life-changing experiences initiated a spiritual search. This extract describes a mystical moment, and uncovers a trope that grows only too familiar to every seeker on the journey: the need for patience, the willingness to wait.—Ed.
I arrived in India in November 1977 and stayed in B’s house in Delhi, where I had first met Shantih. For ten days I was so overwhelmed, I was unable to leave B’s balcony. We sat together and watched India walk by in the streets below.
One afternoon after a large group of half-naked, ash-coated yogis had passed by, singing and dancing and stopping the traffic for miles, B said quietly: ‘Do you know what this country does to you? It makes you believe against your will that at any moment the curtain of what you have called reality can part and reveal something amazing, fabulous. The revelation has not come. But I am patient.’
The wild, plangent singing of the yogis drifted back to us through the dusk. B turned to me. ‘Revelation will come to you. I have always known that. Ever since you were a child. Once I asked you what you wanted to be. Do you remember what you said?’
I shook my head.
B laughed. ‘You said you wanted to be a singer or a saint. I knew then the world would not be enough for you. This country had bitten you too deep.’
‘But I am not looking for a revelation,’ I said.
‘You don’t look for it. It finds you.’
Three months later I found myself in the south of India, in Pondicherry, a former French colonial town on the sea, visiting the ashram of Aurobindo. I had not heard of Aurobindo or Pondicherry before I came back to India; I had no intentions of visiting any ashrams (four years’ experience at an Oxford college had cured me of any fascination with ‘monasticism’). I went there on a whim, on a chance remark from a fellow traveller who had found me thin and depressed in a fleapit in Tanjore and said, ‘Go to Pondy and get yourself a supply of good English beer, French bread and a clean room.’
My first days in Pondicherry—despite the English beer, French bread and clean room—were disgruntled. The city itself unnerved me with its long, straight, empty avenues baking in an unwaveringly harsh sun. I disliked the ashram with its pompous colonial buildings and air of goody-goody whitewashed piety. What little I gleaned of Aurobindo’s philosophy of evolution struck me as ridiculous. I wrote to a friend in England who had been afraid I would ‘get religion’ in India that Aurobindo was obviously an escapee from reality, a fantasist of the most grandiose proportions. How could anyone but a fantasist believe at this moment that humankind had any hope of saving itself, let alone ‘leaping into Divine Being’, or some such rubbish, after the Gulags, the First and Second World Wars? After Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Kampuchea and Vietnam? As for sweet Mother, his Shakti, the half-French half-Turkish sibyl who had accompanied him on his ‘adventure’, I wrote: ‘I see nothing in the so-called Mother of the Universe and Co-creator of the coming transformation of human beings into divine infants but an ancient Jewess with an appalling taste in clothes.’ I ended the letter: ‘I am leaving this incense-scented morgue tomorrow for the beach (any beach anywhere) and a little sensual sanity. I’d rather die drunk in a Calcutta ditch than spend another day here.’
In fact, I went on to spend four more months.
That evening I met Jean-Marc Frechette and began a friendship that would change my life.
He was standing in front of me in the ashram food queue, frail, stooped, with balding light chestnut hair and large, slightly protruding eyes, reading Jaccottet’s translations of Hopkins. I was so relieved to see someone reading and not wandering in the usual ashram daze that I moved close to him and craned over his shoulder. We started talking and continued most of the night. He was from Montreal and lived in a guest house near the ashram. He loved Rilke, Piero della Francesca, and Callas, as I did; we had a whole culture in common, and that bound us immediately. But he had made a transition into the Eastern world that I had not managed.
‘Why are you here?’ I asked him.
‘To change my life.’
‘You believe in Aurobindo’s philosophy?’
‘Belief is not so important. What is important is
experience. I experience his philosophy.’
That made me furious. As we walked by the sea I launched into a denunciation of the escapism of ashrams in general and the uselessness of Eastern wisdom in the face of the problems of the world.
‘The world is in its last nightmare, and sweet old clichés like “peace of mind” and “the power of meditation” and “evolution into divine being” aren’t going to wake it up. So-called Eastern wisdom is as bankrupt and helpless as that of the West—more so, in fact, because its claims are so much more grandiloquent.’
Jean-Marc heard me out with barely suppressed amusement.
‘Why don’t you just let go of it?’ he said.
‘Let go of what?’
‘The toy you are holding.’
‘Don’t be cryptic.’
‘You are holding on to horror and tragedy like a child on to its last toy. It is all you have left, the last rags of a costume you do not want to give up.’
His certainty exploded me into another tirade. ‘I’d rather die than be calm. I’d rather die of the horror I see everywhere than hide from it in some smug yogic catatonia.’
Jean-Marc dropped to the sand laughing.
‘Oh, my god,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘No wonder you like Callas so much.’
He imitated my indignant face and flailing arms.
‘You see the world as one long grim nineteenth-century opera with nothing in it but pain and loss. You refuse to imagine anything but catastrophe.’
He started laughing again. ‘How conventional.’
‘Stop laughing, damn you!’
‘I don’t have to stop laughing. You have to start. Don’t you see how absurd you are being? Look around you. Feel this night, its sweetness, the softness of the sand where we are walking. You’ve been running from your spirit for years. You must stop. You must sit down, shut up, open, listen, and wait. Give your soul a chance to breathe. Never in my life have I seen a performance such as the one you have just given. The only thing you didn’t do is cut open a vein.’
He stood up and put his arm around me. ‘The room next to mine in the guest house is vacant tomorrow. Why don’t you take it? We could go on talking and walking by the sea. I could introduce you to my poetic genius, and we could drink tea in the garden in the afternoon like old British colonels.’
Undoing a year’s careful planning, I accepted.
Jean-Marc’s gift to me—for which I will always be grateful—was to live the spiritual life before my eyes with such a happy simplicity I could not deny its truth. Jean-Marc had given up all ‘normal’ life for a small room with a badly working fan by the sea in south India. He had almost no money, no job to go to, no ring of friends to sustain his choice—nothing, in fact, but his faith, his few books of Claudel, Rene Char and Aurobindo, and the sound of the sea. Yet he was the clearest man I had ever known, spare, joyful, delightfully eccentric, like his room with its narrow, lopsided wooden bed, its desk with one leg propped up by an old copy of the Upanishads, its cracked blue china bowl kept always full of flowers. Nothing interested him less than preaching his mystic insights; he lived them, writing them down in huge swirling letters in the garden swept by sea wind, reading Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross, swigging tea from a flask, walking up and down the beach in his loping zigzag gait, his eyes brilliant with mischief and hilarity.
Jean-Marc never talked about renunciation or expiation; although he had been brought up a Quebecois Catholic in a country village, he detested all notions of guilt and original sin—‘how vulgar to imagine that God cannot forgive anything’; ‘this world is divine,’ he would repeat again and again, leaning down to stroke the beach like an old dog or ruffling the long grass with closed eyes. ‘Hopkins was right: There lives the dearest freshness deep down in things. You just have to go deep enough to find it and stay with it.’
‘Your problem,’ he would say, lowering his voice conspiratorially, ‘is that, like so many post-romantics, you find suffering glorious. Pain has become your substitute for religion. But pain is not glorious; it is boring. Joy is glorious. Praise is glorious. Because they are hard. You have to work at them with your whole being. Your other problem is that you want—like almost every other intellectual Westerner I have ever met—to do everything yourself. You think there is something “unmanly” in asking anyone else for help, let alone looking for a Master who could guide you. Meister Eckhart said: “A fly in God is greater than an angel in himself.” You are a vain angel.’
Slowly Jean-Marc persuaded me to go with him to the ashram, to visit Aurobindo’s tomb, to examine my earlier dismissal of meditation. One day he said, ‘Why don’t you just sit by Aurobindo’s tomb and see what happens?’ I sat day after day with the other silent meditators by the white slab heaped with lotuses and jasmine. Nothing happened; I just felt hot, sad and angry at the confusion in my mind.
Then, one afternoon, just as I had decided to leave and get some tea, the thoughts that had been racing through my brain were suddenly silenced. I felt my entire being gasp for joy, a kind of joy I had never before experienced. I did not tell Jean-Marc for fear that if I talked about the experience it would vanish—but it repeated with more or less the same intensity for days afterward.
At last I told him.
‘Well … ’ Jean-Marc smiled. ‘Now you know that the power of meditation is not a “sweet old cliché”. Your new life is starting.’
We went to the Hotel de Ville on the seafront and celebrated with one tepid bottle of beer each. Later, as we sat on the beach under a nearly full moon, he wrote out one of his poems for me in the sand:
O moon
Mingle our quiet tears
With the tail of comets …
For so the soul begins.
Now Jean-Marc began to lay before me the visionary treasures of his inner life. I listened astonished as he told me of a vision he had had in Duino Castle when Aurobindo had appeared to him in the middle of a lotus of fire; a week before I would have been tempted to dismiss this as fantasy, but now each detail seemed essential, a key to a new possibility.
‘Mystics are not special human beings,’ Jean-Marc said. ‘Each human being is a special kind of mystic. Not everyone, however, wants to know this or to find out what it means. Those who do, and who become conscious of their inner power, see and know as clearly as you and I see this rose or the sea outside the window.’
I still had no real idea what he was talking about. Experiences of the next few weeks would sweep that ignorance away.
Every day I meditated before sleep and soon began to hear a low hum coming from all around me, the walls, the flowers, the sound of the sea itself. If I tried too hard to concentrate on it, it would go away. When I let my mind rest, it would surround me. I told Jean-Marc.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘So that is beginning.’
I pressed him.
‘Creation has a sound. You are hearing it, or part of it.’ One night, about a week after I had been hearing the sound, I had the first vision of my life, which overturned everything I had known up until then.
I fell asleep but I did not feel it like sleep at all. I was simply at peace, detached from my body, which I could see lying beneath me. Rapidly, as if in a great wind, I found myself taken to a white room, open to sounds of the afternoon in which Aurobindo himself was sitting, white-haired, calm, surrounded by a group of silent disciples. The room was not his room in Pondicherry, which I had seen, but one more ancient. I felt as if I were in ancient India. Nothing was said; I moved toward Aurobindo naturally, as if to a long-lost father. I put my head in his lap, and he rested one hand on it.
Then I entered a cloud of swirling light. The Light was filled with thousands and thousands of voices, all singing in rapture. Some of the words I could make out, some were in languages I knew, some in languages I had never heard before. I heard my own voice singing with them, mingling with theirs, singing the words ‘I hate to leave you, but it is your will and I must go down.’ I did not know what the
words meant, but my heart was filled with an immense love for the Light I was mingled with. Having to leave it filled me with grief; my voice burned and rose and fell with the others.
The music stopped. I found myself bound, almost choking, in a dark chute hurtling down what seemed like a long slide. Then, with a bump, I hit ground and woke up.
I heard the words distinctly, spoken in a calm male voice: ‘Remember who you are. Remember where you come from.’
My body was flooded with waves of blissful energy that swept up and down into the pulse and rhythm of the music I had heard.
As soon as I could collect myself, I went out into the morning, lay in the long grass of the garden, and wept with gratitude.
Then fear began. Was I going mad? What would I do with this new, overwhelming knowledge? How would I always remember who I am and where I came from? I knew I had been graced with a great insight, but what would I do with it?
‘What do you do?’ Jean-Marc laughed. ‘You get down on your knees and say a hundred thousand thank-yous for a start. Then you wait.’
‘Wait?’ I exploded.
Jean-Marc broke into wild laughter. ‘Two weeks ago you denied enlightenment existed. Now you want to be enlightened instantly. Some people work and wait years for what you have just been given, and here you are already demanding everything. Go on meditating; be calm. And, for God’s sake, enjoy yourself.’
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