|
Knowledge
and Religious Experience (continued)
It is clear that whether
we apply the physical criterion or the non-physical and more adequate criterion
of Royce, in either case our knowledge of other minds remains something like
inferential only. Yet we feel that our experience of other minds is immediate
and never entertain any doubt as to the reality of our social experience. I
do not, however, mean, at the present stage of our inquiry, to build on the
implications of our knowledge of other minds, an idealistic argument in favour
of the reality of a Comprehensive Self. All that I mean to suggest is that the
immediacy of our experience in the mystic state is not without a parallel. It
has some sort of resemblance to our normal experience and probably belongs to
the same category.
4. Since the quality of
mystic experience is to be directly experienced, it is obvious that it cannot
be communicated.38 Mystic states are more like feeling than thought.
The interpretation which the mystic or the prophet puts on the content of his
religious consciousness can be conveyed to others in the form of propositions,
but the content itself cannot be so transmitted. Thus in the following verses
of the Qur’«n it is the psychology and not the content of the experience
that is given:
‘It is not for man
that God should speak to him, but by vision or from behind a veil; or He sendeth
a messenger to reveal by His permission what He will: for He is Exalted, Wise’
(42:51).
‘By the star when
it setteth,
Your compatriot erreth
not, nor is he led astray.
Neither speaketh he from
mere impulse.
The Qur’«n is no other
than the revelation revealed to him:
One strong in power taught
it him,
Endowed with wisdom with
even balance stood he
In the highest part of
the horizon:
Then came he nearer and
approached,
And was at the distance
of two bows or even closer -
And he revealed to the
servant of God what he revealed:
His heart falsified not
what he saw:
What! will ye then dispute
with him as to what he saw?
He had seen him also another
time
Near the Sidrah
tree which marks the boundary:
Near which is the garden
of repose:
When the Sidrah
tree was covered with what covered it:
His eye turned not aside,
nor did it wander:
For he saw the greatest
of the signs of the Lord’ (53:1-18).
The incommunicability of
mystic experience is due to the fact that it is essentially a matter of inarticulate
feeling, untouched by discursive intellect. It must, however, be noted that
mystic feeling, like all feeling, has a cognitive element also; and it is, I
believe, because of this cognitive element that it lends itself to the form
of idea. In fact, it is the nature of feeling to seek expression in thought.
It would seem that the two - feeling and idea - are the non-temporal and temporal
aspects of the same unit of inner experience. But on this point I cannot do
better than quote Professor Hocking who has made a remarkably keen study of
feeling in justification of an intellectual view of the content of religious
consciousness:
‘What is that other-than-feeling
in which feeling may end? I answer, consciousness of an object. Feeling is instability
of an entire conscious self: and that which will restore the stability of this
self lies not within its own border but beyond it. Feeling is outward-pushing,
as idea is outward-reporting: and no feeling is so blind as to have no idea
of its own object. As a feeling possesses the mind, there also possesses the
mind, as an integral part of that feeling, some idea of the kind of thing which
will bring it to rest. A feeling without a direction is as impossible as an
activity without a direction: and a direction implies some objective. There
are vague states of consciousness in which we seem to be wholly without direction;
but in such cases it is remarkable that feeling is likewise in abeyance. For
example, I may be dazed by a blow, neither realizing what has happened nor suffering
any pain, and yet quite conscious that something has occurred: the experience
waits an instant in the vestibule of consciousness, not as feeling but purely
as fact, until idea has touched it and defined a course of response. At that
same moment, it is felt as painful. If we are right, feeling is quite as much
an objective consciousness as is idea: it refers always to something beyond
the present self and has no existence save in directing the self toward that
object in whose presence its own career must end!’39
Thus you will see that
it is because of this essential nature of feeling that while religion starts
with feeling, it has never, in its history, taken itself as a matter of feeling
alone and has constantly striven after metaphysics. The mystic’s condemnation
of intellect as an organ of knowledge does not really find any justification
in the history of religion. But Professor Hocking’s passage just quoted
has a wider scope than mere justification of idea in religion. The organic relation
of feeling and idea throws light on the old theological controversy about verbal
revelation which once gave so much trouble to Muslim religious thinkers.40
Inarticulate feeling seeks to fulfil its destiny in idea which, in its turn,
tends to develop out of itself its own visible garment. It is no mere metaphor
to say that idea and word both simultaneously emerge out of the womb of feeling,
though logical understanding cannot but take them in a temporal order and thus
create its own difficulty by regarding them as mutually isolated. There is a
sense in which the word is also revealed.
5. The mystic’s intimate
association with the eternal which gives him a sense of the unreality of serial
time does not mean a complete break with serial time. The mystic state in respect
of its uniqueness remains in some way related to common experience. This is
clear from the fact that the mystic state soon fades away, though it leaves
a deep sense of authority after it has passed away. Both the mystic and the
prophet return to the normal levels of experience, but with this difference
that the return of the prophet, as I will show later, may be fraught with infinite
meaning for mankind.
Page [1,
2, 3, 4, 5,
6, 7]
[See
Notes]
Date/Time Last Modified: 6/18/2002 8:02:56 AM
© 2004, Human Development
Foundation. All rights reserved.
1350 Remington Road, Suite W, Schaumburg, Il. 60173
Toll Free: (800) 705-1310 | Email: info@yespakistan.com
| Privacy Policy
|
