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Is
Religion Possible? (continued)
Thus, wholly
overshadowed by the results of his intellectual activity, the modern man has
ceased to live soulfully, i.e. from within. In the domain of thought he is living
in open conflict with himself; and in the domain of economic and political life
he is living in open conflict with others. He finds himself unable to control
his ruthless egoism and his infinite gold-hunger which is gradually killing
all higher striving in him and bringing him nothing but life-weariness. Absorbed
in the ‘fact’, that is to say, the optically present source of sensation,
he is entirely cut off from the unplumbed depths of his own being. In the wake
of his systematic materialism has at last come that paralysis of energy which
Huxley apprehended and deplored. The condition of things in the East is no better.
The technique of medieval mysticism by which religious life, in its higher manifestations,
developed itself both in the East and in the West has now practically failed.
And in the Muslim East it has, perhaps, done far greater havoc than anywhere
else. Far from reintegrating the forces of the average man’s inner life,
and thus preparing him for participation in the march of history, it has taught
him a false renunciation and made him perfectly contented with his ignorance
and spiritual thraldom. No wonder then that the modern Muslim in Turkey, Egypt,
and Persia is led to seek fresh sources of energy in the creation of new loyalties,
such as patriotism and nationalism which Nietzsche described as ‘sickness
and unreason’, and ‘the strongest force against culture11’.
Disappointed of a purely religious method of spiritual renewal which alone brings
us into touch with the everlasting fountain of life and power by expanding our
thought and emotion, the modern Muslim fondly hopes to unlock fresh sources
of energy by narrowing down his thought and emotion. Modern atheistic socialism,
which possesses all the fervour of a new religion, has a broader outlook; but
having received its philosophical basis from the Hegelians of the left wing,
it rises in revolt against the very source which could have given it strength
and purpose. Both nationalism and atheistic socialism, at least in the present
state of human adjustments, must draw upon the psychological forces of hate,
suspicion, and resentment which tend to impoverish the soul of man and close
up his hidden sources of spiritual energy. Neither the technique of medieval
mysticism, nor nationalism, nor atheistic socialism can cure the ills of a despairing
humanity. Surely the present moment is one of great crisis in the history of
modern culture. The modern world stands in need of biological renewal. And religion,
which in its higher manifestations is neither dogma, nor priesthood, nor ritual,
can alone ethically prepare the modern man for the burden of the great responsibility
which the advancement of modern science necessarily involves, and restore to
him that attitude of faith which makes him capable of winning a personality
here and retaining it in hereafter. It is only by rising to a fresh vision of
his origin and future, his whence and whither, that man will eventually triumph
over a society motivated by an inhuman competition, and a civilization which
has lost its spiritual unity by its inner conflict of religious and political
values.
As I have indicated
before,12 religion as a deliberate enterprise to seize the ultimate
principle of value and thereby to reintegrate the forces of one’s own personality,
is a fact which cannot be denied. The whole religious literature of the world,
including the records of specialists’ personal experiences, though perhaps
expressed in the thought-forms of an out-of-date psychology, is a standing testimony
to it. These experiences are perfectly natural, like our normal experiences.
The evidence is that they possess a cognitive value for the recipient, and,
what is much more important, a capacity to centralize the forces of the ego
and thereby to endow him with a new personality. The view that such experiences
are neurotic or mystical will not finally settle the question of their meaning
or value. If an outlook beyond physics is possible, we must courageously face
the possibility, even though it may disturb or tend to modify our normal ways
of life and thought. The interests of truth require that we must abandon our
present attitude. It does not matter in the least if the religious attitude
is originally determined by some kind of physiological disorder. George Fox
may be a neurotic; but who can deny his purifying power in England’s religious
life of his day? Muhammad, we are told, was a psychopath13. Well,
if a psychopath has the power to give a fresh direction to the course of human
history, it is a point of the highest psychological interest to search his original
experience which has turned slaves into leaders of men, and has inspired the
conduct and shaped the career of whole races of mankind. Judging from the various
types of activity that emanated from the movement initiated by the Prophet of
Islam, his spiritual tension and the kind of behaviour which issued from it,
cannot be regarded as a response to a mere fantasy inside his brain. It is impossible
to understand it except as a response to an objective situation generative of
new enthusiasms, new organizations, new starting-points. If we look at the matter
from the standpoint of anthropology it appears that a psychopath is an important
factor in the economy of humanity’s social organization. His way is not
to classify facts and discover causes: he thinks in terms of life and movement
with a view to create new patterns of behaviour for mankind. No doubt he has
his pitfalls and illusions just as the scientist who relies on sense-experience
has his pitfalls and illusions. A careful study of his method, however, shows
that he is not less alert than the scientist in the matter of eliminating the
alloy of illusion from his experience.
The question
for us outsiders is to find out an effective method of inquiry into the nature
and significance of this extraordinary experience. The Arab historian Ibn Khaldën,
who laid the foundations of modern scientific history, was the first to seriously
approach this side of human psychology and reached what we now call the idea
of the subliminal self. Later, Sir William Hamilton in England and Leibniz in
Germany interested themselves in some of the more unknown phenomena of the mind.
Jung, however, is probably right in thinking that the essential nature of religion
is beyond the province of analytic psychology. In his discussion of the relation
of analytic psychology to poetic art, he tells us that the process of artistic
form alone can be the object of psychology. The essential nature of art, according
to him, cannot be the object of a psychological method of approach. ‘A
distinction’, says Jung,
‘must
also be made in the realm of religion; there also a psychological consideration
is permissible only in respect of the emotional and symbolical phenomena of
a religion, where the essential nature of religion is in no way involved, as
indeed it cannot be. For were this possible, not religion alone, but art also
could be treated as a mere sub-division of psychology.’14
Yet Jung has
violated his own principle more than once in his writings. The result of this
procedure is that, instead of giving us a real insight into the essential nature
of religion and its meaning for human personality, our modern psychology has
given us quite a plethora of new theories which proceed on a complete misunderstanding
of the nature of religion as revealed in its higher manifestations, and carry
us in an entirely hopeless direction. The implication of these theories, on
the whole, is that religion does not relate the human ego to any objective reality
beyond himself; it is merely a kind of well-meaning biological device calculated
to build barriers of an ethical nature round human society in order to protect
the social fabric against the otherwise unrestrainable instincts of the ego.
That is why, according to this newer psychology, Christianity has already fulfilled
its biological mission, and it is impossible for the modern man to understand
its original significance. Jung concludes:
‘Most
certainly we should still understand it, had our customs even a breath of ancient
brutality, for we can hardly realize in this day the whirlwinds of the unchained
libido which roared through the ancient Rome of the Caesars. The civilized man
of the present day seems very far removed from that. He has become merely neurotic.
So for us the necessities which brought forth Christianity have actually been
lost, since we no longer understand their meaning. We do not know against what
it had to protect us. For enlightened people, the so-called religiousness has
already approached very close to a neurosis. In the past two thousand years
Christianity has done its work and has erected barriers of repression, which
protect us from the sight of our own sinfulness.’15
This is missing
the whole point of higher religious life. Sexual self-restraint is only a preliminary
stage in the ego’s evolution. The ultimate purpose of religious life is
to make this evolution move in a direction far more important to the destiny
of the ego than the moral health of the social fabric which forms his present
environment. The basic perception from which religious life moves forward is
the present slender unity of the ego, his liability to dissolution, his amenability
to reformation and the capacity for an ampler freedom to create new situations
in known and unknown environments. In view of this fundamental perception higher
religious life fixes its gaze on experiences symbolic of those subtle movements
of Reality which seriously affect the destiny of the ego as a possibly permanent
element in the constitution of Reality. If we look at the matter from this point
of view modern psychology has not yet touched even the outer fringe of religious
life, and is still far from the richness and variety of what is called religious
experience. In order to give you an idea of its richness and variety I quote
here the substance of a passage from a great religious genius of the seventeenth
century - Shaikh AÁmad of Sirhind - whose fearless analytical criticism of contemporary
Sufism resulted in the development of a new technique. All the various system
of Sufi technique in India came from Central Asia and Arabia; his is the only
technique which crossed the Indian border and is still a living force in the
Punjab, Afghanistan, and Asiatic Russia. I am afraid it is not possible for
me to expound the real meaning of this passage in the language of modern psychology;
for such language does not yet exist. Since, however, my object is simply to
give you an idea of the infinite wealth of experience which the ego in his Divine
quest has to sift and pass through, I do hope you will excuse me for the apparently
outlandish terminology which possesses a real substance of meaning, but which
was formed under the inspiration of a religious psychology developed in the
atmosphere of a different culture. Coming now to the passage. The experience
of one ‘Abd al-Mumin was described to the Shaikh as follows:
‘Heavens
and Earth and God’s Throne and Hell and Paradise have all ceased to exist
for me. When I look round I find them nowhere. When I stand in the presence
of somebody I see nobody before me: nay even my own being is lost to me. God
is infinite. Nobody can encompass Him; and this is the extreme limit of spiritual
experience. No saint has been able to go beyond this’.
On this the
Shaikh replied:
‘The experience
which is described has its origin in the ever varying life of the Qalb;
and it appears to me that the recipient of its has not yet passed even one-fourth
of the innumerable ‘Stations’ of the Qalb. The remaining three-fourths
must be passed through in order to finish the experiences of this first ‘Station’
of spiritual life. Beyond this ‘Station’ there are other ‘Stations’
know as RëÁ, Sirr-i-Khafâ, and Sirr-i-Akhf«, each of these ‘Stations’
which together constitute what is technically called ‘ÿlam-i Amr
has its own characteristic states and experiences. After having passed through
these ‘Stations’ the seeker of truth gradually receives the illuminations
of ‘Divine Names’ and ‘Divine Attributes’ and finally the
illuminations of the ‘Divine Essence’.’16
Whatever may
be the psychological ground of the distinctions made in this passage it gives
us at least some idea of a whole universe of inner experience as seen by a great
reformer of Islamic Sufâsm. According to him this ‘ÿlam-i Amr, i.e.
‘the world of directive energy’, must be passed through before one
reaches that unique experience which symbolizes the purely objective. This is
the reason why I say that modern psychology has not yet touched even the outer
fringe of the subject. Personally, I do not at all feel hopeful of the present
state of things in either biology or psychology. Mere analytical criticism with
some understanding of the organic conditions of the imagery in which religious
life has sometimes manifested itself is not likely to carry us to the living
roots of human personality. Assuming that sex-imagery has played a role in the
history of religion, or that religion has furnished imaginative means of escape
from, or adjustment to, an unpleasant reality - these ways of looking at the
matter cannot, in the least, affect the ultimate aim of religious life, that
is to say, the reconstruction of the finite ego by bringing him into contact
with an eternal life-process, and thus giving him a metaphysical status of which
we can have only a partial understanding in the half-choking atmosphere of our
present environment. If, therefore, the science of psychology is ever likely
to possess a real significance for the life of mankind, it must develop an independent
method calculated to discover a new technique better suited to the temper of
our times. Perhaps a psychopath endowed with a great intellect - the combination
is not an impossibility - may give us a clue to such a technique. In modern
Europe, Nietzsche, whose life and activity form, at least to us Easterns, an
exceedingly interesting problem in religious psychology, was endowed with some
sort of a constitutional equipment for such an undertaking. His mental history
is not without a parallel in the history of Eastern Sufâsm. That a really ‘imperative’
vision of the Divine in man did come to him, cannot be denied. I call his vision
‘imperative’ because it appears to have given him a kind of prophetic
mentality which, by some kind of technique, aims at turning its visions into
permanent life-forces. Yet Nietzsche was a failure; and his failure was mainly
due to his intellectual progenitors such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Lange
whose influence completely blinded him to the real significance of his vision.
Instead of looking for a spiritual rule which would develop the Divine even
in a plebeian and thus open up before him an infinite future, Nietzsche was
driven to seek the realization of his vision in such scheme as aristocratic
radicalism.17 As I have said of him elsewhere:
The ‘I
am’ which he seeketh,
Lieth beyond philosophy, beyond knowledge.
The plant that groweth only from the invisible soil of the heart of man,
Groweth not from a mere heap of clay!18
Thus failed
a genius whose vision was solely determined by his internal forces, and remained
unproductive for want of expert external guidance in his spiritual life,19
and the irony of fate is that this man, who appeared to his friends ‘as
if he had come from a country where no man lived’, was fully conscious
of his great spiritual need. ‘I confront alone’, he says, ‘an
immense problem: it is as if I am lost in a forest, a primeval one. I need help.
I need disciples: I need a master.20 It would be so sweet to obey.’
And again:
‘Why do
I not find among the living men who see higher than I do and have to look down
on me? Is it only that I have made a poor search? And I have so great a longing
for such.’
The truth is
that the religious and the scientific processes, though involving different
methods, are identical in their final aim. Both aim at reaching the most real.
In fact, religion; for reasons which I have mentioned before, is far more anxious
to reach the ultimately real than science.21 And to both the way
to pure objectivity lies through what may be called the purification of experience.
In order to understand this we must make a distinction between experience as
a natural fact, significant of the normally observable behaviour of Reality,
and experience as significant of the inner nature of Reality. As a natural fact
it is explained in the light of its antecedents, psychological and physiological;
as significant of the inner nature of Reality we shall have to apply criteria
of a different kind to clarify its meaning. In the domain of science we try
to understand its meaning in reference to the external behaviour of Reality;
in the domain of religion we take it as representative of some kind of Reality
and try to discover its meanings in reference mainly to the inner nature of
that Reality. The scientific and the religious processes are in a sense parallel
to each other. Both are really descriptions of the same world with this difference
only that in the scientific process the ego’s standpoint is necessarily
exclusive, whereas in the religious process the ego integrates its competing
tendencies and develops a single inclusive attitude resulting in a kind of synthetic
transfiguration of his experiences. A careful study of the nature and purpose
of these really complementary processes shows that both of them are directed
to the purification of experience in their respective spheres. An illustration
will make my meaning clear. Hume’s criticism of our notion of cause must
be considered as a chapter in the history of science rather than that of philosophy.
True to the spirit of scientific empiricism we are not entitled to work with
any concepts of a subjective nature. The point of Hume’s criticism is to
emancipate empirical science from the concept of force which, as he urges, has
no foundation in sense-experience. This was the first attempt of the modern
mind to purify the scientific process.
Einstein’s
mathematical view of the universe completes the process of purification started
by Hume, and, true to the spirit of Hume’s criticism, dispenses with the
concept of force altogether.22 The passage I have quoted from the
great Indian saint shows that the practical student of religious psychology
has a similar purification in view. His sense of objectivity is as keen as that
of the scientists in his own sphere of objectivity. He passes from experience
to experience, not as a mere spectator, but as a critical sifter of experience,
who by the rules of a peculiar technique, suited to his sphere of inquiry, endeavours
to eliminate all subjective elements, psychological or physiological, in the
content of his experience with a view finally to reach what is absolutely objective.
This final experience is the revelation of a new life-process - original, essential,
spontaneous. The eternal secret of the ego is that the moment he reaches this
final revelation he recognizes it as the ultimate root of his being without
the slightest hesitation. Yet in the experience itself there is no mystery.
Nor is there anything emotional in it. Indeed with a view to secure a wholly
non-emotional experience the technique of Islamic Sufâsm at least takes good
care to forbid the use of music in worship, and to emphasize the necessity of
daily congregational prayers in order to counteract the possible anti-social
effects of solitary contemplation. Thus the experience reached is a perfectly
natural experience and possesses a biological significance of the highest importance
to the ego. It is the human ego rising higher than mere reflection, and mending
its transiency by appropriating the eternal. The only danger to which the ego
is exposed in this Divine quest is the possible relaxation of his activity caused
by his enjoyment of and absorption in the experiences that precede the final
experience. The history of Eastern Sufâsm shows that this is a real danger.
This was the whole point of the reform movement initiated by the great Indian
saint from whose writings I have already quoted a passage. And the reason is
obvious. The ultimate aim of the ego is not to see something, but to be something.
It is in the ego’s effort to be something that he discovers his final opportunity
to sharpen his objectivity and acquire a more fundamental ‘I am’ which
finds evidence of its reality not in the Cartesian ‘I think’ but in
the Kantian ‘I can.’ The end of the ego’s quest is not emancipation
from the limitations of individuality; it is, on the other hand, a more precise
definition of it. The final act is not an intellectual act, but a vital act
which deepens the whole being of the ego, and sharpens his will with the creative
assurance that the world is not something to be merely seen or known through
concepts, but something to be made and re-made by continuous action. It is a
moment of supreme bliss and also a moment of the greatest trial for the ego:
Art thou in
the stage of ‘life.’ ‘death’, or ‘death-in-life.’
Invoke the aid of three witnesses to verify thy ‘Station.’
The first
witness is thine own consciousness -
See thyself, then, with thine own light.
The second witness is the consciousness of another ego -
See thyself, then, with the light of an ego other than thee.
The third witness is God’s consciousness -
See thyself, then, with God’s light.
If thou standest unshaken in front of this light,
Consider thyself as living and eternal as He!
That man alone is real who dares -
Dares to see God face to face!
What is ‘Ascension’? Only a search for a witness
Who may finally confirm thy reality -
A witness whose confirmation alone makes thee eternal.
No one can stand unshaken in His Presence;
And he who can, verily, he is pure gold.
Art thou a mere particle of dust?
Tighten the knot of thy ego;
And hold fast to thy tiny being!
How glorious to burnish one’s ego.
And to test its lustre in the presence of the Sun!
Re-chisel, then, thine ancient frame; And build up a new being.
Such being is real being;
Or else thy ego is a mere ring of smoke!
J«vid
N«mah
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Notes]
Date/Time Last Modified: 6/18/2002 8:03:55 AM
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