MYSTICISM AND MODERN MAN

Syed Fayyaz Habib

The modern man is in a strange predicament. He is in conflict with his inner and outer self. He feels a void in his life and is also alienated from society. He is cut from the roots of his being. Now there is a growing tendency in the modern man to be asso­ciated with his self. I call this the mystic attitude of the modern man.

Mysticism in common speech is a word of very uncertain con-notation. It has in recent times been used as an equivalent for two characteristically different German words mystizizmus, which stands for the cult of the supernatural, for theosophical pursuits for a spiritualistic exploitation of physical research, and mystik, which stands for immediate experience of a Divine-human inter-course and relationship. The word “mysticism” has, furthermore, been commonly used to cover both (1) the firsthand experience of direct intercourse with God and (2) theologico-metaphysical doctrine of the soul’s possible union with the Absolute Reality, i.e. with God. It would be conducive to clarity to restrict the word “mysticism” to the latter significance, namely, as an equi­valent for the German word mystik and as designating the historic doctrine of the relationship and potential union of the human soul with the Ultimate Reality and to use the term “mystical experience” for direct intercourse with God. On account of its common uses, the name “mysticism” is more misleading than” any other of our type names. As a form of philosophy, mysticism is not to be associated with occultism or superstition, nor with physical research, nor with an application of the fourth dimension to psychology, nor with a cult of vagueness, nor with a special love of mysterious for its own sake.

Mysticism does indeed assert that after our best intellectual efforts there remains an element of mystery in reality ; in this respect, mysticism is more allied to scepticism or agnosticism than to credulity. But the mystic, in the history of philosophy, is the initiate, one who has attained a direct vision of Reality, a vision which he is unable to describe. Like the initiate in the old Greek mysteries, after the sacred drama has been shown to him as a pictorial symbol of metaphysical truth, the mystic is silent, not because he does not know, but because he cannot explain.

Mysticism has had a long history; it is older than realism, older than idealism without notable representative of this type. The influence of Plotinus was enormous. It spread, via the later neo-Platonists—as his school is called—from Alexandria through the whole. world of fading classical antiquity. It was transmitted to Arabic philosophy and came to life again in a series of Muslim Persian mystics. One of these was al-Ghazali, who, falling into scepticism while teaching philosophy in Baghdad, abandoned his chair and his family, betook himself to asceticism, and ultimate-by reached a mystical philosophy. It influenced the Pseudo-Dionysius who in turn became the progenitor of a long line of Christian mystics.

Spinoza and Schelling have much in common with mysticism in their doctrine that the One, the Absolute Substance, cannot be described, since all description is limitation. The Absolute Being is beyond the distinction of mind and matter, of good and evil, of finite and infinite, even of numerical one and many. The mystic has recovered the power to be realistic to face the facts. There are several ways in which this takes place.

First of all, the power of plain scientific observation. What we call the scientific attitude toward the world is clearly the result of a moral development, a new reverence for Nature developing into a new care in according fact and discerning natural law. It has come to appear to us not merely a scientific but a moral duty to submit our minds to the evidence found in experience, the honesty required for scientific work. The mystic is entirely right in his doctrine that the chief conditions for truth-getting are moral, not alone the metaphysical truth of the One, but the truth of physical detail as well.

The discovery of new hypotheses calls for something more than faithful observation ; it requires imagination. But not every imagination will do. What distinguishes the successful from the unsuccessful explorer of Nature is, in the first place, simplicity and open-mindedness,—freedom from pretence and personal vanity, showing itself in cravings to be different or ingenious or in the haste to gain startling results and, in the second place, a kind of sixth sense about the way Nature works, which can come only from a love of the thing. Both of these are moral qualities and such qualities as the mystic’s discipline is particularly fitted to develop.

Further, the mystic recovers the-power to appreciate facts of the qualities of things, achieving a new innocence of the senses so that flowers, sounds, colours are felt as if for the first time. The mystic acquires or recovers the power to face the facts of social intercourse and thus to extend his capacity for friendship. Friendship, among other objects of appreciation, has its own way of running down; largely because, as it develops, there come occasions for saying truths we judge to be unwelcome and we cannot command the art to say them without offence. We are not able wholly to eliminate the self-interest from our criticism. One needs something like the mystic detachment from’ self in order to find that common ground with one’s neighbour which will enable one to denounce him, say to him : “Thou art the man,” in such wise as to leave the friendship strengthened rather than destroyed.

If we are right, then it requires the mystic to be a completely successful realist and the realist to be a successful mystic. The practical conduct of life falls into a normal alternation between work and worship, each phase sharpening the need for the other. Only by some such alternation can mankind keep at par, and remain fit for the increasing burdens of an intricate civilisation with its growing load of material power. For with this material load, the race must grow pari passu in its capacity for transparent observation, for artistic sensitivity, and for friendly personal and national relationship.

Mysticism is a highly specialised form of that search for Reality, for heightened and completed life. It is a constant characteristic of human consciousness. It is largely prosecuted by that “spiritual spark,” that transcendental faculty which, though the life of our life, remains below the threshold in ordinary man. Emerging from its hiddenness in the mystic, it gradually becomes the dominant factor in his life, subduing to its service and enhancing by its having contact with Reality, these vital powers of love and will which we attribute to the heart, rather than those of mere reason and perception, which we attribute to the head. Under the sphere of this love and will, the whole person­ality rises in the acts of contemplation and ecstasy to a level of consciousness at which it becomes aware of a new field of perception: By this awareness, by this “loving sight,” it is stimulated to a new life in accordance with Reality which it has beheld. So strange and exalted is this life, that it never fails to provoke either the anger or the admiration of other men.

A discussion of mysticism, regarded as a form of human life, will include two branches. First, the life-process of the mystic: the remaking of his personality, the method by which his peculiar consciousness of the Absolute is attained and faculties which have been evolved to meet the requirements of the phenomenal,, are enabled to do work on the requirements of the tran­scendental plane. This is the “Mystic Way” in which the self passes through the states or stages of development which were codified by the neo-Platonists and, after them, by the medieval mystics, as purgation, illumination, and ecstasy. Secondly, the content of the mystical field of perception, the revelation under which the contemplative becomes aware of the Absolute. This will include a consideration of the so-called doctrine of mysticism; the attempts of the articulate mystic to sketch for the world into which he looked, in language which is only adequate to the world in which the rest of us dwell. Here the difficult question of sym­bolism, and of symbolic theology, comes in, a point upon which many promising expositions of the mystics have been wrecked. It will be our business to strip off as far as may be the symbolic wrap-ping and attempt a synthesis of these doctrines to resolve the apparent contradictions of objective and subjective revelations of the ways of negation and affirmatian, emanation and immanence, surrender and deification, the Divine Dark and the Inward Light and, finally, to exhibit, if we can, the essential unity of that experience in which the human soul enters consciously into the Presence of God.

Now I will deal with Existentialism. I will give a brief introduction of it. The contemporary philosophy holds that there is no essential human nature common to all men. Instead, each individual creates his own essence or character throughout his lifetime by his choice of interests and actions.Existentialism is a philosophy of irrationalism, because of the prominence it gives to man’s passionate and aesthetic nature and to his feelings of anguish, love, guilt, and sense of inner freedom. It conceives of truth as a free commitment on the part of the individual. Existentialism, despite its exaggerated emphasis on the freedom of the individual, is not committed to a theory of free will. It is a form of individualism which recognises the crucial importance of the decisions of the individual man but does not ignore the individual’s relation to others, the individual, through his self-transcendence, communes with other individuals and ultimately with an all-embracing Being. Although German Existentialism owes many of its insights to traditional idealism, both Heidegger and Jaspers would reject the idealistic level ; they refuse to identify being with consciousness, mind, spirit or any other idealistic principle.thought, usual philosophical classifications for it claims toiha e trap cended the oppositions between naturalism and spiritualism, realism and idealism, pluralism and monism.

The significance of Existentialism lies not in its contribution to technical philosophy. Existentialism is pre-eminently the philosophy of crises; it has interpreted the whole of human and like wise of cosmic existence, as a succession of critical situation, each fraught with danger and demanding for its resolution all the inner resources of the individual; each crisis gives rise to a new crisis requiring similar resolution and the entire series leads to ultimate “shipwreck”. Existentialism is a philosophy of dis­illusion and despair. It is not, however, properly speaking, philosophical pessimism, since it does not impart evil to the ultimate being; the ultimate being transcends both good and evil. Historically considered, existentialist philosophy is a basic response to the present cultural crises.

Existentialists have opened or re-opened a new world within, subjective existence which has scarcely been treated by philosophers since Socrates ; moreover, they have brought to focus once again the needed emphasis upon individual responsibility and freedom, which was becoming rapidly forgotten in a world which was relegating moral responsibility to the realm of pseudo-factuality. Furthermore, their stress on the role which “possibility” plays in the life of man is more than challenging; it is an encouraging thought which should inevitably lead to optimism, despite the pessimistic outlook and conclusion of the existentialist. How can any person be other than optimistic with the thought that his life is laden with numerous possibilities to which he has direct access and control by individual choice! To ask for more would be to place heaven beneath earthly existence.

A few lines on Pragmatism will suffice at this moment. The term’ “Pragmatism” is derived from the Greek word pragmats, which means acts, affairs, business. It was first introduced into philosophy by Charles Peirce. Peirce’s original formulation of they pragmatist principle: “Consider what effects, that conceivably might have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic- method. Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means. Sadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they are “known as”. But these forerunners of Pragmatism used it in fragments; they were preluders only. Not until in our time has it generalisation itself, become conscious of a universal mission, and pretended to a conquering destiny.

The last aspect is Humanism, a very important movement in philosophy. Humanism is the philosophical movement which originated in Italy in the second half of the fourteenth century and diffused into other countries of Europe, coming to constitute one of the modern cultures. Humanism is the attitude of mind which attaches primary importance to man and to his faculties, affairs, temporal aspirations and well-being. Humanism is the philosophy which recognises the value or dignity of man and makes him the measure of all things or, somehow, takes human nature, its limits or its interests as its theme.

In the first sense Humanism is the basic aspect of the Renaissance and precisely that aspect through which Renaissance thinker sought to reintegrate man into the world of Nature and history and to interpret him in this perspective. Medieval Christianity suggested that man’s life on earth was significant only in -so far as it affected his soul’s expectation of God’s mercy after death and it was against this belittling of his natural condition that the humanists of the Renaissance asserted the instinct value of man’s life before death and the greatness of his potentialities. As ecclesiastical influence waned, the protest of Humanism was turned against secular orthodoxies that subordinated man to the abstract concept of political or biological theory. In the twentieth century some new senses were given to the word “Humanism”. F.C.S. Schiller took it as the special name of his own version of Pragmatism, maintaining that all philosophic thinking or under-standing from human activity and reaffirming “protageras’’ that man is the measure against what he called the intellectualist philosophers; whether represented by Plato, by Hume or by the idealists of his own time.

The religious humanists believe in God—meaning a summation of all the social aspirations of the race and the ideational forces operating in history. They believe in immortality. The’ most significant thing is that they believe in man, particularly man’s idealistic aims and achievements. They also believe that whatever contributes to human welfare is Divine and all the activities which advance mankind’s highest development are religious activities. Such is the gospel according to the contemporary religious Humanism.

According to naturalistic Humanism, there is only one order` of existence and that is the natural world and that man is a wholly natural creature whose welfare and happiness come solely from his own unaided efforts. Nature provides us with raw material and it is our duty to build a satisfying existence far ourselves and perhaps for our descendants. But Nature guarantees us nothing; we are on our own in an environment which has no plans, no moral preferences and makes no promises. The naturalistic humanists reject the illusion of immortality. They believe that this life is all and is enough. They do not deny that the yearning for survival is widespread and hence must be considered natural. But this has no relation with survival. However, their real emphasis is not upon the negative implications of this central doctrine, but rather upon showing that life here and now can be satisfying enough to make the prospect of death acceptable psychologically.

Humanism asserts that man’s own reason and efforts are his best and indeed only hope and his refusal to recognise this point is of the chief causes of his failures throughout history. The humanist philosophy persistently strives to remind men that their only home is the mundane world. There is no use of searching elsewhere for happiness and fulfillment, for there is no other place to go. We must find our destiny and our promised land here and now. If one accepts this humanistic ideal of good life and good society, then the following implications would have to be acknowledged.

First, it would seem to mean that religion in virtually all its present forms would die out. A humanist society, assuming its members were intellectually consistent, would have no use for religion.

Secondly, a society living by naturalistic Humanism would necessarily have to shift its ethics from the foundation, they have had for centuries, namely, “the will of God” or Divine commands.

The third implication of the humanist philosophy is more intellectual than ethical. If life in this world is all we have, then knowledge of this world is most important. And the more reliable source is the scientific research. It follows that science provides us with knowledge which is the most humanly significant. The sciences of man are particularly important to Humanism and its exponents insist that these fields should be developed as rapidly as possible.

Psychologists have felt a necessity for inner life. The older psychologists were accustomed to say that the messages from the outer world awaken in that self three main forms of activity: (1) They arouse movements of attraction or repulsion, of cravings of a hungry infant to the passions of the lover, artist or fanatic. (2) They stimulate a sort of digestive process in which she combines and cogitates upon the material presented to her, finally observing a certain number of the resulting concepts and making them part of herself or of her world. (3) The movements of desire or the action of reason or both, in varying combinations, awaken in her a determination by which percept and concept issue in action bodily, mental or spiritual. Hence the main aspects of the self were classified as emotion, intellect and will, and the individual temperament was regarded as emotional, intellectual or volitional, according to whether feeling, thought or will assumed the reins. The unsatisfied psyche in her emotional aspect wants to love more, her curious intellect wants to know more. The awakened human creature suspects that both appetites are being kept on a low diet ; that there reality is more to love and more to know, somewhere in the mysterious world without and, further, that its powers of affection and understanding are worthy of some greater and more durable objective than that provided by the illusion of sense. Urged, therefore, by the cravings of feeling or of thought, consciousness is always trying to run out to the encounter of the Absolute and always being forced to-return.

The vindication of the importance of feeling in our life and in particular its primacy over reason in all that has to do, with man’s contact with the transcendental world has been one of the great achievements of modern psychology. In the sphere of religion it is now acknowledged that “God known of the heart” gives a better account of the character of our spiritual experience than “God is more trustworthy than the dialectic proof. One by one the common places of mysticism are thus discovered by official science and given their proper place in the psychology of the spiritual life.

Further, the heart has its reasons which the mind knows not. It is the matter of experience that, in our moments of deep emotion, transitory though they be, we plunge deeper into the reality of things than we can hope to do in hours of the most brilliant argument. At the touch of passions, doors fly open which logic has battered on in vain, for passion rouses to activity not merely the mind, but the whole vitality of man. It is the lover, the poet, the mourner, the convert, who shares for a moment the mystic’s privilege of lifting that Veil of Isis which science handles so helplessly, leaving only her dirty fingermarks behind. The heart, eager and restless, goes out into the unknown and brings home, literally and actually, “fresh food for thought”. Hence those who “feel to think” are likely to possess a richer, more real, if less orderly, experience than those who “think to feel”. This psychological law, easily proved in regard to earthly matters, holds good also upon the super sensual plane. It was expressed once for all by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing when he said of God: “By love He may be gotten and holaen, but by the thought of understanding, never.” That exalted feel­ing that “secret blind love pressing,” not the neat deduction of logic, the apologist’s “proofs” of the existence of the Absolute, unseals the eyes to things unseen before : “therefore,” says the same mystic, “what time that thou purposes” thee to this work and feelest by grace that thou art called of God, lift then up thine heart unto God with a meak stirring of love, and means God that made thee and bought thee and that graciously hath called thee to thy degree, and receive none other thought of God. And yet not all these but if thou list, for it sufficeth thee enough, a naked intent direct unto God without any other cause than Himself.” Here we see emotion at its proper work. The movement of desire passing over at once into the act of concentration, the gathering up of all the powers of the self into a state of deter-mined attention which is the business of the Will. “This driving and drawing,” says Ruysbroack, “we feel in the heart and in the unity of all our bodily powers. This act of perfect concentration, the passionate focusing of the self upon one point, when it is applied, `with a naked intent,’ to real and transcendental things, constitutes in the technical language of mysticism the state of recollection, a condition which is peculiarly characteristic of the mystic consciousness and is the necessary prelude of pure contemplation that state in which the mystic enters into communion with Reality.”

Our next concern would seem to be with this condition of contemplation; what it does and whither it leads? What are (a) its psychological explanation and (b) its empirical value? Now in dealing with this and other rare mental conditions, we are, of course, trying to describe from without ; which is as much as to say that only mystics can really write about mysticism. Many mystics have so written and we, from their experiences and from, the explorations of psychology from’ another plane, are able to make certain elementary deductions. It appears generally from these that the act of contemplation is for the mystic a psychic gateway, a method of going from one level of consciousness to another. In technical language it is the condition under which he shifts his “field of perception” and obtains his characteristic outlook on the universe. That there is such a characteristic out-look, peculiar to no creed or race, is- proved by the history of mysticism, which demonstrates plainly enough that in some men another sort of consciousness, another “sense,” may be liberated beyond the normal powers. This sense has attachments at each point to emotion, to intellect and to will. Yet it differs from and transcends the emotional, the intellectual and the volitional life-of ordinary men. It was recognized by Plato as that consciousness which could apprehend the real world of Ideas. Its development is the final object of that education which his Republic de-scribes. It is called by Plotinus “Another intellect, different from that which reasons and is dominated rational.” Its business, he says, is the perception of super sensual-or, in neo-Platonic language, the intelligible world. Al-Ghazālī says: “Like an immediate perception, as fore touched its object with one’s hand.” In the words of Bernard : “It may be defined as the soul’s true unerring intuition, the unhesitating apprehension of truth,” which simple vision of truth, says St Thomas Aquinas, “ends in a movement of desire”.

Normal man is utterly unable to set up relation with spiritual Reality by means of his feeling, thought and will; it is clearly in this depth of being—in these unplumbed levels of personality—.that we must search, if we would find the organ, the power by which he is to achieve the mystic quest. That alternation of consciousness which takes place in contemplation can only mean the emergence from this, “fund or bottom of the soul,” of some faculty which diurnal life keeps hidden “in the deeps”.

There is within us an immense capacity for perception, for the receiving of messages from outside, and a very little consciousness which deals with them. It is as if one telegraph operator were placed in charge of a multitude of lines ; all may be in action, but we can only attend to one at a time. In popular language, there is not enough consciousness to go round. Even upon the sensual plane, no one can be aware of more than a few things at once. These fill the centre of our field of consciousness as the object on which we happen to have focussed our vision dominates our field of sights. The other matters within that field retreat to the margin. We know dimly that they are there, but we pay them no attention and should hardly miss them if they ceased to exist.

The “passivity” of contemplation is a necessary preliminary of spiritual energy, an essential clearing of the ground. It with-draws the tide of consciousness from the shares of sense, stops the “wheel of imagination”. “The soul,” says Eckhart, “is created in a place between Time and Eternity; with its highest powers it touches Eternity with its lower Time.” These, the worlds of Being and Becoming, are the two `stages of Reality” which meet in the spirit of man by cutting us off from the temporal plane, the lower kind of reality, contemplation gives the eternal plane, and the powers which can communicate with that plane, their chance. In the born mystic these powers are great and lie very near the normal threshold of consciousness. He has a genius for transcendental—or, as he would say, Divine—discovery in much the same way as his cousins, the born musician and poet, have a genius of musical or poetic discovery. In all three cases the emergence of these higher powers is mysterious and not least so to those who experience it. Psychology, on the one hand, and theology, on the other hand, may offer us diagrams and theories of this preceding of the strange oscillations of the developing consciousness, the visitations of an ellucidity and creative power over which the self has little or no control, the raptures and griefs of a vision by turns granted and withdrawn.

Thus we have seen some of the modern views on the .progress of life. Modern man is a wide term. It includes the younger generation, the scientists, the psychologists and other intellectuals. They are feeling a need of religion which can prove a boon for the modern man. The psychiatrists are laying stress on social and moral values which are essential for the preservation of the individual and the society. They feel that, without this spiritual orientation, the life force is apt to become stagnant. The modern scientists have become a slight hesitant in rejecting all unknown entities. Many of them hold a strong possibility for the existence of a spiritual phenomenon.