THE MORE I WANDER around this turning globe the more I realize that it is not only individual men, parties, governments, or peoples who are to blame for the distressful condition of the human race—so mesmerized by popular follies and so deluded by traditional fables!—but also common ignorance concerning three fundamental questions: What is the meaning of the world and experience? What am I? What is the object of existence? I perceive with startling precision that the bursting of this integument of ancient ignorance will do more than anything else to make enduring peace descend on our troubled earth.
The pith of the world problem is too plain for our complex age to perceive: all acts are sprayed up by the hidden fountain of mind, and when men learn to think rightly they will act accordingly, not before. Their deeds can never be greater than their ideas, for the unheard declarations of the mind decide the noisy journeys of the feet. The world’s bitter sorrows and bestial sins are but symptoms of a disease whose cause is old ignorance and whose only cure is new knowledge. It is the inescapable duty of every intelligent rational human being, troubled by half-conscious and inchoate yearnings for a better life, not to rest in mental sloth but to persist in searching for the answers to these three questions; that is, for the scintillating asterism of TRUTH.
It is a commonplace remark that we live today in an unparalleled world situation. We are born at a crucial juncture in recorded history. Certain new currents of thought, feeling, and activity have been strongly stirring the whole globe since this century opened, and less so for a few centuries earlier. The war has but brought them to a fuller and dramatic convulsion. The slow chronicle of former epochs fades into petty insignificance when compared with our own. The sightless multitudes stand bewildered before its iconoclastic changes and staggered before its devastating events. Mars has put this planet on the torture rack. Nemesis has moved among the nations like a judge, putting on the grim periwig and sternly holding the forgotten scales. And all peoples wander blindly through one of the most momentous transitions which time has ever imposed on the race.
Seven new transforming features of our time are most remarkable from the standpoint of the philosopher, however, and possess an ultimate bearing on the publication of this book.
The first noteworthy feature is the incredible development of mechanical transport between villages, towns, countries, and continents, through the use of steam and electric trains, petrol-driven automobiles, omnibuses, steamships, and aeroplanes. Thus the planet has shrunk and mankind has been involuntarily drawn together. This has definitely widened the space-sense of millions of people. It has brought them into personal contact with their own neighbours, with strangers and foreigners; hence we witness a resulting interchange of racial cultures, a multiplication of ideas, and an expansion of outlooks. Something has thus happened to the world which has no recorded equivalent. Ideas can no longer be insulated, except under the pressure of brute force, and then only for a limited time. And one underrated consequence has been that the voice of Asiatic wisdom is now being heard by European and American ears.
The second feature is the phenomenal raising of both the political status and the economic standard of living of the working classes, when compared with two or three generations ago. This has unfolded within them a sense of self-respect which they lacked when they were tied with the bonds of inherited serfdom. Aristos has handed his sceptre to Demos, unwillingly no doubt, and Demos is wielding it—considerately but uncertainly or dictatorially and decisively. He worships multitudes and abases himself before magnitude. The crowd carries the day; its verdict is the last word. But the brighter consequence of this unprecedented emancipation has in turn been the unfoldment of an interest in life beyond the unavoidable grind of earning a livelihood. The masses have begun to look beyond their noses and to free themselves from a parochial outlook. The larger questions and arguable issues of religion, politics, and culture are no longer entirely outside their range.
The third feature is the elimination of illiteracy and the democratization of education. Knowledge is no longer the monopoly of a fortunate few. Free and compulsory education has worked marvellous changes within a single century in the mind of those who were formerly treated as children by despotic ruling classes. The educational tide has flowed with increasing pressure throughout the world with the consequence that the masses are far less unsophisticated today than they once were. They have outgrown to a marked extent the kindergarten doctrines with which they were fed. The setting up of the first few letter-types sounded the throwing down of all the old epochs of gross ignorance. Where the European peasant or workman of a thousand years ago was unable to read a letter and could not even sign his name, the European and American workman of today cannot only read all the letters of the alphabet but also write them. Nor is this progress confined to those continents although it has reached its crescendo there. Asia and Africa are on the move, too.
But we must not fall into the superficial assumption that this has greatly helped man’s capacity to think rightly. Education is of two kinds: that which merely diffuses facts and helps men to memorize them, and that which helps them to think rightly about those facts. Most education belongs to the first category, which depends on the use of intellect only, but some belongs to the second, which depends on the higher faculty of reason. However, the general increase in the area of knowledge does lead to some increase in the area of inquiry, and this in turn to a consequent if still smaller rational awakening. People are now more ready to apply reason to life than they formerly were, although they are not ready enough to make such an application play a vital part in their existence. Therefore it may reasonably be hoped that many more neophytes will seek for philosophical initiation when its deep and difficult tenets are freed from their opaque veil of forbidding phraseology and put into more lucid words.
The fourth feature is the list of striking inventions to improve communication, which have succeeded each other ever since Gutenberg printed the first black-lettered word on white paper in Germany and William Caxton set up a creaking handpress in London. The printing press, the cheap post, the electric telegraph, the telephone, the cinema, and wireless transmission are civilizing instruments which have combined to communalize and popularize knowledge and make it swiftly available to all. The consequence has been that a continuous interchange of facts, thoughts, ideas, and views is proceeding everywhere. Time has lapsed into little account when wireless and cable can combine to bring the entire planet’s news to one’s house in a flash, when newspapers or printed periodicals place a description of today’s scientific discovery in England before the eyes of a reader in China the same week. A man broadcasting in London will hear the echo of his voice in one-seventh of a second, during which flash it has travelled the globe and penetrated the ears of innumerable listeners. Thus these inventions have also succeeded in altering and expanding the time-sense of most people. Moreover, the opening up for study of immense evolutionary periods in the past history of man and the universe has begun to accustom the educated to think in terms of tremendous time-vistas.
The old-fashioned sense of time as being a slow-moving thing has gone with the wind of progress. We live now in a moving world, not a static one. The tempo of American life has altered to a rate undreamt of by Inca or Aztec. The domestic arrangements and mechanisms of European households allow for numerous daily activities never contemplated in the programme of leisurely old Romans. The habits of a hundred generations are disintegrating before our eyes, but those who spend their whole lives in Occidental cities may not note and appreciate this astonishing alteration so much as those who sojourn at times in Oriental villages where days may be passed remote from all signs of our science and our time. The evolution of men’s minds is therefore much more rapid than in earlier centuries.
The newspaper, produced at the rate of twenty thousand per hour, has become a great formative force in modern life. Where the medieval man could not procure a single book to read because of its high cost and great rarity, his present-day descendant can now procure a newspaper every day and read a cheap new book every week. The printed sheet has spread knowledge, prepared the way for science, publicly proclaimed it in every modern language, and may now clear a new if narrower path for philosophy in general. The birth of the printing press signalled the death of all the eras of esotericism. The time has come to open more fully for the Western world the little-visited track of a hidden Oriental philosophy.
The fifth feature is the appearance of science on the intellectual horizon of mankind. For good or for worse it has affected the mind of today. Its birth in Europe ushered in the era of fact and compelled the world to begin to bid adieu to the era of fable. Men are rising from the primitive rule of magic to the maturer rule of logic. The growth of human mentality may not be very great, but it is clearly noticeable and it is antagonistic to human superstition. The rise of the one means the fall of the other. Scientific facts were once nervous intruders into the forum where guesswork flourished, but today they dominate the world scene. Bacon was but a precursor of the Darwinian war of reasoned teachings against dogmatic beliefs, which left such a deep mark on the thought of the last century. Whatever may have been the place of blind faith during former centuries, it cannot again for long assume leadership in a century when reason has so visibly and so tangibly shown its triumphs all around us. We have begun to grow up, and the jejune chatterings of primitive minds will sooner or later annoy our ears.
The achievements of science are the inseparable facts of our day. Its marvels fill our homes, throng our streets, float on the five oceans, and move invisibly through space. Thus they have decisively demonstrated to the whole world the superior value of applied reason. The advent of new scientific knowledge published to the whole world has begun to shift the foundations of human life, to affect the spirit of our time, and to alter our outlook. Every man who faithfully follows its discoveries has had to make a fresh appraisal of all existence, including his own.
The historic moment of the modern scientific era’s arisal really began when Galileo broke away from the stronghold of tradition and performed his famous experiment in the leaning tower of Pisa. It was the beginning of a vast series of worldwide researches which culminated in the scientific picture of the world as a huge, causally governed automatic machine. God as fussy creator, as capricious supervisor and arbitrary judge, was conveniently dropped out of the old medieval picture. This was the first revolution in the Western outlook. The second came when Röntgen discovered the electrical basis of the atom. Research moved still more rapidly; so rapidly, in fact, that the scientists are now again repainting their picture. The universe is no longer a machine. What it has now become nobody knows for certain. The new picture is blurred and vague, even amorphous, but this is because it belongs to the domain of philosophy. For there has been a gradual process of abstraction, a transition from the empiric standpoint to the metaphysical, a growing tendency for science to become part of its own field of investigation and to turn matter and mechanism into concepts. All signs now indicate that science is not merely shaking hands with philosophy but that Mercury is even preparing to marry Minerva! What is of special interest is that science is also unwittingly moving into the camp of the hidden philosophy, for some of its latest tenets as formulated by Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg, Jeans, and others were anticipated and affirmed by the Indian sages at a time when Western civilization was babbling in its infancy. For the first time in history it is possible to formulate the products of Eastern thought in Western terms—that is to say, in scientific terms—and to synthesize them with the rich results of Western researches. Europe and America have furnished new and broader foundations for the Asiatic wisdom. The latter can now be expounded with an amplitude which has never before been voiced. Thus ancient sage and modern scientist unconsciously meet and it is now possible to construct a tremendously significant intellectual synthesis, a universal ideology of truth, which could not have been possible before.
The sixth feature is the comparatively increased leisure, which has been made available for people of all classes, but especially of the working classes, through the applications of machinery to every department of human existence, consequent on the industrial revolution.
It is customary for the moderns to complain of lack of leisure, but the truth is that the caveman had far less. He had to fight inclement nature, uncontrolled man, and ravenous beast. He had to fight for his sheer existence, food, and satisfaction. It was, therefore, possible for man to turn to think of higher things only after he had sufficiently conquered these wants. When in all history has man achieved such an overwhelming conquest as today? He has more time to undermine his own ignorance. Therefore if a few men could study philosophy in ancient times, the extended leisure of today renders the hour ripe for more students who are willing to use their leisure wisely to be attracted to its illustrious tutelage.
The seventh feature is the historical fact that postwar periods generate religious doubts in many minds with the consequent search for a more acceptable explanation of life in some of these minds. But when two wars have been waged within a single generation, when they are the worst which the world has ever seen, and when they have spread on the most gigantic scale history has ever known, it is undoubtedly no error to predict that faith will sink seriously after the shock of the cataclysm. The despairing feeling that life is without a purpose will spread through all classes of people. The power of religion to control men ethically is likely to be much weakened, which will constitute a position of profound social danger. The breaking down of these old sanctions amid unrest and upheaval demands their reinforcement or replacement by new ones. For most men cannot live in comfort with the thought that there is no fundamental meaning and no great purpose in life. They will soon seek out some faith or theory that will bestow direction to existence. Therefore the present convulsed and collapsed epoch will witness a search for such doctrines as no previous epoch has yet witnessed. And because these changes will always be most marked among the more educated classes, the forms which this quest is likely to take will be mainly mystical and occasionally philosophical rather than religious. Mysticism will probably receive a larger number of adherents than it has known for a long time, for it offers an emotional inner peace urgently needed after the maniacal frenzies and horrors of war, but philosophy will also have to welcome within its portals a modest modicum of new inquirers who have changed their intellectual gear.
If these seven factors mean anything at all they mean that history is in the throes of turning its sharpest corner, that the cultural growth of mankind has been notably accelerated, that a new and unique epoch in human knowledge is opening before the educated world, that the potential field of receptivity to the philosophy of truth is wider and deeper than ever before, that secrecy is becoming superfluous, and that for the first time a new worldwide propagation of higher views has been rendered possible. Moreover, the international political and economic conditions today are such as to force people everywhere to see events and things in their relation to the whole, i.e., to begin to philosophize! Nothing like this opportune phenomenon, which requires the utmost emphasis, can be found in centuries other than the twentieth. This astonishing age of social transition, general dissolution, technological revolution, and mental illumination is, in short, a continuous acceleration of the process of turning man from a primitive to a scientific animal. But even this is not enough. Man should live in the way that is proper to him, and not after the manner of the beast, the reptile, and the parasite. Hence the time is ripe to disclose a doctrine which does not, like most religions, contradict the findings of science, but actually draws support from them. It is really advisable under such conditions to relax the ancient restrictions and release sufficient of the old genuinely Aryan knowledge to help the better cultured classes act more wisely that something nobler may emerge and that we may all advance toward the shaping of a finer human world. For it is to them that the sheep-like masses must always look for guidance; it is their ways of thinking which are set up as criterions to be aimed at; and it is their ways of living which are held up for ambition or imitation. Progress flows from the top, from the leading circles and higher classes of every community, downward until it permeates the populace. The ideas and beliefs held by the most educated and enlightened strata slowly come to be received by those below. Their outlook and attitude count most in influencing the world. Therefore it is to them particularly that the hidden philosophy is now addressed.
The enthusiastic activities of European scientists can now be harmonized with the calm contemplations of Oriental sages. The butterfly of true integral wisdom can ere long burst forth from its cocoon, wherein it has matured and sheltered during the past. This union may presage the new East-West civilization which may one day arise when the spindle of time has spun far beyond our counting and the primacy of materialism has been deposed, and when truth may sit enthroned to direct the real renaissance of all human life and labour. The manhood of humanity must eventually arrive, and if this grand conception could spread among the educated classes of a warless world from Siberia to Spain, and from Colombo to California, the consequences would be remarkable. Unfortunately the materialization of such a vision seems quite remote. It is indeed very far off. Nevertheless the immense renovation which must follow the world’s gigantic collapse will surely bring more candidates to the portals of philosophy in eager quest of new roads, new knowledge, and new axioms. Both the sufferings and knowledge of our times have united to act as a cataclysmic agent which must arouse a new orientation in the world-mind. Not that the new is to be regarded as the better, but rather as having the opportunity to be better. Such are the reasons which render it advisable for this hoary old wisdom to emerge from its hiding place in the minds of a microscopically small number of Asiatics and become accessible to a wider if still limited circle. Its advent is clearly a product of historical necessity. No other all-comprehensive culture can fit so well into the recently expanded time and space sense of mankind.
With this treatise, therefore, I rise with my readers part of the way to such a higher view. The ascension will demand much from them, but it will give more, for it will, when completed in a further volume, finally solve all such problems, remove their deepest doubts and furnish them with an impregnable rock-like support throughout life. Moreover, the thoughtful scientist who cares to study these pages with a free mind may find the further clues he needs for progress toward the self-disclosure of reality; the devotee of religion who wishes to worship the living God rather than dead dogma may discover the secret mainspring of his own faith; the mystic may learn how to rise from his blissful thought of God, which is but an image, to the thought-less and image-less God as He really is; while the philosopher whose brain is distracted by the diverse opinions which prevail everywhere may here meet with an attitude of mind which is finally infallible and can dispose of all criticism. For its roots stretch far back into primeval Asia, when Napoleons had arisen in the world of thought to unshackle themselves from hieratic tradition and to force their passage through Alpian problems. Paradoxically yet inevitably this archaic culture must soon levy tribute from the adolescent young Western world. Even time itself can never antiquate the antiquity of such a culture. It is time conquering because it arises out of the ever-enduring reality within which the universe is embraced.
I did not know, when I first landed on India’s surf-sprayed shores, that I had embarked on a quest which would ultimately carry me even beyond the doctrines of mysticism and the practice of meditation itself, which for so long I had deemed the highest life open to man. I did not know, as I slowly but steadily penetrated to the inmost secrets of orthodox Indian yoga, that the enterprise of winning the truth about life would not only take me into and through its confines but also set me wandering again far beyond them. I did not know that I had thrown dice with Destiny and that the game was not to be concluded in the manner I had been led to expect that is, by settling down to an existence which made physical and mental withdrawnness in profound contemplation its highest goal and sublimest fulfilment.
For the benefit of readers to whom the terms are unfamiliar it must here be mentioned that yoga is a Sanskrit word which appertains to various techniques of self-discipline involving mental concentration and leading to mystic experiences or intuitions, techniques which will be described in a later chapter, while yogi is the person who practises such methods.
Like the yellow-robed Indian yogis, I sat in trance, but later arose, first to compose a chronicle of their lives and then to tell my Western brethren of the way to find and the worth of finding this mental quiet. Yet, when the intermittent satisfactions of mental peace entered into conflict with an innate, ever-inquiring rationalism, tremendous questions slowly became insistent. I perceived that although the little pool of light in which I walked had indeed grown wider, the area of darkness beyond it was as impenetrable as ever.
But this was the same answer which all mystics, whether in ancient Asia or medieval Christian Europe, had also found. Meditation on oneself was a necessary and admirable pursuit, but it did not constitute the entire activity which life was constantly asking of man. It was good, but it proved to be not enough. For the efflux of time had shown me the limitations of mystics, and more time showed that those limitations were accountable by the one-sidedness of their outlook and the incompleteness of their experience. The more I associated with them in every part of the world the more I began to discern that their defects arose out of sheer shrivelled complacency, the hidden superiority complex and the holier-than-thou attitude which they had unjustifiably adopted toward the rest of the world and also out of the premature assumption of total knowledge of truth when what they had attained was only partial knowledge. The conclusion was finally forced on me that the perfection of human wisdom would never develop out of any mystical hermitage and that only a synthetic complete culture could offer any hope for its unfoldment.
Thus I gradually travelled a road of reflection which made me see that the Maharshi’s classic formula for meditation, Who Am I?, which I discovered later, was also used by certain old Sanskrit authors, was not enough, albeit admirably proper in its own place as a milestone on the way to wise self-mastery. For this reason I deemed it advisable some years ago to alter this formula, which I did when writing my more recent books, where I offered this seed for analytic meditation with the new variation, What Am I? The difference between the two short initial words was a difference of only two letters on paper but of a most important divergence of outlook in thought. The word “who” was a personal pronoun and formed fit inquiry for the mystic who was preoccupied with himself as an individual and separate entity, whereas the word “what” was an impersonal interrogative pronoun whose reference rose to a higher level. “Who Am I?” was a question which emotionally presupposed that the ultimate “I” of man would prove to be a personal being, whereas “What Am I?” rationally lifted the issue to scientific impersonal inquiry into the nature of that ultimate “I.” Not that the first formula need be abandoned. It was necessary and excellent in its place, but that place was for novices, while the further formula was for the use of those on a higher level.
The passage of the last few years, with its widening comprehension consequent on incessant search and its gradual growth of unusual experience, did not permit me to rest satisfied even with this important development. The instructive episodes of daily living confronted me, with deepening disillusionment, with the limitations and deficiencies of mysticism and the intolerances and defects of mystics, from whom I did not even exclude myself, and the efforts to understand the problems that arose eventually brought me to see the insufficiency of even this expanded outlook. I saw that just as resigned religious faith in mere dogma was insufficient for the mystic, so his own intuitional feeling was insufficient for me now, and that intuition must be put in its proper place and not be expected to perform miracles. Both had been tested and found incomplete.
Yet the other source of knowledge available—intellect—was also realized on all sides as imperfect likewise, and unable to stand the test of experience. It could become as deceptive as the other ways. For intellect was logical thinking, and Archbishop Whately had once proved, with perfect irony, that logically we were well entitled to doubt the historic existence of the great Napoleon! Logical induction was quite useful so far as it went, but it was too incomplete to yield finality. Its results were always liable to change with further experience. There was something in all these three ways which man needed for balanced living. I had used this combination for years, taking guidance from the words of men deemed wise, i.e., authority, from my own sensitive feeling in meditation and ecstatic absorption, i.e., mysticism, and from the check of self-doubt and self-criticism, i.e., intellect. Indeed I had prided myself on being a rational mystic and on refusing to be cast in the conventional shape. Yet even the totality of this combination did not suffice to unveil a truth that need never be revised. Was a further and finally satisfactory source of obtaining knowledge available? This question also demanded an answer.
It is time to take up anew the train of thought which I have been recording. Graduation from the formula for analytic contemplation of Who Am I? to What Am I? did not end there. Both questions still came within the purview of mysticism and the painful logic of certain events had finally and fully clinched what the logic of critical reflection had begun to reveal. I became acutely aware that mysticism was not enough by itself to transform or even discipline human character and to exalt its ethical standards toward a satisfactory ideal. It was unable to link itself thoroughly to life in the external world! This gap was too serious to be ignored. Even the emotional exaltations of mystical ecstasy wonderfully satisfying though they be—were fleeting both in experience and effect and have proved insufficient to ennoble men permanently. The disdain for practical action and the disinclination to accept personal responsibility which marked the character of real mystics prevented them from testing the truth of their knowledge as well as the worth of their attainments and left them suspended in midair, as it were. Without the healthy opposition of active participation in the world’s affairs they had no means of knowing whether they were living in a realm of sterilized self-hallucination or not.
Meditation apart from experience was inevitably empty; experience apart from meditation was mere tumult. A monastic mysticism which scorned the life and responsibilities of the busy world would frequently waste itself in ineffectual beating of the air. The truth obtained by contemplation needed to be tried and tested, not by pious talk but by active expression; a so-called higher knowledge, which failed to appear in homely daily deeds, was badly learnt and might be nothing more than vacuous vagary. The true sage could be no anaemic dreamer but would incessantly transform the seeds of his wisdom into visible and tangible plants of acts well done. Emotional exaltations won through religious devotion were indeed personal satisfactions but might become dangerous illusions when they failed to find a proper external balance. Society represented an opportunity for the spiritual dreamer to examine the truth of his dreams and to test the strength of the castles he had built in the air. But to do this he needed to change his attitude toward the despised world of activity, to stand intermittently aside from his dangerous ascetic pride, and to broaden and balance his outlook by intellectual culture.
Time, experience, and thought had thus proved faulty and incomplete the theory which tradition had turned over to me of a short cut to the kingdom of heaven, and in the end silently pointed away and bade me continue my quest elsewhere. Mysticism was an important, necessary, and generally neglected factor in human life, but it was only a single and partial factor after all, and could never do duty for the whole of life. A more integral culture was needed, one which could be perfectly rounded by reason and which could survive the test of every experience.
Such a culture could only come from facing the fact that man was here to live actively no less than to meditate passively. The field of his activity was inevitably out there in the external world, not here in the trance world. While the practice of meditation did lead a man to a certain degree of self-knowledge insofar as it penetrated the strata of his thoughts and feeling to their more peaceful foundation, it did not lead him to self-sufficiency. This was because the external world was always confronting him on his return with the silent demand that it also be thoroughly known and properly understood. Unless therefore he inquired deeply into its real nature and united the resulting knowledge with his mystical perception, he would remain in the twilight and not in the full morning sun, as the entranced mystic thought himself to be. Most mystics in attempting to know themselves metaphorically shut their eyes to the profounder enigma of the surrounding world, but that act did not lead to its dismissal.
The last logical extension of this argument led one to perceive that the significance of self would inevitably become clearer when perceived in its proper place within the organic unity of the whole of existence. For just as a completely correct view of any part of a machine was possible only from the standpoint of the whole machine itself, so a perfect view of the individual man was also possible only from that of the universal existence in which he was included. One had to learn to distinguish between the trembling touch of quarter-truths, the hesitant feel of half-truths, and the firm grip of the whole truth. The old Asiatic tale about the four blind men was instructive. They wanted to know what an elephant was like, so they asked its driver to let them touch it. The first touched its abdomen and exclaimed: “It is like a round basin.” The second touched a leg and retorted, “No—it is like a tall pillar!” The third felt an ear and protested it was like a basket. Finally the fourth man felt its trunk and said that the elephant was like a bent stick. Thus their limited views of the animal led to an inconclusive argument. The driver finally settled their controversy by laughing and saying: “You have all taken a part of the elephant for the whole of it and so you are all wrong.”
The mystic worshipped the half-truth of himself while the whole truth, which put together both inner self and the external world, waited ignored or misunderstood.
Contemporary history plainly foreshadowed that the scientist who was preoccupied with the external world alone and ignored his internal world would, if he were mentally penetrative enough and temperamentally courageous enough, finally have to turn his preoccupation toward himself. Thus the man who started with the formula “What is the Universe?” was forced to finish with its mate “What Am I?” Eddington’s latest book, The Philosophy of Physical Science, was nothing less than an open confession of the truth of these statements. But the reverse was equally correct, as experience had proved to me. The mystic who started with wonderment about himself would, if he cared more for truth than for delightful moods, be forced to finish with wonderment at the universe. So long as he avoided or neglected the question “What is the universe?” he himself remained unbalanced and his knowledge incomplete.
If we endeavoured even for a single minute totally to withdraw any creature from his external sense-activity, we would not only withdraw him from the universe but also from his conscious self. For in that condition he would at once be plunged in sound slumber or sudden swoon, when he would know nothing of the I and could never know anything of the I. This indicates that not only is he a constituent part of the world but the world of sense-impression is a part of him, because it disappears together with the disappearance of his ego. Hence the right knowledge of self in its fullness must depend on a right knowledge of this time-fronted and space-backed world. Truth might be won only by a comprehensive analysis of the Whole, which necessarily included world analysis and individual analysis.
It was much to the merit of German Hegel that he had foreseen by pure thinking the same problem which now confronted me on the different road of mystic experience. He pointed out that individual experience was partial and finite and therefore could not embrace the fullness of reality. So long as it remained what it was, isolated from the universal experience, it was filled with the clash of contradictions and anomalies. But the latter disappeared as soon as we merged the individual in the whole, whose existence was already presupposed and always imminent. Hegel perceived, in short, that the individual could be adequately explained only in terms of the whole and that when asked to explain its own significance it pointed beyond itself.
Thus I moved heretically to the climax of this entire thought-process and confronted the final formulas. From “What Am I?” I had graduated at last to “What is the Meaning of this World-Experience?” and “What is the Object of All Existence?” I had come to recognize that the questions involved an ascent from advanced mysticism to pure philosophy itself.
There is a fit time for all events, says Nature as she ritualistically shows her four diverse faces to us every year. The man who would profit by her silent instruction will follow her ancient and tested method of making all self-revelations only at the appropriate hour. The time has certainly come for me to follow my old revered tutor. Hence the first two chapters of this book are purely autobiographical and may therefore sound egoistic in a work which is frankly of a philosophical character. Nevertheless their patient reading is essential as a preparation for the correct understanding of a seemingly new departure in my published work. Moreover, readers will not have to suffer this note of egoism again, for it has been my endeavour that nothing personal shall be found in the rest of this volume to detract from its objective.
I must now tell in plainer words what I hardly hinted in the first chapter of A Search in Secret India, the first book in which I spoke to my contemporaries. Therein I confessed that long before I met the first half-clothed Indian yogi: “I had lived an inner life totally detached from my outward circumstance. I spent much of my spare time in the study of recondite books and in little-known bypaths of psychological experiment. I delved into subjects which always have been wrapped in Cimmerian mystery.”
Nothing has since been added to those unrevealing words. I have kept silent so long as silence served its purpose but that purpose has now worn itself threadbare. On the other hand, recent happenings have shown that, in the face of continued misunderstandings by the ignorant and constant misrepresentations emanating from certain so-called spiritual ashrams,1 no less than from the so-called materialistic world, silence has become injurious.
All this is but a preamble to the necessary confession and defence that when I first came to India I was no novice in the practice of yoga, no gaping “greenhorn” seeking to learn the ABC of a foreign art in its native home. The narrow matrix in which heredity attempted to mould my nature I early broke and discarded, for my whole thought and temperament were of another cast. Boyhood years had been shadowed by a terrible and tremendous yearning to penetrate the mystery of life’s inner meaning. With no maps to make its intricate mazes clear, with no guide to show in which direction to travel and what dangers to avoid, surrounded by a civilization which scorned the very attempt as futile, I yet set forth to explore—or rather stumble through—this twilit land. That which frightens most people away from the investigation of mysticism was exactly what first drew me to it. The very depths of its enigma made me want ardently to explore them. I did not emerge unscathed in nerve and body from these explorations in the labyrinths of my brain and the depths of my heart for “the soul.” I made mistakes and had to pay for them. Chance, however, seemed suddenly to provide a better road. Before I crossed the threshold of manhood the power of inward contemplation had been laid up as treasure in heaven, the ineffable ecstasies of mystical trance had become a daily occurrence in the calendar of life, the abnormal mental phenomena which attend the earlier experience of yoga were commonplace and familiar, while the dry labours of meditation had disappeared into effortless ease.
This fugitive bliss of the mystic, which makes the mundane movement seem so poor and pretentious, has not lacked for laureates, as a reference to the world’s poetry soon proves. During those spacious reveries when, hitherto immured in red blood and white bone, the mind overstepped its imagined limits, the physical world was left as a remote and alien thing, the physical body with its inevitable accompaniment of difficult problems and irritating cares and unsatisfied desires took on a secondary and subordinate aspect, all one’s major interest and attention being focused inwardly on this incredible and amazing experience of an enchanting serenity that seemed to lift the mind high above the commonplaceness of earthly existence. In the deepest stage of trance I seemed to become extended in space, an incorporeal being. When, later, I came across translations of Indian books on yoga in addition to the medieval European books on mysticism I found to my astonishment that the archaic accents of their phraseology formed familiar descriptions of my own central and cardinal experiences. Thus I had unconsciously enfranchised myself in the kingdom of yoga and embarked on research activities which were one day to lead me far beyond it.
But in those days it did not occur to me that I was anything but a stumbling beginner. I had begun to understand man through introspection, but I could only begin to understand life through retrospection. I suffered from that defect of inexperienced youth—lack of self-confidence. My imagination painted vivid—nay, even fantastic—pictures of what might be accomplished given another twenty or thirty years of practice. Consequently I placed all yogis and mystics who had reached middle age on a high pedestal, while those who had finished their fourscore years were veritable supermen in my eyes! The fallacy that all progress was in a continuous straight line confused my reasoning, and it was taken for granted that whoever had practised meditation for even a couple of years longer than I had was necessarily to be revered almost to the point of worship.
That my own evolution went off suddenly at a tangent from constant contemplation of external life as a parade of flickering shadows into strenuous external work amid the high pressure of editorial cynicism and journalistic materialism not long after, or that I could never cross the familiar limit of my further occasional contemplations, taught me nothing. This unexpected change and this tantalizing inability were ascribed to my own personal defects, and I never ceased hoping that one day some sudden joyful burst of progress into an unexplored world would enhearten me. Had I but known it, these failures were more silently instructive than successes!
The time came when I could wait no longer. Knowing that India held the tradition of yoga—however attenuated—more livingly today than any other country, I went off finally in its quest and in the hope of finding its chief protagonists and of perfecting my technique. I travelled throughout the heat-soaked plains of India and devoted precious young years to such investigations. That knowledge was eventually found profusely written in many books and actually embodied in a few men. Among the latter I regarded the Maharshi and still regard him as the most eminent South Indian sage. With him I spontaneously relived afresh my earlier ecstatic moods. The life of rapt inward absorption became again the only life that really mattered. Under his influence and that of the slumberous Indian atmosphere I returned brusquely from my tangential excursion, scorning and despising world-activities and world-service anew as being nothing more than purposeless and perfunctory whippings of a dead horse. Once again thought was redirected in profound concentration upon negating itself. Once again I gave myself up to repeated practice of yoga as being the highest end of man, while the old hope that a wonderful spurt of progress into a totally new dimension of consciousness would eventually reward me dwelt perennially in the heart.
The description of my profoundest trance experience while with the Maharshi given at the end of A Search in Secret India is accurate as a description of what I felt, although I did not then understand the sharp distinction between feeling and knowledge. The general motive that governed my researches reflected itself in my main aim in writing the book, which was to draw European and American people to this much-neglected path to inner peace, i.e., to serve them. And the general Western attitude was that it had no use for the moribund survival of yoga any more than for other superstitions of a senile and sterile India. I had therefore to show that yoga at least possessed some living value, and this could best be certified by using living persons to illustrate this value.
The years passed and my eagerness to unravel the higher mysteries of yoga did not abate, so meanwhile I wrote about the lower ones, which were familiar and no longer mysterious. I found in India that the truth about the yoga system was that, in its twentieth-century practice, it was no system at all, for it had become as mixed as an Irish stew. It was hard to recognize what was mythical and what was mystical. Yoga had been thought largely useless to the modern world because it was held tight by fantastic fakirs in the crippling and unfortunate embrace of superstition. Dogmatic religion had deflected much of it from its psychological goal, while primitive magic had distorted another portion of it into a circus performance. I had not come to India to dig up the graves of old errors and rattle the bones of their skeletons. I made herculean efforts to rescue what was workable in yoga and then turn it into a consciously formulated rational praxis, first for my own clarification and then for the world’s.
My pilgrimage still went on with its inevitable accompaniment of arduous struggles and unforgettable ecstasies, intermittent disillusionments and glorious revealments. I did not make this pilgrimage alone. An unseen and unknown host increasingly travelled by my side. This crowd of fellow seekers was cosmopolitan and classless. It was scattered all over the planet. Whenever the higher bidding affected my reluctant personal will I communicated my discoveries to them. Thus my books were born. Those who were tied by duty to concentration upon the turning wheel of modern materialistic existence were able to profit by the findings of one who had made good his own escape. It was not easy for me to write words which would appeal to a practical matter-of-fact age. Sometimes I could hardly understand why, when so many more exciting and objective books were on the market, anyone should want to read mine. But yet there were these misguided folk who showed such a perverse inclination! I could but thank them and my stars for the encouragement given me. What this meant my pen could answer better than myself. May Allah grant such good people length of days!
But once again I reached the old position of standing at what seemed an impassable barrier. My intelligence demanded more understanding about the self’s relation to the world. Many respected me for having plumbed the depths of yoga, for they did not know that I was inwardly dissatisfied with my attainment, but a few friends were perplexed at the knowledge. For puzzling questions punctuated my ecstatic satisfactions. It is true that the ability to throw oneself into a mystical trance is no little matter; the capacity to concentrate thought at will for long periods of time is no common one; the power to enjoy ineffable if temporary peace by a mere inward reorientation of attention is no paltry acquirement. All these and other characteristics of yoga were in my possession. What then was the true cause of this dissatisfaction? Unless this is explained to the reader he will be perplexed.
After one emerged from the state of trance or contemplation the exalted feeling slowly and gently subsided, leaving at last only a lingering after-echo. Therefore one had to repeat the experience daily if one wanted to live again in the original condition, just as one had to repeat taking one’s dinner daily if one wanted to live without hunger. If one was expert in the matter one could protract the sweet aftereffects for a longer period, but one could not engage in any kind of practical activity without eventually losing it again. Thus the illuminations gained by yoga were always temporary ones. They needed to be renewed daily at the cost of temporary renunciation of practical duties and worldly activities.
This transiency of the contemplative state became a serious problem which engaged much of my earnest consideration. That this problem had troubled more experienced yogis than myself became known to me some years ago during one of my visits to the extensive Ashram of Sri Aurobindo Ghose, at Pondicherry, French India. There I was once shown a number of letters which he had written to his disciples, and one contained the following paragraph, whose truth struck me so forcibly that I copied it straightway. The authoritative value of this statement will become apparent when it is added that Sri Aurobindo is probably the most famous of living Indian yogis and certainly the best-educated one. He wrote:
Trance is a way of escape—the body is made quiet, the physical mind is in a state of torpor, the inner consciousness is left free to go on with its experience. The disadvantage is that trance becomes indispensable and that the problem of the waking consciousness is not solved, it remains imperfect.
Moreover, the man who has to live and work in this world, who must share in its activities, caught in its crucible of work, pleasure, and pain, must sooner or later turn away from his meditation and resume his activity just as he earlier turned away from the world to resume his meditation. “Take what thou wilt but pay the price,” said Emerson somewhere with Greek clarity of statement. The price of yoga was world-renunciation; the proof that this was so lay in the fact that those Orientals who began to make some progress with meditation and sought further advancement usually ended by listening to the melancholy melody of asceticism and fleeing from wife, family, home, property, and work; they took refuge in ashrams, caves, monasteries, jungles, or mountains, so that with the world well left behind their efforts to reach the contemplative mood might be made more uninterrupted and continuous. Seeking the day-long enjoyment of yogic peace, they had perforce to sacrifice the day-long business of worldly living.
Furthermore, this plain fact that the overmuch daily practice of meditation inevitably unfitted a man for activity in the practical sphere of existence became increasingly and disturbingly clear to me. Indeed, I had had to give up my own career in editorial and journalistic work for a time partly because of having overdone the practice and partly because of a resultant hypersensitivity which made most environments a torture. It was much easier to write books because this was an activity which could be executed on a remote mountaintop, if necessary, far from the busy turmoils of city life. All the same, I perceived that at least ninety-five percent of Western humanity were caught involuntarily in crowded whirlpools and had no hope of escape from them. A complete system of yoga could not therefore be offered as a practical possibility to the generality of people. Then how could a way of life which offered the world a reward of merely intermittent peace constitute in itself the ideal of a perfect, true, and integral way which thoughtful persons had ever been seeking? The combination of meditation practice and worldly work was valuable ordinarily only to those who were satisfied with the compromise of imperfect attainment in meditation.
There was a single exception, however. The system which formerly prevailed among the Zen Buddhists in old Japan was sensible and practical. Young men who showed a liking and fitness for meditation were brought to the Zen monasteries and trained there for a period of about three years. During this time there were no distractions to hinder them, so that the work of mind-mastery could go on uninterruptedly. The Japanese masters, with a sense of realism and practicality which their Indian confrères often lacked, did not permit their pupils to overdo meditation or trance but insisted on strict moderation. Contrary to common opinion, the Japanese capacities went beyond slavish imitation. They never became blind adherents of the Indian-born and Chinese-transmitted customs. They used what was applicable to their own needs and rejected the rest. The ultimate aim of medieval Zen was to create keen determined men with crisp clear mentalities who would be calmly active and skilfully concentrated in all their undertakings; who would spontaneously sink self in the service of their country. The dull lethargy, spectral melancholy, and antiworldliness of many Indian monks did not suit such a virile, optimistic, and practical race. The students were not allowed to pass the day in lazy, futile, or parasitical existence, but were given active duties to keep them busy. The Zen aim being a balanced existence they were made to work hard and to meditate well. But at the end of the disciplinary period, with the exception of those who felt an inborn and overwhelming vocation for monkish retreat, they were sent back to worldly life to marry, take up a career, and make good. Equipped with the power of instant and sustained concentration, poised to meet the difficulties and vicissitudes of practical living with undisturbed equanimity, universally respected for their high character, they generally forged ahead of other men and became highly successful in their chosen careers. Many of Japan’s most famous soldiers, statesmen, artists, and scholars were Zen trained men. Their ideal was a perfect balance of the inner and outer man, with efficiency as the keynote of both. The quality of their meditation was so high that a half hour daily was sufficient after their departure from the monastery to keep them in contact with spiritual peace; thus their worldly life did not suffer but was enriched.
There appeared to be little room for such an arrangement in modern life, so meanwhile we had to look at the facts as they were today.
Such were the unpalatable conclusions which I drew after my Western and Indian courses of experience in yoga, as I then knew it, both of which brought me to the point of intense inward abstraction but no farther. It will be apparent that my concern was not merely personal alone, but to some extent altruistic. I had devoutly hoped to find in mysticism a system that could completely satisfy the higher aspirations of all those who, like myself, made experience the final test. I had once thought that the contemporary materialism might find its partial cure in mysticism.
Such perceptions came to me only after I had made the initial mistake of believing and occasionally supporting all the traditional claims on behalf of yoga exercises which one had heard. It was only later and with great difficulty that the growing breadth of my approach enabled me to separate what was sound from what was superstitious in these claims.
These words might easily be misunderstood. Mental quiet has been strongly advocated in my books and I do not regret or retract such advocacy for a single moment. The infiltration of a little peace into a busy life is relatively of great value, and even the memory of a morning’s half hour bathed in blessed tranquillity sweetens the harshest labour and disciplines even degraded pleasures. I have frequently stated in my books that it was never my purpose to induce Westerners to flee into ashrams but only to flee for a while into themselves. Those books show such a way, the practice of their exercises offers such an abundant reward, and the latter may well be enough for most people. The other benefits of meditation, if correctly practised—which is not often—also constitute a valuable asset, possessing a practical bearing on life and conduct. They are chiefly: the ability to concentrate thought at will; greater pacification of emotion and passion; greater power to keep undesirable or troubling factors out of the mind; and finally a better understanding of oneself. Such benefits are obviously not to be despised and are most useful even amid the ordinary avocations of daily living. From my personal knowledge several well-known and active men of affairs—such as Lord Kitchener, the late British Field Marshal, and Lord Brabourne, the late Governor of Bengal—had been privately interested in these practices.
But for the few, again like myself, who sought to understand the meaning of life and to unravel the imperious problem of truth, peace or self-discipline could not alone still forever the keen hunger of the mind—however valuable in themselves. In short, I sought the realization of those promises of ultimate knowledge, which the old Sanskrit books held out as pertaining to the higher mysteries of yoga.
I ought to pause upon this parenthesis to render clearer what I mean by the words “higher mysteries of yoga.” They represent the difference between knowing something and feeling it. In the depths of meditation one felt, apart from transitory emotional exaltations, the world to be like a passing dream, the body to be but a drag on one’s true self, and the only permanent value to lie in the heart’s ineffable depth. Through long practical tests I had plumbed the depths of yoga, as the mystics and yogis of my acquaintance seemed to know it, and found the proper limits of its usefulness; it certainly gave much, it gave the misty feeling of having reached truth, but it did not give the irrefutable knowledge of truth. Yoga gave only these vague feelings but could not turn them into definite formulation; moreover, it could only convert these intermittent experiences into permanent attitudes if one were willing to abide in meditation the day long. This was not only impracticable to most men but also, I know now, impossible to all men.
My bafflement had been intense until the notion slowly dawned on me that such permanence could arise only out of the balance between knowledge and feeling. When intellect had discovered what emotion glimpsed, when it had established that discovery upon an irrefutable basis of fact forever proved, and when reason and feeling had perfectly fused into spontaneous action, the whole being of a man would be harmonized, his outlook firmly established, and his inner peace welded like steel into an unbroken and unbreakable element. It would then no longer matter whether he were active in the noisy world or plunged in silent trance, for his life would be an integral unit. There were statements in the old Indian texts which supported these notions. Although such understanding of the inmost nature of the world, such insight into the subtler meanings of life, could come into real rather than theoretical existence only so far as it was of one’s own making, it was equally true that some ancient finger had to emerge out of the darkness and point out the way which led to it. Thus the knowledge that there were apparently summits still unclimbed, and that no paths leading to them were nowadays discernible, filled me at times with aching discontent.
This need of wider intellectual enlightenment concerning both the nature of the world and its correct relation to the mystical view of man—in short, Truth in all its fullness—caused me to look around and consider where else it might be satisfied. I knew several of the answers of the West, knew too that they were often excellent as far as they went, but they did not go far enough. Science frankly confessed its own insufficiency, and the foremost scientists like Jeans, Eddington, and Planck had begun in sheer compulsion to point their venturesome fingers toward philosophy. I knew something of the Western philosophies, admirably reasoned and laboriously worked out as they were, but their tremendous conflict of opinion largely cancelled out each other’s value and left the student bewildered. I knew however that the foremost thinkers of Asiatic countries had leisurely pondered this problem long before the first city Greeks had begun to ponder it in Europe. Moreover, there was this vital difference—that whereas the Western thinkers usually claimed that nobody had discovered ultimate truth and that human limitations were so narrow that nobody was likely to discover it, the authors of old Asiatic books claimed that ultimate truth was certainly discoverable and that a few sages had definitely known it.
I remembered the enthusiasm with which, in my younger days, I had hotly advocated this claim to a sceptical French artist as we walked beside the Seine on moonlit nights. But alas in those days I had used the words “sage” and “mystic” as interchangeable; now I knew a little better. I felt therefore that if hope lay anywhere it lay in Asia, the continent where the world’s most renowned religious, mystic, and philosophic teachers from Jesus to Confucius had been born. It needed but slightly more consideration to narrow the search to India because I knew from wide study and personal travel that all the Asiatic lands, like Tibet, China, and Japan, had directly or indirectly derived their philosophic knowledge, yoga systems, and religious speculations from this single fountainhead. The stream of philosophic thought was likely to be purer at the source, and so I examined its position in present-day India.
At first sight it was evident to any man whose brains were not closely packed with dusty cobwebs that the medley of contradictory opinion and barrenness of useful result which afflicted Western philosophy was just as prevalent in India, too. There were six classical systems which claimed to explain the universe rationally, but each started from totally different premises and appealed to totally different facts. Consequently they all arrived at irreconcilable notions of what constituted the Truth. There were also innumerable theological and scholastic systems which masqueraded as philosophies, hiding their ultimate appeal to faith by an immediate appeal to reason, or priding themselves on their magnificent structure of reasoning while beginning with the biggest of all dogmas, that of the existence of a personal God. There were not a few seers and saints upon whose heads the populace had thrown a nimbus of holiness, who claimed to be on intimate terms with the Supreme Creator and who explained verbosely what the significance of the universe was according to the explanations which the Creator had personally vouchsafed to them. Here again there was so much conflicting doctrine that one could only decide that the divine plan was changed from month to month according to the Creator’s momentary mood! There were also numerous would-be authors who offered the maximum of verbiage with the minimum of meaning. Wherever one went in this talkative country agile-minded teachers could be found who performed breathtaking feats of logical legerdemain and who were willing to pour out on the least provocation a profuse spate of lengthy words—often meaningless, sometimes cryptic, and generally combining to form unproven or unprovable statements. But what experience in this world meant was finally as elusive as ever. I wanted a philosophy devoid of dogma whose truth could be proved as irrefutably as one could prove an experiment in science—in short, to walk on sure ground.
Most other men in my position would undoubtedly have remained content with their yogic acquirements and enjoyed the daily peace of meditation, retreating to the inner self and leaving intellectual busybodies to worry over the meaning of the universe! Unfortunately my temperament was differently constructed. The stars of cold reason and quixotic strangeness were in conjunction at my birth. I had had sufficiently ripe experience of society and its appalling aridity to know how transitory and how defective were the external satisfactions it offered in comparison with inner achievements. Great poverty had dragged itself on miserable crutches toward me when the fullness of a rich existence was my aim, and I had loathed it. Great wealth came fawning to my feet at a time when the simplest of lives was my ideal, and I had spurned it. Now I disregarded both because my personal life had been committed to higher hands and I could take whatever came to me with contentment.
I had reached a mature age when the first grey hairs had grown alarmingly and the mind had grown sufficiently to make me feel that any attempt to evade its insistent questions would do violence to the integrity of conscience. I had been thrown by time into an epoch tremulous with fateful consequences, when the whole world was being dazed and stunned by a devastating series of startling experiences and caught in a complicated web of events from which it would emerge either ruined or rejuvenated. It was an epoch which had tried to equip itself as a candidate for death. Because I belonged to the ink-stained fraternity I was naturally interested in the fate of my fellow dwellers on this sad star. The aspiration to serve the minority of earnest seekers among suffering ignorant humanity with a compassionate offering of Truth—however humble and imperfect—as I had earlier tried to serve them with an offering of Peace, burned like a consuming fire within me. There were not many years left for an overworked body and I could not afford to wait supinely for the grave while these questions remained unanswered.
But I was caught in a mental cul-de-sac, from which there seemed no way to emerge until I remembered that if there was no one in India’s living present to help me, there might yet have been someone in her dead past. Her most serious reflections on the meaning of existence lay entombed in a multitude of oblong yellowing palm leaf manuscripts. Perhaps among those muted voices it might be possible to find one or two which could speak sympathetically and understandingly to me across the centuries. So I decided to search for such an author’s work.
It should not be thought that the few ideological differences from the Maharshi changed my loving devotion and profound reverence for him. As I wrote in a London journal when he died in 1950: “He was the one Indian who inspired me most.… The inner telepathic contact and close spiritual affinity between us remained vivid and unbroken … Through a visiting friend, he sent me this final spoken message: ‘When heart speaks to heart, what is there to say?’”