“WAS A FURTHER and finally satisfactory source of obtaining knowledge available?” Such was the question asked in the first chapter of this book after a brief reference to religious faith, logical thought, and mystic experience characterized them all as partial, insufficient, and devoid of absolute certainty. The subsequent chapters have supplied further facts for this conclusion. An analysis must now be conducted and an answer found, if possible, to the question which heads this paragraph. It should not be thought, however, that faith, intuition, logical thinking, and mystic trance are valueless. On the contrary, they have their proper places and particular uses, but they should be regarded only as steps. They are not and can never be perfect instruments for the service of a man who is seeking nothing less than complete certitude. Had they really been such, then the world would have answered its age-old queries long ago and its long-drawn quest would today be unnecessary. The mere presence of many conflicting views which still puzzle mankind alone proves the insufficiency and indecisiveness of such sources, upon which mankind has chiefly relied in the past.
The weary inquirer may well be provoked into asking whether the human mind is at all capable of solving ultimate problems. This is an important question. It is indeed the same as our preliminary one, but in another form. Its answer involves the answer to other questions, such as “How do I get knowledge? What is meant by knowledge? Which kind of knowledge is true?”—all of which must be dealt with by the philosopher if he is to walk warily in the light and not dubiously in darkness.
All inquiry into the final meaning of experience and the mystery of the world would be a waste of time if the very limits of such inquiry were set for us beforehand by hard impassable barriers that encircled the available means of knowledge. It is therefore better to know the worst, if worst there be, than to indulge in the folly of pursuing an unattainable quest. It is to the honour of Immanuel Kant that he was the first Western thinker to raise the question whether man possessed a mental instrument fit for knowing truth. He came to a negative conclusion. Fortunately we need not be so pessimistic, for we shall find, as the ancient Indian sages found, that only the best awaits us in the end and that the riddle of life can be solved with man’s present resources.
An infant is too helpless to find its way about life alone. It has perforce to rely on others, i.e., its parents. So too grown men who feel more or less ignorant and uncertain about the interpretation of existence in general have to seek the help of others. Thus to satisfy such a need arises the earliest guidance offered to man, which is that of authority, whether religious, political, cultural, or otherwise, and whether traditional or not. It says: “Believe and you will be safe!”
We must therefore begin an examination of such authoritarianism with the startling postulate of universal ignorance. And this means that the teeming masses are still infantile in some ways. Millions and millions of grown-up men and adult women living in the world today are still intellectual children who fully accept and completely believe much that is nonsensical and more that is false. We ought not to be afraid of such a statement. In the operations of arithmetic we find that the figure of one million multiplied by nought still remains equal to zero. In human life the same calculation evaluates the knowledge of most people. But society being what it is, the masses of mankind, busy with toil or suffering in trouble, must trust in authoritarianism and in normal times can usually find no better guides through the maze of life problems than their traditional ones, provided the trust is not abused.
Take the instance of religion. A religion has to establish its authority by congealing its views into formal assertions and fixed dogmas. It has to announce these doctrines as supernaturally revealed “sacred” truths, not as arguable human ones. The moment it is willing to discuss its tenets on any other basis than that of given and infallible revelation it has opened a door to numerous schisms and to slow but sure weakening of its entire position. Continuance of such weakening will one day lead to its collapse. Therefore religion prudently offers its knowledge to man as something received from a higher source, from a higher being, or a higher world, which he must piously accept on unquestioning faith and reverently maintain as an unquestioned tradition.
Let us examine this position. It is historically satisfactory to the masses, who naturally set out in life with the simplest possible conceptions and who are willing to accept the universe in which they find themselves without troubling their heads overmuch about it. Its value is little, however, to the few who are engaged in the quest of ultimate certitude and who are therefore counselled to begin with the exercise of agnostic inquiry.
Why have the sages enjoined such a cautious attitude? Because, after all, every famous scripture is nothing more than a book which some man or men once wrote or else it could not have come into being, and because religious beliefs flourish in such an immense variety of bewildering contradictions. Whoever ventures to inquire impartially into all of them will arrive at the end in inescapable confusion. He will be totally unable to resolve the mass of conflicting claims into any kind of unity. He can never know for certain which of the worshipped Gods really exist, or which of the cosmological stories are correct, or how to harmonize either irreconcilable dogmas or the different accounts of heaven and hell. He cannot even peer into the mind of another man who is standing before him because mind is the sole characteristic which is never normally open to public inspection. How then can he peer into the mind of a totally invisible being—God—and assert that the latter is all-merciful? For aught he can tell God might be all-merciless. Knowledge of what is going on in God’s mind must necessarily be confined to God Himself. If he attempts to read the mind of God he can only succeed in reading the mind of his own idea of God, i.e., his own imagination! His belief concerning God is in the end his imagination about God; it is certainly not verified knowledge. And when he perceives the hand of divine intervention in his own or others’ lives his perception is really but an imaginative effort on his part; such an effort may fully satisfy his personal feelings and bring him much solace, but will not be better than any other imagination as a criterion of what is true.
In short, his mind can come to complete rest in any religion only because it is incapable of investigating deeply or tired of acute thinking, not because it has found truth! Faith has often been shown in this world by the record of national history and the test of individual experience to be unreliable; hence it cannot lead to uniformly certain knowledge.
It will be asked, perhaps in horror, then do the sages teach atheism? The charge can neither be admitted nor denied. They teach it where dubious Gods are concerned, i.e., imagined Gods. They deny it where the true God is concerned, i.e., God as He really is. But they do not dogmatize about the latter. What God is must constitute part of the object of our search and can only be ascertained after such search. It is a riddle to be solved, not a dogma to be set up. If in the beginning we have to doubt the ready-made Gods and reject them and their legacies of revelation as sources of sure knowledge, this is only to clear the ground for a thorough investigation into what is the irrefutable truth about the whole matter. And if later conclusions may here be hopefully anticipated, we shall happily succeed through philosophy in rediscovering the true God, not in losing Him.
A famous contemporary scientist, after admirable support of the value of philosophy to science and of the truth of metaphysical idealism, proceeded thereafter to cut himself adrift from both philosophy and science and floated away into mere speculation. He wrote reverently of the “divine architect” who is responsible for this world. He fell into the easy fallacy of thinking that because the best classes of human beings plan their houses architecturally before building them, therefore God must also plan His universe in the same way. He thus reduced his almighty God to the level of a mere human being. Where is the justification for lowering the stature of Deity in this way? The scientist did not see, unfortunately, that all these anthropomorphic speculations were but refined blasphemy! Such a God existed in his personal imagination and could not be proved to the satisfaction of everybody else to exist in fact.
The student of philosophy should not make an offering of faith before such an altar, because he above all others seeks truth; i.e., he must confine his quest to facts and not to speculative imaginations.
These words will not be palatable to sincerely pious persons. But whatever critics may make of such statements there is always one inconvenient fact from which religionists usually turn their faces. God has endowed us all—in however feeble a degree—with thinking power, with the potential capacity to discriminate and reason for ourselves. Should we not therefore use His gift and not scorn it?
However, our concern at this point is less with the existence and nature of God than with the help to be derived by the truth-seeker from the revelations of religion in their popular form. The question lies enfolded in a larger one, that of the validity of belief in any authority at all whether it be religious or otherwise. Here the reader must again be warned not to make the error of confusing different systems of dimension in the world of thought. The same rule should not be used to measure both utility and truth. We are not at the moment concerned with the practical value of authoritarianism; this has its undeniable place and is indeed absolutely indispensable for regulating the affairs of society. We are studying the question from a higher dimension altogether, that of philosophy, the search for ultimate truth, and for the time being the reader must drop the lower dimension of thought completely; otherwise he will mix the issues and bewilder his mind. And it is now that the essential qualifications which have already been described in a previous chapter will prove their worth. Indeed, without their passport he cannot even pass the very threshold of this dimension.
There must be adamant refusal to be overawed by authority. There must be an attitude which keenly probes and dissects every dogma which is set up for consumption; there must be a freedom from the ancient prejudices and irrational predilections implanted by heredity, environment, and experience; there must be the courage to resist the emotional pressure generated by conventional social forces, a pressure which carries most people along the stream of untruth, dissimulation, and selfish interest.
What shall we find when the authority of a book, bible, man, or institution is offered as sole sanction of the philosophical truth of any statement? We shall find that it is always possible to discover elsewhere another book, bible, man, or institution that may also be offered as the sanction for a directly contrary statement! Whatever can be put forward on one side can always be opposed, whether justifiably or not, on the other. There is hardly a religious, sociological, economic, political, literary, artistic, metaphysical, or mystical tenet in the history of ancient, medieval, and modern culture which does not have or has not at some time had its contradiction equally existent. There is hardly an assertion which has not been vigorously assailed by opponents who make counterassertions.
He who declares that “the Hindu religion promises many lives on earth to man” will be met by another who objects: “The Christian religion promises only one life on earth to man.” He who quotes a passage from Buckle to show that history is but the outworking of man’s individual and national effort will be opposed by another who quotes a passage from Bunsen to demonstrate that history is the outworking of God’s will in the world. Such a setting-up of authorities against each other can go on endlessly and has done so during the past ages. Religions will boldly contradict each other, writers will gravely oppose one thesis to another, two historians will unashamedly find the same event as a proof and as a denial of purpose in the world drama!
Whence have all these conflicting tenets and discordant assertions been derived? They have invariably been proffered on some dead or living authority. They cannot all be true; many even cancel each other out! The timid inquirer usually ignores this awkward position, but the more courageous one will face it fully, for it indicates that somewhere among the statements there is a logical fallacy. He will then be compelled to confess what the sages have long taught, that the mere say-so of any man, be he as world-revered as Muhammad or as world-reviled as Nero, possesses no value at all to the philosophic student but must be thoroughly inquired into if it be true, no less than the statement of the most obscure and the least esteemed of men. Nor can any authority permanently prevent people from inquiring into dogmas forced on them. Even the ant runs hither and thither examining various substances to inquire if they be edible! Credulity arises out of mental weakness: it is to be overcome by strengthening the mental fibre.
If the seeker may not make any individual authority final, that is because such a source has often proved fallible in the past and may again fall into error. Its only use for him is as a possible indicator of truth but never as its arbiter. He has no right to accept beliefs solely because somebody else accepts them or because most people accept them. For if the others hold their beliefs on the same basis, then all may have accepted complete falsehoods as being completely true. Hence philosophy is unable to bend the knee before fallible persons but only before hard facts. It applies this formula to all men without exception, whether they be enthroned and crowned as kings, barefooted and yellow-robed as yogis, mitred and cloaked as cardinals, or writers mantled with a fame that makes millions follow their every word. Quotation of a thousand sentences is quite valueless as philosophical proof, although quite valuable in empirical existence in many cases where the authorities quoted are experts in specialized knowledge.
The method of disagreement can be applied to all those who quote some authority as final. If they say as proof that A asserts one thing; that does not settle the matter. It is always possible to take up an opposite position and quote B as asserting something else that disagrees with A’s statement. This is enough to show that no man can be taken as a final authority. The student on the philosophic quest must therefore entirely discard blind faith, unquestioning acceptance, easy following of tradition, and submission to the tyranny of large numbers, for all these are to be reckoned as fallacies of thinking! Though useful to the majority of men for the practical purposes of everyday living as they are, they are useless to him for the ascertainment of a truth which cannot be belied.
This is not to say that all such authorities are always wrong; on the contrary, they are sometimes right; it is to say that they might be wrong, that we have no guarantee ensuring their perpetual infallibility.
The very occurrence in man of the desire to know, the need to understand, whether it take the form of belief or not, indicates that ignorance is likewise there. Hence it is better to recognize that he must take to a different path if he would gain knowledge, and this he can do only by beginning with doubt. Unless he introduces the element of courageous questioning into his everyday conceptions he cannot hope to learn more about their validity.
It is not possible to reach the summit of knowing the truth of everything unless we start at the bottom with the first step of doubting the truth of everything! This is the only way in which to obtain a guarantee that every further step taken will be a safe one and that we shall not afterward have to retrace our path in disappointment. It is important to realize that the term “doubt” is used here in no sceptical sense but in an agnostic one. It is not a correct attitude to deny intolerantly what we do not even understand, but it is perfectly correct to observe: “I do not know. I have not seen. Therefore I cannot start with any dogmatic assumptions, whether they be in affirmation or in denial.” Such a position will not be taken up by those who are naturally impatient, who are ready to believe anything at once because it pleases them, who are not willing to suspend premature judgment and to pose pertinent questions before advancing forward into acceptance of any claim. Those who jump to the first and easiest conclusion free themselves from the trouble of internal conflict but they unconsciously commit the fallacy of primitivism. In the end, therefore, their defective attitude must one day yield its fruit in disappointment. An unhurried spirit is therefore an advantage here.
This is not to say that we are to rest satisfied with our doubts and be content with the gloomy confinement of agnosticism. It means that we shall make our doubt act as a constantly pressing spur to deeper investigation, and not as a cold clammy hand to dishearten us. The sages say that doubts are extremely valuable provided we are induced to overcome and solve them by persevering search which carries us eventually to a higher level of understanding. They are not to be forcibly expelled or feebly smothered. And if we foolishly let doubts paralyse all further search, then we have no right to dogmatize pessimistically about the unattainability of truth in general, as so many in the West do.
The hidden philosophy says, in a manner contrary to authority: “Welcome doubt fearlessly as being the first step to certainty. Doubt and you will be saved!” But it says this only to the seeker after the highest truth. To all others, to all those who have no time to take thought for such a long quest or no will and no capacity for it either, it unhesitatingly endorses the injunctions of authority. It is well aware of the practical value to such men of ready-made institutions, which, through sacred books and appointed priests, enthroned rulers, and office-holding leaders, shall dictate their customary forms of thought, their regular habits of conduct, and their basic outlook.
It will now be clearer why, when describing the qualifications needed by the philosophic inquirer, great emphasis was laid upon the elimination of the ingrained human tendency to view things from an egoistic platform. For we may now observe that the authoritarians of every kind are so imbued with the colours of their personal predilections and emotional presuppositions that they unconsciously set limits to their possibilities of getting at the truth of things. The hidden root of their assertions is—the ego! I am right, says one; no, I am right, retorts another.
The I lurks beneath the gregarious ignorance, the fatuous mistakes, and the primitive misunderstandings of men.
Of all the false beliefs and deceptive illusions which darken the mind, the strongest is that whatever one knows, believes, sees, or mentally holds is necessarily true. “I know!” is the statement which any fool can make, as the sages say, but whether what he knows is correct he seldom stops to inquire. This is why doubt is needed. It is a characteristic of such people—and it should be remembered that this means almost the whole of mankind—to believe that they plainly understand when they really do not. Hence the sage who is initiating the candidate into the ultimate path takes as his first task the unveiling of this universal defect. He explains that “I know!” is the conscious or unconscious presumption of mankind and that humility in its truest sense must be sought and found by the aspirant before he can take a single step forward. And this sense is not only moral but psychological. “I know!” usually means “I feel” or “I experience” or “I prefer”—none of which is a fit criterion of truth. Hence the need of rigorously doubting what we think we know, of sternly putting aside our imaginations, of verifying the ideas and testing the concepts we hold so fervently, and of raising questions in points where we are confessedly ignorant. We should not believe in belief. For belief steps in where reason fears to tread.
The student must take his regretful leave. He may turn his feet elsewhere and knock at another door—that of logic. Everybody uses it to some extent. The bird, the beaver, and the fish are guided by a natural instinct, but man must find his way by using some thinking power. Logic possesses immense worth in the realms of day-to-day living; it can arrange our thinking in coherent and orderly fashion; it can detect gross errors and various fallacies in our journey from premise to conclusion; it can usefully show us how not to think; but we must humbly confess that the theoretical knowledge of logical rules has never prevented men from making numerous and absurd mistakes.
Lawyers use logic in presenting their case to a court. But as their conscious or unconscious purpose is to win the case it is not infrequent that truth is mauled in the process by every overweighting of lesser issues, by every suppression of awkward or inconvenient facts, and by every appeal to the emotional bias of a jury. Moreover, when we examine the stock syllogism of logic from a philosophical viewpoint we find it to be quite fallacious. “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal.” Beneath the plausible syllables of this classic syllogism hides the gigantic assumption that we have known all men who ever lived in the past, all men who are living today, and all those who shall live in the future. This is entirely impossible. Therefore the syllogism starts with asserted knowledge which, in fact, is no knowledge at all. Logically it is perfect, but philosophically it is defective. It will suffice for the limited conditions of practical everyday purposes, but for the higher purpose of final truth it is completely unacceptable. Expert logicians themselves admit now that it cannot yield new truth but only draw out what is already contained in the given facts. Logic is an imperfect instrument and as such cannot yield absolute certainty. It operates within a limited range of usefulness and validity. And therefore it cannot reveal the ultimate meaning of existence; the walls which surround it are too steep.
It occasionally happens that those who become aware of these incurable defects of logic take a short cut to intellectual relief by turning backward in their despair or darkness and descending to the vacated level of personal feeling—a course which appears to be the only one open to them. Here the intellect may voluntarily abdicate and find repose for a while, but severe disappointments and blatant contradictions are likely to occur sooner or later, thus indicating that no real relief can be got in this easy manner. Others who are unwilling to retrace their steps have begun to desert the old formal methods and to construct non-Aristotelian systems of logic. But these are still in the stage of experiment.
The seeker who wishes to leave logic for a higher method will ultimately proceed to the next step, which is that of matured reason. By “matured” is meant a thinking faculty which not only conforms rigidly to the requirements of fact, induction, and deduction, not only frees itself impartially from every kind of bias, prejudice, favouritism, or egotism, but also learns to operate as freely on abstract as on concrete levels. It must become as capable of metaphysical flights as of scientific observations. The ancient sages declared it to be precautionary and preliminary to the acquisition of insight.
Before we proceed further it is essential to rid the term reason of the widespread ambiguity and confusion with which it is frequently associated. It is the faculty which apprehends and judges truth, distinguishing it from falsehood, opinion, imagination, or illusion. And there it will be fitting to introduce the sages’ definition of the term “truth.” It has been earlier demonstrated that without such a definition men wander in a dry wilderness of hollow fancies, unfounded opinions, worthless theories, and hypostatized words. This definition may sound quite simple, but its implications are most profound. It should be graven deeply on the heart. Here it is:
TRUTH is that which is beyond all contradiction and free from all doubt; which is indeed beyond the very possibility of both contradiction and doubt; beyond the changes and alternation of time and vicissitude; forever one and the same, unalterable and unaltering; universal and therefore independent of all human ideation.
The quest of this philosophy is knowledge which is independent of the endless vicissitudes of human opinion. Applying the criterion of this definition, we discover that all reliance on changeable human authorities, all belief in written or spoken words, all acceptance of anything short of adequate reason as the final court of appeal or guidance, immediately brings us within the region of contradictions, counterstatements, and possible doubts and therefore rules out these dubious sources of knowledge from our operations. There is no certitude in them. The word “reason” is therefore not used here as a mere synonym for dry logic chopping. The Scholastics of an earlier day used the word in this sense and showed how even astute men could find many reasons for supporting hollow assumptions. Logic is the art which seeks to ensure correct sequential thinking, but unfortunately it does not seek to ensure that it starts with correct data; it may and often does start with assumptions that may be mere fancies or wrong data. Reason is the faculty of correct thinking, which seeks truth and which ensures that its activity shall start with all the observed facts of actual experience. The logician whose premises are faulty may nevertheless think correctly and yet arrive at wrong conclusions. Reason avoids this mistake.
Nor is the term used as a synonym for mere speculation. The annals of metaphysics are replete with numerous flights of sheer fancy which have been given a seemingly rational direction. Such thinking as ignores the facts of experience is not reasoning in our sense. And such reasoning as is restricted to the facts of personal experience alone is likewise not reasoning in the full sense. Although both logic and reason set up the same criterion that thinking shall not fall into self-contradiction, and that it shall not be loose and crooked, the former is satisfied with partial facts whereas the latter demands nothing less than totality of facts. Again, intellect, which may be defined as the activity of logical thinking, is swayed by personal desires and individual bias to choose its data preferentially, whereas reasoning, which may be defined as the activity of truthful thinking, is rigorously impersonal and ascetically detaches its feelings from the handling of facts.
Only when thinking is not only rigidly logical but also rigidly impersonal; only when it is pushed to its farthest extreme and throughout its course based on facts which are universally valid, which can be tested and verified in the deserts of North Africa equally as in the streets of New York and which will still hold good in ten centuries’ time as in ours, only then does it deserve the lofty name of reason.
Such competent reasoning, such intellectual integrity is rare. We shall find that it possesses a twofold self-expression. The first dwells in science, but this is only a limited and imperfect one. The second exists in philosophy, and here it finds the best and fullest play. Therefore it may be noted that science is the porch of philosophy. The vanguard of modern scientists are themselves beginning to make this discovery, for do what they will to escape, the pressure of their own results and the force of their own reasoning lead them pace by pace into the quest of the ultimate meaning of all experience, which is philosophy.
It may be objected that the ancient Indians never knew science as we understand it today. That is correct if reference is made to the method of experiment inaugurated by Bacon, but the sages among them knew the scientific principle of verification and the philosophic value of observation which are essential elements of their doctrines.
Both the scientist and the mystic share this common factor, that they are tired of blind beliefs and seek the satisfying verification of experience. This is why mysticism is placed so high in the scale of mental evolution as to be beyond faith, intuition, and logic. Certain differences of much importance must, however, be noted. The mystic seeks and finds satisfactory his own experience, whereas the scientist is not satisfied with the validity of personal experience but seeks also the experience of a larger number of individuals, i.e., a group. Hence his verification is wider. Science is a collaboration; its results are the results of the efforts of groups such as biologists, chemists, or physicists. It is the irremediable weakness of mysticism that it rests its validity on what one man feels and finds within himself, a region which is inaccessible to others, and therefore most of his findings cannot be verified. It is the admirable strength of science that it rests its validity on what can be found quite accessible in nature or in laboratories and hence can be verified by any other member of the scientific group, who are thus able to agree among themselves. It is the impregnability of genuine philosophy that it alone appeals to universal experience, to what any man at any time in any place may verify if he has the requisite mental capacity.
It is a fashion among mystics, intuitionists, and some religionists to speak caustically of the shifting hypotheses of science, and to pour the acid of scorn upon its most modern achievements and technological applications. Moreover, when war breaks out nowadays part of its horror is blamed on science too. All this shows confused thought and emotional bias. If the changes of theory reveal the imperfections of science, as they admittedly do, we ought to recognize that they also reveal a twofold inner aim which philosophy would gladly encourage and value as possessing extreme significance. Firstly, a search after truth which generates a readiness to drop faulty views for better ones when their faultiness has been conclusively demonstrated by additional facts. Secondly, an effort to generalize data, to formulate universally comprehensive laws: this is in reality an attempt to enclose the many within the one, to receive the differentiated multitude of things into a grand unity. These are characteristics which, pushed to their terminal point, will unfailingly bring the marching army of scientists into the ever-waiting camp of true philosophers.
So far as the censuring of science for the worsening of war is concerned, it may be said that like everything else it has its bright and dark sides, its attractive advantages and repulsive disadvantages. If it has given us high-powered explosives and low-diving aeroplanes, it has also given the great convenience of electric light, power, and heat.
Science is not to be blamed because some men are too foolish or too unethical to use it rightly. It is utterly neutral. The same explosive chemicals which can blow a platoon of living men to the sky can refertilize exhausted soil and cause new crops to spring into life. The same internal combustion engine which propels the death-dealing armoured tank can propel the utilitarian omnibus. The same broadcasting station which fills the minds of a million listeners with lies, hate, and distorted propaganda can also fill them with grand, noble, and instructive truths. Scientific discoveries have poured into the twentieth century like an advancing flood. Scientific knowledge may be well used or badly abused by man, as he wishes, but its remarkable advances cannot stop. It has come stubbornly to stay. It is the outstanding phenomenon of our age. We have to accept it. The mystic may try to ignore it, but he cannot succeed. No modern man can carry on for a week without availing himself a hundred times of the fruits of scientific research. And is it not better that we enslave steel machines rather than groaning men?
It is a further fashion among Oriental mystics, of whom Gandhi is a conveniently illustrative type, to denounce everything modern in favour of everything medieval and consequently to ascribe a satanic origin to science but a heavenly one to primitive forms of culture and civilization. No other reply is needed than that which is afforded by their own lives, for even Gandhi himself did not disdain to utilize the latest methods of scientific surgery to secure the removal of his pain-bringing appendix; yogis do not hesitate for a moment to take advantage of steam-drawn railway trains to carry them nearer their retreats in the foot of the Himalaya; pilgrims enthusiastically crowd the motor-lorries which ply in stages across the plains to the holy cities; and even those critics who send forth such denunciations write them with fountain pens on paper which is mill manufactured often with a view to having them printed on machine presses for wider circulation! Science thus occupies its inescapable place in their lives, however ungrateful be those whom it serves. Its capacity for harming mankind through war and violence, however regrettable it be, can be entirely removed in one way alone, and that is through bringing philosophic truth into mankind’s purview.
It is now necessary to utter a warning based on facts known to practising psychiatrists and professional psychologists. The reasoning faculty may be highly developed so far as its application to a special sphere of interest is concerned, and yet in the same man it may be almost entirely unapplied or at best working weakly when a different sphere comes into question. This is the singular phenomenon called schizophrenia, or mind-splitting. For example, a man may have risen rapidly to the forefront of his profession through the effective use of reason, and yet as soon as his attention is turned to other matters no belief may be too silly to engage his wholehearted assent!
It is quite feasible that one and the same man may be a child in religious matters and an adult in business affairs; consequently he may be mentally apart, yet bodily together!
The mind may be divided into idea-tight compartments, one of which is reasonable and efficient but the other, being dull or even deranged, is totally insulated against it. Certain famous judges and statesmen of proved shrewdness have historically exhibited this peculiar mental infirmity, as when their reason recoiled from questioning the bases of traditional religion. This defeat of intellectual “compartmentalism” arises out of a conscious or unconscious refusal to use reason when thinking about certain reserved subjects. In consequence we see the pitiable spectacle of an otherwise sensible man indulging in special pleading to support ridiculous beliefs. People are duped into believing that because a man is famous for his keen capacity in one field, or is doing his public work in an efficient manner, his opinions about matters outside the sphere of his professional work have the same value. They do not know that insanity can be localized in particular parts of the mind, as it were.
Mind-splitting is frequently found among the insane. But there are various grades of insanity. It is only when an insane person becomes dangerous to others or harmful to himself that he is labelled as such and confined in a lunatic asylum. Large numbers of people do not come within this category but are still sufficiently unbalanced to be partly insane, although neither they themselves nor society at large can realize this. It is not too much to say that the wars, crimes, hatreds, conflicts, and social struggles which afflict the world exist because most of mankind are more or less insane. And according to the hidden teaching, only the sages have achieved full sanity and complete balance!
Insanity tends to grow gradually. What begins as a mild and harmless form of superstitious belief may develop into outright inability to manage the ordinary concerns of life.
The attempt to justify mere baseless fancies or wild inherited superstitions by a plausible show of logic is rationalization. The effort to think strictly and impersonally upon facts is reasoning. The distinction between both can be observed in the cases of many public men by the curious.
The word reason has such a familiar sound, it is so often upon the lips of orators and the pens of writers, that the reader who has waited expectantly for some kind of novel revelation is now likely to recoil in disappointment. He has hoped, perhaps, to learn that the sages of the Far East, as the crest-wave of human mental and ethical evolution, had evolved in their own persons a new organ of knowledge, something that the rest of the laggard mankind would themselves evolve during the course of future ages. He will find his hope amply justified when the higher mysteries of ultramystic meditation come to be revealed in the second volume of this work. Such a new organ exists. It is ultramystic insight. But it cannot be evolved without the preliminary evolution of the trite, commonplace, and much-talked-of faculty of reason.
Let us see. Were the sages so foolish and so unaware of the history of world culture as to proffer an instrument of knowledge which was apparently tried extensively by the Greeks and is still being tried extensively by Euramerican scientists and philosophers, but which has led in neither case to a single solution of the world-problem that is likely to remain forever uncontrovertible; were they so ridiculous as to designate such an instrument as perfect?
The answer is that both ancient Greek and modern thinker have three principal charges laid to their door to account for this failure: (a) neglect to gather complete data, (b) ignorance of the applicability of the law of relativity not merely to observed physical phenomena but also to observed psychological phenomena and finally to the mind of the observer himself, (c) neglect to push their line of reasoning to its last possible terminal point, and thus to exhaust all its still unknown possibilities. These charges are weighty, but they shall be made good. Nevertheless, even if the three defects were rectified, still the truth would be beyond the grasp of the average scientific investigator unless he were willing to discipline himself in a certain way. With all this done, however, then the human mind, purified of its native egoism, concentrated to a perfect degree, sharpened to the most metaphysical subtlety of reasoning upon adequate data, and abstracted into intense reverie of deliberate self-watchfulness, can hope at last to gain a unique insight into the real nature of things, into the ultimate meaning of universal existence, and into the hidden truth of its own mysterious being.
The first charge may now be justified. Western philosophy has not lived up to its own credo. That which has most attracted thoughtful men and generous minds to the study of philosophy through the centuries has perhaps been its claim to seek—alone among all the branches of human culture—a comprehensive view of life as a whole. Yet it is singular enough that the whole historic tradition of Greek, European, and American philosophy completely ignored and omitted from its inquiry an aspect of life which is of such importance that it occupies no less than one third of the duration of human existence.
We refer to the condition of sleep. Those few who studied this subject were psychologists or medical men, not philosophers, and consequently interested only in some of its limited physical meaning.
It is not to be wondered at that the Western thinkers failed to arrive at any agreed solution of the problem of existence when they all failed to investigate the problem of sleep and thus took only a fragmentary and incomplete view of life, although their claim as philosophers was to investigate the whole panorama in its entirety! It need not surprise us that they wandered around so inconclusively, for without the facts to be elucidated by such investigation they were insufficiently equipped for their ambitious task and were foredoomed to return baffled and undecided to their starting point, much as a mutilated tiger wanders vainly in circles through the jungle on its three sound legs. How could they have covered in thought the whole of our complex human life when that wide section which is spent in peaceful slumber or troubled dream was regarded as too insignificant to be worth studying, when all their emphasis was unfairly thrown on the waking state alone? Such an outlook was totally inadequate to the aim they set before themselves and their defeat was thereby rendered certain at the very start of their battle for truth. There can be no finality about any system of thought which excludes the study of sleep, but only liability to erroneous, faulty, or imperfect conclusions.
If science is to evolve into philosophy, and if logic is to evolve into reasoning, they must take all three states of existence into their orbit. It is to the little-known credit of the Indian sages that even when the civilization of Europe was still in its infancy they had seized on this special aspect of life and were proclaiming to listening pupils that it offered a key to the profounder mysteries of being and they early included it as an object of their philosophical studies. Indeed, they declared that an investigation of the nature and implications of dream and sleep was most essential, because these phenomena of life were as fully important to its understanding as the waking state.
There is a common but pardonable notion in the West that only primitive people need pay attention to dreams and that scientific minds have nothing to learn from deep sleep. The superficiality of this view will be amply demonstrated when the subject comes to be dealt with in detail.
A further handicap for the Western philosophers as well as for the scientists lay not only in their insufficient data but also in their imperfect instrument. The tool with which a philosopher must needs work is his mind. The ancient sages did not permit a man to begin philosophic studies until he had put his mind into proper shape so that it could function efficiently. This preliminary phase consisted in a practical course in the yoga of mental concentration often coupled with a parallel course in ascetic self-abnegation. Both courses, however, were usually temporary and continued only so long as they were necessary to bring the mental faculties to a reasonable degree of concentrative competency, and the pupils’ character to a reasonable degree of self-detachment, sufficient to undertake the difficult task of philosophical reflection.
Western thinkers have made admirable attempts, but they have failed to win success partly because they lacked this tool of a yoga-equipped, ego-purified, and body-subdued mentality with which to force open the shut gate of truth.
The lack of a course in yoga training likewise accounts for the inability of certain distinguished Western scientists to proceed to the fullest implications of their own discoveries. Therefore, those scientists and philosophers who have not acquired the enduring mental benefits of mystic practice (as opposed to the fugitive visions and feelings) will have to retrace their steps and do so.
This lack is partly responsible for the second charge against them, for amid all their investigations they have been unable to detect, as will be demonstrated in the second volume, that their own ego has entered into and interfered with their work, although it is as relative, as transient, and as objective as all the other phenomena they have observed; and furthermore, it has prevented most of them from seeing the subtle truth of the mental nature of all phenomena, whether of the world outside or of the ego within.
The justification of the third charge will likewise be fully given in the further volume, but it will suffice for the moment to point out that despite the discoveries of Heisenberg, author of the Law of Indeterminacy, and of Max Planck, formulator of Quantum Mechanics, not a single Euramerican leader of thought has yet dared to take a bold and decisive stand on the question of Non-Causality, but all sit on the fence which separates the old familiar law of causation from the strange new and revolutionary tenet whose full acceptance would involuntarily convert scientists into full-fledged philosophers! However, physics, as the most virile of present-day sciences, has made a noticeable beginning and cast several hesitant glances in the direction of philosophy, which lies immediately beyond its present position and to which it will be eventually forced to travel.
The student must put on his shoes and depart from the hall of blind belief, mere logic, and rational limitations. Whither shall he go? The first reaction from depending on others is to depend on oneself. Thus arises reference to personal feelings underived from reference to external experience, to intuitive and internal experience. So he passes to the second degree of human intelligence, where the knowledge which is offered him seems superior to blind faith. Those who are weary of the contradictions of credulously depending on others sometimes turn away to these personal sources and find therein a fresh certainty, as it appears, and a satisfaction that seems to set them free from such doubtful dependence. We have examples of this in Immanuel Kant, with his interior “categorical imperative” in the matter of morals; in Adolf Hitler, who recognized no other course as being correct than that which felt best to him; in Dr. Frank Buchman, whose Oxford Groups listen in during the “quiet time” for intuitive messages of guidance concerning their personal activities in the world.
An intuition is a thought or idea which springs up spontaneously and unsought, to be asserted to by the ego without demur. It arises in a flash of its own accord, remains independently of our volition, and departs without even asking permission. It may profess to tell us at a moment’s glance something of the real nature of a thing or it may be prediction of future happenings or it may be description of events which happened in remote antiquity or it may—as is most common—proffer immediate guidance for a course of action when faced by a certain set of circumstances.
Is it possible to fix here a source that will yield by itself sure knowledge about the object of existence and the meaning of the universe? Alas! A little historical inquiry will soon yield the disconcerting information that the intuitionists of all ages have differed from one another in their final conclusions, have had absurdly contradictory spontaneous guidance, and have ventured into bold statements that time has mockingly falsified. Not all their predictions have failed of fulfilment nor all their intuitions been in vain; there have indeed been striking instances where words have amply justified themselves and have been verified as correct. The discovery of outstanding technological inventions and useful scientific laws has sometimes come to birth intuitively and of its own accord during moments of relaxation or reverie. But these instances have been so relatively few in number that nobody could in advance guarantee the infallibility of any such statement. On the other hand the instances of disagreement, unfulfilment, emotional bias, and obvious departure from known facts have been so numerous that we must regretfully confess that the ground upon which the intuitionist walks is unsure and unsafe. If his inner guide has served him unerringly sometimes, there is no guarantee that it will continue to do so. Why is this so? Because strong feelings, unconscious complexes, sudden impulses, and “the wish that is father to the thought” are usually mistaken for genuine intuitions. Only the few who have undergone the philosophic discipline are capable of distinguishing all these pseudo-intuitions from the real thing. But as the ordinary person has rarely undergone such discipline he is frequently misled by a masquerader at the very time when he fondly believes that he is being guided by intuition, which actually is as wonderful as it is uncommon. Nevertheless, where the genuine intuitive faculty is really unfolded, it is more valuable than any other, deeper than the thinking faculty and a safer guide.
This is illustrated historically by Ralph Waldo Emerson, with his symbolical “influx of the divine mind into our mind,” by Jacob Boehme with his sudden “illuminations” gained from the three trances that marked his life, and by Emmanuel Swedenborg with his strange visions of the spirits of dead men and women amidst their heavenly or purgatorial habitats. A mystic experience is sometimes spontaneous but usually self-induced. In the latter case it arises out of the practice of mental concentration or intense emotional aspiration or attention inwardly turned, self-absorbed, and prolonged into a condition of reverie or even trance. During these states visions of men, events, or places may appear before the mind’s eye with extraordinary vividness; voices may be audible to the mystic although to none else, and these may convey to him either a message, a warning, a series of instructions, or a religious revelation; God Himself may even be felt as an environing and exalting presence; the mystic may fancy himself being wafted into space as sometimes happens in dream to the nonmystical also, so that he is able mentally to visit distant scenes, persons, and spheres. Or he may reach the final consummation in joyous ecstasy which may be violent and erotic or serene and settled, but which he will take as the sign of entry into a higher realm of being, which he usually calls “spiritual,” “the soul,” “divine reality,” and so on.
However, we ought not accept counterfeits of the wonderful truth-yielding realities of such experiences. First, applying a tenable criterion, let us see how far are the mystics from contradicting each other. Without making a long excursus into a debatable land, it may briefly be said that it must not be thought that mysticism is so unique an experience that all mystics thereafter find themselves in harmony. Far from it. Just as we find that men of religion, from the crudest peasant to the most cultured preacher, vary greatly in personal calibre and mental outlook, so shall we find that similar individual differences exist among mystics, and that once we put aside their five common tenets mentioned in an earlier chapter even the mystics betray by word and deed that they have achieved not much more unanimity themselves. Although there are several similarities in their doctrines and practices, there are also many unbridgeable differences. Whereas most spend much time ploughing up problematic esoteric meanings buried in scriptures, a few disdain scripture and regard this practice as imaginative acrobatics and not as spiritual discovery, holding that the time would be better spent in meditating on themselves. Whereas most still cling more or less loosely to the name of some sacred personage like Jesus or Krishna, a few declare that it does not matter much whom one follows provided the presence of divinity is felt. The doctrines about which they disagree are replete with prolific fancies and are much more numerous than the five specified essentials about which they are all likely to agree.
Those who dispute this fact—and they are mainly well-meaning but uncritical people—should endeavour to imagine a solemn conclave of the following famous historic mystics imprisoned in a room until they could emerge declaring their complete unity of outlook (would they ever emerge at all?): Cornelius Agrippa, who mingled mystical piety with strange magic; Emanuel Swedenborg, who chatted familiarly with angels and spirits; Simeon Stylites, who sat in lonely self-mortification for many years on the top of a stone pillar; Anna Kingsford, who openly claimed she had killed vivisectors by thought power in order to save the lives of animals; Miguel de Molinos, who brought Spanish emotional intensity into his union with God; Eliphas Levi, who applied queer Cabbalistic interpretations to Catholic theology; Jacob Boehme, who was ecstasy-rapt amid the old shoes of his cobbler’s shop; Hui Ko, who taught his mysticism to the Chinese peasants and was cruelly martyred for his pains; and Wang Yang Ming, who discovered a divine world in his own heart!
For this is the hidden limitation and undetected weakness of mysticism, that it is not a quest of conclusive truth so much as a yearning for emotional experience. Therefore the mystic is more concerned to get his feelings temporarily held by a great peace or temporarily thrilled by a great vision or temporarily flattered by a personal oracular message. Hence philosophy accosts or startles him with the question, “How do you know that the source of your communion really is God or Reality or Jesus or Krishna?”
But he will listen to no criticism, however impressive it be, of the possible irrelevancy of his conclusions. He will insist on making the undeniable fact of his own experience the deniable criterion of its validity. It is quite inevitable and perfectly human that under such circumstances he should be so irresistibly carried away by the feeling of extraordinary immediacy in the event and by the strength of his uncommon exaltations that he lays stress upon the less essential and that it suffices to satisfy him without his making any further inquiry into its hidden nature and truth.
The value of meditation for inner peace, sublime ecstasy, and world-free self-absorption is immense. But its value for the quest of truth and reality unaided by philosophy is quite a different matter and demands searching investigation by sympathetic yet impartially critical minds possessed of a sense of proportion and philosophic acumen—qualities usually absent from the mystic’s makeup. Ecstasy is indeed a form of personal satisfaction, but it is not either a complete criterion of reality or an adequate evidence of truth. For satisfaction of any kind whatever, however noble it be, is no evidence of truth. Indeed, the warmer a man’s feelings and the more propulsive his enthusiasm, the more he should cool and calm them in order to examine experience impartially and impersonally. If it be true, it will lose nothing by such examination, but if it be false his calmness will greatly help him to detect its falsity.
Furthermore, we are faced with the insuperable difficulty that it is impossible to verify the inner experience of another man because ordinarily it is impossible to enter directly into his mind. Even thought-transference and thought-reading, although genuine possibilities, are still uncommon and still imperfect. We may draw inferences, creatively imagine, or make conjectures, but this is not at all the same as actually and perfectly participating in the knowledge or inner experience of another man. The latter must needs be beyond normal human range. So even if a mystic tells us that he has seen God we have no undeniable means of either confirming or refuting his vision. It is not transmissible. Even if we succeed in reproducing it mentally, it will then be our own production and we can never place both visions side by side and compare their likeness. And granting the occasional accuracy of particular knowledge gained in meditation, it is unfortunately not possible for most other men in other parts of the world to be sure of duplicating the same discovery in the same manner for themselves: they must either resort to mere faith or forgo this method entirely. Hence mystical experience is utterly individual and possesses only a personal certainty. Thus the lack of universal certitude which was found among men of faith is now found among men of vision. Where is the guarantee that what they now feel to be the highest state, what they now take to be the loftiest consciousness, the final reality, will not later be replaced by a different one? Goethe correctly pointed out that mysticism was the “scholastic of the heart and the dialectic of the feelings.” The whole level with which it deals is that of unchecked feeling. But how does the mystic or yogi know that what he has come in contact with during meditation or ecstasy is the ultimate reality? “I felt it, therefore it must be real,” is the general attitude of most mystics who never pause to inquire. They assume the reality of their feelings because they are so much attached to them as to be blind to the important difference between the seeming existence of a thing and its proven reality, or between what appears to be and what is. How do they know that they have reached the highest state of knowledge? Why should extraordinary peace constitute a sufficient title to the estate of truth? Why should it become a synonym for omniscience? We are quite justified in posing such crucial questions, for in doing so we render a double service—to ourselves and to truth. The votaries of meditation who have found the final truth within its quietude should pause to inquire if it be truth, even if that pause takes a few months or a whole lifetime.
Inasmuch as mystics have not penetrated beyond their feelings, however exalted these be, we have to conclude that whatever knowledge they purport to bring us from meditation might not be ultimately true. Why? Because feeling is liable to change: what is felt now as true may be discarded tomorrow as untrue. Even Plotinus, who is hailed by ancient mystics and modern theosophists alike as being one of the most illustrious of their band, has confessed that the highest mystical realization yields no emotion, no vision, and no concern with the beautiful. Had he not been a disciple of Ammonius he might never have reached this understanding. For Ammonius’ school at Alexandria taught both mysticism and philosophy, the latter, however, being reserved for the highest class, and was based, as previously explained, on a tradition of initiation which drew ultimately from India.
“What do you want?” asked Ramakrishna, the illustrious sage who lit up the nineteenth-century darkness of India. Replied his famous disciple Swami Vivekananda: “I wish to remain immersed in mystic trance for three or four days at a stretch, breaking it just to take food.” Said Ramakrishna: “You are a fool! There is a state which is even higher than that.”
Our quest of a valid source of knowledge can come to an end only when it will yield one that is universally and forever unalterable, which will be the same and hold to the same laws of verification at all times and in all conditions, not during meditation alone.
However, a further means of assaying the work of mystic guidance is at hand. Let us consider how many mystical statements pass unchallenged, how many are without counterassertions, how many are absolutely beyond all doubts. Let the annals of sceptical science and orthodox religion provide an answer!
It is clear therefore that as a sole source of certain knowledge, mystical or yogic experience cannot be relied on. Its chief value exists for the particular individual who experiences it, but not for society in general. Hence only when a disciple has passed through all the preliminaries of personal self-discipline and has completed a long course of meditation practice is he regarded as being ripe for initiation into the higher mysteries of knowledge beyond ordinary yoga. Then the student on the ultimate path who is fortunate enough to secure a personal teacher will notice that the latter begins to suggest certain doubts to his mind. This is done so cleverly and so carefully that the pupil is insensibly led by slow degrees from his present position to a higher one. It is not done suddenly and violently, or he will only lose faith in his present standpoint without being able to find support in a new and stronger one. This change is achieved by the teacher making certain indirect observations and asking certain cryptic questions of the pupil in such a way that his mind begins to acquire more strength and to grow in clearness until certain doubts arise of their own accord. The more he submits to this discipline of doubt, the more is he likely to relinquish long-held attitudes of mind. He gets the courage to question his own experiences and to re-estimate them anew after a critical examination from a fresh standpoint. Only so can he read their meaning aright. He will then begin to see the insufficiency of his attainments, the invalidity of his beliefs, and the limitations of his practices. Whatever illusions have held him will begin to loosen their grip. But his master warns him not to rest until all these doubts are fully cleared.
This analysis does not mean we are to despise meditation exercises as futile or dismiss the mystic’s experience as worthless. Peace, tranquillity, and ecstasy are not worthless things. And no scornful sceptic can rightly deny that the successful mystic gets them, albeit intermittently. Neither the sage nor the novice need discard these or other satisfactions, only the former will never permit them to deflect his mind from truth. Meditation becomes a hindrance only when it consists in hugging imagination as though it were reality or clinging to vision as though it were truth, whereas it is indeed a partner to philosophic technique when it consists in one-pointed surrender to utter tranquillity.
We who seek truth may reject the mystic’s uncriticized visions and his narrow view of the world, but we would be foolish indeed if we rejected the valuable gifts of concentration and peace which mysticism offers us. The novice who has practised meditation faithfully for some period may unfold a fair degree of concentrativeness and subtlety which will be most valuable when he passes to a higher degree, for he will be expected to keep his mind thoroughly one-pointed during his development in the yoga of philosophic discernment.
The success of the ancient sages did not come from blindly believing the words of some personage; it did not come from yielding to the consolations of some religious book; it did not come from mystic intuition, that appeared suddenly and involuntarily; it did not come from the satisfactions of elementary yoga alone but also after long-laboured metaphysical thinking followed by the supreme yoga which swept the ego into the Universal All and stilled both thinking and feeling.
Nevertheless it should also be noted that the sources of knowledge which have been found fallible are not thereby excluded from the rational life. Some beliefs are quite reasonable even if many are quite ridiculous. Where authorities and scriptures, intuitions and illuminations, arguments and conclusions agree with universal experience and genuine reason they should be most acceptable. They may be useful as helps, even though they may not be relied on alone. The philosopher is not unwilling to listen to what these have to say to him, for he knows that knowledge can often be got through such sources, but unlike others he will be determined to judge them ultimately by higher canons for himself, so that he may find out how far they may be relied on. For he seeks a rocklike impregnable position. He rejects nothing in advance but he questions everything in the end to inquire if it be true, whereas unenlightened men deliberately divorce intuition from any contact with reason while unenlightened mystics deliberately refuse to submit their “truth” to any test. He will not be so foolish as to repel an intuition, for instance, but he will be ready to accept it only after he has controlled, examined, and confirmed it. Thus mentally fortified he will so use his own intuitions or expert authorities that they may become a most useful help.
Fidelity to reason does not debar but admits faith, therefore, only it demands that we should test our beliefs and discover if they be true. It likewise accepts the existence of spontaneous intuition, but asks that we check our intuitions and ascertain whether they be correct, not hesitating to reject them where found unsatisfactory. It unhesitatingly admires the unusual tranquillity to be found in mystic meditations, but counsels that we inquire rigorously whether the feeling of reality which it gives us be reality. It always approves of the exercise of logic in the organization of thinking, but it points out that the operations of logic are strictly limited by the amount of available data and that at best logic can only rearrange in an orderly manner what we already explicitly or implicitly know. In short, it seeks firm verification.
If, for instance, those who are having mystic experiences will, without necessarily giving them up, subject them to the tests here described, the profit will be much and the progress more. It is one of the functions of philosophic discipline to act as a corrective to mystic experience.
Now how can we test our beliefs, check our intuitions, inquire into the reality of meditation experience, know whether our logic is dealing with all possible facts or not, and eliminate the errors of every one of these methods? There is but a single answer to all these queries, a single means of satisfying our doubts concerning them, and that is—we must begin and end with the canons of reason as the sole criterion of judgment. For it is only by critically reasoning upon them that such examinations can be fruitfully carried out.
What is it that even theologians attempt to use when they wish to discriminate between authentic scriptures and spurious ones? They seek to use reason. What is it that tells us of the insufficiency of logic and the fallibility of intuition? It is not intuition itself, not revelation and not vision; it is reason. And when it is claimed that both intuition and mystic feeling are above reason, then why do those who make the claim venture to discuss, to argue, and to prove by reasoning that what they have felt or seen is correct? Is this not an unconscious reference to reason as the final court of appeal, to the verdict of thinking power as the supreme arbitrament? Is it not a tacit admission that reason alone has the right to sit in silent judgment on the ultimate value of all other faculties? Thoughts cannot cease save in sleep or trance, and every form of thinking—whether used by hardheaded realist or otherworldly mystic—involves some reasoning, however imperfect and however crude the latter be. Why should we then not go the full length, when we have gone so far along this road, and unreservedly accept the supremacy of reason?
A thorough conviction and an unassailable grasp of true principles can only be reached through the adequate exercise of thinking power intently concentrated and raised to its highest degree. No other method of approach can yield such an enduring correctness in every instance. And it will eventually be the sole means of obtaining worldwide agreement among all peoples and in all places on this globe, because reason cannot vary in its conclusions about truth; it is universally verifiable and will remain so a hundred thousand years hence. Such variations will, however, belong to what pretends to be reason. And they will also exist whenever reason is unjustifiably limited to the experience of waking state alone.
Thus is it possible to arrive at a knowledge of the meaning of world-existence which shall be valid at all times, which some bearded Indian sage dwelling in his Himalayan school forty centuries ago once gladly recognized and fully acknowledged but which shall yet not be antiquated or found false by some keen American scientist forty centuries hence, despite the fact that he shall then be heir to all the knowledge of the vanished generations which preceded him. Such a series of unvarying final conclusions can never be dispossessed by the activities of new thinkers nor displaced by the novel wizardry of modern science.
The ancient Indian sages once stood in certain respects where the scientists stand today, but they did not hesitate to push their inquiry into a wilderness where all familiar landmarks were lost. They devaluated the personal factor and thus began as heroes sworn never to stop until the last letter of the last word of human thought about truth had been completely spelt out. They firmly pushed their reasoning to its ultimate possibility, to a point where, in fact, it could go no farther for the reasoning faculty ceased to work at the mysterious moment when it detected the hidden truth, itself coming to rest in the same instant. They discovered, moreover, that there are really two different kinds of thinking which might be termed the lower and higher stages of reasoning. In the first the power of analytic judgment is applied to the external world in an effort to distinguish what is substantially real from what is merely apparent. When this has been carried as far as possible—and not until then—thought must critically return to itself and unhesitatingly examine its own nature, which final step can only be successfully achieved if success in yoga has previously been achieved.
This is a task of immense difficulty because it requires the utmost concentration of the subtlest kind. Nor can a feeble and fragile intelligence make the needed effort. When this concentration has finally fulfiled its object the knowledge of reality dawns immediately, and in that moment reason ceases to work for its services in judging and discriminating within itself are no longer needed. This spontaneous cessation of thinking is not to be confused as is so often done with the mystic’s “direct intuition of reality.” It marks the successful conclusion of thinking, not the successful abolition of thinking. Reflection must not renounce itself before it has done its fullest work. Nor does the mystic ever achieve abolition of thought simultaneously with the retention of waking consciousness, the feat being possible only when he advances into the ultimate path. Thus what the mystic regards as the final achievement of his task is regarded by the sage as only the half-completion of his own. And where the mystic merely feels, he thoroughly understands.
The sages who have gone looked within self in the quest of abiding reality rather than fitful experience, of final truth rather than emotional satisfaction, and above all in completion rather than in commencement of their examination of the world—hence they alone found the genuine goal. And because they did not flee as did mystics from the vexing problem of the world, they solved that too at the same startling moment that the self was understood. That rare instant of all-embracing comprehension in the depth of thought-filled mystic trance was the culminating point in the pyramid of their philosophical endeavour. It was called by the sages “the lightning-flash,” for it moved across the field of consciousness with the tremendous speed of a stroke of lightning. This having been achieved, their further work was to recover and stabilize the gratifying glimpse thus gained. With that their quest came to a perfect end. For the new sun did not rise in the reddening East for them alone. Thenceforth they made the age-old cause of all mankind their own.
What they knew, that they were! Having perfected reason, they unhesitatingly left it far behind and then perfected the higher faculty of insight, wherein knowledge and being merge into one.