I have had the experience of ‘Self Realisation’ some three or four times. The first experience I had of it happened when I was quietly engaged in some art work, thinking of nothing, focussing on my picture. There was a spontaneous shift in consciousness entirely outside of any effort from me to produce it, and I suddenly became aware that ‘I’ was the Self. The first notable insight from this viewpoint was that if I worshipped any exterior notion of ‘God’ in whatever form, I would simply be worshipping myself. From this a quiet expansive joy succeeded, and I sat quietly for a few minutes and observed myself. In this consciousness it was irrelevant where in the world I was, it would all effectively be one and the same. All the usual bug bears of my ego had disappeared and I was deeply at peace. The experience lasted a few minutes, but I was unable to sustain it, and little by little slipped back into ordinary ego awareness. I was never able to replicate this experience again by mere effort, nor by using any kind of device like my (ego self) remembering what the experience felt like and trying to copy it. I next had the experience, again spontaneously, during a visit I made to the ancient Hindu pilgrimage location at the sacred source of the Ganges, Gangotri. The day had been sublime, the scenery more beautiful than any words could convey. Within this setting I had my second sacred vision of God – a profound inward apprehension of the Totality, but this time the Totality as Manifest – Prakriti – the One as the All; the two complementing one another as Totality Unmanifest (of my first vision, see below) and Manifest. During the meditation I conducted that night, I had the experience of being both ‘me’ but also the Self as in two as one. I have had several subsequent and always spontaneous experiences of a kindred order. None of these was produced or could afterwards be replicated by remembering what it felt like during the course of the experience and trying to manipulate one’s consciousness to achieve it.
These experiences certainly support the Advaitist contention that we are, in fact, one and the same as God at heart; that there is some immortal part of ourselves that is one with the Divine. Given the Upanishadic understanding that Being , Consciousness and Joy are the three distinguishing attributes of God, then as human beings we are indeed made up in significant part from that source given we have being and consciousness at least, even if joy only vicariously. As indicated elsewhere here, most of my experiences are very dualistic by nature, inasmuch as I experience myself in an intensely close relationship with the Divine, but as a separate It and me.
The rich corpus of accounts of Christian mystics given in Underhill’s authoritative work on the subject, demonstrate that the mystical experience of the Divine is, most commonly, a dualistic one. Underhill explores the final stage of the Mystic Way – Stage 5 ‘Union’ – as being ‘The Unitive Life’ when the soul forms a mystic union with the Divine, but she holds out against the final stage of Eastern ontology, of oneness – as in sameness – with It:
“Union must be looked upon as the true goal of mystical growth; that permanent establishment of life upon transcendent levels of reality, of which ecstasies give a foretaste to the soul. Intense forms of it, described by individual mystics, under symbols such as those of Mystical Marriage, Deification, or Divine Fecundity, all prove on examination to be aspects of this same experience “seen through a temperament.” It is right, however, to state here that Oriental Mysticism insists upon a further stage beyond that of union, which stage it regards as the real goal of the spiritual life. This is the total annihilation or reabsorption of the individual soul in the Infinite [emphasis added]. Such an annihilation is said by the Sufis to constitute the “Eighth Stage of Progress,” in which alone they truly attain to God. Thus stated, it appears to differ little from the Buddhist’s Nirvana, and is the logical corollary of that pantheism to which the Oriental mystic always tends. Thus Jalalu d’Din: “O, let me not exist! for Non-Existence Proclaims in organ tones, To Him we shall return.'”
It is at least doubtful, however, whether the interpretation which has been put by European students upon such passages as this be correct. The language in which Al Ghazzali attempts to describe the Eighth Stage is certainly more applicable to the Unitive Life as understood by Christian contemplatives, than to the Buddhistic annihilation of personality. “The end of Sufi-ism,” he says, “is total absorption in God. This is at least the relative end to that part of their doctrine which I am free to reveal and describe. But in reality it is but the beginning of the Sufi life, for those intuitions and other things which precede it are, so to speak, but the porch by which they enter. . . . In this state some have imagined themselves to be amalgamated with God, others to be identical with Him, others again to be associated with Him: but all this is sin.” The doctrine of annihilation as the end of the soul’s ascent, whatever the truth may be as to the Moslem attitude concerning it, is decisively rejected by all European mystics, though a belief in it is constantly imputed to them by their enemies: for their aim is not the suppression of life, but its intensification, a change in its form. This change, they say in a paradox which is generally misunderstood, consists in the perfecting of personality by the utter surrender of self. It is true that the more Orientally-minded amongst them, such as Dionysius the Areopagite, do use language of a negative kind which seems almost to involve a belief in the annihilation rather than the transformation of the self in God: but this is because they are trying to describe a condition of supersensible vitality from the point of view of the normal consciousness to which it can only seem a Nothing, a Dark, a Self-loss. Further it will be found that this language is often an attempt to describe the conditions of transitory perception, not those of permanent existence: the characteristics, that is to say, of the Ecstatic Trance, in which for a short time the whole self is lifted to transcendent levels, and the Absolute is apprehended by a total suspension of the surface consciousness. Hence the Divine Dark, the Nothing, is not a state of non-being to which the mystic aspires to attain: it is rather a paradoxical description of his experience of that Undifferentiated Godhead, that Supernal Light whence he may, in his ecstasies, bring down fire from heaven to light the world. In the mystics of the West, the highest forms of Divine Union impel the self to some sort of active, rather than of passive life: and this is now recognized by the best authorities as the true distinction between Christian and non-Christian mysticism. “The Christian mystics,” says Delacroix, “move from the Infinite to the Definite; they aspire to infinitize life and to define Infinity; they go from the conscious to the subconscious, and from the subconscious to the conscious. The obstacle in their path is not consciousness in general, but self -consciousness, the consciousness of the Ego. The Ego is the limitation, that which opposes itself to the Infinite: the states of consciousness free from self, lost in a vaster consciousness, may become modes of the Infinite, and states of the Divine Consciousness.” So Starbuck: “The individual learns to transfer himself from a centre of self-activity into an organ of revelation of universal being, and to live a life of affection for and one-ness with, the larger life outside.” (1)
On occasions when I have felt a sense of alienation from the esoteric philosophies propounded by ancient sages of India and their modern exponents, I have often found greater solace and meaning in what Underhill calls the ‘The Mystic Way’, which classifies the mystical spiritual life journey into discreet stages with their different sets of experiences, which my own life has conformed to in many ways.
Mysticism and Yogic religions do concur that the only real way to apprehend the Divine is via mystical insight rather than by any reasoning or intellectual enquiry. In Yogic traditions these mystical insights are generally gained during the deeper states of meditation; in the western Mystical traditions, it may be through what is referred to as ‘contemplation’, although spontaneous visionary states are also described, which have, in fact, been my own personal experience:
“There came an afternoon when I had another experience, the order of which is frankly impossible to describe. I am very hesitant indeed to include it at all, but if people don’t share their collective experiences, how are others who are also looking for deep spiritual truths to be helped? I had a vision of God, or the ‘Self’ as I generally refer to it following Eastern and Jungian custom. By calling it a vision I should clarify that I didn’t actually see anything at all, which is to say that it was not an experience mediated by the senses, so it wasn’t an hallucination, visual, auditory or otherwise. It was as though an organ of apprehension that I hadn’t before been aware of, opened in my centre (the heart as understood in Eastern religious schools) and I clearly apprehended the Totality. The experience lasted for some two minutes, perhaps longer, and initiated a complete collapse in me. I broke down sobbing, unable to comprehend, contain, express what I was seeing, completely overwhelmed by it. There were no words whatever that could come close to describing what I saw, but in a moment, I felt I understood the reason for everything. To apply the term ‘beyond’ rather in the manner that ‘to the power of’ numbers are added to a figure, I could say this: it was beyond the most beautiful thing you could begin to conceptualise, with a feeling from it of love of an order that I was unable to confront because it was beyond my capacity to. In a moment I understood that famous vision of St. Teresa of Avila, oft misunderstood, when she had a vision of an angel who stabbed her several times with a lance, filling her with love for God. She says that it was so painful she thought she would die of the pain, yet so beautiful she wanted it to go on forever. The feeling of love that this vision contained was so immense it was beyond my capacity to endure, but so beautiful I wanted it to go on forever. You cannot imagine these experiences. They come from another dimension. I had no inkling whatever of what these feelings were before and how I saw the Totality in all Its beyond magnificence. I couldn’t have imagined it; it was completely outside of any prior realm of experience (2)”.
I am therefore inclined to fall back on what might seem to be a ‘cop out’, in accepting that as mere humans, we cannot begin to comprehend the mystery of the Totality; we are too limited. It is better to accept that It is, in the end and always will be a mystery. But that’s alright. We can engage in these fascinating if always frustrating exercises of applying our reason and imagination into trying to understand the nature of Reality in much the way that Quantum Mechanics plays with trying to produce a Theory of Everything, and never quite succeeds.
(1) Evelyn Underhill. 1930 (1911)Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, 12th, Revised Edition & Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People (Two Books With Active Table of Contents) Kindle Edition
(2) Elizabeth Currie. In Defence of Faith
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