The Real Nature of Mystical Experience

The Need for a Serious Study of the Phenomenon

(Chapter 7 of THe Real Nature of Mystical Experience)

In dealing with mystical ecstasy we deal with a fundamental impulse in the human mind. Modern science has absolutely no awareness of the fact that the average human brain, as the result of continued evolution, is now ripe for the manifestation of another mode of cognition superior to the intellect. It is only through this channel that Consciousness can be perceived as an independent Reality existing in a boundless universe of its own. It is the emergence of this cognitive faculty which the ancient Indian adepts designated as the opening of the “Third Eye,” or the “Tenth Door,” and the Egyptians represented by the symbol of the Serpent on the headdress of Pharaohs, by the “Eye of Horus” and other emblems. The whole occult, esoteric, hermetic and alchemic literature of mankind revolves round this amazing possibility in the human brain.

The phenomenon of mystical ecstasy has not received the attention it deserves on the part of empiricists, because this possibility in the brain is not even suspected. There is no awareness about the forces behind psychokinetic phenomena or extrasensory perception, nor about what relation they bear to the brain of the psychic or medium who displays the gifts. The possibility of the involvement of the brain in the weird demonstrations is not even mentioned as a subject for discussion. But almost every saint or mystic has been credited with psychic gifts and some mystics are reported to have exhibited these gifts to a remarkable extent.

The life-stories of saints throughout the world often contain accounts of their miraculous performances. How are we able to account for them? Patanjali, the author of the first authoritative treatise on Yoga, who flourished centuries before the birth of Christ, treats psychic or miraculous gifts as an inevitable harvest of yogic discipline and divides them into eight categories. There is a close affinity between the practice of Yoga and the disciplines followed by Sufis, Christian mystics and the Taoists of China. The exercises are directed to train and discipline all the constituents of the human personality — imagination, will, thought, emotion, as also the physical body. Concentration and self-mastery constitute the pivotal exercises. Discipline and mental training have been considered necessary for illumination or the attainment of miraculous powers from immemorial times.

Why? Has any rational explanation been offered to show why mental and physical discipline is necessary for religious experience or psychic gifts? Are the mental exercises and the ennoblement of character undertaken to propitiate a Divine Power to win favor? If the answer is in the affirmative, it means that divine intervention is needed as a necessary condition for enlightenment. In that case, the phenomenon of mystical ecstasy must always remain beyond the periphery of science. The same must then be the position of psychic powers also. How can then the research that is now being done on psychic phenomena lead to any tangible results, when the energies and forces involved are purely subjective, operating, as it were, in a magical way, without any relationship to the human organism? If this position does not accord with the law-bound character of the universe, and there must be a rational explanation behind the repeatedly observed fact of spiritual illumination or the possession of psychic faculties, it is necessary then to look more closely into the personality of man to find an answer to this riddle.

Intellectual speculation or scientific study of the subject can never help one to cross the barrier and understand the nature of mystical consciousness. The empiricist who would like to explore this territory must experiment in the laboratory of his own self. Nature has built an unscalable wall here to keep the intellect from intruding into a territory that belongs to a superior sense. If this wall did not exist, reason would continue to dominate the mind of man and the emergence of a higher faculty would never be possible. The natural function of intellect is to help this evolution. Just as it is not humanly possible to arrest the normal growth to adulthood of a healthy child, except at the risk of malformation and distortion, in the same way, it is not possible to block the evolution of the human mind except by causing malformation and distortion of the whole personality. In the case of isolated savage populations in Africa, Australia and the new world, cannibalistic practices, human sacrifice and other perverse and inhuman customs were the result of obstructed evolution. Correction and reformation came when the obstructions were removed.

At the present stage of human progress, any obstruction in the path of evolution can be disastrous. The slightest abnormality, twist or kink in even a few of the leading intellects of a nation, especially a powerful nation, can prove calamitous for the whole race. We have to bear in mind that the two bloodiest wars in all history have already been fought in this century. Apart from them, a whole chain of appalling massacres in different countries spelled the death of scores of millions of innocent human beings, dwarfing all the bloody slaughters of the past. In the light of what has already happened, deluded, indeed, is the intellect which fails to draw a lesson from these happenings of the twentieth century and lives unconcerned about the future. It is good to be optimistic, but heedlessness is a sign of mental inertia highly inimical to survival.

Since it is hard to accept that an All-knowing Intelligence controls the destiny of mankind, we are prone to ascribe the present overhanging threat of a global war and the precarious condition of the world to a chance combination of certain factors or to a rapid advance in technology and entertain the hope that the crisis would pass off with a proper handling of the situation by the political leadership of mankind. But we never ascribe it to the imbalance created by disproportionate growth of the human personality — a giant intellect attended by a pygmy will and a dwarf moral conscience. Survey all the departments of human activity and the truth of this statement will become obvious to you. The reason for the menacing condition of the present world lies in the imminent danger of disproportionate evolution which, if not corrected, would be fatal for the race. It is the racial consciousness, prescient of the pernicious outcome of this disproportion in the nuclear age, sounding warning after warning at the heedless crowd. In the mystical state, where there occurs a more direct contact with Cosmic Consciousness, the warning comes as a Message or an inspired composition to draw attention to the digression. This is the secret behind the prophetic utterances and the predictions of upcoming disasters, made by prophets, oracles and seers, throughout the past and, in our time, by clairvoyants like Edgar Cayce and a few others.