Beyond the Occult (68 page)

During one of these sessions Tucker tried to envisage what might be happening to a friend who had taken some of his paintings to New York.
‘All of a sudden an image flashed into my mind of a modern building with revolving glass doors.
Through the doors I could see through into an art gallery.
On the wall was a painting of mine — one of these paintings that my friend had taken with her.’
This image continued to float into his mind at every ‘relaxation session’ for a week or more.
Some time later he went to New York, and on the first day set out full of enthusiasm to go and look at the Museum of Modern Art.
From a distance it looked vaguely familiar.
As he approached the revolving door he recognized it as the place he had seen so often in his after-lunch relaxation sessions.
Facing him on the wall, exactly where he had ‘seen’ it, was the same painting.

It is interesting to speculate what might have happened if he had allowed the ‘energy waves’ to develop.
It sounds like an experience of what the Hindus call the kundalini serpent, the spiritual energy that lies coiled at the base of the spine which can be released to flow upwards through the seven
chakras
— the points where man’s physical body and the astral body are connected.
It seems conceivable that he might have developed into a full-flown psychic, and it seems clear that even ordinary relaxation was enough to produce ‘clairvoyant’ perception.
And so once again we become aware that there is no sharp dividing line between mystical experience and ‘psychic’ experience: one blends into the other.

But if mystical awareness is so ‘close’ then what prevents us from experiencing it every other day?
This question goes to the very heart of the problem.
The answer, in a single sentence, is that consciousness tends to focus upon what we lack rather than what we possess.
From the moment we are born we struggle to achieve the things we lack, or think we lack: food and drink, possessions, the esteem of other people, security, personal fulfilment.
It is only when we are faced with some threat or crisis that we grasp how lucky we are, how much we
already
possess.
Then, suddenly, consciousness ceases to focus upon what we still want and focuses upon what we already have.
This is what happened to Maslow’s mother as she watched her husband and children eating breakfast.

When we are faced with a crisis we suddenly realize that we already possess the secret of happiness.
Faced with the prospect of a concentration camp Hans Keller could say, ‘If only I could escape from Germany, I swear that I would never be unhappy for the rest of my life,’ and in that moment he could
see
that it would be perfectly easy to keep this promise.
Standing in front of a firing squad Dostoevsky can see that all life is infinitely delightful, and that if he is fortunate enough to be reprieved it will be perfectly easy never to forget this insight.
What has happened, of course, is that he has been plunged into the state we often experience in a warm bed on a freezing winter morning when we have to get up in five minutes: a state that might be called ‘self-reflective awareness’ in which we are intensely aware of ourselves
and
of our present situation, resting wholly
in the present moment
instead of straining our eyes into the future.
This trick of inducing ‘self-reflective awareness’ is obviously
the basic trick of the peak experience and of all human happiness.

This is the fundamental essence of Buddhism: to cease to be driven by desire (i.e.
consciousness of what we lack) and to recognize that we already possess the fullness of existence.
Yet when the mystic tries to express this simple insight he finds himself wrestling with a kind of octopus of unsatisfactory language.

An American doctor, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, had his own experience of Nirvana in August 1936 and ten days later tried to express what happened in his journal:

I had been sitting in a porch swing, reading … .
Ahead of the sequence in the book, I turned to the section devoted to ‘Liberation’, as I seemed to feel an especial hunger for this.
I covered the material quickly and it all seemed very clear and satisfactory.
Then, as I sat afterward dwelling in thought upon the subject just read, suddenly it dawned upon me that a common mistake made in the higher meditation, i.e.
meditation for Liberation, is the seeking for a subtle object of Recognition, in other words, something that could be experienced.
Of course, I had long known the falseness of this position theoretically, yet had failed to recognize it.
(Here is a subtle but very important distinction.) At once, I dropped expectation of having anything happen.
Then, with eyes open and no sense stopped in functioning — hence no trance — I abstracted the subjective moment — the ‘I AM’ or ‘Atman’ element — from the totality of the objective consciousness manifold.
Upon this I focused.
Naturally, I found what, from the relative point of view, is Darkness and Emptiness.
But I Realized It as Absolute Light and Fullness and that I was That
.
Of course, I cannot tell what It was in Its own nature.
The relative forms of consciousness inevitably distort non-relative Consciousness.
Not only can I not tell this to others, I cannot even contain it within my own relative consciousness, whether of sensation, feeling or thought.
Every metaphysical thinker will see this impossibility at once.
I was even
prepared not to have the personal consciousness share in this Recognition in any way.
But in this I was happily disappointed.
Presently I felt the Ambrosia-quality in the breath with the purifying benediction that it casts over the whole personality, even including the physical body.
I found myself above the universe, not in the sense of leaving the physical body and being taken out in space, but in the sense of being above space, time and causality.
My karma seemed to drop away from me as an individual responsibility.
I felt intangibly, yet wonderfully, free.
I
sustained this universe and was not bound by it.
Desires and ambitions grew perceptibly more and more shadowy.
All worldly honours were without power to exalt me.
Physical life seemed undesirable.
Repeatedly, through the days that followed, I was in a state of deep brooding, thinking thoughts that were so abstract that there were no concepts to represent them.
I seemed to comprehend a veritable library of knowledge, all less concrete than the most abstract mathematics.
The personality rested in a gentle glow of happiness, but while it was very gentle, yet it was so potent as to dull the keenest sensuous delight.
Likewise the sense of world-pain was absorbed.
I looked, as it were, over the world, asking, ‘What is there of interest here?
What is there worth doing?’
I found but one interest: the desire that other souls should also realize this that I had realized, for in it lay the one effective key for solving of their problems.
The little tragedies of men left me indifferent.
I saw one great Tragedy, the cause of all the rest, the failure of man to realize his own Divinity.
I saw but one solution, the Realization of this Divinity.
^*

This is a long and difficult passage.
Yet Merrell-Wolff is obviously expressing the same insight that came to Barbara Tucker as she listened to the Beethoven quartet.
‘I found myself above the universe … in the sense of being above space, time and causality.’
‘I felt intangibly, yet wonderfully, free.’
But the most difficult part is the description of how he
arrived at this state of bliss — recognizing that the basic mistake is to look
outside
oneself for some kind of revelation.
Suddenly we realize that what he did was to switch the beam of attention from what we lack to what we already possess, then on to his own essential being.
This brought instant ‘Nirvana’.

But the key to the whole experience obviously lies in the passage about the one great Tragedy — the failure of man to realize his own Divinity.
To Western ears this almost has the ring of cliché — the kingdom of God is within you and so on.
Yet Merrell-Wolff grasped it as an immediate truth.
It reminds us that Beethoven told Elizabeth Brentano, ‘Those who understand my music must be freed from all the miseries which others drag around with them … .
Tell [Goethe] to hear my symphonies, and he will see that I am saying that music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher worlds of knowledge which comprehends mankind, but which mankind cannot comprehend.’
We may also recall that Beethoven told Court Secretary Von Zmeskall, ‘The devil take you.
I don’t want to know anything about your whole system of ethics.
Power
is the morality of men who stand out from the rest, and it is also mine.’
Beethoven obviously felt — as Merrell-Wolff did — that most of us take far too lowly a view of ourselves.
Consequently we are too easily discouraged and are inclined to make mountains out of molehills.
This inbuilt pessimism has become — as we saw in an earlier chapter — an integral part of our Western culture: ‘Man is a useless passion,’ ‘Human life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,’ ‘Most men die like animals, not men.’
We feel that this attitude is justified by the problems of modern civilization, the rat race, the rising crime rate, the atomic threat.
For modern man, pessimism seems a
logical
response to human existence.
Yet every peak experience, every flash of mystical intensity, reveals that this is nonsense.
Why?
Because they make us aware of ourselves as
active
forces, as ‘movers’, as beings who are capable of causing change in the universe.
This was the essence of Beethoven’s view of himself and the essence of Merrell-Wolff’s Nirvana experience.
‘We are gods,’ says Daskalos, ‘but we are not aware of it.
We suffer from self-inflicted amnesia.’

Merrell-Wolff’s method of achieving his Nirvana experience offers a vital insight.
He did it by an extremely difficult method: looking inward, and then ‘abstracting the subjective element’ from the ‘objective consciousness manifold’.
That is he ignored everything that is ‘not me’ and thereby succeeded in focusing upon the ‘me’, the centre of consciousness.
It was, as he tells us, a kind of darkness, and there was a time-lapse before he realized that it was ‘absolute light and fullness’.

Quite instinctively most of us prefer a simpler method of focusing the ‘me’.
Anything that gives us a sudden powerful sensation illuminates the ‘me’ like a flash of lightning.
‘God is fire in the head,’ said Nijinsky, speaking about this sudden ‘flash’.
The same flash occurs ‘when a man is fighting mad’ and ‘he completes his partial mind’.
In Tantric yoga sex is deliberately used to produce this insight.
But there is a disadvantage in these methods.
The lightning flash is too brief to give us a chance to
grasp
what it is showing us.
This is why Don Juan and Casanova and Frank Harris spend their lives trying to repeat the sexual experience a thousand times: they hope that with the thousandth illumination they might finally grasp what they are looking at.
Yet the process tends to be self-defeating for the reason that Merrell-Wolff specified.
They are seeking for ‘a subtle object of Recognition’, something they can grasp.
In fact what Frank Harris grasps in the moment of sexual conquest is the absurd recognition that he is not Frank Harris.
The actual truth is, ‘I am God.’
But a moment later he is again Frank Harris, and the insight is meaningless.

Daskalos explained the essence of the problem when one of his followers asked him about the meaning of personality.
He explained that there are two personalities: the permanent personality and the present personality.
The present personality is ‘who I think I am at this moment’.
The permanent personality is ‘that part of ourselves upon which the incarnational experiences are recorded and are transferred from one incarnation to the next’:

Let us assume [Daskalos said] that the permanent personality is a large circle.
Imagine another circle outside
without a periphery.
We call that the soul, which is within God, within infinity and boundlessness … .
There is also a small circle inside the other two which I call the present self-conscious personality.
All three circles have the same centre… .
The centre of the present and permanent personality, as well as the self-conscious soul, is the same.

The more the present self-conscious personality opens up as a circle, the more the permanent personality penetrates into the present personality.
The higher you evolve on the spiritual path, the greater the influence and control of the inner self over the present personality.
We habitually say, for example, that this man has conscience whereas another one does not.
In reality there is no human being who does not have a centre.