IX · Mysticism, Analogy & Metaphor

I take up the word mysticism, which Kailash had raised, a word whose meaning has shifted so far over the centuries that it has become almost a pure abstraction. It comes from the Greek mystikos and the Christian mystery cults, and it was used in three ways: the interpretation of scripture beyond its historical circumstance to a deeper esoteric meaning; the mystical connection with the divine through the ritual of the Eucharist; and the experiential, the visions of a Teresa of Avila, which since William James has come to dominate the word. At its center is mystical union, the tying together of the divine with all else, and that sense of binding runs through the Sanskrit root for yoke, from which we have both yoga and the yoke that joins oxen to the plow, and through the Latin religare, to tie together with cords. So yoga, religion, and mysticism share that felt sense of union. After James, though, and his Varieties of Religious Experience, and under the psychoanalytic weather of the time, there arose perennialism, the claim that one common element links the mystics of every religion. Aldous Huxley, whom I admired as much as anyone, set the traditions side by side in his book and invited us to see how alike they sound. I am critical of the text: the selections are an editor’s selections, the translations are all cast in one biblical, King James English, and the reduction leaves the elements so thin they are no longer recognizable in any tradition they came from.

To see how mysticism came to mean only the private and the ineffable, I go back to Martin Luther, who pressed the privatization of Christianity, the personal relationship, the silent reading, and who called the mystical reading of scripture and the Eucharist so much hogwash, since the Bible plainly says what it means. As the natural sciences matured and the European Enlightenment dawned, science had to purify itself of its mystical elements: that a plant resembled the organ it healed no longer carried any merit. And alongside this, science created a new category of writing, fiction; non-fiction became the transparent rational prose that science required, while the mystical, the mythological, even the religious were given over to the novel and to poetry. So mysticism was banished from science, pushed to the margins of religion, and by William James lifted out of philosophy and set squarely in the private realm of the psychological, where it has largely remained. Indian culture cannot be called mystical in this sense, and the reason is speech: the texts are largely oral, and their interpretation follows linguistic lines. The great thinkers we call India’s philosophers, Ādi Śaṅkara, Mādhava, Rāmānuja, were fundamentally linguists, and their readings rest on the considerations of speech and on the commentaries that accompany them. There is nothing here to fall into a trance over, no darshan of God’s plans for the earth.

What, then, is sacred speech, and how does it differ from ordinary speech? It comes down to the speech itself. Pāṇini’s (पाणिनि) Aṣṭādhyāyī (अष्टाध्यायी) lays no rational philosophy over the language, and it was never meant for those who did not already command Sanskrit. For years I struggled with why a man would build something of such complexity, a thing the West has needed fifty or sixty years even to begin to follow. He did not do it to impress his peers. I concluded that the sacred rites performed for the prosperity of society demanded enormous precision, as all magical ritual does, and that Panini and the lineages of grammarians disciplined the performance of the Vedic ritual; this is why kings and queens held it so dear. So we must draw a distinction between the mystical and the scientific, though not the one usually drawn, of the rational against the irrational, the provable against the flaky. I turn instead toward sacred speech, which at this point is only an idea, an ideal, even a fiction, and I want to give it enough density that we can make out its contours. For that I return to resemblance, a category used everywhere in Indian culture and, in Europe, in the hermeticism and alchemy of the Middle Ages, in whose vocabulary I find far closer kin to the Indian usage than in the modern psychoanalytic terms I object to. I read from the Puruṣa Sūkta, where from the mind of the Virāṭ Puruṣa is born the moon, from His eyes the sun, from His mouth Indra and Agni, from His breath the wind, from His navel the space between heaven and earth, from His head the sky and from His feet the earth; the device at work there is analogy. And I read one dense passage from my own book, the Autobiography of a Sadhu, among the two or three hardest I ever had to write, where every unnecessary word was cut away.

I close by setting out what is to come, the ways of resemblance that I find missing from the modern and new-age discourse on India. There is convenience, the resemblance of things near and adjacent, which exchange their properties through proximity; emulation, by which things reflect one another across a distance, as the human face reflects the sky with the eyes for sun and moon; and analogy, a word I return to again and again, without which speech cannot be examined outside the scientific and post-Enlightenment paradigm. There are the three gunas, rajas among them, which I had woven into the passage I read; and there are the signatures, the marks on the surface of the world that announce a resemblance and point us to where two worlds meet. All of it bears on speech, on the prejudices we bring to it and on the distinction I want us to reach between sacred and ordinary speech. On the scale of mass media its workings are plain to all of us; on the personal scale there is real work to be done, attuning ourselves to the natural rhythms of speech, and through them to greater well-being.