“The eternal necessity of suffering and its eternal vicariousness. The veiled and incommunicable nature of the worst sufferings;—the passivity of genius, how it is essentially instrumental and defenseless, moved, not moving, it must do what it does;—the impossibility of discovery without its price;—finally, the excess of what the suffering ‘seer’ or genius pays over what his generation gains. (He seems like one who sweats his life out to earn enough to save a district from famine, and just as he staggers back, dying and satisfied, bringing a lac of rupees to buy grain with, God lifts the lac away, dropping one rupee, and says, ‘That you may give them. That you have earned for them. The rest is for me.’) I perceived also in a way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over what we can demonstrate.
“And so on!—these things may seem to you delusions, or truisms; but for me they are dark truths, and the power to put them into even such words as these has been given me by an ether dream.”
R. W. Trine: In Tune with the Infinite, p. 137. ↩
The larger God may then swallow up the smaller one. I take this from Starbuck’s manuscript collection:—
“I never lost the consciousness of the presence of God until I stood at the foot of the Horseshoe Falls, Niagara. Then I lost him in the immensity of what I saw. I also lost myself, feeling that I was an atom too small for the notice of Almighty God.”
I subjoin another similar case from Starbuck’s collection:—
“In that time the consciousness of God’s nearness came to me sometimes. I say God, to describe what is indescribable. A presence, I might say, yet that is too suggestive of personality, and the moments of which I speak did not hold the consciousness of a personality, but something in myself made me feel myself a part of something bigger than I, that was controlling. I felt myself one with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in Nature. I exulted in the mere fact of existence, of being a part of it all—the drizzling rain, the shadows of the clouds, the tree-trunks, and so on. In the years following, such moments continued to come, but I wanted them constantly. I knew so well the satisfaction of losing self in a perception of supreme power and love, that I was unhappy because that perception was not constant.”
The cases quoted in my third lecture, here onwards, are still better ones of this type. In her essay, The Loss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol. LXXXV p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer explains that the vanishing of the sense of self, and the feeling of immediate unity with the object, is due to the disappearance, in these rapturous experiences, of the motor adjustments which habitually intermediate between the constant background of consciousness (which is the Self) and the object in the foreground, whatever it may be. I must refer the reader to the highly instructive article, which seems to me to throw light upon the psychological conditions, though it fails to account for the rapture or the revelation-value of the experience in the Subject’s eyes. ↩
H.-F. Amiel: The Journal Intime, i. 43–44. ↩
M. von Meysenbug: Memoiren einer Idealistin, 5te Auflage, 1900, III 166. For years she had been unable to pray, owing to materialistic belief. ↩
Whitman in another place expresses in a quieter way what was probably with him a chronic mystical perception:
“There is,” he writes, “apart from mere intellect, in the makeup of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter. [Of] such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind mere optimism explains only the surface.”
Specimen Days and Collect, Philadelphia, 1882, p. 174
Whitman charges it against Carlyle that he lacked this perception. ↩
J. Trevor: My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 268, 269, abridged. ↩
J. Trevor: My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 256, 257, abridged. ↩
R. M. Bucke: Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, Philadelphia, 1901, p. 2. ↩
R. M. Bucke: Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, Philadelphia, 1901, pp. 7, 8. My quotation follows the privately printed pamphlet which preceded Dr. Bucke’s larger work, and differs verbally a little from the text of the latter. ↩
My quotations are from Vivekananda, Raja Yoga, London, 1896. The completest source of information on Yoga is the work translated by Vihari Lala Mitra: Yoga Vasishta Maha Ramayana, 4 vols., Calcutta, 1891–99. ↩
My quotations are from Vivekananda, Raja Yoga, London, 1896. The completest source of information on Yoga is the work translated by Vihari Lala Mitra: Yoga Vasishta Maha Ramayana, 4 vols., Calcutta, 1891–99. ↩
A European witness,
