The Vajrayāna
Mystical Intuitions
There are moments during life when a startling but marvelous experience leaps into one’s mind as though coming from another world. The magic that calls it forth — as though someone had accidentally whispered the “open sesame” that rolls the stone back from the hidden treasure — is often so fleeting as to be forgotten in the joy of the experience. It may be a thin cadence of music: a bird bursting into song, the splash of a wave, a flute played by moonlight. It may be a grand harmony of sound, peaceful or awe-inspiring: the murmurous voices of a summer’s afternoon or the fateful shrieking and drumming of a mountain storm. It may be something seen: a lovely smile or the curve of an arm; a single gesture, form, or hue of compelling beauty; a familiar scene transformed by an unusual quality of light; a majestic panorama of interweaving colors splashed across sea or sky; a cluster of rocks suggestive of enormous beings imbued with life. Or the spell may be wrought by a sudden exaltation springing directly from the mind and jerking it, so to speak, into an unknown dimension. That the experience is not a passing fancy but an intimation of something profoundly significant is recognized in a flash, but understanding of its significance does not always follow. A curtain hitherto unnoticed is suddenly twitched aside; and, though other veils intervene, for a timeless moment, there stands partially revealed a mystery.
Then the curtain falls back in place, and at least a measure of oblivion descends.
“Mystery” is not a satisfactory term, but what else can be said of it? It has a hundred names, all of them inappropriate. It has been called the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and all of these together. Philosophers term it the Absolute, or Ultimate, Reality.
To Christian mystics, it is known as the Godhead and, to Christians in general, as God. It is the Brahmā and Paramātman of the Hindus, the Beloved of the Sufis, the Dao (Tao), or Way, of the Daoists (Taoists). Buddhist names for it vary with the context: Nirvāza, the Womb of Dharmas, Suchness, the Void, the Clear Light, the One Mind. In the words of the Chinese sage Laozi (Lao-tzu), “The Way that can be conceived of is not
the Eternal Way; the Name by which it can be named is not its Eternal Name.” Of late, some psychologists have displayed an awareness of it by suggesting the need for “integration” with something reaching far beyond ourselves. William James spoke of it obliquely. Were it not that frequent and clear visions of it engender a compassionate urge to communicate the bliss, it would be best to use no name at all.
Names set bounds. Unfathomable by the keenest scientific probing, the mystery can be intuited but never grasped — how then named? Mystics and poets are supremely fortunate in that visions of it sometimes dawn on them unsought; hearty extroverts, if they glimpse it at all, are shocked into fears for their sanity. Uncomfortably, they dismiss it as a mental aberration — or run for the doctor!
Attempts to define it succeed no better than the search for a name. To say that it exists is to exclude from it the nonexistent and limit it to what speaker or hearer means by existence. To say that it does not exist involves the other side of the dilemma. Both concepts are too crude to describe its subtle nature. To say, as many do, that it is pure mind is well enough in certain contexts, but it ought not to be set apart from matter, with which it is inseparably united. To say that it is at once material and otherwise is to play with words. However, man’s consciousness cannot easily divest itself of symbols.
Accomplished mystics tend to describe it in terms of the qualities lent to it by the filter of their senses: Clear Radiance, Immaculate Void, Ecstatic Bliss, Infinite Love, AllEmbracing Unity.
Clear and profound intuitions of the mystery are not limited to any period, region, kind of person, or religious faith. Knowledge of it has come from widely varied sources: the Egyptian and Greek mystery cults, the Druids (so it is said), the indigenous peoples of the two Americas, people with no particular religious faith, and followers of all the world’s great religions. On the whole, however, religious authorities seem to fear it. Mysticism has seldom been encouraged (and sometimes savagely repressed) by the Catholic and Protestant Churches, by orthodox Muslims — that is to say, non-Sufis3 — and by the Confucians, although each of these communities has produced some notable mystics. The reason for this attitude seems to be that mystics, intoxicated with their vision, no longer care for conventional forms; like artists, they offend against propriety. The Christian Orthodox Church of Greece and Russia seems less hostile, but, even there, exoteric, liturgical religion prevails. The Daoists (Taoists), once mystics par excellence, have, by and large, turned to magic. The Hindus, to their everlasting credit, allow freedom for every sort of religious belief and practice, but, even among them, true mystics are a minority.
Buddhism is perhaps the one widespread religion that, in theory at least, is wholly mystical, for it recommends to all its followers the practice of mind control and the
readily acknowledge the influence of Daoism (Taoism) on the development of Buddhism. Laozi (Lao-tzu) is venerated as a philosopher by Confucianists and as a saint or god by some of the common people and was worshiped as an imperial ancestor during the Tang dynasty (618—907). 3 Sufism, also spelled Sufiism, is a mystical Islamic belief and practice in which Muslims seek to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God. It consists of a variety of mystical paths that are designed to ascertain the nature of man and God and to facilitate the experience of the presence of divine love and wisdom in the world.
attainment of intuitive wisdom. Even so, among Buddhists, people actively engaged in the sublime search are less common than might be supposed except for a few schools and sects of which the Vajrayāna is one.
Confirmation of the genuineness of the mystical experience is to be found in the high degree of unanimity observable in the attempts to describe its nature. Descriptions by people widely separated in time and place are strikingly similar, especially if allowance is made for four diverse factors: the impossibility of accurately describing an experience that transcends all concepts for which words exist; the pious tendency to reconcile all religious experience with cherished doctrines; the prohibition in some societies against expressing views not in accord with the prevailing doctrines; and the need to make descriptions intelligible and acceptable to others. The underlying unanimity that characterizes the mystical writings of all faiths is well brought out in Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. If, as the cynics would have it, the mystical experience is sheer illusion, the stuff of dreams, it is strange that men and women belonging to widely different environments have, throughout the centuries, suffered the same delusions and dreamed the same dream.
No one who has had several intense or prolonged mystical experiences doubts their validity, but what is intuited is so hard to communicate that the mystics’ virtual unanimity is the only evidence that can be offered to the world at large. Nor is the value of these experiences easy to demonstrate. Indeed, from the point of view of society, they must seem detrimental, for a mystic can no more subscribe to mundane values than unicorns can behave like bees or ants. Nevertheless, the people concerned regard them as the most worthwhile happenings in their lives: they are tormented by a thirst to regain them and prolong the bliss forever. The possibility of attaining to unexcelled beauty, truth, and ecstasy makes it natural to renounce all other goals.
Unhappily, modern life is not conducive to the spontaneous dawning of the experience; people are so used to filling their leisure with meaningless distractions that the surface of their minds is seldom placid. Scholars are too preoccupied with investigating details of the outward flux to pay much heed to those who speak of a sublime truth discoverable within; but it must be said that their unwillingness to experiment with the techniques affirmed to lead to that discovery ill accords with their spirit of scientific enquiry. No doubt, the reason is that the techniques demand prolonged exertion to achieve a goal whose very existence they doubt.
