CHAPTER XXII Theosophy of Max Müller. Ancient India. Philosophy of the Vedanta. Tat twam asi. Knowledge by means of the expansion of consciousness as a reality. Mysticism of different ages and peoples. Unity of experiences. Tertium Organum as a key to mysticism. Signs of the noumenal world. Treatise of Plotinus On Intelligible Beauty as a misunderstood system of higher logic. Illumination in Jacob Boehme. "A harp of many strings, of which each string is a separate instrument, while the whole is only one harp." Mysticism of The Love of the Good. St. Avva Dorotheus and others. Clement of Alexandria. Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu. Light on the Path, The Voice of the Silence. Mohammedan mystics. Poetry of the Sufis. Mystical states under narcotics. The Anaesthetic Revelation. Experiments of Prof. James. Dostoyevsky on "time" (The Idiot). Influence of nature on the soul of man. T O trace historically the process of the development of those ideas and systems founded upon higher logic or proceeding from it, would indeed be a matter of great interest and importance. But this would be difficult and almost impossible of accomplishment because we lack definite knowledge of the time and origin, the means of transmitting, and the sequence of ideas in ancient philosophical systems and religious teachings. There are innumerable guesses and speculations concerning the manner of this succession. Many of these guesses and speculations are accepted as unquestioned until new ones appear which controvert them. The opinions of different investigators in regard to these questions are very divergent, and the truth is often difficult to determine—it would be more accurate to say "impossible" if conclusions had to be based upon the material accessible to logical investigation. I shall not dwell at all on the question of the succession of ideas, either from the historical or any other point of view. The proposed outline of systems which refer to the world of noumena is not intended to be complete. This is not "the history of MAX MÜLLER ON THEOSOPHY 271 thought," but merely examples of movements of thought which have led to similar conclusions. In the book Theosophy (or Psychological Religion) the noted scholar Max Müller gives an interesting analysis of mystical religions and mystical philosophical systems. He dwells much on India and her teachings. That which we can study nowhere but in India is the all-absorbing influence which religion and philosophy may exercise on the human mind. So far as we can judge a large class of people in India, not only the priestly class, but the nobility also, not men only but women, never looked upon their life on earth as something real. What was real to them was the invisible, the life to come. What formed the theme of their conversations, what formed the subject of their meditations, was the real that alone lent some kind of reality to this unreal phenomenal world. Whoever was supposed to have caught a new ray of truth was visited by young and old, was honored by princes and by kings, was looked upon indeed as holding a position far above that of kings and princes. This is the side of life of ancient India which deserves our study, because there has been nothing like it in the whole world, not even in Greece or Palestine. I know quite well, [says Müller] that there never can be a whole nation of philosophers or metaphysical dreamers . . . and we must never forget that all through history, it is the few, not the many, who impress their character on a nation, and have a right to represent it as a whole. What do we know of Greece at the time of the Ionian and Eleatic philosophers, except the utterances of Seven Sages? What do we know of the Jews at the time of Moses, except the traditions preserved in the Laws and the Prophets? It is the prophets, the poets, the lawgivers and teachers, however small their number, who speak in the name of the people, and who alone stand out to represent the nondescript multitude behind them, to speak their thoughts and to express their sentiments. Real Indian philosophy, even in that embryonic form in which we find it in the Upanishads, stands completely by itself. And if we ask what was the highest purpose of the teachings of the Upanishads we can state it in three words, as it has been stated by the greatest Vedanta* teachers themselves, namely Tat twam asi. This means Thou art That. That stands for that which is known to us under different names in different systems of ancient and modern philosophy. It is Zeus or the Eis Theos or To On in Greece; it is what Plato meant by the Eternal Idea, what Agnostics call the * Vedanta is the end of the Vedas, the abridgment and commentaries on the Vedas. P. Ouspensky. Unknowable, what I call the Infinite in Nature. This is what in India is called Brahman, the being behind all beings, the power that emits the universe, sustains it and draws it back again to itself. The Thou is what I called the Infinite in man, the Soul, the Self, the being behind every human Ego, free from all bodily fetters, free from passions, free from all attachments (Atman). The expression: Thou art That—means: thy soul is the Brahman; or in other words, the subject and the object of all being and of all knowing are one and the same. This is the gist of what I call Psychological Religion or Theosophy, the highest summit of thought which the human mind has reached, which has found different expressions in different religions and philosophies, but nowhere such a clear and powerful realization as in the ancient Upanishads of India. For as long as the individual soul does not free itself from Nescience, or a belief in duality, it takes something else for itself. True knowledge of the Self or true self-knowledge, expresses itself in the words, "Thou art That" or "I am Brahman," the nature of Brahman being unchangeable eternal cognition. Until that stage has been reached, the individual soul is fettered by the body, by the organs of sense, nay even by the mind and its various functions. The Soul (The Self) says the Vedanta philosopher, cannot be different from the Brahman, because Brahman comprehends all reality and nothing that really is can therefore be different from Brahman. Secondly, the individual self cannot be conceived as a modification of Brahman, because Brahman by itself cannot be changed, whether by itself, because it is one and perfect in itself, or by anything outside of it (because there exists nothing outside of it). Here we see [says Müller], the Vedântist moving on exactly the same stratum of thought in which Eleatic philosophers moved in Greece. "If there is one Infinite," they said, "there cannot be another, for the other would limit the one, and thus render it finite, so, as applied to God, the Eleatics argued: "If God is to be the mightiest and the best, he must be one, for if there were two or more, he would not be the mightiest and best." The Eleatics continued their monistic argument by showing that this One Infinite Being cannot be divided, so that anything could be called a portion of it, because there is no power that could separate anything from it. Nay, it cannot even have parts, for, as it has no beginning and no end, it can have no parts, for a part has a beginning and an end. These Eleatic ideas—namely that there is and there can be only One Absolute Being, infinite, unchangeable, without a second, without parts and passions are the same ideas which underlie the Upanishads and have been fully worked out in the Vedânta-Sutras. ELEATIC MONISM 273 In most of the religions of the ancient world [says Müller] the relation between the soul and God has been represented as a return of the soul to God. A yearning for God, a kind of divine home-sickness, finds expression in most religions, but the road that is to lead us home, and the reception which the soul may expect in the Father's house have been represented in very different ways in different religions. According to some religious teachers, a return of the soul to God is possible after death only. . . . According to other religious teachers, the final beatitude of the soul can be achieved in this life. . . . That beatitude requires knowledge only, knowledge of the necessary unity of what is divine in man with what is divine in God. The Brahmins call it self-knowledge, that is to say, the knowledge that our true self, if it is anything, can only be that Self which is All in All, and beside which there is nothing else. Sometimes this conception of the intimate relation between the human and the divine natures. comes suddenly, as the result of an unexplained intuition or self-recollection. Sometimes, however, it seems as if the force of logic had driven the human mind to the same result. If God had once been recognized as the Infinite in nature and the soul as the Infinite in man, it seemed to follow that there could not be two Infinites. The Eleatics had clearly passed through a similar phase of thought in their own philosophy. If there is an Infinite, they said, it is one, for if there were two they could not be Infinite, but would be finite one toward the other. But that which exists is infinite, and there cannot be more such. Therefore that which exists is one. Nothing can be more definite than this Eleatic Monism, and with it the admission of a soul, the Infinite in man, as different from God, the Infinite in nature, would have been inconceivable. In India it was so expressed that Brahman and Atman (the spirit) were in their nature one. The early Christians also, at least those who had been brought up in the schools of Neo-platonist philosophy, had a clear perception that if the soul is infinite and immortal in its nature, it cannot be anything beside God, but that it must be of God and in God. St. Paul gave but his own bold expression to the same faith or knowledge, when he uttered the words which have startled so many theologians: In Him we live and move and have our being. If anyone else had uttered these words they would at once have been condemned as pantheism. No doubt they are pantheism, and yet they express the very key-note of Christianity. The divine sonship of man is only a metaphorical expression but it was meant originally to embody the same idea. . . . And when the question was asked how the consciousness of this divine sonship could ever have been lost, the answer given by Christianity was, by sin, the answer given by the Upanishads was, by avidya, nescience. This marks the similarity, and at the same time the characteristic difference between these two religions. The question how nescience laid hold on the human soul, and made it imagine that it could live or move or have its true ... being anywhere but in Brahman, remains as unanswerable in Hindu philosophy as in Christianity the question how sin first came into the world. Both philosophies, that of the East and that of the West [says Müller] start from a common point, namely from the conviction that our ordinary knowledge is uncertain, if not altogether wrong. This revolt of the human mind against itself is the first step in all philosophy. In our own philosophical language we may put the question thus: how did the real become phenomenal, and how can the phenomenal become real again? Or, in other words, how was the infinite changed into the finite, how was the eternal changed into the temporal, and how can the temporal regain its eternal nature? Or, to put it into more familiar language, how was this world created, and how can it be uncreated again? Nescience or avidya is regarded as the cause of the phenomenal semblance. In the Upanishads the meaning of Brahman changes. Sometimes it is almost an objective God, existing separately from the world. But then we see Brahman as the essence of all things . . . and the soul, knowing that it is no longer separated from that essence, learns the highest lesson of the whole Vedanta doctrine: Tat twam asi; "Thou art That," that is to say, "Thou who for a time didst seem to be something by thyself, art that, art really nothing apart from the divine essence." To know Brahman is to be Brah man. Almost in the same words as the Eleatic philosophers and the German mystics of the fourteenth century, the Vendântists argue that it would be self-contradictory to admit that there could be anything besides the Infinite or Brahman, which is All in All, and that therefore the soul also cannot be anything different from it, can never claim a separate and independent existence. Brahman has to be conceived as perfect, and therefore unchangeable, the soul cannot be conceived as a real modification or deterioration of Brahman. And as Brahman has neither beginning nor end, neither can it have any parts; therefore the soul cannot be a part of Brahman, but the whole of Brahman must be present in every individual soul. This is the same as the teaching of Plotinus, who held with equal consistency, that the True Being is totally present in every part of the Universe. The Vedanta philosophy rests on the foundation thesis that the soul or the Absolute Being or Brahman, are one in their essence. The fundamental principle of the Vedanta-philosophy is that in reality there exists and there can exist nothing but Brahman, that Brahman is everything. Idealistic philosophy has swept away this world-old prejudice more thoroughly in India than anywhere else. The nescience (which creates the separation between the individual soul and Brahman) can be removed by science or knowledge only. And this knowledge or vidya is imparted by the Vedânta, which shows that all our |