The Private Sea
William Braden
5. The god of the East
Toward the middle of the last century the poet Charles Baudelaire
became a member of the famed Club des Haschischins in Paris. He
was initiated into the mysteries of hashish, one of the derivatives
of psychedelic hemp, and he later wrote of the drug in something
less than glowing terms. Baudelaire declared that the "accursed
sweetmeat" resulted in "an appalling thing, the marriage
of a man to himself." It led to "the individual's belief
in his own god-head." In short, it made a man feel he was
God.
A similar objection to the psychedelic experience was lodged more
than a hundred years later by Professor R. C. Zaehner of Oxford,
an authority on Eastern religions and a Roman Catholic. Zaehner
set himself the task of replying to Huxley's enthusiastic claims
for mescaline, and to play fair the professor took mescaline himself.
"I disliked the experience," he reported, and what especially
displeased him, as he put it, was the fact of losing control of
oneself. "My conscious resistance to the drug was, indeed,
very strong." That was not a very propitious set, as the
cultists say, and as a consequence no doubt Zaehner's experience
was limited to a sort of silly jag which often occurs in the early
stages of a complete experience. Everything seemed utterly ridiculous
and totally funny, and Zaehner laughed himself to tears. He described
The Golden Bough as one of the great comic classics, and
he said the trouble with Jung was "he doesn't realize how
dull his collective unconscious is." Cultists believe this
period of cosmic laughter reflects a first dawning of the awareness
that words and normal perception patterns are both artificial
and inadequate. In any case, Zaehner never went beyond it, and
even in his most mirthful moments, he said, he managed to distinguish
between funny and sacred objects. Shown a reproduction of a praying
figure in a nativity scene by Piero della Francesca, he remarked
that this was "a holy thing not to be looked at when you're
drugged." Later he evaluated the experience as in a sense
anti-religious—not conformable with religious experience or
in the same category— and he reported with some pride that his
normal religious consciousness "was never completely swamped."
Zaehner's book, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane, is so far
the most authoritative attack upon psychedelics from the viewpoint
of orthodox religion, and in it the professor denies the idea
that drugs might give rise to a genuine state of mystical consciousness.
Zaehner concedes that psychedelics might promote what he terms
natural mysticism and monistic mysticism, in which the subject
feels a sense of union either with nature or with some impersonal
Absolute; but they do not promote Theistic mysticism, in
which the subject encounters the transcendent, personal God of
Judaism and Christianity. That at least is Zaehner's opinion,
to which he adds: "In the case of Huxley, as in that of the
maniac, the personality seems to be dissipated into the objective
world, while in the case of theistic mystics the human personality
is wholly absorbed into the Deity, who is felt and experienced
as being something totally distinct and other than the objective
world."
In Theistic mysticism, Zaehner explains, the subject is conscious
only of God and loses his awareness of all other things. In Huxley's
brand of mysticism, one identifies himself with the external world—to
the apparent exclusion of God.
From his own point of view, Zaehner may be right. But there is
reason to dispute even his basic premise—that psychedelic drugs
cannot promote Theistic mysticism—and his statements in any
case are somewhat confusing if not confused. The Zaehner test
for authenticity does not compare the psychedelic experience to
mysticism as such. It compares it to Western mysticism. And that
is just the point. There also is Eastern mysticism, which is older
even than Western mysticism, and in fact it is just here that
the drug movement offers its second major challenge to orthodox
theology.
Zaehner to the contrary, Westerners under the influence of psychedelics
very often have reported overwhelming awareness of a transcendent
God; on the other hand, they also have reported the experience
of alien concepts which frankly astonished—or even terrified—them,
and these by and large have been the concepts of Eastern mysticism.
Within the drug movement, moreover, it seems fair to say that
the tendency has been toward the latter type of experience. There
are subjective factors which may help to account for this tendency,
and we shall discuss them later. But for the moment we can say
that psychedelic experience on the whole frequently appears to
validate Eastern ideas about God, man, and the universe.
This of course is a very broad statement and possibly a very hazardous
one; it assumes that it is possible to speak of Eastern ideas
as such, as if these constituted a monolithic system of belief.
The fact is otherwise, it scarcely needs to be said, and in one
sense it is just as misleading to speak of Eastern religion as
it is to speak of Western religion, thus bedding down together
the Unitarian, the Roman Catholic, and the Seventh-day Adventist.
It is not even proper to speak in general terms of Hinduism as
such, or Buddhism as such, or even Hinyana Buddhism and Mahayana
Buddhism as such. Each is a major system which contains various
levels of sophistication and paths to the truth; in India, for
example, you will find one Hindu worshiping a whole pantheon of
Gods (330 million, according to one count, including the elephant-headed
Gunputty), while another Hindu contemplates a metaphysical abstraction:
you will find one Hindu who denies the world and another Hindu
who is totally involved in the world. As you delve into Eastern
thought you reach a level of interpretation which seems to correspond
with at least some elements in Western thought; at a still deeper
level it becomes almost impossible to say anything positive at
all. But we shall call attention to some of these finer points,
and meanwhile the fact remains that there is something
the Westerner refers to mentally when he uses that term, Eastern
ideas. Perhaps in what follows it might be more correct to say
that we are describing Eastern ideas as they are generally viewed
in the West, from a more or less superficial point of view, and
that for the most part (in this chapter) we are describing the
ideas of India rather than those of China or Japan: that is to
say, we are talking more about Hinduism than Buddhism, and a rather
rudimentary Hinduism at that. Within such a context, then, riding
roughshod over nuances, it might be said that psychedelic experience
is Eastern in so far as it appears to validate immanence rather
than transcendence, monism rather than pluralism, reincarnation
rather than resurrection, nirvana rather than heaven, maya rather
than hell, ignorance rather than evil, liberation rather than
salvation, and self-knowledge rather than grace, redemption, or
atonement.
As applied to the concept of God, transcendence refers to a form
of deity whose nature is wholly different from man's. Theistic
transcendence implies a wholly-other God who is some sort of supreme
Person, in the sense at least that he can and does enter into
a personal relationship with man. In strict transcendence, God
and man are no more the same person than a master and his servant
are the same person. In immanence, on the other hand, men partake
of God's nature; God dwells in men, and they are in fact a part
of God. The concept of immanence as such is perfectly acceptable
from the viewpoint of Western Theism, so long as it does not deny
altogether the element of transcendence. Thus it is fine to say
that in God we live and move and have our being, in the orthodox
interpretation of that phrase, just so we do not develop some
fancy notion that we are him. The relationship in this
case is crudely that of a father and son perhaps, as opposed to
that of a master and his servant. But in pure immanence, or pantheism,
God's nature and man's nature are identical. God is just another
word for mankind as a whole, or the universe as a whole, or reality
as a whole, or the life force as a whole. In pantheism it is neither
insanity nor heresy to imagine you are God, because in fact you
are God. Western theology on the whole has tended to emphasize
the transcendent aspect of God—certainly so at least in comparison
to Eastern theology, which has tended to emphasize the immanent
aspect of God. In Asia, moreover, the emphasis has been given
to pure immanence or pantheism, and God in any case is not conceived
from a Theistic viewpoint as in any sense a person or being who
dwells apart.
Consider next the doctrines of monism and pluralism. Pluralism
insists upon the integrity of the individual soul, self, or ego.
In monism, the individual personality has no lasting reality.
It is a passing phenomenon, illusory in nature, and, in the end,
all of the individual selves will be absorbed again into the godhead:
into the One, the Whole, the Absolute, like drops of water in
a termless sea. The godhead perhaps has temporarily divided itself
for some practical purpose, as the hand is divided into five fingers;
or more likely the godhead is simply amusing itself, making all
the world a stage on which it acts out the various roles—a method
of killing eternity, as it were. In Hinduism, this monistic Absolute
is known variously as Atman or Brahman, and all individual selves
are but aspects of Atman or the supreme Self. A Hindu holy man
contemplates the sacred syllable OM, emblematic of the Atman godhead,
and he asks, "What is that?" He is told, "Thou
art that." Thus the wise Hindu is never jealous, for of whom
should he be jealous? He sees no other, hears no other, knows
no other, for what other is there to see, hear, or know? He hates
no living creature—not even the tiger—for he knows that all
creatures are simply food: are born from food, live upon food,
and then become food. As the hissing Hamadryad in Mary Poppins
put it: "It may be that to eat and be eaten are the same
thing in the end.... Bird and beast and stone and star—we are
all one, all one."
As cream in butter, as salt in the sea, Atman is in everything
and is everything. Atman is like a flame which assumes the shape
of each object it consumes. As the air in a jar is nevertheless
the same as the air outside the jar, although it takes the shape
of the jar, so the Self in every self is nevertheless Atman. And
the wise Hindu knows this. He knows that he himself is the youth,
the maiden, the old man bent upon his staff, the dark butterfly,
the green parrot with red eyes, the thundercloud, seasons, and
seas. Buddhists, in reverence, refuse to limit reality even to
a universal Self, and thus they never speak of Atman. They speak
instead of the Void or of the Clear Light of the Void. But the
Void is not a void in the Western sense; the expression is a via
negativa which seeks to avoid the trap of language, because
there are no words—even Atman—to describe that which is beyond
all words and beyond all determinations.
But call it Atman or call it the Void, enlightenment comes when
the individual self realizes it has no separate identity beyond
this Absolute. Such liberating awareness is referred to as moksha
by Hindus and satori by Zen Buddhists, and with it comes
that perfect peace in which the individual self achieves nirvana
and is absorbed into the Absolute.
In the Theistic mysticism of the West, strictly speaking the soul
is not absorbed by the Absolute, or by God. Rather, the soul and
God retain their distinctive identities, and their relationship
is one of love. Love is the key word that distinguishes Theistic
mysticism from Eastern mysticism; it implies a relationship between
two separate entities, and it therefore preserves both the transcendent
nature of God and the everlasting integrity of the individual
human soul. The soul is not sucked up by the Absolute as water
is sucked up by a sponge; the soul relates to the godhead in an
act of love, and the soul in fact may be referred to, in this
relationship, as the Bride of Christ. As Buber expressed it in
terms of his I-Thou relationship, I-Thou necessarily implies both
an I and a Thou; I is not Thou and Thou is not I, but I and Thou
are united in love: hence the significance of that hyphen.
In the Asian doctrine of absorption, of course, the achievement
of nirvana can mean different things, depending upon the interpretation.
It can mean an actual release from the world, physically and psychically,
or simply a new state of consciousness in which one is no longer
deceived by his intellect and therefore views the world as it
actually is, beyond language and appearances. But nirvana commonly
has been associated with the former interpretation, and this leads
directly to the Asian concept of reincarnation—as opposed to
resurrection. Resurrection was an Egyptian idea; it supposes that
man has but one life upon the earth and thus only one chance to
win his just and lasting reward, whatever that might be. On the
judgment day of Western theology, the soul will be reunited with
its body to find eternal life in a pluralistic heaven. Saint Thomas
among others found it necessary to insist upon resurrection; with
his rejection of dualistic idealism, it seemed the only way to
provide for the personal immortality of the individual soul, and
this point was the main basis for Thomas' famous quarrel with
Averroism. Averroes had denied the possibility of personal immortality
and had proposed instead the theory of monopsychism: the idea
that mankind as a whole has a single mind in which all individuals
participate. It is said that Thomas considered personal immortality
the most important issue of the thirteenth century; he defended
it vigorously, and Averroism was anathematized by the bishop of
Paris in 1270.
But resurrection and the permanence of the individual soul also
are denied by the East. In the alternative doctrine of reincarnation,
the separate self does not really exist, and it is only the realization
of this fact which permits the achievement of nirvana. But realization
is difficult—far more difficult than good works or avoiding
sin. So a man is given not one life in which to achieve it, but
many lives. The soul passes from body to body in a cycle of death
and rebirth, as a leech proceeds from one blade of grass to the
next, and each life offers a fresh opportunity to make the great
discovery in which one recognizes at last the nature of the Grand
Illusion. With the discovery comes the death of the individual
personality, which never was, and absorption into the monistic
Absolute or the everlasting peace of nirvana. This doctrine also
has been interpreted symbolically as a poetic expression of the
many stages that one man passes through in one lifetime, just
as nirvana has been interpreted to mean a state of awareness rather
than literal absorption into nirvana which leaves the earth behind.
But the goal in any case bears no similarity to the phenomenal
heaven of the West. State of mind or state of Being, it is not
a place, and the individual personality is not an aspect of it.
In the same sense, there is no Eastern equivalent to the Western
hell. If there is a hell, it is the world itself, or at least
the deceiving world of appearances—the phenomenal illusion which
is known as maya or sangsara. A man lives in hell
when he fails to recognize reality. He lives in hell when he denies
his own true nature and is therefore tormented by lust and desire.
It is his mistaken sense of individuality which causes all of
his pleasure and all of his pain, and there is far more pain than
pleasure. He is a victim of dualism, hopelessly enmeshed in meum
et thrum. Because he imagines that there is an other, he envies
or desires the other. Because he imagines that his little self
is his real Self, he weeps at the thought of his own mortality
—for he knows full well that the little self is finite and that
one day it must perish forever. But with enlightenment comes peace,
serenity, and release from this hell. The wise man knows that
there is no other, so he does not envy or desire the other; he
is free from craving. The wise man knows that there is no little
self, so he does not weep for his own mortality; he knows that
there is only Atman or the Void, there is only the One, and he
is that One, and therefore he is in fact immortal and can never
perish.
It also follows, from the Eastern viewpoint, that evil deeds are
a product of ignorance. Evil in the Western sense is just one
more example of dualistic perception. It suggests there is a very
real, if negative, force which causes man to sin against the light.
But ask the Western moralist what would happen if a potential
murderer were somehow spirited away to a tropical island and left
there alone. This would-be killer would have nobody to kill, and
so of course he would not kill anybody. On judgment day, shall
he be judged a murderer or not? The problem is easily resolved
in the East, where all men in a manner of speaking are stranded
upon that island. It is impossible to kill anybody else, because
nowhere in the universe is there anybody else. There is no other,
except as imagined. In doing harm to what he supposes is another
person, therefore, a man does harm only to himself. Homicide is
impossible; there can only be partial suicides. And so it is,
according to the doctrine of maya, that men do wrong through
ignorance. They sin against others, and thereby against themselves,
because they are deluded as to their true nature—because they
fail to understand that they and their fellows are but elements
of a monistic whole. Thus knowledge is the path to righteousness,
and he who has knowledge will never sin. Thus the goal of wisdom
is liberation from maya.
It follows that Eastern liberation is not the same as Western
salvation. The Westerner must work for his own salvation, but
ultimately it comes to him only through the love and mercy of
God. In an act of grace, the transcendent deity may bestow his
gifts upon some erring soul. For Christians, man's redemption
was secured by the sacrifice on the cross, a direct intervention
of the supernatural power on behalf of mankind. But in the East
there is no supernatural power to intervene. There is no forgiveness,
for there is no God who is able to forgive. The burden of liberation
falls entirely upon the individual, who must lift that burden
himself; he cannot pray that it be lifted from him. He must strive
for liberation through self-knowledge, and in doing so he is helped
or hindered by his karma—the sum total of a man's thoughts and
actions during his lifetime or his lifetimes. He will be helped
if it is good karma, hindered if it is bad karma.
Bad karma might seem at first to correspond with Western guilt,
but it does not really. Guilt implies that sinful action is provoked
by the active powers of darkness—by the force called evil—and
that free-willed man has perversely chosen darkness over light.
A clear-cut choice and the freedom to choose are basic assumptions
in the doctrine of guilt,-and the whole idea is foreign to Eastern
thinking. There may be a choice, but there is nothing clear-cut
about it. It is obscured by maya, which prevents a man from seeing
it. If he could see it, there is no question what his action would
be; he would do the right thing without a moment's hesitation,
because the right thing is simply the logical thing: it is the
selfish, or if you will the Selfish, course to follow. Bad karma
arises from ignorance, not perversity. It has been equated with
cause-and-effect and with heredity. One remains a prisoner in
the Net of Illusion because one has not been thinking the right
thoughts—has not gained the proper knowledge, in other words—and
heredity is another way of saying that karma follows you from
one generation to the next, or from one reincarnation to the next.
Evangelists such as Billy Graham have complained bitterly that
people no longer believe in guilt, and Saint Augustine in his
time felt called upon to condemn a similar trend. In the latter
case, the false prophet was the astrologer, who suggested that
a man's faults lay in his stars, while the tempter's voice today
belongs to Freud. And perhaps America at least is moving toward
an Eastern view of sin. It has been said that an American takes
delight in his analysis, talks about it freely, and has a penchant
even to boast about it, while a European is still ashamed of his
libido and would not dream of discussing it in public.
But the world as illusion does not sit very well with traditional
American concepts, and some would view this idea as a greater
threat to our values than pantheism, monism, or any of the other
Eastern isms. It seems to assert that life itself is a curse,
and indeed the Hindu speaks of life as a terrible wheel of death
and rebirth; reincarnation in his eyes is a curse, and a new birth
is something to be avoided at any cost. This might be taken as
a direct challenge to the Christian doctrine that being as being
is good (esse qua esse bottom est), and, as mentioned,
some elements within the drug movement seem to have found it an
attractive idea. Moreover, it could be argued that modern physics
supports the basic proposition with its formula that energy equals
mass times the velocity of light squared (E=MC2)—suggesting
that matter after all is not the solid, substantial stuff we had
supposed it to be. Nor is this just another idea of some woolly-headed
philosopher; it is an idea that blew up Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
These various ideas represent the religious tradition of half
the world. Insofar as it confirms them, therefore, the psychedelic
experience cannot be dismissed as non-religious on the grounds
laid down by Zaehner and Baudelaire, who really meant that it
is non-Western.
It seems fair to say, moreover, that most drug cultists do
interpret the LSD experience as a confirmation of Eastern metaphysics.
Timothy Leary, the high priest of LSD, has often appeared a bit
vague on this point in his public statements. While he expresses
himself for the most part in Hindu and Buddhist terminology, he
tends to speak of the experience simply as "religious"
in nature—suggesting that the religions of the East and West
are fundamentally the same. Shortly after he founded his League
for Spiritual Discovery, however, I asked Leary if there are not
in fact certain basic differences between the Eastern and Western
views. He agreed that there certainly are. I then asked him whether
he thought LSD experience supports the pantheistic Eastern God
or the transcendent Western God. And he told me there is no question
about it—the experience supports the Eastern God, not the Western.
Even so, is it necessary to regard Eastern thinking merely as
threat and challenge? As we have already indicated, many of the
Eastern concepts are subject to different levels of interpretation—and
some of them at least, at certain levels, may be entirely compatible
with Western trends of thought. Furthermore, we might demonstrate
that these Eastern ideas are not so foreign to the West as they
may seem.
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