by Colin Wilson
It is obvious what happened; long meditation had tired him until he had lost sight of his aim. The decision to kill himself was a sudden danger to his vital power that aroused all his sleeping life-energies. His vision was the same as Nietzsche’s on the hilltop again. The Outsider suddenly knows himself. It is Alyosha’s vision of love of the earth, love of life, or, like the unbeliever in Ivan’s story who had walked a quadrillion miles and declared that a few seconds of heaven were worth every minute of it. It is Chuang Tzu’s ‘Great Awakening5, the interior gates that opened for Swedenborg and Boehme and Blake. It is a blazing of all the senses, the complete opposite of Roquentin’s Nausea.
Now, Blake has told us that this vision would be possible for everyone if ‘the doors of perception were cleansed’, so that, under the circumstances, we cannot contend that the vision is something purely objective, like sitting in a cinema and just watching what goes before your eyes. No; what had happened to Ramakrishna is that the threat of death awoke the sleeping Will; the Will did the rest. It is important to understand this. It is this realization that is the final salvation of the Outsider. When we read of Biblical prophets or saints seeing visions, we tend to think that the vision appeared to them, whereas it would be truer to say that the saint appeared to the vision. Modern scepticism is quite right to doubt the possibility of such visions, if they are simply a matter of something happening. But they are not. They are an example of the Will making something happen. The Western way of thinking tends to staticize the Will.
It is necessary to get this clear before we go on with Rama-krishna’s life. The fact is difficult to grasp, because our thought is always aware of such things, but is not aware that it is holding them upside down.
Go into any London library and look in the philosophy section until you find some book with a title such as ‘What is Man?’ or ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ Read half a page of it, and you will see what I mean by ‘staticizing the Will’. It is as if the author were saying: ‘Well, here am I, sitting in my armchair, looking out at the Panorama of Life. What is it all about?’ He looks outward and accepts what he sees; he does not ask what elements in himself are making him see the world as he does. Moreover, even if he turns his eyes inwards and asks, in a Freudian or Kantian frame of mind, ‘How far do my perceptions affect the way I see things?’ he still sets out examining those perceptions as if they were something at the other end of a microscope, and he were a permanent and static person looking at them.
The reverse of this happens in a ‘moment of vision’ like Alyosha’s or Nietzsche’s. The bombardment of the ‘self with emotions and sensations like so many shooting stars make the visionary realize that his interior being is more like a mill-race. He is struck forcibly by the kinetic nature of the world itself. While before, he had seen the world as rather a static place, where all sorts of trivialities assumed importance as they would in a dull country village, he now sees the world as a battleground of immense forces. At once he becomes aware of two things, the kinetic nature of the world, and the kinetic nature of his own soul. Instead of seeing the surface of things and feeling that it is rather dull, he sees the interior working of the force of life, the Will to more life. This Will is normally hidden, leaving the conscious mind to carry on with its own affairs. The conscious mind is left in exile in the world of matter, left to make-itself-at-home as best it can by setting up its own conception of identity and permanence. In most men, the conscious and the unconscious being hardly ever make contact; consequently, the conscious aim is to make himself as comfortable as possible with as little effort as possible.
But there are other men, whom we have been calling, for convenience, ‘Outsiders’, whose conscious and unconscious being keep in closer contact, and the conscious mind is forever aware of the urge to care about ‘more abundant life’, and care less about comfort and stability and the rest of the notions that are so dear to the bourgeois. I have tried to show in the course of this book, how the Outsider’s one need is to discover how to lend a hand to the forces inside him, to help them in their struggle. And obviously, if he is only vaguely aware of these interior forces, the sensible thing is to become more aware of them and find out what they are aiming at. The Outsider usually begins by saying, CI must have solitude to look inside myself’; hence the room on his own. Unfortunately, he also discovers that he often gets to know himself better under the stimulation of new experiences; and new experiences are out of the question when he is in a room on his own. A conflict is set up at the beginning of the ‘new life’, all of which is expressed so fully in Steppenwolf.
Ramakrishna succeeded in administering the stimulus himself. He seized a sword to kill himself, and immediately the life-force in him revealed itself and told him: ‘Nonsense; you are not going to die; look at all the work I have for you to do.’ And Ramakrishna had his first vision of the ‘Mother’, a sudden realization that the universe is full of life, is nothing but life, life engaged in an unending attempt to reinforce its grip on matter. Van Gogh had become aware of the same interior vortex when he painted the ‘Road with Cypresses’ and the ‘Starry Night’, just as Beethoven had become aware of it when he wrote the ‘Hammerciavier’. The sensitivity of Ramakrishna’s interior harmony made it easy for him to re-establish contact with that recognition. The image of Kali in the Temple became a symbol of that recognition.
Kali is depicted as a fierce, black-visaged woman, holding a sword and a dripping human head in two of her four hands, and offering blessing to her children with the other two. She stands on the prostrate body of her husband Shiva, for Shiva only symbolizes conscious life; she is the life-force; around her neck is a necklace of human skulls. Whoever devised the first image of Kali must have been some Hindu Nietzsche who realized that the life-force is higher than the mere individual will to self-preservation, and may aim at more life through the deaths of individuals. Hindu hymns recognize this demoniac quality in the life-force; one begins:
All creation is the sport of my mad mother Kali.
Another:
Crazy is my father, crazy is my mother [i.e. Shiva and Kali].
Another (which brings out the demoniac quality even more):
This time I shall devour thee utterly, mother Kali
For I was born under an evil star
And one so born becomes, they say, the eater of his mother 9
It is the same conception that Dostoevsky puts into Kirilov’s mouth: . . the man who insults and rapes a little girl—that’s good too, and the man who blows his brains out for the child, that’s good too. Everything’s good.’ Nietzsche’s expression of the same conception has led to his condemnation as an ‘Antichrist’, ‘cold monster’, etc. Admittedly, the abuse of the idea of Kali as destroyer led to the terrible curse of thuggism in India, just as the ideas of Nietzsche are popularly supposed to have led to the Nazi policy of murder-camps and race-extermination.
Ramakrishna became a priest in the Kali temple after the death of his brother, and soon his reputation as a holy man spread. He was a strange priest, seldom bothering to observe the formalities of worship, on one occasion even offering the food intended for the Mother to the temple cat. When challenged about this, he replied simply that he saw everything as an embodiment of Kali. The least thing could awaken ‘God-consciousness5 in him and plunge him into samadhi (ecstatic trance); once, a glimpse of an English boy leaning against a tree with his body bent in three places like the traditional pictures of Krishna sent him into ‘communion with God.’
When Ramakrishna was forty-six, the headmaster of a local school happened to visit him; Mahendranath Gupta became one of Ramakrishna’s chief disciples, and kept the record of his daily conversations that has come down to us as the magnificent Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. It is impossible to overpraise this great religious biography; it is the only complete, exhaustive record we possess of the day-to-day utterances of a God-intoxicated saint (the complete English version contains over half a million words, three times the length of th
e New Testament). Here is one of Ramakrishna’s parables from it:
Once a tigress attacked a flock of goats. As soon as she sprang on her prey, she gave birth to a cub and died. (A hunter had fired at her from a distance.) The cub grew up in the company of the goats. The goats ate grass and the cub followed their example. They bleated; the cub bleated too. Gradually it grew to be a big tiger. One day another tiger attacked the flock. It was amazed to see the grass-eating tiger. Running after it, the wild tiger at last seized it, whereupon the grass-eating tiger began to bleat. The wild tiger dragged it to the water, and said: ‘Look at your face in the water; it is just like mine. Here is a little meat; eat it....’ But the grass-eating tiger would not swallow it, and began to bleat again. Gradually, though, it got to know the taste of blood, and came to relish the meat. Then the wild tiger said: ‘Now you see there is no difference between you and me; come along and follow me into the forest....’
Eating grass is like enjoying ‘woman and gold’. To bleat and run away like a goat is to behave like an ordinary man, Going away with the wild tiger is like taking shelter with the guru, who awakens one’s spiritual consciousness, and recognizing him alone as one’s relative. To see one’s face rightly is to know one’s real Self.10
It is tempting to compare this parable with Steppenwolf’s division of himself into man and wolf, goat and tiger. The goat part is the ordinary bourgeois who bleats tamely in the world; the tiger is the Outsider part, the part that Raskolnikov chose when he murdered an old pawnbrokress, or the savage who is tired of being a goat. But the comparison is not quite accurate. It is true that Ramakrishna has accepted his destiny as an Outsider, and spends his time trying to persuade other men to become Outsiders too. But Steppenwolfs goat part enjoyed music and poetry, and so could hardly be accused of completely lacking ‘spiritual consciousness’. Clearly, when the Outsider reaches Ramarkrishna’s degree of spiritual consciousness, his divisions become clearer; there is now no question of murdering old women or deliberately embracing crime.
One of the most striking of Ramakrishna’s teachings is the belief in the unity of all religions. The Life tells us how Ramakrishna first practised various religious disciplines of different sects (which is as strange in India as it would be for someone in England to declare himself at once an ardent Methodist; Quaker and Roman Catholic); later he turned to other religions, and studied in turn Christianity and Mohammedanism, worshipping the Virgin Mary instead of Kali, and then the all-pervasive Allah. Ramakrishna knew the basic reality of the universe; it made no difference what symbols he used to call it to mind; the result was always the same: ecstatic God-consciousness.
Again, before we leave Ramakrishna, we might try to clarify what exactly is meant by ‘God-consciousness’. There is a passage in The Varities of Religious Experience in which James speaks of ‘melting moods’:
The rest of us can ... imagine this by recalling our state of feeling in those temporary ‘melting moods’, into which the trials of real life, or the theatre, or a novel, sometimes throws us. Especially if we weep! For it is then as if our tears broke through an inveterate inner dam and let all sorts of ancient peccancies and moral stagnancies drain way, leaving us now washed and soft of heart, and open to every nobler leaning. With most of us, the customary hardness quickly returns, but not so with saintly persons…11
We have already noted that Ramakrishna was lucky in having spent his early life in a quiet village, where his susceptibility to these moods, his imaginative sensitivity, was in no danger of having to put a shell on itself to protect it against the world’s brutalities. (Readers of Dickens’s Christmas Carol will recall the scene in which Scrooge reads The Arabian Nights in his schoolroom, and the description of his delight and absorption in the book; and of how the older Scrooge, now hardened and bitter, recalls the scene and is plunged into a ‘melting mood’.) We must understand that Ramakrishna preserved his childlike sensitivity all his life. We, among the complexities of our modern civilization, are forced to develop hard shells; therefore it would not be false to say that it is our civilization that is responsible for the prevailing humanistic and materialistic modes of thought. Ramakrishna, at the opposite extreme, could plunge to a depth of imaginative ecstasy which few Westerners have ever known, except those mediaeval saints who also were able to give up their minds as he did to contemplation and serenity.
In the last years of his life, Ramakrishna was widely regarded as an Avatar, an incarnation of God, like Christ, Krishna, Gautama. (Even today his picture is worshipped by thousands of Indians who regard him as God.) In his forty-ninth year, Ramakrishna developed a sore throat, which developed into a cancer, and finally killed him in August, 1886. Many of his disciples retired into a monastery, and later set out to spread his message over the world; the best known of them, Narendra, Ramakrishna’s favourite disciple, became Swami Vivekananda, who made his master’s name known throughout England and America.
In the course of the past two chapters, certain conclusions about the Outsider have become steadily more apparent, and we can express the most important one by saying that the Outsider would seem to be a basically religious man, or imaginative man, who refuses to develop those qualities of practical-mindedness and eye-to-business that seem to be the requisites for survival in our complex civilization. It must be again emphasized that by ‘religion’ I am not trying to indicate any specific religious system. Religious categories, as I have tried to show, are such simple ideas as ‘Original Sin’, ‘salvation’, ‘damnation’, which come naturally to the Outsider’s way of thinking.
Moreover, both the Eastern and the Western ways of thinking tend to identify Original Sin with delusion. Ramakrishna never tired of telling his disciples not to think of themselves as sinners; yet he never ceased to refer to men who are ‘in the world’ as ‘bound souls’, ‘deluded souls’. As to the way of escaping this delusion, there is no division of opinion: Go to extremes. That is the first necessity. The Buddha advocated a ‘middle way’, yet this was only after a preliminary course of extremes: the Majjhima Nikaya tells how he was ‘a penance worker, outdoing others in penance; I was a rough-liver, outdoing others in roughing it; I was scrupulous, outdoing others in my scruples; I was a solitary, outdoing others in solitude’. I offer only one example of the description of the ‘extremes’ that followed (interested readers can find a fuller account in Woodward’s Sayings of the Buddha in the World’s Classics series):
Then, Aggivesana, I said to myself: ‘Suppose I practice still further the musing of breath suppressed ?’ Accordingly, I stopped my breathing in and out from mouth and nostrils, and I closed my ears.
Then, just as if a strong man with a sharp pointed sword should crash into the brain, so did the rush of air, all outlets being stopped, crash into my brain. Then was my energy strenuous and unyielding indeed. Mindfulness was indeed established undisturbed, yet my body was perturbed; it was not calm thereby, because I was overpowered by the stress of the painful struggling. But even then such feelings as arose could not lay hold of and control my mind....
Finally, the scripture tells us, Gautama starved himself until he was a living skeleton. One day when he was bathing in the river, he found he had not strength to climb out. He finally saved himself from drowning by clutching an overhanging branch; but the near-experience of death had the same effect upon him as upon Ramakrishna; a realization that he wanted more life, not less. Then another memory came to him:
Then... I thought: ‘I call to mind how when the Sakhyan my father was ploughing I sat in the cool shade of the rose-apple tree, remote from sensual desires and ill-conditions, and entered upon and abode in the First Musing, which is accompanied by thought directed and sustained, which is born of solitude, full of zestful ease.5 And then I said: ‘Is this, I wonder, the way to Wisdom?’
This realization was followed by a decision to eat and drink normally, and to rely upon the sensitivity of his imagination and power of discrimination to bring about the desired result.
And it was here that Gautama meditated his way to ‘freedom’, Nirvana, perfect knowledge, self-realization. (We, of course, are welcome to doubt whether such an ultimate is attainable by man; but, all the same, we can recognize the value of the Buddha’s method.)
We can find even more extreme examples in the Christian saints; there is Heinrich Seuse (or Suso) (1295-1366), who, in his Autobiography, tells how he invented appalling bodily penances for himself, wearing a gown of hair and an iron chain that cut his body; then having an undergarment made of leather straps with brass tacks pointing inwards, which he wore for several years; he made a cross with nails pointing inwards, which he strapped to his back and carried for eight years. He slept on an old, studded door with no covering but a thin straw mat in winter or summer. He continued these ascetic practices for sixteen years until he considered that he had completely subdued the body. He was inspired by a passage in Meister Eckhart:
