It is said that when the coiled serpent rests in the first lotus center, asleep, the personality of the individual is characterized by spiritual torpor. His world is the world of unexhilarated waking consciousness; yet he clings with avidity to this uninspired existence, unwilling to let go, just hanging on. I always think in this connection of what we have been told of the habits of dragons: how they hoard and guard things in their caves. What they usually hoard and guard in this way are beautiful girls and treasures of gold. They can make no proper use of either, of course, yet there they remain, always there. Such people in life are called “creeps,” and God knows they are numerous enough. The name of this first lotus is mūlādhāra, “the root base.” Its element is earth, it has four crimson petals, and its situation is described as between the genitals and the anus.
Center number two, then, is at the level of the genitals, and accordingly, anyone whose energies have mounted to this stage is of a psychology perfectly Freudian. Everything means sex to him, one way or another, as it did indeed to Freud himself, who was certain that there was nothing else people lived for: and we have now even a great school of thinkers who call themselves philosophers, interpreting the whole course of human history, thought, and art in terms of sex—repressed, frustrated, sublimated, or fulfilled. The name of this station is svādhishṭhāna, “her favorite resort.” It is a lotus of six vermilion petals, and its element is water.
Lotus three is at the level of the navel. Its name, maṇipūra, means “the city of the shining jewel.” It is a lotus of ten petals of the color of heavy-laden storm clouds; fire is its element; and the governing interest of anyone whose unfolding serpent power has become established on this plane is in consuming, conquering, turning all into his own substance, or forcing all to conform to his way of thought. His psychology, ruled by an insatiable will to power, is of an Adlerian type. And so Freud and Adler and their followers can be said to have interpreted the phenomenology of the spirit in terms exclusively of cakra s two and three—which is enough to explain their inability to make anything more interesting either of the mythological symbols of mankind or of the goals of human aspiration.
Fig. 6.3 — Cakras
For it is only at the level of the fourth cakra that specifically human, as distinct from sublimated animal, aims and drives become envisioned and awakened; and, according to the Indian view, it is to this level and beyond (not to the concerns of cakra s one, two, and three) that religious symbols, the imagery of art, and the questions of philosophy properly refer. The lotus of this center is at the level of the heart; its element is air; it has twelve petals of an orange-crimson hue (the color of the Bandhuka flower [Pentapoetes Phoenicea] ), and it has a very curious name. It is called anāhata, “not hit,” which means, when fully interpreted, “The sound that is not made by any two things striking together.” All the sounds that we hear in this world of time and space are made by two things striking together: the sound of my voice, for example, by the breath striking my vocal cords. Likewise, every other heard sound is of things, whether seen or unseen, striking together. And so, what then would be the sound not made that way?
The answer given is that the sound not made by any two things striking together is of that primal energy of which the universe itself is a manifestation. It is thus antecedent to things. One might think of it as comparable to the great humming sound of an electric-power station; or as the normally unheard humming of the protons and neutrons of an atom: the interior sound, that is to say, of that primal energy, vibrating, of which ourselves and all that we know and see are apparitions. And when heard, they say, the sound that it most resembles is OM.
This sacred Indian syllable of prayer and meditation is said to be composed of four symbolic elements. First, since the O, in Sanskrit, is regarded as an amalgam of the two sounds A and U, the sacred syllable can be written and heard as AUM, and when it is so displayed, three of its four elements are made visible. The fourth, then, is the Silence that surrounds the syllable so viewed, out of which it rises, back into which it falls, and which supports it as the ground of its appearance.
Now when pronounced, the A of AUM is heard proceeding from the back of the mouth. Coming forward with U, the sounding air mass fills the whole mouth cavity; and with M it is closed at the lips. When thus pronounced, they say, the syllable contains the sounds of all the vowels of speech. And since the consonants are but interruptions of these sounds, the holy syllable contains in itself—when properly pronounced—the seed sounds of all words and thus the names of all things and relationships.
There is an extremely interesting and important Upaniṣad, the Māṇḍūkya , in which the four symbolic elements of the syllable—the A, the U, the M, and the Silence—are interpreted allegorically as referring to four planes, degrees, or modes of consciousness. The A, resounding from the back of the mouth, is said to represent waking consciousness. Here the subject and the objects of its knowledge are experienced as separate from each other. Bodies are of gross matter; they are not self-luminous and they change their forms slowly. An Aristotelean logic prevails: a is not not-a. The nature of thought on this level is that of mechanistic science, positivistic reasoning, and the aims of its life are as envisioned at cakras 1, 2, and 3.
Next, with U, where the sound mass, moving forward, fills the whole head as it were, the Upaniṣad associates dream consciousness; and here the subject and object, the dreamer and his dream, though they may seem to be separate, are actually one, since the images are of the dreamer’s own will. Further, they are of a subtle matter, self-luminous, and of rapidly changing form. They are of the nature of divinities: and indeed all the gods and demons, Heavens and Hells, are in fact the cosmic counterparts of dream. Moreover, since on this subtle plane the seer and the seen are one and the same, all the gods and demons. Heavens and Hells are within us; are ourselves. Turn within, therefore, if you seek your model for the image of a god. Accordingly, it is experiences of this plane of consciousness that are rendered visible in the Oriental arts.
Next, M, third element of the syllable, where the intonation of this holy sound terminates forward, at the closed lips, the Upaniṣad associates with deep dreamless sleep. There is here neither object seen nor seeing subject, but unconsciousness—or rather, latent, potential consciousness, undifferentiated, covered with darkness. Mythologically this state is identified with that of the universe between cycles, when all has returned to the cosmic night, the womb of the cosmic mother: “chaos,” in the language of the Greeks, or in Genesis, the first “formless waste, with darkness over the seas.” There is no consciousness of any objects either of waking or of dream, but only uninflected consciousness in its pristine, uncommitted state—lost, however, in darkness.
The ultimate aim of yoga, then, can be only to enter that zone awake: which is to say, to “join” or to “yoke” (Sanskrit verbal root yuj, whence the noun yoga ) one’s waking consciousness to its source in consciousness per se, not focused on any object or enclosed in any subject, whether of the waking world or of sleep, but sheer, unspecified and unbounded. And since all words refer to objects or to object-related thoughts or ideas, we have no word or words for the experience of this fourth state. Even such words as “silence” or “void” can be understood only with reference to sound or to things—as of no sound, or as of no thing. Whereas here we have come to the primal Silence antecedent to sound, containing sound as potential, and to the Void antecedent to things, containing as potential the whole of space-time and its galaxies. No word can say what the Silence tells that is all around and within us, this Silence that is no silence but to be heard resounding through all things, whether of waking, dream, or dreamless night—as surrounding, supporting, and suffusing the syllable AUM.
Fig. 6.4 — Sukhāvatī
Listen to the sound of the city. Listen to the sound of your neighbor’s voice, or of the wild geese honking skyward. Listen to any sound or silence at all without interpreting it, and the anāhata will be heard of the Voi
d that is the ground of being, and the world that is the body of being, the Silence and the Syllable. Moreover, when once this sound has been “heard,” as it were, as the sound and being of one’s own heart and of all life, one is stilled and brought to peace; there is no need to quest any more, for it is here, it is there, it is everywhere. And the high function of Oriental art is to make known that this truly is so; or, as our Western poet Gerhart Hauptmann has said of the aim of all true poetry: “to let the Word be heard resounding behind words.” The mystic Meister Eckhart expressed the same thought in theological terms when he told his congregation, “Any flea as it is in God is nobler than the highest of the angels in himself. Things in God are all the same: they are God Himself.”3 That, in short, is the experience of anāhata, at the level of the fourth cakra , where things no longer hide their truth, but the marvel is experienced that Blake envisioned when he wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”4
And so what, then, of cakra five?
Cakra five is at the level of the larynx and is called viśuddha, “purification.” It is a lotus of sixteen petals of a smoky purple hue, and its element is ether, space. The yogi at this center is leaving art, religion, philosophy, and even thought behind; for, as in the Purgatory of the Christian faith the soul is purged of residual attachments to earth in preparation for an experience of the Beatific Vision of God, so in this Indian locus of purgation the aim is to eliminate all interpositions of the world between oneself and the immediate hearing of AUM, or, expressed in visual terms, between oneself and the vision of God. The ideals and disciples of this stage are those rather of the hermit’s cell and monastery than of art and civilized life: not aesthetic, but ascetic. And when, at last, the level of the sixth center is then attained, the mystic inward eye fully opens, and the mystic inward ear. One experiences then in immediate force the whole sight and sound of the Lord whose form is the Form of forms and whose radiance resounds. The name of the lotus here is ājñā, which means “authority, command.” Its petals are two, most beautifully white. Its element is mind, and its place, well known, is a little above and between the brows. One is here in Heaven, and the soul beholds its perfect object, God.
However, there is one last barrier still; for, as the great Indian saint and teacher Ramakrishna, of the last century, once told his devotees, when the accomplished yogi beholds in this way the vision of his Beloved, there is still, as it were, an invisible wall of glass between himself and that one in whom he would know eternal extinction. For his ultimate aim is not the bliss of this sixth but the absolute, non-dual state beyond all categories, visions, sentiments, thoughts, and feelings whatsoever, which is of the seventh and final lotus, sahasrāra, “thousand-petaled,” at the crown of the head.
Let us withdraw, therefore, the glass. The two, the soul and its god, the inward eye and its object, are extinguished, both and equally. There is now neither an object nor a subject, nor anything to be known or named, but the Silence alone that is the fourth and final grounding element of the once heard, now no longer heard, syllable AUM.
And here, of course, one is beyond art; beyond even Indian art. Indian art, I would say, is concerned to suggest and render experiences akin to those of the lotus centers four to six: at four, the objects and creatures of this world as they are (to use Eckhart’s phrase again) “in God”; at five, the terrifying, devastating aspects of the cosmic powers in their ego-shattering roles, personified as wrathful, odious, and horrific demons; and at six, their bliss-bestowing, fear-dispelling, wondrous, peaceful, and heroic forms. Thus one is ever beholding in these truly sublime, visionary masterworks either creatures represented under the aspect of eternity, or mythic personifications of the aspects of eternity known to man.
There is therefore little, very little, of empirical daylight reality in Indian art, of the world as known to men’s normal eyes. The interest, far and away, is in gods and mythological scenes. And when one approaches Indian temples, of whatever period or whatever style, there is something altogether remarkable about the way they appear either to have burst out of the landscape or to have dropped upon it from aloft—altogether in contrast, for example, to the lovely temple gardens of the Far East. They have either burst from beneath the earth as an eruption of subterranean landscape, or have descended merely to rest on earth as the chariot or magical palace of some celestial divinity. Indeed, on entering any of the numerous, altogether wonderful cave temples, chiseled, as it were, by wizard craftsmen, deep into the sides of mountains, not only do we leave behind the world of normal human experience to enter one of earth-inhabiting gnomes, but we also leave behind our normal sense of reality and find these forms to be more true, more real, more intimately our own, somehow, than the accustomed revelations of our light-world lives. Indian art, that is to say, is an art concerned with the transcendence of our normal two-eyed experiences of life, meant to open this third eye, in the middle of the forehead, of the lotus of command, and to reveal to us thus, even while we are awake, a dream-world vision of Heaven or Hell become stone.
All of which is very different from the accent of the arts of the other East, of China, Korea, and Japan. The Buddhism of those lands, of course, originated in India and came to China in the first century A.D., to Japan from Korea in the sixth. And along with Buddhism there was brought, indeed, the wonderful Indian art of depicting the powers of all the Heavens above and Hells below this plane of earth. The natural tendency of the Far Eastern mind is much more earthly, however, than the Indian, more matter-of-fact and concerned with the optical, temporal, and practical aspects of existence. As the eminent Japanese Buddhist philosopher Daisetz T. Suzuki has pointed out in his many writings on the history of the doctrine, the luxuriance of the Indian imagination, dazzling in poetic flight, indifferent to the features of time, soaring at ease through spheres and aeons measured in terms only of infinities, contrasts altogether with the manner of thought particularly of China, where the usual term for the vastness of this universe is, “the world of ten thousand things.” That is number enough for the eye and for the mind concerned rather with time than with eternity: time in its practical passage, and space in terrestrial measure, not extrapolated beyond sight. Hence, even in the Buddhist arts of the Far East there is evident generally a displacement of interest from the prospect of the sixth cakra to the level of cakra four; from that moonlight lotus of two petals, where divinity is beheld unclothed of things, to the rich garden of this beautiful world itself, where things comfortable in their places may be recognized as themselves divine in their very idiosyncrasies. For, “even in a single hair,” as I have heard, “there are a thousand golden lions.”
Fig. 6.5 — The Way of Nature
Two distinct orders of art can therefore be readily recognized in the Far East. One is the order of the Buddhist icons, continuing as far as possible in the spirit of the Indian visionary inspiration, reduced, however, to the level of cakra four. The other is most notably represented in the unsurpassed tradition of Chinese and Japanese landscape painting. These are works of an altogether different spirit, representing a native Far Eastern philosophy, the philosophy of the Tao, which is a Chinese word translated generally as “the Way, the Way of Nature.” And this Way of Nature is the way in which all things come into being out of darkness into light, then pass out of light back into darkness, the two principles—light and dark—being in perpetual interaction and, in variously modulated combinations, constituting this whole world of “ten thousand things.”
The light and the dark of this system of thought are named respectively yang and yin, which are words referring to the sunny and the shady sides of a stream. Yang is of the sunny side; yin, the shady. On the sunny side there is light, there is warmth, and the heat of the sun is dry. In the shade, there is the cool, rather, of the earth, and the earth is moist. Dark, cold, and moist; light, hot, and dry: earth and sun in counteraction. These are associated, further, with the female and the male as the
passive and active principles. There is no moral verdict here intended; neither principle is “better” than the other, neither “stronger” than the other. They are the two equally potent grounding principles on which all the world rests, and in their interaction they inform, constitute, and decompose all things.
Myths to Live By Page 13
