by Sudhir Kakar
Visions are like hallucinations in that they too are images, such as flashes of light, which are visually perceived without the external stimulation of the organ of sight. They are, however, not hallucinations in that they occur during the course of intense religious experience rather than during a psychotic episode. They are thus less bizarre and less disorganized. Visions belong more to the realm of perceptions that take place say, during a dream, while falling asleep (hypnagogic) or when awakening (hypnopompic). None of these can be called a consequence of psychic impairment. Visions are, then, special kinds of dreams which find their way into waking life. To have vision is in itself as much a manifestation of mental disorder as is the corresponding process of real events being drawn across the barrier of sleep into the formation of dreams. Freud recognized the special nature of visions when, in an aside on the psychology of the mystic, he remarked, ‘It is easy to imagine, too, that certain mystics may succeed in upsettting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, so that, for instance, perception may be able to grasp happenings in the depths of the ego and in the id which were otherwise inaccessible to it.’33 Ramakrishna’s visions, as perhaps those of other mystics, do not constitute a unitary phenomenon. They span the whole range from what can be fairly described as hallucinations in the psychiatric sense, through more or less conscious visions, to what I would call ‘unconscious visions’ (or ‘visions of the unconscious’?) which cannot be described since the observing ego is absent. These are the ineffable ‘salt doll’ visions which comprise a small, though perhaps the most striking part of the total mystical repertoire.
Before we discuss the various kinds of visions, let us note their central common feature: the intense affect they generate, an affect that endows them with their characteristic sense of noesis. The affect, so strong that it is experienced as knowing partakes of some of the quality of the symbiotic state in infancy when the child knew the mother through an interchange of their feelings, when affect and cognition were not differentiated from one another.34
The affects are also manifested in the body, and Ramakrishna’s visions had certain well-defined physical correlates. At times, he would shudder while tears of joy streamed unchecked down his cheeks. At other times, his eyes would become half-closed and unfocused, a faint smile playing around the mouth while his body became completely rigid and had to be supported by a disciple lest he fall and hurt himself. The accompaniment to certain other trance states was a flushed chest or a strong burning sensation all over the body. Ramakrishna reports that once when in such a state, Brahmani, his tantric guru, tried to lead him to his bath. She could not hold his hand, so hot was his skin, and she had to wrap him in a sheet. The earth that stuck to his body while he was lying on the ground became baked. Then there is the feeling of being famished—one wonders, spiritual receptivity with a bodily analogue (or is it vice versa)? Or there are the bouts of gluttony in which he consumed enormous quantities of food, generally sweets. The craving for a particular dish or a sweet would come upon Ramakrishna unexpectedly, at any time of night or day. At these moments, Ramakrishna would be like a pregnant woman who is dominated by her obsession and cannot rest till the craving is satisfied.
From inside the tradition, all these manifestations are some of the 19 bodily signs of the mystical experience. To the analyst, however, they are a further confirmation of the mystic’s access to a period in early life—‘oral’ in the classical nomenclature—when the boundary between psyche and soma was much more porous than is the case in adulthood. His is the reclamation of a truly dialogical period wherein engendered affects were discharged through the body while physical experience found easy expression in affective states. Ramakrishna’s longing for the Mother, accompanied by breathlessness of a kind where he feels he is about to die, for instance, is akin to a certain type of asthmatic bodily manifestation of dammed-up urge for the mother’s succour.
Coming back to the various types of visions, the hallucinations, unbidden and unwelcome, belong to his period of insanity (unmada). ‘I would spit on the ground when I saw them. But they would follow me and obsess me like ghosts. One the day after such a vision I would have a severe attack of diarrhoea, and all these ecstasies would pass out through my bowels.’35
These hallucinations, or better, nightmarish visions, are not alien but perhaps as much a part of Ramakrishna’s personality as are his artistic sensibility or his more elevated, mystical visions. Their essential linkage may be better understood if we take recourse to Ernst Hartmann’s work on nightmares.36
In his study of nonpsychiatric volunteers who suffered from nightmares since childhood, Hartmann found that these subjects were usually sensitive people with a strong artistic bent and creative potential. More important, they demonstrate what he calls ‘thin boundaries of the mind,’ a permeability between self and object, waking/sleeping, fantasy/reality, adult/child, human/animal, and other such boundaries, which are relatively fixed for most people. The thin boundary of the mind, Hartmann tries to show, is at the root of both their artistic sensibility and potential for nightmares. It is tempting to speculate that Ramakrishna, and perhaps most other mystics, have a genetic biological predisposition, reinforced by some early experiences to which we will come later, to thin boundaries, also between nightmarish and ecstatic visions.
The second class of visions are the conscious ones. Welcomed by a prepared mind, they fall on a receptive ground. Conscious visions may be symbolic representations of an ongoing psychic process, the symbols taken from the mystic’s religious and cultural tradition. This is true, for instance, of Ramakrishna’s vision of his ‘enlightenment,’ which he ‘saw’ in the traditional yogic imagery of Kundalini, the coiled serpent energy rising through the different centres (chakras) of his body and opening up the ‘lotuses’ asociated with these centres, a specifically Hindu metaphor for mental transformation and the opening up of the psyche to hitherto inaccessible psychic experience. ‘I saw a 22, 23-year-old, exactly resembling me, enter the Sushumna nerve and with his tongue ‘sport’ (raman) with the vulva-(yoni) shaped lotuses. He began with the centre of the anus, through the centres of the penis, navel, and so on. The respective four-petaled, six-petaled, and ten-petaled lotuses which had been dropping, rose high and blossomed. I distinctly remember that when he came to the heart and sported with it with his tongue, the 12-petaled lotus which had been dropping rose high and opened its petals. Then he came to the 16-petaled lotus in the throat and the two-petaled one in the forehead. And last of all, the 1000-petaled lotus in the head blossomed.’37 This particular vision, in which self-representation is split into observing and participating aspects, can also be seen through psychiatric glasses as a heutroscopic depersonalization which occurs particularly among individuals with tendencies toward self-contemplation and introspection. Yet in the absence of any associated painful or anxious affect and the fact that this kind of vision was only one among Ramakrishna’s vast repertoire of visions with very different structures and qualities, I would tend to see its ground in a creativity, akin to the heightened fantasy of an artist or a writer, rather than in pathology. Goethe and Maupassant are two instances of creative writers who also experienced the phenomenon of their doubles.38
Other conscious visions are visual insights, images full of conviction and sudden clarity, couched either in a universal-mystical or in a particular, cultural-historical idiom. Some examples of the former would be seeing the universe filled with sparks of fire, or glittering like a lake of quicksilver, or all its quarters illuminated with the light of myriad candles. Such visions of light, we mentioned earlier, have been reported by mystics throughout the ages, and, indeed, seeing the divine light has been a central feature of many mystical cults, including 17th-century Quakerism. Another visual insight of the universal variety is seeing everything throbbing with consciousness: ‘Sometimes I see the same consciousness playing in small fish that is animating the world. Sometimes I see the world soaked with consciousness in the same w
ay as the earth is soaked with water during the rains.’39
The full import of the more culturally constituted visions, on the other hand, can only be appreciated if we keep in mind that Ramakrishna was a Hindu Brahmin living at a time—the 19th century, and place—rural Bengal—in which the ideas of pollution and polluting substances were strong, caste taboos strict, and the threatened loss of caste a horror of the first magnitude. Visions dissolving religious distinctions and caste taboos, such as the ones on touching forbidden substances or taking food from forbidden persons, were thus primarily expressed in a cultural imagery relevant to Ramakrishna’s community. For instance, ‘Then I was shown a Muslim with a long beard who came to me with rice in an earthen plate. He fed other Muslims and also gave me some grains to eat. Mother showed me there exists only one and not two.’40 ‘Another day I saw excrement, urine, rice, vegetables, and other foods. Suddenly the soul came out of my body and, like a flame, touched everything: excrement, urine, everything was tasted. It was revealed that everything is one, that there is no difference.’41 Or, when on the repeated egging on by his nephew, he asked the Goddess for occult powers and saw a middle-aged prostitute come up, squat on her haunches with her back to him, and proceed to evacuate. The vision revealed that occult powers were the shit of that whore.
There is another class of visions, or strictly speaking, mystical illusions, since these rest on a transmutation of external stimuli into creations which are nearer to those of the artist. Thus the way an English boy leans against a tree is transformed into a vision of Krishna; a prostitute walking toward him is changed into a vision of the Mother Goddess—both images irradiate his body and mind with beneficence. In Blake’s words, these illusions are ‘auguries of innocence’ enabling the mystic ‘to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.’
And finally, there are the indescribable, unconscious visions. ‘You see,’ Ramakrishna once said to diciples, ‘something goes up creeping from the feet to the head. Consciousness continues to exist as long as this power does not reach the head; but as soon as it reaches the head, all consciousness is completely lost. There is no seeing or hearing anymore, much less speaking. Who can speak? The very idea of “I” and “You” vanishes. While it (the serpent power) goes up, I feel a desire to tell you everything—how many visions I experience, of their nature, etc. Until it comes to this place (showing the heart) or at most this place (showing the throat) speaking is possible, and I do speak. But the moment it goes up beyond this place (showing the throat) someone forcibly presses the mouth, as it were, and I lose all consciousness. I cannot control it. Suppose I try to describe what kind of vision I experience when it goes beyond this place (showing the throat). As soon as I begin to think of them for the purpose of description the mind rushes immediately up, and speaking becomes impossible.’42
His feelings during these visions could then only be expressed in metaphors—‘I feel like a fish released from a pot into the water of the Ganges.’ Ramakrishna, however, does not seem to have been overly enamoured of these states which have been so often held as the apex of the mystical experience. He consciously tried to keep a trace of the observing ego—a little spark of the big fire—so as not to completely disappear, or disappear for a long time, into the unio mystica with its non-differentiation of ‘I’ and the ‘Other.’ ‘In samadhi, I lose outer consciousness completely, but God generally keeps a little trace of the ego in me for the enjoyment [here he uses a deliberately sensual metaphor, vilas] of intercourse. Enjoyment is only possible when “I” and “You” ‘remain.’ As he maintained, ‘I want to taste sugar, not become sugar.’ Yet in spite of himself he was often the salt doll that went into the ocean.
The unconscious visions, irreducible to language, are different from other visions which are ineffable only in the sense that their description can never be complete. The unconscious visions are a return to the world before the existence of language, visions of ‘reality’ through the destruction of language that the particular mystical act entails. As Octavio Paz puts it, ‘Language sinks its roots into this world but transforms its juices and reactions into signs and symbols. Language is the consequence (or the cause) of our exile from the universe, signifying the distance between things and ourselves. If our exile were to come to an end, languages would come to an end.’43 The salt doll ends exile, writes a finis to language.
The vicissitudes of separation have been, of course, at the heart of psychoanalytic theorizing on mysticism. The yearning to be reunited with a perfect, omnipotent being, the longing for the blissful soothing and nursing associated with the mother of earliest infancy (perhaps as much an adult myth as an infantile reality), has been consensually deemed the core of mystical motivation. What has been controversial is the way this longing has been viewed and the value placed on it by different analysts.
The traditional view, initiated by Freud, sees this yearning as reactive, a defence against the hatred directed towards the Oedipal father. For writers influenced by Melanie Klein, the longing for the blissful ‘good’ mother is a defensive denial of her terrifying and hated aspects.44 Given the limitation that Ramakrishna did not spend any time on the couch (but, then, neither have other theorists had mystics as patients), I can only say that there is no evidence in the voluminous record of his conversation, reminiscences, and accounts of his visions which is remotely suggestive of any strong hostility toward the Oedipal father. The evidence for the denial of the dreaded aspects of the mother is slightly greater, namely through a plausible interpretation of some elements of his vision in the Kali temple when he had taken up a sword to kill himself. However, seen in the total context of a large number of visions of the Mother Goddess, the ambiguous evidence of one particular vision is not enough to compel an acceptance of the Kleinian notions on mystical motivation.
Paul Horton has advanced a more adaptive view of mystical yearning and mystical states, especially during adolescence.45 He sees them as a consequence of the pangs of separation in which the felt reality of being utterly and agonizingly alone is transiently denied. The mystical experience is then a transitional phenomenon which soothes and reassures much as a baby is soothed by a blanket, a child by a stuffed toy or fairytale, an adult by a particular piece of music—all these various creations, material and nonmaterial, providing opportunities for the controlled illusion that heals.
There is much to be said for the hypothesis that experiences of separation and loss spurred Ramakrishna onto the mystical path. We know that Ramakrishna’s first quasi-mystical ecstasy when he became unconscious at the sight of white cranes flying against a background of dark clouds took place in the last year of his father’s final illness (according to one place in Ramakrishna’s reminiscences, two years after his father’s death), that is, at a time of an impending loss. And I have described the marked change that came over Ramakrishna is not unlike some of the Christian mystics in whose lives too, as David Aberbach has demonstrated, one could hypothesize a link between personal loss and their mystical calling.46 Teresa of Avila’s life in the church began with the death of her mother when Teresa was 12 years old. The loss of a parent or parent-surrogate may also be an early one, heightening a later sense of abandonment and the subsequent search for the ‘eternal Thou,’ as perhaps in the examples of St John of the Cross, whose father died a few months after his birth, or of Martin Buber, whose mother deserted him when he was three.
The mystical path is then also a way of lessening the agony of separation, mitigating the grief at loss, reducing the sadness of bereavement. In my own interviews with members of a mystical cult in India, loss was the single most important factor in their decision to seek its membership. The very embarkation on the mystical path had a therapeutic effect by itself, while any experience of a mystical state had a further marked effect in altering the person’s dysphoric state of mind.47 In contrast to the person’s previous feelings of apathy and depression, the turn to mysticism had the consequence of his dealing with grief in
a more orderly and more detached, though in a more transcendent, manner. Perhaps T.S. Eliot is correct in observing that ‘A man does not join himself with the universe so long as he has anything else to join himself with.’48
Of course, Ramakrishna’s two actual experiences of loss are not sufficient to explain the totality of his mysticism, the intensity of his yearning throughout life to end the state of separation from the Divine, and the acuteness of his distress at the absence of the Mother. The motivational skein of mysticism, as of any other psychic phenomenon, is composed of many strands. One could speculate that the advanced age of his mother at his birth, his family’s poverty and thus his mother’s added preoccupations with household tasks, the birth of another sibling when he was four, may have led to the emotional unavailability of the mother at a phase of the child’s development when his own needs were driving him closer to her. In other words, the suggestion is that in the crucial ‘rapprochement’ phase (which occurs later in India than in psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler’s timetable), the mother was unavailable at a time when his anxiety about separation, and its convergent depression, were at their apex. This would fix separation and its associated anxiety as the dominant theme of his inner life. Each feared or actual loss would reactivate separation anxiety together with a concomitant effort at combating it by reclaiming in fantasy an adored and adoring intimacy with the maternal matrix. The unity Ramakrishna aimed for is, then, not the mergerlike states of the infant at the breast, though these too prefigured his trances, but the ending of separation striven for by the toddler. It is a state in which both mother and child have boundaries in relation to each other while another boundary encloses their ‘double unit’ from the rest of the world. Here the enjoyment of the mother’s presence is deeply sensuous, almost ecstatic, and informs Ramakrishna’s selection of words; images and metaphors that describe his experiences.
