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Reason, nature and the human being in the West: Part 4

 

Blake, The Ancient of Days. Scan by Mike Harden

Identification of the human being with nature

There is finally in Romantic thought a powerful strain of 'nature-mysticism'.

There is a long tradition of 'mystical' thought in the West. It lends itself particularly to the strain in Christianity which despises this world and tries to shift the focus elsewhere. An analysis within the Christian tradition describes the mystical experience as one which involves a feeling of awe, of being utterly overpowered, of energy or urgency, of 'stupor' and finally a feeling of 'fascination'. (Otto, The Idea of the Holy)

But other traditions appear to recognise much the same kind of phenomenon. The characteristics that are claimed to be common ground for a number of religious traditions have been listed like this:

The mystical experience

  1. The Unitary Consciousness, from which all the multiplicity of sensuous or conceptual or other empirical content has been excluded, so that there remains only a void and empty unity. This is the one basic, essential, nuclear characteristic, from which most of the others inevitably follow.
  2. Being nonspatial and nontemporal. This of course follows from the nuclear characteristic just listed.
  3. Sense of objectivity or reality.
  4. Feelings of blessedness, joy, peace, happiness, etc.
  5. Feeling that what is apprehended is holy, sacred, or divine. ...
  6. Paradoxicality.
  7. Alleged by mystics to be ineffable.

From Stace, W.T., Mysticism and Philosophy, London, 1961, Macmillan, pp.110-111.

 

The 'nature mysticism' which we find in Romantic writers like Wordsworth is not generally regarded as on all fours with the mysticism to be found in the world religions. But it shares with them - and this is our interest - something of the expansion or loss of personal identity that they regard as fundamentally characteristic of the mystical experience.

Here is a version of the religious perspective, for example:

"As a lump of salt thrown into water melts away . . . even so, 0 Maitreyi, the individual soul, dissolved, is the Eternal - pure consciousness, infinite, transcendent. Individuality arises by the identification of the Self, through ignorance, with the elements; and with the disappearance of consciousness of the many, in divine illumination, it disappears."

From the Brihadaranayaka Upanishad, quoted by Stace, Ibid. p. 118. (The Upanishads , ed cited by Stace, p.88.)

What do you think?

Do you think of mystical experience as a window onto reality?

Discussion site

Mysticism in Plotinus

No doubt we should not speak of seeing but, instead of seen and seer, speak boldly of a simple unity. For in this seeing we - neither distinguish nor are there two. The man ... is merged with the Supreme, one with it. Only in separation is there duality. This is why the vision baffles telling; for how can a man bring back tidings of the Supreme as detached when he has seen it as one with himself. . . . Beholder was one with beheld . . . he is become the unity, having no diversity either in relation to himself or anything else . . . reason is in abeyance and intellection, and even the very self, caught away, God-possessed, in perfect stillness, all the being calmed.

(Plotinus, Works, trans. by Stephen MacKenna, New York, New York Medici Society, Enneads VI, IX, and XI. Quoted by Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy)

 

And, more tersely, from the Christian tradition, in a thought which encompasses the whole of Nature as well as the individual soul, Meister Eckhart:

"All that a man has here externally in multiplicity is intrinsically One. Here all blades of grass, wood, and stone, all things are One. This is the deepest depth."

(quoted by Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy, p. 63)

The loss of personal identity, or, put another way, the identification of the self with Nature as a whole, explicit in this mot from Eckhart, is the thought that finds particular expression in nature mysticism. The religious mystic comes to understand that they and God are one. the nature mystic that they and Nature are one.

The identity of the nature-mystic expands as it were into nature, so that what is asserted is that the distinction between the individual and nature is lost. the two become one (or what is discovered is that what appeared to be two are have really been one all along).

EXERCISE

Identify something in the Modern world which is illuminated by the concept of the internal origination of change.

E.g. health?

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