Ramakrishna, Sri

Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa - Sri Ramakrishna Ashrama, Mysore: Chetan Hegde M

Sri Ramakrishna (1836-86)

A once obscure and conventionally ‘uneducated’ village boy, Gadhadhar Chatterji, who became a prominent Hindu holy man, emphasizing non-contradiction and unity among all religions.

Ramakrishna claims that he practiced all faiths and discovered that they all lead to the same spiritual place (i.e. they produce the same kind of numinous experience and attitudes toward God, other people and the meaning of life).

Just how thoroughly, however, one can effectively rid oneself of one’s cultural and religious biases remains open to question.

By way of analogy, it almost sounds like a rabbit saying, “I tried being a bird, a fish, a cow and a snake… and all are just the same.”

This phenomenological issue aside, biographers say Ramakrishna often fell into extended ecstatic raptures. These trances were extreme to the point that even Ramakrishna himself sometimes wondered if he’d gone mad.

At such moments the Blessed Mother, Kali, apparently would appear in a mystical vision and console him with her graces.

Before marrying Sri Devi, Ramakrishna prayed that Kali would “root out” all of her sexual tendencies. Not surprisingly, their marriage was never consummated. While this may seem strange to many who can’t see beyond material techno-sexual culture, the two reportedly were united in a purely spiritual sense, making sexual union redundant, perhaps even distasteful.

The Gospel of Ramakrishna, based on the writings of his direct disciples, is widely available in the West. Essentially it’s a wisdom book, full of pithy sayings and examples. In one analogy Ramakrishna notes, for instance, that bad tomatoes rot faster when bashed up and thrown in the garbage heap, referring to the idea that the soul may be purified of ungodly attitudes (i.e. bad tomatoes) through holy suffering (see » Bhagavad Gita, Alchemy).

Conforming to the idea of karma transfer, an Indian biographer writes that Ramakrishna apparently:

had a vision of his subtle body…[with] a number of sores on the back. He was puzzled by the sight, but it was made clear…profane people had caused the sores on his body. They themselves had been purified, but they had left the suffering arising from their own sins with him.¹

This well represents some of the central beliefs regarding the dynamics of Hindu mysticism.  Similar but not identical beliefs can be found in the Christian mystical tradition–e.g. that souls close to God suffer for the liberation or salvation of less pure or holy souls (see » Faustina Kowalska).

Further on this point, the common worldly critique that “prayer does nothing” might, from the perspective of a bona fide saint, be seen as an unfortunate misunderstanding perpetuated by ignorance or sin.

On a more publicly visible level, Ramakrishna’s disciples founded the international charity organization known as the Ramakrishna Mission. And his most beloved disciple, Swami Vivekananda, became another pivotal Hindu religious figure.

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¹ Swami Tejasananda, A Short Life of Sri Ramakrishna, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama [Publication Department], 1990, p. 92.

» Brahman, Contemplation, Hinduism, Mental Prayer, Spirit, Vocal Prayer

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Ramacharaka, Swami

Ramacharaka, Swami (1799-189?)

Hindu-influenced mystic philosopher who writes extensively on astral planes where the self allegedly resides between reincarnations.

In his book Mystic Christianity Ramacharaka offers a personally imaginative, if not scholarly, account of the meaning of the Bible and particularly of the life of Christ.

Most likely Ramacharaka had interior visions or experienced imaginal scenes concerning various personages in the Bible. But the veracity of these visions seems impossible to prove or refute.

Like so many religious thinkers, Ramacharaka seems to adapt sacred scripture to his own personal and cultural filters.

By the same token, it could be argued that most Jewish and Christian believers are prejudiced by interpreting aspects of Biblical scripture according to their respective personal and cultural biases. And the same could be said of any religious or scientific body of believers.

The debate as to ‘who’s got it right’ continues. But ultimately it seems that almost any truth claim, be it religious, philosophical or scientific comes down to belief.

On the Web:

• http://users.telenet.be/ananda/ramach.htm
• Wikipedia asserts that Ramacharaka is a pseudonym for William Walker Atkinson (1862–1932)

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Sufism

Sufi Festival: Haseeb ANSAR

Sufism

The term sufi (Arabic: mystic) is likely based on the root suf (wool), recalling the simple woolen garments worn by ascetics.

Sufism is often regarded as an unorthodox type of Islamic mysticism.

While Westerners might think Sufis are itinerant holy men wandering through remote deserts, Sufism became an organized movement around the 7th and 8th centuries, mostly in reaction to the worldly Middle-Eastern Umayyad dynasty.

The well-known Dervish orders arose in India around the 12th and 13th centuries. These emphasized ecstatic states and remained influential until quite recently.

The Sufi Al-Hallaj (CE 858-922 ) advocated the mystical union of the individual soul with God, was branded a heretic, imprisoned and later executed.

The essence of Sufism might best be expressed by the 13th-century and increasingly popular poet Jala ud-Din Rumi. Rumi’s verse can be found in New Age bookstores and his message prefigures Joseph Campbell’s dictum of follow your bliss.

» Islam, Prayer, Sikhism

At Earthpages.org:

• “Surfin’ with Sufis” (expands on this entry)

On the Web:

• Excellent entry at Wikipedia
• Try http://ias.org too. Good information there and they are non-sectarian and non-denominational Muslims (Buzz Kill)

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Spirit

spirit catcher: Rannie Turingan

Spirit

One definition of the word spirit points to an incorporeal being which may not be seen, as compared to a ‘ghost’ which allegedly is seen by a living person.

Spirit has several other meanings, such as an animating or vital force within life, the soul or some some kind of invisible force or presence that permeates the created universe.

Spirit arguably becomes an ambiguous concept if assessed merely from a conceptual level of analysis.

Many New Age thinkers, for instance, equate the notion of spirit with that of matter/energy. This is a dubious analog when we consider Rudolf Otto and C. G. Jung’s treatment of the term numinosity and, moreover, the Christian understanding of The Holy Spirit.

It almost seems as if those who haven’t experienced any difference between the perception of matter/energy and spirit tend to automatically equate the two, just as one might equate any seemingly similar variables without having had a significantly direct experience of them.

By way of analogy, if one had never drunk white wine they might look at its color, recognize it as a liquid and say white wine is equivalent to apple juice or perhaps urine. And so it is, many mystics content, with the experience of spirit. Those who know, they claim, realize that spirit’s character may vary significantly, not only because spirit is passing through psychological and cultural filters, but also because of the differences inherent to spirit itself.

serpent spirits: Jeremiah Ketner

Since the experience of ‘the spirit’ may be associated with a ‘particular spirit,’ as in the opening definition, we have the notion of ‘pure and impure,’ ‘holy and unholy,’ ‘good and evil’ spirits, along with their respective abilities to influence human beings for good or ill.

This tremendous diversity as to the meaning of spirit is not just found in Christianity but in most world religions. But again, some well-meaning but arguably unknowing individuals tend to simplify this diversity by making unsupportable claims, as did Sri Ramakrishna, that all paths involve the same type of spirit, lead to the same place, and so on.

This may have been Ramakrishna’s belief when dabbling in different religions from his master perspective of Hinduism but it certainly isn’t everyone’s.

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Numinous

Numinous

The term numinous is often said to have been coined by the German Lutheran scholar Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) to describe a personal experience of spiritual power.

But in 1647 Nathaniel Ward wrote in The simple cobler of Aggawam in America:

The Will of a King is very numinous; it hath a kinde of vast universality in it.

Source: Oxford English Dictionary

The term is derived from the Latin numen, usually translated as “the presence of a god or goddess” or the “will, manifestation or power of a deity.”

The most ancient example is in a text of Accius cited by Varro: “Alia hic sanctitudo est aliud nomen et numen Iouis” (“Here, the holiness of Jupiter is one thing, the name and power of Jupiter another.”

Schilling, Robert. “Numen.” Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. Lindsay Jones. Vol. 10. 2^nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. 6753-6754. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale.

For Otto, numinosity originates from outside the self but is perceived within. A higher process than the magical, the numinous takes many forms. It has primitive, daemonic and dark as well as elevated, noble and pure aspects.

Otto calls the absolute and purest experience of the numen “the Holy.” This high aspect of the numinous involves an experience marked by a feeling of “Awefulness,” “Overpoweringness,” “Energy” or “Urgency.”

Sometimes Otto implies that the numinous is identical among all religions. Other times he reveals a Christian bias, suggesting that the numinosity experienced through the Bible and by various Christian mystics is absolute and pure.

From today’s standards, Otto’s definition of numinosity might seem a bit vague and unsystematic. But his work is regarded as a milestone and continues to have a profound influence in depth psychology and comparative religion.

The term numinous is also used by C. G. Jung to depict a spiritual experience involving some kind of alteration of ego-based consciousness (i.e. “altered states”).

For Jung, the experience of numinosity arises when an archetype of the collective unconscious is activated. Depending on combined factors such as the condition of the psyche, the stability of the ego and the archetypal source, numinosity may be either psychologically healing or destructive.

Joseph Campbell says that numen has parallel terms in the “Melanesian mana, Dakotan wakon, Ironquoian orenda and Algonquian manitu.”

But it would be unwarranted to suppose that these terms necessarily point to identical spiritual forces and related experiences.

Along these lines, the Romanian scholar, Mircea Eliade says that numinosity exhibits a diversity of intensities, qualities and effects. And Deidre Sklar adds from the perspective of dance:

While the experience alternately called presence, or unity, or numinosity may be the same across spiritual traditions, “ways of doing” are different. Presence comes in a multitude of flavors. “The virgin,” is different than “Buddha” or “God the Father.” Kneeling in prayer before the virgin is a different bodily experience than sitting cross-legged in meditation. Both the natures of the divinities and the ritual practices performed in their names are elaborated in distinct communities to do different work upon soma.

Deidre Sklar, “Reprise: On Dance Ethnography.” Dance Research Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1 Summer, 2000: 70-77, p. 72.

Sigmund Freud saw the numinous in terms of a person recalling the unified “oceanic bliss” that everyone apparently felt within the mother’s womb. Perhaps Freud’s greatest shortcoming was his inability – or perhaps unwillingness – to study religion on its own terms, at its own level of experience.

Before Otto, Jung, Campbell, Eliade and Freud, the philosopher Immanuel Kant spoke to a realm of the noumena. Kant said we cannot know the character of the noumena but may ascertain its existence by virtue of the “intelligible order of things” in the empirical world of phenomena.

Kant’s noumena may point to a source of numinous experience but it is not the numinous itself.

Mystics from various traditions write about different numinous experiences. And even within a single tradition descriptions of the numinous vary dramatically in terms of both quality and intensity.

Consider, for example, the ordinary churchgoer who claims to feel an invisible presence of peace on entering a Church as compared to the full-fledged saint who speaks of various all-absorbing states of numinous rapture.

In Paradise Lost John Milton depicts Satan’s dismay when he sees the gloom of hell that he’s traded for the light of heaven.

“Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,” Said then the lost archangel, “this the seat That we must change for Heaven, this mournful gloom For that celestial light?”

At Earthpages.org:

• An Outline of Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy
• C. G. Jung and Numinosity
• Celibacy, Sex and Spirituality

» Archetypal Image, Aurobindo (Sri), Ego, Holy, Inflation, Jackson, (Michael), Joachim of Fiore, Mysticism, Numen, “Numinosity,” Paranoia, Participation Mystique, Power, Psychosis, Ramakrishna (Sri), Religion, Sargon, Symbol, Teresa of Avila (St.) Kowalska (Faustina Helen, St). Vampires, Vulcan

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Seer

Thee High Priestess ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Blah (T.H.P.O.T.T.O.P.B.) by Suzanna / Comtesse de Wurzeltod

Seer

In the religious sense a seer is a person with an alleged gift of inner sight. He or she apparently ‘sees’ the past and future, possibly across great distances and through different spiritual realms.

Some spiritual figures like Da Free John, Sri Aurobindo, Sri Chinmoy and Paramahansa Yogananda apparently receive other people’s thoughts, feelings and experiences, and claim to use these abilities to assess their disciples’ degree of spiritual development.

Mystical Hinduism, particularly the guru ideal, stresses the importance of the seer. And his or her gifts are said to coincide with and contribute to spiritual wisdom.

In Catholicism the seer often adheres to the rules and regulations of their order, as in monastic Catholicism. Spiritual abilities are viewed as gifts or charisms from God and are usually played down out of humility–that is, there’s no desire to puff oneself up as a big holy person, an unsavory approach which in Jungian terms is called inflation or self-aggrandizement.

Catholic seers allegedly have the gift of ‘reading hearts,’ which includes knowing another person’s thoughts, inclinations and overall spiritual condition.

In Greek myth Tiresias was a blind seer.

Some are willing to entertain the idea that a seer may possess unconventional abilities but question their source as well as the ethics as to how they are applied in daily life.

Meanwhile, skeptics like James Randi remain unconvinced about everything paranormal, the notion of ‘seeing’ and so on.

» Clairaudience, Clairsentience, Clairvoyance, Remote Viewing, Rishis, Psi, Wisdom

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Teresa of Ávila, St.

Ecstasy of St. Teresa of Avila, by Bernini

St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582)

Spanish Carmelite Catholic mystic whose frank autobiography was criticized by the American psychologist and philosopher William James. However, this work along with The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection are widely regarded as spiritual classics.

St. Teresa was a profound mystic and convent organizer who spoke of degrees of purity, detachment from the world (to include one’s relatives) and supernatural graces encountered by the seeker on the journey to God-awareness and spiritual perfection.

For St. Teresa God’s love was experienced as a kind of spiritual water for which she was ever thirsty.

In keeping with the general motif of the Dark Night of the Soul, she spoke of terrible “dry” periods where grace was lacking. During these moments she neither enjoyed this world nor a heavenly one, “as if crucified between heaven and earth, suffering and receiving no help from either.”

St. Teresa apparently levitated. This made her uncomfortable because she didn’t want to draw any special attention to herself.

Perhaps her most enduring saying is “God alone suffices.” »  John of the Cross (St.), Numinous, Pollution

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Underhill, Evelyn

Evelyn Underhill and Michael Ramsey by mberry

Underhill, Evelyn (1850-1941)

Respected British author on the subject of mysticism.

Underhill is often described as an Anglo-Catholic. Her book, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911) is widely regarded as a Christian classic.

Sincere mystics, she writes, are aware of the need for intense rational discernment and self-analysis.

Ecstasies, no less than visions and voices, must, they declare, be subjected to unsparing criticism before they are recognized as divine: whilst some are undoubtably “of God,” others are no less clearly “of the devil.”¹

In Practical Mysticism: A little book for normal people (1914), published at the outbreak of WW-I, Underhill makes a distinction between meditation and contemplation.

While these two terms often overlap, Underhill suggests that, for the most part, meditation may lead to more elevated forms of contemplative understanding. As Underhill puts it:

Now meditation is a half-way house between thinking and contemplating: and as a discipline, it derives its chief value from this transitional character.²

Arguably the strength of this definition is that it’s not ‘this or that,’ ‘black or white,’ as so many fundamentalists and conservatives depict the world. Rather, it represents a developmental approach. » Alice in Wonderland, Aurobindo (Sri), Clairaudience, Kabbala

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¹ Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (New York: The New American Library, 1955 [1911]), p. 361.

² ___, Practical Mysticism: A little book for normal people (London: Dent, 1914), p. 46.

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Wisdom

Woman of Wisdom

Originally uploaded by Fort Photo

Wisdom

When a person seems to know through insight, intuition and experience the best course of action or the possible outcomes of situations, we might say they are wiser than those who make superficial, snap or conventional judgments.

Wisdom may or may not involve scholarly, specialized or factual knowledge. The intuitive aspects of wisdom may involve revealed, infused, illuminated or ‘transcendental’ knowledge–that is, knowledge that seers and mystics from most world religions say extends beyond the conventional understanding of space and time.

The notion of wisdom is sometimes hotly debated among various religious traditions. Some Hindus, for example, might see Christians as slaves to externally imposed dogmas and rituals that lock them up in ignorance, while some Christians may see the works of the devil binding Hindus to false or incomplete beliefs which deny or ‘water down’ the belief that Christ is the unique and only human incarnation truly equal to God.

But even within a given world religion, opposing viewpoints can be found as to the nature of wisdom. Fundamentalist Christians, for instance, often have knee-jerk, hypocritical and perhaps sometimes violent reactions to the deeper aspects of Christian mysticism that they themselves haven’t experienced. In fact some Christians go as far to say that all mysticism is of the devil.

The Protestant Josh McDowell seems to lean in this direction. In The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict McDowell begins by noting in a sentence or two that there are many types of mysticism but proceeds to only discuss his perception of the errors of the “pantheistic mysticism of the East” (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1999: 643-658 ). And his discussion equates the general term ‘mysticism’ as if it only applied to Eastern mysticism, most notably that of Zen Buddhism.

McDowell’s argument overlooks the plain and obvious fact that the term ‘mysticism’ applies to a wide variety of religious experiences along with the key question as to their place of origin and related ethical orientation–e.g. (a) God as ‘wholly other’ (b) God as conceptualized in pantheism or (c) an evil being hostile to God.

In fact, Catholics and other Protestants take great pains to differentiate those interior experiences which are from God and those which are not.

» Alchemy, Ancestor Cults, Anselm (St.), Ashram, Bible, Book of Job, Bowie (David), Brahman, Clairaudience, Cupid, Dhammapada, DSM-IV-TR, Ego, Hero, I Ching, Jnana yoga, Levels of Knowledge, Kabbala, Koan, Kowalska (Saint Maria Faustina Helena), Manichaeism, Mystic, Neurosis, Odin, Paranormal, Pericles, Ramakrishna (Sri), Reincarnation, Seer, Serenity Prayer, Theosophy, Theravada Buddhism, Tiresias

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Watts, Alan

Emptiness

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Miss Gong & The Flickers

Watts, Alan (1915-1973)

No one really knows just who the British-born Alan Watts was. Scholar, writer, Tantric yogi, ex-Catholic synthesizer of Eastern and Western beliefs–all would apply.

An innovate teacher, Watts mastered the art of spontaneity. His wit and enthusiasm made him one of the leading advocates of mystical introspection.

His abundant charms, however, may have been garnered at the expense of rigorous thought.

For example, one of his arguments about the West “not getting it” is developed from simplistic assumptions.

In his video, Time: The More it Changes, Watts says that Western psychologists used to explain human behavior in terms of instinct, and now – 1972 – people tend to speak of “drives.” He then provides counterexamples to suggest the opposite, saying that he’s not “driven” to eat or have sex, but rather chooses to “identify” with these activities.

The problem with this argument is that not all psychologists see human behavior as solely motivated by “drives.” Even Freud, whose idea of the libido is often viewed as excessively instinctual, recognized the importance of social forces in regulating biological drives.

Meanwhile, twentieth-century existentialists argue that what makes a human truly human (and free) is the “gap of nothingness” that stands between drives and actions (or inaction). And religious people speak of “grace” that may override drives.

But Watts did popularize and provoke. In 1968 he admitted to taking five different types of psychedelic drugs to learn about mysticism.

I myself have experimented with five of the principal psychedelics: LSD-25, mescaline, psilocybin, dimethyl-tryptamine (DMT), and cannabis. I have done so, as William James tried nitrous oxide, to see if they could help me in identifying what might be called the “essential” or “active” ingredients of the mystical experience.

Alan Watts, “Psychedelics and Religious Experience,” California Law Review, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Jan., 1968:74-85), p. 75.

As the following demonstrates, Nordstrom and Pilgrim take an extremely dim view of his ideas.

Watts’ mysticism is deviant because it seeks perversely to undo mystical experience. This is done by inferring from the fact that mystical experience is not ineffable, that there is no separation between the spiritual and the physical, which eventually is transformed into the view that the spiritual and the physical are virtually the same thing, which Watts calls his “spiritual materialism”…[this] both precludes the possibility and obviates the necessity of mystical experience. What is perverse about Watts’ mysticism, in a word, is that it is antimystical.
This would not be so perverse were it not for the fact that Watts considered himself to be a mystic, as remarks like “I am a shameless mystic” and “a mystic in spite of myself” make clear.
Watts is a strange and confusing combination of a man-of-letters and a mystic, who used his extraordinary articulateness and literary ability to undermine mystical experience by rejecting the sense in which such experience is ineffable. What one is left with, unfortunately, is, as Zen master Rinzai once put it, “words and phrases, however excellent.”

Louis Nordstrom and Richard Pilgrim, “The Wayward Mysticism of Alan Watts,” Philosophy East and West, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Jul., 1980: 381-401), pp. 381-382.

Love or hate him, according to legend Watts predicted a flash of lightning which would accompany his death. At the moment he died, a local Druid’s bell apparently rang out in town, off schedule. Later, a lightning flash hit the cable leading to the bell.

Similar paranormal phenomena are said to have accompanied the death of Carl Jung, another prominent innovator and advocate of an East-West synthesis. » Confucianism, Ego, Id, Superego, Taoism, Wu Wei, Yogi

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