The Outsider (47 page)

It is unfortunate that we do not know enough about Traherne
’
s life to observe what happened when he made his decision to live on bread and water and wear leather clothes. We know in Fox
’
s case, though; we know that Fox was not a complete success by the Outsider
’
s stern criterion of success. Traherne became a priest to a country family, where he lived a quiet, meditative life, dying at the age of thirty-eight. To judge by the
Centuries of Meditation,
Traherne succeeded in permanently adjusting his vision until he saw the world with the same eyes as Van Gogh, the Van Gogh of the
‘
Road with Cypresses
’
. That adjustment, I am inclined to believe, can only be achieved in solitude: Nietzsche understood that society is a hall of distorting mirrors.

By way of comparison with the Western mystics we have been dealing with, we might turn to the life of a great Hindu mystic, Ramakrishna. Here the environment is different. India has its tradition of contemplation and
‘
self-surmounting
’
(although at the time of Ramakrishna
’
s birth, 1836, Western ideas were pushing that tradition into the background). Here we can see what happens when the Outsider can slip into a tradition where he ceases to be a lonely misfit.

(In the following pages I am quoting from the anonymous
Life of Ramakrishna
issued by the Advaita Ashrama in Madras. It is, on the whole, informative and well-balanced; in its latter more than in its earlier part.)

Sri Ramakrishna was born of Brahmin parents in a little Indian village in Bengal. From a very early age he showed that he saw the world with the same eyes as Traherne. Acting in plays at the local religious festival, he would plunge into a
trance of joy, so that onlookers felt as if he really were the
‘
baby Krishna
⁵
whom he was acting. He was an imaginative child who loved to read religious stories and legends aloud to the villagers (these, of course, would be the only imaginative literature available to him); in fact, he so obviously entered into the spirit of the stories that his parents thought it was a sign of hysteria or nervous instability.

When Ramakrishna was only seven, he had an important experience, which I give in his own words:

One day in June or July
.
.. I was walking along a narrow path separating the paddy fields, eating some puffed rice, which I was carrying in a basket. Looking up at the sky, I saw a beautiful, sombre thundercloud. As it spread rapidly over the whole sky, a flight of snow-white cranes flew overhead in front of it. It presented such a beautiful contrast that my mind wandered to far-off regions. Lost to outward sense, I fell down, and the puffed rice was scattered in all directions. Some people found me
...
and carried me home..
.
⁷

It is immediately obvious that this experience has something in common with Nietzsche
’
s two
‘
vastations
⁵
; Nietzsche was older, he was a child of a self-critical civilization that could not give itself so easily to extreme emotions. Yet both Nietzsche and Ramakrishna experienced a sense of harmony, a possibility of a way of seeing the world that would make life a continuous
‘
form of intensity
⁵
. Or remember Nietzsche, walking around the lake of Silvaplana and crying
‘
tears of joy
⁵
.
‘
I have seen thoughts rising on my horizon, the like of which I have never seen before
⁵
;
‘
Calm and peace spread over the mountains and the forests
⁵
;
‘
Six thousand feet above men and Time
⁵
.

But there is an enormous difference. Ramakrishna lived in a little village. He was a Brahman
’
s son; his life was reasonably well shielded from violent and unpleasant things. His life was idyllic (all his life he could be plunged into ecstasy, literally, by considering the country-idyll episode of Krishna
’
s life). He was like a fine string that could resound sympathetically to the slightest vibrations of beauty or harmony in his surroundings. We might be excused for asking: Would he still have felt the world so harmonious if he had been born into Raskolnikov
^’
s
Petersburg, or the environment
Graham Greene pictures in
Brighton Rock?

It
is true, I think, that Ramakrishna was lucky to spend
his
formative years in a peaceful environment, but that is not the whole answer. Nietzsche had his vision of
‘
enthusiasm and life
’
on the Strasbourg road, after days spent among the brutality and stench of a battlefield. But we must return to this point later. Ramakrishna
’
s spiritual temperament, or perhaps we should say his imaginative sensitivity, continued to develop throughout his youth. His elder brother became a priest in the Kali temple at Dakshineswar, a privately-owned place of worship, built by a wealthy Sudra woman and maintained by her, and in due course his younger brother joined him there.

Now Ramakrishna tended to think of God in terms of harmony, which was natural, since his mind dwelt constantly on
a
legendary Golden Age of Krishna
’
s life on earth, and since his
‘
mystical experiences
’
, like the one of the paddy field, gave him an insight into a state of perfect internal serenity. Traherne said he was seeking
‘
happiness
’
; Ramakrishna said he was seeking God; but they meant the same thing. Blake would have called it Vision. Ramakrishna recognized, just as Traherne had done, that serenity comes in moments of contemplation, by directing the thoughts towards the idea of harmony. So he began to go alone into places where he was not likely to be disturbed—a grove with a reputation for being haunted was his favourite—and would sit cross-legged, and try to make his emotions and intellect co-operate to give him perfect detachment from the world. In other words, he would try to achieve the state that Nietzsche could achieve listening to
Tristan und Isolde
or reading Schopenhauer: detachment.

Now, anyone who has ever tried this knows what immediately happens. Unless the imagination can keep the high ideal in sight, the thoughts tend to get earthbound, like a bird that cannot quite take off and flutters along the ground. You sit down intending to make the mind soar up to the sky, but after a few hours, the trees and the ground seem realer than ever, and the idea of
‘
celestial regions
’
seems nonsense.
Things are too real.
It is Roquentin
’
s Nausea aga
in. This dead weight of uninter
pretable reality is always one of the major difficulties of the solitary. Mixing with other people at least stimulates one to emulation, to strive to make comparisons favourable to oneself.

Would Joyce
’
s Stephen Dedalus have taken such pride in regarding himself as an artist if he had not been able to tell himself that
‘
their silly voices made him feel that he was different from other children
’
? That is what Zarathustra means when he tells the aspiring solitary:

A day shall come when you shall see your high things no more, and your low things all too near, and you will fear your exaltation as if it were a phantom. In that day you will cry: All is false.

Ramakrishna has told of how he too went through this stage; he prayed to the Divine Mother, Kali:
‘
Are you real or are you a delusion? Am I making a fool of myself imagining that I can ever know you?
’
He began to feel that all his worship and meditation were getting him no nearer to a vision of
‘
pure Will
’
. He tells:

I was suffering from excruciating pain because I had not been blessed with a vision of the mother. I felt as if my heart were being squeezed like a wet towel. I was overpowered by a great restlessness, and I feared that it might not be my lot to realize her in this life. I could not bear the separation any longer: life did not seem worth living. Then my eyes fell on the sword that was kept in the Mother
’
s temple. Determined to put an end to my life, I jumped up and seized it, when suddenly the blessed mother revealed herself to me.
...
The buildings
...
the temple and all vanished, leaving no trace; instead there was a limitless, infinite, shining ocean of consciousness or spirit. As far as the eye could see, its billows were rushing towards me from all sides ... to sw
a
llow me up. I was panting for breath. I was caught in the billows and fell down senseless.
⁸

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 Awakening
⁵
, 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.