The Outsider (48 page)

But there are other men, whom we have been calling, for convenience,
‘
Outsiders
’
, whose conscious and unconscious being keep in closer contact, and the conscious mind is forever aware of the urge to care about
‘
more abundant life
’
, and care less about comfort and stability and the rest of the notions that are so dear to the bourgeois. I have tried to show in the course of this book, how the Outsider
’
s one need is to discover how to lend a hand to the forces inside him, to help them in their struggle. And obviously, if he is only vaguely aware of these interior forces, the sensible thing is to become more aware of them and find out what they are aiming at. The Outsider usually begins by saying,
^C
I must have solitude to look inside myself
’
; hence the room on his own. Unfortunately, he also discovers that he often gets to know himself better under the stimulation of new experiences; and new experiences are out of the question when he is in a room on his own. A conflict is set up at the beginning of the
^‘
new life
’
, all of which is expressed so fully in
Steppenwolf.

Ramakrishna succeeded in administering the stimulus himself. He seized a sword to kill himself, and immediately the life-force in him revealed itself and told him:
‘
Nonsense; you are not going to die; look at all the work I have for you to do.
’
And Ramakrishna had his first vision of the
‘
Mother
’
, a sudden
realization that the universe is full of life, is nothing
but
life, life engaged in an unending attempt to reinforce its grip on matter. Van Gogh had become aware of the same interior vortex when he painted the
‘
Road with Cypresses
’
and the
‘
Starry Night
’
, just as Beethoven had become aware of it when he wrote the
‘
Hammerciavier
’
. The sensitivity of Ramakrishna
’
s interior harmony made it easy for him to re-establish contact with that recognition. The image of Kali in the Temple became a symbol of that recognition.

Kali is depicted as a fierce, black-visaged woman, holding a sword and a dripping human head in two of her four hands, and offering blessing to her children with the other two. She stands on the prostrate body of her husband Shiva, for Shiva only symbolizes conscious life; she is the life-force; around her neck is a necklace of human skulls. Whoever devised the first image of Kali must have been some Hindu Nietzsche who realized that the life-force is higher than the mere individual will to self-preservation, and may aim at more life through the deaths of individuals. Hindu hymns recognize this demoniac quality in the life-force; one begins:

All creation is the sport of my mad mother Kali.

Another:

Crazy is my father, crazy is my mother [i.e. Shiva and Kali].

Another (which brings out the demoniac quality even more):

This time I shall devour thee utterly, mother Kali

For I was born under an evil star

And one so born becomes, they say, the eater of his mother
⁹

It is the same conception that Dostoevsky puts into Kirilov
’
s mouth:
\
. . the man who insults and rapes a little girl—that
’
s good too, and the man who blows his brains out for the child, that
’
s good too. Everything
’
s good.
’
Nietzsche
’
s expression of the same conception has led to his condemnation as an
‘
Antichrist
’
,
‘
cold monster
’
, etc. Admittedly, the abuse of the idea of Kali as
destroyer led to the terrible curse of thuggism in India, just as the ideas of Nietzsche are popularly supposed to have led to the Nazi policy of murder-camps and race-extermination.

Ramakrishna became a priest in the Kali temple after the death of his brother, and soon his reputation as a holy man spread. He was a strange priest, seldom bothering to observe the formalities of worship, on one occasion even offering the food intended for the Mother to the temple cat. When challenged about this, he replied simply that he saw everything as an embodiment of Kali. The least thing could awaken
‘
God-consciousness
⁵
in him and plunge him into samadhi (ecstatic trance); once, a glimpse of an English boy leaning against a tree with his body bent in three places like the traditional pictures of Krishna sent him into
‘
communion with God
.’

When Ramakrishna was forty-six, the headmaster of a local school happened to visit him; Mahendranath Gupta became one of Ramakrishna
’
s chief disciples, and kept the record of his daily conversations that has come down to us as the magnificent
Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.
It is impossible to overpraise this great religious biography; it is the only complete, exhaustive record we possess of the day-to-day utterances of a God-intoxicated saint (the complete English version contains over half a million words, three times the length of the New Testament). Here is one of Ramakrishna
’
s parables from it:

Once a tigress attacked a flock of goats. As soon as she sprang on her prey, she gave birth to a cub and died. (A hunter had fired at her from a distance.) The cub grew up in the company of the goats. The goats ate grass and the cub followed their example. They bleated; the cub bleated too. Gradually it grew to be a big tiger. One day another tiger attacked the flock. It was amazed to see the grass-eating tiger. Running after it, the wild tiger at last seized it, whereupon the grass-eating tiger began to bleat. The wild tiger dragged it to the water, and said:
‘
Look at your face in the water; it is just like mine. Here is a little meat; eat it....
’
But
the grass-eating tiger would not swallow it, and began to bleat again. Gradually, though, it got to know the taste of blood, and came to relish the meat. Then the wild tiger said:
‘
Now you see there is no difference between you and me; come along and follow me into the forest.
...
’

Eating grass is like enjoying
‘
woman and gold
’
. To bleat and run away like a goat is to behave like an ordinary man, Going away with the wild tiger is like taking shelter with the guru, who awakens one
’
s spiritual consciousness, and recognizing him alone as one
’
s relative. To see one
’
s face rightly is to know one
’
s real Self.
¹⁰

It is tempting to compare this parable with Steppenwolf
’
s division of himself into man and wolf, goat and tiger. The goat part is the ordinary bourgeois who bleats tamely in the world; the tiger is the Outsider part, the part that Raskolnikov chose when he murdered an old pawnbrokress, or the savage who is tired of being a goat. But the comparison is not quite accurate. It is true that Ramakrishna has accepted his destiny as an Outsider, and spends his time trying to persuade other men to become Outsiders too. But Steppenwolfs goat part enjoyed music and poetry, and so could hardly be accused of completely lacking
‘
spiritual consciousness
’
. Clearly, when the Outsider reaches Ramarkrishna
’
s degree of spiritual consciousness, his divisions become clearer; there is now no question of murdering old women or deliberately embracing crime.

One of the most striking of Ramakrishna
’
s teachings is the belief in the unity of all religions. The
Life
tells us how Ramakrishna first practised various religious disciplines of different sects (which is as strange in India as it would be for someone in England to declare himself at once an ardent Methodist; Quaker and Roman Catholic); later he turned to other religions, and studied in turn Christianity and Mohammedanism, worshipping the Virgin Mary instead of Kali, and then the all-pervasive Allah. Ramakrishna knew the basic reality of the universe; it made no difference what symbols he used to call it to mind; the result was always the same: ecstatic God-consciousness.

Again, before we leave Ramakrishna, we might try to clarify what exactly is meant by
‘
God-consciousness
’
. There is a
passage in
The Varities of Religious Experience
in which James speaks of
‘
melting moods
’
:

The rest of us can ... imagine this by recalling our state of
feeling in those temporary
‘
melting moods
’
, into which the
trials of real life, or the theatre, or a novel, sometimes throws
us. Especially if we weep! For it is then as if our tears broke
through an inveterate inner dam and let all sorts of ancient
peccancies and moral stagnancies drain way, leaving us now
washed and soft of heart, and open to every nobler leaning.
With most of us, the customary hardness quickly returns, but
not so with saintly persons
…
¹¹

We have already noted that Ramakrishna was lucky in having spent his early life in a quiet village, where his susceptibility to these moods, his imaginative sensitivity, was in no danger of having to put a shell on itself to protect it against the world
’
s brutalities. (Readers of Dickens
’
s
Christmas Carol
will recall the scene in which Scrooge reads
The Arabian Nights
in his schoolroom, and the description of his delight and absorption in the book; and of how the older Scrooge, now hardened and bitter, recalls the scene and is plunged into a
‘
melting mood
’
.) We must understand that Ramakrishna preserved his childlike sensitivity all his life. We, among the complexities of our modern civilization, are forced to develop hard shells; therefore it would not be false to say that it is our civilization that is responsible for the prevailing humanistic and materialistic modes of thought. Ramakrishna, at the opposite extreme, could plunge to a depth of imaginative ecstasy which few Westerners have ever known, except those mediaeval saints who also were able to give up their minds as he did to contemplation and serenity.

In the last years of his life, Ramakrishna was widely regarded as an Avatar, an incarnation of God, like Christ, Krishna, Gautama. (Even today his picture is worshipped by thousands of Indians who regard him as God.) In his forty-ninth year, Ramakrishna developed a sore throat, which developed into a cancer, and finally killed him in August, 1886. Many of his disciples retired into a monastery, and later set out to spread his message over the world; the best known of them, Narendra, Ramakrishna
’
s favourite disciple, became Swami Vivekananda,
who made his master
’
s name known throughout England and America.

In the course of the past two chapters, certain conclusions about the Outsider have become steadily more apparent, and we can express the most important one by saying that the Outsider would seem to be a basically religious man, or imaginative man, who refuses to develop those qualities of practical-mindedness and eye-to-business that seem to be the requisites for survival in our complex civilization. It must be again emphasized that by
‘
religion
’
I am not trying to indicate any specific religious system. Religious categories, as I have tried to show, are such simple ideas as
‘
Original Sin
’
,
‘
salvation
’
,
‘
damnation
’
, which come naturally to the Outsider
’
s way of thinking.

Moreover, both the Eastern and the Western ways of thinking tend to identify Original Sin with delusion. Ramakrishna never tired of telling his disciples not to think of themselves as sinners; yet he never ceased to refer to men who are
‘
in the world
’
as
‘
bound souls
’
,
‘
deluded souls
’
. As to the way of escaping this delusion, there is no division of opinion: Go to extremes. That is the first necessity. The Buddha advocated a
‘
middle way
’
, yet this was only after a preliminary course of extremes: the Majjhima Nikaya tells how he was
‘
a penance worker, outdoing others in penance; I was a rough-liver, outdoing others in roughing it; I was scrupulous, outdoing others in my scruples; I was a solitary, outdoing others in solitude
’
. I offer only one example of the description of the
‘
extremes
’
that followed (interested readers can find a fuller account in Woodward
’
s
Sayings of the Buddha
in the World
’
s Classics series):