von Hugel, the Mystical, Bergson, and Nisargadatta.

 Baron Von Hugel in his magisterial work ‘The Mystical Element of Religion’ considers the apparently inescapable dilemma of the Subjective versus the Objective.  How do you know that your ‘rapt to the highest heaven’ is not an illusion?  Can you ever know?  Are they those peak experiences breadcrumbs to find our way home or pebbles?  Can the illusory really be transformative or is that only an apparently deep question which evaporates like a puddle in the sun?  

“And this objection is felt most keenly in religion, when the religious soul first wakes up to the fact that itself, of necessity and continuously, contributes, by its own action, to the constitution of those affirmations and certainties, which, until then, seemed, without a doubt, to be directly borne in upon a purely receptive, automatically registering mind, from that extra-, super-human world which it thus affirmed. Here also, all having for so long been assumed to be purely objective, the temptation now arises to consider it all as purely subjective. “ (Mystical Element)

……And finally, this doubt and trouble would seem to find specially ready material in the mystical element and form of religion. For here, as we have already seen, psycho-physical and auto-suggestive phenomena and mechanisms abound; here especially does the mind cling to an immediate access to Reality; and here the ordinary checks and complements afforded by the Historical and Institutional, the Analytically Rational, and the Volitional, Practical elements of Religion are at a minimum. (op.cit. below)”

Are we stuck with this analysis or is it vyavaharika  (conventional/mundane/relative) rather than hewing to the ‘paramarthika’  (absolute) line as the Vedantin puts it?  As long as we think in terms of the usual accounts of truth as correspondence or coherence we will be trapped in an inescapable aporia.  We are stuck on that reef and no tide will lift us off.  Berkeley was right you know when he held that there need be no matter that is the cause of our representation if that was what we were relying  on for our experience of the world.  Representations beg the question. There had to be a way of allowing for the ‘external’ world, a way that was properly founded.  God keeps the game in play and when Samuel Johnson kicked the stone God underwrote the ouch.

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But does all that really matter to the mystic who lives in the heart of being even when his epistemology is flawed.  As Bergson who is frequently referred to by von Hugel points out we move from intuition to conceptualization and not the other direction which is the path that philosophical inquiry takes.  Conceptual analysis is useful while at the same time being an engine of alienation.  It spawns paradoxes and oppresses us with mental fidget.  In that hedging  locution favoured by philosophers - ‘we worry’.

Nisargadatta the Sage of Bombay achieved self-realisation following the instruction of his guru to continuously keep his mind on the reality - I am.  I AM THAT the great saying of the upanisad is almost a forced conclusion compared to the immersion in being of I AM.