Science & Mystical Experience

There is a great deal of variation in the accounts of mystical vision available to us for study. Apart from the traditional mystics, whose frame of mind was essentially religious and who underwent various spiritual disciplines to attain the mystical state, there have been poets, philosophers, scientists and scholars who had a sudden visionary experience, once or several times in their life, without the practice of any orthodox religious or esoteric discipline. Pascal, Bucke, Tennyson, Wordsworth and Tagore are a few examples of this type of mystical vision. According to his own statement, a few moments before his epileptic seizures, Dostoevsky experienced a state of lucidity and bliss which, he says, counted more than a lifetime of ordinary experience.

How are we to account for this phenomenon? From immemorial times the mystical state has been held to be a vision of Divinity, or God or Allah or Brahman or any celestial or supernatural Being. There are hundreds of books from the pens of mystics themselves or of theologians and other scholars supporting this view. For this reason a deeply religious life, involving seclusion from the world, renunciation, submission to Divine Will, contentment, austerity, even penance with extreme love of the Deity, and utter devotion, has been considered to be the essential prerequisite for success in this sublime quest. The Revealed scriptures of mankind are all explicit on this point. From this point of view, the anomaly created by the mystical ecstasy of those on whom the experience was, as it were, thrust in the course of normal life, devoted to worldly pursuits, without having made the surrenders and sacrifices to deserve the reward from Heaven, is hard to explain.

There have been well-known mystics in recent times in whom ecstasy started from boyhood, as in the case of Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharishi. In both of them the state of intense absorption was, as it were, a natural state of the mind. Guru Nanak and Jnaneshwar were mystics from birth. The former in his talk, behavior and poetic composition was a religious genius from the age of ten, while the latter wrote his famous commentary on the Bhagavad Gita known as Jnaneshwari, and considered to be a classic, at the age of sixteen. There is no rational explanation for these extraordinary cases of mystical consciousness.

There are still many scientists who, like Freud, treat the whole phenomenon of religion as an illusion, a pathological condition due to repressed sexuality--their one answer to many problems of the mind. According to this view, the whole irrational fabric of faith should have been exposed to its bottom by now. But, strange to say, the reverse has happened. Mystical vision and the miracles associated with it, now classified as psychic phenomena, have assumed an urgency and importance that they never possessed before during the last two centuries. This shows how erroneous the intellect can be. The widespread thirst for self-awareness or the occult side of nature, which is a striking feature of our day, is utterly inexplicable in the light of modern psychology.

It is incredible that the learned world should still be in the dark about a phenomenon that has been at the base of civilization and culture, also all the moral and intellectual progress made by mankind. The religious impulse and the lure of the supernatural, which we see always associated with the life of man from as far back as archeological record is available, provide irrefutable evidence to show that the human mind has been occupied with the occult and the divine almost from the beginning of reason. The priest, the witch doctor, the medicine man and the shaman appear on the scene from the remotest periods. In the prehistorical world we see all the vanished civilizations of the past completely dominated by religion. In fact, in some of them the kings performed the offices of the ruler and the high priest both. The current faiths that took form from about 2,000 years before the birth of Christ to medieval times kept as firm a hold on the imagination of man as those that preceded them by thousands of years. In this sphere of the human mind, science is but a helpless spectator of the scene.

The world is tense and the race lives under the overhanging threat of a holocaust because we are violating an Almighty Law of nature. We have not even the awareness of this Law. It is not mere chance or accident or hysteria or the machinations of charlatans and priests that brought the current major faiths of mankind into existence. In such an event, they could never hold the tremendous sway which they did over the minds of people in almost all parts of the world. It is not by chance or accident that the great spiritual luminaries were born to reveal the mode of life and the pattern of behavior to be followed by the multitude to live in concord with the evolutionary processes working in the race. It is the impact of their teachings and the order they established which prepared the soil for the great achievements of modern science. The parents, grandparents and the great-grandparents of the pioneers of science were, in most cases, deeply religious men and women with faith in God and a righteous way of life. What will be the achievements of the progeny, born in all parts of the world, two or three generations from now, in the mental climate which undiluted rationality has created we have still to see.

The signs, however, are not auspicious. Pregnancy and birth in a tense, highly charged and threatened mental atmosphere can never be above fault. The tragedy has been that the custodians of faith attached more importance to formulism than to the basic teachings of the founders. At the same time, many of the great thinkers and scientists, during recent times, failed to understand the importance of religion as the outward symbol of the deeply rooted evolutionary impulse in human beings. They failed to note that all the revealed scriptures of mankind had a common purpose which is to implant an ideal of a Heavenly Deity, called by the name of Brahman, God, Jehovah, Vishnu, Allah, Buddha or Ahura-Mazda, etc., and, to prescribe the way of life and the mode of behavior necessary to achieve union with or proximity to that Being. In other words, the aim was to present an evolutionary ideal and the methods to achieve it.

Religion came, as I have said, to prepare the ground for science. The advent of science, too, did not come by chance or accident. It marks another stage in the evolution of the human mind. We do not see the connection because there persists an erroneous impression, even in the ranks of science, that the human brain is static and has been so for the last, at least, twenty thousand years, since the time of the Cro-Magnon type of man. We are, however, prepared to concede that there must have been some kind of a qualitative difference between the brain of a genius, as for instance Einstein, and a man of average intelligence. In fact, it is to locate this difference that portions of Einsteins brain have been under observation for the last many years.

The wonder is that while we are ready to acknowledge that there must be a variation in the brain of a genius as compared to that of a common man, we still naively believe the myth that there has been no appreciable change in the human encephalon for the past thousands of years. Even a champion of evolution, like Teilhard-de-Chardin, subscribed to the same view, probably under the impression that what the biologists of his day propounded was the last word on the subject. The bloom of science and the bloom of intellect, we see today, compared to the dense, slow-moving mind of the Stone Age man, shows as great a gulf, if not greater, as exists between a highly talented individual and a blockhead in our time. What physiological factors are responsible for this difference? No one is able to answer this riddle at present. The moment this difference is located, the enigma whether or not the human brain is still in a state of evolution will be solved.

The tragedy is that the human mind is never able to frame a correct picture of the state of its knowledge even a few decades ahead. The great intellects, alive in the late 1800s, could never imagine the state of knowledge of the intellects alive today. Similarly, the latter can never visualize correctly the mind of those living in the late 2000s. There are extremely few who can think ahead of their time. The science of life has reached a stage where a breakthrough in our knowledge about the brain is imminent. This would show that the religious impulse is genetically present in human beings. Where it does not exist, a departure from the normal is indicated. The aim of the impulse is to effect coordination between the evolutionary modeling of the body and the surface consciousness of the individual. I say this because there is no other explanation for mystical experience. The fact that those who laid the foundation of all current faiths of mankind made a clear avowal of the position that what they were preaching was revealed to them by God, or an Angel, or a Divine Consciousness, or an Enlightened state of mind is a clear indication of this fact.

With the breakthrough in the knowledge about the brain, the stage will be set for rapprochement between religion and science. The real purpose for which science took birth is to bring about an acceleration in the evolution of mankind. From this point of view, science is not the end but the means to an end. This is the reason for the highly increased tempo of progress in our time. We are all a witness to the fact that changes and innovations that, in medieval times, took centuries to occur are often accomplished in decades now. How has this come to pass? The answer that this is due to highly sophisticated technology is only partially correct. Technology itself is inextricably linked up with the capacity of the human mind. It is the technological brain that has evolved to the pitch where the amazing achievements of our day have become possible. If the evolution of the brain does not keep pace with the speed of progress, a state of stagnation would ensue beyond which it would be impossible to proceed.

The past history of mankind is standing witness to this ossification. What happened to the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, the people of the Indus Valley, the Indo-Aryans, Chinese, Persians, Greeks and Romans after their rise to lofty heights of culture and even technological achievements of which we see surprising relics even today? Stultification and decadence occurred as the brain ceased to keep pace with the demands of the progress achieved, and decay set in to level the once victorious and ascendant nations to dust. As many as fourteen civilizations, whose achievements are scattered all over the earth, which, some believe, were harvests of their contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, have already paid the forfeit for their ignorance of this Almighty Law. Our civilization will follow the same course, if science continues to ignore the fact that spiritual evolution is the real goal of human life.

The time-defying pyramids and the wonder-exciting temples of Egypt could not save the populace from falling a helpless victim to decline, when the brain ceased to cooperate. Space rockets, skyscrapers and all the wonders of modern science, combined, will not be able to save the race, if the brain refuses to tolerate the pressure to which it is subjected now, because of ignorance of the Law. The result would be what we are already witnessing--a desire to drop out of the struggle, perverted thinking, drugs, promiscuity, escapism, discontent, violence, crime and wishful thinking of a holocaust. The top-heavy, ponderous structure of modern civilization, in every part of the world, is actually rocking. Only we are not fully aware of it, as we are not conscious of the worldwide rebellious trend of the human brain.


Written by: Gopi Krishna