The Pursuit of Divine Madness
Seeing the Footprints
The title of this book reflects two aspects of spiritual and religious teachings. First, the term “mystic” reveals that the subject involves and is surrounded by numerous mysteries. The mysterious, often arcane language used by priests, yogis, shamans and philosophers when discussing spiritual states frequently prevents people from serious consideration of the knowledge compiled by religious traditions and the people that have travelled the path to illumination. Second, there is “the quest,” a plot that runs through many of the myths relating to spiritual transcendence, immortality, death, dying and the meaning of life. In this book, the quest refers to a journey we take to find a truth that must be experienced, and which can involve many trials and tribulations. It is both a mythic and a mystic quest, a search for the Holy Grail or the Philosopher’s Stone, or the Wish-fulfilling Gem as the Tibetans call it. This quest is mythic and common in ancient legends and fables and mystic in an important sense. It is the mysterious psychological process not experienced by the majority, but in its fullest sense, by a minority of people in all lands and cultures. Of this experience Joseph Campbell writes,
“…whether small or great, and no matter what the stage or grade of life, the call rings up the curtain, always on a mystery of transfiguration — a rite, or moment, of spiritual passage, which, when complete, amounts to a dying and a birth. The familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.”
Evelyn Underhill begins her treatise titled, Mysticism, with these words: “The most highly developed branches of the human family have in common one peculiar characteristic. They tend to produce — sporadically it is true, and often in the teeth of adverse external circumstances — a curious and definite type of personality; a type which refuses to be satisfied with that which other men call experience, and is inclined, in the words of its enemies, to “deny the world in order that it may find reality.” We meet these persons in the east and west; in the ancient, mediaeval, and modern worlds. Their one passion appears to be the prosecution of a certain spiritual and intangible quest: the finding of a “way out” or a “way back” to some desirable state in which alone they can satisfy their craving for absolute truth. This quest, for them, has constituted the whole meaning of life. They have made for it without effort sacrifices which have appeared enormous to other men: and it is an indirect testimony to its objective actuality, that whatever the place or period in which they have arisen, their aims, doctrines and methods have been substantially the same. Their experience, therefore, forms a body of evidence, curiously self-consistent and often mutually explanatory, which must be taken into account before we can add up the sum of the energies and potentialities of the human spirit, or reasonably speculate on its relations to the unknown world which lies outside the boundaries of sense.”
The mystical, esoteric traditions of Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, the Kabala in Judaism, the Gnostics and contemplatives of Christianity, and the Sufi of Islam all deal with the subjective experience of an individual undergoing spiritual transformation. They are paths that lead to illumination and individuation; to the maturing of consciousness, relief from suffering, and to deeper spiritual insight. These paths have been in continuous use for thousands of years and contain a wealth of knowledge for living in ways that take us to a perception and sagacity that is not commonly found in the world. From a mystic’s perspective, this experience is the organic unfolding of the creative potentiality of the Absolute. It can be experienced as Divine Madness, a temporary, abnormal state of consciousness that may be referred to as the mystic or shamanic trance (although there are important distinctions in the aims of these different religious practices). The “call,” the apparently external prompting to become a shaman, nun or priest varies in different cultures. The call can be viewed as hereditary, spontaneous and brought about by a god or spirits, or sought through a deliberate quest. This shamanic quest may include some states identical with those sought through meditation and the cultivation of states of bliss, rapture, and ecstasy, but will also include states not deliberately sought in many religious traditions. Some people might call this process kundalini awakening, some a mental illness, others might term it grace, revelation, self-realization, enlightenment, or cosmic consciousness. Others may make large distinctions between commonly sought shamanic encounters and stages of realization, insight, or enlightenment. These states, whether shamanic, mystic, or yogic, may occur with powerful releases of emotion as unconscious elements flood awareness. They may be triggered by deep states of mental quiescence, beauty, shock, despair, or by a host of other means from drumming and dance, to drugs, self-inflicted pain, and sensory deprivation. The myth, the religious “story,” forms a psychological container that aids in comprehending and assimilating experiences of altered states of consciousness and to linking them with one’s personal “self,” culture, and community. Myths can also act as an intellectual means to comfort a person engaged in the process of dying. A subjective belief in heaven or in reincarnation may do much to console the dying and their loved ones regardless of its objective truth.
The desire to impart the knowledge gained through spiritual practices and the states of extraordinary consciousness they occasion has long been disseminated by the use of stories commonly referred to as myths. Though the tales may be mythological in the sense that they are fabrications (conscious or unconscious), they are often profound sourc es of a knowledge that has been gleaned over many generations and that embody phenomenal and psychological truths that can be readily derived from them. These truths may be too terrible to state bluntly or too beautiful or profound to express in ordinary language with its inherent limitations; they are veiled in metaphor, allegory, anecdotes, and poetic verse. The themes of religious myths bear a striking resemblance to each other and Jung theorized that they ultimately derive from the structure of the psyche and he coined the term archetypes to denote them. All the major religious traditions use myths to augment the teachings of their founders who may also be mythical in their attainments, attributes or even their existence. For many people, their understanding of religion does not go beyond the stories of miracles, angels, demons, heaven and hell, reincarnation or some other form of after-life. At this level of understanding, the accumulated knowledge of countless generations in cultures around the world is often dismissed without thought to what it means to those who have not only stud ied or adopted a faith, but who have combined that study with the practical psychological exercises which lead the mind to states beyond the imagination’s ability to follow. It is from the states of mind that transcend mind’s language function that the most profound teachings are ultimately derived. In Tibetan Buddhism, this state is referred to as pristine cognition. A belief in the objective reality of a myth still has many useful applications and can significantly counter the fear of death or provide meaning to one’s life and pursuits.
It is possible that many psychotic-type episodes are mislabeled incidences of naturally occurring states that can lead to experiences of higher mystic states. These may be aggravated by public censure, lack of prior knowledge, or the deliberate or indifferent abuse by persons or power hierarchies in medical, government, and religious institutions. This is not always by personal malice, but is a feature of any fixed social setting that tends to support a culture-based definition of sanity that may be limited by a particular religious or ideological view. This conditional perception is not grounded in the extraordinary perception of mystic states but in “normal” everyday consciousness that has no access to the insights of these special mental states. Unfortunately, institutionalized religions often lose their genuine spiritual function and become a means of control and a method to condition people to a perspective chosen by others. Religion’s real purpose though is to strip the mind of its conditioning. This stripping is the result of spiritual practice being properly engaged in and the clarity of this “unconditioned perception” has been the object of my quest.
Myths from all over the world attest to the pervasiveness of the theme of the Great Quest, through trials and tribulations to a grand view of Truth and Beauty. This is in keeping with the very real psychological reality as it is experienced. In Christianity, there is the Beatific Vision, the contemplative’s reward for treading the path of devotion and renunciation; or the quest for, and attainment of, enlightenment in Buddhism. It should be noted that while some mystic experiences do involve a passage into states that might properly be termed psychotic, the most sublime mystic states by-pass or pass through those states, to reach the deepest realm of experiential perception. Mystic states are by definition ineffable because they pass beyond the language function of the mind. Awareness remains, but ordinary sensory perception and discursive thought based on language may not.
Referring to the various mystics that have left us their insights into the realm beyond the senses, Evelyn Underhill writes:
“Under whatsoever symbols they have objectified their quest, none of these seekers have ever been able to assure the world that they have found, seen face to face, the Reality behind the veil. But if we may trust the reports of the mystics — and they are reports given with a strange accent of certainty and good faith — they have succeeded where... others have failed, in establishing immediate communication between the spirit of man, entangled as they declare amongst material things, and the “only Reality,” that immaterial and final Being, which some philosophers call the Absolute, and most theologians call God.”
The various religious traditions acknowledge and give special names to many different states of consciousness that have a relevance to the process of spiritual growth. Psychology too, assigns names to states of consciousness and defines them and their value in accordance with the current trends and whims of people who may be psychologically handicapped in their understanding of these states by their own conditioned perception and lack of experience with them. R. D. Laing quotes Gregory Bateson, in an introduction to an autobiographical account of schizophrenia:
“It would appear that once precipitated into psychosis the patient has a course to run. He is, as it were, embarked upon a voyage of discovery that is only completed by his return to the normal world, to which he comes back with insights different from those of the inhabitants who never embarked on such a voyage. On