An Unsuspected Link

Mathematics, science, art, mysticism and delusions are not common bed fellows.  Not so, according Anthony Storr in one of my newly bought old books . They are the same in one respect: they are just different methods of coping with the problems life presents us. The book has as its title one of my favourite expressions: Feet of Clay. It was published in 1996! It is substitled: A Study of Gurus. Recently I wish to explore religion again because I just joined a new "progressive" religious group. It is difficult to have a new religion without some kind of guru. The so-called New Age spiritual movement is literally littered with them. So it makes sense to try to find out something more about gurus. But when I turned to the book's table of contents, my attention was immediately struck by three words: "Chaos and Order". I simply love to get to the bottom of things, if I can. So I read that chapter first. The following is what I found.  

 

As long ago as 1911, Freud has already found that pathological delusion may in reality be an attempt or a process at psychological recovery and reconstruction! Men frequently experience discord both in the external physical and social world and within their internal psychic world which they experience as doubt and uncertainty. In the face of such stress, men and women desperately and passionately seek release. The belief that order will ultimately triumph over disorder is one of the fundamental beliefs of mankind and may be the basis of all religion. As a species, we have a strong biological predilection for either "finding" or "inventing" order and to "create" integrated wholes and new unities out of discrete data.  The biologist Conrad Lorenz thinks that as a species,  man is a "specialist in non-specialization": we adapt by maladaptation! We are partially adapted to very different environments but are fully adapted to none. Our inventiveness, our creativity stems directly from this. We are creative precisely because we are spurred by doubt, by confusion and by dissatisfaction with what is, both within and without.  This compels us to use our imagination to look for new ways of understanding ourselves and the external world in which we live. Had we been more adapted, there would have been no need for any inventiveness or creativity and we would probably become a huge ant colony! One of the gurus Shree Bhagwan Rajneesh has said: "Man is the only unnatural animal: that is why religion is needed.". The works of artists, musicians and writers are thus often concerned with subjective emotions and their solutions. To Storr, "By creating a new unity in a poem or other work of art, the artist is attempting to restore a lost unity or to find a new unity, within the inner world of the psyche, as well as producing work which has a real existence in the external world." Graham Greene once said, "Writing is a form of therapy.". I cannot agree with him more!

 

Because dissatisfaction is a spur to creativity, it is not surprising that the most creative individuals are especially liable to violent mood swings or may exhibit signs of psychological instability. The pattern of distressing chaos followed by the discovery or the invention of a new order is typical of mathematical, scientific and psychological discoveries. Mathematicians and sceintists often have long periods of fruitless pondering and hesitation over a problem or puzzle before they "suddenly" or almost totally unconsciously, "discover" the solution or had it "revealed" to them, often whilst they are engaged in some other activity totally unrelated to the puzzle they have been trying to solve for months or even for years! Mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss said in relation to a theorem on which he had been struggling for 2 years, "Like a flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself cannot say what was the conducting thread which connected what I previously knew with what made my succcess possible" and Henri Poincaré who solved the Fuchian functions, suddenly discovered the solution just as he was stepping on to a tour bus and solved another mathematical puzzle whilst he was relaxing on a seaside walk. He compared the situation to some previously unconnected ideas hung on the wall suddenly getting lose from it and starting to join together in new ways on their own, unconsciously, until they stick together in a perfect fit. Graham Wallas theorizes that the creative process usually happens in four stages. First, we consciously ponder the problem from every possible angle (preparation); then we abandon conscious thought to unconscious scanning and sorting out (incubation) after which the hidden connection suddenly reveals itself in a flash (illumination) and finally we subject the new solution to another process of rigorous examination and objective testing (verification). Jacques Hadamard  says that "the feeling of absolute certitude which accompanies the inspiration generally correspond to reality but it may happen that it has deceived us" and the joy of solution may be accompanied by a feeling akin to those of a "religious" revelation! To Storr, "our picture of the universe" is bound to be conditioned, not only by the fact of being limited by Kantian concepts of space, time and causality, but also by the established beliefs which form part of the structure of our own psyche. At the same time, once discovered, the scientist may grow attached to and become identified with his new insight, his new model of the universe, despite all new evidence to the contrary, in more or less the same way that Thomas S Kuhn describes as a "paradigm" in his Structure of Scientific Revolution and that model may become entrenched in his mind as if it were a delusion of the insane or the faith of a religious believer e.g the phlogiston theory, theory of ether, the Ptolemy theory of cosmos, Einstein's  initial rejection of quantum indeterminacy ! 

 

However, although the process by which new creative insights are arrived at by mathematicians, scientists, artists, musicians, writers and the religious gurus are often the same, there is one essential difference. Whereas the artists and scientists often try to work on new problems once they have fully worked out the implications of their previous theoretical discoveries or a particular line of their insight and recognize that their insights are merely partial solutions, the gurus often think that the answers they have found are holistic, all embracing and applicable to all men and all situations and at all times although often such answers are merely "generalisations from their own subjective experience". And often, some of their "revelations" appear so eccentric, so out of touch with accepted opinions about the world that we may properly regard them as evidence of mental illness. But the gurus are not alone in this. Ordinary people too may have deeply irrational holistic experiences in which the distress of inner conflict and the sense of being improperly adjusted to the world may temporarily disappear. Thus so-called "sane" people may often be "madder" than we realize.  To Storr, mystical experiences, being in love and religious beliefs may have more in common with psychotic delusions than we realize.Mystical states however may be short-lived but may still leave an indelible imprint on its subject's mind. Hugh Milne, the former body guard of Guru  Rajneesh, wrote: "On several occasions, I reached that true bliss and abundant joy which comes from a deep meditative state. This meditative space was incomparably beautiful and worth anything to experience. Those who dismiss "evil cults" have no idea at all how rapturous this state can be, and how no other pleasure can compare with it. Most people who have spent any time in a religious cult will have tasted this bliss, and it is this what keeps them coming back for more.". Wordsworth called such moments "intimations of immortality": "these moments of perfect harmony, in which the self and the world seem at one, are precious recollections " which imprint themselves on our memory. Byron describes his sense of unity with Nature thus, in his poem "Childe Harold's Pilgrimmage":

            Are not the mountains, waves and skies, a part

            Of me and of my soul, as I of them?

           Is not the love of these, deep in my heart

           With a pure passion? should I not contemn

           All objects, if compared with these? and stem

           A tide of suffering, rather than forego

          Such feelings for the hard and worldly phlegm

          Of those whose eyes are only turn'd below,

          Gazing upon the ground, with thoughts which dare not glow?"

Admiral Byrd described an experience he had in Antartica in 1934 thus: "Harmony, that was it. This was what came out of the silence--a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps. It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that moment, I feel no doubt of man's oneness with the universe...That universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was as rightfully part of that cosmos as were the day and night." . Baroness Malwida von Meysenburg described an episode she had in 1876 in Sorrento when Nietzsche last met Wagner there  "I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating and reconciling; and now again, as once before in the distant days of Alps of Dauphiné. I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of union with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable. Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as one vast world--encircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all great who had ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and it appeared as if I heard their greeting:"Thou too belongest to the company of those who overcome.". Those in love may also feel a sense of complete union with their lover, though not necessarily with the entire universe. In any case, it is a sense of having lost  or merged one's individual "self" into another person, a feeling of the annihilation of one's "self" as a separate entity! Freud referred to the state of being in love as a kind of "madness", as the "normal prototype of the psychoses". Perhaps it is for this reason that we treat the infatuated lovers with the kind of indulgence and tact we show to believers whose faith we do not share, and to madmen whose delusions we perceive as absurd. We all know that it is no use arguing with those in love that the obejct of their infatuation may be totally unworthy of their devotion. To be in love is "a pure and exalted sentiment" to Edward Gibbon, because it is as much concerned with the search for unity as it is with sex. Some may describe the feeling thus: "I had the experience of being entirely at one with her. There was no anxiety to impress or compete; just a deep joy at loving and being loved; a tranquil ecstasy...Such ecstasies do not last for very long--whether of relief or of joy, I cannot tell, but the memory of that serene certainty is still precious and continues to colour our subsequent friendship.". Freud interpreted such "oceanic" feelings as an extreme regresson to the state of the infant at the breast before he has learned to distinguish himself from either his mother or the external world. It is a good feeling and to be welcomed. The only difference between the feelings of an agnostic and the religious fanatic or the psychotic suffering from a mental delusion is the "rigidity" of their beliefs and their "permanence".  The believer has invested so much in his belief system that he can neither modify it nor subject it to rational argument. The sceptic may continue to search and may occasionally find that unity and is thus less hampered.

 

William James has charaterized the mystical state of mind as comprising 4 qualities: ineffability (the mystic finds it difficult to express the experience in words), noetic quality (he has a strong conviction that he has discovered directly a new depth of the Truth) transience (it seldom lasts more than an hour or two) and passivity (the mystic feels that his will is extinguished and he is guided or controlled by some power external to himself) and M C Jackson adds a fifth quality: serenity ( a deep sense of peace and tranquility) and perhaps even an altered sense of space and time and a sense of oceanic unity with nature or the universe as a whole. 

 

Thus, according to Storr, the guru often goes through a period of stress, sometimes amounting to a psychotic illness, which is brought to an end by the revelation of a new truth which dispels confusion,  brings order and provides relief. This is comparable to the creative processes whereby the mathematician, the scientist and the artist discover a new truth or produce a new work. To William James, "To find religion is only one out of many ways of reaching unity; the process of remedying inner completeness and reducing inner discord is a general psychological process, which may take place with any sort of mental material, and need not necessarily assume the religious form ....it may be away from religion, into incredulity or from moral scrupulosity into freedom and license; or ..the irruption into the individual's life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge or patriotic devotion. In all these instances, we have precisely the same psychological form of event-- a firmness, stability and equilibrium succeeding a period of storm and stress and inconsistency."

 

In short, the guru's beliefs, mystical experience, being in love all share one common feature: they resemble mental delusion in that they are not susceptible to rational argument or criticism. Thus some of the deepest, most important human experiences of mankind are ultimately, irrational!