Three literary accounts of mystical union, part 2
Lanza & Kress's "Observer," Maugham's "The Razor's Edge," and Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi"
(If you like this post, bless the Algorithm Angels and select the “heart” icon ❤️ even if you’re not a subscriber. It helps!)
In part 1 we looked carefully at the “Oneness” account in the novel Observer by Robert Lanza and Nancy Kress, identifying a number of problematic issues that make it a conceptual or secular but not a genuine spirituality. The account is vague, for one thing, and is dependent upon highly specialized technology. What’s more, the character who has the experience, Lorraine, remains bound to her ego and is left with no other effect than being somewhat “otherworldly.”
In this post we’ll now turn to the two other accounts, one in W. Somerset Maugham’s 1994 book, The Razor’s Edge, the other in the chapter “An Experience in Cosmic Consciousness” found in Autobiography of a Yogi, written by the 20th-century Indian-American mystic, Paramhansa Yogananda. Maugham’s is an improvement over Observer but is yet just a paragraph. Yogananda’s account—which, by the fact that it’s included in an autobiography, is a real telling and not merely fictional make-believe—doesn’t suffer from the shortcomings identified in the previous post. As a clear and specific account, it provides a solid reference for writing similar accounts in fiction.
The account of Larry Darrell in The Razor’s Edge
You may have heard of one or another movie by the same title as W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel; one movie was produced in 1946, the other (starring Bill Murray) in 1984. Both movies focus on the character of Larry Darrell, who in the book is seeking truth or enlightenment (call it what you will) as contrasted with the worldly ambitions of other around him. His search eventually takes him to India where he has—in the book at least—an experience of enlightenment.
The book itself doesn’t actually focus on Larry all that much, except for a lengthy conversation—all of Chapter Six—between him and the author. Maugham, who is the first-person narrator of the story. In fact, Maugham states up front that readers can even skip that chapter entirely because it’s nothing more than Larry recounting his story to Maugham.
The part that’s relevant to this post occurs in section (viii) of the chapter. Larry tells of how he awoke one morning to watch the sunrise in the Himalaya, where he’s been living. “I had a strange feeling of suspense,” he says, and then is utterly taken by the daybreak as it unfolded. He describes his experience thus:
I was ravished with the beauty of the world. I'd never known such exaltation and such a transcendent joy. I had a strange sensation, a tingling that arose in my feet and travelled up to my head, and I felt as though I were suddenly released from my body and as pure spirit partook of a loveliness I had never conceived. I had a sense that a knowledge more than human possessed me, so that everything that had been confused was clear and everything that had perplexed me was explained. I was so happy that it was pain and I struggled to release myself from it, for I felt that if it lasted a moment longer I should die; and yet it was such rapture that I was ready to die rather than forego it. How can I tell you what I felt? No words can tell the ecstasy of my bliss.
A short time later, when Maugham challenges him to say why it wasn’t just a hallucination, Larry says:
Only my overwhelming sense of its reality. After all it was an experience the same order as the mystics have had all over the world through all the centuries. Brahmins in India, Sufis in Persia, Catholics in Spain, Protestants in New England; and so far as they've been able to describe what defies description they've described it in similar terms. It's impossible to deny the of its occurrence; the only difficulty is to explain it. If I was for a moment one with the Absolute or if it was an inrush from the subconscious an affinity with the universal spirit which is latent in all of us, I wouldn't know.
How, then, does Larry’s account hold up to the criteria given at the end of part 1?
Unlike Lorraine’s experience in Observer, Larry’s doesn’t have to be a special person with access to special technology. He marvels a moment later that he, “Larry Darrell of Marvin Illionois” had received this illumination without “austerity and mortification.” His description of the experience, too, is more detailed than Lorraine’s, although, like Lorraine, he begs off trying to elucidate further. That is, Larry demonstrates a more heightened awareness to a degree, but he still ends up being somewhat vague.
Where his experience also falls short is that he expresses no clear transcendence of the ego, and although he describes something of an expanded awareness, he’s still the only consciousness around.
The final criteria is whether the experience really changes Larry, and here’s where his response is curious: he decides that he wants to experience the material world as fully as he can:
If in those moments of ecstasy I had indeed been one with the Absolute, then, if what they said was true, nothing could touch me and when I had worked out the karma of my present life I should return no more. The thought filled me with dismay. I wanted to live again and again. I was willing to accept every sort of life, no matter what it's pain and sorrow; I felt that only life after life, life after life could satisfy my eagerness, my vigor and my curiosity.
Larry announces, too, that he’s planning to simply engage in mundane work as a mechanic, a truck driver, or a taxi driver, saying that a taxi would be “equivalent to the staff and the begging bowl of the wandering mendicant.” In that way he’ll be living a somewhat carefree life of simple joy, but there the inspiration stops. Unlike the accounts of other mystics, touching God apparently didn’t leave him with wanting to touch God again.
Yogananda’s “Experience in Cosmic Consciousness”
We can now compare the accounts of Observer and The Razor’s Edge to that in Autobiography of a Yogi. To set a bit of context, Yogananda has, in his story to this point, been on a determined search for God. And although he has found his divine teacher (guru) in Swami Sri Yukteswar,1 he yet attempted to run off to seek God in the Himalayan solitudes. Thwarted in that journey, he’s just returned, meek and humbled, to Yukteswar’s ashram in the Calcutta suburb of Serampore. (The full chapter, and the book, is available online.)
Sri Yukteswar, instead of being angry, understands his disciple’s longing and chooses a moment a few days later to bestow the experience that Yogananda has sought:
“Poor boy, the mountains couldn’t give what you wanted.” Master spoke caressively, comfortingly. His calm gaze was unfathomable. “Your heart’s desire shall be fulfilled.”
Sri Yukteswar seldom indulged in riddles; I was bewildered. He struck gently on my chest above the heart.
Right away we can see a difference from the situation of Observer described in part 1: no special equipment is necessary. Yukteswar transmits the experience with nothing more than a touch. Of course, such a master cannot just walk around sending people into cosmic consciousness willy-nilly. As Yogananda explains a little later in the chapter:
A master bestows the divine experience of cosmic consciousness when his disciple, by meditation, has strengthened his mind to a degree where the vast vistas would not overwhelm him. The experience can never be given through one’s mere intellectual willingness or open-mindedness. Only adequate enlargement by yoga practice and devotional bhakti [worship] can prepare the mind to absorb the liberating shock of omnipresence. It comes with a natural inevitability to the sincere devotee. His intense craving begins to pull at God with an irresistible force. The Lord, as the Cosmic Vision, is drawn by the seeker’s magnetic ardor into his range of consciousness.
Which is to say, if a fictional character is to undergo a true experience of mystical union, then the story should establish that preparation (as Autobiography of a Yogi does in the preceding 13 chapters), both for the experience and its consequences.
In looking at the account in Observer, we also saw that it was quite vague. Yogananda’s account, on the other hand, is highly specific from the first moment:
My body became immovably rooted; breath was drawn out of my lungs as if by some huge magnet. Soul and mind instantly lost their physical bondage, and streamed out like a fluid piercing light from my every pore. The flesh was as though dead, yet in my intense awareness I knew that never before had I been fully alive. My sense of identity was no longer narrowly confined to a body, but embraced the circumambient atoms. People on distant streets seemed to be moving gently over my own remote periphery. The roots of plants and trees appeared through a dim transparency of the soil; I discerned the inward flow of their sap.
We can also see in this first paragraph a sense of transcending the ego, the small sense of self that’s bound to a particular body. Yogananda feels and describes the “circumambient atoms,” the motion of people, and the life movements within trees and plants.
The last line of the preceding excerpt also suggests a transcendence of the senses, that is, entering into a kind of super-sensory awareness. As the account continues:
The whole vicinity lay bare before me. My ordinary frontal vision was now changed to a vast spherical sight, simultaneously all-perceptive. Through the back of my head I saw men strolling far down Rai Ghat Road, and noticed also a white cow who was leisurely approaching. When she reached the space in front of the open ashram gate, I observed her with my two physical eyes. As she passed by, behind the brick wall, I saw her clearly still.
All objects within my panoramic gaze trembled and vibrated like quick motion pictures. My body, Master’s, the pillared courtyard, the furniture and floor, the trees and sunshine, occasionally became violently agitated, until all melted into a luminescent sea; even as sugar crystals, thrown into a glass of water, dissolve after being shaken. The unifying light alternated with materializations of form, the metamorphoses revealing the law of cause and effect in creation.
Clearly, this account goes well beyond vague “I’m one with everything” statements, and indeed now gives a sense of expansion into the furthest reaches of creation:
An oceanic joy broke upon calm endless shores of my soul. The Spirit of God, I realized, is exhaustless Bliss; His body is countless tissues of light. A swelling glory within me began to envelop towns, continents, the earth, solar and stellar systems, tenuous nebulae, and floating universes. The entire cosmos, gently luminous, like a city seen afar at night, glimmered within the infinitude of my being. The sharply etched global outlines faded somewhat at the farthest edges; there I could see a mellow radiance, ever-undiminished. It was indescribably subtle; the planetary pictures were formed of a grosser light.
The divine dispersion of rays poured from an Eternal Source, blazing into galaxies, transfigured with ineffable auras. Again and again I saw the creative beams condense into constellations, then resolve into sheets of transparent flame. By rhythmic reversion, sextillion worlds passed into diaphanous luster; fire became firmament.
These words convey far more than ideas: they convey feeling and aliveness. What’s more, unlike the conceptual, ego-bound account in Observer, Yogananda’s expanded awareness includes God as an immediate, present reality, even as Yogananda employs personal pronouns in his first-person point of view. But that first-person POV is not that of the ego, but of an awareness that truly is one with everything:
I cognized the center of the empyrean as a point of intuitive perception in my heart. Irradiating splendor issued from my nucleus to every part of the universal structure. Blissful amrita, the nectar of immortality, pulsed through me with a quicksilverlike fluidity. The creative voice of God I heard resounding as Aum, the vibration of the Cosmic Motor.
And a little later in the chapter, Yogananda recounts the experience in his lengthy poem, Samadhi,2 which shares many similarities with accounts of mystical union recorded by various Christian saints and mystics.3 The poem leaves no doubt about the awareness of other life forms, the awareness of other conscious beings, and the transcendence of the ego into God. Here are a few lines:
Thoughts of all men, past, present, to come,
Every blade of grass, myself, mankind,
Each particle of universal dust,…
Thou art I, I am Thou,
Knowing, Knower, Known, as One!…
Where I, the Cosmic Sea,
Watch the little ego floating in Me.
The sparrow, each grain of sand, fall not without My sight.…
Mobile murmurs of atoms are heard, …
…
Myself, in everything, enters the Great Myself.
If you read the poem in its entirety, you’ll see that it’s again no vague, intellectual rendering of ideas (of the sort that a soulless AI can generate) but a powerful rendering of real experience. It’s unfortunate that Lanza and Kress didn’t seem to know about this poem when they wrote Observer, because if they had, then they could have made Lorraine’s experience much more meaningful to readers as well as themselves.
As for lasting effects, Yogananda says the following:
The cosmic vision left many permanent lessons. By daily stilling my thoughts, I could win release from the delusive conviction that my body was a mass of flesh and bones, traversing the hard soil of matter. The breath and the restless mind, I saw, were like storms which lashed the ocean of light into waves of material forms–earth, sky, human beings, animals, birds, trees. No perception of the Infinite as One Light could be had except by calming those storms. As often as I silenced the two natural tumults, I beheld the multitudinous waves of creation melt into one lucent sea, even as the waves of the ocean, their tempests subsiding, serenely dissolve into unity.
Yogananda also makes it clear that he didn’t just become an otherworldly space-cadet like Lorraine, for as soon as he returns from the experience, Sri Yukteswar says to him:
“You must not get overdrunk with ecstasy. Much work yet remains for you in the world. Come; let us sweep the balcony floor; then we shall walk by the Ganges.”
“The soul must stretch over the cosmogonic abysses,” Yogananda writes, “while the body performs its daily duties.”
In closing
In these two posts we’ve looked at the distinct contrast between three accounts of mystical union—one vague and mind-born, one a bit more genuine yet still vague, and the third highly specific and born of actual experience. If a story involving mystical realism hopes to give characters even part of such an experience, Yogananda’s account in Autobiography of a Yogi certainly deserves attention as a reference.
Incorporating even a little of such an experience into a novel, like Observer attempts to do, is also a fantastic opportunity for an author to attune to and visualize this state of mystical union, rather than relying solely on intellectual notions, or, as Maugham does, simply have it reported through a third party. As I wrote in The privilege of writing inner experience: part 2, such visualization is a powerful form of meditation, however imperfect your visualization might be.
I suggest reading the Samadhi poem (or listen to this reading). Feel it. Visualize it within yourself. And if you’re incorporating something of its nature into fiction, visualize and feel it within your character, to whatever extent is appropriate for them. Then write that part of the scene.
You soul will be delighted you did.
I think I’ll go write for a bit.
(If you like this post, bless the Algorithm Angels and select the “heart” icon ❤️ even if you’re not a subscriber. It helps!)
Pronounced yook-TESH-war, where “war” rhymes with “car.”
“Samadhi” is the Sanskrit term for the experience of cosmic consciousness that’s used throughout India’s mystical literature. Patanjali, the ancient expounder of the practices of Raja Yoga, gives samadhi as the end result of his eight-fold path to oneness with God.
For example, St. John of the Cross, St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Veronica Giuliani, Blessed Henry Suso, St. Anselm, Meister Eckhart, St. Bernard, and St. Simeon the New Theologian.