On Being God – Transcendentalism and Romanticism : A Mystical Approach
Thomas Cole. Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
Abstract
The intention of this study is to demonstrate the occurrence of mystical experience in the English Romantic and American Transcendental literary traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The characteristics of this phenomenon are explored and identified in the analysis and their influence is assessed. The primary theory is that the experience holds a central importance to the traditions considered, and exhibits a distinct and consistent experiential framework in all of the writers and their varying works.
I would like to thank the Gloucestershire University Library, Inter-Library Loan Department and the Liverpool Central Library for access to a range of source material. I would also like to express my gratitude to Dr Debbie Thacker for the support and advice that has been given to me during the creation of this dissertation.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 – The Essence of Union
Chapter 2 – The Problem of Ego
Chapter 3 – The Limits of Language
Chapter 4 – A Wise Passiveness
Conclusion
Endnotes
Bibliography
Introduction
There has been no time in recorded history when the eternal questions have not been asked. We even know they were on the minds of pre-literate humans by the passing down of oral traditions. Life – Being – exists, and philosophically speaking, this is a problem. It would be simpler if there was nothing whatsoever, no “existence”, yet we perceive an intricate complexity in the world and recognise a consciousness in ourselves and the life around us. Instances when individuals have purported to intuitively understand the nature of existence have their prominence in the historical records because of their universal appeal. Could it be that they hold a common origin? Is there a universal source to these mystical intimations of immortality?
The word “mystical” has previously been dogged with associations of obscurity, and has been used to describe anything mysteriously esoteric. One aim of this study is to re-define the mystical by the work of the English Romantic and American Transcendental writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The mystical attributes of these traditions have been randomly identified and variously termed, from moments of ‘visionary solipsism’ to imaginative perceptions of ‘the egotistical sublime’, but this analysis will attempt to create a new all-encompassing criticism of the works orientated around the transpersonal perspective. Regarded as the ‘fourth force’ in contemporary psychology, the transpersonal field recognises the non-ordinary state of consciousness to be identified. This ‘state’ will be nominated as a core element of Transcendentalism and a central vision of Romanticism.
A mystical enlightenment is regarded as the union of the individual with a divine Absolute, giving recourse to spiritual truths impossible to fully express. Their occurrence is the central basis for many Far Eastern religions and philosophies, but their emergence into the Western literary canon has been subtle and noiseless. This study proposes to identify that emergence and its common characteristics. By attempting to read and elucidate the experience, various works will be referred to with an emphasis on the major poets and writers. The analysis will focus on the Romantic and Transcendental traditions while utilising various sources to inform the structure of transcendence, from Ancient Eastern to contemporary Western texts.
The first chapter will break down the elements of the peak experience, describing and identifying them in various related works. In this way the interrelated aspects of self-transcendence can be laid out. Chapter two will trace some individual relationships with the self-less state and their varying stages of influences and expression. In the third chapter the limits of language are considered in relation to the apprehension of Truth. And finally the environmental and psychical factors are investigated in the fourth chapter to understand further the nature of the mystical awareness. In conclusion there is a consideration of the findings and their implications for literature and the wider cultural context. All references and title quotes may be found at the end of the full text.
The Essence of Union
We apprehend the world with a feeling of distinct separations. Our environment exists out there, while we yield to the confining walls of a biological body. Even the external objects we perceive succumb to borders and lines, defined by their differences and interminably at odds with each other. We crave some meaningful unity, a cohesive whole we may finally fathom. Our attempts generally seem futile. If there is an absolute, we struggle to reconcile it with ourselves and the world we inhabit, remaining ultimately alienated.
If moments have arisen when existence has revealed a wisdom unhindered by borders, their record is surely accounted for in the artistic works of human history. The English Romantic and American Transcendental traditions are commonly associated with a worldly transcendence centred around the individual mind, but its characteristics have not been defined in any lucid pattern or comprehensive experiential framework. Wordsworth’s poetry abounds with such a specific transition of sensory faculties. Writing on a central figure of the movement Kenneth Johnston has commented, ‘in the realms of consciousness, Wordsworth is our first and greatest border poet.’ The nature of his preoccupation with ‘border’ states can be clarified by the identification of a spontaneous and evolving vision in Wordsworth’s poetry that corresponds to the work of a number of other philosophically-orientated minds, and which amounts to the formulation of a concrete mysticism.
The awareness of some unitive force residing in nature is felt in ‘Tintern Abbey’ as Wordsworth confesses he feels a presence that ‘disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts’, apparently so strong that it heightens his consciousness with almost ferocious intensity. Intuitive emotions take centre stage and there is an escape from the tensions of disharmony. There is ‘A sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused’, an elusive, benign and unending web of connections that Wordsworth is beginning to perceive in the once-isolated realm of external objects. It is of an origin ‘whose dwelling is the light of setting suns’, indeed all things perceptible to the eye. There are intimations that everything is made from some unseen force, as Emerson deciphered: one ‘hidden stuff.’ This living, ubiquituous composition in Whitman’s experience (as described in the original ‘Song of Myself’) ‘goes onward and outward’ relentlessly and ‘nothing collapses’, for all phenomena is seen as continually manifesting in one all-pervading energy process. The living element of this inherent principle is emphasised by its inexorable wayward intensity. For Wordsworth the poet becomes ‘An inmate of this active universe’ in which motion takes on a commingling autonomy that is normally unnoticed.
Wordsworth’s first incarnation of The Prelude (1799) elaborates on the mental processes that normally mar the deeper truth: ‘In weakness we create distinctions’ through the engagement of the intellect, (or Coleridge’s understanding), that ‘false secondary power’ imposing on things and events. Wordsworth sees this type of categorical awareness to be inferior, of a lower order than the perspective encompassing a deeper and more expansive worldview. For in normal conscious awareness we fail in believing ‘our puny boundaries are things / Which we perceive’ and therefore do not question things assumed to be ‘not which we have made.’. Blake, too, recognised that those bound by the restrictive and “ignor[e]ant” consciousness were imprisoned by the throttling embrace of the same ‘mind-forg’d manacles’.
So, in effect the common human consciousness is understood as a desensitised affectation. To those unblinded by distinctions however, ‘the unity of all has been revealed’ and the fallacy of dissimilitude is exposed as a kind of grand illusion. As Emerson states in his essay ‘Oversoul’, ‘in these instances the intellectual gifts do not make the impressions of virtue, but almost of vice.’ There is felt to have been an over-reliance on the ordering aspect of the mind, and a natural re-balancing occurs of opposing ways of apprehending the world. In the terminology of Emerson’s ‘Nature’, when Reason, or intuition, is stimulated also, ‘outlines and surfaces become transparent’, inconsequential to an overriding fusion of multiplicity. This illuminating sense is felt to be a real metaphysical aspect of the individual for, as Coleridge remarks in Aids to Reflection, ‘Reason…is a direct aspect of Truth, an inward beholding.’ As the faculty is focused and refined the active participation of the mind with the world is revealed in glorious detail.
Berkeley, a major influence on Coleridge, states unequivocally in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge that ‘Sensations imprinted on the Sense…whatever Objects they compose…cannot exist otherwise than in a Mind perceiving them…’ This demands a fundamental necessity in nature for man, where human awareness is literally nature perceiving itself. In Blake’s terms, ‘Where Man is not Nature is barren.’ Reflecting this belief that consciousness was co-operatively creative in the world, Coleridge asserted that ‘any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system.’ Fully realising its implications, the reality-generating mind is appreciated by Wordsworth as ‘working…in alliance with the works which it beholds.’ No longer is the role of passive receiver taken by the mind, which now ‘Creates, creator and receiver both,’ intimately involved in the perceptual event. Objective reality is understood to depend on a mind attending to it. Light exists only insofar as the eye perceives it, forms it as light. The subject-object dichotomy begins to dissolve as an ‘ennobling interchange / of action’ takes place between the knower and the known. The writers we are analysing no longer recognise a separation between the organism and its environment. This fresh awareness fundamentally relates the perceiver and the perceived – until this duality, the final distinction, evaporates also.
Since there is a merge between the person and the external world, the foundation of individual Being is paradoxically recognised as the entire universe, and a cosmic consciousness manifests. Previously rigid in qualitative structures that ‘loath to coalesce’, the participator is reimbursed with a unitive vision that reconciles all polar opposites of worldly recognition. Upon this juncture an incipient mysticism occurs. In ‘The Pedlar’ Wordsworth-as-child experiences ‘sensation, soul and form, / melt[ing] into him.’ Since no distinctions can be possibly made, ‘In them’ he lives, ‘and by them did he live – they were his life.’ This synaesthesia of Being immerses the person in natural motions and cycles. By the same medium, in ‘Nature’ Emerson would recount personally partaking in the sea’s ‘rapid transformations.’ The normal physical boundaries of individuality are relegated to a lower circle of logical reasoning. Awareness is no longer ignorant to the situation as a whole and becomes open to subtle exchanges of energy.
The writer, far from downplaying the event, profoundly ruminates on its exalted properties. After bearing witness to a seemingly self-regulating and complex interplay of forces unlimited to previous boundaries, the intuitive conclusion emerges that the world is indeed Godhead, a self-evident truth. The observer identifies God as an abstract principle of energy in all things: for a time Whitman ‘see[s] something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each / moment then’ , basking in the knowledge of an indwelling divinity. To those with access to the new consciousness, the duration of this perception varies considerably. Whitman would write of his experience in the manifestation of one or two remarkable episodes, while Blake would recognise the state for most of his life, living ‘in God’s presence night and day’. For Wordsworth it would manifest at times of ‘clearest insight’ when, ‘Reason in her most exalted mood’, the divine would unravel to the observer the game of lila, a cosmic play of Life, with the observer now in awe of transcendent reception. The poet becomes aware of previously ‘unknown modes of being’ which are ‘bound / Together by a link, and with a soul / Which makes all one.’ As Spinoza defined the immanent Absolute, He is now not the creator of things but the things themselves.
This conclusion provokes a radical theological re-orientation. When the ‘light of sense’ reveals this ‘invisible world’ in ‘such strength / Of usurpation’, this can be translated as the removal of the transcendent “Other”, the personal God and His monarchical authority. The metaphor of the potter (God) and his clay (the material world) is no longer applicable, and another duality is removed. “Dead” matter no longer exists and the yawning gap between creator and creation is void.
In his early pantheist years, Coleridge himself had little doubt that everything had a life of its own, while still existing as one Life. His theory of the divine-conduit imagination, like the Quaker’s Inner Light, gave support to the truths Wordsworth had intuitively perceived and opened Coleridge up to similar convictions. He writes in Religious Musings of the ‘one Omnipresent Mind, / Omnific’, coursing through existence. While comparatively, in more lucid periods Emerson feels ‘the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me’, the philosopher’s muse turns inwards, and realises a most awe-inspiring Truth.
As Huxley has elucidated, the individual looks to one’s own existence and, by a process of “dying to self”, comes at last to a knowledge of the Self, the Kingdom of God that is within. Emerson experiences the revelation that ‘I am part or particle of God.’ The poet identifies with the universe, and it is largely attributed to a living divine immanence. For Wordsworth that sense of something ‘deeply interfused’ is now no other than that ‘in which all beings live with God, themselves / are God’. Similarly, Whitman eloquently describes how he knows
that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own.
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers…and the women my sisters and lovers.
This property is assigned to all living things, even inorganic ‘heaped stones’.
The controversy in orthodox Christian terms, by the doctrine of the Fall, has its roots in a thoroughgoing world denial. In Lallemant’s judgement: ‘We should feel wonder at nothing at all in Nature except only the Incarnation of Christ.’ But, as defined by Emerson’s Oversoul, the omniscient is incontrovertibly ‘that Unity…within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other.’ In the flavour of pantheist conviction, God is ‘substance’, as Spinoza would have it, and man is of the same nature. Isolation is now far removed from the writer. The human individual is for the first time seen as ‘an agent of one great mind.’ Consistent with Blake’s Jerusalem, all forms are equally alive and equally parts of the same body, which is ‘at once the body of God and of risen man.’
Correctly, Walter Pater has observed, in this state of consciousness the individual is rapt in the knowledge of a spirit of life in outward things, a single, all-pervading mind in them, of which man, and even the poet’s imaginative energy, are but moments. There is nothing that is not God. In the poetic character, the mounting urge to convey such emotional release can be intense. In the same realm of experience, even the church could not hush its mystics. St. Catherine of Genoa confessed of her underlying divinity found deeper than the conception of mere personality: ‘My Me is God, nor do I recognise any other Me except my God Himself’ (my italics). Her inner being, as opposed to the illusive surface “I”, is identical to the Hindu Brahman.
The exchangeability of words like God, “myself” and the cosmos becomes possible through the union of these hitherto qualifying grounds. By their mutual identity there are now produced new dimensions of meaningful complexity intrinsic to the world that seem to defy the conventions of human perception. Blake is witness to a limitless depth of realisation when he
…see[s] a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
This union precludes the limiting dimensions of reality, revealing a source of origin beyond the confines of time and space. As Emerson observed in his essay ‘Intellect’, by the constitution of this penetrative, microscopic perception all the laws of nature may be read in the smallest fact. The nature of the Divine Ground reflects its infinity whereby the universe is ‘represented in an atom, in a moment of time.’ “One” manifestation of divinity implies “All” others, like the surface of a convex mirror. In the Neo-Platonist tradition the understanding is allied in characteristics. Porphyry speaks of his master Plotinus as having four times in his life achieved a direct apprehension of God. In consequence, Plotinus concludes that ‘every one has all things in himself and again sees in another all things, so that all things are everywhere and all is all and each is all, and infinite the glory. For each of them is great, since the small also is great.’
Emerson would have agreed, for it was clear to him that to see the miraculous in the common was an invariable mark of wisdom. Indeed, from the initial perception, those with ‘genius’ could retrace the diffusion back to one common origin. The creative expression of the Absolute in the physical exudes the feeling of ‘something evermore about to be’ on the surface, while the Ground of Being resides beneath as an elusive but omnipresent undifferentiated and eternal source, ‘our destiny, our nature, our home.’
When this depth of realisation is achieved, there is an onset of fervent emotional understanding. In the normal waking consciousness, the phrase “God is Love” is no more than a piece of wishful positive thinking; from the perspective of the mystical consciousness it is a self-evident surety. By Coleridge’s intuition, the Universal Mind’s ‘most holy name is LOVE…’ The manifest diffusion of the Absolute allows an altruistic Self-awareness of mutual dependency to exist. Love, in all senses of the word, imbibes all things. As every true virtue is a part of that love, Spinoza explains, it is that ‘with which God loveth Himself.’ Therefore, it is believed that to hurt other sentient beings is, at the fundamental level, to hurt oneself. The wisdom supplants a moral framework characteristic of compassion, influencing the experiencer’s philosophical attitude. It is believed as through deepest insight that these revelations be unequivocal truths. Without doubt a virtuous man, in Emerson’s opinion, is in unison with Nature’s works. He is not “going it alone” against the relentless transitions of the cosmos, but aligning action and thought to its nature. As William Law has written, one concurs with the living inspiring spirit of God within him. In this way he is on the path to union with the universal Soul, which is described similarly as a source of goodness.
The choice however, remains. If God is the totality, He is free, as nothing external limits His infinite Being. If humans share this divinity then they are free also. Those with access to the vision, however, profess to discern intuitively the benign, spiritual core of existence. As Huxley contends, when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, ‘what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure?’
To be virtuous, then, amounts to being in harmony with nature, or moving into the Tao. The experience is, in Coleridge’s words, ‘the sublime of man / Our noontide majesty’ to know ourselves ‘Parts and proportions of one wond’rous whole.’ These impressive statements suggest that recognition and absorption of such wisdom brings great gratitude and sacredness to the person. The integrative state allows the individual to come ‘to a loftier height’, for ‘instinct with Godhead’ reveals ‘one galaxy of life and joy.’ It is evident the ensuing bliss the vision elicits can not be over-stated. Indeed, one is left feeling that those poets who have attempted to re-capture in words the transcendent emotional peak are left frustrated and unsatisfied with their efforts. Such is the nature of the mystical state.
Above, the experience central to those traditions under scrutiny has been elucidated. It tends to begin with the awareness of a continuous living activity in external phenomena as the intellect relaxes its previously restrictive grasp. Through the emerging intuitive conduit is revealed that inherent unity, which in turn makes clear the central importance of man’s place in the world and his manifest capability of realisation. Inevitably the sense of individuality dissolves and finally the revelation of an eternal immanence is made plain.
The psychological paradigm that encapsulates these moments of intense union is transpersonal because it acknowledges their existence and attempts to learn from them, whatever their origin. As Cowley states, there is no argument about the real occurrence of such ecstasies. Despite this, an off-hand relegation of mysticism is regularly employed by contesting interpretations, most notably from the psychoanalytical perspective. In a classic example of dismissive reductionism, Wordsworth’s intuition and identification with Nature is seen simply as a maternal substitute, deduced from the fact that he lost his mother very early in life.
Similarly, Whitman’s visionary experience is demoted to a ‘psychological catharsis’ in psychoanalytic phraseology, as a kind of regressive narcissistic fantasy. The express evidence in this analysis, however, is to the contrary. The transpersonal interpretation of the considered works can be ratified by Stace’s exposition of universal characteristics. In Mysticism and Philosophy he finds all such occurrences include a sense of unity, the transcendence of time and space, elements of paradox, a deeply felt positive mood and a sense of sacredness – all of which can be found in this consideration.
Although the essential principles of the mystical experience have been discussed, there are further inroads of investigation. What has been the long-term relationship of those poets with the revelation, and how have their works evolved to express this? Let us look at this in the next chapter.
The Problem of Ego
In the historical records, long and enduring sacrifices have been willingly undertaken in the name of individual transcendence. There is the intense conviction that the mind in opposition with the external world – what we concede to be reality – does not conform to the order of a natural psychical homeostasis. The frustration with being in perpetual isolation and the inevitable need to conquer nature does not accord with our views of the infallibility of a natural evolutionary design. The urge for liberation from the current human condition is therefore powerful and supersedes all phenomenal desire, but intimations of the death of that part of the mind conscious to the world as a separately functioning organism initially suggests the most horrifying demise of all.
The conditioned ego faces ultimate dissolution and the struggle for self-affirmation resonates profoundly in one desperate final justification. Mystic poet Thomas Traherne, in the beginning phases of his systematic spiritual advancement, remembers a certain ‘want and horror…beyond imagination’ fall upon him as its widening awareness terrifies his measly frame. During these inchoate hints of transcendence it is apparent the confines of the individual consciousness are about to expand to unfathomable proportions: Emerson confides he ‘almost fear[s] to know how glad I am’ when communing with illuminated Nature. In remaining open to the experience, however, the person moves towards a courageous acceptance of the death of the base self. The result is recorded as the perception of the Unity and its consequences. The definition of an illusive self in opposition with the deeper Self was a central tenet of the Transcendental tradition. Though probably the most unsure member of this body of thought, even Hawthorne shared the belief that human excellence consisted of an opened awareness that dissolved the individual ego, attuning to the living principle of order believed to underlie all of existence.
The rewards for this sacrifice, by spontaneous event or willed experience, are expressed as infinitely reimbursing for the poet. For Romanticism, in Wordsworth’s summations, once the individual has relinquished the ego only benign awareness can proliferate. At the end of The Prelude (1799) he recalls his sixteen-year old experience when ‘in all things / I saw one life / And felt that it was joy.’ The realms of previous everyday consciousness are looked back on in illuminated vision: Wordsworth experiences a release from all his previous earthly burdens, when the ‘weary weight / Of all this intelligible world / Is lightened’. For the first time the ego is seen as a long standing, nurture-conditioned illusion. In the same state, Whitman sees his initial egoistic fears stemming from a lack of understanding of a deeper Self, lying behind the mask of the persona. For, living in the knowledge of transcendent release and the fallacy of basic independent existence he ponders, ‘Who need be afraid of the merge?’
Whitman goes on at length to explain that the self he sings of is not the ego-concept of identity. Everyday habits and sufferings are cited in the poem, for they have been primarily confronted under the illusion of an unchanging independent observer that is ‘not the Me myself.’ By the same conclusion, in the contemplative attitude of Walden, Thoreau distinguishes two aspects of the psyche: he is sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand remote from myself as from another…I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you.
This concept of ego is universally revealed in the experience and at the moment of death to have been ‘a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only’, while the underlying conscious awareness emerges transcendent to become one with the ground of Being.
The notion of self-transcendence appealed to thinkers in late eighteenth century England for its fresh perspective, but such devotion did not always hinge on experiential knowledge. The argument has been put forward that Coleridge ever only ‘flirted’ with pantheism his whole career, never really achieving any direct liberation of his own. Indeed, Adair has suggested that Coleridge’s early poems of pantheism ‘amount to little more than verse propaganda for the various causes and ideas championed at the time.’ There is evidence, however, that gives credence to the idea that Coleridge, similar to Wordsworth, was the spontaneous receiver of an apparently ego-less experience, what the Catholics term a ‘gratuitous grace’. In his journals, a visit to a Gothic cathedral is described evoking a sublime state whereby Coleridge is filled with awe; he is ‘lost to the actualities that surround me’ while his whole being ‘expands into the infinite’. Earth and air, nature and art ‘all swell up into eternity, and the only sensible impression left is, “that I am nothing”’. The similarities are variously recognised in the mystical literary canon: Blake defines the core aspects of Coleridge’s experience when he writes that ‘man is himself infinite’ and union with this Eternal ‘can be attained only by annihilation of the Selfhood.’
Coleridge’s poetical output has been seen as his attempt to end the eternal conflict between the self and the world, to unite them into one infinite entity. His characteristic style of proclamation is used to convey his new belief in Religious Musings, announcing ‘God all in all!’ By exclusive consciousness of the divine, the deeper Soul, ‘All self-annihilated…make[s] / God its identity’. There is the possibility that such an experience also influenced his linguistic philosophy. Coleridge’s theory of the primary imagination was not only the prime agent of human perception. It included the awareness of an inherent divinity: in Biographia Literaria, by route of the imagination he suggests ‘we proceed from the self, in order to lose and find all self in God.’ By his own innate conviction, Coleridge assumes this knowledge to be accessible to all.
The same criticisms of falsity have been brought against Whitman’s works of spiritually-oriented discourse, his ‘Song of Myself’ widely misinterpreted as ‘merely a journalist’s report…of popular culture of the 1850s.’ Descriptions preferring a transcendent interpretation have been read as ‘imaginative flights’ of fancy. But before the publication of ‘Song of Myself’ his notebooks are full of sidelong references to such a visionary experience, concentrated around two summers. If Whitman is speaking literally in the original poem it is illogical to regard it as ‘empty rhetoric and bluff’ when Whitman claims to be ‘no longer contained between my hat and boots.’ A spontaneous death to self reportedly results in the identification with an expanded life, and the paradoxical position is taken that while “I” is nothing, it encompasses all things via a web of consciousness. By this position, the recognition of a ‘deathless spirit’ leads the poet to the conviction that all people are ‘just as immortal and fathomless as myself.’ Even the smallest sprout shows there is really no death.
When Whitman wrote the first edition of ‘Song of Myself’ he appeared to know nothing about Indian philosophy. In light of its similarity with his work, Thoreau questioned Whitman on his knowledge of the ancient Eastern texts, to which he replied he knew nothing of. However, this state of affairs does not impede the expansion of Whitman’s seemingly intuitive oriental wisdom into further works: in his Democratic Vistas he speaks of a consciousness that ‘once liberated and looked upon…expands over the whole earth, and spreads to the roof of heaven.’ Clearly describing the mystic portrayal of the original ‘Song of Myself’, its long-term influence was probably decisive in Whitman’s choice to affiliate with Concord Transcendentalism.
Emerson’s praise of the poem could be connected to his own experiences of direct apprehension. The most famous of all Transcendental inspirations has been imbued with importance in previous criticisms. The moment recorded in Nature that has been equally admired and derided can also be seen as the motivation behind Emerson’s revolutionary ‘Divinity School Address’: ‘Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all.’ Emerson clearly defines the stages of cosmic consciousness, finally becoming aware of its divine character. In this state, he continually gives watch to a sight ‘of uncontained and immortal beauty’ amid nature, in moments of quiet solitude.
Religious ecstasies of this character are seldom induced if relied on purely by spontaneous occurrence. If their sporadic manifestation slowly recedes as a pleasant memory their absence is deeply apparent. Wordsworth’s capricious intuition had waned in his twenties, leaving him to question, ‘How shall I trace the history, where seek / The origin of what I then have felt?’ The recollections of ‘Intimations of Immortality’ also hark back to an innocent year of revelation and unitive perception that had been spontaneously granted to him. While Wordsworth struggled to re-experience the state, other obstacles would confront Coleridge’s ensuing deliberations. In ‘The Eolian Harp’ he imagines the world as a system of ‘organic Harps diversely fram’d’, and considers one vast ‘intellectual breeze, / At once the Soul of each, and God of all?’ However, the speculation is rejected by his wife in the poem’s continuation as a product of the ‘unregenerate mind’, which gives rise to the radical reception of pantheism at the time.
This and a variety of other influences may be considered to have had an effect on Coleridge’s eventual return to a Trinitarian belief. While at a later stage Coleridge would be unable to reconcile individuality with pantheism, he retains an ambiguous relationship toward the mystical philosopher he had been so influenced by, which suggests he may still have been Unitarian at heart. Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary describes a scene when Coleridge kissed a portrait of Spinoza in front of an edition of his works, exclaiming, ‘”This book is a gospel to me.” But in less than a minute he added: “His philosophy is nevertheless false”’
Despite this uncertainty, there is evidence Coleridge brought about a change in his friend’s surface convictions. Denouncing the kind of nature-worship in Wordsworth’s poetry as ‘contagious’, he would no longer support the pantheist belief. Though Wordsworth would initially refute Coleridge’s argument, he was to modify the end of The Prelude (1805) with a worldview more aligned to Coleridge’s acceptance: ‘And God and Man divided, as they ought, / Between them the great system of the world / Where Man is sphered, and which God animates.’ This turnaround of philosophy is in opposition with previous publications. Wordsworth may have recognised his indebtedness to Coleridge for previous philosophical notions, hence been persuaded more towards a transcendent God of religious theism.
Whitman’s poetry also underwent changes as the poet’s philosophical inquiry evolved. Cowley has suggested that many of the revisions of subsequent ‘Song of Myself’ publications are concealments of the original meaning. As new editions were released the author approached a personal identification with the celebrated Universal Self: the ego-hold seemingly re-asserted itself and Whitman’s exhilarating pride of discovery changed into humourless arrogance. In a messianic optimism Whitman made plans to turn Leaves of Grass into a kind of Holy Bible for the modern age, (containing 356 chants – one for each day of the year) and supplanted the virtues of the idealised deeper Self on to his personal identity. According to the sages, however, when there is egoism neither Self-knowledge nor liberation is possible. Whitman came to regard his intuition in the light of memory as the intense recognition of a personal self-justification. Whitman moved further away from his initial conviction and returned to a more orthodox perspective. In a disorientating personification, Whitman reverts to descriptions of a world-transcendent figure of divinity. By the later poem, ‘Chanting the Square Deific’, the ego lays claim to the virtues of a transcendent Universal Mind. Details such as these reinforce the idea that as Whitman grew older less emphasis was laid on his mystic episodes.
Although Wordsworth’s intuitions had ended by 1804 and Coleridge had moved towards a more orthodox Christian theism, Wordsworth was still capable of writing about the ego-loss experience. There is evidence that Wordsworth was penchant to incorporating old pantheist material into new poems. He writes in The Excursion book in the typical semantics of mystical apprehension: at length the poet describes in third-person of a place when
…all things there
Breathed immortality, revolving life
And greatness still revolving; infinite;
There littleness was not; the least of things
Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped
Her prospects, nor did he believe, – he saw.
The recognition of a time when the ego has ceased to function in a previous mystical absorption is again known. The intensity of the experience is sometimes re-lived in fleeting moments of awareness, reminding the poet of the original revelatory quality of the cosmic consciousness. But later, ‘Oft as he called those extacies to mind’, Wordsworth would experience a ‘lowly heart’ in yearning for a succeeding divine intuition.
The transitory nature of the mystic state poses the problem of the sense of a self slowly reinstating its apparent reality. The differing involvement of many of the poets identified as having the self-annihilating experience raises new questions. Why do some individuals move away from their apparently learned wisdom, while others maintain some sort of perception of the Absolute? The return to orthodox beliefs of Coleridge, Whitman, and (to a lesser extent) Wordsworth is interesting, when those in the character of Blake and Emerson court an ongoing relationship with the divine. What exact physical and psychological set of circumstances must be appropriated for the experience to occur? How does the individual affect his constitution up to the point where he may purposefully facilitate the onset of such a state? These issues, and linguistic considerations of self-transcendence, will be analysed in the following chapters.
The Limits of Language
If one is to believe the Bible, it was by uttering words that God created: ‘And God said, “Let there be light.” And light appeared.’ It could be argued that God had already conceived the light in His mind, but it wasn’t until He uttered the words that light came into being. Words, then, are powerful. Words are also dangerous, in the form of racial and militaristic propaganda. Language itself can appear to be threatening and at the same time convey beauty in a poetic arrangement. The range of possibility that language engenders appears to be limitless. Indeed, in most areas of knowledge it is more than adequate, and if a new discipline does form, it simply compensates by creating further symbol systems.
Yet the strain of the lingual codes is increasingly apparent in the elements of Romanticism and Transcendentalism under study. Shelley would also be one to find himself struggling with language throughout his poetic career. This could be attributed to mystical intimations: Weisman has continually critiqued the works of Shelley as a developing quest for a mode of fiction-making which is sensitive to the poet’s belief in a metaphysical ultimate. Shelley’s suspicion that there was an inherent inefficiency in language itself lay in the belief that the truth he was trying to express was non-verbal. In the same point of inquiry with eighteenth-century Neo-classical precursor texts such as Pope’s ‘An Essay on Criticism’, the loss of raw subjective experience in the linguistic transition is explored: ‘Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound, / Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.’ The problem is that even when they are used well, verbalised concepts are seen to misshape ‘the beauteous forms of things’.
In Blake’s need to communicate his experience he had to state his spiritual events symbolically in order for them to be intelligible. However, the vivid experience of this wisdom was never confused with its expression. Blake described his ‘Descriptive Catalogue’ as ‘all of them representations of spiritual existences of God’s immortality.’ In the same way, Coleridge’s intense interest in matters of language taught him to distrust the symbol, which he concluded could not be confused with the greater reality it designated. In attempts to directly know this reality one had to go beyond mere concepts: in Coleridge’s judgement, ‘the being who wishes to communicate with the Absolute must, while employing the symbol at some stage, eventually by-pass it.’ Indeed, the means is discarded in the attainment of the end.
Emerson’s own knowledge of the lingual inadequacy was of the same ilk. In ‘Oversoul’ he writes that ‘the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers.’ He refers to the mystic that will have very little to do with language, in the mould of St Thomas Aquinas who, after an experience of Infused Contemplation, refused to go back to work on his unfinished book which he now regarded as no better than chaff or straw. Emerson understood as well as Wordsworth that conceptual language affected our perceptions of the world. If one can remain ‘unblinded by these formal arts’, however, there can be knowledge of a Unity. While in this state, Burke explains, hardly any thing can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity.There is a constrictive effect on any attempt to decipher it with verbal modes: if words are produced, Emerson writes, ‘I define, I confine, I am less.’ Indeed, ultimately, in the quest for enlightenment the writer’s best communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all that he has done. Upon the call to elaborate on the nature of the mystical consciousness, an answer in words is delusive. The realisation that language conditions the senses evokes a new perspective. This shift of relations can be traced in those poets who have undergone a mystical intuition.
Emerson’s position in the church became unstable during his religious conversion, and he became so sceptical of the validity of the Lord’s Supper that he could no longer administer it. Leaving the pulpit in 1832 after his view of the irrelevance of wordy preaching had developed, in 1838 his criticism of the church was complete with his ‘Divinity School Address’ at Cambridge. In an affirmation of individual potentiality and self-reliance, Emerson makes the established religious institutions obsolete. He describes how, in the ‘vulgar tone of preaching’, priests have come to speak of the revelation, ‘as if God were dead.’ In the Christian discipline and by the Fall, ‘man is ashamed of himself’, when instead he should be made sensible that he is an infinite soul. In order that he might ‘acquaint men at first hand with Deity’, Emerson explicates that one’s deepest soul is ‘wiser than the whole world.’ If one can be virtuous in action and direct in experience, one shall see the world to be ‘the mirror of the soul.’
The individual is conscious of an inherent divinity, self-sufficient in order and harmony. As Emerson states in ‘Intellect’, whosoever propounds a philosophy of the mind is ‘only a more or less awkward translator of things in your consciousness.’ All that is needed lies within the person. The suggestion of bypassing the church in a direct apprehension of God verged on insubordination. As a result, the ‘Divinity School Address’ brought with it a virulent series of attacks in the press for its heresies, and earned Emerson a notoriety that barred him from speaking at Harvard for three decades. If God were to be found ‘in the earnest experience of the common day’, the individual could pursue a spiritual path of their own, without the need for organised religion. In Democratic Vistas, Whitman elaborates on the effects of the mystical experience and the church’s relationship with it: upon the inducement of the visionary state, ‘the soul emerges, and all statements, churches, sermons melt away like vapours.’ The realms occasioning language are transcended. Indeed, in ‘Song of Myself’ the experience itself seems to Whitman ‘more than all the print I have read in my life’, and itself remains beyond statement. The feeling expressed is not in any dictionary, utterance or symbol, and so the illuminated soul ‘extricates itself entirely from the churches.’
Blake’s revolutionary thought was similar in endorsement. In his belief, the whole of the New Church was ‘in the active life and not in ceremonies at all.’ In what could be called a spiritual purism, direct experience is seen as paramount and verbal systems cannot convey the inwardness of the mystic state. It is possible to connect Wordsworth’s failure to complete his proposed great philosophical work, ‘The Recluse’, with these insurmountable qualities. In his conclusion, it was beyond even his powers to accomplish. The individual is in the position where they are at once beneficiaries and victims of language. That which, in the language of mysticism, is called ‘this world’ is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed and, as it were, petrified by language. As Emerson confesses in ‘Nature’, ‘we know more than we can communicate’, and make do with mere intimations of eternity and selflessness in words instead of their direct experience.
Those fields of inquiry based on the lingual tradition will not forgo their method of debate, however. Logical reasoning is seen as the only viable pursuit of knowledge. Northrop Frye considers many philosophers ‘terminological buccaneers’, obsessed with concept-words and descriptions in an attempt to ground unitive theories. The problem of philosophy, according to Plato, is ‘for all that exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and absolute.’ According to the mystical traditions, such a goal is impossible. If there are non-verbal means of understanding, words are transcended. In Wittgenstein’s terms, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.’ The indwelling wisdom refuses to be limited to lingual codes: as Coleridge consistently believed, the highest spiritual truths are only available to intuition rather than abstract logic. In these experiences of eternity, the temporal frameworks of language do not direct the same boundless intensity. But the conditioned apprehension of the world through lingual structures is strong. Blake would also play on the human intellectual obsessions. In his essay ‘Young Men of the New Age’ he assures that ‘God…cannot be approached through reasoned argument by means of philosophical propositions.’ Indeed, eternal truths can only be comprehended by ‘imagination heightened to vision’, which corresponds with the historical Buddha’s ‘metaphysical silence’ in face of a philosophical elucidation. In the same belief, in ‘Oversoul’ Emerson describes as ineffable ‘the union of man and God in every act of the soul.’
If the mind’s conditioned linguistic processing is a major interference with the direct apprehension of the world, what of the time when we may not have been so quick to subsume reality to verbal utterance? In childhood we see the world through innocent eyes, and with a similar perception to the mystical perspective. In a possible mystical insight, Christ acknowledges, ‘whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child, will never enter it.’ As Emerson confessed, he always regretted that he was not as wise as the day he had been born. In his major Transcendentalist work, only those who have ‘retained the spirit of infancy’ can see Nature. Within the setting conducive to the mystical, however, one who is about to know the direct experience can ‘cast off his years’, and henceforth remain ‘always a child.’ In Wordsworth’s summations, our new souls ‘have sight of that immortal sea / Which brought us hither’, radiating this in younger periods, before language is known. Indeed, ‘heaven lies about us in our infancy’, but one must learn the symbol systems in order that one may unlearn them. If there is a communicated method for this process, what are its elements? If, as in the Taoist tradition, one who is weighty in virtue ‘resembles an infant child’, how may this similar perception be regained? This will be explored in the next chapter.
A Wise Passiveness
Seldom is it that the mind ceases its relentless eddy of thoughts in the busy hours of modern life. One concept-chain leads to another, and the internal process is repeated. We find little time for idle moments of pure awareness; even by sleep the mind continues to elaborate on reality. Attention to the environment suffers consequently, as do other persons within its sphere. This Mind-less, unending stream of verbosity is also purported to be responsible for denying the human natural mystical vision. A denial, that is, unless one can discover practical steps to correct the learned imbalance.
The types of mental states conducive with the mystical apprehension carry common features in striving for a higher consciousness: intense Christian prayer involving prolonged repetition has been known to elicit mystical “heresy”. In the same way, by dissipating the flow of internal concept sublimation, Evelyn Underhill has suggested Wordsworth would be the mescaline taker’s favoured poet. For the transcendental visions under consideration, solitude and silence firstly are almost invariable pre-conditions. It is a time when the ego is at its lowest level of functioning. Understanding this much in the Romantic character, while many ‘thought[s]…Traverse my indolent and passive brain’ Coleridge would still abide in nature ‘and tranquil muse upon tranquillity’, trying to remain detached. In this preliminary attainment he would arrange the right conditions. The natural setting favours the vision, for as Emerson would see it, in nature’s eternal calm man finds himself. Indeed, Thoreau would comment he ‘love[d] to be alone’ in the forests of Walden during his experiments in self-sufficiency.
The inducement of this ‘wise silence’ returns the poet to the state prior to the original spontaneous experience, and approaches a lucid recollection of the central vision. For Wordsworth, ‘Oft in these moments, such a holy calm / Would overspread my soul,’ and what is seen appears ‘like something in myself, a dream.’ Intimations of the mutual dependency of mind and reality are felt. The number of passages written around this physical repose affirms Wordsworth’s recourse to nature’s solitude, as it has been during these times that the poet is most aware of the One Life. By the same wisdom, Whitman believed that only in solitude could the spirituality of religion positively come forth at all: ‘Only on such terms…the devout ecstasy, the soaring flight…’ Referring here to his experiences recorded in ‘Song of Myself’, Whitman understood the precursory demands for the mystical onset. In the poem, he decides to do nothing for a long time but listen, in this case facilitating the spontaneous mystical absorption. Without extra effort on his part, Whitman is granted the satori. Remaining passive results in a union through the audible, Whitman’s impending perception of unity not limiting itself to any singular sensory modality: the hearing of sounds in the external environment becomes acute, resembling ‘a grand opera…A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me.’
The motivation to facilitate the state, however, cannot simply rely on future spontaneous inducements. Further steps must be taken to coax a continual unitive experience. In ‘Nature’, Emerson considers when ‘seen in the light of thought, the world is phenomenal.’ This would dictate that, in Whitman’s episode, the ego underwent an unprompted dissolution, halting the mind’s universal subordination of experience to language or conceptual thought. The identical nature of the natural mystical state with the “self-induced” experience suggested that the mind could be perfected in some way. With concurring theory, Wordsworth remained positive that we could improve and ‘feed this mind of ours, / In a wise passiveness’, no matter how inconsistent or unsure his method may have been. By Huxley’s similar deliberation, he suggested that in this state of ‘wise passiveness’ there is made possible the emergence of forms of consciousness other than the utilitarian awareness of normal waking life. In the same vein, Wordsworth would acknowledge the possibility that this practice contributed to the refining of an inner faculty responsible for the attainment of these perceptions. The Oriental poetry expresses the same belief: if we can ‘Attain complete vacuity / Maintain steadfast quietude / All things come into being.’ As Emerson concluded, the original silence becomes a ‘solvent’ that erodes the ego, and ‘gives us leave to be great and universal.’
Despite his own egotism, Whitman believed in such an individual striving for spirituality: ‘Bibles may convey, and priests expound, but it is exclusively for the noiseless operation of one’s isolated Self, to…reach the divine levels.’ However, he may have strongly attributed his vision to other unrelated variables. Whitman thought the onset of mystical experience was caused by ‘superabundant health and energy’, which is nowhere recognised in the mystical literary works as an effective means of self-transcendence. As Emerson observed, ‘we have little control over our thoughts’, and so the mind must be re-conditioned individually with a discipline of mindful concentration. Thoreau’s agrarian experiment at Walden Pond tested not only the virtues of strict economy and the study of nature, but also this contemplative life. Each morning he would study ‘the stupendous and cosmogonal’ philosophy of the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which ‘our modern world and its literature seem trivial.’ In Walden he writes of a deeper understanding through his reading and meditation practice: ‘I realised what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works.’ As well as a spiritual furtherance, Thoreau notes the classic Western scorn towards passive-receptive, non-conceptual attitudes. However, as Emerson maintains, ‘the great man is not convulsible or tormentable.’ In the character of deep meditation, events pass over him without much impression, and Thoreau continues in his own manner.
Emerson in particular emphasised the importance of a discipline of reflective meditation that required daily attendance. Identifying the ancient oriental practice, Emerson commented that we were fortunate, when daydreaming in the woods, to be awakened to mindfulness by the scream of an eagle. By such awareness in persistence the perception of Unity is reported to illuminate the senses. Thoreau logs his initial experience, during a moment of contemplative solitude in the rain, when
I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very patterning of the drops, and in every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me…Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me…that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.
When the mind has been emptied, the poet detects a life in all things. In Coleridge’s words, it is whenever the mist, that stands between the Absolute and the individual ‘Defecates to a pure transparency, / That intercepts no light and adds no stain’. The internal faculty is attuned to its height, and ‘There Reason is, and then begins her reign!’ The usual dominance of the intellect is subdued: for Wordsworth that ‘bodily image’ has been swept aside, that previously ‘hath diffused / A soul divine which we participate.’ In the manner of Blake, historical enlightened sages reported this state in their everyday apprehension of the world. Wordsworth elucidates his acknowledgement of those who dwell in the experience through either concentrated attention or natural vision. In The Prelude (1805) he confirms he knows of higher minds that ‘by sensible impressions not enthrall’d,’ are able to ‘hold communion with the invisible world.’ Describing the Buddhist Bodhisattva, through the impressions and every image and act of life, ‘the highest bliss / That can be known is theirs.’
The direct insight of a divine eternal reality is commonly reported to be within the mystic’s comprehension in their release from conceptual perception. Thoreau expresses this temporal eradication by writing after long periods of contemplation: God ‘culminates in the present moment.’ In this eternity there is something true and sublime, for ‘all times and places and occasions are now and here.’ There is an Eternal Now, where time is revealed to be a contrivance of the illusion of selfhood. Wordsworth identifies it as ‘the life where hope and memory are as one,’ the projection of past and future now dissolved. ‘Heaven is revealed’ to meditation in the eternal quietness, although the attainment of this level of consciousness refuses to occur in high frequency. In a letter to Sara Hutchinson, Coleridge would express his problematic and fleeting temperament of mind: he complains of existing ‘in thoughts rather than in things.’ Yet, however Coleridge understood it, he wrote in accordance with the mystical tradition when stating how ‘the mind must strive continually to make itself permeable to a holier power.’ Only in a sustained spiritual practice can the experience be made more permanently manifest. In such a discipline the poet can learn to see with what the philosopher, Plotinus, describes as ‘that other kind of seeing, which everyone has, but few make use of.’
This life-long unknowing of intuition and the stale, dominant apprehension of the world through utilitarian consciousness is consistently referred to as a state of sleep in both Transcendental and Romantic traditions. Blake’s psycho-spiritual constitution spurs him to call to all, ‘Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand! I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine.” Additionally, in Blake’s Jerusalem, man (symbolised by Urizen) is asleep to the divine vision. Here, Man himself, in conceiving the Absolute as a world-transcendent divinity, hides the Divine Wisdom. By the same metaphor, Thoreau explains that to be awake is to be alive. This is not meant in the universal sense, however; Thoreau confesses he ‘has never met a man who was quite awake.’ In fact, we must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake by ‘an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.’ This mindfulness compliments formal meditation practice, increasing the rate at which the process of awakening unfolds. Geddard believes that to be awake was to be in a state of detached self-observation, what Emerson called ‘reflection’. In ‘Nature’, Emerson declares normal awareness of the world to be ‘a divine dream’, which encouragingly, ‘we may soon wake from.’
The unexpected similarity between the mystic and the poet lies in their identical goal. Although the mystic will generally have nothing to do with words, both strive for a perceivable coherence in nature and a transcendence of self. Unfortunately for some of the poets, however, the non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of experience, are almost completely ignored. Emerson believed that in all great poets lay a ‘wisdom of humanity’ which was superior to any talents they exercised, for their purpose was to create in order to communicate. In ‘Intellect’, Emerson proposed the experience ‘needs a vehicle or art by which it is conveyed to man’, and it is by route of the poet that this may be achievable.
The suggestion that those poets identified as moving away from the experience did so because of the lack of any structured spiritual discipline is conceivable. Emerson’s definition of some form of receptive practice could account for the lack of evidence of any decline of Transcendentalist conviction in his and Thoreau’s work. Even if Wordsworth’s intuitions naturally occurred, the tranquil muse of the sublime was a recognised mode of Romantic inspiration that took the English poets halfway towards the purported vision. Here, then, could lie the reason for the emergence of mystical experience through those poetic traditions considered.
Conclusion
After identifying the experience, the range and effect of mystical intuition has essentially been approached from several different perspectives.
A person having this form of spiritual experience sees all things in the environment, even inanimate objects, as radiant manifestations of a unified field of divine creative energy and realises that the boundaries between them are illusory and unreal. While the poetry that has been analysed attempts to convey the essence of the cosmic consciousness, it has also been discovered that, in truth, it is considered to lie beyond the power of even the highest art to express. If the understanding is to be complete and sustained, verbalised concepts about experience are replaced by direct, unmediated acquaintance with actual events. This can be facilitated individually by a wordless awareness or other disciplined spiritual practice, as the spontaneous vision cannot be guaranteed to recur or maintain a lasting influence.
The ‘mystical’ theme commands a characteristic structure and development that can be identified universally in the literature as a transcendent experience. The study suggests that Wordsworth’s abundant episodes of “nature worship” and other similar texts could be reassessed and reclassified in the transpersonal criticism. The study of this aspect of the Romantic and Transcendental works has shown that much criticism of it is approached either through the filters of psychoanalytic theory or a materialistic Cartesian worldview. What has also been revealed is that the most common conception of God in Western culture has been anthropomorphic, and any other ideas about the Absolute have been swiftly condemned. Apart from the implication that psychoanalysis has become the “new religion”, the suggestion is also that Western religious hierarchies discourage direct spiritual experience in their followers, because they are not easily controlled and allow an independence whereby the religious institution becomes obsolete, no longer the sole route to the divine.
The mystical experience emphasises the mutual dependency of opposites in the dualistic consciousness. In the same way, the rational materialist might do well to realise the intuitive aspect of the mind. Those who limit themselves to rational-discursive thought, in Blake’s judgement, ‘know not why they love nor wherefore they sicken and die.’ By this standpoint of narrowed perception, knowledge of eternity has become ‘weak Visions of Time and Space.’ The opposing force of logical reasoning hides that which should be seen. Emerson believed that empirical science was apt to cloud the sight and bereave the student of contemplation of the whole. By result, Watts has suggested, the illusion of separateness underlies the misuse of technology in ‘a violent and hostile subjugation of man’s natural environment’, terminally alienated from oneself.
The appreciation of direct experience in the transpersonal criticism is important, in that the origins of religious establishment can be regained and reaffirmed. For Emerson, the religious fanatic was ‘the possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a single topic.’ In the same way, religious doctrines can degenerate into dogmas and rituals into empty ritualism after relentless repetition. If one allows the mystical experience to be seen as the basis of the major religions, this problem can be resolved. If genuine calls were heeded for organised religions to transform their attitude to worship, the decline of attendance may be remedied.
The cosmological system of Copernicus removed the human position at the centre of the universe and the individual was placed in an infinite space, but the mystical intuition re-aligns that universal centrality. In Whitman’s conclusion, it is the potential latent in every living person.
Endnotes
Introduction
It suggests mist, and therefore foggy, confused, or vague thinking. It has also come to suggest hocus-pocus and miracle-mongering. – Stace, W.T., Mysticism and Philosophy (Macmillan, London, 1972), p.15
Rzepka, Charles, The Self as Mind (Harvard, Cambridge, 1986), p.26
Weiskel, Thomas, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Psychology of Transcendence (John Hopkins University Press, London, 1976), p.55
Transpersonal Psychology was founded by Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich, who together concluded that the humanistic psychology movement they had also helped found, was not comprehensive enough to include all that was being discovered about the ”farther reaches of human nature”. It was officially born with the publication in 1969 of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. – Armstrong, Thomas, The Radiant Child (Theosophical Publishing House, Illinois, 1985), p.35
The first three forces are psychodynamic (Freudian), behavioural and humanistic. See Roberts” Four Psychologies Applied to Education: Freudian, Behavioural, Humanistic, Transpersonal (John Wiley & sons, New York, 1975), p.3
Referred to generally as ”holotropic states”. – Grof, Stanislav, Psychology of the Future, (New York State Press, New York, 2000), p.xii
Chapter 1 – The Essence of Union
Quote Wordsworth, ”Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, ll.96-7, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems 1797-1800 (Cornell University Press, New York, 1992), p.117
7 New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. Hartman, Geoffrey (Clarendon , London, 1972), p.9
”Tintern Abbey”, ll.95-6
Ibid., l.96
Ibid., l.98
”Circles”, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.102
”Song of Myself”, Leaves of Grass [1885], 120-1, Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.2100
Wordsworth, The Two Part Prelude of 1799, Part II, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Wordsworth, Jonothan (WW Norton & Co, New York, 1979), p.21
Prelude [1799], Part II, l.252
Ibid., l.251
Ibid., ll.253-4
Braden, William, The Private Sea (Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1967), p.156
Prelude [1799], Part II, l.256
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.223
Consistent with this theory, lama guru Sri Ramakrishna maintains the nature of diversity to be a state of ignorance, submitting to the worldly illusion of Maya, while a true knowledge of reality incorporates a more intense recognition of complete unity. – Ashram, Advaita, Teachings of Sri Ramakrishna (Swami Ananyanandra, India, 1985), p. 37
William Blake would identify this concept as the ”poetic genius”. See All Religions Are One (1788).
Norton Anthology of American Literature, v. 1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1090
Aids To Reflection, (Bell, London, 1913), pp.43-4
McFarland, Thomas, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1969), p.300
For Blake, apart from man God had no meaning. – Modiano, Raimonda, Coleridge & the Concept of Nature (Macmillan, London, 1985), p.87
The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Griggs, Leslie (Clarendon, Oxford, 1956), p.709
Prelude [1799], Part II, ll.304-5
Ibid., l.303
Alan Watts has represented the reliance of the existence of the phenomenal universe on a perceiving body in more lucid terms by the analogy of a rainbow sighting. Literally the world exists, as it is, in the eye of the beholder. – ”The New Alchemy”, This Is It: Essays on Zen and other Spiritual Experience (Mirage, New York, 1997), p.187
The Prelude of 1805 in Fourteen Books, Book XIII, 375-6, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Wordsworth, Jonothan (WW Norton & Co, New York, 1979), p.21
Prelude [1799], Part II, l.280
”The Pedlar”, ll.103-6, Wordsworth: Selected Poems, ed. Davies, Damian (Everyman, Channel Islands, 2000), p.56
Ibid., ll.105-6
”Nature”, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1077
As Emerson deduces of his experience, ”the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and object are one.” – ”Oversoul”, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.208
”Song of Myself” Leaves of Grass (1855), ll. 1273-6, from Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.2136
Frye, Northrop, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1947), p.8
Blake elaborated on his perpetual divine immersion in numerous works. In A Vision of the Last Judgement he envisages ””What,” it will be Question”d, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” Oh no, no, I see an innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty.”” – Songs of Innocence and Experience: Critical Essays, ed. Bottrall, Margaret (Macmillan, Bristol, 1970), p.159
Prelude (1805), Book XIII, ll.169-70
In Hindu mythology, ”lila” is the undifferentiated play of the Godhead, eternal Brahman, manifesting itself in endless dualities in a game of purposeless creative expression; time and space is formed as its action, from a source ”without qualities”, yet containing all qualities. This is a profoundly spiritual viewpoint. – Flood, Gavin, An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996), p.113
Fragment. Wordsworth”s Poetical Works, ed. Selincourt, E. de, & Darbishire, H. (Clarendon Press, Oxford,1949), Vol.5, pp.340-1
Schelling too would observe: ”God is not the cause of all, but the All itself.” – McFarland, Thomas, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1969), p.54
Prelude (1805), Book VI, ll.533-6
The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Griggs, Leslie (Clarendon, Oxford, 1956), p.864
Wordsworth, John, The Borders of Vision (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982), p.362
Coleridge, Religious Musings, ll.119-20, Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Wu, Duncan (Blackwell, Oxford, 2001), p.455
”Nature”, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1075
The reader is referred to chapter three of this dissertation for an elaboration on the nature and effects of ego-loss, or self-dissolution.
Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy (Harper & Row, New York, 1945), p.4
”Nature”, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1075
Hermann Hesse”s German novel Siddartha fictionalises the final realisation of this experience. Knowledge of the cosmic unity is the source of the calm contentment seen in Vasudeva”s face. – trans. Rosner, Hilda, ed. McCrory, Donald (Picador, London, 1998), p.48
Prelude, ll.532-3
”Song of Myself” Leaves of Grass (1855), ll. 82-85, from Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.2099
Ibid., l. 89, p.2099
As recently as three hundred years ago an attitude of world condemnation by the Church was prevalent. – The Doors of Perception, Huxley, Aldous (Chatto & Windus, London, 1954, e-text: www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/doors.htm)
”Oversoul”, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.208
McFarland, Thomas, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1969), p.66 Spinoza, of whom Coleridge was an avid reader, maintained that besides God, no substance could be granted or perceived.
Fellow radical Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing also believed that to understand a great being, we must have ”the seeds of the same excellence within us”. – Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Porte, J (Cambridge University Press, USA, 1999), p.15
Prelude (1799), Part II, l.302
Fry, Northrop, Songs of Innocence and Experience: Critical Essays ed. Bottrall, Margaret (Macmillan, Bristol, 1970), p.166
Pater, Appreciations (Macmillan, London, 1920), p.56
Taken from The Perennial Philosophy, Huxley, Aldous, (Harper & Row, New York, 1945), p.11
Literally, ”Atman”, the deepest immanent Self of the human individual, is ”Brahman”, the all-pervading undifferentiated source: “Thou art That.” – Cross, Stephen, Elements of Hinduism (Element, Dorset, 1994), p.30
”Auguries Of Innocence”, A Choice of Blake”s Verse, ed. Raine, Kathleen (Faber & Faber, London, 1990), p.31
”Intellect” Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.262
”Oversoul”, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.229
Frye, Northrop, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1947), p.8
The Neo-Platonists, trans. Whittaker, Thomas (Cambridge University Press, London, 1901), p.63
”Nature”, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1100
Gable, Harvey, Liquid Fire: Romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Peter Lang, New York, 1998), p.11
Prelude (1805), Book VI, ll.538-543
Tibetan Buddhists term this unmediated source the Clear Light of the Void which, if the dying person can keep his mind clear at the moment of death, one will be returned to. – The Tibetan Book of the Dead ed. Evantz-Wentz (Mohawk, London, 1975), p.11
Huxley, Aldous, Culture and the Individual (originally appeared in Playboy magazine, 1963, e-text: www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/huxcultr.htm)
Coleridge, Religious Musings, l.120
Coleridge”s search for transcendence through love went as far as his relationship with Sara Hutchinson. For a short time Sara brought him close to something like the transcendental: ”In loving her thus I love two souls as one…” – Adair, Patricia, The Waking Dream (Edward & Arnold, London, 1967), p.180
Spinoza, taken from Coleridge”s Miscellaneous Criticism, Raysor, T.M., (Harvard University Press, Mass., 1936), p.263
”Nature”, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1078
Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy (Harper & Row, New York, 1945), p.178
”Nature”, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1081
Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception (Chatto & Windus, London, 1954, e-text: www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/doors.htm)
Soothill, W.E., The Three Religions of China (Oxford University Press, London, 1973), p.16
Coleridge, Religious Musings, ll.140-3
Prelude (1805), Book VIII, ll.631-9
Cowley, Malcolm, Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (Penguin, New York, 1986), p.xiii
See The Self as Mind page 29, by Charles Rzepka (Harvard, Cambridge, 1986) and The Borders of Vision page 79 by Jonothan Wordsworth (Clarendon, Oxford, 1982) for a consideration of this perspective.
Black, Stephen, Whitman”s Journeys into Chaos: A Psychoanalytical Study of the Poetic Process (Princeton University, Princeton, 1975), pp.46-7
Stace, W.T., Mysticism and Philosophy (Macmillan, London, 1972), p.285
Chapter 2 – The Problem of Ego
Quote Whitman, ”Song of Myself”, Leaves of Grass [1885], l.24, Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.2096
84 Salter, F.W., Thomas Traherne: Mystic and Poet (Edward Arnold, London, 1964), p.38
An almost identical deliberation is to be found in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Pure Light of the Void, and even the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn being. – The Doors of Perception, Huxley, Aldous (Chatto & Windus, London, 1954, e-text: www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/doors.htm)
As Emerson reiterates in ”Oversoul”, ”the heart which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.214
This identification is similar to Jung”s collective unconscious.
Gable, Harvey, Liquid Fire: Romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Peter Lang, New York, 1998), p.266
Prelude [1799], Part II, l.459-60
Wordsworth, ”Tintern Abbey”, ll.40-1
In Greek, persona was literally the mask worn by an actor in a play.
”Song of Myself”, Leaves of Grass [1885], l.138, Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.2096
Whitman”s transcendent Self is represented by the assuming of the name Walt (as opposed to Walter) to signify the author of the original ”Song Of Myself” – Whitman has changed his name to assume a new personality. – Cowley, Malcolm, Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (Penguin, New York, 1986), p.xxxii
”Song of Myself”, Leaves of Grass [1885], 120-1, Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.2096
Thoreau, Walden, from Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1839
Ibid., p.1839
McFarland, Thomas, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1969), p.322
Pertaining to the years 1794-97. – Adair, Patricia, The Waking Dream (Edward & Arnold, London, 1967), p.12
Huxley, Aldous, Heaven and Hell (Chatto & Windus, London, 1954, e-text: www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/doors.htm)
Modiano, Raimonda, Coleridge & the Concept of Nature (Macmillan, London, 1985), p.122
Ibid., p.122
Beer, John, Blake”s Humanism (Manchester University Press, New York, 1968), p.208
McFarland, Thomas, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1969), p.278
Extract. Rzepka, Charles, Self as Mind (Harvard Press, Cambridge, 1986), p.104
Mimmicking Christ”s words, Coleridge declares, ”We and our father are one!” – Ibid., p.104
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, I, ed. Shawcross, J. (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979), p.154
Ibid., p.154
Cowley, Malcolm, Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (Penguin, New York, 1986), p.xi
Allen, Walt Whitman: Centennial Essays, ed. Jolson, Ed, (University of Iowa Press, Iowa, 1994), p.4
Cowley, Malcolm, Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (Penguin, New York, 1986), p.xii
Snyder, John, The Dear Love of Man: Tragic and Lyric Communion in Walt Whitman (Mouton, The Hague, 1975), p.6
Whitman,”Song of Myself”, Leaves of Grass [1885], l.24, Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.2096
Ibid., ll.130-1
Ibid., l.119
According to Cowley, the original poem text is not political in the least, purely defining Whitman”s experience. – Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (Penguin, New York, 1986), p.xii
Whitman, Democratic Vistas, from Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Holloway, Emory (Nonesuch Press, London, 1964), p.693 Also, in ”Songs of Prudence”, Whitman expresses a moral system identical to Indian karmic action.
Wilson has suggested the experience was as essential to Emerson”s career as writer and lecturer as his Harvard degrees and ordination had been to his first career as a minister. – The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Porte, J (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999), p.86
See chapter 3 of this dissertation for a further examination of Emerson”s ”Divinity School Address” in relation to mystical experience.
”Nature”, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1075
Ibid., p.1075
”The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” – Wordsworth, ”Ode. Intimations of Immortality”, l.8, Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Wu, Duncan (Blackwell, Oxford, 2001), included CD-ROM
Prelude [1799], Part II, ll.395-401
Coleridge, ”The Eolian Harp”, ll.45-8, Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Wu, Duncan (Blackwell, Oxford, 2001), p.549
Ibid., l.55
Coleridge: ”For a very long time I could not reconcile personality with infinity; and my head was with Spinoza, though my heart remained with Paul and John.” – Biographia Literaria, I, ed. Shawcross, J. (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979), p.134
Diary, Reminisces, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Sadler, Thomas (Macmillan, London, 1869), p.400 For more on the relationship of Robinson with the major Romantics, see Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, etc., being Selections from the Remains of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Morley, Edith, (Manchester University Press, New York, 1922).
Allsop, Thomas, Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S T Coleridge, Third edition, (Farrah, London, 1864), pp.57-8
Prelude [1805], Book XIII, ll.246-8
Such as Reason and the Understanding. See any good book on Coleridge”s theory.
Cowley, Malcolm, Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (Penguin, New York, 1986), p.x
Ibid., p.xxvii
Ibid., p.xxviii
Ashram Advaita, Teachings of Sri Ramakrishna ( Swami Ananyananda, India, 1985), p.20
This too may have been influenced by the actions of close friends: Psychiatrist Dr. Richard Bucke wrote Cosmic Consciousness, in which he placed Whitman alongside Jesus and Buddha, the avatars of a new evolutionary stage in human consciousness. – Zweig, Paul, Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet (Viking, Middlesex, 1985), p.9 While identifying the same plane of experience, the juxtaposition of Whitman with such names may have accelerated his bumptious messianic immersion.
”Life of the great round world, the sun and stars…I, the most solid” – ”Chanting the Square Deific”, l.40-5, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.2196
See Wordsworth”s ”Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”, composed between 1802-4.
Wordsworth, Jonothan, The Borders of Vision (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982), p.24
Wordsworth, ”The Excursion”, ll.248-53, Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Wu, Duncan (Blackwell, Oxford, 2001), included CD-ROM
Ibid., ll.256-8
Chapter 3 – The Limits of Language
Genesis, 1:3-5
Weisman, Karen, Imageless Truths:Shelley”s Poetic Fictions (Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1994), p.2
Ibid., p.4
Huxley, Aldous, Culture and the Individual (originally appeared in Playboy magazine, 1963, e-text: www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/huxcultr.htm)
Songs of Innocence and Experience: Critical Essays, ed. Bottrall, Margaret (Macmillan, Bristol, 1970), p.143
My italics. Ibid., p.66
Modiano, Raimonda, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (Macmillan, London, 1985), p.69
Ibid., p.83
Ibid., p.83
”Oversoul”, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.222
Huxley, Aldous, Culture and the Individual (originally appeared in Playboy magazine, 1963, e-text: www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/huxcultr.htm)
Prelude [1799], Part II, ll.220-1
Wordsworth, Jonothan, The Borders of Vision (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982), p.21
”Intellect” Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.264
”Oversoul”, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.223
This idea is expressed in Huxley”s utopian novel Island, when the children of the Palanese colony are taught the story of the Buddha holding up a flower to his followers as a sermon. Gautama couldn”t put his teaching into words. – Huxley, Aldous, Island (Chatto & Windus, Glasgow, 1994), p.246
Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1070
Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Porte, J (Cambridge University Press, USA, 1999), p.16
”Divinity School Address”, Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1119
Ibid., p.1122
Ibid., p.1120
Ibid., p.1124
Ibid., p.1123
Ibid., p.1126
”Intellect” Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.264
Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1071
Ibid., p.1071
”Oversoul”, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.224
Whitman, Democratic Vistas, from Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Holloway, Emory (Nonesuch Press, London, 1964), p.693
”Song of Myself”, Leaves of Grass [1885], l.228, Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.2100
Whitman, Democratic Vistas, from Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Holloway, Emory (Nonesuch Press, London, 1964), p.688
”Song of Myself”, Leaves of Grass [1885], l.1301, Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.2100
Whitman, Democratic Vistas, from Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Holloway, Emory (Nonesuch Press, London, 1964), p.693
Quote from Blake”s annotations to Swedenborg”s ”Wisdom of Angels concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom” [1789]. – Wilson, Mona, The Life of William Blake (Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1948), p.51
Wordsworth, Jonothan, The Borders of Vision (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982), p.376
Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception (Chatto & Windus, London, 1954, e-text: www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/doors.htm)
”Nature”, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1083
McFarland, Thomas, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1969), p.xxxii
Taken from Coleridge”s The Fiend in Emerson”s ”Nature”, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1083
McFarland, Thomas, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1969), p.61
Modiano, Raimonda, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (Macmillan, London, 1985), p.228
Wilson, Mona, The Life of William Blake (Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1948), p.56
Ibid., p.56
Watts, Alan, ”Lecture on Zen”, audio lecture (ACC, California, 1973)
”Oversoul”, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.226
Luke, 18:16-7
Emerson, ”Divinity School Address”, Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1820
”Nature”, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1074
Ibid., p.1074
Wordsworth, ”Intimations of Immortality”, l.166-7 , Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Wu, Duncan (Blackwell, Oxford, 2001), p.375
Ibid., l.66
Herryman, Maurer, trans. The Way of the Ways: Tao The Ching (Fellowship in Prayer, Princeton, 1982), p.69
Chapter 4 – A Wise Passiveness
Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy (Harper & Row, New York, 1970), p.148
Braden, William, The Private Sea (Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1967), p.32 For a further elaboration on the philosophical similarities, see Watts” The Joyous Cosmology, and for a scientific consideration of the connection, see Huston Smith”s ”Do Drugs Have Religious Import?”.
Wordsworth, Jonothan, The Borders of Vision (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982), p.17
Coleridge, ”The Eolian Harp”, ll.38-41, Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Wu, Duncan (Blackwell, Oxford, 2001), p.549
”Nature”, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1077
Thoreau, Walden, from Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1839
”Oversoul”, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.208
Prelude [1805], Book II, ll.367-71
Wordsworth, Jonothan, The Borders of Vision (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982), p.4
Whitman, Democratic Vistas, from Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Holloway, Emory (Nonesuch Press, London, 1964), p.693
Ibid., p.693
This could be said to be the point at which Whitman”s insight into the inducement of the mystical experience ended, which made further spiritual progress difficult.
Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy (Harper & Row, New York, 1970), p.54
Whitman, ”Song of Myself”, Leaves of Grass [1885], l.600, Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.2100
Emerson, ”Nature”, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1094
”Expostulation and Reply”, ll.23-4, Wordsworth: Selected Poems, ed. Davies, Damian (Everyman, Channel Islands, 2000), p.105
Huxley, Aldous, Culture and the Individual (originally appeared in Playboy magazine, 1963, e-text: www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/huxcultr.htm)
Those ”Powers, / Which of themselves our minds impress.” – ”Expostulation and Reply”, ll.21-2, Wordsworth: Selected Poems, ed. Davies, Damian (Everyman, Channel Islands, 2000), p.105
Chan, Wing-tsit, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton University Press, USA, 1963), pp.147-8
Emerson, ”Intellect” Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.264
Whitman, Democratic Vistas, from Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Holloway, Emory (Nonesuch Press, London, 1964), p.693
Cowley, Malcolm, Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (Penguin, New York, 1986), p.xiii
It is the loss of egocentricity that deliberates the onset of mystical experience. – Huxley, Adous, The Perennial Philosophy (Harper & Row, New York, 1945), p.98
Emerson, ”Intellect” Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.254
Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Porte, J (Cambridge University Press, USA, 1999), p.22
From Bhagavad-Gita: As It Is, ed. Prabhupada, Swami (Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, Germany, 1986), p.912
Thoreau, Walden, from Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1827
”This was sheer idleness to my fellow townsmen, no doubt.” – Thoreau, Ibid., p.1827
Emerson, ”Circles”, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.248
Ibid., p.248
One half of all spiritual practice in the mainstream Buddhist schools involves such a mindfulness. ”If we are able to wake up…stand back from the ongoing drama of our lives and take an objective look at the habit patterns in which we are caught, then their compulsive hold over us begins to loosen. The practice of mindfulness should be brought to bear on what is happening at every moment. We are almost totally distracted, lost in unreflective thought and fantasy, which are interwoven with beguiling emotional sub-themes.” – Snelling, John, The Buddhist Handbook (Rider, London, 1998), p.67
The eagle is an image of our higher capacities of perception, and it is grace when that organ of thought calls us to attention. – Geldhard, Richard, The Vision of Emerson (Element, Dorset, 1995), p.26
Thoreau, Walden, from Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1837
Extract. Modiano, Raimonda, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (Macmillan, London, 1985), p.229
Ibid., p.229
Prelude [1805], Book V, ll.15-6
Prelude [1805], Book XIII, ll.103-105
Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy (Harper & Row, New York, 1945), p.64
Prelude [1805], Book XIII, ll.107-8
Thoreau, Walden, from Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1815
Wordsworth, ”The Tuft of Primroses”, ll.292, from The Borders of Vision , Wordsworth, Jonothan (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982), p.371
Ibid., ll.295
Rzepka, Charles, The Self as Mind (Harvard, Cambridge, 1986), p.106
Modiano, Raimonda, Coleridge & the Concept of Nature (Macmillan, London, 1985), p.84
Huxley, Aldous, Culture and the Individual (originally appeared in Playboy magazine, 1963, e-text: www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/huxcultr.htm)
Nesfield-Cookson, Bernard, Blake: Prophet of Universal Brotherhood (Aquarian Press, Great Britain, 1987), p.8
Ibid., p.342
Thoreau, Walden, from Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.22
Ibid., p.22
Ibid., p.22
Achaan Chah, A Still Forest Pool, ed. Webster, Frank (Buddhist Society, London, 1992), p.27
Geldhard, Richard, The Vision of Emerson (Element, Dorset, 1995), p.22
”Nature”, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1095
The exception to this lies in the Zen arts, where calligraphy and haiku poetry is used in order to express the moment of Enlightenment.
Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception (Chatto & Windus, London, 1954, e-text: www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/doors.htm)
”Oversoul”, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.223
”Intellect”, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.262
Conclusion
Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception (Chatto & Windus, London, 1954, e-text: www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/doors.htm)
The modern system of elementary and higher schooling in China was more or less built up by the Christian missionaries. These schools dominated as they were by Western conceptions of history and culture, presented Buddhism as a component of the old-fashioned, outmoded, backward Asiatic culture which was now giving way to the progressive civilisation of the Christian West. The very titles of the books written by prominent missionaries on China and Chinese Buddhism are testimony to this point of view. In 1847, at the beginning of German missionary activity in China, a magazine bore the title, ”Light in the Chinese Darkness”. The traditional cliché (Christianity=light; paganism=darkness) was simply clapped down upon Chinese Buddhism. The whole history of Christian literature is dominated by this attitude. – Benz, Ernst, Buddhism or Communism: Which Holds the Future of Asia? (Allen & Unwin, London, 1966), p.180
Nesfield-Cookson, Bernard, Blake: Prophet of Universal Brotherhood (Aquarian Press, Great britain, 1987), p. 19
Ibid., p.18
Emerson, ”Nature”, Norton Anthology of American Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.1096
Watts, Alan, The Book: on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (Mirage, New York, 1999), p.2
”Intellect”, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, ed. Sanborn, F.B. (Franklin Watts, New York, 1968), p.261
Grof, Stanislav, Psychology of the Future, (New York State Press, New York, 2000), p.212
This has been identified successfully in Huxley”s Perennial Philosophy and its ongoing academic pursuit.
Watts expounds on this idea in the audio lecture ”Out of Your Mind” (California, 1971)
All are just as ”fathomless” as himself. – ”Song of Myself”, Leaves of Grass [1885], l.128, Norton Anthology of Literature, v.1, ed. Baym, Nina (WW Norton & Co, London, 1998), p.2100
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Copyright Tim Hardwick. Many Thanks for Tim’s contribution to the understanding of this aspect of Western shamanic tradition