Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West/Part First, 2

by Ameen Rihani

II

THE MYSTICISM OF REALITY

EXPERIENCE is knowledge; but knowledge, when it is sought only as a material resource, is not always a blessing. Experience is wisdom; but wisdom, with those who lack vision, is not always power. Experience is tolerance; but tolerance, when it is induced by apathy, is not in the least a virtue. But even though experience often woos cynicism, breeds complaisance, and engenders cowardice, it has in it, nevertheless, the seeds of knowledge and wisdom and power.

Some one, if not ourselves, is better, to be sure, for what we know. Some one, if not ourselves, is wiser for what we suffer. A thought in the crucible of life melts into the thought of the world; the footsteps of a pioneer become ultimately the highway of a nation; the heroism of an individual becomes the trodden path of a race. Every human action, collective or otherwise, has in it the possibility of a creative or a destructive force. We stop in our work, but we do not know, we can not know, where our work really ends. It may never end, for that matter.

Through the scintellating candor of follies, the mirage of illusions, the unlighted labyrinths of realities, it goes on, with us or without us, perpetuating itself and its fruition. True, we are often lifted by it to cold barren heights, or led into a chamber of horrors. Hence the cowardice that often becomes supreme, the complaisance that often is the harbinger of moral decrepitude.

A diversity of experience, to be sure, enriches life; but its reward, to those who deliberately, self-consciously seek it, seldom measures up with its promise, when our criterion is detached from the higher things of the soul. In spite of which, we continue, after all our realizations or disappointments, to reach for something beyond the realities of experience, in the distances of unknown possibilities. And what were life, indeed, without the horizon of the spirit, and without an eye to see the horizon? What were life without that potentiality of mystery that holds out to us, across the glamors of the mirage and the dusky opacities of reality, when we awaken from the somnambulism of self-consciousness, the nectar of love and assurance and peace.

But we boast nowadays of being free and untramelled; we glory in the right to pursue the light within us, which, under the exigencies of a highly evolutionized society, seldom leads us outside of Self. And we call it the pursuit of happiness. In which forsooth, through the little heart-thrills and heart-aches of experience, we shatter one illusion after another.

And we seldom stop to ask ourselves whether such a course makes for a greater freedom and a healthier consciousness. We often forget too that in the cult of the Ego the worship of unconventionality becomes itself a conventionality most rigid and austere. It is, in fact, the conventionality of the elect—the conventionality supreme.

Now, if life were as simple as a multiplication table, to shatter all its illusions would be the only way to re-form and re-build it on a sounder and more enduring foundation. By all means, we should begin with realities—at the very bottom of stern, bitter realities. But are not the most obvious facts in life liquid or malleable? Is there such a thing as a bald and finite reality, divested of all spiritual or moral or social or physical associations? Is there such a thing as an isolated material fact, which you could dispose of as if it were a banana peel in your way? Why, even the most degenerate of beings is a vital link in the chain of social and spiritual possibilities.

Indeed, every reality is in itself an undying source of myterious growth and decay. Even the theologian, like the scientist, recognizes the theory of causation and the continuity of the natural law. Neither good nor evil, in this sense, is a hard fact, but a liquid phenomenon. And every individual manifestation, every given fact is related to thousands, millions of its kind that precede and follow. Repentance, for in, never remedies a wrong act. It only complicates it. For though the wrong may cease, temporarily or permanently, the act continues—becomes a part of the unwritten social law. Likewise, a definite consciousness, blossoming in one individual, may have its roots in a generation that is already extinct, and may waft its seeds to generations unborn. It is because we live mostly in the present, however, that we only see the link in the chain of circumstances, and we often mistake effects for causes. Nevertheless, we pretend to be able to define the confusion within us.

Psychology, we call to our aid. But civilized man has but recently began to study the underlying strata of his intellectual and spiritual make-up. We are still lisping in the hornbook of psychology. Why then put on dionysian airs and bamboozle ourselves and the world with introspective profundities? Or with candor, measured and designed? Or with loud, unreserved avowals of seeking and understanding the re-actions of life upon the Ego?

For this is one of the dominating intellectual passions of the age. We seek experience only to see how it reacts upon us. In other words, we do not give for the sake of giving and the joy in the giving, but only for the sake of studying its effect upon ourselves. We do not seek in experience the hidden and oft times remote agencies of spiritual growth and betterment, but the palpable, material, and immediate returns.

I do not say, however, that this is prompted wholly by selfish motives. On the contrary, the selfishness, if any, springs from an illusory extension of Self—a fictitiousness of our own making. It is the result of an individualism abnormally and artificially developed—an individualism of the hot-house. It is the Ego taking an especial delight in its grotesqueries, revelling in its own madness, boasting even of its morbid, cancerous growth. The soul is turned into a clinic, as it were; the mind, into an asylum. This is the kind of experience that leads into the chamber of horrors; and it is responsible, even in real art, for the spiritual bankruptcy of the Western world.

We are told that people who disarm us with their candor, who discount our suspicion with a startling confession, are not capable of deceiving. But the eye very often belies the tongue. A delicious candor, a surface sincerity goes little into the soul of things—the hidden springs of reality. When a woman mundane, for instance, tells you that her hair is a wig, her complexion, paste and cream and rouge and art, might not this show of bankrupt pulchritude be designed to avert your eye from the more pathetic bankruptcy within? Might it not be what the military critics call a diversion?

To be sure, we would not allow the world, if we can help it, to peep into our soul, much less to enter it. Our No-Man's-Land is hedged about with a wire entanglement of insincerities. And often we take refuge in a temperament, a pose, or a mystic mood. Like certain animals, we take on the color of our surroundings in self defense. And often aggressively we color our own passions, oblivious of the native pigment hidden in our own consciousness. We want to be what we are not, and we are petulent, moody, when we fail.

Albeit, moods, howsoever evanescent, have a spiritual significance—a physical import as well. They are the living cells, as it were, of the psychology of our being. Even the most elusive, the most sudden and unaccountable, has in it the potency of perpetuity. It vanishes into our subconsciousness like a waft of perfume or a whiff of smoke, and there, in the alembic of mystery, is invisibly, insensibly transformed or crystalized. It evades in either instances our mortal ken. Its process of growth can not be detected, however keen our perceptive faculty. And a microscope of moods has not yet been invented. Let us then respect the aura of mystery—the etherial,—spiritual and moral,—emanations of every reality. And the trick of candor and sincerity as well. Our psychological analysis leads us but to the door of knowledge; and there, we must either enter blindly or go our way bravely with our curiosity still unsatisfied.