MYSTICISM OF TIBET

From the book: The Way of Power. A practical guide to the Tantric Mysticism of Tibet by John Blofeld

(In tibetan buddhism Tantra don't mean sex. See): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_tantric_practice

Mystical Intuitions

There are moments during life when a startling but marvellous experience leaps into mind as though coming from another world. The magic that calls it forth - as though someone had accidentally whispered the 'open sesame' that rolls the stone back from the hidden treasure - is often so fleeting as to be forgotten in the joy of the experience. It may be a thin cadence of music: a skylark bursting into song, the plash of a wave, a flute played by moonlight. It may be a grand harmony of sound, peaceful or awe-inspiring: the murmurous voices of a summer's afternoon or the fateful shrieking and drumming of a mountain storm. It may be something seen: a lovely smile or the curve of an arm; a single gesture, form or hue of compelling beauty; a familiar scene transformed by an unusual quality of light; a majestic panorama of .interweaving colours splashed across sea or sky; a cluster of rocks suggestive of enormous beings imbued with life. Or the spell may be wrought by a sudden exaltation springing directly from the mind and jerking it, so to speak, into an unknown dimension. That the experience is not a passing fancy but an intimation of something profoundly significant is recognized in a flash, but understanding of its significance does not always follow. A curtain hitherto unnoticed is suddenly twitched aside; and, though other veils intervene, for a timeless moment there stands partially revealed - a mystery. Then the curtain falls in place and at least a measure of oblivion descends.

'Mystery' is not a satisfactory term, but what else can be said of it? It has a hundred names, all of them inapt. It has been called the Good, the True, the Beautiful and all of these together. Philosophers term it the Absolute or Ultimate Reality. To Christian mystics it is known as the Godhead and to Christians in general as God. It is the Brahma and Para-Atma of the Hindus, the Beloved of the Sufis, the Tao or Way of the Taoists. Buddhist names for it vary with the context: Nirvana, the Womb of Dharmas, Suchness, the Void, the Clear Light, the One Mind. In the words of the Chinese sage Lao-tze, 'The Way that can be conceived of is not the Eternal Way; the Name by which it can be named is not its Eternal Name.' Of late, some psychologists have displayed an awareness of it by suggesting the need for 'integration' with something reaching far beyond ourselves. William James spoke of it obliquely.

Were it not that frequent and clear visions of it engender a compassionate urge to communicate the bliss, it would be best to use no name at all. Names set bounds. Unfathomable by the keenest scientific probing, the mystery can be intuited but never grasped, how then named? Mystics and poets are supremely fortunate in that visions of it sometimes dawn on them unsought; hearty extroverts, if they glimpse it at all, are shocked into fears for their sanity. Uncomfortably they dismiss it as a mental aberration - or run for the doctor!

Attempts to define it succeed no better than the search for a name. To say that it exists is to exclude from it the nonexistent and limit it to what speaker or hearer means by existence. To say that it does not exist involves the other side of the dilemma. Both concepts are too crude to describe its subtle nature. To say, as many do, that it is pure mind is well enough in certain contexts, but it ought not to be set apart from matter with which it is inseparably united. To say that it is at once material and otherwise is to play with words. However, man's consciousness cannot easily divest itself of symbols. Accomplished mystics tend to describe it in terms of the qualities lent to it by the filter of their senses: Clear Radiance, Immaculate Void, Ecstatic Bliss, Infinite Love, AilEmbracing Unity.

Clear and profound intuitions of the mystery are not limited to any period, region, kind of person or religious faith. Knowledge of it has come from widely varied sources: the Egyptian and Greek mystery cults, the Druids (so it is said), the tribal peoples of the two Americas, people with no particular religious faith and followers of all the world's great religions. On the whole, however, religious authorities seem to fear it. Mysticism has seldom been encouraged (and sometimes savagely repressed) by the Catholic and Protestant Churches, by orthodox Muslims - that is to say non-Sufis - and by the Confucians, although each of these communities has produced some notable mystics.

The reason for this attitude seems to be that mystics, intoxicated with their vision, no longer care for conventional forms; like artists, they offend against propriety. The Christian Orthodox Church of Greece and Russia seems less hostile, but even there exoteric, liturgical religion prevails. The Taoists, once mystics par excellence, have by and large turned to magic. The Hindus, to their everlasting credit, allow freedom for every sort of religious belief and practice, but even among them true mystics are a minority.

Buddhism is perhaps the one widespread religion which, in theory at least, is wholly mystical, for it recommends to all its followers the practice of mind control and the attainment of intuitive wisdom. Even so, among Buddhists, people actively engaged in the sublime search are less common than might be supposed except for a few schools and sects of which the Vajrayana is one.

Confirmation of the genuineness of the mystical experience is to be found in the high degree of unanimity observable in the attempts to describe its nature. Descriptions by people widely separated in time and place are strikingly similar, especially if allowance is made for four diversive factors; the impossibility of accurately describing an experience that transcends all concepts for which words exist; the pious tendency to reconcile all religious experience with cherished doctrines; the prohibition in some societies against expressing views not in accord with the prevailing doctrines; and the need to make descriptions intelligible and acceptable to others. The underlying unanimity which characterizes the mystical writings of all faiths is well brought out in Aldous Huxley's Perennial Philosophy. If, as the cynics would have it, the mystical experience is sheer illusion, the stuff of dreams, it is strange that men and women belonging to widely different environments have, throughout the centuries, suffered the same delusions and dreamed the same dream 

No one who has had several intense or prolonged mystical experiences doubts their validity, but what is intuited is so hard to communicate that the mystics' virtual unanimity is the only evidence that can be offered to the world at large. Nor is the value of these experiences easy to demonstrate. Indeed, from the point of view of society, they must seem detrimental, for a mystic can no more subscribe to mundane values than unicorns can behave like bees or ants. Nevertheless, the people concerned regard them as the most worthwhile happenings in their lives: they are tormented by a thirst to regain them and prolong the bliss for ever. The possibility of attaining to unexcelled beauty, truth and ecstasy makes it natural to renounce all other goals.

Unhappily modern life is not conducive to the spontaneous dawning of the experience; people are so used to filling their leisure with gay distractions that the surface of their minds is seldom placid. Scholars are too preoccupied with investigating  details of the outward flux to pay much heed to those who speak of a sublime truth discoverable within; but it must be said that their unwillingness to experiment with the techniques affirmed to lead to that discovery ill accords with their spirit of scientific enquiry. No doubt, the reason is that the techniques demand prolonged exertion to achieve a goal of which they doubt the very existence. 

As to Nirvana, the goal of all this effort, the Buddha never spoke of it except to say what it is not, thus conveying that it fits no category conceivable by the human mind. However, certain things are tentatively said of it - not based on speculation but on intimations received during meditation. Theravadin Buddhists hold that it is a state beyond, and thus outside, Samsara. Mahayanists believe it to be Samsara as seen when the veils of delusion have fallen. It has been described by means of analogies deduced from the mystical perception that arises in meditation. The descriptions of it include radiant light, ecstatic bliss, infinity, wholeness, eternity, reality, shining void, the union of opposites, boundless compassion, immaculate undifferentiated mind and many, many more. Although radiant, it is said to be colourless and without form or substance; for which reason, I have sometimes called it the non-substance of reality. Christian and Sufi mystics ascribe similar attributes to God. Doubtless they have experienced the same reality, but there are important differences between the Buddhist and the ordinary Christian or Moslem interpretations of what is experienced. Buddhists do not equate this shining reality with a creator of the universe; they hold Nirvana to be not the presence of God, nor a heaven inhabited by individual souls, but a state of being beyond duality in which all beings are one with one another and with Nirvana itself. This accords with the Buddhist concept of a middle path between belief in permanent existence and extinction. No being is ever extinguished but, when his false ego has been negated, nothing remains of which it could be said 'he exists'. So, to use Sir Edwin Arnold's lovely phrase, 'the dewdrop slips into the shining sea'; only it should be added that strictly speaking there is no slipping into, for sea and dewdrop have never been separate except in appearance; nor is the sea a sea in the sense of a substance in which the many are absorbed into the one; it is a non-substance which has the marvellous quality of being the one and the many simultaneously. This is something which can be understood in mystical states of consciousness in which dualistic logic is transcended.