Archives: Third Party Stories

Nanak (1469 –1539), also referred to as Baba Nanak, was born in the small village of Talwandi in the Punjab (now a territory of Pakistan). As a child, Nanak attended school and tended cows for his father, a farmer. However, Nanak did not like rural life, and he proved to be of little use to his father. Nanak thus went to live in Sultanpur with a brother-in-law who held a post there as a petty government officer. Nanak also obtained a governmental post, working as a storekeeper in the Commissariat. Shortly thereafter, at the age of 18, he married, and, by the time he was in his late thirties, he had fathered two sons.

It was during his time at Sultanpur, while working at the Commissariat, that Nanak began to awaken to the spiritual life. He took to joining with a Muslim friend, Mardana, in singing devotional songs and attending religious lectures. It was also around this time that Nanak nearly drowned in a canal where he regularly bathed, and he had a near-death experience (NDE). This NDE generated in him a profound spiritual awareness of the eternal Self.

Thereafter, Nanak proclaimed to his friends and family that he had been taken up to God and had known Him directly. Transformed by his experience, Nanak was inspired to teach others of the all-pervasive God. He thus quit his job, and, renouncing worldly life, set out as a religious mendicant. Nanak traveled extensively across Asia—eastward as far as the city of Benares, as far as Kashmir to the north, and westward, to Afghanistan and Persia, and to Mecca in Arabia—teaching his message of one God who dwells in everyone and constitutes the eternal Truth.

After his long and broad travels, Nanak returned to his family, taking them to the village of Kartarpur, on the Ravi River, where he had been given some fertile farmland. There, in his later years, he settled down as a wheat farmer. A commune of devotees gathered there, and Nanak generously shared with all who came both his grain and the wisdom he had acquired.

During his many years of traveling, Nanak wrote down numerous musings and inspirational songs of God. Below are examples of Nanak’s mystical writings, which describe the spiritual union with God that he experienced:

“When the light of the soul blends with the universal Light,
And the human mind commingles
With the Mind of all things,
Then, our petty being,
With its violence, doubt and sorrow, disappears.
Through the grace of the Guru,
Such spiritual union takes place.
They are blessed in whose hearts the Lord resides.”

Nanak further wrote:

“It is not through thought that He is to be comprehended,
Though we strive to grasp Him a hundred thousand times;
Nor by outer silence and long deep meditation
Can the inner silence be reached;
Nor is man’s hunger for God appeasable
By piling up world-loads of wealth.
All the innumerable devices of worldly wisdom
Leave a man disappointed; not one avails.
How then shall we know the Truth?
How shall we rend the veils of untruth asunder?
Abide by His will, and make your own His will,
O Nanak; write this in your heart.”

Quoted from History of Mysticism by Swami Abhayananda.

Photo Credit: Nanak from www.freepressjournal.in.

Heraclitus (540 – 480 B.C.E.) was an Ancient Greek philosopher and a native of the city of Ephesus, which was then part of Persia. Born an aristocrat, a prince, Heraclitus renounced all political activities and ceded his title and properties to his brother. He then became a recluse, living in the mountains, “making his diet of grass and herbs.” It is interesting to note that, although Heraclitus was a contemporary of the Buddha—who was also a prince who renounced his role for spiritual pursuits—it doesn’t seem that Heraclitus had any contact with Eastern thought. Rather, he came to his views through his own reflection and mystical experience.

Heraclitus is famous for his book, On Nature, which was published around 500 B.C.E. On Nature is a philosophical treatise containing three discourses on 1) the universe, 2) politics and ethics, and 3) theology. Heraclitus had a significant influence on other thinkers of his own and later times. Hesiod, before him, had described the world of matter as arising from the primal Chaos, and had conjectured that this matter, of which the universe consisted, was then set in order in a designed manner by the all-pervading Thought or Intelligence of God. That Divine, all-pervading formative Intelligence, Heraclitus called “Logos,” a common Greek word used variously to mean “thought,” “reason,” or “idea.”

Below is Heraclitus’ message of mystical oneness, based on existing fragments from On Nature:

“[There is] one Intelligence, which is distinct from all things and yet pervades all things. That Intelligence is One; to know It is to know the Purpose, which guides all things and is in all things. Nature has no inherent power of intelligence; Intelligence is the Divine. Without It, the fairest universe is but a randomly scattered dust-heap. If we are to speak with intelligence, we must found our being on THAT which is common to all… For that Logos, which governs man, is born of the One, which is Divine. It [the Divine] governs the universe by Its will and is more than sufficient to everyone.”

Heraclitus further wrote that:

“One should not conjecture at random about the Supreme [Truth]. The eyes are better witnesses to the truth than the ears; but the eyes and ears are bad witnesses for men if their souls cannot understand. You could not in your travels find the source or destination of the soul, so deeply hidden is the Logos. [But] I searched for It [and found It] within myself. That hidden Unity is beyond what is visible. All men have this capacity of knowing themselves, [for] the soul has the Logos within it, which can be known when the soul is evolved. What is within us remains the same eternally; It is the same in life and death, waking and sleeping, youth and old age; for It has become this world, and the world must return to It.”

Quoted from History of Mysticism by Swami Abhayananda and On Nature by Heraclitus.

Sri Aurobindo (1852 – 1950) was a philosopher, poet, and influential spirituality/yoga teacher. Aurobindo was born third in a family of five in the Indian city of Calcutta in West Bengal. His father, Krishna Ghose, was a surgeon, which meant Aurobindo had a comfortable upbringing. Krishna believed that education was important and ensured that all his children became fluent in English. In 1879, the entire family moved to Britain to facilitate the children’s advanced studies. Over time, Aurobindo became conversant in at least 12 languages, including Greek, French, German, and Sanskrit. After finishing his studies, in 1893 Aurobindo returned to India to work in the state service. His father died just before Aurobindo returned to India, after being misinformed that Aurobindo had died at sea.

Aurobindo soon became a revolutionist and was actively involved in nationalist politics. He joined the Anushilan Samiti movement based in Bengal, a nationalist movement seeking Indian independence from Britain at all costs. Aurobindo was arrested and charged with treason in 1908 after the Anushilan Samiti group had been linked to various bombings of the ruling regime, and he was imprisoned in the Alipore Jail. However, Aurobindo was ultimately found innocent due to a lack of evidence. During his time in jail, Aurobindo had a spiritual Awakening, and what he valued changed from politics and revolution to spirituality.

After withdrawing from politics, Aurobindo moved from Calcutta to Pondicherry, where he developed a philosophy and practice called Integral Yoga. His many books include The Life Divine, The Integral Yoga, The Human Cycle, and The Future Poetry. Aurobindo was nominated twice for the Nobel prize—for Literature in 1943 and Peace in 1950. His life and philosophy have been influential to modern spiritual practices and beliefs. Various renowned authors and philosophers such as Ken Wilber, Jean Gebser, and William Irwin Thompson have cited Sri Aurobindo as their main influence. Sri Aurobindo died in 1950 at the age of 98.

Sri Aurobindo described his mystical consciousness as follows:

“At the gates of the Transcendent stands that mere and perfect spirit described in the Upanishads, luminous, pure, sustaining the world…, without flaw of duality, without scar of division, unique, identical, free from all appearance of relation and multiplicity,– the pure Self of the Advaitins, the inactive Brahman, the transcendent Silence. And the mind when it passes those gates suddenly… receives a sense of the unreality of the world and the sole reality of the Silence which is one of the most powerful and convincing experiences of which the human mind is capable.”

According to the late Princeton University Philosophy Professor, W.T. Stace, we see from Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga philosophy that “Aurobindo is mostly concerned to do justice to what he regards as two poles of human thought, Western scientific materialism and Eastern idealistic mysticism. Each tends to run to unacceptable extremes. He blames Indian mysticism for its extreme otherworldliness. To this he thinks Western materialism, which is the other extreme, is a valuable counterweight. Moreover, he thinks that the mystical mind which is not restrained and kept straight by a clear, austere, and trained intellect—such as scientific education produces—is apt to lose itself in a world of fantasies and perverting superstitions. The function of Western materialistic science in the evolution of the human spirit has therefore been to clarify and discipline the mind so that it can advance on a more solid basis to the heights of spirituality. He even writes that ‘we should observe with respect and wonder the work which atheism has done in the service of the Divine.'”

Quoted from The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo and The Teachings of the Mystics by W.T. Stace.

Photo Credit: Sri Aurobindo from https://swarajyamag.com.

Charles Earle Raven QHC FBA (1885 – 1964) was an English theologian, Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, and Master of Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. Raven was also a clergyman in the Church of England, where he attained the rank of canon. Well-known for his interesting and arresting oratory, Raven was appointed a chaplain to the King in 1920.

During World War I, Raven served as a chaplain to the soldiers in the field and, due to the atrocities of war he witnessed, he became a pacificist. For the remainder of his life, Raven wrote prolifically about the subject of pacifism, a position for which he experienced some degree of ridicule and isolation. As a pacifist, Raven was an active supporter of the Peace Pledge Union and the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

From 1950-1952, Raven was the Gifford Lecturer in Natural Religion and Christian Theology at The University of Edinburgh. In 1947, he won the James Tait Black Award for his book English Naturalists from Neckam to Ray. From 1951-1955, Raven served as president of the Botanical Society of the British Isles, and from 1953-1957, he served as president of the Field Studies Council.

In his book, Good News of God, Charles Earle Raven described his mystical experience as follows:

“The healing came when with the sudden closing in of darkness the perspective became a silhouette, and the wide horizon of the fenland narrowed down to the small circle of the lamp. You know how in that little world every leaf and reed-blade takes on value; how one becomes aware of ranges of beauty and interest normally ignored. So it was then. But out of the wealth of a detail there was for me a drop of water in the axil of a teazle-leaf—a drop of water, and in it all the fullness of God. Our little lives, our fret and pain, so tiny and yet so tremendous. A drop of water and the presence of God.”

Quoted from Good News of God by Charles Earle Raven.

Robert Browning (1812 – 1889) was a prolific Victorian-era poet and playwright born in Camberwell, a suburb of London. Browning received an honorary D.C.L. (Doctor of Civil Law) degree from Balliol College, University of Oxford, in 1887. Among Browning’s notable works are Paracelsus, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, Men and Women, The Ring and the Book, and Asolando.

In Paracelsus, Robert Browning described mystical consciousness as follows:

“Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate’er you may believe.
There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fulness; and around,
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
This perfect, clear perception – which is truth.
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Binds it, and makes all error: and to know,
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without.”

Quoted from Paracelsus by Robert Browning.

Rabindranath Tagore FRAS (born Rabindranath Thakur; 1861 – 1941) was a Bengali Brahmin polymath—he was a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter. Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913; he was the first non-European to win the award.

Tagore first wrote poetry at the age of eight, and, at 16, he wrote his first short stories and dramas. Tagore was a humanist, universalist, internationalist, and ardent anti-nationalist who advocated for India’s independence from Britain. He was also the founder of Visva-Bharati University, a public university located in Shantiniketan, West Bengal, India.

Rabindranath Tagore described his mystical experience in a letter to his friend, C. F. Andrews. Tagore explained that he was on Free School Street (now named Mirza Ghalib Street) in Kolkata, and he was standing on a verandah watching the sun rise above the trees at the time of his mystical experience. Tagore wrote:

“[A]s I was watching it, suddenly, in a moment, a veil seemed to be lifted from my eyes. I found the world wrapt in an inexpressible glory with its waves of joy and beauty bursting and breaking on all sides. The thick shroud of sorrow that lay on my heart in many folds was pierced through and through by the light of the world, which was everywhere radiant.

That very day the poem known as The Fountain Awakened from its Dream flowed on like a fountain itself. When it was finished, still the curtain did not fall on that strange vision of beauty and joy. There was nothing and no one whom I did not love at that moment… I stood on the verandah and watched the coolies as they tramped down the road. Their movements, their forms, their countenances seemed to be strangely wonderful to me, as if they were all moving like waves in the great ocean of the world. When one young man placed his hand upon the shoulder of another and passed laughingly by, it was a remarkable event to me… I seemed to witness, in the wholeness of my vision, the movements of the body of all humanity, and to feel the beat of the music and the rhythm of a mystic dance.”

Quoted from Letters to a Friend, by Rabindranath Tagore.

Mary Hunter Austin (1868 – 1934) was an American writer born in Carlinville, Illinois, as the fourth of six children. A graduate of Blackburn College, Austin lived in various places in California. She was one of the earliest authors to write about nature in the American Southwest. Her classic 1903 book, The Land of Little Rain, describes the fauna, flora, and people of the deserts of California. Austin’s play, The Arrow Maker, which was about American Indian life, was produced at New York’s New Theatre in 1911.

In her book, Experiences Facing Death, Mary Hunter Austin described her childhood mystical experience as follows:

“I must have been between five and six when this experience happened to me. It was a summer morning, and the child I was had walked down through the orchard alone and come out on the brow of a sloping hill where there was grass and a wind blowing and one tall tree reaching into infinite immensities of blueness. Quite suddenly, after a moment of quietness there, earth and sky and tree and wind-blown grass and the child in the midst of them came alive together with a pulsing light of consciousness. There was a wild foxglove at the child’s feet and a bee dozing about it, and to this day I can recall the swift inclusive awareness of each for the whole—I in them and they in me and all of us enclosed in a warm lucent bubble of livingness. I remember the child looking everywhere for the source of this happy wonder, and at last she questioned—‘God?’—because it was the only awesome word she knew. Deep inside, like the murmurous swinging of a bell, she heard the answer, ‘God, God…’

How long this ineffable moment lasted I never knew. It broke like a bubble at the sudden singing of a bird, and the wind blew and the world was the same as ever—only never quite the same. The experience so initiated has been the one abiding reality of my life, unalterable except in the abounding fullness and frequency of its occurrence.”

Quoted from Experiences Facing Death by Mary Hunter Austin.

Rupert Chawner Brooke (1887 – 1915) was an English poet born in the market town of Rugby in Warwickshire, England. Educated at The Rugby School and King’s College, University of Cambridge, Brooke was known for the idealistic war sonnets he wrote during World War I, including “The Dead” and “The Soldier”. After university, Brooke spent time traveling in Europe, and, during this period, he wrote a dissertation, entitled “John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama”, for which he earned a Fellowship at King’s College in 1913.

After turning 27, Brooke was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary sub-lieutenant, and he participated in the Royal Naval Division’s Antwerp expedition in October of 1914. Brooke sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, which was en route to the February, 1915 Gallipoli landings; however, he developed pneumococcal sepsis from an infected mosquito bite.

For treatment, Brooke was transferred to the French hospital ship Duguay-Trouin, which was anchored off of Skyros, a Greek Island in the Aegean Sea. There, French surgeons twice drained Brooke’s abscess, but the procedures proved insufficient and Brooke died of septicemia on April 23, 1915. Brooke’s close friend, William Denis Browne, was with Brooke when he died and wrote the following of the poet’s passing:

“I sat with Rupert. At 4 o’clock he became weaker, and at 4.46 he died, with the sun shining all round his cabin, and the cool sea breeze blowing through the door and the shaded windows. No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme.”

In his 1910 poem, “Dining-room Tea”, Rupert Brooke described his mystical moment as follows:

“Under a vast and starless sky
I saw the immortal moment lie.
One instant I, an instant, knew
As God knows all. And it and you
I, above Time, oh, blind! could see
In witless immortality.”

Quoted from Rupert Brooke’s poem, “Dining-room Tea”.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888 – 1975) was an Indian philosopher and statesman who served as India’s second president from 1962 to 1967. Radhakrishnan was one of the most distinguished twentieth-century scholars of comparative religion and philosophy, having held the King George V. Chair of Mental and Moral Science at the University of Calcutta from 1921 to 1932 and the Spalding Chair of Eastern Religion and Ethics at the University of Oxford from 1936 to 1952.

Radhakrishnan’s philosophy was grounded in Advaita Vedanta, and he reinterpreted this tradition for modern times. Moreover, he was influential in shaping the world’s understanding of Hinduism, earning a reputation as a bridge-builder between India and the West. In his book, Eastern Religions and Western Thought, Radhakrishnan wrote eloquently on mystical experience as follows (presumably based on his personal experience):

“The transcendent self stoops down, as it were, and touches the eyes of the empirical self overwhelmed by the delusion of the world’s work. When the individual withdraws his soul from all outward events, gathers himself together inwardly and strives with concentration, there breaks upon him an experience, secret, strange and wondrous, which quickens within him, lays hold on him and becomes his very being….

The highest wisdom is to know the Self… The Self is more than the ego; personality is truly a mask. The Self is the silent eternal witness, a light that no power can extinguish, whose attributes are truth and beauty, peace and wisdom, our true being which we do not perceive on account of the cloud of ignorance which covers our eyes… This spiritual consciousness is not a metaphysical fantasy but one that can be realised by each of us. In this transcendental consciousness, where the body is still, the mind attains quiescence, and thought comes to rest, we are in contact with the pure spirit of which the states of waking, dream, and sleep are imperfect articulations….”

Radhakrishnan further wrote of humankind’s mystical moments as follows:

“These memorable moments of our life reveal to us the truth that we are, though we soon lapse from them into the familiar life of body, sense and mind; and yet these moments of our divine existence continue to guide us the rest of our lives as ‘pillars of cloud by day, pillars of fire by night’. The soul is led through a succession of states until in the depths of its own being it experiences the touch of divinity and feels the life of God. By breaking through the entanglements of created things, the veils of sense and of intellect, the soul establishes itself in the nudity of spirit. The seer no longer distinguishes himself from that which is seen. He is one with the centre which is the centre of all… God ceases to be an object external to the individual and becomes a consuming experience.”

Quoted from Eastern Religions and Western Thought by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.

Nicholas Cusa (1401 – 1464) was born Nicholas Krebs at Cues (Cusa) on the Moselle River in the Rhineland to a wealthy barge captain. Like Thomas á Kempis, twenty years before him, Nicholas went as a young boy to the Brethren of The Common Life at Deventer to receive his early education. At the age of 16, he entered the University of Heidelberg, and then transferred to the University of Padua, where he studied Canon law, the sciences, mathematics, and Greek. He received his degree at the age of 22, and thereafter decided to enter the priesthood. Nicholas studied theology at Cologne, as did Meister Eckhart, and, in 1426, became secretary to the Cardinal legate, Giordano Orsini, becoming ordained as a priest in 1430.

It seems that, around this time, Nicholas collected and read a great number of classic philosophical and mystical works, including those of Plato, Eriugena, Dionysius the Areopagite, and especially Meister Eckhart. Sometime around his 28th year, it appears that he experienced “the vision of God” of which he was later to write about so lucidly. But, in the years that followed, Nicholas became caught up in the politics of the Church and the ongoing disputes between the Church and the state, thus beginning the career of reform and reconciliation, which lasted, throughout his life. Nevertheless, Nicholas frequently experienced the uncommon drawing-power experienced within that which is known as “Grace,” and he described mystical experience as follows:

“The vision of God is not seen in this world… until He will make Himself visible beyond all obscurity….None can attain unto Thee, … none can possess himself of Thee, except Thou givest Thyself to him.

…In beholding me, Thou givest Thyself to be seen of me, Thou who art the hidden God. None can see Thee save insofar as Thou grantest a sight of Thyself, nor is that sight anything else than Thy seeing him that seeth Thee.”

Of his own mystical experience, Nicholas is typically silent in most of his written works; but, in “The Vision Of God”, written for the monks of Tegernsee, he does reveal something of his own vision. Here, he speaks of how the “Face of God” may be seen beyond the veil of all appearances and all faces:

“Thou hast at times appeared unto me, Lord, not as one to be seen of any creature, but as the hidden, infinite, God…. Thou dost ravish me above myself that I may foresee the glorious place whereunto Thou callest me. Thou grantest me to behold the treasury of riches, of life, of joy, of beauty…. Thou keepest nothing secret.

…I behold Thee, O Lord my God, in a kind of mental trance, …Thus, while I am borne to loftiest heights, I behold Thee as Infinity… And when I behold Thee as absolute Infinity, to whom is befitting neither the name of creating Creator nor of creatable Creator—then indeed I begin to behold Thee unveiled, and to enter into the garden of delights! …[In that vision] nothing is seen other than Thyself, [for Thou] art Thyself the object of Thyself (for Thou seest, and art That which is seen, and art the sight as well)….

Hence, in Thee, who art Love, the lover is not one thing and the loved another, and the bond between them a third, but they are one and the same—Thou, Thyself, my God.

Since, then, in Thee the loved is one with the lover, and being loved [is one] with loving, this bond of coincidence is an essential bond. For there is nothing in Thee that is not Thy very Essence… I see, Lord, through Thine infinite mercy, that Thou art Infinity encompassing all things. Nothing exists outside Thee, and all things in Thee are not other than Thee.”

Quoted from The History of Mysticism by Swami Abhayananda.