Religious experience is something like artistic or musical inspiration, though “inspiration” is a word that through misuse has unfortunate associations; religious experience is not “uplift” or flighty emotionalism. Strictly speaking, a composer is inspired when melody emerges from the depths of his mind, how or why we do not know. To convey that melody to others he writes it down on paper, employing a technical knowledge which enables him to name the notes which he hears in his mind. This fact is important: his technical knowledge does not create the tune in his mind; it simply provides him with a complicated alphabet, and is no more the source of music than the literary alphabet and the rules of grammar are the sources of men’s ideas. If he is writing a symphony he will want to orchestrate his melody, but to do this he does not look up the books on harmony and orchestration to find out what combinations of notes he is advised by the rules to put together. He has heard the whole symphony in his mind with every instrument playing its independent part, and his knowledge of orchestration and harmony simply enables him to tell which is which. What music teachers call the “rules” of harmony are just observations on the harmonies most usually used by such people as Bach and Beethoven. Bach and Beethoven did not use them because they were in the rules but because they liked their sound, and if people’s tastes change so that they like other sounds then the old harmonic forms are replaced. It is necessary for a composer to study harmony in order that he may be able to identify chords which he hears in his mind, but he does not use his knowledge to construct chords unless he is a mere imitator of other people. In the same way, language is used not to create thoughts but to express them, and mastery of prose does not make a great thinker.
The spiritual genius works in the same way as the musical genius. He has a wider scope because his technique of expression, his alphabet, is every possible human activity. For some reason there arises in his soul a feeling of the most profound happiness, not because of some special event, but because of the whole of life. This is not necessarily contentment or joy; it is rather that he feels himself completely united to the power that moves the universe, whatever that may be. This feeling he expresses in two ways, firstly by living a certain kind of life, and secondly by translating his feeling into the form of thoughts and words.
People who have not had this feeling make observations on his actions and words, and from them formulate the “rules” of religious morality and theology. But this involves a strange distortion, for as a rule the observer goes about his work in the wrong way. When the mystic says, “I feel united with God,” the observer is interested primarily in the statement as a revelation of the existence of God, and goes on to consult the mystic’s other sayings to find out what kind of God this is and in what manner He behaves. He is interested only secondarily in the mystic’s feeling as a feeling, and it occurs to him only as an afterthought that it might be possible for himself to feel united with God. Whereat he proceeds to achieve this by trying to think in the same way as the mystic; that is to say, he takes the mystic’s ideas and substitutes them for his own. He also tries to behave in the same way, imitating the mystic’s actions. In other words, he tries to perform a kind of sympathetic magic, and in imitating the mystic’s external forms deceives himself and others into thinking that he is really like him. But the important thing about the mystic was his feeling, not his ideas and actions, for these were only reflections of the feeling, and a reflection existing without a light is a sham. Therefore just as great technical proficiency will not make a creative genius in music, morality, theology, and discipline will not make a genius in religion, for these things are results of religious experience, not causes, and by themselves can no more produce it than the tail can be made to wag the dog.
The Spiritual Irrelevance of Occultism
This is not the only example of confused thought in searching for religious experience. The other, which we have already mentioned, is the opposition made between the spiritual and the material. Much depends, of course, on the precise meaning given to the word “spirit,” but it should certainly not be confused with the word “psychic” and many things described as spiritual are clearly psychic. There is no definite rule as to how these words should be used, so to be explicit we have to make our own rules. And the spiritual, in the sense in which it is used here, is no more opposed to the material than white is opposed to long. The opposite of white is black, and of long, short; white things are no more necessarily short than material things are unspiritual. But we can say that the material and the psychic are opposed, if only in the sense that they are opposite ends of the same stick. Psychic things belong to the world explored by occultism and “psychic science”—telepathy, clairvoyance, mind reading, and all those phenomena which appear to require sixth or seventh senses whose development seems unquestionably to be assisted by ascetic practices. The so-called spiritual realms inhabited by departed souls, angels, elementals, and demons, and the source of beatific visions, would be most correctly described as psychic if we are to allow that such things have actual, objective existence. And this world is the logical opposite of the material world because it belongs in the same category; it contains forms and substances, even though its substance may be of a wholly different order from what we understand as matter. People who are in touch with this world, however, are not necessarily spiritual people; they may have unusual faculties of perception and be familiar with the beings and ways of a more glorious world than our own, but this is a matter of faculty and knowledge, not of spirituality. The technique of living employed by such people is more highly evolved than that of ordinary men, just as the technique of the opera is more complicated than that of pure drama. Opera involves not only acting but singing, playing music, and sometimes dancing, but this does not make it a greater art.
Spirituality belongs in the same category as happiness and freedom, and strictly speaking there is no such thing as the spiritual world. If psychic people are to be believed, there is a psychic world, and because it is a world entry into it is simply an enlargement of experience. But experience as such never made anyone either free or happy, and insofar as freedom and happiness are concerned with experience the important thing is not experience itself but what is learned from it. Some people learn from experience and others do not; some learn much from a little, others learn little from much. “Without going out of my house,” said the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, “I know the whole universe.” For the spiritual is in no way divided from the material, nor from the psychic, nor from any other aspect of life. To find it, it is not necessary to go from one state of consciousness to another, from one set of senses to another, or from one world to another. Such journeying about in the fields of experience takes you neither toward it nor away from it. In the words of the Psalmist:3
Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall Thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.
Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to Thee.
In fact the spiritual world, if we must use the term, is this world and all possible worlds, and spiritual experience is what we are experiencing at this moment and at any moment—if we look at it in the right way.