Morphology of Religious Consciousness (Part-II)

Morphology of Religious Consciousness (Part-II)

Mr. A. K. Brohi

Nihilistic attitude is negative in that it rejects all known codes of behaviour based on the knowledge of the supra-personal ground. But it is in itself a positive philosophy of action. When Marx, for example, declared war against the institution of religion, his war aims had nothing to do with the elimination of religion as such; he was merely attacking what he felt was a kind of religious belief and practice sanctioned by the traditional norms of religion. He, in fact, wanted to establish another official religion and what he preached was yet another ‘sermon on the mount‘. His battle cry, of course, was so formulated that it gave a false appearance to his real mission. He was really out to establish another religion. In defence of this contention reference may be made to the following extract from Ralph Barton Perry’s book, Realms of Value:

“Religion in this universal sense will then include cults which judged by Christian standard are atheistic. Thus Communism is said to be Godless and anti-religious because it rejects Christianity. But in the same breath the critics of Communism declare that Communism is itself a religion in that it exalts the proletarian revolution above all other ends and holds that its success is guaranteed by the Law of Nature and History. Whether one says that Communism is atheistic or that it has made a good of Economic Force depends on whether one is thinking in terms of a particular religion or in terms of religion in general. The God which Communism denies is a particular variety of God such as the Christian God. The God it affirms is another variety of universal God. Both gods answer the description of God as Cosmic Power viewed from the stand-point of what men take to be their paramount good.

“It is clear that esoteric Buddhism as well as Marxian Communism recognizes no God in the Christian sense. But Buddhism teaches that Nirvana is the supreme good and that the constitution of things— the view of Karma and ultimate illusoriness of existence— permits Nirvana to be attained. Buddhism is thus a religion in its conjoining of a hierarchy of values with a cosmology; and it can even be said to have its god, if by ‘god’ is meant the saving grace of man's total environment.”

 In the comprehension of the foregoing argument, it would be useful to elaborate the central point around which gyrates that constellation of ideas that underlie the use of the three terms that l have improvised. That point could be seen in the three different views that the three religious attitudes mentioned above adopt in relation to the concept of “personality of man”. For the theocentric, the human person is the most primary and inviolable element in the scheme of things; he is sui generis, and is underived and underivable from the world in which he has been lodged to do the battle. For the anthropocentric view, the man has emerged from what has gone before him and he is explicable in terms similar to those that explain the cosmos. He shares in his being that which exists outside of him in his environment. There is for the present nothing unique in him for he is just the child of the cosmos, and nothing more, in his right as being the final product of creation he is in some sense superior to all that has contributed to his existence. But that is all. For the nihilistic consciousness, the concept of personality is an illusion and the only explanation it is called upon to give is: how has this illusion arisen? For the materialist it is just a superfluous concomitant condition a mere by-product; and the highest attainable end for man is to renounce this illusion and accommodate himself within the framework of the hostile universe in which his life has arisen by the interplay of forces which had no pre-vision of the end they were achieving.

As a sample of nihilistic view of life, let me exhibit the following passage from Bertrand Russell's famous Essay on “Free Man’s worship.”

The life of man viewed outwardly is but a small thing compared with the Forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds himself and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in oriental subjection but we absorb it and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle of private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things—this is emancipation and this is free man’s worship. And this aberration is effected by the contemplation of fate; for fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of Time.

United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of the common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided...

‘Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and on all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction. omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gates of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built, undismayed by the empire of chances to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate for a moment his knowledge and his condemnation to sustain alone, a Weary but unyielding at last, the World that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.”

The mood behind the words cited above is one of unyielding despair and such is the sort of human situation that we ourselves have witnessed only too often within the depths of our soul.

As a poet’s vision of Human Destiny, it might claim our serious attention and respect. But as a philosophical discourse upon the condition of Man, it cannot escape our criticism. How can a free man emerge at large from a universe where “all being is bodily and all causation is mechanical?” If it be true, as Mr. Russel says in some other parts of his Essay: “That man is the product of the causes which had no pre-vision of the end they were achieving, that his origin, his growth, his hopes and his fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collection of atoms; that no fire no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave, that all the labours of ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried under a debris of ruins”- one cannot understand by what process can the urge to worship at all arise. After all, all worship is based on the miracle of self-transcendence. If the ‘self’ in man has an aspiration towards something which points a ‘here beyond’, it could not anyhow be the product of the “causes that had no pre-vision of the end they were achieving.” Mr. Russel cannot have it both ways.

Adverting for a moment once again to the classification of the three religious attitudes we have been considering, it would be conducive to clarity of thought if I were to classify the traditional religions of mankind in terms of these denominations. Subject to some obvious reservations, the precise nature of which it is not necessary for me to set forth here, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and some systems of Hindu religious thought and belief fall into the theocentric group, whereas Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism and Existentialism of the theistic variety fall in the anthropocentric group, and Atheistic Existentialism, Positivism, Behaviourism and Dialectical Materialism, considered as philosophies of life, fall in the nihilistic group. For the first group, the ground of personal life is interpreted as meta-cosmic Reality which manifests itself in, but is not exhausted by, the world of appearance; and this Reality partakes of the character of a higher presence with whom dialogue by the finite person is possible. For the second, the supra-natural ground is transcendental to finite consciousness but is intra-cosmic; and man is to utilize his knowledge of its laws and processes much in the manner in which the mariners during the middle ages used to avail of “trade winds” for the purpose of being able to sail to the hospitable habitat in the tropics for doing trade. Not that ‘winds’ were designed to promote trade by facilitating the passage of the sailing vessels in hospitable habitats, but that man, having learnt the secret of the seasonal direction of the monsoonic winds, exploited the secret for doing navigation better than he would have been able to do had he no such knowledge. For the third, the ground is supra-personal only in the sense that the personality of man itself is unreal and the salvation of man therefore consists in giving himself up to a wider synthesis—to Nirvana, to the State, to the non-human elements in the cosmos, etc.

The primary categories of theocentric perspective are metaphysical in character; and as for anthropocentric and nihilistic perspectives, they are the psychological and the ethical ones respectively. The first instances the case of objective consciousness, the second reflects the twilight zone between the light of the objective and darkness of the subjective consciousness and the last one is the case of pure subjective consciousness, that is to say it tenants the world of unadulterated illusion and Maya which, for it, is the only reality. The approach of a devotee in the case of theocentric religious consciousness is that of humanity, one of adoration of the Divine of total surrender in an act of worship at its altar; and that of the devotee in anthropocentric religious consciousness, it is one akin to that of the cunning man, that is to say, of a man who has somehow found himself possessed of a prescription which he is going to exploit for securing his redemption and for him the need to be reverential to the designer of the prescription does not so much as arise: —- this, as would be noticed, is really not a religious attitude at all but partakes of the character of the belief in a sort of magical formula to secure certain results. For the nihilistic consciousness, it suffices to say that the only attitude it fosters is one of arrogance, since it is born of a conviction it fosters, viz., that every man is sufficient unto himself and his highest reach is along the direction of leading an active life to the end that the historical milieu in which he finds himself is radically altered. This is, it would be recalled, behaving more or less in the typical image of the strategy reflected in the ideal of the Prometheus Unbound. The theocentric attitude regards human action as a symbol, as though it constituted an offering of the finite at the altar of the Absolute; the anthropocentric attitude regards the human action as a means of self-fulfillment and does not pause to inquire whether or not it ought to concern itself with the consequences of action. The nihilistic attitude takes human action seriously, in that it constitutes for it the only mode that there is of acting on the environment—or rather ‘pseudo-environment’, since a subjective consciousness cannot know any other objective environment. His is an action for the sake of action, since in the scheme of things the pursuit of human activity is devoid of any serious purpose. The devotee who subscribes to a theocentric perspective, believes that his essential progress lies in securing an ever-increasing approximation to the meta-cosmic source of light and power. For such a one salvation within oneself and thus such like an infant on the bosom of the Infinite and thereby feel nourished and thus become stronger (diviner) in the process. This is to be likened to a piece of iron taking on the character of fire by continuously remaining in fire. The anthropocentric devotee, on the other hand, conceives all his destiny in another dimension, which is one of discovering his identity with the Absolute, the Azma, eventually discovering himself as a Brahma. Here progress does not lie so much in the securing of transformation of the finite self as the discovery that the finite self is the Real Self and indeed the realization comes to such a one that one has been so all along: it is, in short, a case of the dew-drop discovering that it is an ocean. For the nihilistic consciousness, the progress lies in finding itself engaged in an activity which involves it continually in the world of outer circumstances and this fate can be likened to that of a patient who is suffering from what modern medicine calls paralysis agitans: once he starts walking, he must go on and on—not so much because he wants to go on but simply because he has lost all voluntaristic control over his movements. The meaning of existence for such a one lies in its meaninglessness and indeed its only point lies in its pointlessness. The functional lever of change for the one oriented in theocentric perspective is the consciousness of sin. The fact that I conceive myself to be, when He alone is, itself an act of sinful pride. For the anthropocentric consciousness there can be no sin, but only an error of judgment. The former depends for his redemption primarily on ‘grace’ of God and the latter one on an effort to exploit the magical formula in the sense stated above. For the nihilistic one, of course, there is nothing good or bad except perhaps that only thinking makes it to be so. Since his is the world in which what rules is the relativity, nothing is ontologically valid: after all, in the twilight all things are grey and in darkness they all vanish.

The presentation of the foregoing three characteristic attitudes have been offered in an attempt to facilitate comprehension of religious systems of thought, belief and practice. Of course these characteristics shade off imperceptibly into grays and a given religious system may contain variations on the central and cardinal features that I have depicted.

What contributes to the emergence of certain types of religious consciousness in certain epoch and at certain places in the scheme of things is another and a far more fascinating chapter in the study of Comparative Religion and this is not the place to expatiate upon that aspect of the problem.

Before I conclude, I would like to present a possible solution of the problem of the immortality of the soul in terms of the three types of religious consciousness that I have attempted to delineate in the foregoing pages. It is obvious that for the nihilistic consciousness, the possible continuance of man‘s life after death presents no problem for the simple reason that for it human individuality is not a value, and since the emergency of the illusion of personality in man is itself attributable solely to the interplay of mechanical forces within his bodily life, with the disintegration of his body the bubble that is human personality bursts and man fades into oblivion and is heard of no more. For the anthropomorphic consciousness, however, the problem of the survival of the human soul arises for serious consideration if only because it does treat human personality as representing a higher phase of manifestation of the Law of Evolution which it sees operating in the cosmos. But since the distinctive feature of the personality of man for the anthropomorphic consciousness is not that it denotes the presence in him of any meta-cosmic principle something which is wholly contained within the range of possibilities disclosed by the operation of some impersonal power or the working of some sort of plan of law, the issue concerning its survival after the disintegration of bodily life certainly presents some insuperable difficulties. There may, however, be as indeed there actually are, some representative founders of the religious systems and world-philosophies who appropriately belong to his category of thought, but who nevertheless hazard the belief that although, to begin with, nothing immutable or eternal manifests itself in the life of man, it is possible to hold that some form of life entirely unknown to us may yet emerge at the point at which human life begins to consummate itself. Immortality of soul thus, with such of them, is not a birth-right of man but is something to be fought for and obtained as a reward for his work on earth. For them there is the possibility that something may survive after the death of bodily life which may be capable of continuing the evolution of life in the sense entirely unknown to us. For the anthropocentric consciousness, the belief in the survival of soul thus involves the hazard of faith. For the anhropomorphic consciousness therefore the possibility of soul’s survival after man's death is not eliminated on a priori grounds. It remains, right to the end, an open question.

For the theocentric consciousness, of course, the immortality of soul is not only the essence but the quintessence of that relationship which the earthly life of man has to meta-cosmic principle which is seen operating within the limits of the law that conditions the cosmos as if from a trans-cosmic source. Thus, with the disintegration of man‘s bodily life that entelechy which is encased in the ‘muddy vesture of decay’ ought to be able to regain its original status and any experiences acquired by the soul of man on earth would therefore be available to it for its further growth and expansion after it has discarded the ‘mortal coil’.

We started by saying that religious consciousness is the primary nexus which links man with something other than himself. On closer analysis this “other” can either be: (a) some non-human farce or law underlying at the base of the fabric of cosmos, or (b) some presence of a sort as it reveals to me when I look at the lives of my fellowmen, or again (c) it may be somewhat like the stuff from which my empirical self is made, e.g., my thoughts, my dreams, my feelings, my loves, my hates and indeed it can be apiece with all that I have felt and found.

By empirical self, in this context, I mean the self that I contact when I introspectively attempt to recover, as I do when I set out to know myself. In order to avoid misunderstanding it is necessary to point out that even the self I recover in introspection is really outside me: do I not say ‘I have hope‘. ‘I have admiration’. ‘I have pain’? Even the contents of consciousness are outside that meta-cosmic principle, that “I” in me which secures their organization in a synthetic unity of appreciation: My link with my mind is in no sense different from the link that I have with the distant Nebulae and both of them are “outside” me.

These three varieties of the other are reflected in the interpretation of the supra-personal ground by the three forms of consciousness I have described; anthropocentric being based on the first, theocentric being based on the second and nihilistic being based on the third element of our analysis. But the analysis also incidentally establishes the gradation in the kind of knowledge which at the present level of our consciousness is possible to us. Thus: (a) when I see the majesty and grandeur of Nature as it is manifested say in lightning and thunder, or (b) hear the soul-stirring voice of a friend. or (c) communicate with my empirical self as I do introspection which I talk of myself, I have presented to myself an orderly procession of the various levels of communication through that link that we have with the “other”.

To assume that these are the only kinds of knowledge possible in principle for us to witness the “other” is to go beyond the evidence that is available. All this. on the other hand, may go to establish the possibility of some higher form of consciousness in which I could directly communicate with the “other”. That such a communion is possible for man’s deeper or metaphysical self with the meta-cosmic Reality, which for the theocentric consciousness is a presence and a personality and that too in a manner entirely unknown to my present forms of consciousness. is what all higher mystical tradition of mankind has taught us to believe.