Mysticism or Pathology In dealing with ecstasy, we are face to face with a most profound, constantly repeated phenomenon of religious experience. The real cause for this extraordinary state of mental absorption, attended often by insensibility to the external world and a cataleptic condition of the body, is still unknown. Many among the seekers after self-awareness, ecstasy, sartori, samadhi or God-realization have often no clear-cut idea of the final goal to which the discipline they are undertaking would lead; or that the samadhi brought about by Yoga, the ecstatic trance of the Christian mystics, sartori among the Zen, the state of absorption of the Sufis and the union of Shakti with Shiva of the Tantriks, signify, when genuine, the same experience. But there can be artificially induced or pathological conditions of the mind which present the same external symptoms but lack completely in the subjective elements of the genuine ecstasy. It is clear that drugs like LSD, mescaline, preparations of opium, hashish, marijuana and the rest in some inexplicable way affect our consciousness. Since these drugs are either taken by mouth or smoked or injected the inference is clear that they affect the blood and the chemistry of the brain in some way which creates a powerful effect on the mind. From this it follows that even our food and drink must be affecting our consciousness, although in a manner which is not perceptible to us except when due to excess or the ingestion of a disagreeable, putrid or poisoned article of food, we feel an adverse reaction both in our body and the mind. The feeling of well-being after a good, wholesome meal and of uneasiness or nausea after an ill-cooked, unsavory or unwholesome one provide an indication of this fact. Any hallucinogen, irritant or excitant consumed by us affects, irritates or excites the brain matter first. From the way our waking consciousness is affected by the condition of our blood or what we eat or drink or smoke, it is obvious that the same process must be at work in our dream awareness also, and our bodily or visceral conditions must be reflected in the dreams. We little know what happens to the brain cells by constant fretting, irritation or excitement. But we can make a guess by recalling the smart caused by a caustic or the effects of irritation caused to the skin by a coarse, ill-fitting or very tight article of dress. The analogies can be multiplied. What is important to remember is that our brain is not as immune to abuse, hurt or ill-treatment as we suppose it to be. In the light of this fact it should be easy to imagine what harm we cause to the gray-matter by excess, vice and violence. But for a prompt repair system, humanity would be a race of maniacs in a few generations only. Most of this repair work is done in the ever-active brain in sleep when we are powerless to interfere! This is the main benefit we derive from the ministrations of our heaven-provided nocturnal nurse. Many of the current interpretations of dreams are arbitrary and fictitious. There is order and not chaos in our interior. Neither the angel nor the beast runs amok. If there is a fault, it is in ourselves. Our constitution or heredity needs correction. If there is order in atoms and their parts, there cannot be disorder in the ethereal constituents of consciousness. Our dreams hold up a mirror to the surface consciousness to look at herself critically in a manner which, out of vanity and self-love, she never does during the waking hours. They are prophetic, admonitory, reformative, expository or timeless, like mythologies and the inspired material contained in the religious books of various faiths. Our dream scenario can also be an absurd, unintelligible or confused amalgam, depending every time on the state of the neurons. It will take mankind ages to understand the signs. With this position before our eyes, showing how intimately the body and the mind are interconnected, it is hard to believe that an unprecedented mental state, betokening union with the Almighty and filled with unutterable bliss--never known on the earthly plane--can be the experience of the mind or soul alone, without involving the body or the brain. However brief it might be, the transcendental flight of the soul must be reflected in the cerebral matter in some way. Conversely, it can happen that as the result of a reaction caused in the brain by intense concentration, constant worship, prayer, extreme longing for the beatific vision or consuming love of God, continued for long periods of time, a process of transformation would start in the organ conducive to the extraordinary experiences of the mystical type. The current explanations for astonishing states of mind, as for instance those of child-prodigies, lightning calculators, mediums and mystics, are mostly hypothetical, the result of cogitation by intelligent minds. They are not the fruit of direct experience because the elements involved are too subtle for empirical study. The result is a multi-colored dish of highly spiced cuisine, cooked up by a bright cluster of mind-healers of our time. The phenomenon cannot be explained only in theophantic terms, viz that it represents communion of the soul with God, but also in terms of a revolution caused in the fabric of the brain. The experiences with LSD and mescaline clearly show to what an amazing extent chemical reagents can affect the state of a normal mind. This fact should provide food for reflection not only to the religious-minded, but also to every honest savant engaged in the study of higher consciousness. For the latter, rather than resort to the naive explanation that mystical ecstasy is an exhibit of the subconscious, would it not be more rational to look for a solution to the riddle in the encephalon, if not in the entire organism of the individual. Even if a product of the subconscious, the magnitude of the phenomenon and its impact on the personality make a look at the brain necessary, on the analogy of the study done on genius and insanity. In the light of the fact that the human organism is a chemical laboratory of a most elaborate kind, the possibility of a bio-chemical synthetic process in the neuronic material to create a different pattern of consciousness, as happens in the case of certain drugs, cannot be ruled out. In fact, there is a growing apperception of the fact that mental disorder can be the immediate result of organic imbalances in the brain. It is to this aspect of Mystical Ecstasy that I wish to draw the attention of the world. Once the study of this rare state of mind is taken up and pursued with vigor, as is done in the other branches of science, a two-fold harvest is sure to result: (1) a clear understanding of the mystical trance, and (2) a widening of the horizon of science itself. Instead of introducing a supernatural factor or a subterranean cavern in mind itself to account for a historical phenomenon, would it not be more rational to hold that since a distressful, depressive or painful mental condition in an individual can be caused by a disorder of the mind or body, the reverse can also be true and the intensely blissful, elevating and rapturous transport of mystical ecstasy can be the result of a better and more harmonious state of the organic frame. We are not able to decide or even envision this possibility because of the scanty knowledge of our nerves and the brain. How a scientific mind can believe that a psychological fire-work can start in an individual without involving the cerebrum is hard to understand. The accounts of the mystics are so varied and their experiences so paradoxical and so diverse in character--a compound of exaltation and depression, ecstasy and agony, hope and despair, light and darkness--so influenced by the state of health, age, mental disposition and environment of the subjects that, in its external features the phenomenon is no different from the other psychological states of human beings. Were mystical ecstasy only a spirit to spirit encounter with incorporeal Divinity, the bodily or mental state of the mystic would not be allowed to color the experience. But this is not the case. On the contrary, the stress and strain caused on the system of a contemplative--entrancement, contortion of the body, epileptic seizure, diminished pulse and breathing, hysteria and, sometimes, even convulsion--tell a different tale. Correctly understood, in the light of studies already done, mystical ecstasy is a psychosomatic phenomenon which can be investigated if approached in the right way. The views expressed by Underhill and other capable writers on mysticism, as also the avowals made by mystics themselves, make it clear beyond doubt that in the genuine mystical trance the subject loses, wholly or partially, the awareness of the world and experiences a state of lucidity and self-expansion in which the soul apprehends its oneness with God or a Divine Imminence, variously delineated, attended by a rapture which is unique. The artificially induced states resulting from certain passive types of meditation, arrest of breathing, Khechari mudra, repetition of sounds, gazing at bright objects or the tip of the nose, or other methods of self-hypnosis, used by some well-known mystics too, as for instance Boheme, though alike in external symbology, do not betoken genuine ecstasy and often lead to serious error in evaluating the true condition. Commenting on this subject of the mystical trance, Underhill writes: "There are three distinct aspects under which the ecstatic state may be studied: (a) the physical, (b) psychological, (c) the mystical. Many of the deplorable misunderstandings and still more deplorable mutual recriminations, which surround its discussion, come from the refusal of experts in one of these three branches to consider the results arrived at by the other two. Physically considered, ecstasy is a trance; more or less deep, more or less prolonged. The subject may slide into it gradually from a period of absorption in, or contemplation of, some idea which has filled the field of consciousness; or, it may come on suddenly, the appearance of the idea--or even some word or symbol suggesting the idea--abruptly throwing the subject into an entranced condition. This is the state which some mystical writers call rapture. The distinction, however, is a conventional one and the works of the mystics describe many intermediate forms. "During the trance, breathing and circulation are depressed. The body is more or less cold or rigid, remaining in the exact position which it occupied at the oncoming of the ecstasy, however difficult and unnatural this pose may be. Sometimes entrancement is so deep there is complete anesthesia, as in the case which I quote from the life of St. Catherine of Siena. Credible witnesses report that Bernadette, the visionary of Lourdes, held the flaming end of a candle in her hand for fifteen minutes during one of her ecstasies. She felt no pain, neither did the flesh show any marks of burning. Similar instances of ecstatic anesthesia abound in the lives of the saints, and are also characteristic of certain pathological states."* "The mystics themselves are fully aware of the importance of this distinction," continues Underhill. "Ecstasies, no less than visions and voices must, they declare, be subjected to unsparing criticism before they are recognized as divine: whilst some are undoubtedly 'of God,' others are no less clearly 'of the devil.' 'The great doctors of the mystic life,' says Malaval, 'teach that there are two sorts of rapture, which must be carefully distinguished. The first are produced in persons but little advanced in the Way, and still full of selfhood; either by the force of a heated imagination which vividly apprehends a sensible object, or by the artifice of the devil. These are the raptures which St. Teresa calls, in various parts of her works, Raptures of Feminine Weakness. The other sort of Rapture is, on the contrary, the effect of pure intellectual vision in those who have a great and generous love for God. To generous souls who have utterly renounced themselves, God never fails in these raptures to communicate high things." "Sometimes both kinds of ecstasy, the healthy and the psychopathic," adds Underhill, "are seen in the same person. Thus in the cases of St. Catherine of Genoa and St. Catherine of Siena it would seem that as their health became feebler and the nervous instability always found in persons of genius increased, the ecstasies may become more frequent; but they were not healthy ecstasies, such as those which they experienced in the earlier stages of their careers, and which brought with them an excess of vitality. They were the result of increasing weakness of the body, not of the over-powering strength of the spirit: and there is evidence that Catherine of Genoa, that acute self-critic, was conscious of this. Those who attended on her did not know how to distinguish one state from the other. And hence on coming to, she would sometimes say, 'Why did you let me remain in this quietude, from which I have almost died?'"* I have again cited Evelyn Underhill at some length as it is needless to recapitulate what has been said on this point by a well-known sympathetic writer on mysticism. What does this study reveal? Does it not show that mystical ecstasy is not an experience of the spirit alone, but that the body, nervous system and the brain of the mystic are inextricably interwoven with it? Assuming for the sake of argument that the audience of the soul with God causes such an impact on the corporeal sheath that by the sheer force of it all the vitality in the body is drawn up and it lies motionless in a swoon, insensible to itself and the world around for the period of the communion, the position still remains that the embodied spirit, in her encounter with the Divine, cannot leave the corpus behind but, whether fainting or conscious, inert or active, has to carry it along with herself whenever the audience takes place. Since the spirit is herself a ray or spark of the Divine, it is evident that if the corporeal form develops the capacity to bear the Splendor, manifested at the time of the intercourse, the meeting or the union can be possible any and every time. This is what I have in mind when I refer to further evolution of the brain. This is what Yoga and other spiritual disciplines are designed for. What more evidence is needed to show that the body and the brain play a signal role in bringing about the mystical trance than the avowals of some mystics themselves that ecstasies, visions and voices should be subjected to closest scrutiny, before they are accepted as divine, for some of them are undoubtedly of God and others no less clearly of the devil. If this interpretation of chaste and unchaste ecstasies is literally accepted, it would mean putting the whole subject of mystical vision in serious uncertainty and doubt. This can make one suspicious of the genuine experience as well, for in supporting such a point of view, we regress to the primitive superstitious belief that what is good comes from God and what is evil from the arch-enemy of man. To an unbiased mind, it should be palpably clear that a rational explanation for the polarity in the two ecstasies can only be that in one case the organism is well-adjusted for the experience. In the second, it is not. It is the state of preparedness of the percipients' brain that makes the ecstasy beneficent and divine in one case or maleficent and diabolical in the other. The same individual can have both types, at different times, corresponding to the condition of the brain. There is still a serious misunderstanding about the real nature of the mystical trance. I say serious because the consequences of this ignorance about a phenomenon of great historical importance, as the seed-bed of all the four current major faiths of mankind, with all the eventualities which emerged from them during the past two thousand years, and still continue to emerge, can prove distressful for the race. This is not all. It will, perhaps, never become known how many hundreds of thousand souls, thirsting for self-knowledge, during the last few decades, unable to resist the urge and, at the same time, in confusion about the real nature of their thirst on account of the chaos existing in this province, went from pillar to post and from post to pillar in their search to fall victim to deception, drugs, disease and degeneration for lack of correct knowledge of and right guidance on the path. When the scores are reckoned, on whom will fall the responsibility for this default? "It need hardly be said," adds Underhill, "that rationalistic writers, ignoring the parallels offered by the artistic and philosophic temperaments, have seized eagerly upon the evidence afforded by such instances of apparent mono-ideism and self hypnotization in the lives of the mystics, and by the physical disturbances which accompany the ecstatic trance, and sought by its application to attribute all the abnormal perceptions of contemplative genius to hysteria or other disease. They have not hesitated to call St. Paul an epileptic, St. Teresa the 'patron saint of hysterics;' and have found room for most of their spiritual kindred in various departments of the pathological museum. They have been helped in this grateful task by the acknowledged fact that the great contemplatives, though almost always persons of robust intelligence and marked practical or intellectual ability--Plotinus, St. Bernard, the two St. Catherines, St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, and the Sufi poets Jami and Jalalu 'ddin are cases in point--have often suffered from bad physical health. More, their mystical activities have generally reacted upon their bodies in a definite and special way; producing in several cases a particular kind of illness and of physical disability, accompanied by pains and functional disturbances for which no organic cause could be discovered, unless that cause were the immense strain which exalted spirit puts upon a body which is adapted to a very different form of life."* In the concluding portion of the paragraph, Underhill comes nearer to the truth than, perhaps, she herself suspected. It is "the immense strain caused on the body by an exalted spirit" which is at the bottom of the degenerative tendencies and pathological conditions associated not only with the mystical personality, but, more pointedly, with genius also. Considered in the light of the fact that mental aberration, eccentricity, neurosis and insanity have been a common feature of exceptionally gifted minds, instead of a sweeping generalization that genius is a form of insanity, and collection of voluminous data to support this view, would it not have been more rational to concede that the reason for this peculiarity could lie in the excessive consumption of psychic energy by a mind more brilliant, more fertile, more artistic or more imaginative than an average one? It is ignorance about the working of the brain and the energy nourishing it which is at the base of the highly mistaken notions current about genius or that form of it which manifests itself in the mystical mind. "The progress of science," says Whitehead, "consists in observing and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting work are but examples of a few general connections or relations called laws. To see what is general in what is particular and what is permanent in what is transitory is the aim of scientific thought. In the eye of science, the fall of an apple, the motion of a planet around a sun, and the clinging of the atmosphere to the earth are all seen as examples of the law of gravity. This possibility of disentangling the most complex evanescent circumstances into various examples of permanent laws is the controlling idea of modern thought."* We are not able to disentangle the highly complex problems, presented by genius, mystical ecstasy and psychosis because bewildered by the diversity of the features, peculiar to each, we fail to detect the single thread that runs through all of them due to the habit of our isolating thought from the brain. Underhill's criticism of the views expressed by rationalist writers is not well-timed. The provocation is from the other side. If someone claims that he had intercourse with the Almighty and, instead of providing incontestable evidence in support of it, comes off from the encounter with a sickly body and a schizoid mind, the doubt created would be fully justified. In fact, those who are confident of their theistic interpretation of the experience should be all too ready to satisfy the doubts. Scholars have been unsparing in their views about geniuses, exposing ruthlessly their mental and physical faults, although most of them never claimed special divine favor. So there appears to be no reason why mystics should be treated differently in those cases where there is a similar or even greater departure form normalcy. In this context, the view expressed by William James, another well-known authority on religious experiences, is worthy of note: "The classic religious mysticism, it now must be confessed," says James, "is only a 'privileged case.' It is an extract, kept true to type by the selection of the fittest specimens and their preservation in 'schools.' It is carved out from a much larger mass. as seriously as religious mysticism itself, the kind that accumulates traditions and makes schools, is much less unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both ascetic and antinominaly self-indulgent within the Christian church. It is dualistic in Sankhya, and monistic in Vedanta philosophy. I called it pantheistic; but the great Spanish mystics are anything but pantheists. They are with few exceptions non-metaphysical minds, for whom 'the category of personality' is absolute. The 'union' of man with God is for them much more like an occasional miracle than like an original identity." "How different again, apart from the happiness common to all," continues William James, "is the mysticism of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Richard Jeffries and other naturalistic pantheists, from the more distinctively Christian sort. The fact is that mystical feeling of enlargement, union and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own. It is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with materials furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only they can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood. We have no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in favor of any special belief, such as that in absolute idealism, or in the absolute monistic identity, or in the absolute goodness of the world. It is only relatively in favor of all these things--it passes out of common human consciousness in the direction in which they lie."* "So much for religious mysticism proper. But more remains to be told, for religious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The other half has no accumulated traditions accept those which the text books on insanity supply. Open any one of these and you will find abundant cases in which 'mystical ideas' are sited as characteristic symptoms of enfeebled or deluded states of mind. In delusional insanity, paranoia, as they sometimes call it, we may have a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is pessimistic: instead of consolation we have desolation; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. It is evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from the great subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so little is really known. That region contains every kind of matter; 'seraph and snake' abide there side by side. To come from thence is no infallible credential. What comes must be sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience, just like what comes from the outer world of sense. Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods, so long as we are not mystics ourselves."* The aim of knowledge is to throw light on what is obscure, explain what is inexplicable and to solve what is problematic. We cannot call that knowledge which makes the obscure darker, the inexplicable even more so and the enigmatic more perplexing than before. Nor is that knowledge which, instead of answering a riddle, explains it by another even harder than the one answered by it. This is the position adopted by modern psychology in dealing with the abnormal and paranormal phenomena of the mind. Other than this how can we classify the attempt made to explain psychosis, automatism, inspiration, mystical ecstasy or extra-sensory perception in terms of the 'unconscious,' an entity more puzzling, more mysterious and more foreign to us than the phenomena which they try to explain by it. We can no more divide the mind into conscious and unconscious parts than we can divide the flowing water gliding down the sandy bed of a winding river. We can only see the upper surface of the current, Its ripples, waves, whirlpools and eddies and not the, by far, larger mass of water gliding below, hidden by the upper layer from our sight. For this, we do not make a distinction between the top and the bottom levels of water, but call the whole mass a river, not the 'surface river' and the 'under-the-surface river.' In fact, it would be a mistake to do so as there is a constant interchange of water between the upper and lower layers of the current; water from the surface coming down and that under it rising up in a swirling motion, as the river flows on. Like a measureless, all-encompassing river, the stream of consciousness flows on day and night. Its ripples, waves, whirlpools and eddies represent the revolutions, upheavals and cataclysmic ups and downs of life. A river rises from the waters of the ocean as nebulous vapor condensing into a very fine atomized spray that gathers into drops, descending on the earth as rain, hail or snow, to form into a stream which flows on and on until its water mingles again with the ocean wherefrom it had come. It is one. Its division into two parts, the 'upper' and the 'lower' is unrealistic as the water is in movement up and down everywhere. Mind has a cosmic dimension in which our individual minds are like drops of water in an ocean or extremely slender beams of light radiating from a gigantic sun. Our mind knows all about us for it is the intelligence in us while we know only as much as we are permitted to do, according to the capacity of the brain. How it has been assumed that each individual mind is restricted to one particular body, in two divisions, the upper and the lower, is a riddle. Can highly rarefied mediums, like ether and light, or gases like hydrogen, helium and air or even liquids like water, spirit or oil, be separated into parts or prevented from spreading out without the use of impervious containers or the erection of impenetrable partition walls? How can then it be supposed that mind, subtler than all of them, can stay in isolated units, clinging to the highly porous mortal frame of each living creature, without mingling with the surrounding fields? The position remains unaffected whether mind is considered to be a chance product of organic activity or as a self-existing constituent of the Universe. It also remains unaffected whether it is held to be incorporeal, etheric or organic in its composition. Why I wish to draw attention to this obvious fact is because the current concepts of psychology about mind debase and disfigure the holy image of consciousness, the sublime object of man's eternal quest. This error in thinking is the outcome of an incorrect approach to the study of mind and insufficient knowledge of the brain. When even the physicists have been driven to admit that, at its finest levels, matter is becoming more and more difficult to explore and the behavior of its elementary particles harder and harder to determine, how can the dogmatic premises of psychology about an element, inaccessible to sensory observation and by far more subtle and complex than the former be accepted as correct? I am constrained to point this out because in its existing form and with its present methods of investigation, the current science of mind, by denigrating the high ideals and supernal beliefs of religion, is doing more harm than good to the race. If a distinction is to be made it would be more appropriate to call one 'incarnate' and the other 'discarnate' mind. This, too, is only a man-made distinction for the drop is never out of the ocean and the rays of light never cut off from the sun. There is no 'unconscious' mind. The very idea is a contradiction in terms. The areas, further away from our awareness, are as highly conscious and intelligent as the rest and even more so. It is, as it were, a plumbless ocean of intelligence everywhere. The fantasies of childhood, the traumatic experiences of puberty and the savage traits of our remote ancestors cling to us--the drops of the always unsullied waters of the ocean--as a result of contaminations arising from embodiment. The water of the river carries various kinds of matter held in suspension which makes it muddy and impure. It is these impurities which lend a particular tint, taste or even odor to the fluid. Cleared of them it is uniformly pure, both in its upper and lower reaches. The floating sediment, because of its heaviness, gravitates towards the bottom and finally settles down as silt on the bed and the banks of the river. When interwoven with the body, our mind too, carries impurities in suspension which gravitate more toward the lower reaches, closer to the flesh. Otherwise, this ethereal stuff is perennially stainless and pure. It is the more or less purity of this marvelous element of creation in the embodied form which determines our daily cheerful and heavy moods, the delightful or unpleasant contents of our dream scenes at night, the fertile and barren periods of genius, the delirious and lucid intervals or manic and depressive phases of insanity and the enrapturing flights to heaven or gloomy descents into hell of the mystical mind. It is these impurities which cause the psychopathic syndrome in countless minds living on the borderline of sanity--abnormal behavior, sexual perversion, obsession, possession, uncontrollable impulses, urges, appetites and the rest. The more a mind is sensitive, penetrating and intelligent, the more likelihood there is of its susceptibility to psychic ills. There are impurities and toxins in the nerves and the brain as there are viruses and poisons in the blood and other tissues of the body. But the subtle nerve and brain poisons are of a different kind. They will be amenable to control, when once sufficient insight is gained into this still obscure parameter of organic life. The modern psychologist sits on the horns of a dilemma. He must preserve his peace with the anthropologist and the biologist. At the same time, he must not stray too far from the prevalent orthodox ideas and beliefs on which he is brought up and bred in the university. It is hard to be a rebel and run the gauntlet of a host, or forego the 'hurrah' of appreciative colleagues on one's performance. Otherwise, it should not be difficult for an intelligent student of mind to realize that the subject under his study is bristling with contradictions and unsolved problems. There is more of make-believe material in his books than of real insight into the phenomena. For this reason, instead of focusing his attention at the spot where the unearthed secrets of this element of nature lie buried deep in the soil of the body, he is compelled to wander here and there in search of them. The following words of Jung ring as true today as they did in his time. "There is not one modern psychology," he says, "there are dozens of them. This is curious enough when we remember that there is only one science of mathematics, of geology, zoology, botany and so forth. But there are so many psychologies that an American university was able to publish a thick volume under the title, Psychologies of 1930. I believe there are as many psychologies as philosophies, for there is also no single philosophy but many. I mention this for the reason that philosophy and psychology are linked by indissoluble bonds which are kept in being by the inter-relation of their subject-matters. Psychology takes the psyche for its subject, and philosophy--to put it briefly--takes the world."* When there are so many psychologies that a directory becomes necessary, where is a person with a pressing psychological problem sitting heavy on his mind to go in order to find a correct solution for it? The basic features of consecrated religious life have always been the same--unwavering belief in a higher power, truthfulness, fellow-feeling, purity of heart, compassion and a passionate desire for self-conquest. Wherever we look, a mosaic of these traits is found to be a common characteristic of the enlightened mind in any part of the earth. How could a phenomenon so wide-spread in space, so extended in time and so rich in the wealth of ideals and principles be brushed aside in the search for knowledge in recent times? The responsibility of this rather strange behavior is shared both by religion and science--by the former on account of its dogmatic insistence on the infallibility of Revelation and the latter for the same over-emphasis on the infallibility of the intellect! The fact that mind is incorporeal and cosmic does not affect the position that, in some way unknown to us, it can affect material forces or particles and, in turn, be influenced by them. Without this action and reaction embodied life, as we know it, would not be possible. We cannot refuse to determine this relationship between mind and cerebral matter on the ground that the objective world, in which the human body and the brain are included, are but illusory creations of this universal mind. To assume this would be to put an end to the progress of knowledge and even of embodied mind itself. The assumption that all we see around is a product of consciousness is a greater reason why we should redouble our efforts at finding answers to the riddles encountered. This assumption would naturally include what we think, imagine, do or plan as also the riddles we encounter and the efforts we make to solve them, are all the ingredients of this illusory display. That being the case, common sense demands that the rules of the same be applied to all the constituents of this illusion and not only to some. This means that they apply also to the relationship between the mind and the brain. If it is supposed that mind is the product of material elements at their primary levels, that is at the level of atoms or even below, in that case, too, it will have to be admitted that this extremely subtle or complex biochemical product must in some way be interwoven or interconnected with neurons and act on the body in a manner unintelligible to us at this time. In either case, in order to solve the mystery, there can be no denying of the fact that brain is the most likely place where we can look for a solution to the problem presented by the mind. The examination of a dissected brain, or the data transmitted by an electro-encephalograph or knowledge of the chemical composition of neurons, or study of sleep or insanity or of yogis cannot yield to us any specific information about the nature of the mind or its relationship to the brain, for the simple reason that the element involved is too subtle, too intricate and too inextricably interconnected with cerebral and nerve substances to become a separate object of empirical investigation, as is the case with materials and forces with which science has been dealing so far. The presumption that mind, or the stuff of which our thoughts and feelings are made, does not possess any property by which it can become perceptible to our senses, can only lead to the conclusion that our own mystery would always remain beyond the reach of science. For this purpose, the first issue to be decided is to determine whether the current methods of empirical study can be applied to an entity which is impervious to sensory perception and utterly devoid of any attribute by which it can be empirically measured or sized. What course then is left for a fair-minded empiricist to reach to the bottom of this mystery? If scientific study of the nature followed in the case of material objects is ruled out, then the only other alternative left is an internal study of the experimenter's own mind, both in its conscious and unconscious contents. The question is: did any empiricist during the last, let us say, two hundred years undertake a self-study of this kind. If no study of this nature was undertaken, we cannot then expect anything better than what has been achieved in the field of psychology so far. It is not for the lover of religion to intercede with the empiricist in this behalf, but it is for the latter to decide whether his own demarcation between the objective world and the spirit is correct. We have still to grasp the colossal mystery surrounding our existence. Just as by constant attention to and study of the external world we were able to make the amazing progress in the knowledge of matter, of which the fruits are before our eyes, in the same manner by constant attention to and study of the inner world we can make progress in the knowledge of the spirit of which, too, the rich harvest will be no less commensurate with the effort made. But this effort has not been made so far except in the field of religion under an individualistic premise and belief. What is needed is a reverent, impersonal approach to this colossal, super-mundane mystery. It cannot be said that raw material, as provided by alchemy, astrology, healing arts and natural sciences of olden times, for the physical sciences of today, was not available for the pioneers of the science of mind. It was and, perhaps, is a more lavish measure than for any other branch of knowledge. A huge library of self-revelations and writings of hundreds of earlier luminaries of this branch of knowledge, including among them some of the loftiest figures in history, and a large proportion of the most truthful and honest souls ever born, was right in front of them and only needed the labor of reading to know that a method did exist by which mind could be studied in a far better way than any used by science so far. This galaxy of empiricists of the mind included in its ranks some of the most illustrious figures of the ancient world, from Egypt, China, India, Europe, Arabia, Persia, Japan and other places, whose names are household words even today. They do not belong to one race, one period of time or one creed, but their distinguished array, which stretches to the remotest periods of history, includes all racial types and covers all the faiths of mankind. It is unbelievable that any disciplined body of truly enlightened intellects could dismiss with but one stoke of the pen the accumulated experience and knowledge of a subject of study, religion in this case, contributed by over two hundred generations of keen observers, some of them tallest in mental acumen and moral stature, as was done by some luminaries of science, during the last two centuries in a manner as if all this reverently preserved material had emanated from an assembly of petty, hare-brained creatures, unworthy of notice from the cream of the intelligentsia of our time. The mistake occurred because religion, mystical ecstasy, psychic phenomena, miracles, occultation, alchemy and the rest were viewed in isolation from each other and not as ramifications of an extraordinary activity of the brain, witnessed from a period long before the pyramids were built. From the time over fifteen hundred years before Moses, in Egypt, to Ramakrishna and Gandhi in India, a span of not less than five thousand years, this special class of human beings has repeated the same story, displayed the same traits of character and followed the same simple pattern of life. How fallible is the human intellect, and how inconstant is the nature of man is demonstrated by the fact that a hundred times more regard was shown, more attention paid, more time and resources spent and more labor done to provide evidence for the guess-work of a nineteenth century naturalist on the Origin of Man, which time is disproving now, than on the study of a recurrent phenomenon relating to the same issue, vouched for by the brightest stars of the firmament of human thought, hundreds in number, covering the whole span of history. How would it reflect, in the days ahead, on the mentality of this rational age when it is decisively proved, on the testimony of the brain, that their collective stand was right and the wild conjecture, aimed to disprove that, grievously wrong? What has prevented the modern giants of learning and the pillars of science from looking more closely into such a prominent and promising field of enquiry, it is hard to say. But, if one is permitted to make a guess, it could be the intoxication of material triumphs, unwarranted prejudice and pride.