THE PATH TOWARDS an authentic life is also the path towards a knowledge of God. In travelling along this path one appears to live in two worlds, a world of spiritual reality in which the highest values are the measure of ultimate meaning, and an earthly world in which survival and satisfaction of the body are the most pressing concerns. One soon learns that the two have to be actively confronted and properly integrated: a life that neglects material needs cannot attain spiritual reality, whereas material concern devoid of spiritual awareness ends in frustration and failure.
In my own early life the impression of spiritual reality was stamped indelibly in the deep centre of my personality, that is the soul, or spiritual self. The secret lay hidden within, but I had also to act in a way becoming to a child, which meant assuming a respectful attitude to teachers, many of whom I knew were devoid of deeper understanding, and being congenial to my fellows, who were more concerned about games and physical exercise than the life of the spirit. In the beginning of the spiritual ascent it is all too easy to become otherworldly and to lose concern for humanity. Two baneful results accrue from this: a general impotence in asserting oneself in the world, so that one is bullied and overridden, and a reciprocal feeling of contempt for those who behave insensitively to one. At the same time there is a deep, incoherent awareness of black evil around one, an evil that shows itself as an anonymous external power seeking to destroy the vision of completeness vouchsafed one, and leading one into a negative state of selfish living that culminates in a loss of identity within a dark shapeless mass of lifeless debris that was once living men. It follows that the two dangers lurking at the beginning of the path of life are a fear of occult attack by those who reject the vision of the aspirant, and exclusiveness, which is an unconscious reaction to the insecurity experienced within. At any age these fearsome adversaries can lead to a state of isolation not far removed from despair. When a child has to cope with them, they either break him completely or else they are surmounted. When the latter is achieved, the child begins to understand the meaning of authenticity and the exercise of free will.
My ineptitude in purely physical endeavours, such as games and creative manual work, not only made me an easy victim for bullying by those stronger than I, but also left me with a disconcerting sense of unreality in my relationships with other children. How different these superficial encounters were when compared with the silent communion I had with the African servants. To defend myself in the face of a hostile, uncomprehending crowd, I developed the mental side of my character. It must always have been powerful, as witnessed by my immediate grasp of the significance of the vision I had been given when only very young. But until my school days it lay dormant. Instead I was in direct communion with people and nature, and lived in harmony with my surroundings. It was through intellectual mastery that I held my own in an alien environment, and earned respect from those who would otherwise have unwittingly crushed me.
I must have been a strange child! Silence I loved more than anything else. In it I was in perpetual communion with my surroundings and with a world far greater than my physical surroundings. Each object, each flower, the sky and the atmosphere were bathed in a supersensual radiance. Each created thing pulsated with a life that was far more intimate than the coarse, movable life of worldly activity. In the darkness of night there was an even brighter light, the light of tumultuous silence in which the story of creation was celebrated in everlasting glory. Each object, no matter how little, was supreme, for God had made it and it reflected, in its own humility, the divine imprint. Each human face was pulsating with hidden meaning. That there was so much dull incomprehension of the very vision of life eternal was overwhelming in its sadness for me. In the depths of receptive silence no secret remains hidden. One's own inner life becomes open and transparent.
But the world does not know of this mystical reality that sustains the life of flux in which we all have to graduate to a measure of full personality. People lose sight of the embracing love that bears up all creation in its everlasting arms when they are immersed in surface living from day to day. How could I be understood - especially when I lived in a twilight zone between mystical light that was uncreated and the darkness of material and psychical evil? This evil was not related especially to my home, which was a place of beauty and warmth, but to the whole created universe which had been corrupted and desecrated by the selfish actions of its creatures, especially the angelic hierarchy and men, since the time of willed disobedience to the law of life, which is love for all things and for God who created them. No one who lives in full awareness, and has not blinded himself to reality by the abuse of intellectual ratiocination, can fail to feel the full power of psychic darkness, which has been personified, in various religious traditions as the devil. And some of this darkness has been assimilated by personalities, even our own, when they have been in a negative, destructive frame of mind. The end of evil is the complete destruction of the person, yet that word should mean the unique identity of every creature and especially of man, in whom personality is developed to its supreme degree, at least in the experience of the world we inhabit. This destruction is both an incorporation into nothingness and an annihilation of all uniqueness. It is the final result of living in isolation oblivious of the full body of mankind, and is an ever-present menace lurking for any whose life is selfish and centred in ignorance. The words of the Compline exhortation always ring audibly in my inward ear: "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: whom resist steadfast in the faith" (I Peter 5:8). One learns in the course of life that evil has no primary, or substantive existence, but is the psychic residue left after a selfish, unredeemed action. What it is important to realise is that evil can never simply be averted. It must be confronted in the power of love and redeemed by love. I know now, as I glimpsed then as a child, that He who came to me could alone redeem evil, for He was love.
In the sombre progress through fear, ineptitude, and fore boding the light of reality breaks forth at every moment of full consciousness. Though the path of inner dereliction was already charted, I could escape from its overpowering pressure by an act of full participation in life. Joy comes from within; it is assuredly present in the world, but it does not come to us merely from agreeable outer circumstances. Rather it is the radiant joy from within ourselves, the knowledge of God immanent in our own being, that sheds radiance on the world, raising it from the corruption of mortality to the splendour of eternity. Joy came to me whenever I could centre my attention, in childlike wonder, on any phenomenon or object. As I have said, I knew, early in my life, the joy of identification with nature in her many forms: the countryside with its changing pattern of beauty; from spring blossoms to the yellow summer grassland, the flowers of the field, the autumn tints of brown and red, and the sharp cleansing winter barrenness when all was desolate and yet full of that true beauty that comes of a shriven landscape. In nature there is not merely the outer form, but also an inner realm that palpitates with psychic and spiritual life. To him who can observe there is nothing empty save the emptiness of a vapid, selfish human being intent only on himself and his needs.
I also knew the joy that comes from intellectual contemplation. When a mathematical problem is solved, and its solution sheds light on the fundamental properties of form, there is a momentary release of tension, and the mysterious glory of the universe is comprehended. The scientist studying the inner-most secrets of life and the substance of life in its many manifestations can, in a moment of self abandon, see clearly into the mind of Him who is the source of creation. This awareness came to me somewhat later in life, but I had an understanding of the supreme joy that follows pure mental activity when I was still a child, and this helped to sustain me in my lonely path.
What was painfully lacking in my life was human contact with my peers. This lack was accentuated by a paralysing shyness and social ineptitude. It is clear to me now that I was not properly earthed as a child; the spirit, as it were, had not fully incarnated. I could roam with facility in realms of mental speculation, but I doubted the efficacy of my own bodily actions.
This observation seems to me to be of theoretical importance in assessing the nature of the mystical temperament. The true mystic is born and not made. He is not really of this world at all, so, if his life is to be successful, he has to learn to come down to earth and mix fully with all sorts and conditions of men. His task is the reverse of that of the much more common earth-bound man, who, if he is to succeed fully, has to move beyond personal acquisitiveness to universal sympathy. How fortunate it is that both types of people inhabit the world, for one is essential to the other while neither is to be regarded as superior to the other.
My first real contact with people as individuals came significantly once again through African servants. I can remember an enormously fat African woman who used to do the family washing each Monday morning. She washed the linen in a large tub with a scrubbing board out in the open yard. One Monday she failed to arrive. When I enquired about her I was told quite perfunctorily that she had died of pneumonia during the week. This news pierced me, for though I had hardly ever spoken to her, I felt I knew her, and the circumstances of her death seemed unjust to me. This awareness of the monstrous injustice visited upon the African population became ever more strong. When I was eight years old I met the boy-friend of a servant maid. He was a coloured man, extremely intelligent and with a genius for mechanical things, but because of his colour he could get no work equal to his abilities. He was also a heavy drinker. One night he came in with flesh wounds following a drunken fracas. I was fascinated with the contrast of colour between his brown skin and the pink flesh of his chest wall! It was the first intimation I had of my future medical career, though my father was himself an eye-specialist. Even more important to me, however, were the circumstances that had led to this assault. How wrong it was that a person of such manifest intelligence should have to spend his life so wastefully! Shortly afterwards he was killed in a fight. The seeds of social awareness had been well implanted in my consciousness by these and other similar experiences. Indeed, I was an ardent socialist by the age of eight, though later experiences caused me to modify my political views without in any way decreasing my identification with the downtrodden and the abused.
Another early revelation was the evil of capital punishment, which was carried out quite often where I lived, usually on Africans. While I did not condone the violence of murder or rape, I realised that it was often the community that was as much to blame as the criminal, and that many self satisfied, respectable, outwardly religious white people who exploited the Africans shamelessly were as eligible for the gallows as were the criminals themselves. Much of this moral insight was to be confirmed later when I was shown aspects of the after-life. Evil can never be expelled, not even in the life beyond death. It has to be faced directly with love. Only thus can it be redeemed. It is easier far to start this long process of redemption here on earth than in the indeterminate mental realms of the after-life. Moreover, the damage caused by resentment is much less severe while it is earthed than when it flows unimpeded in a psychic environment.
What I lacked in the way of outer companionship, I gained from reading the world's great classics. Indeed, it was the masterpieces of literature that were my inspiration rather than the classics of religious or mystical thought - apart from the Bible. I have always been grateful for this. Had I come of a family that indulged in mystical speculation or psychical research, I would quite naturally have assimilated the current trend of thought and repeated it automatically. The fact that the mystical sense was inborn in me and not cultivated by my background made it much more authentic. I started to read books on these subjects many years later, and, though I found what had already been revealed to me, I can honestly say that I never learned anything from them that was new to me. From this one can induce that the knowledge of spiritual things is given through one's experience of life, which means living in receptive awareness of the contrary influences around one. It can never be acquired second-hand from the writings or words of other people. Such instruction, if assimilated at all, remains merely a mental edifice. When the rains descend, the floods rise, and the winds blow and beat upon the house of intellectual knowledge, it falls down. Only the house built upon the rock of faith founded on spiritual experience can withstand the onslaught of the elements, as Jesus taught His disciples at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. It is this paucity of real spiritual knowledge that lies at the root of the failure of conventional religion to satisfy the inner hunger of modern man.
As I grew into early adolescence, so the glory of the world's great thought and music filled my heart, inspiring me to fulfil the vision that had come to me so long before. But each day brought nearer the foreboding of utter loneliness, the time when I would be completely uprooted, and left with nothing but memories of the past. I knew that this period of aesthetic and intellectual fulfilment was merely an interlude, a time of recreation, before the real test began. I was living in a mental world, delectable and ethereal, but with no direct participation in the world of form. I can see now that this phase, far from being a period of reprehensible self-indulgence at the expense of others, was a vital preparation for what I had to do later on. The, Holy Spirit works best through a well-trained, healthy mind. It is as much a duty to imbibe the beauties of life as to work in the shadow regions amongst the derelict, for without the knowledge of that beauty and its promise of universal redemption, there would be no message to give the derelict and broken-hearted. But my heart was broken too, even in the heights of mental stimulation and aesthetic delight, for I was in psychic contact with those who suffered, especially in the German concentration camps during the period of the Nazi regime. Though I was thousands of miles away and therefore physically safe, an awareness of the overpowering evil that filled the world obsessed me. Through the gift of precognition, I found all too often that my worst fears were later confirmed. And yet even in this awareness of darkness and sin, there was the vital realisation that all men are members one of another, and no one who is a full person can isolate himself from injustice anywhere in the world.
It is the way he deals with this injustice that marks out the spiritual man from the superficial rabble-rouser who uses social injustice only to further his own ends.