152
PARTISAN REYIEW
actual violence is the complete disappearance of group loyalty ...
and a savagery of social chaos unprecedented because there is
nothing to contain the terrible energy of an unprecedented number
of completely loosed individuals." The totalitarianism of the die·
tators, according to Heard
(Man the Master,
1941), is an ersatz
answer to this threat of anarchy, which must be superseded by the
genuine solution.
The technique of mysticism consists of varous stages of con·
centration during which the discursive activity of
the
mind is
gradually diminished. The mind changes focus from one
]hana,
or level of "ecstatic musing," to another.* A Buddhist text
describes it thus:
When, aloof from sensuous ideas, aloof from evil ideas, he
enters into and abides in
First J'hana.;
wherein attention is applied
and sustained, which is born of solitude and filled with zest and
pleasant emotion; when next from the subsiding of attention
applied and sustained, he enters into and abides in
Second /hana,
which is inward tranquillizing of the mind, self-contained and
uplifted from the working of attention, is born of concentration,
full of zest and pleasurable emotion; when next through the
quenching of zest, he abides with equal mind, mindful and dis–
cerning, experiencing in the body that pleasure whereof the
Ariyans declare: "Happy doth he abide with even lucid mind,
and so enters into and abides in
Third
/kana";
when next by
putting away both pleasant and painful emotion, by the dying
out of the joy and misery he used to know, he enters into and
abides in
Fourth /hana,
that utterly pure lucidity and indiffer–
ence of mind, wherein is neither happiness nor unhappiness-this
is the training of higher consciousness.
The goal is the immediate apprehension of the divine presence, an
affective, emotional apprehension freed of worldliness by the
annihilation of all desire and all imagery. The nature of the
mystic trance differs with different mystics, often being accom–
panied by symptoms of schizophrenia, catalepsy, epilepsy or
neurasthenia. All mystics seem to have in common, however, the
feeling of security, of escape from frustration, of the universality
of love and the transcendence of individualism. To Gerald Heard
*What Huxley tries to convey hy jumbling the chapters of
Eyeless in Gaza
is the
possibility of mutating from
/hana
to
/hana.
He
will
have none of the empiricist's
divi&io non facit saltum.
