Books: Ground Zero

THE LIGHT AT THE CENTER: CONTEXT AND PRETEXT OF MODERN MYSTICISM by AGEHANANDA BHARATI 254 pages. Ross-Erikson. $11.95.

Let your fingers do the walking and these days they stumble at almost every step over yoga parlors, t'ai chi ranches, Scientology centers, Subud temples, Sufi congregations, TM ashrams, Hare Krishna missions, Zen monasteries, astrology academies and tarot prophets. The flyways from East to West are dense with flocks of migratory swamis who come bearing wisdom and go lugging gold. A bazaar of the bizarre if ever there was one, and its most exotic merchandise, the pearl beyond price, is something known as brahmacaryam, samadhi, marafat or, in plain English, the mystical experience.

It is an experience so rare that few are qualified to distinguish the false from the genuine article. What has long been needed is a global Bureau of Mystical Standards, or at least an impartial Spiritual Assayer who is thoroughly trained in both Eastern and Western traditions and values. The right man may now have turned up. Son of a Hindu father and a German mother, Agehananda Bharati grew up in between-wars Vienna, studied in Indian monasteries, and then took degrees in anthropology and philosophy at the University of Washington. He is now chairman of the department of anthropology at Syracuse University.

Personal Encounter. In The Light at the Center: Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism, Bharati unscrews the inscrutable with the precision tools of language, philosophy and behavioral science. He lets incensed air out of inflated spiritual traditions and reputations on both sides of the world. He scoffs at the counterculture's notion of the mystical experience as a category of paranormal phenomena, and he disagrees with theologians who equate mysticism with a personal encounter with the deity. The only way to understand a mystical experience, says Bharati, is to have one.

"Tasteless ... like distilled water ... zero content of a cognitive sort... I was the universe moving in itself... no longer quite human ... somehow divine"—in describing his own six mystical experiences. Bharati manipulates the vague traditional formulas. He also confirms that the "zero-experience," as he calls it, may be accompanied by feelings of unspeakable ecstasy. But then he springs a heresy: "Fasting, prayer, drugs, self-mortification, fornication, standing on his head, grace, listening to Tristan and Isolde unabridged three times in a row ... for a mystic, whatever leads to the zero-experience is good."

Spiritual Exercises. Howls of religious outrage may also greet Bharati's description of the mystical personality. Conventional wisdom in most traditions, says Bharati, assumes that a man who has looked into the eye of God must be a saint or a sage. Rubbish, he replies. "The zero-experience cannot generate sainthood [or] wisdom ... any more than orgasm can generate good citizenship ... The mystic who was a stinker before he had the zero-experience remains a stinker after the experience." By way of illustration, Bharati describes a mystic named Trailinga who threw stones at approaching visitors. The author also quotes an all too revealing conversation between Ramakrishna, the most celebrated mystic of this century, and a swami called Vivekananda.

R.: What do you really think of me?