D. H. Lawrence and Yoga

D. H. Lawrence is one of those writers whose works unfold a vision which is exclusively personal, unsanctioned by con­vention or popular assent. The system of thought, of which he is the sole founder with no worthy second so far, is often commented on for its exotic non-conformity and peculiar strangeness. R. P. Blackmur calls it a new psychology come from nowhere or from the ear of Zeus.¹ Dians Trilling remarks that it has its source and fulfilment only in phantasy.² Its incompatibility with British orthodoxy exiled Lawrence from the country of his birth on a savage pilgrimage around the world. Among his works, The Rainbow (Methuen, 1915) was suppressed, and Lawrence could not find a publisher for, Women in Love (New York, 1920). His last novel Lady Chatterey’s Lover (Orioli, Florence, 1928) was banned and his paintings were confiscated in 1929. It is because Lawrence tried to build a system outside the pale of Western thought turning a pre-mental and spontaneous sex into a psychobio-spiritual experience.

A basic religious instinct and a prodding Messianic impulse, to destroy the old and create the new, prompted Lawrence to devise a new religion, a religion of blood:

“My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says is always true”. ³

This peculiar faith of Lawrence bringing together “blood” and “religion” is an endeavour to create a sort of theology out of biology. Lawrence has given to his thesis a scienticised religio-philosophic exposition in his theoretical treatises Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) and has fictionalised it particularly in the novels written after Sons and Lovers. But Lawrence’s scientific statements are too unscientific to be tested and proved. His religion is unconventionally atheistic and his philosophy strangely uninstitutionalised. On the whole, he creates a personal myth, a subjective science.

Lawrence includes Yoga among the sources that he acknow­ledges as providing him with “hints” and ‘suggestions’ for this subjective science:

“...I have found hints, suggestions for what I say here in all kinds of scholarly books, from the Yoga and Plato and St. John the Evangel and the early Greek philosophers like Herakleites down to Frazer and his ‘golden bough’, and even Freud and Frobenius”. ⁴

In the absence of sufficient evidences, the precedence given to Yoga may be regarded only as chronological, as from Yoga to St. John, and from the Greeks to Freud. But one can also conclude the inclusion of Yoga, as Lawrence’s admission of his knowledge of Yoga, however vague that knowledge might be. Emile Delavenay points out that Lawrence omits the origins of his sources with a “studied negligence” and among the neglected origins are numbered Helen Blavatsky, James M. Pryse and Edward Carpenter, ⁵ all three associated with the Theosophical Society in India, a societydevoted to the Hindu religious revival and Yogic tradition. Lawrence himself mocks at theosophy as “Besantheism.” There is a strong possibility of Lawrence having received his knowledge of Yoga through his reading of these authors.

Lawrence’s contact with Edward Carpenter’s written and spoken words is corroborated by Jessie Chambers. Jessie, who was Lawrence’s first love, assured Emile Delavenay in 1935 that “their mutual friend” Alice Dax, the wife of an Eastwood, pharmacist, owned most of Carpenter’s works. Jessie was sure that Lawrence had read all the books on Mrs. Dax’s shelves, he being a frequent visitor to Daxes’ house at Eastwood and later at Shirebrook. If so, Lawrence had heard about Yoga even in his youth. ⁶

All that Lawrence knew about India and its thought were what he might have gathered through his friends and readings. Among his friends in close ranks are the Brewsters who had a passion for Buddhism and had stayed in Ceylon and India and loved these countries. Earl H. Brewster recollects that Lawrence had talked to him about the “centre between the eyebrows.” Lawrence had told him:

“You don’t look the intellectual type. You were not meant to be governed by the centre between eyebrows. We should not pass beyond suffering…..Look deep into the center to your solar plexus”. ⁷

Belittling the centre between eyebrows as the seat of cerebral consciousness and exhorting Brewster to look to the godhead in the Solar plexus is characteristic of Lawrence. Commenting on this, Brewster later writes: “Vaguely, I knew of the Hindu theory of the Chakras, but years passed before I felt the signi­ficance of what he said to me then”. ⁸ Lawrence himself uses the word “Chakra” and “Centre” indiscriminately:

“....Having begun to explore the unconscious, we find we must go from centre to centre, Chakra to Chakra, to use an old esoteric world”. ⁹

What might be inferred fromthese is that Lawrence had in his mind the Yogic Chakras whenever he mentioned polar centres in human body, though his knowledge of the Yoga might be incomplete and imperfect.

Among Lawrence’s Indian friends are one Suhravardy whom Lawrence selected as one of the chosen few friends to go along with him to found the ideal Utopian community, the Rananim.¹⁰ Boshi, who talked to him at length on the Sanskrit meaning of“the one-O words” ¹¹ “Om”, the holiest sound which is the origin of the Universe itself, and Dr. Feroz, a Parsee, in whose big empty room, Lawrence had danced with his friends till “we were staggered and quite dazed”. ¹² But the identity ofthese Indian friends and how they came to befriend Lawrence, and the extent of their influence on him, are still a mystery.

If in future these questions might be answered with ample scholarly evidences, an Indian scholar may have much to say about India’s vital influence on Lawrence. Meanwhile, we may wonder why Lawrence avoided visiting India when he toured its neighbouring country Ceylon. This avoidance according to Middle­ton Murry was not accidental but purposeful. Middleton Murry comments onthis in a leading article” Lemonade in the Adelphi”:

...It is worth musing on the fact (for it is not accidental) that Mr. Forster has written his novel about India, the one continent from which Mr. Lawrence shrank away on his journey round the world. Mr. Lawrence was driven by a positive urge, he was seeking a racial consciousness in which his own could find rest. He sniffed India from Ceylon and went on to Australia...For him India might have been really overpowering and he did not want to be overpowered, but to be renewed... ¹⁵

If Lawrence purposefully avoided visiting India, it was due to his fear of being overpowered. It is quite characteristic of Lawrence that he always feared the thing to which he was attracted. One has only to remember his love for England and for his mother and yet his desire to flee from both. Besides doesn’t this reflect a conflict between Lawrence the mystic and Lawrence the Englishman?

While Lawrence the Englishman with his British racial superiority, characteristic of his time, feared being overpowered by India, Lawrence the religious man might have been vitally influenced by a spiritual consciousness in the Indian thought-stream and adopted it as the basic frame for his philosophy which eventually turned out to be unorthodox and exotically queer in the Western context.

Notes

¹ R. P. Blackmur, “Prefatory Note”: Eleven Essays in the European Novel (1943, rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.). P. vii.
² Diana Trilling, “A Letter of Introduction to Lawrence”: A. D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, ed. Harry. T. Moore (London: Heinemann. 1961), p. 127.
³ Lawrence’s letter to Ernest Collins, 17 Jan. 1913: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Aldous Huxley (4th ed. 1932; rpt. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1956), p. 94.
⁴ FUPU, p. 6.
⁵ Emile Delavenay, “Introduction” to D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A Study in Edwardian Transition (London: Heinemann, 1971), p. 2.
⁶ Ibid., p. 21.
⁷ Earl Brewster and Achsah : D. H. Lawrence; Reminiscence and Correspondence (London: Martin Seeker. 1934), p. 18.
⁸ Ibid., p. 18.
⁹ FUPU, p. 233.
¹⁰ Anthony West, D. H. Lawrence (London: Arthur Baker Limited, 1950), p. 44.
¹¹ LH, p. 744
¹² Letter to Katherine Mansfield, 27 Dec. 1916. LH P. 464.
¹³ Middleton Murry, Reminiscences of Lawrence (New York) Dodge Publishing Company, 1938), Pp. 254-55.