2022-02-03 - Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill
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The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali led me to Narada's Bhakti Sutras.
Likewise, the Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson led me to Evelyn
Underhill's Practical Mysticism. This pattern shows a path from
knowledge to love. Half-way through my path, i found a map, so to
say, in Practical Mysticism. I find it oddly fascinating to
recognize the landmarks already seen and to anticipate what lies in
store. It is almost as though the map were a pleasant diversion
meant to bolster confidence and courage to venture forth. Below are
some excerpts from the book.
For more about mysticism, see my notes from chapter 9 and 10 in
The Different Drum by M. Scott Peck.
The Different Drum by M. Scott Peck
Chapter 1
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Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person
who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at
and believes in such attainment. [It is not easy to define Reality
in terms that everyone can understand.] Therefore, for the time
being, the practical [person] may put it on one side. All that [one]
is asked to consider now is this: that the word "union" represents
not so much a rare and unimaginable operation, as something which
[one] is doing, in a vague, imperfect fashion, at every moment of
[this] conscious life; and doing with intensity and thoroughness in
all the more valid moments of that life.
It is notorious that the operations of the average human
consciousness unite the self, not with things as they really are, but
with images, notions, aspects of things.
Therefore it is to a practical mysticism that the practical [person]
is here invited: to a training of [one's] latent faculties, a bracing
and brightening of [one's] languid consciousness, an emancipation
from the fetters of appearance, a turning of [one's] attention to new
levels of the world.
Chapter 2
=========
Further, it might occur to you that a slight alteration in the rhythm
of the senses would place at your disposal a complete new range of
material; opening your eyes and ears to sounds, colours, and
movements now inaudible and invisible, removing from your universe
those which you now regard as part of the established order of things.
What is it, then, which distinguishes the outlook of great poets and
artists from the arrogant subjectivism of common sense? Innocence
and humility distinguish it. These persons prejudge nothing,
criticise nothing. To some extent, their attitude to the universe is
that of children: and because this is so, they participate to that
extent in the Heaven of Reality
In the game of give and take which goes on between the human
consciousness and the external world, both have learned to put the
emphasis upon the message from without, rather than on their own
reaction to and rearrangement of it. Both have exchanged the false
imagination which draws the sensations and intuitions of the self
into its own narrow circle, and there distorts and transforms them,
for the true imagination which pours itself out, eager, adventurous,
and self-giving, towards the greater universe.
Chapter 3
=========
Here the practical [person] will naturally say: And pray how am I
going to do this?
Has it never happened to you to lose yourself for a moment in a swift
and satisfying experience for which you found no name? When the
world took on a strangeness, and you rushed out to meet it, in a mood
at once exultant and ashamed?
Mere emotion then inducted you into a world which you recognised as
more valid--in the highest sense, more rational--than that in which
you usually dwell: a world which had a wholeness, a meaning, which
exceeded the sum of its parts. Mere emotion then brought you to your
knees, made you at once proud and humble, showed you your place. It
simplified and unified existence: it stripped off the little
accidents and ornaments which perpetually deflect our vagrant
attention, and gathered up the whole being of you into one state,
which felt and knew a Reality that your intelligence could not
comprehend.
Now that simplifying act, which is the preliminary of all mystical
experience, that gathering of the scattered bits of personality into
the one which is really you the great forces of love, beauty, wonder,
grief, may do for you now and again. You can, if you like, keep
those windows clear. You can, if you choose to turn your attention
that way, learn to look out of them. These are the two great phases
in the education of every contemplative: and they are called in the
language of the mystics the purification of the senses and the
purification of the will.
To "purify" the senses is to release them, so far as human beings
may, from the tyranny of egocentric judgments; to make of them the
organs of direct perception.
But you, practical man, have lived all your days amongst the
illusions of multiplicity. ... your attention to life has been
deliberately adjusted to a world of frittered values and prismatic
refracted lights: full of incompatible interests, of people,
principles, things. Ambitions and affections, tastes and prejudices,
are fighting for your attention. Your poor, worried consciousness
flies to and fro amongst them; it has become a restless and a
complicated thing. ... Yet the situation is not as hopeless for you
as it seems. All this is only happening upon the periphery of the
mind, where it touches and reacts to the world of appearance. At the
centre there is a stillness which even you are not able to break.
This universe, these possibilities, are far richer, yet far simpler
than you have supposed. Seen from the true centre of personality,
instead of the usual angle of self-interest, their scattered parts
arrange themselves in order: you begin to perceive those graduated
levels of Reality with which a purified and intensified consciousness
can unite.
But under those abnormal circumstances on which we have touched, a
deeper level of his [or her] consciousness comes into focus... Then
he [or she] rises, through and with his [or her] awareness of the
great life of Nature, to the knowledge that he [or she] is part of
another greater life, transcending succession. So, if he [or she]
would be a whole man [or woman], if he [or she] would realise all
that is implicit in his [or her] humanity, he [or she] must actualise
his [or her] relationship with this supernal plane of Being: and he
[or she] shall do it, as we have seen, by simplification, by a
deliberate withdrawal of attention from the bewildering multiplicity
of things, a deliberate humble surrender of his [or her] image-making
consciousness. ... the purified and educated will can wholly withdraw
the self's attention from its usual concentration on small useful
aspects of the time-world, refuse to react to its perpetually
incoming messages, retreat to the unity of its spirit, and there make
itself ready for messages from another plane.
We begin, therefore, to see that the task of union with Reality will
involve certain stages of preparation as well as stages of
attainment; ... So the practical mysticism of the plain man [or
woman] will best be grasped by him [or her] as a five-fold scheme of
training and growth: in which the first two stages prepare the self
for union with Reality, and the last three unite it successively with
the World of Becoming, the World of Being, and finally with that
Ultimate Fact which the philosopher calls the Absolute and the
religious mystic calls God.
Chapter 4
=========
Recollection, the art which the practical man [or woman] is now
invited to learn, is in essence no more and no less than the
subjection of the attention to the control of the will.
Recollection begins, she [St. Teresa] says, in the deliberate and
regular practice of meditation; a perfectly natural form of mental
exercise, though at first a hard one.
Now meditation is a half-way house between thinking and
contemplating: and as a discipline, it derives its chief value from
this transitional character.
"The road to a Yea lies through a Nay." You, in this preliminary
movement of recollection, are saying your first deliberate No to the
claim which the world of appearance makes to a total possession of
your consciousness: and are thus making possible some contact between
that consciousness and the World of Reality.
Now turn this new purified and universalised gaze back upon yourself.
Observe your own being in a fresh relation with things, and
surrender yourself willingly to the moods of astonishment, humility,
joy--perhaps of deep shame or sudden love--which invade your heart as
you look. You will, in fact, know your own soul for the first time:
and learn that there is a sense in which this real You is distinct
from, an alien within, the world in which you find yourself, as an
actor has another life when he is not on the stage. When you do not
merely believe this but know it; when you have achieved this power of
withdrawing yourself, of making this first crude distinction between
appearance and reality, the initial stage of the contemplative life
has been won. It is not much more of an achievement than that first
proud effort in which the baby stands upright for a moment and then
relapses to the more natural and convenient crawl: but it holds
within it the same earnest of future development.
Chapter 5
=========
So, in a measure, you have found yourself: have retreated behind all
that flowing appearance, that busy, unstable consciousness with its
moods and obsessions, its feverish alternations of interest and
apathy, its conflicts and irrational impulses, which even the
psychologists mistake for You.
Something more than realisation is needed if you are to adjust
yourself to your new vision of the world. This game which you have
played so long has formed and conditioned you, developing certain
qualities and perceptions, leaving the rest in abeyance: so that now,
suddenly asked to play another, which demands fresh movements,
alertness of a different sort, your mental muscles are intractable,
your attention refuses to respond.
It is not merely that your intellect has assimilated, united with a
superficial and unreal view of the world. Far worse: your will, your
desire, the sum total of your energy, has been turned the wrong way,
harnessed to the wrong machine. Habit has you in its chains. You
are not free. The awakening, then, of your deeper self, which knows
not habit and desires nothing but free correspondence with the Real,
awakens you at once to the fact of a disharmony between the simple
but inexorable longings and instincts of the buried spirit, now
beginning to assert themselves in your hours of meditation--pushing
out, as it were, towards the light--and the various changeful, but
insistent longings and instincts of the surface-self.
This state of things means the acute discomfort which ensues on being
pulled two ways at once. The uneasy swaying of attention between two
incompatible ideals, the alternating conviction that there is
something wrong, perverse, poisonous, about life as you have always
lived it, and something hopelessly ethereal about the life which your
innermost inhabitant wants to live--these disagreeable sensations
grow stronger and stronger.
The surface-self, left for so long in undisputed possession of the
conscious field, has grown strong, and cemented itself like a limpet
to the rock of the obvious; gladly exchanging freedom for apparent
security, and building up, from a selection amongst the more concrete
elements offered it by the rich stream of life, a defensive shell of
"fixed ideas."
You cannot, until you have steadied yourself, found a poise, and
begun to resist some amongst the innumerable claims which the world
of appearance perpetually makes upon your attention and your desire,
make much use of the new power which Recollection has disclosed to
you; and this Recollection itself, so long as it remains merely a
matter of attention and does not involve the heart, is no better than
a psychic trick. You are committed therefore, as the fruit of your
first attempts at self-knowledge, to a deliberate--probably a
difficult--rearrangement of your character; to the stern course of
self-discipline, the voluntary acts of choice on the one hand and of
rejection on the other...
What then, in the last resort, is the source of this opposition; the
true reason of your uneasiness, your unrest? The reason lies, not in
any real incompatibility between the interests of the temporal and
the eternal orders; which are but two aspects of one Fact, two
expressions of one Love. It lies solely in yourself; in your
attitude towards the world of things. How often in each day do you
deliberately revert to an attitude of disinterested adoration? Yet
this is the only attitude in which true communion with the universe
is possible. The very mainspring of your activity is a demand,
either for a continued possession of that which you have, or for
something which as yet you have not...
The substance of that wrongness of act and relation which constitutes
"sin" is the separation of the individual spirit from the whole; the
ridiculous megalomania which makes each man [or woman] the centre of
his [or her] universe. Hence comes the turning inwards and
condensation of his [or her] energies and desires, till they do
indeed form a "lump"; a hard, tight core about which all the currents
of his [or her] existence swirl. This heavy weight within the heart
resists every outgoing impulse of the spirit; and tends to draw all
things inward and downward to itself, never to pour itself forth in
love, enthusiasm, sacrifice.
So it is disinterestedness [or detachment], the saint's and poet's
love of things for their own sakes, the vision of the charitable
heart, which is the secret of union with Reality and the condition of
all real knowledge. Then the guardian at the gate, scrutinising and
sorting the incoming impressions, will no longer ask, "What use is
this to me?" before admitting the angel of beauty or significance who
demands your hospitality. Then things will cease to have power over
you. You will become free. ... Ascending the mountain of
self-knowledge and throwing aside your superfluous luggage as you go,
you shall at last arrive at the point which they call the summit of
the spirit; where the various forces of your character--brute energy,
keen intellect, desirous heart--long dissipated amongst a thousand
little wants and preferences, are gathered into one, and become a
strong and disciplined instrument wherewith your true self can force
a path deeper and deeper into the heart of Reality.
Chapter 6
=========
This steady effort towards the simplifying of your tangled character,
its gradual emancipation from the fetters of the unreal, is not to
dispense you from that other special training of the attention which
the diligent practice of meditation and recollection effects. Your
pursuit of the one must never involve neglect of the other; for these
are the two sides--one moral, the other mental--of that unique
process of self-conquest...
In the preliminary act of gathering yourself together, and in those
unremitting explorations through which you came to "a knowing and a
feeling of yourself as you are," thought assuredly had its place.
There the powers of analysis, criticism, and deduction found work
that they could do. But now it is the love and will--the feeling,
the intent, the passionate desire--of the self, which shall govern
your activities and make possible your success. Few would care to
brave the horrors of a courtship conducted upon strictly intellectual
lines: and contemplation is an act of love, the wooing, not the
critical study, of Divine Reality. It is an eager outpouring of
ourselves towards a Somewhat Other for which we feel a passion of
desire; a seeking, touching, and tasting, not a considering and
analysing, of the beautiful and true wherever found.
... it is the ardent will that shall be the prime agent of your
undertaking: a will which has now become the active expression of
your deepest and purest desires. About this the recollected and
simplified self is to gather itself as a centre; and thence to look
out--steadily, deliberately--with eyes of love towards the world.
To "look with the eyes of love" seems a vague and sentimental
recommendation: yet the whole art of spiritual communion is summed in
it, and exact and important results flow from this exercise. The
attitude which it involves is an attitude of complete humility and of
receptiveness; without criticism, without clever analysis of the
thing seen. When you look thus, you surrender your I-hood; see
things at last as the artist does, for their sake, not for your own.
Therefore this transitional stage in the development of the
contemplative powers--in one sense the completion of their elementary
schooling, in another the beginning of their true activities--is
concerned with the toughening and further training of that will which
self-simplification has detached from its old concentration upon the
unreal wants and interests of the self. Merged with your intuitive
love, this is to become the true agent of your encounter with
Reality; for that Simple Eye of Intention, which is so supremely your
own, and in the last resort the maker of your universe and controller
of your destiny, is nothing else but a synthesis of such energetic
will and such uncorrupt desire, turned and held in the direction of
the Best.
Chapter 7
=========
Concentration, recollection, a profound self-criticism, the stilling
of his [or her] busy surface-intellect, his [or her] restless
emotions of enmity and desire, the voluntary achievement of an
attitude of disinterested love--by these strange paths the practical
man [or woman] has now been led, in order that he [or she] may know
by communion something of the greater Life in which he [or she] is
immersed and which he [or she] has so long and so successfully
ignored.
This illumination shall be gradual. It shall therefore develop in
width and depth as the sphere of that self's intuitive love extends.
Self-mergence is a gradual process, dependent on a progressive
unlimiting of personality. The apprehension of Reality which rewards
it is gradual too. In essence, it is one continuous out-flowing
movement towards that boundless heavenly consciousness where the
"flaming ramparts" which shut you from true communion with all other
selves and things is done away; an unbroken process of expansion and
simplification, which is nothing more or less than the growth of the
spirit of love...
In the first form of contemplation you are to realise the movement of
this game, in which you have played so long a languid and involuntary
part, and find your own place in it. It is flowing, growing,
changing, making perpetual unexpected patterns within the evolving
melody of the Divine Thought. In all things it is incomplete,
unstable; and so are you. ... What is that great wind which blows
without, in continuous and ineffable harmonies? Part of you,
practical man [or woman]. There is but one music in the world: and
to it you contribute perpetually, whether you will or no, your one
little ditty of no tone.
> Mad with joy, life and death dance to the rhythm of this music:
> The hills and the sea and the earth dance: The world of man dances
> in laughter and tears.
Begin therefore at once. Gather yourself up, as the exercises of
recollection have taught you to do. Then--with attention no longer
frittered amongst the petty accidents and interests of your personal
life, but poised, tense, ready for the work you shall demand of
it--stretch out by a distinct act of loving will towards one of the
myriad manifestations of life that surround you: and which, in an
ordinary way, you hardly notice unless you happen to need them. Pour
yourself out towards it, do not draw its image towards you.
Deliberate--more, impassioned--attentiveness, an attentiveness which
soon transcends all consciousness of yourself, as separate from and
attending to the thing seen; this is the condition of success. As to
the object of contemplation, it matters little. From Alp to insect,
anything will do, provided that your attitude be right: for all
things in this world towards which you are stretching out are linked
together, and one truly apprehended will be the gateway to the rest.
Look with the eye of contemplation on the most dissipated tabby [cat]
of the streets, and you shall discern the celestial quality of life
set like an aureole about his [or her] tattered ears, and hear in his
[or her] strident mew an echo of
> The deep enthusiastic joy, The rapture of the hallelujah sent
> From all that breathes and is.
The sooty tree up which he scrambles to escape your earnest gaze is
holy too. It contains for you the whole divine cycle of the seasons;
upon the plane of quiet, its inward pulse is clearly to be heard.
But you must look at these things as you would look into the eyes of
a friend: ardently, selflessly, without considering his reputation,
his practical uses, his anatomical peculiarities, or the vices which
might emerge were he subjected to psycho-analysis.
By this quiet yet tense act of communion, this loving gaze, you will
presently discover a relationship--far more intimate than anything
you imagined--between yourself and the surrounding "objects of
sense"; and in those objects of sense a profound significance, a
personal quality, and actual power of response, which you might in
cooler moments think absurd. [Reminds me of shamanic and spirit
experiences.]
Those glad and vivid "things" will speak to you. They will offer you
news at least as definite and credible as that which the paper-boy is
hawking in the street: direct messages from that Beauty which the
artist reports at best at second hand. Because of your new
sensitiveness, anthems will be heard of you from every gutter; poems
of intolerable loveliness will bud for you on every weed. Best and
greatest, your fellowmen will shine for you with new significance and
light. Humility and awe will be evoked in you by the beautiful and
patient figures of the poor, their long dumb heroisms, their willing
acceptance of the burden of life.
This discovery of your fraternal [familial] link with all living
things, this down-sinking of your arrogant personality into the great
generous stream of life, marks an important stage in your
apprehension of that Science of Love which contemplation is to teach.
Further, you will observe that this act, and the attitude which is
proper to it, differs in a very important way even from that special
attentiveness which characterised the stage of meditation, and which
seems at first sight to resemble it in many respects. Then, it was
an idea or image from amongst the common stock--one of those
conceptual labels with which the human paste-brush has decorated the
surface of the universe--which you were encouraged to hold before
your mind. Now, turning away from the label, you shall surrender
yourself to the direct message poured out towards you by the thing.
Chapter 8
=========
In the First Form of Contemplation that self has been striving to
know better its own natural plane of existence. It has stretched out
the feelers of its intuitive love into the general stream of duration
of which it is a part. Breaking down the fences of personality,
merging itself in a larger consciousness, it has learned to know the
World of Becoming from within--as a citizen, a member of the great
society of life, not merely as a spectator. But the more deeply and
completely you become immersed in and aware of this life, the greater
the extension of your consciousness; the more insistently will
rumours and intimations of a higher plane of experience, a closer
unity and more complete synthesis, begin to besiege you.
A mere cataloguing of all the plants--though this were far better
than your old game of indexing your own poor photographs of
them--will never give you access to the Unity, the Fact, whatever it
may be, which manifests itself through them.
The deeper your realisation of the plant in its wonder, the more
perfect your union with the world of growth and change, the quicker,
the more subtle your response to its countless suggestions; so much
the more acute will become your craving for Something More. You will
now find and feel the Infinite and Eternal, making as it were veiled
and sacramental contacts with you under these accidents--through
these its ceaseless creative activities--and you will want to press
through and beyond them, to a fuller realisation of, a more perfect
and unmediated union with, the Substance of all That Is.
The fact, and the in-pressing energy, of the Reality without does not
vary. Only the extent to which you are able to receive it depends
upon your courage and generosity, the measure in which you give
yourself to its embrace. Those minds which set a limit to their
self-donation must feel as they attain it, not a sense of
satisfaction but a sense of constriction. It is useless to offer
your spirit a [walled] garden--even a garden inhabited by saints and
angels--and pretend that it has been made free of the universe. You
will not have peace until you do away with all banks and hedges, and
exchange the garden for the wilderness that is unwalled; that wild
strange place of silence where "lovers lose themselves."
Everything, says Julian in effect, whether gracious, terrible, or
malignant, is enwrapped in love: and is part of a world produced, not
by mechanical necessity, but by passionate desire.
Therefore nothing can really be mean, nothing despicable; nothing,
however perverted, irredeemable.
You have then but to focus attention upon your own deep reality,
"realise your own soul," in order to find it. The vision of the
Divine Essence--the participation of its own small activity in the
Supernal Act--is for the spark of your soul a perpetual process. But
you have been busy from your childhood with other matters. All the
urgent affairs of "life," as you absurdly called it, have monopolised
your field of consciousness. Thus all the important events of your
real life, physical and spiritual--the mysterious perpetual growth of
you, the knitting up of fresh bits of the universe into the unstable
body which you confuse with yourself, the hum and whirr of the
machine which preserves your contacts with the material world, the
more delicate movements which condition your correspondences with,
and growth within, the spiritual order--all these have gone on
unperceived by you. All the time you have been kept and nourished,
like the "Little Thing," by an enfolding and creative love; yet of
this you are less conscious than you are of the air that you breathe.
Now, as in the first stage of contemplation you learned and
established, as a patent and experienced fact, your fraternal
relation with all the other children of God, entering into the rhythm
of their existence, participating in their stress and their joy; will
you not at least try to make patent this your filial relation too?
Perpetual absorption in the Transcendent is a human impossibility,
and the effort to achieve it is both unsocial and silly. But this
experience, this "ascent to the Nought," changes for ever the
proportions of the life that once has known it; gives to it depth and
height, and prepares the way for those further experiences, that
great transfiguration of existence which comes when the personal
activity of the finite will gives place to the great and compelling
action of another Power.
Chapter 9
=========
Hitherto, all that you have attained has been--or at least has seemed
to you--the direct result of your own hard work. A difficult
self-discipline, the slowly achieved control of your vagrant thoughts
and desires, the steady daily practice of recollection, a diligent
pushing out of your consciousness from the superficial to the
fundamental, an unselfish loving attention; all this has been
rewarded by the gradual broadening and deepening of your perceptions,
by an initiation into the movements of a larger life... A perpetual
effort of the will has characterised your inner development. Your
contemplation, in fact, as the specialists would say, has been
"active," not "infused."
All that will now come to you--and much perhaps will come--will
happen as it seems without effort on your own part: though really it
will be the direct result of that long stress and discipline which
has gone before, and has made it possible for you to feel the subtle
contact of deeper realities. It will depend also on the steady
continuance--often perhaps through long periods of darkness and
boredom--of that poise to which you have been trained: the
stretching-out of the loving and surrendered will into the dimness
and silence, the continued trustful habitation of the soul in the
atmosphere of the Essential World. You are like a traveller arrived
in a new country. The journey has been a long one; and the hardships
and obstacles involved in it, the effort, the perpetual conscious
pressing forward, have at last come to seem the chief features of
your inner life. Now, with their cessation, you feel curiously lost;
as if the chief object of your existence had been taken away. The
place that you have come to seems strange and bewildering, for it
lies far beyond the horizons of human thought. There are no familiar
landmarks, nothing on which you can lay hold. Your state, then,
should now be wisely passive; in order that the great influences
which surround you may take and adjust your spirit, that the
unaccustomed light, which now seems to you a darkness, may clarify
your eyes, and that you may be transformed from a visitor into an
inhabitant of that supernal Country which St. Augustine described as
"no mere vision, but a home."
You are therefore to let yourself go; to cease all conscious, anxious
striving and pushing.
It is unlikely that agreeable emotions will accompany this utter
self-surrender; for everything will now seem to be taken from you,
nothing given in exchange. But if you are able to make it, a mighty
transformation will result. Ascetic writers tell us that the essence
of the change now effected consists in the fact... that the
surrendered self "does not act, but receives." By this they mean to
describe, as well as our concrete language will permit, the new and
vivid consciousness which now invades the contemplative; the sense
which he has of being as it were helpless in the grasp of another
Power, so utterly part of him, so completely different from him--so
rich and various, so transfused with life and feeling, so urgent and
so all-transcending--that he can only think of it as God.
... the advent of this experience is incalculable, and completely
outside your own control.
You are thrilled by a mighty energy, uncontrolled by you, unsolicited
by you: its higher vitality is poured into your soul. You enter upon
an experience for which all the terms of power, thought, motion, even
of love, are inadequate: yet which contains within itself the only
complete expression of all these things. Your strength is now
literally made perfect in weakness: because of the completeness of
your dependence, a fresh life is infused into you, such as your old
separate existence never knew. Moreover, to that diffused and
impersonal sense of the Infinite, in which you have dipped yourself,
and which swallows up and completes all the ideas your mind has ever
built up with the help of the categories of time and space, is now
added the consciousness of a Living Fact which includes, transcends,
completes all that you mean by the categories of personality and of
life. Those ineffective, half-conscious attempts towards free
action, clear apprehension, true union, which we dignify by the names
of will, thought, and love are now seen matched by an Absolute Will,
Thought, and Love; instantly recognised by the contemplating spirit
as the highest reality it yet has known, and evoking in it a
passionate and a humble joy.
This unmistakable experience has been achieved by the mystics of
every religion; and when we read their statements, we know that all
are speaking of the same thing. None who have had it have ever been
able to doubt its validity. It has always become for them the
central fact, by which all other realities must be tested and
graduated. It has brought to them the deep consciousness of sources
of abundant life now made accessible to man; of the impact of a
mighty energy, gentle, passionate, self-giving, creative, which they
can only call Absolute Love. ... Sometimes this Power is felt as an
impersonal force, the unifying cosmic energy, the indrawing love
which gathers all things into One; sometimes as a sudden access of
vitality, a light and heat, enfolding and penetrating the self and
making its languid life more vivid and more real; sometimes as a
personal and friendly Presence which counsels and entreats the soul.
In each case, the mystics insist again that this is God... But we
must remember that when they make this declaration, they are speaking
from a plane of consciousness far above the ideas and images of
popular religion; and from a place which is beyond the judiciously
adjusted horizon of philosophy. They mean by this word, not a
notion, however august; but an experienced Fact so vivid, that
against it the so-called facts of daily life look shadowy and
insecure.
The marvellous love-poetry of mysticism, the rhapsodies which extol
the spirit's Lover, Friend, Companion, Bridegroom; which describe the
"deliberate speed, majestic instancy" of the Hound of Heaven chasing
the separated soul, the onslaughts, demands, and caresses of this
"stormy, generous, and unfathomable love"--all this is an attempt,
often of course oblique and symbolic in method, to express and impart
this transcendent secret, to describe that intense yet elusive state
in which alone union with the living heart of Reality is possible.
As you yield yourself more and more completely to the impulses of
this intimate yet unseizable Presence, so much the sweeter and
stronger--so much the more constant and steady--will your intercourse
with it become. The imperfect music of your adoration will be
answered and reinforced by another music, gentle, deep, and strange;
your out-going movement, the stretching forth of your desire from
yourself to something other, will be answered by a movement, a
stirring, within you yet not conditioned by you. The wonder and
variety of this intercourse is never-ending. It includes in its
sweep every phase of human love and self-devotion, all beauty and all
power, all suffering and effort, all gentleness and rapture: here
found in synthesis. Going forth into the bareness and darkness of
this unwalled world of high contemplation, you there find stored for
you, and at last made real, all the highest values, all the dearest
and noblest experiences of the world of growth and change.
You see now what it is that you have been doing in the course of your
mystical development. As your narrow heart stretched to a wider
sympathy with life, you have been surrendering progressively to
larger and larger existences, more and more complete realities: have
been learning to know them, to share their very being, through the
magic of disinterested love.
Therefore seeking and finding, work and rest, conflict and peace,
feeding on God and self-immersion in God, spiritual marriage and
spiritual death--these contradictory images are all wanted, if we are
to represent the changing moods of the living, growing human spirit;
the diverse aspects under which it realises the simple fact of its
intercourse with the Divine.
Each new stage achieved in the mystical development of the spirit has
meant, not the leaving behind of the previous stages, but an adding
on to them: an ever greater extension of experience, and enrichment
of personality.
Chapter 10
==========
And here the practical man [or woman], who has been strangely silent
during the last stages of our discourse... asks once more, with a
certain explosive violence, his [or her] dear old question, "What is
the use of all this?"
"... How is it going to fit in with ordinary existence? How, above
all, is it all going to help ME?"
Living in this atmosphere of Reality, you will, in fact, yourself
become more real.
You are still, it is true, living the ordinary life of the body. You
are immersed in the stream of duration; a part of the human, the
social, the national group. The emotions, instincts, needs, of that
group affect you. To this extent, the crowd-spirit has you in its
grasp.
But now, because you have achieved a certain power of gathering
yourself together, perceiving yourself as a person, a spirit, and
observing your relation with these other individual lives--because
too, hearing now and again the mysterious piping of the Shepherd, you
realise your own perpetual forward movement and that of the flock, in
its relation to that living guide--you have a far deeper, truer
knowledge than ever before both of the general and the individual
existence; and so are able to handle life with a surer hand.
... each little event, each separate demand or invitation which comes
to you is now seen in a truer proportion, because you bring to it
your awareness of the Whole. Your journey ceases to be an automatic
progress, and takes on some of the characters of a free act: for
"things" are now under you, you are no longer under them.
Further, you will observe more and more clearly, that the stuff of
your external world, the method and machinery of the common life, is
not merely passively but actively inconsistent with your sharp
interior vision of truth. All man's perverse ways of seeing his
universe, all the perverse and hideous acts which have sprung from
them--these have set up reactions, have produced deep disorders in
the world of things.
Within the love-driven universe which you have learned to see as a
whole, you will therefore find egotism, rebellion, meanness,
brutality, squalor: the work of separated selves whose energies are
set athwart the stream. But every aspect of life, however falsely
imagined, can still be "saved," turned to the purposes of Reality:
for "all-thing hath the being by the love of God." Its oppositions
are no part of its realness; and therefore they can be overcome. Is
there not here, then, abundance of practical work for you to do; work
which is the direct outcome of your mystical experience? Are there
not here, as the French proverb has it, plenty of cats for you to
comb?
So, what is being offered to you is not merely a choice amongst new
states of consciousness, new emotional experiences--though these are
indeed involved in it--but, above all else, a larger and intenser
life, a career, a total consecration to the interests of the Real.
This life shall not be abstract and dreamy, made up, as some imagine,
of negations. It shall be violently practical and affirmative;
giving scope for a limitless activity of will, heart, and mind
working within the rhythms of the Divine Idea.
We said, at the beginning of this discussion, that mysticism was the
art of union with Reality: that it was, above all else, a Science of
Love. Hence, the condition to which it looks forward and towards
which the soul of the contemplative has been stretching out, is a
condition of being, not of seeing. As the bodily senses have been
produced under pressure of man's physical environment, and their true
aim is not the enhancement of his pleasure or his knowledge, but a
perfecting of his adjustment to those aspects of the natural world
which concern him--so the use and meaning of the spiritual senses are
strictly practical too. These, when developed by a suitable
training, reveal to man a certain measure of Reality: not in order
that he may gaze upon it, but in order that he may react to it, learn
to live in, with, and for it; growing and stretching into more
perfect harmony with the Eternal Order...
See also:
Western Mysticism by Dom Cuthbert Butlet
author: Underhill, Evelyn, 1875-1941
detail:
LOC: BV5081 .U6
source:
tags: ebook,non-fiction,spirit
title: Practical Mysticism
Tags
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ebook
non-fiction
spirit