Practical Mysticism quotes

On the other hand, the genuine inquirer will find before long a number of self-appointed apostles who are eager to answer his question in many strange and inconsistent ways, calculated to increase rather than resolve the obscurity of his mind.

He will learn that mysticism is a philosophy, an illusion, a kind of religion, a disease; that it means having visions, performing conjuring tricks, leading an idle, dreamy, and selfish life, neglecting one’s business, wallowing in vague spiritual emotions, and being “in tune with the infinite.”

He will discover that it emancipates him from all dogmas—sometimes from all morality—and at the same time that it is very superstitious. One expert tells him that it is simply “Catholic piety,” another that Walt Whitman was a typical mystic;

Yet perhaps it will give confidence if I confess at the outset that I have discovered a definition which to me appears to cover all the ground; or at least, all that part of the ground which is worth covering.

It will hardly stretch to the mango trick; but it finds room at once for the visionaries and the philosophers, for Walt Whitman and the saints.

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.

The great Sufi who said that “Pilgrimage to the place of the wise, is to escape the flame of separation” spoke the literal truth.

Wisdom is the fruit of communion; ignorance the inevitable portion of those who “keep themselves to themselves,” and stand apart, judging, analysing the things which they have never truly known.

Because he has surrendered himself to it, “united” with it, the patriot knows his country, the artist knows the subject of his art, the lover his beloved, the saint his God, in a manner which is inconceivable as well as unattainable by the looker-on.

This he knows, with this he “unites”; for it is his own creature.

It is neat, flat, unchanging, with edges well defined: a thing one can trust.

He forgets the existence of other conscious creatures, provided with their own standards of reality.

… light on the eager face of the primrose, the landscape as known in its vastness to the woodlouse and ant—all these experiences, denied to him forever, have just as much claim to the attribute of Being as his own partial and subjective interpretations of things.

Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character

, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent. We simply do not attempt to unite with Reality. But now and then that symbolic character is suddenly brought home to us.

Magic presences throng the roadside, or cry salutations to him from the hidden fields. The rich world through which he moves lies in the foreground of his consciousness; and it gives up new secrets to him at every step.

“No-Eyes,” when told of his adventures, usually refuses to believe that both have gone by the same road.

He fancies that his companion has been floating about in the air, or beset by agreeable hallucinations. We shall never persuade him to the contrary unless we persuade him to look for himself.

“No-Eyes,” when told of his adventures, usually refuses to believe that both have gone by the same road. He fancies that his companion has been floating about in the air, or beset by agreeable hallucinations.

We shall never persuade him to the contrary unless we persuade him to look for himself.

Therefore it is to a practical mysticism that the practical man is here invited:

or, as he would say, believes his own eyes.

It has shown us, for instance, that the galloping racehorse, with legs stretched out as we are used to see it, is a mythical animal, probably founded on the mental image of a running dog.

No horse has ever galloped thus: but its real action is too quick for us, and we explain it to ourselves as something resembling the more deliberate dog-action which we have caught and registered as it passed.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, said Blake, everything would appear to man as it is—Infinite.

But the doors of perception are hung with the cobwebs of thought; prejudice, cowardice, sloth.

Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond: too arrogant to still our thought, and let divine sensation have its way. It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that transition:

If the doors of perception were cleansed, said Blake, everything would appear to man as it is—Infinite. But the doors of perception are hung with the cobwebs of thought; prejudice, cowardice, sloth.

Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond: too arrogant to still our thought, and let divine sensation have its way.

It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that transition:

When the world took on a strangeness, and you rushed out to meet it, in a mood at once exultant and ashamed?

Was there not an instant when you took the lady who now orders your dinner into your arms, and she suddenly interpreted to you the whole of the universe?

a universe so great, charged with so terrible an intensity, that you have hardly dared to think of it since. Do you remember that horrid moment at the concert, when you became wholly unaware of your comfortable seven-and-sixpenny seat? Those were onsets of involuntary contemplation;

To persons of this type I do not address myself: but rather to the ordinary plodding scholar of life, who must reach the same goal by a more gradual road.

What is it that smears the windows of the senses? Thought, convention, self-interest.

We throw a mist of thought between ourselves and the external world: and through this we discern, as in a glass darkly, that which we have arranged to see. We see it in the way in which our neighbours see it;

which exercise a selective control upon those few aspects of the whole which penetrate to the field of consciousness and dictate the order in which we arrange them, for the universe of the natural man is strictly egocentric.

We continue to name the living creatures with all the placid assurance of Adam: and whatsoever we call them, that is the name thereof.

Unless we happen to be artists—and then but rarely—we never know the “thing seen” in its purity; never, from birth to death, look at it with disinterested eyes.

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.

There, the rhythm of your duration is one with the rhythm of the Universal Life. There, your essential self exists: the permanent being which persists through and behind the flow and change of your conscious states.

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.

At this very moment your thoughts are buzzing like a swarm of bees.

The reduction of this fevered complex to a unity appears to be a task beyond all human power. Yet the situation is not as hopeless for you as it seems.

But this spiritual principle, this gathering point of his selfhood, is just that aspect of him which is furthest removed from the active surface consciousness.

He treats it as the busy citizen treats his national monuments. It is there, it is important, a possession which adds dignity to his existence; but he never has time to go in.

Yet as the purified sense, cleansed of prejudice and self-interest, can give us fleeting communications from the actual broken-up world of duration at our gates:

Even those objects which minister to our sense-life may well be used to nourish our spirits too.

Who has not watched the intent meditations of a comfortable cat brooding upon the Absolute Mouse?

You, if you have a philosophic twist, may transcend such relative views of Reality, and try to meditate on Time, Succession, even Being itself: or again on human intercourse, birth, growth, and death, on a flower, a river, the various tapestries of the sky.

and at once all the values of existence are changed.

“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.

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.”

It is useless to speak kindly to the limpet. You must detach it by main force.

That old comfortable clinging life, protected by its hard shell from the living waters of the sea, must now come to an end. A conflict of some kind—a severance of old habits, old notions, old prejudices—is here inevitable for you;

It lies solely in yourself; in your attitude towards the world of things. You are enslaved by the verb “to have”: all your reactions to life consist in corporate or individual demands, appetites, wants.

That “love of life” of which we sometimes speak is mostly cupboard-love.

We are quick to snap at her ankles when she locks the larder door: a proceeding which we dignify by the name of pessimism. The mystic knows not this attitude of demand.

in your attitude towards the world of things. You are enslaved by the verb “to have”: all your reactions to life consist in corporate or individual demands, appetites, wants. That “love of life” of which we sometimes speak is mostly cupboard-love.

We are quick to snap at her ankles when she locks the larder door: a proceeding which we dignify by the name of pessimism.

The mystic knows not this attitude of demand. He tells us again and again, that “he is rid of all his asking”; that “henceforth the heat of having shall never scorch him more.” Compare this with your normal attitude to the world, practical man:

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;

crying with the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, “Look that nothing live in thy working mind but a naked intent stretching”—the voluntary tension of your ever-growing, ever-moving personality pushing out towards the Real.

“Love, and do what you like,” said the wise Augustine: so little does mere surface activity count, against the deep motive that begets it.

The dynamic power of love and will, the fact that the heart’s desire—if it be intense and industrious—is a better earnest of possible fulfilment than the most elegant theories of the spiritual world; this is the perpetual theme of all the Christian mystics.

Those glad and vivid “things” will speak to you. They will offer you news at least as definite and credible as that which the paperboy 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.

Now, turning away from the label, you shall surrender yourself to the direct message poured out towards you by the thing.

Then, you considered: now, you are to absorb.

This experience will be, in the very highest sense, the experience of sensation without thought: the essential sensation, the “savouring” to which some of the mystics invite us, of which our fragmentary bodily senses offer us a transient sacrament.

She felt at once the fugitive character of its apparent existence, the perdurable Reality within which it was held.

“I marvelled,” she said, “how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall, for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the being by the love of God.”

To this same apprehension of Reality, this linking up of each finite expression with its Origin, this search for the inner significance of every fragment of life, one of the greatest and most balanced contemplatives of the nineteenth century, Florence Nightingale, reached out when she …

… this linking up of each finite expression with its Origin, this search for the inner significance of every fragment of life, one of the greatest and most balanced contemplatives of the nineteenth century, Florence Nightingale, reached out when she exclaimed in an hour of self-examination,

“I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my cats.”

Yet it is not the self-tormenting strife of introspective and self-conscious aspiration, but rather an unrelaxed, diligent intention, a steady acquiescence, a simple and loyal surrender to the great currents of life, a holding on to results achieved in your best moments, that shall do …

… often puzzled you by displaying an intensity that exceeded the demands of your little world, only have beauty and meaning just because and in so far as you discern them to be the partial expressions of a greater whole which is still beyond your reach.

You have long been like a child tearing up the petals of flowers in order to make a mosaic on the garden path; and the results of this murderous diligence you mistook for a knowledge of the world.

When the bits fitted with unusual exactitude, you called it science. Now at last you have perceived the greater truth and loveliness of the living plant from which you broke them: have, in fact, entered into direct communion with it, “united” with its reality.

that this Creation, this whole changeful natural order, with all its apparent collisions, cruelties, and waste, yet springs from an ardour, an immeasurable love, a perpetual donation, which generates it, upholds it, drives it; for “all-thing hath the being by the love of God.”

Blake’s anguished question here receives its answer: the Mind that conceived the lamb conceived the tiger too.

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.

so here, by a deliberate giving of yourself to the silence, the rich “nothingness,” the “Cloud,” you will draw nearest to the Reality it conceals from the eye of sense.

“Lovers put out the candle and draw the curtains,” says Patmore, “when they wish to see the God and the Goddess: and in the higher communion, the night of thought is the light of perception.”

Such an experience of Eternity, the attainment of that intuitive awareness, that meek and simple self-mergence, which the mystics call sometimes, according to its degree and special circumstances, the Quiet, the Desert of God, the Divine Dark, represents the utmost that human consciousness can do …

for man is immersed in duration, subject to it. Its demands upon his attention can only cease with the cessation of physical life—perhaps not then.

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 forever the proportions of the life that once has known it;

And here the practical man, who has been strangely silent during the last stages of our discourse, shakes himself like a terrier which has achieved dry land again after a bath

; and asks once more, with a certain explosive violence, his dear old question, “What is the use of all this?”

You, accepting the wide deep universe of the mystic, and the responsibilities that go with it, have by this act taken sides once for all with creative spirit: with the higher tension, the unrelaxed effort, the passion for a better, intenser, and more significant life.

The adoration to which you are vowed is not an affair of red hassocks and authorised hymn books; but a burning and consuming fire.

You will find, then, that the world, going its own gait, busily occupied with its own system of correspondences—yielding to every gust of passion, intent on the satisfaction of greed, the struggle for comfort or for power—will oppose your new eagerness;

The heavy animal is diseased as well as indolent. 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.

Man is free, and holds the keys of Hell as well as the keys of Heaven.

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.