The nice paradox of consciousness is that it constitutes each our complete expertise of actuality and our blindfold to actuality because it actually is. Without end trapped inside it, we mistake our ideas of issues for the issues themselves, our theories for the universe, frequently seeing the world not as it’s however as we’re. The supreme frontier of human freedom stands out as the potential to simply accept that one thing exists past understanding, that understanding is a machination of the thoughts and never a mirror of the world — that the world merely is, and our consciousness is a participant in its being however not a creator of it.
The English poet, novelist, mystic, and peace activist Evelyn Underhill (December 6, 1875–June 15, 1941) explores how to do this in her 1914 ebook Practical Mysticism (public library | public domain) — a subject information to mystical expertise that’s secular somewhat than spiritual, the product of “peculiar contemplation” springing from the very essence of human nature, obtainable to all.
Acknowledging what fashionable cognitive scientists well-known — that our consideration is “an intentional, unapologetic discriminator” — Underhill observes that “only some amongst the wealth of impressions we obtain are seized and integrated into our image of the world,” and displays on the religious significance of this tendency to mistake illustration for actuality:
The excellence between mystic and non-mystic is just not merely that between the rationalist and the dreamer, between mind and instinct. The query which divides them is actually this: What, out of the mass of fabric provided to it, shall consciousness seize upon — with what facets of the universe shall it “unite”?
It’s infamous that the operations of the common human consciousness unite the self, not with issues as they are surely, however with pictures, notions, and facets of issues. The verb “to be,” which [the self] makes use of so frivolously, doesn’t really apply to any of the objects amongst which the sensible man supposes himself to dwell. For him, the hare of Actuality is at all times ready-jugged [jugged hare is a traditional English dish of hare marinated in wine and juniper berries, cooked in the animal’s blood]: he conceives not the residing, beautiful, wild, swift-moving creature which has been sacrificed so that he could also be consumed the deplorable dish which he calls “issues as they are surely.” So full, certainly, is the separation of his consciousness from the information of being, that he feels no sense of loss. He’s blissful sufficient “understanding,” garnishing, assimilating the carcass from which the precept of life and development has been ejected. He’s blissful sufficient “understanding,” garnishing, assimilating the carcass from which the precept of life and development has been ejected, and whereof solely essentially the most digestible parts have been retained.
This, Underhill observes, is the other of the magical orientation, which opens us as much as a form of data past understanding — the sort that Elizabeth Bishop invoked in her astonishing poem “At the Fishhouses,” consonant with the notion of adaequatio and kindred to Maurice Bucke’s notion of cosmic consciousness.
5 years earlier, Underhill had voiced these existential reckonings by means of the heroine of her novel The Column of Mud:
She had seen, abruptly, the insecurity of these defences which defend our illusions and push back the horrors of fact. She had discovered somewhat gap within the wall of appearances; and peeping by means of, had caught a glimpse of that seething pot of religious forces whence, from time to time, a bubble rises to the floor of issues.
That bubble, she intimates in Sensible Mysticism, is what mysticism as “the artwork of union with Actuality” surfaces in us. She writes:
As a result of thriller is horrible to us, we have now agreed for essentially the most half to reside in a world of labels; to make of them the present coin of expertise, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent. We merely don’t try to unite with Actuality. However from time to time that symbolic character is instantly introduced dwelling to us. Some nice emotion, some devastating visitation of magnificence, love, or ache, lifts us to a different stage of consciousness; and we’re conscious for a second of the distinction between the neat assortment of discrete objects and experiences which we name the world, and the peak, the depth, the breadth of that residing, rising, altering Truth, of which thought, life, and power are elements… Then we realise that our entire life is enmeshed in nice and residing forces; horrible as a result of unknown… The extra sacred aircraft of life and power which appears to be manifested within the forces we name “religious” and “emotional” — in love, anguish, ecstasy, adoration — is hidden from us too. Signs, appearances, are all that our intellects can discern: sudden irresistible inroads from it, all that our hearts can apprehend. The fabric for an intenser life, a wider, sharper consciousness, a extra profound understanding of our personal existence, lies at our gates. However we’re separated from it, we can not assimilate it; besides in irregular moments, we hardly know that it’s.
Those that bridge the separation, Underhill argues, are the mystics. Pointing to Walt Whitman as one such secular mystic — an individual who “has achieved a passionate communion with deeper ranges of life than these with which we often deal” — she invitations a layered understanding of what this notion of sensible mysticism means:
The visionary is a mystic when his imaginative and prescient mediates to him an actuality past the attain of the senses. The thinker is a mystic when he passes past thought to the pure apprehension of fact. The lively man is a mystic when he is aware of his actions to be part of a better exercise. Blake, Plotinus, Joan of Arc, and John of the Cross — there’s a hyperlink which binds all these collectively: but when he’s to utilize it, the inquirer should discover that hyperlink for himself.
This sensible mysticism, she argues as she contrasts it with an “indolent and ineffective mysticality,” is offered to the peculiar individual as an invite “to a coaching of his latent colleges, a bracing and brightening of his languid consciousness, an emancipation from the fetters of look, a turning of his consideration to new ranges of the world.” She gives a sentiment of winged assurance:
As the attractive doesn’t exist for the artist and poet alone — although these can discover in it extra poignant depths of that means than different males — so the world of Actuality exists for all; and all might take part in it, unite with it, in accordance with their measure and to the energy and purity of their want.
Underhill considers the final word reward of sensible mysticism:
Mysticism [is] the artwork of union with Actuality [and], above all else, a Science of Love. Therefore, the situation to which it seems to be ahead and in the direction of which the soul of the contemplative has been stretching out, is a situation of being, not of seeing. Because the bodily senses have been produced beneath strain of man’s bodily setting, and their true intention is just not the enhancement of his pleasure or his data, however a perfecting of his adjustment to these facets of the pure world which concern him — so the use and that means of the religious senses are strictly sensible too. These, when developed by an appropriate coaching, disclose to man a sure measure of Actuality: not so that he might gaze upon it, however so that he might react to it, study to reside in, with, and for it; rising and stretching into extra good concord with the Everlasting Order, till eventually, just like the blessed ones of Dante’s imaginative and prescient, the clearness of his flame responds to the unspeakable radiance of the Enkindling Gentle.
Certainly, she locations the flexibility — the willingness — to “look with the eyes of affection” at coronary heart of this observe of seeing actuality clearly — a observe containing “the entire artwork of religious communion.” In a passage consonant with Dostoyevsky’s insistence that “nature, the soul, love, and God, one recognizes through the heart, and not through the reason,”, and evocative of Hilton Als’s notion of love as the art of receptivity, Underhill writes:
The perspective which it includes is an perspective of full humility and of receptiveness; with out criticism, with out intelligent evaluation of the factor seen. Whenever you look thus, you give up your I-hood; see issues eventually because the artist does, for his or her sake, not to your personal. The basic unity that’s in you reaches out to the unity that’s in them: and also you obtain the “Easy Imaginative and prescient” of the poet and the mystic — that artificial and undistorted apprehension of issues which is the antithesis of the only imaginative and prescient of sensible males. The doorways of notion are cleansed, and all the pieces seems as it’s. The disfiguring outcomes of hate, rivalry, prejudice, vanish away. Into that silent place to which recollection has introduced you, new music, new color, new gentle, are poured from the outward world. The aware love which achieves this imaginative and prescient might, certainly should, fluctuate… However the will which that love has enkindled can maintain consideration in the suitable route. It might refuse to relapse to unreal and egotistic correspondences; and proceed, even in darkness, and within the struggling which such darkness brings to the woke up spirit, its appointed process, reducing a approach into new ranges of Actuality.
Complement these fragments of Underhill’s wholly revelatory Practical Mysticism with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on transcendence for the science-spirited, then revisit Emerson on nature, transcendence, and how we become our most authentic selves.
