Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill (classic reads .txt) 📕

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. On the apex of your personality, spirit ever gazes upon Spirit, melts and merges in it: from and by this encounter its life arises and is sustained. 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? This actualisation of your true status, your place in the Eternal World, is waiting for you. It represents the next phase in your gradual achievement of Reality. The method by which you will attain to it is strictly analogous to that by which you obtained a more vivid awareness of the natural world in which you grow and move. Here too it shall be direct intuitive contact, sensation rather than thought, which shall bring you certitude⁠—“tasting food, not talking about it,” as St. Bonaventura says.

Yet there is a marked difference between these two stages. In the first, the deliberate inward retreat and gathering together of your faculties which was effected by recollection, was the prelude to a new coming forth, an outflow from the narrow limits of a merely personal life to the better and truer apprehension of the created world. Now, in the second stage, the disciplined and recollected attention seems to take an opposite course. It is directed towards a plane of existence with which your bodily senses have no attachments: which is not merely misrepresented by your ordinary concepts, but cannot be represented by them at all. It must therefore sink inwards towards its own centre, “away from all that can be thought or felt,” as the mystics say, “away from every image, every notion, every thing,” towards that strange condition of obscurity which St. John of the Cross calls the “Night of Sense.” Do this steadily, checking each vagrant instinct, each insistent thought, however “spiritual” it may seem; pressing ever more deeply inwards towards that ground, that simple and undifferentiated Being from which your diverse faculties emerge. Presently you will find yourself, emptied and freed, in a place stripped bare of all the machinery of thought; and achieve the condition of simplicity which those same specialists call nakedness of spirit or “Wayless Love,” and which they declare to be above all human images and ideas⁠—a state of consciousness in which “all the workings of the reason fail.” Then you will observe that you have entered into an intense and vivid silence: a silence which exists in itself, through and in spite of the ceaseless noises of your normal world. Within this world of silence you seem as it were to lose yourself, “to ebb and to flow, to wander and be lost in the Imageless Ground,” says Ruysbroeck, struggling to describe the sensations of the self in this, its first initiation into the “wayless world, beyond image,” where “all is, yet in no wise.”

Yet in spite of the darkness that enfolds you, the Cloud of Unknowing into which you have plunged, you are sure that it is well to be here. A peculiar certitude which you cannot analyse, a strange satisfaction and peace, is distilled into you. You begin to understand what the Psalmist meant, when he said, “Be still, and know.” You are lost in a wilderness, a solitude, a dim strange state of which you can say nothing, since it offers no material to your image-making mind.

But this wilderness, from one point of view so bare and desolate, from another is yet strangely homely. In it, all your sorrowful questionings are answered without utterance; it is the All, and you are within it and part of it, and know that it is good. It calls forth the utmost adoration of which you are capable; and, mysteriously, gives love for love. You have ascended now, say the mystics, into the Freedom of the Will of God; are become part of a higher, slower duration, which carries you as it were upon its bosom and⁠—though never perhaps before has your soul been so truly active⁠—seems to you a stillness, a rest.

The doctrine of Plotinus concerning a higher life of unity, a lower life of multiplicity, possible to every human spirit, will now appear to you not a fantastic theory, but a plain statement of fact, which you have verified in your own experience. You perceive that these are the two complementary ways of apprehending and uniting with Reality⁠—the one as a dynamic process, the other as an eternal whole. Thus understood, they do not conflict. You know that the flow, the broken-up world of change and multiplicity, is still going on; and that you, as a creature of the time-world, are moving and growing with it. But, thanks to the development of the higher side of your consciousness, you are now lifted to a new poise; a direct participation in that simple, transcendent life “broken, yet not divided,”