What is mysticism? Who are the great mystics, and what wisdom do they have to share with us today? How is mysticism related to religion and spirituality, and yet how does it speak to a universal truth that transcends dogma? Questions like these were explored in a great, but often overlooked, literary masterpiece published a hundred years ago -- Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness by Evelyn Underhill.
1911 was not a particularly dramatic year. The Mexican Revolution was ongoing and the Italians declared war on the Ottoman Empire. The Chevrolet Motor Car Company was incorporated and the Encyclopædia Britannica brought out its legendary 11th edition. But this otherwise unremarkable year also saw the first publication of Underhill's study on mysticism, a book that has never gone out of print and has become a modern spiritual classic.
Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) was a true pioneer in many ways. She was the first woman to deliver lectures on religion at Oxford University; and in a time when the Church of England did not ordain women to the priesthood, she became renowned as a retreat leader and spiritual teacher. She wrote more than 25 books, including novels, collections of poetry, and a variety of books about prayer and spirituality. But her most enduring work has been her in-depth study of the beauty and splendor of the quest for union with God.
Mysticism is a huge book -- more than 500 pages of text and notes, drawing on the wisdom of more than 100 great mystics, not only from Christianity but from around the world. The first part of the book answers the question "What is mysticism?" and explains why the spiritual life matters, even in a world dominated by science and technology. Underhill relates mysticism to art, science and psychology, but also explores how spirituality cannot be reduced to any other field of human knowledge. The second half of the book explores the developmental process of the mystical life, detailing such key transitions as conversion, self-purification, illumination or enlightenment, the dark night of the soul, and the final splendor of "deification," or participation in the Divine Nature of God. Drawing on psychology as well as religion, this evolutionary map of mysticism anticipated by several decades the work of later specialists in human spiritual growth and development, like James Fowler or Ken Wilber.
Most important of all, Underhill emphasized that mysticism was not just for the religious elite, but for anyone who truly sought to live a transcendent life that unites the present moment with the glory of eternity. Although she assumed that mystics somehow had a "greater" or "higher" calling than the "ordinary" person, her insistence that mystical wisdom was for everyone presaged the rise of popular spirituality in the late 20th century, from the freewheeling explorations of the new age to the widespread popularity of the Christian centering prayer movement. Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner predicted shortly before his death in 1984 that "the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist;" Underhill's Mysticism explains why Rahner's words can be seen as a challenge rather than a warning.
Given how widespread the quest for enlightenment and inner experience is in our time, it is difficult to imagine how only one hundred years ago the English-speaking world remained dominated by a type of scientific materialism that made topics such as mysticism and spirituality taboo to most people. As the wife and daughter of prominent British attorneys, Evelyn Underhill belonged to the mainstream of society, and her family did not understand her devotion to the spiritual life. But she bucked social expectations and followed her intuition, and by doing so became a foremother of the great rebirth of spirituality that emerged after her death. Key spiritual leaders and authors like Thomas Merton, C. S. Lewis, Alan Watts, and T. S. Eliot were among the many visionaries who were influenced by her teaching. My own work as a blogger and author is directly inspired by Evelyn Underhill.
For those who might find the length and scholarship of Underhill's Mysticism daunting, her 1914 book Practical Mysticism offers a shorter and more accessible introduction to her thought. But in its centennial year Mysticism remains her most essential book of the topic, and offers a lucid and insightful introduction to a subject many people find difficult to comprehend.
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Fr. Richard Rohr: Mysticism In Religion: Three Ways to View the Sunset
Evelyn Underhill - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Question of God . Other Voices . Evelyn Underhill | PBS
The eighty-one chapters in his small book are riddled with self-contradictory phrases: "The Tao illuminated appears to be obscure. The Tao advancing appears to be retreating. It is the form of the formless; the image of nothingness." Lao Tzu used paradox to provoke an unusual awareness in his readers, and to help explain the patterns and cycles, the parity and complementarity, that he saw superimposed on reality by the physical forces in the universe. The most striking of these patterns. central to the Tao Te Ching, is that of polarity.
Instantly, space was formed and time began, and two charged states came into being, yin (negative) and yang (positive). As a result of the complementary polarity of yin and yang, matter and energy, that were at first undifferentiated, separated and regrouped into the physical reality that became our universe.
Lao Tzu believed that everything that exists comes into reality through the polarity of yin and yang. He called the specific physical laws and cycles that control and govern reality the Tao, and suggested that the actions of the Tao reflect the purpose of a larger entity (the Absolute). So if reality came about because the Absolute wanted to know itself, then our evolutionary destiny must be to help it get a good look by investigating, observing, and emulating nature.
My understanding of mysticism is precisely that, a non-dual state of mind. Buddhism, Taoism, and even their mother, Hinduism, all strive towards this viewpoint and have different names for the this condition. Science and other-wordly religions usually insist on dualist perspective; that is, our particular (particulate) selves, and this or that other particular / particulate thing--'the other".
Mysticism is about the interconnectedness of things and the mutually exclusive nature of all things, namely that all things not only "ARE" ( as in "exist"), but that they are also ONE. Change is inevitable and all forms are only temporary as they continually fold back into the same one-ness.
This idea is a far cry from typical Western thought which struggles with the notion of one-ness. The West has been built on distiction and individualism.
I understand the desire to purge things of their supernatural character, but is there a meaningful difference between a "non-dual state of mind" against mystical experiences other than description? One references the empirical process while the other chronicles the subjective qualitative data. Perhaps I did not read the blog closely enough, but I didn't see any claims that the experiences themselves were actually veridical.
Lauri Lumby
Authentic Freedom Ministries
http://yourspiritualtruth.com
He was once a Pagan (Wiccan) as I am now but he has found his true spiritual home in Mystical Christianity. Dare I say that if more Christians were taught early on that Christ could be sought beyond dogma and that prayer is much more than memorized words or conversations in your head many of us who were once Christians might still be so.
2500 hundred years after buddha realized that the origin of suffering was ignorance the world still knows very little about his realization. even most buddhists dont know the origin of suffering and confuse symptoms with its origin.
one has to understand rebirth to have a better understanding of the origin of our suffering.
one has to move beyond phenomena to better understand the origin of our suffering and the teachings of buddha and the enlightened hindus.
"if a rock tumbles down from a hill to a women's back yard and smashes one of her knees, her suffering is isn't owing to her "unawareneÂss of reality,"
if she built her house on the side of a mountain then her much ignorance and much suffering from rocks rolling down the mountain. :-)
suffering is much more than physical pain. rebirth has to do with unawareness of reality. physical life is harsh but until we are able to see the underlying reality of phenomena rebirth occurs.
but hey stick with the gravity thing as the origin of our suffering and the origin of life on earth. ignorance is not a sin but it is troublesome.
to accuse the buddha's teachings as fortune cookie philosophy is ignorance defined. find the origin of that ignorance and a whole new reality will evolve in your awareness.
think of ignorance as unawareness of our perfect reality within each and every one of us. the more unaware we are, the more we suffer, not as punishment as religion will tell you but as consequences. those consequences evolve the soul with time and experiences; without consequences I doubt the soul would ever evolve into higher states of consciousness.
if one looks close and observes, one can see all different states of consciousness and a good indicator is one's level of empathy. even our two political parties demostrate this on a daily basis.
move beyond Aristotle'Âs PHYSICS this is very low level of consciousness.
continue to seek and you to will find that indeed the buddha was correct that the origin of suffering is our unawareness of reality. ie ignorance. we fail to see the underlying reality of phenomena as also aristotle did.
no I am not a buddhist. they too have their conditioned beliefs.
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There is no consciousness in a tree branch or piece of bark, though they undergo change (Aristotle's definition of suffering), though they suffer.
Whether the origin of suffering among humans is our "unawareness of reality" is naive. For example, if a rock tumbles down from a hill to a women's back yard and smashes one of her knees, her suffering is isn't owing to her "unawareness of reality," a law of physics dealing with an inclined plane (hill), the component of gravity acting upon the hill, the momentum, etc. (She knew this injury would occur if she were in the rock's path or line of fire.) Her suffering is due to her being at the wrong place at the wrong time when the rock came tumbling down that hill.
Or if a honey bee is buzzing in a rose and stings you, the hurt from the sting is not due to your "unawareness of reality." Rather, it is due to your not guarding yourself against a nasty bee.
Childhood indoctrination of any superstition and teaching superstition in science class are crimes against humanity because it prevents people from being inspired by science. Instead they are kept gullible so that they remain prime targets for myth, religion and superstition.
I do agree with you though. It is too easy to misuse these to foster close-minded fundamentalist views that attempt to supplant rational thought. I just think it is more complex then it appears.
awe and wonder at the mysteries of the universe is something many atheists also share, so I am not willing to concede they need to be tethered to religion or spiritualism...
It's obvious we are free to ignorant
BTW, they are wrong in the same sense the Greeks were wrong about Zeus.....
“the great truth that life is a spiritual evolution that his life but a passing phase in the soul’s progression burst upon my vision with overwhelming grandeur……..I felt myself going, losing myself. Now came a period of rapture, so intense that the universe stood still…….the all loving, the perfect, the perfect wisdom, truth, love, and purity. And with rapture came the insight. In that same wonderful moment of what might be called supernal bliss came illumination……..worlds systems all bended in one harmonious whole.â€
Her sister saw her three months later and stated the following:
“her changed appearance made such a deep impression on that I shall never forget it. Her looks and manner were so changed that she scarcely seemed the same person. There was a clear bright peaceful light in her eyes, lighting her whole face and she was so happy and contented, so satisfied with things as they were. It seemed as though some heavy weight had been lifted and she was free. As she talked to me I felt that she was living in a new world of thought and feeling unknown to me.â€
Some will call these experiences hallucinations but only out of ignorance; we are not blameworthy or culpable for our ignorance contrary to the world’s teachings, but it is very troublesome. I.e. the origin of suffering is ignorance.
Everything material undergoes change, endures change, is altered and therefore suffers. In Aristotle's PHYSICS, even the trees suffer owing to the weight of snow they bear on their boughs (in the winter) or to the storms they endure when their bark is pelted or branches bent. It has nothing to do with ignorance.
We likewise suffer, undergo change, are altered because we are not pure spirits, as it were; we are matter (and spirit). We suffer owing to the physical stuff of our bodies that occupy space.