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

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 they feel this strange life moving and stirring within them. Sometimes it seems to pursue, entice, and besiege them. In every case, they are the passive objects upon which it works. It is now another Power which seeks the separated spirit and demands it; which knocks at the closed door of the narrow personality; which penetrates the contemplative consciousness through and through, speaking, stirring, compelling it; which sometimes, by its secret irresistible pressure, wins even the most recalcitrant in spite of themselves. 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; that here under these diverse manners the soul has immediate intercourse with Him. 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. They say that this Fact is “immanent”; dwelling in, transfusing, and discoverable through every aspect of the universe, every movement of the game of life⁠—as you have found in the first stage of contemplation. There you may hear its melody and discern its form. And further, that It is “transcendent”; in essence exceeding and including the sum of those glimpses and contacts which we obtain by self-mergence in life, and in Its simplest manifestations above and beyond anything to which reason can attain⁠—“the Nameless Being, of Whom nought can be said.” This you discovered to be true in the second stage. But in addition to this, they say also, that this all-pervasive, all-changing, and yet changeless One, Whose melody is heard in all movement, and within Whose Being “the worlds are being told like beads,” calls the human spirit to an immediate intercourse, a unity, a fruition, a divine give-and-take, for which the contradictory symbols of feeding, of touching, of marriage, of immersion, are all too poor; and which evokes in the fully conscious soul a passionate and a humble love. “He devours us and He feeds us!” exclaims Ruysbroeck. “Here,” says St. Thomas Aquinas, “the soul in a wonderful and unspeakable manner both seizes and is seized upon, devours and is herself devoured, embraces and is violently embraced: and by the knot of love she unites herself with God, and is with Him as the Alone with the Alone.”

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. “How delicately Thou teachest love to me!” cries St. John of the Cross; and here indeed we find all the ardours of all earthly lovers justified by an imperishable Objective, which reveals Itself in all things that we truly love, and beyond all these things both seeks us and compels us, “giving more than we can take and asking more than we can pay.”

You do not, you never will know, what this Objective is: for as Dionysius teaches, “if anyone saw God and understood what he saw, then it was not God that he saw, but something that belongs to Him.” But you do know now that it exists, with an intensity which makes all other existences unreal; save in so far as they participate in this one Fact. “Some contemplate the Formless, and others meditate on Form: but the wise man knows that Brahma is beyond both.” 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 outgoing 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. First, the manifested, flowing, evolving life of multiplicity: felt by you in its wonder and wholeness,