 112. Mysticism (Inner Sky & Sun) |
Many mystics have written of their experiences, and these writings are the best source for our knowledge of mysticism. Poetic language is frequently the vehicle of expression. Fire, an interior journey, the dark night of the soul, a knowing that is an unknowing-such are the images or descriptions used for communicating the mystical experience. In the Christian tradition mysticism is understood as the result of God's action in persons, an unmerited grace they receive from union with God. Other religions allow for the human achievement of the mystical states through certain methods of contemplation, fasting, and breathing. Only those whose lives are marked by penance and emotional purification achieve mystical states, however, and the experience itself is always of an Absolute that transcends the human efforts or methods of achieving it.
"Such things have been revealed to me that now all I have written appears in my eyes as of no greater value than straw." So spoke St. Thomas Aquinas the "Prince of Scholastics" in his answer to his secretary's anxious urgings that "Summan Theologiae" be completed. One day in 1273, during mass in a Naples church, St. Thomas experienced a profound mystical insight. The glory of "divine knowledge" so overwhelmed him that henceforth he took no interest in intellectuality.
-Yogananda
The mystic sees the world through a different lens than is present in ordinary experience, and this proves to be a significant obstacle to those who look to mystical teachings and paths. The words of great mystics can seem confusing and confused, opaque, simultaneously over-simplified and full of subtle meanings hidden from the uninitiated. Many mystical traditions, in fact, have formal or semi-formal processes of initiation, in which a given lineage is passed down from master to student, and often the original inspiration for the tradition is credited to some transcendent source, or lost in antiquity. Such intimations of secrecy, power and hierarchy serve to confound the issue even more.
To the mystic, however, there is nothing mystical about his words. They are pragmatic statements, without subtext or weight; simple obvious truths of experience. One of the more famous lines from the Tao Te Ching, for instance, reads:
My words are very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice
Yet no one in the world understands them or puts them into practice. (TTC, 70)
Mysticism and Ego-Death
The conventional mind is a reflection or reaction to psycho-physical experience. The conditions or states of mind may seem to be within and subtler and higher than the body, and even independent of the body. Therefore, the mind tends to imply the existence of a separate, separative, and independent inner self, ego, or soul. Therefore, until the mind is transcended, we are bound and deluded by experience, knowledge, states of mind, and the sense of an independent or threatened inner self. But the mind and the ego (or independent self) are only a complex process of reaction or contraction in the brain, or the body-mind as a whole, and of the reactive or contractive modification of the All-Pervading Life-Principle. Therefore, the illusions of mind and ego must be transcended through prior intuition of the Life-Principle and Transcendental Consciousness that are the Identity of the individual body-mind. (Only in the case of the radical intuition of the Transcendental Condition and Identity of the body-mind may psycho-physical experience be engaged in total freedom.)
Mysticism is a conventional form of knowledge, or mind. It is a matter of the entrance of attention into the higher plane of the brain-mind. It is a matter of self-fulfillment, or ego-fulfillment, via the inward glorification of independent consciousness. But the Truth is Realized only after ego-death, or transcendence of the brain and the mind. THEREFORE, MYSTICISM IS NOT THE ULTIMATE STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION. In fact it is only the fifth of the seven evolutionary spiritual stages of human life.
