Mysticism The theory that a knowledge of God or immediate reality is attainable by a human faculty that transcends intellect and logic. W. T. Stace finds in all mystical experiences five common characteristics: (1) a sense of objectivity or reality, (2) a sense of peace or blessedness, (3) a feeling of holiness, sacredness, or divinity, (4) a paradoxical quality, and (5) an ineffability. There are two broad types of mysticism: in one, God is seen as transcendent, outside the human soul, and union with Him is achieved through a series of steps or stages; in the other, God is immanent, dwelling within the soul and to be discovered by penetrating deeper into the inner self.
The terminology of mysticism, because it is forced to be figurative, is often obscure. A conventional statement of the Christian mystic’s progress on the path to God is as follows: The soul undergoes a purification (the purgative way), which leads to a sense of illumination in the love of God (the illuminative way), and after a period the soul enters into a union with God (the unitive way), and progresses into a final ecstatic state of perfect knowledge of God (the spiritual marriage), during some period of which there comes a time of alienation and loss in which the soul cannot find God at all (the soul’s dark night).
Aspects of mysticism and the mystical experience are common in literature, although to call any single writer—with a few exceptions, such as Richard Rolle of Hampole and William Blake—a mystic is to invite a challenge. Clearly, however, there are mystical elements in the work of Crashaw, George Herbert, Bunyan, Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Carlyle, the New England transcendentalists, Whitman, I. B. Singer, and T. S. Eliot.
--A Handbook to Literature, by William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman, eighth edition
To
lose yourself, as if you no longer existed, to cease completely to experience
yourself, to reduce yourself to nothing is not a human sentiment but a divine
experience . . ..
It is deifying to go through such an experience. As a drop of water seems to disappear completely in a big quantity of wine, even assuming the wine’s taste and color, just as red, molten iron becomes so much like fire it seems to lose its primary state; just as the air on a sunny day seems transformed into a sunshine instead of being lit up; so it is necessary for the saints that all human feelings melt in a mysterious way and flow into the will of God. Otherwise, how will God be all in all if something human survives in man?
--St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 12th-century Christian mystic
I
entered. I lost the boundary of my
physical body. I had my skin, of
course, but I felt I was standing in the center of the cosmos.
I saw people coming toward me, but all were the same man.
All were myself. I had never
known this world before. I had
believed that I was created, but now I must change my opinion: I was never
created; I was the cosmos. No
individual existed.
--anonymous account of satori, the Zen Buddhist mystical state
As long as there are human beings, there will be religion for the sufficient reason that the self is a theomorphic creature—one whose morphe (form) is theos—God encased within it. Having been created in the imago Dei, the image of God, all human beings have a God-shaped vacuum built into their hearts. Since nature abhors a vacuum, people keep trying to fill the one inside them. Searching for an image of the divine that will fit, they paw over various options as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, matching them successively to the gaping hole at the puzzle’s center. They keep doing this until the right “piece” is found. When it slips into place, life’s jigsaw puzzle is solved.
How so? Because the sight of the picture that then emerges is so commanding that it swings attention from the self who is viewing the picture to the picture itself. This epiphany, with its attendant ego-reduction, is salvation in the West and enlightenment in the East. The divine self-forgetfulness it accomplishes amounts to graduating from the human condition.”
--Huston
Smith, Why Religion Matters
To
live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of
our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden
of solitude. This requires not only courage but a strong faith.
As hard as it is to believe that the dry desolate desert can yield
endless varieties of flowers, it is equally hard to imagine that our loneliness
is hiding unknown beauty. The
movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual
life because it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit,
from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the
fearful clinging to the fearless play.
--Henri J.M. Nouwen, in Reaching Out