Chapter 1 Section 4: The Mystic Way
[p. 47] As in those who pass through the normal stages of bodily and mental development, so in those who tread this Mystic Way — though the outward circumstances of their lives may differ widely — we always see the same thing happening, the same sort of growth taking place.[1]
The American psychologist, Dr Stanley Hall, has pointed out [2] that as the human embryo was said by the earlier evolutionists to recapitualte in the course of its development the history of ascending life, to the point at which it touches humanity — presenting us, as it were, month by month, with plastic sketches of the types by which it had passed — so the child and youth do really continue that history; exhibiting stage by stage dim and shadowy pictures of the progress of humanity itself.
Thus, the vigorous period of childhood from eight to twelve years of age, with its practical outdoor interests and instinct for adventure, represents a distinct stage in human evolution; the making of "primitive" man, a srong intelligent animal, utterly individualistic, wholly [p.48] concentrated on the will to live. In the formation of the next type, which isnthe work of the adolescent period, we see reproduced before us one of nature's "fresh starts"; the spontaneous development of a new species, by no means logically deducible from the well adapted animal that preceded it. Much that characterised the child-species is now destroyed; new qualities develop amidst psychic and physical disturbance, "a new wave of vitality" [3] lifts the individual to fresh levels. a veritable new birth takes place.
[Here EU lays out what seems to me the key difference in our approach to this area of experience, and this difference can be clearly seen in our choice of metaphor to contain the experience. I have chosen the parable of the prodigal son, with the outward and homeward journeys of the prodigal carrying the structure of the growth of mystical consciousness. One direction, a natural consequence of the Fall, is abandoned as bankrupt, as the other is taken up. One is the way of power, the other is the way of surrender. They are incompatible. I signal a total change of direction, a movement, first away from God, and then a return.
EU chooses the metaphor of development and growth, from childhood to adolescence. Spiritual awakening and growth is a natural (if not easily predictable) outgrowth and development of, not an abandonment of, ordinary consciousness. Which take is ultimately most profitable, I have yet to determine, but I feel the difference is critical to other areas of disagreement with EU, especially in her somewhat disparaging account of Oriental mysticism which in many ways, with its doctrine of maya, or illusion, is closer to my take. DCW]
Normal human adolescence is thus "an age of all-sided and saltatory development, when new traits, powers, faculties and dimensions, which have nop other nascent period, arise". [4] It is not merely deduced from the childhood which preceded it: it is one of life's creative epochs, when the creature finds itself re-endowed with energy of a new and higher type, and the Ego acquires a fresh centre. "In some respects early adolescence is thus the infancy of man's higher nature, when he receives from the great all-mother his last capital of energy and evolutionary momentum".[5] "Psychic adolescence," says this same authority, "is heralded by all-sided mobilisation." As the child, so again the normal adult; each represents "a terminal stage of human development". Each is well-adjusted to his habitual environment; and were adaptation to such environment indeed the "object" of the life spirit, the experience of "the boy who never grew up" might well be the experience of the race.. But ascending life cannot rest in old victories. "At dawning adolescence this old unit and harmony with nature is broken up; the child is driven from his paradise and must enter upon a long viaticum of ascent, must conquer a higher kingdom of man for himself, break out a new sphere and evolve a more modern storey to his psycho-physical nature. [p.49] Because his environment is to be far more complex, the combinations are less stable, the ascent less easy and secure ... New dangers threaten o all sides. It is the most critical stage of life, because failure to mount almost always means retrogression, degeneracy or fall."[6]
In the making of spiritual man, that "new creature", we seem to see this process aghain repeated. he is the "third race" of humanity; as the Romans, with their instinct for realism, called in fact the Christian type when first it arose amongst them.[7] Another wave of vitality now rolls up from the deeps with its "dower of energy"; another stage in life's ascent is attacked. Mind goes back into the melting pot, that fresh powers and faculties may be born. The true mystic is indeed the adolescent of the Infinite; for he looks forward during the greater part of his career — that "long viaticum of ascent towards a higher kingdom" — to a future condition of maturity. From first to last he exhibits all the characteristics of youth; never loses — as that arrested thing, the normal adult, must — the freshness of his reactions on the world. He has the spontaneity, the responsiveness, the instability of youth; experiences all its struggles and astonishments. He is swept by exalted feeling, is capable of exalted vision and quixotic adventure: there is "colour in his soul".
As with adolescent of the physical order, the mystic's entrance on this state, this new life — however long and carefully prepared by the steady pressure of that transcendant side of nature we call "grace", and by his own interior tendency or "love", — yet seems when it happens to be cataclysmic and abrupt; abrupt as birth, since it always means the induction of consciousness into an order previously unknown. The elan vital is orientated in a new direction: begins the hard work of cutting a fresh [p.50] path. At once, with its first movement, new levels of reality are disclosed, a transformation both in the object and in the intensity of feeling takes place. The self moves in both an inner and an outer "world unrealised".
As the self-expression of the Divine Life in the world conforms to a rhythm too great for us to grasp, so that its manifestation appears to us erratic and unprepared; so it is with the self-expression, the emergence into the field of consciousness, of that fontal life of man which we have called the soul's spark or seed, which takes place in the spiritual adolescence. This emergence is seldom understood by the self in relation with life as a whole. It seems to him a separate gift, or "grace" infused from without rather than developed from within. It startles him by its suddenness; the gladness, awe and exultation which it brings: an emotional inflorescence, parallel with that which announces the birth of perfect human love. This moment is the spiritual springtime. It comes, like the winds of March, full of natural wonder; and gives to all who experience it a participation in the deathless magic of eternal springs. An enhanced vitality, a wonderful sense of power and joyful apprehension as towards worlds before ignored or unknown, floods the consciousness. Life is raised to a higher degree of tension than ever before; and therefore to a higher perception of Reality. [Still haven't got a handle on the "tension". DCW]
"O glory of the lighted mind.
How dead I'd been, how dumb, how blind.
The station brook, to my new eyes,
Was bubbling out of Paradise,
The waters rushing from the rain
Were singing Christ is risen again.
I thought all earthly creatures knelt
From rapture of the joy I felt. the narrow station-walls brick ledge,
The wild hop withering in the hedge,
The lights in huntsman's upper storey,
Were parts of an eternal glory,[p.51]
Were God's eternal garden flowers.
I stood in bliss at this for hours." [8]
The exaltation of Saul Kane, the converted poacher, here breaks into an expression which could be parallelled by many a saint. By the unknown poet of the "Odes of Solomon" crying, "Everything became like a relic of Thyself, and a memorial forever of Thy faithful works." [9] By Angela of Foligno, to whom as she climbed the narrow pathway from the vale of Spello to Assisi, and looked at the vineyards on either hand, the Holy Spirit perpetually said, "Look and see! This is my creation"; so that suddenly the sight of these natural things filled her with ineffable delight. [10] By St Teresa, who was much helped in the beginning of her spiritual life by looking at fields, water and flowers; for "In them I saw traces of the Creator — I mean that the sight of these things was as a book unto me." [11] By George Fox, to whom at the time of his first mystic illuminations , "all creation gave another smell beyond what words can utter". [12] By Brother Lawrence receiving from the leafless tree, "a high view of the providence and power of God." [13] By the Sufi; for whom "when the mystery of the essence of being has been revealed to him, the furnace of the world becomes transformed into a garden of flowers," so that "the adept sees the almond through the envelope of its shell; and no longer beholding himself, perceives only his Friend; in all that he sees, beholding his face, in every atom perceiving the whole". [14] All these have experienced an abrupt access of divine vitality, rolling up [p.52] they know not whence; breaking old barriers, overflowing the limits of old conceptions, changing their rhythm of receptivity, the quality of their attention to life. they are regenerate; entinctured and fertilised by somewhat not themselves. Hence, together with this new power pouring in on them, they receive new messages of wonder and beauty from the external world. New born, they stand here at the threshold of illimitable experiences, in which life's powers of ecstacy and of endurance, of love and of pain, shall be exploited to the full.
This change of consciousness, this conversion, most often happens at one of two periods: at the height of normal adolescence, about eighteen years of age before the crystallising action of maturity has begun; or, in the case of those finer spirits who have carried into manhood the adolescent faculties of growth and response, at the attainment of full maturity, about thirty years of age. [15] It may, however, happen at any time; for it is but an expression of that life which is "movement itself". During epochs of great mystical activity, such as that which marked the "apostolic age" of Christianity, the diffused impulse to transcendance — a veritable "wind of the spirit", — stimulates to new life all it finds in its way. [Note again the reference to an intelligent force acting on and through physical matter. DCW] The ordinary laws of growth are then suspended; and minds in every stage of development are invaded by the flooding tide of the spiritual consciousness.
The stages of growth which follow are well known to mystical and ascetic literature. Here conditions of stress and of attainment. each so acutely felt as to constitute [p.53] states of pain and pleasure, alternate with one another — sometimes rapidly, sometimes in long, slow rhythms — until the new life aimed at is at last established and a state of equilibrium is assured. First after the joy of "Rebirth" there comes a period of difficult growth and effort; the hard and painful readjustment to a new order, the "long viaticum of ascent" in which the developing soul re-makes its inner world. All that helps life to move in the new direction must now be established. The angle of the mental blinkers must be altered, attention focussed on the new outlook. All that holds the self back to a racial past, the allurements of which have now become a retarding influence or "sin" must be renounced. [This association of sin — that which separates one from God — and tribal loyalties is the essence of Carolyn Myss teaching, and part of my own belief structure, though I would include the conventional Church as one of the tribes concerned, which EU does not. In seeking security or knowledge or power for oneself or one's tribe, however defined, we are sinning. DCW] This process, in its countless forms, is Purgation. Here it is inevitable that there should be much struggle, difficulty, actual pain. Man, hampered by by strong powers and instincts well adapted to the life he is leaving, is candidate for a new and higher career to which he is not yet fully adapted. Hence the need for that asceticism , the training of the athlete, which every race and creed has adopted as the necessary preliminary of the mystic life.. The period of transition, the rearrangement of life, must include something equivalent to the irksome discipline of the schoolroom; to the deliberate curbing of wild instincts long enjoyed. [One may perhaps be forgiven for wondering occasionally which wild instincts EU identified in herself, and the extent to which sailing and motorcycling were involved. DCW] It is in fact a period of education, of leading forth: in which much that gave zest to his old life is taken away, and much that is necesary to the new life poured upon him through his opening faculties, though in a form which he cannot yet enjoy or understand.
Next, the period of education completed, and those new powers or virtues which are the "ornaments of the spiritual marriage" put on, the trained and purified consciousness emerges into that clear view of Reality in which it lives and moves, which is known sometimes as the "practice of the Presence of God"; or, more generally, as Illumination. "Grace", the transcendant [p.54] life force, surges up ever stronger from the deeps — "wells up within like a fountain of the spirit",[16] — forming new habits of attention and response in respect of the supernal world. The faculty of contemplation may now develop, new powers are born, the passion of love os disciplined and enhanced. Though this stage of growth is called by the old writers on mysticism, "the state proper to those that be in progress", it seems in the competeness of its adaptation to environment to mark a 'terminal point' of spiritual development — one of the halts in the upward march of the soul — and does in fact mark it for many an individual life, which never moves beyond this level of reality. Yet it is no blind alley, but lies upon the highway of life's ascent to God. In the symbolic language of the Sufis, it is the Tavern, where the pilgrim rests and is refreshed by "the draught of Divine Love": storing up the momentum necessary for the next "saltatory development" of life.
True to that strange principle of oscillation and instability, keeping the growing consciousness swinging between states of pleasure and states of pain — which seems, so far as our perception goes, to govern the mystery of growth — this development, when it comes, destroys the state which preceded it as completely as the ending of childhood destroys the harmonious universe of the child. Strange cravings which it cannot understand now invade the growing self: the languor and gloom, the upheavals and loss of equilibrium, which adolescents know so well. Like the young of civilised man, here, spiritual man is "reduced back to a state of nature, so far as some of the highest faculties are concerned, again helpless, in need not only of guidance, but of shelter and protection. His knowledge of self is less adequate, and he must slowly work out his salvation." [17] [p.55] This is the period of spiritual confusion and impotence, the last drastic purification of the whole character, the re-making of personality in accordance with the demands of the transcendant sphere, which is called by some mystics the Dark Night of the Soul, by others the "spiritual death" or "purgation of the will". Whatever the psychological causes which produce it, all mystics agree that this state constitutes a supreme moral crisis, in which the soul is finally cleansed of all attachments to selfhood, and utterly surrendered to the purposes of the Divine Life. Spiritual man is driven from his old paradise, enters on a new period of struggle, must evolve "another storey to his soul".
The result of this pain and effort is the introduction of the transmuted self into that state of Union, or complete harmony with the divine, towards which it had tended from the first: a state of equilibrium, of enhanced vitality and freeedom, in which the spirit is at last full grown and capable of performing the supreme function of maturity — giving birth to new spiritual life. Here man indeed receives his last and greatest "dower of vitality and momentum"; for he is now an inheritor of the Universal Life, a "partaker of the Divine Nature". [18] "My life shall be a real life being wholly full of Thee."
"Mankind, like water fowl, are sprung from the sea —the sea of the soul;
Risen from that sea, why should the bird make here his home?
Nay, we are pearls in that sea, therein we all abide;
Else why does wave follow wave from the the sea of soul?
'Tis the time of union's attainment, 'tis the time of eternity's beauty,
'Tis the time of favour and largesse, 'tis the ocean of perfect purity.
The billow of largess hath appeared, the thunder of the sea hath arrived,
The morn of blessedness hath dawned. Morn? No, 'tis the light of God" [19]
Now it is exactly this growth in vitality, this [p.56] appropriation of the "billow of largesse" — called by her theologians "prevenient grace", — which Christianity holds out as the ideal, not only of the religious aristocrat, but of all mankind. It is a growth which goes the whole way from "earth" to "heaven", from the human to the divine; and may as easily be demonstrated by the processes of psychology as by the doctrines of religion. At once "natural" and "supernatural" it tends as much to the kind of energy called active as to the other, rarer kind of energy called contemplative. "Primarily a life of pure inwardness, its conquests are in the invisible; but since it represents the life of the All, so far as man is able to attain that Life, it must show resulkts in the All." [20] Its end is the attainment of that "kingdom" which it is the one business of Christianity to proclaim.. She enshrined the story of this growth in her liturgy, she has always demanded it in its intensest form from all her saints, she trains to it every novice in her religious orders — more, every Christian in the world to whom his faith means more than assent to a series of credal definitions. As we shall see, when she asks the neophyte to "imitate Christ" she is implicitly asking him to set in hand this organic process of growth. Whether the resultant charcter tends most to contemplation or to action will depend on individual temperament. In either case it will be a character of a mystical tyupe; for its reaction upon life will be conditioned by the fact that it is a partaker of Reality.
If the theory wehich is here outlined be accepted, it will followthat Christianity cannot be understood apart from the psychological process which it induces in those who receive it in its fulness. Hence the only interpreters of Christian doctrine to whose judgement we are bound to submit will be those in whom this process of development has taken place; who are proved to have followed [p.57] "the Mystic Way", attained that consciousness, that independent spiritual life which alone is really Christian, and therefore know the realities of which they speak. Thus not only St Paul and the writer of the Fourth Gospel, but also St Macarius or St Augustine will become for us "inspired" in this sense. So, too, will later interpreters, later exhibitors in this new direction of life: the great mystics of the mediaeval period. Those who lived the life outside the fold will also help us — Plotinus, the Sufis, Blake. "My teaching is not mine, but His that sent me: if any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the teaching." [21]
"Just as we cannot obtain," says Harnack, " a complete knowledge of a tree without regarding not only its root and stem, but also its bark, its branches and the way in which it blooms, so we cannot form any right estimate of the Christian religion unless we take our stand upon a comprehensive induction that shall cover all the facts of its history. It is true that Christianity has had its classical epoch; nay, more, it had a Founder who Himself was what He taught — to steep ourselves in Him is still the chief matter; but to restrict ourselves to Him means to take a point of view to low for His significance. ... He had His eye on man, in whatever external situation he might be found — upon man, who fundamentally always remains the same."[22] Man, the thoroughfare of Life upon her upward pilgrimage; self-creative, susceptible of freedom, able to breathe the atmosphere of Reality, to attain consciousness here and now of the Spiritual World.
Notes
1. I have discussed the stages of this growth in detail elsewhere (Mysticism: a Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness, 4th edition, 1912, Pt II.). The biographies of numerous mystics exhibit them with great clearness; particularly the Blessed Angela of Foligno, Visionum et Instructionum Liber; Suso, Leben; St Catherine of Genoa, Vita; St Teresa, Vida; Madame Guyon, Vie par Elle-meme; and other records to which reference will be made in the course of this present work.
2. In Adolescence: its Psychology, etc., 2 vols. New York, 1904.
3. ibid., Vol I. p. 308.
4. ibid., Vol I. p 47.
5. ibid., Vol II. p 71.
6. ibid., Vol II. p 71.
7. Cf. Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity, Vol I. pp 300 - 352, where numerous examples are given.
8. Masefield, The Everlasting Mercy, p. 97.
9. Ode XI. (Harris' edition, p. 105).
10. Visionum et Instructionum Liber, cap. 20.
11. Vida, cap. ix. 6.
12. Journal, Vol. I. cap. 2.
13. The Practice of the Presence of God, p. 9.
14. 'Attar, The Seven Valleys.
15. St Francis of Assisi, Suso, Madame Guyon, Richard Jefferies, are examples of the first class; St Augustine, Angela of Foligno, St Ignatius, St Teresa, Pascal, of the second. It almost seems as though there were mutation periods in the history of man not unlike those of which de Vries claims that he has demonstrated the existence in the history of plants (cf. Die Mutationstheorie). After a periodof stability and rest, the unstable "tendency to variation" breaks out with enormous force.
16. Ruysbroeck, L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles, Lib II. cap. 3.
17. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, Vol II, p. 71.
18. 2 Peter i. 4.
19. Jelalu d'Din, Divan, (Nicholson's trans., p. 35).
20. Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p. 457.
21. John vii. 7
22. Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums, pp 7, 11 (Eng trans., pp 11, 17).
[ "faculties" It is worth taking a little trouble here to establish exactly what EU intended to convey by this term, for I believe it is not what is commonly understood today by the term, but a clearly defined concept in the context of a particular school of contemporary psychology. DCW]
