How can we see mysticism playing out in everyday life?

Today’s Post

For the past several weeks we have been addressing the venerable topic of ‘mysticism’ from the perspective of ‘The Secular Side of God’.  This perspective has led to the suggestion that mysticism occurs as a natural part of human life.  We are all mystics when we begin to accept our intuition as simply a way to peer into the indeterminate space between what we know empirically and what exists outside ourselves that is yet to be known.

This week, we will pursue such activity by looking at common examples of such mysticism.

Everyday Mysticism  
Western religion has done a disservice by evolving from the deeply experienced closeness to the divine that was so prized in the early church, to the dogmatic practice of hierarchically- imposed rituals that was common at the turn of the twentieth century.  This regrettable trend was resisted by the Church ‘Mothers and Fathers’, the ‘great mystics’ of Christianity, but they, too also left an unfortunate model for those who followed.  With their distancing from mainstream life, they also modelled the belief that life as commonly lived was not compatible with true spiritual life.  Their duality of ‘sacred’ vs ‘profane’ has persisted to this day.
These mystics, of course, certainly delved into the same ‘liminal space’ that we have been exploring. With their intense and highly focused gaze, what they saw clearly caused them to experience very profound, even ecstatic, feelings of closeness with the divine.  It has fallen to the modern mystics, such as Thomas Merton and Teilhard de Chardin to carry the practice of mysticism outward, in which it could lead to, as Teilhard puts it, “a clearer disclosure of God in the world.”
Life as it is lived is more commonly lived in such a way which does not permit a ‘turning from the world’, and mystics such as Teilhard suggest a ‘turning to the world’ as a path to spiritual growth.  One step along such a path is to recognize how our minds employ a ‘secular mysticism’ in the living of our lives.

The most common human practice that touches on mysticism is, or course, the arts.  To the person who learns to attune their senses to the ‘liminal space’ within us, a painting, a passage of poetry or a melody will result in an ineffable resonance within us.  The cosmic sadness of Albinoni’s adagio or the leap of joy from Beethoven’s Pastorale as we accompany his experience of the “Awakening of happy feelings on arrival in the country”.  Or the frizzon of dread as we watch McBeth march to his doom; that of terror as we hear the tinkling of bells as Montressor is bricked up in Poe’s ‘Cask of Amontillado’; the wistfulness of Wyeth’s ‘Christina’s World’.  All evidence of an inner sense that cannot articulate itself, and of the human skill of “making eternal the desperately fleeting moment” (Tennessee Williams),

But this inner sense comes into play in many more seemingly mundane ways.  Even with art, to some extent and for some small expenditure of time, a ‘turning away from the world’ is necessary.  What about the mysticism in the everyday encounters with life?

If we accept that the idea that peering into ‘liminal space’ is a general approach to mysticism, we should be able to see it at work in life beyond the emotions induced by such stimuli as art.  Teilhard proposes a more immediate, while less emotionally resonant, activity when he observes “the burst of intuition upon a pile of facts”.  Put this way, we are immersed in such mysticism as we live our lives.

Articulating Everyday Mysticism

One of the ways that mysticism can be seen as active in human thinking is the ‘footprint’.  From time immemorial, humans have had to live with the consequences of their actions.  Almost every decision precipitates an unintended consequence, and preparing for the unexpected is a skill necessary for not our own life, but for our evolution as a species as well.

Take the example of ‘fuel’ that we addressed as we looked at Norberg’s nine examples of evolution in human life.  There we traced the evolution of fuel as humans have used it in their ‘fix-break-fix’ process.  We noted how problems relating to earlier solutions to the need for energy led to better solutions but often incurred unintended consequences.  Here, we take note of how the understanding of such consequences and the planning for mitigating them has continued to widen as we have evolved to the present day.  The web of logistics, extraction of raw materials, environmental and economic impacts and many other aspects has become increasingly complex as the world’s need for energy has increased while natural materials are seen to decrease.  The ‘footprint’ associated with each new arrival of an energy source has increased even as the ability of the new sources has expanded to meet ever increasing needs.  The ‘next generation’ of sources of energy, such as solar, wind and nuclear power, and perhaps hydrogen engines, all come with their need for a wider and more complex matrix of causes and effects.

What is common to each round of the ‘fix-break-fix’ cycle is not only the increase in size of the ‘footprint’ that is required to make it happen, but more importantly our ability to better understand and prepare for consequences.  Such vision is yet another example of ‘peering into the liminal space’ that lies between our legacy grasp of the situation and a fuller realization of the consequences of any invention and improvement.
With the incessant barrage of ‘news’ that inundates us daily, we are confronted with a similar problem.  How to put it all into a clear perspective, to form a conclusion and choose a reaction?  The ‘footprint’ is active here as well.  A skill of ‘listening’ and ‘seeing’ is vital to our psychological well being if we are going to swim in such turgid waters.

Next Week

This week we began to carry our look into mysticism into not only how it can be seen in the natural current of human life but also of our need for it.

Next week we will take a look at how the principles of secular mysticism play out in daily human life.

As the depth of mystical insight increases, the scope widens

Today’s Post

     Last week we explored how Teilhard’s approach to mysticism moves it from the ‘ecstatic experience of a person removed from the pedestrian vagaries of ‘normal’ life’ to that which can be seen as simply the practice of clarifying our vision of ‘life as it is lived’.

This week we will explore this new facet a little further, recognizing that as our mysticism seeks a deeper understanding of life, this depth also offers a ‘wider’ field of view of reality.

Wider Vision

While ‘grounding’ mysticism by way of empirical resonance and balancing emotions is necessary for such clearer vision, the ‘field of view’ of the mystical sight must also increase to take in a more complete grasp of what is being seen.  Once again, the ‘evolutionary hermeneutic’ comes into play.  Whatever is seen is lodged in ‘spectra’.  Examples of such spectra are categories of ‘past and future’, ‘cause and effect’, and ‘precedent and consequence’.

Our human evolution clearly moves forward in a trial-and-error process, as we saw in addressing the risks of human evolution.  Despite its fragility and all the attendant danger, it is full of examples of improvements to our welfare that occur once causes of problems are more clearly understood and consequences more completely anticipated.  The improvements which emerge from these ‘fix-break-fix’ cycles can objectively be seen to emerge, as we saw in looking at how evolution works in the human species.  Norberg’s articulation of nine areas of human evolution not only show progress in human welfare, but they also show examples of how human society has better learned from its past while it is getting better at planning for its future.

How does this aspect of mysticism play out at the personal level?  Obviously, most actions that we take are preceded by our memory of the consequences of similar past actions, and anticipation of the consequences that can be expected.  Teilhard recommends that we always attempt the widest possible perspective on any situation which faces us.  His ‘widest’ perspective was ‘evolution’.

“Evolution: a theory, a system, a hypothesis? Not at all, but much more than that, a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems, must henceforth bow and satisfy if they are to be thinkable and true. A light illuminating all facts, a curve all lines must follow.”

This perspective plays out in our personal level, as he writes,

“..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   Such a grand vision, one with no less than a ‘field of view’ of the entire cosmos and its awesome depth of time, must be approached incrementally.  How can this be done?

The Widening of Vision

A very practical first step to understanding reality is to see it as an evolution by which we, and our surroundings, are being carried in a current towards the future.  Seeing it from this perspective is to begin seeing everything in terms of its predecessor and its successor.  Teilhard saw this particular context as essential to understanding anything.  He gives the example of the ‘cell’:

“…the cell, like everything else in the world, cannot be understood (ie incorporated in a coherent system of the universe) unless we situate it on an evolutionary line between a past and a future”

 Rohr notes how Bonaventure sees this as a step toward seeing God more clearly in life.

“Unless we are able to view things in terms of how they originate, how they are to return to their end, and how God shines forth in them, we will not be able to understand.”

   Such an insight, in addition to the better ‘seeing’ that it affords, also moves us to Teilhard’s second step of ‘fuller being’.  Rohr goes on to note that

“Bonaventure’s theology is never about trying to placate a distant or angry God, earn forgiveness, or find some abstract theory of justification. He is all cosmic optimism and hope! Once we lost this kind of mysticism, Christianity became preoccupied with fear, unworthiness, and guilt much more than being included in–and delighting in–an all-pervasive plan that is already in place.”

He goes on to say

“If we had listened to Bonaventure, he could have helped us move beyond the negative notion of history being a “fall from grace” and invited us into a positive notion of history as a slow but real transformation and emergence/evolution into ever-greater consciousness of who we eternally are in God. Bonaventure began with original blessing instead of original sin, and he ended where he began.”

   Bonaventure’s essential first step of mysticism also includes an example of what can be seen by applying it.  Bonaventure, as read by Rohr, understands that human evolution, and hence our personal spiritual evolution, is less a ‘fall’ from an initial perfection to a current state of imperfection, but more a ‘rise’ to a ‘fuller’ state.  Seeing it this way leads us to the understanding that we are heirs to a potentiality which is gratuitously granted us by the nature of our evolutionary process (Rohr’s ‘all pervasive plan’).  We are not, as Luther asserted, “piles of excrement” requiring Jesus’ sacrifice (or, as Luther put it, ‘covering by Christ’) but sparks of consciousness requiring more complete understanding of our innate goodness.

Next Week

This week we extended our look at ‘secular mysticism’ to the recognition of how the deepening of mysticism can lead to a broadening of its ‘field of view’

Next week we will look at a few examples of how ‘secular mysticism’ pervades everyday life.

Living a life more open to the forces of evolution which can bring us to ‘fuller being’

Today’s Post

     Last week we explored how Teilhard’s mysticism was grounded in the objective findings of science.  His unique perspective on science, without diminishing the significance of its findings, opened a fresh and new perspective on the teachings of religion without diminishing its insights into the human person.  This significant step towards a non-dualistic approach to reality brings a new facet of mysticism into focus.

This week we will explore this new facet.

Practical Mysticism

Teilhard’s approach to ‘making sense of things’ extends the traditional religious concept of ‘mysticism’ by recognizing its need for a ‘grounding’ by empirical thought.  Such grounding provides the intuitional imagination a natural step toward a clearer concept of objective reality.  In doing so, he introduced yet another insight into the evolutionary value of ‘thinking with the whole brain’.

The shift from understanding mysticism as a privileged ecstatic experience of a person removed from the pedestrian vagaries of ‘normal’ life can be seen as simply seeing it as the practice of learning to see ‘life as it is lived’.    Such clearer vision permits us to see reality, as Hopkins put it, as ‘charged with the grandeur of God’.

Richard Rohr opens this door with his ‘simple’ recognition of how Francis of Assisi understood mysticism:

“Francis of Assisi knew that the finite manifests the infinite, and the physical is the doorway to the spiritual. If we can accept this foundational principle we call “incarnation,” then all we need is right here and right now—in this world. This is the way to that! Heaven includes earth and earth includes heaven. There are not sacred and profane things, places, and moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places, and moments—and it is we alone who desecrate them by our lack of insight and reverence. It is one sacred universe, and we are all a part of it. In terms of a spiritual vision, we really cannot get any better or simpler than that.”

   If a critical facet of mysticism is simply recognizing the presence of such ‘incarnational’ threads in our lives, then the key skill required by mysticism is learning to see its fullness in the fullest way.

In his masterful work, “The Phenomenon of Man”, Teilhard asserts that the most important skill that we can develop is such ‘seeing’.

“Seeing.  We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb- if not ultimately, at least essentially.  Fuller being is closer union: such is the kernel and conclusion of this book.  But let us emphasize the point: union increases only through an increase in consciousness.  And that doubtless is why the history of the living world can be summarised as the elaboration of every more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen”.

   In this passage, he introduces his insight that for us to become fuller, to develop our potential for ‘person-ness’, we must become closer, and to become closer we must become more completely what we are capable of becoming.  He expresses this dyadic action in his insight that

“Fuller being comes from closer union, and closer union results from fuller being.”

   The essentials of our “increase in consciousness”, both in our growth as individual persons and our evolution as a species, are reflected in this succinct statement.  And he reflects the key activity, the “essence of the whole of life”, in the action of ‘seeing’.  We can paraphrase Teilhard’s statement about being and union with one that relates seeing to being:

“Clearer sight from fuller being, and fuller being from clearer sight.”

   Certainly, this would seem to be the case for our traditional mystics, that as our vision becomes more complete, we experience a ‘fullness’.

Robert Wright relates ‘seeing’ to ‘meditation’ in his book, “Why Buddhism is True”.  Meditation, in Wright’s view, is not a metaphysical route toward a higher plane.  It is a cognitive practice of self-exploration that underlines what contemporary psychology already knows to be true about the mind. ”

“According to Buddhist philosophy, both the problems we call therapeutical and the problems we call spiritual are a product of not seeing things clearly.  What’s more, in both cases this failure to see things clearly is in part a product of being misled by feelings.  And the first step toward seeing through these feelings is seeing them in the first place- becoming aware of how pervasively and subtly feelings influence our thought and behavior”

   Wright offers another aspect of such ‘practical mysticism’, the placing of our emotions into the appropriate context.  To him, it’s less ‘overcoming emotions’ than objectively recognizing the part that they have played in our process of ‘seeing’.

Next Week

This week we have continued our exploration of mysticism into the realm of practicality.  Having seen several perspectives on this slippery subject, we can begin to see it as a natural human practice that helps us to gain a clearer view of ourselves in a world more clearly seen.

Next week we will address still another facet of such ‘mysticism’, that of ‘scope’.