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.