How is mysticism a key to the continuation of human evolution?
Today’s Post
Last week we continued our look into Cynthis Bourgeault’s insights into ‘enstasy’, and saw examples of it in scripture and in the works of Elaine Pagels. This week we will look into how mysticism can be seen in both our ‘personization’ and in the continued flow of human evolution.
The Mystical Role in Personization
We have seen how Teilhard understands the progress of universal evolution as captured in the process of ‘complexification’. He further sees this process leading to the emergence of ‘personization’ as he sees the ‘reflexive consciousness’ of the human as the point of greatest complexity reached thus far. To Teilhard, not only does ‘true union differentiate’, and ‘fuller being result from closer union while closer union results from fuller being’, but that in these recursive dances the continuous rise of complexity takes on the unique aspect of ‘personness’. What role can mysticism be seen to play in this unfolding?
As we have seen frequently thus far, Teilhard exemplified the enstatic mode, continuously weaving the profound insights of Christianity into a common cloth with the profound insights of Science. As we saw above, Cynthia Bourgeault, who introduced the concept of enstacy to our conversation, showed how Teilhard’s insights into the evolutionary foundation of the human person led to his insights on the uniqueness of the person. She also noted the potential danger of the other face of the ‘liminal space’.
“Teilhard’s evolutionary vision is profoundly enstatic. He fought ecstasy all his life- the siren call, as he took it, of the Asian traditions to dissolve into the One, to fund union at the point of undifferentiated simplicity.”
She notes elsewhere that ecstasy and enstacy are not necessarily opposites but work differently in the human person. In the traditional treatment of ecstasy, the person is pulled away from Teilhard’s psychism in order to come into contact with what is most real within us. In the great stories of Christian mysticism, the mystic’s first step is to pull away from the trappings of society. Some see this happening in the early days of the church as the ‘Desert Mothers and Fathers’ sought to escape the hierarchical church’s need for orthodoxy. But no matter what the cause, the mystical life was a clear ‘siren call’ from the depths of the soul.
Teilhard’s concept of the psychism, on the other hand, recognizes that we can be called into fuller being as we undergo closer union. Teilhard, reflected in Bourgeault’s development, notes that both enstasy and ecstasy require a ‘peering into liminal space’ for the vision that can move us to fuller being, but it is only the translation of the inner sight into fuller articulation that causes this to happen.
It should be noted that the great mystics often return from their ecstatic visions with such articulations. For example, we saw above Hildegard’s understanding that her visions were instances of a natural human capability of ‘resonance’ with the divine.
When we explore this resonance, we are peering into the liminal space between what we know and what is real, by seeking what is still left to be understood. To the extent that we understand, we activate our potential not only to understand more fully, but to become fuller ourselves. Such mysticism is not only an aspect of the potential by which we become more fully what we can be, but by which the evolution of our species becomes more fully resonant with its environment.
Not only are the things we see in liminal space yet to be understood, they are potentials yet to be actualized. Thus, when we look into liminal space, it can be said that we are looking into the future.
As we have explored it here, mysticism is simply a skill which is, as Audre Lorde put it in her poem “The Unsayable’
“…the way we give names to the nameless so it can be thought.”
Giving the ‘nameless’ a name so that it can be thought is bringing an intuition into the empirical state in which it can be objectively considered. An insight into the future thus becomes a tangible way of preparing for it. Seen from the perspective that we have been developing, mysticism can be seen as the building of planks to be installed on the bridge that we are building to the future.
Next Week
This week we began to address mysticism as a skill which is required to move into the future. It is a key evolutionary skill, without which human evolution would simply be replaced by an endless repetition of replication followed by decay. (Indeed, as we have seen, many materialists consider this to be exactly what is happening.)
Next week we will take yet another look at human history to see how it shows the slow increase in the ‘skill of mysticism’ at work in the building of our bridge to the future.