Mysia

“ There is always for the mystic the unmeasured immensity of soul land to explore, that Great Beyond and within which is infinite, eternal, and of which we are all a part.
Ah! but it may be said, all are not mystics, to which I would reply, all who desire can be mystics. For what, after all, is a mystic, but one who enters into possession of the inner life? One who becomes fully aware of her self-consciousness, and who gains thereby new faculties and enlightenment. ”

“ The mystic brushes aside that universe, even in its supernormal manifestations. Though he does not, as his enemies declare, neglect his duty to the many, his heart is always set upon the changeless One. This One is for the mystic, not merely the Reality of all that is, but also a living and personal Object of Love; never an object of exploration. It draws his whole being homeward, but always under the guidance of the heart. Living union with this One—which is the term of his adventure—is a definite state or form of enhanced life. ”

“ Now that simplifying act, which is the preliminary of all mystical experience, that gathering of the scattered bits of personality into the one which is really you--into the "unity of your spirit," as the mystics say--the great forces of love, beauty, wonder, grief, may do for you now and again. These lift you perforce from the consideration of the details to the contemplation of the All: turn you from the tidy world of image to the ineffable world of fact. But they are fleeting and ungovernable experiences, descending with dreadful violence on the soul. ”

“ They have roused the Dweller in the Innermost from its slumbers, and round it have unified their life. Heart, Reason, Will are there in full action, drawing their incentive not from the shadow-show of sense, but from the deeps of true Being; where a lamp is lit, and a consciousness awake, of which the sleepy crowd remains oblivious. He who says the mystic is but half a man, states the exact opposite of the truth. Only the mystic can be called a whole man, since in others half the powers of the self always sleep. This wholeness of experience is much insisted on by the mystics. ”

“ But Mysie and her fate would not be banished from his mind, and he lay and tumbled and tossed, a terrible anxiety within him, for youth is apt to pity its own sufferings, and give them a heroic touch under the spell of unrequited love. ”

“ Emerging from its hiddenness in the mystic, it gradually becomes the dominant factor in his life; subduing to its service, and enhancing by its saving contact with reality, those vital powers of love and will which we attribute to the heart, rather than those of mere reason and perception, which we attribute to the head. Under the spur of this love and will, the whole personality rises in the acts of contemplation and ecstasy to a level of consciousness at which it becomes aware of a new field of perception. ”

“ The dizzy elevation of the mystic produces sometimes a similar overweaning sense of personality.
Often instead of rising above the infirmities of our nature, and the common laws of life, the mystic becomes the sport of the idlest phantasy, the victim of the most humiliating reaction. The excited and overwrought temperament mistakes every vibration of the fevered nerves for a manifestation from without; as in the solitude, the silence, and the glare of a great desert, travellers have seemed to hear distinctly the church bells of their native village. ”

“ The statement is on the whole borne out by the few Lydian, Mysian and Carian words that have been preserved, as well as by the general character of the civilization prevailing among the three nations. The race was probably a mixed one, consisting of aborigines and Aryan immigrants. It was characterized by industry and a commercial spirit, and, before the Persian conquest, by bravery. The religion of the Lydians resembled that of the other civilized nations of Asia Minor. It was a nature worship, which at times became wild and sensuous. ”

“ The Mystic in his moment of enlightenment attains through the flux of his personality the realisation of oneness with the divine forces of the Universe.
To ordinary men and women, however, this mystical ecstasy is unknown, and the ordinary human consciousness is far more aware of its separateness than of its oneness with the vital forces of creation. Yet the glow of half swooning rapture in which the mystic's whole being melts and floats in the light of the divine force is paralleled in the rapture of lovers. ”

“ Is our straining after action and achievement to be relaxed while you relate the way in which Mystics reduced themselves to utter inactivity? While we are rejoicing in escape from superstitious twilight, is it well to recall from Limbo the phantasms of forgotten dreamers, and to people our sunshine with ghostly shadows? And since Mysticism is confessedly more or less a mistake, were it not better to point out to us, if you can, a something true and wise, rather than offer us your portrait of an exaggeration and a folly? ”

“ Reality has become real to him; and there are no others of whom we can fully say that. So, ordered correspondence with each level of existence, physical and spiritual, successive and eternal—a practical realization of the proportions of life—is the guarantee of the genuine character of that sublimation of consciousness which is called the mystic way; and this distinguishes it from the fantasies of psychic illness or the disguised self-indulgences of the dream-world. The real mystic is not a selfish visionary. ”

“ But alas, how tardily arises this new world of inner wonders! It must be accelerated—drawn up by some strong compelling charm. The doctrine of passivity becomes impossible to some temperaments beyond a certain pass. The enjoyments of the vision or the rapture are too few and far between—could they but be produced at will! Whether the mystic seeks the triumph of superhuman knowledge or that intoxication of the feeling which is to translate him to the upper world, after a while he craves a sign. ”

“ Life stretches that tentacle out, but she also draws it in again with the food that it has gathered, the news that it has to tell of the regions which its delicate tactile sense has enabled it to explore. This, it seems to me, is the function of the mystic consciousness in respect of the human race. ”

“ This tendency, in great mystics, gradually captures the whole field of consciousness; it dominates their life and, in the experience called "mystic union," attains its end. Whether that end be called the God of Christianity, the World-soul of Pantheism, the Absolute of Philosophy, the desire to attain it and the movement towards it--so long as this is a genuine life process and not an intellectual speculation--is the proper subject of mysticism. ”

“ The Mystic can face the future without fear, for the power has been given her to take her soul, and like a carrier dove, loose it into space, to speed away into the fathomless, the everlasting, the voiceless deep whose silence is the "Welcome Home" of God. ”

“ It is at least permissible to look upon the strange “psycho-physical” state common amongst the mystics as just such a rebellion on the part of a normal nervous and vascular system against the exigencies of a way of life to which it has not yet adjusted itself. ”

“ At one end of the scale, therefore, we have the so-called negative language of mysticism, which describes the supersensuous in paradox by refusing to describe it at all; by declaring that the entry of the soul upon spiritual experience is an entry into a Cloud of Unknowing, a nothing, a Divine Darkness, a fathomless abyss. The curious thing is, that though here, if anywhere, the mystic seems to keep his secret to himself, as a matter of fact it is just this sort of language which has been proved to possess the highest evocative power. ”

“ We take the observable fact in the rough, whether legitimate or not. Now, does not the believer, whatever his degree of culture, whatever his religion, at the moment when he feels the emotion, tremble, turn pale, exhibit the sacer horror, the overwhelming awe which may end in unconsciousness, the prostrate attitude? Have not the mystics over and over again described the violent disturbances which agitate them, the internal tempest which ravages them, till, calm being re-established, they express themselves in language frequently recalling that of sexual love? ”

“ You may remember our former sketch of the finite situation that sends us all alike looking for true Being. Data of experience, present facts, are on our hands, — colors, sounds, pains, passions. These are so far relatively immediate; in psychology we call them masses of sensation or of feeling; they are in general not wholly satisfactory, usually perplexing, often very tragic. The mystic would insist that for this very reason they are not wholly immediate. In our more clearly conscious moments they constantly stimulate us to think and to act. On the other hand, we have our ideas. ”

“ This sensation, which many people experience vaguely and intermittently, and especially at times of emotional exaltation, would seem to be the first glimmerings of that secret power which, with the mystics, is so finely developed and sustained that it becomes their definite faculty of vision. We have as yet no recognised name for this faculty, and it has been variously called "transcendental feeling," "imagination," "mystic reason," "cosmic consciousness," "divine sagacity," "ecstasy," or "vision," all these meaning the same thing. ”

“ More than the apprehension of God, then, more than the passion for the Absolute, is needed to make a mystic. These must be combined with an appropriate psychological make-up, with a nature capable of extraordinary concentration, an exalted moral emotion, a nervous organization of the artistic type. All these are necessary to the successful development of the mystic life process. In the experience of those mystics who have left us the records of their own lives, the successive stages of this life process are always traceable. ”

“ The weak and volatile nature is smitten, on a first interview with the mystics, with a rage for mysticism—is for turning mystic straightway, and is out of patience, for six weeks, with every other form of Christianity. The cold and proud nature scorns their ardour as a phantasy, and (to its own grievous injury) casts out the warmth they bring. ”

“ Now, this state of mind, in which a man is straining to see, thinks he sees, but does not see—in which a man is forced to construct thoughts out of presentations which befool and mock consciousness like will-o’-the-wisps or marsh vapours—in which a man fancies that he perceives inexplicable relations between distinct phenomena and ambiguous formless shadows—this is the condition of mind that is called Mysticism. ”

“ Who will not see that we have here no literary exercise, but the fruits of an experience of peculiar intensity? It answers exactly to one of the best modern definitions of mysticism as "in essence, the concentration of all the forces of the soul upon a supernatural Object, conceived and loved as a living Person." [161] "Love and desire," says the same critic, "are the fundamental necessities; and where they are absent man, even though he be a visionary, cannot be called a mystic." ”

“ This parallel is more than a pretty fancy: for mystic and lover, upon different planes, are alike responding to the call of the Spirit of Life. The language of human passion is tepid and insignificant beside the language in which the mystics try to tell the splendours of their love. They force upon the unprejudiced reader the conviction that they are dealing with an ardour far more burning for an Object far more real. ”

“ They are “in the hiddenness,” as Jacob Boehme would say. There they develop unchecked, until a point is reached at which their strength is such that they break their bounds and emerge into the conscious field: either temporarily dominating the subject as in ecstasy, or permanently transmuting the old self, as in the “unitive life.” The attainment of this point may be accelerated by processes which have always been known and valued by the mystics; and which tend to produce a state of consciousness classed by psychologists with dreams, reverie, and the results of hypnosis. ”

“ Certain processes, of which contemplation has been taken as a type, can so alter the state of consciousness as to permit the emergence of this deeper self; which, according as it enters more or less into the conscious life, makes man more or less a mystic. ”

“ That there is such a characteristic outlook, peculiar to no creed or race, is proved by the history of mysticism; which demonstrates plainly enough that in some men another sort of consciousness, another “sense,” may be liberated beyond the normal powers we have discussed. This “sense” has attachments at each point to emotion, to intellect, and to will. It can express itself under each of the aspects which these terms connote. Yet it differs from and transcends the emotional, intellectual, and volitional life of ordinary men. ”

“ Over and over again the great mystics tell us, not how they speculated, but how they acted. To them, the transition from the life of sense to the life of spirit is a formidable undertaking, which demands effort and constancy. ”

“ The mystics have never turned away: to do so would have seemed to them a self-destructive act. Here, in this world of illusion, they say, we have no continuing city. This statement, to you a proposition, is to us the central fact of life. ”