These past few weeks, I’ve been reading Evelyn Underhill, The Brilliant British Poet And Mystic. I read her when I first came to the mountain on the hill with two dogs, and now, even though she’s been dead for many years, she has my attention again. She is one of the best writers on spirituality, mysticism, and the power of meditation; she was a mentor to me.
She helped me pursue a spiritual life in her books, and now I’m turning to her again to understand the mysticism I sometimes feel and the “reality” that so often fails me.
At the beginning of this week, I was told—we all were—that we were on the edge of an Apocalypse – rich people were losing money.
Money finally got our society’s attention; suffering was ignored, as always. We moved on to something else two days later, and life continued.
It’s challenging to know what reality is or to embrace it. Mysticism is the reality of one’s self, the only reality we can know. Go into yourself, she said. Reality is on the inside, not outside
My assistant…
This paragraph below meant a lot to me then and now; it’s about mysticism and the meaning of turning inward and meditating.
“You are not to fall into the clumsy effort,” she wrote, “of supposing that the things beyond the grasp of reason are necessary unreasonable things.” Immediate feeling, so far as it is true, transcends the highest results of thought.” I had not only fallen into it, I realized, but I was choking in it.
She predicted that in the preliminary but essential act of gathering myself for meditation and in those explorations through myself, “You come to a knowing and a feeling of yourself as you are.” You keep a realistic understanding of the world and the mystical world of feeling.
But the mystical always ends with feelings, no matter where she or she begins. One has to learn with the other; no one can completely hide from reality. I learned about feeling in my meditation, which was not a clumsy attempt to stay within the grasp of reason and the things I could see.
In this meditation, Underhill wrote, “The powers of analysis, criticism, and dedication found work that they could do.” But now, she wrote, it is the love and will—the feeling, the intent, the passionate desire—of the self that will govern our activities and make our success possible.
Few people, she cautioned, would brave the difficulties of a courtship conducted strictly along intellectual lines. Contemplation – meditation – is the act of love, the wooing, not the critical study of reality.
