Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People — John Shaqi
Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal PeopleUnderhill, Evelyn
Religion
Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People
Underhill, Evelyn
Mysticism
That great thinker and ecstatic said, that all human personality
was thus two-fold: thus capable of correspondence with two
orders of existence. The "higher life" was always tending towards
union with Reality; towards the gathering of it self up into One.
The "lower life," framed for correspondence with the outward
world of multiplicity, was always tending to fall downwards, and
fritter the powers of the self among external things. This is but a
restatement, in terms of practical existence, of the fact which
Recollection brought home to us: that the human self is
transitional, neither angel nor animal, capable of living towards
either Eternity or Time. But it is one thing to frame beautiful
theories on these subjects: another when the unresolved dualism
of your own personality (though you may not give it this
high-sounding name) becomes the main fact of consciousness,
perpetually reasserts itself as a vital problem, and refuses to take
academic rank.
This state of things means the acute discomfort which ensues on
being pulled two ways at once. The uneasy swaying of attention
between two incompatible ideals, the alternating conviction that
there is something wrong, perverse, poisonous, about life as you
have always lived it, and something hopelessly ethereal about the
life which your innermost inhabitant wants to live--these
disagreeable sensations grow stronger and stronger. First one and
then the other asserts itself. You fluctuate miserably between
their attractions and their claims; and will have no peace until
these claims have been met, and the apparent opposition between
them resolved. You are sure now that there is another, more
durable and more "reasonable," life possible to the human
consciousness than that on which it usually spends itself. But it is
also clear to you that you must yourself be something more, or
other, than you are now, if you are to achieve this life, dwell in it,
and breathe its air. You have had in your brief spells of
recollection a first quick vision of that plane of being which
Augustine called "the land of peace," the "beauty old and new."
You know for evermore that it exists: that the real thing within
yourself belongs to it, might live in it, is being all the time invited
and enticed to it. You begin, in fact, to feel and know in every
fibre of your being the mystical need of "union with Reality"; and
to realise that the natural scene which you have accepted so
trustfully cannot provide the correspondences toward which you
are stretching out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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