Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal PeopleUnderhill, Evelyn
Religion
Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People
Underhill, Evelyn
Mysticism
A subtle interpenetration of your spirit with the spirit of those
"unseen existences," now so deeply and thrillingly felt by you,
will take place. Old barriers will vanish: and you will become
aware that St. Francis was accurate as well as charming when he
spoke of Brother Wind and Sister Water; and that Stevenson was
obviously right when he said, that since:
"The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we ought all to be happy as kings."
Those glad and vivid "things" will speak to you. They will offer you
news at least as definite and credible as that which the paper-boy
is hawking in the street: direct messages from that Beauty
which the artist reports at best at second hand. Because of your
new sensitiveness, anthems will be heard of you from every
gutter; poems of intolerable loveliness will bud for you on every
weed. Best and greatest, your fellowmen will shine for you with
new significance and light. Humility and awe will be evoked in
you by the beautiful and patient figures of the poor, their long
dumb heroisms, their willing acceptance of the burden of life. All
the various members of the human group, the little children and
the aged, those who stand for energy, those dedicated to skill, to
thought, to plainest service, or to prayer, will have for you fresh
vivid significance, be felt as part of your own wider being. All
adventurous endeavours, all splendour of pain and all beauty of
play--more, that grey unceasing effort of existence which makes
up the groundwork of the social web, and the ineffective hopes,
enthusiasms, and loves which transfuse it--all these will be seen
and felt by you at last as full of glory, full of meaning; for you
will see them with innocent, attentive, disinterested eyes, feel
them as infinitely significant and adorable parts of the
Transcendent Whole in which you also are immersed.
This discovery of your fraternal link with all living things, this
down-sinking of your arrogant personality into the great generous
stream of life, marks an important stage in your apprehension of
that Science of Love which contemplation is to teach. You are
not to confuse it with pretty fancies about nature, such as all
imaginative persons enjoy; still less, with a self-conscious and
deliberate humanitarianism. It is a veritable condition of
awareness; a direct perception, not an opinion or an idea. For
those who attain it, the span of the senses is extended. These live
in a world which is lit with an intenser light; has, as George Fox
insisted, "another smell than before." They hear all about them
the delicate music of growth, and see the "new colour" of which
the mystics speak.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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