THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE -- A PSYCHOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW!

THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE -- A PSYCHOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW!
The Mystical Experience
A Psychological Point of View

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2005

Author’s Note: This was a presentation at an ESP Adventure Seminar, The Tides Bath Club, St. Petersburg, Florida 33711 on November 11, 1973.

You step off the curb and a speeding car misses hitting you by inches; a powerful current pulls you under in Tampa Bay, and you nearly drown, but are saved by your eight-year-old son whose rubber raft is there when you surface, although you had instructed him not to go into the deep water; you are working as a chemical engineer in a chemical plant when an electrical line malfunctions throwing you ten feet without injury; you complete a consulting call at a petrol-chemical plant and miss by minutes being one of more than a hundred causalities when multiple explosions rip through the facility; you are accosted early one morning in Washington, DC by three rowdy youths set to rob you, when they have a sudden change of mind; you have a head on collision with a van that totals your Oldsmobile, and sends you flying into the back seat, crushing your car like an accordion, presumed dead, emergency crews attend to the van driver who was thrown clear of his vehicle, when you suffered no serious injury, only shaken up; you are high-lined in a transfer basket between two ships in a storm and the crew on one ship loses the torque of its line, dumping you into the angry sea, but are pulled eventually to safety, drenched but unhurt; you are on another vessel that is quarantined because of an Asian flu epidemic being one of less than a hundred on a 1,400 man crew untouched by the disease and still able to work

To say these experiences have had a spiritual impact on me, who has experienced them, begs the question, but are they mystical experiences? I'll let you decide. This is obviously a Christian perspective. I suspect many readers may be more interested in the psychic or metaphysical, and therefore not highly tied to the Christian ethic. Others no doubt would still be Christian, but not traditionally so. The mystical experience has been recorded and related in all cultures from Chinese, Hindu, and Egyptian to the tribal cultures of the Indians of the Americas and the Eskimos. My purposes here are to develop a psychological point of view, and to do that effectively, I have taken the liberty to make it somewhat personal.

Mysticism is not the occult in my view but the patterns of enter light that guide one through situations that cannot be explained otherwise. Are they happy accidents or mystical experiences?

With regard to mysticism in particular and the occult in general, I am what you might call a non-believer. Yet, I'll admit there are supernormal situations and occurrences that cannot, or cannot yet be explained in normal terms, that have been known to occur. Mystics throughout history have recorded them. The Roman Catholic Church calls them "miracles."

Mysticism claims a direct communion with the ultimate reality, which we commonly call God. The occult, on the other hand, relates to matters involving actions or influences of supernatural or supernormal powers or some secret knowledge of them. I believe life is mysterious, but I am suspect of this premise.

Krishnamurti provides words to express my doubt:

“How easily we destroy the delicate sensitivity of our being. The incessant strife and struggle, the anxious escapes and fears, soon dull the mind and the heart; and the cunning mind quickly finds substitutes for the sensitivity of life. Amusements, family, politics, and gods take the place of clarity and love. Clarity is lost by knowledge and belief, and love by sensations.

“Does the tightly enclosing wall of belief bring understanding? What is the necessity of beliefs, and do they not darken the already crowded mind?

“The understanding of what is does not demand beliefs, but direct perception, which is to be directly aware without the interference of desire. It is desire that makes for confusion, and belief is the extension of desire. The ways of desire are subtle, and without understanding them belief only increases conflict, confusion and antagonism. The other name for belief is faith, and faith is also the refuge of desire.

“To most of us, life has no meaning but that which belief gives it; belief has greater significance than life.” (Commentaries on Living: First Series, pp. 55 – 56).

Why is that I wonder?

There are many mystifying things in life as I have already alluded to as possible “happy accidents.” The mystical experience is perhaps the most beautiful known to man. But what is it?

Paul the Apostle, the converted, the tortured saint was many things: gifted, sensuous and guilt ridden. You need only read his "Letters to the Corinthians" to register a sense of this. He was at a constant war with his own spirit and exorcised it in his zeal to build a church. His spirit was bound so tightly to him until it finally sublimated into mystical expression and charismatic passion.

To suggest that each of us goes through this same painful sublimation as well might seem a stretch if not sacrilegeous, but think about it.

All of us wrestle with needs, desires and wants. We run into a wall when needs are not realized, which is manifested as frustration. This may grow into anxiety. Anxiety can sink into depression and even despair. If not careful, petty neuroses can blossom into full-blown psychoses. We are fragile, but we are mystical in our fragility.

Some have found purification through the flesh. Others have realized purification by denial of the flesh. Paul chose the latter and grew. Augustine went the full route, first through the flesh and then through the flesh’s denial. Some of us cannot make up our minds which is right for us:

“If I must boast,” states Paul in Second Corinthians (Chapter 12: Versus 1 – 10), “it is not indeed expedient to do so, but I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago, whether in the body I do not know, or out of the body I do not know, God knows, such a one was caught up to the third heaven. And I know such a man, whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows, that he was caught up into paradise and heard secret words that man may not repeat. Of such a man I will boast, I shall not be foolish; for I shall be speaking the truth. But I forbear, lest any man should reckon me beyond what he sees in me or hears from me. And lest the greatness of the revelations should puff me up, there was given me a thorn for the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to buffet me. Concerning this I thrice besought the Lord that it might leave me. And he has said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for thee, for strength is made perfect in weakness.' Gladly, therefore, I will glory in my infirmities, that the strength of Christ may dwell in me. Wherefore I am satisfied, for Christ’s sake, with infirmities, with insults, with hardships, with persecutions, with distresses. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Paul found himself and in the finding discovered Jesus. And thus Jesus, who was an interesting man – I only wish we knew more about him for he was indeed a man of flesh and blood and sensuous form – was not allowed by tradition to be just that, a man.

Paul made Jesus into a mystical body by the sublimation of his spirit through transubstantiation into the body, and blood of Christ. This Christian dogma relates to the elements of bread and wine being transformed by God’s power into the substance of the body and blood of Jesus Christ by priestly consecration in the mass.

I am a Roman Catholic reared in this ritualistic tradition from a very early age with its dogmas stenciled on my soul with little chance of thinking otherwise. Doubters don’t buy this believing that one can reprogram oneself with little difficulty. It has been my experience the more one tries to deprogram oneself the deeper it drives the conundrum into one’s soul. Now, in my mature years, I have come to accept my Catholicism, renegade that I am, as much a part of my flesh and blood as I am a part of it. Moreover, I have come to accept that I have a Catholic mind and am a Catholic writer with all the limitations and possibilities that that might suggest.

Jesus is not as real to me in a mystical sense (body of Christ) as he is in a historic sense (as a man), ironically, largely because of the very human letters of Paul. Dogma and belief remain obstacles to this human foundation, as do the Catholic walls of guilt anchored in Paul’s salesmanship of sin. His great talent was not originality of design, but that of taking the words of the Old and New Testament and making them his own.

The only sin I know is waste, any kind of waste. Mortal sin, venial sin, original sin are constructs of this saintly architect. Still, were it not for sin and guilt, which consumed men such as Paul, they would not be nearly as fascinating.

The “happy accidents” reported in my opening remarks were not mystical experiences in the sense that they were surpranormal, but rather fortuitous to the extreme. Point taken.

A common mystical experience is psycho-sensual and psychosexual in nature. Consider how much the dance of life consumes our spiritual drive in out-of-body experience by entering that of another in pleasure and creation. Without this mysticism, where would poetry and literature be, indeed, all the arts? Mystics, as I hope to show, were no strangers to this duality.

It was the fall of the year and everything was dying, and no place more serenely so than in the quiet sanctuary of a cemetery. Here the stillness of eternity was my audience, with the ghosts of my ancestors in attendance. You could feel the moon caress the earth; hear the wind whisper through the grass as you made love for the first time.

She was young, as was I, virgins that didn’t understand how sacred the church we were entering was and would be for the rest of our lives. Was it love, or lust, need or desire, pleasure or pain? Or was it what the Greeks called aphesis, “the letting go”?

For the briefest of mystical moments the self is forgotten, dies, and is reborn in love. Just as the mystical experience cannot be sustained by hysteria neither can the act of love be sustained by the physical expression of it.

Not long ago I gave a seminar on humanistic management for a corporation. Management, pleased with the results, celebrated it by having a dinner for the hundred participants and their mates. Sitting beside the CEO, he asked, “Were my people responsive to your efforts?” I am one of those people you don’t ask a question if you are not prepared for the answer.

“Well,” I said levelly, “some of them came fresh out of the shower, naked; others never took off their overcoats in the summer’s heat.”

Then smiling to myself, remembering certain characters, I continued, “Some in fact put overcoats over their overcoats. But I suspect the naked ones learned something new, discovered something they will find useful.”

Pausing to study his expression, I could imagine he was doing the math of how much this outing cost, I added, “It has been my experience that if twenty percent of a group are learners and not simply knowers you are ahead of the curve.”

It was not what he expected nor was he happy with my assessment. I would imagine human resources led him to believe the seminar was a resounding success. All he wanted was a polite confirmation that justified the expense of the venture, which was in the five figures.

Clearly, the CEO was a member of the overcoat brigade. When you already know, already believe, and already understand, how can you discover anything new?

Now, the mystics of the past, who saw into themselves and found self-forgetfulness and called it “God,” were experiencing love, and were naked to experience.

We are enjoying a form of collective communion, whereas the mystics often preferred to find theirs alone, sublimating human need for affirmation and confirmation on a higher astral plane. The wonder is how little different their experience is to ours. Paul Zweig writes:

“To mount to God is to enter into oneself. For he who inwardly entereth and intimately penetrateth into himself gets above and beyond himself and truly mounts up to God.” (The Heresy of Self-Love, p. 23)

These are the words of an Arab mystic which are analogous to intercourse with self and invite wondering.

Augustine, in the Ninth Book of his Confessions echoes these sentiments:

”The good, which I now sought, was not outside myself. I did not look for it in things, which are seen with the eyes of the flesh but the light of the sun. For those who try to find joy in things outside themselves easily vanish away into emptiness. They waste themselves on the temporal pleasures of the visible world. Their minds are starved and they nibble at empty shadows.”

Augustine was very much a man of the flesh. When his ardor had cooled, he became a man of God. He never saw God as the Christ. He always referred to God as the Light.

There are two distinct but complementary currents in Christian feelings and worship. One is directed towards God, the Eternal and Infinite Spirit; the other towards His incarnate revelation in Jesus Christ.

In technical language, there are three different ways in which God is so called. There is the theo-centric or God centered. God is realized under more or less impersonal symbols such as Light and Love. Then there is the Christo-centric or Christ centered. Here the mystic senses a direct personal communion with Our Lord. And finally, there is the phallic-centric or life centered. The latter has risen to some distinction as we have become increasingly self-indulgent and puerile in our obsession with the sensate.

The mystic Catherine of Siena (1347 – 1380) would have understood this struggle. For her, God was a pull between a life-centered need and a Christ-centered desire. She chronicled this in her “Mystical Marriage with Christ.” Here she candidly described her spiritual intercourse with Christ. Today, that might offend people inasmuch as Catherine had an orgiastic experience with Christ. Yet, her experience if the truth were known is as painfully true today for many who struggle on the horns of this dilemma.

My first real experience in mysticism was making love. Since then, I have found there are many ways of making love other than physical. All the mystics had an interest in it: St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Bernard, Eckhard, Tauler, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, and Madame Acarie, and Boehme. I had the good fortune to read of these mystical saints as a boy, and found they all had love affairs with an idea or ideal.

Many of us have similar love affairs with ideas. Is it because we are afraid to have love affairs with something real? Do ideas keep us protected from confrontation with reality?

Is the occult world the world of ideas or is it beyond such a world? People who take the occult seriously, and many do, would appear to live in the world beyond the real. Others attempt to find something they already possess and cannot lose. Alan W. Watts likens this to operating in life as if we have our foot on the accelerator and brake at once burning up rubber and going nowhere, while William F. Buckley, Jr. simply calls it, “forward inertia.”

With all due respect, I am a skeptic that flip-flops through these worlds celebrating my ignorance. I have found the only way to unshackle my mind from thinking I know is to realize I know nothing; that life is a rehearsal for the game of eternity, and I am involved in this rehearsal and cannot escape the game.

We all know this, as Paul would say, in the body or out of the body, I do not know, God knows.

There is no need for me to confirm this because you already think it yourself. You think it in the shower, when you’re playing solitaire, when you’re pulling weeds in your garden, when you’re doing something that puts your mind on automatic pilot. I think the shower is the best place in the world for your muses to visit you. The second best place is taking a leisurely stroll through the neighborhood.

As you are cleaning your body, or walking the frustration out of your limbs, your soul comes clean in the process and clears your mind of detritus. Ever noticed that?

As you look in the mirror, drying yourself, truth smiles back at you in good humor. All our blemishes fail to diminish us, but tickle our spines. So, you have sag here, and a bulge there, clothing is the mirror’s way to cover our vanity, as knowledge and belief are the mind’s way to cover our ignorance.

The wonder is why we don’t see ordinary people as mystics, people such as the NFL player Joe Namath. He seems unafraid to live in the real world and to take it for what it is, which in my view is truly a mystical experience. I don’t know Joe Namath, might not like him, but it wouldn’t seem to matter to him because he likes himself, and celebrates life in his own inimitable way. It would seem he has experiences, mystical and otherwise, on terms that are real to him.

Chances are he has not read Gurdjieff, but he doesn’t have to. Gurdjieff writes:

“The sole means now for saving of the beings of the planet earth would be to implant again into their presence a new organ of such properties that everyone of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them” (All and Everything: First Series – Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, p. 1183)

Gurdjieff, strangely enough, could write this and still not live it. He was another of the occult world who could not or would not “let go.” He talked incessantly about “self-remembering” instead of “self-forgetting” (which is love). Self-remembering is of course just the opposite of love. Still, Gurdjieff had a great following and has risen to a new prominence today.

I think Gurdjieff and the occult have had a revival because “self-hatred” appears rampant in our society. The occult exists in a secret world well above the petty games of survival. Gurdjieff made a wonder of himself in this world untouched by the common.

Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous” deifies Gurdjieff, while Gurdjieff adds to his own mystical reputation in “Meetings of Remarkable Men.” You get the same sense of wonder about this man in Thomas de Hartmann’s “Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff,” and Fritz Peters’s “Gurdjieff Remembered.”

No doubt Gurdjieff was a clever man. He picked the esoteric brains of the best minds in the occult world such as Ouspensky, de Hartmann, and Osokin, and made a reputation for daring with their words echoing as his. To wit:

“Everything that people do is connected with sex: politics, religion, art, the theater, music is all sex. Do you think people go to the theater or to church to pray or to see some new play? That is only for the sake of appearance. The principal thing in the theater as well as in church is that there will be a lot of women or a lot of men. This is the center of gravity of all gatherings.” (Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, p. 254)

Ouspensky puts these words in the mouth of Gurdjieff sounding all the while the more like Ouspensky. The others do the same.

We are all vulnerable to the mystical, to the idea that someone else embodies the answers to our destiny that we cannot seem to discover ourselves.

We project on others degrees of knowing and wisdom, degrees of understanding and insight that escape our attention. We are all looking for a savior, someone that will lead us out of the dark forest of our confusion and loneliness; if not that, someone to quiet our pain and reassure us of our worth.

Some look for it in the bottle, others in psychedelic drugs, still others in sexual conquests, some in achievment, power and influence, and then, of course, those that are most vulnerable of all, in a mystical guru.

A young woman came to me after a seminar. Very attractive, she told me she was twenty-six, divorced, mother of a little girl, and then went on to describe her life and woes in the most intimate details. She went on and on until I finally said, “Why?”

The question startled her. “Why? I don’t understand.”

“Why me?”

“Well, it’s because you seem to have answers.”

“Thank you,” I replied with a smile, “but I don’t.” Disappointment masked her face. “What you are looking for,” I continued, “you will never find in me or anyone else. You are looking for a teacher, a guide, may I say it, a guru, perhaps even a messiah.”

She started to raise her hands in protest. “Please, hear me out,” I said quietly, “I’ve been there. It is not an easy place to be when you are fresh out of answers and it seems people with answers are all around you.

“You find yourself looking for a book, an idea, a belief, a church, something that will end your doubt and bring you back to yourself with a sense of peace. It is perhaps why I am here tonight sharing with you my take on the mystical experience. I am older than you are and if I have discovered anything it is this: what you are looking for is not out there, it is in here,” I said pointing to my heart, “and it is waiting for you to discover it. I don’t have it. You have it and you cannot lose it.”

Tears rolled down her eyes. She took out a Kleenex and wiped them with the tissue turning black with mascara. She forced a smile through the tears, “I can’t lose it, right?”

“Right!” I repeated.

I hope she found it. She didn’t return to the balance of the seminar.

Later, I walked into a session conducted by Helmi (Indian Medicine Woman) and made instant communion. I felt her in the most exquisite way. She gave me such exuberance, such joy. This thing lasted all evening until a person who was very unhappy with life tried to ram into my car as I was parking at a restaurant. When I got to the front door, there he was looking defiantly at me. I expected an apology so I suppose my look was no less defiant.

“What’s your problem, Mac,” he said.

“Don’t you know?” I answered.

“No idea.”

“You. You’re my problem.”

About that time, a policeman who witnessed the situation joined us. “Is this fellow bothering you?” he asked me.

“No, officer. He’s just a little surly,” I said not wanting to make any trouble.

“I’m what?” my surly friend said.

In the most uncharitable manner, I said, “Want me to define the word surly for you?”

There we were, the officer, the angry man, and me in all my pomposity. The fine state that Helmi’s presentation had warmed my spirit to had left me. If only that young lady had seen her guru now!

We flow in and out of trouble, in and out of highs and lows, in and out of joys and sorrows. The mind and experience meet and repeat the same natural phenomenon as if children of the moon with the rising and lowering tide. Then unexpected storms crash into our world and all semblances of order and control vanish as if they never existed.

I felt poorly the rest of the evening for how I treated that man. All the esteem that young lady had heaped upon me, and then reinforced by Helmi’s session, was flittered away. My mind flows like a river because life is a river. I wrote this poem to express this sense a long time ago:

Ever moving ever changing ever enchanting ever vexing
Forging through space climbing to mountains and sky cascading unto parch earth and green valleys
Growing muddy and putrefying every decaying ever stinking ever polluting ever stagnating
Becoming clear lucid pure sparkling happy invigorating refreshing
Gravitating from frigidity coldness coolness to comfort warmth hotness incontinent heat
Exploding particulate matter into flotsam and jetsam
Exposing arrogance aloofness stupidity affection flippancy irrationality
Bringing peace satisfaction power convenience temporality
Surrendering solace fulfillment tranquility transcendence essence
Experimenting with fear hate envy lust greed deceit pleasure courage happiness music
Searching for valor love hope beauty charity faith kindness caring
Creating chaos by raging abandoning destroying disfiguring lying distorting scarring killing
Inundating indiscriminately presumptively
Every singing ever praising ever soothing ever titillating ever mesmerizing ever enticing ever fantasizing ever duping ever using ever toying
Offering to play pray sport escape entertain travel dream nourish know see think feel
Making love laughter music war hate peace tomorrow
Causing growth atrophy health debility inspiration apathy discovery disillusionment
Establishing order by producing reproducing transforming transplanting transmutating transmigrating transmitting transmogrifying
Ever balancing ever imbalancing ever taking ever giving
Emulsifying demulsifying foaming defoaming coagulating dispersing scaling softening corroding electroplating sequestering precipitating hurting helping killing saving losing winning hating loving bombing building destroying remaking upsetting stabilizing confusing elucidating excoriating nurturing acidizing neutralizing beginning ending coloring decoloring oxidizing reducing liquefying solidifying catabolizing fermenting

Influent to
Effluent from

Nunc fluens of time
Tota simul of eternity

Being born existing living dying
Being buried

Eons after eons after eons

Without a rhyme or reason for
Without a known fons et origo or a fathomable terminus

With only a promised promise promised

Transporting this fragile tissue hope mankind by a swift noiseless pulling mysterious gentle ceaseless subtle mighty treacherous conflicting fascinating sweeping force

With an irresistible current

Carrying all to a sea of light or a sea of doubt [© James R. Fisher, Jr., October 1969]

Life is not a box. It has no beginning, middle or end. It is not a set of definitions, problems and situations. It is not a concept, not a simple handle or a complex abstraction. It is simply a river and we are all on it.

Edgar Cayce, dear friend of my uncle’s, Dr. Leonard M. Ekland, a noted psychologist in his own right, once told him that there is no system but only this river. It has taken me a good while to grasp this fact.

“Watergate” is an interesting word. It dates back to biblical times and has come to mean something totally different from what it is.

A Watergate is not an office complex, nor is it a gate for preventing the flow of water, but simply a gate preventing animals from going upstream. The present dilemma of our society makes watergate an interesting metaphor.

We have failed to see the river for what it is. Or for that matter, we have failed to see the gate for what it is not.

There is a Zen saying, “You cannot push the water.” This matches life is a river. So, what does this all have to do with the topic of mystical experience? Eric Hoffer says:

“Man’s thoughts and imaginings are the music drawn from the taut strings of the soul. The stretching of the soul that produces music is the result of a pull of opposites, opposite bents, attachments, yearnings. Where there is no polarity, where energies flow smoothly in one direction, there can be hustle and noise but no music.” (Calvin Tomkins, Eric Hoffer, An American Odyssey)

The mystical experience is all about tension that produces music. Instead, we have a society today that generates little music, but a great deal of noise. This is not stated for spite, but for the way it is at the moment on the river of life.

Mystics cannot save us from ourselves, reveal truths that only they possess, but they can enrich our illusions. One of the amazing things of life is that what is real is always simple. It is “we” who make it complex:

“That in living life, and wondering about life, and thinking about life, if you are lucky, you will discover some truth. And once you tell your truth to someone else that truth will become a lie because your truth is only true to you and none other.” (JRF, Fragments of a Philosophy)

Psychologists call this perception, while in mysticism it is called apperception. There is first the apprehension of the message, which comes to us from the outside world, and then there are the ideas, images and memories already present in our minds. The environment, then, of the mystic is carried into his truth.

When the mystic writes about truth, if he is a cobbler, he writes in the mystical expression of the cobbler, like Boehme did. If he is the son of an aristocrat and soldier, he writes of his mystical experience like Ignatius Loyola did. Loyola was a physical man with a fragile sense of machismo and so saw his redeemer as “that most powerful Wrestler, our boundless God,” reasoning that he must first wrestle with himself to obtain salvation. The order of the Jesuits, then, was meant to be “Soldiers of Christ.” Loyola was sort of a Norman Mailer of the Middle Ages.

It is the reason I stated in the beginning that I have a Catholic mind and am a Catholic writer. My ideas and reasoning grow out of that experience.

If you happen to be a person without roots, like Kahlil Gibran, your whole life is a river. The character of your mysticism is then an expression of the passing scenery envisioned on that journey. Read any of his works and you get a sense of this: “Life is love made visible as is all work an expression of love.”

Krishnamurti, too, essentially adopted by a rich woman, educated and then meant to be deified into heading a new theosophy, which he rejected, said, “There is no race, there is no religion, there is no system that you can use to discover truth. There is no method, there is no teacher. Truth is only discovered by you.”

He appears to be speaking to us but at the same time he is speaking to himself in all his gusto as he fought his whole life to escape the imprisonment of the devotion of others.

The only way you can discover truth is by being aware of yourself as you are, and others as you find them. That means accepting what you see for what it is and isn’t, no more, no less. For in seeing things as they are, there is no longer conflict but truth, and the joy of that truth is peace.

Simple, isn’t it? Then why do so few practice it? Or if they do, would we ever know? If they tell us, they have discovered truth then it is a lie.

One of the surprises when people study the great mystics is to realize that many of them were not very holy people, that they were physical, perhaps even immoral people. Listen to the words of Angela of Foligno:

“Being the while full of greediness, gluttony and drunkenness, I feigned to desire naught, save what was needful. I diligently made an outward show of being poor, but caused many sheets and coverings to be put where I lay down to sleep, and to be taken up in the morning so that none might see them. I was given over to pride and the devil, but I feigned to have God in my soul, and His consolation in my chamber, whereas I had the devil alike in my soul and my chamber. And know that during the whole of my life, I have studied how I might obtain the fame of sanctity.” (Evelyn Underhill, The Mystics of the Church, p. 101)

Now why is that? Why do we equate mysticism with morality? Morality is in the mind of the times, and it is sometimes quite unholy, as in our present age, virtue is often hard to come by.

Morality changes as it moves down the river. The candor of the mystic, Angela, lost in the wake of her confession, stirs us not.

Today, they are all holy, all apart from our earthily ways: St. Angela of Foligno, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Ignatius Loyola, John Duns Scotus, St. Francis of Assisi, and Madame Acarie. They worked hard on their own histories to become saintly. They went against the flow of the river, and fought nature to become good. But is this the lesson we want to learn from them about ourselves?

Eastern mystics as compared to Western mystics arrive at holiness without effort as they have learned to let go and to go with the flow.

Eastern mystics are not interested in becoming for to them holiness is already possessed by us, only waiting for us to recognize it in us. They remind us that there is no effort involved because what we already have we cannot lose. So, the way to see into things is not through effort but in being, something so easy that we cannot do it.

Krisnamurti reminds us that religion is not a church, but awareness of what is, which is reality.

Awareness is the key to everything, but we place so many obstacles in the way of it that we equate intelligence with someone with a great deal of information, when all this reflects is a constipated mind.

If we could wake up long enough from this sleep to see things as they are, we wouldn’t have to have so many dog and pony shows to entertain us. Of course, we like dog and pony shows, and hide and seek games, and all the other elaborate constructions of society that obstruct our vision. We don't want to see; we seek entertainment, not enlightenment; mysticism, not reality; religion, not education.

We want an edge, a religion of haves pitted against the have nots; an elite, occult, true believers, possessors in a world of the dispossessed. We see the world of losers apart from ourselves; the forfeiters bankrupt from we the solvent, lower animals dumb and needy while we scorn their limitations against our sagacity. Is there any wonder why we are disillusioned?

When I was young and very believing and very pure, I was very much afraid. I wrote mainly about and out of fear. I had been very successful but had little understanding why until I wrote a book, which became an international best seller in the selling profession (Confident Selling 1970). Fear, I came to understand, was not apart from me but flowed in my veins and was the source of my motivation.

When I understood this, fear left me while still being a part of me. Fear was always there but it did not get in the way. Fear no longer was a stranger to me. I still had fears, doubts and misgivings. I still encountered obstacles and barriers that frustrated and thwarted me. I still had unfulfilled needs, wants and desires. Yet, once fear became a companion to me, it no longer was my enemy. Fear retired to the shadows of my mind, but kept me alert to possible dangers, which is its primitive role in Nature.

Now in my thirties, I have had a remarkable career yet I am very average. This is neither false modesty nor humility speaking. It is the voice of awareness.

This voice has risen out of my spirit, not out of books. We have had a spate of tantalizing books – “The Games People Play.” “What Do You Say After You Say, Hello?” “I’m OK – You’re OK!” “What You Always Wanted To Know About Sex and Were Afraid To Ask.” “Transactional Analysis.” “Biofeedback.” “Alpha Potential.” – all meant to cure the disease while feeding it.

People don’t actually need a teacher or a book to tell them what they are much less how they are. They need only pay attention.

If you have ever notice, the people with the most hang-ups cling to their fears as possessively as if they were lovers. The last thing they want to get rid of is fear. What would they have to talk about? They read every book that comes down the pike that gives them a new fix on their fear, and a new vocabulary to express it to friends.

At the moment, it would seem our entertainment is self-remembering, not self-forgetting. It is all about self-hatred. We are much more comfortable expressing what is wrong with us rather than what is right about us; much more inclined to complain than to celebrate our good fortune; much more afraid when the other shoe will fall. We can handle failure far better than success, disaster far better than good fortune.

Alas, there is no handle, no theory, and no concept that will free us from ourselves except ourselves. A student says to me, “But this is so abstract. I need something concrete. I can’t use what you say. It is too flighty. I can’t put it together.”

I answer, “Can you feel my words?”

“Yes, I can feel them.”

“Then they are yours, not mine. Don’t try to understand me because feelings drive consciousness. Feelings are all that there is to being human when it comes to dealing with our fears.“

Intellect has the tendency to complex the simple into a quadratic equation of confusion. Facts have their place, of course, but facts cannot explain fears. If you can deal with your fears on a simple mystical plane, fine. But if you have to soar to astral planes, and some people prefer this, I think you will have robbed yourself of the full appreciation of the scenery along this river called life.

You have plenty of time to play these astral games when you leave life and return to eternity. Life is only a short visitation from your permanent home. Too many very bright people are afraid to experience life because they don’t think it deserves their efforts, or it is below their station. Intelligence is a gift and it is not personal. People should not treat it as if it belongs to them because it is so acutely present in them. It is something to be used in the service of others, and not hoarded as a miser might his gold.

Life is not fair and some people go from birth to death never knowing what it is to have the comfort of a full meal, soft bed or safe resting place.

Then there are those who have too many full meals, too soft a bed, and too much rest and still wait for life to provide them with what they want when they cannot define it themselves. They sit and wait to die for 50, 60, 70 or more years. They play martyr games for entertainment, telling anyone who will listen how bad they have it. They devour ideas and beliefs as they come down the pike. They divorce themselves from life and try to re-remember what it was like back home in eternity.

In an unpublished novel of mine, I describe such a person:

"Harry felt nothing toward them. Nor did he feel anything for his country, the state of the world, the state of the human race, for his wife, Sarah, his son, Timothy, or for the state of his mind. He was beyond feeling, detached from human sensation, by choice. He was not pro or anti social, or for or against anything or anybody. Nor was he a deist, atheist, or agnostic. He was beyond such definitions as enigmatic as an amoeba. He was in life but not of life.

"Then it happened! The eye saw the eye and knew itself. The soul looked into the soul and moved to another plane of being. In that instant, Harry understood all knowing, seeing the most complex products of man’s genius as simple toys of vanity, thinking in the seeing that nothing is more nor less than unity, that ego is a myth invented by man as companion to his soul. People paraded pass the eye and all were familiar and known, the most humble were the same as the most elevated, as was race the same, as was wealth the same, as was the most dastardly the same as the most saintly, as were the birds of the air and the crawling creatures of the land the same, as were the species that fly the same as those that swam the deep, as were all things the same. Harry was one with himself and with his universe. He had left his home but he was still at home."(James R. Fisher, Jr., © The Triple Foole)

To such an end, I wish you all the happiest of mystical experiences.

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© November 11, 1973; © November 28, 2005
posted by The Peripatetic Philosopher | 2:10 PM
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