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Stages of Mysticism: a synopsis of Evelyn Underhill's Practical Mysticism (Part Two)

1/21/2017

 
This post continues the discussion from Part One. 

Chapter Four: Meditation and Recollection

Continuing along the mystical path laid out my Underhill, this chapter dives deeply into the practice of training our attention, or Recollection.

Underhill defines Recollection as “the subjection of the attention to the control of the will.” It begins with the “deliberate and regular practice of meditation.” There is nothing special, according to her, about disciplining our consciousness: “The real mystical life,” she says, “which is the truly practical life, begins at the beginning; not with supernatural acts and ecstatic apprehensions, but with the normal faculties of the normal man.” It is something that everyone must do if they “would get control of their own mental processes.” She then lays out the process of training our attention.


In describing meditation she says, “Take, then, an idea, an object, from amongst the common stock, and hold it before your mind.” And as with all guidance to beginning meditators, she warns that this is not nearly as easy as it sounds: “But, the choice made, it must be held and defended during the time of meditation against all invasions from without, however insidious their encroachments, however ‘spiritual’ their disguise. It must be brooded upon, gazed at, seized again and again, as distractions seem to snatch it from your grasp.”

Eventually, through this act of focusing, we begin to merge with our object of meditation, to “sink as it were into the deeps of it, rest in it, ‘unite’ with it.”


“Moreover,” she goes on, “as your meditation becomes deeper it will defend you from the perpetual assaults of the outer world. . . .  And gradually, you will come to be aware of an entity, a
You, who can thus hold at arm’s length, be aware of, look at, an idea—a universe—other than itself.” And finally, in Recollection, you “turn this purified and universalised gaze back upon yourself.”

So here’s the process:


Step one: First we are to devote our attention to, meditate on, an object to such an extent that we are no longer aware of where our consciousness ends and the object begins.


Step two: We abide, protected from the world, in this meditative state.


Step three: Eventually, we discover an awareness outside of our ordinary consciousness, a witness that stands outside of our personal whims.


Step four: We turn this new found awareness back upon the personality and are able to witness our self.


For Underhill, this is just the beginning, the initial training of consciousness at the outset of the mystical path:


“So doing patiently, day after day, constantly recapturing the vagrant attention, ever renewing the struggle for simplicity of sight, you will at last discover that there is something within you—something behind the fractious, conflicting life of desire—which you can recollect, gather up, make effective for new life. You will, in fact, know your own soul for the first time: and learn that there is a sense in which this real
You is distinct from, an alien within, the world in which you find yourself, as an actor has another life when he is not on the stage. When you do not merely believe this but know it; when you have achieved this power of withdrawing  yourself, of making this first crude distinction between appearance and reality, the initial stage of the contemplative life has been won.”

However, this trick of consciousness is nothing in itself. It takes the addition of Purgation and a loving disposition to continue down the path.

​Chapter 5: Self-Adjustment

​Just training our attention is not enough because the act of seeing ourselves through this disinterested or detached awareness reveals an inevitable conflict between our new understanding and our “old habits, old notions, old prejudices.”

Once we get our first glimpse of Reality, “Never again,” Underhill tells us, “need those moralists point out to you the inherent silliness of your earnest pursuit of impermanent things: your solemn concentration upon the game of getting on.”

But just seeing this truth is not enough. She assures us that we will backslide without self-discipline. Having recognized the fallacy of our old perceptions of what is real and important, we have to make systemic changes. This “drastic remodeling of character” is called Purgation, and it is “the second stage in the training of the human consciousness for participation in Reality.”

Purgation itself has two components: detachment and mortification. According to Underhill, detachment means stepping away from three very ingrained behaviors. It is “the refusal to anchor yourself in material things, to regard existence from the personal standpoint, or confuse custom with necessity.” And mortification is “the resolving of the turbulent whirlpools and currents of your own conflicting passions, interests, desire; the killing out of all those tendencies which the peaceful vision of Recollection would condemn, and which create the fundamental opposition between your interior and exterior life.”

As we see here, for Underhill, morality is more than just choosing to follow a set of rules. It is a question of our fundamental disposition. She points to one character trait as the most in need of adjustment: “You are enslaved by the verb ‘to have.’”

“The very mainspring of your activity is a demand, either for a continued possession of that which you have, or for something which as yet you have not: wealth, honour, success, social position, love, friendship, comfort, amusement. You feel that you have a right to some of these things: to a certain recognition of your powers, a certain immunity from failure or humiliation.”

But holding these beliefs keeps us from experiencing Reality: “So long as these dispositions govern character we can never see or feel things as they are.”

The answer, the path forward, is one of expanding our capacity for detachment, which Underhill does not see as cold or hard hearted, but as characterized by a compassionate recognition of the intrinsic value of all things.

“So it is disinterestedness, the saint’s and poet’s love of things for their own sakes, the vision of the charitable heart, which is the secret of union with Reality and the condition of all real knowledge. This brings with it the precious quality of suppleness, the power of responding with ease and simplicity to the great rhythms of life; and this will only come when . . . the verb ‘to have’ . . . is ejected from the centre of your consciousness.”

​The effort continues, as we see in the title of the next chapter, through love and will.

​Chapter 6: Love and Will

​The next effort that must be made, after working to train our attention and remodel our interior landscape, is “to push with all your power: not to absorb ideas, but to pour forth will and love.”

It is “by an eager outstretching toward Reality” that we “move towards Reality” and “enter into its rhythm.” Underhill says we must “look with the eyes of love,” which she admits sounds a little corny, but it couldn’t be more important.

“To ‘look with the eyes of love’ seems a vague and sentimental recommendation: yet the whole art of spiritual communion is summed in it, and exact and important results flow from this exercise. The attitude which it involves is an attitude of complete humility and of receptiveness; without criticism, without clever analysis of the thing seen. When you look thus, you surrender your I-hood; see things . . . for their sake, not for your own. The fundamental unity that is in you reaches out to the unity that is in them.”

It is this effort of love and will that allows us to progress into what Underhill calls the Forms of Contemplation.

“Therefore this transitional stage in the development of the contemplative powers . . . is concerned with the toughening and further training of that will which self-simplification has detached from its old concentration upon the unreal wants and interests of the self. Merged with your intuitive love, this is to become the true agent of your encounter with Reality . . . .”

At this point we have seen that we begin by training our attention to see things as they are rather than filtering them through our enculturated language and self-serving categories. Next we find that the new knowledge brought from this awareness gives the lie to our old way of being in the world and, if we are to progress, we must stem this cognitive dissonance by adjusting our thoughts and actions to meet up with the wisdom we’ve gained. And finally, here we’ve seen that the path is still not passive. We must press on, through love and will, reaching out toward Reality.
​
In the next post, we will explore the results of all of this effort, which is the journey through what Underhill calls the Three Forms of Contemplation. They amount to ever-expanding circles of loving union with the World of Becoming or Nature, the World of Being or Spirit, and finally with the Absolute, whatever insufficient label we choose to give It!

Stages of Mysticism: a Synopsis of Evelyn Underhill’s Practical Mysticism (Part One)

1/18/2017

 
PictureEvelyn Underhill (1875-1941) Photo credit: William Edward Downey. Public Domain
Evelyn Underhill was born a mystic. She experienced spontaneous unitive states of consciousness from an early age. As an adult, she studied and wrote about mysticism both to deepen her own understanding and to advocate the practices that nurture what she saw as one of the most important experiences a person can have.

She wrote the short, dense book, Practical Mysticism: a Little Book for Normal People, in 1915 as a guide for the “everyman” of her era.  (As she used the masculine normative throughout, I’ve decided not to mark each instance with a [sic] for ease of reading. Please forgive me this lenience.) Underhill firmly believed that mystical experiences are available to all who truly pursue them.

She admits that the topic is usually reserved for those cloistered away, and then goes on to say: “Yet it is to you, practical man, reading these pages as you rush through the tube to the practical work of rearranging unimportant fragments of your universe, that this message so needed by your time—or rather, by your want of time—is addressed. To you, unconscious analyst, so busy reading the advertisements upon the carriage wall, that you hardly observe the stages of your unceasing flight: so anxiously acquisitive of the crumbs that you never lift your eyes to the loaf.”

In other words, it was written for people going about their workaday lives with little or no comprehension of what she calls Reality, with a capital "R," which different people call the Ultimate, the Absolute, God, Allah, Brahman, the Sacred, and so on.

I believe that her message is just as important to us today, if not more so as the stakes are raised in our time concerning the future of humankind. But her writing style is challenging, to say the least. What I propose to write here is a series of posts that will provide a synopsis, chapter by chapter, of that already little book. I am doing this mostly, if I’m candid, to help myself and maybe others parse its compressed and nearly antiquated early 20th century prose into something more manageable for the early 21st century mind. That said, I find many of her florid turns of phrase to be both spot on and delightful, and at times, like in the above quotation, to show important consistencies between our times. Therefore, I will use her words liberally throughout.
​
Let’s get started.

​Chapter One: What is Mysticism?

​“Mysticism,” as Underhill defines it, “is the act of union with Reality.”

Setting aside, until chapter two, the question of what exactly Reality is, we are asked instead to consider the word “union.” Union, she says, is happening all the time. It is not some “rare and unimaginable operation” but instead something we are always doing. We are uniting with something, “in a vague, imperfect fashion, at every moment,” and “with intensity and thoroughness in all the more valid moments” of our lives.

So, the question isn’t whether we will experience union, but “what, out of the mass of material offered to it, shall consciousness seize upon—with what aspects of the universe shall it ‘unite’?”

The problem is that most of us spend our time uniting with things that are superficial and impermanent, less than Reality. At the root of this problem, according to Underhill, is the question of labels.

 “Because mystery is horrible to us,” she says, “we have agreed . . . to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent.”

To put this another way, we are separated from Reality because we automatically categorize sensations and perceptions. We spontaneously label everything. But labels misrepresent reality because words and the mental categories they create are necessarily less than the experiences they represent. It is this veil of words, of superimposed mental categories, that prevents us from experiencing, “uniting,” with Reality directly.

​But we can overcome this separation by learning to experience our sensations directly, through “contemplative consciousness,” which is a faculty we all have. That will be the focus of chapter three. But before we get there, we need to talk about Reality.

​Chapter 2: The World of Reality

In her second chapter, Underhill takes on the question she set aside at the beginning of chapter one: how to describe the experience of Reality.

When we “reach out and unite with the fact, instead of our notion of it,” she says, we experience “direct communion.” When we achieve “an ideal state of receptivity, of perfect correspondence with the essence of things,” then there is an experience of “absolute sensation.”

“It is,” she goes on, “a pure feeling-state, in which the fragmentary contacts with Reality achieved through the senses are merged in a wholeness of communion which feels and knows all at once, yet in a way which the reason can never understand, that Totality of which fragments are known by the lover, the musician, the artist.”

OK, let’s back up a bit and recap. To begin with, we are always uniting with some aspect of Reality, however shallow that encounter might be. And sometimes the encounter takes on greater depth—in love and in creative acts. (And I wonder if we should consider adding here reverie and all of those events which these days we might call “peak experiences” à la Maslow and “flow experiences” à la Csíkszentmihályi.) Then, in the mystical experience, the encounter is no longer with only a piece of Reality: it is complete immersion.

Moving forward again, Underhill begins to explain how to cultivate this experience when she says, “Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond: too arrogant to still our thoughts, and let divine sensation have its way.”

She tells us, “It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that transition: for the process involves a veritable spring cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wild birds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged with wonder and freshness, and drown with their music the noise of the gramophone within.”

​This spring cleaning of our inner lives is a necessary step in learning how to refrain from subjecting our immediate experience of sensations “to the cooking, filtering process of the brain.” Continuing on this theme, in chapter three we will learn “to put the emphasis upon the message from without, rather than on (our) own reaction to and rearrangement of it.”

​Chapter 3: The Preparation of the Mystic

According to Underhill, there are “two great phases in the education of every contemplative . . . the purification of the senses and the purification of the will,” also known as Recollection and Purgation." And both are achieved through "self-simplification.”

“What is it that smears the windows of the senses?” Underhills asks. And she answers, “thought, convention, self-interest.” Later she adds, “Religion, priggishness, or discontent may drape the panes.”

To make this clearer, she says, “To ‘purify’ the senses is to release them . . . from the tyranny of egocentric judgments . . . to make of them the organs of direct perception. This means that we must crush our deep-seated passion for classification and correspondence; ignore the instinctive, selfish question, ‘What does it mean to me?’”

Ok, you may be saying, I get it. I’m supposed to stop filtering sensations through my preconceived, enculturated categories. But how do I do that? I believe that Underhill would have us find inner stillness.

“At this very moment your thoughts are buzzing like a swarm of bees. The reduction of this fevered complex to a unity appears to be a task beyond all human power. Yet the situation is not as hopeless for you as it seems. All this is only happening upon the periphery of the mind, where it touches and reacts to the world of appearance. At the centre there is a stillness which even you are not able to break. There, the rhythm of your duration is one with the rhythm of the Universal Life. There, your essential self exists: the permanent being which persist through and behind the flow and change of your conscious states.”

Finding this stillness, she says, is comparable to the “Eastern visionary” beckoning us to “Take your seat within the heart of the thousand-petaled lotus,” or the Christian mystic urging us to “Hold thou to thy Centre.”

“This is a practical recipe,” she says, “not a pious exhortation. The thing may sound absurd to you, but you can do it if you will: stand back, as it were, from the vague and purposeless reactions in which most men fritter their vital energies. Then you can survey with a certain calm, a certain detachment, your universe and the possibilities of life within it.”

Through this “deliberate withdrawal of attention from the bewildering multiplicity of things” we begin to simplify and purify the will until it can “retreat to the unity of its spirit.” And there we unite not just with our own eternal spirit but successively with the “three levels of existence: which we may call the Natural, the Spiritual, and the Divine.” She also calls these levels the World of Becoming, the World of Being, and the Absolute or God.

Finally, Underhill sets out the path in toto:

“We begin, therefore, to see that the task of union with Reality will involve certain stages of preparation as well as stages of attainment; and these stages of preparation . . . may be grouped under two heads. First, the disciplining and simplifying of the attention. . . . Next the disciplining and simplifying of the affections and will, the orientation of the heart. . . . So the practical mysticism of the plain man will best be grasped by him as a five-fold scheme of training and growth: in which the first two stages prepare the self for union with Reality, and the last three unite it successively with the World of Becoming, the World of Being, and finally with that Ultimate Fact which the philosopher calls the Absolute and the religious mystic calls God.”

The next couple chapters go further into the practices of Recollection and Purgation, which we might also call meditation and detachment.

​To be continued . . .

New Classes!

1/6/2017

 
Picture
Dear friends in Yoga,

I’ve found a great new space for our classes! It’s the Shall We Dance studio at 4101 E. Grant Road, which is on the north side of the street just west of Columbus. Starting 23 January, I’ll hold gentle hatha classes there Monday and Thursday mornings from 10:15-11:30.

The building is not much from the outside, but it has beautiful floating wood floors and it’s big enough for classes to expand without becoming crowded. There’s a front desk with friendly staff, and it has dressing rooms and fans that turn off. (If you remember Ms. Fit, you’ll understand why this is important!) Outside, you can park on the street side or behind the building.

The cost will be $10 per session, which is on par with places like Yoga Oasis, Yoga Connection, and Mindful Yoga. But, unlike at those places, I get a 50% split of whatever comes in. So every time you pay, $5 goes to overhead and $5 goes to me. They do take credit cards and offer punch cards, though not at a discount.

Besides all of the great physical attributes and conveniences of this location, I am hoping it will offer our classes stability. In just over a year three places I’ve taught have closed: the owners of Ms. Fit retired; Bookmans Sports is becoming a Bookmans Entertainment Exchange; and most recently the landlord at Modern Mystic chose to repurpose the space. Hopefully, by striking out on my own like this, I can avoid that kind of turbulence for many years to come.

On a more personal note, I am nearly healed and have started to rebuild both physically and mentally. Physically, my abs are shot and my balance is terrible! Mentally, I am reassembling my life in a way that is peaceful and sustainable. Part of this includes not offering night or weekend classes right now so I can focus on my first priority, my family. 

Thank you all so much for your patience and encouragement during my recent chapter break. I’m so looking forward to getting our classes going again!

Peace and joy,
Amy

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