(Transcript by Tob Hawk)
This evening we are going to begin a series of studies of mysticism. And in harmony with our general program we want to try to present the material in accordance with a graduate level of basic thinking, hoping to clarify the terms, but not to remove any of the essential information which the thoughtful person should have. The term mysticism we all rather well know. We know approximately the meaning which is classically associated with it. Namely that it represents a belief or a conviction that the experience of the divine being, or the divine essence, is possible to man without the intervention of organized theology. It would move religion from tradition and authority directly to the substance of experience. Therefore essentially the classical writers on mysticism refer to it as a rational process as such it is recorded in the works of Emanuel Kant, Rene Descartes and many other philosophers including Spinoza, who have been accused of being mystics.
The word has come into such general and broad usage however that the essential principles of mysticism have been for the most part obscured. We have placed so much emphasis upon the hope or belief that we are capable of certain metaphysical experiences, by means of which spiritual truths may be brought more strongly to our conviction that we have overlooked the fact that this is not essentially mysticism. Mysticism does not exist irrationally upon a theoretical level. It is not a process of trial and error, it is not a program of experimentation and research, nor does it have as its primary purpose the development of an interior phenomena of any kind.
Mysticism in its original and classical meaning was associated primarily with the idea that a certain way of life produced a certain result and that this result, if sought apart from the natural causes by which it might be induced, or if it was brought about by any artificial intellection, could not properly be termed Mysticism. Through the early centuries of the christian church and among the religions of both the far east and the near east, Mysticism was therefore closely associated with Asceticism, in other words the mystic was required to practice a certain way of life. To aspire to mystical apprehension the person must therefore achieve a grand and complete renovation of himself. This phase of the subject lost more and more interest with the coming of the protestant reformation and as early as the time of Luther Mysticism had already divided into that group which clung desperately to the high ethical and moral levels of mystical thought. As represented in the writings of the pseudo-Dionesis and what might be termed a Practical Mysticism in which the primary problem was the attainment of end regardless of means.
This latter school therefore became definitely concerned with the possibility of the production of mystical phenomena by the inducing of artificial states of consciousness within the individual, in order that he might record or report certain borderline phenomena, or might experience certain exaltation, or sense of interior liberation, or again find an exaggeration or intensification of his sensory faculties, his imagination and even his attitudes of reverence or veneration. A modern example of this particular situation is the increasing scientific interest in the various products and byproducts of the cactus plant Mescal.
This plant which was known to the Aztecs of the valley of Mexico and also spread through the northern parts of Mexico and the southern parts of the United States, under the general name of peyotl or peyote, has caused numbers of modern psychologists and psychological investigators to consider the possibility of recording artificially produced mystical experiences induced by the use of the various mescal alkaloids. This concept has certain scientific advantages inasmuch as enough information has already been assembled to indicate that by one-way means or way or another certain faculties can be stimulated, certain processes and functions resembling those of psychoanalytical procedure can be induced, and in a certain number of cases therapy has resulted.
The danger of this type of experimentation however lies in its essential departure from the essence of Mysticism and as as has been pointed out by a number of the early mystics and has been again very clearly emphasized by William James, it is a thin line indeed between mystical experience and hallucination, imagination, all the various stimulations by artificial means of emotional faculties within the individual and it is extremely difficult even at this time to distinguish between pure Mysticism and a pseudo kind of Mysticism, in which certain phenomenal factors are present, but in which the proper condition or situation for genuine Mysticism is not present.
Thus we are interested this evening in attempting to understand something of the use of Mysticism in the practical daily living of the individual. And we must first of all therefore outline certain guards, protections, certain means of analysis, certain personal defense instruments by which the individual can come to estimate the merit or demerit, the validity or the non-validity of the personal experiences that may occur to himself. All experience of a mystical likeness is not true Mysticism and there is scarcely a day go by in which problems are brought to me, in which various forms of pseudo-mystical phenomena are reported. These experiences cannot however rise from true mystical apprehension. They must arise from certain psychological situations which have come into focus within the subconscious life of the person.
Thus we come back to our original concept, as taught in the east by Buddha and in the west by Plotinus, namely that Mysticism has to be in effect the cause of which must be equal to the effect produced. The cause of Mysticism is neither simply well-wishing or the scientific stimulation of extrasensory faculties. The cause of Mysticism is a certain adjustment of human consciousness with the laws of universal existence. Thus all true Mysticism begins as a way of life, it begins as a dedication and it unfolds according to the conduct pattern of the individual.
Mysticism cannot arise in a situation contrary to itself. This does not mean that extra sensory perceptions of various kinds, as for example those resulting from the use of the mescal button, that such experiences cannot approve an attractive mystery. We do not deny that the individual without the improvement of his moral or cultural life, can under certain conditions have experiences which transcend his ordinary functions. The question then arises how valid are these experiences, how important are they to the individual and do they actually advance any useful purpose in his life.
Authorities researching into this problem have come to the rather sober and I think sincere and reasonable conviction, that pseudo-mysticism has produced very little good. For the small amount of encouragement or stimulation which arises from it there is a group of dangers which cannot be overestimated. The individual under hallucination of any kind is not approaching truth naturally and properly, and even though this hallucination may gratify him, may cause him to feel that he has attained a deep degree of insight, if this insight is not real even though it may appear enjoyable or even instructive, if it is not real it is unreal and if it is unreal it endangers the solid growth of the person. We have observed therefore that nearly all individuals becoming overly concerned with phenomena of any kind impair their own progress and arrive ultimately at a disquietude or a series of interior conflicts that may be considered essentially dangerous.
A problem was brought to my attention by a letter which I only received when I returned from this last trip in which experiments were made to discover if possible the relationship between experimentation in psychic phenomena and the deterioration of bone marrow. This seems like a rather complicated situation. We are not sure what is going to arise from this program of research. Whether we shall discover that the premature and ill-advised effort to stimulate psychic faculties may have a serious effect upon the entire energy economy of the human body. Whether this be demonstrated or not the principle in terms of psychology philosophy and religion has been well justified and demonstrated, namely that there is nothing more dangerous to the normal growth of man than hallucination.
Inasmuch as illusion hallucination represents a kind of experience the individual prone to give greater weight to that which happens to himself is more easily deceived by himself than by any other person and if this deceit advances some cause or belief in which he is interested or concerned or gratifies some natural or unnatural ambition within himself it is more likely that he will become the victim of self-delusion.
Thus Mysticism's greatest hazard is an artificial facsimile of itself. A situation which resembles it in many respects but is not it and this hallucination is not limited merely to persons of comparatively slight information but is traceable in some of the outstanding documents relating to the field. It is therefore quite certain that we must ultimately divide Mysticism into another grouping of two parts or appearances. The first being Genuine Mysticism and the second Psychological Mysticism.
James was one of the first to point out the importance of pseudo-Mysticism as a psychological symptom to point out that very often what we call mystical experience may be merely the pressure of psychological symbolism which can arise as a series of interior manifestations or delusions just as surely as it can induce dreams, nightmares and other apparently mysterious sleep phenomena. So in our Mysticism we have only one true and proper guidance namely that Mysticism represents a natural growth. It must therefore be revealed through a more or less complete integration of the person on a level of mystical insight. Such integration calls for a gradual reformation or reorganization of the major perspective toward life. We observe that in our modern way of living the attitude of the individual becomes more and more evasive on all matters relating to the changing of personal conduct. He is convinced today that he can attain certain powers regardless of what he is and that therefore there are tricks, scientific formulas, even drugs, or hypnosis, or some particular and special way to attain an extension of faculty apart from an actual merit system. This optimism is ill-grounded. It is not possible. And wherever there appears to be an exception that exception will ultimately prove the rule because the exception will inevitably lead to a sorry chain of consequences which the individual must ultimately face.
Now, it is not assumed that modern man in his modern environment and under the pressures of modern living can or should turn from the daily responsibilities which make up his existence to some solitary asceticism or to renounce his proper and reasonable duties in order to cultivate certain extra sensory faculties within his own nature. In fact the effort actually to cultivate by intent may itself destroy the validity of the entire experiment. For all practical purposes therefore Mysticism like every other form of unfoldment in nature is a natural and gradual procedure cultivated without special tension, or stress, or strain, not longed for or yearned after, but rather assumed to be a natural state or stage in the development of normal persons in the course of the integration of themselves.
Mysticism is therefore as natural in the evolutionary development of man as any other stage of consciousness through which he may pass. It is only when it is natural, arising as the inevitable consequence of adequate causes, that it can be regarded as true and can be regarded as completely safe. Because of this and because most persons of devout and sencere minds have certain convictions and these convictions impel toward the basic concept underlying Mysticism, namely that man is capable of an interior apprehension or a perception of reality. Because we hold this to be a sacred truth in our own lives we should and can begin the gradual development of mystical value. We can do this safely so long as we remain essentially modest creatures. As long as we refrain from exaggerating our own attainments or ignoring our own faults.
The beginning of practical mysticism is therefore honesty and it is honesty in this sense of the word that brings us very close to the realm of science. Scientists may or may not be honest but science is essentially honest. Science represents an acceptance of a pattern of exactitudes that everything in nature is orderly, reasonable, factual. That all things that appear to be mysterious are so only because some phase of this pattern is unknown or has been incorrectly interpreted. Assuming therefore the factuality of the basic scientific concept, the premise behind science, namely that everything is as it is and on this basis beginning the estimation of ourselves we may come to some useful conclusions. The individual is not better than he is, he is not worse than he is, he is not more no less than he is, he has not outgrown more than he has outgrown, and he has outgrown all that he has outgrown, and somewhere in this series of almost platitudinous statements which seems so obvious that it almost offends the intellect to put them into words there is one tremendous and important fact - a fact that was summarized beautifully for me by an old southern mammy who once said to one of my cousins when I was a small boy: There's no use trying to be what you ate because you is what you am. And never was greater words spoken by Plato, Aristotle or Buddha.
And our entire life in terms of personal growth depends upon the solid recognition of this fact. We are what we are. In addition to what we are there are two polarities - the sharp and the flat - of this natural tone. One is the positive pole. We can be what we hope to be. The other is the negative poll so to say and this is to the effect that we do not have to remain the undesirable part of what we are. We are in constant motion and growth.
A man today oriented in a very complicated world, can take very basic advantage of certain of the essential concepts of science. He can recognize a complete fact, the fact of things and that the only way that things can change is factually and we use the term sometimes “actually”, and by “actually” we actually mean “by action”. Therefore all things which because of action are what they are, can only be changed by another action, an action either taught what they should be or if we are not so positively inclined, an action away from what they should be.
Now, it would not seem reasonable to assume that Mysticism stands upon so solid and normal putting as this simple statement of factuality yet this is the solid ground of the entire subject. The individual being what he is has a faculty range which is determined by what he is. This faculty range is not primarily determined by his artificially attained education. Education may modify the fact of the individual but only under one condition namely that education leads to action by means of which an existing fact is modified or changed by a new quality of action. It would follow inevitably from this that the person being what he is, his faculties, his powers and his propensities, constitute instruments. By means of these instruments he bridges intervals between himself and what he knows and all other things beside himself and what he desires to know. In order to create substantial bridges by which he can extend himself reasonably and properly these bridges have to be natural, they have to be factual and they have to be secure rationally and psychologically.
To build such bridges is a slow and not especially spectacular undertaking, yet it is this type of undertaking systematically continued and constantly and dedicatedly advanced, which leads ultimately to new levels of sensory unfoldment. We think sometimes of the extrasensory gametes and mystical attainments of primitive people and we wonder why it is that some Australian bushmen or some American Indian medicine priest, or perhaps a Fiji islander, can have valid metaphysical experiences and we do not have them. It would seem to indicate to our minds that these experiences are not associated with progress, but are essentially the reward of a primitive or semi-savage condition. This is not the truth however.
Psychologically the truth lies in the peculiar and abiding virtue of primitive man and that is his inevitable clinging to factuality. Primitive man lives so completely in a group of acceptances that he does not in true complicated psychological intellectualism on his own part. He lives very close to the factualities of life. And because he has not obscured his consciousness with the various artificial factors with which our natural thinking has been afflicted, he is capable of a certain psychic penetration which we no longer possess.
We have built barriers of sophistication which must also be overcome. We have ceased to be natural, we have ceased to be simple and perhaps we have ceased to be humble and because therefore we have developed certain arrogance, certain sophistication or certain uh self-opinionism. We continually lock those procedures by means of which we might open ourselves to true mystical experience. True mystical experience arises out of simple acceptances. A man to become simple again must truly be born again for he has left essential humility far behind him.
To meet this situation and to start where we are now which is always the problem that confronts the individual, we must realize that as Mysticism is not in itself an intellectual action but is rather in itself an emotional experience. And as man is capable of a wide gamut of emotionality in his living thinking and feeling it becomes evident that in some way his emotions must be brought within areas of realization or understanding so that emotion can be factualized. The fact of emotion is no less than the fact of reason but we have come to regard reason as a positive certainty and emotion as an uncertainty. This is simply due to our own perspective on these matters having little if anything to do with the facts themselves.
In the use of such drugs as mescal we have discovered for example the tremendous overtones of simple things. We become aware symbolically that the universe as we see it and know it is infinitely more important, more diversified and more intimately stimulating than we have been likely to imagine. Life to the average person is rather a routine drudgery. It is composed of the continuous repetitions of traditional activities. The person under strong and immediate economic compulsions is forced therefore to think of himself as living a material external life and escaping from this by some violent directive into what he might term a more rarefied super physical atmosphere of dreams, and ideals, and hopes and aspirations. Mysticism insists that this rarefied atmosphere is just as near to us as our materialism. There is really no essential difference that what appears to be a difference is interpretation, emphasis or the concentration of our attention upon only certain parts of actions, or conditions, or circumstances.
To begin as a natural mystic, as Thoreau began, as many very quiet mystical thinkers have begun, something in the spirit of Walt Whitman and others who have been greatly admired for a rather simple appreciation of value, we must begin by discovering fact, essential fact in the common place. Science can be of the greatest help to us because it can remind us that most things are stodgy and uninteresting because we do not understand them. You will find therefore a person who has very little appreciation of art, wander by a beautiful painting or a fine example of sculpturing, comparatively untouched and unmoved by it. Ten years later is the result of interest in art he comes back to the same piece of work and finds himself enthralled and entranced. In music it may require 30, 40 or 50 listenings to a great music drama, such as Tristan and Isolde, before the sheer genius of the music really reaches into us. We cannot immediately grasp these innumerable overtones, these wonderful gallandales or decorations of life which are everywhere present if we pause to consider.
Confucius and Laozi in China both considered Mysticism as the opportune pause. They recognized it as resulting from the sudden halting of the superficial pageantry of thought and emotion and the giving of the attention to meaning for in meaning lies fact. The most simple thing that we handle every day, the most common conveniences that we know are tremendous dramatic things if we give them thought. But if we take these things for granted as merely part of the process of living we move on and we take education for granted, we take politics for granted, we take philosophy for granted, religion for granted and ultimately we take god for granted, assuming that an intellectual acceptance constitutes an acceptable affiliation of consciousness. This is not true. That which is taken for granted is never known as fact. And the tendency to move over surfaces, without ever penetrating into the substratums of these surfaces, this tendency is so strictly and totally western and most of all so completely contemporary. It is our way of doing things excused under the broad statement that we have no time.
Actually the individual who superficially employs his opportunities has no time because he has wasted all of it to become more thoughtful and more penetrating is of the highest importance. A good example of this would be the day of the average person. He may rise and on his way to work he may get into his car. Now, to him his automobile is his second self, his alter ego, he practically lives in it and his home is merely a detour between the front door and the garage. He practically is as attached to his car as the ancient mexican indians thought that cortes was attached to his horse, they were one being, a kind of unicorn. Perhaps man is an automobile-human kind of composite being. Yet although he depends upon this automobile and his continuously bewailing the cost of it is continuously unhappy over the mechanical bills that arise in connection with it, man has never realized or appreciated that most of the essential laws of universal dynamics are locked up in his car. If he understood his car completely he would understand the universe. It is an ever-present text revealing hundreds of principles. Working together, brought together, yet the minds that conceived and united these to form this modern monster of convenience actually these minds were following archetypal laws and if there is anything in the design of a car or its motor that is not true, that is not factual, the model will be shortly removed from the market because it will be unsatisfactory in action. Thus we have in this car principles which explain to us many of the deepest problems of biology, many elements of physics, mathematics, chemistry, and we discover how these various parts of knowledge fit together to produce an astonishing utility, one of the outstanding devices created by human ingenuity. Yet created only because the inventors down through time have been practicing, copying fragments of nature. They have found again and again rules and operations naturally occurring which have given them the key and the guide to the creation of this car.
Experiments in aviation have followed the same rules. The airplane from its most primitive developments to its most advanced period of jet propulsion is a story of the universe. It is a story of life, of law, of fact and of the infinite combinations of principles by means of which certain specific and definite ends may be attained. Out of the consideration of such things including the washing machine, the curling iron, the electric toaster, the woolen fabrics of your clothing, your glasses, your ballpoint pen, paper, silk, rubber, housing, walls, roofs, heating, ventilation, all of these things exist simply because man has been able to combine natural facts. And the reason why one man invents these and another does not, is that one man becomes aware of a fact, and in another person this awareness is not equally stimulated.
Thus life is continually confronting us with symbolical representations of value, of eternal fact. There is an old Greek-Roman study of ancient sewerage systems based upon the study of the arterial circulation of the human body so we adapt one fact to another need and if our adaptation is correct the new need is satisfactorily met. But if in this adaptation we depart in any way from fact we shall ultimately regret this departure, whether it by intent or ignorance, and we will correct or reform our device until it once more functions properly because it is factual.
This discovery of the imminence of more than we realize is of the greatest validity in giving the individual an understanding of the paracelsion axiom that those that would understand god must walk the book of nature with their feet. In other words they must recognize the imminence of eternal doctrine and they must recognize man's intellect, or his consciousness, as an unfolding process of acceptances, of discoveries leading to uses, and that what we call inspiration is becoming aware. It is the breathing in of universal reality.
To the mystic the recognition that he lives in a world of reality, from which he is divided by his own unreality, becomes the inducement for the larger correction of his own nature. It leads him to recognize the tremendous challenge not of mere observation but the challenge that comes from the ability to interiorly become aware that he abides in a midst of fact, that morality is to live according to fact, and that morality and ethics are therefore good living because they keep the facts, and that religion essentially is the same thing inasmuch as the will of god is revealed to man by fact. There being no appeal beyond the will of god, man has no appeal beyond fact which is his discovery of the divine procedure as this procedure works out on levels within his comprehension.
It is also inevitable that man should assume that there are other procedures beyond his comprehension no less factual. And that what we would turn this mystical ascent into rarified atmosphere is really only man's advancement in subtle fact, the exchange of that which is more rare, or attenuated, or that which is more gross, or material, or obvious, but never for a moment departing from fact, this great need then to be factual is in what way impaired in man. If the absolute fact of life is god living why is man not immediately and intuitively aware of this. He probably is immediately and intuitively so aware but this immediate and intuitive reaction is almost immediately blocked by intellection. The individual cannot be content with the acceptance of a fact. He must dramatize it, he must dogmatize it, he must creedalize it, he must in some way reduce it to the nature of imperfection like himself. In so doing he transforms a natural fact into an unnatural error and then attempts to live upon his interpretation rather than upon the fact.
This is perhaps the reason why for so many people what is right and what they want to do become synonymous terms. The individual takes it for granted that what he wants is good. He does not try to adapt himself to any standard of good, he assumes that he possesses this standard and adapts the facts to himself which means to adapt a reality to an unreality. And this in turn destroys the dynamic of the fact and the person falls into illusion.
If we move constantly from a true acceptance of that which is true we shall observe immediately that a marked change occurs in the pattern of our interior living. This marked change when viewed in perspective is extremely alarming. The first alarm comes but it occurs to us that if there is a difference between what we want to do and what we should do. The achievement of virtue arises through the inhibition of our natural desires. Small children arrive at the natural conclusion for them that if it's pleasant it's wrong, if they like it they shouldn't do it, and if they are enjoying it immensely it is approaching the state of mortal sin. The person normally therefore divides his life into what he wants to do and what he should do and regards these as dissimilars. In the light of fact this is an error to start with. He has no such choice, he has only the choice of accepting the fact or coming under the penalty of illusion. If it were possible for the individual to live without fact, and live well, the entire ethical and moral structure of nature would collapse. But it has been demonstrated since the beginning of human intellect that the person cannot do this, regardless of all his optimism and his incessant trying. And of course it is obvious that the subject has been given adequate exploration and adequate experimentation. Man has tried every evasion conceivable, he has made every mistake possible and he has assumed every evasive action or attitude within the gamut of his capacities and still he is unable to escape factuality, is unable to escape the foundation upon which all things must be built. This may seem to be a long digression but it is not. It is not because it is the foundation of Mysticism.
Mysticism is the gradual discovery of fact. Each degree of discovery leading naturally to a corrective within the individual. The mystic is simply a person who tries to apply what he knows and also tries to continually increase his knowing in order that he may apply more completely. The end of his search is not that he shall attain knowing but that by a degree of knowing he shall attain a factual existence, an existence without alarming error, subterfuge or deceit, likely to detract from his ultimate integrity.
Having this thought basically in his consciousness the mystic begins by tying experience outward and experience inward into a pattern. The child going to school, learns a little of a new lesson every day. Being a child it is quite probable that these lessons cannot be immediately applied. The child learns for example one day the location of the Amazon river, a little later perhaps the exports and imports of New York harbor for 1948. These stimulating and amazing discoveries are more or less wasted on a teenager. In fact they would some of them be wasted on an adult. But they constitute a dawning or growing accumulation of facts. Now, these facts are more or less purely intellectual facts, they may be useful someday, more generally they simply provide a general orientation, they help the individual to have a certain insight into the way of the world in which he lives, the communities in which he may travel and the means by which his civilization is perpetuated. These things can ultimately add up to a kind of education about his world. But even more pertinent and valuable is a very interesting little formula that can continually be used namely that each person starting out in the day should try during that day to add one more fact to his life.
Now, of course in the abstract and the absolute facts are not very numerous. Facts are few and the great facts sustain all life. But in our common experience we are not able to assimilate these great facts therefore we must approach them more humbly, observing first those most immediate and available facts. There are only certain facts immediately accessible to us in the common daily experience of living. We cannot suddenly experience Angkor Wat or Bangkok Siam because we're not going there. We can have an intellectual comprehension of the world and its countries, its cities and its nations, but these are beyond immediate experience in their totality except in a very few cases. However there is the possibility of adding a fragment of fact to our way of life every single day we live.
These fragments which are most vital to us have to do with the values of things. They have to do with decisions that have to be made. They have to do with our use of our means and our time. They have to do with our conduct in our association with other persons. They have to do with our sober reflections about the inadequacies of ourselves under the pressures of emergency. They tell us something of our own limitations and how we follow the admonition of the apostle that when we would do good evil is ever lie unto us. But each day we can find a fact, a fact of our own weakness those are very easy to find if we're diligent. The fact of someone else's strength that is not quite so easy to find because we do not believe that much in other people, but it is a useful thing to enlarge this belief. The recognition of the relationship between action and reaction in our own private business. Every day we can enlarge our understanding by little flashes of insight. These little flashes of insight are themselves mystical experiences, they are little ones but all things must begin as little ones, and as lord bacons pointed out, all young things are awkward in their proportions. Therefore the beginning is not the end but the entire mystical method is revealed through the first legitimate flash of insight.
The first time the individual is truly aware of an unrecognized or previously ignored fact, he has achieved half a step forward, he has put one foot out, now he must draw the other foot to meet it. The second half of each step is the application of this newly discovered fact to an internal experience within himself. The discovery of the fact is the first half, the conscious application of the fact to conduct resulting in the experience of the fact of the fact, is the second step. Thus we experience outwardly a discovery, we experience inwardly a utility, and when discovery and utility meet and neither one is a permitted to escape from the other, so that each discovery is moved immediately to its proper utility and no utility is permitted that is not established upon a discovery.
If we keep these rules working consistently, we approach Mysticism scientifically. We approach it on the ground that we have two very serious dangers, a series of discoveries that are held in the mind for the pleasure of the emotions and are not used. Such discoveries gradually accumulate to form intellectualism. Intellectualism being nothing but a mass of discoveries which have become so fascinating in themselves that we have no inclination to do anything with them. Facts that are held for their own sake alone. Discoveries by which we are amazed, and astonished, and sometimes impelled to sit down with a certain attitude of or that we are able to be so stupendous as to make these discoveries and of course an attitude of greater or to other people who have made bigger ones and yet the question remains what has been done with any of it.
This inevitably leads uh to the danger of developing also experiences internally that have no relation or valid foundation in the discoveries which we have made. It is a mistake to take a discovery and do nothing with it and it is a greater mistake sometimes to take a very small discovery and try to do more with it than the facts justify. The moment we depart from the fact or depart from the natural boundaries of the discovery, we pass from valid experience into an invalid kind of experience, an experience which becomes experimental, becomes over emotional, over intense, and by trying to transcend the discovery which we make we may land in hallucination or fanaticism, both of which arise from conduct intense but not sustained by discovery.
Discovery always implies that we have perceived the working of a law and, having satisfied ourselves that this law operates and is valid, we then take this law unto ourselves and into ourselves and incorporate it into our pattern of conduct regulations. If we do this continuously, gaining a little insight every day, and through this experiencing a little more from within ourselves every day we shall move interiorly and exteriorly in harmony and in proper relationship. There will then be no conflict between the material person and his super material interior life. Conflict arises from the material nature of man moving in one direction and his aspirational structure moving in a contrary direction. If these move together like two feet carrying the one man along each step measured by the counter step, each move balanced by an appropriate move of both parts of the moving equipment, then we have the person progressing, growing, unfolding according to the natural way of life.
Under such growth what we commonly known as self-delusion is almost impossible. This does not mean that we can begin and immediately eliminate all errors or that we can transform ourselves from the sinner to the saint in a night. It means however that for hope and for optimism we are substituting a factual procedure derived from nature, supported by conscience and justified by interior and exterior experience. Moving in this way we move with propriety and if we study Mysticism we shall discover something of the direction in which this motion usually leads us, a motion which has been recorded in the lives and characters of innumerable persons of varying degrees of interior enlightenment. We observe of course among all these persons a gradual diminishing of certain aggressive attitudes, attitudes which in themselves and of themselves are obviously not factual. They are not factual because we discover if we become attentive that these processes produce ill rather than good, and if by our works we shall know them we cannot justify that which does not justify itself in action. Therefore regardless of our feelings any thought, emotion or action which produces a destructive or negative result cannot be justified, cannot be factual, because nature is not factually decreeing annihilation. Nature is attempting continuously to rescue things from the tendency which they possess to destroy or injure themselves.
If we attempt to rationalize and try to indicate that ends justify means, that in our way of life it is impossible for us to practice certain virtues revealed to us as factual by our own power of experience discovery, if we annihilate or assail the right of these facts to dominate our own conduct, we then place ourselves in a situation which is likely to prove completely detrimental. We observe therefore that if a pattern of living is not producing in the individual a reasonable similitude of that which he desires with rightness of desire, or that which he intuitively apprehends to be right, or if more obviously the things that he is doing are producing detrimental negative or destructive results upon himself or others, then his experience discovery mechanism demands that these things be changed. The discovery mechanism shows him that he is wrong. Further discovery mechanism mechanism may give him some insight as to what is right. He cannot depend upon right being in this case an action opposite to wrong, he can only assume that right is an action consistent with fact. But if he discovers that an action within himself is producing nothing good in himself, what defense has he for the continuance of it. If this defense has to do only with the continuance of the general pattern of his habits then his position is indefensible. He must determine in his own nature certain values and he must attempt to rationalize the means of attaining them.
Now, we all know that it is extremely difficult to change the outward structure of society around us. We also know that it is extremely difficult to change the attitudes of persons, with whom we must have certain continuous or occasional association. Therefore our adjustments factually speaking must in every instance be an adjustment of discovery an experience in relationship to ourselves. We cannot expect or require that other persons will share our insight. We can only hope that in the due course of time they too will be led to the path of fact discovery and experience.
In the meantime however we have decisions that have to be made. These decisions today are becoming more pressing than ever before and it is because of the pressing nature of these decisions that we have this tremendous upsurge of mystical living and thinking ranging from the restoration of faith healing in our churches to the cultivation of zen buddhism. This tremendous gamut is a reflection of man's personal acceptance that he has discovered his own inadequacy. Now, this discovery is factual because he must live with himself. He finds he cannot. Or that if he manages to endure the association it is incomplete unsatisfying and even unfriendly.
Through the discovery therefore of the fact of maladjustment he is confronted with the challenge of applying this discovery directly to the interior mechanisms of his own experience. He must then decide, simply and directly, whether he will continue in his way and expect to bear the consequences of his error or whether he is becoming weary of this relationship between cause and effect and is inclined to attempt to remedy the situation. The tendency to remain as he is satisfies a static nature quality which he possesses. It seems to be the line of least resistance, or the line of least decision, or perhaps the line which might to the least degree curtails certain satisfactions which he regards as partial compensations for insecurity.
For instance he may be perfectly aware that his way of life is likely to bring him to the grave prematurely, that he will live only 50 or 60 years when he might otherwise live 70 or 75 years and that in the 50 or 60 years he will have considerable more sickness, pain, misery and perhaps unemployment through incapacity but he will do as he pleases. Or he may live more moderately with better control and discipline of himself, extend his period of usefulness, improve his health save himself a great deal of pain and annoyance, have more friends, a better family and children developing in a more secure and proper atmosphere. He must decide from his discovery of these facts what he is going to do. If he does nothing and continues along in his old accustomed way then the discovery does not lead to experience and because this discovery does not impel him to the personal acceptance of the truth that has been revealed and this personal acceptance in turn has not led to an immediate modification in his own conduct, then the sequence which we know brings about the mystical experience has not been established. Because he has learned a thing to be true does not make this mystical experience inevitable. Because he accepts it does not make it inevitable.
But if to acceptance he adds a measure of dedication by means of which he resolves to live according to the highest degree of life that has been accorded to him and he immediately places himself under the authority of this light forbidding by nature, or instinct, or interest any action destructive to this revelation of fact, then he begins to move toward Mysticism, because he begins to change the psychic chemistry of his own interior nature.
There is no doubt in the world that this procedure if it could be rendered scientific would carry us much further than the types of psychoanalysis that we have today. Well these are concerned constantly with trying to help us to know more and be the same and still comfortable. A very difficult formula, one that has not yet been perfected although no doubt in the world that some of our prominent business corporations will work on it. It will be most attractive if man can break the law and enjoy life to the fullest. And man would gradually accept this as being perfectly right and proper and refer to it as scientific progress. But nature forbids it and what nature forbids man cannot accomplish. Man can use nature, man can abuse nature to a degree, but nature turns relentlessly upon those that abuse it. A man cannot escape from the pattern, the vast organic structure by which the entire economy of the world is sustained.
If then we take some simple situation that can arise the individual discovers for instance a natural tendency to pre-barricade, in less pleasant language he is a confirmed liar. By confirmed we do not mean that he lies all the time, he only lies when it seems to bring him some kind of advantage, but after a while one lie that is necessary requires two more to support it and truth becomes virtually extinct. This individual suddenly faces the fact, not because he has been injured immediately by this particular lie, although perhaps a series of critical situations may bring the requirement of remedy closer to his attention, but he suddenly experiences nature through a discovery of truthfulness, of verisimilitude. Nature never lies. A man discovering this and beginning to contemplate on the innumerable complications that come to him through prevarication may come to the conclusion that not to lie is better than to lie. This may be called a theological victory. It is the victory of right over wrong as far as theory is concerned.
If the person having discovered this and rationalized it remains a liar, which can well happen and often does, nothing of vital significance has been finally accomplished. But if this person, having this discovery, suddenly realizes that it is the will of god as expressed by the law of nature that he be truthful, and begins to worship through truthfulness, and to experience the interior benefits of truthfulness, discovery plus experience produces an opening, or an awakening, or a vitalizing a value leading inevitably to an experience of truth, an experience of earned truth, of the victory of truth over error. And most of all the personal experience that the individual can achieve to any good that he determines to achieve and that through this achievement he opens his conviction to further achievement and discovers in the long run, that his truthfulness is a tremendous improvement in the total pattern of his probable happiness, security and friendliness.
Out of this new relationship he experiences a closer relationship with the plan of life, with the purpose of things as they are. But this relationship is not possible while the individual, who believes in telling the truth, still lies. If a person, who believes in telling the truth, is by this means brought into a religious movement, affirming the value of truth, discussing it, arguing it, preaching it, teaching it and forcing it upon everyone else, but remaining untruthful himself, this individual should he possess any psychic attenuation of faculty will have a delusionary experience, because he cannot have the true experience apart from his own experience of truth.
Mysticism then is this continually unfolding experience of value. One of the most common of all of our unhappy situations is one which is much nearer to us and often less easily integrated than some spectacular vice, like forthright prevarication, or alcoholism, or total immoral depravity. These things are so-called large problems. But these large problems never have to really be faced as such because they are nothing but accumulation of neglected small problems and ultimately have to be so dissolved.
But we have certain basic problems and the most basic problem that we all have and the one that stands between nearly every person and the beginning of mystical appreception is the problem of personal non-tranquility. You can say that it is due to any one of a hundred different circumstances and factors but we have the very difficult situation of the person who is not really bad and at the same time is not much good. This taxes our ingenuity because when you try to say to such an individual “you are wrong about this” they look at you so innocently. The little mistakes that they make should certainly not be held against them, especially when compared to the large mistakes everybody else makes.
So non-tranquility which is just a certain general disorder, a kind of disorder uh that corresponds in physical symptomology to what they used to call a pining condition. In the old days people who did not feel too well either pined or had a misery. Now, misery could be almost anything from a touch of rheumatism to a toothache, but a misery was just not feeling good and in our problem of fact and unfact, or non-fact, this problem of the misery is this situation of the individual who is just a little miserable all the time or most of the time, and has a pathetic look of unbelief on their faces if for a moment they are not miserable. These individuals are made up of the world's good-hearted people, the well-intentioned ones, the ones who are so well meaning, that it just seems terrible to say anything unkind about them. But this type of negative non-adjustment can and does block nearly all of our positive efforts to grow spiritually and a person in this condition of perpetual misery trying to unfold religious convictions, or to advance spiritually, or to cultivate extra sensory perception, is in the most deplorable miserable condition of all because he is in constant danger of hallucination.
The hallucination does not seem as though it should naturally follow, after all he's only a little bad. All right nature is just, he only has a little hallucination. But a literal hallucination gets very much larger when we think about it. The hallucination rapidly develops overtones much more than the little badness with which it was associated and most persons who have this kind of hallucination including it the strange imagination or fantasy which would insist that they are better than they are which is the most comforting form of fantasy and very often paralyzes any further effort to correct the cause. The individual probably forgets the cause, forgets his own needs and dashes off in the service of some hallucinational destiny which he feels awaits him in larger worlds to conquer.
So this problem of the small misery is one thing which is so frequently overlooked, so consistently denied or excused away with a gallant gesture. Here is the common problem of Mysticism in relationship to life, it is also the problem of life, because most people are not very bad and not very good and it is out of this general dilemma that many of our most terrible tyrannies have arisen. The moment we recognize that we have a certain number of faults, even though they be minor ones, our fact discovery must go to work on them. It must recognize that religion, in terms of Mysticism, is the systematic rededication of attitudes and impulses, so that they become useful rather than useless, that they become even in smallest matters basically constructive and that there is a clear allegiance in which every resource that we have is dedicated to the best use that we can make of that resource.
Now, this does not mean that our small virtues are dedicated to some vast project. It means that small virtues are dedicated to small necessary immediate ends and that through the continual experiencing of these they add up and a few years of careful recognition of the principles involved will and usually does bring about a mark increase of a perception on the part of the individual.
Now, another problem that often perturbs us a little is the fact that we try desperately for six months and at the end of that time we are not illuminated. The mystical experience hasn't happened therefore the bottom is out of the ethical universe and we go on without hope, giving up any tiresome project that seems so rewardless. A few years ago under this type of situation the individual always changed teacher or joined a new movement. It was obvious that he wasn't getting anywhere. But where was he trying to get? What he had hoped to do was to take one ounce of base metals and transmute them into a ton of pure gold. He was entirely out of his death. He did not realize that if his procedure was accurate and correct he was developing his mystical apperception, whether he realized it or not. This apperception was not sufficiently strong to open the heavens until they resemble the vision of Dante. These achievements were small achievements which he magnified because it is so difficult for the average person to do anything well. If he has one victory he feels that all the universe should pause and admire it.
Actually his reward was that with each discovery transmuted into experience action he gained a little greater skill in further discovery. That if he did not falsify his own records he would find that as the result of correcting even one minor peculiarity of disposition he had a new orientation on life, perhaps not vastly new, but an orientation that gave him control of some situation, gave him insight to some degree that he did not previously possess. Thus his journey beginning as it must with the single step, continues and each step is a single step, but a man taking enough of them finally comes to the end of his journey. The end of the journey, like the beginning of the journey, is also a single step. We have become so hopeful that we could jump over vast hurdles quickly, then believe definitely that in a few months we could attain victory over sickness, or sorrow, or despair of one kind or another, that we simply fail to observe nature's way. We have not discovered the facts of this situation and because we have failed to discover the facts, we have interpreted them wrongly and from this wrong interpretation have come to our own despair, our disillusionment and our sense of futility.
Beginning then to think in terms of scientific Mysticism, as the greeks and early christians understood it, asceticism is merely a term for unworldliness. It has nothing to do with an individual going away and living alone in a cave. Asceticism is the individual creating a code, by means of which he refuses to compromise principle for advantage, a code by which he firmly and sincerely believes that through attaining a certain interior orientation he will justify and inevitably receive an enlargement of interior apprehension. That he will be delivered from certain evils to the degree that he delivers himself from certain errors.
The idea of a vicarious atonement for these situations has in itself had a markedly detrimental effect upon western civilization. It has helped the individual to actually take the belief that it is not necessary for him to immediately and initially correct his own qualities. Now, this is not the big moral problem that most persons assume it to be, and all the preaching in the world sounds forbidding and negative and certainly platitudinous but it has very little to do with the fact itself. It has been proven on every occasion that it takes no more energy to do it well and do it badly. That the individual is not required to give up things that are near and dear to him, unless these things are so basically unworthy that they should not be near and dear to anyone.
Nature does not demand that the person desert his responsibilities or his problems, it simply requires a continuous evidence of purposed growth and while man grows, nature rejoices. When man stops growing, nature comes up behind and prods him appropriately. Nature refuses to permit the individual to stop growing and most of so-called growing pains are the individual resisting growth or some bodily structure that is not keeping up with the national or natural pattern of nature's intent. To grow then is to be natural and it is perfectly proper and natural that man should grow to the degree that his interior faculties become the active agents in the directing of his activity and conduct. It is part of nature's law that the human being shall be self-ruled, self-governed and as an incident or natural evidence of this we realize that every other form of government has failed. And we also realize as Plato pointed out that if man is self-governing, it makes very little difference what type of political structure he lives under. The self-governing man can live well under any government. The man who is not self-governed cannot live well even under the best government. And if peoples are so afflicted, the best government is rapidly corrupted.
Thus the the tendency of nature to force us to grow, to continually unfold our potential, means a motion from our exterior and grosser perceptions to our interior and more refined perceptions. We know for example that for man to be truly greater than he is, he must know more than he does. in order for man to be oriented in the total universe, in order that spiritually, psychically, intellectually, emotionally and physically he shall be in all things sufficient, and that this sufficiency should in its own expression be the full growth of that person, the full exhibition of the grace, power, dignity and honor of that person. That to attain this end, even with relative completeness, we must have faculties we do not now functionally possess. We know that the individual must sometimes be adjusted to an invisible world of principles, as now is adjusted only to a visible world of effects. We know that the time will come when man will outgrow the lessons that materiality can teach him. In spite of his complicated way of life these lessons are comparatively few and diagramming human situations as they can exist in life, has already demonstrated there are only about 40 things that can happen to a human being, and all the complicated plots of history are merely combinations of these basic happenings.
Thus man lives, from phenomenally speaking, in a limited universe in which a limited group of adjustments confronted. Yet even if he makes all these adjustments, he is not yet perfect, in as much as the physical universe does not provide him with the most necessary of all ingredients and that is the appreciation of causes. Man is not able to examine naked principles, he is not able to know things according to their true natures, he can know them only according to their seeming and not according to their essence. But man in order to attain to the full expression of his own humanity and reach upward towards participation in his own divinity, man must have more faculties, more powers, more abilities than he presently is able to use.
The mystical experience therefore in most systems of Mysticism is acknowledged to be a simple and natural faculty, normally available to the individual who has proven through conduct that it is next for him that he should be raised to a new level of interior experience, that new kinds of universal facts must be revealed to him in order that his own growth can properly continue. When in the next degree of his own growth requires an extension of faculties then and then only the mystical experience is a proper and normal thing. Forced in any other way it is a forced and unnatural thing, and when forced or unnatural, it is inevitably heavily involved in illusion because man cannot force his power to a perceived truth. He cannot achieve a pseudo spirituality. He can achieve a pseudo hysteria, he can achieve a false state which he may regard as spiritual, but he cannot achieve a union or an atonement with a superior condition, until that union is the next thing necessary for him. He must therefore build toward this through the exhaustion of the consciousness wisdom content of those testimonies which can be bestowed upon him by faculty perception.
Now, what does this discipline lead to, to what does man turn or what does he become if we may assume that by continual growth he gradually exhausts the 40 some odd situations on which flesh is heir in the problem of living. It really means that each individual by this exhaustion gradually eliminates a false concept, a false standard or a false code of action. Mysticism assumes that by the gradual relaxation of error it is possible for the individual to achieve a tremendous amount through the intensification of his own dedication. Nature recognizes two factors in the increasing of the tempo of human progress. One is growth in extensity and the other is growth in intensity. Extensity is a problem of time in which experience is diversified on a very large area and is available to man in sequences, so that in so many years or so many lifetimes he may attain to a certain degree of knowing. This means growth along evolutionary lines with incredible vistas of time leading ultimately to the attainment of the desired end. Intensity however means the speeding up of time through intensive effort in which the person chooses to move more rapidly. Intensity is not a substitute for extensity. The intense individual, who wishes to achieve in five years what another man may take ten to accomplish, has only one recourse namely that he must work twice as hard. He cannot attain this end until a measure of achievement required has been attained or achieved.
Therefore there's Euclid of Megara said “there is no royal road to learning, there is no royal road to illumination, there is no trick by which it can be done”. What we observe occasionally as a more rapid motion is actually a more intense procedure, an intensity usually results from increased dedication, greater alertness, stronger resolution to achieve a certain purpose and perhaps the experience at the end is so desirable that certain other less desirable things can be easily sacrificed to that end. But the only thing that can be sacrificed is error. Man never sacrifices truth. He can only give up what is not so for what is so is not divisible from himself at any time. He can obscure it but he cannot successfully renounce it. Therefore all that he can give up is his own inadequacy and the rapidity with which he resolves to do this results in the intensity and the life of certain individuals. Intensity may arise from a variety of causes, inspiration, noble example, critical situations, a certain type of common instruction. It is easier in one generation than another because of the attitudes of persons. In those ages and days in which culture was recognized, culture achievement was more rapid. In days in which scientific progress is recognized, scientific progress will be more rapid. The individual will find it easier to grow according to the pressures of his time but as he goes further into his life he finds that the greater pressures are his own need, his own interior realization and his dawning sense of spiritual values.
Thus he may grow a little faster than his neighbor, but this does not mean he is favored, or that he has been selected, or that he has been ordained to a spiritual aristocracy. It simply means that he is willing and able to roll up his sleeves and work harder. There can be no achievement by accident. All achievement is by experience intent.
If we follow these patterns we will observe the natural civilization of our species. We will observe therefore that Mysticism is an overtone of biology, that it moves with anthropology and ethnology. That all of these elements work together and that man achieving a certain platform of culture becomes aware of self-culture, becomes aware of the possibility of advancing by his own intention, this evolutionary procedure which is moving around him in nature. This was the great concept of alchemy, man as an artist perfecting nature. And when the individual uses his interior resources to anticipate and advance the proper works of nature, he becomes then the alchemist and also the faithful gardener and the faithful shepherd. It is his own dedicated determination to move with life more directly, more completely, more sincerely, that leads to what we call the exceptional case of Mysticism. Very often the intellectual faculties are not entirely clear on this but what might be termed a general intellection, known as aspiration, takes over. An aspiration is a union of the mental and emotional faculties in the determination to experience the presence of god. When this aspiration is strong enough to cause the individual to instinctively cast off that which is contrary to the fulfillment of this aspiration. We may have examples of Mysticism as in the case of Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis of Sales and many other of the mystics, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Santa Teresa. These represent the individual now devoting himself to the service of his own aspirational nature but the service always accompanied by a decreasing self-awareness until, as the persian and near eastern mystic puts it, the individual forgets himself in God.
The end of all observation discovery experience is the reduction of the ego equation in the individual. The elevation of principle above personality, the elevation of reality above appetite, or selfishness, or self-interest, or self-pity. These are all victories of the impersonal over the personal, they are the victories of a divine purpose over human negations. Wherever this victory is hastened your Mysticism becomes more naturally apparent. But if we have super physical phenomena separated from these dedications and these achievements, we're going to have hallucination. We're going to have a pseudo experience one in which the individual may be deceived into the belief that he is growing, and growing beautifully, but he has failed to observe that this growth is not justified by his own self-directed. The individual finds that he still has his faults but is also having experiences. This discovery should cause him pause immediately or he should know that something is wrong. Nature does not reward that which has not achieved any more than it punishes that which has achieved.
Therefore any experience inconsistent with the dedicated growth of the individual must be viewed with suspicion. Only the individual can sit down and honestly determine these facts in a factual manner. If he is not able to do so he is already heavily under hallucination. But he may come to secondary testimony in the fact that his affairs go badly and in the world in which this occurs, in his own interior relationships, he cannot control the world around him, but where his own inner life is not growing to some degree, becoming a little mellower, and a little softer, and a little kinder every day, he must be suspicious of any apparent extra sensory extension that he may have. Thus the entire subject becomes basically scientific and on the basis of this scientific foundation we can continue next week with the next degree of our study.
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