Top 10 Reasons Mysticism is Right

I would like, once and for all, to clear up some of the confusion concerning mysticism.

Every now and then, the world goes nutty, and there are
famines, plagues, droughts, corruptions, wars,
earthquakes, economic and political upheavals – every kind
of chaos you can imagine.

When those things happen, certain people take it upon
themselves to figure out what the heck has gone wrong -
to figure out what really is going on here, and why these
things are happening, and who’s in charge, and what’s the
best way for us all to get along and get by without
incurring further wrath.

Some of these certain people are urban, and they come
back with certain conclusions: be nice, play by the rules,
adhere to etiquette, learn how to get along with the roiling
mob – witness Confucius and Shintoism.

Other folks are rural, and they are the types to go live up in
the hills, in a mountain-top cave for a while, and contemplate their belly-buttons until the arrival of Enlightenment.

The cool thing, to me, is that every culture, every society, from every imaginable era,
has produced mystics, and – more to the point – that every single mystic–Judaic,
Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Moslem, you name it–that every single mystic comes
back with the very same conclusions as every other mystic–in some cases, dang near
word-for-word.

That, to me, is pretty frickin’ cool, and a pretty good sign that these folks are on to something.

I’m not going to get into an anti-prophet rant right now – I’ll save that for later – but I hope that you will read the
following snippets and think about it all, and understand why I, for one, consider myself a mystic.

T. S. Eliot was kind of a forbearer of American anti-fiction, believe it or not, when he concluded that there wasn’t
much point in trying to paraphrase someone who had already said it in the best possible way – you’d be better
off just quoting Shakespeare or the Upanishads. Hence the prolific footnotes for Eliot’s work.

Anyway, I’m taking a page from Eliot’s work ethic, and proceeding to quote, at length, someone who really did
his homework, and who says the whole thing far better than I ever could, on the subject of mysticism.

R. B. Blakney takes a Taoist bent, and I have no quarrel with that. I haven’t edited the following bits in any
significant way, but have, instead, taken the text directly from his introduction to the 1955 edition of his
translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. I have, though, done a bit of minor typesetting, to facilitate your reading
pleasure and spiritual edification.

Dang frickin brilliant, and the thing that blows my mind is that Blakney – and his sources – make it all sound like a
lead-pipe cinch.

Anyway:

Wherever the great mysticism has come, it has offered to replace popular or local religion with a new and
universal allegiance. Folk beliefs about gods and spirits give place to a metaphysic of the utmost generality for
those who can rise to it. The mystics passion is satisfied only with the sense of the Ultimate Reality, the God,
Godhead, or God-ness that is back of the world of mind and nature. What is the Ultimate like? And what has it
to do with man? The mystic report is that:

“Reality, however designated, is One; it is an all-embracing unity from which nothing can be separated.

1. Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord (Palestine, 7th c BC)
2. So I say that likeness born of the One, leads the soul to God, for he is One, unbegotten unity, and of this
   we have clear evidence (Eckhart, Germany, 1300)
3. Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray (Kabir, India, 1500)
4. Something there is, whose veiled creation was before the earth or sky began to be; so silent, so aloof and
   so alone, it changes not nor fails but touches all (Tao Te Ching 25)

IT, the Ultimate, is nameless, indescribable, beyond telling: and therefore anything said about it is faulty:

1. What is his name?… And God said to Moses, I AM WHAT I AM… Say unto the children of Israel, I AM
   hath sent me unto you (Exodus 3:14)
2. Describe it as form yet unformed, as shape that is still without shape; or say it is vagueness confused:
   one meets it and it has no front; one follows it and here is no rear (Tao Te Ching 14)
3. IT cannot be defined by word or by idea as the Scripture says, it is the One ‘before whom words recoil’
   (Shankaracharya, India, 800)
4. It is God’s nature to be without a nature. To think of his goodness, or wisdom, or power is to hide the
   essence of him, to obscure it with thoughts about him… Who is Jesus? He has no name (Eckhart)

Within the self, IT is to be found and there it is identical with Reality in the external world:

1. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him… (Genesis 1:27)
2. … the Father is in me and I in Father… I and the Father are one (John 10:38, 30)
3. As sure as the Father, so single in nature, begets his Son, he begets him in the spirit’s inmost recess, and
   that is the inner world. Here, the core of God is also my core; and the core of my soul, the core of God’s
   (Eckhart)
4. Here likewise in this body of yours, my son, you do not perceive the True; but there in fact it is. In that
   which is the subtle essence, all that exists has its self. That is the True, that is the Self, and thou,
   Svetaketu, are That (Chandogya Upanishad, India)
5. I went from God to God, until they cried from me in me, O thou I! (Bayazid, Persia, 847)
6. The world may be known without leaving the house; God’s way may be seen apart from the windows (Tao
   Te Ching 47) [cf. Within You Without You, George Harrison]

IT can be known, not discursively, but by acquaintance, and this acquaintance is the point of all living:

1. Know that when you learn to lose yourself, you will reach the Beloved. There is no other secret to be
   learnt, and more than this is not known to me (Ansari of Herat)
2. Where is this God? In eternity. Just as a man who is in hiding clears his throat and reveals his
   whereabouts, so it is with God. Nobody could ever find God. He has to discover himself… But when
   one takes God as he is divine… he will be like one athirst; he cannot help drinking even though he thinks
   of other things… the idea of the Drink will not depart as long as the thirst endures (Eckhart)
3. If you work by the Way, you will be of the Way; if you work through its power, you will be given the
   power; abandon either one and both abandon you (Tao Te Ching 23)

Reality is disclosed only to those who meet its conditions, and the conditions are primarily moral:

1. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God (Matthew 5:8)
2. The more a man regards everything as divine – more divine than it is of itself – the more God will be pleased
   with him. To be sure, this requires effort and love, a careful cultivation of the spiritual life, and a watchful,
   honest, active oversight of all one’s mental attitudes toward things and people. It is not to be learned by
   world-flight, running away from things, turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, one must
   learn an inner solitude. He must learn to penetrate things and find God there, to get a strong impression
   of God fixed firmly in his mind (Eckhart)
3. When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit laughs for what it has found (Sufi)
4. With the lamp of the world and discrimination one must go beyond word and discrimination and enter upon
   the path of realization (Lankavantara Sutra)
5. The student learns by daily increment. The Way is gained by daily loss, loss upon loss until at last comes
   rest (Tao Te Ching 48)”

And thus I leave you with Eliot’s parting shot from the Waste Land:

“… Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon – O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymos mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih, shantih, shantih…”