CHAPTER I

THE POINT OF DEPARTURE
The mystic type—its persistence—Man’s quest of Truth—The Mystics claim to have attained it—The foundations of experience—The Self—its sensations—its con- cepts—The sense-world—its unreal character—Philosophy—its classic theories of Reality—Naturalism—its failures—Idealism—its limitations—Philosophic Scepticism —the logical end of Intellectualism—Failure of philosophy and science to discover Reality—Emotional and spiritual experience—its validity—Religion—Suffering— Beauty—Their mystical aspects—Mysticism as the science of the Real—lIts state- ments—its practice—It claims direct communion with the Absolute
Ae most highly developed branches of the human
family have in common one peculiar characteristic.
They tend to produce—sporadically it is true, and usually in the teeth of adverse external circumstances—a curious and definite type of personality ; a type which refuses to be satisfied with that which other men call experience, and is inclined, in the words of its enemies, to “deny the world in order that it may find reality.” We meet these persons in the east and the west; in the ancient, mediaeval, and modern worlds... Their one passion appears to be the prosecution of a certain spiritual and intangible quest: the finding of a “way out” or.a‘“‘ way back” to some desirable state in which alone they can satisfy their craving for absolute truth. This quest, for them, has constituted the whole meaning of life: they have made for it without effort sacrifices which have appeared enormous to other men: and it is an indirect testimony to its objective actuality, that whatever the place or period in which
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4 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
they have arisen, their aims, doctrines and methods have been substantially the same. Their experience, therefore, forms a body of evidence, curiously self-consistent and often mutually explanatory, which must be taken into account before we can add up the sum of the energies and potentialities of the human spirit, or reasonably speculate on its relations to the unknown world which lies outside the boundaries of sense.
All men, at one time or another, have fallen in love with the veiled Isis whom they call Truth. With most, this has been but a passing passion: they have early seen its hopeless- ness and turned to more practical things. But there are others who remain all their lives the devout lovers of reality: though the manner of their love, the vision which they make unto themselves of the beloved object, varies enormously. Some see Truth as Dante saw Beatrice: a figure adorable yet intangible, found in this world yet revealing the next. To others she seems rather an evil yet an irresistible enchantress: enticing, demand- ing payment and betraying her lover at the last. Some have seen her in a test tube, and some in a poet’s dream: some before the altar, others in the slime. The extreme pragmatists have even sought her in the kitchen; declaring that she may best be recognized by her utility. Last stage of all, the philo- sophic sceptic has comforted an unsuccessful courtship by assuring himself that his mistress is not really there.
Under whatsoever symbols they may have objectified their quest, none of these seekers have ever been able to assure the world that they have found, seen face to face, the Reality behind the veil. But if we may trust the reports of the mystics —and they are reports given with a strange accent of certainty and good faith—they have succeeded where all these others have failed, in establishing immediate communication between the spirit of man, entangled as they declare amongst material things, and that “ only Reality,” that immaterial and final Being, which some philosophers call the Absolute, and most theo- logians call God. This, they say—and here many who are not mystics agree with them—is the hidden Truth which is the object of man’s craving ; the only satisfying goal of his quest. Hence, they should claim from us the same attention that we give to other explorers of countries in which we are not com- petent to adventure ourselves; for the mystics are the pioneers
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 5
of the spiritual world, and we have no right to deny validity to their discoveries, merely because we lack the opportunity or the courage necessary to those who would prosecute such explora- tions for themselves. ;
It is the object of this book to attempt a description, and also—though this is needless for those who read that description in good °faith—a justification of these experiences and the conclusions which have been drawn from them. So remote, however, are these matters from our ordinary habits of thought, that their investigation entails, in all those who would attempt to understand them, a certain definite preparation: a purging of the intellect. As with those who came of old to the Mysteries, purification is here the gate of knowledge. We must come to this encounter with minds cleared of prejudice and convention, must deliberately break with our inveterate habit of taking the “visible world” for granted; our lazy assumption that somehow science is “real” and metaphysics is not. We must pull down our own card houses—descend, as the mystics say, “into our nothingness ”—and examine for ourselves the foundations of all possible human experience, before we are in a position to criticize the buildings of the visionaries, the poets, and the saints. We must not begin to talk of the unreal world of these dreamers until we have discovered—if we can—a real world with which it may be compared.
Such a criticism of reality is of course the business of philosophy. I need hardly say that this book is not written by a philosopher, nor is it addressed to students of that imperial science. Nevertheless, amateurs though we be, we cannot reach our proper starting-point without trespassing to some extent on philosophic ground. That ground covers the whole area of first _ principles: and it is to first principles that we must go, if we would understand the true significance of the mystic type.
Let us then begin at the beginning: and remind ourselves of a few of the trite and primary facts which all practical persons agree to ignore. That beginning, for human thought, is of course the I, the Ego, the self-conscious subject which is writing this book, or the other self-conscious subject which is reading it; and which declares, in the teeth of all arguments, I AM.
* Even this I AM, which has seemed safe ground to most metaphysicians, is of course combated by certain schools of philosophy. ‘* The word Szm,’’ said Eckhart
6 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
Here is a point as to which we all feel quite sure. No meta- physician has yet shaken the ordinary individual’s belief in his own existence. The uncertainties only begin for most of us when we ask what else zs.
To this I, this conscious self “imprisoned in the body like an oyster in his shell,” come, as we know, a constant stream of messages and experiences. Chief amongst these are the stimulation of the tactile nerves whose result we call touch, the vibrations taken up by the optic nerve which we call light, and those taken up by the ear and perceived as sound.
What do these experiences mean? The first answer of the unsophisticated Self of course is, that they indicate the nature of the external world: it is to the “ evidence of her senses ” that she turns, when she is asked what that world is like. From the messages received through those senses, which pour in on her whether she will or no, batter upon her gateways at every instant and from every side, she constructs that “sense-world’ which is the “real and solid world” of normal men. As the impressions come in—or rather those interpretations of the original impressions which her nervous system supplies—she pounces on them, much as players in the spelling-game pounce on the separate letters dealt out to them. She sorts, accepts, rejects, combines: and then triumphantly produces from them a “concept” which zs, she says, the external world. With an enviable and amazing simplicity she attributes her own sensa- tions to the unknown universe. The stars, she says, ave bright; the grass zs green. For her, as for the philosopher Hume, “reality consists in impressions and ideas.”
It is immediately apparent, however, that this sense-world, this seemingly real external universe—though it may be useful and valid in other respects—cannot be 7he external world, but only the Self’s projected picture of it.2 It is a work of art, not
long ago, ‘‘can be spoken by no creature but by God only: for it becomes the creature to testify of itself Mon Sum.’’ In a less mystical strain Lotze, and after him Bradley and other modern writers, have devoted much destructive criticism to the concept of the Ego as the starting-point of philosophy : looking upon it as a large, and logically unwarrantable, assumption.
* Plato, Phaedrus, § 250.
? Thus Eckhart, ‘‘ Every time that the powers of the soul come into contact with created things, they receive and create images and likenesses from the created thing - and absorb them. In this way arises the soul’s knowledge of created things.
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THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 7
a scientific fact ; and, whilst it may well possess the profound significance proper to great works of art, is dangerous if treated as a subject of analysis. Very slight investigation will be enough to suggest that it is a picture whose relation to reality is at best symbolic and approximate, and which would have no
_ meaning for selves whose senses, or channels of communication,
happened to be arranged upon a different plan. The evidence of the senses, then, cannot safely be accepted as evidence of the nature of ultimate reality: useful servants, they are dangerous guides. Nor can their testimony disconcert those seekers whose reports they appear to contradict.
The conscious self sits, so to speak, at the receiving end of a telegraph wire. On any other theory than that of mysticism, it is her one channel of communication with the hypothetical “external world.” The receiving instrument registers certain messages. She does not know, and—so long as she remains dependent on that instrument—never can know, the object, the reality at the other end of the wire, by which those messages are sent; neither can the messages truly disclose the nature of that object. But she is justified on the whole in accepting them as evidence that something exists beyond herself and her receiving instrument. It is obvious that the structural peculiarities of the telegraphic instrument will have exerted a modifying effect upon the message. That which is conveyed as dash and dot, colour and shape, may have been received in a very different form. Therefore this message, though it may in a partial sense be relevant to the supposed reality at the other end, can never be adequate to it. There will be fine vibrations which it fails to take up, others which it confuses together. Hence a portion of the message is always lost; or, in other language, there are aspects of the world which we can never know.
The sphere of our possible intellectual knowledge is thus strictly conditioned by the limits of our own personality. On
Created things cannot come nearer to the soul than this, and the soul can only
| approach created things by the voluntary reception of images. And it is through the _ presence of the image that the soul approaches the created world : for ¢he image ts a
Thing, which the soul creates with her own powers. Does the soul want to know the nature of a stone—a horse—a man? She forms an image.’’—Meister Eckhart, Pred. i. (‘‘ Mystische Schriften,” p. 15).
8 AN. INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
this basis, not the ends of the earth, but the external termini of our own sensory nerves, are the termini of our explora- tions: and to “know oneself” is really to know one’s universe, We are locked up with our receiving instruments: we cannot get up and walk away in the hope of seeing whither the lines lead. Eckhart’s words are still final for us: “the soul can only aK toi created things by the voluntary reception of images.” Did some mischievous Demiurge choose to tickle our sensory a ase in a new
a
a
‘The late Professor James once suggested as a_ useful exercise for young idealists a consideration of the changes which would be worked in our ordinary world if the various branches of our receiving instruments happened to exchange duties; if, for instance, we heard all colours and saw all sounds. Such a remark as this throws a sudden light on the strange and apparently insane statement of the visionary Saint-Martin, “I heard flowers that sounded, and saw notes that shone”; and on the reports of certain other mystics concerning a rare moment of consciousness in which the senses are fused into a single and ineffable act of percep- tion; and colour and sound are known as aspects of the same thing.t
Since music is but an interpretation of certain vibrations undertaken by the ear, and colour an interpretation of other vibrations performed by the eye, all this is less mad than it sounds. Were such an alteration of our senses to take place the world would still be sending us the same messages —that strange unknown world from which, on this hypothesis, we are hermetically sealed—but we should have interpreted them differently. Beauty would still be ours, though speaking another tongue. The bird’s song would then strike our retina as a pageant of colour: we should see all the magical tones of the wind, hear as a great fugue the repeated and harmonized greens of the forest, he cance of stormy sos Dida realize how slight an adjustment of 6tif Own organs is needed
to initiate us into such a world, we should perhaps be less
* Thus Edward Carpenter says of his own experience of the onset of mystical consciousness, ‘‘ The perception seems to be one in which all the senses unite into - one sense”’ (quoted in Bucke’s ‘‘ Cosmic Consciousness,” p. 198).
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\ THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 9
contemptuous of those mystics who tell us that they appre- hended the Absolute as “heavenly music” or ‘“ Uncreated Light”: less fanatical in our determination to make the “real and solid world of common sense” the only standard of reality. This “world of common sense” is a conceptual world. It may represent an external universe: it certainly does represent the activity of the human mind. Within that mind it is built up: and there most of us are content “at ease for aye to dwell,” like the soul in the Palace of Art.
A direct encounter with absolute truth, then, appears to be impossible for normal non-mystical consciousness. We cannot know the reality, or even prove the existence, of the simplest object: though this is a limitation which few people realize acutely and most would strenuously deny. But there persists in the race a type of personality which does realize this limitation : and cannot be content with the sham realities that furnish the universe of normal men. It is necessary, as it seems, to the comfort of persons of this type to form for themselves some image of the Something or Nothing which is at the end of their telegraph lines: some “ conception of being,’ some “theory of knowledge.” They are tormented by the Unknowable, ache for first principles, demand some background to the shadow show of things. In so far as man possesses this temperament, he hungers for reality, and must satisfy that hunger as best he can: staving off starvation, though he may not be filled.
Now it is doubtful whether any two selves have offered themselves exactly the same image of the truth outside their gates: for a living metaphysic, like a living religion, is at bottom a strictly personal affair—a matter, as Professor James reminded us, of vision rather than of argument.t Nevertheless such a living metaphysic may—and if sound generally does— escape the stigina of subjectivism by outwardly attaching itself > to a traditional School; as personal religion may and should outwardly attach itself to a traditional church. Let us then consider shortly the results arrived at by these traditional schools—the great classic theories concérning the nature of reality. In them we see crystallized the best that the human intellect, left to itself, has been able to achieve.
* * A Pluralistic Universe,” p. 10.
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10 - AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM