Mysticism: The Preeminent Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness

A Meditation on a Book by Evelyn Underhill. Part I

Note: Mysticism: The Preeminent Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness by Evelyn Underhill is divided into two parts. The first part, titled The Mystic Fact, which I will explore in this essay, offers an introduction to the general subject of mysticism. The second part, titled The Mystic Way, lays out the typical stages through which the mystic passes. I will be exploring that part of the book in next month’s essay.

“Leave your ignoble ease, your clever prattle, your absurd attempts to solve the apparent contradictions of a Whole too great for your useful little mind to grasp. Trust your deep instincts: use your latent powers. Appropriate that divine, creative life which is the very substance of your being. Remake yourself in its interest, if you would know its beauty and its truth. You can only behold that which you are. Only the Real can know Reality.” –Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: The Preeminent Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness

1.

After I completed sixth grade my family moved from the town where we’d been living my entire short life. My ambitious father had been offered a promotion in the company he worked for and the new position required him to relocate, which our family—my parents, me, and my three brothers—were going to do at the end of the school year. Rather than go to class on that final celebratory June day, I stayed home.

My classmates knew I was leaving but I never told them that I was going to do this, although I had planned it. For some reason, I thought it would be cool to disappear, to imagine my schoolmates and friends wondering where I was, to fantasize about them missing me. Which I am quite sure, looking back, they did not.

But I think there was something much deeper going on in my young soul. For the first time in my life, I was leaving one world for another and felt that during that momentous transition I didn’t want any big fanfare, no tearful goodbyes. I just wanted to go quietly, to be left alone to go my own way.

Now, to many of my friends—or former friends—I have disappeared again. Much like that time years ago, I’ve told no one what’s happened to me. But this time, I haven’t gone anywhere. I’m still here in my home of almost 27 years and going about my life as usual, sort of, yet with a significant change. What’s changed is my inner world. And if that shows up in the way I live day-to-day, it’s in my social life—or the lack of it.

This time, I haven’t any fantasies about anyone missing me. Nor do I care. And I am certainly not doing this because I think it’s cool. But the trajectory that I’d experienced years ago in sixth grade and the one I am experiencing now have a similar resonance. I’m slipping from one world to another, but this time at this stage of my life and in what’s become of our world, it’s far more momentous. It’s not just a change of location; it’s a shift in consciousness.

When I recently reread those lines I quoted above from Evelyn Underhill’s magnificent 1911 book, Mysticism: The Preeminent Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, I thought they were an apt description of what’s been happening to me since March 2020 when the COVID-19 psyop struck. I’ve left behind my ignoble ease and clever prattle and have been trusting my deep instincts and latent powers and appropriating the divine, creative life which is the very substance of my being, and remaking myself in its interest. And to do that, I’ve needed to disappear from much of what has come before in my life and, to a large degree, to do it on my own, like a molting caterpillar.

I’ve retreated from my old world to gather my inner strength for what’s become clear to me is a spiritual war. I’ve wanted to focus my energies rather than dissipate them by going to certain places or seeing certain people, none of which holds much interest for me any longer. For the time being, I’m no longer going to events I used to love—art openings, plays, concerts, movies, book readings—because I feel they speak of a world in which nothing has changed, in which nothing much important has happened between March 2020 and today. But everything has changed, so much so that I feel as if I now live in two radically different worlds.

In one world, I go about the basic business of living—shopping for food, going to the hardware store, working around my lovely old home, paying my many bills, going out for an occasional meal (except at the restaurants that required patrons to be jabbed to get in their doors during the height of covidmania; they’ll never see me again). And recently I’ve returned to showing up at occasional gatherings of friends from my former life.

Granted, with them I have to bite my tongue and pretend that everything is fine and normal to blend in like a chameleon, which I do because I still enjoy their company as much as I did before the onslaught of the COVID-19 psyop. (They don’t know about this “Underlined Sentences” column because I’ve kept it a secret from them.) In this war, I’m needing to choose my battles. Not my will but Thy will, O God, I pray to myself in situations like this. And God whispers back: Sometimes, to hear the exquisite and invaluable harmony of friendship and love, you need to be silent. And, I think, maybe I need to suffer a little for it.

In my other world, the world of my inner life, I am striving to attune my being as never before to a transcendent presence beyond the veil of appearances—both real and virtual—that occupies far too much of life in the modern, material world. It’s not been easy, straddling these two worlds where every day the divide appears to be growing wider and deeper, perhaps by my own doing to some extent. It’s not anything you can really see but in my mind I have this cartoon image of a man standing with one foot on one side of a bottomless abyss and the other foot on the other side, and the fissure keeps getting wider and I don’t know what’s going to happen to him.

I sometimes think of a line F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his 1936 essay, “The Crack-Up,” in which he says that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In that essay, Fitzgerald writes about two years in his life when he realized he had been “drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.” He continues:

“I realized that in those two years, in order to preserve something—an inner hush maybe, maybe not—I had weaned myself from all the things I used to love—that every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at dinner had become an effort. I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking.”

Fitzgerald apparently never fully recovered. Four years after he wrote those lines, he died in 1940 from a heart attack brought on by alcohol abuse. He was 44.

I didn’t die, obviously, but a part of me perished in those early days of the COVID-19 psyop, that much I know. It was a psychological death. The death of what I believed the world to be, the death of the structures that gave my life direction and purpose and goals and, at times, even a giddy optimism. It all collapsed. I think many of you reading this can say much the same about your lives back then and these past six years in which we’ve all needed to remove ourselves as much as we can from the insanity going on around us to preserve that “inner hush.”

We’ve done that to reassess and realign and reimagine our way of being—the entire architecture of our inner lives and how we live in alignment with that—in a world that had sunk into such a pit of bedlam and deception and depravity that we hardly knew what to do with our lives except to feed the body and let it sleep, and even that was hardly possible in a world that felt like having to continually listen to fingernails on a chalkboard.

Beginning in March 2020 when the “two weeks to stop the spread” lockdowns began and lasted for months, I was waking up most mornings all wide-eyed with disbelief and horror to a world I no longer recognized. No one did. No one on earth had ever seen anything like it—empty streets, empty skies (except for the chemtrails), empty offices and schools and stores. Our inner lives were also experiencing something entirely new and untried as, the way I saw it, the globalists treated us like lab rats in a vicious experiment of human conformity and compliance.

It was a waking nightmare for me and many others who knew in our depths what was really happening, that Orwell’s infamous boot he wrote about in his novel 1984 was coming down hard on our faces and there was nothing we could do to make it stop or even alert others, who were captured by the madness, to what was really going on. In a state of near helplessness—and even hopelessness—I did whatever I could to remove myself from participating in the charade and, when my girlfriend wasn’t with me, I was very much on my own—and very much in my head, even when my girlfriend was around. I was reminded of the part of T.S. Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton,” where he writes of being:

“At the still point of the turning world…

Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards…”

Here’s the thing I discovered in that “still point” in the midst of all of that mayhem. In a world that had fallen into such disarray, we can either stumble down a road of despondency and self-destruction or we can open ourselves up to uncharted paths of self-discovery and creativity. I know there must be a middle way somewhere in there. But if life is all about choices, it was pretty clear to me back then that those were the only two.

At first, I found myself on the road to the former, thinking I could drown with drinking my heartbreak over the sudden plight that most of humanity had allowed itself to be backed into. It didn’t work, at least not in the way I had intended. Instead, one day in the spring of 2021 I found myself in the doctor’s office with a case of pancreatitis brought on by alcohol. After that, I woke up to what I was doing to myself and chose the latter path, with a few short bouts of backsliding, one of which brought me to an urgent care center in the fall of 2023 while on vacation in the Adirondacks with a hypertensive emergency.

(Photo by James Kullander)

At last, I came to believe that the only way I was going to be able stay alive and relatively sane during that staggeringly insane period of life on earth was to think and read and write myself out of my despair, to wrestle some kind of order and meaning back into my inner life to counteract the relentless chaos of the world around me, to become a kind of imaginary island of relative sanity in a tumultuous sea of unmitigated madness. To “straighten up and fly right,” as my father used to badger me years ago when he thought I was misbehaving and would have told me the same if he were alive today and if he’d seen what I had been doing to myself. It didn’t matter that I still had to go out into the world to get on with the basic business of living. What mattered is that I had to put up some kind of major psychic forcefield around me and to manage it all without losing my way—or my shit.

2.

In 1911, when Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) first published her masterpiece, Mysticism: The Preeminent Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, she most likely had no idea that she was laying the foundation to prepare the modern human soul for the cataclysmic changes that were about to wreak havoc throughout much of the world. The First World War was still three years away. But, aside from brief periods of relative peace and prosperity since it ended in 1918, the so-called Great War is in many ways still going on.

These days, the war appears to be reaching a crescendo as the global predators who’ve run roughshod over our precious planet for far too long are finally being exposed and backed into a corner as never before. And it’s a fight they are not going to give up easily. There is simply too much at stake for them—money, power, control, even their lives. It’s also a fight in which I feel we need to turn to the transcendent for help. It’s as if all of Western civilization has become a kind of fox hole. And, as William T. Cummings, a Catholic chaplain who served with American troops during World War II, is thought to have said, there are no atheists in fox holes. The idea being that in extreme danger, like combat, people often turn to faith.

We, too, are being backed into a corner. And now many of us need spiritual sustenance and protection, the armor of God, as Paul writes in his Letter to the Ephesians some 2,000 years ago. In the letter, he names pieces of the armor worn by the fighting men of his day, and repurposes them for use in spiritual warfare. He writes:

“Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” (Ephesians 6:14-17)

Rumors are flying around the internet that the tide is turning and great numbers of people are realizing the damage that’s been done to Western civilization these past few years by the predators running things—or at least maybe were running things until recently. One of my favorite Substack writers, Elizabeth Nickson, has hailed the recent conservative election victories around the world as a tipping point that is now leading Western civilization the way back to some semblance of reason and sanity. She writes:

“It’s over, lefties. It’s over, globalist scum. All your plans have failed. No one’s life has been made better except criminals, your only genuine voting base. You cannot fight reality and when it snaps back, the sting is memorable. It will last a hundred years. Your reputation’s collapse, the humiliation coming to you will be studied for centuries, it will be that spectacular.”

True, that. But what’s coming—those ruined reputations and wide scale humiliations of that “globalist scum”—might very well provoke them to go full throttle on us as if they’ve nothing left to lose. Which they don’t if things continue to unfold as they have been. And given this impending scenario, I think we’re all going to need something like that mighty armor of God just to get groceries, much like we did during covidmania, which many have been saying was simply a dry run for what’s to come.

To acquire that armor, you really need look nowhere else but within yourself. You need to reach down into your depths to home in on the divine presence always shining there like a beam of light on a still pool of the purest water from which we draw to slake our thirst for all that is good and true and holy. And to live free and without fear. Others can help lead us there but in the final hour it all comes from within. This is what the mystical life teaches us.

At first, the mystical life is a fascinating dinner guest brought to your house by a mutual friend. Then it becomes someone who has overstayed his welcome late into the night. Then you find he’s moved in, first into one room—maybe a spare bedroom you hardly ever use—and one day you find he’s taken over your entire house and has brought all his exquisite furniture and beautiful art to hang on your walls. Yet, you never turn him out because there’s something appealing and even fated about it all, so much so that you eventually never want to leave your house or see anyone else. Because what was once an unexpected guest turns out to be you.

This is how you remake yourself and behold that which you are and what is Real with a capital “R” that Underhill writes about and which I quoted above. You deliberately leave behind the world of ignoble ease and clever prattle. And not because you want to but because you have to lest you find yourself in that state of despair and defeat in which I’d found myself a few years back, and maybe drinking yourself to death while you’re at it.

And then you fight. Not with guns and bombs. This war is not that kind of war. For this war you need to go within for a time—and sometimes often, like a retreat from a battlefront—to fight your own demons, your hidden weaknesses. Every martial artist knows this and hopes to never have to use his body as a weapon, although he’s prepared to do that. Spiritual warriors need to be prepared to die for our convictions, no less than Jesus nailed to the cross, which is another way of using our bodies as a weapon we also hope we don’t have to use. But we need to be prepared to do that.

This is what happens when you turn to, and embrace, a mystical life, even if you may not call it that. I like to call it that because it connects me to an ancient tradition with a long line of holy ones who’ve come before us and with their own lives charted the path and have left behind their wisdom to help guide me. Their words are like coordinates on a map; they help orient and anchor me and point me in the right direction.

Whatever you want to call it, it’s a life in which the focus is about going within. We disappear from the life we’ve long loved and have been attached to—which, sadly, includes some friends—and reach inside ourselves for a higher level of reality while, at the same time, we find new likeminded individuals, kindred souls, and communities of support—as they find us—due to the unseen yet ever present gravitational pull that attracts like to like as a welcomed antidote to the inevitable loneliness that arrives with awakening.

3.

The beginning of an inner journey is often initiated by a piercing disappointment. Speaking for myself, and I think for many others, this happened in shocking, overwhelming waves through the years of 2020, 2021, and 2022. In that time, it became blatantly—and disappointingly—obvious during the height of covidmania that the world we knew was not what we thought it was. Over that time, the tiny and tolerable fissures of differences between us grew into an abyss between those who knew and those who did not know what was happening to our world.

Those of us who knew balked at the closures and mandates because they were absurd and wrong and, most startling, even the work of the devil. The scolds who championed the tyrannical diktats did not know this. To them, the threat of a so-called virus from a bat in a cave deep in the hinterlands of China with the capacity to wipe out all of humanity was real and the closures and the mask mandates and the injections with a so-called vaccine were the only way to stop its spread. Never in modern times—perhaps never in all time—had there been a more absurd fiction believed by so many.

I take no pleasure in saying that I’ve arrived at the unavoidable conclusion that this is why the divide between those who knew this and those who did not know this has become so wide and so deep—and so irreparable. Within the first months of the plandemic, we found ourselves in a world where we had a perilous, irreversible choice to make about whom to trust with our lives and the lives of our families and others we love. All kinds of human divides—those between the races, income disparities, levels of education, and cultures—have, and can be, bridged. But the divide between those who still believe with their heart and soul that fallible and corrupt governments—as all governments are—have our best interests in mind and those who put their trust in the sovereignty of the individual bestowed upon each of us at birth by God, is simply a bridge too far.

It is a bridge too far because there’s been a pronounced split in levels of consciousness, which manifests in two profoundly different ways of living. Those who cast their lot to be frightened wards of a soulless state—the physical, lower world—do not grasp what it feels like to be fearless and bold wards of God the Creator—the spiritual, upper world—as Jesus lived and admonished others of his times, and each of us today, to live as well. And, apparently, never the twain shall meet or agree with each other. Fear (which governs the lower world) and fearlessness (which governs the higher world) are about as compatible as oil and water.

How this happened—how some of us knew what was going on and how others did not—remains a confounding mystery to me and everyone I know. But the other night I was listening to a podcast where someone said that those who knew were tapped on the shoulder by the Holy Spirit, who told us what was happening and warned us to stay away from the jabs. Which suddenly made sense to me like nothing else has. It is as good an explanation as anything else I’ve come across. And perhaps, in the final analysis, it is the only explanation. Which for me opens the door to forgiving those who did not know what was going on nor what they had done to themselves nor what they had got caught up in. They did not know because they were not told in the way we were told. We can believe all we want that we’d come to the conclusion on our own. But maybe it was not as simple as that.

The divide between those who know what’s been happening and those who don’t may indeed be as wide and as deep as never before. But the divide between each one of us and the divine truth is never unbridgeable. It’s always in us to access at any time. A mystic understanding of life bridges that gap. And it’s not unattainable to all but a chosen few solitaries who dwell on some misty mountaintop, in a desert outpost, or in a dark, dank cave—all far from the madding crowd.

To be sure, many of the greatest mystics, of all time and of all creeds, have gone to these places to search within for the ultimate lessons of human existence. But they have done so to more deeply connect to the world as it is, to Reality, turning their backs on the business of life in the ephemeral, material world for a time—or even for life in the case of monastics—to communicate more directly with God and to bring back and share the hard-won and precious secrets of their grueling inward journey.

Indeed, as Underhill writes:

“It is true that in nearly every case…[they] have first left the world, as a necessary condition of establishing communion with that Absolute Life which reinforced their own: for a mind distracted by the many cannot apprehend the One. Hence something equivalent to the solitude of the wilderness is an essential part of mystical education. But, having established that communion, re-ordered their inner lives upon transcendental levels—being united with their Source not merely in temporary ecstasies, but in virtue of a permanent condition of the soul, they were impelled to abandon their solitude; and, resumed, in some way, their contact with the world in order to become the medium whereby that Life flowed out to other men. To go up alone into the mountain and come back as an ambassador to the world, has ever been the method of humanity’s best friends. This systole-and-diastole motion of retreat as the preliminary to a return remains the true ideal of Christian Mysticism in its highest development.”

And of those solitaries, Underhill adds: “Strange and far away though they seem, they are not cut off from us by some impassable abyss. They belong to us. They are our brethren; the giants, the heroes of our race.” From these mystics who lived long ago we can learn a lot about how to live today, beginning with the first mystics who emerged in early Christianity, those who left the increasing confines of the fledgling church, a church that was beginning to, as Underhill writes in another book of hers, called The Mystic Way, “adjust itself to this world rather than cut its way through to the next.” Those who fled to the deserts of Egypt did so as Christianity gained more acceptance under Emperor Constantine (early 4th century) but believed the faith was becoming too worldly or compromised. And there were thousands of them.

Among these desert fathers and mothers are Anthony the Great, often called the “father of monasticism,” who retreated into the Egyptian desert and became a model for solitary (eremitic) life; Pachomius, who founded the first organized monastic communities (cenobitic life), where monks lived together under a rule; Macarius of Egypt, a prominent spiritual teacher known for wisdom sayings and guidance to other monks; Syncletica of Alexandria, one of the most famous desert mothers, known for her teachings on inner discipline and humility; and Amma Sarah, a strong spiritual figure who lived near the Nile and was known for her resilience and authority. In a collection of the wisdom of the desert monastics, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, we read these words from Macarius of Egypt that are just as applicable today as they were many hundreds of years ago: “If you reprove someone, you yourself get carried away by anger and you are satisfying your own passion; do not lose yourself, therefore, in order to save another.”

The desert mystics endured lives of extreme simplicity and devotion and self-sacrifice beyond what most of us can imagine today: minimal food, possessions, and shelter; constant prayer and meditation on scripture; manual labor; and spiritual mentorship. Yet, they would have it no other way. As Underhill puts it in The Mystic Way:

“The upgrowth of the monastic system within Christianity, which began in Egypt in the fourth century, represents the flight of these mystical spirits from the restless complications and unrealities of the world; with its perpetual calls on attention, its perpetual tendency to deflect the movement of consciousness from the ‘straight and narrow path’ of its thoroughfare to God. Here, the thwarted spirit of new life shifts its center, begins to cut another ‘way out’ towards transcendence….”

As we watched churches around the world not only shut down in lockstep to the malfeasant governmental commands during the plandemic and then, when “allowed” to reopen, insist that their parishioners get jabbed and masked up to be allowed back through their supposedly hallowed doors, many of us lost our faith in their leadership. Even Pope Francis threw himself into the heinous fray when in August 2021 he famously said: “Getting the vaccines that are authorized by the respective authorities is an act of love. And helping the majority of people to do so is an act of love, love for our families and friends, and love for all peoples.”

Maybe I've figured it all wrong here but I have to say that this strikes me as being in opposition to the official teachings of the Catholic Church, found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is based upon the ancient Roman Catechism, also known as the Catechism of the Council of Trent, first published in 1566, which states:

“From the beginning of Christian history, the assertion of Christ’s lordship over the world and over history has implicitly recognized that man should not submit his personal freedom in an absolute manner to any earthly power, but only to God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Caesar is not ‘the Lord.’”

The Pope’s statement was part of a public service announcement video produced in collaboration with the Ad Council. It was aimed particularly at audiences in the Americas to encourage what was being touted as COVID-19 vaccination. But by my lights more treacherous and traitorous words could not have been spoken by the leader of the largest church in the world. What he said was not only in opposition to the Catechism of the Catholic Church; it was also encouraging the forced vaccination of those who did not want to get injected with a bioweapon but felt they had to if they wanted to keep their jobs or return to their schools or attend cultural and social events or remain a “good” Catholic. This sort of “love” happens when you’re raped. Of which, as is well known by now, many members of the Catholic Church leadership have been found guilty. Talk about disappointment.

So where do those of us of any Christian denomination, or inclination, now turn? It might be high time that we look within, and not look anywhere outside ourselves, for any sort of validation of our faith in the divine wisdom that holds the key to what’s as essential to our lives as the air we breathe and the force that animates our souls. I am embarking deeper into the mystic way these days because I feel there is nowhere else to go, nowhere else to run, nowhere else to hide.

But I really don’t want to go, run, or hide anywhere. For me it is time to reconnect with God here and now as never before and to fortify that bond. My sense of having no exit is “only the immeasurability of God to which no paths are needed because he is already here,” as the renowned German theologian Karl Rahner, S.J. (1904—1984) writes in his book, The Mystical Way in Everyday Life: Sermons, Prayers, and Essays. And if God is already here, then I want to make that connection more deeply felt and known, even when I am at my lowest. Or especially when I’m at my lowest. As Rahner writes so eloquently and unmistakably:

“Do not despair when experiencing despair: Let your despair take all away from you, since what is taken from you is only the finite, the unimportant, even if it may have been ever so wonderful and great, even if it may be yourself with your ideals, with your smart and idealized plans for your life, with your image of a god that looks more like you than the incomprehensible one.”

I am delving into Christian mysticism because that is the world with which I am most familiar and also, and more importantly, to which I have found myself, amidst my forays into Buddhism and Sufism and Hinduism over the past few decades, most consistently drawn to and devoted. I’m drawn to how Jesus taught the people of his day everything there is to know about the ruling predators and their matrix, systems that shape how people think, perceive reality, assert control, and enslave people. And what He taught back then is just as applicable today as it was 2,000 years ago because the predators and their matrix are still with us, and even more so than ever before.

The COVID-19 psyop revealed to all with eyes to see that the web of deceit and control and enslavement is still with us, that little in this regard has changed from ancient times to today. Even most of the institutional churches have become inculcated in the insidious ways of human subjugation. What I’m hearing in the quiet but persistent whispers in my heart is calling me to the mystic’s direct connection to God when the world around us seems so far removed from it. That is, I’m longing to find God with no go-between. I think for me—and for many others—the time has come for this to happen. As Rahner wrote in Theological Investigations, Vol. XII 60 years ago in 1966: “The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic,’ one who has experienced something, or he will cease to be anything at all.”

A makeshift altar I stumbled upon a few weeks ago while walking through the woods in a New York state park close to where I live. (Photo by James Kullander)

4.

The word “mysticism” is derived from the Greek term “to close” or “to conceal” and its derivative mystikos, meaning “an initiate.” This can also mean “make someone aware of something,” “train,” “familiarize,” “give first experience of something.” A related word, myéō, can mean “shutting the eyes and mouth to experience mystery.” The Greek mystikos passed into Latin as mysticus, then into Old French, and eventually into English as “mysticism” in the early 18th century.

The mystic way is less a journey of distances than it is an exploration of the soul. It is a never-ending pilgrimage from our normal self and our normal universe to cross the great gulf that stands between us and the God within, to “meet God without intermediary,” as the Flemish mystic, John van Ruysbroeck (1293 or 1294–1381), put it. And meeting God without intermediary forms the foundation of both our individual and community strength. The mystic journey is a moveable redoubt. It’s a refuge that goes where we go as we move through the world and stands against the devil’s schemes to obliterate us individually and collectively.

A mystic way of life may be available to us all but requires some study, practice, patience, and trust in every step of the journey to locate and finally immerse oneself in mysticism’s eternal embrace, even when we’re out doing what we need to do to put a roof over our heads and food on our tables and raise our families. For, mysticism is not a way of knowing. Rather, it is a way of being. It is also a way of comprehending our world. As Underhill writes:

“A direct encounter with absolute truth…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 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.”

To be sure, those who cannot be content with the sham realities that “furnish the universe of normal men” grow less attached to the world of transient appearances and more attuned to a timeless transcendent order—what Underhill and others steeped in the mystic way call the “Absolute”—that governs us unseen by any human eye. Yet, we do not abandon our commitment to detail in how we conduct ourselves in the manifest world around us. Far from it. Nor do we cease to pay attention to what’s happening in that world. We live, Underhill writes, “with both hands; towards the finite and towards the Infinite, towards God and man.” So, here we are again with those two worlds.

The idea of participating in the finite world is an important one if we are to share the fruits of our spiritual labors. In his foreword to Underhill’s book, Ira Progoff helps us get the picture. He writes:

“What Underhill means by mysticism is an approach to life that asserts the primacy of the inner world. Because it proceeds on the belief that the reality of life is on the interior level, it can achieve experiences of unity that connect the inner and the outer. This is the reason that Underhill speaks of the mystic as an inherently creative person.”

I like this idea a lot because when we are using our talents to create something meaningful and beautiful, something that resonates both within our depths and with the firmaments high above—be that with words, music, art, even setting up our homes—we are manifesting here in the sensate world that which longs to be brought down from the heavens in as much as we long to go the other way. Monasteries are notoriously clean and well-ordered and intentionally designed to inspire reverence. Their beauty quietly speaks to us and inspires us to think that, as John Keats writes in the closing lines of his 1819 poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

On the creativity of the mystic, Underhill herself writes:

“The earthly artist, because perception brings with it the imperative longing for expression, tries to give us in colour, sound or words a hint of his ecstasy, his glimpse of truth. Only those who have tried, know how small a fraction of his vision he can, under the most favourable circumstance, contrive to represent. The mystic, too, tries very hard to tell an unwilling world his secret. But in his case, the difficulties are enormously increased. First, there is the huge disparity between his unspeakable experience and the language which will most nearly suggest it. Next, there is the great gulf fixed between his mind and the mind of the world.”

We thus have that wide and ever-growing abyss between those of us who may at best be only slightly aware of the ravages of evil plaguing our planet and those who don’t know a thing about it—no matter how we each came about knowing what we know. It’s not that we cannot mingle among the others. There is really no escape from that. We can even forgive those who were tricked and captured by the COVID-19 hoax because of their gullible fear that a virus was going to kill us all and for their trust in those who exploited that fear. Because, perhaps, they were not touched on their shoulders by the Holy Spirit.

What we cannot do, then, with rare exception—if ever—is to raise their awareness to a level of reality that can free them from their attachment to, and belief in, the deadly fictions that are running rampant throughout our lives, which is the real virus. Many of us have tried to raise this awareness in others and just as many have failed. It seems that this higher awareness is simple but not transmissible, at least by human means, especially now that countless bridges have been burned during the unprecedented civic annihilation brought on by COVID-19 psyop.

All told, to Underhill, mysticism is defined less by what it is than by what it seeks. By definition, she writes, mysticism is simply “the science or art of the spiritual life.” Then, she goes on to say:

“Broadly speaking, I understand it to be the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order; whatever be the theological formula under which that order is understood. This tendency, in great mystics, gradually captures the whole field of consciousness; it dominates their life, and, in the experience called ‘mystic union,’ attains its end. Whether that end be called the God of Christianity, the World-soul of Pantheism, the Absolute of Philosophy, the desire to attain it and the movement towards it—so long as this is a genuine life process and not an intellectual speculation—is the proper subject of mysticism. I believe this movement to represent the true line of development of the highest form of human consciousness.”

5.

From what I’ve gathered by steeping myself in Underhill’s book and the writings of many mystics over the years, and by having gone on many silent and solitary retreats at Christian and Buddhist monasteries, is that a mystic’s approach to life has at least four components that I will summarize here:

First, the mystic way is a training in sanity. Sanity is the opposite of evil. The mystic way trains us to see where evil lurks. Evil shows itself, for example, in those who appear or try to appear to be good, but to them appearance is all. In essence, their goodness is a heinous ruse. The COVID-19 jabs were never “safe and effective” and those who manufactured them and the governmental despots who pushed them, and, in many cases, mandated them, knew this all along. At the outset, when the jabs were first administered in December 2020, what we were told about them stopping the spread of the so-called virus and keeping its victims from dying, was all a lie. And it remains a lie. An evil lie. The jabs are deadly and if they are effective at anything it’s in maiming and killing those who got entangled in a web of deceit and foolishly rolled up their sleeves to get injected.

Second, the mystic way is a training in discernment. Discernment requires a clear head and an open heart guided by the infinite wisdom of God. You need to be curious. You need to ask yourself why certain things are happening and who benefits from those things. Once you acknowledge that the end game of the predators who operate the levers of governments is to kill or enslave us all, then you begin to filter everything you experience of the cabal’s tool of propaganda—that is, the mainstream media—through that illuminated awareness. Slowly, as you practice this way of seeing, you become increasingly aware of the depth and reach of this deadly agenda and choose life instead. When you begin to see the difference between fake goodness (virtue signaling) and true goodness, you also develop an increasing level of discernment that helps to differentiate the two. You will begin to wonder how you didn’t see it all years before.

Third, when you step onto the path of the mystic way you will begin to see—or to see anew as we did as children—the vast and inimitable beauty of the natural world that God has given us. Much of the ugliness we see in the world is a result of the evil in the world. The thing about natural beauty is that it’s eternal because it was given to us by God. To be sure, humanity has brought much ugliness into the world. But we also create a lot of beauty when what we create ultimately echoes the beauty that God has created within us and wants us to share—love, humility, charity, and even righteous anger when we’re confronted with evil and its abuse. Our highest and most holy task is to mirror in a myriad of ways this divinity with our creativity, even if you’re just creating your own life in a meaningful way. That alone is a beautiful thing.

Finally, the mystic way is a training in transcendence. This is important because transcendence is our final recourse to stand against the concerted, massive efforts of human degradation and demoralization laying waste to human sovereignty. “What we have to do is to proclaim that we do not belong entirely to the world of objects to which men are seeking to assimilate us, in which they are straining to imprison us,” writes the 20^th-century French philosopher, Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) in his book, Man Against Mass Society. In other words, he writes, “a man cannot be free or remain free, except in the degree to which he remains linked with that which transcends him….” Which is key to recognizing our divinity within a divine reality as, he writes “…human beings can be linked to each other by a real bond only because, in another dimension, they are linked to something which transcends them and comprehends them it itself.”

I am not giving up the fight in this spiritual war. I am choosing my battles. And I’m not checking out. I’m checking in. In future essays I will occasionally be focusing on Christian mystics and mysticism because writing about this is a means of meditating on Christian ideals and on the depths of God’s will for me. And it is a way for me to share my journey with all those who are also struggling as much as I am, if not more so. This is the task of our times as much as it has been the task of all times, and of which we are all capable of undertaking and achieving.

As Underhill writes:

“In the great mystics we see the highest and widest development of that consciousness to which the human race has yet attained. We see its growth exhibited to us on grand scale, perceptible of all men: the stages of its slow transcendence of the sense-world marked by episodes of splendor and of terror which are hard for common men to accept or understand as part of the organic process of life. But the germ of that same transcendent life, the spring of the amazing energy which enables the great mystic to rise to freedom and dominate his world, is latent in all of us; an integral part of our humanity.”

6.

Evelyn Underhill was a British spiritual writer, retreat leader, and one of the most influential modern voices on Christian mysticism. She is acknowledged as being largely responsible for the modern rediscovery of mysticism. She was a pioneer for women in religious spheres, becoming the first woman to lecture theology at Oxford, the first to lecture Anglican clergy, the first to officially lead spiritual retreats for the Church of England (including at Canterbury Cathedral), and a theological editor for The Spectator. She received an honorary Doctor of Divinity from the University of Aberdeen and fellowships at King’s College London.

Underhill also led retreats and offered spiritual direction, helping ordinary people develop a deeper inner life. This is what initially drew me to her and her work. A prolific author, she published some 40 books focusing on mysticism as a universal human phenomenon, blending psychology, history, and comparative religion. She studied many spiritual traditions but was deeply rooted in Christianity, which shows in the book that we explored here, Mysticism: The Preeminent Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness.

I cannot recall exactly when I bought and first read the book but I do know it was in the early 1990s when I was going through a particularly challenging period of my life, and I’ve dipped into it many times over some 30 years since then for spiritual sustenance and guidance. The book is Underhill’s most famous work and it remains one of my favorite books of all time.

Underhill died in London, England on June 15, 1941, just a few months after England entered World War II on September 3, 1939, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced the declaration of war against Germany. The cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage, a type of stroke. She was 65. After becoming a pacifist in her later years, particularly in the lead-up to World War II, she might have been taken from us by God, sparing her another round of wartime ravages that she’d lived through during World War I.

She is buried in the churchyard of St John-at-Hampstead in Hampstead, London (often referred to as St John’s Church, Hampstead).

Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941)

Selected Bibliography

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible. Meeks, Wayne A., et al. eds. The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version, with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. New York, New York. HarperCollins, Publishers, Inc. 1993.

Catechism of the Catholic Church. New York, New York. Doubleday, 1995

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Crack-Up: With Other Uncollected Pieces, Note-Books and Unpublished Letters. Edited by Edmund Wilson. New York, New York. New Directions Paperback, 1956.

Marcel, Gabriel. Man Against Society. Translated from the French by G.S. Fraser. Lanham, Maryland. University Press of America, Inc., 1985.

Rahner, Karl, S.J. The Mystical Way in Everyday Life. Translated from the German and edited and with an introduction by Annemarie S. Kidder. Maryknoll, New York. Orbis Books, 2010.

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Translated and with a foreword by Benedicta Ward, SLG. Trappist, Kentucky. Cistercian Publications, 1975

Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: The Preeminent Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. With a foreword by Ira Progroff. New York, New York. Doubleday, 1990. Originally published: London, England: Metheun, 1911.

Underhill, Evelyn. The Mystic Way: The Role of Mysticism in the Christian Life. Alpharetta, Georgia. Ariel Press, 1992.

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Note: Van Morrison refused to get the scamdemic injections and never required his audiences to get jabbed.