The full impact of life’s unimaginable beauty and wonder
I know I am not the only person who, upon being intrigued by an idea encountered in a book or during a conversation, finds himself subsequently running into said idea over and over again.
Earlier this year, in Josef Pieper’s The Silence of St. Thomas, I came upon this: “the reality and character of things consist in their being creatively thought by the Creator.” This prompted me to begin thinking of myself as “being creatively thought by the Creator.” Lo and behold, I began running into like notions in the days and weeks that followed.
My last three columns have had to do with looking at the world minus the labels we attach to its contents. Well, last week I read a book — re-read it, actually; I first read it about 40 years ago — in which this sentence, not surprisingly, popped right out at me: “It is notorious that the operations of the average human consciousness unite the self, not with things as they really are, but with images, notions, aspects of things.” Then, on the very next page, there was this: “Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make them the current coin of experience ….”
This book advocates that we “‘purify’ the senses” in order “to make them organs of direct perception,” adding that “this means we must crush our deep-seated passion for classification and correspondences” and “escape from the terrible museum-like world of daily life, where everything is classified and labeled.” Such a life of “pure sensation,” the book suggests, “would mean that we should receive from every flower, not merely a beautiful image to which the label ‘flower’ has been affixed, but the full impact of its unimaginable beauty and wonder.”
I could hardly disagree with any of this since I had been entertaining similar notions here for three weeks running. (Once again, I must remind readers that the point of this column is to record trains of thought, not to advance theses and argue on their behalf. If I have learned anything from writing the column it is how quaint this practice has become. Discourse seems to have devolved almost entirely into advocacy of one sort or another. The notion of thinking of yourself as “being creatively thought by the Creator” just to see what that feels like, and irrespective of whether or not you believe in a Creator, is apparently alien to many people these days.)
Anyway, about that book I was reading. It is called Practical Mysticism and is by Evelyn Underhill, best-known for Mysticism, a Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness.
I hadn’t thought of the ideas I discussed in my three previous columns in terms of mysticism, either practical or otherwise, but I had mentioned the sense of mystery I experienced when I tried looking at the world as best I could unencumbered by the categories of thought. One of the more interesting things about Underhill’s book is that, from the start, her position is that what is called “mysticism” is really about encountering what she calls “Reality.” Her point is that the world seen in terms of pure sensation, unmediated by abstractions, itself provides an experience of transcendence:
Real knowledge, since it always implies an intuitive sympathy more or less intense, is far more accurately suggested by the symbols of touch and taste than by those of hearing and sight. True, analytic thought follows swiftly upon the contact, the apprehension, the union: and we, in our muddle-headed way, have persuaded ourselves that this is the essential part of knowledge — that it is, in fact, more important to cook the hare than to catch it. But when we get rid of this illusion and go back to the more primitive activities through which our mental kitchen gets its supplies, we see that the distinction between mystic and non-mystic is not merely that between the rationalist and the dreamer, between intellect and intuition. The question which divides them is really this: What, out of the mass of material offered to it, shall consciousness seize upon — with what aspects of the universe shall it “unite”?
From this passage you can see that Underhill, as a writer, was no airy-fairy dreamer. She has a clear, direct, and down-to-earth style. And it looks to me as if she got across what I was driving at better than I did.
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When Underhill speaks of purifying the senses, the language she uses reminds me strongly of the Rinzai school of Zen practice. Very, very similar ways of stating hte case for direct perception of reality. Which is what mysticism is all about. In fact it’s the most pragmatic, no-nonsense, non-filtered way of confronting reality there is.