Practical Mysticism | Page 3

the mystics themselves, and to other
works in which this question appears to be answered, these people
reply that such books are wholly incomprehensible to them.
On the other hand, the genuine inquirer will find before long a number
of self-appointed apostles who are eager to answer his question in many
strange and inconsistent ways, calculated to increase rather than resolve
the obscurity of his mind. He will learn that mysticism is a philosophy,
an illusion, a kind of religion, a disease; that it means having visions,
performing conjuring tricks, leading an idle, dreamy, and selfish life,
neglecting one's business, wallowing in vague spiritual emotions, and
being "in tune with the infinite." He will discover that it emancipates
him from all dogmas--sometimes from all morality-- and at the same
time that it is very superstitious. One expert tells him that it is simply
"Catholic piety," another that Walt Whitman was a typical mystic; a
third assures him that all mysticism comes from the East, and supports
his statement by an appeal to the mango trick. At the end of a
prolonged course of lectures, sermons, tea-parties, and talks with
earnest persons, the inquirer is still heard saying--too often in tones of
exasperation--"What is mysticism?"
I dare not pretend to solve a problem which has provided so much good
hunting in the past. It is indeed the object of this little essay to persuade

the practical man to the one satisfactory course: that of discovering the
answer for himself. Yet perhaps it will give confidence if I confess
pears to cover all the ground; or at least, all that part of the ground
which is worth covering. It will hardly stretch to the mango trick; but it
finds room at once for the visionaries and the philosophers, for Walt
Whitman and the saints.
Here is the definition:--
Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who
has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at and
believes in such attainment.
It is not expected that the inquirer will find great comfort in this
sentence when first it meets his eye. The ultimate question, "What is
Reality?"--a question, perhaps, which never occurred to him before--is
already forming in his mind; and he knows that it will cause him
infinite-distress. Only a mystic can answer it: and he, in terms which
other mystics alone will understand. Therefore, for the time being, the
practical man may put it on one side. All that he is asked to consider
now is this: that the word "union" represents not so much a rare and
unimaginable operation, as something which he is doing, in a vague,
imperfect fashion, at every moment of his conscious life; and doing
with intensity and thoroughness in all the more valid moments of that
life. We know a thing only by uniting with it; by assimilating it; by an
interpenetration of it and ourselves. It gives itself to us, just in so far as
we give ourselves to it; and it is because our outflow towards things is
usually so perfunctory and so languid, that our comprehension of things
is so perfunctory and languid too. The great Sufi who said that
"Pilgrimage to the place of the wise, is to escape the flame of
separation" spoke the literal truth. Wisdom is the fruit of communion;
ignorance the inevitable portion of those who "keep themselves to
themselves," and stand apart, judging, analysing the things which they
have never truly known.
Because he has surrendered himself to it, "united" with it, the patriot
knows his country, the artist knows the subject of his art, the lover his
beloved, the saint his God, in a manner which is inconceivable as well

as unattainable by the looker-on. 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"?
It is notorious that the operations of the average human consciousness
unite the self, not with things as they really