PSI Annual Journal 1999

What is mysticism? Can one be a Unitarian Universalist and a mystic without losing one' s mind and one' s friends? Or are the two utterly incompatible?

For most people mysticism is a vague term that suggests a wide variety of confusing images, for instance:

whirling dervishes, or people sitting for hours in the lotus position, looking for all the world like a human pretzel; fire walking cults, airport panhandlers, witchcraft, shamans, or yogis who can bring their breathing almost to a standstill; so-called New Age phenomena like parapsychology, psychic healing, astrology, auras, or oracles like Tarot cards and the I Ching.

All of this can obscure what mysticism is: the belief that God (Ultimacy, the Creative Source, The Life Force) can be known directly; can be known, in Emerson' s words, "without mediator or veil."

In volume II of his SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, one of the twentieth century' s finest theologians, Paul Tillich, puts it this way:

"Mystical" is, first of all, a category which characterizes the divine as being present in experience. In this sense, the mystical is the heart of every religion. (Continue Tillich:) A religion which cannot say "God is present" becomes a system of moral or doctrinal rules which are not religious, even if they are derived from originally revelatory sources. Mysticism, or "the felt presence of God" is a category essential to the nature of religion. (Paul Tillich, SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, Vol. II, pp. 83)

The mystic affirms that Transcending Reality is knowable. That is all that mysticism is. And, really, that is enough. The incense and candles, Sufi dancing, meditation, chanting "OM," and other so called occult practices are merely forms, vehicles for coming to God; they are not the experience itself. At the heart of mysticism lies the simple faith that God is knowable: that we can and do participate in God. This is first and foremost what mysticism is. Secondarily, mysticism refers to that set of practices, such as meditation or divination, which aid one in experiencing Ultimate Reality. It is this secondary sense that Zen Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism are regarded as forms of Eastern Mysticism. Each of those traditions involve practices, or ways of perceiving the world, that help overcome the existential split between self and Ultimacy.

With this much by way of background, let me share with you a story of my own experience. Some of you have heard it, but it bears repeating because it, more than anything else, marked my start down the mystical path.

At the end of October 1978, my wife left me for another woman. We had been apart for most of the summer, so by the time of our final separation that fall, I had become used to living alone and slowly had begun to heal. But at the time I felt fairly strongly that the only way to avoid such pain in the future was never to love again.

In that context I attended, that November, the fall conference of the Liberal Religious Educators Association in Syracuse, New York. The program was on developmental play, a form of affective learning designed to help children and adults overcome certain kinds of emotional blocks. As part of the workshop, children were recruited by the local R.E. Director to help us demonstrate these techniques. I agreed to be one of the adult volunteers. I don' t remember the precise instructions anymore, but essentially we were asked to interact with the children in a particularly playful, focused way. I was working with a boy of about eight or nine, and as soon as we began the process, I became overwhelmed with a feeling of intense love for this child. It was an absolutely indescribable experience. It' s as if my heart just opened up with a whoosh, and there he and I were just very present with one another. I was so moved that tears came to my eyes (though I tried to hold them back). It was a kind of physical feeling of being in love – in the sense of being surrounded by love, like being in a cloud or a mist. It was a gently tangible feeling, although it wasn' t anything one could actually see. I was in love with that boy. It was an exuberant, incredible, wonder-ful feeling. It lasted until the demonstration was over – about ten minutes. Just as suddenly as it came, it vanished.

Later that night and the following day at odd moments I tried to write in my notebook the exquisite nature of what I had experienced. That the name of the experience was love, I was clear about. Everything else about it I never was able to adequately describe.

I have come to regard that experience as a mystical experience. It was probably not as profound as Paul' s experience on the road to Damascus, or Isaiah' s vision of the Lord and the seraphim in the temple. But it gave me an inkling of what Mary must have experienced when an angel announced to her that she was going to give birth to the holy spirit in human form.

Unlike Isaiah, I cannot claim that I' ve seen God. Nor have I seen a white light at the end of a tunnel. But I have seen love. Actually, what I experienced was not a seeing, so much as a feeling. In Bill Schultz' s words, I was for those moments in contact with "the Gracious, in touch with something of inestimable splendor." (Schultz in The World, 3/87)

That small, profound experience changed my life in two days. First it healed me. I don' t mean that I was transformed in some magical way, I mean that in those moments my heart was re-opened. I still had to do the hard work of mending my hurts, but I realized that while a relationship had ended, love had not. Love lingered, love remained. By love I was transformed, by love re-claimed. I learned that my ability to love persisted.

The second thing that I gained from that experience was a clear sense of vocation. I had been in the ministry for some time, but the early years were a struggle. Part of that struggle involved a lack of clarity on my part as to the focus of my ministry. Suddenly, it all came clear. My vocation was to open my heart to others, and to help them open theirs as well. In the years since then, there have been times when I have wandered from that understanding, times when I have become lost in the minutiae of administration, or when problems in my personal life have taken up the largest part of my energy and abilities. But even so, I' ve never lost that vocational vision. Ultimately, I believe that we are all ministers, all servants of that Universal Love; we are all called by that Love to the task of opening our hearts, and in the spirit of love, called to the work of serving one another.

This is the mystical path, the path of the heart. And it is the same path, no matter how it is called by the various faith traditions. William Johnston, in his book THE INNER EYE OF LOVE, puts it this way:

All the great religions speak of a mystery which they call by various names; the Buddha nature, Brahman and Atman, the divine spark, the ground of being, and so on. There (amidst unspeakable mystery) we find ourselves confronted with the most powerful (force) of all: divine love, infinite love, unrestricted love -- a force that shakes (us) to the very (depths) of our being. (Johnston, pp. 33.)

A few moments ago I described my encounter with what might be called Universal Love. While this break-through experience was my first and only mystical experience, it was not my first encounter with the mystical tradition. That began years before and continues today through my interest in science. I am not a scientist. I never mastered calculus, but I have always been fascinated by science. Some years ago I encountered the book THE TAO OF PHYSICS. This was one of the first in a whole series of books that sought to understand and make sense of the profound parallels between the cosmologies of physics and mysticism. Brian Swimme, a physicist who is at work constructing a modern cosmology, offers this perspective:

I realize how strange it sounds: an empty realm, a mysterious order of reality a no-thing-ness that is simultaneously the ultimate source of all things. But there is little we can do about that. In the language of physics, we call it quantum fluctuation. Elementary particles fluctuate in and out of existence. A proton emerges suddenly – where did it come from? Who made it? How did it sneak into reality all of a sudden? We say it simply leapt out of no-thing-ness: particles boil into existence out of sheer emptiness. That is simply the way the universe works. We are here approaching an Ultimate Mystery, something that defeats our attempts to investigate. There was no fireball, then the fireball erupted. The universe erupted, all that has existence erupted out of nothing, all of being erupted into shining existence…(B. Swimme, THE UNIVERSE IS A GREEN DRAGON, pp.37,39.)

What is so striking about the current understandings of physics is how similar this new physical reality is to that order of reality that mystics have encountered down through the ages. Contemplate the words of Robert Oppenheimer and Meister Eckhart on the front cover of your program. Or these words from Lao Tzu:

Look, it cannot be seen – it is beyond form.
Listen, it cannot be heard – it is beyond sound.
Grasp, it cannot be held – it is intangible.
Nature did not originate in beginnings;
will not reach its goal in endings.
Nature is the formless source of all forms,
which yet remains unaffected by its forms.
Stand before it and there is no beginning.
Follow it and there is no end.
Thus begins understanding of the Tao
(Lao Tzu, TAO TE CHING, #14)

Something of significance is occurring in the convergence of mysticism and physics. As we reflect in depth on the mysteries of modern physics, we realize that in the relativized world of post-Newtonian quantum mechanics, science has made mystics of us all. Where before we were able to imagine subject and object as discrete and detached, now we realize that the observer and the observed are one. In this new scientifically mystical world we inhabit, we realize that we are all inextricably linked to one another in the cosmic web of being. With this by way of overview, a brief discussion of two central aspects of the mystical perspective will help round out our understanding. I noted earlier that mysticism is often described as the path of the heart. That is because the mystic understands that in the search for ultimate answers, the mind can only take one to the limits of ego and the outer edges of rationality. But in order to understand that which transcends all ego and all rationality, another kind of knowing is required, an intuitive kind. The path of the heart is that kind of knowing. Two imperatives follow from this. They correspond to the inner and outer dimensions of being. The first is the necessity for self-emptying. The second is the necessity for compassionate action.

Self-emptying:

Lao Tzu writes:
Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind rest at peace.
Knowing stillness is insight.
Knowing stillness, the mind is open.
With an open mind, you will attain the divine.
Being divine, you will be one with the Tao.
(Ibid., #16)

The importance of the emptying of the self is echoed by countless others who have traveled the mystical path. The point is well taken. It is one that we in the West need to heed more than ever before. Our lives are endlessly filled, filled to over-flowing. Our materialist culture is a culture of fullness. We have bodies too full, minds too full, but spirits that are too often empty of anything that is truly nourishing. How shall we find peace and joy in life if we are eternally enmeshed in seeking to be full. Mysticism teaches that for Godness to enter, for the open-hearted path to be found, there needs, instead, to be a process of emptying.

Compassionate action.

The second imperative is the necessity for compassionate action. Writes Meister Eckhart:

Jesus became a human being because God, the Compassionate One, could not suffer, and lacked a back to be beaten. God needed a back like our backs on which to receive blows, and thereby to perform compassion as well as to preach it.

You may call God love. You may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion. (MEDITATIONS, pp. 100, 111)

One of the criticisms often made against mysticism is that it is self-centered and lacks a theory or practice of justice. Actually, mysticism is self-centered, but not in the way most people usually mean. Mystical practice such as meditation is designed to help persons come to know themselves at their deepest levels. But at the deepest levels of being we recognize our common humanity, we recognize our connection with others. Thus, paradoxically, as one finds oneself, one loses oneself. One loses the sense of identification with an individualized ego. One finds, through love, one' s infinite communion with all being.

With the deepening awareness of the ultimate continuity between self and other, comes a natural flowing of the heart towards compassionate action. As we reflect on the matter, we realize that throughout history, those who in one way or another lived in the presence of Ultimacy, were also humanity' s best teachers and greatest social reformers: Gandhi, Buddha and Jesus all experience mystical consciousness. All devoted themselves to the betterment of humanity. In our day the same is true of Mother Theresa. Though she might not describe herself as such, she is a contemporary Christian mystic. Her life is holy in the truest sense of that word. She lives continually in God' s presence, and her life is not only devoted to compassionate action, it is the quintessential example of the meaning of that term. Mother Theresa is compassionate action.

Before I close, a word is in order about the limitations of mysticism. Perhaps the most important one is its non-rational character. Many of rationalist persuasion, including most humanists, find mysticism unacceptable because it is "irrational" and unscientific. This is true in one sense, but is misleading. In fact, to make such a claim is, I believe, to misunderstand or misuse science.

Science is a particular way of knowing, a way that has enabled us to make sense of the world as we have never before been able to do. Science has made possible incredible material well-being. Science has made possible nuclear holocaust. There is a tendency in our heavily left-brained culture to assume because science is rooted in rationality that it is automatically good and that, therefore, the fruits of science are automatically good, as well. The truth is that science is neither automatically good, nor bad. Science simply exists. The question of rationality' s ultimate virtue must be answered not by science, but by human being.

There is, really, an incredible irony in the rationalistic critique of mysticism. That is this: the very forces of modernity and rationalism that sought to displace mysticism and raise science to the level of God, now, paradoxically find themselves being drawn by that same science into a renewed, re-inspirited mystical cosmology. It is scientists, not mystics, who are discerning and depicting the parallels between mysticism and science. The mystics have known this all along. Now they are simply observing the eternal play of the Tao while science rediscovers and cycles around to an ancient, mystical form of knowing.

Finally, we see that the rationalist critique of mysticism misses the mark. Mysticism is not anti-rational, it is trans-rational. It is like the yin and yang of Taoism: a necessary, complimentary principle of life. Mysticism and rationalism are simply different ways of knowing.

I said at the beginning of this series that I would share at the end my own theological perspective. By now it should be clear. I seek a balancing of the left-brained and the right, of dark and light, of yin with yang. For many years I have struggled to develop an adequate language for my theology. I' ve tried several formulations: scientific mysticism, right-brained humanism, mysticism with a humanist face, left-brained rationalism, meta-rationalism. None of them is quite satisfactory. My current favorite is this: hu-mysticism. Actually, the easiest way to describe my theology is to say that I' m a Taoist and risk that people will not know what that means. Taosim teaches us to live out of both sides of our being, to celebrate the polarities of light and dark, to use both hemispheres of our brain. As a humanist, I value rationality, the democratic character of community, and the ethical imperative to seek justice in social relations. As a mystic, I value the intuitive dimension of being and the path of the heart which encourages me towards the complementarity of quiet mind and compassionate action.

"Be all that you can be," proclaims the army ad. What an unlikely place to find wisdom. Yet how true those words are. For me all-that-I-can-be necessarily involves polarity, Life, God, the Tao, or Ultimacy, call it what you want, is not to be known in only one way: either through pure rationality or through pure mysticism. Neither way by itself is large enough to contain the Divine Mystery. Probably both together are not large enough either, but they are all we have available at the moment so they will have to do. Taken as contrasting yet complementary ways of knowing, they offer more promise for making sense of life than any other way I know.

As I draw to a close, I would evoke that sense of the Divine Mystery that is, finally, what mysticism is about. I do so using Brian Swimme' s words about Shakespeare:

Why did Shakespeare write? He wrote because the world enchanted him. He wrote to capture the grandeur, pathos, profundity and beauty that he experienced in life. In order to do so he had to become one with this beauty. How else to express feelings except by entering deeply into them? Shakespeare lived his life, stunned by its majesty, and in his writing attempted to capture this passion in symbolic form.

Shakespeare put himself into writing because the world enchanted him. Drawn into life by allurement in a thousand different ways, he became alluring. Stunned by the fascination permeating the order of existence, he in turn fascinated. (Swimme, pp.56)

As with Shakespeare, so with us all. Drawn into life by love, it is our challenge and possibility
to become one with love,
to become love,
ultimately, to give ourselves away in love.
For truly, what else is there to do?

PSI Symposium Annual Journal 1999