Mysticism Everyday
On Sunday I was invited to a event at the Tau Center in Wheaton, a presentation on “everyday mysticism.” Being new to the area, I am curious to make new acquaintances, and the topic does interest me. Mystical experience is not esoteric, rare, something reserved for the psychologically unbalanced. Seems to me that mystical experience is nothing more or less than paying attention to what life presents.
Distraction is the norm for us. Our physical survival is assured for most of us in the first world by agricultural productivity, and the marvelous systems of communication and transportation which distribute the benefits of our sciences widely. Of course there is the possibility that one will be unlucky, and encounter a life changing accident, or the body and mind may still be disabled by some of the same maladies that afflicted our ancestors. By and large though, our basic welfare need not be front and center of our concern. As a consequence we are subject to a plethora of distractions. If you pause to consider what comes into your conscious awareness on a typical day, I am sure that you can make your own list of distractions.
Paying attention strikes me as pathway to “hearing one’s name called” so to speak, to a feeling “beyond words,” that there is a rightness about life, and that all of life is connected, and worthy of human compassion. I get that feeling whenever I settle in to do a job, any job, satisfied to do the work to be best of my ability, to achieve excellence in the end. I cannot recall ever being disappointed with the result of this difficult one hundred percent focus, of losing myself in the elements of the work. When the project is completed I have a sense of improvement within myself as a human being. Without distraction I have learned more about “reality” than I knew before inception of the project. Any project at all qualifies as another opportunity for mystical engagement: mowing the grass (yet again), chipping away old paint from a railing, applying paint to deck boards, etc.
Here’s another: putting into words some thoughts on mysticism, to point to landscape to the extent that I’ve observed, and to let that be enough.
The discussion at the Tau Center was stimulating, and the wine was especially tasty.
The end of mysticism
is the establishment of a contact,
consequently of a partial coincidence,
with the creative effort which life itself manifests.
This effort is of God,
if it is not God himself.
The great mystic
is to be conceived
as an individual being,
capable of transcending
the limitations imposed upon the species
by its material nature,
thus continuing
and extending
the divine action.
— excerpt The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
By Henri Bergson p. 221
