“Mysticism, in its pure form, is the science of ultimates, the science of union with the Absolute, and nothing else, and the mystic is the person who attains to this union, not the person who talks about it. Not to know about, but to Be, is the mark of the real initiate. ”—Evelyn Underhill
Mystical experience almost always involves a loss of the self and a connection with something larger. These moments may be fleeting or sustained. D. T. Suzuki, who was instrumental in bringing Zen Buddhism to the West, told Roshi Jiyu Kennett that “once or twice” he had the great experience of Kensho or “seeing into his own nature,” but “a million times the little moments that make one dance.”
Evelyn Underhill, in Mysticism, holds that spiritual history reveals two distinct and fundamentally different attitudes toward the unseen, and methods for getting in touch with it. She calls these methods the “way of magic” and the “way of mysticism.” The fundamental difference between the two is that “magic wants to get, mysticism wants to give—immortal and antagonistic attitudes, which turn up under one disguise or another in every age of thought.” She points out that mysticism is nonindividualistic, and rather implies the abolition of individuality, of “that hard separateness, that ‘I, Me, Mine’ which makes of man a finite isolated thing.” Essentially, she concludes, mysticism is a movement of the heart which seeks to transcend the limitations of the ego in order to surrender itself to ultimate reality for no personal gain.
Most religions focus on the heart rather than the head when it comes to union with the divine. Christianity is based on connection to Christ and to others through love, and many Medieval women mystics spoke of their union with Christ in sexual terms. Buddhism puts the seat of intelligence in the heart, and it is from that center that we reach out. The Sufi mystic is in love with the Absolute—not in some weak, sentimental way but with the entire force of the will—and seeks for this beloved in every aspect of earthly phenomena. For the modern Taoists, love is the Way. Ecstacy is a word often used when this contact has been established, but stillness, silence, deepening, and peace also describe this union.
Mystical experiences may arrive spontaneously or be actively sought through a lifetime of meditation and devotion. Silence and letting go seem to form an intrinsic part of the experience. As Martin Buber put it, “When we are quiet to the Lord, he makes his dwelling with us; we say Lord, Lord, and we have lost him.” Because the experience is essentially beyond language, fundamentally ineffable, the attempts to describe union are sometimes overdramatic, even hysterical. This excess of language perhaps leads people to believe that communion with the divine involves whipped-up emotions and the whir of angel wings—something they aren’t capable of or don’t deserve. It could be, however, that the mystical experiences written about—or at least anthologized—represent only one type of union, and that Suzuki’s “million moments that make one dance” are much more commonly experienced than generally acknowledged. Women throughout the ages have often lived in this dancing light, but may never have felt the need to write or speak about it because they were never separate enough from the experience to require that it be put into language to make it seem real to them.
We’ve all had these moments of connection, of touching down deeply to feel our spiritual roots: a sudden stillness in the woods where we forget ourselves completely and “become one” with nature; contact with another person in which we so fully embody ourselves that our soul bypasses our ego to directly commune with their soul; moments of utter clarity when delusion falls away, leaving only naked awareness. These moments—which can be described as contact with the Tao, “letting go” in Zen, self-remembering in Gurdjieff work, and so on—give meaning to our lives and provide felt connection with the rest of the world. They also shape our spiritual path, for after we start paying attention to such dancing moments, worldly compensations no longer satisfy, we want the authenticity and validity of the Tao contact to last. And it can, but we need to have faith in our own experience, slow down, pay attention, and let go.
Psychologist Jean Shinoda Bolen, author of Goddesses in Everywoman, connects the Eastern concept of the Tao with C. G. Jung’s theory of synchronicity, which finds deep spiritual roots beneath what may appear to be a coincidental meeting or event. True moments of synchronicity have an emotional charge, a sense of knowing, that is absent in chance happenings. Anyone who has worked with the I-Ching (Book of Changes) and felt herself to be part of a larger design has experienced synchronicity—and the Tao.
The Tao
The experience of the Tao or of a unifying principle in the universe to which everything in the world relates, underlies the major Eastern religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoist, and Zen. Although each religion may call the experience by a different name, the essence of all varieties of Eastern mysticism is the same. Each holds that all phenomena—people, animals, plants, and objects from atomic particles to galaxies are aspects of the One. . . .
The Tao experience conveys a profound awareness of being part of something far greater than ourselves, of being included, loved, and in touch with an invisible, eternal reality. In that timeless moment, when the Tao is experienced, we know that this is more significant than the tangible world around us and far more meaningful than our usual, everyday concerns. At that moment, everything and everyone seems synchronistically connected, linked by an underlying spiritual meaning.
What is known intuitively, through experience of the Tao, is that we are not lonely, isolated, insignificant, and meaningless creatures, accidently evolved from organic rubbish on a minuscule dot in the vast cosmos. Instead, the Tao experience gives us the direct knowledge that we are linked to all others and to the universe, through that which underlies everything and which some call God. Synchronistic events are glimpses into this underlying oneness, which is the meaning conveyed through an uncanny coincidence. The unseen linkage moves us; the synchronistic event tells us we are not alone.
Jean Shinoda Bolen
The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self
“Unfortunately our Western mind, lacking all culture in this respect, has never yet devised a concept, nor even a name, for the ‘union of opposites through the middle path, ’ that most fundamental item of inward experience, which could respectably be set against the Chinese concept of the Tao.” —Carl G. Jung
“There is a true secret about starting practice. The operation is as different for men and women as sky from sea. The principle for men is refinement of energy, the expedient for women is refinement of body.”—LiuTMing
Women who became adept at Taoist practices were called “Immortal Sisters” and were often given the honorific title of “Real Human. ” Sun Bu-er lived in the twelfth century in China and began a serious study of the Tao when she was fifty-one, after raising three children. In her set of fourteen poems, a classic of Taoist practice, sheadvocated that women “cutoff the dragon,” that is, stop the menstrual flow, so that “the alchemical energy returns to the furnace.” Much of esoteric Taoism includes working with the inner forces of yin and yang, sexual energy, and inner alchemy. In the following poem—not a part of the work mentioned above—brambles are a metaphor for compulsive emotional reactions, whereas the lotus blossom, which grows in mud yet remains pure, symbolizes pristine mind.
Immortal Sister’s Poem
Brambles should be cut away, Removing even the sprouts.
Within essence there naturally blooms A beautiful lotus blossom.
One day there will suddenly appear An image of light;
When you know that,
You yourself are it.
Sun Bu-er
from Immortal Sisters: Secrets of Taoist Women, translated and edited by Thomas Cleary
“What both Freud and Jung called ‘the unconscious’ is simply what we, in our historically conditioned estrangement, are unconscious of. It is not necessarily or essentially unconscious. ”—R. D. Laing
“This room was where people went formally to communicate directly with Oneness, in what we might call meditation. They explained to me the difference between Mutants’ [white people’s] prayer and the Real People’s [Australian Aborigines’] form of communication is that prayer is an outward talk to the spiritual world, and what they do is just the opposite. They listen. They clear thoughts out of their mind and wait to receive. ’’ —Mario Morgan
Living in Dreamtime
The Aborigines listened through all their senses to the various languages that permeate the natural world—for example, languages emitted by trees, celestial bodies, rocks, wind, water, fire, shadows, and seeds. In closely observing, imitating, or questioning a tangible phenomenon, one is able to listen to a message of the nature of reality as a whole. The Dreamtime stories arose from listening to the innate intelligence within all things. In many Aboriginal languages the word for listen and the word for understand are the same. The symbolic or poetic understanding we derive from contemplating natural form is dependent on a metaphoric model in which one thing stands for or is understood in terms of another. For example, a botanical tree, with its roots embedded in the earth and its branches reaching into the sky, may stand as the metaphysical “tree of life,” the connecting link between the upper and lower worlds. We believe these metaphoric relationships are generated solely by human “intelligence” and exist only in the human language. For the Aborigines, however, the knowledge and understanding gained and reiterated as metaphor derives from an intelligible energy actually emanating from the observed form—the seed, tree, or stone—to which subtle sensory centers in our body respond.
On a day’s hike into the remote wilderness of a mountainous national park, I began musing on this subject. After walking for hours, I fell and lay, as if embraced, in the thick, soft layers of red and gold leaves. I opened my eyes and met with a strange sensation that rippled through my body. My mind full of language and concepts began to dissolve into a world of twisting forms, of stretching, giant cassarina trees, sensual dancing eucalyptus trees, and the entangled, bleached bodies of those trees that had fallen. I had to pull out for a moment to remind myself to listen and smell. Then it began—a nearly subliminal chattering of voices that seemed to radiate from the trees themselves. Some were transformed into ideas in my mind, others reached into my heart and groin with a sort of wordless understanding. While merging into the consciousness of this wondrous forest, I also felt distinctly human and very feminine. I felt a rush of joy for having glimpsed a world in which the Aborigines must live every day and every moment.
Johanna Lambert Wise Women of the Dreamtime
Contemplations:
“Without words, it comes. And suddenly, sharply, one is aware of being separated from every person on one’s earth and every object, and from the beginning of things and from the future and even a little, from one’s self.”—Lillian Smith
“We and the sun and the trees, all is perpetual flowing. It’s only the kind of senses we have that do this stop-photography. In actuality, everything is moving all the time, and it can be scary as hell.”
—Joanna Macy“The kingdom of God does not come if you watch for it. Nor will anyone be able to say, ‘It is here’ or ‘It is there. ’ For the kingdom of God is within you ” —Jesus of Nazareth
"The manner in which one receives communication from blessed spirits in a vision is difficult to tell. Everything that is said is uncommonly brief. From one word I learn more than otherwise from thirty. One sees the idea of the speaker, but one does not see with the eyes, and yet everything is clear, more distinct than now. One receives it with pleasure, like the blowing of a cool breeze in hot summer. One can never repeat it wholly in words . . .—Anna Katharina Emmerich
“Once on a fine spring day, Rabi’a’s servant called to her to come out and behold the work of the Creator. 'Rather, you come in, ’ answered the saint, ‘and view the Creator Himself. Contemplation of Him keeps me from beholding His creation."
“You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden, but you will grow if you are sick, if you are in pain, if you experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain and learn to accept it, not as a curse or punishment, but as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.” —Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
"God’s grace is the beginning, the middle, and the end. When you pray for God’s grace, you are like someone standing neck-deep in water and yet crying for water. It is like saying that someone neck-deep in water feels thirsty, or that a Gish in water feels thirsty, or that water feels thirsty.”—Ramana Maharshi
“But once it appeared to me—if I may say it, although I dare not assert it as certain—that I had been outside the body. But how and when my soul left its body, how it threw off the body, I cannot tell. For so lightly and suddenly, in an instant, as it seemed to me, did my soul throw off the cloak of flesh, as when one clad in an open cloak is running along the road, and the cloak slips suddenly from the shoulders of the runner.”
—Alpais of Cudot (1150-1211)“The result is not more than these three words: I got burnt and burnt and burnt.”
—Rumi, on mystical union
For more on women mystics, see:
Ann Bancroft, Weavers of Wisdom: Women Mystics of the Twentieth Century, Arkana, 1989.
Carol Lee Flinders, Enduring Grace: Loving Portraits of Seven Women Mystics, Harper & Row, 1993.
Meditations With series, edited by Matthew Fox, Bear & Company (includes writings of such female Christian mystics as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Teresa of Avila).
Leonore Friedman, Meetings with Remarkable Women, Shambhala, 1987.
Swami Ghananada and Sir John Stewart-Wallace, eds., Women Saints: East and West, Vedanta, 1979.
Mary Giles, ed., The Feminist Mystic, Crossroad, 1982.
Daniel Goleman, Varieties of Meditative Experience, Dutton, 1977.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Modem Library, 1988.
Roshi Jiyu Kennett, How to Grow a Lotus Blossom, Abbey, 1977.
Ellen Sidor, ed., A Gathering of Spirit: Women Teaching in American Buddhism, Primary Point, 1987.
Bernadette Roberts, The Path to No-Self, Shambhala, 1985.
Eveyln Underhill, Practical Mysticism, Dent, 1914.
Simone Weil, Waiting for God, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951.