We do not perceive reality as it is, but we have perceived attributes of it (color, size, taste, etc.) and assign a collection of those attributes as a label for the thing. We think about reality in the form of labels, but this a separation from reality. This is like a man who walks down a road and is oblivious to everything around him, concerned only with the most efficient way of getting to his destination; the mystic is like a man going to the same place, but he perceives the trees and hedges, wonders about what is beyond them, and feels the wind on his fact. Poets like Whitman, Keats, and Blake are examples people who have trained themselves in mysticism. We can offer a definition: mysticism is uniting with Reality, or the experiential understanding of Reality.

We avoid mystery, and so we have united ourselves with shortcuts of things. It is like weaving a tapestry of the thing: the thing cannot be reduced to little squares, we have only captured the things which we noticed (generally the most common things), and the tangle of thread on the other side betrays the imperfection of our conception. We have to become like little children, to take just our perception and not filter it or cook it down into something manageable; a direct perception of the world. This frees us from our “museum-like” world where everything is labelled facts; “[i]t would mean that we should receive from every flower, not merely a beautiful image to which the word ‘flower’ has been attached, but the full impact of beauty and wonder, the direct sensation of life having communion with life” (Ch. 2) From these sense perceptions we occasionally “discern a whole fact—at once divinely simple and infinitely various—from which these partial messages proceed” (Ch. 2). We perceive the divine simplicity and its infinite varieties. The artist and poet are mystics who can communicate what they have perceived.

The reason why you, the practical man, does not see this is because we focus on what benefits us with the multiplicity of the time-space world. You probably have already had glimpses of this: a moment at a concert where you became unaware of your seat because your attention was wholly given to the music, or the woman, the love of whom redefined your world so that everything was interpreted in light of her. We are within time and space, yet can transcend it, as if the notes of the melody can transcend it an apprehend in the musician. The mystics have identified three realities: the Natural, the Spiritual, and the Divine; these move from multiplicity to One-which-contains-all-others. The first step is to withdraw into the silence of the part of ourself that it is unchanged by the changing moods, circumstances, and happenings of the world, the real you. Only then can you attend to the One Fact in which your selfhood is contained. The next step is to discipline your attention, the “orientation of your heart” (this goes by the name Purgation). After this preparation you can unite with Reality, beginning “with the World of Becoming, [then] the World of Being, and finally with that Ultimate Fact which the philosopher calls the Absolute and the religious mystic calls God.” (Ch. 3, end)

Do not expect this process to be quick: Teresa of Avila informs her daughters that this is a long, arduous process. Teresa says that we begin with Recollection, which is “the subjection of the attention to the control of the will” (Ch. 4, beginning). This is not itself mystical, but preparation. She says that we can practice by taking anything, whether it be a natural object, something more abstract like family or birth and death, or even pure idea. We need to learn to hold our attention on it. At first, we will quickly become bored, and doing it for fifteen minutes will be difficult, but as you continue you will see depths to it, and “[y]ou will hear the busy hum of [the world] as a distant exterior melody, and know yourself to be in some sort withdrawn from it.” (Ch. 4) Within that silence you are free. Over time you will become aware of You, and you can turn that concentration onto yourself. Looking at yourself like this will, after repeated practice, begin to reveal yourself to you, and you will find that there is something in you that is not a part of the world of multiplicity, like perceiving that an actor has another life off-stage. This is the first step, the initial baby step in contemplation.

By itself, Recollection is little more than a “psychic trick”. Self-perception must be accompanied by “a deliberate—probably a difficult—rearrangement of your character” (Ch. 5). As you have perceived yourself, you will have perceived the ugly and self-centered motives behind much of what you do. The problem is not merely that you do not perceive Reality because your mind takes symbolic shortcuts, but also because your will and being have been pointed the wrong way. Everything is about me, myself, and I, and is dedicated to acquiring the things of the world that you desire. This self-orientation is source of what have been known as the Seven Deadly Sins. It is this self-orientation that prevents us from seeing and uniting with Reality. As one ancient said, we are midway, capable of rising and uniting with the One, or falling and uniting with the multiplicity. So we next need what the mystics call Detachment and Mortification. Detachment is removing the limpet clinging to rock of the worldly things, saying “mine”. Mortification is the process of redirecting our love outwards. Together these are the process of Purgation.

Once you have developed Recollection to your center and “purging discipline” has developed your character, cultivating a detachment and simplicity, you have built the foundation for the next stage. Now you push out love with all your strength towards Ultimate Beauty. Intellect, which we should not neglect, is not useful in this, because this is intentional love, giving up “I-hood”, a sort of wooing. The foundation you have built will prevent you from scattering your attention on multiplicity, enabling the pushing and striving that the mystics describe. Eventually your loving longing will be rewarded and you will apprehend the eternal. This stage is transitional, training the will and simplifying the self from detachment to merging with your “intuitive love”, as this love is how we experience Reality. The “['Simple Vision'] is nothing else but a synthesis of such energetic will and such uncorrupt desire, turned and held in the direction of the Best.” (Ch 6, end)

We now arrive at contemplation, where we expand our intuitive love to in wider and wider circles (for instance, from family, to workmates, to city, to nation, to humanity), a process of self-mergence, which the mystics says is “unwalled”. However, we can usefully distinguish three stages of perception of Reality: the (Natural) World of Becoming, the (Spiritual) World of Being, and the highest, the “Divine Reality within which these [previous two] opposites are found as one” (Ch. 7, beginning). These are interwoven, but trying to jump directly to God is equally an error as much as remaining at this level as a “nature-mystic”. Start by Recollecting yourself, then pick any of the things of around you and “[p]our yourself out towards it” (Ch. 7), look at it lovingly, like a friend. Soon you will perceive a relationship between you and it, and they will “speak” to you; as St. Francis said, Brother Wind and Sister Sun. This is similar to what we did before, but different in that we took a label before, but now we surrender ourselves to the thing itself. (This experience is what Wordsworth, Whitman, and Blake were trying to communicate.) This is not Quietism (passivity), nor is it spiritualization, but is in a manner of speaking, savoring the thing.

Your acquaintance with the things of Nature as a loving sibling, will have suggested, from time to time, something deeper. Until now you have been perceiving phrases and verses of the poem, but in this stage you start to perceive the poem itself; from individual notes you begin to perceive the melody. You could catalog all the things, which is an improvement on the old index of photographs, but this stage is the invitation to experience the Fact which expresses itself through them. In this stage you must offer yourself completely to the Reality—"that wild strange place of silence where ‘lovers lose themselves’” (Ch. 8), and the amount you will receive is in proportion to how much you desire. As Julian saw, that God made the hazelnut-sized world, he loves it, and he keeps it. So the World of Becoming (that is, Nature) is a creative push by God who makes it. Therefore, both the lamb and the lion were made by God, and both are good when seen from his perspective. Matter is not evil, nor is it unredeemable even though it might be thoroughly twisted, because God loves it. We see things more truly as we see them as created and kept as an expression of God’s love.

This second stage is similar to the first: “surrender of selfhood, next ... a diligent thrusting out of your attention, last ... a union of love” (Ch. 8). This stage is more inward, as you learn that the unchanging part of yourself “can spread and merge in the general consciousness, and gather itself again to one intense point of personality.” (Ch. 8) And you discover that you have a hunger to be part of the one Act, an expression of the one Fact, and that all your desires stem from this hunger “for some total self-donation, some great and perfect Act within which your little activity can be merged.” (Ch. 8) Roysbroeck warns that from here on, you will have a hunger that cannot be fully satisfied. Again, it is not through intellect that we know God, since intellect is our tool to relate to the multitudinous, but rather we know God through love. In this stage the attention becomes inward, the senses and thoughts become detached, and we enter St. John of the Cross’ “Night of the Senses”; nonetheless we know that that this place is good, our “sorrowful questionings are answered without utterance” (Ch. 8), and we know that we are part of “the All”. It brings complete adoration from within us, yet we receive back equal love. We perceive that unity and multiplicity are simply two ways of looking at Reality: “the one as a dynamic process, the other as an eternal whole” (Ch. 8), and since we participate in the transcendent whole, our life as an individual piece in the multiplicity is not separation from the whole. It is an internal silence that transforms us. However, because we are embedded within the changeable Becoming, we cannot stay in this state constantly, nor should we.

As the Dark Night of the Senses continues, we painfully experience the fact that, while in the other stages, we were able to make progress through effort, here we are completely dependent on God to come to us. St. Teresa says that until now we have been watering with a watering can—slow, but output results are proportional to input effort; now we are depend on the rain, which is much greater, but completely out of our control. The purpose of this stage is a deeper purging, of our endemic attempts to pull everything inward to our center, and to pull the One Fact down to us, instead of giving ourselves. In the Dark Night we should simply wait patiently (neither be passive nor give up, but surrender and accept the stillness); “union with Reality can only be a union of love, a glad and humble self-mergence in the universal life.” (Ch. 9) We do not lay hold of it, but give ourselves and let it take hold of us. “It is unlikely that agreeable emotions will accompany this utter self-surrender; for everything will now seem to be taken from you, nothing given in exchange.” (Ch. 9) Eventually Reality will come rushing in, either as a slowly developing process, or all at once, and we will be completely transformed in our experience, as we will have complete conviction of being close to God. The strength of our experiences here is relative to “the ardour, purity, and humility of the experiencing soul” (Ch. 9), but even mild experiences have the same utterly convincing, transformative quality, and all people have the capacity to experience the Infinite. (“In some great and generous spirits, able to endure the terrific onslaught of Reality, [the experiences] may even reach a vividness by which all other things are obliterated; and the self, utterly helpless under the inundations of this transcendent life-force, passes into that simple state of consciousness which is called Ecstasy.” (Ch. 9))

Practical Mysticism is one of the more unusual books that I have read. On the one hand, Underhill paints a sort of watercolor of the stages of contemplation in a way that both preserves the mystical sense, but also gives something to hold on to. She also gives guidance for each stage, and the overall purpose or direction of the stage. On the other hand, for a book entitled Practical Mysticism, the book is remarkably vaporous: there are no steps or exercises, and the descriptions tend to slip out of your mind. Still, the colors and shapes, as it were, remain and inspire. Also, if you have experienced a stage, you will probably recognize it from her description, and since the stages sort of overlap, you will probably have some recognition of several stages beyond. The descriptions, while somewhat elusive, are at the same time illuminating. The purpose of the stages is maybe the most concrete part, and ties the stages into a logical progression (as much as mystical experience can be logical). I found both the suggestion on what to do, and what the purpose was to be helpful in the stage that I think I am mostly in, so it is certainly practical in that sense.

Underhill was a Christian, an Anglican, but this book does not even mention Christ. Most of the references are from Christian mystical writers, although there are a couple Hindu and maybe some Buddhist quotes. She is clear about the process requiring reducing sin (although she does not call it that) and about giving yourself fully to “Reality”, which since it is also “One”, is obviously God. However, she leaves open the possibility that non-Christians can achieve oneness with Reality. Certainly non-Christians have mystical experiences, and getting to the level of what she calls a “nature mystic” (someone who is attentive to Nature, and even has enough outgoing love to perceive things through Nature) would be possible. But since Christ, and union with Christ is at the center of Christianity, and if Christ is really Reality, it seems like there ought to be something that is distinctively identifiable as Christ in the process, even if not named that way. So while I do think that being able to reach a wide audience is positive, and while I understand that Britain in the 1920s had a Christian understanding of the world, I think there is something seriously missing if I struggle to find Christ somewhere in the path to mystical union with Christ. Underhill’s descriptions are certainly compatible with union with Christ, assuming you understand the Church’s ancient assessment that God/Christ is Goodness, Truth, Reality, but they seem compatible with any perspective that is “love everything”.

This is an interesting and intriguing introduction to the traditional Christian mystical framework. More than that, though, I found that it also facilitated a sort of mystical experience of a stage slightly beyond me. I found myself able to see the world from a perspective of love, in this case, mostly people because I was reading in a café in a city. And even though this city and café were clearly opposed to Christian values, I was able to look from a perspective of love, without the normal emotional reaction I normally have to their aggressively anti-Christian, reality-denying worldview that I normally get. As an introduction to the Christian mystical tradition, I think this is a good book, and certainly an unusual read. If you have experience, it may be less helpful.