Mysticism – The path to truth

In this column, I want to think and reflect on a word that is misunderstood by so many. That word is “mysticism.”

What is mysticism? Mysticism is not sitting in a cave contemplating your navel. You can be a “mystic” and be working in the busiest office in downtown Chicago or San Francisco. In fact, it might save you from a lot of high blood pressure and migraine headaches if you were. Mysticism goes back as far as we can trace, in all religious traditions, including Judaism and Christianity. Experience and intuition are the two key words in mysticism. Wisdom, truth, insights are best discovered through intuition and experience. There is an inner knowledge that is not the result of an intellectual process. The mystic does not ignore reason and the intellect but knows that there is a limit to both. Where reason and intellect end, intuition takes over. The mystic goes beyond the obvious and the immediate and realizes that there is something more, something not visible, that there is an invisible world of realities, and truth, that can be discerned only through a leap of intuition.

The mystical orientation, or experience, is always the same, whether Taoist, Hindu, Native American, Buddhist, Christian or what have you. The mystic always points toward the oneness, the wholeness of the universe of which we are only a very small part. The word “God” is only a symbol for that Mystery that saturates and permeates everything in the universe. As the giant 13th century Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, put it: “To watch a child pouring water into a glass is to watch God pouring God into God.” Or again: “Going around looking for God is like sitting on an ox looking for an ox to ride.” Or again: “The dung in the stable and God are One. The flea and God are One. Do you want to see God? Look into a mirror.”

William James, the distinguished psychologist wrote: “The mystic has insights into depths of truth that are unplumbed by the discursive intellect.”

As Carl Jung put it: “The creative mystic has always been a thorn in the side of the dogmatic and creedal church. But it is to the mystic that we owe all that is best in religion and humanity.” It usually amazes people, when I am lecturing on this subject, to hear that a vast majority of our Nobel Prize-winning physicists are mystics. As theoretical physicists, they have, by intuition, seen into the nature of reality that goes far beyond the intellect. Mysticism and physics are fraternal twins. Albert Einstein wrote this: “The cosmic order can be directly apprehended by the soul in the mystical union.” Read more

Joseph Campbell

There is one man who profoundly changed my life… who opened my eyes and my brain/mind/spirit to a new world of scholarship and the mystery of the human spirit. That person was a man who became my dear friend, Joseph Campbell, the pre-eminent scholar in the history of religions and comparative mythologies.

Campbell changed many people’s lives. Mickey Hart, the drummer for the Grateful Dead, said it was because of Campbell that he became a leading scholar on the history of percussion. George Lucas said his “Star Wars” theme was due to the insights of Joseph Campbell.

My friendship with Campbell began when I spent three weeks with him one glorious summer in the Montana mountains. He lectured about 5 hours a day to the 30 of us who had been selected for the seminar. The rest there were all artists and university professors. His wife, Jean Erdman, the lead dancer for Martha Graham, had grown up in the home of her father, a Congregational minister. That may have been the bond that drew us together, as, at the time, I was a Congregational minister of the large downtown church in Tacoma, Washington while at the same time lecturing at the University of Puget Sound.

I remember vividly the day that changed my life, my thought, and the direction of my studies. It was a Sunday morning, one of those most glorious days, in the “Moon When the Ponies Shed,” as the Lakota call it. We were at 7,000 feet. The sky was an intense blue, undimmed by haze or smog. It was “like wine” as they say. Aspen leaves were quaking. Walking on such a day in such companionship is a spiritual experience, when in silence, or soft talk, you feel, smell… hear… see… touch and taste, everywhere, the Mystery. To move toward the Mystery of our being we must allow our spirit to soar and fly in the timeless, spaceless quest for the holy, the sacred. Throughout history, that quest has been described many different ways in the myths of humankind. Read more

The spirit world

Over the course of my long life, there have been so many events that have influenced me, events that have been beyond comprehension, beyond explanation, far beyond the law of probability, and even beyond Carl Jung’s “synchronicity.”

It was my dear friend, Vine Deloria, Lakota Indian, distinguished scholar and author, who introduced me to the “spirit world.” This was the subject of his last book, before he passed away and went on to “the other side” of the spirit world. He always told me he would communicate with me after he went to the “other side.” He did. I will describe that later in the column, but first, thoughts about the “spirit world.”

“Life,” so called, is only a short interlude between two great mysteries which are yet ONE. Spring begins with winter and death begins with birth and we all share the same breath together in this short interlude of “life”…the trees, flowers, birds and animals, including the human animal. We all dance to a common rhythm.

We live in the midst of, and are supported by, mysteries beyond our comprehension.

We are ONE with our sacred earth, and we are also ONE with the furthest star in the furthest galaxy. We feel, we sense, that in some way, somehow, we are all together, “dancing to a whispered voice overheard by the soul.” As you study the images of the Eagle Nebula, brought back by the Hubble Telescope from deep space where stars are born, it is easy to imagine the interplay of Cosmic forces, across space and time, of matter and spirit, dancing to the music of the spheres. Read more

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