Reading Mystical Literature

feelings of love in which two lovers experience identity with each other and the universe as a whole. Clements makes a convincing case that John Donne's love poetry describes, not just the conceits of a lusty Elizabethan rake, but the bona fide Vision of Eros.

The Vision of Agape, or of brotherhood, is an experience of unity with human beings, often particular ones, in which the experience once again is of the individual self unified with the external cosmos. Walt Whitman's poetry - "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," for example - often discloses the Vision of Agape, as do many of Rumi's startling expressions of love for his teacher Shams of Tabriz.

Auden's description of the Vision of Dame Kind, or nature, corresponds closely to what Stace calls the extrovertive mystical experience, in which the mystic unifies with all of his or her surroundings. Clements argues that the Vision of Dame Kind is the most frequent kind of mystical experience in modern times, and points not only to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman, William Blake, Jacob Boehme, and others, but also to modern physicists such as Erwin Schroedinger and Wolfgang Pauli whose philosophical writings in the mid-twentieth century clearly articulate sensibilities directly in line with the qualities Stace and Auden speak of.

A Penobscot Indian's Twentieth Century Vision of Dame Kind

Once again, these categories are fluid and not mutually exclusive in any scientific sense. But at this point it may be helpful to look at a fairly pure, straightforward example of the description of the unitive experience, in order to show how the experience is identified. The following passages come from "The Mind of a Scientist, the Heart of a Mystic," by Eunice Baumann-Nelson, a Penobscot Indian. She says:

"... It was sometime in October 1951, and I was beginning my graduate work in New York City. I lived on Eighth Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, which is a really busy place with restaurants all over and all kinds of traffic. To get to class at New York University, I had to cross this street and go through Washington Square park.
"This one day I was going to a late afternoon class, and when I stepped off the curb something happened. In the time from when I stepped off the curb to when I got to the other side of the street, this thing happened, and it was as though I had lived all my life with a blindfold on, and it had been ripped away in that instant. Or maybe, it's hard to find words for it, it's as if I had lived in a dark cave all my life and had suddenly come out into bright sunlight. It was instantaneous, and I mean there was not time; I couldn't time it, but it must have been very short by our usual way of reckoning, because by the time I got to the other side of the street it was over. I walked a short block to Washington Square and entered the park. I was cutting across diagonally when I looked up for some reason. All I saw were these dark branches of trees against a blue sky, and it reminded me somewhat of the type of Japanese and Chinese paintings that they do with these outlines of trees. I stopped and thought, 'My, how beautiful, what glory, and it's been around me all my life and I've never seen it.' ...
"[Later] I read Suzuki's Zen Buddhism and hit the jackpot-I recognized my experience in the description of satori, or enlightenment. I realized from my anthropological training that the 'mystical experience' and satori were identical ...
"[W]hat had happened to me during that experience, when I stepped off the curb on Eighth Street, was a sudden recall of that early, limitless, boundless experience of nonseparatedness ... Somehow, I believe, something must have triggered it for me, but I have no recollection of what it may have been. All I remember vividly is the knowledge thrust upon me that I was one with all- humans, animals, the Moon, Sun, stars, universe. There was no separation between me and them. At the time, however, I had no way of explaining to myself or to anyone else what had happened to me, except that it had brought about the feeling of oneness with all.
"Now we know that connectedness does exist-that we are, in fact, connected to everything. It was known about, acknowledged, and acted upon by traditional Native Americans. My ancestors knew that we are related to ... everything. ... My experience had given me an unshakable conviction of my connectedness."
(Baumann-Nelson 73-76)

The key statement occurs toward the end of these paragraphs: "I was one with all," she says; "a sudden recall of that early, limitless, boundless experience of nonseparatedness" characterized her vision. This is the Unifying Vision of reality in Stace's terms, and the Vision of Dame Kind in Auden's. The experiencer feels she is at one with, or in effect has become her natural surroundings: "'I was one with all.'" Her statement is direct and unambiguous, and for our purposes as readers, we can either take what she says seriously, or dismiss it as hallucination or simply falsehood - there are few other choices.

Let's take her seriously and ask if any of the other qualities Stace mentions are present. One of the qualities is a greatly heightened sense of objectivity or reality. In Eunice Baumann-Nelson's experience, she feels that a blindfold "'had been ripped away in that instant,'" and goes on to make the analogy that it was "'as if I had lived in a dark cave all my life and had suddenly come out into bright sunlight,'" an image exactly parallel to Plato's Allegory of the Cave (which we will talk about in more detail later). Her remarks on the beauty of the trees in the park reflect the essence of this as an aware, extrovertive experience of nature, rather than of her inner consciousness, and the sense of great beauty parallels the feelings of "blessedness, joy, peace, happiness" specified by Stace. Finally, Baumann-Nelson says in passing that "'it's hard to find words for it'" and "'I had no way of explaining to myself or anyone else what had happened'"; these remarks square with the frequent statement that the mystical experience is ineffable, that words are totally inadequate to convey what has happened.

This is a classic description of the mystical experience. It is like hundreds of other descriptions of the experience and could have been recorded, in its essential elements, any time in human history. Its only modern features inhere in its city setting and in passages not quoted here which propose - more than 40 years after the experience - a scientific explanation for what happened, without denying the reality or value of the experience in any way.

Evelyn Underhill's Five Stages of the Mystic Way

In addition to the outlines of mystical experience created by William James, W.T. Stace and W.H. Auden, a fourth description helps throw light on mystical experience when it appears in literary works. In her book Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness, first published in 1912, Evelyn Underhill provides a general outline for understanding the stages that many or most mystics undergo in the course of their lives.

Underhill uses St. Augustine's divisions as her point of departure. St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) observed that cosmic awareness develops in three stages: Awakening, Purgation, and Illumination. Underhill, after copious reading in world mystical literature, particularly autobiography, expanded St. Augustine's categories and said that mystics seem in general to go through five kinds of experience on the path to enlightenment. These stages are referred to as "the mystic way," or "the way," or sometimes "the path." Interestingly, all cultures seem to use basically the same metaphor of "way" or "path" to describe this progress, and we'll have more to say about this later.

Underhill observes that the mystic way is "a life process" which characteristically follows five stages. It begins with an Awakening (which is a form of conversion), proceeds to a stage of Purification, and then to a complex and multifaceted stage of Illumination. The ecstatic experiences of Illumination can lead to a difficult advanced stage she calls the Dark Night of the Soul, and this can culminate in union, or the "Unitive Life" (Underhill 169-70).

According to Underhill, the first significant moment in the growth of consciousness is experienced as an "awakening." This refers to a realization, which may be sudden and intense or gradual, that one's own life is more meaningful and much larger than it seems on the surface, and indeed is a new consciousness of a "Divine Reality." Underhill says clearly, "It is a disturbance of the equilibrium of the self, which results in the shifting of the field of consciousness from lower to higher levels." The word "conversion" is associated with this awakening experience, but Underhill warns that it's a conversion of religious feeling, not of religion.

Part of awakening is realizing your own imperfection, and the next step on the Way is purification, or Purgation. An awareness develops in the person that a quest for perfection is involved, and this requires activity. In a sense the mystic realizes that the world is not as she thinks it is, and - using William Blake's phrase - the perceptions need to be cleansed: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite" (Blake 93). The cleansing involves the painful stripping away of learned, conventional ways of understanding the world and oneself. This happens in various ways, and Underhill notes that mystics speak widely of "detachment," which includes submitting themselves to poverty, chastity and obedience to what is seen - variously from culture to culture - as divine or cosmic will. In a way, the stage of Purification is a "remaking of character." The person is striving to go beyond, or transcend the artificial boundaries - which in Plato's imagery amount to shackles - that most people's consciousness live under all their lives.

After a period of time which varies widely from person to person, a moment is reached in which the mystic feels suddenly that the