Reading Mystical Literature

shackles of the old self have dropped off and the new self has gained
a detached, clearer, more objective relation to the universe. The
great mystical metaphor of Light enters the terminology, here: the
mystic feels Illuminated. Underhill describes the Illuminated state
as "an enormous development of the intuitional life at high levels"
(234). She says that three experiences or qualities characterize the
Illuminated state: a consciousness of the Absolute, or sense of the
presence of God; a vision of the world as being connected and
invested by a radiance, beauty or reality of an intensity and
completeness never before suspected; and a greatly heightened
intuitive awareness which manifests itself in automatic experiences
such as hearing voices, engaging in dialogue with other (usually
divine) intelligences, visions, and sometimes automatic writing.

The stage of Illumination includes the introvertive and extrovertive
experiences that Stace describes. But at this stage, these experiences
are (recalling James's term) transient, or very brief, and so
Illumination, as intense as it is, is not the culmination of the mystic
way. In fact, during the period of time in which the intense
Illuminative experiences occur, the mystic achieves the growing
realization of the actual distance that he or she - bound here in the
physical world - is from divine reality. The mystic then enters the
fourth stage, which involves the stripping away of the final
attachments to the physical world that prevent the mystic from
living unified with the ultimate reality that he or she has glimpsed
in the Illuminative state. Underhill calls this fourth stage the Dark
Night of the Soul, and explains that it is the most arduous and
painful of the mystics purgative activities because the more clearly
the mystic perceives the existence of the ultimate reality, the greater
is the desire to achieve union with it, or become it. It is described
variously as a burning thirst, starvation, and in its most complex
metaphor, as a fear of rejection by a lover, who in this case is God,
the ultimate partner, in a way.

An incredible array of metaphors is used to try to convey the
exquisite heights and abysmal depths the soul experiences during the
Dark Night. Dante's Purgatorio unfolds carefully detailed
descriptions of spirits voluntarily undergoing incredible suffering to
achieve heaven. Sufi poets from the Middle Ages forward use erotic
metaphors to try to convey the intense feelings of urgency and
despair of those who have come into the presence of "the Friend" or
God, and wish with all their being to return and live there forever.

Underhill notes that many mystics who make their way through the
difficulties of the stage of Purification and then experience the peak
pleasures of the Illuminated stage, do not have the strength or
spiritual endurance to last through the Dark Night of the Soul. But
some do, and those people achieve the Unitive Life while still alive
in the body. It is a state of full, permanent consciousness of, or
spiritual union with God, or reality, or the cosmos. These people are
conventionally referred to as saints, or Buddhas. Examples are
Sakyamuni Buddha himself, Christ, Muhammad and Rumi, and
Underhill calls special attention to St. Catherine of Genoa. The lives
of Far Eastern and Native American mystics do not fit as neatly into
Underhill's categories as do Christian and Muslim mystics, but
powerful similarities in their depictions of the mystical life
nonetheless exist, and we'll say more about this later.

Meanwhile, what this introductory essay has offered are ways of
identifying mystical experiences when they appear in books, poems
and other writings. I say "other writings" because mystical
literature is often autobiographical. Even Plotinus, one of the
littlest-known but most influential philosophers in Western culture,
did not shy from describing his own experience. In fact one of the
most famous testaments in Western philosophy to the reality of
mystical experience comes from Plotinus, and is a good way to sum
up these opening ideas:

Many times it has happened: lifted out of the body into myself;
becoming external to all other things and self-centred; beholding a
marvelous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with
the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life; acquiring identity with
the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity;
poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the
Supreme … (Plotinus Ennead IV.8)

Whatever it is, it really happens. And it's been happening for
thousands of years at least. While Plotinus' words are famous, the
most powerful and perhaps the central image of mystical
experience, and how we should understand it, is given first in Plato
- who was, after all, the principal predecessor of Plotinus, the
Neoplatonist. We should have a brief but important look at Plato's
Allegory of the Cave.

__________________________________________________________

Plato

Plato's Cave

In Plato's Republic, Socrates tells a story that is an important key to
understanding mystical experience. It's not the only key, and not the
only way of understanding what mystics say. But it is one of the
earliest full expressions of what mystical experience is like, and it is
a very clear and accessible story that has profoundly influenced
Western philosophy, religion and mysticism. Because of its clarity
and the compact fullness of its metaphorical meaning, it's a useful
point of comparison in understanding what the mystics from many
different cultures say.

Imagine, Socrates says one afternoon to his listeners as they're
talking in the agora in Athens, people living in a cave underground.
The cave has a long entrance that's open to the light. The people are
sitting on the ground, and they're chained together, with their backs
to the entrance. They're facing the far wall of the cave, and on that
wall lights and shadows are dancing back and forth. The lights and
shadows are all they see because their chains prevent them from
turning around.

Behind the chained people, on top of another wall, a big bonfire is
burning which, once again, the people can't see. In front of the fire
is a sort of walkway with a screen in front of it, like the screens
used in puppet shows, and people behind the screen are carrying
different kinds of carved objects in front of the fire so that the
objects' shadows thrown by the fire are playing on the opposite
wall. These are the shadows the chained people see.

Since the people can't turn around and have never seen anything
else, when they talk to each other about what's happening in their
cave, they assume the shadows on the opposite wall are real things,
and they speak of them this way. If the people in back who are
moving around the carved objects sometimes speak or make noises,
the chained people think the sounds are coming from the shadows.
You can't blame them, really, since they can't see anything else.

Now imagine further, says Socrates, that from time to time one of
the chained people finds a way to get free of his (or her) shackles.
He stands up and turns around, and is astonished to see that the light
in the cave is thrown by the fire, and slowly he realizes that the
images on the far wall which he always assumed were real, are just
the shadows thrown by the fire from the artificial objects. This
would be an astonishing realization - to discover that what you
thought was real your whole life, is only shadows.

But then the unshackled person looks up beyond the fire and sees a
much brighter, more expansive light that is so bright it hurts his
eyes. Since he has a new realization about lights and shadows, he
decides to go up the long entrance and see what this other, larger
light might be.

As the light grew brighter, the person's eyes would have trouble
adjusting. Imagine what it would be like to come out of a dimly lit
cave toward full sunlight. It would be quite painful, and the person
might feel compelled to turn back. But imagine he had helpers who
forced him to continue on toward the cave entrance. When he
finally emerged in the bright sun, he would be blinded. He'd have to
squint and close his eyes against the brightness. After a while,
though, his eyes would begin to adjust to the light, and he'd be able
to make out the shadows of real things, and then eventually the
things themselves, trees, mountains, oceans, stars, the sun itself.

Imagine what it would be like to experience this world, and to
realize that the cave was a world of shadows - not only shadows, but
the shadows of artificial objects. The person would realize why
there are seasons, and how the year progresses. He would feel, in a
sense, blessed, and when he thought of his friends back in the cave,
he'd be likely to want to bring them up into the light too.

So he goes back down into the cave and tries to explain to the
people sitting there in chains that the world they're watching isn't
real, that real light and real objects are up behind them. It might
take his eyes a little time to get adjusted to the dim light again, and
he might have a little trouble making his way inside the cave again.

How would the chained people react? He would probably become
the butt of the chained people's jokes because he'd seem clumsy in
the dimness. If the freed person tries to explain to them that the
shadows are unreal, most of them will not know what he's talking