Top 10 Reasons Mysticism is Right

I would like, once and for all, to clear up some of the confusion concerning mysticism.

Every now and then, the world goes nutty, and there are famines, plagues, droughts, corruptions, wars, earthquakes, economic and political upheavals - every kind of chaos you can imagine.

When those things happen, certain people take it upon themselves to figure out what the heck has gone wrong - to figure out what really is going on here, and why these things are happening, and who's in charge, and what's the best way for us all to get along and get by without incurring further wrath.

Some of these certain people are urban, and they come back with certain conclusions: be nice, play by the rules, adhere to etiquette, learn how to get along with the roiling mob - witness Confucius and Shintoism.

Other folks are rural, and they are the types to go live up in the hills, in a mountain-top cave for a while, and contemplate their belly-buttons until the arrival of Enlightenment.

The cool thing, to me, is that every culture, every society, from every imaginable era, has produced mystics, and - more to the point - that every single mystic--Judaic, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Moslem, you name it--that every single mystic comes back with the very same conclusions as every other mystic--in some cases, dang near word-for-word.

That, to me, is pretty frickin' cool, and a pretty good sign that these folks are on to something.

I'm not going to get into an anti-prophet rant right now - I'll save that for later - but I hope that you will read the following snippets and think about it all, and understand why I, for one, consider myself a mystic.

T. S. Eliot was kind of a forbearer of American anti-fiction, believe it or not, when he concluded that there wasn't much point in trying to paraphrase someone who had already said it in the best possible way - you’d be better off just quoting Shakespeare or the Upanishads. Hence the prolific footnotes for Eliot’s work.

Anyway, I'm taking a page from Eliot's work ethic, and proceeding to quote, at length, someone who really did his homework, and who says the whole thing far better than I ever could, on the subject of mysticism.

R. B. Blakney takes a Taoist bent, and I have no quarrel with that. I haven't edited the following bits in any significant way, but have, instead, taken the text directly from his introduction to the 1955 edition of his translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. I have, though, done a bit of minor typesetting, to facilitate your reading pleasure and spiritual edification.

Dang frickin brilliant, and the thing that blows my mind is that Blakney - and his sources - make it all sound like a lead-pipe cinch.

Anyway:

Wherever the great mysticism has come, it has offered to replace popular or local religion with a new and universal allegiance. Folk beliefs about gods and spirits give place to a metaphysic of the utmost generality for those who can rise to it. The mystics passion is satisfied only with the sense of the Ultimate Reality, the God, Godhead, or God-ness that is back of the world of mind and nature. What is the Ultimate like? And what has it to do with man? The mystic report is that:

"Reality, however designated, is One; it is an all-embracing unity from which nothing can be separated.

1. Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord (Palestine, 7th c BC)
2. So I say that likeness born of the One, leads the soul to God, for he is One, unbegotten unity, and of this we have clear evidence (Eckhart, Germany, 1300)
3. Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray (Kabir, India, 1500)
4. Something there is, whose veiled creation was before the earth or sky began to be; so silent, so aloof and so alone, it changes not nor fails but touches all (Tao Te Ching 25)

IT, the Ultimate, is nameless, indescribable, beyond telling: and therefore anything said about it is faulty:

1. What is his name?... And God said to Moses, I AM WHAT I AM... Say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you (Exodus 3:14)
2. Describe it as form yet unformed, as shape that is still without shape; or say it is vagueness confused: one meets it and it has no front; one follows it and here is no rear (Tao Te Ching 14)
3. IT cannot be defined by word or by idea as the Scripture says, it is the One ‘before whom words recoil’ (Shankaracharya, India, 800)
4. It is God’s nature to be without a nature. To think of his goodness, or wisdom, or power is to hide the essence of him, to obscure it with thoughts about him... Who is Jesus? He has no name (Eckhart)