A Forgotten Vision Evelyn Underhill Touching the Depths of Life – The Marginalian

It's hard to know why we're here, what we can do with what we can do nothing about, how we can fill every atom of borrowed matter with meaning. It is hard to ignore the answers given to us by our culture, our parents, our peers, our heroes. There are those rare moments – for Virginia Woolf, it happened in the garden; of Thich Nhat Hanh, in the library; to Fernando Pessoa, at the writing table – when something moves you and you see that meaning in the corner of your eye. You tremble with joy and fear to touch the beating heart of truth, then fall asleep again in your daily life. A great challenge, a great victory, to stay awake the part of you that knows, and always knows, the truth of what life means.

In Practical Mysticism (public library | public domain) – his century-long guide to mystical experience without religion, the product of “common meditation” from the essence of human nature, available to all – English poet, novelist, mystic, and peace activist Evelyn Underhill (December 6, 1875–June 15, 1941) examines how we arrive at that revelation of truth, that mysterious knowledge of the truth deep in the heart that is self-knowledge.

It always begins with a moment, suddenly and comfortingly, when “the inherent folly of your endless pursuit” is revealed, leaving you “face to face with that dreadful revelation of discord, unreality, and inner turmoil.” Underhill writes:

Focusing your mind on the game progress… continues. Again and again you turn back to it. Something more than consciousness is required if you are to adapt to your new worldview. This game that you have played for a long time is yours and conditioned you, developing certain qualities and ideas, leaving everything diminished: so that now, suddenly you ask to play another, which requires a new movement, an awakening of another kind, your mental muscles do not move, your attention refuses to respond. Nothing less will work for you here than that mysterious restructuring of the character called “Purification,” the second stage of training one's consciousness to participate in Reality.

The great sorrow of knowing one's own unreality – those words that sound on the face of the soul, indifferent to its incomprehension of the sea. We meet one another as a place, but we desire to meet as souls. (There's a reason we look for soul-mates and not partners.) A generation before Virginia Woolf figured out how to feel the soul through personal conversation and ten years before Hermann Hesse gave us his timeless prescription for finding the soul beneath the self, Underhill recounts those moments, often disappointing, of touching the bare flesh of life: under the cloak:

It's not just that your intelligence has become the same, it's combined with an unrealistic view of the world. The worst: your will, your desire, the sum of your energy, distorted in the wrong way, chained to the wrong machine. You have become accustomed to the idea that you want, or should want, certain useless things, certain specific positions… Habit has you in its chains. You are not free. Then, the awakening of your deepest self, unpracticed and desiring nothing but free contact with the Real, awakens you at once to the reality of the discord between the simple but immovable desires and the buried spirit, which now begins to strengthen itself in your hours of meditation – pushing outward, as it were, towards the light – and a long long and deep change, but persistent. Between these two there is no peace: it is always in conflict… An unpleasant attention between two incompatible ideas, a changed belief that there is something wrong, distorted, toxic, about the life you have always lived, and something hopeless about the life your neighbor wants to live—these growing and powerful feelings are incompatible. First one and then the other asserts. He fluctuates painfully between the attractions and their requests; and there will be no peace until these claims are met, and the apparent contradictions between them settled.

Because it takes years for differences to develop beyond the point of tolerance, the root of this conflict often manifests as a mid-life crisis. Underhill describes the moment when everything breaks open:

The surface-self, long left in the unchallenged place of the known field, grew strong, and fixed itself like a limpet on the rock of transparency; happily exchanging freedom for apparent security, and building, in choosing among the concrete features offered by a rich life, a protective shell of “fixed ideas.” It is useless to talk kindly to a bully. You have to remove it with great force. That old comfortable clinging life, protected by its hard shell from the living waters of the sea, must now end.

In evidence of the power of rupture as a force that determines authenticity, he adds:

A conflict of some kind – the separation of old habits, old ideas, old prejudices – here is inevitable for you; and the decision as to the position to be taken by the new reformation… Its main ingredients are courage, singleness of heart, and self-control… By active self-control, that state of mind which mystical minds sometimes call poverty and sometimes complete freedom – for these are two aspects of one thing – will happen to you. You climb the mountain of self-knowledge and throw aside your unnecessary burdens as you go, you will finally arrive at the place they call the summit of the spirit; when the various powers of your character – the bare strength, the deep wisdom, the longing heart – which have been scattered for a long time among thousands of wants and choices, are gathered into one, and become a strong and moral instrument through which your true self can force its way deeper and deeper into the heart of Truth.

Through this process of “simplifying your confused character,” by “gradually freeing you from the illusions of what is unreal,” you come to yourself—”the agent of all who come in contact with Reality.” To find out, Underhill writes in the rest of his complete revelation Practical Mysticismyou must have come under “all those flowing looks, those busy and unstable understandings and emotions and passions, your hot swings of interest and indifference, your conflict and irrational thinking, that even psychologists mistake for you.” Only then can you find your “inner sanctum” and in it “something that doesn't work at all… so unknown to your face, yet you know it and go on with it” – something you see as the most faithful of all, so that (to borrow a line from one of the greatest poems ever written) “you can love again the stranger that was you.”