It is hard to know why we are here, what we can make of the transience we can do nothing about, how we can fill every borrowed atom of matter with meaning. It is hard not to take for givens the answers handed down to us by our culture, our parents, our peers, our heroes. There are those rare moments — for Virginia Woolf, it happened in the garden; for Thich Nhat Hanh, at the library; for Fernando Pessoa, at the writing desk — when something jolts you awake and you glimpse that meaning out of the corner of your eye. You shudder with the thrill and terror of having touched the beating heart of reality, then fall back asleep into your daily life. The great challenge, the great triumph, is to keep awake the part of you that knows, and has always known, the truth about what it means to be alive.
In Practical Mysticism (public library | public domain) — her century-old field guide to mystical experience without religion, the product of “ordinary contemplation” springing from the very essence of human nature, available to all — the English poet, novelist, mystic, and peace activist Evelyn Underhill (December 6, 1875–June 15, 1941) explores how we arrive at that revelation of reality, that elusive knowledge of the deepest truth at the heart of which is self-knowledge.
It always begins with a moment, sudden and bracing, when “the inherent silliness of your earnest pursuit of impermanent things” is revealed, leaving you “face to face with that dreadful revelation of disharmony, unrealness, and interior muddle.” Underhill writes:
Your solemn concentration upon the game of getting on… persists. Again and again you swing back to it. Something more than realisation is needed if you are to adjust yourself to your new vision of the world. This game which you have played so long has formed and conditioned you, developing certain qualities and perceptions, leaving the rest in abeyance: so that now, suddenly asked to play another, which demands fresh movements, alertness of a different sort, your mental muscles are intractable, your attention refuses to respond. Nothing less will serve you here than that drastic remodelling of character which the mystics call “Purgation,” the second stage in the training of the human consciousness for participation in Reality.
The great tragedy of consciousness is the unreality of the self — those ripples on the surface of the soul, insentient to its oceanic fathomlessness. We encounter each other as surfaces, yet yearn to meet as souls. (There is a reason we search for soul-mates and not self-mates.) A generation before Virginia Woolf contemplated how to hear the soul through the chatter of the self and a decade before Hermann Hesse gave us his timeless prescription for discovering the soul beneath the self, Underhill chronicles what happens in those moments, always disorienting, of touching the naked flesh of life under the costume of self:
It is not merely that your intellect has assimilated, united with a superficial and unreal view of the world. Far worse: your will, your desire, the sum total of your energy, has been turned the wrong way, harnessed to the wrong machine. You have become accustomed to the idea that you want, or ought to want, certain valueless things, certain specific positions… Habit has you in its chains. You are not free. The awakening, then, of your deeper self, which knows not habit and desires nothing but free correspondence with the Real, awakens you at once to the fact of a disharmony between the simple but inexorable longings and instincts of the buried spirit, now beginning to assert themselves in your hours of meditation — pushing out, as it were, towards the light — and the various changeful, but insistent longings and instincts of the surface-self. Between these two no peace is possible: they conflict at every turn… The uneasy swaying of attention between two incompatible ideals, the alternating conviction that there is something wrong, perverse, poisonous, about life as you have always lived it, and something hopelessly ethereal about the life which your innermost inhabitant wants to live–these disagreeable sensations grow stronger and stronger. First one and then the other asserts itself. You fluctuate miserably between their attractions and their claims; and will have no peace until these claims have been met, and the apparent opposition between them resolved.
Because it takes years for the tension to build up beyond the point of tolerance, the crescendo of this conflict often expresses as a mid-life crisis. Underhill describes the moment it all breaks down in order to break open:
The surface-self, left for so long in undisputed possession of the conscious field, has grown strong, and cemented itself like a limpet to the rock of the obvious; gladly exchanging freedom for apparent security, and building up, from a selection amongst the more concrete elements offered it by the rich stream of life, a defensive shell of “fixed ideas.” It is useless to speak kindly to the limpet. You must detach it by main force. That old comfortable clinging life, protected by its hard shell from the living waters of the sea, must now come to an end.
In a testament to the power of breakdowns as a clarifying force for authenticity, she adds:
A conflict of some kind — a severance of old habits, old notions, old prejudices — is here inevitable for you; and a decision as to the form which the new adjustments must take… Its chief ingredients are courage, singleness of heart, and self-control… By diligent self-discipline, that mental attitude which the mystics sometimes call poverty and sometimes perfect freedom — for these are two aspects of one thing — will become possible to you. Ascending the mountain of self-knowledge and throwing aside your superfluous luggage as you go, you shall at last arrive at the point which they call the summit of the spirit; where the various forces of your character — brute energy, keen intellect, desirous heart — long dissipated amongst a thousand little wants and preferences, are gathered into one, and become a strong and disciplined instrument wherewith your true self can force a path deeper and deeper into the heart of Reality.
Through this process of “simplifying of your tangled character,” through “its gradual emancipation from the fetters of the unreal,” you arrive at yourself — “the agent of all your contacts with Reality.” To have found yourself, Underhill writes in the remainder of her wholly revelatory Practical Mysticism, is to have dived beneath “all that flowing appearance, that busy, unstable consciousness with its moods and obsessions, its feverish alternations of interest and apathy, its conflicts and irrational impulses, which even the psychologists mistake for You.” Only then may you discover “your inmost sanctuary” and in it “a being not wholly practical… so foreign to your surface consciousness, yet familiar to it and continuous with it” — a being you recognize as the truest you, so that you may (to borrow a line from one of the greatest poems ever written) “love again the stranger who was your self.”
Maria Popova
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