[John William Waterhouse Crystal Ball]
What does the mystic see?
There are three distinct periods of English mysticism: the 13th, 14th, and 19th centuries encompassed love/beauty, nature, philosophy, and religious devotion.
The Mysticism of Love and Beauty
- Mary Shelley (1792-1822), "whose world centered on the Spirit or Soul of the Universe in which everything exists and moves, also focused on love, incarnate in humanity, and death, the only true life. Love and imagination between them can create a new universe."
- Robert Browning (1812-89), was one of the deepest mystics and philosopher. "Our sense of vision allows us to see the expression of an underlying unity," that which all grows toward. Personal growth provides one with the ability to feel compassion for all of creation. "Knowledge gained through the senses is not enough."
Wholly distrust thy knowledge, then, and trust
As wholly love allied to ignorance.
"Good and evil are relative. Without evil there can be no good, hence Browning's preoccupation with villainy." Feeling pain causes one to grow, pain is to be viewed as a stepping stone.
Only by looking low, ere looking high,
Comes penetration of the mystery.
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), "was preoccupied with the beauty of the female face because of its 'kinship with immortal things.'" He longed to understand the "underlying unity that a beautiful woman can bring. Beauty is a symbol of love which in turn is the answer to the mystery of life." Rossetti's obsession with physical beauty "blocked his way to spiritual beauty, which is the ultimate unity at the heart of things."
- Keats (1795-1821), did at first embrace unity through beauty, and the unity of life forms the basis of his poetry. However, as he grew older, took a more selfish turn with his poetic works, thus eliminating any "insight gained through sorrow and human suffering." Consider his this passage from his poem, Endymion (bk. i.l. 774).
Feel we these things? That moment have we stept
Into a sort of oneness, and our state
Is like a floating spirit's.
~
Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
"Love of another is the same as love of beauty which is the same as the love of beauty's underlying (presumably Platonic) principle and is the same as beauty and truth."
The possession of Knowledge, unless accompanied by a manifestation and expression in Action, is like the hoarding of precious metals — a vain and foolish thing. Knowledge, like Wealth, is intended for Use. The Law of Use is Universal, and he who violates it suffers by reason of his conflict with natural forces." — The Kybalion.
Nature Mysticism
"Writer's nowadays are instructed to 'show, not tell.'" With mystics there's not a lot to show, unless you share their experience, and those who tell it the way it is are usually the most powerful and graphic." Consider the following passages-
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great Ring of pure endless light,
All calm as it was bright. - Henry Vaughn
and
All I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. - William Wordsworth
and
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light. - William Wordsworth
Nothing is too trivial. One must only quiet the mind to "see" it. Wordsworth knew that "most of us are like illiterates with a book. What we need to know is printed there on the page if only we could change something inside ourselves and learn to read."
- Sunshine was to Richard Jeffries (1848-1887), what moonlight was to Keats. "I felt in the midst of eternity then, in the midst of the supernatural, among the immortal; . . . .and I knew the supernatural to be more intensely real than the sun. . . .I touched the supernatural, the immortal, there that moment."
- John Donne (1572-1631) believed love "belonged not to the body, but to the soul. Donne said, "man, to get towards Him that's infinite must first be great." However a mystic would disagree, thus believing, "it is only through the loss of self that you reach the Infinite." (There exists much debate as to whether or not Donne should be included among the mystics.)
- Emily Bronte (1818-1848), "whose narrow life was bounded by a graveyard and the moors where wind, in those days before the end of the Little Ice Age, really would have wuthered. In spite of this, Bronte wrote mystical poetry recording the 'vision of a soul.'"
...The Unseen its truth reveals;
My inward sense is gone, my inward essence feels.
"The dark night of the soul (desolation) - the mystic feels when the tie to the underlying reality is broken; when the soul begins 'to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.'"
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson's mysticism is based on experience (and relied on these three concepts: Immortality, God's existence, the Ressurection):
I found him not in world or sun,
Or eagle's wing, or insects eye;
Nor through the questions men may try,
The pretty cobwebs we have spun.
~
A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing season's colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer'd 'I have felt.'
And what I am beheld again
What is, and no man understands;
And out of darkness came the hands
That reach through nature, moulding men.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) "believed in a universal Mind or Spirit which we can approach by an act of will until we become a part of God." -
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In a word or sigh or tear.
Browning had an interest in people. Shelley, a belief in love and Keats's worshipped beauty. "Nothing dies. Matter is spiritual. Everything is important. Heroes are sent to make the divine known to the rest of us. Your duty is to express the Force within you through work, although what matters in the end is not what you do, but what you become." (Spurgeon)
Works Cited:
Spurgeon, Caroline F.E. Mysticism and English Literature. 1913. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
Wordsworth, William. A Choice of Wordsworth's Verse. Selected with an Introduction by R.S. Thomas. 1971. Faber and Faber. London.