It has achieved consciousness of a world that was always there, and wherein its substantial being - that Ground which is of God - has always stood.
Responding to the intimations received in that awakening, ordering itself in their interest, concentrating its scattered energies on this one thing, the self emerges from long and varied acts of purification to find that it is able to apprehend another order of reality. Really and actually as one whose noviciate: the period or state of being a novice, especially in a religious order, is finished, he has “entered the Inner Choir, where the Soul joineth hands and danceth with Sophia, the Divine Wisdom”: and, keeping time with the great rhythms of the spiritual universe, feels that he has found his place. But the mystic has now a veritable foothold in that transcendental world into which they penetrate now and again: enjoys a certain fellowship - not yet union - with the “great life of the All,” and thence draws strength and peace. The initiates of beauty (sensitivity) or of wisdom (profound), as the great mystic is the initiate of love, they share in some degree the experiences of the way of illumination. Those who will go with him a little way - certain prophets, poets, artists, dreamers - do so in virtue of that mystical genius, that instinct for transcendental reality, of which all seers and creators have some trace. Here, the mystic does but adopt in a more drastic form the principles which all who would live with an intense life, all seekers after freedom, all true lovers must accept: though he may justly claim with Ophelia that these wear the rue with a difference.īut in the great swing back into sunshine which is the reward of that painful descent into the ‘cell of self-knowledge’, he parts company with those other pilgrims. It is the most exalted form with which we are acquainted of that catharsis - that pruning and training of the human plant - which is the essence of all education, and a necessary stage in every kind of transcendence.
The purification to which he then sets himself - though this possesses as a rule certain features peculiar to mystical development - is again closely related to the disciplines and mortifications of ascetic, but not necessarily mystical, piety. His awakening to consciousness of the Absolute - though often marked by a splendour and intensity which seem to distinguish it from other psychic upheavals of that kind - does not reproduce upon higher levels those characteristic processes of conversion and falling in love which give depth and actuality to the religious and passional life. His preceding adventures and experiences cannot be allowed this quality. “In Illumination we come to that state of consciousness which is popularly supposed to be peculiar to the mystic: a form of mental life, a kind of perception, radically different from ‘normal’ men.
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