Living a life more open to the forces of evolution which can bring us to ‘fuller being’

Today’s Post

     Last week we explored how Teilhard’s mysticism was grounded in the objective findings of science.  His unique perspective on science, without diminishing the significance of its findings, opened a fresh and new perspective on the teachings of religion without diminishing its insights into the human person.  This significant step towards a non-dualistic approach to reality brings a new facet of mysticism into focus.

This week we will explore this new facet.

Practical Mysticism

Teilhard’s approach to ‘making sense of things’ extends the traditional religious concept of ‘mysticism’ by recognizing its need for a ‘grounding’ by empirical thought.  Such grounding provides the intuitional imagination a natural step toward a clearer concept of objective reality.  In doing so, he introduced yet another insight into the evolutionary value of ‘thinking with the whole brain’.

The shift from understanding mysticism as a privileged ecstatic experience of a person removed from the pedestrian vagaries of ‘normal’ life can be seen as simply seeing it as the practice of learning to see ‘life as it is lived’.    Such clearer vision permits us to see reality, as Hopkins put it, as ‘charged with the grandeur of God’.

Richard Rohr opens this door with his ‘simple’ recognition of how Francis of Assisi understood mysticism:

“Francis of Assisi knew that the finite manifests the infinite, and the physical is the doorway to the spiritual. If we can accept this foundational principle we call “incarnation,” then all we need is right here and right now—in this world. This is the way to that! Heaven includes earth and earth includes heaven. There are not sacred and profane things, places, and moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places, and moments—and it is we alone who desecrate them by our lack of insight and reverence. It is one sacred universe, and we are all a part of it. In terms of a spiritual vision, we really cannot get any better or simpler than that.”

   If a critical facet of mysticism is simply recognizing the presence of such ‘incarnational’ threads in our lives, then the key skill required by mysticism is learning to see its fullness in the fullest way.

In his masterful work, “The Phenomenon of Man”, Teilhard asserts that the most important skill that we can develop is such ‘seeing’.

“Seeing.  We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb- if not ultimately, at least essentially.  Fuller being is closer union: such is the kernel and conclusion of this book.  But let us emphasize the point: union increases only through an increase in consciousness.  And that doubtless is why the history of the living world can be summarised as the elaboration of every more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen”.

   In this passage, he introduces his insight that for us to become fuller, to develop our potential for ‘person-ness’, we must become closer, and to become closer we must become more completely what we are capable of becoming.  He expresses this dyadic action in his insight that

“Fuller being comes from closer union, and closer union results from fuller being.”

   The essentials of our “increase in consciousness”, both in our growth as individual persons and our evolution as a species, are reflected in this succinct statement.  And he reflects the key activity, the “essence of the whole of life”, in the action of ‘seeing’.  We can paraphrase Teilhard’s statement about being and union with one that relates seeing to being:

“Clearer sight from fuller being, and fuller being from clearer sight.”

   Certainly, this would seem to be the case for our traditional mystics, that as our vision becomes more complete, we experience a ‘fullness’.

Robert Wright relates ‘seeing’ to ‘meditation’ in his book, “Why Buddhism is True”.  Meditation, in Wright’s view, is not a metaphysical route toward a higher plane.  It is a cognitive practice of self-exploration that underlines what contemporary psychology already knows to be true about the mind. ”

“According to Buddhist philosophy, both the problems we call therapeutical and the problems we call spiritual are a product of not seeing things clearly.  What’s more, in both cases this failure to see things clearly is in part a product of being misled by feelings.  And the first step toward seeing through these feelings is seeing them in the first place- becoming aware of how pervasively and subtly feelings influence our thought and behavior”

   Wright offers another aspect of such ‘practical mysticism’, the placing of our emotions into the appropriate context.  To him, it’s less ‘overcoming emotions’ than objectively recognizing the part that they have played in our process of ‘seeing’.

Next Week

This week we have continued our exploration of mysticism into the realm of practicality.  Having seen several perspectives on this slippery subject, we can begin to see it as a natural human practice that helps us to gain a clearer view of ourselves in a world more clearly seen.

Next week we will address still another facet of such ‘mysticism’, that of ‘scope’.