How can we become adept at seeing daily life through the ‘lens of mysticism’?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at how the basic human exercises of ‘listening and seeing’ underlie seeing things mystically.  This week, we will carry this a little further, exploring how these basic skills can be better honed to allow us to become more deeply resonant to the insights that lie in the ‘liminal space’ of mysticism.

The ‘Interpretive Key’ to Secular Mysticism

Cynthia Bourgeault, in an article published in “Teilhard Studies”, uses the term ‘interpretive key’ to describe seeing reality through a mystical lens.  While her article focused on a much wider and deeper aspect of Teilhard’s vision (one which we will explore in a later post), it suggests that to a large degree, our reaction to reality is colored by how we interpret it.  As we have been discussing in this series, the true mysticism is that which leads us into an understanding of reality that is more resonant with it.  This suggests that such an improved understanding would benefit from a better lens of observing it.

As we undertake our daily life, we peer into an uncertain future, acting to effect outcomes which we hope will move us ahead, and all our actions depend on how well we understand the situations with which we grapple.  A significant and constant stimulus which we must process is the information in which we are inundated.  The multifaceted media which surrounds us requires a constant energy on our part to process and try to understand.

We spend a considerable part of our lives learning to do this, and to develop skills of doing so by which we can achieve some degree of becoming more whole.   As Teilhard suggests, we try to “trim our sails to the winds of life” so that we can be “borne by a current toward the open sea”.

A key skill that is necessary for ‘trimming our sails’ is finding a means of interpreting the flood of information that besets us every day.  Having a well-developed way of reading every news article, listening to every news broadcast, and sorting candidate political positions, is critical for putting such information into its proper context.  Not unlike the simple tool of arranging data into spreadsheets and plots, the right ‘interpretive key’ permits a more comprehensive picture of any subject to come into focus.

We have used the example of Johan Norberg’s insights into recent global history to illustrate how the immense data amassed over the previous hundred fifty years can lead to the startling insight that something is happening in the human phenomenon that lifts our species to a fuller quality of life.  As he points out, this trend in human history was neither planned, expected nor explicitly managed, but required the belief among many people that it could be done.
The ‘interpretive key’ that this suggests is simply reading each piece of news, each new opinion, each assertion, each political promise, for evidence of the ‘current’ that Teilhard suggests and that Norberg articulates as he plumbs the underlying current flowing beneath the turbulence of global data.

Teilhard, of course, goes much further.  He would doubtlessly agree with Norberg that the data shows the positive flow of human evolution, since he understands that such human data is to be expected in a universe in which “everything which rises will converge”, and “fuller being comes from closer union which comes from fuller being”.  The findings of Norberg are not exemptions to Teilhard’s forecast of continuing human complexification, they are examples of it.

The problem, of course, is that, immersed as we are in the turbulent waves of existence, the underlying currents elude us.

Richard Rohr reflects on the thoughts of Charles Péguy (1873–1914), French poet and essayist on this subject

“Everything new and creative in this world puts together things that don’t look like they go together at all but always have been connected at a deeper level.  Spirituality’s goal is to get people to that deeper level, to the unified field or nondual thinking, where God alone can hold contradictions and paradox.”

   Thus, a key skill in distinguishing the superficial waves from the essential current is ‘putting things together’ that are seen to be disjointed. Teilhard proposed a very straightforward ‘interpretive skill” to putting things into a such a perspective, in his example of the cell.

“…the cell, like everything else in the world, cannot be understood (ie incorporated in a coherent system of the universe) unless we situate it on an evolutionary line between a past and a future”

      One such ‘interpretive key’ which is emerging in our culture is ‘recognition of the footprint.”  To make sense of any concept, we must put it into its larger timeline.  The ‘footprint’ begins to emerge when the precedents and probable outcomes of a phenomena begin to be seen.

When we addressed Norberg’s well-documented insights into global trends, we noted in the ‘history of fuel’, how the ‘footprint of fuel’ grew as the secondary costs of providing fuel began to be more completely understood even as the process of providing it became more complex.  As a result, it has become common today to question the real consequences of decisions about fuel.

For years, the recognition that fossil fuels were nonrenewable has precipitated the search for new sources.  Today, as concepts such as ‘electric-powered vehicles’ are seen as more sustainable, questions begin to surface about the ‘footprint’ of fabrication and storage of electric power.  While the impact of emissions from operation of battery-operated vehicles will be reduced, what is the environmental impact of the many steps of producing batteries?  What is the impact on the environment as batteries are depleted and must be disposed of?

Each round of innovation and invention that occurs as we continue to increase our need for energy incurs wider and wider ripples of impact on the already complex milieu in which we live.  An ever-widening net of insight is always needed to be able to keep up with this trend.

Next Week

This week we addressed how a truly integrated sense of mysticism is needed if we are going to continue to build our bridge to the future while we are walking on it.

Next week we will take a look at the different ways that such a mysticism can be seen as active in an integrated human life.