The Return of Homo Mysticus
by Elinor Dickson
The fact that our civilization has not yet totally failed may be because, over the millennia, shamans, sages, and mystics have always appeared in both the East and the West. They remind us of a deeper, more numinous world beyond the ego-generated images of our ordinary perception.
Given the ecological and spiritual wasteland facing us today, it is not surprising that the desire for a renewed unity between immanence and transcendence has resurfaced. While often submerged in our psyche, there has always been a mystic within us. Instinctively, we know how to live from the space between time and timelessness, but today that knowledge is consciously being brought to the fore.
Our ancient ancestors were natural mystics living in a spirit-filled world. In our recorded history, mysticism was often aligned with religious traditions, requiring a rigorous discipline unattainable for most people. Authentic mystics, regardless of their many outward forms, illuminate the height and depth of a cosmic reality that continues to envelope us in its mystery today.
In my youthful idealism, I discovered the prominent Catholic scholar Karl Rahner, who felt that theology should be based on mysticism, because dogmatic doctrine had eliminated the mystery and power at the core of religious experience. For many years, I carried his words within me: “We will either become mystics or cease to be anything at all.” Recently, I found a similar yearning expressed by political and cultural commentator David Brooks in the New York Times International, May 24-25, 2024. In an article on the struggle between liberalism and authoritarianism that the world is currently engaged in, Brooks celebrates liberalism while acknowledging its limits. “Liberalism cannot be the ultimate purpose in life. We need to … subscribe to transcendent loyalties in the depth of our being. … People need to feel connected to a transcendent order; nice rules don’t satisfy that yearning.” He names certain philosophical positions, or creeds, but I would go further and say that no creed be it religious, political, humanist, or atheist, will suffice for the future of humanity. “We need to subscribe to transcendent loyalties in the depth of our being.”
In the late 1970s, I wrote my doctoral thesis on Core Religious Experience in the Process of Human Self-Actualization. I managed to defend it successfully, while showing my credentials in experimental design and statistical analysis—a necessary ritual in those days. The groundwork that made my subject matter acceptable in a University Psychology Department was William James’ enduring book The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902. Following the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, psychology, inspired by James’ writing, began to throw off the restraints of behaviorism and psychopathology. Contemporary psychologists looked for an expanded understanding of the individual in the Human Potential Movement. New techniques based on imagination, the arts, and psychodrama expanded our understanding of healthy individual development. It also stimulated an interest in Eastern spirituality and transpersonal experience, including those from chemical experiments. Abraham Maslow’s book The Further Reaches of Human Nature: Towards a Psychology of Being provided the theory in which I could ground my thesis.
Since those days, mysticism found its way down from the mountain and out of the monastery. The way to a mystic perception of the world starts very simply. “I require no more of you than to look.” These are the instructions the 16th century Mystical Doctor of the Church, Teresa of Avila, gave to those seeking to enter the contemplative process. The first step to transcendence is to look at the reality around us as a subject rather than an object, as something connected intimately to ourselves.
We may think of mysticism as something that takes us out of our body, whereas it is rooted in the body. At this moment in our history, the old metaphor, body as machine, is dissolving in the quantum reality of a more subtle body that has become conscious of its own soul essence. For this reason, we find the mystics of today among physicists, biologists, botanists, paleontologists, mathematicians, and in many other walks of life.(1)
Science penetrates the world with microscopes, telescopes, or mathematical equations, but unless we bring in the feeling resonance of the senses, we have not fully acknowledged our part in the equation. Our knowledge remains separate and limited. Only when we see creation through our purified senses do we experience our embodiment in the numinous metaphysical world of being.
When the hunter-gatherers of the Amazon jungle first encountered modern explorers and scientists, they were asked about their knowledge of plants. How did they know which plants were good for certain conditions? Their answer was simply, “the plants told us.” In the Middle Ages, the physician Paracelsus, known as the father of modern chemistry, instructed his colleagues to sit in the meadow among the plants and to tap into their dual energy derived from the sun and the earth. Evelyn Underhill, whose work The Cloud of Unknowing is a spiritual classic, encourages us to turn away from the labels of our everyday perception and surrender to the thing before us and receive its energy. She writes, “This experience will be, in the very highest sense, the experience of sensation (resonance) without thought. … in this total surrender of you to the impress of things, you are using to the full the sacred powers of sense.”(2) This is the first step in the journey from immanence to transcendence that she called becoming a nature mystic. Albert Einstein, in his personal writings, called this “essential mysticism,” as opposed to a fixation on the supernatural. Through this contemplative attitude toward nature, all the senses combine to bring you to the metaphysical background of the world. Through the resonance of the body, we move into the diversity of creation toward the unifying essence of Source.
The poet William Blake wrote, “Man has no body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.”(3) Our senses, meant to connect us to the transcendent through the duration of time and space, have been traumatized, not only by our limited bandwidth of consciousness but, in our day, by a polluted environment, both physical and spiritual. This makes seeing the world through the eyes of the soul increasingly difficult. Yet, in the past one hundred years, many people have penetrated their opaque surroundings, slowly thinning the veil of illusion that keeps us separated from our interrelatedness with the community of creation to which we belong.
Starved for meaning, there is an ongoing revival of indigenous wisdom, both East and West. From the Tao of the sages to the life and visions of Black Elk, a Lakota Sioux healer, we are learning to dance in the realm between two worlds. Mysticism begins with seeing the light in matter, the nuances that ripple on the surface of a world that is a manifestation of the World Soul, or Wisdom. Modern biology, in discovering our quantum body of light, can be said to have caught a glimpse of Soul/Wisdom at work, “the refulgence of eternal light,”(4) that is everywhere—including our DNA. The resonance of quantum wave theory gave us an assurance and vocabulary through which we can articulate the consciousness of all creation that we partake in. Consciousness is the driving force behind creation, and its fullness resides in every aspect of our being from light to particles, to atoms, to molecules, to plants and animals. As we learn the language of whales and trees, we are beginning to experience the world of becoming from within. We become conscious of ourselves as conscious beings in a world that is conscious! This is the resonance that connects us with our destiny as the incarnation of an evolving timeless mystery.
The soul resonance of our body is rooted in our instincts, the biologically generated life force that through experience and memory creates a subtle, intuitive body. This feeling sensation botanist Stephen Harrod Buhner calls the secret kinesis of the world. Everything has its own feeling aspect, and in Buhner’s words, “reclaiming the feeling sense, and developing it as a primary sensing tool, is one of the main ways to begin to enter more deeply into the metaphysical background of the world.”(5) The manifest world becomes a portal to the numinous essence of a transcendence that leads to Source. We begin to see the world with “immortal eyes” leading to a relationship based on love. Nature has much to teach us about the community of belonging, if we can learn the art of listening.
Having let go of the ego’s need to control, the mystic is one who lives in the flow of their soul’s continuous creative energy between immanence and transcendence, matter and spirit. Today, I rejoice in the fact that we, as the Wise Species, have begun to train our senses to embrace the soul essence of the world we live in. To pursue this course leads us away from the situational, transactional world that is on a trajectory toward extinction and, instead, allows us to embrace a relational world that is the basis for a new, universal vision.
(1) In a previous essay entitled “Medusa and the Post-Modern Age,” I wrote of the struggle between “homo technicus” and “homo mysticus.” Is our future identity in AI and robotics or in reaching a deeper understanding of our humanity as the Wise Species?
(2) Underhill, Evelyn. Practical Mysticism, Renaissance Classics, 2012, p. 55.
(3) Blake, Poems and Letters, ed. by J. Bronowski, Penguin Books, England & New York, 1958, p. 94.
(4) Old Testament, Book of Wisdom 7:26. Catholic edition.
(5) Buhner, Stephen Harrod. Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, Bear & Company, Vermont, 2014, p. 268.