The Essentials Of Mysticism And Other Essays

Offering different essays of the practice of mysticism Underhill gives a thorough treatment of the practice that relies on experience rather than logic to justify the matters of faith. While a dangerous path to follow as it can quickly lead to paths away from God, this thinking is valid to a point in that we must be able to experience the fullness of God in some way to be fully alive in the realization of who God the Father is.

Excerpt from The Essentials of Mysticism and Other Essays So we are forced to ask ourselves, what is the essential element in spiritual experience? Which of the many states and revelations described by the mystics are integral parts of it; and what do these states and degrees come to, when we describe them In the current phraseology and strip off the monastic robes in which they are usually dressed? What elements are due to the suggestions of tradition, to conscious or unconscious symbolism, to the misinterpretation of emotion, to the invasion of cravings from the lower centres, or the disguised fulfilment of an unconscious wish? And when all these channels of illusion have been blocked, what is left? This will be a difficult and Often a painful enquiry. But it is an enquiry which ought to be faced by all who believe in the validity of man's spiritual experience; in order that their faith may be established on a firm basis, and disentangled from those unreal and impermanent elements which are certainly destined to destruction, and with which it is at present too often confused. I am sure that at the present moment we serve best the highest interests of the soul by subjecting the whole mass of material which is called mysti cism to an inexorable criticism. Only by inflicting the faithful wounds of a friend can we save the science of the inner life from mutilation at the hands of the psychologists. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Evelyn Underhill (6 December 1875 - 15 June 1941) was an English Anglo-Catholic writer and pacifist known for her numerous works on religion and spiritual practice, in particular Christian mysticism.In the English-speaking world, she was one of the most widely read writers on such matters in the first half of the 20th century. No other book of its type-until the appearance in 1946 of Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy-met with success to match that of her best-known work, Mysticism, published in 1911.

ÒMystics are artists; and the stuff in which they work is most often human life. They want to heal the disharmony between the actual and the real: and since, in the white-hot radiance of that faith, hope, and charity which burns in them, they discern such a reconciliation to be possible, they are able to work for it with a singleness of purpose and an invincible optimism denied to other men.Ó