By Ethan Maurice | November 28, 2023
What is a mystic? A mystic is simply someone who sticks with and perceives the basics of reality, because the basic of reality are wildly miraculous.
A few examples:
We live on a tiny planet floating in the endless void of space.
“Pale Blue Dot.” A far out portrait of our home.
Time is an illusion made by measuring spins of the earth and laps around the sun. The past is a memory, the future a dream, and both are mental projections from the present. All is one ever-changing, eternal present moment.
A single cell organism speciated into all forms of life on Earth. All life on our planet traces appears to trace back to one source, an unbroken chain of life branching out from a single trunk. To say we are “related” to all of life on Earth may be the grandest understatement.
“The Phylogenetic Tree of Life.” LUCA stands for Last Universal Common Ancestor.
While the basics of reality are a truly miraculous experience, they are difficult for us to experience because our experience is overlaid with culture.
Culture is super useful and allows us to cooperate with others in incredible ways. As we grow up, we spend years and years learning how to live in this cultural world. Culture allows us to live-as-though — to experience things created by humans that are not actually real — things we overlay atop fundamental reality. Examples include: language and concepts, governments and businesses, money and boarders, norms and rules etc.
We are all taught to see, act, and live within culture. To figure out what to do, we observe the people around us. To improve our lives, we might try to accumulate money, acquire nice things, live full social lives, have a great career, find a great partner, or maybe even “change the world” (by which we tellingly mean our culture). These are all fine aspirations. However, notice they aspire only within the cultural dream.
This is what Ed Abbey was pointing to in Desert Solitaire when he wrote:
“A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us—like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness—that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures.”
While essential to life as we know it, culture tends to obscure our ability to experience everything outside itself, including the miraculousness nature of reality upon which culture is built.
We obscured our view of the “world of marvels” too. As Ernest Becker wrote in his 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death:
“The world as it is, creation out of the void, things as they are, things as they are not, are too much for us to be able to stand. Or, better, they would be too much for us to bear without crumbling in a faint, trembling like a leaf, standing in a trance in response to the movement, colors, and odors of the world. I say “would be” because most of us — by the time we leave childhood — have repressed our vision of the primary miraculousness of creation. We have closed it off, changed it, and no longer perceive the world as it is to raw experience. Sometimes we may recapture this world by remembering some striking childhood perceptions, how suffused they were in emotion and wonder — how a favorite grandfather looked, or one’s first love in his early teens. We change these heavily emotional perceptions precisely because we need to move about in the world with some kind of equanimity, some kind of strength and directness, we can’t keep gaping with our heart in our mouth, greedily sucking up everything with our eyes everything great and powerful that strikes us. The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived all they would be naturally paralyzed to act.“
In the above quotes, Ed Abbey and Ernest Becker offer different perspectives of the same thing: basic, fundamental reality as epic and holy ground, that we have overlaid with culture, repressed, and forgot.
These perspectives in mind, it makes perfect sense why monks and mystics withdraw from culture to live simply in monasteries and mountains. Monks and mystics aim to ground their experience in the basic miraculousness of reality — to remove the cultural lens, to remember the repressed, to see the miracle forgetten.
Dictionary.com defines a mystic as:
“a person who claims to attain, or believes in the possibility of attaining, insight into mysteries transcending ordinary human knowledge, as by direct communication with the divine or immediate intuition in a state of spiritual ecstasy.”
To be a mystic requires no magic or spiritual rocket science, though. Rather, mysticism can be seen as a return to a more direct experience of reality with less cultural obscurement — as we established at the beginning of this article, the basics of reality are wildly miraculous.
This is what Franciscan friar Richard Rhor was pointing at in Falling Upward when he wrote:
“We are more struggling to survive than to thrive, more just “getting through” or trying to get to the top than finding out what is really at the top or was already at the bottom.”
How to be a Mystic
Living in a cave in the mountains is a stretch for most of us, but like mystics and monks, we can strive keep things simple. If we cultivate a relationship with the “world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship” and keep it in view, our experience of living can feel as miraculous as it actually is.
We are descendants of an exploding universe, carbon-based creatures whose atoms were cooked into existence eons ago in the nuclear heart of stars. We live among processes titanic and vast — galaxies swirling about black holes, planets orbiting stars, Earth’s precession gives us seasons as we rotate like a slow-roasting barbecue spit creating days, nights, and ideal conditions for life.
As we notice and meditate on this ripple running through eternity, we may even get a sense that we and all things are this ripple, that all is this creative force of the universe radiating out into the most wondrous complexity among endless space and time.
When we slow down and take the larger, longer view of what’s going on here, the basics of reality become more miraculous than any story.
This is the way of the mystic.
As we go about our days, can we keep this primary miraculousness in view? Can we not get so caught up in our human affairs that we lose touch with the miraculousness upon which our human world is built?
Personally, I love my fellow humans and find the basic fundamentals of reality wildly miraculous. So, I strive not to retreat from the human world, but to walk a middle path. With a foot in the human world and a foot in the world beyond, at my best, I am rooted in both and bridge the two.
The challenge seems to not get completely caught up in the human world. To keep the whole in view, I strive to live simply and deliberately step outside the human world every so often.
For example, I’ll take:
A walk over a television show.
Raw nature over luxury resorts.
Sunsets and stars over restaurants and bars.
A functional car over one made for cultural benefits.
Simple over complex.
Some would say this sounds boring, but they just can’t see it! What is boring is to be unable to experience the vast eternal miracle.
By reserving a portion of our awareness and training it on the whole, by casting awareness across the cosmos, by feeling eternity in this ever-present moment, by seeking direct experience with the “world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship,” we can find our everyday lives flowing and alight with mystery, awe, and breathless wonder.
I’ve been slowly and deliberately cultivating this awareness in my life for years now and can honestly say that not most yet — but much — of my experience includes these mystic feels.
For all our human brilliance, we’re still little buggers on a tiny rock orbiting a star in an incomprehensibly vast universe. Whatever we create — whatever cultural dream we weave — will always be dwarfed by the creative force of the universe and the miraculous interstellar tapestry in which the little world of man floats and we culturally dream.
And yet, we don’t want to shuck who we are, what we are, and leave each other and our cultural dream behind either. We sustain each other and our cultural dream sustains us.
The fullest move of the mystic is to live through the cultural lens and beyond it — to be a human in full view of the miracle upon which we culturally trip.
