The most beautiful emotion
we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true
art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who
can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.
The mystic desires to be as close to God as possible;
if not indeed part of the Divine Essence Itself; whereas the
ordinary devotee of most religious systems merely desires
to walk in God's way and obey His will.
Knowledge of the world is born from self-knowledge. Our
own limited individuality assumes its spiritual place in the
grand, interconnected web of the world because something comes
to life within us that reaches beyond our individuality and
embraces everything in which our individuality participates.
Perfect Love maketh God and the soul to be as if they both
together were but one thing.
The mystic experience ends with the words, 'I live, yet
not I, but God in me' … possessed by the sense of a Being
at one and the same time greater than the Self and identical
with it: great enough to be God, intimate enough to be me.
— E. Récéjac,
translated by S. C. Upton |
To the mystic, Love is the source of joy, the secret of the
universe, the vivifying principle of things.
Mysticism … is the name of that organic process which
involves the perfect consummation of the Love of God: the
achievement here and now of the immortal heritage of man.
Or, if you like it better — for this means exactly the
same thing — it is the art of establishing his conscious
relation with the Absolute. The movement of the mystic consciousness
towards this consummation is … an ordered movement towards
ever higher levels of Reality, ever closer identification
with the Infinite.
When love has carried us above all things ... we receive in
peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us and penetrating
us. What is this Light, if it be not a contemplation of the
Infinite, and an intuition of Eternity? We behold that which
we are, and we are that which we behold; because our being,
without losing anything of its own personality, is united
with the Divine Truth.
How great a thing is Love, great above all other goods: for
alone it makes all that is heavy light, and bears evenly all
that is uneven. ...Nought is sweeter than love, nought stronger,
nought higher, nought wider: there is no more joyous, fuller,
better thing in heaven or earth. For love is born of God,
and cannot rest save in God, above all created things.
Love rules the court, the camp, the grove — men below
and saints above: For love is heaven and heaven is love.
We priests must live in two worlds, the World of Form
and the Otherworld of Force, for true existence involves the
constant intercourse of both. Let our goal therefore be to
live and thrive between form and force, being in the World,
but not of it.
The cure of the part should not be attempted without treatment
of the whole. No attempt should be made to cure the body without
the soul. Let no one persuade you to cure the head until he
has first given you his soul to be cured, for this is the
great error of our day, that physicians first separate the
soul from the body.
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