THE MYSTIC WAY - A PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY IN CHRISTIAN ORIGINS
Evelyn Underhill
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"The natural things of the earth – the wheat, the vine, all growing living creatures – are already entinctured with Spirit, radiant of the divine loveliness, 'full of Thy glory', and hence….may become lenses that focus and distribute the flashes of the Uncreated Light."
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"The living water never ceased to flow. No doubt many of those through whom it passed are unknown to us. But enough are known, through their lives and their writing, to enable us to establish the continuance and ever richer, deeper growth of the life-force at work within humanity: the development of the new 'seed' within the world, destined to serve the interests of the Divine Plan."
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"The movement which He (Christ) initiated…is in essence a genuinely biological rather than a merely creedal or intellectual development of the race. In it, we see life exercising her sovereign power of spontaneous creation: breaking out on new paths."
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"There are no breaks in the World of Becoming; Life, though it be instinct with spontaneity, though it cut new paths for its branching stream in fresh, unimaginable directions, behave in a thousand incalculable ways, ever remains one."
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"Knowledge of ourselves, which we too easily confuse with knowledge of our sins, means accurate consciousness of our powers as well as of our deficiencies. It means the bringing of all the levels of our nature into the field of consciousness: a complete review of the available material."
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"Deity, in so far as it is apprehended by human intuition and love, appears to us as a vast, all-encompassing, all-penetrating Reality, which is both transcendent and immanent, static and dynamic, changeless yet changeful, ineffable yet personal."
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"When Angela of Foligno says, 'I had comprehension of the whole world, both here and beyond the sea, and the Abyss and all things else; and therein I beheld naught save the divine power in a manner which is verily indescribable, so that through greatness of marvelling the soul cried with a loud voice, saying 'This whole world is full of God' – when we read this, an intuition deep within us replies that it can here recognise the accent of truth."
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"We live and are in God, we are of His substance, we have heaven and hell in ourselves; what we make of ourselves, that we are." Jacob Boehme, 'The Threefold Life of Man'
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"Man [is] the thoroughfare of Life upon her upward pilgrimage; self-creative, susceptible of freedom, able to breathe the atmosphere of Reality, to attain consciousness here and now of the Spiritual World."
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"We are like coals, burned on the hearth of Infinite Love." Ruysbroeck, 'De Septem gradibus amoris', ch. 14
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"Man, said St. Bernard [of Clairvaux] is 'a capacity for the Infinite.'"
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"Throughout the whole course of this struggle [of life] we observe on the side of spirit – or, if you like it better, on the psychic side of life – an unmistakable instinct for transcendence: 'an internal push, which has carried life by more and more complex forms to higher and higher destinies.' (Bergson, 'L'Evolution creatrice')."
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"The destiny to which our human spirit tends is 'freedom': that high level of being, upon which life achieves reality and becomes the self-creative auxiliary of the divine."
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"We feel, interpenetrating and supporting us, the action of a surging, creative Spirit, which transcends all its material manifestations."
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"The action of 'grace', the spirit of love leading life to its highest expression, is continuous from the first travail of creation even until now."
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"This Life – the divine elan vital – is an energetic spirit, thrusting itself to expression in and through the world."
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"Life immanent and life transcendent, the Temporal and the Eternal order, are the complementary expressions of a Reality which is one."
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"I am God, says Love; for Love is God and God is Love. And this soul is God by condition of Love." Ruysbroeck, 'The Mirror of Simple Souls'
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"As the heightening of mental life reveals to the intellect deeper and deeper levels of reality, so with that movement towards enhancement of the life of spirit….the world assumes not the character of illusion but the character of sacrament; and spirit finds Spirit in the lilies of the field, no less than in the Unknowable Abyss."
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"You need not call Him from a distance, your opening and His entering are but one moment."
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"The glory of that One Reality [is] ablaze in the humblest of growing things."
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"The holy spark of the divine nature within (humanity) has a natural, strong, and almost infinite tendency or reaching after that eternal Light and Spirit of God from whence it came forth. It came forth from God, it came out of God, it partakes of the divine nature, and therefore it is always in a state of tendency and return to God." William Law, 'The Spirit of Prayer'
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"Be thou drunken in love, for love is all that exists." Jalalu'ddin, 'Divan'
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"They who see but One in all the changing manifoldness of this universe, unto them belongs eternal truth: unto none else, unto none else." Katha Upanishad
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"Divine Love is not a single thread that links creature and Creator; but rather a web that knits up the many with the One."
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