“It makes of its true disciples good, healthy, and happy men. … Through the mastery which the yogi attains over his thoughts and his body, he grows into a ‘character.’ By the subjection of his impulses and propensities to his will, and the fixing of the latter upon the ideal of goodness, he becomes a ‘personality’ hard to influence by others, and thus almost the opposite of what we usually imagine a ‘medium’ so-called, or ‘psychic subject’ to be.”
Karl Kellner: Yoga: Eine Skizze, München, 1896, p. 21
I follow the account in C. F. Koeppen: Die Religion des Buddha, Berlin, 1857, I 585 ff. ↩
For a full account of him, see D. B. Macdonald: “The Life of al-Ghazzali,” in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1899, vol. XX p. 71. ↩
A. Schmölders: Essai sur les écoles philosophiques chez les Arabes, Paris, 1842, pp. 54–68, abridged. ↩
Görres’s Christliche Mystik gives a full account of the facts. So does Ribet’s Mystique Divine, 2 vols., Paris, 1890. A still more methodical modern work is the Mystica Theologia of Vallgornera, 2 vols., Turin, 1890. ↩
M. Récéjac, in a recent volume, makes them essential. Mysticism he defines as “the tendency to draw near to the Absolute morally, and by the aid of Symbols.” See his Fondements de la Connaissance mystique, Paris, 1897, p. 66. But there are unquestionably mystical conditions in which sensible symbols play no part. ↩
Saint John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul, book II ch. XVII, in Vie et Oeuvres, 3me édition, Paris, 1893, III 428–432. Chapter XI of book II of Saint John’s Ascent of Carmel is devoted to showing the harmfulness for the mystical life of the use of sensible imagery. ↩
In particular I omit mention of visual and auditory hallucinations, verbal and graphic automatisms, and such marvels as “levitation,” stigmatization, and the healing of disease. These phenomena, which mystics have often presented (or are believed to have presented), have no essential mystical significance, for they occur with no consciousness of illumination whatever, when they occur, as they often do, in persons of non-mystical mind. Consciousness of illumination is for us the essential mark of “mystical” states. ↩
Saint Teresa: The Interior Castle, Fifth Abode, ch. I, in Œuvres, translated by Bouix, III 421–424. ↩
Bartoli-Michel: Vie de Saint Ignace de Loyola, I 34–36. Others have had illuminations about the created world, Jacob Boehme, for instance. At the age of twenty-five he was “surrounded by the divine light, and replenished with the heavenly knowledge; insomuch as going abroad into the fields to a green, at Görlitz, he there sat down, and viewing the herbs and grass of the field, in his inward light he saw into their essences, use, and properties, which was discovered to him by their lineaments, figures, and signatures.” Of a later period of experience he writes:
“In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at an university. For I saw and knew the being of all things, the Byss and the Abyss, and the eternal generation of the holy Trinity, the descent and original of the world and of all creatures through the divine wisdom. I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds, the external and visible world being of a procreation or extern birth from both the internal and spiritual worlds; and I saw and knew the whole working essence, in the evil and in the good, and the mutual original and existence; and likewise how the fruitful bearing womb of eternity brought forth. So that I did not only greatly wonder at it, but did also exceedingly rejoice, albeit I could very hardly apprehend the same in my external man and set it down with the pen. For I had a thorough view of the universe as in a chaos, wherein all things are couched and wrapt up, but it was impossible for me to explicate the same.”
Jacob Behmen’s Theosophic Philosophy, etc., by Edward Taylor, London, 1691, pp. 425, 427, abridged
So George Fox:
“I was come up to the state of Adam in which he was before he fell. The creation was opened to me; and it was showed me, how all things had their names given to them, according to their nature and virtue. I was at a stand in my mind, whether I should practice physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues of the creatures were so opened to me by the Lord.”
Journal, Philadelphia, no date, p. 69.
Contemporary “Clairvoyance” abounds in similar revelations. Andrew Jackson Davis’s cosmogonies, for example, or certain experiences related in the delectable Reminiscences and Memories of Henry Thomas Butterworth, Lebanon, Ohio, 1886 ↩
Saint Teresa: Vie, pp. 581, 582. ↩
Saint Teresa: Vie, p. 574. ↩
Saint Teresa discriminates between pain in which the body has a part and pure spiritual pain (Interior Castle, 6th Abode, ch. XI). As for the bodily part in these celestial joys, she speaks of it as “penetrating to the marrow of the bones, whilst earthly pleasures affect only the surface of the senses. I think,” she adds, “that this is a just description, and I cannot make it better.” Ibid., 5th Abode, ch. I. ↩
Saint Teresa: Vie, p. 198. ↩
