Mind Visualization

Often one of the most common complaints about mystics in general is that they are unsocial and are generally ‘loners’ and that their spiritual enthusiasms are personal and individual, and that they do not share or value the corporate life and institutions of the church or community to which they belong.define mysticism It so happens that the relationship that can and ought to exist between one’s private faith and the public face of the church often takes on a fierce, but fascinating, appearance; in this, possibly more easily than anywhere else, may be seen the rules which control the relationship between man and society.

mystic magazineTrue mystics, often mislabeled as “religious individualists can be viewed as taking personal religion to its optimal power. If we accept his experience as genuine, it involves an intercourse with the spiritual world, an awareness of it. This transcends the normal experience, and seems to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he or she belongs. The mystic speaks with God as a person with a Person, and not as a member of a group. He survives by an immediate knowledge far greater than by belief; by a knowledge possessed in the hours of direct, uninterrupted intercourse with the Transcendent, which he calls ‘an union with God’.A certitude was received by the certitude with which he can not be parted with and which is normally not diffused-oversees every consequence of the Universe. Even in his times of deepest darkness when he loses his entire sense of spiritual reality, that certainty still continues to support him.

This personality seems to stand without the need of support, while the smaller nature,having more of a religious consciousness, recieves from the corporate spirit. By the very term “mystic” .we indicate a certain aloofness from the crowd, suggest that he is in possession of a secret which the community as a whole does not and cannot share; that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise. I think that much of the distrust with which he is often regarded comes from this sense of his independence of the herd; his apparent separation from the often clumsy and always symbolic methods of institutionalized religion, and the further fact that his own methods and results cannot be critized or checked by those who have not shared them. “I told you what I saw,” David told them; and the people who didn’t see could only keep quiet.

Yet this common opinion that the mystic is a lonely soul wholly absorbed in his vertical relation with God, that his form of religious life represents an opposition to, and an implicit criticism of, the corporate and institutional form of religious life; this is decisively contradicted by history, which shows us, again and again, the great mystics as the loyal children of the great religious institutions, and forces us to admit that here as in other departments of human activity the corporate and the individual life are intimately plaited together. Even those who have left the church that raised them have now found that they seem to draw devout followers to them and have become leaders of their own groups now. So, we can question the link between what the mystic may receive from the communal interaction and sense of community, versus what the religious organization will gain from the mystic.

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