apparently useless peculiarities

  

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Here it is that we approach that attitude of the self, that point of view, which is loosely and generally called mystical. Here, instead of those broad blind alleys which philosophy showed us, a certain type of mind has always discerned three straight and narrow ways going out towards the Absolute. 

In religion, in pain, and in beauty—and not only in these, but in many other apparently useless peculiarities of the empirical world and of the perceiving consciousness—these persons insist that they recognize at least the fringe of the real.


—Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism

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Brother stand the pain; 
Escape the poison of your impulses.
The sky will bow to your beauty, if you do. 

Learn to light the candle. Rise with the sun. 
Turn away from the cave of your sleeping. 
That way a thorn expands to a rose. 
A particular glows with the universal.


—Rumi 

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warp and woof

  

 

 

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Over and over again—as Being and Becoming, as Eternity and Time, as Transcendence and Immanence, Reality and Appearance, the One and the Many—these two dominant ideas, demands, imperious instincts of man’s self will reappear; the warp and woof of his completed universe.


—Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism

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You know, all mystics - Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion - are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. 

Though everything is a mess, all is well. 

Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.


—Anthony de Mello

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... the little lips! 

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