Remembering Who We Are in our Original Beauty
A friend recently asked me what message did I think was in any mystical experiences? I think the essence of any mystical experience, no matter how subtle or intense, is that it allows us to see through the veil of finite human existence. It allows us to see beyond the finite, into the realm of Beauty, Truth, and Love and also that we are fundamentally changed by the experience. Mystical experiences occur in diverse ways, whether watching the setting of the sun, listening to beautiful music, or in a direct experience of the divine. Whatever way it happens, I think the message is that it shows there is so much more to life than the manifest material world. I think spiritual and mystical experience is specifically designed to prompt us onto the path of inner inquiry and to draw us beyond the given, material world. We may or may not take up that invitation but I think that is the ‘message’ of it. It’s an invitation to explore the deeper meaning of life and ‘what lies beyond.’
Our capacity to respond to that invitation is inevitably affected, mostly adversely, by various levels of unconscious conditioning that have shaped who we are. We pick up unconscious conditioning from every aspect of our upbringing, background, and environment. We are shaped by our family, religion, society, culture, history, politics, ideologies, race and the like. But we are mostly blind to the ideas that are shaping us until we choose to become conscious and intentional about our own self-enquiry.
When my mystical experiences began I collided with a foundational tenet of my Catholic religious upbringing — original sin. The whole teaching, and internalised sense of self, given to us by Christianity is that we are sinners. That we are here to atone. That Christ had to come in and save us all because we were fundamentally flawed, broken, and stained by original sin. Yet, in my mystical experiences I experienced myself in divine union with the blazing light of love itself. I was thrown into confusion on many levels and had to radically question it all. One central confusion was: ‘How can union with the Divine be possible if my entire life I've been told that I am in original sin, that I am fundamentally unlike to the God figure, unlike to the higher power, unlike the divine?’ How can it be possible to become one with the light of Love if we are fundamentally different to God?’ How could anyone dissolve into a oneness with divine love, if in our fundamental identity we are sinners?
I knew from philosophy, going back to Aristotle, that, like knows like, and God would not commune with something that was unlike to God. Given the experience of union recorded over the millennia by countless mystics, that must mean there is something in us that is in fact, primordially like God. Whilst yes, we go wrong, yes we sin, we are not sinners in our original and essential identity. Rather, the opposite must be true. I became convinced that all of life began in an original blessing. That life is a gift, an overflowing generosity of God who is Love itself. That in our original essence and identity we are created in love as beings of love; we are created in the light as beings of light.
And I came to agree with the ancients that an essential part of our human-material design is that we are designed to forget our original identity. Our truth and original identity as beings of love is designed to be veiled from us. We are designed to forget. The early creation myths of the pre-rational era always included the origin story that on our way to incarnation in this realm we pass through the river Lethe, the river of forgetting, so that everything that happened before is veiled from us.
My sense of it all now, is that the whole point of human life is to remember that we are divine beings and consciously to return to that state of being. That mystical and spiritual experiences deliberately draw back the veil to give us a temporary glimpse of what the truth really is. To answer my friend’s question, I think the message is the revelation that we're meant to be on a whole different path than is at first apparent in the human, finite, material realm. That there's a whole other level of consciousness where we truly belong, that is our true home, which is in the light as beings of love, as divine beings. I think the whole point of life is a journey from the light to this material realm in order to experience the joy of our return.
Of most importance is the realisation that the return begins here. The design of life and evolution is that we increasingly become aware of our true identity as one with the Divine and the Sacred, here and now, in this material realm, and begin to live out of that deeper, truer, and higher knowing of who we really are in our truth. If we allow ourselves to take experiences of the Sacred seriously, and to follow the invitation, follow where it draws us, follow the longing it engenders in our hearts, it will guide us home to the light which is love.