The Via Mystica Part I. The role of experience in our awakening.
A series of essays on the primary role of experience in our awakening and our inner transformation.
Today I’m looking at the importance of restoring our confidence and trust in our spiritual experiences and recognising them as deeply meaningful on the road to our awakening.
The Via Mystica or ‘the way of the mystic’ is first and foremost ‘the way of experience.’ It’s about how you experience the Divine, the Sacred, the Cosmic Christ, or however you describe the Godhead. The mystic says,
‘I saw the light … I heard a voice … I felt profound peace … I sensed the presence of the Divine. I knew without knowing how I knew that all is one. I dissolved in love … I became fire…’
It’s always an experience that they are describing and it’s these experiences, no matter how subtle or dramatic, that actually transforms us. Experience is the active ingredient, so to speak, of our inner transformation. And importantly, each of us is a mystic when we pay attention to the spiritual experiences already happening in our lives. We speak of initiatory experiences because experience is what initiates our transformation and then intelligently guides it. Even a mystic who speaks or writes of emptiness and silence, is having an experience of emptiness and silence. I’ve really come to understand that our journey home to our True Self is primarily contained in the specific flavour and contents of our lived experience of the Sacred.
But, for too long (approximately 800 years in the west) the primacy of the mystic’s experience, especially if she was a woman, was eclipsed by the religious ‘authorities’ in favour of a focus on the ‘path.’ A path is essentially a formal, structured, and increasingly reified route by which one might approach the Divine but this belies the fact that it is the Divine who is approaching us through the momentary glimpses and feelings of belonging to something far greater, more loving and more beautiful than ourselves.
Paths, by definition, are secondary to experience. They generally focus on the theoretical rather than the experiential. The long-standing overarching formal mystical path in Christianity is, purgation, illumination, union, and it’s as uninviting as it is inaccessible to ordinary people. We do need paths to hold and orient our experiences but it’s the experiences that transform us and so this is where our attention needs to be.
Historically, culturally and religiously, there was a bias towards the strictness of the path and spiritual practices, and increasing suspicion and suppression of our lived experiences. This artificial divide still lives on in our psyche today. The ‘way of experience’ was put into scare quotes, and ordinary people were warned off trusting our own experiences and told to ignore anything that might happen. We’ve been conditioned to ignore or suppress minor and major spiritual or mystical experiences and then we are left confused and clueless when they do happen and break through to our conscious awareness. You only have to think of what happened so many hundreds or thousands of women and men burned at the stake for speaking of their spiritual experiences to know that it’s ingrained in our psyche to be suspicious, fearful and distrusting of inner experience, especially if you are a woman.
In setting up this divide in our relationship with the Divine, as between our lived experience and the often forbidding paths, we were told to, and then learned to, distrust our own inner experience. Worse again, the ‘authorities’ indicated that mere mortals should not even have significant spiritual or mystical experiences unless we are on a pre-approved ‘path’ which most of us are not. Many paths are of course beautiful, exquisite even, such as Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle but the downside of putting the path ahead of our lived experience is that the path becomes the focus, and increasingly we forget to attend to the significance and importance of the subtle beauty of what we are actually experiencing. We no longer know how to let it shape us and guide us towards our True and awakening Self.
All in all, we have become further and further removed from a natural capacity to recognise the significance of our own sacred experience, or even being able to admit that we are having them. We’ve lost confidence in what is happening in our inner lives, and lost the ability to trust it or ourselves. We’ve also lost the wisdom to know how to engage meaningfully with the experiences that we do have. We’ve lost our sovereign authority to manage our personal relationship with the Divine, and to know that we are guided and protected from beyond by our ancestors, our guardian angels, our spirit guides, and the Sacred itself. Many of us are left confused, despairing, and isolated, with nothing or no one to guide our engagement with our spiritual or mystical experiences when they happen. Yet, these experiences are the very path of our inner transformation and spiritual awakening. So, it’s important that we re-learn how to engage meaningfully with them, and to walk again along the via mystica, the way of experience.
One way to recover trust and restore confidence in our experience is to pay attention to what is actually happening in our inner and outer life and to record it in our journal. This is where journaling is our best friend and can help us to heal the split and to restore the primacy of our experiences. Journaling is the safe place where we can record the subtle nuances or dramatic fireworks of our inner lives. To record the events of our inner lives validates and affirms what is happening and gives us a record on which to reflect, engage, and understand how and where we are being called on our spiritual path and in our life. If we say, ‘it’s all in the detail’ we mean the wisdom lies in the details of your spiritual experiences. When you begin again to pay attention to what is uniquely happening in your inner life you let the vibrancy of these transformative energies in, and allow them to touch you deeply at the level where transformation occurs.
Readers of Light on Fire know that I met my fair share of authority figures and spiritual directors who told me just to ignore my mystical experiences. They seemed to want to destroy my trust in what was happening until I finally lost trust in them. I realised I had to figure it all out for myself. So, alone, lost, confused, and in despair, I committed to finding my way through – and my main conclusion is that we all must pay attention to what is already actually happening in our inner lives. It’s these experience that move us, quicken us, impact and transform us. We must once again let our experience guides us home to Love. Paths will help, but your lived experience is primary.
When Carl Jung was encouraging his analysand, Christiana Morgan to record her remarkable visions, her told to
‘Write, record, paint her “visions” ‘in some beautifully bound book … [and that book] will be your church – your cathedral – the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal…. in that book is your soul.’
Each of our journals is a sacred book where we can record and honour our spiritual experiences and find renewal. Our journal will then become our own sacred text, a cathedral for our soul, a place that records and documents the living movements of our awakening to our inner divinity. What could be more important than to re-learn the practice of paying attention to what is already happening, recovering confidence and trust in it, and honouring it by recording it in your journal. In this way you consciously engage your awakening and give it breathing space in your life.
Image, Dance of Flames. A Nihonga painting. By Hayami Gyoshu.