SCHOLAR ISLAND

"When suddenly I was swept out of my body;-,knowing, finding Feeling the love of God burning through his creation, and an ecstasy of bliss pouring through my spirit and down into every nerve. I'm ashamed to put it down in these halting words. For it was ecstasy-that indissoluble mingling of fire and light that the mystics know There was a scalding sun in my breast-the "kingdom of God within"-that rushed out to that All-Beauty-its weak rays met those encompassing ones and the bliss of heaven filled me."

(diary of Loran Hurnscot)

"My heart has become capable of every form; it is a pasture for

   gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,

And a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Kaaba and the tables of

   the Tora and the book of the Koran.

I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camels take,

   that is my religion and my faith."

Ibn Arabi

"He who fondly imagines to get more of God in thoughts, prayers, pious offices and so forth than by the fireside or in the stall in sooth he does but take God, as it were, and swaddle his head in a cloak and hide him under the table. For he who seeks God in settled forms lays hold of the form, while missing the God concealed in it. But he who seeks God in no special guise takes hold of him as He is in Himself, and such a one lives with the Son and is the life itself."

Meister Eckhart

"To me the occurrence of mystical experience at all time and places, and the similarities between the statements of so many mystics all the world over, seem to be a really significant fact. Prima Facie it suggests that there is an aspect of reality with which there persons came in contact in their mystical experience and which they afterwards strive and fail to describe in the language of daily life."

-C.D. Broad  British Philosopher

"But now I am always living in the awareness of the oneness of God. It is no longer necessary for me to have this lonely time with God. I am receiving constantly. Some call this the God centered nature. The divine nature, the Kingdom of God within. The Quakers call it the inner light. In other places it is called "Christ in you," "your hope of glory," the in- dwelling Christ." The psychologists call it the super conscious, but it' s all the same thing. It's constantly waiting to govern your life gloriously, but you have free will to allow it or not to allow it."

Peace Pilgrim

"It flashed up lightning-wise during a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony at the Queen's Hall, in that triumphant fast movement. The swiftly flowing continuity of the music was not interrupted so that what T.S. Eliot calls 'the intersection of the timeless moment' must have slipped in between two demi-semi quavers.....Rapt in Beethoven's music, I closed my eyes and watched a silver glow which shaped itself into a circle with a central focus brighter than the rest. The circle became a tunnel of light proceeding from some distant sun in the heart of the Self. Swiftly and smoothly I was borne through the tunnel and as I went the light turned from silver to gold. There was an impression of drawing strength from a limitless sea of power and deepening peace. The light grew brighter but was never dazzling or alarming. I came to a point where time and motion ceased. In my recollection it took the shape of a flat topped rock, surrounded by a summer sea with a sandy pool at its foot."

-H. Warner Allen

The Timeless Moment

"Early in his (the mystics) progress, however, he learns there are not sick people and ,well people: there are only those Who do not know the truth, and those who do: the unillumined and the illumined. "

Joel S . Goldsmith

American mystic

Parenthesis in Eternity

"As salt dissolved in the Ocean

I was swallowed in God's sea,

Past faith, past unbelieving,

Past doubt, past certainty.

Suddenly in my bosom

A star shone clear and bright;

All the suns of heaven

Vanished in that star's light.

Quatrains by Jalal ad-Din Rumi

"But what isn't mystical vision? All is a mystical vision. All of life

is a mystical experience. It becomes "ordinary" only through ordinary

numbness, habitual assumptions and desires. In this numbness people

make a distinction between the "ordinary" and the "miraculous",

between "common" and "mystical," but really, there is no such

distinction. It is all miraculous; all mystical."

Charles Bolte

"God is living, now, today; and all beings are brothers, For they are his children. Simple words enough, yet which only angelic natures can use or hear in their full, free sense."

Margaret Fuller

"We hear much of the mystical temperament, the mystical vision. The mystical character is far more important: and its Chief ingredients are courage, singleness of heart, and self-control. It is towards the perfecting of these military virtues, not to the production of a pious softness, that the discipline of asceticism is largely directed; and the ascetic foundation, in one form or another, is the only enduring foundation of a sane contemplative life."

Evelyn Underhill

Practical Mysticism

" All at once without any warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-coloured cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in the great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all worlds, is what we call love, and that happiness each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed."

Richard Bucke

Cosmic Consciousness

"All around me became transformed into golden glory, into light untellable. The golden light of which the violet haze seemed now to have been as the veil of outer fringe, welled forth from a central immense globe of brilliancy. But the most wonder thing was that these shafts and waves of light and even the central globe itself, were crowded to solidarity with the forms of living creatures, like a single coherent organism filling all place and space, yet composed of an infinitude of individuated existences. Those beings were, moreover present in teaming myriads in the church I stood in: and they were intermingling with, and passing unobstructedly through both myself and my fellow worshippers. The Heavenly host drifted through the human  congregation as wind passes through a grove of trees; beings of radiant beauty and clothes in shimmering raiment." (from Wilmhurst, Contemplations) 

(Vision happening to a man named 'Watkins' who was singing a Te Deum in Church)

"Quakerism represents a form of group mysticism which has persisted longer than any other instance in literate times. In the course of three centuries it has shown both the strength and the weakness of a religion of this type. The central fact of such a religion is the uniting power of the divine Spirit integrating the group as an organic whole. 

-Howard H. Brinton intro to "Friends for 350 years"

"I found in the writings of those great medieval mystics, for whom self-surrender had been the way to self-realization.....that they had found the strength to say Yes to every demand which the needs of their neighbors had made them face, and to say Yes also to every fate life had in store for them....They found an unreserved acceptance of life, whatever it brought them personally of toil, suffering, or happiness."

-Dag Hammarskjold, Markings

".....Nature herself reveals little of her secret to those who only look and listen with the outward ear or eye. The condition of all valid seeing, upon every plane of consciousness, lies not in the sharpening of the senses, but in a peculiar attitude of the whole personality: in a self-forgetting attentiveness, a profound concentration, a self-merging, which operates a real communion between the seer and the seen...."

-Evelyn Underhill

Mysticism

"A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still proves contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, the day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later babblings of the fountain from which, in purer days, it drew its own supply of inspiration."

-William James

Varieties of Religious Experience

"The way I see it, a mystic takes a peek at God and then does her best to show the rest of us what she saw. She'll use image-language, no discourse. Giving an image is the giving of gold, the biggest thing she's got.....Hurling and wielding the best stuff she can imagine, insisting on an unmediated Way of Wakefulness.....she agrees to the quiet morning how in front of God in exchange for a bit of revelation. She doesn't ditch tradition as much as take for its word and peer inside its cavernous shell. There must still be something worth saying, worth pointing to."

-Jessie Harriman

"Truly! Truly! By God! Be as sure of it as you are that God lives: at the least good deed one here in this world, the least bit of good will, the least good desire, all the saints in heaven and on earth rejoice, and together with the angels their joy is such that all the joy in this world can't be compared. But the joy of them all together amounts to a little as a bean when compared to the joy of God over good deeds. For truly, God laughs and plays."

-Meister Eckhart

"Sufism is a mystical tradition aimed at spiritual awakening and perfection....Being a Sufi means to be in the world, but not of the world. Outwardly the Sufi goes among the people, aspiring to serve them and do good to them, while internally abiding as a friend of the Beloved-with God. Sufism reminds the human being of his true nature. The basic Sufi vision of the world is the principle of Unity of Being. As human beings are prone to forgetting, and an individual's worldly self is apt to be a distraction from reality, Sufis practice constant internal Remembrance of God, the dhikr. With each breath and with prayer they focus themselves on God, thus sustaining a state of spiritual wakefulness and a sense of the Presence of the Most High."

-Kushkarov

"I hold to no religion or creed,

am neither Eastern nor Western,

Muslim or infidel,

Zoroastrian, Christian, Jew or Gentile.

I come from neither land nor sea,

am not related to those above or below,

was not born nearby or far away,

do not live either in Paradise or on this Earth,

claim descent not from Adam and Eve or the Angels above.

I transcend body and soul.

My home is beyond place and name.

It is with the beloved, in a space beyond space.

I embrace all and am part of all."

-Rumi

"When by the grace of my Guru, Shri Babaji, I saw the extremely subtle, Consciousness-filled divine light of the Self, which is different from the red, white, black, and yellow lights, the lotion of pure consciousness bathed my eyes. Then my vision became divine, and the imaginary distinction between unity and duality vanished. My sense of difference regarding space, time, and substance totally disappeared. There is no space, no time, no substance; there is no diversity. my Self appeared as the universe, and the universe, which we call objective reality, appeared as my Self. There is no outer world. Only the Absolute exists. I had the direct experience of 'I am He, I am brahman.' I, Tukaram, became brabmananda the transcendental bliss that is attained through the understanding of the Vedantic declaration' Thou art That."

   "The word, which during sadhana appears differentiated, becomes God when one reaches full realization. Tukaram says, 'I am perfect in my own being.'"

Tukaram Maharaj

"Buckminster Fuller transmitted American transcendental metaphysics better than anyone else I've met with his method of talking to me (and anyone else who listened) at length about everything but metaphysics."

-Johnny Dolphin

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Book: "An Introduction to Mysticism" by Margaret Smith

Book: "Why the Mystics Matter Now" by Frederick Bauerschmidt

Book: "West Of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief" by Steven Kotler

Book: "The Mystic Healers, Revised Edition: A History of Magical Medicine" by Paris Flammonde

Book: "Mysticism: Experience, Response, and Empowerment" by Jess Bryon Hollenback

Book: "Mysticism: The Experience of the Divine"

Book: "The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism: Sacred Practices and Spiritual Marriage" by Arthur versluis 

Book: "Friends for 350 Years" by Howard H. Brinton

Book: "A Guide to the Zohar" by Arthur Green

Book: "The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance" by Dorothee Soelle

Book: "The Mystics Of Islam" by Reynold A. Nicholson

Book: "The Sufi Brotherhoods in the Sudan" by Ali Saih Karrar

Book: "Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions In American History" by Philip Jenkins