Self Improvement Guide

ONE of the commonest of the criticisms which are brought against the mystics is that they represent an unsocial type, of religion; 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.christian mysticism And as a matter of fact, the relation that does and should exist between personal religion and the corporate life of the church frequently appears in them in a peculiarly intense, a peculiarly interesting form; and in their lives, perhaps, more easily than elsewhere, we may discern the principles which do or should govern the relation of the individual to the community.mystic

True mystics, often mislabeled as “religious individualists can be viewed as taking personal religion to its optimal power. If we agree that his experience was real, it indicates that he is aware of a spiritual world and can interact with it. which transcends the normal experience, and appears to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he belongs. The mystic does not speak with God as a member of a group but with God as a person. He lives by an immediate knowledge far more than by belief; by a knowledge achieved in those hours of direct, unmediated intercourse with the Transcendent when, as he says, he was” in union with God.The certainty he acquires – a certainty which he cannot pass on to others – affects the totality of his responses to the Universe. It will withstand and support him during the darkest events of his life when all awareness of spirituality is not evident.

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. But even so, the term ‘mystic’ alone indicates a certain aloofness from the majority, suggesting that he holds a secret that the community together does not and cannot share and that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise.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 suppose he is often distrusted because of this sense of his freedom of the herd, his possible separation from the often clumsy and always symbolic methods of institutional religion, and the additional fact that his own methods and results cannot be bashed or verified 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.

It is commonly felt that the mystic is a lonely person, only interested in developing his relationship with a higher being, that his believes contradict traditional views of religion; history has not proven this to be true, showing instead that mystics are loyal followers of religious organizations, causing us to reflect on the importance of the link between church and the individual. Even those who have broken away from the churches that reared them, have quickly drawn to themselves disciples, and become the centres of new groups. Surely, therefore, it is worth while to examine, if we can, the nature of the connection between these two factors: to ask, on the one hand, what it is that the corporate life and the group consciousness which it develops give the mystic; on the other, what is the real value of the mystic to the corporate life of his church?