Quotes about Mysticism

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is
the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and
science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer
wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.
To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is
something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity
reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and
in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.

I carry a torch in one hand
and a bucket of water in the other
with these things
I am going to set fire to Heaven
and put out the flames of Hell
so that voyagers to God
can rip the veils
and see the real goal.   

Chaung Tzu was one of the most natural men the world has seen. He has not given any discipline, he has not given any doctrine, he has not given any catechism. He has simply explained one thing: that if you can be natural and ordinary, just like the birds and trees, you will blossom, you will have your wings open in the vast sky.

"Sacred Activism is the fusion of the mystic's passion for God with the activist's passion for justice, creating a third fire, which is the burning sacred heart that longs to help, preserve, and nurture every living thing."

In the earliest times, the many gods of the Egyptians were unique children of One Great God, the Source of All Life. Among the many gods, none of them was considered to be the ultimate god. Each was a free-willed portion of the Great Oneness which composed the Most High God. Even in Genesis the plural form is used as the name of God, indicating that the One was composed of many, and the many contained the Universal, Omnipresent One.

Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. The mystic has recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational discussion. The mystic has reasons for what he believes, and these reasons are empirical. The roiling mystery of the world can be analyzed with concepts (this is science), or it can be experienced free of concepts (this is myticism). Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial--at once full of hope and full of fear--of the vastitude of human ignorance.

Being is Dying by Loving

The Path to Union

By means of Invocation, the being awakens,
and awakening becomes fullness.

By means of balancing, fullness becomes
internal wholeness.

By virtue of exteriorized attention, internal
wholeness becomes Communion.

By virtue of self-forgetfulness, Communion
becomes Union.

Finding God in All Things

To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower; hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.

I played the vina until my heart turned into the same instrument. Then I offered this instrument to the Divine Musician, the only muscian existing. Since then I have become His flute, and when He chooses He plays His music. The people give me credit for this music which, in reality, is not due to me, but to the Musician who plays his own instrument.

Notice [in Quantum Questions] I was not saying that modern physics itself supports or proves a mystical worldview.  I was saying the physicists themselves were mystics, and not that their discipline was a mystical or somehow spiritual endeavor resulting in a religious worldview.  In other words, I disagreed entirely with books such as The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which claimed that modern physics supported or even proved Eastern mysticism.  This is a colossal error.  Physics is a limited, finite, relative, and partial endeavor, dealing with a very limited aspect of reality.  It does not, for example, deal with biological, psychological, economic, literary, or historical truths; whereas mysticism deals with all of that, which the Whole.  To say physics proves mysticism is like saying the tale proves the dog.

The typical New Age notion is that you want good things to happen to you, so think good thoughts; and because you

create your own reality, those thoughts will come true. Conversely, if you are sick, it’s because you have been bad.

The mystical notion, on the other hand, is that your deepest Self transcends both good and bad, so by accepting
absolutely everything that happens to you - by equally embracing both good and bad with equanimity - you can

transcend the ego altogether. “The idea is not to have one thing that is good smash into another thing called my ego

A language possesses utility only insofar as it can construct conventional boundaries. A language of no boundaries is no language at all, and thus the mystic who tries to speak logically and formally of unity consciousness is doomed to sound very paradoxical or contradictory. The problem is that the structure of any language cannot grasp the nature of unity consciousness, any more than a fork could grasp the ocean.