Reading Jeff Kripal’s Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom brought the topic of mysticism to the front of my mind. At earlier junctures of my life journey, mysticism had clearly been a concern. It seemed to offer a way out of the dilemmas and double binds of experience – impasses that I wasn’t breaking through and were making me sick. (I mean literally. I mean cancer. That’s not a metaphor.)

Of my most sustained experiment with a mystical path, I’ve told the story in these columns. A person had been recommended to me as a Realized Master in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta. She was a young Indian woman – almost transcendently beautiful – like no one I’d ever seen. Over time, I noticed a change in her, both in her appearance and in her speeches. Some kind of corrupting process was at work. She was dispirited – disillusioned with herself perhaps – and her swamis were taking control of the project of the ashram, possibly of her, in a way that smelled to me unhealthy. It looked like an organization on a downward slope, with mind control or brainwashing lurking at the bottom of it.

So I took one last long look, and went back to the common sense world, which has its own occasional, never-predictable near-miracles. Anyway, with or without miracles, I stopped trying to get “above it.”

Kripal’s book brought the topic – of an individual merging with the divine – to my mind in a new form. His discussion foregrounds the erotic component of such mergers. He finds it in the mystics themselves and in the historians who study them. His book has five chapters in which this two-level journey is investigated. Each of the chapters is followed by a discussion, labeled “Secret Talk,” in which Kripal’s own analogous experiences are brought out of the closet and set before the reader. So it’s pretty enticing stuff I guess.

There’s only so much I can read about other people’s sex life – no matter how transcendently effulgent it’s been. But his initial chapter, about the only woman historian of mysticism, got my attention. It told a story I didn’t know.

Her poetic name, Evelyn Underhill, is familiar to students of mysticism. Her book, Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, was first published in 1911 and has stayed in print ever since! She practically created and catalogued mysticism as a topic in its own right, requiring serious, specialized study.

According to Kripal, her work suffers from some serious shortcomings. For example, she smooths over the conflicts, conceptual and ideological, between mystics, neglects the Asian contributions, foregrounds Christianity overmuch, and scants the erotic components of the experiences that she does discuss.

Okay okay. Of course I don’t know as much about it as Kripal does, but I’m not “shocked, shocked” that the effort to climb close to God might incorporate, betimes in an unruly manner, the energies of human desire. After all, loving intercourse itself has a divine trajectory … .

What interests me about Underhill is, first of all, what an entrancing stylist she is! Here she is reflecting on a parchment with some writing on it that Blaise Pascal wore “sewn up his doublet,” which was discovered by a servant after his death.

“I know of few things in the history of mysticism at once more convincing, more poignant than this hidden talisman; upon which the brilliant scholar and stylist, the merciless disputant, has jotted down in hard, crude words, which yet seem charged with passion—a memorial of the certitude, the peace, the joy, above all the reiterated, all-surpassing joy, which accompanied his ecstatic apprehension of God (p. 229).”

Her book concludes with her own assignment of highest rank to the mystic as “the pioneer of Life on its age-long voyage to the One … [which] flames out, had we eyes to see, from every department of existence (p. 535).”

*     *     *

We each have to find our unique path in life – what we are called to. The better I have known myself, the more evident it has been to me that I’m not summoned to climb toward ecstatic union with the divine All.

So what is my actual assignment? So far as I can tell, it’s to live out my life on the timeline where one has ever and always to choose between the crackingly consequential alternatives – in the domains of 

what to say, how to think,

and what to do.

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