24^th January, 2024 •

Chapter II The World of Reality

Series overview

Our brains are chattering incessantly, analyzing and scheming. All fine and well for a lot of the time, but as Underhill will show us, it gets in the way of knowing reality in the way of just feeling. Perhaps Keats expressed in how much he yearned for this feeling when he uttered O for a life of sensations rather than thoughts!.

In the previous chapter we where asked to ignore the question What is reality?, whilst we instead where introduced to what union means. As we are digesting that, we can now move on to the finding out what reality is. Be warned that Underhill wants to shatter your idea of what reality is in this chapter, but even so, let us lay our heads on the anvil as her hammer falls.

Practical Mysticism is out of copyright and free to read. This is a walk-thru of Chapter II The World of Reality.

Project Gutenberg also offers other formats.

Commentary

Most of us assume that what we know is real, but what do we really know for sure? Take, for instance, the ground beneath your feet. Is it not solid and obviously part of reality? Well, Underhill and a great, philosophers, mystics and others would retort that no, you don't actually know that, you can only assume it is so.

Plato's famous allegory of the cave tries to explain that what our senses tell us is not reality, they are only triggered by it. The movie Matrix tries to explain the same thing by claiming humanity is plugged into the Matrix and the Matrix manipulates our brain so we believe we are living in the late 20th century, and not in pods of slime.

Neo waking up to reality, it wasn't 90s suburbia after all

Maybe another way to understanding is to consider that all you are aware of are sensations from your senses. You are aware of the images you see, but you can only know that these sensations are brought to your awareness, you can not know 100% that they are what we colloquially call reality (yes, they probably are, but you cannot prove it, go ahead change my mind.

Other ways to consider how our perceptions are limited is the parable of the Blind men and the elephant, where one blind man assumes he is dealing with a snake, because he is only feeling the animals trunk, whilst another assumes it is a tree for he is touching the leg etc.

Underhills way of explaining this is by likening our mental model of reality to a tapestry made up of materials we have found here and there, and that our mental tapestry could change significantly if we came across new types of thread to weave with.

The senses funnel what they can from reality. Our mental maps are emphatically not the terrain

Our mental chatter that makes up our reality, it is a wall separating us from reality. And union is the pin that can burst our mental bubble and lead us to what Underhill terms absolute sensation, which is worth quoting at some length.

It is a pure feeling-state; in which the fragmentary contacts with Reality achieved through the senses are merged in a wholeness of communion which feels and knows all at once, yet in a way which the reason can never understand, that Totality of which fragments are known by the lover, the musician, and the artist. … It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that transition: for the process involves a veritable spring-cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wild birds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged with wonder and freshness, and drown with their music the noise of the gramophone within. Those who do this, discover that they have lived in a stuffy world, whilst their inheritance was a world of morning-glory; where every tit-mouse is a celestial messenger, and every thrusting bud is charged with the full significance of life

By why and what for? It sounds like a lot of work, spring-cleaning and rearranging furniture. And work it certainly is dear reader, change is never easy. But if done it holds promise that we will escape from our little dreary bubbles (or Neo's slime pod) and experience the world afresh, or . We will feel alive to creation, and once tasted, this freedom can lead to profound changes in our lives.

An objection to the argument presented is that it is common knowledge that the senses cannot be trusted fully, even a child knows that. So what exactly will I get from suppressing the tyranny of thought? Well, we get to what mystics and poets and others have called the Truth. But it is at this very point the reader needs to decide if they will take a leap of faith by believing it exists and accepting union with it, or cling to their familiar mental prison. Underhill asserts that doing so will allow us to discern a whole fact — at once divinely simple and infinitely various.

What does that mean in practice? A question hard to answer, but if living in our heads is a closed loop where we do not want to change things, then union with reality allows us to tap into the creative outpouring of the universe. Stop thinking, and from the silence things will emerge.

Final thoughts

A proverb, likely from Asia, that The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master" is a nice way to summarize this chapter. Sure it can do a lot of stuff for us, but if we live in our heads all the time we miss out on the beauty of life.

We choose what to think about, and two people can share an experience yet it can mean totally different things to each of them. Allowing our awareness to dwell on our senses, instead of our mental chatter, creates a stillness, that like the primordial soup, new creations can crawl out from. A mystic is someone who's awareness emphasizes sensation.

"Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world." —Mary Oliver