“A mystic is one,” says Alan Watts, who is “sensibly, or even senselessly, aware of his inseparability, as an individual, from the total existing universe.” At another time he said, “The mystical experience is nothing other than becoming aware of your true physical relationship to the universe.” That’s not bad, but I think we can do better. The way I describe it, a mystic is a human adult, which is what we become after we shuffle off the egoic coil and emerge into the light of our own life which, as an organism in our own right, we were meant to do when we hit puberty, but which, as a single cell in the greater herd organism, we were never meant to do at all. I don’t know if many people understand mysticism to be achieved by the unifying of the juvenile self-other dichotomy into the whole human adult, but I was a little startled to hear someone else talk this way.
Log In or Register to Continue
"When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling. The truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is and always was and always has been and always will be."
Alan Watts