SCHOLAR ISLAND

"When suddenly I was swept out of my body;-,knowing, finding Feeling the love of God burning through his creation, and an ecstasy of bliss pouring through my spirit and down into every nerve. I'm ashamed to put it down in these halting words. For it was ecstasy-that indissoluble mingling of fire and light that the mystics know There was a scalding sun in my breast-the "kingdom of God within"-that rushed out to that All-Beauty-its weak rays met those encompassing ones and the bliss of heaven filled me."

(diary of Loran Hurnscot)

"My heart has become capable of every form; it is a pasture for

   gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,

And a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Kaaba and the tables of

   the Tora and the book of the Koran.

I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camels take,

   that is my religion and my faith."

Ibn Arabi

"He who fondly imagines to get more of God in thoughts, prayers, pious offices and so forth than by the fireside or in the stall in sooth he does but take God, as it were, and swaddle his head in a cloak and hide him under the table. For he who seeks God in settled forms lays hold of the form, while missing the God concealed in it. But he who seeks God in no special guise takes hold of him as He is in Himself, and such a one lives with the Son and is the life itself."

Meister Eckhart

"But now I am always living in the awareness of the oneness of God. It is no longer necessary for me to have this lonely time with God. I am receiving constantly. Some call this the God centered nature. The divine nature, the Kingdom of God within. The Quakers call it the inner light. In other places it is called "Christ in you," "your hope of glory," the in- dwelling Christ." The psychologists call it the super conscious, but it' s all the same thing. It's constantly waiting to govern your life gloriously, but you have free will to allow it or not to allow it."

Peace Pilgrim

"Early in his (the mystics) progress, however, he learns there are not sick people and ,well people: there are only those Who do not know the truth, and those who do: the unillumined and the illumined. "

Joel S . Goldsmith

American mystic

Parenthesis in Eternity

"As salt dissolved in the Ocean

I was swallowed in God's sea,

Past faith, past unbelieving,

Past doubt, past certainty.

Suddenly in my bosom

A star shone clear and bright;

All the suns of heaven

Vanished in that star's light.

Quatrains by Jalal ad-Din Rumi

"But what isn't mystical vision? All is a mystical vision. All of life

is a mystical experience. It becomes "ordinary" only through ordinary

numbness, habitual assumptions and desires. In this numbness people

make a distinction between the "ordinary" and the "miraculous",

between "common" and "mystical," but really, there is no such

distinction. It is all miraculous; all mystical."

Charles Bolte

"God is living, now, today; and all beings are brothers, For they are his children. Simple words enough, yet which only angelic natures can use or hear in their full, free sense."

Margaret Fuller

"We hear much of the mystical temperament, the mystical vision. The mystical character is far more important: and its Chief ingredients are courage, singleness of heart, and self-control. It is towards the perfecting of these military virtues, not to the production of a pious softness, that the discipline of asceticism is largely directed; and the ascetic foundation, in one form or another, is the only enduring foundation of a sane contemplative life."

Evelyn Underhill

Practical Mysticism

" All at once without any warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-coloured cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in the great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all worlds, is what we call love, and that happiness each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed."

Richard Bucke

Cosmic Consciousness

"Quakerism represents a form of group mysticism which has persisted longer than any other instance in literate times. In the course of three centuries it has shown both the strength and the weakness of a religion of this type. The central fact of such a religion is the uniting power of the divine Spirit integrating the group as an organic whole. 

-Howard H. Brinton intro to "Friends for 350 years"

"A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still proves contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, the day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later babblings of the fountain from which, in purer days, it drew its own supply of inspiration."

-William James

Varieties of Religious Experience

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Book: "An Introduction to Mysticism" by Margaret Smith

Book: "Why the Mystics Matter Now" by Frederick Bauerschmidt

Book: "Mysticism: Experience, Response, and Empowerment" by Jess Bryon Hollenback

Book: "Mysticism: The Experience of the Divine" 

Book: "Friends for 350 Years" by Howard H. Brinton

Book: "A Guide to the Zohar" by Arthur Green

Book: "The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance" by Dorothee Soelle

Book: "The Mystics Of Islam" by Reynold A. Nicholson

Book: "The Sufi Brotherhoods in the Sudan" by Ali Saih Karrar

Book: "Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions In American History" by Philip Jenkins