THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
The experience of "illumination" is a genuine event awaiting most of us. Exactly what this much touted and nebulous event is, among other things, is the subjective nature of consciousness breaking through our ordinarily objective thought patterns. These "solipsistic" experiences are moments when we catch a conscious glimpse of our own (or God's) subjective nature as it relates to the world. Most of us desire these happenings mightily—and have them long before they are recognized or understood.
So much has been written about illumination that no thinking person still questions its existence, albeit, many have searched for it without success, and many more have wandered into anguish, confusion and metaphysical gridlock trying to make a preconceived concept happen for themselves. Many more have been led astray by the fanciful accounts of those in high places who would like us to believe they know what they are talking about. The experience of gnosis is not uncommon—but it is often misunderstood or ignored by organized, dogmatic Christianity and Judaism. In Western metaphysics it is ignored, spoken of in hushed circles and frequently distorted. Illumination is better understood in the East, but misconceptions abound there as well. This quiet event actually happens often for everyone in unrecognized ways, much more frequently than it is understood. Light is our birthright. That experience has taught me that my Experience is everyone's experience; that what is true for me is true for the rest of myself—including those who read these words.
THE MOVE TO SIMPLICITY AND CHILDLIKENESS
After half a lifetime, I began to understand that every breakthrough and breakout was accompanied by a personal move toward simplicity and childlikeness. Again and again, when my affairs had grown complex, a glimpse of Light arrived, reducing earlier frustrations to new simplicities, and revealing a underlying unity. Somewhere along the line of our inner development, simplicity and childlikeness become primary. Science has perceived this move toward simplicity, but neither science, religion nor metaphysics has seen the equation between simplicity and childlikeness—the untouched Child within us. The recognition of this will be part of the explosion soon to come.
In a marvelous and mysterious way, an Overtruth takes care of our affairs. But, until I was convinced of this, the inner workings of science, religion, mind and metaphysics were disconnected and confusing. As each glimpse of Light arrived, the complexity was understood and seen beyond, and a new simplicity came into view; then the process began again and still another simplicity arrived to explain itself within another view more basic than the last.
I call these simplifying insights "Glimpses," and we will have much to say of them later in the book. They are extremely important. Surely, for all of us, the study of truth becomes a knot of intellectualism until Something bursts through to help.
SCIENCE CONFIRMS THIS PROCESS
The new sciences, embracing metaphysics to a degree, are making breakthroughs into a comprehensive simplicity. Each breakthrough produces questions that proliferate into areas of confusion, and then comes another Glimpse and a sudden turn toward an underlying, more fundamental unity.
When the final answers are known in this world, the Divine Simplicity of the Primal One (Godhead) will be "all there is,' and human intellectualism will not only have reached its limit, but will have run its course as well. The intuitive knowledge of a primal Simplicity behind everything sparks the scientist's search as surely as the metaphysician's.
Now, as the twentieth century winds down, one can see that human searching has nearly reached the limits of human measure, but woe, the heart of us, the soul of us, remains where it was, just beyond the reach of the intellect. Neither religion nor metaphysics has performed as it promised. The "heart and soul"? Yes. The real of us, the Christlike truth of us, the Child of us, the ultimate Identity seems as far from our grasp as ever. Clearly, the fullness of Godhead remains beyond the limits of intellectualism and its organizations, but the wisdom about God that can be understood lies rooted in a knowledge of Identity, the Self made in the image of God. Certainly, Identity includes the heart and soul.
A Guide To Awareness and Tranquillity by William Samuel
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