Mystical experiences will not resolve all your emotional, mental and physical problems. While seeking, those personal concerns may block or, at least, slow your progress on the path. It will only while absorbed in them. What happens afterwards depends upon you.
Mysticism is not about you. It is about the ground of existence, the very nature of being itself. If you are just concerned with your own achievement, with escaping your troubles and judge advancement solely in relation to yourself, true divine awareness will elude you. While you cannot transcend your surface self, you cannot reach the absolute and ultimate. You will remain entwined in the temporary and relative. You create your own limitations, even if you prefer not to acknowledge it. “You” is insignificant; beyond you is essential.
A contemporary spiritual teacher in the West had questioned his counterpart from the East, “what do you say when students ask you about their psychological problems?” The Eastern teacher replied, “what psychological problems?” Whenever students arrive at school burdened with their personal worries, selfish interests and multiple hang-ups, they cannot learn. They may hear what is being said, but will not understand it because they are not paying attention or are filtering it through their ego. What is is, not what you want it to be.
Most of these essays have a similar message: Forget about your self. The affective “I” of ego, psychological “me” of individuality, and material “my” of your manifest being must be absent to experience divine Reality. Why crave love, or lament past loves, when divine Love surrounds you? How can you find divine Truth while occupied with everyday fictions and fantasies? You want what you want when you want it...yet are seldom able to specify exactly what you want. What we most long for, wholeness, is beyond our ability to explain.
When we study what we emotionally feel, mentally conceive or physically perceive in this life, we begin to realize that much of it is based on our own assumptions rather than demonstrable facts. We rarely can, by ourselves, truly prove most of what we believe has already been proven to be true. As Oscar Wilde once said, “when you ‘assume’ you make an ass out of you and me.” What we each imagine to be correct is frequently confused with fact. It is not that people are stupid or naive, it just that we are “too busy” (too lazy?) to confirm our beliefs. Ignorance is not bliss...it breeds lethargy.
Knowing what is in this life may be limited by our expectations, our defenses and lack of attention. What we presuppose to be true, protecting ourselves in case it is not, and preoccupation with other matters, cloud our perceptions. We may feel someone loves us, yet think they possibly are using us, or saying and doing what will trap us. Unconditional love cannot be realized on those terms. The best things in life* must be accepted for what they are, even at the risk they are not. Absorption in divine essence, mystical union, is such.
“What if such an encounter is misinterpreted, just a fiction of our imagination or is a sign of insanity?” If we think any of those things, we will probably end that experience. In so doing, we may have blocked the flow of divine Love, Truth and Reality. Isn’t the risk worth that reward? You bought a lottery ticket knowing that your chances of winning were minuscule. How about spending a little of your immediate <