776 Quotes About Mysticism

The nature of things is such that the unitive knowledge of the Ground which is contingent upon the achievement of a total selflessness cannot possibly be realized, even with outside help, by those who are not yet selfless.

[C]harity [...], unlike the lower forms of love, [...] is not an emotion. It begins as an act of the will and is consummated as a purely spiritual awareness, a unitive love-knowledge of the essence of its object.

In other words, the highest form of the love of God is an immediate spiritual intuition, by which 'knower, known and knowledge are made one.

The divine eternal fullness of life can be gained only by those who have deliberately lost the partial, separative life of craving and self-interest, of egocentric thinking, feeling, wishing and acting.

Holiness, on the contrary, is the total denial of the separative self, in its creditable no less than its discreditable aspects, and the abandonment of the will to God.

To the extent that there is attachment to 'I,' 'me,' 'mine,' there is no attachment to, and therefore no unitive knowledge of, the divine Ground.

Mortification has to be carried to the pitch of non-attachment or (in the phrase of St. Fran$ois de Sales) 'holy indifference'; otherwise it merely transfers self-will from one channel to another, not merely without decrease in the total volume of that self-will, but sometimes with an actual increase.

To sum up, that mortification is the best which results in the elimination of self-will, self-interest, self-centred thinking, wishing and imagining. Extreme physical austerities are not likely to achieve this kind of mortification. But the acceptance of what happens to us (apart, of course, from our own sins) in the course of daily living is likely to produce this result.

This is, perhaps, the most difficult of all mortifications to achieve a 'holy indifference' to the temporal success or failure of the cause to which one has devoted one's best energies. If it triumphs, well and good; and if it meets defeat, that also is well and good, if only in ways that, to a limited and timebound mind, are here and now entirely incomprehensible.