A baffled medical specialist came looking for me at the hospital coffee shop to demand, in my mid-sip: “You’re a mystic … what’s your intuition on this?”

My emergency room had been visited by doctors and many nurses ever since my admission. They wanted to examine the gyrating blood pressure monitor above my bed. Apparently the chaos of my pulse was not connected to any mental or physical symptoms. They repeatedly asked me if I was alright. I said I was.

Someone told me the medical staff and nurses crowded in to add the experience to their professional education …

However, the heart specialist was finding it difficult to establish a professionally safe, defensible medical reason to keep me hospitalised with a portable monitor as I was by then – or should he risk sending me home without diagnosis or treatment?

He waited for my answer, so I said:  “Send me home. Have me checked out regularly.”

So he did. I’m fine. As I intuited, the pulse irregularities appear to have been just a delayed settling down of the system after a previous surgical procedure to eradicate cholesterol build up. I am not a young chicken …

This incident got me thinking about the intuition mystics are said to have.

I think intuition is a human word describing how mystics see widely experienced things humans also see but don’t notice, that intuition is “an ineffable conscious experience, as distinct from any physical or computational process*”.  Intuition seems as common to humans, as their blindness to it.

Is intuition a largely veiled part of ordinary human evolution, Reality at work, starting with the animals that seem to have an abundance of basic survival intuition, whereas most humans are biased against anything not widely experienced or accepted by their cultures – collective blindness?

Will intuition generally develop through basic intelligence, to full blown attributes of intuitive observation, conclusion, action and communication? Will languages die? Is this intuitive process part of the evolutionary process?

Are mystics the only ones currently developed enough to use intuition as part of their daily lives?

As mystics know, in Reality, in which all things are perfect, there are no names or languages. Could this mean intuition is the language of Reality?

Is intuition the human  ‘eureka’ principle, those sudden, logically and intellectually unsupported sudden scientific discoveries we hear so much about?

Is intuition the human word to describe the ineffable experience of MER?  Mystics would say partly, yes, because any experience, particularly the experience of the Mystic Experience of Reality, is the beginning of all wisdom.

*Wordweb dictionary for ‘ineffability’.

Mysticexperiences.net

“Mysticism is practical, not theoretical.” – Evelyn Underhill

Evelyn Underhill in “Mysticism: The nature and development of spiritual consciousness”, Oxford 1994, 82

I disagree. My mystical experiences have never lead me to enact any kind of practical use of the phenomenon, or regard it as a theory.

Scientists, academics, theologists and religionists who examine the phenomenon give the impression there is such a thing as practical or even theoretical mysticism. There isn’t. They simply haven’t experienced the mystical experience of Reality (MER).

They give the feeliing it is correct to expect something of human use from the phenomena, like rules of conduct, morality, ethics, commandments, worship, devotion, prohibitions, even drugs or mind shifting dances; at the very least some stages of human attainment.

Sadly not, if my experiences are to be believed. I had the experiences throughout every one of my years from about 14 years of age to the age of 35 or so.

I did not experience any practical demands then or since, any more than a tulip would demand to know what its existence is all about … the unfolding message for me is to ignore anything human as a distraction. That has been one of the gifts of Reality – a freedom beyond expression.

The only answer I got when I ‘demanded’ to be told what was expected of me was: “Nothing. Reality is in charge. Reality does everything. All Is Well.”

This revelation might not measure up to the utilitarian demands humans make of their experiences and revelations in life, but there it is. According to my experiences It is what It is, make of it what you can.

MER is not theoretical either. The key to understanding Reality is experience of Reality! A corollary.

All else is what George Fox the founder of Quakerism (a suspiciously Western imitation of Sufism) referred to as “notionalising”.

But even George Fox couldn’t overcome his instinct for the human need for utilitarianism. He thought his MERs demanded extreme simplicity – a Quaker morality, ethic, place, manner of worship, and clothing.

Fox really does appear to have been a mystic. But did he, like most of the mystics before and after him, wrongly believe MER was meant to be evangelised, or practised, or even could be?

My intuition is that “practical mysticism” or “theoretical mysticism” are mythomanical human inventions, nothing to do with Reality. In spiritual terms there are no such things as “practical or theoretical mysticism”.

Mysticexperiences.net