Posted by Clint Sabom | Apr 10, 2018 (contemplativelight.org)
An Experiential Meditation on Evelyn Underhill’s 5 Stages Of Awakening. What is life like after awakening? What are some of the signposts of this process and the shifts of spirit that happen along the way? The stages, while laid out in the most helpful model I’ve seen, are still only that, a model. They are not set in stone, nor is it essential to locate yourself in the exact phase: growth is rarely linear.
Drawing on the tradition Benedictine model of Christian mysticism [1. Purgatio 2. Illuminatio 3. Unitio], Underhill expanded the Holy Road home to God into five territories that usually overlap:
1. Awakening 2. The Purgative Way 3. The Illuminative Way 4. The Dark Night Of The Soul 5. The Unitive Way
Her writings in her masterpiece work, Mysticism, utilize quotes from the saints and mystics of the past to illustrate the shifts and turns in consciousness that occur as our inner being awakens to the Presence of God everywhere all the time here NOW. Ultimately, it is a journey where Grace takes over our individual egos, and The Holy Spirit wakes up to Itself within us. We are only the vessels in which the transpersonal God makes Himself manifest in this earthly domain.
New Thinking • Dec 8, 2023 This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1988. It will remain public for only one week. Robert Frager, Ph.D., is past president of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology and the founder of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Here he shares his wide experience as a student and participant in diverse spiritual traditions. These include yoga in India in the school of Paramahansa Yogananda, Sufism within a 300-year-old Turkish Sufi order, and Aikido in Japan under the tutelage of Osensei, the system’s founder. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY.
Mysticism is Evelyn Underhill’s seminal work on the subject. The book is divided into two parts, “The Mystic Fact” and “The Mystic Way.” In the first part Underhill explores the theological, psychological, and philosophical underpinnings of mysticism from a historical perspective. In the second part Underhill examines the application of mysticism in one’s life as a means for spiritual growth. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism is both a fantastic introduction to the search for spirituality through mysticism and an almost encyclopedic examination of the subject.
Evelyn Underhill was an English Anglo-Catholic writer and pacifist known for her numerous works on religion and spiritual practice, in particular Christian mysticism.
In the English-speaking world, she was one of the most widely read writers on such matters in the first half of the twentieth century. No other book of its type—until the appearance in 1946 of Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy—met with success to match that of her best-known work, Mysticism, published in 1911.
