A difficult self-discipline, the slowly achieved control of your vagrant thoughts and desires, the steady daily practice of recollection, a diligent pushing out of your consciousness from the superficial to the fundamental, an unselfish loving attention all this has been rewarded by the gradual broadening and deepening of your perceptions, by an initiation into the movements of a larger life. Hitherto, all that you have attained has been-or at least has seemed to you-the direct result of your own hard work. But some word we must have, to indicate the real cleavage which exists between the second and third stages in the development of the contemplative consciousness: the real change which, if you would go further on these interior paths, must now take place in the manner of your apprehension of Reality. It at once suggests to him visions and ecstasies, superstitious beliefs, ghosts, and other disagreeable interferences with the order which he calls “natural” and inclines him to his old attitude of suspicion in respect of all mystical things. The hard separation which some mystical writers insist upon making between “natural” and “supernatural” contemplation, has been on the whole productive of confusion rather than clearness: for the word “supernatural” has many unfortunate associations for the mind of the plain man. 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 1911.126 CHAPTER IX THE THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 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. The Evelyn Underhill Association Evelyn Underhill was an English Anglo-Catholic writer and pacifist known for her numerous works on religion and spiritual practice, in particular Christian mysticism. 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.

Evelyn Underhill was an English Anglo-Catholic writer and pacifist known for her numerous works on religion and spiritual practice, in particular Christian mysticism.

Practical mysticism by evelyn underhill