Mysticism and the Occult

I had a challenging time trying to figure out what the difference was between mysticism and the occult. Even book publishers have a difficult time distinguishing the two. I’ve seen a lot of book covers on books about mysticism that - even if the books are about something as prosaic as praying - still look like something out of The Twilight Zone. Type fonts and letterings are both garish and abnormal. Dark backgrounds. Dark foregrounds. Weird pictures of weird people doing weird things.

But that’s all probably due to the mental associations I’ve spoken of already. And to the weirdos working in the art departments of most publishing companies.

Anyway, this brings me to Evelyn Underhill’s magnum opus, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. When I first saw that book, its cover had a picture of a garish statue of Saint Theresa of Avila ( another argonaut) having one of her ecstatic trances. That put me off reading the book for a good long while.

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) was one those gifted amateurs who become authoritative without seeming to have ever picked up specific credentials for what they become authoritative about. She was the one, in the 20th century, who “wrote the book on” the topic of mysticism. She had read an astonishing number of books on mysticism, that spanned various time periods and various religions. And then she sat down and wrote this massive work that was her consolidated understanding of what she had read.

I will tell you that from my perspective, Underhill’s Mysticism has a peculiar flavor to it. It dates from when Underhill was a James 1:17 kind of believer, but not yet a John 3:16 kind of believer. This book has universalistic tendencies, and Underhill often refers to God as “Reality.”

But there is a strength in that. As part of her wanderings as a James 1:17 type believer trying to feed her spiritual hunger, Underhill had for a time been a member of the Golden Dawn Society. This was a society dedicated to the study occult subjects, and Aleister Crowley himself had once been a member at one time. When Underhill found that her spiritual hunger did not lay in the direction of occultism, she dropped out of the society. But this brush with occult teaching gave her the criticial insight to distinguish exactly what the difference was between mysticism and occultism.

The difference turns out to be between thinking and feeling. Let me give you an analogy.

Lets say that Albert Einstein had a pet dog. To that dog, Einstein’s thoughts could never be its thoughts, nor Einstein’s ways its ways. (Isaiah 55:8) It could never in a million years comprehend what Einstein meant by E=MC squared. But if that dog truly became Einstein’s pet, it would one day learn to bark excitedly and wave its tail rapidly back and forth whenever Einstein yelled “Eureka!” in his study. And it would also learn to run into his study, whimper, and lick his dangling fingers whenever Einstein sat down, dejected.

The mysticism (inner experience) that honors God and seeks Him out is the kind where a human being is transformed into being a sort of “pet” of God, who loves what God loves, and hates what God hates, and yearns most earnestly for what God earnestly yearns for:

Luke 10:27

27 ... Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

(KJV)

Christianity is uniquely geared towards facilitating that kind of mysticism. The internal mechanism for allowing it to happen has been made available by God.

I Jn 4:7-10

7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.

8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.

9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.

10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation [ satisfying of God ] for our sins.

(KJV)

1 Pet 1:22-23

22 Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently:

23 Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever.

(KJV)

The eternal Son has become incarnate to be the propitiation (satifying of God) for our sins. This allows the Holy Spirit of God to indwell us. The Holy Spirit of God then prompts us to pray unto the Father in the name of the Son. And that begins to conform us to the image of the Son so that we are made sons of God by adoption.

Occultism, on the other hand, is about the thinking part. It’s the attempt to know what God knows, instead of feeling what God feels. Einstein’s dog is not so much interested in loving Einstein as in knowing what E=MC squared means so that it can do without Einstein and remain, in the end, just a dog. We are fortunate that the disobedient angelic spirits do not bother much with dogs.

Prayer is begging God that He will change our hearts so we will fall into line with what His will is on earth as it is in heaven. It is an act of faith in God’s goodness.

Magick, on the other hand, is ordering or begging intermediaries between us and God to execute our will, regardless of whether or not it is God’s will, and regardless of whether we are initelligent enough to know whether something is going to be good for us and others, or not. It is a faith in our own intelligence which is also an disbelief in the goodness of God.

In this lies the essential difference between mysticism that is of God, and mysticism that is of the Devil. There are mysticisms, including those that purport to be Christian mysticisms, which tend to blur this distinction.

Before I leave this topic, let me clarify three things about what I’ve just said.

First, when I said that the true inner experience of God is though emotions rather than the intellect, I do not by that mean that intellect is something to be discarded in order to experience God.

In fact, let me back that up further and say that experiential knowledge of God is not something that can be seized by executing certain techniques. It is always something God may give us if it pleases Him to do so. God more often uses our emotions rather than our intellects because our intellects are finite and limited in comparision to His. When God deals with us internally, He may find that our emotions always outstrip our intellects when it comes to receiving something He has for us. So He tends to use communication with our emotions more often than not.

So deliberately discarding your intellect and deliberately running on your emotions will not necessarily get you anywhere. (In fact, that may harm you instead). Your intellect still has its place in educating and directing your emotions. And while intellect may not be able to comprehend some of these emotions, it is still their guardian and fellow-worker. Emotions, in the end, are a communication tool and not the communication tool.

Secondly, a tiny little bit of direct emotional communication goes a long way. So far as I know, Amy Carmichael received only that one auditory vision I spoke of earlier. It was enough to overturn her existing scale of values and make her a missionary for life. If that’s all she ever got in that way, it was certainly enough for the rest of her life. So one’s life doesn’t necessarily have to be one constant stream of emotion. Like every other passion in life, there will be dry spots here and there, and you should not be laid low if you experience them from time to time.

Lastly, these direct personal communications to your soul are exactly that - direct personal communications. They are rarely meant for the Christian assembly as a whole, and most definitely do not supercede one iota of truth already found in the Word of God. If you receive such a personal communication, please remember this, and please don’t forget that there is always the possibility of a deceptive, demonic element in anything that gets placed on the back door of your mind. If you forget this, you are virtually asking a devil to make a fool out of you.