For him, the hare of Reality is always ready-jugged : he conceives not the living, lovely, wild, swift-moving creature which has been sacrificed in order that he may be fed on the deplorable dish which he calls “things as they really are.” So complete, indeed, is the separation of his consciousness from the facts of being, that he feels no sense of loss. The verb “to be,” which uses so lightly, does not truly apply to any of the objects amongst which the practical man supposes himself to dwell. It is notorious that the operations of the average human consciousness unite the self, not with things as they really are, but with images, notions, and aspects of things. The question which divides them is really this: What, out of the mass of material offered to it, shall consciousness seize upon - with what aspects of the universe shall it “unite”?

The distinction between mystic and non-mystic is not merely that between the rationalist and the dreamer, between intellect and intuition. Evelyn UnderhillĪcknowledging what modern cognitive scientists well know - that our attention is “an intentional, unapologetic discriminator” - Underhill observes that “only a few amongst the wealth of impressions we receive are seized and incorporated into our picture of the world,” and reflects on the spiritual significance of this tendency to mistake representation for reality: The English poet, novelist, mystic, and peace activist Evelyn Underhill (December 6, 1875–June 15, 1941) explores how to do that in her 1914 book Practical Mysticism ( public library | public domain) - a field guide to mystical experience that is secular rather than religious, the product of “ordinary contemplation” springing from the very essence of human nature, available to all. The supreme frontier of human freedom may be the ability to accept that something exists beyond understanding, that understanding is a machination of the mind and not a mirror of the world - that the world simply is, and our consciousness is a participant in its being but not a creator of it. Forever trapped within it, we mistake our concepts of things for the things themselves, our theories for the universe, continually seeing the world not as it is but as we are.

The great paradox of consciousness is that it constitutes both our entire experience of reality and our blindfold to reality as it really is.

Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill