Overview
This is a guidebook for mystics like no other--with both detailed descriptions and practical suggestions. It offers spiritual explorers a map of the mystical landscape which can be used both to explore inner dimensions and to value our everyday human experience. Though considering himself a scientist--specifically, a practicing psychologist--Van Dusen approaches reality from the standpoint of multi-leveled mysticism. Using the insights of mystics from Hinduism and Buddhism and drawing on the writings of eighteenth-century visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, he shows how our interior realm reflects the external cosmos. The inner structures of our minds and personalities reflect the outer structures of the world, creating an internal-external correspondence that makes a mystical sense of oneness possible. As Van Dusen writes, "We are in a massive order, far greater than we can grasp. Yet we are not alien to this order. We are created out of it." As mystics from many ages have insisted--and Van Dusen considers mystics from Meister Eckhart to Sai Baba--neither we nor the world around us is chaotic, regardless of appearances to the contrary. Here science and mysticism join, because science informs us that, though the order it discovers may be complex, there is order nonetheless. In our personal lives as well, Van Dusen insists, there is a higher order which, while not controlling us, moves us inexorably toward a higher destiny. Even the cosmos reveals this transcendent sense of purpose, a truth we can verify during mystical experiences. This book invites each of us to confront mysticism both as a spiritual fact and as proof that we and the universe share a spiritual design, which orders our lives as surely as it orders the cosmos itself. "Wilson Van Dusen is one of the ...wisest explorers of the inner life in the world today."--Michael Murphy, Esalen Institute