Modern mystics don’t kneel in ecstasy—they sit still and let the light seep into their bones. Then they get to work practicing compassionate activism in the world.
You can read a hundred books on mysticism and never get close to being a mystic if you’re not willing to sit alone for a few minutes every day. That’s the nut of it, the cost of such an undertaking. Mysticism is an experience of ultimate communion. It’s relational. It belongs to the body. You can’t get there by thinking about it. You have to sit your body down and not think about it. That’s why the German mystic Meister Eckhart called the process of enlightenment “one of subtraction, not addition.”
There’s no need to add to what you have or are or know, but there’s a lot to take away. For one, a belief that it takes effort. The only effort is the effort of being there, sitting there, with no judgment, no expectation, no disappointments if nothing happens. The process is interior, a raising of one’s whole self to a condition in which union with the Infinite is possible.
Don’t think of yourself as a seeker trying to find something or someone. Sit there and imagine light making its way into your bones and marrow. A fish doesn’t seek water. A bird doesn’t seek air. A mystic doesn’t seek God. There is nothing to long for. The union already exists. We just have to open our door to it. And it’s different each day, like love itself. Sometimes subtle, barely there. Sometimes all riled up, full of fury. Sometimes a stream of loveliness, quiet and pulsating.
The experience of oneness is incremental. It grows in intensity. One’s relationship to the Divine, to the Invisible Force, to Mind-at-Large, deepens and expands interiorly. It grows from the inside out. What you bring to the table is quintessential to the outcome.
There’s a big difference between a New Year’s resolution and a wedding vow. The difference is commitment. One commits one day and begins a practice. Each day one grows more familiar with the quiet, begins to crave it, may even decide to sit for longer periods, just for the lusciousness of it.
The silence feels fuller, the emptiness more fertile. The connection is complete. There is nothing to seek. I am one with the Beloved.
A relationship begins to develop. A curious correlation arises between the desires of the heart and thoughts streaming in from the Great Beyond. Emily Dickinson felt this. She spoke of it in these words:
The Only News I know
Is Bulletins all Day
From Immortality.
Every person who knows this relationship comprehends it as connectedness. I am not separate—not from the Earth, not from the multitudes of people, not from the stars, or even from the Divine. As Jesus once described it, “I and the Father are one.” As evolutionary creators, we are perfecting the language of the tribe now, altering prayers and creating them anew to reflect aspects of the Divine we experience in our practice. This poem I wrote is an example:
He Is, She Is
He is Cosmic Intelligence, Mind at Large
She is Wisdom, making soup and bread
from his stellar ideas.
He is night-time, twilight, dawn and daylight
She is the Serengeti, the rainforest,
Lover’s Lane and Death Valley.
He is silence, stillness, a cavern of nothingness
She is birdsong, lovemaking, the laughter of children
He is the heat of the Sahara desert
She is the sand in the palm of his hand.
He is space all boundless and infinite
She, a galaxy wrapped in his arms.
He is the fire, She the volcano,
spewing new earth from his molten seed.
He is the sea, and She the wave,
He the wind, She the wheat fields
All day long they rise and roll
lean and bend, like teenagers
locked in love’s embrace.
All life grows from the union of the two
When two become one, the New rises up.
Our spiritual lives are our own creations, embodied expressions emerging from the consciousness of these times. We are calling God home, localizing God in our own beings, giving God a change of address: Here, Now, Always. People are refusing to use patriarchal language in their prayers. Several atheist churches have arisen. Home churches are popping up everywhere as traditional church buildings get converted to grocery stores and beer marts.
In my own experience, I do not think of God as a deity in a fixed location somewhere in space, putting me in the category of post-theist. I have abandoned the notion of a male God, period. I do not believe in the story that God intervenes in human affairs, the story that was made up by men thousands of years ago when everyone believed the Earth was flat.
As I create my own faith, I create tenets that resonate with who I am as a woman, a teacher, a seer, a queer. I cannot return to prayers of separation when I know from my own practice that unity is all there is. Feeling one with is the ultimate test of a mystic. These are not the Middle Ages. We are not on our knees, panting and crying, in throes of ecstasy, with visions of angels.
We, the imagineers of the future, are huddled in our homes—the lucky ones who have homes—and our work is now interior. We are being called to attention, called to higher consciousness, called to be that communion of saints who march in faithfully—according to our own understanding of what it means to be our brother’s and sister’s keeper, what it feels like to knock so the door can be opened, comprehending the meaning of loving our neighbors as ourselves and living like the kingdom really is “within us.”
Modern-day saints, mystics, and prophets demonstrate this behavior every day. They reject negativity, they add wood to the fire, they acknowledge the darkness of these times and treat it as grist for the mill. We cannot change the circumstances we’re ensconced in, but we can change our reactions any moment. We can decide to be joyful, to respond kindly, to practice nonduality. That alone will change our focus.
Mysticism is a practice that comes alive when its nascent power bubbles up into compassionate action. Mysticism in work boots is prophetic action. The moment we were born for is upon us. There is no savior to announce or baptize. We are the ones to redeem what is left of this carved up, ravaged, and poisoned planet. We are the stewards, the caretakers. We have the whole world in our hands.
As matter, it is our job to matter, to make a verb of what we are—material beings, the visible aspect of the Immaterial Source. We find our purpose in mattering. We find out who we are when we matter, make a difference, move in the direction of kindness and mercy.
A mindfulness practice is barren without action. It is yin with no yang: incomplete, unfulfilled. The mystical experience is completed by the self-forgetful act of communion—an act, not of self-denial, but of self-fulfillment. In the nondualistic world, giving is receiving. When we reach out to others, what we offer to them is always multiplied as it returns to us. Ask any mystic.
These times are conditioning us for a new world. Though one might feel the dread of DANGER AHEAD, it is equally true that in many ways we shape the future with our own thoughts. This is a threshold time, a portal into a new and unknown culture that will be shaped both by the powers that govern and by the thoughts, prayers, and actions of the ones being governed.
Meister Eckhart said that “when the soul wants to have an experience of something, she throws out an image of that experience ahead of her and enters into her own image.” Perhaps, if we create an image of the world we want to live in, we will eventually live our way right into that vision.
— © Spirituality & Health March/April 2026, by Jan Phillips