Are you a child of chaos? Congratulations! That's your ticket to mystic experience.
On Evelyn Underhill, addiction, and ego death
Hi! I missed writing to you here. It was so good to get away—I saw the Alhambra for the first time and generally levitated in awe above the city of Granada. And now, it’s so good to be back.
Last time, we were talking about the early-twentieth-century mystic and spiritual writer Evelyn Underhill and her tiny but powerful book Practical Mysticism, which argues that mystic experience is a universal human capacity, and never more needed than in times of war. This punchy little book then outlines practical, step-by-step guidance for deepening from time into eternity. For contacting the expansive, whole-making, ultimately unwordable order of existence that many mystics have called divinity, and which Underhill calls Reality.
That post seems to have struck a chord: I’ve heard from lots of people who were fired up by Underhill’s ideas. So I wanted to speak about why Practical Mysticism resonated so deeply for me, beyond being a fantastic primer on the practice of mysticism.
In the first half of the book, Underhill outlines the first stages of her process for attuning to Reality—the eternal truth that lies before and beyond our lives in time. This process, she explains, begins with meditation to clear the scales from your eyes, which will naturally lead to a process of “self-adjustment.” In other words, once you’re seeing clearly what is, rather than the defensive and illusory stories you’ve always told yourself about the world (as an inevitable part of being human), you will recognize all the ways in which your thoughts and your will, all the effort of your life, have served the wrong ends. Here’s Underhill:
It is not merely that your intellect has assimilated, united with a superficial and unreal view of the world. Far worse: your will, your desire, the sum total of your energy, has been turned the wrong way, harnessed to the wrong machine. You have become accustomed to the idea that you want, or ought to want, certain valueless things, certain specific positions. […]
The surface-self, left for so long in undisputed possession of the conscious field, has grown strong, and cemented itself like a limpet to the rock of the obvious; gladly exchanging freedom for apparent security, and building up, from a selection amongst the more concrete elements offered it by the rich stream of life, a defensive shell of “fixed ideas.” It is useless to speak kindly to the limpet. You must detach it by main force. That old comfortable clinging life, protected by its hard shell from the living waters of the sea, must now come to an end. A conflict of some kind—a severance of old habits, old notions, old prejudices—is here inevitable for you; and a decision as to the form which the new adjustments must take.
Yes, yes, yes!, I thought while reading this. Partly because Underhill is such a lucid and no-nonsense guide to processes that often seem cloudy. But mostly because the path she outlines happens to mirror a process I’ve been deeply involved in for the past several years: that of addiction recovery.
What Underhill describes above is essentially a deliberate but nonetheless alchemical process of ego death: of shedding your false self, your ego-driven appetites and constructed narratives. And this is precisely the process that’s engineered in the 12 steps of addiction recovery. In that program, the core, alchemical moment of ego death is laid out in steps four to seven, in which:
We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever made a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself and then shared it with another human being, but let me tell you it’s no picnic. The feeling is precisely what Underhill describes: the sense of detaching a limpet of fixed ideas [and behaviours] by main (and often painful) force.
And perhaps it’s obvious that both Underhill’s guidance and the 12 steps would involve ego death, since they’re both paths of spiritual awakening, and the death of the ego is always an essential part of that awakening. That much is clear from the lives of pretty much every spiritual leader and saint I can think of.
Even so, here’s why it moved me so deeply to see the parallels between the processes: because it’s very easy indeed, if you’ve lost years or decades of your life to addiction or bad relationships or ego-driven seeking or any other bad coping mechanism—it’s very easy indeed to feel like you’re somehow forever at a disadvantage. That no matter how much peace and happiness you might have found now, you still wasted a chunk of your life, and those years are never coming back, and wouldn’t it be better if it had never happened at all?
Underhill’s book felt like a gift because it reminded me that the mind-boggling extent of my fuck-ups and my lostness is actually a gift. If I hadn’t cocked everything up quite so badly—if I hadn’t damaged myself and others so much with my drinking, if I hadn’t gone on to balls-up a marriage as a dry drunk, if all my mistakes hadn’t forced me to restart my life from scratch at 36—I might have gone through my entire life with the scales still over my eyes. I might never have begun to engage the process that Underhill calls “self-adjustment” and which I call ego death. And I certainly would never have begun to engage that process in the context of a program and a supportive community that invite true rigour.
I cannot tell you how much joy it gave this child of chaos, this idiot who lived a haywire half-life for such a very long time, to read someone as no-nonsense as Underhill confirming that my lostness was never an aberration; it was part of the path. That everyone has scales over their eyes until they do something about it. And that what really matters is how you get out of your lostness. Whether you truly commit to the process of self-adjustment.
If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably a sensitive soul too. You probably feel things deeply—so deeply that it sometimes all feels like too much. You’ve probably, at some point, begun to tell yourself stories about the world that confirm this idea of too-much-ness or unsafety, and then developed mechanisms to help you cope with or escape life as it unfolds. And some of those coping mechanisms probably haven’t served you, in the big-picture sense. They’ve probably seen you chasing things that weren’t right for you, or that didn’t really matter; and they’ve probably seen you rejecting the things your soul needed most because it was too scary to try. At some point, you might well have found yourself at a fork in the road: a moment of clarity that you can’t keep going the way you have been, but that the other path, the path of self-adjustment, looks dark and scary and overgrown with brambles.
If that’s where you find yourself now, or have found yourself in the past: congratulations! It might feel like shit, but you’re right on track. This could be the very moment that your life in Reality begins. But don’t just take my word for it. Evelyn Underhill told us so.
Love,
xx Ellie