Evelyn Underhill: Detachment,Drill, and Discipline

You willingly spend time and money over that narrowing and sharpening of attention which you call a "business training," a "legal education," the "acquirement of a scientific method." But this new undertaking will involve the development and the training of a layer of your consciousness which has lain fallow in the past; the acquirement of a method you have never used before. It is reasonable, even reassuring, that hard work and discipline should be needed for this: that it should demand of you, if not the renunciation of the cloister, at least the virtues of the golf course.

The education of the mystical sense begins in self-simplification. The feeling, willing, seeing self is to move from the various and the analytic to the simple and the synthetic: a sentence which may cause hard breathing and mopping of the brows on the part of the practical man. Yet it is to you, practical man, reading these pages as you rush through the tube to the practical work of rearranging unimportant fragments of your universe, that this message so needed by your time—or rather, by your want of time—is addressed.

To you, unconscious analyst, so busy reading the advertisements upon the carriage wall, that you hardly observe the stages of your unceasing flight: so anxiously acquisitive of the crumbs that you never lift your eyes to the loaf. The essence of mystical contemplation is summed in these two experiences—union with the flux of life, and union with the Whole in which all lesser realities are resumed—and these experiences are well within your reach.”

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) in Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, LTD, 1914) 28-29.

Today marks the fifth of seven posts from Practical Mysticism. Download this classic work freely here.

Underhill rightly starts with detachment from this artificial world. It’s a world of advertisements and entertainment, a world of lies and propaganda.

Then she employs the drill as a word picture. It implies the need to break through a hard surface and also to go deeper. The older you are, likely the harder this will be.

And then we see the call to discipline. Some reading this like getting business, legal, or scientific training. Others love refining their golf game.

But God wants us to experience deeper training to do more than grow sales, improve our physical health, or our putting on the golf green.

He wants our training to start with self-simplification. Our life in the artificial world has become so complicated that we give little or no time to the one thing that matters.

We are so anxiously acquisitive of the crumbs that we miss the loaf. This relates to our generosity as God wants to give us the loaf. He’s the loaf!