Daily mysticism. How do we get it? Is it even possible? Yes, says renown author Robert Wicks. He maintains that how we accept life’s lessons directly affects our own ability to live life at that deeply spiritual level. For it is all too easy to let life become habitual and to live on autopilot. Jesus says he came not only to give us life, but to give it to us “in abundance.”
Robert Wicks book Seeds of Sensitivity investigates his own ability to learn the mystical way of life, and he concludes it starts with unlearning and relearning. To demonstrate by example, he first describes his visit to Cambodia and the pain and suffering he witnessed in that country. His reflection on this experience is too profound to do anything but quote here:
The little girl whose home was burned down also had a lesson to teach–the
fresh continuance of hope. Would I accept this, learn from it, and be able
to maintain perspective in my life as well? Would I continue to be
sensitive to the people and lessons that each day held for me, or
would I try to run away, psychologically and spiritually, in search
of security and comfort and then call it peace? [36]
It is all too easy to run from experiences that makes us uncomfortable in search of a more comfortable and secure place. Yet, Wick challenges us to be open to our experience, because such experience holds a wealth of opportunities to change ourselves. And it is precisely such changes that open the door to new opportunities to life, the mystical experiences. Again:
We no longer need be on a seesaw of comfortable complacency balanced
by occasional, abrupt, rash acts of desperation because we fear that life is
slipping through our hands. With this new interest in unlearning, relearning,
and responding to life in a new way, it may become really possible to grasp
something that may have been elusive or incomprehensible to us up to this
point. When sensitivity is pure and real it can actually open us up to life
in a way that daily mysticism can become a natural way of living rather
than merely a subject of occasional fantasy. [37]