Mystical Intelligence
Spiritual Knowing: Part Four – Developmental Learning
When I was in school, I decided to try my hand at the drums. I say “hand” fairly literally, as I could never get myself to play two rhythms at once. I could hold a beat though—as long as it was just one beat. My band director mercifully put me on the big bass drum and I pounded away with the single count in my head. It’s the same reason I failed at the piano. Two hands doing different things at the same time? Not for me. Throw the feet in there as well on a drum set? Forget about it.
I would claim that I just wasn’t very musical. Until later in high school when I picked up a trumpet and found something I could do pretty well—after some practice naturally. With the encouragement of my friends and a kind teacher, I also discovered that I had a half-decent singing voice. My shower-voice had fooled me, for I was certainly not a soloist. Rather, I had a nice blending voice for duets and harmonies.
You may not think you’re a mystic because you don’t have visions or ecstatic trances. Maybe you think you’re just not a very mystical person because of your history of one-sided prayers. There’s a pretty good chance you’re probably not Mozart—or you would know by now. But you’ve almost certainly got a little music in you.
As with any form of intelligence, there are certain things that come more natural to us. We just take to certain things through some combination of genetics, environment, skill, and preference. But even then, most intelligence has to be developed through study, training, and experimentation. Most people perhaps don’t think of it this way, but what if mysticism is an intelligence you can personally develop?
You’ll never know if you don’t pick up an instrument and annoy your neighbors for a while.
Mystical Education
In the idea of multiple intelligences, mathematics is listed as a category. While there are savants who just get it automatically, pretty much every mathematician and engineer had to start by learning 2+2=4. Then they went to school and studied multiplication tables, algebra, calculus, and onward. They had to develop their mathematical intelligence.
Jesus Teaching His Disciples
Where are the schools for mysticism? Not just learning about mystics, but guilds and communities where people learn to develop their own spiritual intelligence? Healthy churches do this to some degree, but most stop short at moving into mysticism. Modern seminaries primarily focus on theology and academic learning. Just like most of the Western education system in general, the emphasis is on the mind.
Jorge Ferrer, a scholar in transpersonal psychology, identifies this shortcoming as a primary reason for our mystical atrophy:
“The cognicentric (i.e., mind-centered) character of Western culture hinders the maturation of nonmental attributes, making it normally necessary to engage in intentional practices to bring these attributes up to the same developmental level the mind achieves through mainstream education . . . A common outcome is that most individuals in the Western culture reach adulthood with a conventionally mature mental functioning but with poor or irregularly developed somatic, emotional, aesthetic, intuitive, and spiritual intelligences.”
“Participatory approaches, that is, seek to enact with body, mind, heart, and consciousness a creative spirituality that lets a thousand spiritual flowers bloom.”
The fact is, most of us haven’t been trained to develop our mystical intelligence, our ways of sensing and perceiving—indeed our ways of knowing beyond the modern, rational approach. So entrenched are we in this epistemology, it may not even make sense to you to think of the act of knowing without immediately associating it with mental thought processes.
The truth is we engage in this type of knowing far more than we tend to recognize. We may call it instinctual, intuitive, imaginative, spiritual, energetic, and more. If your mind is still doubting, just ask yourself how you know you love someone. Your awareness goes straight to your heart.
It is not one or the other, as the dualistic ego sometimes makes it out to be. It is not a matter of denying the extremely important function of mental knowing, but rather going beyond the narrow limitation of only knowing by thought. I don’t quit the debate team because I joined the choir. And masterfully debating the finer points of music theory has its place, but of itself makes no music.
Beginner’s Mind and Expectant Heart
“What was at first a vague intuition of universal unity has become a rational and well-defined awareness of a presence…I am beginning to suspect that appeals and indications of an intellectual nature may well build up around me and have a message for me. A presence is never dumb.”
-Teilhard de Chardin
Our first step in developing our mystical intelligence is to embrace a beginner’s mind and an expectant heart.
Listening to beautiful music might inspire you to play the piano, but your first attempts will sound nothing like Mozart. And that’s perfectly ok. Tuning in to the subtle realm of non-physical, mystical reality is not something most of us have had any training in. Accept that it will probably take some time and require practice.
But also come with an expectant heart. When we get in touch spiritually with these other parts of ourselves, with our hearts, guts, and feet—especially in the context of a WeSpace group with higher frequency from shared energy fields—we often discover much more within than we may have guessed. Our hearts are full and a palpable energy is apparent. Your heart is more ready for this than you know.
Another reason to be expectant is because you’re not on your own. You have a great master right there with you, speaking to you and leading the dance. This may be Jesus, or another spiritual guide, if you’re open to receiving their help.
This takes an integration—often times a re-integration—of the 2nd person, personal reality and experience of God. Christian mysticism is in many ways primarily the mysticism of the personal. The contemplative mystical path is not only the path of silence, but very much also the path of encounter and conversation.
“Once the possibility of God has been accepted, there is no longer any difficulty in the possibility, and even the theoretical probability of a revelation, of a reflection, that is, of God on our consciousness . . . Since man is personal, personal God must influence him at a personal level and in a personal form: he must influence him intellectually and affectively. In other words he must ‘speak’ to him.”
-Teilhard de Chardin
Can we develop our mystical intelligence to be able to hear these revelations, these reflections of God on our consciousness? Can we learn to hear God speak to us? How would we do that?
Next week we will explore learning how to understand the mystical languages from our body centers of spiritual knowing.
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