Communion With Reality

And Being a Musician Again

Evelyn Underhill and Communion with Reality

In her work Practical Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill defines mysticism as ‘the art of union with Reality’.

I wrote last week about how we do not just see the world but we see the world as something. That is, our senses are constantly bombarded with limitless amounts of information, most of it visual apparently, and with our minds we make some kind of sense of all this by choosing what it is that we pay attention to.

We must go further than this and say that it is not only how we make sense of things but how we unite ourselves to some aspect of reality, how we establish communion with it. This is, again, a religious decision on our part - even though we are a lot of the time unaware of the fact.