I am doing this mostly, if I’m candid, to help myself and maybe others parse its compressed and nearly antiquated early 20th century prose into something more manageable for the early 21st century mind. What I propose to write here is a series of posts that will provide a synopsis, chapter by chapter, of that already little book. But her writing style is challenging, to say the least. I believe that her message is just as important to us today, if not more so as the stakes are raised in our time concerning the future of humankind. In other words, it was written for people going about their workaday lives with little or no comprehension of what she calls Reality, with a capital "R," which different people call the Ultimate, the Absolute, God, Allah, Brahman, the Sacred, and so on. 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.” She admits that the topic is usually reserved for those cloistered away, and then goes on to say: “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. Please forgive me this lenience.) Underhill firmly believed that mystical experiences are available to all who truly pursue them.
(As she used the masculine normative throughout, I’ve decided not to mark each instance with a for ease of reading. She wrote the short, dense book, Practical Mysticism: a Little Book for Normal People, in 1915 as a guide for the “everyman” of her era.
As an adult, she studied and wrote about mysticism both to deepen her own understanding and to advocate the practices that nurture what she saw as one of the most important experiences a person can have. She experienced spontaneous unitive states of consciousness from an early age.
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