According to the Mystic
As there is a category of facts to which our senses are our best available but very imperfect guides, as there is a category of truths which we seek by the keen but still imperfect light of our reason, so according to the mystic, there is a category of more subtle truths, which surpass the reach both of the senses and the reason, but which can be ascertained by an inner direct knowledge and direct experience. These truths are supersensuous, but not the less real for that: they have immense results upon the consciousness changing its substance and movement, bringing especially deep peace and abiding joy, a great light of vision and knowledge, a possibility of overcoming the lower animal nature [within us], and vistas of a spiritual self-development which without them do not exist.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Integral Yoga
The masters of history point to possibility in our lives: the possibility that everything we have learned, the superficial and finite, has force and value only upon the surfaces of things, in the ephemeral passages of time, the swing and sway of emotions we call our Self. And that lessons are available which deepen our touch beyond the surface, and deepen our experience beyond what we can identify as something sensed or something thought.
It is not the sixth sense which was popularized some years ago: to put a box around a box doesn’t open the package, but closes it more completely than when it was first examined. The masters of history looked for places beyond the map they were handed at birth, and beyond the maps of all the lands they examined thereafter. They looked beyond the maps, and beyond those who made the maps, to the explorers themselves, the ones who traveled and discovered… and followed the luminous traces of their footsteps to a life outside of the mundane.
It is because untying from the mooring takes courage, and it takes reference. There is a sun toward which the Earth turns in its rotation, there is an spiral arm of stars which points in toward the center of a whirling galaxy; there is a neighborhood of galaxies spinning in a cosmic dance – what else could you call it, and not belittle something so grand? – from an unremembered Beginning toward an unimagined Conclusion. And your life, and my life, are mirrored in every flicker of light.
The masters point toward that flicker of light, and if you follow the aim of their fingers – if you look where they are pointing – the consequence is a single small step off the map. Away from what your senses tell you, your parents told you, away from the foggy stories you have been taught of human history.
Once you step off the map – that two-dimensioned, bordered square of paper – not even the sky’s a limit.