Essays
Standalone essays on the contemplative life, hosted here in full. Where The Signal follows what is surfacing now, these pieces have already lasted.
The Essentials of Mysticism
Underhill asks what remains of mysticism once tradition, temperament, and symbolism are stripped away, and answers with two essentials. The clear conviction of a living Absolute, and the remaking of the whole self in response to it.
35 min readThe Over-Soul
Emerson argues that the individual soul opens onto one universal Soul, and that every moment of genuine insight is that Soul disclosing itself. Written by a close reader of the Gita, a generation before Vedanta reached America by other roads.
31 min readA Suggestion About Mysticism
James's last paper on mysticism proposes that mystical states are sudden enlargements of the ordinary field of consciousness, and reports, unusually for an academic journal, three such experiences of his own.
16 min readThe Realisation of the Infinite
The closing chapter of Sadhana, the Harvard lectures Tagore gave the year he won the Nobel Prize. The infinite is realised through the finite world, in love and joy, and not by escaping it.
20 min readOn Beauty
Beauty, Plotinus argues, is the soul recognising kinship with its source, and the way to it runs inward. Withdraw into yourself, and look. The sculptor image at the centre of this treatise shaped fifteen centuries of contemplative method.
20 min read