by Paul Hourihan, edited by Anna Hourihan

Rather: Worldly life is escapism! Someone close to us dies—a spouse, a beloved child, a dear friend and the spirit of renunciation seizes us—we determine to live differently, give up all the aimless activities and time-wasting addictions to which we are prone, all the things that leave us at the mercy of … things! We make this vow. We will live seriously for the first time. We will lead a great life, not merely a self-indulgent one. We keep this vow … for a week, maybe two … and then? We are back at our old tricks. We flinch from the burden of so much responsibility, so much challenge. We embrace the known, the familiar, the everyday—and call it reality! Then we may even accuse those of seeking Truth, or the Divine, or the Secret of Life, as being mystics … of being escapists! Those who had the courage to do what we could not do, we label as escapists, as dodging their responsibilities!

No! Mysticism is not escapism from the world. Rather, it is escapism into something—that something is the Real. 

The alcoholic is a mystic but doesn't know it, thinks alcohol is the answer; takes the wrong way in his rejection of the world he finds, and the personality he finds … seeking another world, another personality, another reality. That is why the psychiatrist cannot help him because the psychiatrist is trying to get him to accommodate himself to a world he does not believe in to start with! The psychiatrist does not know the source and scope of the hunger that drives him, which is the Divine itself. But, not knowing this, the alcoholic tries to appease his restlessness with the bottle, or with drugs, and so goes down, down … and is finally destroyed. Alcoholics Anonymous has had the most success because it frankly recognizes the alcoholic as a spiritual being who can only solve his problem by displacing his present personality, by regenerating his whole outlook from top to bottom. On the whole AA is not a path of mysticism as such, but it is a step in that direction. That is why it is so successful. Mysticism is Truth. What resembles Mysticism resembles Truth.

Escapism…? No. The opposite is true. Worldly life, so much prized, is escapism. We know of the world’s great scriptures. We know of the great sages and saints of history—Christ, Buddha, and other supreme souls. We know their message, their counsel, and example. Do we follow what they say? Do we accept their doctrine? A few do, but the rest of us turn elsewhere. Nobody’s perfect! we say—and embrace worldly life. Escaping from the burden of acceptance—of making a decision, a commitment. Worldliness, then, itself is escapism. Mysticism is the way to Reality. Paradoxes here, enigmas. All our values have to be transvalued, as Nietzsche said. All our assumptions are false. All our standards are makeshift.

But this does not mean we abandon the world. We are part of it, mixed into it, to be sure. One leg in each world—that of time, that of the timeless.

We do not abandon or reject the world, but rather deify it by pervading it with the mystical consciousness that slowly arises in us. Then, we see another world—the world we were always seeking.

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*The term "Mysticism" here does not refer to occult practices, but rather to the doctrine or outlook that declares there is a divine or transcendental reality in the world, something beyond the senses that can be contacted and known directly and everyone has the power and potential to do this. Mysticism is the direct personal experience of the Divine, the Infinite Source of all.

See also Words of Wisdom: Mysticism, Spiritual Life.