Mysticism and Ethics

October 12, 2025

“This is how one ought to see,” I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers, or glanced at the jeweled books in the shelves […]. “This is how one ought to see, how things really are.” And yet there were reservations. For if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.

Just looking, just being the divine Not-self of flower, of book, of chair, of flannel. That would be enough. But in that case what about other people? What about human relations?

One ought to be able," I said, “to see these trousers as infinitely important and human beings as still more infinitely important.” One ought-but in practice it seemed to be impossible. his participation in the manifest glory of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, the necessary concerns of human existence. […]

How was this cleansed perception to be reconciled with a proper concern with human relations, with the necessary chores and duties, to say nothing of charity and practical compassion?

Mescalin can never solve that problem; it can only pose it, apocalyptically, for those to whom it had never before presented itself. The full and final solution can be found only by those who are prepared to implement the right kind of Weltanschauung by means of the right kind of behavior and the right kind of constant and unstrained alertness

Over against the quietist stands the active- contemplative, the saint, the man who, in Eckhart’s phrase, is ready to come down from the seventh heaven in order to bring a cup of water to his sick brother. […]

The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms. The contemplative whose perception has been cleansed does not have to stay in his room. He can go about his business, so completely satisfied to see and be a part of the divine Order of Things that he will never even be tempted to indulge in what Traherne called “the dirty Devices of the world.” When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when “the sea flows in our veins… and the stars are our jewels,” when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure? Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the faces of the poor

~ Door of Perception

This is the connection between mysticism and ethics I was looking for: the recognition of the subject–object divide, and then the melting of the two, resulting in an outlook that, when kept in mind at all times, makes negative virtue impossible. For how can you sin when you know that you would be transgressing against the holy that you have experienced yourself?