Practical mysticism plainly put - Holden Edward Sampson - PDF

Practical mysticism plainly put 

Now, without any further preamble, let me commence the subject that is before us, namely, “The Call of the Path.” It is the first lecture of a series of five on the Path of the Divine Mysteries—Mysticism, plain and practical. I never use, or rarely use, the word “ Mysticism,” because it has been so distorted by all kinds of thinkers and teachers, and so much has been mixed up in the term “ Mysticism,” that I have learned by very sorrowful experience that it is not a very good word to use in these days. I am thankful - to say, however, that it is more safely used in this country than it is in America, because everything that is “ occult,” everything that is psychic, everything that is “ freakish ”— I will not say that all these things are freakish—but everything that has freakish nature about it is called “Mysticism,” and a man is called a ‘ mystic’ who has no right to the title. 

I think I can safely use the word “‘ mystic’ here, though I rather dislike it. Therefore I will not discuss the word ‘ Mysticism.” I am discussing the subject of the Path of the Divine Mysteries; and what is the special Call to the Path? We are living in a day in which the Call to the Path is more exigent and vociferous than it has ever been in the past, to my knowledge and study of history. The Call of the Path in earlier days, in the days of the Apostles, and in the days of the Prophets, was a very much more dangerous call, a more painful call, than it is at the present time, because those who preached the Call of the Path in those early days suffered often martyrdom ~ and severe torture and other penalties for their audacity, for their temerity. 

It was the Call of the Path that was the message of the Great Master Himself. It was the Call of the Path, and the vast profound question that lies behind that Call, that is the source of it, the energy of it, and the motive of it, that was the message that our Lord Jesus Christ, our Great Master, and His successors, the Apostles, delivered to those who had the ear to hear, and they, every one of them, suffered the fatal consequences of delivering the message. 

That was the only possible reply, the only reply that has ever been given to that message from the earliest days, and humanity has suffered the consequences of many centuries of failure in delivering that message. The question arises in the mind today— Why is it that there is no persecution, not torture, not suffering, in these days following upon the delivery of the message, as compared with the days gone by, as compared with past history? 

Shall I give you the answer to that question? Perhaps if I do you will hiss me. No, I do not think you will be quite so rude as that, but you will shake your heads; or perhaps some of you will. But the Call of the Path has never been felt in any clear, emphatic and positive manner during all the centuries that have transpired since the Apostolic days; and yet the Call of the Path has been always existent. It has led many thousands of people, in every century of the present era—it has led them here and there in pursuit of something the nature of which they could not define, and has often brought them down to despair in the failure to discover what that Call was: to diagnose conditions by which to realize its purport and to fulfill its intention.

Author: Holden Edward Sampson

Publication date: 1922

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