What do I mean by “spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism”?

An overview

For most of my adult life I’ve been blessed to live in the Ananda intentional spiritual communities with most of that time also as a member of the Ananda Sevaka order. That means that I’ve lived half my life in an environment where devotion to God, meditation on God, and awareness of God’s living presence is not compartmentalized into specific parts of the day or week but rather woven into the fabric of everyone’s moment-to-moment consciousness, regardless of time, place, and circumstance, whether in work, in relationships, in education and child-raising, in service, in recreation, in the arts, in mundane household duties.

It’s an environment where success is measured not in terms of worldly success or desires satisfied, but in terms of inner expansion and desires transcended.

This, in a nutshell (as later posts will go into more detail), is what I mean by “spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism”: the inner awareness of God's very real presence in ordinary, everyday life, in everyday situations and settings.

Similarly, mystical realism is also God’s presence experienced by ordinary, everyday people like you and me, rather than something reserved only for “special” souls.

Photo by Jorge Garcia on Unsplash

For that very awareness is what turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, and not just in the fictional realms of speculative and fantasy worlds but in the real and tangible world in which we live, even the modern world with all its perceived complexities. That’s the “realism” part. And that awareness can again be experienced by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Like the weather. Like drinking a cup of tea. Like breathing.¹ As Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15), meaning right here, all the time. But oh, so not in itself ordinary or mundane!

Mystical realism is the inner awareness of God's very real presence in ordinary, everyday life, for ordinary, everyday people, in everyday situations and settings.

But oh, so not in itself ordinary or mundane!

Inward and personal, but not subjective

This inward experience of God’s presence may not show on the outside. Did not Jesus also say, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21)? It’s not something that other people will necessarily notice unless you specifically choose to put it on display (which isn’t usually recommended anyway). It may not affect changes in any outer structures or circumstances, either. In fact, it may produce the opposite of what worldly, self-seeking minds might expect.

But it certainly makes a difference on the inside: in one’s approach to life, in one’s perception of the world, in one’s understanding of people and purpose, and in the depth and resiliency of one’s own happiness.

As an inner experience, it’s also deeply personal, as is the fundamental nature of spirituality, devotion, and mysticism.

And yet such inner, personal experience is not wholly subjective. There’s a remarkable unity or at least similarity between different people’s accounts, and not just those of old-time saints and mystics. Nearly thirty years’ living in spiritual communities has shown me this. Many memoirs, biographical accounts, and other volumes of mystical literature also attest to this similarity of experience.²

In the introduction to his memoir, Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis wrote:

How far the story matters to anyone but myself depends on the degree to which others have experienced what I call "joy". If it is at all common, a more detailed treatment of it than has (I believe) been attempted before may be of some use. I have been emboldened to write of it because I notice that a man seldom mentions what he had supposed to be his most idiosyncratic sensations without receiving from at least one (often more) of those present the reply, “What! Have you felt that too? I always thought I was the only one.”

Such a commonality of experience is why I believe that expressions of mystical realism in fiction can and will be meaningful to many people. Indeed, “In poll after poll,” writes physicist Amit Goswami in The Self-Aware Universe, “it has been revealed that an amazingly high percentage of Americans have had mystical experiences.” (271)

Aspects of mystical realism

For the purposes of fiction, and to create experiences for fictional characters that are relatable to that high percentage of Americans (and certainly others around the world), I don’t think it’s necessary to go to a full-on “I and my Father are One” sort of thing. After all, I doubt many readers of fiction have already achieved a state of mystical union or marriage, as some saints have described it. Most are likely still seeking or cultivating such experiences and would identify more with characters who have an I-Thou relationship with God.

Thus, the experience of mystical realism—again, for ordinary people in everyday circumstances—manifests not so much in grandiose visions or miracles but as inward, even quiet feelings. These are not emotions, mind you, which are agitated feelings. They’re more aspects of consciousness itself, the calm, deep feeling of transcendent qualities like joy, love, peace, calmness, wisdom, and energy (or power, in a vitalizing sense, which includes life).³

That’s at least how it’s been for me to feel God’s presence in various ways throughout my life, a presence that can come, as it does for many others, in the most mundane of places. I often enjoy a simple feeling of delight—pointless delight, you might say—while pushing a cart around a grocery store, a place where I’m often (honestly) calm and relaxed enough in the moment to feel the sheer joy of being alive.

We likely feel and experience mystical realism more than we realize.

Photo by Scott Warman on Unsplash

This presence may also be a feeling of love or connection. For example, the other day I bought an over-the-counter medication at Dokimo’s Pharmacy in Nevada City, CA. On the surface, my wholly unremarkable exchange with the cashier went like this:

"Is that all?" said the clerk.

"Yes," I replied.

"That's $18.41."

I pulled my card.

"Debit or credit?” he asked.

“Debit." I swiped my card. (The chip reader wasn’t working.)

"Do you need a bag?"

"No, thank you."

The transaction completed and I got my receipt.

"OK, thanks," I said.

"Have a good one," he answered.

Really banal, predictable stuff that AI can write. But the part that soulless technology won’t ever replicate is the look in the cashier’s eyes when we exchanged a brief glance, making a connection of one human being to another, a connection that said, “No matter how shallow our conversation might have been, I'm glad to have spent these few seconds together.”

He really did mean for me to have a good one.

In that brief exchange I was more deeply aware of how every individual person is a unique point of view in the universe, a unique portal of experience, a unique channel for the divine to express itself—to express kindness, love, and hope—in this world, to us and through us.

These feelings, too, can come at many other times, such as:

• A flow of energy beyond what one normally expects from the body’s physicality when engaged in work or exercise.

• A surge of will, determination, and focus when a situation demands it, such as responding in a crisis.

• An expansive love in the presence of a friend or loved one.

• Insights during one’s work (as I relate in Mystic Microsoft).

• Inspiration when visiting a place of pilgrimage, watching a sunset, or stargazing.

• A profound peace in nature or when praying for others.

• An upwelling and even overpowering joy when listening to music or poetry or even reading a passage in a book.

• The self-awareness of being conscious in the first place.

In short, we—many people, as Goswami claims—likely feel and experience mystical realism more than we realize. Perhaps that oversight is simply because we identify those experiences as merely psychological or emotional rather than mystical. Perhaps it’s because we don’t have words for them. Perhaps it’s because we think it’s “just me,” like C. S. Lewis said, because we’ve never seen or heard an expression of a similar experience elsewhere.

Can mystical realism work in fiction?

I wonder, then: what would happen if more people found such experiences integrated and reflected—and thus validated—within the framework of enjoyable and entertaining stories?

Of course, it’s certainly possible to find validation in non-fiction works such as spiritual biographies, memoirs, and treatises. (Here I include those “fictional” works that are really non-fiction treatises in disguise, like those that quote at length from a book or teacher within the “story.") However, there are several reasons why they might not serve this purpose:

• Such volumes often come hot and heavy where matters of spirituality are concerned, asking—demanding—a lot from readers intellectually and philosophically.

• Non-fiction inherently makes claims on Truth and typically isn’t necessarily to be experiential.

  Because such books are often concerned less with story and more with laying out a body of spiritual teachings, a reader has to accept or at least not reject those teachings as a whole to accept those parts that might validate their own experience.

• Treatises, especially, but even memoirs and biographies, might not provide any accounts of inner experience at all.

Here’s where I come full circle on my past criticism of fiction as having a low “truth density” as explained in my previous post Mystical realism: Motivations, inspirations, and opportunities. Commercial or genre fiction—stories built around plot, character, and setting—doesn’t seek to inform or educate (which is why didactic fiction doesn’t really work). It doesn’t seek to engage readers intellectually or philosophically, or to bludgeon them with theology, metaphysics, and scriptural quotations. Fiction is designed instead to engage readers emotionally: people read such stories to feel, to experience something through characters that they care about, even fall in love with.

And mystical realism is all about feeling.

As such, mystical realism in fiction provides an avenue for people to connect with their own inner experiences in a simple, lightweight manner, if they want. For good fiction suggests rather than demands. And readers, in that freedom, might then allow themselves to say, “Hey, I’ve felt something like that! I thought it was just me!”

1. Indeed, one of the simplest methods of cultivating such awareness begins with breath awareness, which means to focus the mind on something going on inside yourself rather than in the external world of the senses. But that’s a topic for another post.

2. See, for example, Frank Laubach's Letters By a Modern Mystic and Paramhansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi along with the interviews in Marsha Sinetar's survey Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics. Readers have also enjoyed my own contribution in Mystic Microsoft.

In his 1911 book, Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians, James Lawson makes this argument about accepting variations of testimony, an argument that really must apply beyond his scope of evangelical Christianity to not only all forms of Christianity but also to the mystical experience of people in all faiths: “In a court of law, the testimony of witnesses would be rejected if they all gave the same evidence and gave it in the same words and manner. It would prove that there had been a secret cooperation among the witnesses. But if each witness gave his evidence in his own words and manner, and yet the testimony of the witnesses agreed as to the essential facts, the evidence would be regarded as most convincing.” (8-9)

3. For my book, Finding Focus, I made an expanded list of different qualities, feelings, and values that more or less fall into these categories, which I’ve copied these to a page here on Substack.