To you, unconscious analyst, so busy reading the advertisements upon the carriage wall, that you hardly observe the stages of your unceasing flight: so anxiously acquisitive of the crumbs that you never lift your eyes to the loaf.” She admits that the topic is usually reserved for those cloistered away, and then goes on to say: “Yet it is to you, practical man, reading these pages as you rush through the tube to the practical work of rearranging unimportant fragments of your universe, that this message so needed by your time-or rather, by your want of time-is addressed. Please forgive me this lenience.) Underhill firmly believed that mystical experiences are available to all who truly pursue them. (As she used the masculine normative throughout, I’ve decided not to mark each instance with a for ease of reading. She wrote the short, dense book, Practical Mysticism: a Little Book for Normal People, in 1915 as a guide for the “everyman” of her era. As an adult, she studied and wrote about mysticism both to deepen her own understanding and to advocate the practices that nurture what she saw as one of the most important experiences a person can have. She experienced spontaneous unitive states of consciousness from an early age.
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