—But what of mysticism? Does it not inform us how unity without duality is experienced? May we dispute the truth of its account?
—I know not of a single but of two kinds of happening in which duality is no longer experienced. These are at times confused in mystical utterances—I too once confused them.
The one is the soul’s becoming a unity. That is something that takes place not between man and God, but in man. Power is concentrated, everything that tries to divert it is drawn into the orbit of its mastery, the being is alone in itself and rejoices, as Paracelsus says, in its exaltation. This is the decisive moment for a man. Without it he is unfit for the work of the spirit; with it, he decides, in his innermost being, if this means a breathing-space, or the sufficient end of his way. Concentrated in unity, he can go out to the meeting, to which he has only now drawn quite close, with the mystery, with salvation. But he can also enjoy to the full this blessed concentration of his being, and without entering on the supreme duty fall back into dissipation of being.—Everything on our way involves decision, purposive, dimly seen, wholly mysterious: this in the innermost being is the primal mysterious decision, carrying the mightiest consequences for our destiny.
The other happening lies in the unfathomable nature of the relational act itself, in which two, it is imagined, become one: “one and one united, bareness shines there into bareness”. I and Thou are absorbed, humanity, which just before confronted the godhead, is merged in it—glorification, deification, and singleness of being have appeared. But when the man, illuminated and exhausted, falls back into the cares of earthly affairs, and with knowledge in his heart thinks of the two situations, is he not bound to find that his being is split asunder and one part given to perdition? What does it help my soul that it can be withdrawn anew from this world here into unity, when this world itself has of necessity no part in the unity—what does all “enjoyment of God” profit a life that is rent in two? If that abundantly rich heavenly moment has nothing to do with my poor earthly moment—what has it then to do with me, who have still to live, in all seriousness still to live, on earth? Thus are the masters to be understood who have renounced the raptures of ecstatic “union”.
Union that was no union: as illustration I take the men who in the passion of the engrossing Eros are so enraptured by the miracle of the embrace that their knowledge of I and Thou perishes in the feeling of a unity that does not and cannot exist. What the ecstatic man calls union is the enrapturing dynamic of relation, not a unity arisen in this moment of the world’s time that dissolves the I and the Thou, but the dynamic of relation itself, which can put itself before its bearers as they steadily confront one another, and cover each from the feeling of the other enraptured one. Here, then, on the brink, the relational act goes beyond itself; the relation itself in its vital unity is felt so forcibly that its parts seem to fade before it, and in the force of its life, the I and the Thou, between which it is established, are forgotten. Here is one of the phenomena of the brink to which reality extends and at which it grows dim. But the central reality of the everyday hour on earth, with a streak of sun on a maple twig and the glimpse of the eternal Thou, is greater for us than all enigmatic webs on the brink of being.