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A Source For Mystycs
by Tom Cowan Finding Both Healing and Insight In the Natural World Every day we must rely on our senses to get us through our rounds of activities, even though we are repeatedly told that our senses can deceive us. Yet fully warned, people still live according to the old adage, “Seeing is believing.” I often wonder why we don’t also claim, “Hearing is believing.” When it comes to belief, we tend to favor our eyes over our ears and other senses. Maybe we don’t trust our ears because they are more skillful deceivers than our eyes. Ears, after all, can lure us into a nursery of baby hawks. Worse, the limitations of hearing might convince us that a tree falls silently in the distance or that people across the street are moving their lips but not really talking. On the other hand, what are we to make of hermits walking on water and rowing boats across meadows of flowers? Seeing is believing. In an old Irish myth, the hero Cormac journeys to the Land of Truth in the Otherworld, where he is instructed in the mystical realities of the Universe. There he sees a pool of water surrounded by hazel trees that drop their nuts into the water. Five salmon break open the nuts to eat the kernels. The juice from the purple hazels colors the water, which then flows from the pool in five streams that disappear beyond the horizon. Cormac inquires about this strange scene. The ruler of this enchanted land, Manannan mac Lir, explains that the hazels are the Nuts of Wisdom, the fish are the Salmon of Wisdom, and the five streams, carrying the juice from the nuts and flowing from the pool, are our five senses. Then he tells Cormac, “Everyone drinks from the five streams. But only mystics, poets, and people with the gift of vision drink from the five streams and the pool itself.” I have been trying to put this difficult truth about reality into practice for many years. It is truly revolutionary in terms of the accepted paradigm in our society that says the objects of our senses are just physical objects. According to Manannan, the information that comes through our senses comes with otherworldly wisdom from the Land of Truth. Physical reality is not just physical, it is spiritual; it comes from a place of truth, wisdom, and sacred knowledge. This means that a tree is more than a tree, a rock more than a rock, a drop of rain more than a drop of rain. Even a pile of garbage, an automobile wreck, the atrocities on the evening news — all of these are not just events in ordinary reality. A lake may not be only a lake, or a meadow simply a meadow of flowers. Everything is a stream of consciousness flowing from non-ordinary reality. To believe that this other reality is just as real as the one we experience daily through our senses takes faith, or as Cormac learned, it takes mysticism, poetry, and visionary gifts. The People of Vision drink from the streams of their senses and the pool itself. They know that what they see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and feel convey supernatural meaning that is more eternal and soul-full than the physical reality that is most apparent. Perhaps the ability of the senses to trick us is actually a reminder about this. Rather than “failing” to represent reality accurately, the occasional deception might actually be a call to remind us that the purely physical sensations that come from the outer world to our inner world are not what they seem because they are always much more than what they seem. On a trip to Vienna, where I taught a seminar in Celtic shamanism, my Austrian host, Paul, noticed as we rode the elevator up to my hotel room that my luggage still had the airline flight tags on it. He reached down and said, “We will take these off. They will be a source for mystics.” As he began to tear them from the handles of my suitcases, I wondered how exactly that would work. “What do you mean?” I asked. “You will attract mystics!” Paul repeated, sounding very assured that he understood the problem, even though I hadn’t the foggiest idea of how that would happen. “How will those tags attract mystics?” Paul looked at me askance. Then, enunciating more slowly and with greater pains to soften his German accent, he said carefully and clearly, “Not mystics. Mis-takes.” “Mißverständnis!” I announced proudly, my college German courses paying off. “Mistakes.” “Yes,” he agreed. “There will be mistakes.” “Well, take them off,” I said, “but it would be nice to be a source for mystics.” “Ah, it would be very nice to be a source for mystics,” he agreed. We rode up the rest of the way to my floor, silently, both pondering the joy of being a source for mystics. Mistakes. We ought to value them. They are a source for mystics.
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