mystics among us

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Mystics Among Us:

The Open in Our MidstBy

Michael H. Shenkman

Preface

It is not good

To be soullessWith mortal thoughts. But good

Is conversation, and to speak

The hearts conviction, to listen to talesOf days of love

And deeds once done.

Hlderlin, Remembrance1

Welcome.

In the pages that follow I offer a framework for mentoring mystics. This book is

addressed to mentors, and that means it is addressed to anyone who wants to actively engage

in open, mutually inspiring conversations that touch on pure aspirations of people of good

will, vision, commitment and courage. Mentors foster our ability to listen to mystics

aspirations, to understand their lives, lived in such longing. They provide a way of listening

to these breakout creative people. The mentors way is to remain silent, ask questions and

give way in conversations. Thus mentors exemplify how to be more open, and how to forego

our ingrained certainty of our own trained perceptions and common-sensically rigid

validations; mentoring conversations exemplify how to bring the mystics necessary way of

envisioning our world into our everyday decisions, actions and thoughts.

Mystics, in turn, are people who open their lives to great ideas, who are willingly

affected by the great forces of their times, who develop great insights into the state of the

human endeavor and offer their faith-for what can come of such energies when brought to

1In Henrich, Dieter, The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hlderlin (Stanford, CA;

1997); p. 253.


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life. These great powers constitute such a potent focusing dynamic that mystics can envision

no other way to live other than stepping into the vortex, no matter how arduous the process,

and bring about something -- some glimmer, spark or granule -- of that greatness. The

mystic endeavor may be abstract in its articulation, strange in its peculiar kind of optimism,

and deeply unsettling for the challenges it poses to our complacency. But restoring vitality,

invigorating and refreshing the human endeavor begins with this unbounded energy given

over to what can only be realized in this figures faith for what being human offers on our

good earth.

Mystics are our first and primary teachers. What mystics offer never comes by way

of common sense or easy belief. What they offer and bring to us did not come easy to them,

but came by way of a long struggle with feelings of estrangement, loss and then deep study in

a field that seems to beckon their prodigious energies. And, I would advise: be suspicious,

skeptical, even be dismissive, of those who claim an easy, sudden and completely

explanatory revelation. Those who make such claims are not mystics they are something

else. From the work of mystics -- hard research, examination and study mixed with deep

personal investment come realizations that are compelling or unsettling, realizations that

touch us so ferociously. Being no mere intellectual propositions, the mystics realizations

instigate or ignite what we decide to take up and educate ourselves into. In short, mystics

embody the urge to venture onward. And whenever teaching is going on that venturing,

onwarding urge is being tapped; mystics have made it so alluring that it dilutes the impact of

any other kind of motivating. Once touched by the mystic precept, as we shall call it, any

drive that does not have far, distant, or unseen horizons as its destination seems unworthy.

Mentoring and Mystics

This book addressed the vocation of mentoring, and specifically, mentoring mystics.

Lets think about the mentoring vocation in the context of the human endeavor for a moment.

Mentoring describes a most ancient kind of conversation, one that is specific in terms

of its participants, and is specific in terms of the outcomes it endeavors to support.

Mentoring takes its name from one of the human forms assumed by the goddess Athena in

order to steel her conversant to undertake great challenges with a sense of resolute aspiration.

In Homers Odyssey Mentor is the name Athena assumes when she befriends Telemachus

and encourages him to undertake a (futile) journey, an odyssey of his own, in order to find


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his still missing father, Odysseus. The journey seems most necessary because Odysseus

kingdom is under assault from pretenders and suitors to Penelope, the kings wife and

Telmachuss mother. In other words, the goddess assumes the guise of Mentor in order to

urge the young man to begin, to set out in order to act on his aspirations for restoring

wholeness to his situation; it counsels commencing a life practice characterized by

undertaking the hard road, without regard to being able to predict its success.

This complex of conducting a conversation that envisions the mentees aspirations, of

that person setting out in order to bring about a wholeness of life, situation and self, without

the promise of success, but only the fullness of the act itself as an unfolding of that aspiration

lies at the core of what we mean by mentoring.

These conversations have been inspiring people to step out of the ordinary and into

the great throughout the human endeavor whether voiced by the commandment of a god (to

free a people from bondage in Egypt), or by teacher (Aristotle inspiring the young Alexander

eventually, Alexander the Great. But, I would venture, such a conversation only becomes

necessary when the mystic appears on the scene. I would argue that such precursor

conversations as Homers myth has given us tap into an urge that marks out the human

endeavor, to be sure the urge for adventure and striking out into strange terrains that have

to be formed and constructed in order to become worlds. However, in epochs (in the

Western, European world) prior to the current one, set in motion by the mystics in the 13th

Century AD, the impetus of the human endeavor has been to consolidate and stabilize viable

forms out of wilderness conditions. Mentoring conversations were necessary only

episodically and fit the idiosyncratic needs only of certain individuals (who were of mythic

proportion).

What has changed such that the arising of the mystic now necessitates the mentoring

conversation? The figure of the mystic arises when the human endeavor has reached the

stage of acknowledging that humans have taken charge of their own fate, destiny and

prospect as a species on this earth. The mystic embodies and expresses the realization that

whatever God or the gods may be, they do not make what the human endeavor was, is or will

they determine what the human endeavor will become. This is all in the hands of we humans

ourselves. The mystic is thus a figure who feels deeply, poignantly and passionately about

the human endeavor. However it is expressed, as God or other potency, the mystic bears the

force of beginning, of initiation, of pure inception; she is one who has and does continually


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open our sensing onto wide open fields, fields of pure energy, domains and possibilities that

have yet to be formed, assimilated, accommodated or incorporated into viable social,

economic or historic activities. That may sound high-falutin, abstract, or even religious

but it is not. This sense of living in an age of pure portent infuses fuels the dynamics that

shape our world, as forces for change confront the virulent and vengeful powers of fear and

reaction. Such is the epoch of the mystic at the dawn of the 21st

Century.

We live in the epoch of the mystic precisely because and to the extent that we accept

that our vocations, and indeed our occupations, are guided by our complete acceptance of

such a venturing mission. For instance, Denning and Dunhan state In September 2009,

Amazon.com reported 9,300 printed books with innovation in their titles.2

We make

products to change how we live; we drive concepts that change our relationships; we sustain

an economy that thrives on disruption; we strive toward governments that make room for

disruption, protest and change of lifeways. We abhor ideologies that would lock us in place

or worse, send us back to conjured up fantasies of idealized pasts. Thus, we live in a world

where we are all Telemachuses, we are all getting the message to strike out on the journey

that instigates wholeness, and forget whether or not it will be successful (the junk literature

of positive thinking and business prowess aside).

Whenever, wherever and however we take up this call to bring forth something that

changes our lifeways, whenever we embrace the notion that we can institute more expansive

and more encompassing ways of living, we are participating in that mystic vision. And, I

offer, whenever we hear a voice that urges us onward, that nurtures our aspiration, we are

hearing the mentors voice. Whether or not it is personified, whether or not it is recognized as

such, whether or not it is a matter of dedicated effort on the part of both participants, we are

now in an age when the mentoring conversation is in our ears night and day.

MENTORING AND ASPIRATION. Thus, in the mystic epoch, mentoring is ubiquitous.

There are mentoring programs in corporations, community mentoring programs for youth in

danger, conferences about mentoring, academic fields opening up on the subject; and there

are organizations such as New Directions Mentoring, Inc., an organization to which I

contribute, that supports people who take up the work of breakout creative figures. That

mentoring conversation are offered so regularly, with this level of institutional and social

2The Innovators Way: Essential Practices for Successful Innovation (Cambridge, MA; 2010); p. 3. I

added the quotation marks around the word innovation, in order to emphasize the word.


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permeation and constancy represents a new phenomenon. There is a danger in such wide

adoption and popularization of this noble endeavor of course. I see it everywhere:

mentoring is a term applied to any conversation where one person attempts to motivate

another person to succeed, whatever that means. Such is not the intent of the mystics

precept.

If mentoring is not to succumb to the positive thinking culture that proffers

bromides for success, it has to remain a conversation that transcends and dispenses with

ambition and instead taps into aspiration, that takes full responsibility for having pure

aspiration at stake, and is conducted so as to assure that only aspiration frames and

determines the conversation.

This is not easy to do. Aspiration is a quality that is strange to the core. At its best, it

summarizes an excess of hopefulness and faith that propels a person to take on what exceeds

anything their lives seem to be prepared for. And aspiration is blind to success; it only cares

for itself: that it survives the inevitable failures and derision that follows when a person steps

out of the norm.

Mentoring thus has to offer a conversation that envisions something being at stake

that was never at stake before; it has to take place in a way that envision a different kind of

relating than was ever offered before; and it has to allow for the kinds of outcomes that had

never before been considered being worth a damn.

WITHIN PARAMETERS. If the mentoring conversation is to remain true to its vocation

of nurturing aspiration, it will abide within certain parameters. For one, the mentoring

relationship can offer neither the companionship of a friend, the constancy of a blood

relation, nor the lovers ardor for the others life. Then, It is a conversation that does not

offer certainty or veracity of the mentees way. The conversation is as likely to undermine a

simple certainty and confidence of a way of life, as it is to affirm it. Indeed, only a god could

sustain certainty in a mentoring context but then, how often does the mortal exceed what

the god is willing to bestow? Then, the mentoring relationship cannot envision offering a

path to success; it cannot even envision what success might look like. The mentor, always

ensconced in his own way, cannot presume to assume this is the way that works for the

mentee; the mentee is in the relation because no path is in view, no less a successful

culmination of the journey. And, finally, the mentor cannot enter the conversation expecting

to be an authority, expecting to emerge untouched by the proceedings. The conversation is


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mutually transformative, with the trajectory of transformation oscillating from moment to

moment, from person to person, from intention to intention. No one leaves the conversation

untouched.

MENTOR THE MYSTIC? So, what about the conversation in which one mentors a

mystic? Isnt it impossible to mentor a mystic? What can a layperson, a person who is not

a mystic presume to offer one whose very being necessitates there being such a conversation?

Isnt it axiomatic that the layperson mentor is not a mystic, and so cannot even touch upon a

comprehension of the mystics aspiration? Isnt such a conversation tantamount to a two-

way boot strapping operation? The mentor is bootstrapping himself so as to get to the level

of mystic engagement, while also helping the mystic become herself; and, as this is going on,

the mystic is uplifting and teaching the mentor so that the mentor can be a mentor to her.

Isnt this a preposterous situation?

Yes, it is; and yet. This is exactly what the mentoring conversation entails,

whenever it engages a mystic, or other breakout creatives figure (artist, prophet, leader).

When we enumerate all the ways the mentoring conversation installs uncertainty and upsets

authority, we are describing exactly this impossible situation. And, we have to consider

something else: on the other hand, this situation only arises because mentoring (not

instruction or coaching) is now necessary. The point is not to be cute here, but rather to touch

lightly on something wondrous: mentors offer a conversation that is truly a turning (versa)

with (con). It is a con-vers-ation that starts out with the presupposition of inequality,

incommensurability and asymmetry3

and so, with the equilibrium (of identity, of established

authority) disturbed, the motion of change and the trajectory of comprehension keeps

alternating. We may never be in closer proximity to a pure dynamism that we can lend to

each other than in the mentoring conversation.

And so to conclude our enumeration of parameters for the mentoring conversation,

we offer these thoughts: the mentor needs to concentrate his energy such that this dynamic

and transforming conversation can take place. And, respectively, the mentee, who comes to

the mentor in a state of self-doubt, confusion and/or disorientation, needs to offer a

willingness to give way to some exploration of her life, again so that the dynamic can be

3Asymmetry is the term I use to discuss this aspect of the mentoring relationship in the Preface to

Shenkman,Artists and Mentors: The New Conversation (Unpublished; available on request; 2010).


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launched on its way. This convergence of concentration and giving way, we call the

mentoring moment.

THE MENTORINGMOMENT. This book is devoted to that specific momentwhen the

conversation has to begin, or the breakout creative impetus (in this case the drive of the

mystic toward the precept) will be lost. It is a moment in which two strangers meet, from out

of nowhere, and between whom it is expected that some kind of happening will transpire

such that generative energies will be observed, noted, nurtured and sent on their way. All of

these pages, all of the terms that are coined or named or reformulated have in mind that

singular moment when a mentor sits across the table from a mentee of mystic proclivity, and

has to ask a first question that begins the conversation. And, it envisions all the moments

throughout the course of the encounter when such beginnings have to be found once more

and a turn has to be energized.

There will be moments of silence in the process. Will these moments be awkward, or

will they constitute openings, spacings in which the participants can turn toward an occasion

an opening, and even an abysmal one such that the bond is enlivened? Will the moments

initiate movement, or will they fall back into the inertia of dispirited stasis? A mentor who

approaches a breakout creatives figure in general, or a mystic in particular, without some

ballast, some sense of the structures of the endeavor that advance and impede the mystics

work will find the conversation at an end. This is no academic notion I have experienced

such moments of collapse, and so have the mentors who do this work with me.

The premise of this work is that even in the extremity of mystic openness and

diffusion of the weight of the doing-world, there are parameters in the psychic/somatic

functioning of this person that are called into play. If a person is devoid of such structures,

that person can be considered to be in a vegetative state, from a behavioral standpoint at

least. The mystic is neither a formless phantom nor an empty vessel. We speak of there

being such people as mystics because certain people behave in ways that accord with

consistent accounts that are available to us. And, the mystic is no apparition. This is a figure

that arose in the West at a certain time (albeit in the wake of some scattered but known

precursors), in response to certain circumstances, and thus developed ways of living and a

manner of work that are specific to those circumstances. By being familiar with these

specificities, a mentor can offer touchstones in a conversation that will be worthy of response

and continuing the conversation.


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My Thinking About the Mystic

Underlying this work is a sense that our world takes shape by vast, free flowing and

cosmic-scale energies registering the slightest nuances of difference with respect to what

exists, and with respect to each other. As these slight nuances of difference combine,accidentally and arbitrarily, sometimes only momentarily, sometimes for longer durations,

some formations become viable and new occurrences emerge (suddenly, gradually or

imperceptibly) onto or into the scene. As one emergence follows on another, the force of

formation, the past that gives way and life thrusts us out and onward, challenging our

capabilities in taking our next steps. We follow not so much a path as we track a murmur in

the wilderness and so leave pathways as we move out toward the destination we envision lies

ahead. So it has been in our cosmos. Our actions are not determined, to be sure, but they do

take on the weight of significance and probability because each and every step emerges in

this way. Thus, an ethical cosmology pulses beneath this narrative, driving each step, one

after another, in an effort of making viable whatever is offered.4

THE BREAKOUT CREATIVES SCHEMA. Also implicit in this text is an idea about how

this process affects the world we live in. Since we inhabit a cosmos that clearly changes, we

presume that the world we live in (the terrestrial, social and economic conditions we have

fashioned for human habitation) also changes. That is far from a controversial notion. But

things start to get touchy when we ask, how does that process occurs, what does that process

look (and feel) like, and toward what end (if any) is such change gravitating?

Enter the breakout creative figures. In my breakout creatives schema in the human

arena, change happens when certain kinds of capabilities ripen, new modes of behaving and

organizing the ways of the human endeavor arise. Certain people care more about change and

therefore have done more to incorporate the desire for change into their own personal values

and lifeways than others have. These people are not only frustrated by the status quo, do not

only sit back and complain about the failings of others: they act. And the people who we

speak of and support do not just strike out against a (real or imagined) foe, but instead,

ardently engage in the process of comprehending, refining and then articulating and

transmitting those ways so that others can adopt them and, eventually, incorporate them in

the large milieu of human action. Thus we envision a process wherein certain kinds of

4See, Shenkman, Ethical Cosmology: How Self-Organization Promise a NewHuman Endeavor

(Unpublished, available on request; 2009)


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sensitivities shape certain personalities to undertake certain kinds of actions that intend to

make the human endeavor more expansive and more encompassing for themselves, for other

people, other creatures and the earth.

We speak about figures, therefore we are envisioning actual people who take up a

certain lifeway, a certain pathway that while singular in all ways also respects the milieu in

which their actions take place. By combining their aspirations with this regard for the world,

this love for the life that this earth makes possible, they depersonalize their actions and adopt

a way that has been prefigured in the past and requires a new figuration in order to fulfill

their vision in the present. In this way, human capabilities are our concern, not an

individuals eccentricity, transgressive exceptionality nor genius. We are defining

breakout creative figures as being people whose psychic/somatic constitution attunes them

to a lifeway that revitalizes, refreshes and renews the human endeavor. They attain the status

of figure, precisely because their own egoistic or individual specialness (talent, ambition,

record of accomplishment) is not at issue; rather they exert great effort in order to initiate a

new human capability, a capability that is more expansive in its grasp of what the human

endeavor entails, and that is more encompassing in what it comprehends as contributing to

the human endeavor, what it requires for its thriving and what it requires for its continued

prospect.

Since we are looking at capabilities, and not mere happenings and occurrences in the

course of human activity, we can identify a select few defining capabilities, which first

distinguish the human endeavor from the ways of other creatures, and then engender

differences among humans, from one epoch and/or one geographical region to another. Each

figure has a role in establishing a capability and thus constituting a new impetus in the

historic/evolutionary exploits of the human endeavor, and the actions, orientations and means

of comprehension each figure sets in motion enables an epoch to have its own quality.

Here is my schema:

Table P.1: The Breakout Creatives Schema: Overview

Human Capability Figure EpochHumans depart from accustomed habitats Leader Pre-History; 50,000 years ago

Humans discern the ability to adapt to strange habitats and

create worlds (that replace habitats).

Artist 15,00 years ago.

Epoch of Spirit

Split: As the ability to adapt and create is focused on language,

the word, the book, then logic. Occurs in Mesopotamia, Greece,

then European West.

Prophet 5,000 years ago.

Epoch of Self.


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Human efficacy is identified with cosmic, universe-forming

potencies. Freedom, Infinity, Being and Nothing, and Self-

Organization rise into view.

Mystic 800 years ago.

Current Epoch: Actuality?

We know of a few such figures by name; these are people who are noted the history

books; they are the ones who have been enshrined as founders and advancers of disciplines

that we now take for granted. In religion, Moses, Jesus, and the Buddha come to mind; on

the world historical stage, David, Cyrus, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Gandhi come to

mind; in American history, Washington, Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, the three Roosevelts, and

Martin Luther King, Jr. come to mind. Surely the ones who have been so noted are Breakout

Creatives; but, and this is a crucial point for all that follows: these figures only represent the

most extreme and most minute tip of a much larger and more inclusive iceberg. These

people, as Newton rightly states, ride on the shoulders of giants. Those shoulders often arethose of other Breakout Creatives, but they are also the shoulders of other types that do

different kinds of work within the great heart, spirit, soul, mind and power that drive the

human endeavor.

Along with this notion of people taking on roles that accord with certain figures, we

also envision that by taking these roles into account we can forge a different picture of how

the human endeavor becomes more expansive and more encompassing.

THEWAY OF CHANGE. The change envisioned in the Breakout Creative process is

epochal in the time of its unfolding and qualitative in its delimiting a way of the human

endeavor, or in defining a human nature.5

A figure is not an eccentric, but instead

embodies the epochs comprehending of the human milieu with a nuance of difference from

others in his or her culture. You could say that while each of these figures lives among

others, he or she also embodies a slight (socially accommodated) mutation of

psychic/somatic constitution that erupts onto the human scene, is appreciated, mimicked and

then broadly incorporated into the comprehension of the human endeavor. That is, the

mutation is so compelling in its expression and in what it yields, that, as it is adopted and

further elaborated, this figures isolated mutation spreads. It thereby inaugurates, and

5 To those schooled in philosophy, the Hegelian stamp, imparted from out of the misty pages of the

Phenomenology of Spirit: The Science of the Experience of Consciousness is unmistakable; and it is intentional.I admit to the fact that my sense of the human endeavor has been molded by Hegel since the very moment when

such a sense began to emerge in my days in college. It has been modified by findings in self-organization, and

evolutionary cognitive science and evolutionary neuroanatomy (of the Damasio and Edelman variety); it also

compresses the notion of world historical figures which are largely political in their description in Hegels

Philosophy of History, with the figures that establish shapes of consciousness in thePhenomenology.


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delineates the dominant notion of what constitutes being human for an epoch. Each

introduces into the ongoing milieu a new psychic/somatic (and then cultural and people

defining) factor of realization and capability that had not formed sufficiently to command

attention, notice or amass to some level of viability. Once a figure is established, the

workings of the human way are changed forever.

THE EPOCHS EPICYCLES:ERAS AND CHANGING ROLES. On the world-historical

level, the Breakout Creatives process envisions a migration of development from (1) initial

mystic opening, to (2) artistic and then (3) prophetic development of new means of engaging

worlds, to, finally (4), the leaders actual building of lasting artifacts out of the ideas, images

and principles the three predecessor figures have wrought. And, once a capability and its

figuration has been established, it does not go away in a new era. No figures mode of

discerning, working and expression has disappeared at the hand of a newly emergent

figures; the predecessor forms are modified to suit new parameters of the (insurgent) shape

of the (new) lifeway now in ascendancy in the epoch. Because each new way has to work

through and modify older forms, within an epoch we can identify periods in which the

working through of an older form, accommodating it to the new one, dominates. A period of

concentrated working through the epochs task constitutes an era within that epoch.

This transmission process takes eons, with upsurges of constellating accomplishments

along the way. Only at the final moment, at the point when leaders have the full array of

teachings, logic and language available, do we know that an epochal change has become

firmly established.6

And by then, a new epochal figure may have already been at work,

boring down and through the hardened loam of the real.

For example of this process of transmission through eras in which one mode of

figuration dominates over others, we can look at what has transpired in the West in the

current epoch, the epoch inaugurated by the mystic. The mystic figure appeared and

established its efficacy in the 13th Century, AD. Years of disruptive warfare and social chaos

6 The process just cited is itself the historical, currently ongoing result of the labors that occurred

during two preceding epochs. Once the leader broke away from immersion in nature, the artist figure arose to

create a new vision of the human situation, expressed in symbols. In the West (only) a further development

arose in the form evoked by the prophet, in which the word became a locus of obligation, knowledge and

technical competence. The mystic appeared (in the West) only recently, in the thirteenth century, and we arestill working their precepts through their paces (the artist interpretations arose in the Renaissance, in art and

science, in particular; the prophetic was taken up in the Enlightenment -- and a derivative of that, the

Reformation which culminated only in the twentieth century). This process is treated again in Chapter Two. It

is also discussed in the context of larger cosmically generative potencies in my work,Ethical Cosmology(unpublished as of this writing), available upon request.


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ensued. The first moment of ordering after that upsurge occurred during a period we call

The Renaissance. This is an era in which the artist figure (as artist, mathematician, as

scientist) coalesced into a way that accorded with the mystic imperative inaugurated a mere

three hundred years earlier. Then came The Enlightenment, which was a period in which

the Prophetic mode blossomed. In this period the dominant canon of a Western way of living,

in the form of Reason, was promulgated, advanced and disseminated. The disastrous 20th

Century was a time when a leader impetus arose, ineptly and prematurely, misappropriating

some of the notions, methods and capabilities in the works since those times. In other words,

we are not at a time in our epoch where the process has fulfilled itself sufficiently for leaders

to take it over. I think we are in a loop where the artist figure is now challenging the

prophetic notions of the Enlightenment and a new prophetic era is just barely beginning to

emerge.

Table P.2: Eras within the Mystic Epoch

Period Name Work Through Time

Frame

Some Key

(BoC) FiguresMystic Rising Mystic form emerges. Attains classical

expression and is brutally suppressed

13th 16th

Centuries

Subject of this

volume. Porete,

Eckhart, Teresa, de

la Cruz, et. al.

Renaissance Mystic form attains artist level of

specificity in discernment. Perspective

and individuality in art; abstraction and

theorem in science; algebraic expressionin mathematics.

16th Century Michelangelo,

Reuben, Dante,

Galileo, Kepler,

Copernicus

Enlightenment Mystic form attains prophetic expression.

Knowledge as individual; God as universal

potency; Individual right and law asmoral imperative.

17th Century Descartes, Spinoza,

Leibniz, Locke,

Hume, Berkeley

Reformation Adaptation of prophetic grasp of the

mystic into a leaderly form.

17th Century Luther, Calvin

30 Years War

Napoleonic Era

Perversion of the leaderly/prophetic into

power/property conflicts.

17th Century

19th Century

Papacy, Hapsburgs,

Napoleon

Idealist/Romantic Era Recasting of artistic, prophetic into a larger

frame of human efficacy and facultative

capability. New sciences are initiated.

End of 18th

Century

early 20

th

Century

Kant, Novalis,

Schlegel, Schelling,

Hlderlin, Hegel,Marx, Nietzsche,

Rilke, Poe, Melville,Mallarme, Freud,

Weber, James

Modern Era Perversion and misappropriation of these

notions into premature leader imperatives.

First Half of

the 20thCentury

The Kaiser, Wilson,

Roosevelt,Churchill, Stalin,

Hitler; Truman

Post-Modern Recasting artist and prophetic

interpretations into new facultative

Second Half of

20th Century

Husserl, Levinas,

Heidegger,


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regimes and envisioning new capabilities.

A restoration of the mystic endeavor, now

in anamystic form.

now. Blanchot, Celan,

Char, Nancy,

Deleuze, Rorty,

Stevens, et. al.

BREAKOUT CREATIVE FIGURES ATWORK. History7

shows us that along the way,

through the epochs, as one era arises and forces another to give way, violent disruptions and

outbursts occur. But in our account, in contrast to the normal accounts of historical

cataclysms, these conflicts are not the point. Instead, the breakout creative figures and the

processes they embody guide our attention to the slow, deep, thoroughgoing transformation

the human endeavor perpetrates on itself. The breakout creatives aim to change what it

means to be human, what living the human way entails, and what human faculties themselves

are capable of encompassing. Breakout Creative figures do not envision violent overthrows

of authority, they instigate epochal breakouts, and symmetry breaks that usher in more

expansive and more encompassing ways. Theirs is not a zero-sum game. The breakout

creative figures, those famous ones we know of and those about whom we know nothing at

all, put forward a new constitution of our ways of perceiving and experiencing. The point is

not to see different things, but to see with different eyes, as Proust and others have said.

Before we have grasped something as true, or valid, or suitable for our engagement, our

perceptions and sensings of the situation have been ordered and structured.

The breakout creative figures do not do their work at a distance, by any means.

Breakout creatives instigate new epochs byshaping their lives to greater or lesser degrees,

to the demands of the more expansive and more encompassing exigency they take up (from

out of their anomalous discerning) as their responsibility. And the breakout creatives

impetus is not an all-or-nothing proposition: the breakout creative impetus will shape a

persons life to whatever extent they choose, or to whatever degree they allow themselves to

enter that transforming way of exerting human efficacy. The figures that come down to us as

7 History is notion that highlights the way a new capability launches within the human fold, works its

way through the eras and epochs and establishes itself as a constitutively formative psychic/somatic structure.

History begins as a notion that erupts with the prophetic drive, taking the form of the Biblical account that

sets itself in opposition to the mythic/epic narrative. The notion of history, in other words, did not exist and doesnot exist, among cultures still oriented toward myth (a form of the artists work and the defining quality of the

epoch of Spirit). We see this conflict played out as Homer and Herodotus use oral traditions and accounts in

two, very different ways. So, during this fertile era, the prophetic mode splits off from the poetic and artistic

(which takes the forms of at least tragedy, epic poetry, sculpture, and athletics), but also splits within itselfbetween history, properly so called, and the philosophical/conceptual form.


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being of world historical import have given over their whole lives to the work. Many others

did so as well, to as great an extent or to a lesser extent that the ones we know of and were

just never were recognized or even acknowledged. Maybe their strange behavior was

persecuted and punished, but their social peers took note, the transmission was made, and

something new kept pressing, remained on its way.

Mentoring a Breakout Creative Figures Aspiration

When we are mentoring a person with breakout creative proclivities, it is not a

persons talents or even interests that are at stake --neither for that person nor for the mentor.

The mentors gaze passes right over, through, under, or around these concerns. This may

come as a surprise. But, on reflection we can see that other service providers, such as

coaches and instructors, those who have some real technical expertise to offer, are the bestresources to treat talents and interests. Mentoring comes to the fore because a person is

feeling a debilitating or at least immanently threatening level ofloss with respect to an urge

to live a certain way, to dedicate her time and lifes energies to something that calls, beckons

and even demands attention.8

That urge, this person knows, takes them away from the

comforts, or even the disturbing deficiencies of the doing-world and propels them into modes

that contest that world. The very countenance of this urge is enervating, consumes

inordinately prodigious amounts of the mentees energy. The mentee has not yet begun to

think of talents or interests, or, for that matter, of the comforts now put into question. At this

inceptual instant, the mentor is being asked to attend to this call, this urge itself, decrease the

8 This feeling is not a defect or even a deficiency of the mentees personality. Levinas masterfully

evokes how the human situation is one of fatigue, of starting out each moment already behind the curve ofwhat he calls theIl y a, the there is of being. TheIl y a always surges onward, while human conscious

existence and its world already constitutes a moment of reserve, hesitation, lag, with respect to that condition.

(See,Existence and Existents (Pittsburg, PA; 20010). Chapter III.)

In a separate piece, I call this state one of past-making by conscious, singularizing beings. In this

depiction, self-organized structures constellate within a trailing trace matrix opened by the pure onwarding

potency of our universe (as unaccountable or explicable as is LevinassIl y a). Self-organized beings, includingthe human, or more to the case, especially the human, are thus pasts (of pure onwarding) turned back onto

themselves, constellating beings out of cycling pasts. (See, Shenkman,Ethical Cosmology: How Self-

Organization Offers a Paradigm for Revitalizing the Human Endeavor(unpublished; available on request;

2009)

The motion of breakout creatives is to swim against the stream that past-making. Indeed all life

comprises a moment of such resistance or refusal of pasts (the moment of constellating of self-organized entitiesthemselves), and this is a mode that can be sustained only momentarily before it swings back into the past-

making, constellating moments of existence. The initiating phase of the breakout moment is thus one that must

wrest itself from its state of fatigue, from its state of comportment with its accommodation to the given. That

is, each moment of initiating the breakout impetus is one that counters fatigue, in order to step into loss, so as toventure toward what beckons.


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noise, provide an occasion so that some modicum of coherence can arise so this person can

take the inceptual step.

The work that lies behind each mentoring engagement, therefore, lays out a line of

thought, traces a pattern of living and comprehending life, the mindset that generates a

certain kind, quality and range of action for each of the figures. We create a framework for

the conversation, so that certain things are assuredly covered, other things can be elided, and

still other topics can be considered as being outside of the mentoring fold. The mentor then

takes this framework into the conversation and uses it to guide what occurs there. The mentor

uses the framework in order to sort and choose one figure to use as an exemplar, or as a field

that enables him to shift among the figures to find that sweet spot that gives the mentee some

measure of relief, then inspiration, and then the firmness to proceed.

GUIDING STATEMENT. Using this framework, a mentor can formulate and take into

the conversation aguiding statement. The statement will gravitate around the work the

figure must do so as to transform a vague drive into something that is actually put forward

into the world. It provides a center that takes all the ambiguities that are felt as disturbing

and translates them into actions that measure up to the disturbance and so give this person the

feeling of being alive.

There is a structure, a grammar and syntax to these statements. First there is the

materialeach of the figures works with; then the self-reflectivestance the figure needs to

cultivate; and finally, there is the attitude or ethic the figure must embody to undertake this

work with the integrity that offers it to others. The mentors work is to enable these figures to

do this work, to marshal the right kinds of energies and devote the appropriate kinds of

attentiveness such that this work can get underway, the materialcan be identified and

substantiated, thestance can be constellated configured in a way that is viable, strong and,

indeed, enlivening for the figure, and the persons commitment to the ethic of this figure is

deepened and made inviolate, no matter the resistance.

Here are a couple examples of such statements for figures that we are used to

recognizing. First, for the leader, the most common (though still uncommon) of the figures

we encounter, we can say this: the leaders work is creating followers, the material is the

vision he seeks to bring forth, his stance is self-trust, and his attitude or ethic is that of

attentive responsibility. For the artist, the work is, the artwork, his material are fleeting

and ephemeral upsurges of energy (we call imagations) that transpire in a psychic/somatic


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milieu we call the arteous; his stance is enduration, to stay in the encounter; and his ethic is

that of giving way to bringing forth the occurrence.

In the case of the mystic, the mentors guiding statement is this: mystic the mystics

work is to find, elucidate and articulate theprecept, by exploring the material of herfield of

enthusiasm, in a stance of purefaith-for(the potency of this field), which then is taken up in

an ethic and lifeway ofteaching.

Mentoring the Mystic

PRECEPTS. Precepts result from mystics work, and we live in a world ordered by

precepts (from E=MC2

to We the People, to All You Need is Love). The power of

precepts distinguishes the mystic epoch from all others. In the earliest epochs, it was the

command of the leader, the classical tyrant that mattered and nothing else shaped thecourse of events in that world. In the prophetic epoch, the idea of justice claimed the

imprimatur of the gods such that even the ruler had to pay obeisance to this word. With the

inception of the mystic figure the powers of human determination, application and

consequence, shape our state of being, no exceptions. To comprehend these powers, as a

people once learned the edits of its rulers, or studied the nuances of Gods law, calls for new

capabilities, demands that people become capable of encompassing the emergence of the

human endeavor itself.

Precepts bear an expansively sweeping, primal and all-encompassing demand, yet

they do not offer advice; instead their words point out a trajectory of human self-

comprehension. The notion calls to mind the notion of revelation, but does so only

superficially. Both notions are received, or heard, by individuals who feel singled out

by a call. Both notions carry the energies of powers that exceed the mundane strictures and

mandates of the world. But the similarities stop there. For one thing, the two notions are

heard by different figures and so, whatever energies are in play are interpreted and set in

motion in very different ways. A revelation is a statement of what is, an orienting

declaration that selects and designates a way that intends to define a people. It prescribes

(writes in advance of any conscious awareness of its import or consequence). Revelation is


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thus a notion of the prophetic mode of engagement, and is not a notion appropriate to a

mystics way.9

A precept, on the other hand envisions neither a people nor a way. It is experienced

as though it is a matter of indifference as to whether or not one hears it. If the revelation

serves to orient a person on a path or within a people, the precept dis-orients the hearer

(and the adherents of the mystic), by discounting any limited or defining locale or point of

entry.10

Whereas revelation locates a point of clarity-making and absoluteness of being

(the God that is there), the precept demands a new effort be exerted and declares that only by

means of such an effort will humans have a chance at engaging occurrences in their (greater)

fullness; only by expanding and deepening their range of capabilities beyond what

conventional learning offers will what occurs be encountered in the fullness of its arising,

striking and passing away. With the mystic precept, the work of the human endeavor not

only finds what is true and good (as is shown in a revelation), but that work also has to

encompass questions as to how such notions are founded, perpetuated, made into viable ways

for human conduct at all. Precepts thus set into motion the range of responses in our living

that willbe available once this working through has reached some state of adequation

between occurrence and human capability. The precept then demands that a way be found to

simultaneously, instantaneously engage this wider range of experiencing, and then bring it

forth into the field of communication, decision and action such that all humans, creatures and

the earth are regarded in their generative vitality.

9 I take this notion of revelation from the correspondence between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888

1973) and Franz Rosenzweig (---) where the latter is struck by Rosenstocks explanation of revelation as

orientation. From this explanation, Rosenzweig arrived at his Archimedes point, of understanding himself,

his philosophy and his religion. Rosenstock was a Jew who converted to Christianity and Rosenzweig, aftercarefully considering that option, elected to deepen his Judaic faith and practice. I mention this to emphasize

the prophetic interpreting that is active here. From this conversation Rosenzweig takes away this conclusion:

in the revealedspace-time world the middle is an immovably fixed point, which I do not displace if I change

or move myself [emphasis added] For Rosenzweig, this middle point (the revelation) is 1800, the time of

Hegel, the last philosopher and Goethe, the first Christian. See, Franks and Morgan, Trs and Eds, Chapter IV,

Urzelle to the Star of Redemption,Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings (Indianapolis,IN; 2000)

10 Later in the text cited, Rosenzweig links revelation with mysticism (The eternal occurrence of God

can be understood from the basis of the fulfilled philosophy (Schelling), and on the basis of revelation

(mysticism). (ibid; p. 50) I think this link is commonplace, but inappropriate. The prophetic does itself a

disservice by not setting its work within the mystic precept, and therefore enabling revelation to be a principle

of activation that sets the orienting process, the specifying and comprehending process on a properly inclusivefooting. The link obscures the necessary distinction between what Rosenzweigs disciple, Levinas, describes as

the difference between Infinity and Totality. Infinity, that surging excess that opens for spacing, but delineates

no such parameters, is proclaimed in its moving potency by the mystic precept. Totality, a cognized set of

occurrences that is projected as presence and whole a derivative and constructed verity is validated by therevelation, the sanctifying of the people and the law.


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EXPERIMENTALPRECEPTS. Mystics are oriented to what can best be characterized

as experimental precepts. No single mystic can be said to embody all the precepts, or

even totally embody the most characteristic precept in operation within an epoch or culture.

Neither does any single mystic map out the complete elaboration of viable formulations that

can promise a successful accomplishing of the still-forming epoch (meaning that the human

species continues with some vestige of nature still remaining?). What can be said, is that

mystics form highly individualized and idiosyncratic percepts for themselves; if others

become interested in them, if some get taken up into more stable and abiding structures, fine.

If not, that breakout creative precept fades into oblivion.11

[Note: Precepts are free-forming putting forth of the sense of what is beckoning. I want to make this

qualification to the flow of the text in order to dispel any notion that the mystic precept is a moral demand in the

mode of the classical prophets, or a guiding principle in the manner of a philosophical ground. The precept

may indeed take on these forms, but it also may take the form of a metaphor that while touching all of our sense

of life, is itself far removed from any prescriptive intention.

Precepts are sensings that occur out of conscious grasping and conceptualizing. They occur before

such sensing have been articulated and channeled through functioning facultative capabilities. As such, they

/command the body, release it out of functional form, occur as pure and unsullied, as ecstasies that may never

be comprehended or assimilated to the doing-world. They may not ever become words. But those occurrences

that do become words are preserved, held apart, kept in a free-floating aleatory state by their very designation as

precepts as a sensing destined for comprehension, and maybe language, but as something that can only be

enacted and taken up in body-play (often expressed in sexual terms, but also poetic non-sense).The mystics work is to render this precept into a word, into a transmittable way, for others to take up,

specify, make historically viable, and render into what is actual, at hand, and fully there. The mystic,

however only teaches what comes of the encounter and immersion in the pre-ceptual. It is never complete,

never finished, never certain in the mystics renderings. Mysics suffer derision in the doing-world from this

incompleteness, but they are celebrated by breakout creatives who now take up their share of the work.]

THE LIFE OF THE PRECEPT. Precepts do not come into existence frivolously. Mystics

abandon frivolity and self-possession in order to comprehend the occurrences that precipitate

the eruption of a precept; and they dedicate their lives to doing the work -- the formulating,

11 Or, as in the case of Hlderlin, maybe the greatest breakout creative figure of our era within the

mystic epoch, his works disappeared from sight, but were later unearthed and then placed back into the fray and

became powerfully generative of a new age some breakout creative figures do work that is before its time.Even more intriguing is the work of Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls. This founding mystic work

disappeared from open circulation when she was executed by the Catholic Church in 1310, and then was

brought back to light in the 1940s. The works of Meister Eckhart were also suppressed, but when they were

recovered, they wreaked havoc on orthodoxy. Indeed, his works are seminal documents in the founding of thecurrent era, at least insofar as they catapulted Schelling over any and all dogma of his day.


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expressing, structuring engagements and doing the teaching that follows on from this

sojourning. Other breakout creative figures also work hard, sometimes for their whole lives,

to get this precept right, to get it clear just what this phenomenon is that shapes their lives so

strangely. And once they decide to take up this task of comprehending the precept, breakout

creatives take great risks in order to enact their interpretations of its demands. They can be

scorned, rejected, vilified, or even killed, for putting those precepts into play, but this is not a

sufficient deterrent to these figures.

Behind every precept, there beats a deeply felt and courageously undertaken

reorientation of the mystics psychic/somatic organization; the mystic just does not believe

in what certain words or images convey; no, instead, there is no living at all for this person

but for the precept; the mystics life appears in terms of what the precept comprises and

demands, and nothing else. The fact that mystics give way to this call, the fact that they live

as embodiments of what has yet to come about, yet to be made (brought to be) real or even

found amid available articulations, takes the mystic out of the mainstream of the everyday

doing-world and thrusts her into a distinctive lifeway. Following or taking up a dwelling

within this pure aspiration, this pure state of longing that we call the mystics faith-for. The

stance of faith-for declares the necessity of this precept and also puts lie to the given

assumptions and institutions of the doing-world that have grown tired or even murderous.12

TEACHING, The mystic lives as a faith-for the precept, and, unlike the priest or even

the artist or especially the leader, she has no powerful institution or inscribed logic or

narrative to validate her stance. Once again to use revelation as a foil, whereas a revelation

can clarify a situation and can heighten certain factors to irrefutable dominance, a precept

instigates confusion. Any and all clarity or situatedness (or appropriateness) that is suitable

for articulating, declaring or proclaiming to others is arrived at only after painstaking work.

And no one else can immediately get either the intent or validity of the precept either.

While the precept harbors a demand, it offers no commandment. Instead, the work of

articulating the precept replicates the painstaking work required of the mystic to grasp its

import.

12 This not yet factor of the mystic precept disqualifies any notions available in established religious

practice. Whether it be the coming of the savior or the messiah, these are already found and hardenedbeliefs that require submission, but not constitution. Mystics are not found in established religions and are

not proponents of their beliefs. As our story shows, mystics are anathema to established religion. When the

Catholic church took up the banner of mystics (after having persecuted the greatest ones to death), it was as a

defensive gesture to combat the mystic-like positions of the religious leader Martin Luther and the propheticleader, Calvin.


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The mystics life is thus given over to teaching. This vocation takes on a special cast

in the mystic epoch. It is certainly true that any breakout creative endeavor involves some

kind of transmitting discipline. Leaders persuade and enjoin; artists captivate and attract;

prophets regale, declaim and conceptualize/philosophize. In all these cases, the figures have

something, some subject matter that they present or represent so as to be comprehended

and engaged. Not so for the mystic. The mystic has only the still to come precept that

sparkles before her in her field of enthusiasm. It exists only as the mystics faith-for.

Teaching for the mystic is thus not a matter of (just) learning the material that lies in closest

proximity to the precept (although the great mystics are precociously learned), and it is not

just a matter of putting the material she can craft out there (although the materials the

founding mystics we cite, for example, are so compelling at the level of art that they were

treasured and preserved, sometimes at great risk to their keepers). Teaching is rather the life-

consuming ethic of the mystic: it becomes what their lives must become if the living that

matters to them is to find its place in the world. Developing the media for teaching,

expressing the subject matter, gathering the assembly of potential adherents, and conveying

the visceral life-energies of the precept are the actions that define the mystics life.

Facultative Development

In addition to this guiding statement (that includes a depiction of the life this person is

likely living as she works through the relationship she bears to the figure she resembles, a

family tree of the mentees breakout creative form, and a depiction of the figures

mindset) we supply the mentor with one last framing resource. This is a resource that

provides the mentor with a story, a narrative that gives the mentees agonies intrinsic value.

It is a resource that frees the mentor from having to make judgements about the viability of

the mentees mission and frames the mentors questions in a dynamic context that allows the

mentor to enjoy the prospect the mentees way opens onto. This framing resource also

allows the mentor to conceive of the Breakout Creatives Project as a whole and envision an

answer to the question: what makes this mentees suffering worth it? This framing resource

is a notion that we callfacultative development.

Facultative development provides mentors with a hypothesis they can use in order

to form an affirming narrative in their minds as to the value and worth of the mentees

experiments whatever they might be. This is a notion that specifies the generative potencies


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of the human endeavor in a form that is historically viable and conceptually valid, while not

assuming any kind of causality or necessity to any mentees efforts. Historically, the notion

derives from the current state of how human capabilities are regarded in terms of their ability

to coalesce into situation-specific constellations that include recognition and recollection,

comprehending, decision-making and acting. It is a notion that is at least useful in

providing accounts for how psycho/somatic and neuroanatomical assemblages combine

spontaneously to produce an open and ever-expanding repertoire of human engagements with

a variety of worlds.

FACULTY. The notion of faculty cannot be grasped mechanically, as describing

a sort of thinking machine of the brain that is installed whole and functional from the start.

The notion describes a psychic/somatic development that is as organic, as evolutionary, as

culturally determined as are the results of its work (Reason or factuality, or truth or God).

Conceived as a mind/brain constellation, it presumes no predetermined constitution. It

simply denotes an assemblage of capabilities that are spurred to rise to the fore, from moment

to moment, in ways that are more or less competent or adequate to and a situation, problem,

imagining or thought that rises to hand.13

We organize our perceptions, feelings, intuitions,

and memories, etc. into powerful, clearly directed actions (thoughts, speech acts, decisions)

by the various capabilities that our faculties make possible. A faculty assembles a

complex, assign it a place in the hierarchy, comprising many psychic/somatic,

neuroanatomical processes, orientations and sources so that amazing feats of sensing,

recollecting understanding, imagining, categorizing and organizing comes to be easy,

transparent, and are rendered immediately (if not sooner) available for our use in speech,

acting and deciding. A faculty, one might say, organizes a complex into a simplex.

In the course of the human endeavor, new faculties developed. From grunts and

pointing and tool making, came inscription and language. From language came the ability to

organize into communities that assigned value and relationships to non-terrestrially oriented

survival actions. From these facultative capabilities, came the most recent facultative

accomplishment, reason. Each of these new capabilities extended our worlds. When early

13 I use the term to hand very deliberately. A faculty has the intention of activating the hand, theorgan(s) of activity toward certain modes of engaging. A chain of psycho/somatic constellating acts organizes

into a faculty when this chain becomes subconscious, seemingly instinctual and automatic. One develops

the faculty for hitting a baseball, it is not an instinctual act. However, by the time someone steps up to the plate

in a game, it is assumed that all the necessary perceptual, motor and conceptual process are locked in place andare ready to be instantaneously, instinctively unleashed at the approaching ball.


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hominids developed the faculty of self-awareness, they became beings that lived

independently from immediate environmental dictates, having a sense of past and future\; as

they developed language and writing, they became able to assign relative values to

completely different kinds of entities, for example.

When later humans developed the faculty of conceiving in universals, in great

schemes of infinite connection, they developed religion. When modern humans developed

refined language, capable of discernment of differences and constructing robust systems of

relation among diverse perceptions, science came to be. Now, because of the mystic

imperative, we, in the midst of the mystic epoch, are in the process of developing a capability

that marshals all our communicative, discerning and organizing faculties in order to

consciously shape a new sense of what being human comprises. The Breakout Creatives

are the avatars in the efforts to start a large-scale integration of given renderings into new

facultative capabilities that establish and transform into standards what once were new

precepts.

MENTORS,MYSTICS AND FACULTATIVE DEVELOPMENT. All the breakout creative

figures contribute to this process of moving from precept to standard and facultative

capability. Mystics, set this demand in motion, but never complete the action. Other figures

must rise to the fore, within the mystic epoch, to complete the movement from pure faith-for

the precept to a concrete way of life that offers (by means of leaders, properly prepared for)

products, services, institutions and organizations equal to the demand. The artist dedicates

herself to enduring within an encounter with the energies that the mystic senses and from this

create works that foster the experiencing of a nascent, once only impossible experiencing.

The prophet takes loose and freely floating impressions and holds them in a state of

suspension such that actively mental streams of relating, knowing, responsibility and

organizing energies can be applied to them forming viable a facultative schema for their

incorporation and use in the now trembling human endeavor. Only when the leader does the

work of transforming these concepts into ongoing activities comprising products, services,

institutions, laws, societies and worlds (leaders work at all these levels) is there a

possibility of a faculty actually emerging.

Facultative development is the notion that the mentor holds out, at least in his mind,

so as to offer the mentee a prospect, a way onward, for the work that the mystic does (and the

other breakout creative figures do as well). The mystic faces the peculiar challenge (each of


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the Breakout Creative figures faces challenges peculiar to their roles) that their precepts are

never seen in their full mode while the process of working them through is going on.

Sometimes, the full-blown precepts do not emerged at all and so the mystics utterances

seem be mere quandaries, haiku or non-sensical (or poetic) fragments; or they are only

partially understood, but are taken up by other figures, prophets for instance, and are

rendered into being philosophies, or (worse) professional stances that are narrow, usually

apologetic of an already established religion or idea. These become dangerous and violent

dogmas that can only be imposed on a pliable and all-too-easily manipulated population (for

a while). The mystic thus has to adopt the stance of faith-for, remain obscure, at some level,

so that that the precept will take shape appropriately from the teaching she to which she

devotes her life.14

In the mind of the mentor, the mystic mentee places before us the precepts that

demand our own facultative development (and stir our own vehement resentments). They

present us with the choice: to take up the precepts or not; if not for them we would not have

such a choice. But, then, what choice do we make when we ignore them? How about

considering: what among the choices so presented can we take up, however we are able to

do so? The mentor does not have to decide about how successful the mentee is likely to be;

nor does the mentor have to assess whether or not he would want to subscribe to the precept

and become an adherent of the mentee. The mentor just has to envision that the precept

intends to break a pattern, and breakout of the confines of a convention, and help the mentee

on the way such that her faith-for is fortified sufficiently to take up the life of teaching.

Embarking

I hope this book will provide a deeper and more detailed understanding about the

mystic and her glorious but incredibly difficult way of living. This course of thinking about

the mystic is intended to help you ask good questions, and open your mind to the unexpected

responses that might come back to you from these people you care for (that is, if you

appreciate mystics or are interested in them as a kind of exciting person to know or are

14 This is the great moral dilemma the mystic faces from Porete and Eckhart to Nietzsche. The

former two presented their works in utter innocence, I believe. They believed that the light they shed wouldenlighten the authorities (the Church fathers) of their day. Of course, they were wrong. Nietzsche presented his

precepts with no such navet, but also underestimated, I think the destructive uses to which his work, by being

misappropriated, could take on. The inveterate affirmations of the mystics faith-for makes them vulnerable to

such violence, and worse, sometimes sets this violence loose in the hands of the il-prepared, unleashing itsdevastation on us all.


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concerned about someone who you suspect might be a mystic and is suffering, or if you feel

that someone is creative in ways you cant quite grasp, and still want to plumb these

compelling depths).

As a course of thinking, I am asking you to engage in an inquiry. We have a breakout

creative human being, a striking, startling and singular phenomenon of humanity before us: a

mystic. To thinkabout these people means to find ways to open our awareness to what their

living is like. And it is to let go of our stereotypes and enter into an exploration with only

their special and singular way of living as a guide.

ABANDON STEREOTYPES. I especially ask you to put aside a couple of these

stereotypes. First, put aside once and for all the notion that mystics are people who have, or

are prone to repeatedly have, outsized, ecstatic experiences that yield special

communications with a divine. What is absolutely true about mystics, I have found, is that

they do experience their worlds differently than non-mystics do. But, as we show, this

difference is not a matter of exceptional eruptions of rapturous abandon. Instead, there is a

constant, continual, structure to the way a mystics experience unfolds; there is a tradition, a

pathway, a discourse and domain of study that the earnest mystic studies; there is sober and

measured way the mystic sets her precept to work.

Second, let go of the stereotype of the mystic as an incompetent airhead. Let me be

really clear about this: the mystics I have met are highly placed executives in demanding

organizations, who are responsible for the work and incomes of many people. They are the

mostcompetent, not the least. That said, the following is also true: the mystic life is so

demanding, so draining of energy, so enervating in its unfolding and accommodating of the

conventional world, that some people just dont make it. They do succumb; they do drop out

and give up. But many people who face far less stringent demands also drop out; dropping

out is no criterion for labeling someone a mystic. And because someone is active and

productive in the corporate or organized world does not disqualify her from being a mystic.

Third, mystics arent necessarily religious, and mysticism isnt a validation for

religious truth, or the truth of any particular religious notion. As our genealogy in Part Two

shows, the classical and founding mystics were religious because that mode of discourse

provided the most fruitful way to explore what was not yet institutionalized and relegated

into the social, economic and conceptualized hierarchies. Especially after Spinoza, but even

earlier, beginning even in the heart of the classical period, in the early 14th

century, with the


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likes of Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart, the religious boundaries of the mystic

realizations were falling.

Since the 19th century, and with the astounding contributions of the mystically-

informed philosophers (we call them prophetic mystics in the text below) in Germany,

especially that of Hlderlin, Schelling and Hegel, the mystic project has taken a remarkable

turn. Indeed, in its current manifestation, spearheaded by the driving rush of Nietzsches

writings and Deleuzes powers of re-conceptualizing our world, the mystic work is now

decidedly post-religious, and presents a demand that we regard the human endeavor head on,

with no masks or delusive projections. These post-Nietzschean mystic avatars I call

anamystics. Our work follows in their recasting of the mystic endeavor.

And so, finally, I ask you to discard the stereotype that the mystic is an unfathomable

enigma of a person, who seems to drop in from nowhere. For those who suspect that they

might be mystic, I say this: first, there is a definite way that a psyche organizes to yield the

kinds of experiencing you live with. I offer a way to begin to reflect on this in Part One.

Secondly, you have a genealogy of great predecessors whose work guides our own. I offer a

sample genealogy in Part Two; start there.

OFFERING A CONVERSATION. Concluding this preface, I repeat that this work is

offered in the spirit of conversation. To that end, taking advantage of the fantastic

communications and community-building potential of the Internet, I invite readers to publish

their comments on the website,breakoutcreatives.blogspot.com.

Fostering this conversation is critical if we are to marshal sufficient energies, in a

short enough period of time to make this human endeavor viable this is my bedrock

conviction, the one that drives this work. The four figures have different language systems,

different ways of experiencing the world, and come from very different kinds of psychic and

biographical development processes. Because these people have labored so hard on their

own to forge their lives into creative and generative forces, it is hard for them to break out of

their own mindsets. Even within the types, such conversation is difficult. The history of the

breakout creatives is littered with the fallen bodies and dashed reputations of such conflicts.

I hope, by offering this work, that there can be greater comprehension of the full

range of dynamic engagement that each breakout creative figure, and each mystic, is

offering; and I hope we come to appreciate that we denigrate their gifts to us at our own peril.


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In the age of the mystic precept, the conversation that transforms us is the necessary

step. The mentoring conversation undertakes this transformation as its core and heart. A

mystic might say to us, The conversation is the point, dive into it.

mystics among us

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