We can produce many rational arguments in favor of mysticism, but there is a much simpler way of validating mystical knowledge: we can actually show what mysticism does to a person. For mysticism effects not only the knowledge of the brain, but it also has an impact on the total being of an individual. So we can take the life of a mystic and we can actually show, with textual and material data, that a transformation of consciousness occurred in the course of her or his life. So here the method for validating mysticism is hermeneutical: we will trace back the major events of the mystic's life and point to some of these significant transformations of consciousness.

A beautiful and moving example of such changes taking place in the heart and mind of the mystic was the life of a Dutch Jewish woman, called Etty Hillesum. She lived in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, during World War II . From 1941-1943, till the time she was deported to Westerbork, a 'Durchgangslager' for the gas chambers of Auswitzch, she kept a diary. This diary was but recently, in 1981, discovered, but in short time it became just as popular as the diary of that other Dutch Jewish girl, Anne Frank. It's now translated in many languages all over the world. For the religious content of the diary is heart and breath taking. The book shakes your soul.

What is so remarkable is the fact that the woman was only 27 years old when she started the diary and 29 when she was forced to abandon it. But it is as if we see the ripening of a whole human life developing before our eyes, but now condensed in a mere two years. At the end of the diary Etty is a totally different woman. The woman that threw her farewell note out of the wagon that brought her to Auswitzch had become a mystic, a drunkard of God.

But let's return to the first year of her diary and see what kind of a woman Etty was. She was half Russian from her mother's side. People around her described her psychology as having the ups and down of the Slavic temperament, oscillating between high exaltation and the deep gloom of depression. There were psychoses in the family, especially with her mother and her very musically gifted brother Michael (Mischa). But though she decribed her self as chaotic, these emotional disturbances were not so overwhelming with Etty, because of her very keen intelligence and her total devotion to reflect relentlessly her own thoughts and feelings. She was simply too conscious to be taking totally a drift by her own emotions.

But life was very hard for Jewish people in the war. Many suffered from psychological ailments. Society became with every new decrete from the Germans more and more hostile. There were even whispers coming from England that the Nazi's were planning and executing the total extinction of the Jewish race. It is no small wonder that in this climate of fear, hate, distrust and paranoia many Jews suffered from panic disorders and depressions. Etty also did not feel too well in 1941. She started consulting a student of Jung, who recently had come to Amsterdam from Berlin, called Julius Spier. Etty and Julius became very intimate and even developed a love relation. Spier was a remarkable personality, with exceptional psychic gifts. He was the teacher. who, together with the books of the German poet Rilke, inspired Etty to find God in her heart. At his suggestion she started writing her diary.

From her conversations with Julius she learns to  observe her own thoughts and feelings ruthlessly. Bit by bit she makes progress in ameliorating her own inner world, by searching for the love that hides in the deepest recesses of her heart. But it was no immediate success. The struggle with her emotions was very hard. The temperament of her character was not a very balanced one. She was also hampered by all sorts of physical disturbances, like headaches and intestinal problems. And the people around her often distracted her from her inner search. There was so much hate, distrust and pessimism all around her. How difficult it was for a Jew to gain peace of heart in those days.

But despite the difficulties and the drawbacks something gradually changes with Etty. These changes were very hesitant at first, in the beginning mere glimpses of a brighter future, but suddenly sentences like these pop up in her diary:

These changes were the result of her mystical practices that she initiated during these spring months of 1941. She had begun to meditate every day:

I believe I should better do it: 'fall inward' in the morning before I go to work,for half an hour. To listen to what's inside of me. 'Sich versenken'. You can also call it meditation. But that word still gives me the creeps. (...) Let this be the goal of meditation: to become like a wide open space, without that sneaky brushwood taking away your vista. That something like 'God' can enter, just like there is something of 'God' in the Ninth of Beethoven. (June 8 1941)

It is still very hard for her not to be disturbed by her fears and her worries, but more and more the Witness gains control over her consciousness. In the course of the book the personal Etty steps more and more aside. We notice a more universal onlooker emerging and a more detached way of registrating  her inner and outer life.  She now begins to feel like she is more of an instrument in God's hands. That God has chosen her to be a 'battlefield' where all the big questions of her time could  find a place to fight and come to rest.

For the big questions of her time were: why is there so much suffering in the world? why do people hate each other? what is the reason for all these painful ordeals? The answer Etty finds in the course of her diary is: that we may find that everlasting Love in our own heart, that is even cherished amid great perils and pains, a forgiving Love and a humanity that ennobles the heart by accepting everything God sends on our path; and that we may root out all hatred and all judgment of our fellow men, even if these men are Nazi's. For we have to preserve our dignity in all circumstances.

But in order to find this Love, this answer to all questions, we have to embark on a mystical quest: we have to find God in the centre of our heart.

Inside of me there is a deep well. In it God sits. Sometimes I can reach him. But more often stones and debris block the entrance. Then God lies buried. Then he needs to be excavated.
I can imagine some people praying with their eyes raised up toward heaven. They look for God outside. But other people lower their head and hide it in their hands. I suppose they look for God inside of them. (August 26 1941)

Though Etty's strategy in overcoming her chaos had always been deeper thought and fuller reflection, she now began to feel that there was something more needed to reach that final stillness in her heart, that stillness where all problems would be solved and were finally redemption laid waiting. Here we see the first symptoms of the transcendence of the mental plain, a transcendence that could only take place after an integration of the rational. She was very intelligent and always prone to rational investigation of her inner and outer life. But rationality was not sufficient for attaining the summum bonum.  So she concluded:

I have by now the final remedy. It is better in a little corner to crouch on the ground and hunched like that to listen to what's inside of me. Mere thinking will never avail. Thought is a beautiful and proud occupation as study is concerned. But you can never think your way 'heraus' of difficult emotional problems. Something else needs to be done. You have to make yourself passive and listen. Get into touch with that little piece of eternity inside of you. (...) Lord, rather give me wisdom, instead of knowledge. (September 4 1941)

How was it possible that such a major shift in consciousness accurred in a young woman of her age that had but only recently outgrown her adolescence? Most people only reach this stage of full grown psychological development in their second maturity (if they reach it at all). Most women of her age are more preoccupied with more mundane affairs like starting a family and finding security in social relationships. Though Etty was also a woman of flesh and blood (and not at all negligent and slack in her sexual activities), the main focus of her life was spiritual. How are we to account for this vein of mystical genius?

I think this sudden premature uprising of mysticism in the heart of this exceptional young woman had everything to do with the atmosphere of impending death that was prevalent during those war years in the Netherlands. She knew that life could be over in just a second, especially for her as a Jew. When you know that death is imminent and certain, a major shift in consciousness is likely to occur. Thinking, now becoming desperate, is likely to drop of its own accord. A sudden moment of aporia (that stillness provoking moment of not logically finding your way out) opens the way for glimpses of sunyata (formless emptiness) to come into focus. With these sunyata experiences consciousness is expanded and can now look at its own Ground of being. I have written about these catalytic propensities of the near death experience in death, our teacher.

On my bike yesterday, with ineffable gloom and heavy inside, when I heard the aeroplanes roaring above my head, the sudden impression that a bomb could end my life gave me a feeling of liberation. (September 9 1941)

But a full transformation into a Master did not happen in a fortnight. These last months of 1941 were sometimes very difficult for Etty. She had momentary relapses into her former chaotic frame of mind. She often felt very lonely and isolated. Her inward journey used up all her energies and sometimes it was too much for her. But on New Year's Eve she could write:

Then finally in the first months of 1942 there was a final breakthrough in consiousness. The woman that had learned to kneel on the rough cocomat in her bathroom is not the same girl as she was the years before. No more headaches. No more compulsive taking of asperine. No more sleep during the day. Etty has turned into a radiant, loving woman, despite the circumstances that confronted her.

By now she has transformed into a beautiful mystic, full of energy and love and ready to assist and help her suffering fellow men. She had dived deep into her own inner centre and had managed to root out all evil and 'rottenness' by surrendering her self to what she called God.  And now we can see the great glory of mysticism. For can you imagine a young woman speaking of trust and gratefulness that life is so beautiful in those circumstances of impending doom and evil? How could a Jewish woman in 1942, with the precognition of sudden death in the gas chambers of Eastern Europe,  have inner peace, self confidence and lack of fear? At last Etty had found eternal peace in her heart.

The total transformation that took place in the psyche of Etty was also noted by people around her. In March of that year she met her old friend Max again, who wanted to consult her about his plans for getting married. Max didn't believe his own eyes:

If we take a close look at these distinctive psychological features of the mystical transformation, as presented here in Etty's diary, then the most striking feature seems to be the universality of consciousness that has by now become the prominent matrix of thinking and feeling: the second half of Etty's diary deals more and more with the condition humaine of universal man, and in a lesser degree with Etty's personal life. The personal has now become a gateway to reflect on universal questions. Almost every line in the book has by now become philosophical and religious, as if she wants to instruct us more than simply narrate the events of her personal life.

Now she has transcended the personal and reached the level of universality, she has become (for herself unknowingly perhaps and with great humility) a Master of mysticism. So what we can do now, that we may give our lives direction and meaning and learn from her deep wisdom, is to ask questions.
 

1. Why does mankind suffer so much, Etty?

2. What kind of mysticism do you advise us to practice?

3. Is their no danger of mysticism becoming an anti-social form of solipsism?

'Self-work' is no pathological form of individualism. Only after every individual has found  peace in himself, only after he has rooted out and has conquered all hatred against his fellow men of whatever race or nationality and has transformed it into something that is no hate anymore, but amounts to something like love in the end, only then can peace become real peace. Or is this too much to be asked? (June 20 1942)

4. What should be our attitude toward death?

5. What are your views about relationships and sexuality?

6. Can you give us some advise how we should proceed on the Mystical Path?

Selfishness

Conclusion

It would be wrong to conclude that Etty her religious feelings were strictly Christian or Jewish, though she definitely was influenced by biblical thought and though she always carried a little bible with her, even when finally going to Westerbork. It is, I think, more close to the truth if we say that her religious feelings  were too universal to be restricted to one particular creed. Her God is very personal. It's more like the better and nobler part of her innermost soul. But at the same time her God is also very universal, beyond all places and all times. So she seems to transcend the mythological religions of the world. She looks for pure unsullied religion (religion an-sich) in her own heart. These are, as said, the features of mysticism.

Arnhem, April 2004

Etty Hillesum Like Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum was a Dutch Jew living in Amsterdam.  She died in Auschwitz in 1943, at the age of 29. She began a diary nine months after Hitler invaded the Netherlands and continued her diary for two years, describing the deportations and increasing terror of life under the Nazis. An Interrupted Life includes the diary Etty kept in Amsterdam as well the letters she wrote during the year she spent in Westerbork, a detention camp in the north of Holland where Jews were held before transport to the death camps of Poland. She went voluntarily to Westerbork in July of 1942, at about the same time a young girl named Anne Frank began writing her diary in the attic of a house a few miles away from Hillesum's home in Amsterdam. Her letters (the second part of the book) reveal a great deal of detail about the day-to-day life at the transit camp of Westerbork (the last stop before Auschwitz). Individual people come into view clearly and the horrors and atrocities facing the Jews emerge. One of the most striking aspects of Etty’s diary is her compassion. She refuses to join her fellow Dutch in despising the Germans. She tries to rise above hate in the midst of horror and evil and reveals a tremendous inner strength. An Interrupted Life is an incomparable record of the meaning of life that embraces horror and beauty, love and sexual awakening.

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