Do not ask why, but only experience from the depths of your soul the mystery, and you will know; but will you ever know:

Raven, creator to some, evil to others
Earth bound, injured wing, can’t you fly?
Why, if divine, where comes the suffering?
Do you remember flying high, voice of power, black not white?
Why maimed, earth bound separate from heaven

Black to some is life while white is death
Experience the mystery for yourself, Raven shouts
Why do you refuse to see the mystery within me?
Always looking, judging, separating, but never seeing the light of the mystery
You do not know me; I am Raven
The majestic one that suffers and weeps
For the ones I have left behind

What is life to one as me?
Surprise will be my answer to you
I am not what I appear
I am you and you are I
We are One*

Even though, each one of us is a mystic to the core of our soul, very few ever venture to this central place of magic, wonder and power. And even fewer choose to bring to the surface and express their vision of the mysteries, knowing the sacrifice that has to be made. I must ask you then, what do you choose to do?

“Jesus was a Jewish heretic, Buddha was a Hindu heretic. The ancient Greek state executed the great philosopher Socrates for his heretical beliefs. Pythagoras was burnt to death along with most of his followers. Al-Hallaj, the tenth-century Islamic Sufi mystic, was crucified by the Muslim authorities. The thirteenth-century German mystic Meister Eckhart was prohibited from writing by the Catholic Church and eventually excommunicated a few days after his death. The sixteenth/seventeenth-century mystic Jacob Boehme, known as ‘the inspired shoemaker’, was chased out of his home town of Görlitz in Silesia by the Protestant authorities, who even desecrated his grave after his death. The Church of Rome tortured the Italian mystic philosopher Giordano Bruno over a period of eight years before he was burnt at the stake.

Ironically, it is by losing themselves in God that mystics find the rugged individualism courageously to follow their visions wherever they may lead, in a world usually hostile to their penetrating insight and spiritual values. The figure of the mystic appears eccentric and challenging to those who want to remain secure in the commonly accepted view of the world that happens to be prevalent at the time. This is why so many mystics have been forced to live precarious lives on the edges of social acceptability.

While some managed to maintain an uneasy alliance with the religious authorities of their day, most mystics were vilified and horribly persecuted for claiming direct personal knowledge of a God whom the religious establishment wished to make accessible only via their hierarchy of priests and theologians. Yet the natural experience of spiritual awakening that lies at the heart of mysticism is the birthplace of all religions, and they find their common ground in this common source. Mystical experiences inspired the founders and reformers of religion as well as its greatest heretics—indeed, they have often been the same people. The history of mysticism is the history of their revelations.” (The Complete Guide to World Mysticism, Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy, pg. 15-16) 

*This poem is dedicated to the wounded raven that hobbled by my window one wintry afternoon. (Jim 2002)