In 1911, a British scholar named Evelyn Underhill published a book that most people have never heard of. It was called Mysticism, and it was 600 pages long. In it, she did something that had never quite been done before: she read every major mystic in the Western tradition — Christian, Sufi, Neoplatonist — and asked a single question. What do they all have in common?

The answer surprised her. Beneath the different theologies, the different centuries, the different languages, there was a single recurring structure. A path with five distinct stages. A map of the interior life that appeared, in some form, in every serious account of the spiritual journey she had ever studied.

Underhill called it the Mystic Way. This essay is a guide to all five of its stages — what they are, what they feel like, and what the mystics themselves said about each one.

"Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or lesser degree."

— Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (1911)

Before We Begin: What Mysticism Actually Is

The word "mysticism" has been so thoroughly misappropriated by wellness culture that it requires rehabilitation before we can use it. In Underhill's sense — and in the sense used throughout the tradition she documented — mysticism is not about the paranormal, the occult, or the metaphysical decoration of ordinary life. It is about direct, unmediated experience of reality.

The mystics were not people who escaped the world. They were people who paid such close, sustained attention to it that the ordinary categories — subject and object, self and other, the sacred and the mundane — began to feel less solid than they had assumed. What remained, after that dissolution, is what they called God, or the Absolute, or the One. You do not have to use any of those words. The experience they were pointing at is real regardless of the label.

The Glitch in the Routine

The first stage of the Mystic Way is the one most people have already experienced, without recognising it for what it was. Underhill called it the Awakening — a moment of sudden, vivid awareness in which the ordinary world briefly reveals its strangeness.

It might happen when you look at your own hand on the steering wheel and find it profoundly strange that you exist at all. It might happen at 3am when you are suddenly, inexplicably aware of the sheer weight of being alive. It might happen in a supermarket, or at a funeral, or in the middle of a perfectly ordinary Tuesday. The content doesn't matter. The structure is always the same: the autopilot turns off, and for a moment, you see.

"Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God."

— Meister Eckhart (1260–1328)

Meister Eckhart — the 13th-century Dominican friar who Underhill considered one of the greatest mystical intellects in history — is describing the same thing. The profound mystery of existence is not hiding in a temple. It is in the coffee mug. The motorway. The strange fact of your own hands. Most people suppress this moment the instant it arrives. They reach for their phone. They turn up the radio. They go back to sleep. The mystic does the opposite: leans into the glitch.

The Decluttering of the Mind

The second stage is the one that surprises most modern readers. After the Awakening — after the opening of that new, vivid perception — you might expect the path to become steadily more illuminated. Instead, it turns inward and becomes demanding.

Underhill called this stage Purgation. In the medieval tradition, it manifested as physical asceticism: fasting, silence, poverty. The monks were pointing at something real, even if the methods were extreme. What the Purgation actually requires is not physical suffering but radical honesty — a systematic dismantling of the ego's constructions.

"By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never."

— The Cloud of Unknowing (Anonymous, 14th century)

The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing is making a precise psychological point: the thinking mind, with its endless categorisations and narratives, cannot grasp reality directly. Reality — raw, wordless, immediate — can only be approached when the thinking mind is temporarily set aside. The Purgation is the process of learning to do this. It is not comfortable. We are attached to our mental furniture — our grievances, our identities, our carefully maintained sense of who we are. Purgation asks what would remain if all of it were put down.

The First Taste of Union

The third stage is the one the mystics describe with the most lyrical intensity, because it is the most genuinely difficult to put into words. Underhill called it Illumination — a state of sustained, luminous awareness in which the ordinary world appears transfigured.

Julian of Norwich — the 14th-century English anchorite who Underhill considered one of the most psychologically precise mystics in the Western tradition — described it simply:

"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

— Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c.1395)

This is not optimism. It is not wishful thinking. It is a report from a particular state of consciousness in which the resistance between the self and reality has temporarily dissolved. Modern neuroscience has a name for a related state: transient hypofrontality — a reduction in activity in the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for the self-monitoring voice. The mystics reached it through contemplation. Athletes reach it through physical extremity. Musicians reach it mid-performance. The mechanism differs. The territory is the same.

The Necessary Dissolution

This is the stage that separates the casual seekers from the serious ones — and the stage that is most catastrophically misunderstood by contemporary culture. Underhill devoted more pages to the Dark Night than to any other stage, because she understood that it is the pivot on which the entire path turns.

After the clarity of Illumination, the pendulum swings back. The practices that worked no longer work. The silence that felt like peace now feels like a void. Nothing makes sense. The things that used to comfort feel hollow. St. John of the Cross — the 16th-century Spanish Carmelite who gave this stage its name and wrote the most honest account of it in the entire tradition — described the experience with clinical precision from a prison cell in Toledo.

"In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything, desire to have pleasure in nothing. In order to arrive at possessing everything, desire to possess nothing."

— St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel (c.1579)

Modern psychology often misdiagnoses the Dark Night as depression. The surface symptoms can be nearly identical. The crucial distinction is this: clinical depression is a malfunction of the organism. The Dark Night is the organism working exactly as it should. It is consciousness outgrowing a structure that can no longer contain it. The old self is dissolving — not because something has gone wrong, but because something is going right. The only instruction the tradition gives for this stage is the one the ego finds almost impossible to follow: do not try to fix it. Let the burning happen.

Chopping Wood

The fifth and final stage has the strangest description of all. After the drama of the Awakening, the rigour of the Purgation, the beauty of the Illumination, and the suffering of the Dark Night — you return to your ordinary life. The same job. The same commute. The same steering wheel.

There is a famous Zen proverb: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Underhill would have recognised this immediately. The Union she documented is not a permanent residence in some elevated state. It is the permanent establishment of a changed relationship with ordinary reality — a stable, ongoing awareness that the world in front of you, right now, is exactly where the fundamental mystery of existence is occurring.

The great mystics who reached this stage were not people who retreated from the world. Teresa of Ávila ran a religious reform movement and founded seventeen convents. Meister Eckhart preached to thousands. Julian of Norwich wrote the first book in English known to be authored by a woman, from a cell the size of a bathroom. Union does not produce withdrawal. It produces an engagement with the world that is no longer driven by fear or the compulsive need to escape the present moment.

A Note on the Path

You will not move through these five stages in a straight line. No one does. Underhill was clear on this: the Mystic Way is not a ladder but a spiral. You will experience Awakenings and fall back asleep. You will clear the ego-constructs and quietly rebuild them. You will taste Illumination and then spend months in a Dark Night you didn't see coming.

This is not failure. This is the path. What changes, over time, is the quality of attention you bring to each return. The Awakening at fifty is not the same as the one at twenty-five. The Dark Night at forty is darker and more productive than the one at thirty. The path deepens as you do.

"Not to acquire any new gift, but to enter into possession of what you already have: this is what the mystic life means."

— Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism (1914)

If you want to go deeper, the next step is Underhill's own work — particularly Practical Mysticism, which she wrote as a short introduction for the everyday reader. Or, if you want a structured guide to applying the five stages to modern life, the eBook below walks through each stage with a practical exercise you can begin immediately.