Living in the Mystery: Between head and heart, by Jan Arriens

Author: Jan Arriens. Review by Roger Bartlett

Jan Arriens’ book is a personal account of his experiences around life and death. Jan is a Quaker by convincement: at his first Meeting, as he tells us in his introductory chapter, he found himself ‘swept up in a kind of forcefield’ and his ‘vertical sense of connection with whatever it is beyond ourselves now spread out horizontally into the group’. His consequent experience of Quakerism as ‘essentially mystical’ has accorded with other fundamental life events.

But Jan is also ‘a child of our modern scientific age’, seeking intellectual answers to the meaning of the world. These answers – human logic and scientific rationality – compel him to the materialist conclusion ‘that there is no divine purpose, no guiding hand; the world just is’. But for Jan this runs up repeatedly against counter-evidence and counter-experience, itself inexplicable but suggesting something other and greater, offering intuitive certainty of a different order of knowing.

This dichotomy is the starting point of the book: a vivid and engaging account of life events that have led Jan to accept the ultimate mysterious unknowability of reality. In successive chapters he narrates the mystical experiences of people he has known and trusts: personal accounts of near-death and out-of-body experiences; premonition and precognition; communications from dead people; and the moral and mystical experiences of prisoners on death row. Not least are his own mystical experiences. Central to these was one brief but unforgettable moment when ‘I felt a sense of utter benevolence descend over me, like a cloak… It was a kind of blessing, with a quality of infinite love and compassion… Here was a different dimension of being’. This remained with him as ‘the one incontestable thing in my life, connecting me to whatever it is that enfolds us. It has been heart’s trump card – confounding all that head can throw at it’.

The final chapters seek to make sense of such experiences and their implications. They range over topics including the Via Negativa, the nature of consciousness, quantum mechanics, Eastern religions, and Einstein and other luminaries. Mystical experience is commonly attended by a sense of the universe as full of love. Jan talks of love as ‘the name we give to the energy of interconnectedness’. It is ‘about knowing we are not alone but an integral part of some greater whole’. Morality, the Quaker testimonies, and the imperative to social action all arise from this sense of connectedness and communion. Through that, he argues, we can know that we are in touch with the mystery at the heart of our existence.

This is a challenging meditation, beautifully structured and written, finely balanced between the personal and the broader narrative. I had some unanswered questions – the issue of evil arises but is not examined, and the question of healing, very germane to the topics treated, makes no appearance. But answers to every query cannot be expected. This is a frank, thought-provoking and very readable account of one person’s experiences in an area which raises important issues for the Quaker Way.

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