Mystics Among Us:

The Open in Our Midst

By
Michael H. Shenkman

Preface

It is not good
To be soulless
With mortal thoughts. But good
Is conversation, and to speak
The heart’s conviction, to listen to tales
Of days of love
And deeds once done.

Hölderlin, “Remembrance”1

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 mentor’s 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 mystic’s 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

1
In Henrich, Dieter, The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin (Stanford, CA;
1997); p. 253.
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 figure’s 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 mystic’s 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.
Let’s 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 Homer’s 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
his still missing father, Odysseus. The journey seems most necessary because Odysseus’
kingdom is under assault from pretenders and suitors to Penelope, the king’s wife and
Telmachus’s 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 mentee’s 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 Homer’s 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
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 mentor’s 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
permeation and constancy represents a new phenomenon. There is a danger in such wide
2
The Innovator’s 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.
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 mystic’s
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 lover’s ardor for the other’s life. Then, It is a conversation that does not
offer certainty or veracity of the mentee’s 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
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? Isn’t 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?
Isn’t it axiomatic that the layperson mentor is not a mystic, and so cannot even touch upon a
comprehension of the mystic’s aspiration? Isn’t 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.
Isn’t 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
launched on its way. This convergence of concentration and giving way, we call the
“mentoring moment.”

3
“Asymmetry” 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).
 THE MENTORING MOMENT. This book is devoted to that specific moment when 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 mystic’s
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.
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

4
See, Shenkman, Ethical Cosmology: How Self-Organization Promise a New Human Endeavor
(Unpublished, available on request; 2009)
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
individual’s 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 Epoch
Humans depart from accustomed habitats Leader Pre-History; 50,000 years ago
Humans discern the ability to adapt to strange habitats and Artist 15,00 years ago.
create worlds (that replace habitats). Epoch of Spirit
Split: As the ability to adapt and create is focused on language, Prophet 5,000 years ago.
the word, the book, then logic. Occurs in Mesopotamia, Greece, Epoch of Self.
then European West.
 Human efficacy is identified with cosmic, universe-forming Mystic 800 years ago.
potencies. Freedom, Infinity, Being and Nothing, and Self- Current Epoch: Actuality?
Organization rise into view.

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 are
those 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.
THE WAY 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 epoch’s 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 figure’s 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 Hegel’s
Philosophy of History, with the figures that establish “shapes of consciousness” in the Phenomenology.
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 EPOCH’S 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 figure’s mode of
discerning, working and expression has disappeared at the hand of a newly emergent
figure’s; 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 epoch’s “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 are
still 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.
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 Some Key
Frame (BoC) Figures
Mystic Rising Mystic form emerges. Attains classical 13th – 16th Subject of this
expression and is brutally suppressed Centuries volume. Porete,
Eckhart, Teresa, de
la Cruz, et. al.
Renaissance Mystic form attains artist level of 16th Century Michelangelo,
specificity in discernment. Perspective Reuben, Dante,
and “individuality” in art; abstraction and Galileo, Kepler,
theorem in science; algebraic expression Copernicus
in mathematics.
Enlightenment Mystic form attains prophetic expression. 17th Century Descartes, Spinoza,
Knowledge as individual; God as universal Leibniz, Locke,
potency; Individual “right” and law as Hume, Berkeley
moral imperative.
Reformation Adaptation of prophetic grasp of the 17th Century Luther, Calvin
mystic into a leaderly form.
30 Years War – Perversion of the leaderly/prophetic into 17th Century – Papacy, Hapsburgs,
Napoleonic Era power/property conflicts. 19th Century Napoleon

Idealist/Romantic Era Recasting of artistic, prophetic into a larger End of 18th Kant, Novalis,
frame of human efficacy and “facultative” Century – Schlegel, Schelling,
capability. New sciences are initiated. early 20th Hölderlin, Hegel,
Century Marx, Nietzsche,
Rilke, Poe, Melville,
Mallarme, Freud,
Weber, James
Modern Era Perversion and misappropriation of these First Half of The Kaiser, Wilson,
notions into premature leader imperatives. the 20th Roosevelt,
Century Churchill, Stalin,
Hitler; Truman
Post-Modern Recasting artist and prophetic Second Half of Husserl, Levinas,
interpretations into new facultative 20th Century – Heidegger,
 regimes and envisioning new capabilities. now. Blanchot, Celan,
A restoration of the mystic endeavor, now Char, Nancy,
in “anamystic” form. Deleuze, Rorty,
Stevens, et. al.

BREAKOUT CREATIVE FIGURES AT WORK. 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 by shaping 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
person’s 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
being of world historical import have given over their whole lives to the work. Many others
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 does
not exist, among cultures still oriented toward myth (a form of the artist’s 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 itself
between history, properly so called, and the philosophical/conceptual form.
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 Figure’s Aspiration

When we are mentoring a person with breakout creative proclivities, it is not a
person’s talents or even interests that are at stake --neither for that person nor for the mentor.
The mentor’s 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 best
resources to treat talents and interests. Mentoring comes to the fore because a person is
feeling a debilitating or at least immanently threatening level of loss with respect to an urge
to live a certain way, to dedicate her time and life’s 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 mentee’s 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
noise, provide an occasion so that some modicum of coherence can arise – so this person can
take the inceptual step.
8
This feeling is not a defect or even a deficiency of the mentee’s personality. Levinas masterfully
evokes how the human situation is one of “fatigue,” of starting out each moment already behind the curve of
what he calls the Il y a, the “there is” of being. The Il 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 Levinas’s Il y a). Self-organized beings, including
the 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 entities
themselves), 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 to
venture toward what beckons.
 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 a guiding 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
material each of the figures works with; then the self-reflective stance 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 mentor’s 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 material can be identified and
substantiated, the stance can be constellated configured in a way that is viable, strong and,
indeed, enlivening for the figure, and the person’s 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 leader’s 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
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 mentor’s guiding statement is this: mystic the mystic’s
work is to find, elucidate and articulate the precept, by exploring the material of her field of
enthusiasm, in a stance of pure faith-for (the potency of this field), which then is taken up in
an ethic and lifeway of teaching.

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 the
course 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 God’s 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
thus a notion of the prophetic mode of engagement, and is not a notion appropriate to a
mystic’s way.9
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 Rosenstock’s 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, after
carefully 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:
 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 will be 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.
“EXPERIMENTAL” PRECEPTS. 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
“in the revealed space-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 inclusive
footing. The link obscures the necessary distinction between what Rosenzweig’s 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 the
revelation, the sanctifying of the people and the law.
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
“pre-“ cepts – 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 mystic’s 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 mystic’s 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, 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

11
Or, as in the case of Hölderlin, 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 1940’s. 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 the
current era, at least insofar as they catapulted Schelling over any and all dogma of his day.
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 mystic’s 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 mystic’s 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 mystic’s “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.
The mystic’s 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

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 hardened
“beliefs” 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 prophetic
leader, Calvin.
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 mystic’s 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 mystic’s 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 mentee’s breakout creative form, and a depiction of the figure’s
“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 mentee’s agonies intrinsic value.
It is a resource that frees the mentor from having to make judgements about the viability of
the mentee’s mission and frames the mentor’s questions in a dynamic context that allows the
mentor to enjoy the prospect the mentee’s 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 mentee’s suffering worth it? This framing resource
is a notion that we call facultative 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 mentee’s
experiments – whatever they might be. This is a notion that specifies the generative potencies
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 mentee’s 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
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.

13
I use the term “to hand” very deliberately. A faculty has the intention of activating the hand, the
organ(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 and
are ready to be instantaneously, “instinctively” unleashed at the approaching ball.
 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
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 mystic’s 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
concerned about someone who you suspect might be a mystic and is suffering, or if you feel
that someone is creative in ways you can’t quite grasp, and still want to plumb these
compelling depths).

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 would
enlighten the authorities (the Church fathers) of their day. Of course, they were wrong. Nietzsche presented his
precepts with no such naïveté, 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 its
devastation on us all.
 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 think about 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 mystic’s 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
most competent, 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 don’t 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 aren’t necessarily religious, and mysticism isn’t 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
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 Hölderlin, Schelling and Hegel, the mystic project has taken a remarkable
turn. Indeed, in its current manifestation, spearheaded by the driving rush of Nietzsche’s
writings and Deleuze’s 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.
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.”