How to Shed the Surface-Self: The Forgotten Visionary Evelyn Underhill on Touching the Depths of Being

It is hard to know why we are here, what we can make of the transience we can do nothing about, how we can fill every borrowed atom of matter with meaning. It is hard not to take for givens the answers handed down to us by our culture, our parents, our peers, our heroes. There are those rare moments — for Virginia Woolf, it happened in the garden; for Thich Nhat Hanh, at the library; for Fernando Pessoa, at the writing desk — when something jolts you awake and you glimpse that meaning out of the corner of your… read article