How Spirit Invites Us to Heal, Grow, and Transform - 5 Initiations • Skye (Carl) McColman
from October 18th, 2026
We welcome you to watch/listen to the video, read the transcript below, and/or share your thoughts in the comments!
Skye McColman explores Evelyn Underhill's five stages of the mystical journey, from awakening to divine union, in this Sunday lecture on spiritual evolution.
About the Lecturer
Carl “Skye” McColman is a spiritual director, author, retreat leader, and speaker on mystical spirituality and contemplative living. His books include Read the Bible Like a Mystic, The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism, Eternal Heart, and Unteachable Lessons. He is one of the co-hosts of the Encountering Silence and Radical Mystics podcasts, and writes the Anamchara newsletter on Substack. Skye’s approach to the mystical path is joyful, inclusive and expansive; with a dedication to exploring the common ground between faith traditions, with a particular interest in the connecting points between Christian, Buddhist and Pagan wisdom. Skye lives with his wife, artist Fran McColman, in Atlanta.
This will be Skye’s third visit to the Metaphysical Chapel of Life! In the past he was known by his given name of Carl. Since his last visit, he received guidance to begin using a new name, Skye, reflecting Buddhist and Celtic Wisdom as well as the beauty of nonbinary gender.
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00:00 - Introduction for Meditation
00:56 - "Contemplative Affirmations" Meditation
11:23 - Lecture Introduction
12:49 - Lecture
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How the Spirit Invites Us to Heal, Grow, and Transform, and Five Initiations of the Mystical Life • Lecture by Skye (Carl) McColman, October 18th, 2026
(Lecture transcript)
Welcome and Evelyn Underhill's Map
Aw shucks. All right, let's see. I think I've got everything I need. You can hear me okay. Yep. You can see me okay there in little camera land. Okay. So all right. I don't think I shaved very well, so don't pay attention to that. It is such a joy to be back here, to see Bill and Debbie and to see all of you, some familiar faces. It was only just over a year ago that we were here, the summer of twenty-five. The first visit was a long time ago, and that was I think when my father passed away.
And so that would have been twenty thirteen. 'Cause our daughter was here, wasn't she? Didn't she come the first time? Yeah. And then she passed away in twenty fourteen. And so at any rate, it is such a delight to be back. Debbie had actually suggested that I could come for Ooh, I just knocked an angel over. I hope that's not an omen. There we go.
So she's listening. Okay, that's just her reminder that yeah, that she's paying attention. And now I've got Jesus over here. So okay, I'll respect you too. We have a friend who is a Catholic priest in Dublin, Ireland, and he has a dancing Jesus bobblehead, and then a dancing Pope bobblehead. And so of course I would go there and Jesus danced longer than the Pope. I think there is a message in there somewhere. So I am already off my script, though this is gonna be a fun morning.
Okay. So I think when you originally invited me, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the original idea was that I would come for homecoming, but I got the dates wrong. So that's why I'm here early. So I get to be the warm-up act for the homecoming festival, which is actually pretty awesome in and of itself. And I understand the theme is embracing spiritual evolution. Is that okay?
So I am going to speak on that, and I don't want to take away any of the thunder for next week. So this is just going to be my little contribution to what I think is a huge and wonderful topic. And I'm sure you'll hear some other amazing voices next week to continue to deepen this conversation about how the Spirit does invite us to heal and to grow and to transform.
So my inspiration for today's talk comes from one of the great mystics of the 20th century. And this was a woman named Evelyn Underhill. And Fran and I had the incredible honor just a few months ago, we were in England and we visited the retreat center where she used to teach. And it's out in what would you say, Fran? It's just in the middle farm country, right? British farm country. The middle of the wheat fields.
And we're in this little retreat house, and every morning the birds, it was a symphony. We were there in May, so it was kind of the perfect time. And Fran would get up and she would just say to me, Honey, the birds are calling. And she'd get out there and just have a mystical experience with the birds. But it was just this amazing opportunity to touch a woman who, of course, I never met, she died about 20 years before I was born, but whose writings have been such a guiding light for me.
And so at any rate, she wrote this book called Mysticism. In fact, one of my books, which is on the table over there, is called The Big Book of Christian Mysticism. And it is in many ways my kind of homage to her. It's my way of honoring how her teachings were such a gift to me. And I hope I can pass on a little bit of wisdom as well, maybe to the next generation.
So, but what Underhill does. So mysticism is a big topic. And people will, you know, I'll go to a party or a reception or something, and people will ask me, Well, what do you do for a living? And I say, Well, I'm a mysticism blogger. And then they look at me like I just spoke in French to them. And they don't speak French. And so it's like they can kind of wrap their heads around blogger, but then it's like, well, what do you mean by mysticism? And it's one of those words that's almost impossible to explain, anyways. But in a space like this, I think it is easier to explain because mysticism is about the embodied experience of the divine. That God is not way up there and we are down here. But God or goddess, mother god, the divine, the spirit, I mean none of the words capture it. It's like trying to capture the Atlantic Ocean in a thimble, you know? All those words, they're all limited. So if a word bugs you, set it aside. There's another word that will work better. But they all point to a reality that has been poured into our hearts. That's a biblical teaching, that the spirit of love has been poured into our hearts. And so a lot of us go through life kind of ignoring this fact, don't we? It's really a tragedy. But the mystics are great people throughout history who invite us to remember who we truly are.
And so that's what Evelyn Underhill's book really introduced me to as a young person. And then I've given my life to it. It's been just such an honor and a privilege to be able to share the wisdom of the mystics with communities just like this one. And so what she does in her book, and it's a huge book, it's like 500 pages, she talks about who the mystics are, what their teachings were, how we can apply them to our lives. But then in the second half of the book, she gives us kind of like a chart. Like if you live the mystical life, these are the movements that you can expect the Spirit to lead you through. And even though she's an English lady and she writes out of a Christian kind of tradition, I believe her teachings can be applied in any context, that they really are universal teachings.
But I do want to mention, and she says this herself, that this map or this chart that I'm going to share with you this morning is just one possible way of understanding how the spirit can guide us in our spiritual evolution. So, once again, please, this is not dogma. I am not the Pope. I would look really goofy in one of those hats. But it is [unopportun]. I like to think there's a mountain and there are many paths up the mountain. So this is one of the paths. And if it resonates with you, yay. If it doesn't resonate with you, you learn something, you know? And we'll leave it at that.
So Evelyn suggests that the mystical life has five distinct stages. And I think you could even call these initiations.
Now, not necessarily in a formal sense, it's not like somebody is there, you know, waving a wand over you or anything, but in an inner sense, in a spiritual sense, a metaphysical sense, if you will. So these initiations take place in our hearts, and they take place over the course of a lifetime, lifespan. And again, she presents it in a linear way, like A to B to C to D to E.
But I think it's important to remember that real life doesn't work that way. And sometimes the path up the mountain spirals up the mountain. And sometimes we'll touch something and then we'll spiral back to it at a later time. But maybe we're a little bit further up the mountain. And so we come back to that same place, but it's not the same place. We've grown, we've evolved, we've changed. And spirit is maybe teaching us something new in the process. Okay.
The First Initiation: Awakening
So, the first initiation, the first stage, is the stage of awakening. And again, I alluded to this a few minutes ago, that unfortunately it seems like many, many human beings, many of us, we sleepwalk through life. We get caught up in the hustle of getting and spending, of good things, making money, having a family, getting married.
Doing our best to build a legacy for our children, making a difference in our community, working for peace or for justice or for healing, and so forth. You know, and life can be overwhelming. Many of us are overwhelmed, and we seem to never find the time to just stop and breathe and to be still and to know. Even though those are the links to the divine presence within.
You know, as the Christ said,
"I stand at the door and knock."
Sometimes knocking, knocking, knocking, and nobody ever answers the door. But the invitation is always there. One of my other teachers, a man named Thomas Merton, he said,
"There is no program for seeing the divine, but the gate to heaven is everywhere."
Isn't that a beautiful affirmation? The gate to heaven is everywhere, which means if we miss this one, there's, you know, it's like the subway in New York. You know, you miss one, the next train's gonna come in just a few minutes. So the Christ or the Buddha, or again, you know, the name that which cannot be named, the spirit of love, I like that, is always eager to enter into our hearts. All we have to do is open the door and invite that spirit in.
You do not have to be a member of the correct religion or to have reached a certain level of sanctity or holiness. In fact, I would say those things can sometimes get in the way. But no matter who you are, what you believe, or even how you behave, the invitation to awaken is always there. So what happens? It can be as simple as falling in love.
It could also be experiencing a deep loss.
It can be as simple as asking the question: What's the meaning of life? What happens after we die? Is this all there is? Why is life so painful? But also, why is it so heartbreakingly beautiful? Questions like this invite us to hear that knocking at the door of our heart. Once we answer the door, and once we invite the Spirit of Love in, nothing is ever the same. We are now citizens of heaven as well as of earth, of eternity as well as of time. We have awakened, and suddenly everything becomes possible.
The Second Initiation: Purification
But this leads us to our second initiation, and this is the initiation of purification.
Now, a thought experiment. Let's say you suddenly got news that somebody you really, really admired, in my case, it would probably be like Paul McCartney.
You know, I don't know, Taylor Swift. I don't know, you know. I wrote down some political examples, but I don't want to go there, so I'm gonna let you use your imagination. But you can imagine a political figure you really admire, you know, or somebody, yeah, somebody like a famous movie star or a musician or somebody who you really admire, and you find out by some strange quirk of fate, they are coming over to your house for dinner.
Right? What are you going to do? Fran, what are we gonna do? Paul McCartney will be there in two weeks. We're gonna buy a new house. But isn't that, you just clean up from top to bottom, don't you? You declutter, you maybe if it means just throwing everything in the garage, I'll deal with that later, you know. You do a spring cleaning even though it's the end of October.
Why do we do this? Well, we do it out of respect, don't we? But it's respect for the person, but it's also respect for ourselves, isn't it? You know, we want to put our best foot forward. You know, we want to honor the person. It's, you know, welcome to our simple home, you know, that kind of thing. And hopefully it would be a gracious experience. But now, so now imagine your heart has received word that the spirit that moves the sun and the stars is coming to visit you. And not only to visit, not only to start with, hey, I want tacos. They're moving in. They are moving in. The spirit of eternity wants to live in your heart.
You know, as much as I love my wife's sense of humor, no, we're not gonna move. It's our heart. If we move, the spirit would say, I'm gonna follow you. It's our heart the spirit wants. So it is normal to have this initiation again of purification. This idea that I got off script again.
This, I think I've said it all. You know, we'd mow the lawn, we'd, you know, maybe give the house a fresh coat of paint. So well, how do we do this on an interior life? Well, maybe we begin to let go of some of our attachments, don't we? Some of the ways that we, you know, when we're out on sixty-four and somebody cuts you off and you talk like a sailor for about 30 seconds, you know, that we let ourselves get, we give ourselves over to anger, we give ourselves over to fear, we do things that cause suffering. But you know what traditional religion calls sin. And I know that's a loaded word. But the idea that sometimes we suffer and sometimes we do things to cause suffering. So we move into a place of interior healing.
Let's let that go.
This isn't about shame. This isn't about, I'm a bad person— mea culpa—was it beating on the breast? That in itself is a mistake. But it is about acknowledging that sometimes the house needs a fresh coat of paint. Sometimes we have to take the steps to do what we can, again, out of love, love for ourselves as well as love for the spirit, to build a sacred vessel.
A vessel that's worthy of what we're being invited at. Okay, so it's time to practice our very best hospitality. We seek inner healing, inner cleansing, inner purification. And you know, I know that 12 steps, okay, addiction is technically an illness, but it is an illness that often has a spiritual consequence, doesn't it? And what do we do? If you do the traditional 12-step program, you turn yourself over to a higher power.
You know, you acknowledge, I can't do this. I can't let go of this addiction on my own. I need this spiritual help. And so that's the interesting thing about this initiation. We're running around wanting to clean the house so Paul McCartney can come over, and then suddenly we see Paul is standing there with an apron and a pair of gloves, and he's like, Let me help you. And you're so embarrassed, you're so humble. But he turns out to be a great guy.
And he helps you clean. That's what the Spirit of Love does. Spirit of love comes into our heart and she says, I will lead you on this healing journey. I will bring the transformation that you seek. Because I know that as you move into your deeper purity, boy, are you going to be a vessel for my love to radiate out of me.
The Third Initiation: Illumination
Such good stuff. I love it all. So what happens when we do all this amazing purification stuff? Well, once again, another initiation just kind of naturally emerges. And that is the third initiation, which is the initiation of illumination.
Illumination. So you've got the dirty window, you've got your Windex or whatever you use, or you know, some sort of organic, earth-friendly soap. You clean it up, you clean it up, you clean it up, and voila, the light shines through. Isn't it great? You know, my glasses, they always get messy, in fact, they're awful right now. They always get messy, and I get one of those little things, you know, get my Costco, those little things you clean up, and then suddenly I can see, you know.
So illumination represents what many of us think of as enlightenment or as mystical experience, or just, you know, this sense of the practice of the presence of God. You hear language like that. It's this idea that, another example would be anybody who has ever had a relationship with tobacco, with smoking, and you give it up, and then it's like, things taste so much better.
You know, smell, I've forgotten, you know, what it's like to smell perfume or to smell flowers. You know, again, as we let go of the things that separate us from our own inner divinity, the inner divinity just rushes back in. When you clear away everything that interferes with the flow of love in your life, well, the love just flows that much more abundantly. You become
a living breathing miracle. Now, the truth is you always were a living breathing miracle, but you become more conscious of it. And that creates a transformation. The light shines in you and through you with beauty and grace. Joy becomes the center of your soul's gravity. And guess what? We are still only halfway up the mountain. So, initiation number four.
The Fourth Initiation: The Dark Night of the Soul
Is called the dark night of the soul. The dark night of the soul. And it's kind of like, but wait a minute, I was enjoying the light. I was grooving, I was having all this ecstasy and this, you know, this practically walking on water. And now you're saying I gotta experience a dark night of the soul. Well, look at nature. After a beautiful day of sunlight comes the night. After summer comes the winter.
It is natural to enjoy and desire times of expansion and growth, but times of withdrawal and rest and renewal are just as important and just as divine. And so the dark night of the soul on the surface almost sounds like a cruel joke. Like is God playing hide and seek with me all of a sudden?
But if we can remember it is part of the nature that the divine has given us, we can see that this too is its own incubator for miracles. The dark night of the soul is a time when the light seems to vanish and we might experience confusion or disorientation or a sense of being spiritually adrift. Suddenly, God seems far away. We become painfully aware of the fact that despite all the purification work we did, we still can lose our temper at the drop of a hat. We still can do things that sting with a sense of remorse. We still experience suffering. Life is not perfect. What's that all about? Before we had learned how to live with the grimy window. Now the tiniest little speck drives us to distraction.
So, this is not, again, not about shame or failure. The spirit of love who dwells in our hearts is directing this process. It is about love being so splendid and powerful that we just want to yield more and more to its cleansing and healing power. So there's a paradox here, isn't there? We feel like we are bereft with a sense of divine absence. God seems far away. You know, He's gone back up into the heavens. And yet our heart is singing for the love that is calling us further and further up the mountain, further and further, deeper into divine joy. As the dark night progresses, we may find that it seems like we're being asked to give up everything.
Give up everything, even our beliefs, our dogmas, the things that we have held true for so long, and it's like suddenly even that seems to be like a house of cards. Nothing less than the highest and purest truth will ever satisfy us now. We are being prepared for the most spectacular initiation of all. The fifth initiation.
The Fifth Initiation: The Unitive Life
And Evelyn Underhill calls this the [unitive life]. The [unitive life]. You can also hear a lot of spiritual teachers in our day refer to it as the experience of non-duality. Non-duality, divine union, union with God, becoming one with God. Again, these are all words we use to try to explain again something that cannot be put into words. It is it is to be immersed in the limitless ocean of divine love. Here, there is no separation between your tiny self and the infinite manifestation of divine love. It's almost like we are a little drop of water and we've been dropped into the ocean. Bling.
And once you're there, it's like, can I have my drop of water back? That tiny drop has become the ocean, hasn't it?
No separation. This is what in the Bible it says,
"I live now, not I, but Christ lives within me."
And once again, Christ is simply a marker. I love in your principles that Christ was, what does it say? It's the symbol or the representation of the inner intersection between divine and human. Absolutely. As I surrender the fullness of my ego, what rushes in is that pure Christ spirit.
A friend of mine used to say,
"God is not elsewhere."
Isn't that a great line? God is not elsewhere. He's Irish, that's how the Irish talk.
Another friend put it this way:
"God and I are not two."
God and I are not two. The great German mystic, Meister Eckhart, famously said,
"The eye with which I see God is exactly the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowledge, and one love."
Friends, in the unitive state, you are no longer merely loved by love or in love with love, although both of those can be true. You are love.
You are love. You are light. You are the unending manifestation of pure joy, pure healing, pure wisdom, and pure service. Okay, on the outside, your life may seem just as ordinary or humble as anyone else's, because it is the nature of divine love to manifest in the purest and simplest humility.
But humility is not low self-esteem. Rather, it is the manifestation of a recognition that every dimension of our lives, body and soul, mind and emotion, action and contemplation, all of it is one with the divine. A manifestation of God, an expression of God. Jesus said,
"You are the light of the world."
Peter said,
"You are a partaker of the divine nature."
You are the Christ.
Making Ourselves Accident Prone: Prayer, Trust, and Generosity
So when do we sign up? The mystical journey sounds greater than any earthly journey that any of us can take. And I've seen a good chunk of the world. Since I was here last time, I've made it to Hawaii, from Hawaii to Scotland, right, Fran? And some beautiful places, trust me. This journey is better than all of that. Nothing can compare to the shimmering splendor of the journey into the heart of God.
But friends, the kicker is that we are not in control of this. It is God's work, the Spirit's work, not ours. Mystical union is not a goal we achieve, it is a gift we receive. But if I can't make it happen, what can I do to make myself available for it? And this brings me
to a saying that a friend of mine who is a Buddhist teacher loves to say. And I don't think it's original with him, but I don't know who said it first. But he is speaking in Buddhist language, he says:
"Enlightenment is an accident. Meditation makes us accident prone."
So in a metaphysical context, we might say union with God, divine union, non-duality is an accident, but the work of spiritual practice, meditation, contemplation, service, participating in a community like this is what makes us accident prone. So, how am I doing on time? Ooh, I need to wrap this up.
There's so much more. I can go on and on. But let me just end with one word. And again, from another great mystic, and this woman's name was Julian of Norwich. Julian lived in England also. In fact, when we visited the Evelyn Underhill Retreat House, we also visited where Julian lived. Julian taught that
"Prayer unites the soul with God."
That's how she put it. Prayer unites the soul with God. And she said, and in prayer, God teaches us two things: teaches us trust and generosity. Trust and generosity. And she says, so you've got prayer and you've got trust, and the Spirit wants us to be generous with both. And I remember the first time I read that, it was like, you know, a little light bulb, you know, like in the old cartoons, you know.
The Wile E. Coyote and the little light bulb goes off. If you haven't seen the Wile E. Coyote movie, go see it. It is amazing. It's at least as mystical as anything I've said this morning. So the little light bulb went off. It's like, yes, when we pray, we are opening our hearts to generosity and trust. When we are generous, when we give out of our abundance, we are opening our hearts to trust and to prayer.
And when we do the little work that we can do to trust Spirit more, we are opening our hearts to grow in generosity and prayer. So I think they dance together and each one supports the other. Prayer, generosity, and trust. And I would argue that those things make us accident prone. They soften our heart so that the spirit is able to do the amazing work
that she wants to do to bring us healing and transformation and joy. And then out of our spiritual magnificence, we then become available to serve others. Alright, I'm gonna wrap it up there, but thank you so much for letting me nerd out with you for the last 10 or 15 minutes. And maybe you'll invite me back and there'll be more.
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