Hi Gary,
Just reading your recent post on how mystics can't escape the map/terrain
problem has made me query a few of the points you mention.
Gary: "I am a junior grade mystic. I haven't honestly earned any merit
badges in any of the mystic skills/techniques of meditation of detachment.
But, hey I've read a whole bunch! So, onward..."
Well, I can't set myself up as a paid up mystic, either, but my reading, and
a little experience, leads me to some different conclusions.
Gary: "revelation is transmitted in the language of humans"
Perhaps. My reading suggests that mystic knowing is not verbal, though
undeniably we can only talk about it in language.
Gary: "mysticism, the product of that Divine union is totally contextual.
Totally particular to the specific culture and individual history of the
participant mystic."
I'm not convinced by this. Certainly mystic experience is often interpreted
within the language and thought forms of a particular religion or culture.
As you do by using sexual imagery. The mystic who most intrigues me is John
Wren-Lewis, who 'fell' into a mystic state after a near death experience,
and who had a low opinion of mysticism previously. He is also an intelligent
and articulate man, a scientist interested in religion, and of a naturally
sceptical bent. He also appears to me to be extremely honest, and as good a
person to comment on 'the dazzling dark', as he termed it, as any in today's
world. What is significant to me is that for him there was no path to mystic
experience - he had it thrust upon him. So he can affirm the powerful
reality of living in the moment, with a freedom from any special pleading.
He has no axe to grind, no ideology to uphold! And what I also find
interesting is that mystics from quite different traditions often have
little trouble communicating the core of their experience, at least to each
other.
Gary, quoting Rufus Jones "The fact is nobody seriously thinks of applying
the term mysticism to the classic manifestations of the great religions."
But they do, Gary. Or at least to the originators of these religions. If we
mean by "classic manifestations" the eventual shape of the religion that has
evolved, then I must agree. But references to the words of the founders of
these religions abound in the mystic literature, and imply that most major
religions are, if you like, epiphenomena of the mystic experience of their
founders, the largely static social fallout of intensely dynamic
'individual' mystic experience.
Gary: "All mystics have a revelation that is appropriate to their experience
prior to the mystic union!!! No human has ever had a different event"
"People/mystics were shaped by the ideas in their heads!"
Well, to the extent that their words about their experience are the same
words that they learnt in earlier experience, this must be so. But that the
experience was simply an outworking of earlier ideas; no, no, no. A few
minutes contemplation on the development of language in individuals should
convince you of that.
I would argue that what Wren-Lewis experienced was quite outside the realms
of his previous experience, and this makes his story most significant. What
is also significant is that this changed way of being still persisted when I
spoke to him some twenty years later. He would not describe his experience
as something that happened in time, to which he could refer later. He
described it as having "everything to do with a dimension of aliveness here
and now which makes ... each present instant so utterly satisfying that even
the success or failure of creative activity becomes relatively unimportant.
In other words, I've been liberated from what William Blake called obsession
with "futurity", which, until it happened, I used to consider a
psychological impossibility. And to my continual astonishment, for ten years
now this liberation has made the conduct of practical life more rather than
less efficient, precisely because time consciousness isn't overshadowed by
'anxious thought for the morrow'". (The Dazzling Dark, p 3) This has
considerably shaped my view that mysticism has little to do with 'peak
experiences' or 'revelations' or 'sex with the divine', or what not, and
lots to do with immediacy, and maintaining contact with the here and now of
experience, undistorted by our memories and projections.
Gary: "All we got is human words."
This really is a postmodern fantasy. As Pirsig points out, when I sit on a
hot stove what I get is not words, though some oaths may quickly follow, but
a low quality experience (and a burnt bum). The extreme deconstructionist
myth is that experience is just another form of language, just as elusive
and slippery as any other language. Pirsig argues differently, that the
experience of quality is the primal reality. Language is a static latch.
Regards,
John B
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