Let's not talk about the coronavirus which, dare I say it, is not important in the greater scheme of things*. Let's talk about more serious matters to do with the reasons for us being here in the first place rather than what may or may not provide the means of exit. Let's talk about that old favourite, the meaning of life.
There is a spiritual approach which seeks to transcend all idea of self, of form and of time and space. Its goal is to rest in complete 'presence', a state in which there is no movement, no change, no anything. This is the spirituality of pure being and is regarded by some as being at the zenith of true knowledge; the finishing point to which all paths must eventually tend.
I see the appeal of such a state for people who have suffered in this world and yearn for peace but I also think there is an element of spiritual escapism in the attitude behind it. Consequently, it is my contention that those who follow it will, after they have experienced a Nirvana-like state for a period, long or short, be impelled by an evolutionary inner urge or drive back into the world of time and space. They will be required to learn all the messy lessons of life they have avoided.
In this type of mysticism a person aims to dissolve his self into the universal sea of life and so be freed from all pain and suffering. Usually it is pursued by those of a contemplative turn of mind who wish to escape the hurly-burly of the created world and who see reality as transcending all form. As it does in its absolute sense but a key teaching of Christianity is that God looked at the world and saw it was good. So a Christian, and really by that I mean anyone who wants to live the life intended by God, does not reject the created world but resolves it by drawing it up into its spiritual origin. The uncreated plus the created is more than just the uncreated alone. Life manifests to become more. What this boils down to in practical terms can be summed up by asking the following question. Is the individual self a transitory thing to be transcended in a higher vision of the One or is it a fundamental reality which, to be sure, does merge into the One but which, when it does, retains its full integrity? Otherwise put, is the purpose of life found in returning to the One and being reabsorbed or is it found in a joyful union of the One and the Many with ceaseless interplay between the two? This interplay is love which can only be known in the latter case though, as a legacy of Christianity which is very much the religion of the latter case, it has been appropriated by devotees of the former, notwithstanding the fact that in their scenario it makes no sense and, indeed, would not even be possible. Love demands the full reality of the person.
Monistic mystics, those who seek to renounce the self completely, are actually looking for a return to the spiritual womb. Might this be, contradictory as it seems, because their real motive is not the desire to love and know and serve the living God but to enjoy a personal bliss, albeit in an impersonal form? They might spend years in meditation to perfect themselves for this but if their inner orientation is off then their meditation might bring them peace and detachment but it will not deepen real understanding. There is a big difference between renouncing the self for a perceived spiritual benefit (though who is this supposed to benefit?) and laying down your life for your friends. One is almost an investment or 'deal' while the other is a gift of self-sacrifice in love.
The approach criticised here can be associated with quietism which often has the allure of an advanced form of spirituality. The quietist turns his back on the world for absorption in contemplation. But the danger here is moral neutrality and moral neutrality actually enables immorality and must therefore share in the wickedness of the latter. If you don't give a proper recognition to creation, you will be unable to perceive or to stand against evil and will therefore be drawn into it. This is the trap for the monistic mystic.
*Note: Just to be clear, I am talking about the virus itself. Our reaction to it is important in that it is driven by fear and will potentially lead (was this the intention?) to vast numbers of people directly dependent on the state for their survival.
There is a spiritual approach which seeks to transcend all idea of self, of form and of time and space. Its goal is to rest in complete 'presence', a state in which there is no movement, no change, no anything. This is the spirituality of pure being and is regarded by some as being at the zenith of true knowledge; the finishing point to which all paths must eventually tend.
I see the appeal of such a state for people who have suffered in this world and yearn for peace but I also think there is an element of spiritual escapism in the attitude behind it. Consequently, it is my contention that those who follow it will, after they have experienced a Nirvana-like state for a period, long or short, be impelled by an evolutionary inner urge or drive back into the world of time and space. They will be required to learn all the messy lessons of life they have avoided.
In this type of mysticism a person aims to dissolve his self into the universal sea of life and so be freed from all pain and suffering. Usually it is pursued by those of a contemplative turn of mind who wish to escape the hurly-burly of the created world and who see reality as transcending all form. As it does in its absolute sense but a key teaching of Christianity is that God looked at the world and saw it was good. So a Christian, and really by that I mean anyone who wants to live the life intended by God, does not reject the created world but resolves it by drawing it up into its spiritual origin. The uncreated plus the created is more than just the uncreated alone. Life manifests to become more. What this boils down to in practical terms can be summed up by asking the following question. Is the individual self a transitory thing to be transcended in a higher vision of the One or is it a fundamental reality which, to be sure, does merge into the One but which, when it does, retains its full integrity? Otherwise put, is the purpose of life found in returning to the One and being reabsorbed or is it found in a joyful union of the One and the Many with ceaseless interplay between the two? This interplay is love which can only be known in the latter case though, as a legacy of Christianity which is very much the religion of the latter case, it has been appropriated by devotees of the former, notwithstanding the fact that in their scenario it makes no sense and, indeed, would not even be possible. Love demands the full reality of the person.
Monistic mystics, those who seek to renounce the self completely, are actually looking for a return to the spiritual womb. Might this be, contradictory as it seems, because their real motive is not the desire to love and know and serve the living God but to enjoy a personal bliss, albeit in an impersonal form? They might spend years in meditation to perfect themselves for this but if their inner orientation is off then their meditation might bring them peace and detachment but it will not deepen real understanding. There is a big difference between renouncing the self for a perceived spiritual benefit (though who is this supposed to benefit?) and laying down your life for your friends. One is almost an investment or 'deal' while the other is a gift of self-sacrifice in love.
The approach criticised here can be associated with quietism which often has the allure of an advanced form of spirituality. The quietist turns his back on the world for absorption in contemplation. But the danger here is moral neutrality and moral neutrality actually enables immorality and must therefore share in the wickedness of the latter. If you don't give a proper recognition to creation, you will be unable to perceive or to stand against evil and will therefore be drawn into it. This is the trap for the monistic mystic.
*Note: Just to be clear, I am talking about the virus itself. Our reaction to it is important in that it is driven by fear and will potentially lead (was this the intention?) to vast numbers of people directly dependent on the state for their survival.
73 comments:
@That's pretty much my own conclusion about this. The initial (private and personal) embrace of Monistic Mysticism is not necessarily harmful, and may be a step in the right direction. However, it is an intrinsically corrupting situation, and especially it becomes evil when preached.
I can't see any way in which is can be regarded as a good thing to preach this kind of self-negating nihilism, unless the whole thing is regarded as analogous to a spiritual tranquillizer - which is itself a nihilistic recommendation when prescribed for spiritual malaise.
(At least in a Western context) Mystic Monism is therefore analogous to (ie. spiritually-equivalent-to, not exactly the same as) suggesting that people spend their whole lives asleep, blind drunk, high on opiates - or advocating painless suicide.
I believe there's a saying to the effect that the heresy people most condemn is the one they incline towards. That is probably why I have written about this quite a lot. That and the fact that so many people are tempted in this direction because of sophisticated forms of Eastern mysticism. Western too but Eastern mostly. I don't fully reject it because I think it has its place but, far from being the acme of religious thought, I now see it as a stage to be outgrown by something more comprehensive.
This perfectly points out the pitfalls of Western people exploring certain strains of Eastern philosophy and religion. Naturally, its non-theist proponents have argued that this is a distortion and debasement- which might be true to some extent. Nevertheless, the main point remains: when the doctrines of maya and anatta are misapprehended (which is typically the case) they basically amount to "loving nihilism."
It's not just when they are misapprehended, Chris. Enabling nihilism is the logical outcome of those doctrines if they mean what they say they mean.
William,
Ha, somehow, I knew you would say that.
You would make Vyasatirtha and the Dvaita philosophers proud!
I don't know who the former is but I accept the latter! Ramanuja's criticism's of Sankara are correct in my view. "Unity is not the sublation of all diversity but the subordination of diversity to unity" is a good starting point. I know that Ramanuja is not actually a Dvaita philosopher but I see him as a sort of crypto-Christian since he regards the supreme reality as the Divine Person.
As you know, Ramanuja was the founder of vishishtadvaita or qualified nondualism . On this view, differences are affirmed and the Supremely Real is personal, but the world and God are considered in a kind of mind/body relationship . I don't think that a Christian theist could accept this kind of strong panentheism . One of the key doctrines of Christianity is creation ex nihilo, which would conflict (I think) with Vishishtadvaita's "organic" unity of Creator and created.
I have a question about oneness versus multiplicity. Part of spirituality is to know about and to become closer to the greatest reality. Yet, sometimes that reality is spoken of as more than our ordinary material world, but sometimes spoken of as less.
In the post you wrote: "There is a spiritual approach which seeks to transcend all idea of self, of form and of time and space. Its goal is to rest in complete 'presence', a state in which there is no movement, no change, no anything." But then if the most fundamental reality is simply reality but with form, time, and space subtracted, how is that higher than form, time and space?
If that is the truth, then Reality can be viewed as a pyramid where each step on the Great Chain of Being is simpler than the one below.
On the other hand, in some of your posts, you have said that matter is the most restricted level of reality. One of the reasons C.S. Lewis disagreed with Anthroposophy is not because its cosmology contained too much, but because it did not contain enough. This blog (https://reconditecogitations.blogspot.com/2009/12/great-war-cs-lewis-owen-barfield.html) excerpts a letter from C.S. Lewis to A.C. Harwood on the subject and it is worth quoting in full:
"No one is more convinced than I that reason is utterly inadequate to the richness and spirituality of real things: indeed this is itself a deliverance of reason. Nor do I doubt the presence, even in us, of faculties embryonic or atrophied, that lie in an indefinite margin around the little finite bit of focus which is intelligence—faculties anticipating or remembering the possession of huge tracts of reality that slip through the meshes of the intellect. And, to be sure, I believe that the symbols presented by imagination at its height are the workings of that fringe and present to us as much of the super-intelligible reality as we can get while we retain our present form of consciousness.
My scepticism begins when people offer me explicit accounts of the super-intelligible and in so doing use all the categories of the intellect. If the higher worlds have to be represented in terms of number, subject and attribute, time, space, causation etc (and thus they always are represented by occultists and illuminati), the fact that knowledge of them had to come through the fringe remains inexplicable. It is more natural to suppose in such cases that the illuminati have done what all of us are tempted to do:—allowed their intellect to fasten on those hints that come from the fringe, and squeezing them, has made a hint (that was full of truth) into a mere false hard statement. Seeking to know (in the only way we can know) more, we know less. I, at any rate, am at present inclined to believe that we must be content to feel the highest truths 'in our bones': if we try to make them explicit, we really make them untruth.
At all events if more knowledge is to come, it must be the wordless and thoughtless knowledge of the mystic: not the celestial statistics of Swedenborg, the Lemurian history of Steiner, or the demonology of the Platonists. All this seems to me merely an attempt to know the super-intelligible as if it were a new slice of the intelligible: as though a man with a bad cold tried to get back smells with a microscope."
If this view is true, then Reality can be seen as an inverted pyramid, where each step on the Great Chain of Being is richer and more varied, less restricted than the level below.
The Pythagoreans tried to reconcile unity and multiplicity. They said that if there are a variety of things, yet it is not chaos, then there must be an order, a pattern that binds them together and they were the first to use the word Cosmos, meaning order, to refer to the universe.
What do you think is the proper way to think about unity versus multiplicity?
Chris, I'm not saying they're exactly the same but they have points in common, certainly more so than advaita and Christianity.
NLR, your question does get to the heart of the matter. I must admit I tend to approach these things intuitively rather than intellectually and consequently I probably over-simplify. I would start from the premise that God is one and everything comes from him. Then I would move to the full acceptance of human individuality. How do we reconcile these two things? For me, God creates us in his image meaning he is the Subject, the Person that is the fundamental reality of the universe which means I see God as Person prior to spirit as being. He gives us freedom because only through freedom can we consciously know and love him. Thus there is unity which is him and multiplicity which is us and all the other forms of created consciousness. Both are real. God is ultimate reality but he has given us a full reality through creation.
You say that sometimes spiritual reality is spoken of as less than our world. I'm not aware of that and would completely disagree. On the other hand, I do think that experience of the material world offers something not available in the spiritual and that is the sense of separation which allows us to develop a full independence which includes the capacity to think and to think for ourselves. So I would never say matter is in any way bad but it is constricting from the spiritual point of view. Nonetheless through its function as object to the spiritual subject it enables us to know spirit more fully and that is invaluable. I do say matter is the most restricted level of reality from the point of view of consciousness but it is still part of reality and without it we would remain spiritual infants for it enables us to know our freedom by providing a locale in which we can be externalised, a place to which we can be sent out from God in order to know ourselves which we need to do before we can know him.
You also ask "if the most fundamental reality is simply reality but with form, time, and space subtracted, how is that higher than form, time and space?" But i am not saying that. I am saying that is the view of the mystics I criticise in this post. In my view the ideal is Christ who at the ascension took his body up into heaven thus unifying spirit and matter in the so-called mystical marriage. Form, time and space are good things which must be sanctified not abandoned. You could have neither goodness nor love nor beauty without them or at least you could not have the proper expression of these things.
The apparent contradiction between unity and multiplicity is a false problem. Why can they not co-exist? Perhaps they are just two ends of the one polarity.
I hadn't seen that letter of CS Lewis before. He really is a ceaseless fount of wisdom. I take it he is saying that all these occult systems actually end up materialising spirituality and I agree. Fascinating as they can be they tend to interpret the next world in terms of this one whereas it is really of a different dimensional order altogether.
William,
Thank you for your thougtful response.
I am glad to hear you say that unity and multiplicity can coexist and to read your thoughts on why how this comes to be.
If I may chip-in: a simple way I think about unity and multiplicity; is that our hope is for a multiplicity of persons, freely-choosing a unity of purpose, from motives of love.
The idea is - the world of separate objects that we ordinarily perceive, is an illusion - in reality, literally everything depends on everything else in the following manner. Object A can only be defined by contrasting it with object B - therefore, objects A and B necessarily go together. They exist as a team.
If you say object A could exist entirely on its own, that it has a self independent from any other object, a true self, then you are positing an object with no characteristics.
Therefore, everything good depends on everything bad - they are not separate things. They go together.
The world is one vast unity - there are no individual objects in it, everything goes together. From this point of view, everything is one vast beautiful perfection just as it is, and there is no goal or purpose in life. There is no reason to interfere, control, strive, seek etc - everything is perfection and bliss. You are 'released'.
The only goal may be to realize this view. That may be the only kind of spiritual practice worth doing, in this view.
The purpose of life can only be then, to appreciate it - "play".
And God is just this vast whole system - existence playing with itself. A form of pantheism.
Is this nihilism?
From the mainstream Western perspective, the world of separate objects is real, and therefore we have a purpose and goal - because individual objects, taken as individual objects, including our selves, are obviously inadequate. And pain and suffering, isolated and seen on its own and not as the necessary part of a system that contains joy and pleasure, must be eliminated (that is why "wars" on social ills like poverty, or "wars" on aging and death, are so common in the West. Wars against one side of reality).
So in this context, saying there is no goal must mean nihilism.
The main difference is - in the mystic view, this is it. We are just where we need to be. There is no goal because we've already reached it. Since we already are literally the whole world, there is no need for us to "grow".
Bruce Charlton wants to grow and become a God, one among many, and smaller than the world. The mystic feels he is already as large as the universe, he is already all the gods that there ever were or will be, so growth is meaningless. A misunderstanding.
The mystic simply posits that the goal of the mainstream striver has already been achieved - it was always there, we just didn't see it.
"The end of all our wandering will be to return to where we started".
The hinge here, it seems to me, is whether one sees the apparent world of separate objects as "real". Logically since ancient times, and in modern times scientifically, this view has been shown to be indefensible.
But on psychological grounds it retains appeal to many people - I believe Charlton calls it a First Assumption, and declines to defend it - and you cannot change a person's character or mind.
For people who accept this principle, life is very grim, unhappy,and serious drama, a battle between good and evil, and all hope is in the future. It is however a life full of drama and excitement, even great moment.
There is no real drama in the life of the mystic, obviously, because life isn't serious or important - in another sense, everything that happens is really just a drama, a play and a game, and the world is joyful, beautiful, fun.
The grim serious people are certainly entitled to their path, and no one should try and "convert" them. That isn't even possible. They are playing their own kind of game, which they enjoy.
As an aside, your idea William that the purpose of life is an endless process of creative growth strikes as really, as much as to say that life has no purpose :)
If there is no end state, no goal, and the process itself is the point - what you have is "play", not purpose.
But in the end, the mystic view - with its beyond good and evil - is unlikely to appeal to the masses. Many people are frightened of the idea that the world is not real. Some Mahayana Buddhist scriptures assert that the old style Buddhist, the seeker after personal growth, dropped dead when they heard the doctrine of Emptiness.
It is also extremely socially disruptive and a threat to any power and establishment - if people are not afraid, they will not work, struggle, and strive. Growth, development, civilization, science - will all disappear, because everyone is happy and content and will busy themselves with appreciating life rather than altering it.
Therefore, all traditions make these doctrines "hidden" - and Eckhardt was about to be burned by the establishment church.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the highest, most esoteric and hidden practice is known as Dzogchen - it was also controversial throughout its history.
And what is this highest and most sublime of teachings, that you can only study after years of practice and effort? To just let anything happen, control nothing, abandon meditation and all spiritual practice, and relax. Total acceptance.Lol.
One sees that calling it the "highest" is a bit of a joke. It is also an attempt to misdirect the establishment with its ideals of striving. Make them think its also about striving, you have to strive for years before you can reach this, etc, etc- so they won't persecute you.
Sorry for cluttering up your comments section just one more thing occurred to me -
Mystic religion goes together with a Stone Age nomadic lifestyle - no growth. No striving for a "higher" state, because you are already one with All. Life is an unending play.
Agricultural societies have an intermediate religion - the note has shifted towards striving, but one strives towards an end state where striving ends. The goal can be reached. In a sense, one must strive in this lifetime, to reach a goal where one no longer strives - all is perfection. This is traditional Heaven. There is still tolerance for and interest in mysticism, but it can be controversial and provocative to many.
Modern times, industrial and technological religion - endless striving and growth. Growth for its own sake. Mysticism either completely incomprehensible to most or rejected as absurd.
Are we perhaps poised for a resurgence of the mystical view of non-striving, as everything is a cycle? If so, I don't think it will be anything very abrupt - the non-striving view emerge and begin to coexist at first, perhaps uneasily, with the dominant striver view. Signs of this are surely happening.
Unknown, we've gone over this before and I don't think there is any need to again so I don't want to get embroiled in a long discussion. Suffice it to say that your philosophy, which I do not entirely reject though I think it is incomplete, focuses essentially on being but I believe that the true goal is a unification of being and becoming, absolute and relative, that produces something more than either one on its own. The mysticism you espouse denies the value of the person but why are there persons? If the end goal was as you describe there would have been no point in starting up the whole creative process at all.
"The end of all our wandering will be to return to where we started". Perhaps but we do so in a radically different way, as loving creative individuals.
Dzogchen is very interesting and quite profound but I don't see it as the highest practice because it cannot incorporate the active expression of love. Compassion yes, love no. The world is not just the ceaseless play of consciousness. It has an end goal. You cannot dismiss history just because there is something above and beyond that.
For sure, I'm not trying to get into any kind of argument and I'm certainly not trying to convert you. I've grown to respect and appreciate your view and certainly see it as a legitimate expression of the religious impulse.
In fact, from the mystic view, your view is a necessary counterpart and must exist of mysticism is to exist. It would make no sense to try and change you - all is good as it is.
Its really a personal choice. I just enjoy laying out different possible ways of seeing the world without any intent to convert any one.
"The mysticism you espouse denies the value of the person but why are there persons? If the end goal was as you describe there would have been no point in starting up the whole creative process at all."
Exactly, there is no "point" in starting up the creative process or in having persons - the whole thing is the universe playing with itself!
It didn't "have" to happen, and there is no point to it - except fun. Its God experiencing himself in a billion different ways.
That is the mystic view. Of course you reject it - I kNow that. I even respect and appreciate that.
But there it is - its one possible view, that appears in all religions again and again.
"The world is not just the ceaseless play of consciousness. It has an end goal."
I apologize then, what is the end goal according to you?
I thought both you and Bruce saw the purpose of life as an endless process of creative growth.
Is this incorrect?
Its fascinating to me because according to my scheme above, the religion of endless creative growth - modernity - is in a way arcing back towards mysticism, in that there is no end goal to strive for.
It still retains a considerable striving element - because there is no end goal, but millions of mini-goals, and there is a clear "direction" - which is not the case in mysticism, which has no goal and no direction.
But the mere elimination of the end goal of traditional religion - the traditional Heaven - strikes as an emerging dissatisfaction with goals.
But is this not your view, that life is a process of endless creative growth? Do you think there is an end goal?
I would say the end goal as far as this world is concerned is the fulfilment of love which means the spiritualisation of matter so that it is raised up in glory. Christ said" The very stones would cry out." Perhaps one day they will. I always return to the Ascension as the summation of the evolutionary process and i think there is an evolutionary process as in the unfoldment and expansion of consciousness.
A few more ideas I wanted to share - William, if you wish me to cease and desist please let me know I promise I will not post any more. I find these discussions - not arguments - fascinating and there are few places where people are interested in spirituality. But I also know that real mysticism has always been seen as provocative and controversial and many would prefer not to discuss it. I completely respect that.
Regarding escape, many Eastern faiths frankly describe themselves as paths of liberation - if you are in a bad situation, there is nothing wrong with trying to escape. Why wouldn't you?
From the mystic POV, strivers who are trying to achieve goals are trying to escape. They are trying to escape where they are.
Much mystic literature from the East actually defines itself as a path if "no escape" - they think suffering comes precisely from thinking you have to escape, that you have to get anywhere.
So obviously, we are all trying to escape this bad situation we find ourselves in somehow by being born - at least it appears to us as a bad situation.
The mystic tries to escape it by realizing a point of view from which it isn't really a bad situation at all - that he actually doesn't have to escape, that's a misunderstanding.
Paradoxically, the Eastern paths of Liberation really amount to liberation from the idea that you even need to be liberated.
The establishment religious type tries to escape by actually getting to a better place or condition, or by changing himself.
And in the end, it all depends on what you think of our mind - is the normal picture of the world it produces accurate, or just an approximation and thus in some ways an illusion?
"I would say the end goal as far as this world is concerned is the fulfilment of love which means the spiritualisation of matter so that it is raised up in glory. Christ said" The very stones would cry out." Perhaps one day they will. I always return to the Ascension as the summation of the evolutionary process and i think there is an evolutionary process as in the unfoldment and expansion of consciousness."
Thank you.That is a perfectly coherent and worthwhile view that I can very much sympathize with.
The only difference between us is, that I think from the right point of view, the material is the spiritual. Matter is already spiritualized, if we can bit see it.
Love is already fulfilled - everything is interdependent, in a cosmic embrace of complete love.
We don't suffer so much in what we want - just on whether the path there is in our minds, or in physical space.
Or deeper, whether we even need a path - or we are already there, beyond all paths.
We need the path to become fully conscious of what always and already is. Perhaps God needs us too to become more fully conscious of what he is.
Escape from prison is a good idea but the escapism I refer in the post is the attempt to escape from self as opposed to sanctifying it. The self is essentially a good thing, a gift from God, but it has gone bad because it has turned in on itself. By giving itself back to God it can become holy.
I think spiritual escapism is the correct word. There is already a huge mind-body disconnect in the west and the New age stuff plays into it. You might say it seeks to indulge in the pleasures of the body (including spiritual trips), but what it really amounts to is to flee from the sober condition and task of the material world. It's all about dissolving the outer world in favor of a floating state of mind only.
If you discard the world of things "out there" as illusion, that means you are just rejecting the materialist conception. I would argue that the traditional Christian POV is that intimate relationship between subject and object, in which the qualitative experience of the outer world is real. This affirms both the mind and the world in an empirical sense. The danger of new age spirituality is that it plays into the Lutheran impulse of seeing nature as entirely bad to be overcome and therefore closing of the senses in favor of a mere rationalistic belief.
If you don't believe in Christ, the path of dissolution might sound better. Maybe during the age of the Buddha, but today, when Ahriman seeks to replace the body with technology? It will only lead to a 'mindful' virtuality where nature and suffering is abolished. We need the affirmative action of Christ to face evil and we need to taste His blood to come to our senses!
Thanks Eric. Good comment. The approach advocated by Unknown does indeed sever the mind from the world which means it severs the self from others who are not perceived as real in themselves but only real insofar as they are part of the great All.
Eric - it's not about rejecting the physical world. It's about realizing that the world divided into separate objects - the world of matter - is an illusion. The world as "measured" by our minds.
And it certainly isn't about dissolving the outer world for a floating state - it is about letting things be just as they are.
It is based on the idea that our own efforts are getting us into trouble - we are tripping over our own feet. So we just have to chill. Go along with. Our own efforts create this feeling of separation, of struggle, against the world that is the source of our frustrations and sense of being an inadequate small particle that we then have to "grow".
Mainstream religion is based on the opposite idea - that effort is exactly what will get us out.
Both are in a sense escapes - you say it is an escape from the task at hand. Correct, but task at hand is an escape from the situation at hand :)
So.
Different paths.
"We need the path to become fully conscious of what always and already is. Perhaps God needs us too to become more fully conscious of what he is."
Yes, this is the mainstream path of effort. And it is perfectly legitimate. The counter culture path of no effort is the other side of the coin.
William, the path I am describing us the path of no effort - the mystic path . It seeks to change nothing. It does not reject it obliterate anything.
The Eastern doctrines say again and again reject nothing and cling to nothing - let it be.
So it does not obliterate individuality - it recognizes that individuality only exists because of interdependence. An object "in itself" - existing alone and unable to be compared with other objects - would not be perceivable, because to perceive is to compare and contrast.
Interdependence is the ground of individuality - not it's opposite.
To be fair, there IS a type of oath that fits your description, especially in the older Buddhism and Hinduism.
@Unknown
Buddhist techniques can of course be excellent in attaining sobriety and equilibrium of the mind but the question is what metaphysical end you use it to. I was talking about the spiritual effects it has on modern new age spirituality specifically. I believe there is a huge difference between the world before and after the incarnation of the Logos. I find Buddhism very materialistic and subtractive in its metaphysical way to relate to this world. Actually it peculiarly reminds of the British empiricist David Hume who I was reading about the other day. He said something like only the world of senses is real and everything else is fantastical imagination of perceived separate "things" added together to create mythical figures and beliefs. It seems to me that buddhism both affirms and reject this view, only to diminish the relevance of the individual in the end. Unfortunately it plays into the wrong powers in this day and age.
@unknown It is said that the history of religious impulses follows the path of the Sun. And you are right in that we have still much to learn from the morning sun - with Buddhism a reflection of its glorious last fading rays.
But the sun is now well past the meridian and the Eastern Path has fallen into shadow.
Everything changed when a God came to Earth. A seed was planted in the Earth and Humanity. Both now are on a forward path of redemption. Many will fail, souls may be lost en-route - the stakes couldn't be higher. And so it would be a great mistake to dismiss matter as Maya for in truth we are responsible for raising matter up to the spirit. Every animal, rock and tree now looks to humanity for their redemption - just as we look to Christ for our own salvation.
Buddhism does not say that only the world of our senses is real.
It says that the conceptual net we cast over the world of our senses in order to divide it up into little bits, measure it, and control it, is the source of our feeling of alienation and the frustrating sense of struggle we have against the world.
We mentally divide the world in order to measure it - and then forget that that was just an expedient, and begin thinking we really are these small, separate fragments that can die. Then we feel separate and alienated from everything else, panic, and begin all these projects to "grow" our selves.
The point of Buddhism is not to tell you what the world "is" - but to free your mind from nets it has gotten stuck in. It is a path of "liberation".
So it is the opposite of "materialism" - matter comes from meter, to measure. Materialism is the world divided up into little bits for the purpose of measuring and controlling. Freed from this conceptual net, the works is sheer wonder and magic.
Hume was, of course, materialist and while he discarded some nets, he trapped himself in others.
Buddhism certainly diminishes the relevance of the individual - it diminishes the relevance of all objects. But it also frees the individual to be exactly what he is, and gives him cosmic relevance.
As an individual you are nothing - but you are also the whole universe, and thus everything.
Since you are already everything and there is no need to "work on yourself", you can finally truly be your self, just as you are. If you had to fit some kind of predetermined plan that your mind cooked up, you'd be stereotyped and boring. You'd kill your individuality. "Trying" to be am individual is an oxymoron.
But you can only not want to change yourself if you recognize your interdependence with everything else, that you are not separate. So the condition you to be exactly the individual you are in all your glorious fullness is to recognize clearly that you are not separate from the whole, and so are not going anywhere.
That is why in Zen you see such marvelously eccentric and richly individual characters - individuality cannot exist without spontaneity, and spontaneity can only exist if you trust yourself just as you are now, and that comes from recognizing you are everything and thus not in need of change.
Moonsphere - your vision is moving and beautiful, and I can certainly understand why it appeals.
It is a great and exciting drama, and a wonderful culmination.
It is really a question of personal intuition and character.
I have always had an intuition that the world is sheer magic right now, and no culmination is needed - if we can see it aright, and I have had many moments where it appeared that way.
I then began the attempt at spiritual cultivation, to see the world this way permanently - as I dug deeper, I saw that all effort at achieving this state just pushed it further away.
That led me to see that everything is interconnected, and my self struggling against the world was an illusion, and I do not have to "wrestle" with the world to achieve that mystic state - it comes and goes, and it doesn't matter, because I am already everything. There is no separate me.
But this is my path.
Everyone has to follow their in most intuitions and sense of how things are.
I am just describing what true mysticism is, so that it can be accepted or rejected based on what it is. It is not for everyone. Its just one alternative.
@Unknown
Good then. Buddhism is a negative method of mind purification and Christ is an affirmative path for bodily ascension. There are seemingly two ways out of Maya - Annihilation (subtraction) or Heaven (vertical reincarnation). Christ has built us a Heaven to dwell in according to His promise. I can only take him for his word. Christianity is a counter-intuitive but life affirming path of lifting up creation through works and communion while Buddhism is an individualistic path of indifference. It has no positive vision for anything and developed as a rejection of society and family. The best thing for you would certainly be to become a monk so that you can do your best to avoid reincarnating into something less than human in the next life. Like a God, for example.
In a way Buddhism and Christianity are the only serious forms of spirituality. But the former is man's attempt to overcome material attachment on his own while the latter is divine revelation that promises not life stripped back to the bone, albeit the spiritual bone of pure consciousness, but the life more abundant. God creates to become more. Return to unmanifest being, which is basically the path you describe Unknown, is an option but it ignores the Christian revelation that the person is not a barrier to understanding but the key to greater understanding. It is also powerless against evil which it doesn't recognise or nor properly recognise. But evil is real in the world and its action here has an impact on the next if it is not confronted and defeated within the soul and that is an active thing that does require effort.
That's a bit harsh :)
It is important to note o am talking about the Mahayana. The older Buddhism did indeed start out in many ways as rejection of desire, but as the logic of desire was better understood - i.e, to desire not to desire is itself a desire, so you cannot cultivate non-desire. To try and destroy ego only builds the ego, so it is impossible to destroy ego - Buddhism developed its true logical implications in the Mahayana, which avoids extremes.
Buddhism is certainly a "negative" path in the sense that it is based on the idea that everything is perfect just as it is, right now - and our own actions are preventing us from seeing this. So instead of building up, we have merely to free ourselves.
And as for individualism, it gives you the freedom to be who you are - but it does so by telling you you have no separate self, so there is nothing to strive for or fear. Just relax, and be spontaneously.
As for indifference, it is the joy of play - not a stony suppression of emotion. Enjoy, but don't take it seriously.
It is not the rejection of family and society - unless they make it impossible for you to live spiritually, of course. Rejection of family and society would be a form of striving, trying to change oneself, of one sided desire.
Anyways I am not a Buddhist - although I am inspired by it.
William - I would say the concept of "more" only makes sense if a world of separate objects is real. An separate object may feel itself small and inadequate and wish to become more.
You say God created to become more - this situated God within the universe, which is larger than him. I believe Bruce explicitly sees God as a limited being within the universe, who quite reasonably may wish to become more.
However, if God is everything, and there is nothing beside him - the concept of more ceases to make sense. In that context, creation can only be a sort of play, without having any serious purpose because everything is ready completely fulfilled.
As for returning to the unmsnifest source, far from it - there is no need to go anywhere or change anything. There is no rejection and no building up. Properly seen, the manifest world is perfect just as it is, and there is a deep mystery in it which we cannot solve.
The Buddhist phrase for this is Samsara and Nirvana are one, not different - there is no where to go, no need to escape, just to see correctly.
And then - there isn't even any need to try to see correctly. Trying just pushed it away, because it is based on the false premise that there is a you separate from the world that can act on it. Its like trying to pull your self up by your bootstraps - impossible.
So you are already everything, there is no need to cultivate anything.
You are correct that Buddhism does not recognize evil - but what is evil?
The most evil being - Satan himself - thinks his actions will bring him himself. He is merely unenlightened about what will truly bring him happiness.
There are different levels of enlightenment - and we should have compassion for the blind.
As for evil being eradicated, how can it, when it goes together with good? Because you can only tell what's good by comparing it and contrasting it with evil. Lose that ability to compare, and you lose your ability to see good. You can't have just one side.
"And as for individualism, it gives you the freedom to be who you are - but it does so by telling you have no separate self"
So back to Hume again then, because this is what he said. That there is no unchanging soul, that "I" is just a collection of floating sensations and memories. That every composite idea of oneself or the world are false idols to be crushed. The Buddha could have said the same thing. There is a clear philosophical correlation between materialism and Buddhism. Both seek to negate the primacy of the subject and have an empty view of the human being. The difference being that in Buddhism we have accumulated effects from past lives, supposedly being able to reincarnate without there being any basis for our being that could reincarnate.
It is really a question of personal intuition and character.
Indeed, that is true. There is also the question of why someone who admits to being temperamentally unsuited to Christianity, is attracted to a forum such as this one. ;)
You say you are not a Buddhist, but at the same you say "this is my path". Were you once a Christian? Are you a Westerner looking East? Are you younger or older? At a certain point in a debate, these things do become relevant.
Eric - materialism is the affirmation that what our senses reveal, together with what Kant would call our mental categories that we use to organise this raw data, is the only reality.
Buddhism does not believe in reality at all - life is a dream, an illusion. Matter is not real.
I am not sure why denying that there is an essence to the subject is materialism - seems rather the opposite. Positing a "core" to a subject - that it exists independently if everything else - seems closer to materialism.
As for Hume, the only point at which he touches Buddhism is in his discovery that there is no "core" we can identify as the self. Otherwise he was an affirmative materialist.
I agree reincarnation doesn't fully make sense in Buddhist logic.
Moonsphere -
Well, I am attracted to this forum because I like discussing spiritual ideas in an unconventional setting, and there are few places you can do so these days. And also because I feel in modern times, the mystic position is widely misunderstood - and I seek to clarify it.
As for my self, I am an American. I spent several years reading up on Christianity and thinking I would become one, but never fully practiced.
I seem unable to settle into any one tradition, unless mysticism is a tradition :) But mysticism is counter cultural.
Perhaps I am that dreaded thing, spiritual but not religious :)
If I am causing offense or distress here and this is a forum for co.kitted Christians, I certainly apologize and would cease and desist.
"I am not sure why denying that there is an essence to the subject is materialism - seems rather the opposite. Positing a "core" to a subject - that it exists independently if everything else - seems closer to materialism."
In materialism, there is no spiritual essence to the individual. The core is matter (separation). In Buddhism, there is no spiritual essence to the individual. The core is spirit (unity). They are opposite relatives. Christ is what balances this equation. Materialism has it upside down. There are individual souls but no material "things".
Eric - I don't think a position which does not believe the physical world is real, or that our senses and minds reveal an accurate picture of the world, can be described as materialism.
Anyways I am glad you find comfort and solace in Christ. There are many paths, and there are many different types of people.
Unknown, you are not causing any offence at all. You are always courteous and simply put forward your position which is fine. I appreciate the fact that you feel you can comment here. We disagree but that also is fine. I sympathise with your pov, having been drawn to it myself, but I think the fundamental point hinges on whether God is primarily being or Person. I believe it is the latter and I also believe he has a purpose in creating. I certainly don't see him as a limited being within the universe as you say above but I do see him as creative which in your vision he is not, not really, since the idea of creation as play is just cutting something that can't be explained by a particular system down so that it can fit in that system.
But shall we call it a day for the time being? Please feel free to comment further if you wish but I think we've gone as far as we can go on this thread.
Thanks for the conversation, William and others. Yes, we've said all for the time being.
Unknown,
I noticed that you use the term "mysticism" as if it's a particular approach or understanding. IMO, that's a word that you seem to have appropriated to reference your own personal spiritual philosophy- a kind of "mere" Buddhism .
If you are coming from a Perennialist point of view, then I presume that you believe that there is a tremendous unanimity among mystics in different places and times? I think that there's a certain truth to that, except, of course, for all the mystical traditions that are fundamentally bhaktic, where the goal is union , not identity. This is the core of the dispute between theists and nontheists and , incidentally, part of how I came to discover William's excellent blog.
William takes the position that non-theistic spirituality is essentially nihilistic.
I'm somewhat reluctant to go that far. Nevertheless, I do concede that his pov certainly has teeth. The ego or "litte me" is a shifty fellow and the danger of spiritual pathology is a problem no matter what metaphysic one espouses, including the theistic traditions. But, the nontheistic traditions can be particularly dangerous for people of the modern secular world- the pitfalls of nihilism and narcissism being the most prominent.
I wouldn't go quite that far either! But it certainly has the strong potential to go in that direction particularly, as you say, for Western people who don't have a strong religious background.
Chris - in a certain sense, mysticism is nihilistic. It deflates the world. It says the world simply isn't very serious at all, that you are not very serious at all. It devalues both the world and you.
The world has no purpose, no goal, and isn't serious or important. You're not serious or important.
That's pretty nihilistic, in a sense.
What, the world has no value? We have no value?
What happens when you see the world this way though, isn't depression - you feel light, and joy arises within you. A burden is lifted.
Neither the world nor your self being serious or important, you can just play - the world becomes magic and beauty.
We must ask our selves why we really want to develop our egos so much, why we want to feel we are so important and significant - why do we wish to become Gods, saints, "Enlightened", sages. All this is an ego trip, an attempt to be important and serious.
Why do we want this?
Because we feel a lack - we feel inadequate. And it may be we feel lacking because we have been told we must be more. The very wanting of more may be what is making us feel lacking.
Nihilism as bitter rejection of the world is not what I am describing. Angry rejection or disgust still means you expected something and were disappinted. But what if you expected nothing?
The idea that the world has no meaning only causes suffering if you expect it to have a meaning.
Desire, expectation, hope, fear - according to Buddhism, these are the causes of suffering. And desiring to be "more" is the cause of suffering.
Not distracted by any grand tasks, since you and the world are unimportant, you can for the first time see the beauty and magic in every moment of every day. Not burdened by fear or hope, you can just play.
The mystic vision is that "everything is well, and all manner of thing shall be well".
But the gateway to that is nihilism - to die to your self, to the world. That sounds so serious and grim lol - all it means is to not take your self or the world as serious or important.
Laughter, joy, and lightness, magic, beauty, and mystery - that is mysticism.
As for theism vs non theism, I am not sure that is the dividing line - mysticism certainly exists within theistic traditions, and theistic traditions don't necessarily have simplistic depictions of a personal God.
The god of the Old Testament, though exhibiting personal characteristics, is deeply mysterious and the very foundation of reality itself. He is awe inspiring as he is depicted. He is infinitely more than even the greatest imaginable person.
And in Buddhism, personal deities as manifestations of the underlying mystery are plentiful.
Words are just words - we probably shouldn't take them too seriously.
@Unknown I think what you are missing here is a sense for the miraculous.
By that I mean, the miracle of belief itself. You will know that one cannot choose ones beliefs - that way lies madness. And so we are somewhat at the mercy of the fates.
There are of course some believers who are on a collision course with a crisis of faith. One can read just how Dawkin's "God Delusion" or some other atheist bestseller tipped them over the edge. But that path is well trodden and the signage well understood. It is not a miracle to become another casualty of an increasing secular and science-oriented society.
What is less well understood is the journey in the other direction. To become a believer does take a miracle. I can only speak for myself but it is a life-changing event that one gives thanks for every day.
A breezy exposition by the nihilist, the atheist or the humanist is no siren call to such a person. There will be absolutely no need to be strapped to the mast lest ones willpower fails, such is the emptiness of the vision on offer! A feeling of sadness perhaps might describe it best.
Unknown,
I sympathize with what you say about striving and development. If the purpose of our lives is perpetual development, then that is unsatisfactory, since it does not really answer the question about purpose but locates it in the future. We never encounter purpose as it is in itself.
On the other hand, the opposite viewpoint, that, ultimately, reality is One and all multiplicity is an illusion is also unsatisfactory because while it situates us within a magnificent pattern it also does not explain why we are here in the first place.
C.S. Lewis gave a good characterization of the tension between these two views in his essay Is Theology Poetry: "For I take it there are two things the imagination loves to do. It loves to embrace its object completely, to take it in at a single glance, and see it as something harmonious, symmetrical, and self-explanatory. This is the classical imagination; the Parthenon was built for it. It also loves to lose itself in a labyrinth, to surrender to the inextricable. This is the romantic imagination; the Orlando Furioso was written for it."
Many seem to believe that in any philosophy, we must pin down the first principles exactly and that any mystery in the philosophy is a pathology, an indication of a lack of knowledge or a lack of rigor in one's thinking. And once we have pinned down those first principles, any more knowledge will be merely filling in the details. However, as you say, mystery is important. Rather than being a pathology, mystery is an indication of depth, a sense of a lack of completeness, in an intellectual sense.
Hermetic philosophy, as referred to by Thomas Browne in Religio Medici, speaks of levels of reality: "The severe Schools shall never laugh me out of the Philosophy of Hermes, that this visible World is but a Picture of the invisible wherein, as in a Pourtraict, things are not truely, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some more real substance in that invisible fabrick." Perhaps mystery is an indication that our level of reality is incomplete, and following the idea of the Celestial Hierarchy, perhaps there are many layers above ours, themselves incomplete. Only the highest level, the level where God dwells, is complete in itself.
In summary, there really does seem to be a tension between oneness and multiplicity and perhaps the full resolution of this paradox is not to be found in our world and this is no more a problem than the fact that mountains in the distance look faint is a problem of vision -- it is because they are far away that they are faint, not because of a defect of our eyes.
This comment is not meant as an argument, but simply as a presentation of some views on these matters.
I'm delighted that my little blog has been the forum for such an interesting debate. I do think though that the question boils down to this. Is life fundamentally the absolute only (essentially the Buddhist view and that of those who emphasis oneness at the expense of multiplicity - despite the later teaching that Samsara is Nirvana) or is it the union of the absolute and relative, oneness and multiplicity, which is the Christian view? The latter is surely fuller, more complete and the only one that gives real meaning and purpose to creation. Simply to say there is no meaning and no purpose is an evasion. We know there is or we would not have the concept of these things.It is also the higher revelation given by Jesus, coming from above downwards, that supersedes the discovery of Buddha which was a human attempt to plumb the depths of existence but without reference to God. The Buddha founds the depths of the Self but not the depths of God and these are not the same thing despite popular metaphysical belief that they are.
The Christian revelation means that reality is personal, made of persons not things. No ego does not mean no self. It simply means that the true self does not exist in space/time.
NLR - thank you for your thoughtful and excellent comment.
I am not sure there is a tension between oneness and multiplicity properly understood. Oneness just means that nothing has an individual essence but everything is interconnected. But connection is the ground of multiplicity.
You can only perceive one thing by comparing to another - that means when you see black, you automatically see white. That's Oneness.
You can't take blackness and imagine it existing on its own. Imagine a universe containing black and no white - that makes no sense. One implies the other. Black has no independent essence.
So oneness and multiplicity are actually the exact same thing, as the Buddhist scriptures say. Samsara and Nirvana are the same thing.
If you demanded that each object had its own essence, not only could there be no change, each object would have no characteristics that we could perceive.
So oneness understood as just everything being interdependent and having no essence - no "ego" - of its own, then multiplicity isn't a puzzle, it is the condition of oneness so understood, and our being here has no purpose beyond just being.
Think of your happiest moments - were you going anywhere, or were you doing something with no purpose, like maybe walking through some beautiful countryside or enjoying time with your friends?
Life can be seen as just play - the most enjoyable and worthwhile things we do - art, music, nature, friendship - have no purpose, in general.
Yes, I think mystery suggests other dimensions of reality - and I think we should live with the mystery and never try and solve it.
Why? Because if you solve the mystery, it becomes a part of the world of our senses and minds. Its no longer another dimension of reality. Its been brought into this one.
So we all have this sense that there is dimension of reality beyond our senses and our minds, and that if we manage to solve it, we haven't really solved it, just found something that fits into the rather small world of our senses and mind.
All the mystics have said that to approach God through knowledge is to miss the most interesting thing about him - that he represents an order of reality beyond our senses and minds. If he can be brought into the folds of our minds, he is reduced and not so interesting any more.
So you just live with the Mystery. Because anything you're able to solve, isn't It.
It's like living on the edge of a beautiful and mast mist shrouded forest - if you ever plumbed its depths, it would lose its fascination. If someone gave you a full map of all its secrets, it would become merely knowledge.
I think it all comes back to the status of our minds - I think the sense that our minds our finite, that there is something beyond it, is the crucial element of religion. And I think THE heresy that set modernity in motion is limiting our selves to only what can become knowledge. To shrink our world to that narrow compass.
All religion I think is this fascination with that which cannot become knowledge, which is beyond our minds - we feel all value, all magic and wonder, comes from that place we can never know.
We must live at the edge of the forest, connected to the mysterious depths. The Japanese have a word for it - Yugen, that sense of mystery you might feel on seeing an endless forest or misty mountain range stretching beyond sight, or a flock of ducks disappearing into the distance.
William - yes, it's wonderful that your blog has become home to such interesting ideas!
I think a lot of your criticism applies to the older Buddhism but not to the Mahayana - which developed the implications of the older Buddhism after experience had taught what it really meant to transcend desire and ego - and it was quite surprising.
In Mahayana, oneness and multiplicity are not alternatives. The way they understand Oneness - that nothing can be understood on its own, grasped on its own, perceived on its own - the principle of contrast or interdependence - is the same thing as multiplicity.
Oneness and multiplicity, in that system, is the same thing.
As for ego, they don't mean our ordinary experience of self - they mean the notion that anything has an essence absolutely independent of everything else. The idea that anything can exist on its own.
And since logically, you can only tell something apart by contrasting it, nothing can exist on its own - have an absolutely independent essence.
A lot of our fear comes from our belief that we exist completely on our own and so can die. Also our sense of alienation. Also our sense that we need to be more.
You never came into being so you can't die. You don't exist in that sense - as an independent being.
Its asking us to see that the only individual object is the entire universe - all the objects we see within the universe, cannot, logically, be objects at all - because to perceive them, you have to compare them to other things.
Anything you can only see by comparing to something else, cannot be an independently existing thing on its own - it is dependent on something else.
What is the only thing that you cannot compare to something else? The universe.
As for purpose or meaning - the ultimate state and experience necessarily cannot have purpose. Purpose always implies a beyond, meaning always implies a beyond.
But the highest state, by definition, has nothing beyond. It is the ultimate.
It doesn't have to be static, it can be a state of change and becoming - that can be the highest state.
Now, you say that we are not in this ultimate stare now, but must work to reach it - so for the time being at least there is purpose.
However, this depends on the notion that individual objects exist - if the only object is the universe, then it is already in an ultimate state. Is always completely fulfilled and perfect.
Therefore, all change and becoming is play :)
Spiritual practice is about attaining this vision. That's the penultimate perspective.
The ultimate perspective is that whatever arises is an expression of an ultimate perfection, there is no need even for spiritual practice - and that's when we get Zen and Dzogchen etc.
Meaning points to a beyond. The ultimate state by definition cannot have meaning.
Heaven has no meaning. There is nothing beyond it.
Unknown,
I'm trying to get a sense of where you are coming from....
The Buddhist perspective is a based on process metaphysics whereas the Western systems are founded upon substantialist philosophies.
I'm curious, do you believe that truth is one, and consequently, these different approaches of describing Reality ultimately converge?
If there is, indeed, a Primordial Tradition or underlying Perennial Philosophy (what you seem to call "Mysticism"), how do you respond to the problem of contradictory core doctrines between the various systems?
Ok, but we need to distinguish between older and newer Buddhism.
The older Buddhism believed in the existence of impermament things that never added up to a unified identity and that were in constant flux. In that sense it was process metaphysics.
The newer Buddhism extended the insight of no essence to everything - so there no more things. Nothing had an ego, an essence. So there was no process in the sense of things changing and becoming.
There was change and becoming - but no things which changes and became.
It is an elusive view, but the best analogy is dream and illusion. It has a kind of reality but not the substantive one you think.
That's s very different kind of process metaphysics that goes beyond the dichotomy you presented - and ultimately its not really metaphysics because it doesn't really describe the ultimate reality at all.
It is just negation of our ordinary way of seeing without really putting anything in its place. You live with mystery about the ultimate.
As for Perennial tradition and all paths converging, I believe that all paths contain a core tradition - mysticism - that is largely the same. Sufism, Eckhardt, Dzogchen, etc.
To me this is the flower of each tradition.
But obviously, traditions have very different core principles outside of the mystical side - the Christian emphasis on development and progress is obviously very different than the Buddhist emphasis on the world as dream and illusion.
Now, the way I organize this is hierarchically - all traditions are effective for some people and contain some truth, just each has more or less insight.
So I don't seek the conversion of anyone nor do I feel mysticism should become the One True Religion. It is only right for some.
Moonsphere - I do believe in the miraculous - the world seems uncanny and wondrous to me, something I can never fully know.
I am happy you find comfort in beliefs and that is certainly a legitimate path.
There is another path, that of faith - you have no beliefs, but faith in the uNiverse, in God. Instead of supporting yourself with beliefs, you abandon yourself to the universe, you surrender to it, because you have faith that "all is well, and all manner of thing is well".
But beliefs certainly bring great comfort and I am not opposed to them at all. Since anyways I think the world us mysterious and unknowable why not have beliefs.
But even God is beyond beliefs ultimately.
Ok, so you are proponent of the Perennial Philosophy.
I returned to Christianity by way of the Perennialist School.
As I immersed myself in that Tradition, I increasingly found it difficult (if not impossible) to square its core doctrines with "Mysticism", as you would put it. Here's the difficulty, there is almost nothing that supports the claim that Christianity has a mystical core, more specifically that of unqualified nondualism in which the Supremely Real is beyond all categories of thought, even that of Being Itself! Now, Christians who accept the Perennial Philosophy try real hard to get a whole lot of mileage from Meister Eckhart. Not surprisingly, one of the most famous Perennialists , Ananda Coomaraswamy, supposedly had said that Eckhart was the "greatest European". This "Mysticism" does not reject theism, put it seems to place theism at a lower level .
"... all traditions are effective for some people and contain some truth, just each has more or less insight."
Is the personal God of the theistic traditions of less insight?
There is another path, that of faith - you have no beliefs, but faith in the uNiverse, in God. Instead of supporting yourself with beliefs, you abandon yourself to the universe, you surrender to it, because you have faith that "all is well, and all manner of thing is well".
The etymology of the word "religion" is interesting. We have the -ligare part meaning to bind together as with ligaments, etc. But what about the re- bit?
Religion means to re-bind together. But what caused the split? It seems that belief (and therefore religion) only became necessary at the point where humanity lost its original connection and knowledge of the spiritual world, known by the Hindus as the start of the Kali Yuga - The Age of Darkness. Belief (as opposed to knowledge) became necessary from that point forward.
Let's say someone in modern times has a direct spiritual experience of Christ. Would they still need faith or indeed belief at that point? I think it would be more akin to knowledge.
Does William "believe in" or "have faith in" the existence of The Masters? Or has his direct experience become actual knowledge.
Chris - you're quite correct.
There is no compelling reason to see mysticism or Eckhardt as the core of Christianity.
All we can say is each tradition "contains" this mystic message. And that many of each traditions great figures thought this way.
To me, it does seem to be the culmination of the religious quest that best unites its various themes, but that is just my opinion.
And there is no reason for you to choose Eckhardt over a more mainstream Christianity if that suits you best.
As the principle of non-duality implies, you can't have a counter culture without a mainstream culture. It would make no sense for the whole world to become mystics!
Also, when I say I organize it hierarchically I was being too harsh - its true, but there are also lots of cases of not better or worse just what suits you. Is Zen better than Eckhardt? Just what suits you.
Also, simple pious people may spiritually be in a higher level - may be in that state of abandonment and connection to everything else - than subtle theologians who grasp non duality very well.
Ultimately ones state of being matters, not ones intellect. One can know nothing of non duality and believe in a man in the sky with a white beard and have that mystical state of connection to everything.
As for a personal God vs an impersonal, as to which is higher, I think that's wrongly posed - the so called "impersonal" view merely says God is beyond our comprehension. It's a negation.
To them turn it into a positive statement - that God "is" this impersonal, featureless "thing" - is to not understand, although people find it very hard to simply stay with a negation and always end up turning it into a positive.
So to return to your question - anyone who regards God as "only" personal is on a relatively low level of insight, if he cannot see God as something so grand as to be utterly beyond our comprehension.
But anyone who denies God can also have a personal side has left the realm of non duality, which says God only isn't limited to his personal side.
So someone who limits God to a person has created an idol - a limited being within the universe.
It was precisely against this that the Old Testament rails - to not worship any limited being, however powerful.
But anyone who limits God to the impersonal has committed a similar violation of limiting the All.
In both cases the thing is to free from limitation - not impose limitations.
There are however some kinds of religion which do not seek to connect to the All, like paganism, but limit themselves to interacting with powerful bit limited beings within the universe. While I respect that, this is undoubtedly a low level of religion - it is not satisfy the deepest yearning for something comprehensive and awesome.
If a man is satisfied with this level, then that is OK, but I would say such a man has a limited religious faculty.
This "mystic message" is non-theistic , or if you prefer, an impersonal conception of Divinity, correct?
I don't think any orthodox Christian could accept that.
Nevertheless, the classical tradition of the great theistic philosophers never took the view that God is "a" Person, that is, a being among beings. He is "Being Itself", or Pure Act, as the Thomists would say, metaphysically non-composite, timeless and immutable. That doesn't mean that God is a thing or an "it", it means He is radically transcendent yet personal all the same.
In order to reconcile these divergent views, a hierarchy or a scale , would have to be devised in which one is of "less insight". To claim that they are all equal would violate the law of non-contradiction.
Moonsphere -
Sure, and that's also true of the mystic state that senses that everything is well and good with the world right now - that each moment the world is fulfilled and nothing needs to be done.
Is that direct knowledge?
Anyone who has a personal experience of Christ or of God has come into contact with something that is beyond all knowing or comprehension.
If it is a limited being, however powerful, then one can still gave fears and anxieties that things won't work out, etc. The good guys can still lose, etc.
The kind of "faith" I am talking about - the sense that everything is well a s will turn out well - necessarily goes beyond knowledge, because nothing limited within this world can give you that feeling precisely because it is something within this world.
Williams encounters with the Masters is knowledge not faith - to the extent that these encounters gave him the kind of faith I am talking about, that all is well (and I am not sure they have), it would be because they were a connection to something beyond themselves.
Chris -
The mystic message is not non theistic nor does it posit an impersonal God.
A better way of saying it is that the mystic vision is of exploding all limitations - of connection to something beyond limitation. Therefore, it cannot say anything - because all words are limitations. If God is good, he is limited, etc.
God cannot be limited to a person, because a person is a limited being within this world. But you cannot say God is impersonal - that too, is a limitation.
There is no reason not to connect with a personal God - even the do called impersonal traditions have a host of deities of compassion and love etc that they connect to.
But in my view, the only thing that can give our hearts peace, allay our anxieties, and help us see the miraculous nature of the world, is to connect to something beyond limitation.
And once you see past limitation, you don't isolate and examine this or that aspect of the world but see it whole, you see the world as already complete and perfect and not needing to get anywhere.
If you can't have white without black, then you start to see there is a perspective from which they are not enemies, not dichotomies, not a duality - but embraced in cosmic love, like everything.
At that point you can relax - and laugh. Life is play.
God is not nothing or absolutely non-existent, correct?
If we can agree to that, would you object to saying that God is Being Itself?
Chris -
Well, my objection that is that Being is just a word - and as such, it can only describe limited phenomena within the world.
It is a limitation - all words limit by defining.
What is wanted here is what Keats called "negative capability" - to rest in not trying to know, not penetrating the mystery.
Being is good as far as it goes, but there must be a sense of something beyond being or not being - beyond being "confined" by a definition.
Also, Being implies essence, and are there essences? Being also implies something static and featureless. What we are trying to get at is something so glorious and awesome as to explode all our conceptions, not something featureless, static, boring.
What would you say to the Nothing? Or Emptiness? The idea here is not that it is really nothing - but that whatever it is, it is beyond our minds.
If the religious quest is about connecting to something beyond our limited understanding in this world, the best way to express it would have to be by negation. At least that's the mystic vision.
But people hunger for the positive - at least many do. So there is no reason to rule out things like a personal God or Being or anything like that as long as we keep in our minds somewhere that there is something beyond even all that.
Unknown
You are completely right that whatever God "is" is not something that can be confined into a box. You just can't throw a net on God and expect to catch him. But in practice, the experience of the world is always personal. God is personal because I am. The qualitative experience of the world is a personal meeting between it and your senses. They exist together in action. It is alive, not a dead abstract unknowable thing. It only gets impersonal in theory, not in practice. Everything is a personal meeting not something that exists in and by itself. The world is a relationship of Being(s), but never a static thing. So in a sense God is a verb who must reign sovereign. As soon as you latch onto it it will escape you and you will end up with a copy. In another sense God is a constant, the unmoved non-attributable ground of being. But you have to make a positive affirmation of it not to end up in atheism or nihilism.
For me , a big question is this-
Does the metaphysic follow the spiritual temperament/practice, or does the spiritual practice/temperament follow the metaphysic.
The Jewish philosopher of mysticism, Steven Katz, famously said that there are " no unmediated experiences" . If that is true, then it would be the latter.
Chris - I always feel temperament comes first.
For instance, ever since I was little I always had this feeling that there is mysterious reality hovering just beyond my mind.
But some people lack this. Even some religious people are "positivist" - they believe all reality in principle can be reduced to the simple categories of our minds and senses.
Naturally, we will have very different metaphysics.
And there are some perfectly intelligent people that I cannot explain mysticism too no matter how much I try.
Eric -
Yes, the world is a relationship of beings. That's also the Buddhist view. Nothing is on its own - its all in a relationship. There is no "thing" - rather, there is a set of relationships.
Positive affirmations have their place and I am not against them, but they too are dangerous - they can easily become positivism, that on my what our senses and logic reveal exists.
Chris
"the classical tradition of the great theistic philosophers never took the view that God is "a" Person, that is, a being among beings. He is "Being Itself", or Pure Act, as the Thomists would say"
Some eastern orthodox believers have posited that Aquinas' first cause has been a slippery slope to Atheism, since it's based on the empirical notion that man gains all knowledge from the senses. I believe the orthodox are more platonic, emphasizing mystical experience from within by which they reject scholastic reasoning. I would say it's very important to cross-fertilize both views. Platonism can degenerate into dualism as likely as Aristotle into positivism, with materialism coming out on top.
Intelligent people are reacting to the self-refuting nature of what is being presented.
If God is beyond all categories of thought, then all explanations must be false *including" the explanation that God is beyond all categories of thought.
It's like saying "There is no truth."
If it's true, it's false.
If it's false, it's false.
If you all don't mind I think it's time to call it a day on this thread before we descend into intellectualising and forget the simple truth that God is a living God and is real. Thanks to everyone for contributing and good night!
Chris -
Excellent :)
You are just climbing a ladder. After you climb you throw it away.
In Buddhism the final stage is to realize the Emptiness of Emptiness - even Emptiness should not be clung to. It was just provisional.
In the end you should have no supports whatsoever - even that you should have no supports.
Anything you do - any side you doing to - gets you stuck in the web deeper.
At that point, you can just throw your hands up and laugh - and realize that there is nothing you can do.
In the East, there is the idea that the guru gives you an increasingly hard set of tasks to perform until you finally realize there is nothing you can do. Like don't desire anymore - but that's a desire. The intent is for you to realize you are not separate from the world so you cannot act on it.
No problem William - thanks for the convo.
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