| |
I am so excited because so much of this month's (July 2009) Science of Mind magazine is devoted to Mysticism. It is one of my favorite ways of BEing. And the lead article in this month's magazine is by one of my very most favorite contributors - Jesse Jennings. The Rev Dr Jennings is senior minister of Creative Life Spiritual Center in suburban Houston, and editor of The Essential Ernest Holmes. His “Questions and Answers” column has appeared in each issue of Science of Mind magazine since 1991.
Mystic as Mirror
Mysticism is our natural state, just as gleeful astonishment at creation is our natural activity. It's all about first-hand, personal experience of the Divine Idea pulsing through Its creation, both where we stand, and we who observe, feel, and choose.
Given the pace of modern times, and our propensity for distilling life into labels and roles, we can better define mysticism by what it isn't than by what it is.
It's not a role, even a useful one, like plumber or parent. True, mystics have often been assigned certain tasks by their cultures, but mystic equals shaman only in that both necessitate a highly prized skillset. From early times, the mystic/shaman would be clad in special shaman garb, ensconced in some out-of-the-way place, expected to commune productively with the Infinite, and then say some “sooth” to the group about winning this war or ending that drought.
In a few cultures, Egypt before the Ptolemys especially, the monarch and shaman were interchangeable, mystical insight being a prerequisite for accession to leadership. Elsewhere, the monarch would keep a shaman or several near at hand for counsel - court jesters and astrologers are derivatives of this.
Later, mainly in the West, shamanism and the mystical bent that gave rise to it became feared, excluded from consideration, and relegated to the outskirts of the cultural consciousness - which is where Ernest Holmes, our founder, and others like him went looking. Here's what they found.
Dean W R Inge was an English clergyman, scholar, and translator of Plotinus, whom Holmes loved to study and quote from. Inge believed that personal spiritual experience was surperior in its wisdom to compulsory ritual observance, though slippery to define. In 1899, Inge wrote, “No word in our language - not even “Socialism” - has been employed more loosely than 'Mysticism'. Sometimes it is used as an equivalent for symbolism or allegorism, sometimes for theosophy or occult science, and sometimes merely suggests the mental state of a dreamer, or vague and fantastic opinions about God and the world.” Inge found the best representations of contemporary Western mystical thought in the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and others of the Transcendentalist school.
Soon thereafter, William James published his Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he described four defining characteristics of a mystical experience:
[1] Ineffability: The mystical experience can't be communicated Many people try to do so, but end up writing, speaking, painting, sculpting, or composing about the residual feeling of their experience, rather than effectively capturing the essence of the experience itself. Words simply fail. This exposes the experience to wide interpretation and dilution, and skepticism that anything unusual actually happened.
[2] Noeticism: This basically means that the mystical experience is not contained within or particular to any one aspect of the life of the person having the experience, but that it is pervasive, with “a unique, all-encompassing sense of integration”. It is more than (or other than) new intellectual information, new emotional content, new ambition or intention or insight. It also doesn't immediately render a person better, smarter, or happier. It just reveals wholeness, and whatever one does with that isn't the point.
[3] Passivity: This sets the mystical moment greatly apart from the normal course of events. Having a mystical experience is unplanned, unprepared for, “gratuitous and undeserved”, says James. Consider Jesus answering the Pharisees: “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here ! or lo there ! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20-21). If we ever wonder why such fierce condemnation of mysticism has originated within Western church hierarchies rather than, say, among shopkeepers, it might be due to a sense of entitlement to spiritual gifts on the part of spiritual workers. But enlightenment doesn't recognize vocation. In seventeeth-century Saxony, for instance, a great mystical vision into the absolute nature of God came to the shoemaker Jakob Boehme. Only later did he become great and learned.
[4] Transiency: The indescribable, grand, spontaneous moment passes. “Intermittent intensive” experiences occur “rhythmically”, says Louis Dupre's entry on the subject in the Encyclopedia of Religion. Once a mystic, always so,
and some experiences do last quite a while, but none is permanent. In mythological terms that describe the “hero's quest”, this phase of a vanishing vision is pictured as a return to the world, to the tribe, to normal, everyday life, nevertheless permanently transformed by the inward journey.
Universal Experience
The mystical experience happens to everyone at one time or another, perhaps many times, or even relentlessly appearing, then fading. Think of Wordsworth's lines: “Not in entire forgetfulness,/And not in utter nakedness,/But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home.” For all of us, the same home, similar glory-clouds, which are rememberings and reminders that we are more than we seem.
All forms share the same Creative Mind. We who are incarnated individuals are bound to one another by our essential unified nature. Further, we have as sentient beings the capacity to doubt, wonder, reflect, feel sympathy and awe, and attach ourselves to or distance ourselves from various opinions about God's nature and life's meaning.
The mystical experience comes to us all, but not everyone knows what to make of it. In some places, it has been continually prized and elevated as a legitimate spiritual experience. By and large, the West was not among them until the amalgam of philosophies that ultimately appeared as, among other things, New Thought, made its emergence - New Thought, ancient thought revitalized.
If mysticism is the unfathomable, sudden, unbidden, yet life-changing realization of oneness - a momentarily disclosed opening into true Reality - then a mystic is a person who has cultivated the natural ability to perceive wholenss, deep order, and a patterning Intelligence on an ongoing basis. We are all mystics to the same degree as we are all artists or musicians - in potential - because while the mystical experience arrives without notice or a cultivated spot in which to plant it, the work of applying it to material existence and service to the world takes training and practice.
(deb's note - This is the entire purpose of creating this group, to provide a place of study, discussion and support for the cultivation of being always avaialable, always open, ready to do the work of Spirit, within the framework of our very own life - to be Living Metaphsics as our mode of travel in this incarnation.)
This is why students are drawn to gurus, and vice versa. The seeker feels he or she has heard a “calling” or had a “knowing”, and so sets off on a spiritual quest that will almost always involve apprenticeship in one form or another to a mentor who will offer guidelines and exercises for expressing the student's unique variation on the ubiquitous theme. The Holmes brothers' epic poem, The Voice Celestial, is a fine tour of the soul's education in this manner.
Some of this inner work involves unlearning and dismantling, the taming of the ego, and the liberation of the self from its absorption in the roles it plays. But it's all aimed at the student being, and thereafter doing, something unprecedented in the world; it's all about creative genius and the utmost authenticity. The last thing good gurus want is others shaped in their image. What would be the point? (from Deb a gentle Amen)
The Spark of LIfe
Cambridge professor Henry Gwatkin, a late-nineteenth-century Transcendentalist, wrote, “We may have philosophy and science, criticism and culture in perfection … and still have no life in us. But where shall the spark of life be found? The spark of life is mysticism … The conviction, acted on if not expressed, that a true communion with the divine is given to all that purify themselves with all the force of heart and soul and mind.”
(deb's note - And this is the other purpose of this group, to encourage this effort to purify our receptive aspects, so that the Divine may speak to us in language that our heart and soul and mind can clearly understand, to make ready in clarity these, for the receiving of guidance from Divine Intelligence.)
Dupre add, “Mysticism belongs in the core of all religion. Those religions that had a historical founder all started with a powerful personal experience of immediate contact. But all religions, regardless of their origin, retain their vitality only as long as their members continue to believe in a transcendent reality with which they can in some way communciate by direct experience.”
Ernest Holmes for his part taught that a trained mind is more powerful than an untrained one, which he meant in terms of spiritual self-discipline, not just intellectual edification. Wherever we want to go, we must first project our minds there, with thought and feeling united in belief. Our belief sets the table for the feast that follows.
And one broad purpose of the New Thought philosophy is to hold a distinct place open in the collective consciousness for direct knowing, the intuitive awareness of context rather than content, because it's in the context of our lives that harmony, peace, and happiness are to be found. Content shifts like today's styles. People, places, and things don't make us happy. “God”, said Buckminster Fuller, “is a verb”. All our accumulated possessions rose from the dust and will return to it; what we seek is the numinous, the sense of the sacred.
So our ancestors eventually moved indoors from their fire-dances, into tidy little houses of worship, only to have their descendants head out again under the stars for some of that old primal magic missing from their spiritual lives. Mysticism, though at times disguised, never entirely disappeared from the Western spiritual landscape, and is beginning to flourish. There are more rune-readers now than the Norse ever dreamed of, far more labyrinth-walkers than when that pattern was first envisioned; a greater “thirst after righteousness”, and alongside it, a greater capacity to slake that thirst. After eons, we are coming consciously and deliberately to discover who and what we really are.
|
