Richard Rohr: don’t ‘let the word mystic scare you off’. It’s experience cf belief!

‘…..do not let the word “mystic” scare you off. It simply means

one who has moved from mere belief systems or belonging systems to actual inner experience.

All spiritual traditions agree that such a movement is possible, desirable, and available to everyone. In fact, Jesus seems to say that this is the whole point! (See, for example, John 10:19-38.)

Some call this movement conversion, some call it enlightenment, some transformation, and some holiness. It is Paul’s “third heaven,” where he “heard things that must not and cannot be put into human language” (2 Corinthians 12:2, 4). Consciously or not, far too much organized religion has a vested interest in keeping you in the first or second heaven, where all can be put into proper language and deemed certain. This keeps you coming back to church, and it keeps us clergy in business.

This is not usually the result of ill will on anybody’s part; it’s just that you can lead people only as far as you yourself have gone. Transformed people transform people. From the way they talk so glibly about what is always Mystery, it’s clear that many clergy have never enjoyed the third heaven themselves, and they cannot teach what they do not know. Theological training without spiritual experience is deadly.

We are ready to see and taste the full sunset now and no longer need to prove it or even describe it. We just enjoy it — and much more!’

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fr-richard-rohr/three-ways-to-view-the-su_b_822092.html

LIFE asks the same of us as of the mystics – Awaken more; Detach more; Serve others Better.

The core of all Traditions and the three actions they ask of us are : Awaken more; Detach more; Serve others Better.

This is both mysticism and everyone’s day to day spiritual challenge. – RP

MYSTICS: Great site of introductory articles on Western Mystics

Great site of introductory articles on Western Mystics by Bob O’Hearn –

https://westernmystics.wordpress.com/

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: ‘Mysticism is Living Love’s Oneness’. Are we all mystics?

‘Mysticism is living Love’s oneness’ so says contemporary Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee.

At first I mis-read the title as ‘Mysticism: Living one’s Oneness’. I am wondering if that also is true?

Another way to put that is to say how far does integration of the individual’s (false) self a prerequisite for purity and lack of self-deception in our preparedness for mystical experience.

Perhaps a useful metaphor here is that of radio interference – from thoughts, feelings or the ‘world’ that keep us suffering negatives from the past – fear, etc – or from the ‘future’ anxiety etc.

I take it that almost everyone is a mystic in the same way that most people can walk, run and throw but not at Olympian levels. But it is part of the soul’s experience, in basic forms, for most people – except sociopathic and psychopathic people or those in whom there is a complete take-over by the egoic self.

I work with a simple definition ‘a mystical event is an experience, via truth, goodness or beauty, that enables us to transcend our little, frightened egoic self’. Such an event has probably happened to you today, or recently, when you were moved by a smile, or something a child said, or a beautiful landscape etc.

A third way of asking the question is ‘is our sensibility to possible mystical events conditional on a substantial degree of transformation of disturbing negatives into a higher degree of integration?

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The article by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is HERE – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/llewellyn-vaughanlee/mysticism-living-loves-oneness_b_1304518.html

John Hick said Religion consists primarily in experiencing…

John Hick said;

Religion consists primarily in experiencing our life in its relation to the Transcendent and living on the basis of that experience….

…..in terms of Ninian Smart’s six-dimensional analysis – distinguishing the

ritual,
mythological,
doctrinal,
ethical,
social and
experiential dimensions of religion

– mysticism is a general name for religious experience together with part at least of the network of religious practices which support it.

Hick, John, (1981) Mystical Experience as Cognition in Understanding Mysticism, ed. Richard Woods, London: The Athlone Press

Patrick White Australian novelist: ‘only love can pierce the “cloud of unknowing” which lies between Him and us’

‘God cannot be apprehended by man’s intellect and that only love can pierce the “cloud of unknowing” which lies between Him and us.’

In the 14th Century an anonymous English mystic wrote a book called ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’, the main theme of which is that God cannot be apprehended by man’s intellect and that only love can pierce the “cloud of unknowing” which lies between Him and us.

I feel that in my own life anything I have done of possible worth has happened in spite of my gross, worldly self. I have been no more than the vessel used to convey ideas above my intellectual capacities. When people praise passages I have written, more often than not I can genuinely say, ‘Did I write that?’ I don’t think this is due to my having a bad memory, because I have almost total recall of trivialities. I see it as evidence of the part the supernatural plays in lives which would otherwise remain earthbound.

Patrick White Australian novelist and winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Mysticism is the art of reality Evelyn…

“Mysticism is the art of reality” – Evelyn Underhill

For more about Evelyn Underhill go HERE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Underhill

MATTHEW FOX THOMAS MERTON DR SUZUKI MEISTER ECKHART…

MATTHEW FOX, THOMAS MERTON, DR SUZUKI, MEISTER ECKHART, NONDUALISM & THE MYSTICAL TRADITION

1 Matthew Fox in an interview says;
“One of my main works or accomplishments was recovering the mystical tradition of Christianity. For example, I was the first one to translate Eckhart into English from the critical edition, and provide a commentary on it.

2 In fact, it was through a Hindu – not through Christianity – that I discovered Eckhart. It was Suzuki, the Japanese Buddhist, who alerted Thomas Merton, the Catholic monk, to Meister Eckhart.

3 In 1959, they had a dialogue on Buddhism and Christianity, and Suzuki threw up his hands and said “Merton, you’re a typical Western dualist. There’s only one outside chance you’ll get Zen, and that is to read the one Zen thinker of the West, Meister Eckhart.” And Merton said, “But Eckhart was condemned by the church.” And Suzuki said, “Well, I can’t help that, can I?”

4 So in 1960, Merton went off and did nothing but read Zen and Meister Eckhart, and it totally changed him. You can see his writings from the ’50s to the ’60s – he became very prophetic in the ’60s, and he was the first religious figure who came out before Dr. King against the Vietnam War.

5 Merton is the one who sent me to Paris to study spirituality, and it’s there that I got the creation spiritual tradition named for me by Pere Chenu, a wonderful French Dominican who is the father of liberation theology and creation spirituality.

6 The year I was expelled from the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church by the Pope, they also expelled Leonardo Boff, who is a liberation theologian and the most read Catholic theologian in Latin America. And they expelled Eugene Drewermann, the most read Catholic priest theologian in Germany.

7 Clearly it was not a good year for theologians, but there was obviously a political purpose in all this. By getting the three most visible Catholic priest theologians on three continents, they were sending a message of fear and control. It was theological downsizing.”

FROM: Original blessings: An interview with Matthew Fox By Ravi Dykema – http://www.mcs.ca/vitalspark/2020_schools/312crtn03.html

My paragraphing and numbering – Roger –

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN THE EXTRACT

THOMAS MERTON – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton

D T SUZUKI – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._T._Suzuki

MEISTER ECKHART – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meister_Eckhart

CHENU – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Dominique_Chenu

DREWERMANN – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Drewermann

MATTHEW FOX – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Spirituality

The mystic and the schizophrenic find themselves…

“The mystic and the schizophrenic find themselves in the same ocean, but whereas the mystic swims, the schizophrenic drowns.” -R.D.Laing

The mystics ask you to take nothing…

“The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience.
The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation.”
Ken Wilber